how to find your passion and live up to that.

1) Asking The Right Questions

To find your passion, you need to ask yourself the right questions first. You can make use of the 5 W’s(What, Who, Where, Why, When) and one H (How) which is a commonly used method for information gathering.

I have replaced “When” with one more “What”, as I feel that one more “What” question might be more useful.

You can ask these questions to yourself to find your passion:

• What do I enjoy doing the most?  - Is there anything that you are already doing, or have done in the past that you really enjoy doing?

• Who do I want to be? – What kind of person would you like to become? Would your passion help transform you to your ideal character in the process?

• What do I want to achieve in my life? – Do you want to become successful, rich, happy, or simply content with your life? Would your passion help you achieve what you desire?

• Where would I like to be at? – Would you like to be following your passion in a specific country and place, or travel around the world doing it?

• Why would I want to do it? – What would come out of doing it? Will doing it lead to improve yourself, make you more money, or make you a happier person?

• How can I make it happen? – What kind of plans would you need to make to be able to follow your passion? Will you need to make money or find more time to do it?

The first four W’s might help you identify some ideas that you are positive about following. The last two questions involving the “Why” and “How” are more about trying to realistically find some ways to make them happen. Write down your ideas on a piece of paper, or in a word processor and see what you get.

Writing your thoughts and ideas has a powerful effect, so you might want to literally write them down instead of typing them.

2) Contacting your inner child

We might need to go back, at an earlier time of our life, when worries didn’t cloud our thoughts. Going back to your childhood and reminiscing what you were passionate about at that time might help bring to the surface unconscious desires that you would still like to see come to life today.

Go back to a time, before you were socially conditioned to limit yourself and your abilities. At that time, everything seemed possible, even the most absurd things. While those absurd things might not appear to be possible now, chances are, if you slightly modify them in a way, they can become possible and something to strive for.

3) Fast forward to the future

To evaluate whether something is right for you, you can use the creative visualization technique to see whether your future self would be content doing what you want to do now.

You simply relax, close your eyes and see, hear and feel if you would be enjoying doing what you have chosen, 10 years from now. If the thoughts aren’t so appealing, then perhaps you might want to find another passion to pursue.

4) Making Money From Your Passion

Finding your passion is great, but what if you don’t have the resources to go for it? The most important resources are time and money. Our usual excuses consist of not having the time to try something new and not having enough money to cast everything aside to give it a shot.

The timing will never be perfect and we will never have everything ready before starting, so we might as well make a good plan and try to execute it now. There is always the potential to make money from your passion. Whether it’s teaching it to someone else, or writing about it on the Internet and monetizing it in a way, when we have a true passion for what we are doing, the gates of creativity open wide and solutions appear.

Building Self Confidence – Ways To Improve Self Confidence

1 Imagining the worst case scenario

Now this might not seem like such a positive advice to follow, but most of the times, the task that we are so afraid of doing is usually not one that is life threatening. Simply thinking this way can actually help you try what you are afraid of doing.

Perhaps it’s talking to that attractive woman or man at the bar or making that dreaded phone call to a client, or trying for a new career in life. What’s the worst thing that can happen? It’s nothing worth fearing probably. In the vast majority of cases, even if the decision can be life changing, taking action can dissolve any fear and any lack of self confidence that you might have and help you build confidence.

2 Being motivated by regret

I got one more tip for you that is not that positive either! Negative emotions can actually really help give you a kick in the butt to help you get moving. As Steve Jobs famously said in Stanford’s Commencement Address in 2005: “for the past 33 years, I’ve looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, if today were the last day of my life would I want to do, what I am about to do today?” He later went on to add that if the answer to that question had been no for too many days in a row, then he knew that he had to change something.

The above quote has had a profound effect in my life as I had spent a good amount of my life living inside my comfort zone, living life in a relatively passive state instead of an active one. Don’t be a passive observer of life and take life in your hands or you might be spending a lot of time in the future regretting what might have been. Regret can be a powerful motivator for building self confidence so you can use this method accordingly.

3 Loving yourself

Let’s finish with a tip on building self confidence that is on a more positive note. They say that the world outside is merely a reflection of your inside world. Loving yourself and trusting yourself is vital in building self confidence, because if you don’t love yourself, in the end you won’t feel like you can accept all the good things that life has to offer and you will spend your life living with low self confidence and low self esteem and feeling undeserving of all the great things out there that are available to us all.

Some people feel that loving yourself can be a bad thing because it might sound narcissistic and arrogant but that’s not the case. You need to love yourself first if you want to expect other people to love you. If you spend your life not feeling love for yourself then it will be a tremendous blow to your self confidence because you won’t feel that you are deserving of anything good.

Learning to Love Yourself And Accepting Yourself

1) Accept yourself – The first step to self-love is always self-acceptance. Accepting yourself means to accept every aspect of your existence, whether it is good or bad. You might think that if you are trying to change yourself, accepting yourself just like you are right now is not going to work too well. To change yourself, you need to accept yourself as it is first. By being oblivious of the negative traits of yourself, you are not helping yourself change anyway.

2) Be kind to yourself – There are so many times when we are too quick to be judgmental on ourselves. Whether we make a big or small mistake, we are quick to blame ourselves for poor performance or poor judgement.  Being harsh on ourselves doesn’t help our improvement; in fact it can have the exact opposite effect and make us perform worse, if we are already in a disappointed state of mind.

3) Forgive Yourself – Forgiving yourself is relevant with the “be kind to yourself” point above. With so many decisions to make each day, we are bound to make a decision that will not look like the best decision after taking a closer look. You might act in an unfair way to someone else, or to yourself. Let go of any regrets and learn to forgive yourself because you are the one that needs your forgiveness the most.

