Month: July 2014

Do you ever feel like you are not moving forward? That there are great things that you want to do but are missing out on? Well usually this is due to the fact that you are not working towards your goals and are instead just grasping at things and opportunities as they come by. This leds to the idea of Life Mapping

Life Mapping: A Vision of Success

Success is more than economic gains, titles, and degrees. Planning for success is about mapping out all the aspects of your life. Similar to a map, you need to define the following details: origin, destination, vehicle, provisions, landmarks, and route.

Origin: Who you are

A map has a starting point. Your origin is who you are right now. Most people when asked to introduce themselves would say something like, “Hi, I’m Jean, I’m 17 and I’m a senior in high school.” This does not tell you anything about who Jean is; it only tells you her present circumstances.

To gain insights about yourself, you need to look closely at your beliefs, values, and principles aside from your economic, professional, cultural, and civil status. You can also reflect on your experiences to give you insights on your good and not-so-good traits, skills, knowledge, strengths, and weaknesses.

For example, Jean might realize that she was highly motivated, generous, service-oriented, but impatient. Her inclination was in the biological-medical field. Furthermore, she believed that life must serve a purpose, and that wars were destructive to human dignity. Of course, she might not say all of this to everybody she met; but the knowledge would inform all of her words and actions.

Destination: A vision of who you want to be

“Who do want to be?” This is your vision. Once you know who you are, you will also have a clearer idea of who you want to be, and the things you want to change whether they are attitudes, habits, or points of view. If you hardly know yourself, then your vision and targets for the future will also be unclear. Your destination should cover all the aspects of your being: the physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual planes.

Continuing Jean’s story, after she defined her beliefs, values, and principles in life, she decided that she wanted to have a life dedicated to serving her fellow human beings.

Vehicle: Your Mission

A vehicle is the means by which you can reach your destination. It can be analogized to your mission or vocation in life. To a great extent, your mission would depend on what you know about yourself.

Jean had recognized that she wanted to help humanity. Now she needed to identify a vehicle, a way to do this. It seemed to her that she was suited to becoming a medical doctor. She also wanted to travel and promote peace. Describing her vehicle or mission fully: it was to live a life dedicated to serving her fellowmen as a doctor in conflict-areas.

Provisions: Your knowledge, skills, and attitude

Food, drinks, medicines, and other travelling necessities are the provisions that you take on a journey. Applying this concept to your life map, you will need certain knowledge, skills, and training to carry out your mission successfully. So you need to assess what knowledge, skills, and attitudes you have at present (what provisions you already have) and what else you need to gain along the way.

Clearly, Jean would need to go to college and medical school to gain the knowledge and professional qualifications to become a doctor. She also knew that she had a tendency to be impatient with people and this was something she wanted to change.

Landmarks and Route: S.M.A.R.T. objectives

Landmarks confirm if you are on the right track while the route determines the travel time. Thus, in planning out your life, you also need to have a route and landmarks.

The landmarks are your mini goals that measure your success on your way to your main goal. These mini goals, like your main goals, must be S.M.A.R.T.: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time bound.

Going back to Jean as an example, she identified the following landmarks in her life map: completing a bachelor’s degree in biology by the age of 21; completing medical school by the age of 27; earning her specialization in infectious diseases by the age of 30; getting deployed in local public hospitals of her town by the age of 32; and serving as doctor in war-torn areas by the age of 35.

Anticipate Turns, Detours, and Potholes

The purpose of your life map is to minimize hasty and spur-of-the-moment decisions that can make you lose your way. But oftentimes our plans are modified along the way due to inconveniences, delays, and other situations beyond our control, or a genuine change of mind.

For example, during her medical training Jean might find that she became more interested in pediatric medicine than in infectious diseases. Switching to pediatrics would change her route, but would not stop her achieving her goal.

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Recently my workplace brought in a workplace gym in the new building. I love the idea of workoing out at work but there are a few things to think about when you are about to start training at work.

