What Are You Doing To Help Yourself?

Changing the way you view yourself and your current situation is one of the best ways to change your life. It is the first step to developing new behaviors. And it helps you recognize the progress you've made in your life as well as assisting in finding new solutions to your existing struggles.

But how do you do that? How do you change the way you see your situation and yourself, if all you know is what you have always done?

That's a tough question - that most people struggle with. In many cases it is the answer you can't find on your won - you need outside help (a life or business coach or someone acting in that role). But, in the absence of an outside agent helping you see your life differently, here are some tips / techniques that you can use yourself:

- Stop accepting the problem as the end. Listen to yourself talk sometime about your problems, even if it means recording yourself and playing it back. Are you always talking about problems and stopping right there? If you are an "excuse maker", that is probably the case. So rather than stopping at the problem, take yourself one step further and offer a solution. It doesn't have to be the perfect solution, it just has to get you closer to better situation than you had / have already.

- Find what's working, focus on it and do more of it. Ask yourself "What's working in my life?" or "What worked for me today?" and really focus on that. Most people see so much "wrong" in their lives that they forget to look at what's right. When you can see what's right, you can begin to understand the power you have over your own life. And the more you understand that power, the more you can duplicate it in the future.

- Be grateful for what you have. Gratitude is a grounding process. The more you are thankful, the more you begin to look at life as full of abundance, rather than scarcity. Take a few moments every day to focus on what you are thankful for in your life and you will begin to see your life in a completely different way.

- Stop doing what isn't working for you. This may sound like common sense, but as has been said many times by many people, "Common Sense is NOT Common Practice." Just because something doesn't work for you doesn't mean that you are going to automatically stop doing it. The reason most people don't apply this rule is because they've tried to stop, but nothing seems to work to change it. But honestly, they haven't tried everything - just what they know.

The internet is an amazing thing - forums on just about every subject / problem out there. Google your struggle and find a new solution. Try it and give it your best to change what's not working for you. If that process doesn't work for you either, then try another and another. Make it is that "not working for you" is not an option.

- Take small steps every day, rather than large steps once a week / month, to achieve what you want. Real, lasting change requires sustainability. Sustainability requires that you be able to live with the changes. The truth is the bigger the changes you try to accomplish, the stronger the pull back to your old habits. This is one of the reasons dieting is so hard - the more dramatically you try to lose weight, changing your lifestyle, the stronger the pull of your old lifestyle is and the more likely you will yo-yo back to where you started.

So if you want to change anything for the rest of your life, do it in small, measurable, planned increments and do it for the long term . . . not the short term.

Go Forth And Conquer By Systematizing These Ideas

None of these tips are magical - they require hard work and daily diligence - the one thing that we all tend to struggle with. If you truly want to help yourself, you won't stop by just trying these few tips I written above once or twice - instead you will take the necessary steps to take these steps from once a week occurrences or "only when I feel bad" solutions, to every day solutions that you apply not only when things are good, but also when they are NOT.

That means putting into place some form of daily accountability that will help you stay on track even when you don't feel like it anymore. It means doing more than just getting excited today. It's about getting excited today and every day forward - not just about generating results, but also in the daily process.