4) Be grateful for what you have – Being grateful for what you have in your life is a powerful tool that can not only help you love yourself, but also motivate you to work harder and can keep you content. No matter what situation you are in right now, there is always someone in a worse situation. Just being alive is a gift itself. Be grateful for what you have and learn to appreciate even the small things that you usually don’t even notice.

5) Overcome Negative Self-Talk – We spend a lot of time having with ourselves and by the conditioning of the society that we live in, all that self-talk is usually negative and happens at an unconscious level. By utilizing the power of, you can shift all the negative self-talk into positive. By doing so, you can improve all aspects of yourself and practice all of the points stated in this post to make a positive shift in your unconscious mind and life.

6) Don’t sacrifice your needs for others – Sometimes we just want to be helpful to other people, so much that we often forget our true needs. Don’t say yes to someone when you need and want to say no. We need to learn to respect ourselves more and care for our needs too. If our needs are not taken care of, it’s difficult to take care of other people’s needs and requests.

7) Don’t compare yourself to others – This is a common problem that almost all of us are guilty of. We see another person and we say “I wish I had his/her body” “I wish I had as much money as him/her” “I wish I was as smart/successful as him/her”. Comparing ourselves to others is serving us no purpose, as we are all different in our own ways. We all have our good and bad traits and comparing ourselves to others will always gives us a reason to be unhappy, because someone will always have an aspect of their lives that is better than ours, just like someone will always have an aspect of their lives that is worse from ours

Improving Self-Esteem – 7 Ways To Improve Your Self-Image

1) Stop the comparisons – This is something that we have learned to do at an unconscious level and usually has a devastating effect in our self-esteem. Most of the times we compare ourselves to others, we tend to compare ourselves with people that have already achieved what we want to achieve, so naturally we will find that they have all the qualities that we are looking for. This is especially true if we don’t personally know the person and see them only on TV or over the Internet where the media tend to create extra hype over successful people and celebrities.

2) Compliment other people – Instead of comparing yourself with others, you can compliment the positive traits of other people. When you show that you can appreciate the good in others, then you will probably get some compliments yourself. Don’t shrug off compliments and be gracious in accepting them. A simple “thanks” followed by a smile will give out a positive self-image and will make you feel like that too.

3) Set Goals In Your Life – When you don’t set any goals for yourself, it’s only natural that you will stop striving to become better if you don’t have an ideal to reach. You need to find something that you are passionate about and try to follow through. Even if you set a high goal and not achieve it, you will improve throughout the whole experience and the motivation that you will get from following your goals will also increase your self-esteem.

4) Take Action – Taking action is the first step to success in pretty much all areas of our lives. Even if we don’t feel competent enough to do a task, starting it will give us a confidence boost and can help us increase our self-esteem.

5) Exercise – Exercising can really help with self-esteem as you will be doing something good for yourself which is caring for your body. You don’t have to go to a gym if you don’t want to. Just doing some simple stretches on a consistent basis can really help you improve your confidence and self-esteem, since you will actually be taking action to keep your body in shape.

6) Improve your posture – Our posture can reveal a lot about ourselves. If you slouch while walking for example, it will appear that you lack any self-confidence and have a poor self-esteem.  Keeping an upright posture while sitting, standing or when chatting with people can make you look more confident and you will also feel more confident inside. You don’t have to keep your spine 100% straight, but note when your body starts to slouch and fix your posture as soon as you take notice. It will with time become natural and you won’t have to fake it anymore.

7) Stop listening to negative people – We have all come across people in our lives that just don’t seem to have anything good to say. Try not to associate with people like that, as they will take you down with them, along with your self-esteem. Try to be around people who have a positive self-image and this will have a positive effect on your self-esteem as well

self improvement - positive thinking

5 Positive Thinking Tips To Keep Your Day 

5 Positive Thinking Tips to Apply In Your life :

1) Being grateful – You can start your day by appreciating all that you have so far in your life. Whether it’s something small or big, everyone has something to be grateful for. Even if it’s just for the fact of being alive.

Being grateful can be especially empowering, as the things that you have now in your life, might have been the things that you have only dreamt of having before. Showing some gratitude in respect with what we already have in our lives can take us a long way and bring a smile on our face.

2) Do some deep breathing – Finding 5 minutes out of your busy schedule to close your eyes (or with open eyes)  and try to relax with breathing techniques shouldn’t be that difficult. Deep breathing is a deceivingly simple way to relax and refresh your mind from the hectic schedule of the day. growing

A simple breathing technique you can do is to inhale for a count of five, hold your breath for a count of 5 and then exhale for another count of 5. Not only will this give your mind some rest and let you clear away some of the negativity that has accumulated from the start of the day, it will also give you an energy boost, to help you continue with the work that needs to be done.

3) Don’t let negativity create a snowball effect – The snowball effect occurs when a thing of small significance builds upon itself to become bigger and bigger and could lead to disastrous results if the first event was of negative nature.

4) Keep away from negative people or the media – While both are difficult to achieve, we can at least try to minimize our exposure to them. Negative people carry their aura of negativity with them and without them wanting to they take down everyone else they come in contact with. Try to be associated more with the positive people, the ones that have something positive to say and have a smile on their face.

5) Lighten up – Don’t dwell on any mistakes you might do during the day. We tend to get angry at ourselves and think about a mistake that we have done for a long time after it has been done, as if the act of worrying about it would actually fix it. Chances are, the mistake is not life threatening and anything other than that shouldn’t have you worry too much about it.

By keeping in mind these positive thinking tips throughout your day, you will minimize the chances of letting an event or a mistake control your thoughts and actions for the rest of the day. You need to be in a positive state of mind to display your best efforts, so don’t let anything bring you down.