Have Fun

Have fun. Laugh out loud. Figure out what you enjoy the most and do it. Figure out how to put more fun into every activity and do it. Do it often. Do it with great pleasure and no guilt or regrets or unrealistic expectations. Just have fun, as genuinely and as often as you can. Find new and different ways to have a good time. It is perfectly OK to have fun. In fact it is better than OK. It is great, and uplifting, and empowering. It is inspiring. It can keep you healthier. It can make you wealthier. It can improve your relationships and instantly raise the quality of your life.

Rather than looking for reasons to complain, look for reasons to laugh. When you can’t think of anything to do, try smiling. A smile can quickly take you from negative or neutral to positive and productive.

Why do you think there are things you enjoy? Do you think these things are set up to punish you or to frustrate you? Of course not. Fun and enjoyment are wonderful, blissful ways of encouraging you. Think of how great you feel when you’re involved in something you truly, genuinely enjoy. Go ahead, think about it and conjure up those feelings. And by the way, just thinking about having fun is enjoyable itself, isn’t it? It brings a smile to your face and a lightness to your heart. So by all means, stop and think of yourself being deeply and happily involved in some activity or situation that is just plain fun for you. See yourself in that situation and feel the feeling of how great it is.

When you visualize that positive, fun experience, what else do you feel? Chances are, you feel confident. You feel effective. You feel enthusiastic. You feel energetic and optimistic. Wow! These are certainly powerful, positive feelings. Imagine what life would be like if, somehow, you could be more confident, more effective, more energetic and enthusiastic anytime you decided to be. Think of all the great things you could accomplish and all the fabulous places you could go.

The fact is, you can conjure up this powerful, positive state simply by having fun. You can become more confident by doing more of the things you truly enjoy. You can become more effective and enthusiastic by doing what you genuinely like to do.

Having fun can immediately add value and power to almost any activity. We often get the idea that having fun is somehow irresponsible, but it most certainly does not have to be that way. The truth is that when you’re genuinely enjoying yourself you’re probably acting at just about the highest level of responsibility possible, because you’re being responsible to the best that is within you. Irresponsible fun -- having fun at the expense of others -- is not really having fun. It’s just a poor substitute that’s often used by people who lack the courage or the imagination to truly enjoy themselves. You don’t need to be irresponsible to have fun. You don’t need to take advantage of others to have fun. All that’s necessary for having fun is just allowing yourself to enjoy whatever you’re doing. It’s really as simple, and as powerful, as that.

Have you ever noticed that people who are really good at what they do make it look fun? The reason they make it look fun is because, to them, it is fun, whether it’s running a copying machine, installing a water pump, giving a sales presentation, playing basketball, performing surgery or teaching a classroom full of eight-year-olds. Those who do a great job are those who genuinely enjoy the job they’re doing. Those who excel are those who have fun.

Needless Needs

Do you really need all the many things that you strive to consume or possess?
How much of your time resources and energy do you spend satisfying needs that you don’t really need?
Remember, just because everyone else has particular things, does not mean you need it too.

Much of what you think you need, you may not need at all. Challenge your assumptions, and free yourself of needless needs.
When you find yourself feeling that you need something, stop, step back and ask yourself if you really do. The more of those needless needs you can leave behind, the faster ahead you will go.

The needs you’ve devised for yourself can be very comfortable. And yet their comfort keeps you confined in a narrow, limited corner of life.
Certainly there are very real necessities and obligations in your life. But there’s nothing to be gained by piling your own invented needs on top of them.

Look for opportunities to get away from your needs and into your possibilities.
Choose to break free of the needs that you don’t really need. Choose to let go of the cravings, obsessions, habits, worries and anxieties that do nothing but hold you back.

Life might in fact be much better if you made the choice to do without some of the things you think you can’t do without. Letting go of self-imposed burdens can open many doors to new experiences and joys.

Imagine the sense of freedom that would come from simply letting go of the most useless of those needs.
Practice focusing your effort and attention not on what you must get, but rather on the best you can be. Real abundance comes more from quality than from quantity.

