We need reward in our lives; this does not however and especially should not be, financially driven. If you make changes to your life in other areas such as thinking positive, creating lists, setting goals, I guarantee you that positive things will happen, put yourself in positive situations, surround yourself with positive people that want to achieve.... all this will lead to great prospects, to job satisfaction and happiness but as a net result of all that you will discover that you will be earning more money... just don’t let the money be the focus and the reason for doing something.
It’s important to have things that you enjoy doing to make all the ‘working’ worthwhile. These can be simple or not so simple pleasures... like treating yourself to a new item of clothing once a month (however cheap or expensive), buying CD's, taking your parents/close friend out for a drink, playing golf, sailing...whatever makes you happy.
Having these small but satisfying rewards will work towards inner peace as when we are doing these things, we forget about anything else and simply enjoy the moment, we relax, we don’t have a million things running around in our head to worry about...these things seem to drift away. so it’s important to have this kind of time to balance our work and social lives.
Without this kind of time, we end up feeling trapped inside our 4 walls.. thinking about things to much... and what we tend to find is that we focus on the negative things... why am I not in a relationship, why don't I have great career prospects, why don't I have the money I need to do the things I want to, why, why, why... a downward spiral of negative thoughts.
With that said, it is important to have some ‘alone’ time...but make sure you use this time in a positive way. Building plans, setting goals, or perhaps it can also be ‘relaxing time’, inside... or outside..it doesn’t matter. In this kind of environment, we have nobody asking us for our time, no one saying ‘can you just...’, ‘would you mind...’, ‘when can you...’...so how about you put on your favourite album.. put your phone on silent.. turn up the stereo.. lay on your sofa/bed...close your eyes... and just listen.. without any distractions..focus on the words..let yourself drift away and become enveloped by the artist.. imagine it's you singing live on stage...listen to the whole album from start to finish and see how you feel at the end.. I bet you feel calmer than you did before..
We must also give ourselves time to get the things done that are important to us and that are neccessary... Sometimes it seems like life is so hectic that we don’t get time to tend to our own ‘nest’. This can have a very negative effect on us... we want our home to be clean and tidy, we want some degree of order, we need the time to pay our bills, to go grocery shopping, to go shopping for clothes, to the doctors or where ever it may be....nothing should impact on this time (or at least it should rarely)... so plan ahead.. think about how your week ahead looks, write a list of what needs to be done this week and then plan ahead when you can fit them into your schedule so that you aren't running around at the last minute when deadlines are due...
A great way of giving ourselves a sense of achievement is to set life goals...a ‘bucket list’ if you like... things to do before you walk up the big white steps. Things that would give us great pleasure like, reducing golf handicap, driving a rally car, sky diving, driving an F1 car (these are some of mine as an example)....and I have found a great website to help keep a track of these .. http://www.my50.com/ you can set out your goals, give them a time frame, and complete them so you can keep track of your achievements. Another great site for understanding goal setting is http://www.mindtools.com/page6.html
Having regular pleasures and seeing a list of our achievements registers in our brain that we are on the right path, that things are going ok, that we are balancing our life, that we are getting reward for the effort we put in. Without these the question is raised ‘what is all this for?’... ‘why am I working so hard and seeing nothing for it?’.
So... make a start today... why put it off until tomorrow... visit the my50 website... and start to set out some goals... but make sure you also enter the things you've already achieved to get you going.. to show to yourself... you're doing just fine!
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