Zig Ziglar

8 Ways to Be More Productive With the Help of Meditation by Szymon Pelechowicz

What would you give for more time in your life?

The ability to do more in less time has always been a fundamental human desire. Because of that, it can seem counterintuitive to develop a meditation practice.

You already have trouble making time to sort the laundry, make dinner and exercise. And you think you should make time to meditate?

Bear with us as we explain why this makes sense.

Here are 8 ways in which meditation can actually make you more productive and also improve the quality of your life.

1. Meditation Improves Your Focus and Memory

You may think that studying, learning and working can all help keep your brain working optimally throughout your life. However, sometimes our brain grows when we’re not bombarding it.

Experts say that technology may be harming our attention and capacity to store information.

Meditation can help with that.

One study looked at test scores earned over time by participants who took a mindfulness and meditation class versus participants who took a nutrition class. The researchers found that the group that learned how to meditate showed improvements in scores on several types of tests.

Meditation alters the physical structure of the brain. The size of the blood vessels in the brain increases and more blood is transported to the brain. The cerebral cortex also thickens.

2. Meditation Helps You Live Longer

With more years in your life, you can be more productive, right?

Meditation can add years to your life. A University of Pennsylvania study found that repeating a mantra creates vibrations that disconnect the mind from the body. This allows the body to become more relaxed and evenly regulated.

Try this guided meditation to elevate your vibration.

People who meditate have also been found to have more telomerase than those who don’t. Telomerase is an enzyme that keeps chromosomes from deteriorating, which is one cause of aging. When your DNA is protected, the rate at which you age slows down.

People with higher telomerase levels also tend to have better psychological wellbeing. When you’re balanced psychologically, you’re less stressed. Research has consistently shown that stress can be a factor in health problems like heart disease, obesity, and stroke.

3. Meditation Gives You a Break That Helps You Work Less

You may be thinking, “What? Working less isn’t increasing my productivity.”

Many people don’t take the time to meditate simply because they feel more productive when they’re working hard. However, leisure time researchers say that multitasking and working longer hours don’t necessarily indicate that you’re getting more done.

In fact, one of the downfalls of working all the time is that you don’t achieve more than someone who works in a more focused mindful manner. You also don’t get to take advantage of leisure time, because you feel like you’re always working.

Taking time out of your busy day to meditate can help you get all of your work done in a more efficient manner, leaving you with more time to enjoy life too.

4. Meditation Organizes Your Mind

We often run through life without stopping to organize our thoughts. When our minds become filled with so much information, we can feel confused, overwhelmed or foggy. This doesn’t help us with our productivity.

Just like your computer works more efficiently after you defragment it, so do you. Meditation allows you to organize the information in your brain, creating more space for learning and processing information.

5. Meditation Keeps You From Procrastinating

Be honest; how much time do you spend scrolling through social media? You tell yourself that you’re just hopping on to check one thing, and you spend the next hour blindly scrolling. This type of procrastination takes a toll on your productivity.

Instead of doing those activities that suck away your time, what if you meditated? You would probably spend less time meditating than you do wasting time in other ways. Also, you would become more aware of the time that you do have and the ways in which you can realistically spend it.

6. Meditation Encourages “Right Thought”

The idea of right thought comes from the Buddhist principle that meditation creates clear intentions. This allows you to see your path and move through it more clearly, preventing you from wasting time on activities or even thought processes that are unproductive.

7. Meditation Teaches You To Push On Through

Meditating isn’t always easy. It can be challenging to rid yourself of the fluster of thoughts that crowd your brain at any given moment. Developing a consistent meditation practice takes patience and perseverance.

Over time, however, you end up learning how to breathe through the difficult situation. You understand how to regulate your breathing and better control your mental and emotional responses to stressful circumstances. It helps you get through other demanding situations in your life with more ease and grace.

8.Meditation Makes You More Creative

Meditation allows you to think more flexibly. What should you do when life doesn’t go as planned? Instead of letting obstacles get in your way, you can come up with more creative solutions when your ways of thinking allow for flexibility.

