Regular commitments: Key to your long-term success

I recently created the following affirmation: "Regular commitments are so awesome. Being made in moments of absolute clarity of my true life priorities, they ensure that I'm putting into action what matters most - regardless of how I feel in a specific situation."

There is a lot of truth in it:

1. It is so important to take regular time to think about what is important in life and to define review our core values for which we are living. A lot of people today are addicted to high-frequency tasks and hence will feel uneasy and unproductive. Nothing could be further from the truth as it's better to ensure that the ladder is at the right wall before we start climbing it.
   
2. Based on what is most important to us we should set up regularly reoccurring times in our schedules in which we work on making our desires reality. Otherwise most people get caught up in other things as distractions today are omnipresent.
   
3. It is extremely important to have the discipline to really commit 100% to doing those things. Unless something more important – not something more urgent! – comes along we have to discipline ourselves to stick to what we previously planned.
   

I have plenty of regular commitments in my schedule. I set the time intervals in a way that it still leaves me with enough time to deal with unexpected events. For example I go to martial arts classes twice a week, study a stock market course once a week and catch up with one of my best mates at least every fortnight.

All three things support things that are very important to me. The regular commitment allows me to not listen to all the daily excuses I'm confronted with and after doing those things I always feel absolutely awesome as I made another very crucial step closer to my dreams. For example I usually feel a lot of thoughts going on in my head before martial arts classes like "I'm too tired. Today I could skip class once". However, as I know I have this commitment set-up it's so easy to disregard this rubbish that is trying to keep me in mediocrity.

Challenge Yourself: In which areas of your life could you establish regular commitments to ensure that you are really doing what is most important to you in life?

Accountability Partner – Why having one is so important if you want to grow personally

The reality for every person that I've met so far in my life is the following: Everybody needs at least one person to hold him/her accountable for achieving goals is life.

You probably know this from so many situations in life: If other people are watching you or even if you just feel others might be watching, you perform so much better. If you expect guest you clean up your apartment/house. If there is a big audience you perform better at sports.

The key is to use this principle and make it a regular system so it works on your behalf. How do you do it? By setting regular appointments with at least one accountability partner to analyse how you are performing against your goals.

David Deida described it in his book "The Way of the Superior Man" as follows: "Your close men friends should be willing to challenge your mediocrity by suggesting a concrete action you can perform that will pop you out your rut, one way or the other. And you must be willing to offer them your brutal honesty, in the same way, if you are all to grow. Good friends should not tolerate mediocrity in one another. If you are at your edge, your men friends should respect that, but not let you off the hook."

How does this work in practice? Let's say you are afraid of public speaking. So you set yourself the goal of speaking in public three times a week. At the end of each week you meet up with your accountability partner and talk about your progress. If you failed to achieve the goal in one week you'll have to do five speeches the next week. Once you feel that the goal is not challenging enough anymore, you might want to move on to other areas in your life that you desire to improve.

As with every post on this blog, the most important thing is that you TAKE ACTION. Don't just read this post but really DO IT. Call some friends, share the knowledge and set up a regular (weekly or fortnightly time) in which you just talk about your life goals and keep each other on track. You'll be amazed about the outcomes.

SRI – Use your breath to increase your well-being and reduce stress

I went to an SRI workshop this weekend with Dr Donald Epstein and found the techniques I learned very helpful. SRI stands for "Somato Respiratory Integration" and is a series of breathing techniques to reduce stress, increase well-being and improve overall health. SRI is especially powerful when we feel under stress and need to reconnect with our body.

I go to a Network Chiropractor regularly and find that SRI really improves the healing process of my body a lot. Over the past 12 months I've seen tremendous improvements in my health due to the Network Care that I receive. The most amazing thing is that normal doctors told me for so many years that I had to wear specially adapted shoes to outbalance the imbalance of my hip. Within only a few weeks my chiropractor managed to make adjustments to my body, so that I can just wear normal shoes: What an amazing relief after I thought that I could never wear normal shoes again. It turned out that the doctors who previously told me that my legs were of different length were completely wrong. In fact my legs are perfectly the same length and also my hip is 100% healthy, only my spine was twisted. I think this a perfect example of the limitations of normal medicine that is too often focused on treating the symptom (e.g. taking a painkiller or wearing adjusted shoes) rather than working on the cause (e.g. unhealthy lifestyle, twisted spine).

Based on my experience I'd love to encourage you explore the following opportunities:

1. Make an appointment with a chiropractor practicing Network Care (not the traditional chiropractic care)
   
2. Practice the first stage of SRI which is easy to learn and very effective (instructions e.g. available here: http://www.freemanwellness.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/Stage1.pdf )
   
3. When you go to a doctor don't see yourself as a patient asking the doctor to take care of your problem but rather a patient member with responsibility i.e. Invest some time researching skilled doctors in the respective area, ask questions to find out whether the doctor is really qualified: "Are you really focusing on treating the cause? How many people with similar problems have you helped in the past?"