Eliminating the Regret in Life

You and I can look back in our history.  We can reminisce on those things in life that we have regretted.  Regret should be a learning experience to make us wiser as we move forward.  However, it can be one of the most debilitating processes that can hold any of us back from accomplishing more in our lives.

Here are some thoughts that I have pondered as I approach another birthday, another yearly inventory, and hopefully have learned to make whatever future God allows me to traverse with whatever I can do to accomplish a life with few regrets.

Based on my daily routines and actions, where can I expect to be in five years?

This is your life story and you are the only author.  If you’re feeling like you’ve been stuck in the same setting for too long, it’s time to start writing a new chapter of your life.  The plot structure is simple:  Doing nothing gets you nothing.  Doing the wrong things gets you the wrong things.  Doing the same things gets you the same things.  Your story only changes when you make changes.

If you have an idea about what you want the next chapter of your life to look like, you have to do things that support this idea.  An idea, after all, isn’t going to do anything for you until you do something productive with it.  In fact, as long as that great idea is just sitting around in your head it’s probably doing far more harm than good.

Your subconscious mind knows you’re procrastinating on something that’s important to you.  The necessary work that you keep postponing causes stress, anxiety, fear, and usually more procrastination – a vicious cycle that continues to worsen until you interrupt it with ACTION.

Progress in life is always measured by the fact that you’ve taken new action.  If there’s no new action, you haven’t truly made any progress.

Are the people around me helping me or hurting me?

A big part of who you become in life has to do with whom you choose to surround yourself with.  And as you know, it is better to be alone than in bad company.  You simply cannot expect to live a positive, fulfilling life if you surround yourself with negative people.

Distancing yourself from these people is never easy, but it’s a lot harder when they happen to be close friends or family members.  As hard as it may be, it’s something you need to address.  To a certain degree, fate controls those who walk into your life, especially as it relates to your family and childhood friends, but you decide whom you spend the majority of your time with.

If someone close to you is truly draining you, be honest about it.  Be kind, but communicate your point of view.  Tell them you love them, and that you want to be around them, but you need their help.  Remember, most problems, big and small, within a family and close friends, start with bad communication.  If this other person is draining you, and you haven’t talked about it, they may not even know.

At the end of the day, you should surround yourself with people who make you a better person and distance yourself those who don’t. 

How have I been draining my own happiness?

In life, you become what you repeatedly think about.  If your thoughts and behaviors aren’t helping you, they’re hurting you.  Other people and outside events can influence you, but happiness is ultimately an inside job.  You have to disconnect external influences and achievements from happiness and give yourself permission to be happy, in each moment, without the need for anything more.

This isn’t to say that you should be complacent.  You can still set goals, work hard, interact with others, and grow, but you must learn to indulge joyously in the journey, not the destination.

What you need to realize is that all you ever truly have are your thoughts towards the present moment.  Every moment is very similar; the details are just details.  If you say something like, “If I had more than what I have now, I would be happier,” you are sadly mistaken.  Because if you are not at all happy with what you have now, you will not be any happier even it were doubled.  It’s just more of the same.

The bottom line is that you have everything you need to be happy or unhappy right now.  It just depends on how you think about it.  Will you be grateful for what you have, and find joy in it?  Or will concentrate on what you don’t have, and never, ever feel like you have enough?  The choice is yours to make.

What excuses am I making?

George Washington once said, “It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one.”

Truth be told, if you are good at making excuses, you will never be good at anything else.  No matter what the obstacles are that you see in front of you, the only thing truly standing between you and what you want is the excuse you keep telling yourself as to why you can’t achieve it.

When something is a priority, it gets done.  Period!  And it’s not what we claim are our priorities, but how we spend our time each day that reveals the truth.  You can make excuses.  You can always try to wait for the perfect moment, the perfect this, the perfect that… but it won’t get you anywhere.

To get where you want to go you just have to start DOING.  It makes all the difference.  Making excuses takes the same amount of time as making progress.

What mistakes do I regret most?

Mahatma Gandhi once said, “Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.”

