It is already only February, but apparently, 99% of us have already broken our new year’s resolutions… but it’s not too late, you can start again and use these 5 tips to take it more seriously this time!

Like others you’ve set yourself some goals that you want to achieve by the end of 2013 but unlike 99% of other people and unlike last year you want to stick to these goals.

Well, there are many things you can do to help yourself to stick to your goals but five of the really best things to do are:

1. Be Very Specific

If you really want to achieve something it’s important that you be very specific. For example if you want to make more money make sure you know exactly how much more money you want to make or if you want to lose weight like many people do then you need to know how much weight you want to have lost by the end of the year.

2. Add Emotion To Your Goals

Us humans act on emotion, it’s important then that you tie emotion to your goals. So, if you do want to lose weight then think about the reasons why you are losing weight, maybe it’s because you want to be more attractive to the opposite sex or you want to be able to run around with your children.

3. Use The Power of Visualization

A study was once done where a basketball team was divided into three groups and one group practiced their free throws and also spent time visualizing themselves free throwing, the second group just visualized and the third group just practiced the free throws and did no visualizing.

The results of the study showed that the group that visualized and practiced improved the most and that the group who did just the visualizing improved better than the group who did nothing but practice.

I’m sure you can see then that the power of visualization can really help you to achieve your goals. Make sure then that you take time each day to really picture yourself achieving your goals, and don’t make these visualization mistakes – the more feeling and emotion you can insert the better!

Take a look at our affirmations for visualizing to improve your visualization skills!

4. Make Use of Positive Affirmations

How you think determines what you will get in life. To achieve your goals then it’s important that you think in a way that allows you to achieve them and that can be done by using the power of positive affirmations.

Positive affirmations are positive statements that describe the person you want to be and what you do is you take these affirmations and you repeat them aloud at least twice a day and what happens is eventually the way you think starts to change and you end up with a mindset that is much more conductive to you living the life you want.

5. Tell a Friend

Make yourself accountable by telling a friend what your goals and ambitions are. When we keep them to ourselves and we don’t follow through then no one knows, we don’t lose face..

However, if you tell other people, then they will check on you, you increase your accountability and add extra pressure to perform, to stick to your goals and to reach your destination.

It is probably no surprise that a lot of people choose the path of meditation for self-discovery. There are many reasons why meditation can help people reflect with more clarity. Meditation allows the mind and the body to relax and that helps in introspecting about life and the world immensely.

While there are several ways that you can meditate to embark on the path of understanding yourself, the most common remain to be reflection and relaxation. Whatever way you approach meditation, you need to be in a quiet and peaceful place where you can be disturbed by no distractions.

History of Meditation

Meditation is an ancient art and has been practiced over centuries for introspection and analysis of human thought and emotion. It is easy to ignore the importance of spending time with yourself in the hassle of everyday life and to discover your feelings and needs. Incidents and situations often trigger us to make hasty and rash judgments about life without any reasoning.

More often than not, we only realize that we have been wrong due to poor understanding. The importance of the basic philosophical question of “Know Thyself” is often emphasized but not often understood. But is knowing yourself easy, or even possible? Meditation is one way to reach your destination.

But there is not one way to approach meditation and the history of meditation in the West and the East is diverse. However, there is one factor common in all forms of meditation and that is solitude.

The Bible has been a central part of the Western religion and it emphasizes the need of long meditation and praying for answers with perseverance. The disciple Paul shows the way by emphasizing the need of meditating on what he called the deeper things for enlightenment.

Eastern cultures not only rely on silence, but also on word for meditation. A good example is the Buddhists who meditate by repeatedly chanting “N’am Yoho Renge Kyo” in order to purge unnecessary and vile thoughts from their natural minds. According to the teachings of Buddha, the meditating soul can reach the truth in this state.

Another example was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Indian spiritual teacher who was popularized in the West in the ‘60s. He preached that just a single word “Om” was enough for concentration in meditation. He said that chanting this word repeatedly will transcend the one who meditates to an enlightened state from the ordinary material life.

No matter what form, meditation can offer great help in reflecting over life, its problems and the important decisions that make their solutions. Meditation helps reduce hasty and rash decision through the reflection and understanding it involves. To meditate is to ponder and to ponder is to introspect. This involves thorough and concentrated understanding of a person’s nature and desires. There is no wonder why people feel so relaxed and rejuvenated after meditation.

The Right Way to Meditate

You don’t really need to enquire about what particular form of meditation to follow in order to practice it. Just follow basic guidelines such as finding a peaceful and quiet place where nothing or no one could distract you. Meditation requires complete attention and you don’t want your attention diverted elsewhere.

Once you find yourself in the right kind of environment, meditating is actually pretty simple. When you find yourself relaxed enough to concentrate properly, start asking yourself a series of questions. Questions such as what is the most important to you, what do you love doing the most and what do you think about a certain part of your life.

Never move on to the next question without finding an answer and don’t try too hard to find the answer. Instead, rely on the first word that comes to your mind about something. You would have seen on media or would have played yourself the game of saying the first word that comes to your mind about someone or something. This is called Word Association and if offers great insight into the deepest thoughts and desires of a person.

Carry on the series of questioning while keeping your mind relaxed, starting with the simplest. Ask yourself about what you love to eat and what kind of movies interest you and then move on to the next level, that is, the questions that really matter to your life. Ask yourself what you really want to do and achieve in your life. Ask yourself about your career, your family and things you have never done but want to try. Ask yourself how happy you are and how do you see money influencing your life.

