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There is another great post on the Pick the Brain website, I’m really becoming a fan of this site. This post is about th at old chestnut, limiting beliefs, and is entitled, How to Beat the Plague of Limiting Beliefs. I guess most of us know what limiting beliefs are, though we may still need help in identifying our own and even more help in overcoming them. This post reminds us, quite rightly that all our limiting beliefs are imaginary …

As I said, most of us will need some support and guidance in helping us to overcome our limiting beliefs. This article gives us some tips and advice in doing just that.

It starts by reminding us that our limiting beliefs are in our mind, that is to say that they are imaginary and that there is often no physical reason to hold us back. Once this is accepted and realised, it is easier for a person to overcome their limiting beliefs.

Our limiting beliefs are not something we were born with; we have learned them from somewhere. If we are able to recognise where we have learned them and then to question them, we can start to overcome them. Your beliefs may have come from your parents, your school, your friends or from the society/neighborhood in which you live but, ask yourself, do you always have to accept what they told you?

Inside you, you may feel that something is right but your mind may be telling you ‘no’. Sometimes the mind says ‘no’ for a good reason but sometimes it just says ‘no’ because it is controlled by a limiting belief. Whereas your ‘heart’ does not have such beliefs and may often urge you forward … there are times when you should folow your heart.

The article does come up with an interesting concept; that of temporary suspension of limiting beliefs. You may want to remove all your limiting beliefs and that is a great goal but it is one that will certainly take some time. It may well take some time to permanently remove just one belief. Yet, you do not always have that time, so why not just temporarirly suspend that belief and act as if it did not exist within you? You could try this by practising a new skill, by visualizing life without the belief, or by just ignoring the belief and moving forward.

In all this is a great article on tackling limiting beliefs and I recommend it to anyone.

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Many of us will have heard of the phrase ‘turn a crisis into an opportunity’ but hopefully many of us will not have had to discover what it meant. For myself, I discovered meaning of the phrase when I found myself suddenly out of work. That was my ‘crisis’ and yet I kept telling myself that this was also an ‘opportunity’ but an opportunity for what?

For me, that opportunity was the chance to explore new avenues of work and to take my experience to a wider audience. be

Should you, and I do not wish this upon anyone, find yourself in a similar crisis, it may not easily clear what ‘opportunity’ is open to you. A new article on the Pick the Brain website, entitled How to Turn Crisis into Opportunity offers you some insight and tips into finding opportunity in crisis, particularly the current financial crisis.

According to the article, the current crisis could be an opportunity to take advantage of unfounded pessimism, take advantage of low competition and, my favorite, reassess your life plan. The article offers some interesting ideas and insights but don’t just take my word for it …

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There is an absolutely marvellous post on the Pick the Brain blog. It is provocatively titled Your Money or Your Life and it simply asks the question, which is more important?

At one point, the author asks the reader to recall the three most important days in their life. Most of us would probably choose days such as wedding day, 18th birthday, kids births, retirement day etc.. The author then goes on to ask if you can recall what your bank balance was on those days!

The chances are that most of us cannot. The author points to this as evidence that our life is more important to us than money.

The author goes on to remind us that we are not a bank balance, we are not a credit score and we are not the economy. Our lives consist of good times, meaningful relationships and, for want of a better term, life purpose, most of which had little to do with money.

It is only by focusing upon these important aspects of life that a person can remain centered during these times of financial difficulty.

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The Pick the Brain website continues to publish great articles, and to think I nearly missed this one! A couple of days ago, the site had a post about how meditation improves health part 2. I reported earlier my responses to part 1. Part 2 looks at how meditation can improve the body’s reaction to stress.

The article claims that meditation helps ward off the negative effects of stress by taking the mind and the body out of the stressed state and into a relaxation response. This is a much more beneficial state for the body to be in and it helps reduce and control the release of unwanted hormones that are released during stress.

Meditation also, it seems, enables your body to utilise less oxygen and lower heart rates. It also has an effect upon brain wave functioning, similar in a way to the mind and body entering sleep.

