• Self improvement is the act of improving yourself. Understanding yourself is a difficult task, but it is the first step of self improvement. First recognize your strength and weakness. If you realize yourself, you can work to improve yourself. This will help you to believe that you are proficient.
• The major key for your success and happiness is to believe in you. You learn to love yourself and trust in your capabilities. Think that you are very special. Believe that you can change the world and can attain your great destiny.
• Dream big and work hard until you make it to be achieved. Believe that nothing is impossible. Your family and your friends will light up your life. They are a grand resource of motivation.
• Every day you may feel fear to do some things. Living a bold life gives you a confidence. Just break the walls around you.
• When bad things happen in our lives, try to change them. This may leads to falling in to depression. Make yourself allow the things that you cannot change, you will become happy.
• Ignore the persons who are trying to break your motivation.
• You want to encircle yourself with positive optimistic people who love you. They lift you up and give confidence along your troubles.
• Kindness has a tendency to come back. Be generous with your smiles and many other things. Try to help others. You may be in need some day and people you know will come to assist you when they recognize that you would do the same for them.
• Be ready for everything that will approach your way. Build yourself up before people bang you down.
• Write down the jobs you want to attain in each day. Tick them off when you complete them. If you can’t do all things, it doesn’t matter; move that task to tomorrow’s list.
• Getting up early and eating breakfast will give you a good start for the day.
• You need energy throughout the day to achieve your goal.
• You can also do some exercise in morning. If you live with other people you can attempt to make use of this opportunity to get everyone together at the table to eat in the mornings. This is a nice way to start the day.
• Enjoy your life! You will feel a lot better when you realize how great your life is!
Posts Tagged ‘depression’
Self Improvement Tips
What I Have Learned in these Economic Times
We hit an economic recession, a near depression was in view in September of last year, we have had government bailouts, a burst of the real estate bubble, a stock market crash, devaluation of the dollar and over 10% unemployment, these are the headlines of the last year. Hardly a day goes by when these headlines are not hitting us in the face, and while all of those are very real, the question is what really hits home for the average person? There is the old saying that when your neighbor loses his job you are in a recession, when you lose your job it is a depression, and I believe that. When someone has lost their job any economic advice is easy, cut back on everything you can and try like hell to get a job. It’s easy advice, and not always so easy to do. But the question is for those of us who still have jobs but are dealing with some very real consequences of this economic slide, how do we deal with it? I am not her to give economic advice, lets leave that up to the professionals, if you can even find one anymore. I am just here to share my thoughts on the issues, how I have dealt with some of the things I have been faced with.
The first thing that i have done is cut back, and that is the obvious place to start. Last fall and winter, during the economic melt down I was petrified, I had seen my retirement accounts fall by north of forty percent with no end in sight, I didn’t know if my job was safe or anyone’s job for that matter. So I would say from October through January I spent on nothing except my children and even that was kept to a minimal. But around February I realized living scared was no way to live at all, so we began to do things again. My wife and I went out to dinner, even to some of our favorite restaurants, but we scaled back, our dinners were less expensive and less frequent. For spring break we decided to take our kids away, but we went somewhere that was driving distance, and found incredible deals on the internet. This year the lease on my car was up, so I go a less expensive car to save more. My wife’s lease is up this year and we will do the same thing. I am very concsious of saving more money than i have in the past, I think for the first time in my life I was scared into believing that things will not always be good, and while I have always been a saver, I probably was not as careful as I should have been.
One of the big issues we have faced is our home, we our one of the one’s that is “underwater” in our house. The truth is the financing was so cheap and interests were so low we may have like many others bought more home than we could afford. Now, we didn’t do any 100% financing but I did only put down 10% on my home, the truth is we should have bought less and put down more. Also, we bought in 2006 near the top of the real estat market, and we did a seven year interest only loan. The good news is we have four more years of these payments before our loan becomes an adjustable mortgage. it was a big mistake, we should have bought with a 30 year mortgage at a payment we knew we could afford forever, but we fell into the trap of finding our dream home and over extended ourselves. Hopefully home values will go back up, and we our trying to save so that we can put more down if we need too, or that the banks will work with us. I don’t want to lose my home for several reasons. First, I believe most people want to make good on their debt, I gave a commitment to pay for something and if I can I will honor it. Second, although I was stupid in the way I financed the home my intention is to live here until my kids are grown and we retire, so we had a long term plan of twenty years or longer. Third, we love our house, it is our home, and I believe most people feel this way, they did not buy it as an investment first and a home second, quite the contrary, most people did it the other way. This is our home and we intend to keep it.
