We come into this world alone and we leave alone. We alone are answerable for the life we choose to live, jet so many define themselves through  other people – their spouses, their children,  their heroes – that they lose themselves and their own unique purpose in the process.

people become so dependent on others that they are unable to function alone. Many people can’t even bear to be alone for more than a few minutes. Nothing is for ever and the one thing you can rely on in life is that things change – circumstances, people, the environment we live in. Your inner strength and sense of independence will help see you through the problems and challenges of life.

Seek time to be alone every day and to contemplate your goals and direction in life. We often make ourselves to busy with daily “stuff to do”  and coping with the demands of other people to do the most important thing of all – to be still and listen with our intuition to our true inner being. And finally,  in order to have self-respect and stay independent you need to know your differences from others, you are unique and nobody like you. You’ve got personality, talents, abilities that’s  what makes you different from others. Don’t be afraid to be yourself, speak boldly and show that you have your own opinion and  that you are not afraid of being confronted with different opinion. People will start to have more and more  respect for you for being yourself and having your own opinion. Don’t expect that people will tap over your shoulder for having your own opinion or not having your own opinion, but at the end of the day being yourself and having your own opinion and not being afraid to share with others what you think it will make you much happier and you will understand that until you will start to have self-respect for yourself nobody will.

We often rely on our logical minds when we really should listen to the small voice inside us, which is aligned with our principles and will always do what is right for us. How often has your intuition prompted  you to do something that turned out to be a fabulous opportunity , or started off series of coincidences that led to worthwhile changes in your life? We all have intuition or gut feelings about things, yet often it is difficult to recognize this as our heads are full of instructions from other people.

Many of them are negative and detrimental to us, yet have become embroiled in our minds and indistinguishable from our own true feelings. We need to learn to stop and listen to our own inner voice, clear of all the clutter. You have to   just  “be” for a while. You could call it meditation, but it is essentially just stopping the noise in your head in order to get in touch with your true self. It is getting into the gap between your thoughts.

It is not always easy at first since we are not used to listening to our “inner guide”, but it does get less hard with practice. If you have decisions to make and are not sure what to do or can’t decide what direction to take, think it through and consider all your options, then turn it over to your subcnscious mind and listen to your intuition. It will almost invariably be right.  Sometimes we can go round in circles with reasoning and tie ourselves up in knots trying to work things out logically. Try simply trusting your gut instincts.

Find some space in your day to be alone – a special place where you won’t be disturbed by anyone or anything.  Just take some time every day to quietly sit alone, close your eyes, and silence your mind. As you sit peacefully, think of black velvet or concentrate your thoughts on a candle flame. After around 20 minutes or so you may start to get a feeling about something, which is your intuition starting to guide you. Sometimes you will get answers very clearly. The more you practice, the more you will recognize your intuition.

Learn to notice the feelings you get in your body in response to people, situations or your own thoughts. Intuition is definitely time related, and we get feelings about things only as we need them. How often have you said, “If only I would done that when I first thought of it; now it’s too late”?

All great thinkers spend time alone in contemplation and listen to their intuition. Get into the habit of listening to your “inner guide” and learn to trust your gut feelings. As you practice and prove that your intuition was right, you will come to rely on it more and more as a compass to your  “true north” and a guide to making decisions in your life.

Let’s say that you set a goal to sell a certain amount or earn a certain amount of income in a given year. If you break that down into monthly and weekly goals, and then you achieve the first of those goals, you will feel great about yourself. Each time you reach another milestone, your self-esteem and ability to perform will
increase, and you will feel encouraged and enthusiastic about the next challenge.

4. The fourth element of self-esteem is comparison with others. Leon Festinger of Harvard University concluded that in determining how well we are doing, we do not
compare ourselves with abstract standards, but, rather, we compare ourselves with people we know. To feel like a winner, you must know for sure that you are doing as
well as or better than someone else. The more you know about how well the others in your field are doing, and the more favorably you compare with them, the more
you will feel like a winner, and the higher your self-esteem will be.

