30 Day Mental Fast – Day 25: Chaos

Chaos is defined as a state of utter confusion(chaos, 2014). What I have noticed is that there are many people that tend to move through life with no sense of a goal in mind. It is this type of movement through life that causes people to live in a state of chaos.

It is important when even starting your day to have a goal in mind. These goals don’t need to be elaborate. These goals just need to be present. The goals that you set could be as simple as doing laundry or even going shopping.

Setting goals helps people to keep chaos from creeping into their lives. The concept is as simple as knowing that organization is the tool for fighting chaos in each of our lives.

Here are some tools that I use to keep chaos from creeping into my life.

1. Establish goals (daily, weekly, monthly and yearly(
2. Track your goals on a calendar (I use the calendar on my cell phone)
3. Establish a reward system for achieving my goals (I give myself time for playing World of Warcraft)
4. Break your daily schedule into manageable segments (one way I heard of doing this is to wok at something for 25 minutes and spend the next 25 minutes doing something else)

Keeping chaos from entering your life is a choice that you have to make yourself. It may take some time to change habits or to create a system that will work for you. The important thing is that you find a way to make the system easy for you to follow. For a process to work you have to be able to duplicate it over again. If a system is too complicated, you may not be able to reproduce the same results on a consistent basis.

Chaos. (2014). Retrieved form http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/chaos

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30 Day Mental Fast – Day 18: Limitations

Limitations – It is said that limitations are the the blockers to success. We are the creators of our own limitations. There are many influences though that help us to accept limitations in our lives. Some of these go as far back as to the day that we were born. The people we grow up with as friends and even our parents help us to set our limitations to our own success.

It’s funny when I think about the biggest limitation that I have to overcome is the American dream that; if I go to school and get good grades. I get my degree and get a good job. I get a good job, retire in forty years and live happily ever-after. What nobody told me is that dreams is not possible in today’s world. When I started working all you needed was a high school diploma. Then you needed an Associate degree to get the better jobs. The ironic part of all this was by the time I finished my Associate degree, I now needed a Bachelor Degree to get the better jobs. Wait though it gets worse yet. I am working on my Bachelor degree and have the one math class left to finish to get it. When I finish my Bachelor degree a Master’s will be the minimum for the high paying jobs. It seems to be turning into an endless circle of continuing education. I’m not sore where it will end. Will I need to go on for my Ph.D. in order to get the high paying jobs? Will I ever finish with school? Where will the massive student loan debt finally end?

That was the purpose of this 30 Day Mental Fast, was to retrain my mind and to break free of the limitations that I have established in my 55 years of life. Sometimes I wonder if thirty days is enough. I have to tell you about the 7 day gap in my posts. I found one evening while I had nothing to do. I was sitting in front of the TV. It wasn’t even turned on yet. I knew my DVR was filling up it hadn’t been watched in two weeks and it was still recording. I checked to see what I could delete to make sure that it didn’t get too full. Instead of deleting movies or shows that I didn’t need to watch, I hit play and spent the next 3 days watching recorded shows and movies to make space on the DVR.

If you take anything away from this post. I hope you know that it is not easy to lose you limitations and that we all have moments of weakness. It is what we choose to do for ourselves in those moments of weakness.

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30 Day Mental Fast – Day 11: My Goals

So in the post for day 8 I said that it is important to set goals if you want to succeed. When you do set your personal goals you want to make sure that you right them down. I also want to remind you about that tip I got in Madison a couple Saturdays ago, about placing the goal you are working for where yo can always see it. When you write your goals keep in mind that you want to set short-term and long-term goals at the same time. Short-term goals should be a goal that you want to reach in 30 to 60 days. Long-term goals are the goals that can take up to a year to achieve.

As I was working on my personal goals for 2014. I started by writing out the goals that I want to achieve in the first 30 day, then 90 days and then the entire year.

