How do you feel about what you achieved in 2011?  How excited and confident are you about what you will be achieving in 2012?

Making specific goals and writing them down, dramatically increases the chances of success.  What if this coming year you set goals you felt great about and achieved them?  Let’s dare to dream.

I know it can be scary – if we don’t say it out loud then it won’t hurt so much if we fail.  But what if?  What if we could make a wish list of reasonable, possible things that would make us feel fantastic, and what if they did come true?  What if it was all our own choice?

Well of course it is.  We know what we are capable of (and that it’s actually much more than we think).  Why not put some juicy goals in writing and arrange to achieve them?  I will if you will.  J

Ok, so here are some steps for setting goals for the year ahead that will put you in the drivers seat on the road to success.  This is what I’m doing, and I invite you to join me.

Step one:-

Read more: Planning for a Great Year Ahead

With persistence comes success!

I'm pretty sure Napoleon Hill said that, and I'm reminded of his famous book Think and Grow Rich often as I absorb the ideas and concepts taught today in the world of personal development.

We've all got stuff we want to achieve in our lives, big things and smaller things. Love, friendship, happy well adjusted kids, a well run, organized home, being healthy, being a size we feel comfortable with, financial security, learning a skill that brings us pleasure, helping others and making a valuable contribution, a project around the home, travel, all sorts of things. In order to achieve any of these wonderful, worthwhile, desirable things, we must persist in pursuing them.

So what does persistence mean? I think of it as the famous old "just keep showing up" trick. (Not quite the same as the old "banana in the tailpipe" trick.) There are all sorts of variations on this. I've heard stories of people getting a job they didn't think they had much chance at getting simply because they showed up and nobody else did, or showing up and ending up with a different job. There's also the phenomenon that if you repeatedly "show up", no matter how stubborn or stupid you are, you are likely to accidentally learn something and achieve at least small improvements in your methods and knowledge, or that somebody will eventually notice you, or that you will happen to be in the right place at the right time, or that you will learn from those around you or the environment you have been showing up to.

Read more: How to Get What You Want

Something which commonly comes up for people struggling with clutter is the idea of letting go.  Releasing the physical stuff from our home and our life has all sorts of emotional meaning attached to it, and means also releasing a lot of emotional clutter from our mind.

That’s got to be a good thing, right?  If we know it will be good for us to let go of the emotional clutter associated with the physical stuff, why are we so reluctant to do it?  What’s holding us back?  If we understand intellectually that getting rid of physical stuff will free us up emotionally, why do we experience such resistance?

Read more: Letting Go of Clutter

Feeling overwhelmed is such a familiar strategy to me. Do you know the feeling? It's all too much, you don't know where to start, there is more to do than you can possibly get done, it's all coming at you at once, you feel stuck, paralysed, overloaded, weighed down, unable to choose between two or many more tasks, confronted with insurmountable obstacles, as if you're wading through mud. It all looks like a big mess, sounds like a bunch of noise, feels chaotic and a logical way through is not obvious.

Did you notice I just called it a strategy? It's inevitable that my coaching training will start to appear in my articles. If you tell a life coach that you're feeling overwhelmed, she is likely to ask you how choosing to run that strategy is working for you. Huh? You mean I'm choosing it? Does that imply that the answer to the question: "how do I stop feeling overwhelmed" is simply don't choose to do it?

 

Read more: How to Stop Feeling Overwhelmed

Poor self esteem seems to be the root of all evil these days. I sure as hell know mine has been rotten and although it's improving I wouldn't mind it still getting much better much faster. So, how to improve your self esteem.

The important thing to understand if self esteem is an issue for you, is that you still have to take responsibility for it yourself. Yeah, sorry, you don't get to use it as an excuse unless you want to live out your life wallowing in self pity and blaming the world and not actually achieving any personal growth.

Read more: How to Improve Your Self Esteem

Most of us feel more comfortable, more confident and more at ease when our home is organized.  Home organization can give us great pleasure and satisfaction when we manage to achieve it, and the lack of it can be a source of much stress and anxiety.  Living in a home which is organized gives us the freedom to give better quality attention to other areas of our life, such as work, family, hobbies, community, health and so on, creating better balance.    Home organization is important to many people, and is something I’ve always been interested in and enjoy writing about.


The basics of achieving organization in our home are time management, routines, systems and decision making.  Running a home in an organized way is something which is a continuous activity, can be learned, and gets easier as habits are established.

Read more: Home Organization