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You are here: Home / Archives for Self Growth

Self Growth

The Joy And Satisfaction Of Doing Work You Love

August 4, 2016 by Joi 1 Comment

“Life is difficult,” said M. Scott Peck in his classical book, A Road Less Traveled. “This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths,” he explains. “It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it.”

Despite your more than able mind, your open heart, and your best intentions, life can throw you an unexpected curveball. You might be inexplicably confronted with a chronic illness despite your best efforts to pursue a healthy lifestyle. You might get fired from a job because the company could not keep pace with the competition. And the love of your life might leave you for some petty reason.

These things happen. Bad things can happen to good people. While you may be true and brave with how you deal with everything, impeccable with your word and earnest in your efforts, essential aspects of your world could still slip into entropy.

The question is not how you can avoid all the chaos heading your way, stirred up by causes outside your control, but how, despite the unpredictability of the human condition, you can carve out a rich, happy, and fulfilling life.

Besides adopting the right attitude and practicing more wisdom and kindness in dealing with difficult people, the best answer might be finding work that you love.

The reason to focus on work as your weapon of choice in the battle for happiness is because that is where you spend most of your time. If you can find work that you love, then this will be time well spent.

Characteristics of Meaningful Work

For work to be meaningful, it has to provide you with some unique benefits. Without these benefits, the work is mere drudgery, a mechanical way of earning a paycheck and paying for your livelihood.

Here, then, are 3 essential characteristics of meaningful work reported by people who love what they do for a living:

  1. Contribution.

Contribution does not necessarily mean self-sacrifice for the sake of a noble ideal. Doctors, for example, are ranked as some of the highest paid and most admired professions in the world.

The medical field is all about contribution. It’s at the forefront of careers focused on making a positive difference to human beings. In this case, it seeks to alleviate human suffering caused by ill health.

However, becoming a doctor is not an easy route. The most formidable gateway to even getting started is the challenging MCAT exams. It’s all that stands between pre-med students with exemplary GPAs and medical school admissions. Fortunately, there are tutorial groups like Next Step Test Prep to help students pass the MCAT. Preparing on their own, students might not study the right materials or get stuck on comprehending some essential topics.

2. Creativity.

It’s almost impossible to stick with something for the long run if it is boring. When work is mechanical, repetitive, and predictable, it’s boring because it doesn’t stir human creativity.

Often people mistake a good job for a lucrative one, but if you are doing work that bores you to tears for the sake of a handsome paycheck you will neither be happy nor fulfilled.

Creative work, in contrast, increases your clarity, purpose, and joy. You feel motivated to solve problems, empowered by your knack for coming up with ingenious solutions, and encouraged enough by accumulating successes to gradually improve your performance.

Some ingredients of creativity are autonomy, complexity, and reward.

Autonomy is an essential aspect of creative work. Unless you are free to make decisions, you can’t be ingenious.

Complexity stirs interest. If something is too simple, it does not excite a need to come up with a new perspective, solution, or way of doing things.

Finally, the end product has to be rewarding. Rewards can be psychological, spiritual, or financial. There has to be some kind of payoff for the time and energy invested in a task.

Fortunately, in today’s knowledge economy, there are many opportunities for creative work, ranging from freelance writing to graphic design and from writing code to building a gorgeous website.

  1. Engagement.

Doing engaging work is a rarity. Only about 30 percent of American workers are engaged. The other 70 percent are either going through the motions (not engaged) or hate their jobs (actively disengaged.)

The best way to describe engaging work is to compare it to working with a jigsaw puzzle. In its initial stage, a puzzle is chaotic. Then, through patient application, you use intelligence to tame chaos, and what was once random information now expresses order and structure. Engagement, then, can be defined as the joy of putting things together  in better way than you originally found them.

A manager, for example, who takes a motley crew of workers and turns them into a collaborative team is turning chaos into order. For someone who loves encouraging people to excel, this whole process is engaging.

The Money Factor

It’s commonly assumed that the purpose of work is to earn money. This is not entirely true. Billionaire Warren Buffett is a perfect example of someone who works for the sheer fun of it. In fact, he jokes that he plans to retire 5 years after his death and run his business through a Ouija board. Meaningful work, then, is work that fulfills you on many levels. It’s a perfect vehicle for joyful self-expression.

 

About the Author: “I’m [David Jones] a creative blogger with five years of experience. I focus on travel, business, lifestyle, health and gaming related topics. I’m working with a team of writers and clients satisfaction is our core goal. I have contributed contents to many high quality sites including entrepreneur, huffington etc… .”