When you’re stuck in a particular way of thinking, you don’t tend to move forward. The creative thinking that is encouraged by meditation helps you get through life with more ease and efficiency.

But what does being more productive really mean?

Before you trade in your three cups of coffee for a new meditation practice, stop to consider what productivity really means to you. Do you have to do so much laundry?

Most of us have way too much on our to-do lists, and the majority of what we hope to accomplish isn’t going to fulfill us or change our lives significantly.

Productivity doesn’t have to mean working more. Productivity doesn’t have to mean never taking breaks or never relaxing.

Productivity should be about using your mind efficiently and creatively in order to live your life in a more rewarding manner.

When you’re more mindful about the way you live your life, you will become more productive when necessary, allowing you to make better use of the time that you do have.

Is it really more time you want? Do you need to get so much more done, or do you just want to be more efficient and mindful in the way you live your life? If you’re doing it for the right reasons, you can turn meditation into a daily habit.

http://www.purposefairy.com/82496/8-ways-productive-meditation/

How to Develop Mental Toughness: Lessons From 8 Titans -Tim Ferris

“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”
― Archilochus
Mental toughness can take many forms: resilience against attack, calmness in the face of uncertainty, persistence through pain, or focus amidst chaos.
Below are eight lessons from eight of the toughest human beings I know.
All are taken from the hundreds of tips and tactics in Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers.

#1 – IF YOU WANT TO BE TOUGHER, BE TOUGHER.
(Jocko Willink, former Navy SEAL Commander)

“If you want to be tougher mentally, it is simple: Be tougher. Don’t meditate on it.”
TIM: These words of Jocko’s helped one listener—a drug addict—get sober after many failed attempts. The simple logic struck a chord: “Being tougher” was, more than anything, a decision to be tougher. It’s possible to immediately “be tougher,” starting with your next decision. Have trouble saying “no” to dessert? Be tougher. Make that your starting decision. Feeling winded? Take the stairs anyway. Ditto. It doesn’t matter how small or big you start. If you want to be tougher, be tougher.


 

#2. I WASN’T THERE TO COMPETE. I WAS THERE TO WIN.
(Arnold Schwarzenegger)  

TIM: In my interview with Arnold, I brought up a photo of him at age 19, just before he won his first big competition, Junior Mr. Europe. I asked, “Your face was so confident compared to every other competitor. Where did that confidence come from?” He replied:
“My confidence came from my vision. . . . I am a big believer that if you have a very clear vision of where you want to go, then the rest of it is much easier. Because you always know why you are training 5 hours a day, you always know why you are pushing and going through the pain barrier, and why you have to eat more, and why you have to struggle more, and why you have to be more disciplined… I felt that I could win it, and that was what I was there for. I wasn’t there to compete. I was there to win.”

 

#3 – PUSH BEYOND, SHARE PRIVATION, TACKLE FEAR.
(4-Star General Stanley McChrystal)

TIM: The following from Gen. McChyrstal was in response to “What are three tests or practices from the military that civilians could use to help develop mental toughness?”:
“The first is to push yourself harder than you believe you’re capable of. You’ll find new depth inside yourself. The second is to put yourself in groups who share difficulties, discomfort. We used to call it ‘shared privation.’ [Definition of privation: a state in which things essential for human well-being such as food and warmth are scarce or lacking.] You’ll find that when you have been through that kind of difficult environment, you feel more strongly about that which you’re committed to. And finally, create some fear and make individuals overcome it.”