Successful people continually compare themselves with other successful people. They think about them and read about them and study their performances, and then
they work to surpass them one step at a time. Eventually, successful people reach the point where they compete only with themselves and with their past accomplishments.

But this comes after they have moved to the top and left many of their competitors behind.

5. The next element for self-esteem is recognition of your accomplishments by people whom you respect. To feel really great about yourself, you need the recognition of people you look up to and admire, such as your boss, your coworkers, your spouse and people in your social circle. Whenever you are recognized and praised for any accomplishment by someone whose opinion you hold in high regard, your self-esteem goes up, along with your eagerness and enthusiasm to do even better on the job.

6. The final element of self-esteem involves rewards that are consistent with your accomplishments. You may work in a field where you receive financial bonuses, status symbols—larger offices, bigger cars—or even plaques and trophies for superior achievement. All of those symbols can have an incredible impact on raising your self-esteem and causing you to feel terrific about yourself.

If, however, your existing situation does not offer the tangible or intangible rewards that are necessary for you to build and maintain your self-esteem, you must create rewards for yourself. One of the smartest things you can do is to design a system for giving yourself rewards for both small and large accomplishments as you move progressively toward your goals. For example, people who do telephone prospecting will often treat themselves to a cup of coffee after every 10 calls.

After 25 calls, they will reward themselves with a walk around the building or the block. After 50 calls, they will go out to lunch. Each of those rewards serves as an incentive that motivates them to repeat the performance. The end result is success, enthusiasm, and high self-esteem.

Whether or not your current environment provides the six elements of self-esteem building—goals, standards, success experiences, comparison with others, recognition, and rewards—you need to establish your own structure and take full responsibility for building yourself up on a regular basis. Of course, it is possible to like yourself in the abstract, to think of yourself as a valuable and worthwhile person, but this tends to be a very shaky form of self-esteem that is easily knocked down by a negative experience or a temporary disappointment.

The only real way for you to absolutely know that you are a valuable and worthwhile person is for you to make the effort, overcome the obstacles and pay the price to bring these elements into your life. When you have that foundation, you will experience a form of mental fitness and unshakable optimism that will sustain you through failure and propel you to success.

Everything that you do or say or think will affect your self-esteem. Your job, therefore, is to keep your self-esteem high and positive on a continuing basis. Probably the best definition of self-esteem is this: the level to which you respect and value yourself as an important, worthwhile person. People with high self-esteem feel terrific about themselves and their lives. When you feel really good about yourself, you tend to be the very best person you can possibly be.

Your level of self-esteem is really your level of “mental fitness.” It’s a measure of how healthy, hardy, and resilient you are in dealing with the inevitable ups and downs of daily life. Your self-esteem determines how much peace of mind and inner contentment you experience. It is also closely linked to your health and levels of energy. People with high self-esteem are seldom sick and seem to have an inexhaustible flow of energy and enthusiasm that progressively moves them toward their goals.

How much you like and respect yourself also determines the quality of your relationships with people. The more you like and enjoy yourself, the more you will like and enjoy others, and the more they will like you. In fact, when your self-esteem is hurt in any way, the very first thing that is affected is the way you get along with people.

To perform at your best and to feel terrific about yourself, you should be in a perpetual state of self-esteem building and maintenance. Just as you take responsibility for your level of physical fitness, you need to take complete responsibility for the content and quality of your mind.

There are 6 basic elements of building self esteem.

I have discovered a simple formula that contains all the critical elements of self esteem building, and you can use it on a regular basis to assure maximum performance.
This formula is comprised of six basic elements. They are: goals, standards, success experiences, comparison with others, recognition, and rewards. Let’s take them one at a time.
1. How much you like and respect yourself is directly affected by your goals. The very act of setting big, challenging goals for yourself and making written plans of action to achieve them actually raises your self-esteem, which causes you to feel much better about yourself.

Self-esteem is a condition you experience when you are moving step-by-step toward the accomplishment of something that is important to you. For that reason, it’s really important to have clear goals for each part of your life and to continually work toward achieving those goals. Each progressive step causes your self-esteem to go up and makes you feel more positive and effective in everything else you do.