Filed Under: Articles by Various Authors, Mental Fitness, Self Growth

The One Superpower We All Have… The Power to Choose

July 26, 2016 by Joi Leave a Comment

Quote About Choices and Decisions
Who is your favorite superhero? Batman, Wonder Woman, Captain America, Thor, the Black Widow, Spiderman, Superman, Iron Man, Hawkgirl? With all due respect to all caped heroes and heroines, my top three are Hawkgirl, Iron Man, and Batman.  Though, after seeing the new trailer for Wonder Woman, I have a feeling my “top 3” is about to become a “top 4.”

That lasso, man.

We all love superheroes because they have this incredible amount of nobility and endless power they use for the good of mankind.

While we mere mortals may have varying degrees of nobility, we do have something in common with superheroes – we have our own superpower and can most certainly use it for good. This superpower is the power to choose.

I don’t know about you, but I often abuse my power. I am often confronted with two choices and exercise my superpower poorly by making the wrong choice.

We all struggle with the power to choose simply because we are, in fact, mere mortals.

Quote About Making Good Choices
Situation 1: We’re confronted by someone who is clearly in a bad mood. We have enough sense to SEE that but do we have enough sense to get out of the way? Not always. In fact, very often we charge right in, making a bad situation worse by responding to their harsh words with even harsher words. We take our power to choose and blow it to bits. In doing so, we take a bad situation and elevate it to a terrible situation – benefiting absolutely no one.

Situation 2: We can choose to take a walk or do a little yard-work – getting sunshine, fresh air, and exercise at one whack… or we can choose to stay inside and play a game online. How often do we make the wrong choice with this one? And let’s not even get into food choices!

Situation 3: We witness negativity and ugliness on social media. We can choose to rise above it and try to set an example for the immature mortals around us… OR we can get right down on their level and go toe to toe with them. When we make this poor choice, don’t we just increase the number of jackasses? 

The examples go on and on, but you get the idea. We have endless opportunities daily to exercise our superpower. The opportunities are so great that I’d never want to even attempt to count them. Our day is filled with moments and our moments are ripe with opportunities.

Life is the Sum of All Of Your Choices

How do we make better choices?

  1. The first step to making better choices is simply to acknowledge you are, in fact, making a choice. Take the first and last situations above, for example. If we were to train ourselves to be more mindful, we could train ourselves to pause before reacting to others. In that moment of pausing, we could then ask ourselves, “Is this the person I want to be? Do I want to mirror their behavior or aim higher than that?”
  2. The second step is to breath in, breath out and choose well. Ask yourself, which choice is “worthy of me?”  and which choice will “be best for me and others involved?” When it comes to most choices, the decision has to be made within seconds. You don’t always have time to sit down and write out a “Pros and Cons” outline (though I gotta admit, I love those). You have to recognize that you have a choice, then you have to make the one that is worthy of you, best for you, and best for everyone involved. Not the choice that feels good in the moment – but the one that’ll feel good after the moment has passed – because the rest of your life is a heck of a lot longer than that one moment.

If we were to acknowledge the power given to us each time we have a choice, perhaps we’d make smarter choices. Smarter choices = better life.

Wonder Woman would approve.

~ Joi (“Joy”)

Make Choices that are Worthy of Who You Are
 

 

Filed Under: Positive Thought, Problem Solving, Self Growth, Self Improvement Tagged With: choices, power to choose, self awareness, Self Help, self improvement

How to Write an Action Plan to Achieve Goals

June 13, 2016 by Joi Leave a Comment

Achieving Goals Infographic
When it comes to goals, a lot of people have a tendency to call them by the wrong name: dreams, hopes, wishes… While there’s nothing wrong with any of these words (personally, I’m smitten with each one), when we use words like this we kind of take ourselves out of the equation. Dreams, hopes, and wishes – they more or less indicate that success will come at random.

Just by wishing for it! 

While I’m all for positive thought and believe firmly that we can produce more positivity in our lives by first being positive, ourselves, good things do not just happen because we want them to. Work and/or prayer produce desired outcomes.. and when the two team up, look out.

The infographic, above, is on the same page I am.

  • Identify your Goal
  • Write it Down
  • Make a Plan
  • Carry it Out
  • See it Through
  • Drink Coffee (okay, I went a little off track – couldn’t help myself)
  • Keep Your Cool – the best things in life aren’t always easy to obtain. But, boy, are they worth it!

~ Joi

Source: WriteThisEssay.com

Filed Under: Infographics, Self Growth Tagged With: goal setting, goals, self help infographic, self improvement infographic

Spiritual Article: Are You Grieving God or Reflecting Him?

May 3, 2016 by Joi Leave a Comment

Beautiful Tree

I have always flirtted with the idea of creating and publishing a “Spiritual” blog. As a believer, I love the idea of writing articles and doing inspirational book reviews for other believers as well as those precious people who find themselves somewhere along the way between non-believer and believer. I often think of these people as believing, but not being entirely sure what they believe in.

What kind of Christian wouldn’t want to try to reach them?!?

