If you’re bending over backwards just to convince people, you are not influencing.
You are auditioning.

Because being sweet is easy.
Being taken seriously requires a lot of work.

You won’t be remembered for always nodding along.
You’ll be remembered for speaking up when it mattered.
For asking the question no one else had the guts to.

When you’ve spent your life shrinking yourself,
the first time you speak up might come out like an explosion.

“I’m done!”
“Stop it!”
“Not happening!”

You don’t need to attack anybody to protect your space.
You don’t need to offend anybody to be clear.

Boundaries don’t have to burn the house down.
They can close the door—gently, firmly, kindly.

Instead of saying: “I’m not doing that.”
Try: “That doesn’t work for me right now,”
or “That’s not something I can take on.”

1. ‘What is the problem?’
2. ‘Why did I fail?’
3. ‘Why are my relationships not working?’
4. ‘Why am I not able to earn as much as I should?’
5. ‘In which subjects is my child weak?’
6. ‘Why am I not getting what I deserve?’
7. ‘Why am I sick so often?’
8. ‘Why are people so insensitive?’
9. ‘Why are people so unhelpful?’
10. ‘Why did that person insult me?’

Try asking the above questions of yourself; see the kind of answers you get, and also observe the kind of mental themes you are creating for yourself. The themes which may emerge are:
‘I am unlucky.’
‘Life is difficult.’
‘Life is uncertain.’
‘People can’t be trusted.’
‘I can never succeed.’
‘It is not in my destiny.’
‘People are selfish.’

1. ‘What keeps me happy and smiling?’
2. ‘What are the things happening in my life which I value?’
3. ‘What do I value in my relationships?’
4. ‘What is the one thing critical to building happy, healthy and stable relationships?’
5. ‘What changes have I made that have positively impacted my life?’
6. ‘What has inspired me lately?’
7. ‘What does career growth mean to me?’
8. ‘How can I enhance my happiness and positivity today?’

1. ‘I am alive at this moment and thank God for that.’
2. ‘I am safe at this moment.’
3. ‘I am grateful for what I have today.’
4. ‘I am worthy and deserving of love.’
5. ‘I am focused only on what I can control now.’
6. ‘I am open and present to this experience.’

In case your habitual ‘I’ statements are negative and disempowering in nature—
‘I am stuck’, ‘I am not enough’, ‘I am worthless’—
replace them with empowering ‘I am’ phrases.

‘I deserve happiness and I am capable of creating my own happy moments.’
‘I love and accept myself as I am.’
‘I have the capability to deal with challenges.’
‘I am in an adventurous moment, I will make it a memorable moment.’
‘I have inner resources and I am learning to use them appropriately.’

Changing ingrained mental habits takes practice.
Regularly practising the above for 21 days will bring a sustainable change.

Sleep is not the absence of wakefulness. It is far more than that.

Described earlier, our nighttime sleep is an exquisitely complex, metabolically active, and deliberately ordered series of unique stages.

Numerous functions of the brain are restored by, and depend upon, sleep. No one type of sleep accomplishes all. Each stage of sleep—light NREM sleep, deep NREM sleep, and REM sleep—offer different brain benefits at different times of night. Thus, no one type of sleep is more essential than another. Losing out on any one of these types of sleep will cause brain impairment.

Up to this point, we have discussed the power of sleep after learning to enhance remembering and avoid forgetting. However, the capacity to forget can, in certain contexts, be as important as the need for remembering, both in day-to-day life (e.g., forgetting last week’s parking spot in preference for today’s) and clinically (e.g., in excising painful, disabling memories, or in extinguishing craving in addiction disorders).

Moreover, forgetting is not just beneficial to delete stored information we no longer need. It also lowers the brain resources required for retrieving those memories we want to retain, similar to the ease of finding important documents on a neatly organized, clutter-free desk. In this way, sleep helps you retain everything you need and nothing that you don’t, improving the ease of memory recollection. Said another way, forgetting is the price we pay for remembering.

Confidence might begin with that first step, but it’s built in the next one.

I brought a new kind of understanding down the mountain with me; an understanding that I was capable of far more than I had ever allowed myself to believe.

What I’ve come to realize is that climbing Mount Kilimanjaro is no different than asking for a raise, sharing your ideas in a boardroom, or applying for a job that seems beyond your reach. Climbing Kilimanjaro was me—yes, ME—saying yes to a version of myself that I didn’t even know existed yet.

