Declutter Your Life

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In Life by Design, we talk about going through a much needed eliminating unnecessary in your life. How do you get rid of the physical junk, let alone the mental clutter in your head?

 

Declutter Your Life

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How do you declutter your life? It brings to mind an old routine by George Carlin when he talks about how modern life seems to be all about accumulating stuff. We fill our houses with stuff and when we get too much stuff, we buy a bigger house so we have room for all our stuff. Our houses are containers to keep all our stuff. Sometimes we even have to rent a storage space to keep our extra stuff. That’s a whole industry around keeping our stuff. The funniest routine is when he talks about when you go out of town to visit friends. They put you up in their guestroom and there’s never any room to put your stuff because their stuff is everywhere. Other people’s stuff is worthless, but our stuff is important. Our stuff is not junk. Our stuff has meaning and value, but I realized that sometimes my stuff becomes junk. I’m talking about internal stuff, not the extra knick-knacks cluttering my house I threw away. I’m talking about the ridiculous stuff that takes up space in my head. I realized that the same way I need to clean up my external life and get rid of my useless stuff. I also need to clean up my head space. I need to clean up my brain. If I don’t, it turns into head junk. All of us have stuff and if we don’t deal with our stuff, it becomes junk.

I do this twice a year in the beginning and at the end. The purpose of this is to simplify, declutter and throw out all the things that don’t matter. When you’re not careful, things will creep in. Things will pile up. The next thing you know, you’ve got more head stuff. I’ve mentioned the less is more pattern that shows up in every area of our life. I use this idea to point out that only a few things in life matter. When we break it down, only a few things, ideas or people have the biggest impact. The same pattern shows up in our head junk. Here’s an analogy to explain what I mean. I’m sure you have all been to picnics. It’s nice, peaceful and relaxing. You spread out your blanket and enjoy your lunch. You sip a little wine or beer or juice and then the ants appear. It doesn’t matter if you check the ground beforehand. Somehow they find you and invade your space and you fight back. It doesn’t matter how many you smash. More show up, they’re automatic. Automatic like the negative thoughts that pop up in our heads and start spiraling around even though we don’t invite them in and we do our best to get rid of them. I call these annoying mental patterns INTS, internal triggers. Like a column of tiny little ants can ruin part of the picnic, INTS can ruin your day at least for a while.

Almost everything in our life is a result of an ongoing series of internal cognitive events happening inside our head.

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The internal trigger starts an endless spiral of internal babble where you start obsessing about what you should or should not have done and how you overlooked something and so on. You will see the collection to less is more in this analogy. For most of us, a few thought patterns dominate and the negative patterns have a particular potency, especially when they are left unnoticed and unchecked. If you watch your thoughts closely, I’ll bet you agree. In fact, I’d like to challenge you to take part in an experiment. Call it an exercise in self-awareness. Over the next few days, pay close attention to your thoughts. Notice how much of you thought energy is taken up in shoulds, coulds or have-tos. Then notice how often taught patterns like yours are negative and judgmental. Start to notice those INTS. I know how I deal with the INTS in my brain. Almost everything in your life is a result of an ongoing series of internal cognitive events happening continuously inside your head. Your feelings and behaviors and what you believe and what you value and nearly everything else about your life are all the results of these internal cognitive events and this is important.

All of it happens outside of your awareness. Here’s why that’s super important. What happens outside of your awareness isn’t a choice. If for instance, your feelings and behaviors are generated outside your awareness, they will happen automatically on autopilot. Sometimes the results would be good and sometimes not. I call this ongoing stream of cognitive events or internal map of reality. Here is what I discovered. If your internal map of reality runs on autopilot, you have to accept the consequences. It can include negative emotions, behaviors and habits you can’t control, continually ending up in the wrong situations and with the wrong people and overall lack of success in your life. In fact, all of the problems from my younger days were the result of an internal map of reality that didn’t work well. All of your problems are being created in your internal map of reality.

I use meditative or mindfulness practice to create enough awareness to observe my internal map of reality, which normally operates outside your awareness. As it created my feelings, behaviors and the people and situations I attracted or became attracted to, because whatever you’re doing with your awareness becomes a choice. I had a lot of that melted away and here’s why they melted away. You can’t keep doing something that doesn’t serve you and do it with awareness. Don’t explain your problems to yourself. Split brain experiments reveal a fascinating phenomenon in the left side of your brain and that phenomenon is affecting your life. When the connections between the two sides of your brain are interrupted, the different tendencies will come to the surface. The left side of your brain wants to find a reason for why things happen even in the face of scans or conflicting information. It’s an explanation factory where quantity is more important than quality. This tendency to form conclusions in the face of scans or conflicting information is especially important when you’re under stress. That’s when you tend more strongly towards an unthinking habitual pattern of thinking, feeling and behaving. Most of us tilt negative. The problems seem bigger, the world seems meaner and you have more reasons to justify your conclusions.

