Phoenix Education

5 Ways to Add Self-Care into a Busy Day

Where do you fit into your day?

If you’re like most people, you’re busy. You’re already dealing with work, relationships, and a whole lot of day-to-day actions. You’re running in every direction at once. How are you supposed to fit self-care into a day like that?

Thankfully, it’s easier than you think. Try these five ways to add self-care into your busy day.

Ask for Some Important Questions

Self-care isn’t always about over-indulging yourself. Truly, at its core, self-care is more practical than you might think. You start by asking yourself what you need right now. Meeting these basic needs should be at the center of self-care.

Map it Out.

Self-care is never going to just happen. Unless you are intentional, you will never make time for it. By making use of your calendar and scheduling time for yourself you are more likely to succeed in meeting your basic needs. Start small by building in the habits which will help you the most. You can begin by adding a regular exercise date several days a week, or by making a meal plan to help you eat healthier. As you achieve one goal, add another. The key is not to overwhelm yourself all at once.

Figure Out What Comes First

How are you when it comes to priorities? If you’re like most people, just deciding where to begin can be difficult. Here you need to figure out the difference between important and urgent. If something is important and not urgent, you can add it to your schedule. If something is urgent and not important, give it to someone else to do. But if something is urgent and important, do this first.

Learn to Say “No”

You should never feel like you have to say “yes” to everything. Sometimes the best form of self-care is learning how to say “no.” By setting solid boundaries, you protect yourself from activities which will only leave you drained and give you no benefit at all.

Do the Small Stuff

We think the little things don’t matter, but they do. By ensuring you take care of the basics such as making sure you get enough sleep, practicing good hygiene, eating right, and exercising, you will keep your body in tiptop form. These things also have a solid impact on your mental health.

When we get busy, we tend to forget all these things so easily. When you’re making an effort to take care of yourself, you must be intentional in what you do. Remembering these five tips will go a long way toward keeping you healthy and happy no matter how busy you get.

5 Ways Exercise Helps You Become More Successful

You have a lot of energy and are full of visions of fulfilled dreams. You want to succeed in life. But how can you when you’re not moving?

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Oh, sure, you’ve got some great ideas about what you want to do. You’re probably even working toward them. You might even have the entire future laid out in a precise roadmap and are busy ticking off each item on the list. But consider this: you’re still failing if you’re not fit.

In short, you need to exercise.

Why is exercise so important to success?

Exercise Helps You Practice Skills You Need Elsewhere

You’re never going to succeed if you haven’t set up some serious goals and added them to your schedule. People who exercise are used to doing both things already. In fact, this kind of dedicated planning is probably already second nature.

Exercise Invites You to Go Deep

Feeling a little burned out, or bogged down by bad habits? Both problems fade with exercise. When working out, you give your mind a chance to rest. Better yet, the healthy brain chemicals triggered by activity, such as dopamine, replace malaise with a feel-good kind of reaction instead. You get into the zone and can let your mind run free, exploring new thoughts and ideas while growing more fit and healthy with each step. Many a knotty problem has been worked out while working out.

Exercise Drops Stress

No, you can’t tell the people around you what you really think of them. Exercise gives you a safe outlet to burn out anger, rage, frustration, grief, or a host of other emotions aroused by others throughout the day. This clears your mind to get you back on track with what’s important.

Exercise Builds You Up

When you’re working out, you can’t help but feel better about yourself. After all, the very act of exercise makes your body feel good instead of lethargic and heavy. As a result, your self-talk shifts. You become more positive about what you say, and even more optimistic about outcomes, especially as you see yourself realizing exercise goals. You visualize success.

Exercise Keeps You on Schedule

When chasing goals, it’s easy to keep working without stopping. This will eventually kill you if you’re not careful. By taking an exercise break, you put a stop to the day and remind yourself there’s a lot more to life than work. This helps keep you in balance so you can return to your hopes and dreams with a more rested mind tomorrow.