To be honest with you, I’m still not 110 percent sure if I will create a separate blog for my Spiritual articles or if I’ll simply publish them here.  In the meantime, until my cats tell me which direction to take, I’m going to publish them here. If you ARE a Christian, would call yourself a “Believer,” or are simply an open-minded individual with more questions than answers, I hope you’ll get something from these articles.

I honestly don’t believe I have any Self Help Daily readers who are so close-minded that they’d object to these articles being interspersed with the rest of Self Help Daily’s content – but if I do, I might as well out them now.

“Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice.” – Ephesians 4: 30-31

I don’t have the qualifications (nor am I sure who would) to say whether we are or are not in what would Biblically be called the “final days.”  I do know that the final days are marked by a time when good is called bad and bad is called good.

I’ll just leave that for you to decide where we stand.

I’m also not going to wax judgmental about anyone or anything. God is much more interested in me keeping my eyes on Him. If He needed me to police other people, He would have told me so, Himself. He wants me to pray for others and I certainly do. He wants me to tell others about His Son and it’s my honor to do so. He wants me to do what’s right and to walk closely by Him. I set this as my purpose every single day.

But judge others? He simply doesn’t need my help in that area.

Here’s the thing. People all around us are engaging in all manners of craziness and, often, vileness. Crime is all around us and it’s not getting any better.  It often feels like the world has lost its collective mind, doesn’t it?! Political news, alone, can leave you convinced it’s the end of the world.

But, between you and me, you want to know what makes me sadder than just about anything? The fact that so many believers are grieving the Holy Spirit. I’m not making that call… God is.  In Ephesians, we’re told that when we allow bitterness, anger, and malice to rule our thoughts and heart, we GRIEVE the Holy Spirit.  We cause God to feel uneasy, possibly even sad, when we allow these negative emotions to identify us.

Is it natural to get angry when you read about violence or crime? Is it logical to feel downright ticked off to know that there are people out there who want men using the same restroom your daughters do? You bet! But if we allow ourselves to become so angry that negative thoughts and wrath are the norm with us, we GRIEVE the Holy Spirit.

We become our anger and that’s the last thing God wants to see.

Have you ever been in someone’s presence who was completely negative and even had an underlying anger that seemed to spill out of their pores?  Every word out of their mouth was gloom and doom and nothing suited them?  If you’ve been around someone like that, you know that it’s a relief when they walk away.  That is not the sort of person we want to spend time with, right?

So why would the Holy Spirit want to spend time with us when WE are the walking pile of anger? The situation is especially bad for Him because He’s stuck with us!

It’s only natural – in this day and time – to feel overwhelmed by what we see and hear. The only way to stay sane and to retain the calmness and self control God wants us to have is to spend time with Him. When you’re praying for others, don’t forget to pray for yourself. Ask for help in handling what you see around you. Ask Him to help you stay YOU and not become a bitter, angry, raging person that looks like you but no longer sounds like you.

Wouldn’t allowing the things you hate to make you just as ugly as they are be an unspeakable tragedy?

Sidestep anger, run away from bitterness, put aside slanderous & vengeful thoughts, and get back to you.

Don’t GRIEVE the Spirit… REFLECT Him

 “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,  gentleness and self-control.” – Galatians 5:22-23

Actionable Tips:

  • If social media causes you to feel especially angry, avoid it or at least limit your exposure.
  • If there are certain people on social media who cause you to feel as miserable as they apparently are… why are you following them?! Unfollow the perpetually negative crowd and follow people who are more upbeat and positive.
  • When you feel anger creeping up on you, read something or spend time with someone that’ll help you find peace again. Anger is not the problem – we all feel angry from time to time. Anger becomes a problem when it rules our world and dictates our thoughts.
  • If watching the news causes you to feel stressed out, consider watching it less regularly. A constant diet of negativity isn’t good for anyone.
  • Do a self inventory throughout the day and ask yourself if you’re grieving the Spirit or reflecting Him. 
  • Listen to yourself: When you’re talking to others, listen to your words and to the tone of your words. Are the majority of your words angry? Are you talking more about what’s ugly than you’re talking about what’s lovely? Remind yourself that this is not the person you want to be.
  • Do NOT allow the ugliness in the world to move into your heart and mind. Protect them with everything you’ve got. 

~ Joi (“Joy”)

Filed Under: Positive Thought, Self Growth, Spiritual Tagged With: Christian Living, Spiritual article

8 Ways to Conquer Self-Doubt (Infographic)

January 26, 2016 by Joi 3 Comments

Self Improvement Infographic: Risk Taking
How to start taking risks (and why you should do it) [Infographic] by the team at Vegas Extreme Skydiving
 

Filed Under: Infographics, Problem Solving, Self Growth Tagged With: Infographic, risk-taking, self improvement infographic

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