10 Ideas To Get You Started With A Daily Journal

There are a number of factors that contribute to overall happiness and one is the development of habits. The very best and most useful habit is that of  daily journaling.  Back in the day, it used to be called a diary and started with the words “Dear Diary”.  Today, it is used to record one’s self improvement and journey towards enlightenment or that place where one is at their very best.  A daily journal can be a great tool to use on the path to achieve success.

A daily entry to your journal can be a simple account of the events that have had an impact or it can be a complex entry of self-discovery. To help you get started, if you have not already done so, try the following tips:-

1. Record 6 things for which you are grateful, appreciative or thankful that are occurring right now.
2. Record another 6 that are coming to you in the future.
3. Keep a daily list of the prosperity or abundance in your life.  This might be a simple as having a friend shout you a coffee or another driver graciously letting you change lanes.  Keep tabs on them all and let your abundance grow before your eyes.
4. Write about what you have done over the day, action that you have taken towards your life goal.
5. List what you intend to do the next day, week or month and check back later to see how you went.
6. Spend some time writing what you believe are your strengths and weaknesses and then write about how you intend to grow your strengths to outweigh your weaknesses.
7. Record the occasions during the day when you have successfully shifted your feelings from not so good to better by recognising your not so good feelings and changing your thoughts at that time.
8. Work out a set of questions that will help you to challenge yourself around your limiting beliefs.  For example – “What am I doing when I find myself having an argument with my partner?”  “How do I get into the argument in the first place?”  “How can I avoid it?”  This is just an example; you can use anything that you like.  Just make sure that you do not let yourself off the hook.
9. Use your journal to help you to visualise where you intend to be in life, in the next year, next five years, next ten years.  Write in detail about how your life will be, how that will benefit you and the community and why you need to have this life.  Regularly check back to see how you are going on your journey.
10. List the random acts of kindness that you intend to perform in the next 24 hours and then check back each day to see if you did them.

Above all, have fun with this wonderful daily habit.

Act Or React – Decide For Yourself

The Global Financial Crisis is just one of a plethora of challenges to come along and put pressure on how people plan their lives and careers. There have been many such events including Swine Flu, Bird Flu, droughts and climate change and if you dropped your bundle with each of these your life would be wrecked.  What I am getting to is about acting with intent to succeed rather than reacting each time just in case you are affected.

I am not suggesting that anyone should completely discount world events that cross our paths but we do all know that such things are likely to occur. When considering your life path, it is possible to take into account that major world events will occur and decide how you will cope with them.  If you have a business that can be impacted, have some idea what you need to take into account.  If your work takes you around the world or through airports, have something in mind for how you will manage that.

The thing is that reacting all of the time is not good in many ways. It is not good for your health and well-being; it is stressful and unpleasant for all around you.  It is not good for business and it is not good for the whole Universe.  Take the GFC in particular.  Much has been said about how bad it is for businesses, how businesses are likely to go under and not recover, how high unemployment is and so on.

Now all of this is true for those affected but it is not true for everyone and all business. In fact, I am hearing from more and more business people that they have had the best turnover in this year to date that they have ever had!  If those same people had listened to all of the doom and gloom, reacted to it and done things differently they may have had a very different outcome.  It all comes back to making your own decisions about what you will so and when you will do it.  Decide for yourself how you will engage with the information that comes via the media.

Act or react; it is up to you. Keep your eye on what it is that you want in your life and put your attention there rather than on any number of things that will occur regardless.

Decide For Yourself About Your Personal Development

Yesterday I was reading an article on using gratitude as personal development and the advice given was to focus on gratitude once as week as that is said to be more effective than doing it more frequently. To be honest, this surprised me immensely as anything that I had previously read and done suggested showing gratitude as a daily habit that will get you into a permanently grateful space.  I have personally followed this advice and passed it on through my coaching and through my articles.

Now this got me to thinking about how to work with personal development ideas and activities and I realised that it is a very personal thing. What works for me, may not work for you.  Then I realised that there are many divergent and contradictory ideas in books, videos, articles and so on and like many things in life, understanding personal growth can be like herding cats.

Just as you get one idea in the cage, it slips away while you get the next one!! However, it does not have to be that way.  I know now that what I do is to use my skills of inquiry and inform myself through reading, videos, CD’s, youtube and any number of interesting media.  I then give some time to considering how I feel about everything that I know on a subject and decide for myself what I believe or how I will participate in a particular activity or with an idea.

So it works for me to journal on personal development and gratitude every day, it gets me in the right space and is a constant reminder of all of the good things in my life. It is just one of the things that I do to set up my day in the way that I intend it to go and to assist me to hold the attitude that I desire.  I intend to use gratitude daily and I encourage you to decide for yourself what works best for you.  Just do it from a place of knowledge and information.

Intend To Be An Entrepreneur

Let’s dream for a moment that you have woken up with the realisation that you too can be an entrepreneur and you have no idea where to start. You know what, start from where you are at.  That’s right, there is only one place to start, from where you are at right now.  Take a good look at your current situation and decide how that supports you right now and how you will use that position to support you on to your next phase – becoming an entrepreneur.  Build on your positive strengths and release those things that hold you back.  But most importantly, right now, not sometime in the future, intend to be an entrepreneur.

Intention, as described by  Deepak Chopra is singlemindedness of purpose, it is well defined  and not countermanded by any other conflicting desires or interests. You make a decision and go for it and then be alert for opportunities.

Napoleon Hill, the first writer of personal development, calls this your “burning desire”; grow your burning desire to be an entrepreneur. You may not have that burning desire right now but you may have a tiny ember, glowing somewhere deep within.  Often people have carried a dream from childhood and every now and then they feel the warm glow of what used to be a flame, but then they let it go again.  It is true that many potential entrepreneurs know what they want but simply do not do what is necessary to get it.  So, to overcome that inaction, fan the flames of your burning desire to achieve whatever it is that will take you to entrepreneurship.

There are any number of ways to fan those flames and become an entrepreneur! I have heard it said that the quickest way to have a million dollars is to make a million dollars and there has never been a better time than right now.  Right now is always the best moment to take action and it will always be easier to take action if you burn to have something.  Take a little time to figure out what the something is.  For me it was to be happy, have freedom and have my own business.  So on all of those fronts I found my burning desire.  Give attention to what you want.  Think about it, talk about it, see your burning desire growing and growing and intend to succeed.

Intent is everything to the entrepreneur, it keeps you focused and in action. It is hard to imagine how one can succeed if you do not start out with that intent.  This is the basis of the burning desire.  Your intent should headline your every day – I intend to succeed at …., today I intend to ….., right now I intend to …….  Determine your intent as a part of you overall goals, as part of your day and every moment.

You can even play with this and have fun – being an entrepreneur is not all very serious business. For example, one of my favourite bits of fun is to set off from home with the intent to have a park exactly where I need it and then to see how well I have done.  Intend to be an entrepreneur – it is a key part to your success.