Take 20
Personal Development Advice, Tools to Improve The Quality Of Your Life

The easiest thing for you to to do is to blame your circumstances on something or someone other than yourself.

Someone makes you mad. The professor made the test difficult, so you failed. Your boss is inconsiderate, and that’s why you didn’t get a raise. Your girlfriend/boyfriend didn’t understand you, and this made you break up with him/her.

Sound familiar?

You’re in Control

It sure sounds familiar to me. Up until a few weeks ago, I would’ve considered myself a reactive person. Something in my environment was always pushing me around. My parents didn’t understand me. My friends said ridiculous things that made me upset. School was making me miserable. My environment was affecting my performance.

I felt like I had no choice.

My emotions and results in life were highly dependent on external circumstances. This reactive cycle may have continued for the rest of my life if I hadn’t picked up The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People from the bookstore.

One of the chapters in the book is titled “Be Proactive.” This is Covey’s first principle of effectiveness. All highly effective, independent people are proactive. These people don’t dwell on the aspects of their environment they have no control over. Instead, they live within their “Circle of Influence”, where they have the power to take action.

For example, a reactive person would say “My boss didn’t give me a raise, what an inconsiderate fool!” While a proactive person would ask himself, “How can I take on more work and capitalize on the available opportunities so that my boss will have no choice but to give me a raise?” See the difference? The proactive person works within his “Circle of Influence,” while the reactive person hands off his responsibility to his external environment.

Are you reactive or proactive?

Be “Response-able”

We all have the ability to consider the infinite number of choices we face when a new situation comes our way. Instead of being reactive, and acting out the first thing that comes to mind, let’s focus on being proactive and responding to the situation in the best possible manner.

You may be asking, “What’s the difference?”

There’s a huge difference!

If you are reactive, you won’t think about your response to a situation. If someone says something “offensive” to you, you may yell back at them without considering your options. If you fail a test, you may immediately get upset and blame the teacher for not teaching you properly.

If you are proactive, however, you will understand there are many choices available in each situation. Knowing this, you will take the time to pause when a situation arises, and calculate the appropriate response. For example, if someone says something “offensive” to you, you’ll understand you have a choice whether you will find it “offensive” or not. If you fail a test, you stop and think about what you did wrong, and how you can do better on the next test. Essentially, you are being responsible for your results in life.

Think of being responsible as being “response-able.” It means you are able to stop, think, and respond to situations in the best possible manner. You are able to put a wall between external circumstance, and internal state of mind. Think of it as a holding chamber where all external stimuli are held until you decide how to respond to them.

All of us have the ability to respond. In order to exercise this ability more often, we simply need to raise our awareness to how we are dealing with circumstances that come our way. The next time you feel that impulse to react, choose to stop and think. Consider all of your options, and then choose the best option available.

Making the Transition

Shifting from a reactive mindset to a proactive mindset won’t happen over night. It will take conscious effort on your part to make the transition; however, the results are definitely worth the effort.

Instead of letting life push you around, you will give life a taste of its own medicine and gain more control over your results. The quality of your life (physically, mentally, spiritually, emotionally, relationally) will improve because you will realize many of those “problems” that were previously out of your control are actually well within your “Circle of Influence.”

To help with the transition, here are some of the questions you should start asking yourself right now (in parenthesis are examples of ways to be proactive in each area):

• In what areas of my life am I currently handing off my response-ability to my external environment?
• Physically how can I be more proactive in my life (start hitting the gym, change my diet)?
• Mentally how can I be more proactive in my life (pick up a new activity which is intellectually challenging, find friends to have intriguing discussion with, build character)?
• Spiritually how can I be more proactive in my life (learn meditation, study religions, read a book on spirituality)?
• Emotionally how can I be more proactive in my life (consciously get rid of emotionally draining circumstances and people)?
• Relationally how can I be more proactive in my life (spend more time with loved ones, make more time to go out and meet people)?

In addition to asking yourself these questions, start paying attention to how you handle every situation that comes your way. Are you choosing to react impulsively, or are you choosing to stop, think, and respond to each situation that arises?

Raising your awareness to your own actions will speed up the transition from a reactive mindset to a proactive mindset tremendously. It won’t be long before you are exerting more influence on your life, and reaping the benefits of a life that is a result of your own calculated action.

Cheers to that!

Photo by DVIDSHUB

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“Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe. It is not enough that a thing be possible for it to be believed.”

- Voltaire

Faith is a byproduct of self-confidence. Self-confidence and faith are attributes we are all born with, however, they are both suppressed through constant societal conditioning.

If you were to turn on the news right now, chances are you would hear about something exceptionally bad going on somewhere in the world.

