(because the truth doesn’t always produce a positive outcome)

By Mike Zimmerman

1 “The tooth fairy called. She said the way you’re behaving, you might as well keep the tooth.” Parents threaten consequences all the time, but it helps to have a strong third party on call to bring perspective. From Halloween on, throw all your disciplinary needs onto Santa’s lap.

2 “Monsters like to eat dust bunnies. I bet you’re going to get lots of monsters in this room.” Call it a cleanliness incentive plan.

3 “Mommy and Daddy aren’t fighting; we’re rearranging the kitchen.” Kids might not buy this one, but in our desire to be right, we jump into fights even if it means exposing our kids to adult conflicts. Need to scream? Get ’em out of the house first.

4 “Mommy and Daddy aren’t fighting; we’re playing leapfrog. On the bed. Without our clothes.” In case the makeup sex gets out of hand.

5 “Reading books will make you a millionaire.” In today’s screen-dominated world, kids must grow up knowing that books, not blogs, will unlock the secrets of their universe.

6 “Don’t worry, sweetie, that can’t happen here.” Um, sure it can. Murder, terrorism, earthquakes—they can strike anytime, anywhere. But parents must be kiddie Pepto-Bismol: Coat them, soothe them, relieve them.

7 “I know everything.” Before teachers, coaches, and the kid down the street get their shot, parents must be a child’s go-to encyclopedia for all of life’s questions. The important thing is that your children, not you, believe it.

8 “That guy is homeless because he didn’t eat his vegetables.” If you really stretch it, there’s science to back this up, given the importance of nutrition to brain health. More important, this lie teaches cause and effect, and gives your child the power to determine his destiny.

9 “I’m not afraid.” Your smile is their Kevlar vest, your hug proof that everything will in fact be OK, no matter how bleak reality might be.

10 “This is Mommy’s special juice, and it’s poison to children.” Happy hour is sacred ground, folks.

5 Secret Mind Tricks to Avoid Giving Up

Stefan Pinto’s Lists

Our mind is capa­ble of inc­re­di­ble awa­re­ness, thought and expe­rien­ces. But, in an attempt to pro­tect us, a spurt of base­less rumi­na­tions can easily and quickly deceive. Our brain will try and shut down our wor­kouts by con­vin­cing us that we must “stop” or “quit” as it thinks you will get hurt and or fail–regardless of what we want. Avoid “thin­king” too much when wor­king out and make the choice to engage your­self in the moment.

1. Stay in the pre­sent: to stay focu­sed on our goal, you must be in the now–the pre­sent. In order for your inten­tion to be rea­li­zed you must pay atten­tion and become aware of where you are. “When action is per­for­med in the pre­sent moment of awa­re­ness, it is most effec­tive” (Cho­pra). The past and the future are either memory or ima­gi­na­tion res­pec­ti­vely and only the pre­sent is real. The pre­sent simply “is” and it is filled with pos­si­bi­lity. And if you main­tain your atten­tion here, in the pre­sent, without wave­ring into ima­gi­nary “what if” sce­na­rios or worse, with­dra­wing into past reco­llec­tion of fai­lu­res, you can focus on your goal ins­tead of obstacles.
2. Keep going: your brain is telling you that you can’t run the last lap or one slice won’t do much harm. Trick your­self and con­vince your brain that you will only do half the lap and then go for the whole lap or if die­ting, cut the slice into one bite sized por­tion and leave the rest (war­ning: this only works if you actually use uten­sils. Biting off a piece will be a punishing test of will power).
3. Stand tall: don’t look down, hold your head up. By lite­rally kee­ping your head up, you will become more aware of your surroun­dings, your pre­sence, the­reby sen­ding strong sig­nals to the brain, rein­for­cing your inten­tion. Ima­gine you are being “pulled” up by a strong mag­net (towards your goal, if you wish). Science aside, mom is always right, “hold your head up.”
4. Breathe. Relax: Don’t hold onto ten­sion in your jaw and mouth. Other­wise, you are focu­sing on the per­cei­ved pain and com­ple­ting the task. Breathing and rela­xing keeps you in “the zone.” When your jaw is rela­xed, your lips will be sligh­ted par­ted, and the ten­sion will be trans­fe­rred to where you need it the most.
5. Have fun: we pre­fer to surround our­sel­ves with peo­ple that are fun. But often, we for­get about our­sel­ves. We spend most of our times with our­sel­ves, our minds. We should be fun, too. If you enjoy the cha­llenge, it will help you to per­form. There is oppor­tu­nity in adver­sity and if you learn to make lemo­nade from lemons, your challenges–and life–will become that much more enjoyable.

