How to build a worthwhile life....

Today's Post: Friday, 6-24-2011

People who do this are less depressed, are more resilient when stressed, recover faster from stress, have better health and live longer!

That’s true even if your vision of a worthwhile life is making some part of our world better or making money or helping out someone in your family.

What you’re working on does NOT need to be working on your health or even about benefitting you. But if you are really engaged in the process of achieving something that by your values is worthwhile, you will benefit. And your health will be better.

The more important your vision is to you and the more you get into doing the things that achieve it, the better this works.


"Becoming successful is....the result of repeated, intentional effort toward your definition of the life you want to live." P J McClure


Envision and choose what you now want your life to be like. (As you make progress and learn new things, some of your vision will change. But the most important things will remain.)

Commit to the purpose of achieving those things in your life.

Believe you can achieve those things and begin to take repeated, focused, and consistent small actions to make that happen.

When starting, even tiny steps you can already do will help.

Working on protecting your health or fat loss can be a great place to learn these skills.

For example, if you have about 30 pounds of fat you’d like to remove permanently, you will need to upgrade your lifestyle.

A great way to do this is choose the upgrades that the ones people like you follow who have almost no excess fat and stay that way.

In every field, intelligent modeling and emulation of the actions that produced the desired results for people who have them, is a key way to succeed.

Find out what that set of actions is and begin right way.

What tiny things can you already do to emulate those actions?

With permanent fat loss, those who succeed virtually all get regular exercise.

Taking a brisk two mile walk 7 days a week would really help.

But with your life now, that may be out of the question.

But you could find a single place in your coming week to walk 5 minutes.

Maybe you know someone who never uses their home elliptical trainer or stationary bicycle that you could buy for pennies on the dollar. Then during some of your recreational TV, you could watch while exercising for a couple of programs each week.

The key is to simply begin watching for opportunities to begin doing things that you can already do that will make you progress.

Then start trying them today or sometime in the next two weeks that you put on your schedule today.

Will taking one 5 minute walk remove all of your excess fat?

This is a trick question! The obvious answer is no. But in a profoundly important way, it can be definitely yes!

It depends.

If you follow up that 5 minute walk one time this week, with two next week…

…and then find you can build up to 15 minutes of brisk walking each time,

…and then add 10 minutes another two or three times a week of at home strength training or jumping on a minitrampoline too,

…. and you keep doing this as you find you can, you may well find eating right suddenly easier and begin to see the pounds of fat coming off and your health and feeling of well being going up!

But if you never start the process with that one 5 minute walk this week, you’ll never see those results.

So, if you are following the process of building a worthwhile life, that one 5 minute walk WILL start you on the path that leads to removing all your excess fat.

Then by simply keeping up your upgraded lifestyle, the fat never comes back.

The key is that a single start right away and followed up well is exactly how everyone who built a worthwhile life got the job done.

What if you try something that’s too hard?

Try something similar just a bit challenging instead of way too hard.

What if you try something that simply doesn’t seem to work?

Find out if the people who used it successfully added something else to it.

Find something else that might get that result and try that instead.

That kind of relentless and experimental persistence at looking for good things to try, trying things, and continuing the ones that work is exactly the “repeated, intentional effort toward your definition of the life you want to live." that P J McClure speaks of.

It’s how you build a worthwhile life.

How to build your life to be worthwhile....

Today's Post: Monday, 5-2-2011

Last Friday, we posted about two new ways to stop depression.

We also listed 7 other methods.

One of those 7 that’s most effective but least known is to get coaching in building a worthwhile life.

Among other things, doing this gives you long term positive view. So when you temporarily feel rotten it’s a lot easier to think of your bad mood as temporary. And, you are more motivated to do things to feel better because you feel like it’s worth doing.

Then, yesterday in Parade magazine in our Sunday paper had a brief interview with Martin Seligman, PhD about his new book, Flourish.

In that article, he discusses four key areas that help you build a worthwhile life.

1. Have good relationships with others.

(Dr Seligman gives a superb way to do that in the article. The technique even has a name. It’s called the “Losada ratio.”)

What you do is to make 5 accurate positive statements for each negative statement you make when you interact with people. He realized he did not do this when he graded his own graduate students. So he tried it. Then when he did make his criticisms that were most important to make, he found that far more of his students actually used them and improved their work.

(Seligman’s previous work also found this: Thinking about the negatives people do as temporary instead of happening forever really helps you do well with people.

For example, an attitude like, “He’s really grouchy today. I wonder what happened?” will cause you far less problems than one like, “He’s really a jerk and is always like that.” For one thing, the first attitude is far more often correct. Even people who have too many bad days, have good ones sometimes. Of most importance, if you want them to act well, act towards them as if they could act well. Often they will!

That also avoids you causing problems that could have had a much happier ending.)

2. Be engaged in what you are doing.

Make an effort to do it well. Know why you are doing it and get passionate about it. Keep improving in that area and learning more about it.

3. Find a sense of larger meaning and purpose in your life. If you have one, focus on it and doing the things that make it come alive.

(What if you don’t have a purpose or mission like that? For now pick one of the things you engage in that you enjoy most or think more important.)

Focus on what value you can contribute to that area. Management expert Peter Drucker called it focus on contribution. He found that people who are effective do that in the more important things they do.

Last Thursday, 4-28, I heard Joe Pinto, an executive with Cisco, describe using it to get hired there. When they asked him why they should hire him, he told them that he’d work well enough they would be truly sorry to see him retire because they were so happy with the value of his work. (He hasn’t retired yet. But already, thanks to his work, Cisco has one of the best online support websites ever made.)

4. Feel that you are achieving your goals.

Find actions or steps that really help achieve your goals. Pick those that are definitely doable but may take a bit of extra effort. And, pick those that achieve your goal in ways that contribute to the value of those goals.

If you don’t quite get there, keep trying. But try new approaches if what you did at first didn’t work. Rev Robert Schuller called that “Experimental Persistence” in one of this books that I read.

Then keep noticing it and maybe even keeping a log of the things that you do get done successfully.

That log can be as great asset on days you feel rotten or something went wrong.

It also helps a great deal to find ways to be well organized and use check lists.

When you are attentive, conscientious, and reliable, you get three benefits.:

You, yourself, will be far more effective.

People you work with will like you better and do far more to help you.

AND, recent research shows you will also live longer and will become less likely to get any kind of mental decline!

It’s no surprise. You are far better at doing some things than others. Some things are easier for you. You enjoy doing some things more than others because you do them better or have more interest in them. Or you just somehow got more effective practice than other people. So you have more skill and know more.

In the Parade article interview, Dr Seligman called those your “Signature strengths.”

In everything you do, he suggests “you develop and use your signature strengths.”

In short, find ways to use them when you work to achieve things. You’ll feel better and get a lot better results too!

Lastly, by doing this yourself, it will become easier for you to see these signature strengths in other people. That makes it easier for you to find positive statements to make when you talk to them.