#4 – PUT FEAR IN LINE.
(Caroline Paul, luger, firefighter, and more)

TIM: In the 1990s, Caroline illegally climbed the Golden Gate Bridge, rising to ~760 feet on thin cables. She’d mentioned “putting fear in line” to me, and I asked her to dig into the specifics.
“I am not against fear. I think fear is definitely important. It’s there to keep us safe. But I do feel like some people give it too much priority. It’s one of the many things that we use to assess a situation. I am pro-bravery. That’s my paradigm.
Fear is just one of many things that are going on. For instance, when we climbed the bridge, which was five of us deciding we wanted to walk up that cable in the middle of the night. Please don’t do that, but we did. Talk about fear—you’re walking on a cable where you have to put one foot in front of the other until you’re basically as high as a 70-story building with nothing below you and . . . two thin wires on either side.
It’s just a walk, technically. Really, nothing’s going to happen unless some earthquake or catastrophic gust of wind hits. You’re going to be fine as long as you keep your mental state intact. In those situations, I look at all the emotions I’m feeling, which are anticipation, exhilaration, focus, confidence, fun, and fear. Then I take fear and say, ‘Well, how much priority am I going to give this? I really want to do this.’ I put it where it belongs. It’s like brick laying or making a stone wall. You fit the pieces together.” 

#5 – IS THAT A DREAM OR A GOAL?
(Paul Levesque/Triple H, WWE superstar and executive)

“[Evander Holyfield] said that his coach at one point told him, something like his very first day, ‘You could be the next Muhammad Ali. Do you wanna do that?’ Evander said he had to ask his mom. He went home, he came back and said, ‘I wanna do that.’ The coach said, ‘Okay. Is that a dream or a goal? Because there’s a difference.’ “I’d never heard it said that way, but it stuck with me. So much so that I’ve said it to my kid now: ‘Is that a dream, or a goal? Because a dream is something you fantasize about that will probably never happen. A goal is something you set a plan for, work toward, and achieve. I always looked at my stuff that way. The people who were successful models to me were people who had structured goals and then put a plan in place to get to those things. I think that’s what impressed me about Arnold [Schwarzenegger]. It’s what impressed me about my father-in-law [Vince McMahon].”

#6 – PAIN TOLERANCE CAN BE THE FORCE MULTIPLIER
(Amelia Boone, 3x World’s Toughest Mudder champion)

“I’m not the strongest. I’m not the fastest. But I’m really good at suffering.”

7 – WHO DO YOU SURROUND YOURSELF WITH WHEN YOUR EGO FEELS THREATENED?
(Josh Waitzkin, chess prodigy, push hands world champion, first black belt under BJJ phenom Marcelo Garcia)

Back in the world of combat sports and Brazilian jiu-jitsu:
“It’s very interesting to observe who the top competitors pick out when they’re five rounds into the sparring sessions and they’re completely gassed. The ones who are on the steepest growth curve look for the hardest guy there—the one who might beat them up—while others look for someone they can take a break on.”

8 – THE MAGIC OF THE SINGLE DECISION
(Christopher Sommer, former men’s gymnastics national team coach)

TIM: We all get frustrated. I am particularly prone to frustration when I see little or no progress after several weeks of practicing something new. Despite Coach Sommer’s regular reminders about connective-tissue adaptations taking 200 to 210 days, after a few weeks of flailing with “straddle L extensions,” I was at my wits’ end. Even after the third workout, I had renamed them “frog spaz” in my workout journal because that’s what I resembled while doing them: a frog being electrocuted.
Each week, I sent Coach Sommer videos of my workouts via Dropbox. In my accompanying notes at one point, I expressed how discouraging it was to make zero tangible progress with this exercise. Below is his email response, which I immediately saved to Evernote to review often.
It’s all great, but I’ve bolded my favorite part.
“Dealing with the temporary frustration of not making progress is an integral part of the path towards excellence. In fact, it is essential and something that every single elite athlete has had to learn to deal with. If the pursuit of excellence was easy, everyone would do it. In fact, this impatience in dealing with frustration is the primary reason that most people fail to achieve their goals. Unreasonable expectations time-wise, resulting in unnecessary frustration, due to a perceived feeling of failure. Achieving the extraordinary is not a linear process.
The secret is to show up, do the work, and go home.
A blue collar work ethic married to indomitable will. It is literally that simple. Nothing interferes. Nothing can sway you from your purpose. Once the decision is made, simply refuse to budge.
Refuse to compromise.
And accept that quality long-term results require quality long-term focus. No emotion. No drama. No beating yourself up over small bumps in the road. Learn to enjoy and appreciate the process. This is especially important because you are going to spend far more time on the actual journey than with those all too brief moments of triumph at the end.
Certainly celebrate the moments of triumph when they occur. More importantly, learn from defeats when they happen. In fact, if you are not encountering defeat on a fairly regular basis, you are not trying hard enough. And absolutely refuse to accept less than your best.
Throw out a timeline. It will take what it takes.
If the commitment is to a long-term goal and not to a series of smaller intermediate goals, then only one decision needs to be made and adhered to. Clear, simple, straightforward. Much easier to maintain than having to make small decision after small decision to stay the course when dealing with each step along the way. This provides far too many opportunities to inadvertently drift from your chosen goal. The single decision is one of the most powerful tools in the toolbox.”