LBD 24 | Declutter Your Life
Declutter Your Life: If your internal map of reality runs on autopilot, you have to accept the consequences.

 

You need to realize this is happening and then you can take proactive steps to improve your life. Take a conscious look at your explanatory style, how you make sense of a stressful event. This conscious exploration can affect the resonance to stress your happiness and your productivity. First, think about the stressful event. Who was involved? What did they say and do? What do you think about the stressful event? Can you be sure that your first thought about the stressful event or situation is true? How will you feel if you didn’t have that thought? What’s a less stressful and more positive way to explain the situation? What are the three reasons that a more positive perspective might be equally true as your original conclusion? What I normally used to do before I became more aware and more conscious was even in my early days, I learned not to speak when I was angry, frustrated or overwhelmed. At that point, I went through it and show that there was some good to it. It didn’t allow the situation to precipitate and become something more. The downside was that people felt troubled and experienced it as rejection.

Along the way, I learned that when I felt overwhelmed and stressed and I knew that I was spinning out of control, I would tell somebody who I’m working with or the group I was working with that I was ready to consider the situation. I will come back and give them a measured response. On the other hand, I also recognized that when I was in a situation like that I was often overwhelmed. My decision-making and choice-making would be extremely restricted and I would normally pick the worst case scenario. I learned then to be aware of what I became aware of, my worst case scenario, and ignore it as reflecting reality. When it came up, I would recognize and acknowledge these were my feelings, but I didn’t take that as a true or reasonable reflection of what was happening. Thirdly when I went back, I would note down, write down and verbalize all the emotions and feelings I had about that situation so I wasn’t bottling them up inside and getting frustrated and angry. I will vent it somewhere.

Sometimes some people talk it out with others. I tend to write about it or ruminate over it silently until after a while everything will spiral down and the whole intensity of the situation will die down. I will begin to see a new emerging perspective, which would then result often in the whole situation to either disappearing as a problem or being quickly resolved and becoming far less of an issue that I originally experienced it as. That brings us to the next area about neuroplasticity. The more I learned about the latest brain discoveries, the more grateful I feel to be alive. Exciting practical life-changing discoveries are being made every day. Did you know that your income level, your happiness, how much you love or be loved, how easily you recover from setbacks and dozens of other desirable human qualities are all generated in your brain?

Scientists now know that you can change your brain, what’s called neuroplasticity. They also know exactly how to change it so that you can create the qualities and capabilities you want to have internally and externally. This takes personal growth and human potential to a whole new level that is much more precise and much more achievable. The bottom line is you can make specific brain changes that will allow you to change the actual wiring in your brain in a way that raises your income ceiling. Increase the power of the prefrontal cortex, the source of self-regulation, and creating lots of effortless willpower. Become natural and confident and motivated. Raise your threshold for stress so the ups and downs of life don’t just bother you the way they used to. Be creative. Have more good ideas. Learn faster and more easily, remember what you learned. Make better decisions, saving your time and money and reducing your regrets. Be happier, more peaceful and more productive. That’s a long list of other desirable qualities.

The more you can be clear about how to organize your daily life to support your bigger vision, the more you step into your true potential.

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All of the things I’m talking about are results achieved by my clients and people I’ve worked with in my medical naturopathic practice. Young children with ADD, ASD, autism, older people struggling in difficult times in their lives. Business owners running six to eight-figure incomes and figures businesses and they recognized that they were running into challenges. They were running their businesses and their lives based on their old programming and wiring. When you change that, the capacity changed. In fact, they will come back and tell me how surprised they were that the moment we ran this resulted in a whole new response. Suddenly, the people they were dealing with who they used to experience as difficult and challenging became easy to handle. The first step to all of the above is practicing awareness. The second step is mental spring cleaning or eliminating all the non-essential. This is how and why I regularly do my mental spring cleaning.

One lucky audience that posts a review in iTunes will win a private confidential consultation and coaching with me on discovering your soul’s purpose. I will lead you in a personal journey to discover your unique mind, body psychosomatic map of your life. You will get a detailed report and a personal 45-minute consultation with me that’s worth thousands. I’m going to help you design a life that works so you are able to say yes to the things that matter and eliminate everything else that slows you down. The clearer you can be about how to organize your daily life to support your bigger vision, the more you step into your true potential, stay on track and accomplish all that you want and deserve. Are you ready to make that happen? Feel free to reach out to me to ask your questions at AskDrSun.com. Your life is a gift. Design it. Do what matters and join me each episode as we get closer to designing the life of your dreams. Join me next time on Your Life By Design.