What about YOU? Have you ever said no to something you wanted to do because self-doubt stopped you from even trying? Turned down a project at work because you doubted your ability to succeed? Let someone dismiss your idea in a meeting because you didn’t feel confident to stand up for yourself? Skipped applying for a job you really wanted because you thought you didn’t meet every qualification? Stayed home from an event because you felt you wouldn’t fit in?

Those are just a handful of ways that self-doubt can show up in our lives. I bet most of us have experienced some, or all, of these moments.

The best way to overcome failure?
Change the way you see it.

Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx, grew up with a father who understood the importance of failure and the growth it can bring us. Every day at the dinner table, her father would ask one simple question:

“What did you fail at today?”

If Sara couldn’t think of anything she had failed at, like tripping in the locker room or missing some questions on a math test, her father would be disappointed. That one question, “What did you fail at today?” helped Sara reframe failure as proof that she was trying new things and seizing opportunities. If she wasn’t failing, her father reminded her, she wasn’t really trying.

With this mindset, experiencing failures became a positive thing and nothing to be ashamed of. Sometimes, her best failures were even rewarded with a high-five from her proud father. For Sara, the greatest tragedy wasn’t failure; it was never trying or risking anything.

Oftentimes, it’s your own thoughts and fear of failure that hold you back from accomplishing the things you really want to achieve in life. That is, the fear of failing can be much more paralyzing than having to deal with actually failing!

“You can’t understand the world if you never see it.”

Traveling is the best education you will ever receive.
It immerses you in another culture.
It shows you how other people live day-to-day.
And it gives you a greater appreciation for your own opportunities and privileges.

You are going to die — we each get a finite amount of time on this earth.
So do something bold.
Something courageous.
Something ambitious.

Discipline is not a punishment, it’s a way to avoid punishment.
We do it because we love ourselves, we value ourselves and what we do.

Seek yourself, not distraction.
Be happy, not hedonistic.
Let the mind rule, not the body.
Conquer pleasure, make yourself superior to pain.

By the standard of pleasure, nothing is more pleasant than self-control…
and nothing is more painful than lack of self-control.
Nobody who has given themselves over to excess is having a good time.
No one enslaved to their appetites is free.

Uncertainty is a part of life.
We are never, ever in the position to be certain about what will happen tomorrow or a month from now.
We can never truly know what others are thinking or how life would have looked if we had made a different decision.
And when times are tough, none of us mere mortals can predict how things will pan out, or what the best, risk-free way forward is.

“People think a thought is just something that shows up on its own and you have no power.
But once you say to yourself I have the permission and the ability to choose what I think during the day, to choose the actions I will take, that’s where it becomes really fun.”

“Since where you place your attention is where you place your energy, when you wake up in the morning and immediately start putting your attention and energy on all the people you have to see that day, the places you have to go, the objects you own, and the things you have to do in the three-dimensional world, your energy becomes fractured.

All of your creative energy is flowing away from you, to all the things in the outer world that compete for your attention—your cell phone, your laptop, your bank account, your house, your job, your coworkers, your spouse, your kids, your enemies, your pets, your medical conditions, and so on.”

“Every person, object, thing, place, or situation in our familiar physical reality has a neurological network assigned to it in our brain and an emotional component connected to it because we’ve experienced all these things.

Therefore, as you place your attention on all these elements, your energy is flowing away from you and it leaves little energy in your inner world of thoughts and feelings to create something new in your life.”

Health is a type of wealth.
If you don’t feel good physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually, all the money, possessions and fame in the world mean nothing.

“When we are young, we are willing to sacrifice all of our health for the pursuit of wealth
and once we are old, we become willing to sacrifice all of our wealth for even one day of good health.”

All change is hard at first, messy in the middle and gorgeous at the end.
And that nothing tastes as good as top health feels.

Very astute and observant people know that what a person insults you with is often nothing more than the label they can’t acknowledge they actually give themselves.

If you realize this, you can keep your cool in such a conversation.
If not, you may get hooked into a mutual ego-defense session—i.e., an argument—with the person, unknowingly accepting their invitation to play a particular shadow game with them.

People work harder to avoid pain than to get pleasure.
While everyone wants pleasure as much as they can get it, their motivation to avoid pain is actually far stronger.

So when faced with the prospect of pain, the brain will work harder than it would to gain access to pleasure.