5 Secrets of Highly Self-Motivated People

Do you ever see somebody and think, “That person is doing it right”? Well, chances are they have felt the same way about their own role models. This chain of inspiration goes on and on, passing from person to person and affording everyone the opportunity to learn and grow from others. When it comes to motivation, some people have a few tricks up their sleeves on how to stay inspired and driven in everything that they do. Without further ado, here are some bits of wisdom from some of the most self-motivated people out there.

• Be Realistic

This may sound like a dream-crushing piece of advice, but it’s a critical step in the process of achieving your goals. Be realistic when you set goals for yourself. Otherwise, you’ll feel like you can never achieve them, which will lead to much less motivation.

• Put the “Self” in Self-motivated

Yes, that means feeling like you’re being selfish sometimes. Don’t view it as a negative thing, though. Rather than calling it selfish, call it self-care. If we only focus on other people’s needs and goals, we can quickly lose motivation to achieve our own, often due to exhaustion. You deserve to follow your big dreams too. But you can only keep the motivation to reach them when you are taking good care of yourself.....

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 Have a Contingency Plan

If you feel like you’re making great progress and then an external factor completely out of your control swoops in and changes your plans, you may lose the incentive to keep going – all at once. Don’t let this happen! Studies show that people who plan for obstacles are more inclined to stick to their goals. In other words, don’t let anything rain on your parade—it’s your parade, so you can manage the storms.

Remember Your “Why”

There’s a reason for your motives in the first place. They didn’t appear out of thin air. Some people go through the motions without remembering that there is a meaning and a purpose to your goals and responsibilities. For example, if you are trying to write every day because you want to be a better communicator, keep this in mind when you’re struggling with grammar. It’s an intrinsic motivator that will help you reach internally to pull out all the inspiration that you first started with. 

Change Things Up

You’ve heard the saying before, “If you don’t plan, you are planning to fail.” However, even understanding that comment, we forget about in our personal lives. Most of the time, we apply that type of rational thought to our work life. We sadly forget that planning our personal development is also an essential part of achieving everything out of life that we desire. In addition, personal development does include career development.

That includes all your audacious goals and dreams developed minutes before falling to sleep each night that is gone when you wake up. When you wake up life intrudes and diverts your attention with all measure of bright shiny lights, sounds, and distractions.

By creating a personal development plan, you devise a plan that enables you to avoid distractions and instead act each day with intent, knowing it’s going to lead you to the future you want. When you create a personal development plan, you’re primarily asking yourself to identify where and how you are going to focus your actions that will ultimately lead you to succeed in reaching your goals allowing you to live a life with purpose.

Benefits of Creating & Implementing a Personal Development Plan

There are numerous benefits to creating and implementing a personal development plan. It doesn’t matter who you are, you can get a lot out of a personal development plan. Let’s look at some of these benefits. Keep in mind that you may experience even more positivity due to implementing this in your life....

Ways to Find Courage in Yourself

Courage is more than just having confidence or getting rid of fear. It's about doing what is needed despite the fear. Courage is an essential quality to develop if you want to build a successful career, business, and have a fabulous relationship with friends and family. Ready to get started? Here are ways you can begin finding the courage within yourself.

Identify What Is Holding You Back

Ask yourself bold and honest questions to discover what is holding you back. Why do you feel like you need to find more courage? Are there people or situations causing you to be fearful? Is it your lack of skills or knowledge? What are your fears and why do you fear these things? When you can identify the exact cause, you can create a solution.

Experience More

Expand your comfort zone. What this means is you need to experience more life outside of things that you know. It’s normal to keep doing things that bring you joy or comfort. But the more you experience, the more you will understand other perspectives. Even if something seems scary on the surface, it's often only due to a lack of experience. When you challenge yourself, it will allow you to experience your strength and courage.

Learn Forgiveness

You must expect that you will fail or make a mistake at some point in your life. No one can get through life without it. Mistakes provide you with a chance to improve or discover new passions or hobbies. When you make a mistake, forgive yourself. Identify where you can improve but don’t harp or dwell on it without using the information to improve yourself.

What Advice Would You Give A Friends?

Take a moment to put yourself in your friend's shoes. If they were to come to you about this concern, what advice would you give them? It is likely because you care for your friend so much you won’t see them as anything but courageous why be more hash with yourself? Keep this in mind anytime you don’t believe in yourself.

Play It Out and Practice

If certain events or situations prevent you from truly being yourself, a great way to get over this is to practice or play it out. For example, if you want more courage to ask your boss for a raise, act out the conversation you plan to have with your boss. Look at yourself in the mirror and practice assertive communication.