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Beating Fatigue

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You get your nine hours of beauty sleep regularly every night. So why do you feel so tired? You eat all the right foods, or so you think. You regularly exercise 30 minutes a day. However, you just can’t seem to get up and go.

 

Beating Fatigue

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You get your eight to nine hours of beauty sleep regularly every night or do you? Why do you feel tired? You eat all the right foods or so you think. You regularly exercise 30 minutes a day. However, you can’t seem to get up and go. Even sex seems to be a chore. You are fatigued and having trouble sleeping or sleeping restfully and suspect that caffeine may be the cause. When you drink any caffeinated beverage within three hours of bedtime, you drink the equivalent of five or more cups of coffee per day. You become aware that small caffeine increase makes you restless, excited, super alert or nervous. You may suspect that your fatigue may be caused by caffeine overstimulation. If you drink the equivalent of five or more cups of coffee per day, you suffer symptoms of physical hyperstimulation or a sense of depletion. If cutting down on your coffee after you get over the withdrawal makes you feel better, you have discovered the source of your problem.

Do you remember the times you used to feel depressed and out of sorts? Do you remember what you crave to eat at that point in time? Was it fruits and nuts? Was it a salad and fruit juice? Most of you at such times would have gone for sweet things like chocolate, cookies, candies or ice cream. The initial rush of energy or lift you get occurs because these food products are quickly metabolized to produce sugar in your blood. This is precisely what happens when you crave your mid-morning cup of coffee with sugar. Initially, you get a temporary energy lift since it raises your blood sugar level. This is followed soon by a downward plunge of energy, leaving you feeling worse than before, calling for the repetition of more coffee and sweets or alcohol. When we have a simpler way of life, we will strike at our enemy or run away for an emergency, the event will end and our body will return to a more relaxed state.

However, in everyday situations, we are currently confronted with a series of stresses that arouse our bodies in the same fashion as a fight or flight emergency. No wonder you’re tired. However, many individuals don’t feel the emotions of anger, impatience, frustration, depression and despair. They are accustomed to being worried or hostile that they think their condition is normal. Meanwhile, their body is falling apart as they test it to the limit. Fatigue is the inevitable outcome. If you want to have a constant supply of energy, forget the three spread meals at the rule. Most meals aren’t spread but likely to be unbalanced or inadequate anyway. Eat like a rabbit or a squirrel. For some of you, that would work, nibbling away through healthy snacks. For others, two appropriately balanced meals and it depends on who you are, the balance is not the same, would work. I’m not suggesting that you snack on ice cream, chocolates, sweets and pastries. Eat healthy foods that build up your energy level consistently.

Drink fruit juice for breakfast or lunch and you will have the juice of life to burn for hours.

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Substitute protein for sweets and carbohydrates in your many meals. Snack on slices of fruits, nuts, a piece of raw fruit, a celery stick or a carrot strip. Make a protein powder drink with your fruit juice for breakfast or lunch and you will have the juice of life to burn for hours. If you plan to attend an important meeting after lunch and you need to be mentally alert, then skip the carbohydrates during lunch. Have a salad with some fish or chicken. You could even try a protein drink with fruit juice. Sometimes though, you happen to be a nervy type. You want to deliberately calm down or slow down at a meeting. That is when you want to snack on rice and vegetables. For those people, you want to skip the protein foods for they will make you overly alert. Another quick energy-boosting routine is to eat a little bit of fat. I can imagine some of you shaking your head and thinking, “Now, I’ve really heard it all.”

Researchers have learned that a little fat is necessary to make your bladder work. I’ve heard horror stories of people who have had their gall bladder shut down on them because they went on a diet and did not take any fat at all. They needed surgery after that. Taking little fat staves off hunger as well as fatigue for hours. Either add a bit of cold-pressed vegetable oil to your protein drink before you blend it. You will never notice it there or add more oil to your salad in meal times and drink only the remains from the bowl. Each of us has a different peak time or highest energy time of the day. Some of us are morning people. Others have more energy around mid-afternoon, while some people feel the best at night. Most people know instinctively when they’re having their up and down times. You probably don’t get one of these. Some people feel up in the morning, down in the afternoon and up again in the early evening.

Rhythms in the body. Our body has many rhythms or cycles. Many of us are familiar with circadian rhythms. These are 24-hour cycles of wakefulness and sleep. Another important cycle is called the ultradian rhythm, a recurrent period of cycle repeated throughout the 24-hour circadian day. Within the one day, 24-hour circadian rhythm, researchers have found shorter ultradian rhythms. We experience an ultradian rhythm every 90 to 120 minutes. You’ve experienced this many times. You’re working hard, feeling energized and productive. You start to tire a bit and lose your focus after a while. This normally occurs after an hour-and-a-half to two hours. It is a bit different for each person. The ultradian cycle is the most important cycle for high performance. 60/60/30 cycle, the idea with the 60/60/30 is for us to use 60 minutes chunks of time to focus on a single thing. We put two of these chunks together then we spend 30 minutes completely relaxing and eating a small healthy meal.

