Most of us have gone through the trial and error process, but it’s not a very strategic method for the activity you’ll be doing for forty hours a week until you retire. Considering the amount of time we spend comparing brands at the supermarket or researching vacations, shouldn’t we put a little more time and research into our career choice too?

If you’re contemplating a career move, reassessing your mid-life career choice or just entering the job market, consider working through the Three E’s to Finding the Career You Love: Exploration, Evaluation, Execution.

EXPLORATION

Before you start your job search, the first thing you’ll want to do is assess your work values. Ask yourself what you need in order to be happy in your work environment. Prepare a standard set of questions to ask on an interview based on the values you are not willing to set aside. These values provide a template for what any career you pursue should look like.

Then, assess your strengths. Once you have defined what you are naturally talented at, focus on how you can optimize those strengths and write a competitive edge statement that explains what makes you unique, different and valuable.

The final step in the Exploration stage is to find the common “golden” threads that run through your interests and brainstorm careers that would incorporate them. For example, you may find that most of your interests tend to be individual activities that allow your mind to go somewhere else, such as reading, cycling, and playing computer games.

If you thrive working alone and enjoy the “escape” of everyday life, then think of careers that might let you use those interests. Perhaps, you’d enjoy being a writer, a truck driver, or a computer programmer. Write down all the potential careers based on your interests. Don’t edit or censor at this point, jot it all down, everything from a vague interest or silly idea to a dream job.

EVALUATION

Once you’ve explored and discovered your work values, your strengths, your interests, and brainstormed career options, it’s time to evaluate what jobs may actually be suitable for you.

Take your list of jobs and compare and contrast it with your work values and your strengths. You may find that even though being a truck driver aligns with your interests, one of your values is to have the option to work from home. Or, you may not be a very good driver. Narrow your list down to the jobs that fit with your values, use your strengths, and include some of your interests.

Once you’ve narrowed down your options, do a little “on the road” evaluating for your top three job choices—job shadowing, internships, web-research, and informational interviews.

EXECUTION

Now that you’ve learned about your options, pick the one that is the best fit for you. Then find out as much about the industry and the opportunities within that career field as you can. Re-write your resume to position yourself for this career or begin building the foundational components of the new business you would like to start.

Connect with professional organizations in your industry, take any training or educational courses you need to be competitive, and get out there and submit your resume or start that business.

Congratulations, you have arrived at a career choice that will utilize your talents, skills, and passions!

Here is a bonus video to help you get the job of your dreams.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh3VV90v5po

Related posts:

1. It’s OK To Be Rich – Get Wealthier Beyond Your Wildest Dreams
2. How To Motivate Yourself To Achieve Success
3. The Seven Beliefs of Highly Happy People

Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open? Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. Live in silence. — Jalal ad-Din Rumi

If you ever feel exhausted, worthless, helpless, or hopeless, there is a possibility you are suffering from depression. Several steps can be taken to treat this condition.

If you are interested in self-help, there are resources available that can help you get on the right track to feeling more confident and better about yourself.

Self-help consists of several methods that can be performed daily in the comfort of your own home, and these methods are designed to help reduce the effects of depression.

Depending on the severity of your condition, you should seek medical help, but depression help tactics are a great way to start the healing process.

The following tips describe a few methods for reducing stress and building confidence. These methods can also assist in the reduction of your depression symptoms:

• Setting goals are a great way to build confidence especially if you can meet them quickly.
• Split your tasks into smaller sections. This allows you to complete your projects in a timely manner.
• Spend time with those close to you and participate in activities that you enjoy such as going out for a meal, seeing a movie or going to visit some friends. These can both help you feel better.
• Change your physical state: stand straight, smile, hold your head high. Do it in front of the mirror and remember a time you felt great.
• Exercise. It’s scientifically proven that exercise makes you feel better.

