How to Change Your Life: A User’s Guide
‘You will never change your life until you change something you do daily.’ ~Mike Murdock
By Leo Babauta
Start with a simple statement: what do you want to be?
Are you hoping to someday be a writer, a musician, a designer, a programmer, a polyglot, a carpenter, a manga artist, an entrepreneur, an expert at something?
How do you get there? Do you write your intention on a piece of paper, and put it in a bottle and launch it to sea, hoping it will manifest? No. The universe isn’t going to make this happen. You are.
Do you set yourself a big goal to complete by the end of the year, or in three months? S...
Source: Zen Habits - March 19, 2013 Category: Life Coaches Authors: zenhabits Tags: Habits Source Type: blogs
Getting Your Family On Board with Life Changes
‘Men learn while they teach.’ ~Seneca the Younger
By Leo Babauta
It is a curious phenomena that when we try to change our habits — simplify our clutter, eat healthier, start exercising — the other people in our life don’t instantly want to be changed in the same way.
It’s as if they had their own minds!
Horrible as that might sound, it’s the reality we have to deal with if we have a family (or friends, roommates, coworkers, etc.). They often resist changes we make, or their possibly unhealthy habits stand in our way.
You’re trying to eat only whole foods, and yet your d...
Source: Zen Habits - March 15, 2013 Category: Life Coaches Authors: zenhabits Tags: Finance & Family Habits Source Type: blogs
How to Stick to a Habit When Life Falls Apart
‘If you’re going through hell, keep going.’ ~Winston Churchill
By Leo Babauta
We’d like to think that making positive life changes is a straight line from beginning to where we want to go.
But life has taught us differently.
Experience shows us that you can start a new habit (let’s say working out) and things go great for awhile, and then life gets in the way. Things get messy. Things fall apart. We have a few bad days, or a huge project to work on at work, or relationship problems, or a family crisis, or we get sick.
What do we do when life gets messy and our habits fall to the wayside? Wel...
Source: Zen Habits - March 12, 2013 Category: Life Coaches Authors: zenhabits Tags: Habits Happiness Source Type: blogs
Zen Mind in the Middle of Chaos & Stress
By Leo Babauta
What do you do when your job, or your personal life, is a constant source of busy-ness, rushing, nose-to-the-grindstone work, and stress?
Or what do you do if your life is simple and relatively stress-free, but something blows up and you are in the middle of chaos and high stress all of a sudden?
This is when we could use a dose of Zen Mind, or the Art of Letting Go.
What is this Zen Mind? To be honest, I’m still learning what that is, but what I’ve been practising is a constant letting go. Let’s take an example:
I have a major deadline approaching. It is stressing me out, man! But wha...
Source: Zen Habits - March 8, 2013 Category: Life Coaches Authors: zenhabits Tags: Happiness Source Type: blogs
Meditation: The Most Fundamental Habit
‘ To meditate does not mean to fight with a problem.
To meditate means to observe.’
~Thich Nhat Hanh
By Leo Babauta
It’s no secret that I advocate meditation as a great way to start your day, deal with stress, live in the present and more.
But what many people don’t realize is that meditation is perhaps the most important habit if you want to change other habits.
Recently I wrote about the Four Habits That Form Other Habits — and you might recall Habit 2:
Be Mindful of Negative Thoughts
How do you learn to be mindful of your negative thoughts? Simple: you practice. And how do yo...
Source: Zen Habits - March 1, 2013 Category: Life Coaches Authors: Leo Tags: Habits Source Type: blogs
Creating the Genuine Connections We Long For
By Leo Babauta
We all long for genuine human connections, and even in a busy life with lots of people around us, these genuine connections can be hard to find.
We socialize online, but that’s not very genuine (why I quit Facebook). We work with people, but often that’s task-oriented and not human connection-oriented. We might have family and friends in our lives, but when we are busy or distracted by the online world, those connections might fade.
In the last year or two, I’ve made it a point to have fewer friendships, but with deeper connections … while also being open to the miracle of a random...
Source: Zen Habits - February 28, 2013 Category: Life Coaches Authors: Leo Tags: Happiness Source Type: blogs
Tremors of Psychitude: One Little Trick to Find Purpose and Motivation
By Leo Babauta
Today when I asked people what was bothering them, the two most common responses were related to:
Finding meaning and purpose
Finding motivation
As it turns out, those two things can be solved with one little step.
Here’s the step: help someone else.
This sounds exceedingly simple, but it’s the shift in focus that really makes a difference. Let’s say I was having trouble finding the motivation to write … to solve that, I might tweet something asking people what problems they’re having. Then I move from “how do I solve my problem (of not being motivated)” to &#...
Source: Zen Habits - February 25, 2013 Category: Life Coaches Authors: Leo Tags: Goals & Motivation Source Type: blogs
Create the Habits of Being Lean, in 7 Years
By Leo Babauta
People want to lose weight really fast (myself included). We fantasize about having a flat stomach, a leaner body, in just weeks. Two weeks would be ideal.
