Learning How to Live a Healthier Lifestyle

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When you have been engaging in the same lifestyle habits for several years it may look easy to just change over to living a more positive lifestyle. The truth is that it’s not as easy as you think. Taking small steps towards changing your lifestyle habits is the only way to be successful, especially when you’re changing your eating habits at the same time.

Some of the most harmful lifestyle habits are ones you may not even realize you are engaging in. These habits may include the following:

• Drinking in excess
• Smoking
• Using recreational drugs
• Engaging in risky sexual behavior
• Allowing stress into your life
• Poor time management and balance between work, family and recreation

It is has been proven that living a healthier lifestyle promotes a strong immune system, a longer life expectancy, a decreased risk of getting life-threatening illnesses, and an overall sound body and mind. Here are some of the most important ways to start changing your poor lifestyle habits into positive lifestyle changes.

Exercise

Physical activity is a staple in living a healthier lifestyle. Many people have no desire to exercise or engage in any type of physical activity. Not only does exercising increase the production of endorphins which promotes happiness and satisfaction, it makes you feel better mentally and increases your confidence level. If this is true, why has every excuse in the book been used to get out of exercising? Some of the biggest complaints or concerns about not exercising include:

1. No time
2. No energy
3. Too much work to do
4. Too many family commitments
5. Too expensive to join a gym
6. Don’t feel comfortable exercising in front of people in better shape than them
7. Don’t feel comfortable using the equipment

Well, these may all be valid reasons but if lack of confidence or not having money to pay for a membership then there is no problem. There are many simple exercises that you do every day that can help you lose weight and battle fat. Exercising doesn’t have to be a full blow-out gym workout. Smaller activities can provide just as much of a benefit as busting your rear in the gym. Some examples include:

1. Taking a walk at a slower pace
2. Walking your pet or a neighbor’s pet
3. Riding your bike instead of driving
4. Doing chores around the house such as gardening, cleaning the house and mowing the lawn.

These are all a great start to jump starting your system and springing into action. Start off slow rather than going full force at a gym. If you are significantly overweight or considered obese it is best to start off slow and work yourself up to going to the gym. In order to maximize your results, you should engage in a gym workout 2 to 3 times a week or do some type of physical exercise for at least 30 minutes every day.

Keep yourself Active

An active lifestyle usually results in a healthy lifestyle. Regular physical activity is extremely important to maintain our fitness levels although it can easily be ignored. The great thing is that exercising doesn’t necessary mean joining a gym or hiring a personal trainer. Instead of hitting the gym think about other ways you can introduce more physical activity into your regular routine. Walk up the stairs instead of taking the escalator or an elevator. Instead of driving to work, walk to work. Even something as simple as keeping up on daily chores can give you enough exercise to help improve your overall health. It only takes 30 minutes a day to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

Some easy tips for keeping active include:

• Joining sports teams
• Turning the television off and find more physical things that you enjoy doing such as gardening
• Take a walk during your lunch break
• Keep up on your daily chores such as cleaning and scrubbing the house

These small changes to your daily routine can make a world of difference towards a healthier and more fulfilling lifestyle. One very important thing to remember is to not make these changes all at once. Make a long term plan with short term goals that you know you can easily meet and introduce into your daily routine over time.

Take a Break from the Internet

Make a point of getting away from every type of technology you can several times a week. Sitting around browsing the Internet keeps you from getting up and moving around. Instead of chatting with people online, playing games or engaging in social media, change it up 2 to 3 times a week by going out and doing something fun with your family and/or friends. Take a walk, play games with your children, have a cookout, take a spa day, or do anything else that is enjoyable to you where you won’t be involved with using modern technology. This will not only keep you active but it will improve your social skills.

Change to a Healthier Lifestyle

The word “lifestyle” means way of life or routine. Living a healthier lifestyle doesn’t just end at changing your diet, exercising or adopting positive social skills. Your habits and hobbies should be healthy, too. Some of the ways you can do this include:

• Avoid drinking in excess
• Stop taking recreational drugs
• Quite smoking
• Get enough sleep
• Start thinking more positive
• Avoid stress and anything that will cause anxiety

Dieting and exercising are not the sole answer in living a healthier lifestyle. Avoid smoking cigarettes and avoid using drugs and alcohol. Stress levels differ from one person to another. These stressors can come from a variety of factors:

1. Family
2. Financial
3. Personal
4. Issues with peers
5. Work-related stress

The most important step in combating stress is identifying these stressors and then take steps to delete them from your life. Once you have identified these stressors you can begin to work on the underlying causes. One of the most beneficial ways to help you identify these stressors is by writing in a stress journal. The things to keep track of in your journal should include:

• What caused your stress
• How you felt emotionally and physically
• A detailed description of the environment you were in and who you were with
• Your personal reactions to the situation
• What you did to make yourself feel better

Once you have clearly identified the triggers to your stress you should attempt to change your situation by alteration or avoidance. Once you’ve done this, starting working on changing your reactions by accepting and adapting. Be sure to make time for fun and relaxation.