Working Out in a Workplace Gym

Gym Hours – What time are you going to workout? Before work is great but also there is lunch, after work and during odd hours. I prefer working out after lunch as I eat a smaller lunch and have the energy and the gym is really quiet. Be aware of when the gym is busy as social calls and waiting can really wreak havok on your workout.

Eating Plans – You need to make sure that you are not skimping on lunch or breakfast for the sake of working out. There is nothing worse when working out than to not have the food for energy and slowing of your metabolism form not eating.

This may affect the time that you workout but make sure that you eat!

Cleanliness – If you workout in the morning or after work than you may not need to double up on your showers. working out in the morning means that you can workout and then have a morning shower or after work you can wait until you get home to have a shower.

If you do workout at lunch or after than please, for the sake of your coworkers, have a shower after you workout.

Change of clothes – I go through a lot more clothes when I workout as should you. It is nice to have a change of clothes at your desk but remember not to recycle socks and underwear, bring in a new change of clothes everyday with the exception of shoes.

Last year for a while I tried not bringing a change of socks and I paid the price fairly quickly with some terrible athletes foot so be aware of how important this really is.

Workout time – Try to keep your workouts to 45 minutes max. This stops the questions in the office of whether you are wroking enough and it also wforces you to workout very efficiently and with a lot of intensity.

Break up your workouts so you are either doing a s day or a cardio day and then you will not have to do doule duty out of one workout. Focus is the most important thing when you are crunched for time.

I hope that these tips are good and help you out in your fitness goals. When you can just go downstairs to workout it is very easy to avoid and very easy to overdo do make the time and coordinate your schedule so that you can make the most of this great resource.

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There are many factors that determine the success or failure of your loss goals. In this article I will tell you about some of the things you should do in order to lose successfully.

Powerful Techniques to Help Lose Weight

1. Set small goals: Most people are unable to achieve their loss goals because they always think big. There is nothing wring with thinking big, but don’t make your goals so big as though they become overwhelming and intimidating to you.

Don’t stretch your loss goals so far that you feel tempted to quit your loss program altogether. Start slow and you will see how easy it is to shed those obstinate pounds.

You know that you need to make huge lifestyle in order to lose successfully. Now, keep in mind that you cannot make these changes overnight.

For example, if today I ask you to avoid eating junk foods altogether, will you be able to follow my advice? You will probably try hard to avoid junk foods for a day or two, and by doing that, you will be all the more tempted to take a bite of your favorite fatty foods. As a result, you’ll end up gaining more pounds than what you started with. What a waste.

Here is an easier way to do it: instead of trying to cut down on your junk food intake entirely, try to replace one junk food with one good food. Do you eat butter? Well, replace that with peanut butter. Next day, replace burgers with raw carrots. If you eat white breads, replace that with wholegrain wheat breads.

You won’t be able to accomplish all of these changes overnight, but you will be able to archive your goals if you do it slowly, bit by bit. Eventually you will realize that you have completely replaced your bad foods with the healthy foods, but without going through any stress or temptation.

2. Replace bad habits with the good ones: Remember that you gained because of certain bad habits. Ideally you should break those old habits in order to lose , but I know that breaking an old habit is easier said than done.

What you can do instead of modify your bad habit enough so that it becomes a good and healthy habit.

If you are like most people, you have a habit of snacking in the afternoon. Instead of trying to break your afternoon snacking habit, try to replace the snack itself.. If you eat chocolate soups and cookies as snacks, replace them with low-fat yogurt and raw fruits.

3. Get rid of temptations: Unless you learn to control your temptations, you won’t be able to lose successfully. One overwhelming temptation most people suffer from is that of food. Whenever you are tempted to eat, do something that would distract you from the thought of food.

You can do anything such as dancing, driving, walking around your house, doing some sit-ups, or drinking a glass of water. All of these things will help keep yourself away from the continuous food cravings.

Simple and Powerful Techniques to Achieve Weight Loss, 5.0 out of 5 based on 1 rating