Zig Ziglar

Thomas A Edison

HOW TO BECOME SUCCESSFUL - Best Motivational Videos Compilation for 2017

A simple way to break a bad habit | Judson Brewer

What I Learned From Wearing the Same Outfit for 2 Weeks Part 2

According to internet sources, which are rarely wrong, American adults make 35,000 decisions a day: scrambled or over-easy, let the kids watch one more Octonauts or go to the pool, stop for gas here or nearer to day care? They tire us out. Psychologists like Baumeister are starting to understand the wear and tear they leave on our minds. Businesses know it, too. Levav found that by manipulating the order of choices to put the more expensive default options last when people had grown weary of making decisions, custom-suit stores and car companies could encourage customers to spend more. (“High-end rims? Sure, fine, whatever.”) Eliminating choice works, too: online mattress companies such as Casper and Tuft & Needle are disrupting the awful in-store mattress-buying process by offering one mattress. Buy it or don’t. Casper is on pace to earn $200 million in the next year.

In most cases, we stick with what we like. For instance, I decided to automate my coffee orders and discovered that apparently I did that four years ago. This is common: Chris Garrett, manager at my local coffee shop, says nearly all of his regulars have a single order, breaking only when they earn a reward, and even then they tend to order the same drink in a larger size or with an extra shot. Audrey Brinkley, a barista for just under a year, says customers aren’t inclined to venture out of their comfort zones unless pushed by a friend or seasonal menu updates. “They don’t think of changing their drinks until you put a new one in front of them.” This was interesting to learn, and terrible for my science. What good was intentional automation if I was already mostly automating?

I started looking for anything I could drop from my daily decisions. I determined that my kids and I would have the same breakfasts: scrambled eggs, Cinnamon Toast Crunch and a frosted brown sugar Pop-Tart. (Full disclosure: I’ve been eating the latter pretty much every morning for 30 years so that was no big deal.) To limit screwing around with music in my car, I packed a dozen CDs to cut down on my ability to fire up my phone and pick from every song ever recorded. I sought out low-hanging decision fruit: I parked in the same place at home and the store. I ran the same loop around my neighborhood. I settled in. I waited for the avalanche of crystal mental clarity.

Mixed Emotions

First: The good news. During the initial couple of days, a load came off of my shoulders—a light one, sure, but a load nonetheless. My wife works early shifts, so on mornings with coffee to be made, smoothies to blend, day cares to reach, Cubs scores to check and a clock supplying constant, low-level deadline pressure, every little bit of automation helped. I can’t say it revealed brilliant new horizons, but it trimmed the to-do list, which I always welcome.

What’s more, I grew accustomed to my uniform. It’s curious to have one, and I can’t deny the dullish 1984 vibe that surfaced from time to time. But there was also a vague calm to it. I could feel things becoming more efficient, less stressed—not a dramatic lifestyle upgrade, but extra bandwidth. The experiment was working! Life operated a little more smoothly. That lasted for a good four or five days before everything suddenly got super boring.