2. The second element in self-esteem building is having clear standards and values to which you are committed. Men and women with high self-esteem are very clear
about what they believe in. The higher your values and ideals are, and the more committed you are to living your life consistent with those values and ideals, the more you will like and respect yourself, and the higher your self-esteem will be. Lasting self-esteem comes only when your goals and your values are congruent— that is, when they fit into each other like a hand into a glove. Much of the stress that people experience comes from believing one thing and trying to do another.

But when your goals and values are in harmony with each other, you feel a wonderful surge of energy and well-being, and that’s when you start to make real progress. Many people tell me that they are unhappy with their job because they can’t seem to achieve success no matter how hard they try. I always ask them if they are doing what they really care about and believe in. In many cases, people realize that they are not happy with their job because it is the wrong kind of work for them.

Once they change jobs and start doing something that they really enjoy, something that is more consistent with their innermost convictions, they start to make real progress and get a lot of satisfaction out of their work.

The first area of integrity has to do with your relationships with your family and your friends, the people close to you. Being true to yourself means living in truth with each person in your life. It means refusing to say or do something that you don’t believe is right. Living in truth with other people means that you refuse to stay in any situation where you are unhappy with the behavior of another person. You refuse to tolerate it. You refuse to compromise.

Psychologists have determined that most stress and negativity comes from attempting to live in a way that is not congruent with your highest values. It is when your life is out of alignment⎯when you are doing and saying one thing on the outside, but really feeling and believing something different on the inside⎯that you feel most unhappy. When you decide to become an individual of character and integrity, your first action will be to neutralize or remove all difficult relationships from your life.

This doesn’t mean that you have to go and hit somebody over the head with a stick. It simply means that you honestly confront another person and tell them that you are not happy. Tell them that you would like to reorganize this relationship so that you feel more content and satisfied. If the other person is not willing to make adjustments so that you can be happy, it should be clear to you that you don’t want to be in this relationship much longer anyway.

The second area of integrity has to do with your attitude and behavior toward money. Casualness toward money brings casualties in your financial life. You must be fastidious about your treatment of money, especially other people’s money. You must guard your credit rating the same way you would guard your honor. You must pay your bills punctually, or even early. You must keep your promises with regard to your financial commitments.

The third area of integrity has to do with your commitments to others, especially in your business, your work and your sales activities. Always keep your word. Be a
man or a woman of honor. If you say that you will do something, do it. If you make a promise, keep it. If you make a commitment, fulfill it. Be known as the kind of person that can be trusted absolutely, no matter what the circumstances. Your integrity is manifested in your willingness to adhere to the values you hold most dear. It’s easy to make promises and hard to keep them, but if you do, every single act of integrity will make your character a little stronger. And as you improve the quality and strength of your character, every other part of your life will improve as well.

Likewise, integrity is the number one quality of leadership. Integrity in leadership is expressed in terms of constancy and consistency. It is manifested in an absolute devotion to keeping one’s word. The glue that holds all relationships together—including the relationship between the leader and the led—is trust, and trust is based on integrity. Integrity is so important that functioning in our society would be impossible without it. We could not make even a simple purchase without a high level of confidence that the price was honest and that the change was correct. The most successful individuals and companies in America are those with reputations of high integrity among everyone they deal with. This level of integrity builds the confidence that others have in them and enables them to do more business than their competitors whose ethics may be a little shaky.

Earl Nightingale once wrote, “If honesty did not exist, it would have to be invented, as it is the surest way of getting rich.” A study at Harvard University concluded that the most valuable asset that a company has is how it is known to its customers⎯its reputation. By the same token, your greatest personal asset is the way that you are known to your customers. It is your personal reputation for keeping your word and fulfilling your commitments. Your integrity precedes you and affects all of your interactions with other people.

There are several things you can do to move you more rapidly toward becoming the kind of person that you know you are capable of becoming. The first, as I mentioned, is to decide upon your five most important values in life. Organize them in order of priority. Then write a brief paragraph defining what each of those values means to you. A value combined with a definition becomes an organizing principle⎯a statement that you can use to help you make better decisions. It is a measure and standard which enables you to know how closely you are adhering to your innermost beliefs and convictions.