Without your health, you’re never going to truly be able to achieve anything. In the end, the most significant benefit to your future success through exercise comes from the fact you’re healthier overall. Period. So, get moving, be consistent, and have fun. Success is out there waiting for you.

5 Tips for Being Your Best at Work

Being your best at work means not only putting your best foot forward but also continually working to better yourself. This doesn’t always mean turning in the best project or attending all the professional developments. Keep reading to learn basic ways you can show up with your best at work every day.

Get to Know Your Colleagues

Learning about your colleagues has many benefits. You don’t have to be out to make friends, but learning about others can benefit you in many ways. First, it shows you care, and people like it when people are considerate. Second, it will help you find things in common that you can come back to when work gets tough. Finally, getting to know people will help you learn how to work better. Derek prefers exact instructions and asks lots of questions, while Suzy is a big-picture type of person who tends to skip over minor details. Getting to know means learning how to work better.

Don’t Be a Gossip

No one likes an office gossip, except maybe the other office gossip. Getting caught up in drama can be a distraction and can earn you a bad reputation with your coworkers and supervisors. You want to be someone that can be trusted with information. Keep your business to yourself and remember, loose lips sink ships.

Stretch Your Skill Set

Stretching your skills as well as learning new ones allows you to continue growing your tool bag. This will make you a more valuable team member and will help you if you ever decide to look for a new position elsewhere.

Become a Mentor

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Mentoring can be done in and outside of the office. The new intern that is lost? Take that person under your wing and help them find their way. You will be a valuable friend and show that you are willing to help others. You can also do outreach in your profession in schools and other community programs.

Be a Friend

You don’t have to be BFFs with every person in the office but be friendly. Ask how others are doing, encourage, start a meal train if someone is sick or on parental leave. Not only will others appreciate and remember your kindness, but they will be willing to return the favor if the need arises.

Being your best at work is not something that you can achieve in a day. It’s a constant stream of small and conscious decisions that you will make daily. These decisions will build upon each other and allow you to create a work culture and life that will be fulfilling and beneficial.

5 Benefits of Becoming More Comfortable Expressing Your Emotions

What’s happening?

Sometimes we want to scream in agony or shout Life is Fantastic!

“How are you?” has shifted from a point of conversation to a meaningless reflex. If you think about how many times you ask that question every day, you may realize it’s no longer achieving its point. “How are you?” could open up a can of worms. It could allow for meaningful discussion. It could give you the opportunity to talk about your psyche.

But so often, people respond like robots: “I’m good. How are you?” It becomes a pointless conversation –a mere exchange of wasted words. Instead, we could use it as an opportunity to get to know someone better or to express how we’re really feeling. There are many benefits of being comfortable with expressing your emotions; here are five of them!

Be Free (and Free Others, Too)

You don’t realize it, but when you stifle your emotions, you stifle your freedom. You should feel free to express yourself at every phase of life. As soon as you allow yourself to be comfortable with your true self and your true feelings, you open up the door for others to be comfortable with you, too.

Tear Down Your Fears

If you’re afraid of showing your emotions, stand up to them. Tell them that you’re not scared of them. Those feelings may be new and utterly foreign to you, but by confronting them, you’re tearing down the sense of fear.

Be Authentic to Yourself

The real “you” comes with all of the feelings and emotions you’re experiencing. Be true to that, and don’t let the feelings get in the way. You may feel like your true self is one that doesn’t come with baggage – that would be great, but no one is like that! We all come with goods and bads, and in order to honor the authentic “you,” you need to be able to express your emotions openly and honestly.

Add Flavor to Your Life

Believe it or not, being more honest and expressive can help you live life to the fullest more. It allows you to be you and to enjoy who you are more. If you’re stifling your feelings or being ashamed of them, you’re not living life to the fullest. Add flavor to your life by showing who you really are.

Get Closer to Others

Everyone feels emotions on different levels. No one knows precisely what you’re going through, but people can relate to some degree. When you open up to others, you get closer to them. You can bond over shared emotions, or you can ask them for advice on your situation. Either way, intimacy, and friendship is always enhanced when you’re able to open up more.