LBD 23 | Beating Fatigue
Beating Fatigue: Only by working with our natural down cycles can we become more effective and productive throughout the day.

 

One reason this can be powerful is because if you don’t take these breaks, you’ll burn your energy reserves and your willpower and damage the system that allows you to renew. By taking these breaks, you help your renewal system to heal and become more effective. The 60-minute cycles are actually three cycles of fifteen minutes focused on the task, then a short fifteen-minute break followed by the second rung of four cycles for fifteen minutes. I use a little timer, set it to 45 minutes then put it to the side of my desk. What’s great about this is it frees me to completely focus for the next 45 minutes. I know that I don’t need to check emails or voicemails for those 45 minutes. When it beeps, I set it for fifteen minutes then I go stretch, move around and do something different. Forcing ourselves to work through with sheer determination as our energy wanes is counterproductive. This is like reading a book when we are tired.

We are ending up reading the same paragraph over and over again until we either fall asleep with the book or NOOK or Kindle or iPad in hand or realize that we must stop. Only then can we regain our focus and comprehension. Another common strategy when we find ourselves nearing the end of one of our ultradian rhythms is to pump our self with caffeine and sugar. To power through the energy drop or grabbing one of those energy drinks to keep going even when we want to crash. To sustain peak performance, we need to manage our energy throughout the day. We allow our body and mind to renew by taking periodic breaks every 90 minutes. By working with our natural down cycles, we can become many times more effective and productive throughout the day. After almost 30 years of seeing clients with a range of fatigue conditions, we have come to the following factors that could underlie a serious case of fatigue.

These factors are digestive issues, food allergies, parasites and yeast. Chemical poisons. They could include heavy metal toxicity and organic poisons, nutritional deficiencies like iron, B-12, and folic acid. Hormonal hypoglycemia, hypothyroid, female hormonal imbalance, adrenal fatigue, emotional unfinished business, cognitive overwhelm or grief. I’m going to help you design the life that works so you are able to say yes in the things that matter and eliminate everything else that slows you down. The more clear you can be about how to organize your daily life to support your bigger vision, the more you step into your true potential, stay on track, and accomplish all that you want and deserve. Are you ready to make that happen? Feel free to reach out to me to ask your questions in AskDrSun.com. Your life is a gift. Design it. Do what matters and join me each episode as we get closer to designing the life of your dreams. Join me next time on Your Life By Design.

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Childhood Wounding

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Throughout our childhood, we are being programmed by our caretakers and communities to fit into society. We are programmed to do what we can to gain love and acceptance. We split off, repress, or disown parts of ourselves that society finds challenging or unacceptable.

 

Childhood Wounding

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Childhood wounding, a great deal of time is spent in early childhood and young adulthood conforming. It’s traumatic to question one’s true identity and then discover it, but then feel it necessary to keep it secret from one’s inner self, the outside world, and one’s own family. Our childhood programming overview, we all begin in this state of relaxed and joyful bliss. Once our needs are met, our state of relaxed and joyful bliss is sustained. Otherwise, as our need becomes increasingly unmet, negative programming begins. Our unmet need causes fear and pain. In our infantile ignorance, we have no idea how to change it and restore our feeling of safety. We adopt primitive coping mechanisms. At the same time throughout our childhood, we are also being programmed by our caretakers and communities to fit into society. We are programmed to do what we can to gain love and acceptance. We split off and repress all these old parts of ourselves that the society finds challenging or unacceptable.

Those of us with good enough caretakers get by, those who don’t have their lives handicapped. We have the illusion that we have the freedom of choice when it comes to choosing our lives. However, our unconscious has an agenda of its own. Our primitive old brain has a compelling non-negotiative drive and programming to restore us to the original blueprint. To restore us, the damage done in childhood as a result of unmet needs must be repaired. The way the unconscious does that is to design the life that would give us where our caretakers have failed to provide. Every transaction of pleasure and pain in childhood has scarred us. We always try to replicate these transactions as we scan our environment for a suitable life partner. This image of the internal program that can make me whole again, I call the internalized program. Consciously, we will only seek positive traits. Unconsciously, the negative traits of our caretakers are in our internalized programs. These traits cause the painful experience we now seek to heal.

Through conflict, we become aware and grow.

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Our unconscious seeks to restore us with a program that reminds us of our caretakers. In other words, we look for programmed circumstances that replicate the same old deficits that hurt us in the first place. When we fall in love, we do so with someone who is the sum total of all our caretaker’s characteristics. We end up in careers and life circumstances that recreate the essence of our caretaker’s lives. This guarantees more of the same pain and wounding that we experienced as children until we learn to recognize this and move into a more aware way of living. Otherwise, we experience the hurts of our childhood all over again and wonder why life and love hurts. Why is it great that we experience this conflict? It’s because of the conflict that we become aware and we grow and make new choices. This is a natural selection mechanism. Everything in nature is evolving by overcoming a challenge. This can be seen as conflict or emergence.