Turns out when you’re already automating much of your life, making it official can feel suffocating. Right around the beginning of the second week, I began to feel severe burnout regarding gray. I started to miss my other shirts (especially you, Guns N’ Roses). I felt less like the experiment was streamlining my decision process and more like it was eliminating choice. Eventually it felt like work. “Maybe dressing the same is restful for Zuckerberg, but you reacted against it,” says Levav (who, for the record, dresses each morning in whatever T-shirt is closest).

But I missed the point, he says: “The critical issue here isn’t wearing a gray shirt every day, but routinizing your behavior. It’s not about a specific routine, it’s about having a routine.” For me, too little choice was limiting; too much created a paradox wherein I required two days to buy a Brad Keselowski hat.

That said, drawing from a smaller, pre-established pool positively cut down on time and energy. My closet is a lot of blue and gray, sure, but I got to pick which blue and gray. Too little choice scrambles the system; too much oversaturates it. When my experiment ended, I went to the coffee shop in sandals and my GNR T-shirt and ordered an iced green tea, something I rarely drink. After all, some choice is good.

Jeff Vrabel

October 9, 2016

What I Learned From Wearing the Same Outfit for 2 Weeks PART 1

To learn about the curious malady known as “decision fatigue,” I was given a very simple assignment: Wear the same outfit and automate as many daily decisions as possible for two weeks and write about whether it gave me more mental clarity. That was it. Easy breezy. I jumped right in.

On Day 1, I picked out a crisp white shirt, got dressed, opened the front door and promptly spilled coffee all over myself. The first lesson of automating your wardrobe: Select dark fabrics.

“I get to wake up every day and help serve more than a billion people. And I feel like I’m not doing my job if I spend any of my energy on things that are silly or frivolous about my life.” —Mark Zuckerberg

By “automating your wardrobe,” I mean following the fashion examples of Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs and others whose jobs demand a daily deluge of global-scale decision-making. The idea is simple: To preserve brain space for the big calls, cut back on the less significant ones, because the collective weight of your choices, layered over and over each other, creates what psychologists call decision fatigue. Officially, that’s the “deteriorating quality of decisions made by an individual after a long session of decision-making,” says Jonathan Levav, Ph.D., associate professor at Stanford University. Colloquially it means reaching 4 p.m. and no longer giving a damn about the logjam of problems in your inbox.

You can’t always control the flow of the big questions, but you can manage the small ones. Zuckerberg has a family and a Facebook, and he tends to both in simple gray crew-neck T-shirts. (On his first day back from paternity leave, he posted a photo of his gray-on-gray closet and asked what he should wear.) Jobs was too busy inventing the future to worry much about pattern-matching, so he stuck with jeans and black mock turtlenecks. In a July profile, The New York Times wrote that President Barack Obama—who wears only blue and gray suits—daydreamed about retiring to Hawaii to open a T-shirt shop that sold only one size (medium) and one color (white) with Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago and his former chief of staff. When he and Emanuel were faced with problems that had no conclusive answer, they’d turn to each other. “White,” Emanuel would say. “Medium,” Obama would shoot back.

“Making decisions uses the very same willpower that you use to say no to doughnuts, drugs or illicit sex,” Florida State professor Roy Baumeister, Ph.D., told The New York Times in 2011. “It’s the same willpower you use to be polite or to wait your turn or to drag yourself out of bed or to hold off going to the bathroom.” He explored this and more with John Tierney in their book, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.

Levav and two other researchers conducted a 2011 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that found Israeli judges paroled prisoners who appeared early in the morning about 65 percent of the time, while those with late-afternoon appointments were paroled less than 10 percent of the time. The afternoon prisoners weren’t significantly different; they just showed up when the judges were tired and therefore making the lowest-maintenance calls.

Generally speaking, I have fewer problems than Obama, Jobs, Zuckerberg, Israeli judges and most people on earth. But I do have a wife, two energetic sons, a writing business and a daily grind. I also love making decisions in the most convoluted manner possible, which usually involves some combination of instinct, friend recommendations, Yelp suggestions, Amazon testimonials, random Google searches and several competing strains of obsessive-compulsive disorder. (Recently I took two days to decide which NASCAR hat to buy.) There is more data available to us now than ever before, and I do cannonball dives into it.

