The article is entitled 7 Keys to Turning Bad habits into Good habitsand it is well worth a read if you want to replace one of your bad habits.

The secret to the approach is, apparently, to identify what causes, or triggers, you bad habit and then to identify a positive habit you can do instead of the bad one. Then you need to practise the new habit while avoiding any situations that you know may be likely to bring on the bad habit.

Get someone to help or support you and remember to stay positive. It is always a good idea to get people to help you when creating changes to your self or your life, they can be there to encourage and support you in changing. Positive thinking is also important as thinking positive thoughts can help you get through times when it seems hard to continue.

Do not just take my word for it, do pop over to the Zen Habits website and read the article in more depth for yourself. You’ll find it very useful if you want to stop any of your bad habits.

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Do What You Love to Do is a well-worn phrase that is often followed by the phrase, and the money will follow. Basically it is used as a maxim by people who wish to follow their passion with little regard for money. The belief being that money will follow automatically. The problem is that it often doesn’t.

That is the argument followed in an article on the Zen Habits site in a post entitled How to Do what You Love Without Selling Your Soul. This article explores the idea of selling yourself or self promotion.

The central problem is that if you do want to do what you love and the money doesn’t follow, then you have to find a way to attract money. Thios could mean selling your soul or, on the other hand, it could mean finding a way of marketing yourself or whatever it is that you love doing.

I’d guess that few of us like marketing ourselves, many people see self promotion as akin to selfishness, arrogance and even pomposity. This article argues that we need to lose such feelings.

The article goes on the explore the concept of authentic marketing as a means of promoting yourself and the value you offer others while also increasing your own knowledge and skills.

Do take time to read the article, it is well worth the time, particularly if you have the desire to do what you love doing and hope to make it a living.

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Image by stilllearninghowtofly - W W Tribe Psychiatrist via Flickr

The Zen Habits blog has a post today about motivation and how to stay motivated to achieve your goals.

The post claims there are just two secrets to maintaining your motivation; make things enjoyable and use positive public pressure. I guess a person’s first response to reading this might be to say that some things aren’t always enjoyable but you have to do them in order to reach your goal. Also, not many of us, of course, are in the public eye as much as the author; so how could we use public pressure?

Well, the answers to these questions are in the post, so I’d suggest you pop over there and read it. I’ll simply give you clues here by saying that the public pressure could come from anybody – family, friends, neighbors, co-workers not just the public at large. As for making things enjoyable, well the author claims this is an alternative to those of us who fail to achieve goals through lack of dicipline, will-power or staying power. The author claims that it is not discipline that is required to achieve goals, it is motivation and that comes from maing things enjoyable.

All in all, this is a very thoughtful post and one which could help you if you have trouble sticking to your goals.

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Book cover via Amazon

The zen habits webiste has an interesting post about success not being a competition. The article starts by suggesting that helping others can also help you in the long run. That is a sentiment and a belief that I can wholeheartedly agree with.

What strikes me as interesting about this is that this is exactly the same tennet that is explored by Robert Holden in his book Success Intelligence.

Robert, perhaps exploiting the then vogue for ‘intelligences’ viz ‘emotional intelligence’, coined the phrase success intelligence and expounded upon it in his book. He wrote about people’s attitudes to success and how certain beliefs held people back from achieving success, and also about how helping others to achieve success could bring about greater success for all. The various attitudes to success is a topic I wrote an article about for my own website.

Of course, helping others to succeed also makes you feel good, the zen habits blog makes mention of this. It has also been suggested that this is one reason why some people go into ‘caring’ or ‘nuturing’ professions such as teaching, nursing or counseling. However, sharing success seems ‘okay’ when the success you enable others to obtain is different from your own success but what if you both seek success in the same field? Is joint success then as beneficial or is that when it turns into a competition?

It often seems that competition for success emerges when two or more people seek success in the same field. It is difficult at such times for the people involved to envisage ways of working together to create greater success. This is where the narrow focussed mind needs to be replaced by some creative and imaginative collaboration between the parties involved.

So have a look at the zen habits post about success; there is a lot more there than I have talked about here.

The author starts by telling us about a few of his weaknesses. He then asks the readers what their weaknesses are. Then he presents 3 simple steps to turn these into strengths.

The key seems to be not to try to hide your weaknesses but to acknowledge them and also to recognise your strengths. So far so good but the problem is still how do you turn your weaknesses into strengths. The author gives a few examples and then invites the readers to submit their own ideas in the comment box.

So if you have any ideas about how to turn a weakness into a strength or have done this yourself, why not pop along to the zen habits website and share your insights?

The Zen Habits website has a nice article on making goal setting simple and easy.

It is surprising how difficult it can be to set your goals. Which is perhaps why many of us settle for goals given to us by other people (boss, parents, friends, spouse…) I also guess not many of us actually take the time to sit down and try to work out our goals … If this sounds like you then you should take the time to sit down and sort out your own goals and this article is a great place to start.

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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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