These are some of the issues that we have faced. Fortunately, although we lost a lot in our retirement plan it has come back quite away. We will be more prudent with it in the future, probably less stocks and more fixed income investments. We like many others hoped maybe our retirement fund would grow and maybe make us rich, we saw great returns for a while. Now, our goal is what it always should have been, to keep it safe and let us retire with it. Again, we our concentrating on saving more money, to get us through those so called “rainy days.” And finally, we are dealing with the issue of our home, that is our main concern but I believe that we can work our way through it. I have learned a lot the last two years, nothing lasts forever, when things are too good to be true they probably our. And most important, live within your means, not what is inflated, not by what you think you will be able to afford, but by what you know you will be able to afford.
These are crazy economic times, the Dow Jones went from 14,000 to 6,500 and back to 10,000. If you own a home you have seen the value drop from 20% to 50% depending on what part of the country you live in. This is the first time in modern history that home values have dropped nationally, yes, various pockets of the country’s homes have had down economic times before, but that has been region specific based on unique economic conditions in each area. But this is the first time that American’s have seen a national drop in what has been historically their largest and safest investment.
In the last ten years Americans, and the world have seen two huge economic bubbles; first, the Nasdaq/tech bubble of the late 90′s and more recently the worldwide housing bubble. The first merely caused a routine recession, the latter almost caused a Depression, unlike one we have seen since the 1930′s, and we are still not totally in the clear yet. But what makes these bubbles different from the one’s of the past is technology and media. The availability of information through televisions, wireless, and the Internet available to everyone has expanded these bubbles to the general population. Plus, the advances in technology has given the ability to almost everyone to participate. The advance of the Internet has given almost every person instant access to day trading further fueling the bubble of the Nasdaq, and the advances in technology allowed most people to participate in the housing bubble, by allowing fast underwriting and appraisals through technology. So our economic bubbles now affect all people not only the professionals and Wall street.
So how do investors and ordinary workers who have pension plans and 401k’s and savings to invest protect themselves, and even more important how do they make money and save for their retirement? The simple truth is the average investor should never have been participating in these bubbles. When investing the plan should always be for the long term, and yes I know it is difficult to avoid investing in things when your friends and neighbors are doubling and tripling their money on a matter of months, sometimes weeks, but you must resist. Perhaps, the two greatest investors of our generation or any generation for that matter are Peter Lynch, who ran Fidelity mutual funds for decades, and the world’s richest man Warren Buffett. Both have very simple and similar theories on investing. For Peter Lynch, it was invest in what you know and what you use, and what you like. If you worked on your house as a hobby and went to Home Depot, that is something you used and liked, if you bought Home Depot stock you understood what you were buying. If you got up in the morning every day and ate Kellogg’s Raisin Bran or went to Starbuck’s everyday it was something that you used and understood. But buying Cisco Systems that powers the Internet through systems the average man doesn’t understand might be a stock an engineer might buy but probably not a Postal Worker. Now, just cause you used these items, that meant it was only a potential investment. People still need to do their homework, check out management, earnings, timing. For many investors mutual funds are a far better way to go, but the same principles apply, invest in areas that you understand.
Mr Buffet’s theory is very similar, invest in businesses and concepts you can understand. his largest holdings are Coca Cola, pretty simple concept, Wells Fargo a bank, American Express, the credit card industry isn’t going away you lend and get paid back interest, Geico the insurance company, again pretty basic. He also owns See’s candy and Dairy Queen. he is the every man of investing, his philosophy is to invest in things that are used everyday and that are easy to understand. And he has stood the test of time. In the late 90′s, Mr. Buffet’s holding company Berkshire Hathaway was under performing the markets for the first time in his career. The critics said he had lost his touch, the 70 something year old had not kept up to speed by not investing in technology. Mr Buffet called it a bubble, that he didn’t understand the companies business models, that in many cases could not understand what they did, his critics said he was thru. The Nasdaq crashed in 2000, Mr. Buffet is the world’s richest man. In 2008, the market crashed, Mr. Buffets net worth dropped by 50%, critics said his buy and hold theory was dead, while the Dow Jones Industrial tanked, Mr. Buffet bough more Wells Fargo, one of his largest holdings at 20 dollars a share, it’s now 31 he bought General Electric at 13 it’s 17. he bought Goldman Sachs at 115 it’s 190 and the list goes on. He buys great companies, he does not worry where the markets go on a day to day basis because he believes if you do your homework and buy great companies over time you make money. But he doesn’t buy all the time, he has one last credo, buy when most are fearful and sell when most are greedy, because markets are imperfect and tend to overreact to human emotion.
When investing stay away from the hottest trends, you are not an expert. Ten years ago most people I knew were buying tech stocks and making a fortune, the problem was they thought they were stock market geniuses. They weren’t they just caught a bubble. And most people who think they are smarter than they are don’t know when to get out and buy more and more and usually with borrowed money. A guaranteed recipe for disaster. And for all those people who thought they were overnight geniuses in the stock market, most lost all their investment in the end. The same thing held true with the housing market. Five years ago most people I knew were buying homes and trying to flip them. or some bought multiple homes with easy credit and borrowed money and thought they would be the next Donald Trump. The people that were the real experts made a fortune and got out, but the average investor, most had too much leverage and too much greed, for them, it ended up a disaster.