Search for “weight loss” in Amazon and you’ll find books that will show you how to “lose weight fast” or in a certain number of weeks, like 8 weeks, 4 weeks, even 2 weeks.
Of course, that’s bunk.
Let’s take a closer look at what it would take to lose weight in 4 weeks:
About 2/3 of American adults are overweight or obese, and have more than 20 lbs. to lose. If you’re trying to lose 20 lbs. in 4 weeks, ...
Source: Zen Habits - February 22, 2013 Category: Life Coaches Authors: Leo Tags: Health & Fitness Source Type: blogs
Walled-in: Life Without Facebook
Conclusion
We miss out on social connections, on news happening with our friends, family and peers, when we opt-out of Facebook. We are no longer in tune with the rest of the world. This means we are forced to march to the beat of our own drummer, to make it up as we go, to invent the rhythm and reason of our lives ourselves.
That’s a difficult task. It’s much easier for the antelope to fall in with the herd, to shift when the rest of its family is shifting, rather than having to stand on his own, to find his own path, to be afraid of being eaten by a lion. And yet, as an antelope, spend a little time in soli...
Source: Zen Habits - February 19, 2013 Category: Life Coaches Authors: Leo Tags: Simplicity Source Type: blogs
The 7 Habits of Calmness
By Leo Babauta
I have come to believe that high stress, constant anxiety over tasks and work and life, social anxiety … is all a part of the modern way of life.
Most people just don’t feel a sense of peace, of calm, of serenity, throughout their day.
I have to admit that I’m the same way some of the time, but I have learned a few things that have helped me create a feeling of calmness much more of the time than ever before.
It’s a series of habits that have developed over the last few years. I’m not perfect at them, but I do practice them, and they are always helpful.
These are habits, no...
Source: Zen Habits - February 15, 2013 Category: Life Coaches Authors: Leo Tags: Habits Happiness Source Type: blogs
The Four Habits that Form Habits
By Leo Babauta
My daughter wants to work out more, but she has a hard time forming the habit (many of you might be familiar with this problem). From having to get dressed to go to the gym, to actually going to the gym, to the thought of a hard workout … our minds tend to put off the habit.
The solution is exceedingly simple: just do 3 pushups. Or tell yourself you have to walk/jog for just one minute.
Make it so easy you can’t say no.
Of course, most people will think that’s too easy, and tell themselves they have to do more than that. Leo’s advice is for other people! Unfortunately, it’s ...
Source: Zen Habits - February 13, 2013 Category: Life Coaches Authors: Leo Tags: Habits Source Type: blogs
Advice to My Kids
By Leo Babauta
I have six lovely children — one of them now an adult, and a couple more almost there — and I give a lot of thought to what I think they should know as they grow up and go out into the world.
What could I best teach them to equip them for life?
This is what I’d like them to know:
You are good enough. Most people are afraid to do things because they are afraid they’re not good enough, afraid they’ll fail. But you are good enough — learn that and you won’t be afraid of new things, won’t be afraid to fail, won’t need the approval of others. You’ll ...
Source: Zen Habits - February 8, 2013 Category: Life Coaches Authors: Leo Tags: Finance & Family Source Type: blogs
My 10 Essential Email Habits
‘And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart.
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?’
~W.H. Auden
By Leo Babauta
Email can be a great tool, and email can be a tool for procrastination or overwhelm.
It’s not email itself that decides, it’s how you use it.
There was a time when I declared email bankruptcy, but these days I do it 2-3 times daily and power through it quickly and minimally.
I’ve developed a set of habits that work for me, helping me to keep email minimal and productive and still be able to focus on more important work. I can hones...
Source: Zen Habits - February 6, 2013 Category: Life Coaches Authors: Leo Tags: Habits Productivity & Organization Source Type: blogs
The Daily Checklist
‘A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.’ ~Anthony Trollope
By Leo Babauta
Here’s a problem worth solving: am I doing the thing I most need to be doing right now?
How do you figure that out?
You might be reading this article, but should you be doing something more important? Or checking on email or social media to see if there’s something else important you should be doing? There’s an anxiety that many people feel when it comes to this question, on a fairly regular basis throughout the day.
The secret to solving this problem is:
1) to le...
Source: Zen Habits - February 4, 2013 Category: Life Coaches Authors: Leo Tags: Productivity & Organization Source Type: blogs
Sticking to a Habit: The Definitive Guide
By Leo Babauta
The hardest thing for most people, when it comes to building habits, is sticking to it long enough for it to become ingrained.
Duh, Leo.
It’s why most people don’t exercise or eat healthy, why people procrastinate or have clutter or debt, why people smoke and drink soda, why people don’t meditate or learn new languages or write everyday or read more books.
Simply put: if you can learn to stick to a habit, you can do almost anything. I’m a good example of that.
So how do you stick to a habit? I’m going to make this as simple as possible — let’s dive in.
Why You ...
Source: Zen Habits - February 1, 2013 Category: Life Coaches Authors: Leo Tags: Habits Source Type: blogs
