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Don’t Let Your Emotions Cloud Judgement



I feel bad today because I am just sitting on the couch. Last week was a tough week as my kidney deprived daughter was in the hospital a couple of times and it just weighed me down.

On Sunday Taylor was fine and then in the evening she came down with a fever and was misdiagnosed on Monday, which made me furious and then again in the hospital on Wednesday until Thursday to get fluids pumped into her as she was dehydrated. She is fine now but the week was emotionally exhausting

The reason I tell this story is because this week my emotions took me away from my priorities and because of this I have made some super bad decisions due to lazy judgement calls.

I would like to dissect my situation and see if this can help you out.

What I do

Everyday I have certain priorities that I want to complete and I rate my day based on doing these. Mostly my days have to have the following to be successful; exercise, blog posting, facebook twitter and Google+ interaction, family time, sleep, eating healthy, and helping others in some way. Of course there is work too and I want to make sure that I get as many of these things done although I do not have a lot of scheduled or written priorities.

What happens 

I know that this is bad but it usually works for me, well usually until weeks like this knock me down and out.

So what happens during weeks like this (days as well sometimes) is that emotionally we get hit by something, feel a bit down, and then hit by something else and this will just lead us to shield ourselves. In these situations we just shut down the things that are important and we go into protection mode. I have done this, I bet you have done this, and we are all built with a defence mechanism that forces us in times of trouble or distress to just do what is needed and let everything else fall be the wayside.

Is this ok?

I know that how I act, and how we act as individuals is fine. This is the way we are built and how we are supposed to be. I look back on my last week and know that I did what was important (taking care of my family and especially my daughter) but I also made some bad decisions in that I have vague priorities that I did not complete.

I remember a story a few years ago about Kobe Bryant and how he was able to compartmentalize parts of his life. He was in the middle of the rape trial that could possibly put him in prison and he would fly back to LA and play some of the best basketball of his career as he was probably in his worst personal trials of his life. The power of this compartmentalization is something that we should all think about and try to do when the world feels like it is closing in on us.

What to do, what to do…

I am really not that great at this but I am learning. What you need to do is have some goals and plans. Every morning, or the evening before decide based on your life, short term, and daily goals what is important to get done. This does not mean that you have to have 20 things planned or anything in fact just having two or three outcomes or goals for that day are all you need.

This is not what I do and it is my own fault. If I had a goal just to sit down for 30 minutes each day this week to write a blog post and interact on Facebook then I would have got things done while at the same time I could have helped my wife, son, and daughter with their problems better.

Even better of course is to decide on Sunday night what your priorities for the week are and then extrapolate what needs to be done each day to reach those before the next Sunday night comes along.

Also we have to remember that life is supposed to be about those around us. Family and friends are always the top priority and down weeks will happen, this last week fore me is fine but people will have their lives spiral out of control through inaction and bad decisions all the time. don’t be that person!

So now it is time for you

So what do you do? Hop in here with a quick comment and let us all see some other ideas. Do you plan your day? Do you have any daily goals? Do your emotions lead you to making bad decisions or like me just no decisions? I know this could lead to the whole issue of emotional eating but I wanted to keep it a bit more defined to what we do in the situation of emotions and lifestyle.


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Making December Count



I have already started to see the emails and blogs posts and even new stories about New Years Resolutions for next year. Very sad, we live for today and already supposed to look at a month or 13 from now?

Anyway, by my watch there are still a few weeks left in the year, actually 24 days if we start from tomorrow. Plenty of time yet to finish the year with a bang.

Making December Count

Making December Count

So this is my plan and I hope you try it out too. I know that it is easier to succeed if there is a finite time than a huge time limit, so maybe this is our time to jumpstart before the new year even gets here.

Here is the plan for Making December Count

1. Look over your goals from the beginning of the year or try to remember back if you did not write them down. Are they relevant? Did you achieve any of them?

I like to start with this look back because in 11 months lots may have changed in your life.

2. So where are you now? Is there anything that has bee gnawing at you that you have been not quite finishing? Have you resigned yourself to waiting until the end of the year before you start anything?

3. So if you look at those first two questions and are really honest with yourself then your head and your heart should be in a great place to move forward. Your head may be saying “Wait, next year is almost here” and your heart may be saying “Lets simplify and get some of these old things out of the way”

Whenever you can get your feelings and emotions as well as your tactics in place you can achieve anything. If you don’t have these aligned then you will find you spin your wheels.

Since we are just going to try to drive some results out of the next 24 days I want you to looks at a couple things that are important. Maybe, like in my case improve my health, and organize my home and work life. You will notice that these are not real goals. Who gives a crap about real goals when we only have December to worry about anyway. So we are just going to pick off issues one at a time.