Spend less time striving to acquire, possess and satisfy every perceived need, and you’ll have much more time and energy to truly live. The less you need, the more real richness your life will have.

Live by choice, not merely by habit. Let go of the needless needs, and feel the exquisite, empowering freedom.
Live more by intention, and less by reaction. Put your time and effort into those things that create real fulfillment for your life, rather than into needless needs.
Choose your own priorities, based on what’s most important to you. Let go of the need to need so much, and free yourself to live life at its authentic best.

Leadership

Every endeavor which brings people together, requires effective leaders if it is to be successful. Leadership can focus the energy and the actions of a group toward a common purpose, and bring with it great achievements.

You become a leader by making a commitment to the group that you would lead. The more you give of yourself to the interest of the group, the more of a leader you become. Yes, you can be hired, or elected or appointed to this position or that, but your title alone will not make you a leader. True leadership is an activity, not a title. It is what you do in your role, not the role itself, that makes the difference. Many times you’ll find a leader who doesn’t even hold a title, but who is unanimously acknowledged to be the group’s driving force.

True leaders don’t request permission to be leaders. They just do it. The father who shows up at every PTA meeting, voices his opinion, and volunteers to help, becomes a leader. The engineer who works long hours to ensure that all parts of the project mesh together, becomes a leader. The sales rep who shares her successful techniques with reps in other territories, becomes a leader.

Leadership exists and flourishes outside of formal organizations. In fact, in today’s restructured world, where organizational lines are becoming less and less defined, the need for leadership is greater than ever. And by the same token, opportunities for leadership are everywhere. We tend to think of “leadership” as being president of one’s fraternity or manager of a corporate division. More and more, however, leadership is defined in terms of situations, and less in terms of organizations.

As organizations become less structured, leadership becomes more important. Every group effort, whether it is planning a dinner party or developing a new programming language, requires the focus, direction and cooperation that can only be supplied by a leader. Any situation involving a group of people, can benefit from.

Leadership and power are not the same thing. One can attain power through brute physical force, or through the use of material wealth, or by political means, or in a number of other ways, without ever exercising leadership. True leadership, on the other hand, comes not from simply having or acquiring power over others. Rather, it comes from earning the respect and commitment of others. Yes, power does come along with leadership. Yet for true leaders, power is only a necessary tool, not the ultimate goal, of leadership. Leaders exercise power, not for its own sake, but to further the interest of the group. It is sometimes a difficult distinction, and a key attribute of leadership is knowing how to make that distinction with confidence.

Leadership is a delicate balance, and requires constant vigilance. The leader must be simultaneously confident in her own judgment, and considerate of all the various needs and perspectives of the group members. Leaders must speak and act decisively, while constantly examining their own motives.

A leader who cannot make a move without seeking full consensus, is not effective. On the other extreme, a leader who dictates without regard to the group’s input, quickly loses respect and support. Leaders must carefully weigh the issues, and then take a stand based on what they believe to be the best interest of the group. Leaders must make decisions, and then stand by those decisions. There will always be opposition. That is the nature of leadership. Leaders must have enough confidence, and decisiveness, to overcome differences of opinion and to act in the interest of the entire group.

Today, in your own little corner, make a great leader.

Be Encouraged

Just when you think things could not get worse, they get worse. Or just when you’re about to pull ahead, something comes along and pushes you back. Is there any point in going on? Is it time to simply give up, to give in, to abandon your dreams, to turn your back on your most deeply held desires?

Absolutely not! No matter what has happened, no matter how difficult the conditions, no matter how much challenge is piled on top of challenge, there is always hope. In fact, the more difficult the situation, the more reason you have to move beyond it. The more you’ve lost, the less you have to lose and the more reason you have to stride confidently forward.