When you find your path, and you know what needs to be done, you must not be afraid.  You need to find the courage to make mistakes.  Mistakes lead to disappointments and defeat in the short term, but they also teach you what you need to know in the long-term.  Mistakes are the tools life uses to show you the way forward.

Someday when you look back over your life, as I am attempting, you’ll realize that nearly all of your worries and anxious fears never came to fruition – they were completely unfounded.  So why not wake up and realize this right now.  When you look back over the last few years, how many opportunities for joy did you destroy with needless fear about making a mistake?  Although there’s nothing you can do about these lost joys, there’s plenty you can do about the ones that are still to come.

How have past rejections lowered my self-confidence?

NOT believing that you CAN is the biggest trap of them all.  If you don’t know your own greatness is possible, you won’t bother attempting anything great.  Period!

All too often we let the rejections of our past dictate every move we make thereafter.  We literally do not know ourselves to be any better than what some opinionated person or narrow circumstance once told us was true.  Of course, this old rejection doesn’t mean we aren’t good enough; it means the other person or circumstance failed to align with what we have to offer.  It means we have more time to improve our thing – to build upon our ideas, to perfect our craft, and indulge deeper in to the work that moves us

Don’t let old rejections take up permanent residence in your head.  Kick them out on the street.  Realize that sometimes you have to try to do what you think you can’t do, so you realize that you actually CAN.  And sometimes it takes more than one attempt.  If ‘Plan A’ doesn’t work out, don’t fret; the alphabet has another 25 letters that would be happy to give you a chance to get it right.  The wrong choices usually bring us to the right places, eventually.  You just have to believe in your own potential to get there.

When did my life fall so far out of balance?

Be diligent and committed to what you’re trying to achieve, but also make sure you leave time for pleasure and exploration in other areas of your life as well.  It is not enough to succeed at one specific goal or to conquer one particular area of expertise; you also have to take part in the different, beautiful dimensions of your life… while you can, while there’s still time.

Lift your head up from your work every now and then and take a long walk, hold hands with your beloved, go fishing, spend time with your friends, swim, bask in the sunlight, try something new, meditate, breathe deep, or sit quietly for a while and contemplate the goodness around you.

In other words, balance yourself – work diligently toward your goals and dreams, but don’t ignore every other aspect of your life.  Keep your mind fresh, your body active and alive, and your relationships nurtured.  Do so, and the things you want most in life will come more naturally.

Postscript:

Life is filled with unanswered questions, but it is the courage to ask enough of the right ones that ultimately leads you to an understanding of yourself and your purpose.

You can spend your life wallowing in fear by avoiding the obvious, or asking negative questions like, “Why me?”  Or you can be grateful that you’ve made it this far – that you’re strong enough to breathe, walk and think for yourself – and then ask, “Where do I want to go next?”

Letting Go and Moving on!

Happiness in all walks of life is often more about stopping than starting.  More about subtracting than adding.  More about letting go than holding on.

Consider, for example, what happens when you stop, subtract or let go of…

1.  Criticizing everyone and everything.

Life isn’t perfect.  People make mistakes.  Let go of unfair expectations.  Stop criticizing yourself and others for being human.  If you feel like everyone is judging you all the time, realize that human beings often feel this way when they are too busy judging themselves.

It’s far easier to be critical than correct, just as it’s easier to see why something is lacking rather than why it is good.  If you meet someone for the first time and you decide, “This is a person I don’t like,” you can basically take every one of his or her characteristics and find the obvious flaw.  What’s hard to do is describe what you like about them, despite their incompatibility with your ideals.

Everyone is unique: not better, not worse, just unique in his or her own way.  Appreciate the differences instead of criticizing the shortcomings and you’ll see people – and yourself – in a far better light. 

2.  Believing that you have all the answers.

Criticizing has a big brother: the know-it-all-syndrome.  The older you grow, the higher you rise in your chosen field, and the more you achieve, the more likely you are to think you know it all.  When you catch yourself thinking and speaking with intense finality and little tolerance for new ideas, stop yourself and take a deep breath.  If you do not, you will alienate the world around you and become more and more disconnected from reality with each passing day.  Few things are sadder and leave a person unhappier.

