I figured out that saying “dig” in my head while working out is a great inspirational thing.  It is short, simple, and conveys so much in such a simple 3 letter word.  Dig for more energy, dig deeper into your reserves, dig in and push yourself further than you have before.  So now, while running or doing another set of boring reps on the weight machine, my new mantra is “dig”.

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1) Set Goals

if you don’t have goals for yourself, then there is no way to judge if you are doing good or not.  It is much too easy to let things go without having the focus that a goal gives you.  What ever you decide on for a goal, it should be something tangible and it helps immensely to write them down or document them somehow.  Having a goal of “lose weight” is no good.  A goal of “lose 15 pounds” is better, and “lose 15 pounds in the next 6 months” is even better.  Make sure you quantify your goals, put them in writing, and set a time limit if you can.

2) Do it for Yourself

While doing things to please other people, or for some outside motivation can work sometimes, the only way to truly create good habits is to do it for yourself.  You need to own the task and make it fully yours.  Don’t work on losing weight because your partner wants you to; if you really and truly want to lose weight make it your task.  This gives you not only ownership and power, but it also takes away an easy scapegoat.  By being responsible to yourself you take away the possibility of blaming someone else if you fail.  If you don’t really want it for yourself, then maybe it isn’t right and you should rethink what you are doing.  You can always revisit your ideas in the future if you come to truly want to do it for yourself.

3) Be Consistent

This is really the nature of habits.  Make it habitual and create a rhythm and pattern.  Figure out a weekly schedule for exercise and stick with it.  This also applies to building on your successes, or consistently improving.  If you haven’t exercised in a while, it is much better to start slow and consistently build on that.  If you get out and run one time a week, do that for a month and then add a second day so you are running twice a week.  Be consistent about what you are doing and about building on your habits.

4) Make Your Good Habits Easy

Now this tip is more accurately “make your good habits as easy as possible” because what ever you are working on probably isn’t easy. So do what you can to make your activity as easy as possible. For example, find the best time of day for you to exercise.  If you can get up early and exercise – and it leaves you feeling good all day – then do that.  On the flip side, if you find yourself eating in front of the TV at night, change that routine and maybe exercise in the evening.  Also, try to string things together.  My gym is close to my kid’s school, so when I bring them to school I go dressed to exercise and work out on the way back.  Find simple things that you can change to make the habits easier.

5) Remind yourself Why

When you are in the middle of another set of crunches and you really don’t want to continue, it is hard to see the forest of why you are doing this.  Take time to reflect and continually renew why you are doing what you are working so hard on.  This can be reflecting back on the goals (you did set up goals, right?!), or reflecting on why you made this commitment to yourself.  Whether it is for a healthier, slimmer body, or feeling better about the way you look, it is vitally important to remind yourself why.

Do these tips apply to your situation?  Got a tip yourself or an interesting way you applied these?  Be sure and let me know.

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Life is Now

In reality shows like Survivor, they have an intense experience with a group of people, and when it is all done they have the reunion show where everybody (mostly) gets along and they can rehash what a great experience it was.  Life isn’t like that.  There will be no reunion show.  Life is the show.  What you are doing right this moment is your life and it is defining who you are.  Are you happy with it?  Do you want to change?  What is stopping you?

Later isn’t Guaranteed

There are too many things on my to-do list that I have put off until “later”, but the reality is that there is no guarantee that we will have a “later”.  If you died today, what would you regret not doing?  If you have an answer to that, you should work on making it happen now instead of later.

Constant is Artificial

We tend to create an artificial sense of constancy and consistency in our lives.  By creating routines and patterns, many going back years, we create a feeling that life is constant.  It is anything but constant.  It is an ever changing and evolving thing and that is exactly why life is such a beautiful thing.  Embracing the change and evolution is another big way to life now.

Logan Challenge

Today’s Logan challenge is to find one thing in life that has been lingering on your to-do list and do it today.  Don’t save it for tomorrow, or later, do it today.  It can be something as simple as cleaning the bathroom, or as huge as moving to a new country.  Use this one thing to start a positive motion for you.

Make sure you leave me comments on what you plan on doing, or your own helpful tips for self-motivation.

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The blog is official now – I have completed the incorporation of this blog, so please welcome Lopaul Industries, LLC to life!  I want this to be more than a casual hobby, so I committed to making it a business and have begun investing in it and treating it as a business entity.

Look for new and current posts.  I have a notebook full of ideas and a number of draft posts already in progress.  I also have exciting ideas about how I can help my readers with motivation and inspiration.  Please stay tuned as I kick this thing into high gear and start cranking things out.

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Tracking Books

For quite a while now I have been wanting to keep track of the books I read so recently I went looking for software or a website to keep track. I found a few good websites. My favorite is goodreads.com. It is free to sign up for an account and can easily track books. It has “shelves” which you can assign books to. By default you have a “read”, “reading”, and “want to read” shelf. You can add your own named shelves such as “I own it” or and other category you want to track.  There are a few other free websites so be sure to look around if this doesn’t fit what you want.  For software, I really didn’t find anything good – most people just suggested keeping an Excel spreadsheet like I do for my biking log.

iPhone Notes

I love carying my iPhone with me because I always have a place to jot down thoughts.  The Notes program is perfect for miscellaneous thoughts, ideas, or things to follow up on later.  You can even sync Notes with your Mac so you have them available on your computer.  This is a two step process:

1. In iTunes with your iPhone connected, in the left panel select your iPhone under Devices.  Then select the Info tab and scroll down until you see Notes and check the box that says “Sync notes”.  Now click Sync in the lower right corner and it should sync the notes onto your computer. Tip: the computer may warn you with a scary-sounding message like “this will change over 50% of the notes on your computer.  Are you sure you want to continue?”.  If you don’t have any notes already on your computer, this is perfectly normal and safe to continue.
2. The notes actually appear in the Mac Mail program.  If you don’t have Mail set up, you will have to do that now to be able to see your notes.  Once configured, the notes appear in the left pane under Reminders, Notes with the first line of the note appearing like the subject of an email, and then the entire note appearing in the email body section.  Very handy!

I hope you enjoyed these additional tracking tips.  I really like having an accumulation of data over time.  It is great to analyze for future reference, and also just to refer back to since it is so hard to remember everything.  Let me know if you have other data that you like to track or have found good methods.

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