Sleep is one of the most crucial and most important things you can change to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Sleep is extremely crucial for many reasons.

1. Sleep regenerates, refuels and energizes your body and mind.
2. Sleep increases your ability to think more clearly and react in an appropriate manner when stressful situations arise.
3. Sleep helps give you the stamina and motivation to engage in the many aspects of your life that you enjoy.

Feng Shui in the Home – Furniture For Free Flowing Energy

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Arranging or rearranging your home’s furniture is probably the easiest way to implement feng shui in the home. Furniture in your home says so much about the home owner’s personality. We often see something we like and decorate our house with it, not considering how it will react “energy-wise” with the space it is in and the surrounding items. You may decorate your room with your favorite color not realizing that too much of one color can create an imbalance of harmony that can affect areas of your life. When looking to optimize feng shui in the home, furniture placement, arrangement and color are very important aspects to consider.

Furniture is also considered an “inhabitant” of your home. This is because it takes up space and energy in your home as much as you do or as much as your plants and pets do. You should look at and consider how all the “inhabitants” of your home interact with each other. Is balance maintained? Is there conflict? Is everything in harmony? These are the kinds of questions that you would want to have answers to when looking to rearrange or redecorate your home.

Once you decide to apply feng shui in the home, furniture should be one of the first things to consider in terms of how the item represents a Feng Shui element. Usually, the color is the first thing that people look at. Shape comes second, material comes last. Most objects or furnishings are easy to “read”-it will represent two or more elements (i.e. from the 5 element theory), and you can take this as the first step to understanding the Feng Shui element expressions of the various items in your home.

When considering feng shui in the home, furniture can also dictate and give you understanding of how chi enters and flows throughout your environment. With them you can see the relationship between what you have materially and what effect it has on your life. Using Feng Shui in furniture gives you a sense of the kind of energy objects emit, how they speak to you and how they affect your general well being.

Here are a few tips on how to properly arrange your furniture so that they follow Feng Shui theory:

Move tall pieces of furniture away from your line of vision. Tall, big objects that loom over you give you a feeling of anxiety, and reduce your sense of well being.

Avoid huge pieces of furniture that can just translate to clutter. Clutter not only messes up the flow of chi in your home, but indicates stagnant energy as well. Avoid clutter in every aspect of your life, as it gives nothing but bad energy.

When implementing feng shui in the home, furniture can be used to camouflage offending or hard-to-remedy problems. Bedrooms are prone to a lot of sharp, jutting corners that symbolize “poison arrows”. Poison arrows bring health and marital or relationship problems.

Remember that less is always more, when placing furniture in a room. Too much furniture not only makes the room feel cramped, but restricts the flow of energy as well.

Furniture size and positioning should also be made proportional to the size of the room or home.

They Say That If You Fail to Plan, You Are Planning to Fail – Is it the Same Travel Planning?

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Have you ever been on a vacation or business trip and everything seemed to go wrong? For instance you forgot the adapter for your smart phone, or the cord for your laptop. Perhaps you didn’t pack the right clothes and you ran into weather and found yourself, rather than enjoying your vacation, trying to find a local Wal-Mart to get a jacket. It’s happened to me several times, and usually it’s because I didn’t plan my travel needs correctly.

However, since I am now a seasoned traveler, I have a little checklist, it’s really simple, but it prevents me from forgetting the important things. Things like phone numbers that I need to call when I get some place, or universal travel plugs. Travel planning can be very simple, or it can be quite complex, and it often matters what type of traveling you’re doing. Even a simple 3 x 5 index card as a checklist inside of your suitcase can help.

If you are like me and you like to travel light, you might even stick it on the inside of your laptop bag, or the bag you use as your carry-on luggage. It makes sense to keep it simple. Having printouts of itineraries, emergency phone numbers, and secondary plan B or escape plans also makes sense. You never know if you’re going to get stuck in weather, or stuck in an airport for hours on end. What are you going to do if you miss your connecting flight?

Sometimes, if you plan these things in advance, then what might have been a major catastrophe for someone else, can turn into an opportunity for you. For instance if you are stuck for four or five hours at an airport, perhaps you know something very close by you can go see or do. Having secondary itinerary travel plans make a lot of sense and it sure has helped me out over the years. In fact, I’ve made many friends who were also stuck at airports who decided they would rather join me and accompany me in my secondary plans while we were stuck at the airport for six or seven hours waiting for the next connecting flight.