Remember, it isn’t someone who proves you wrong that hurts you; it is choosing to continue your self-deception and ignorance that eventually conquers you entirely.

The measure of your intelligence and success in life will be in direct proportion to your ability to change your mind and let it expand.  If someone is able to show you that what you think or do is not right, thank him or her and happily adjust.  Seek the truth.  Never stop learning.

3.  Trying to control everything.

Craving control leads to anger and unhappiness.  Life is to be lived, not controlled.  Powerful, positive change will occur in your life when you decide to take control of yourself instead of craving control over everyone and everything else.

Imagine that you’re driving in your car and you get stuck in rush hour traffic.  The traffic situation is out of your control and simply requires your patience.  However, this doesn’t stop you from switching lanes, trying to cut in front of other cars, or even leaving the road you’re on to try alternate routes – all desperate efforts to gain control.  Sadly, these efforts just lead to further stress and unhappiness when they are unsuccessful – when control is again obstructed.

Quite simply, the reason you are often miserable and stressed is because of an unhealthy attachment to certain things you have no control over.  So let go.  Release the tension and stress.  Realize you haven’t lost anything; you were never in control of the uncontrollable to begin with. 

4.  Dwelling on what used to be.

When something negative happens, view this circumstance, as a chance to learn something you didn’t know.  Don’t wish it never happened.  Don’t try to step back in time.  Take the lessons learned and step forward.  You have to tell yourself, “It’s OK. You’re doing OK.”  You need to know that it’s better to cross-new lines and suffer the consequences of a lesson learned from time to time, than to just stare at the lines for the rest of your life and always wonder.

The past is valuable.  It provides a solid foundation for everything you’re doing now.  Learn from it – the mistakes and the successes – and then let it go.  This process might seem easier said than done, but it depends on your focus.  The past is just training; it doesn’t define you in this moment.  Think about what went wrong, but only in terms of how you will help you make things right.

The bottom line is that if nothing ever changed – if no chances were ever taken and no mistakes were ever made – there would be no sunrise the next morning.  Most of us are comfortable where we are even though the whole universe is constantly changing around us.  Learning to accept this change is vital to our happiness and general self-improvement.  Because only when we let go of what used to be, do we grow and begin to see a world we never knew was possible.

5.  Wanting everything you don’t have.

Life is NOT short if you spend every waking moment appreciating it.  It’s just that by the time most of us catch up to appreciating what we have, we’ve already squandered our time and left life at least halfway behind us.

The key is being thankful for what you have NOW.

No, not all the puzzle pieces of life will seem to fit together at first, but in time you’ll realize they do, perfectly.  So thank the situations that didn’t work out for you, because they just made room for the situations that will.  And thank the people who walked away from you, because they just made room for the ones who won’t.

No matter how good or bad you think you have it, wake up each day thankful for your life.  Someone somewhere else is desperately fighting for his or hers.  Instead of thinking about what you’re missing, think about what you have that everyone else is missing.  Think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive in your own shoes – to breathe a fresh breath, to think another thought, to enjoy a new moment, to have options – then go out and make the day count.

6.  Whining and doing nothing about it.

Complaining does not work as a strategy.  Those who complain the most, accomplish the least positive results.  When you spend time fretting and complaining, you’re simply using your imagination to create things you don’t want.

Don’t talk about what’s wrong.  Harping on your problems makes you feel worse, not better.  Unless you want to complain about it forever, eventually you’ll have to DO something.  If you took a fraction of the energy you put into complaining and applied it to solving your problem, you’d likely be stunned by how well things can work out.  Start talking about how you’ll improve things, even if the conversation is only with yourself, and then focus on the next positive step.  Refocus your energy into making your situation better.

7.  Fearing everything for any reason at all.

Sometimes we’re afraid we will fail.  Sometimes we’re subconsciously afraid we’ll succeed, because then we’d have to deal with all the disruption (growth) and change that follows success.  And other times it’s our fear of rejection or simply our fear of looking like a fool.  So it’s easier to hesitate, to wait for the perfect moment, to decide we need to think a bit longer or do some more research or explore a few more unnecessary alternatives.