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This is an article that gives some good tips for things to do during a period of ecominc hardship. These tips include, Connect With Your Loved Ones, Rethink Your Priorities, Consider Alternative Careers and Do Something Socially or Religiously Relevant among others.

The tips are very worth while and the author goes into some detail about why and how you could do them. For me the first of the tips listed above is a very important one. It has been shown that economic and financial pressures also put pressure upon relationships, connecting more closely with your loved ones could help ease that pressure and help you get through any economic downturn.

The author states that “some people survive and come through victorious and some don’t”, this can be especially true of times of economic difficulty. It is evident that it will be people who can adapt that will be the most likely to survive difficult economic times. As the author again says, “You are victorious when you can use even adversity to your advantage.”

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There’s a cracking good post on the Pick the Brain blog today about how meditation improves your health.

It claims that meditation can;

1. assist healing, and
2. help you stay healthy

What more could you ask for?

As someone who has long been a fan of meditation, I am not surprised by the finding talked about in the article and it is always pleasing when meditation gets a good airing. So I urge anyone to go along to the blog and read the article. I feel sure that after reading it you will want to learn about meditatio techniques.

Meditation is increasingly being accepted in the West as well as in East where it originates. Mainstream medical doctors are now accepting that it can have benefits in the healing process. A great number of the modern afflictions of our modern western society can be ameliorated by meditation, conditions such as high blood pressure, insomnia, fatigue, headaches, gastro-intestinal problems, infertility, sexual problems, and anxiety attacks, … phew there’s a lot there, I feel almost better already!

This article is just the first in a three part series, if the rest are as informative as this one, then they will all be well worth reading.

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Monday is usually a quiet day but not, it seems, on the pick the brain website. There they have a new post about how to make the world a better place. This seems a pretty huge and noble effort for a Monday morning.

Before, though, you start thinking that this is some religious or political diatribe… think again. Take a look at the post and you will see that it’s about making people feel better.

It compares the impact of trash upon the environment with the impact of trash upon people. We’re not just talking about the physical trash that you throw out but the verbal or emotional trash that you throw upon other people.

The post talks about people who complain. Do you really want to listen to someone complaining? Few of us do. Similarly people rarely want to listen about us complaining!

Wouldn’t you feel better if you had an intellectual conversation, even a short one, with another person rather than just listening to their complaints? Of corse you would. Don’t you think also that the other person would feel the same?

The post seems to take the viewpoint that it is better to leave a person feeling better than they did when you found them. Which is a buit like cleaning up the environment but on a more personal, intellectual and social scale.

So why not read the post, it is a good one and an inspiring one, then go out and try to make someone feel better today?

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Do you find yourself worrying? Possibly worrying about things that might never happen? Well, there’s some good news for you;

Pick the Brain has a new post on worrying or, more specifically, how to stop worrying

Worrying is often not really worthwhile and this is one of the ponts made in the article. It points out that over 90% of our worrying is futile. We either seem to worry about things that do not happen or worry about things we have no control over.

It may be argued that worrying is a precursor to being prepared for any eventuality but when we realise that most of the time, we worry unnecessarily, then we can only assume that worry is a waste of time.

Surely there must be better things we can do than to worry about things that are not going to happen?

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It is at times like these, and for some people those times may even seem never-ending, that you need to find ways of boosting your self confidence.

Over on the zen habits website blog, you will find a really informative article that presents no fewer than 25 ways in which you can boost your self confidence.

Some of these tips are really simple and fairly easy, such as dressing nicely and grooming yourself well. Others might be a bit more difficult and take time to master, such as stopping negative thinking and replacing negative thinking with positive thinking. Others may seem quite daunting, like photoshopping yourself, this will help you see your image as others see you and it can also be a useful tool to help you change your image.

All the 25 tips are quite simple and straight forward, doing any one of them is almost certain to lead to improvement, doing more is likely to bring only positive benefit and doing all of them … well give it a go and see how your confidence improves.

As an alternative, for those of you who find 25 tips too daunting, there is another excellent article on confidence at the Pick the Brain website. This gives 10 tips for boosting your self confidence and again, each tip is well worth trying.

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