The second step to developing integrity and character in yourself is to study men and women of great character. Study the lives and stories of people like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Florence Nightingale, Susan B. Anthony and Margaret Thatcher. Study the people whose strength of character enabled them to change their world. As you read, think about how they would behave if they were facing the difficulties that you face. Napoleon Hill, in his book, The Master Key to Riches, tells about how he created an imaginary board of personal advisors made up of great figures of history.

He chose people like Napoleon, Lincoln, Jesus, and Alexander the Great. Whenever he had to make a decision, he would relax deeply and then imagine that the members of his advisory council were sitting at a large table in front of him. He would then ask them what he should do to deal effectively with a particular situation. In time, they would begin to give him answers, observations, and insights that helped him to see more clearly and act more effectively.

You can do the same thing. Select someone that you very much admire for their qualities of courage, tenacity, honesty, or wisdom. Ask yourself, “What would Jesus do in my situation?” or, “What would Lincoln do if he were here at this time?” You will find yourself with guidance that enables you to be the very best person that you can possible be.

The third and most important step in building your integrity has to do with formulating your approach based on the psychology of human behavior. We know that if you feel a particular way, you will act in a manner consistent with that feeling. For example, if you feel happy, you will act happy. If you feel angry, you will act angry. If you feel courageous, you will act courageously.
But we also know that you don’t always start off feeling the way you want to. However, because of the Law of Reversibility, if you act as if you had a particular feeling, the action will generate the feeling consistent with it. You can, in effect, act your way into feeling.

You can “fake it until you make it.” You can become a superior human being by consciously acting exactly as the kind of person that you would most like to become. If you behave like an individual
of integrity, courage, resolution, persistence and character, you will soon create within yourself the mental structure and habits of such a person. Your actions will become your reality. You will create a personality that is consistent with your highest aspirations. The more you walk, talk, and behave consistent with your highest values, the more you will like yourself and the better you will feel about yourself. Your self image will improve and your level of self-acceptance will go up. You will feel stronger, bolder, and more capable of facing any challenge.

To be impeccably honest with others, you must first be impeccably honest with yourself. You must be true to yourself. You must be true to the very best that is in you, to the very best that you know. Only a person who is living consistent with his or her highest values and virtues is really living a life of integrity. And when you commit to living this kind of life, you will find yourself continually raising your own standards, continually refining your definition of integrity and honesty.

You can tell how high your level of integrity is by simply looking at the things you do in your day-to-day life. You can look at your reactions and responses to the inevitable ups and downs of life. You can observe the behaviors you typically engage in and you will then know the person you are. The external manifestation of high integrity is high-quality work. A person who is totally honest with himself or herself will be someone who does, or strives to do, excellent work on every occasion. The totally honest person recognizes, sometimes unconsciously, that everything he or she does is a statement about who he or she really is as a person.

When you start a little earlier, work a little harder, stay a little later and concentrate on every detail, you are practicing integrity in your work. And whether you know it or not, your true level of integrity is apparent and obvious to everyone around you. Perhaps the most important rule you will ever learn is that your life only becomes better when you become better.

All of life is lived from the inside out. At the very core of your personality lie your values about yourself and life in general. Your values determine the kind of person you really are. What you believe has defined your character and your personality. It is what you stand for, and what you won’t stand for, that tells you and the world the kind of person you have become. Ask yourself this question: What are your five most important values in life? Your
answer will reveal an enormous amount about you. What would you pay for, sacrifice for, suffer for and even die for? What would you stand up for, or refuse to lie down for? What are the values that you hold most dear? Think these questions through carefully and, when you get a chance, write down your answers.

Here’s another way of asking that question. What men and women, living or dead, do you most admire? Once you pick three or four men or women, the next question is: Why do you admire them? What values, qualities, or virtues do they have that you respect and look up to? Can you articulate those qualities? What is a quality possessed by human beings in general that you most respect? This is the starting point for determining your values. The answers to these questions form the foundation of your character and your personality. Once you have determined your five major values, you should now organize them in order of importance.