Meanwhile days, weeks, months, and even years of our precious lives pass us by.  And so do our dreams.

The best way I’ve found to let go of fear is to stare it down.  Connect to your fear, feel it in your body, realize it and steadily address it.  Greet it by name if you have to: “Welcome, fear.”  And then take action!  Whatever you’ve been planning, whatever you’ve imagined, whatever you’ve dreamed of, don’t wait another minute.  Get started!  Take the first step.  Do something.  Do anything.  Learn as you go and watch as your fears slowly subside.

8.  Spending time with people who drain you.

It’s not always where you are in life, but whom you have by your side that matters most.  Some people drain you and others provide soul food.  Don’t jeopardize your dignity and self-respect by trying to make someone accept, love and appreciate you when they have proven that they are incapable of doing so.

When you leave the wrong people in your life, the right things start happening.  What would happen if you surrounded yourself with people who made you better?  What would happen if you started spending time with the RIGHT people?

Think about it!

Strategic Analysis

Strategic Analysis is all about looking at what is occurring outside your organization now and in the future.

There are two critical questions:

1.    How does this affect you?

2.    What is the intelligent response to likely changes?

It is called strategic because it is high level, over the longer term, and about your whole organization.

It is called analysis because it is about breaking something that is big and complex down into more manageable portions.

An objective analysis and understanding of your markets and your costs and capabilities forms the bedrock for the strategy development process. From this analysis and by applying creativity will come a number of options and opportunities that can be used to build and implement a solid strategic plan for new or existing markets.

Setting a strategy requires knowledge in three areas:

Customers: Existing customers and potential customers and markets. What do they do? What would help them do what they do better? What are their needs? Where are the most profitable customers?

Competencies: Skills, knowledge and relationships. What do you do well? What abilities could you draw on? What costs do you have to carry? Where do you make money?

Competition: The whole competitive environment from regulation to real life competition. What is the basis of competition? Where are the threats? Where is their pressure and where is the market easy?

Analysis of the three areas is interrelated. Who you select as your target audience will have implications for what capabilities you need, which will have an impact on what competitive pressures are around which will influence who you choose as your target audience. Some companies will have all this knowledge to hand easily and readily. Others will require information and analysis to be carried out in order to bring together the knowledge together into one place. Within the process of carrying out Strategic Analysis is choosing which customers and markets to concentrate on and looking at what has value to these customers ensures that your efforts and resources can be focused on the areas with the most potential for return.

The best starting points for strategic analysis is to look at who your key target audiences and customers are and what they do and value. Once you understand what your customers do and value, you can start to look for ways of helping them do what they do better. Where "better" is as judged by your customers, looking at what they value, not necessarily what you are good at. The process of choosing a target audience can happen at two levels.

What existing customers we have and what is their value to us (profit not revenue)?

What potential customers can we address in the future if we chose to target untapped markets?

These demand-side views need to be matched against your capabilities and the competitive environment to understand what costs would be involved to reap these rewards.

Existing customers

In terms of customers you already have, many companies will have lists of customers and accounts (this is not always the case, particularly where there is a distribution channel involved).

The key questions to ask are: Who are the most important customers to you in terms of profit and strategic fit? What do these customers value? What are their business priorities? Where are the competitive pressures on these accounts? What can you offer in the way of improvements to keep them with you and increase your value to them, or your value to their customers?

For existing accounts we look at revenue and costs per customer to identify where the profitable customers are (which is not always as you would expect).  Secondly, we look at what these customers need and value to identify areas of opportunity, and possibly to find ways of grouping or sub-dividing customers who have similar needs or requirements. 

Although many companies have close working relationships with their major customers, there is plenty of evidence to show that few companies take the time to periodically review the whole relationship and to understand where and what customers really want. In particular, some of the existing knowledge has been filtered through distribution channels who may have their own agenda, or is focused on the here-and-now sorting out issues of delivery, price and quality on today's sales that the mechanics and future of the relationship can be overlooked, allowing competitors to sneak in.  Consequently this is where techniques such as relationship analysis and for supply chains conjoint analysis, value-chain analysis can have real power to unlock the profit potential from your customers.