This video gives some more ideas on how to reduce depression.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCINURSEg2Y

part 2

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MCN22iPTrU

If you choose to see a therapist to treat your depression, you may be treated with Cognitive Behavior Therapy or CBT. CBT can be considered a form of self-help because of the approach used in treating your depression symptoms. Your therapist may guide this process before allowing you to continue the therapy on your own.

Cognitive Behavior Therapy may consist of keeping a log or diary of your thoughts or facing the problems that may be causing your depression. This method of therapy also helps you to face the problems that may be causing your negative feelings.

Determining the causes of your depression is an excellent first step towards determining the best course of action. In some cases depression suddenly appear in one’s life without an easily distinguishable cause. When this happens, it may be best to see a therapist while continuing your self-help tactics.

Related posts:

1. Using Words For The Health Of It
2. How Journaling Improves Your Emotional Life
3. How To Motivate Yourself To Achieve Success

Motivation at work

Until you’ll find your dream job every other job usually starts the same, at first you’re excited but then with time you enter into a routine and get bored. At this point you have three options: quitting, working and suffering or motivating yourself and even excelling at your job.

Assuming you need the money and you don’t want to quit you’re left with two options. both of them have advantages and disadvantages. Lets start with working and suffering: the advantage is that you get to complain and because people love to complain you will have a common interest with your coworkers and it will be easier for you to communicate.

On the other hand you’ll suffer, you’ll be bored and look at your watch a lot. You’ll probably wont be promoted because people don’t promote mediocre workers. In addition you’ll be tired and you’ll feel that you’re wasting your time.

If you choose to motivate yourself the main disadvantage will be that you’ll need to consciously make an effort at least at the beginning to see the positive sides of your job, and of course you’ll need to find different topics to talk about with your coworkers.

On the other hand you’ll be vigorous, you’ll become interested in your job and therefore better at it which will increase your chances of promotion. In addition time will pass faster and you’ll generally feel better.

If you decide to motivate yourself, here is how you can do that:

• start by remembering why you looked for a job in the first place.
• Think about all the advantages that this job is giving you.
• Divide your job into parts and give yourself small treats for every part you accomplished. The treats should be something you like to do like reading a book or watching TV (avoid food as a treat).
• Imagine that someone is watching every step you make and you want them to have a good impression of you.

If you can’t find advantages to your job and you can’t motivate yourself, you should seriously consider finding a different job. The average person spends a lot of time at work and if you’re unhappy at your job it will affect other areas in your life including your health.

General Motivation

Do you want to know how I motivated myself to do skydiving? The answer is simple I told everyone I know that I’m going to do it. I didn’t want them to think that I’m a liar or just one of these people that talks a lot and does nothing so I had to do it. This “technique” still helps me achieve some of my goals, I use it all the time and it’s easy.

In this video Tony Robbins explains what motivates us and how we can do it better.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cpc-t-Uwv1I

So by now some of you still think “I tried to motivate myself in the past and it didn’t work.” The reason for this is conflicting goals: In this video Tony Robbins explains more about it.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0iFgVzXxKc

You can read more about it in my inner conflicts post.

Related posts:

1. Resolve Your Inner Conflicts – Achieve More
2. How To Achieve Your Desired Outcome
3. 8 Obstacles To Using The Law Of Attraction Successfully

The psychological aspect

There are hundreds of books about weight loss and dozens of diets, and yet people keep searching for that ultimate diet. The one that will actually work. The problem with diets is that they focus only on the physical aspect and you can’t diet forever. Once you quit you gain the weight back and often even more than before.

So what works? The answer is changing your life style. It works because it’s permanent. Before changing your life style it’s important to understand why you chose it in the first place. I’ll give you a couple examples:

1 Mary was molested when she was a teenager and ever since she thought that being attractive is dangerous and therefore she gained weight to protect herself. Usually such thoughts are unconscious meaning she isn’t even aware she thinks them. To change her behavior she will need to change her beliefs.