The reality is you just never know, and “if you fail to plan, you are really planning to fail,” and that goes for travel planning as well. Indeed, hope you’ll please consider this, and if you have any other ideas or suggestions please send me an e-mail. Think on it.

Signs of a Successful Small Business Owner

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When starting a new business, there are numerous signs that can indicate whether you’re succeeding as an entrepreneur or aren’t. A small business can be risky. This is particularly true if you specialize in a niche that bigger companies already excel in. However, if you display some particular qualities, it’s a sign that you’re doing a good job to stay afloat.

That’s because small business owner who have a positive attitude towards success are the most likely to get a taste of it than his counterparts. Their counterparts focus only on stability and nothing more. While business success has a lot to do with your initial idea and how you build upon that idea, it still depends on your personality and capabilities. Here are the few signs of a successful small business owner that you should develop as part of your personality.

You Like To Form Collaborations

Most successful entrepreneurs display this common trait. They understand the importance of having a well-connected network in the business world. Nevertheless, just like in every other change, collaboration needs to start from within your business. This means you’ll need to start delegating tasks effectively. Another crucial part of this is building good relationships with everyone on your team. This includes your employees and suppliers.

Of course, you also need to establish a position in the network of small businesses. It’s unwise to act alone without any partners. You needn’t form friendly relationships with your competitors. However, at the least, you should be on good terms with other small businesses that complement yours. By obtaining a position in the community of other businesses, you’ll be able to create new opportunities that can benefit others. Moreover, others can do the same for you. What results is a beneficial support system that allows all members to rely on one another.

You Have Your Eyes Set on the Future

You never know what the future holds, especially if it’s for something as volatile as a new startup business. That’s why successful entrepreneurs share a common characteristic of looking towards long-term future goals.

Some struggle to stay afloat amidst a rocky economic climate, and such desperate conditions can lead to business owners not looking farther than the near future. Such thoughts are understandable, but think of it this way; acting upon well-structured long-term goals at the same time as day-to-day tasks can ensure far more than financial stability and simple peace of mind.

Your Leverage the Benefit of Technology

Nowadays, when it comes to operating a small business, it all comes down to incorporating the use of technology, whether in marketing, management, or everything else. Technology and software have made it easier for entrepreneurs and small business owner to meet their goals, and now with services like Google AdWords and personal assistants, functions have become much more streamlined than ever before.

Take websites, for instance, they’re a business’ online identity and that’s where most potential customers will go to check whether your brand is legitimate or not. Then comes social media, which is a useful marketing tactic that produces results without requiring you to spend too much of your ad revenue. Then there are other business-related applications like customer support live chat software, fixed responses for keywords and budgeting tools that boost your productivity so you can focus on product quality.

You Love to Learn

You’re never ready to run a business until you’re prepared to improve yourself by learning from others. You may be determined to make it through with a method involving trial and error, but that costs precious resources; you need to start learning from others’ success and failures. Data is the most powerful weapon that a business can possess because it helps you discover trends and important details.

If you aim to learn about what strategies lead to profitable ideas and which ones are just downright terrible, you’ll be able to devise a solution of your own. The best way to fulfill your curiosity is to read and look into insights regarding management, marketing, customer satisfaction, and product quality. Archives can provide you with numerous researches and surveys conducted by different companies. While it isn’t necessary that the results apply to your business, you’re still bound to learn something.

You Don’t Just Think; You Act

While we’re at it, we might as well establish that being a smart business owner doesn’t mean that you’ll never have to take risks; it’s merely the ability to take risks with confidence. One sign that your business will soon see the light of success is that you don’t just think, you also act when the time is right. This sign is associated with the confident ability to make good decisions, even if they’re risky.

It’s true that before you put any plan into action, you need to examine it carefully all the way through. However, if you become stuck on the evaluating stage, you’ll miss your chance to implement your idea. That’s why you should have some faith in yourself and build confidence in your abilities to make a good decision.

You Seek Fulfillment

There are many small businesses operating in the market, but very few businesses owner seek fulfillment. The rest of them, however, only look at it as a means to make ends meet. Success-oriented entrepreneurs always chase after their goal of doing something fulfilling for a living. Your ability to see value in everything you create is contributory to success because you’ll want to build upon ideas to increase that value.

If you realize these traits in yourself, then congratulations; you have what it takes to turn your small business into a success! However, even if you don’t, do not fear! Owning a small business can change you as a person. But, it depends on you whether you take something positive from the experience. All these above-mentioned aspects will greatly improve not just the quality of business, but your life as well. If you can learn to find a hint of success-oriented personality within yourself, then you’ve hit the jackpot.