Conflict that leads to higher levels of organization or emergence is a sign that the psyche is trying to survive to get its needs met and become whole. It’s only without this knowledge that conflict is destructive. Simply changing circumstances without emergence does not solve the problems. We may change our partners, jobs, houses but we keep our programs, carrying them forward into the next relationship, house or job. You can do this by undoing the fundamental negative childhood programs. The Cave Allegory that Plato, a famous philosopher, in his book The Republic has his teacher Socrates recount the allegory of the cave. A group of people has lived chained up in a deep cave since birth, never ever seeing daylight and seeing only a hill. Behind them are a partial wall and the fire between the prisoners and the partial wall. There are various statues manipulated by hidden groups representing all the forces that program and influence us behind the partial wall that the prisoners cannot see.

LBD 22 | Childhood Wound
Childhood Wound: Freedom is when you begin to wake up from your dream state.

 

The prisoners see the shadows cast by the statues moving and they think they are real. Most people mistake the products of the delusion, generalization, distortions and projections as real and reflecting reality. They mistake the internal map of the world for the real world. These prisoners represent people who never asked questions about their lives. They have never realized the mental models that are controlling them. One of the prisoners is freed from his bonds and forced to confront the reality of the fire and the statues themselves. This is what happens when one day you wake up and something shocking happens like you lose your job or someone close to you dies. You’re shaken out from your trans-state or default mode and forced to see the world that’s truly is. The prisoner faces pain and confusion initially because his eyes are not used to the light. He then realizes that he’s seeing the reality for the first time as opposed to the shadows formed by the fire and the statues he previously saw.

He now accepts the fire and the statues as most real. This stage in the cave represents beliefs. He is still unaware that there are greater things waiting for him from the world beyond this cave. Like the prisoner, the first step, the freedom is when you begin to wake up from your dream state and your default modes. Next, this prisoner is dragged out of the cave into the world of sunlight where his eyes are blinded initially. He can only look at shadows and at reflections. Finally, he can see what is real. Trees, flowers, houses, and so on. He sees that these are even more real than the statutes were and that those were the only copies of these. He has now reached the cognitive stage of thought. He has caught his first glimpse of the most real things as they are. When the prisoner’s eyes have fully adjusted to the brightness, he lifts his head and sees the sun. He understands that the sun is the root cause of everything around him, the light, his capacity for sight, the existence of flowers, trees and other objects.

When you wake up from your dream state and your default mode fully and see the world for what it is, you become fully capable of choosing. The only true choices you can design and build new default programs and habits after you have awareness and clarity. Otherwise, even if you hit all your goals and targets, you are simply repeating the same old tired formula. This is the only way to have forward movement in your life. This is a secret that most programs do not address. Even after you achieved all your goals, there’s certainly a feeling of lack and inadequacy. Often, we build up things in our mind. It comes down to making that one single commitment. Let me ask you this. As we have been talking about this, you probably thought of a commitment you needed to make. Maybe it’s a tough conversation you need to have. Maybe it’s an action you need to take. What is it for you? What’s the thing that’s going to move your needle?

Nothing really happens inside the comfort zone.

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It may push you outside of your comfort zone, but all the important stuff happens outside of your comfort zone. If you feel uncomfortable thinking about this, fantastic. Embrace it. That’s right where you should be. Nothing good happens inside the comfort zone. What is the next single commitment that you need to make? If you want to live a life by design, you want to be courageous and not live by default and not be in overdrive. These are the three questions you need to answer if you haven’t already answered them. Number one, what would your ideal life a few years in the future look like? You can pause for a while and take your time to answer this question and when you have and then you come back and look at number two. Question number two, if you continue what you’re doing now, will you feel fulfilled a few years in the future? Quickly answer this and then get ready for question three. Question number three, what commitment will you now make to your ideal future? When you’ve answered this, you can come back to the blog.

Now that you’re clear about the questions you need to answer to live a life by design, the next obvious step is the practicality of implementing this on a daily basis. For example, how will your everyday life change from what you are currently doing? How will your daily decisions be different based on the answers to the questions we discussed now? How will you manage your time so you’re giving attention to the things that matter most? It’s all dreams and visions unless we take our 30,000-foot view of our ideal life and bring it down to practical daily actions. To make positive change and break the rhythm and the routine that isn’t serving us, we have to change. Go ahead and answer the three questions. I can’t wait to see what new breakthroughs you will make.