If you want to be suc­cess­ful, you need to change the way you think and simply let go. “Relin­quish your attach­ment to the out­come. This means giving up your rigid attach­ment to a spe­ci­fic result and living in the wis­dom of uncer­tainty. It means enjo­ying every moment in the jour­ney of your life, even if you don’t know the out­come” (more Chopra).

The Principles of Self-Management Part One
Posted by Brian Tracy on May 21, 2010

The starting point of maturity is the realization that “No one is coming to the rescue.” Everything you are or ever will be is entirely up to you.

This life is not a rehearsal for anything else. This is the real thing. The game is on. Time is passing quickly, and all of your decisions and indecisions, your actions and inactions, have added up to create the life you’re living at this very minute. If you want things to be different in the future, you’ll have to make things different in the present. You’ll have to take complete charge of yourself and your life and make things change, because they won’t change by themselves.

Self-management is really personal management, time management, life management. It’s putting your hands firmly on the steering wheel of your life and then taking yourself in your chosen direction. Remember the old Confucian saying, “If you don’t change the road you’re traveling on, you’ll probably end up where you’re going.” Every successful man or woman in America made, at one time or another, a firm decision about where he or she wanted to go and then took deliberate steps to get there. And you can do this for yourself as well.
One of the most useful ideas I ever learned was to view myself as a “bundle of resources.” You can benefit from this idea by standing back and looking at yourself in terms of what you are, instead of what you do. We tend to define ourselves in terms of our work, in terms of what we’re spending most of our time doing at the present moment. When we meet someone, even at a bus stop, we describe ourselves in terms of our jobs.

We say things such as “I’m a salesperson,” “I’m a manager,” or “I work in such-and-such a business doing such-and-such a job.” Since we tend to become what we think about, the more we describe ourselves to others as being what we do, the more we think of ourselves as what we do. Perhaps this is why people who are fired or laid off go through a period of shock and emotional turmoil. it’s as though they’ve been cut off from their identities. You may have had that experience.

The fact is that you’re not what you do. Instead, you’re a bundle of resources. You have the combination of ingredients that makes you a unique and remarkable human being, different from anyone else who ever has lived or who ever will live. You’ve undergone a wide variety of experiences, both positive and negative. You’ve had a formal education, and you’ve learned from the various jobs and activities that you’ve engaged in. You have a unique intelligence, much of which isn’t yet developed to the full. You have skills that you’ve acquired through hard work, discipline and practice.

You have abilities that you were born with, which make it easy for you to do certain jobs and to accomplish certain tasks. You have energy and ambition and goals and opportunities. You have a philosophy of life, however developed it is, and you have attitudes and perspectives that make you extraordinary. The federal government has identified more than 22,000 different job categories; when you put all your skills together, you’re probably capable of excelling at hundreds of jobs, doing different things in different organizations, businesses and industries.

As the psychologist Abraham Maslow once wrote, “The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short.” The average person tends to settle for far less than he’s capable of and then wonders why he’s so dissatisfied and frustrated with his life.

The fact is that you have an inborn drive toward the realization of your full capacity. There’s a force within you that makes you restless and discontent, and that drives you onward and upward toward the achievement of your dreams and aspirations. Many people attempt to deaden that ambition by drinking too much alcohol, watching too much television, socializing too much and even resorting to drugs and dangerous activities. But it will not be denied. You have been put in this world to do something wonderful with your life. You have a unique destiny, a special purpose.

And the starting point for realizing that purpose is self-management. It is taking full control over yourself and everything that you are doing so that you are moving progressively toward the realization of a worthy ideal, so that you are firmly on the road toward becoming everything you are capable of becoming.