New customers

The option for analyzing target markets is to ask who could your customers be in the future. What sectors would you attack? Where are there economies of scale in meeting a group of customer's requirements?

For new markets, research either in the form of desk research using existing studies and market intelligence, or in the form of market research studies will be needed to ascertain who are the best prospect areas.  It is possible to take an inner view without doing a data collection exercise, but it can be risky to rely on internal views of the wider markets, or even external views such as your distribution channel or existing customers.  The problem is that the perspective you have is likely to be biased because of your position in the market. This is known as the sales-view bias.

Sales are mainly going to be spending most of their time talking to people who are interested in your product (Pro). They see the market from the Pro end looking back. Consequently they spend less time talking to the rest of the market who become more interested in your competitors (Con). The risk is that the customers you don't see start changing the market (move you mouse over the picture to see this), or worse, you produce products and services that become more and more specific to a small number of existing customers and less and less relevant to a wider audience.

This means that it is always worth taking an objective, market wide look to try and identify new markets that are arising, or threats that are developing. Market intelligence can be used to identify likely target customers and to source lists and existing market data. If market research is carried out, a range of techniques such as segmentation can be used to identify likely prospects backed up by in depth qualitative examinations to find out what these new customers are looking for.  Developing a clear and profitable strategy relies on balancing your company's competencies and abilities against the market opportunities toward the future.

The process, when done well, allows the business to develop the Strategic Plan.

Many entrepreneurial ventures mistakenly believe that strategic planning is only for large businesses that can afford the time and personnel to develop a sound plan. However, if you are to compete in the marketplace against the larger competitors, you need to learn facilitate a game plan.  Strategic planning is a major part of any successful, large business. That does not mean that your startup needs all the bells and whistles of the more complex plans. You can in a matter of hours sketch out a good working draft that will help keep you on course to becoming a solid competitor. Let's take a look at the basics that will get your business strategically positioned to develop in the direction you want it to go.

What is strategic planning and how does it differ from other types of planning? Strategic planning involves setting up a strategy that your business is going to follow over a defined time period. It can be for a specific part of the business, like planning a marketing strategy, or for the business as a whole. Usually the owner (CEO) or a board of directors sets the overall strategy for the business and each area of the company plans their strategy in alignment with the overall strategy. Differing businesses use various time periods for their strategic planning. The time period is usually dependent on how fast the industry is moving. In a fast-changing environment like the Internet, 5-year plans don't make sense. In industries that change more slowly, longer range planning is possible and desirable.

Writing a Business Plan is different from strategic planning. One writes a business plan when one is starting something new or revising the forecast for the future, a business or a product/service line within a business. Strategy looks to growth while business planning looks to beginnings. Part of the strategy of a business may be to introduce a new product line. That product line would then have its own business plan for its development and introduction.

Without a strategy your business has no direction. Strategy tells where you want to go. It is like cooking without a recipe. It can be done, but the results may not be what you desire. Perhaps more apropos, it is like playing a sport, albeit running a race or playing football. Without a strategy, your chance of achieving your goals is significantly diminished.  And while strategic planning shouldn't be all you do in your business, it should be an integral part of it. Every action taken should fit with the direction you want the business to go.  Therefore, every action should be in alignment with your strategy. That means every employee knows the strategy and understands their part in making it happen, and in helping change it, when needed. No strategy should be set in stone. It needs to be revisited and revised at regular intervals, again related to how quickly your industry is changing. Set a good process and follow it.

There is no set format for a strategic plan. There are a large variety of models. The important criterion is finding a model that is workable for your particular business.  In its most basic form, the critical components are:

•                Business Purpose

•                Organizational Goals

•                Strategies for Reaching Each Goal

•                Action Plans to Implement Strategy

•                Monitoring Plan Implementation

Business Purpose

The business purpose is often also called the mission of the business. It is a brief statement about why the business exists - what you want to achieve. This does not need to be complicated, but it must sum up the essence of what you are trying to do as a business. A good example is Nike's Mission Statement, "To be the world's leading sports and Fitness Company."