The next time someone says, “How are you?” think twice about your answer. Your reflex may be to say you’re good, but maybe if you tell them how you really are (exhausted, over-the-moon, nervous, excited, etc.), you’ll have a more in-depth conversation with them – and you’ll free yourself to be able to talk about how you really feel!

4 Powerful Ways to Imagine Your Success in Reality

Sitting in the hotel in Bali and looking at the things I want to achieve over the next year. Yes I have published a few books on Amazon, and I am still working on how to improve my Marketing; get a Marketing Manager? And how to promote my online courses?

So here are a few tips I found!

Everyone has big dreams. Everyone wants to be successful. Maybe you see yourself making an Oscars acceptance speech or winning the Nobel Prize. Perhaps you want to be a successful entrepreneur or an elite athlete.

Whether you want to win an Olympic medal or make your first million, you can use the power of visualization to make your dreams of success a reality.

Picture Yourself Winning

Just wanting to be successful isn’t enough. You must be able to taste your success. Picture yourself being offered that promotion, being congratulated by friends and family, seeing your new business cards.

Make your success as real and detailed as you can. How good does it feel?

Find Your Trigger

Finding your own personal success trigger can be a powerful way to keep the momentum going and your energy high. Write down your big goal, whether it’s winning an Oscar or scholarship, or running your own business. Make it a positive statement that is straightforward and concise. For example, “I will be promoted to Vice President next year.”

Look at your trigger statement every day. Maybe make it your computer wallpaper or your smartphone’s lock screen. When Jim Carrey was a young actor trying to make it big, he famously wrote himself a $10million check dated far into the future. When that day came, he was offered $10million for his role in Dumb and Dumber.

Remember that story when you see your trigger statement and think of how good it will feel to achieve your goal.

Create A Vision Board

Vision boards help to make your dreams concrete. You can use pictures, photos, affirmations, and quotes to create a picture of the life you want.

A vision board can be a poster, a Pinterest board, a whiteboard, or a journal. Make sure you keep your vision board where you can see it every day and add to it when you need to or when you find a new photo or quote that really speaks to you.

Feed Your Dream

You can make your visualization even more potent by nourishing it with positivity. Don’t put all the good feelings in the future but feed your dream with happy memories. Think of times when you felt happy, successful, and content with your life.

These positive images reinforce your mind that you have already proven you can have a happy, fulfilled life. Keep negativity at bay by reminding yourself that you have done it, you are doing it, you can do it!

3 Truths About Being Kind We Need to Remember

I am currently on vacation in Bali, a beautiful island in Indoneseia. It’s the first time I have been south of the equator and the sky looks different. People here are so nice and frindly and respectful and kind. Sadly, some of the tourists here give us westerners a bad reputaion by being disrespectful, especially at Temples.

I started thinking about respect and being nice to other people so dug out an article from a while ago and included it here.

It might surprise you to hear that being kind isn’t just good for the other person, it’s good for you too! Sceptical? There is good scientific evidence to show that living up to the adage of doing unto others as you would have them do to you is one of the best things you can do for yourself! It lowers your blood pressure, improves your mood, and acts as a natural anti-depressant by boosting the serotonin levels in your brain.

So, what can you do to stay in the right frame of mind to be kind? After all, being kind isn’t always easy. Some days you want to grit your teeth and just grouse at the world. And there are some people it’s tough to be kind to. How can you change your approach to life to be as kind as you can? Here are three truths to remember when you’re tempted to be unkind.

Remember what you can control and what you can’t

It’s a fact that other people can be rude, thoughtless, irritating, and even mean. They have opinions with which you don’t agree. You can’t change or control any of that. But you can control how you react. Kindness is always the best option for you and the other guy. Take a deep breath, count to ten, and bite back that retort or put down. Practice being kind, and soon it will be second nature.

Anger doesn’t help

Reacting with anger doesn’t do anything to resolve a bad situation. Anger makes you feel terrible. It’s likely to escalate things and won’t get you the result you want. Even worse, anger can lead to all sorts of physical problems, from headaches to high blood pressure, sleep problems, and digestive issues. A lifetime habit of anger can even lead to a stroke or a heart attack. Recognize the potential to get angry and take a step back.