I was intrigued to see whether eliminating the tiny, wee decisions (Am I feeling the BLT or the tomato basil soup?) would truly free up hard-drive space for the big ones. I dug in and made a plan, and then I spilled coffee all over it.

Invisible Forces

First I needed a new outfit.

This proved tricky. Deciding what to wear on a garden-variety Tuesday is one thing; picking an outfit to which you’ll be chained for two weeks introduces several new layers of commitment.

I considered my needs. I work from home, so on many days my interactions are limited to baristas and the lunch crew at Amore Pizzeria. I don’t need anything fancy, but I do need adaptability—something suited for home and the coffee shop, lunches and interviews, school registration and playgrounds. I also needed something temperature-appropriate. (I wrote this during a murderous July heat wave that inflated temperatures in my Indiana hometown from Comfortable Low 80s to Surface of the Sun.) I also hoped to be reasonably stylish—nothing sleeveless, no bracelets and no concert T-shirts, although I did look preeeetty hard at my Guns N’ Roses shirt.

Once I started considering these questions, others began bubbling up faster than I could swat them away: Should I wear button-up shirts? Will I be too hot? Should I stick with short sleeves? Jeans or shorts? I don’t like wearing shorts. If I wear shorts, does that mean shoes or sandals? Am I a hard no on the Guns N’ Roses shirt?

Then it hit me: This was the exact sort of unending, superficial, time-killing decision-making I was assigned to avoid. Four minutes in and I was already slogging through an invisible decision swamp about my outfit when I had specific orders not to.

“Let’s add to the mix the extensive pressure on women to uphold a flawless appearance…. These black trousers and white blouses have become an important daily reminder that frankly, I’m in control.” —Matilda Kahl

I stopped it cold and went full Zuck: gray crew-neck T-shirt, jeans and a pair of Vans. It was versatile and inexpensive, and no one would notice if I coated myself in coffee. I stacked a week’s worth of outfits in my closet for easy morning access and did a hard reset.

Routine Maintenance

When picking my official automated outfit, I realized an unsettling truth: I wear a lot of the same clothes anyway.

I’m a person of pleasant, arguably predictable, routine. I use one brand of toothpaste and shop at the same supermarket. I always order a burger with blue cheese and jalapeños at the local diner. We’ve made a 12-hour drive to visit family down South for years, and I find myself pulling into the same gas stations, grabbing to-go sandwiches at the same restaurants. Even my subconscious, it seems, is more comfortable with the familiar. I justify it as adhering to what I’m accustomed to, though the skeptical could say, “Try some different cheese, dude.” When I told friends about this assignment, they gave me a look that unmistakably said, “This will not be your most strenuous challenge of 2016.”

In all likelihood, you’re in a routine, too. “Most people have a fairly structured morning routine where they do the same things, eat the same foods,” Baumeister says. “The human mind is well set up to form habits and routines to conserve its energy.”

Accomplish more daily from Tony Robbins

Stop putting off your dreams – your life’s mission– because you don’t feel you have enough time. Become the most productive person you know. As Dale Carnegie said, “An hour of planning can save you 10 hours of doing.” It may seem counter intuitive to spend time planning, when time feels scarce already. However, the time you spend planning will allow you to accomplish your work more efficiently and make your dreams a reality.
In order to maximize productivity “chunk” your to do list. Take your various action items and group them together, orienting them toward a common outcome and result. Simply put, chunking is the process of turning more into less!
Try this strategy for optimum results:

• Set aside an hour at the beginning of every week to just think and plan out your week.

• Write down what you accomplished in the previous week that you’re proud of. Write down what you were unable to accomplish.

• Prioritize what needs to be done this week. Find ways to be more efficient.

• Chunk those items together!

• Put away all your distractions and truly focus on how you can make your upcoming week more manageable.

• As soon as you complete a key task or objective, reward yourself!
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