Organizational Goals

Goals are the ends to which your efforts are aimed - how you plan on accomplishing your purpose or mission. A sample goal might be to provide the highest quality widget in the world. This goal commits all your strategies to choosing quality as an endpoint. Brainstorm a wide variety of goals you might want to pursue. Do not worry about conflicts between goals on the first pass. Just get them out on the table for discussion and winnowing at a later time. There are thousands of goals one could set for each mission. Don't go for that many, but give yourself latitude for making choices.  Making choices is what this step is all about. You can't do everything, yet you want to have looked at the broader spectrum in choosing your business goals. A decision will need to be made about which of the possible goals you, as a business, are going to pursue. This doesn't mean you might not pursue some other goals later, just that these are what are planned within the time frame of this plan.

A logic sequence is as follows:  Do you have it and want it?  If the answer is yes, you preserve it.  If the answer is no, you eliminate it.

Strategies for Reaching Each Goal

A strategy is another way of saying what approach are you going to take in reaching this goal. For instance, in the quality goal example above, you may pursue it by buying the best possible components or you may have stringent quality checks throughout the process or any of a wide variety of other approaches. Interestingly, this is the part of your plan that may change most frequently. You may discover that one strategy is not working and look for other ways to get the result you want. The important thing in this step is to build in checkpoints to ascertain that the strategy is working and to be flexible about changing if need be.

Action Plans to Implement Strategy

Action plans are the specific activities that you will be using to implement the strategy. Often these are stated as objectives. For instance, on our quality goal, an objective might be to have only one percent reject rate at a certain rating point in the process. It is good to have this step stated as precisely as possible so that you can measure progress towards its achievement. If multiple departments are involved, it may be helpful to have each of them set their own objectives since that provides buy in which is critical to the actions actually being implemented.

Monitoring Plan Implementation

This is where many, many strategic plans fail. If you don't follow through on whether the plan is being implemented and how it is doing, you might as well have not spent the time doing it in the first place. Put checkpoints on your calendar and make it a point to not let them pass unnoticed. Include benchmarks in your financial reporting system. This is your chance to not only verify that you are on track towards your goal, but it gives you an opportunity to make modifications if they seem needed.

Summary:

While every analysis is unique to the organization under impact, there are logical steps to take to handle and avoid the confusion of how to act.  Business Management Counseling Services can aid your company or organization prior and during the time of strategic analysis.  We highly recommend a pro-active approach of preparedness, however when a pro-active plan does not exist we can facilitate the least amount of collateral damage to the event.

The Art of Self Confidence

If you were able to maintain a level of self-confidence that no circumstance could shake, what would you be doing differently?  Just imagine the things you would accomplish if you were confident that you “COULD”.

This kind of confidence comes from positive self-imaging, and it is something that you can proactively build for yourself.  It doesn’t happen while you wait passively.  When you leave it up to external factors, you build your self-confidence on sandy ground.  What you need is a rock-solid foundation, and this only comes from building it from within.

Plenty has been written about building self-confidence – creating a plan, setting goals, finding the right mentor, etc. – but today we are going to take a look at seven ways that are not as widely discussed:

1.  Take chances that make you feel uncomfortable.

The moment you doubt whether you can do something, you cease forever to be able to do it.  Don’t be afraid to feel uncomfortable.  Don’t be afraid to look uneasy and a little silly in front of others.

Running around in your underwear isn’t the solution we’re talking about here, although I’m sure that would feel uncomfortable and look pretty silly.  What we are talking about is growing your inner strength and building your confidence by occasionally putting yourself in situations where you are forced to overcome new and unknown obstacles.

It’s all about your commitment to learning, adapting and growing.  Decide that your visions and goals are more important than your self-imposed limitations.  Dare to try.  Step outside of your comfort zone.  Believe you can and you’re halfway there. 

2.  Fail fast and fail often.

You must encounter many defeats to learn how to not be defeated.  Failing is a process of learning; it helps you grow and know who you are, what you can rise from, and how you can still rise after you fall.  It is this process that boosts your confidence gradually over the course of your lifetime.