When I was a kid, I was told to “be careful” by my mother before stepping out of the house. I was constantly reminded by family members and loved ones that money was scarce, and in order to feel security I would one day need a full-time job.

Everything is a risk, I was told.

I was being conditioned to believe that the only way to make it in this world was to live inside my comfort zone, and surrender to a life of mediocrity. How is a kid supposed to develop self-confidence in conditions like this?

Let me tell you, it’s not easy. However, I’ve found there is a methodical way to unearth your buried self-confidence, and get in touch with a powerful faith within you never knew existed.

Have you ever wondered how people like Steve Jobs, Abraham Lincoln, Gandhi, and MLK Jr. managed to make a profound impact on the human race? What set these people apart? Everyone has their share of God-given talents, hardships, and shortcomings. There must have been a reason for these prolific figures’ success other than the usual, “They’re just lucky” to explain why they rose to the top of society while others with similar levels of brilliance didn’t.

The only difference between you and these individuals is your levels of courage, self-confidence, and faith. Consciously or unconsciously, these people developed their courage by constantly stepping outside of their comfort zone, thereby building their self-confidence, which ultimately led to their unwavering faith.

Courage is Critical

Before you can develop sufficient self-confidence, you’ll need to get a good idea of what you’re capable of. By developing the courage to step outside of your comfort zone, you’ll be able to test and figure out exactly what your limits are.

This process of exploring your limits requires the courage to ask penetrating questions so you can take a deeper look at yourself.

It requires the courage to get past your pride, and realize your life isn’t everything you know it could be.

It requires the courage to identify your purpose in life, and then take action on it.

It requires the courage to say, “I’m going to do whatever it takes to make my dreams a reality!”

Know Thyself

I have been questioning my true nature for the last three years of my life, and learning the answers to my questions has given me a tremendous amount of self-confidence. The penetrating questions I’ve been asking myself consistently are:

• What do I truly believe?
• How do these beliefs show up in my day-to-day actions?
• How do these beliefs limit me from reaching my true potential?
• What are my deepest values?
• Which values do I need to prioritize in my life?
• What should I be doing with my life?
• What am I exceptionally good at doing, and how can I use these talents to my advantage?
• Is what I’m doing right now what I would be doing if money was not an issue?
• What do I love to do?
• What are my character flaws, and how can I improve upon them?
• Am I thinking for myself? Or am I living a life that is the result of others’ thinking?
• How is pride standing in my way of self-actualization?
• What lies about my reality have I been trying to convince myself are true?

If you ponder these questions long enough, and are brutally honest with yourself, you may come to realize the life you’re leading is incongruent with who you really are.

At first this will be frightening, because up until this moment of clarity, you’ve been living a life of self-deception. This realization is actually a great thing, however, because you’ll now have the power to align your actions with your core self. You’ll be able to proactively mold your character to fit your values. You’ll know what’s really important to you in life, and you’ll be able to prioritize your actions accordingly. You’ll identify limiting beliefs, uproot them, and as a result, you’ll begin to tap into your true potential.

Knowing who you are at your core is the key to self-confidence. Only when you deeply know yourself will you truly begin to grasp how powerful you actually are. This is the understanding that gives way to unwavering faith.

Unwavering Faith

Faith is highly dependent on your level of self-confidence. Without self-confidence, how can you trust yourself to make the critical decisions in life, the choices that will ultimately determine your future results?

Once you’re in touch with your inner-self, faith will come easily to you. Believing in yourself will become second nature, and the “impossible,” as defined by society, will be quite possible to you. Fear will be another illusion you walk through, because you will know deep down what you want out of life.

To illustrate what I mean, here’s an example from my own life.

Making the decision to drop out of college was easy for me because I have a tremendous amount of faith. This faith comes from knowing what I want out of life, and knowing who I am at the deepest levels of my being. The direction I wish to take my life is not related to what I was learning in college, so the choice was very clear. I thought, “If I’m going to stay in school, why don’t I just go outside and dig a hole for no reason instead? They are both an equally good use of my time.”

Anyone close to me will tell you I had been considering dropping out for the past year, but I only recently had the courage to actually do it. This courage came through the process of self-realization described above. First you must know yourself, and then you can do crazy things like dropping out of college or quitting your job!

Tying it All Together

Now you may be asking, what exactly is faith?

Faith is the ability to trust your intuition.

Faith is the ability to trust yourself with making the big decisions in life.

Faith is the ability to understand that every decision you’re making is the right one and that your life is playing out exactly as it should be.

Faith is the ability to understand there is a higher power working for you behind the scenes that you are unable to see with your own two eyes.

Faith is believing before seeing, because you know you’re doing the right things.

Faith is gratitude towards your current situation because you know it’s great and only getting better.

Faith is, as Voltaire so eloquently stated, the ability to believe when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

Photo by ornellas

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