None of this means investing is wrong, or trying to flip a home is a mistake. It means don’t ride trends, don’t think you know more than you do, it means do your homework and buy what you know. If you want to try and by homes or apartments for rental income, know the area, don’t use too much leverage and invest for the long term and make sure you can hold through the rocky times because they always come. The same holds true for the stock market. There are no get rich quick schemes that work, all they will do is get you poor quickly. If returns seem to great to be true they probably are. If people tell you it’s different this time, I promise you its not. It is your money and your future be careful with it, be smart, invest carefully and remember successful investing is a marathon not a sprint.
Worrying About Worrying
Stress is a normal part of everyday life. Sometimes it is even healthy. Worrying too much, on the other hand, never is. Fear of problems in your life can take it over, and make you lose concentration both at work and in other important areas of your life. It can lead to much more serious problems like anxiety and depression. Luckily, there are ways you can treat your worries and make them more manageable.
A seed needs sun and water to grow. Likewise, your worries need feeding from you to keep them getting bigger. By getting control of your thoughts and not letting your concerns take them over so much, you avoid letting yourself fuel your own problems. Think back to past issues that have made you worry. Could the time you spent obsessing over them have been better used actually finding a solution? Having a little anxiety is completely natural. However, the first step in defeating worry is seeing when it becomes too much.
Remember that worrying about a problem is no way to fix it. In fact, it is even very detrimental because it gets in the way of your ability to think clearly. Typically, all we can think about when we worry is everything that could go wrong, which makes it even harder to recognize what would be right. Moreover, if you cannot address an issue directly, it will remain unsolved and continue to add to your stress. Soon, this will all become too much and you won’t be able to get anything done at all.
As you can see, the process of worrying turns into a cycle, with worries doing nothing except making themselves worse. The only way to stop this is by changing your thought process. You can will yourself into a more positive mindset. You have to begin by focusing on the positive possible outcomes that will rise as you tackle issues, which can give you a sense of hope and self-fulfillment. You shouldn’t feel blindly happy, but you definitely shouldn’t panic. Try to find the middle ground.
As the song goes, “accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative.” When you find yourself worrying, direct your thoughts to be more hopeful. Begin with the small things so that they don’t trouble you as you move on to bigger issues. You can’t simply grow bigger shoulders to carry your troubles on – so make sure you let some of them go, and get on with your life.
Three Reasons to be Yourself, Good, Bad, or Ugly
By the time we are in our mid 20’s we are usually happy in our lives or else terribly miserable and usually that is based on the secrets we have chosen to keep. For up to ten years we wrestle constantly with the choice to tell our secrets or not to tell them. We find ways to indulge our private paradoxes; those things we enjoy despite being told we should not. All the while, we fear being caught and yet wish to live free. The funny thing about it is that we think we are alone. There is a reason that so few claim to love Barry Mannilow, but so many of us know every word to all of his songs. This is the time of life that the majority of gays and lesbians “come out of the closet”, and why so many others, unwilling to confess to being themselves find themselves in despondency, often to the point of suicide. All of this pain and sadness can be avoided, but first we need to find the value in choosing to be our complete and honest selves.
The primary reason that we need to simply be ourselves is that when we are anybody but ourselves, we can never truly know that anyone loves us. They love a put on version of us that isn’t truly the totality of who we are. To be anyone other than who we are with the people we love is not only fraudulent, but bases their love for us on a false premise. Depending on the secrets involved, some of the people we love might love us differently or not at all. This is of course, why we are so afraid of honesty, but it’s also why we must be honest. The fact is that if someone we know might not love us if they knew, then they already don’t love us truly. They simply don’t know it yet. You owe it to them, and to yourself, to force them to make a choice regarding their love for you and how they will manifest those feelings.
Secondarily, we need to be ourselves because the consequences of faking our way through life, lying about who we are leaves us short tempered, prone to depression, and overall unhappy. Unhappy people have unhappy lives. Choose happiness. Those who choose honesty find themselves happy. It’s amazing how often a gay, lesbian, or transsexual person will claim happiness that fell on them in waves the moment they chose to be honest and to act as their genuine selves.
The tertiary reason for being ourselves at the risk of personal expense is that when we present ourselves as flawless, others feel the need to appear flawless as well. When you are honest and forthright about who you are, you open the door for others to be honest with you. You offer those whom you love the liberty to reveal their secrets, to find happiness themselves, and that is a tremendous gift. You might lose some relationships as the result of your honesty, but you will likely find richness in your relationships like never before. Happy relationships make for happy people.
May you find your true happiness, true love, and truly open and honest relationships.