30 Day Goals

1. Make Sapphire with Organo Gold
2. Maintain Sapphire and qualify for the Benz club
3. Sign-up 4 new distributors
4. Buy case of coffee
5. Get passport
6. Buy ticket to Project 50K in San Antonio

90 Day Goals

1. Buy Mercedes Benz M550
2. Increase to 2 cases of coffee a month
3. Price houses in Port Royal South Carolina
4. Sign-up 4 more new Distributors
5. Go to Project 50K in San Antonio

2014 Goals

1. Make and maintain Sapphire to qualify for the Benz club
2. Purchase a case of coffee a month
3. Sign-up 4 new distributors a month
4. Buy Mercedes Benz M550
5. Buy House in Port Royal South Carolina
6. Get passport
7. Go to Project 50K in San Antonio
8. See my grand children at least twice
9. Travel more

As you can see I have some goals relating to my Organo Gold business but I also have some personal goals that I want to achieve this year. I guess seeing the grand kids and the travel more can go hand in hand. The reason I say that is I have 8 grand kids in three different states. The living in South Carolina comes from living there for a year and wanting to make that the place where I retire to.

The one piece of advice I hope you draw from this is set goals and write them down.

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30 Day Mental Fast – Day 10: Organization

Organization – Is the ability to neatly arrange items. Whether you organize the files on your computer or the DVDs on your shelf. With organization  of these items it’ makes the search for a single item in the vast amounts of similar items easy to find.

Someone once told me that I over organize the files on my computer. I have folders within folders within folders. Let’s talk about my photos. I have My pictures broken down into sub-folders according to different categories. One category I call pictures and in that folder are all the photos of my family. I have pictures broken into sub-folders for each of my daughters. Inside each of those folders I have folders for friends and for their kids. If I need a photo of my grand-kids Maddi and Mason. I know I’ll find those in the Maddi and Mason folder under their mom Cassie’s folder. If I want a photo of my grandparents. I look in the picture folder in the grandparent sub-folder. For me with the folder system that I have I can find any photo in a few minutes rather than a few hours.

When it comes to organization I’m not saying that you need to organize to the depth that I do. What works for me may not work for you. I do hope that you do at least organize you life. For me I know if I’m looking for a research paper that I wrote for English 102. All I need to do is go to “My Document” the the English 102 folder and find the research paper on “Video Game Addiction.” Last October I ran into a situation that I needed notes from a Computer Forensics class I took in 2009 for a class I was talking in October. All my notes were stored in a folder for the Computer Forensics class and all I had to do was print them out.

If you take anything from this post. I hope at least take the thought that organization in life is important. Organization has brought order to the chaos that existed when my life was cluttered.

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30 Day Mental Fast – Day 9: Perceptions

Perceptions- It is our experiences and the people that are influential in our lives that help us to shape our perceptions. That is why no two people have the same perceptions about the same instance. Two people may have witnessed an event happen but because they have two unique perceptions. The way that when they both give their accounts of the events you may have two completely different stories. In any event the facts that help in our perception of that event is the parts of that event that hold some importance to us. Let’s say that you and I go to a concert and Dierks Bentley is opening for Blake Shelton. If I’m a big Dierks Bentley fan. I might say that I went to a concert to see Dierks Bentley and oh yeah Blake Shelton followed Dierks. Where you might say I went to a Blake Shelton concert and oh yeah Dierks Bentley opened for him. That is because the key points of the concert for each of us is different.

While people don’t see events with the same perceptions a writer can use words to convey his perception to others. So let’s take another look at the same event and see if I can paint a mental picture that will let you see the event through my eyes.

Dierks Bentley took the stage in a packed house at the Colony Theater in Chicago on Monday night. Dierks started his set off with “Home” and closed his set with “Thinking of You”. The crowed was so worked up after listening to Dierks the momentum carried as Blake Shelton took the Stage. Blake opened with “All Over Me”. Blake rocked the house as he sang “If I Was Your Man”. Blake finished his set with “I Thought There Was Time”.

It is that technique that critics review a concert, movie or even food. It allows the reader to see what they are describing as if you were the person that was at that concert or eating that item from the restaurant they were reviewing.

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