Confronting these questions will enable you to reflect more clearly on any decisions that you need to make about important issues in your life. But don’t just expect everything to get sorted overnight. Meditation is a process and over time it will start helping you out with developing clarity about what is important to your life.

Consistency for Effectiveness

Meditation can work wonders for you as far as knowing yourself is concerned but it is not magic. Don’t just expect everything in your life to fix itself through meditation. For results, you would need to be consistent and organized in your meditation.

Make sure that you write down your findings after each meditation session and do it right away while all the answers are fresh in your memory. Build on these answers in the next session. Don’t jump to making a decision after just one session. Reading your answers can immensely help you in making the right decision about an issue.

Frequency of Meditation

The right frequency of meditation entirely depends on you, considering how much you can manage in your schedule. Some people can meditate for more than one session a day, while the others cannot.

However, it also depends upon your commitment to meditation and how strongly you want to resolve certain issues in your life for which you seek the assistance for decision making. Speaking of decision making, never reach a conclusion before sitting through at least 5 to 6 sessions, with the rate of at least one session a day.

Spending several sessions on a particular decision would help bring out feedback from various aspects of your personality. This will particularly be helpful if you are uncertain about a decision and if you consider necessary, then you should meditate on the issue for an even longer time.

Since meditation helps you know yourself better, it would improve your quality of life in many ways. Meditation will sharpen your memory, improve your social and cognitive skills, allow better control over your emotions and improve your decision making power.

Meditation can certainly change your life for the better but all it requires is intent and action.

Coming to know yourself well can only improve your relational skills, improve your memory, calm your emotions and help you to make sound decisions. You will find that, over time, it will yield a lot of improvement in how you think and feel. Meditation is a wonderful self-improvement tool.

This is a Guest Post from Abtruse.net

For more information on meditation, reiki, chakras, spirituality and metaphysics, please visit:

http://www.abstruse.net

I’m a big personal development fan, I read books, I listen to audio, I just LOVE the fact that we can learn about our mind, that we can identify how we are thinking and why.. and then change the way we think for a more positive outcome in our live

s. I read these books quite a long time ago, they were what really inspired me to purse self improvement and pursue a life of my own design..

.. so, positive affirmations and these books changed my life, and now I want to share them with you too in hope that you will read them and get some inspiration too 🙂

1. Think and Grow Rich – Napoleon Hill

Think and grow rich was the book which first really opened my eyes to a different way of thinking. It was the first personal development book I read and it started me on my path.

It opened my mind to consider how other people think, how successful people think, and how we are actually a product of our thoughts, and if we can take control of our thoughts we can change our lives.

It especially highlighted to me that there are patterns to how successful people think, and that I too could learn these patterns, think more like this and apply these principles into my life.. that these successful people aren’t really much different to me, and I can think like them and become successful too. It made success go from seeming unobtainable or far off in the distance, to something I could simply set my mind to, work towards and achieve.

Think and grow rich also has a TON of actionable steps, methods, things to do.. it is not just an inspiring book, it actually gives you the steps (which other successful people have used) which will help you to change your thoughts and think yourself rich.

Oh, and it was such an inspiration to me that of course I made my own think and grow rich affirmations too 😉

2. How to Win Friends and Influence People – Dale Carnegie

When I first started out in my career and business I read this book. I have now read it FOUR times. It is my favorite self improvement book because of this, in-fact I haven’t read any other books four times!

Again it is a transformational book. It changes the way you see other people and how you deal with them. As you are reading you’re not just thinking “hmm, I might try that, I wonder if it would work”.. you can plainly see that the techniques will work..

.. That they will help you to persuade and influence, to make friends, to make yourself memorable, to avoid conflict, to win people over to your way of thinking, to get people to do things, to motivate people, even to turn potential enemies into allies.

I can’t count the number of times I have used the principles from this book, and if you practice them regularly then they do become part of who you are and you find yourself with much more natural social and interpersonal skills.

In my opinion this is a must for anyone in business, or just anyone concerned to improve their social skills and social life. Oh, and yes, I also wrote some how to win friends and influence people affirmations 🙂

The Alchemist – Paolo Coelho

The Alchemist is a little different from most “self help” books in that it is a story book.

It follows a shepherd named Santiago in his journey to Egypt, after having a recurring dream of finding treasure there. Along the way, he encounters love, danger, opportunity, disaster and learns a lot about himself and the ways of the world.

I love this book so much as even if you are not a natural reader, or often buy a self help book only to be bored by it, this is a super easy read. You can read it quickly, and it is so enjoyable. The characters come to life and it is a really interesting and often exciting story.

The other reason I love it is because it is a self improvement book in disguise. Along the way Santiago learns many life lessons about continuing through failure, persistence, setting a goal and following it. You basically get a look into the success mindset as someone else goes on an adventure and follows their dreams.

This book will leave you feeling warm and inspired, you will feel like life is easy, that you can follow your dreams too and it will give you the map of your mind and how to do it. Please read this book 🙂

I don’t have any Alchemist inspired affirmations.. yet 😉

If you have read any of these 3 books too then please leave a comment and tell me what you thought, or maybe you have another favorite book, please tell us what it is and why in the comments below.