Transform Your Life with These 10 Simple Strategies

1. Work on figuring out your unproductive and destructive habits and replace them with good, healthy habits. One of my favorite quotes is by Charles Noble and he says, “First we make our habits, then our habits make us.” So if you allow a bad habit to continue it will start to define you in a negative way. But if you start choosing good habits it will define you in a positive way. For example if you start choosing healthy habits by eating right and exercising it will make you healthy. I will tell you that working on bad habits and replacing them with good habits had made a big difference in my life.

2. Learn to set goals. Goals will make a big difference because they will help you start moving towards the things you want in life. Brain Tracy in his book Eat That Frog said this, “Goals are the fuel in the furnace of achievement.” You want to be sure you set long term and short term goals to help you achieve what you want in life. I think of short term goals as the building blocks to get you to your bigger goals. So for instance if you goal is to lose 100 pounds that would be a long term goal and maybe smaller goals would be to start exercising 4 days a week.

3. Make your health and fitness a priority. Fitting in time for exercise can be a challenge sometimes and eating right is not always easy. These are things you do need to work on if you want to make a difference in your life. If fitness is a priority you will find time for it and it should be a priority because without health you really don’t have anything else. When you feel good and are healthy you sleep better, your mind functions better and you can give a lot more to whatever you do. As one of my favorite quotes says, “Those who do not find time for exercise will have to find time for illness.”
- Earl of Derby

4. Make written to do lists daily. I can’t great this has been to transform my life and my productivity. I fought this one for a while because I thought I knew what I need to accomplish in my mind. Then I would have days that I would simply waste time because I could not think of what I needed to do next. Having a to do list that I check often has changed that and made me so much more productive and made a huge difference in my life. The way I learned to make awesome to do lists and to make them work for me was by reading Eat That Frog.

5. Learn to embrace change. Change is something that is not always easy. We all get comfortable with the way things are and don’t want to step out of our comfort zone. That being said change is something that is inevitable and we can either embrace it or fight it. When you can learn to embrace change you can make a big difference in your life. Change is what helps us to push ourselves and improve our lives. When I learned to embrace change is when I noticed a big difference in my life. As Anthony Robbins says, “If you do what you have always done, you will get what you have always gotten.”

6. Take time for rejuvenation. Taking time for yourself to relax and rejuvenate will make a big difference in your life. We all lead busy lives and sometimes we end up as the lowest priorities on our lists. When you can make time to rejuvenate by doing something simple as giving yourself a quite half an hour to read, taking a bath or getting out and talking a nice long walk you will feel refreshed and it will make a big difference.

7. Keep learning. Learning should be an unending process, it is easy to give up on learning after we are done with school. One of my favorite motivational speakers and authors Jim Rohn says that the best money you can spend is on your self-education. He says that if you see the homes of the most successful people they have libraries in them. I know for me to work on continual learning has really made a huge difference.

8. Stop sweating the small stuff. “Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today or its job.” This quote by Leo Buscaglia is one to be very mindful of. It is very easy to let worry creep in to our lives and if you can stop worrying and especially over little things you can make a big difference in your life. I know, I grew up with a Mom who worried all the time and thus turned me into a worry wart. Spending your life worrying is not a fun way to live and gets you in one bad cycle. I have found that the less I worry the more I am actually able to enjoy life. It is not easy to completely eliminate worry but the more worry you eliminate the more you will make a difference in your life.

9. Learn to be grateful. Being grateful is such a simple way to transform your life. When you make a shift from always wanting something to being grateful for everything you have you will be amazed at what happens in your life. This can be a major shift in thinking if you are someone who has a hard time being satisfied with what you have. You can start by being appreciative of just the smallest things in your life and slowly shift your mindset.

10. Take time to listen to others. When you listen to others you find that you can learn a lot. I know that most of us just want to talk and be heard but we really need to learn to listen. When you listen you need to make sure you are really concentrating on active listening rather than doing a million things at once and only kind of listening. One of my favorite Proverbs in the bible says, “Don’t talk so much. You keep putting your foot in your mouth. Be sensible and turn off the flow.” I also have heard some people use this great phrase, “God gave you 2 ears and 1 mouth for a reason.”