Even if you have nothing else, you have something more precious than the purest gold, more rare and desirable than the brightest diamond. You have life. You can sense. You can think. You can reason. You can make decisions. You can take action. Though you may lose all else, still you retain the ability to move yourself forward, to become the person you decide to become, to live in the way you have determined to live.

At times it may seem that the whole world is against you. But that assessment is based on past history. And the past does not equal the future. The past does not equal the future because you stand solidly in the present, able to break away from whatever has happened in the past and to create your future in the way you desire.

This moment is overflowing with opportunity. If the past has been full of disappointment, now is the time to change that pattern. Now is the moment in which you can make a positive difference. Now is the time to take action. Now is the time to fulfill your incredible possibilities. You’ve glimpsed those possibilities before, and you know deep within your heart how positive and wonderful they can be. Now is your opportunity to grasp them. Now is your opportunity to turn them into reality.

Your future is a blank canvas, waiting for you to apply color, shape and motion, meaning and fulfillment. You can make of it whatever you wish, whatever you dream, whatever you desire.

Start by knowing you can do it. Though you’ve known your share of difficulty, you’ve succeeded in making it this far through life. The challenges of your past stand now as shining examples of your ability to persevere. You have successfully lived through each one of those challenges, each one of those disappointments. Consider for a moment how strong all that has made you. Consider all the valuable things you’ve learned. Just think of what you can do with that strength and that knowledge, applied in a positive direction.

Rather than giving up on your dreams, apportioning blames, feeling depressed, be encouraged.

Turning Defeat Into Victory

You’ve had setbacks. You’ve been disappointed. Things haven’t gone the way you intended. Things haven’t gone the way you planned. What’s the best thing for you to do?

Does it make sense to sit around and feel sorry for yourself? Are you going to let that one disappointment build on itself and take over your life? Or, will you quickly get back on track, back to what you were doing, and move on ahead past the disappointment?

The difference between those who consistently achieve and those who can’t ever seem to make any progress is not in how many times they get knocked down, but in how quickly they recover.

Everyone gets knocked down. Even when you give it your best shot you can be defeated. Every person who is successful has also tasted defeat. Even those people whom you consider highly effective have regular and significant setbacks. In fact, the most highly accomplished people generally experience more disappointments than others, precisely because they are attempting so much. If you are not experiencing setbacks on a regular basis, you are probably not even coming close to making the most of your possibilities, and not even coming close to reaching your full potential.

The biggest winners in life are most often those who have also known the greatest number of disappointments. What makes a winner a winner is the ability to quickly get back in the game, no matter what the setback, no matter what the disappointment.

That’s easy to understand. It’s easy to say. Yet when you are in the midst of defeat it can indeed be difficult to imagine yourself getting back up and moving quickly and enthusiastically ahead. Disappointment can bring with it a powerful negative momentum that it is, admittedly, difficult to overcome. It hurts when you’ve had a setback. It’s no fun. And often the last thing you want to think about is getting back in the game, and putting yourself in a position where there is the possibility for another painful disappointment. Yet getting back on track is the best thing you can do. That’s what will ease the pain more quickly than anything else.

Yes, it will take some effort. It’s well worth the effort, though, because what you’re doing is transforming defeat into victory. What you’re doing is proving to yourself that you can turn every situation into an opportunity for success. Once you realize you can do that, once you’re confident in your ability to do that, the possibilities are virtually unlimited.

When you’re confronted with a disappointment, the first step is to truly experience it. Things haven’t gone your way and you have reason to be disappointed. Allow yourself to fully feel that disappointment, to fully feel that despair. Really experience what it’s like. This will do a couple of things for you.

First, it brings your negative feelings out into the open where you can acknowledge them and deal with them. That’s a lot better than keeping them hidden away where they can grow stronger and where they have the potential to pop up and take you down at any time. In many ways it can be positive to experience negative feelings. They can help to give you a firmer grasp on reality. They can be a powerful teacher. But you don’t want to allow them to build up inside you. You’ve got to get them out and acknowledge them so you can then be free to move positively forward.