Kindness is always the right option

Whatever the situation, you will never go wrong if you’re kind. Kindness also makes you an inspiring leader, a role model for others. Making the choice to be kind in the face of frustration, even provocation, shows that conflict is not inevitable. Giving in to childish feelings of needing to be right or get what you want all the time is easy. But it breeds discontent and won’t win you any friends.

Kindness breeds a more detached attitude to life, it encourages positive emotions and will help to make you and the people around you calmer, happier, and more energized.

Do Something Different Once Per Week

You have probably heard or read on numerous occasions that setting a routine is the best means of accomplishing your goals. That has some truth to it. It’s like creating habits where repetition is the way to develop them. Sometimes, however, this can cause you to get into a rut or a funk. You still need to maintain your routine but need something to break it as well.

Commit to trying something different. You could do this every day or commit once per week. You could also do it once a month, but you may get more out of it with a higher frequency.

The idea is to have something else interesting looking forward. That will help you when tackling your routines. You can think about that new event or activity while you are getting through your daily grind.

You can choose to do any new activities on your own, with other people or a combination of the two. It’s entirely up to you. Sometimes, it’s a good idea to include other people and to meet new people as part of that. When you meet new people, they will share ideas that can stir the pot for you. That is good.

What kinds of activities should you strive to do? As for examples, you could join a sports team. That’s good in the beginning but may also start to become routine after a while. Still, it has the potential of getting you to meet new friends.

If you want to go extreme, why not try skydiving? Admittedly, this is not for everyone. But it can be something that you have wanted to try but too afraid to do. If it is too much, try something like ziplining first, and take it from there.

The activity doesn’t have to be full of adventure to break up your routine. For instance, perhaps you have always wanted to learn how to play a musical instrument and eventually join a band. That’s another great activity to add to your list. Another idea is to join a reading group. This activity is a mix of getting together with people and some alone time.

To get more ideas, join local groups that will update you whenever new events happen. The more groups you join, the more options you will have available to you. Be warned, however. You may start having some fun!

7 Apps for Breaking and Building Habits

Does anybody have any feedback or updates – I wrote this a while ago…

There’s an app for that. It’s become a running joke; there’s an app for everything. Is there an app for habits? No. there are a lot of apps for habits.

HabitBull is a free flexible reminder program that lets you develop good habits. Habits require repetition and HabitBull provides the reminder to keep you on the track to develop the habit of your choice.

If you want to walk for three days in the week, HabitBull lets you set reminders on selected days. If you want to meditate for half an hour each day, you can record your accomplishments in minutes rather than Yes/No answers.
The app creates trends, graphs and tracks your process to create that habit.
HabitBull reminds you that it takes 66 days to create a habit and gives you a progress bar.

Productive (iPhone only application). Productive separates the new habit creation into three categories, morning, evening and whenever. It’s selective as to which it shows when, meaning that it shows the AM reminders before noon only and the PM reminders afternoon, also exclusively. This app is designed to force the user into incorporating the habit into their daily schedule as opposed to saving up or getting it over with early.

Strides. If you’re after a significant goal like losing weight, saving money reading many books, then you should look at Strides. This app looks at the total time to complete any task and breaks it down into milestones that are measurable, trackable. It creates weekly and monthly goals to keep you on track.

Streaks (currently iPhone only). Streaks is an app to help you develop fitness goals. The plus of this app is that it hooks in nicely with Apple’s Health app. It tracks steps, measures heart rate, distance and more. It’s simple, managing only six habits at a time, and has a very easy-to-understand graphics display.

Habitica. This app is free and for iPhone, Android, or web. Habitica takes good habits and converts them into something fun. It converts them into a video game you can play with friends. You can earn badges, battle monsters, and hold each other accountable. If either of you fail to complete the reminder, you’re both penalized.