2 When John was little his mom offered him cookies every time he felt sad. With time John linked pleasure to eating and ate every time he felt sad or depressed to comfort himself, often regardless of his actual hunger. In many similar cases a vicious cycle is created. People feel bad because they’re obese so they eat to feel better; and the cycle is perpetuated.

These examples illustrate that it’s vital to understand the psychological reasons in order to successfully lose weight. It’s also important to understand your rules and their hierarchy.

Each of us has rules like I have to be nice to people, or I should clean the apartment once a week. The difference between should and have to rules are that should are rules that you prefer to do but you don’t link pain to not doing them, and have to are rules that you feel obligated to do because otherwise you’ll feel pain.

One of the differences between obese and slim people are their rules. often slim people have a big list of I have to rules like: I have to exercise four times in a week, I have to eat healthy, I can’t smoke, I can’t use drugs, etc and a short list of I should rules.

Obese people on the other hand have a long list of I should rules: I should exercise,eat healthy and so on, and a short list of I have to rules like: I have to eat, sleep eight hours, and so on. If you want to lose weight you have to make it a priority, change your I should to I have to rules. This will not mean that you’ll do something against your will, it just means that you’ll make it a high priority because you’ll understand that the current condition can’t last.

Using NLP to lose weight

Lets say you have two conflicting parts. A part that wants to lose weight, we’ll call it part X and a part that sabotages part X, we’ll call it part Y. What we want to do is to establish a communication between the parts and to reach a mutual agreement.

The following techniques are from a book called Reframing : neuro-linguistic programming and the transformation of meaning by Richard Bandler and John Grinder.After reading them choose the appropriate one and do it. It won’t help if you just read it.

These techniques include the term reframing which I want to explain first: Just like when you change the frame of a picture and suddenly everything fits and the picture looks great, Reframing in NLP means to view a situation from a different perspective. This is done to to help accept the situation and deal with it better.

Negotiating between parts

1) Ask the part that is being interrupted (part X) the following questions:

a) What is your positive function?

b) Which part(s) is (are) interrupting you? (part Y)

2) Ask the same questions of part Y:

a) What is your positive function?

b) Does X ever interfere with your function?

3) If both parts interrupt each other at times, you are now ready to
negotiate an agreement. (If not, this model is not appropriate, so
switch to another reframing model. If Y interferes with X, but X
doesn’t interfere with Y, six-step reframing with Y may be most
appropriate.)

a) Ask Y if its function is important enough that Y would be willing
to not interrupt X so that it could receive the same treatment in return.

b) Ask X if it was not interrupted by Y, would it be willing to not interrupt Y?

4) Ask each part if it will actually agree to do the above for a specified
amount of time. If either part becomes dissatisfied for any reason, it
is to signal the person that there is a need to renegotiate.

5) Ecological check: “Are there any other parts involved in this?” “Are
there any other parts that interrupt this part, or that utilize these
interruptions?” If so, renegotiate.

Six Step Reframing

1) Identify the pattern (X) to be changed. “I want to stop X’ing but I
can’t,” or “I want to Y, but something stops me.”

2) Establish communication with the part responsible for the pattern.

a) “Will the part of me that makes me X communicate with me in
consciousness?” Pay attention to any feelings, images, or sounds that occur in response to asking that question internally.

b) Establish the “yes/no” meaning of the signal. Have it increase in brightness, volume, or intensity for “yes,” and decrease for “no.”

3) Separate the behavior, pattern X, from the positive intention of the
part that is responsible for X. The unwanted behavior is only a way to achieve some positive function.

a) Ask the part that runs X “Would you be willing to let me know in consciousness what you are trying to do for me by Pattern X?”

b) If you get a “yes” response, ask the part to go ahead and communicate its intention. If you get a “no” response, proceed with
unconscious reframing, presupposing positive intention.

c) Is that intention acceptable to consciousness? Do you want to
have a part of you which fulfills that function?

d) Ask the part that runs X “If there were ways to accomplish your positive function that would work as well as, or better than X, would you be interested in trying them out?”