What is your first, most important value? What is your second value? What is your third value? And so on. Ranking your values is one of the very best and fastest ways to define your character. Remember, a higher order value will always take precedence over a lower order value. Whenever you are forced to choose between acting on one value or another, you always choose the value that is the highest on your own personal hierarchy. Who you are, in your heart, is evidenced by what you do on a day-to-day basis, especially when you are pushed into a position where you have to make a choice between two values or alternatives.

An important corollary of physiology is congruency. If I’m giving you what I think is a positive message-like “I can handle it”-but my voice is weak and tentative and my shoulders are hunched over and my eyes are down, I’m incongruent, and your unconscious mind will pick up what your conscious mind didn’t, and you won’t feel confident about my ability. Unconsciously you know that part of me believes I can handle it; and part of me doesn’t. I am representing one thing in words and quite another in physiology. But if you say, “I absolutely will do that,” and your physiology is unified-that is, your posture, your facial expression, your breathing pattern, the quality of your gestures and movements, and your words and your tonality match-I know you absolutely will do it. One of the best ways to develop congruency is to model the physiologies of people who are congruent-people you respect and admire-watch them in person, or get videotapes of famous people in resourceful states you might want to model.
Remember, modeling is about creating possibility. And there’s no faster, more dynamic way than through physiology.

Here are some action exercises that will help you to develop habits to become more positive  and  productive,

1. Always look for ways to say something nice, uplifting to a person that makes him feel good,because remember what I have said before,every time you say something nice to others,you yourself will feel better and happier,that’s how it works.

2. Use self talk,and remind yourself every time,that you want to be a nice,kind and easy going person that everyone wants to be around.  And then,look for opportunities to do that. May goodness and kindness be guides of your day.

3.  Develop the habit of working well with others; always be looking for ways to contribute, to help others to do their jobs better and faster.

4.  Determine what you find easy to learn and easy to do, and what you most enjoy doing at work; find a job doing more of that.
5.  Identify your unique talents and abilities, and dedicate yourself to becoming absolutely excellent in those areas.
6.  Work all the time you work; when you start earlier, work harder and stay later, you quickly separate yourself from all the others.
7. Get the job done fast! The faster you move, the more energy you have, the more you get done, and the faster you will be paid more and promoted to higher levels of responsibility.

“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”
Eleanor Roosevelt

Never forget the person you want to become.

Good Luck and God Bless You!

There are more than 100,000 different jobs and job categories in the United States alone. There are an unlimited number of things that you can do to earn a good living and to achieve financial independence. You must therefore develop the habit of thinking about the work that you would most love to do. Instead of accepting whatever job or position comes along, you should be continually thinking about your ideal job, exactly as if you could design it personally in every respect. The highest paid and most successful people in our society do what they love to do, as much of the time as they possibly can. You should continually be standing back, examining yourself objectively, and then practicing the habit of focusing on your special talents and abilities. Each person is born with the ability to do one or more things in an exceptional fashion. Just as you have multiple intelligences, you have multiple abilities as well. You will only really be happy and successful when you find the kind of work that taps into the unique talents you have today, or which you can develop tomorrow.

Dr. Victor Frankl, the founder of Logotherapy, wrote that there are four types of jobs that you can do.

The first of these jobs are hard to learn and hard to do. This type of work would include a task like accounting or bookkeeping for a person who has no natural skill in that area. It would be hard to learn, and no matter how many years you did it, it would be hard to do. Many people find themselves in jobs or careers where they are mismatched in terms of their natural abilities and what the job requires. Their work is always hard and seldom satisfying. Don’t let this happen to you.