You have to remember that it doesn’t matter how many times you fail or how slowly you go, so long as you do not stop taking steps forward.  In the end, those who don’t care that failure is inevitable are the ones that most often achieve success.

3.  Be wrong and be OK with it.

You don’t have to always be right, you just have to not be too worried about being wrong.

Just like occasional failures, being wrong from time to time is inevitable.  The people who take the position of always being right aren’t confident. They’re cocky.  They think they know everything and they want you to know it too.  Ironically, their need to always be right imprisons them from being able to learn from their mistakes.

To build true confidence, you have to not mind being wrong.  You have to take a stand, and then admit it if and when you realize your standpoint is wrong.  It’s a process of trial and error that helps you discover what IS right.  And finding out what is right is a lot more important than always being right.

Bottom line:  When you’re wrong, admit it and be securing enough to back down graciously, adjust and carry on. 

4.  Compliment others and help them smile.

The best part of life is not just surviving, but thriving with passion, compassion, humor, generosity and kindness, and using these tools to make the world a happier place.

When we think negatively about ourselves, we typically project these feelings on to others in the form of insults, gossip and incidental neglect.  To break this cycle of negativity, get in the habit of praising other people.  If someone looks nice, tell him or her.  If someone does a good job, applaud him or her.  Refuse to engage in backstabbing gossip and make an effort to compliment those around you.  In the process, you’ll help these people smile, which will help you feel good about yourself.

By looking for the best in others, you indirectly bring out the best in yourself!

5.  Laugh in the face of frustration.

The best medicine is a strong dose of laughter and letting go.

When things don’t go as planned, laughing or crying are often the only two options left, because they are both instinctive human responses to frustration.  Both are OK, but laughing usually feels better.

Sometimes a little self-invoked humor is all you need to lift your spirits and light the path forward.  Even in your darkest moments, strive to see the lighter side of a situation and crack a smile.  Doing so will help you think positively and reawaken your confidence about all the possibilities that still exist on the road ahead.

6.  Ignore what most people think of you.

How would your life be different if you stopped allowing people who don’t matter to poison your mind with their opinions?

Do you have 5 thousand FaceBook friends and 20 thousand followers on Twitter?  Good for you. (?)  Do you have a professional and personal social network of hundreds or even thousands?  That’s great.  Just don’t forget that this massive network of acquaintances pales in comparison to the importance of earning and maintaining the trust and respect of the few people in your life who actually matter – your close family members and real friends.  When you earn the trust and respect of these special people, no matter where you go or what you attempt to do, you will do it with a sense of confidence, because you will know the people who truly matter are truly behind you.

Now seriously, compiling a mega list of “friends” on FaceBook?  Review your list.  Count the ones that will be there no matter what happens in your life if you sincerely needed them to be at your side at 3:00 am, how many of those “friends” will climb out of bed and rush to your side? If you have a handful, amazing!  If you have one, just one, you are blessed!

Let today be the day you stand strong in the limelight of your own truth, without seeking needless external validation.  Accept no one’s definition of your life except your own, and seek approval only from the people who truly matter in your life

7.  Begin right NOW.

To resist at the beginning is always the easiest choice to make, and it’s also the only choice that guarantees you will never reach the end result you desire.

Too often we fall victim to our own waiting.  We feel we have to wait for just the right moment:  To be promoted, to be appointed, to be ready, to be somehow chosen by the powers above, as if there will suddenly be a moment when everything makes perfect sense and the road to our dreams is effortless.

But the truth is, it’s usually just a matter of thinking, “Why not me?  Why not now?”

Right now, in today’s digital, interconnected world, you have access to everything you need.  You can connect with almost anyone you need to know through social media.  You can build your own relationships and professional networks.  You can design and create your own portfolio and products.  You can use blogging and content marketing to attract attention, customers and funding. You can choose your own path – you can choose to follow whatever course you wish.

Right now, without calling attention to yourself, you can begin to make things happen.  You can take a small step forward, and then another, and grow more capable and more confident with every new step you take.