4) Access a creative part, and generate new behaviors to accomplish
the positive function.

a) Access experiences of creativity and anchor them, or ask “Are
you aware of a creative part of yourself?”

b) Have the part that runs X communicate its positive function to
the creative part, allow the creative part to generate more choices to accomplish that function, and have the part that used to run X select three choices that are at least as good or better than X. Have it give a “yes” signal each time it selects such an alternative.

5) Ask the part “Are you willing to take responsibility for using the
three new alternatives in the appropriate context?” This provides a
future-pace. In addition you can ask the part at the unconscious
level to identify the sensory cues that will trigger the new choices,
and to experience fully what it’s like to have those sensory cues
effortlessly and automatically bring on one of the new choices.

6) Ecological Check. “Is there any part of me that objects to any of the three new alternatives?” If there is a “yes” response, recycle to step 2 above.
The following videos will help you lose weight using hypnosis

www.youtube.com/watch?v=svh7r96WXJg

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubz8ngcP5_0

www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAEyYSJ7YrE

www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFVw4F7nObw

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pREKX_-0NyI

The physical aspect

It’s important to understand that the changes I offer are for life, it’s not a diet. As you know changing your psychology isn’t enough. To lose weight you have to eat less calories than the body consumes. To do so you’ll have to do two things: cut back on your calories and exercise.

Eat healthy

The easiest way to cut back on your calories is to eat less fat. Don’t eat: butter, milk with high percentages of fat, gravy for salads. Eat: lean meat, lean chicken (without the skin) and vital fats like: avocado, salmon and almonds. Of course in the right amount.

Although controlling your calories is essential it’s not enough, it’s equally important to control your hormones. The hormones manage the body’s metabolism. Repressing the hormones that are responsible for fat accumulation will result in a large quantity of fats that can be burn in activity.

To effectively manage your hormones you need to manage your Carbohydrates, because consuming carbohydrates elevates the levels of insulin in the body. Insulin is a hormone that interferes with decomposition of fats. Not all the carbohydrates are the same. Simple carbohydrates like the ones in white bread, white rice, potatoes and some cereals elevate the insulin very fast and therefore should be avoided. On the other hand complex carbohydrates like the ones in whole wheat bread, oats, yam and beans should be in your daily menu.

Calories and hormones determine whether the nutrition will be used to build muscles or to build fat, While the number of meals during the day affects the general metabolism. Every time you eat the metabolism increases slightly. If you’ll eat six times in a day your metabolism will increase six times.

It’s a way to lose weight without eating less. It doesn’t mean that you need to eat more, on the contrary you will need to eat less in each meal and chew slowly because it takes approximately twenty minutes before the brain signals the body that your full.

Drink a lot of water. The following video explains more about the benefits of drinking a lot of water.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xQyldIzFZk

Exercise

Do aerobics (exercises for improving the body’s oxygen intake ). Aerobics include running, swimming, dancing, walking fast, yoga and so on. To produce a benefit, aerobic training must raise the heart rate (pulse) to the exerciser’s target level for at least 20 minutes and include at least three sessions a week.

Aerobics has three benefits: it improves your cardiovascular fitness, it burns calories and it influences your hormones. Aerobics elevates the norepinephrine hormone that helps burn fats. it’s best to do aerobics in the morning before eating breakfast for an hour max.

Do anaerobic exercise (exercise intense enough to trigger anaerobic metabolism). Anaerobic exercise includes: heavy weight-lifting, all types of sprints (running, biking, etc.), jumping rope, hill climbing, interval training, isometrics, or any rapid burst of hard exercise.

Besides making you stronger and improving your cardiovascular fitness it will improve your metabolism and stamina. To lose weight a good combination would be to do aerobics four times in a week and Anaerobic exercise twice in a week.

Related posts:

1. How To Master Your Emotions To Achieve Peace Of Mind
2. Resolve Your Inner Conflicts – Achieve More
3. Self Help Tactics To Reduce Depression