In the end, if you want to find more courage within yourself, you must act. Courage is no different than any other skill. If you ignore it or choose not to work on it, it will be harder to find and maintain.

Why Good Organization Is the Ultimate Key to Success

Poor organizational skills can hinder your professional career, cost you time and money, lead to poor relationships, and even to declining mental or physical health. To keep up with your responsibilities and be highly productive, you must possess organizational skills. Thankfully, with training and dedication, you can learn to be more organized. Yes, even you.

Being organized means that you can prioritize, declutter, and schedule people, tasks, or things wisely based on your goals. Being organized can improve all these things and more:

Improves Time Management

Staying organized allows you to always be on time, so you avoid missing important deadlines or appointments. When you are not organized, time is often wasted searching for needed items, tools, and paperwork. Spending time searching instead of doing it can lead to missed deadlines, forgotten meetings, and not having time to go to outings with friends and family.

Improves Mental and Physical Health

Being organized allows you to de-stress, improving overall health as you no longer miss important deadlines or scramble to find important objects through your house or office. Decluttering your space is known to reduce cortisol levels, the hormone responsible for stress. If you want to feel calmer, clean up your space immediately.

Improves and Increases Productivity and Efficiency

Being organized helps you use your time more wisely. When you are organized, you feel like you have more time to work on essential tasks leading to higher productivity. Having the resources that you need front and center without having to fumble through other clutter leads to more valuable time to finish your tasks and produce high-quality work. Having everything you need ready to go can also make overwhelming tasks easier to get done and be used as a source of motivation to keep going.

Creates A Clutter-free And More Hygienic Environment

Clutter leads to dust or more dirt collection that can wreak havoc on your physical and mental health. A clutter-free environment is more hygienic and is known to decrease cortisol levels, leaving you relieved, satisfied, and happier, not to mention ready to work and tackle all the tasks you need to do.

Leads to Improved and Better Relationships

Organization provides fewer opportunities to stress or worry while spending time with friends, family, or other meaningful relationships. Organization includes arranging every aspect of your life to make it easier. This includes ensuring you only work at work, not at home or during other people's time.

As you can see, being and staying organized is the key to optimal success. If you want a successful career, more meaningful relationships, and improved physical and mental health, you must adopt organizational habits.

The Chain Reaction of a Positive Attitude

Your mother says it, your teachers live it, your friends know it’s true, and so do your co-workers – there is no doubt that “positive energy brings positive results.” Having a positive attitude can have a chain reaction in the world. You don’t need to volunteer all your time or know the cure to cancer to make an impactful difference. All the world needs is more positivity and compassion.

Your smile can be enough to make someone's day brighter. Holding a door open for a stranger or saying thank you can make the difference between them having a bad or good day. That positivity can inspire people to be kind to others and change the world to be a better place for everyone.

Improved Health and Wellbeing

Dwelling on the negative aspects of life can make you sick. This can happen when your mind continually goes over what you did wrong, in turn increasing your cortisol levels. However, staying positive can reduce it. Cortisol is a hormone that increases your stress response, as well as triggers other symptoms. Stress can lead to many illnesses and depression and anxiety.

Increased Happiness and Hope

When people are less stressed, productive, and feel valued, their happiness goes up. They become more hopeful of the world and want to continue to spread happiness and positivity. Increased happiness leads to improved health, productivity, life, and relationships with friends and family.

Positive Events and Outcomes

Spreading positivity can lead to festive events and outcomes that can change your society. It can lead to more local donations, volunteers, and overall compassion. Positivity is what brings the whole world together, even strangers. It’s what motivates each other to get along and work together to reduce pain and suffering in the world.

Improved and Increased Productivity

Less stress and increased happiness mean people know they are needed. Which ultimately leads to improved and increased productivity. Negative thoughts can cause people to dwell and dread doing things that lead to poor performance. Positivity, however, clears your brain and gets you inspired to want to do better and more for those who value you.

Ultimately, making the world a better place starts with positivity. Spread the positivity and make a difference in your life and in others’ lives. Inspiring happiness, hope, and health through positivity can make the world a better place.

Five Core Values for The Business Owner

Setting core values for yourself is essential to ensure your business succeeds. Core values are the principles or guidelines you set for yourself or the business. Core values outline what your company believes to be the most important values. These values also affect the path the business takes sell products/services, and to attract their target audience. Learn more about the 5 most important core values below.

Integrity

Customers want to do business with those who are honest and trustworthy. Customers need to know that you will do exactly what you promise without any accountability from others or them. It’s about always doing what is right even if no one else is around. Show your integrity to customers by keeping your promises, being dependable, and owning up to any mishaps.