Coach.me. This app has plans to coach you through the process of forming athletic habits and training. You can see videos and even contact live coaches for hire.

HabitFree (Android only) uses questions to help you keep your routine. “Did you brush your teeth?” “Did you go for a walk?” Not surprisingly, it focuses on streaks, how many days in a row you accomplished your task.

There are a lot of apps available, and the selection in the app store is changing all the time. Scan your options or search under “HABITS” for the one best suited for you.

7 Steps to Your Personal Plan for Flipping the Switch

Flipping your switch can seem like a massive undertaking. One that there are a million separate ways to achieve if all the articles on the internet have anything to say about it. However, flipping your switch is a personal undertaking, one that may have similar milestones for everyone, but really can and should be curtailed by a person’s needs to be successful. Keep reading for the seven steps you need to personalize to flip your own switch.

Find an Activity that Challenges You

The activity that will most help you flip your own switch is the one that challenges you. Not your neighbor or your sibling. But you. This could be as simple as folding an entire basket of laundry in one sitting or the Sunday morning crossword in pen!

Commit to yourself.

Whatever challenge you’re undertaking, you’re doing it for you. Make a promise to yourself that you will try your hardest and not give up when the going gets tough.

Set Realistic Goals

Make sure your goals are attainable. You aren’t going to fold all the laundry that you do on Sunday by the end of Sunday. But maybe you could at least hang up the stuff that will wrinkle. Or perhaps you will only use a pen on the crossword answers you feel 100% certain about, pencil on the rest.

Turn off the T.V. (or the Internet) In General

Get rid of the useless distractions. That show is not going to help you concentrate or make time go faster, so just don’t. You can’t flip your switch on one activity if your brain is partially paying attention to another.

Remove Interruptions

Kids, phones, whatever. Do your best to remove the interruptions that you know will crop up.

Track Your Progress

Find a straightforward way (read: not time-consuming, expensive, or labor-intensive) to track your progress. Sometimes this is a calendar to check off days. For others, maybe you need to write a journal about your feelings, how it went, or your next goal to achieve.

Enjoy Your Experiences

Enjoy what you’re doing and the experiences you are having. It’s not about the destination; it’s about the journey.

Learning to flip your switch is a process, not a one-day training online. It will take time and practice to find out exactly what it takes for you to be in the zone.

7 Significant Benefits to Trying New Things

When you make it a goal to try something new, you may not realize why you’re setting out to do something new in the first place. There is a slew of benefits that come along from incorporating “new” into your life; here are seven of them:

Learning New Things

How will you learn new things if you never try new things? Think about an activity you’ve never tried before. You don’t know much about it, right? As soon as you put yourself out there and try it out, though, you’ll learn a lot more about it.

Get Rid of Boredom

Boredom is the worst – we all can attest. When you’re trying out new projects, new places, new people, etc. – that boredom slips by the wayside. Keep your brain engaged, and you won’t have to deal with monotony creeping in.

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More Stories to Tell

As you try new things and meet new people, you accumulate more stories about your adventures. Whether it’s a funny story or a scary story, your stories become part of who you are. What a great reward!

Get a New Perspective

Sometimes, you need to sit in another area of the room to change your perspective – similarly, you need to try new things to change your perspective on life.

Self-Discovery

Let’s face it – we spend a lot of time with ourselves. A whole entire lifetime, in fact. So, if you do the same thing day in and day out, you won’t see many different sides to yourself. Self-discovery leads to many great attributes – confidence, self-awareness, perceptiveness, to name a few.

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Gain Confidence

Why fly when you can soar? You can amount to remarkable things by simply expanding your horizons and trying new things. Time after time, you’ll begin to gain a new sense of confidence in yourself and your capabilities.

Experience Life to the Fullest

There’s a reason people say you only have one life to live. If you take this sentiment to heart, you’ll want to get as many experiences out of life as you can. That begins with your habits – your day-to-day life. When you push yourself out of your comfort zone, you’ll gain more of these experiences. Who knows what you could learn about yourself or your life? You’ll have to try to find out!