One lucky audience that posts a review on iTunes will win a private confidential consultation and coaching with me on discovering your soul’s purpose. I will lead you on a personal journey to discover the unique mind-body psychosomatic map of your life. You will get a detailed report and a personal 45-minute consultation with me. I will help you design the life that works so you are able to say yes to the things that matter and eliminate everything else that slows you down. The more clear you can be about how to organize your daily life to support your bigger vision, the more you step into your true potential, stay on track, and accomplish all that you want and deserve. Are you ready to make that happen? Feel free to reach out to me to ask your questions at DrSundardas.com. Your life is a gift. Design it and do what matters. Join me each episode as we get closer to designing the life of your dreams.

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Why Being Happy is a Choice

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Do you find yourself at the mercy of your emotions, a victim of reaction, behaving in ways that you’re not proud of and often regret? Are you one of the millions of people who avoid conflict and confrontation because you don’t know how to deal with other people’s emotions? Perhaps you avoid emotions entirely, not allowing yourself to feel deeply – out of fear or simply because you never learned how to experience, enjoy, and manage deep emotions such as love, joy, sadness, or happiness.

 

Why Being Happy is a Choice

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Do you find yourself at the mercy of your emotions, a victim of reaction, behaving in ways that you’re not proud of and often regret? Are you one of the millions of people who avoid conflict and confrontation because you don’t know how to deal with other people’s emotions?

Perhaps you avoid emotions entirely, not allowing yourself to feel deeply – out of fear or simply because you never learned how to experience, enjoy, and manage deep emotions such as love, joy, sadness, or happiness.

Perhaps you have become numb to emotions, not recognizing what or that you’re feeling something. Without the skills to handle them, you might “stuff” your emotions, exploding at some later time when you reach your breaking point.

Then there are those who were taught not to feel, who grew up learning that feelings were bad and you shouldn’t have them at all. And when you do feel something, you cannot let anyone know about it. Well, you’re not alone. Everyone has emotions and many people have no idea what to do with their emotions when they experience them. So, welcome to the Club.

Learning more about emotions, understanding what happens to you when you become emotional; learning to control yourself and your responses to emotions are your personal responsibility as an adult – regardless of what you may have learned or witnessed as a child – and they a big part of living a successful life.

Success cannot only be defined by what you do or what you have; it’s defined in your heart by how you feel about how you are living your life, the things you do, and the impact you make on others including how you make other people feel. Emotions are what make life grand. Emotions bring life to living.

What does it mean to be intelligent about your emotions?

It means being able to recognize and manage your emotions as well as control your behavior in response to emotion. It also means you are aware of the emotions of others and are able to manage relationships using empathy and competence. This is the practice of becoming emotionally confident and it takes time, vigilance, and practice in order to enjoy your emotions and respond to them appropriately as well as becoming more adept at handling the emotions of others and dealing with conflict.

Obviously, the better you are at knowing and managing yourself and your emotions, the better you become at dealing with other people’s emotions. The first step in learning about emotions is to become more conscious to what you are feeling in any given moment.

When your friend, employee, child or spouse doesn’t behave or perform in the way you had expected, it may seem natural to feel very angry, frustrated or resentful. But ultimately, will a strong flood of uncontrolled emotion get you the results you need? How do you find a better way?

A staff member doesn’t handle a problem with a customer well, and you, as the manager, are upset. You think to yourself, “Why on earth would he do such a thing? Doesn’t he know better? He should know that’s not how to deal with a customer!”

Your young child is playing upstairs. You decide to go and check on her and discover that she’s been drawing on the wall. “Look at my beautiful picture!” this small face smiles up to you. You, of course, are enraged and think before responding, “Haven’t I taught her not to draw on the wall? Doesn’t she know better?”

There are probably thousands of examples of these moments, moments when you think “What would make someone do that?” It is at this very moment when we reach a fork in the road and quite often, we get stuck. The stuck point is the assumption that the person knows better. This is the expectation. You have an expectation for how an employee should behave, how your children should behave, how things should function, even how you should be and what you should do. This the tyranny of the “shoulds”.

Now one of the illusions of our culture is that you can do it all. And you know, I just don’t buy it. I believe you can do anything you want, you just can’t do everything you want and so if you are going to live a designed life it has to be based on priorities, i.e. intentionally choosing priorities that will guide your life.

Now you certainly know what’s important to your husband or your wife. You probably know what is important to your boss. You may know what’s important to your parents, or your kids. But who is setting the priorities of your life? What’s important to you? Are you being honest with yourself?

Gabriel is a friend and client. And of course I am not using my friend’s real name. We went to school together. Gabriel had attended my personal development programs. He consistently put other people in his life first. Gabriel had carefully worked out his financial plans so that when he retired he would have financial security six years in the future. When I met Gabriel’s older brother, I felt disturbed. In my opinion, Gabriel and his brother had a serious co-dependent
relationship.