Accountability

Accountability refers to your ability to accept full responsibility for your actions and outcomes. Without accountability, who is being held responsible for getting or ensure the work is done? Being accountable means accomplishing your commitments, owning up to mistakes, and doing what is right always.

Discipline

Business requires the discipline to do what needs to be done, even if you don’t want to do it or don’t enjoy doing it. It's about committing to stick to a plan of action to achieve your goals. Without discipline, employees show up late, assignments are missing or unorganized, bills are left unpaid, and many more. Make them commit to staying disciplined even during the most challenging times.

Passion

Have passion and be passionate about the work you produce and put out into the world. This way, you can be sure your work is authentic and makes a real difference. Your passion can be used to inspire you to show up every day, get work done on time, do extra, and always being willing to improve.

Improvement

No person or company stays the same for years, and that is because they understand the importance of always improving their skills. Improvement is vital to ensure your company or business always stays relevant and successful. Improvement leads to increased productivity, efficiency, and better products or services for your customers.

These are only five of many core values you can set for yourself as a business owner. Balance, diversity, community, and perseverance are a few more to consider, as well. Core values should be personal and true to you to be functional and make a difference for your business.

Attitude Is More Important Than You Think

It may seem your life is completely out of your control, and for the most part, it’s true. Many things are out of your ability to control; however, your attitude is the one thing you do have control of that, if displayed correctly, it can make your life just a little bit easier to deal with.

Attitude Is the Ultimate Secret to Success 

You can have a great business idea, great products or services and still not receive profits due to poor service. To be successful, you need to have the right attitude. Think about the last time you purchased a product or paid for something. Was it a positive or negative interaction, and are you likely to do it again? This is precisely what happens when you communicate with others. You either leave them with a poor or positive impression that can alter your future or success.

Attitude Is Contagious and Reflective

Like laughter or seeing someone smile, a good attitude makes you want to do it too. When you have a positive or negative attitude towards someone, it can change their day instantly. Often negative attitudes can cause more damage as it results in negative emotions or pain. If you are hostile towards others, they are likely to reflect this behavior towards you. It was ultimately, you making your day more difficult due to your bad attitude.

Attitude Affects Your Self-Worth 

A negative attitude can creep into your mind leading to low self-worth and a poor view of the world. Trusting your abilities and being confident in yourself no matter what is vital for leading a successful life.

A great technique to increase your self-worth is to practice words of affirmation. Each morning look into your eyes in a mirror and tell yourself things you love or like about yourself. Dig deep within yourself and believe every word you say. As you continue this practice daily, you will gain more confidence and find yourself taking on more challenges you never thought you could do.

Attitude Affects Your Happiness and Overall Health

Negativity is known to increase cortisol levels and other hormones responsible for stress, reducing happiness. Stress can lead to many illnesses over time if left untreated. Problems like general anxiety disorder, depression, and heart disease rise with more negativity.

Don’t let a negative attitude get in the way of your success. Smile more and inspire others to be positive, achieve goals, and make the world a better place.

6 Characteristics of a Good Leader

Leaders get things done and are responsible for the success of organizations, communities, and nations. Without proper leaders, the world would simply cease to exist or slowly crumble around you. Good leaders are crucial to influence or guide others and make crucial lifesaving decisions and keep things functioning. The following are six common characteristics that a good leader possesses:

Empathetic

Being empathetic means that you can feel others' pain or emotions without physically experiencing the situation or trauma itself. This is important leadership quality as it allows you to be open and transparent with communication. If you understand your employees' needs or situations, you can better relate and find ways to communicate effectively.

Mindful

Good leaders are mindful of others, their actions, and body language. You are a good leader if you understand the importance of proper body language and how it can affect those around you. You won’t see good leaders talk without permission or over others.

Respectful

Good leaders understand that respect is a two-way road. You cannot expect respect without offering it yourself. Successful leaders don’t use roles to communicate or control the room; It starts with respect.

Influential and Inspirational

Being a good leader isn’t about dictating to get important things done. It is about having the ability to inspire or influence another. This is best done by example. Show up to work on time, complete tasks on or before your deadlines, and offer tips, tricks, or advice that work for you instead of being demanding.

Confident and Committed

Having confidence in your abilities and being committed to the work or improving is essential. You cannot expect others to follow your lead or finish tasks on time if you don’t care about or are confident in your work.

Manifest Integrity

Being a leader means the result is up to you, and only you to get it done. That’s why good leaders must manifest integrity or honesty. Always committing to your morals is another way to inspire people to do the right thing. If you are always consistent in your action's others will want to be the same.