4. Make a list  all the things that you want to do in these two areas of your life and just to help you out I want to suggest that you break the things down into chunks that you can get done in a day or during a day. Here are my examples:

Improve my health – Do cardio, eat less refined foods, do weights, cut down on coffee, increase food intake, get better quality sleep.

Organize my home and worklife – Get critical tasks done before noon, spend two hours an evening with the computer off, read with the kids, take my wife out for lunch, Get the day planned the night before.

Again these are just directions, not the goals that I will be hammering on in a few weeks time but the goal of all this is to make some change in your life and to institute change.

5. Get these lists on a piece of paper that you can carry with your or tape up or even put on your fridge put this list in front of you. The idea behind this is that while you are working on structuring your day better today with one thing on the list you can also see the other parts in your life to work on in the rest of the list.

If this process seems tough then you are doing it all wrong. For all the tough parts of making changes in your life there should be at least a balance off of satisfaction and a better quality to your days.

Let me know how this works out for you. I have just started this December adjustment in protest to setting resolutions and giving up on 2011 and we can refine it as we move forward over the next few weeks before starting goal setting in earnest for 2012.

  • Making December Count


Making December Count

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Positive Outlook Helps Focus




How you think and handle your emotions and stress is probably the most important factor in your general well-being or happiness. This, in turn, directly impacts your physical health and your abiliting for losing weight. And, when you think about it, even if it wasn’t connected to your health (it is!) would it still not be of primary importance?

Positive Outlook Helps Focus

Positive Outlook Helps Focus

Positive Outlook Helps Focus

It is no simple matter to ‘be happy’ or ‘think positive thoughts,’ or ‘relax and go with the flow.’ I put these in quotes because they sound like cliches, which they are. Still, they are of utmost importance. That is, what you eat, how you breathe and your thoughts all impact each other. That is actually why I chose to mention this subject. Because it is both the most important and hardest to practice when losing weight,

I wanted to set the stage with other, more straightforward things first. After all, it is easier to simply stop eating a certain junk food and start eating something healthy or to start exercising than it is to change your focus in a more positive direction. Yet if you start with better nutrition and more exercise, it becomes a bit easier to get more positive in your outlook.

More and more people are starting to believe in the notion that we create our reality with our thoughts and emotions. The Law of Attraction has become a popular subject since the release of the book and movie, The Secret (there is considerable debate over this, but I recommend you see it/read it if you haven’t already).

Whether we physically create our reality this way is debatable though some interpret quantum physics in a way that supports this. However, it is much more clear and obvious that, at the very least, our thoughts and emotions some say ‘attitude’ largely determine our experience of reality. This includes our well being and happiness. So, it follows that, if we want to feel good and be happy, we do best if we think positive thoughts and feel positive emotions.

The problem is that life, in the form of events, other people, memories, news stories and other sources, often sends things our way that we don’t find pleasing. So we feel angry, sad, nervous or some other negative emotion. This, in turn, sends signals to our body and all its cells and organs that causes stress. What is even worse, is that these signals tend to be self-replicating. That is, negative or stressful states tend to perpetuate themselves, causing more such states in the future. Fortunately, the reverse is also true the more you can feel good or happy, loving, relaxed, euphoric- the more you can feel good in the future. The body, once again, absorbs these messages as well and this has a very healing effect.

One very important aspect to have a positive outlook helps focus and how to do it is:

LIVE IN THE PRESENT!

I was almost going to devote a whole post to this, but I am trying to keep this brief. Living in the present means that you let of regrets of the past and worries about the future. No one, except maybe some meditation masters living on a mountaintop, lives in the present 100%. It is still a worthy goal, though. It is most important, naturally enough, to let go of negative feelings regarding the past or future, but even positive ones can be limiting if they keep you from realizing your potential in the present moment.

A person who is often nostalgic about happy times in the past has a belief that the best of everything is already over. If someone is always looking forward to some future happy outcome, they, too, are missing out. The problem with the future is that it never arrives. When what we think of as the future does occur, there is always a new future to look forward to. It is a fact of quantum physics that time as we believe in it is not real. It is an intellectual construct that makes everyday life easier to manage. It is not real in any fundamental sense. Keep this in mind when you find your mind wandering into the illusions of the past or future.

So the first step in thinking more positively is to set it as a priority in your life. There are many tools to help with this several in this report, especially breathing and the techniques in the following chapter- but the particular techniques you use are secondary to your basic commitment to do this. You simply cannot have well-being if you are not thinking good thoughts. Period

So if having a positive outlook helps focus why not start this right now and change you life?