Gabriel also had challenges with his ex-wife about getting access to his children. He later confided that he was backing his brother’s businesses financially. I finally told Gabriel that he needed to do significant emotional work about his relationships with people.

That it would take one year. If he chose not to do this, it would have serious repercussions on his future. I also mentioned that I would need to maintain strict neutrality and not hang out with him as a friend for that one year. Gabriel told me that it sounded too painful to do that type of work and he would prefer that we remained as friends.

Fast forward five years. Gabriel’s brother defaulted on his loan, and the banks foreclosed on the loan. Since Gabriel was the guarantor of the loan, they went after him. In one year’s time Gabriel would have achieved financial freedom for life. Instead at that point in time Gabriel was declared bankrupt. He then came in, too little, too late, to do emotional healing. Gabriel got very stressed.

A latent heart problem got activated and became life threatening. He needed surgery to carry on. Fortunately, Gabriel survived the surgery.

If you continue like you are doing now, would you feel fulfilled five years in the future? Or do you need a rapid reality check on where you are going in your life?

Expectations in and of themselves are not bad. We need to have some direction, some vision, and some idea of what we want. Of course, some expectations are unrealistic and this causes tremendous stress, anxiety, anger, struggle, and discontent. But other expectations are reasonable and realistic. Whatever the case, it’s not having the expectation that gets us in trouble; it’s when the expectation is not met that gives us difficulty.

When your expectations are not met, you can experience a psychological response including anger, resentment, anxiety, frustration, disappointment, etc. In fact, disappointment always points to an unmet expectation.

This physiological response often causes people to choose the path at the fork that leads to what I call “The Ugly,” the inappropriate, unproductive, and unprofessional expression of emotion – loss of temper, yelling, conflict, bad feelings, name-calling, gossip, etc. In fact, this response leads to poor relationships, decreases morale, and can be deadly to a leader’s reputation as well as detrimental to the environment or culture of the workplace or your home.

It leads to fear, causes shame, and requires effort to correct as well as time to heal. The opportunity for choosing a better response is at the stuck point, that moment when you feel the anger start or the frustration creep in.

What are you assuming here? Take a step back and question your assumption. That is the beginning of running your mind. This is the beginning of making a choice to embrace peace and happiness.

The pursuit of happiness is not about embracing hedonism. It is about recognizing what matters to you. What matters to the others in your life? Then armed with this you pursue the outcomes in a way congruent with you and your values. Along the way, stop and smell the flowers. When you run into obstacles and road blocks embrace the leaning.

One lucky listener that posts a review on iTunes will win a private confidential consultation and coaching with me on discovering your soul’s purpose. I will lead you on a personal journey to discover your unique mind-body psychosomatic map of your life. You will get a detailed report and a personal 45 minute consultation with me that is worth thousands.

On this podcast I’m going to help you design a life that works. So you are able to say yes to the things that matter and eliminate everything else that slows you down. The more clear you can be about how to organize your daily life to support your bigger vision, the more you’ll step into your true potential, stay on track and accomplish all that you want and deserve. Are you ready to make that happen?

Feel free to reach out to me to ask your questions at AskDrSun.com. Your life is a gift. Design it. Do what matters and join me each week as we get closer to designing the life of your dreams. I am Dr Sun. Join me next week on Your Life by Design.

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How Do You Measure Your Journey Through Life?

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How many steps are you at today?

I bet you know…and you probably know whether you are ahead of your coworkers and family members, too.

I look for ways to increase my steps all day long…. I take the stairs, walk to lunch…

 

How Do You Measure Your Journey Through Life?

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“What do you measure (and manage)? For instance, exactly how many steps do you walk each day? More than a thousand? More than ten thousand? As Peter Drucker famously said, “What gets measured gets managed.” When details come to the forefront, behavior changes. Data can make people more likely to take action.

Until recently, I didn’t have the faintest idea of my number of daily steps. Or my heart rate. Or my sleep cycles. That information didn’t seem relevant, and certainly not fascinating.

Then I got a Fitbit activity monitor—a souped-up pedometer on the wrist. This nifty device illustrates the principle that people work harder to improve performance if they can measure their progress. It collects precise stats about your daily activity, transforming minutiae into a storyline.

By weaving the details together, the Fitbit causes dull facts to become an addictive scoreboard. I can see how many steps my family and friends have taken. Once a day, my wrist buzzes and lights up, telling me that I’ve walked my ten thousand step goal.

Party on the wrist! Even detail-averse folks can get sucked into this addictive gamification. As a result, Fitbit’s market cap is approaching that of the NBA.”
What and how do you measure what happens in your life?

Identify The Difference That Makes The Difference

What if we can seize control of our lives instead of being at the mercy of a media that encourages conspicuous consumption? What if we choose to do only what adds meaning and value to our lives, the lives of our families, and communities?