The second type of job that Frankl identified was a job that was hard to learn but easy to do. This may be a skill like typing with a keyboard or flying an airplane. It takes tremendous dedication and concentration to learn, but once you have mastered it, it is quite easy to do, hour after hour. Unfortunately, this type of job can become boring and unchallenging over time. It seldom causes you to stretch your capabilities and grow your talents.
The third type of job you might find yourself in is a job that easy to learn but hard to do. Physical labor falls into this category, like digging a ditch. It’s easy to learn to do a physically difficult job, but it is always hard to do, no matter how long you do it. Think about chopping wood!
The fourth job category, and the most important, are those things that you find easy to learn and easy to do. You learned it so easily, and do it so naturally, that you almost forget when and how you learned it in the first place. As you can imagine, the jobs and tasks that are easy to learn and easy to do are the best indicators of your natural talents and abilities. This is where you are the most likely to do the best job, get the best results, and to be paid the very most. Throughout your life and career, you must be continually analyzing your activities to identify the things that you learn and do easily, and from which you get the best results and rewards. This type of work for you is the key to career success.

3. Rise Above the Opinions of Others. The third cause of negative emotions is an over concern or hypersensitivity to the way other people treat you. For some people, their entire self-image is determined by the way other people speak to them, talk to them or about them, or even look at them. They have little sense of personal value or self-worth apart from the opinions of others, and if those opinions are negative for any reason, real or imagined, the “victim” immediately experiences anger, embarrassment, shame, feelings of inferiority and even depression, self-pity and despair. This explains why psychologists say that almost everything we do is to earn the respect of others, or at least to avoid losing their respect.
4. No One Else Is Responsible. The fourth cause of negative emotions, and the worst of all, is blaming. When I draw the “Negative Emotions Tree” , I illustrate the trunk of the tree as the propensity to blame other people for our problems. Once you cut down the trunk of the tree, all the fruits of the tree, all the other negative emotions, die immediately, just as when you jerk the plug out of the wall that lights up the Christmas lights in the tree, all the lights go out instantly.

The antidote for negative emotions of all kinds is for you to accept complete responsibility for your situation. You cannot say the words, “I am responsible!”  and still feel angry. The very act of accepting responsibility short-circuits and cancels out any negative emotions you may be experiencing. Just imagine! You can free yourself from negative emotions and begin taking control of your life by simply saying, “I am responsible!” whenever you start to feel angry or upset for any reason.  It is only when you free yourself from negative emotions, by taking complete responsibility that you can begin to set and achieve goals in every area of your life.   It is only when you are free, mentally and emotionally, that you can begin to channel your energies and enthusiasms in a forward direction.   This is why, without the acceptance of complete personal responsibility, no progress is possible.   On the other hand, once you accept total responsibility for your life, there are no limits on what you can be, do and have.

I made a decision a long time ago that I would not participate in discussions of why something cannot be done. The only compensation you will ever receive for participating in or giving energy to that type of discussion, is something you do not want.  I always find it amazing at the number of seemingly intelligent people who persist in dragging you into these negative brainstorming sessions. In one breath these people tell you they seriously want to accomplish a particular objective. And, in the next breath, they begin talking about why they can’t.  Think of how much more of life they would enjoy by making a decision that they will no longer participate in that type of negative energy.  The humanistic psychologist, Dr. Abraham Maslow who devoted his life to studying self actualized people, stated very clearly that we should follow our inner guide and not be swayed by the opinion of others or outside circumstances. Maslow’s research showed that the decision makers in life had a number of things in common; most importantly, they did work they felt was worthwhile and important. They found work a pleasure, and there was little distinction between work and play. Dr. Maslow said, to be self actualized you must not only be doing work you consider to be important, you must do it well and enjoy it.

Dr. Maslow recorded that these superior performers had values, those qualities in their personalities they considered to be worthwhile and important. Their values were not imposed by society, parents or other people in their lives. They did make their own decisions. Like their work, they chose and developed their values themselves.  You have the potential to do anything you choose, and to do it well. But, you must make decisions and when the time for a decision arrives, you must make your decision where you are with what you’ve got.   Did you know that you possesses powers of various sorts which you habitually fail to use?  If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.  By making a simple decision, the greatest minds of the past are available to you. You can literally learn how to turn your wildest dreams into reality.  Put this valuable information to use and recognize the greatness that exists within you.  You have limitless resources of potential and ability waiting to be developed.  Start today – there’s never any time better than the present. Be all that you are capable of being!