Another benefit of fully experiencing your disappointments is that they can motivate you in a more positive direction. When you really know how miserable it feels to lose, that will greatly strengthen your desire to win. Bringing your disappointments out in the open puts you in control. Those disappointments no longer control you. You have taken control, and that is an important step in turning defeat into victory.

What Do You Really Want?

What do you really want out of life, and why? When was the last time you asked yourself that question? When was the last time you truly focused your thoughts and your attention on what it means to be alive, and on what would bring the ultimate fulfillment to your life?

Have you ever spent much time thinking about it? Many people haven’t.
Surrounded by a society that focuses heavily on material consumption, we tend to substitute materialistic tokens for our true desires. That often leads to extreme frustration on several levels.
If you worship money or material things, you'll always feel poor, reasons being that, you'll always find someone who has more money or material things than you.
Material objects are only rough approximations of your true desires. As such, you’ll have problems maintaining a sustained commitment to achieving them.
When there’s a weak connection between your outer goals and your true, inner desires it becomes impossibly difficult to reach those goals. Even if you do manage to reach the goals, they won’t satisfy your desires, and that leads to even more frustration.

Faced with a lot of things to do, a lot of options to explore, a lot of paths to thread on, you must be very precise what you want from life, least you run around doing nothing of real value.

Do you set a goal for yourself, and then try to work your true desires into that goal? That’s an upside down approach. A goal, in and of itself, will not motivate you to achieve it. You’ve got to motivate you. And the way to do that is to align your goals with your true, driving desires.

For example, suppose you decide you want to earn $200,000 per year in income, and you set that as a goal for yourself. Why is it your goal? Because it is ambitious, because it is substantial, you tell yourself. You figure that it’s a high enough amount to accommodate just about anything you might want to do with your life.

Yet once you set that goal, you’re going to have trouble reaching it. Why is that? Because, for the most part, it’s meaningless to you. You’re focused on $200,000 as an abstract concept instead of being focused on the real, compelling desires you have for your life. You’re focused on what you think you want rather than on what you really want.

Is it possible for you to earn $200,000 per year, or even more? You bet it is. Without question, such a goal is within your reach. But before you can reach it, you have to truly want it. You have to forge a solid, continuous connection between that goal and the true desires you have for your life. You have to pull your focus from the monetary angle, to the value you'll have create in order to earn that much and get busy creating that value.

Let money not be the goal, let value be. True lasting value will usher in an endless flow of money.

Communication skill

Want to know a secret? Want to hear one word that can sum up a world of opportunity? In one word, it is -- communicate. The biggest opportunities of our day are available to those who can communicate most effectively.

We live in a world that rises and falls on the quality of communication. Do you want to earn more money? Then learn how to communicate better. Do you want to be more highly admired? Then improve your ability to communicate. Do you want to truly make a positive and meaningful difference in the world? Then work on better developing your communication skills.

Look at the world around you and you’ll see a world that thrives on communication. The explosive growth of the Internet in the last few years is all about communication. Other communication technologies, including wireless telephone and data, satellite, audio, video, fiber optics and others, drive the world’s largest, fastest growing and most successful industries. The opportunities for the average person to engage in meaningful, affordable communication grow on a daily basis. High technology devices and services are increasingly connecting us to each other, breaking down the material barriers of time and space. The ability to communicate is the most widespread and fastest growing wealth-producing resource of our time. Those who understand this, and who take advantage of the growing opportunities for communication, can significantly improve the quality of their own lives, as well as the lives of many others, through the use of effective communication.

Communication skills are much more than just an impressive-sounding phrase on a job application. Communication skills are essential to success in every area of life. Those who are most successful in the world today, those who make the biggest positive difference for the largest number of people, are those who have harnessed and effectively utilized the ability to communicate. In business, health, travel, sports, spirituality, relationships, parenting, leisure, education, and just about any other endeavor you can name, communication skills play a major role. Without question, the more effectively you can communicate, the more successful you will be.

So today, choose to politely and responsibly communicate rather than being harsh.