Everything changes when we accept accountability for our lives, when we exercise our freedom to choose wisely and well. We can ascend to the next level of achievement and growth in our lives when we replace what we find trivial with what makes the vital difference. We are no longer trapped in other people’s agendas. We are free to make meaningful choices.

What if instead of buying more stuff, we focused on creating more space to think, breathe, and be? What if we stopped trying so hard to make money we don’t need, to buy things we don’t want, to impress people we don’t really care about?

What if we stopped measuring our progress in life by how busy we are? Instead, we measured it by how much time we spent meditating, pondering, communicating, and enjoying time with the most important people in our lives. How would we live differently?

I have always been acutely aware of how little time I have and how limited my energy and resources are. So I need to make sure that I use my time and energy optimally to make a difference to myself, my family, and my community.

As a physician, professor, entrepreneur and author, I’ve always had really big goals. And for a long time, I was very focused on my career. The outside world was doing well. The problem was that I achieved these big goals at the expense of my family and health.

Finally, I realized that everything that really mattered to me was suffering. I understood that the wins were not worth the trade-offs; I knew something had to change. This was true not only for my personal life but also for my professional life.

I had the time to reflect on the meaning of my life when I had a near death experience when I was about forty-two. Years from now, when I reach the same point again, I want to make sure I have no regrets about how I spent my time after that near-death experience. My hope is that you don’t have to go through a near death experience to start getting clear about what matters.

Over a three-day period, note how much time you spend on the following activities:

1) Business-related profit-producing
2) Business-related non-profit-producing
3) Personal activities

As you go through each day, jot down your activities and how long you spend on each activity. Be as accurate as you can. After you complete three days of activity tracking, go back and categorize your activities by business-related profit-producing, business-related nonprofit-producing, and personal.

You can also include any categories you think are important and applicable to this exercise and your business. Make sure you make a note of the results you achieve from the time spent on each activity. Add up the time you spend on each category of activities over the three-day period. Add up the total time spent then calculate the percentage of the total that was spent on each category.

I know we did a variation of this exercise the last time. This time though, I want to you to estimate what all of the above activities are costing you not just in terms of time but also in terms of effort, energy and money. Also is there an opportunity cost involved in what you are doing? Have you calculated that or factored that in?

What are the returns on how you are living your life this way also in terms of effort, energy and money?

Hopefully you can quantify the above. If you have challenges quantifying the above, it means that those areas represent areas of your life that are unexamined.

If you’re getting 20 percent of your results from 80 percent of your business activities, think about what needs to happen to turn the 80/20 rule in your favor. It’s all about knowing the value of your time and when your most productive time occurs. Then you can start leveraging your strengths to achieve your profitable activities before you spend time on anything else, especially non-profitable activities.

What does this mean for your business or your life? Unless you commit to continually increase the value of your time, you will not be making the kind of money in your business you want or working the fewer number of hours you want.

There is no free time. You pay for all your time with your life. If you don’t use it, you lose it and all its effects: your income level, your health, and your relationships. In short, if you don’t value your time, no one else will.

It always intrigues me that people generally have no idea what their time is worth and how to increase its value. So the question is, “What is your time worth?” Do you know what your time is worth? Do you know how to value your time to achieve your income goals?

Unless you know the value of your time, your capability to make effective decisions on what you should or shouldn’t be doing, whether you should be delegating, is fatally compromised.

This exercise challenges your perception of the value of time. If you’re honest — and I hope for your sake you are — you get tremendous clarity about why you are or are not be making the kind of progress you want. You and I both know it’s easy to fall onto the trap of ‘everyday
life’.

Every year that passes is another year that we can end up drifting further and further away from the life we truly want. The seeds of doubt start creeping in. We think: maybe I was never meant to be a writer, maybe she never really loved me, or maybe I’ll never be able to lose this weight. Deep down we know what we’re capable of, but the idea of reaching that potential becomes a steeper and steeper hill to climb.

One lucky listener that posts a review on iTunes will win a private confidential consultation and coaching with me on discovering your soul’s purpose. I will lead you on a personal journey to discover your unique mind-body psychosomatic map of your life. You will get a detailed report and a personal 45 minute consultation with me that is worth thousands.

On this podcast I’m going to help you design a life that works. So you are able to say yes to the things that matter and eliminate everything else that slows you down. The more clear you can be about how to organize your daily life to support your bigger vision, the more you’ll step into your true potential, stay on track and accomplish all that you want and deserve. Are you ready to make that happen?

Feel free to reach out to me to ask your questions at AskDrSun.com. Your life is a gift. Design it. Do what matters and join me each week as we get closer to designing the life of your dreams. I am Dr Sun. Join me next week on Your Life by Design.

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