If you don’t possess these traits, it’s unlikely that you will be successful at leadership. However, it can be learned and trained just like any other skill. Learn to adapt and practice these traits to improve and become a better leader.

7 Ways to Show Compassion

For a society to truly function at its best, people must have empathy and compassion for others. Compassion is genuinely caring for and empathizing with others. You show your compassion for others when you take steps to assist them or help them meet a goal.

Compassion is having the understanding that some people may not have the same opportunities as you, and they need help. Your compassion makes you realize that you can spare your time and energy to reduce their suffering.


Be Selfless

This is the main idea of compassion. It is caring more about others and doing what you can to reduce their suffering. To be selfless, think about how other people are feeling. When you help, don’t expect anything in return. Do more things to make people happy, don’t hurt others to gain more, and always choose the option that helps the most or causes the least amount of harm.

Volunteer Your Time

Volunteering in your local community and will increase your happiness as well. Volunteering provides a great way to practice your gratitude as you will likely be helping those less fortunate than you. Local homeless shelters and soup kitchens always need help and donations.

Be Understanding

Stop being judgmental and find a way to be more understanding. Find ways in which you relate to everyone. Even if they seem less fortunate, there will always be something you have in common. Don’t resort to assumptions and always lead with an open mind.

Be Supportive

Be emotionally or physically supportive. Offer a hand up or words of encouragement. The support you offer will be different for each person or group, so ask what is needed before you make an offer they don’t need.

Show Kindness

Open a door, smile often, talk with someone, laugh together, pay for someone's meal, or donate to a local food bank. These are all great ways to practice acts of kindness.


Express Gratitude

Be thankful for those around you and everything you have in life. Express your gratitude by telling people “thank you” often. Tell them why you are grateful and who you are grateful to and for in your life.

Be Helpful

Offer help where you can and where you are needed – if you see someone struggling to open the door or walk, offer help. You’ll be surprised to find that the more you help in seemingly boring ways, the kinder and gentler the world around you starts feeling.

Compassion is vital if you want to live in a thriving and healthy society. This is because everyone doesn’t have the same opportunities or skills. So, some people need a little help to succeed. That’s where you come into the picture. Use these seven ways to show compassion, inspire your community, and help others.

How to Be More Assertive in Life

There is a secret to getting more what you want out of life, and it is no surprise that it starts with the way you communicate. People are either aggressive, giving demands, while some are too quiet and passive, ultimately letting others walk all over them.

However, the secret to good communication and success in life is to be more assertive. Being assertive is the ability to successfully communicate your needs, wishes, thoughts, or feelings without disrespecting others and, in turn, getting more of what you want out of life. Use the suggestions below to help you be more assertive in life.

Practice and Take Chances

Put yourself out there more and take chances to be more assertive. If you sit back and expect things to happen, chances are you won’t change. Take on more responsibilities at your job or within the household, attend more local events or anything you can to get you out of your comfort zone.

Mind Your Manners

Being assertive doesn’t mean you should be rude or disrespectful. It includes understanding how conversations flow and when is the most appropriate time to speak up. Learn about proper communication techniques to improve your conversations, making them more effective and productive.

Stay Positive

Don’t allow negative energy or thoughts to manifest in your interactions with others. Even if the conversation you need to have is difficult, always keep negative thoughts in control. Find the positive outcome of the situation and make sure your body langue, tone of voice, and speed match.

Always Expect Positive and Negative Reactions from Others

Don’t assume a conversation or reaction from others is always going to be your way. You can’t control them or even teach them to communicate “properly.”  Expect any outcome to happen and be mindful of yourself and the situation in each given moment. This way, you are more prepared to make the right reaction.

If you don’t expect others to have a negative response towards you, you might not be prepared for the reaction you will take, ultimately leading to an aggressive response. Assertive behavior includes standing your ground and being respectful towards other people's feelings, thoughts, and opinions when you do.

Practice Empathy and Compassion

Remember, being more assertive is a balancing act between aggressive and passive behaviors. Therefore, you need to be empathetic and compassionate to those around you. This way, you can learn to understand everyone's perspective and get what you need easier and more appropriately. If you assume everyone is like you, you will be viewed as aggressive or egotistic, for example.

Take Time to Understand Others

The more you understand those around you, the better you can effectively communicate your needs or wishes respectfully. Ask challenging questions so you can be on the same page faster.

Remember always to stand your ground respectfully, be true to yourself, and keep practicing. No one is perfect, and that is the beauty of it. If you fail, at least you are trying.