Jamie Fellrath | Practical Mindfulness

One of the best ways to help yourself to progress with personal development type goals is to keep a journal.  Keeping a daily record of things you learned, discovered, encountered, things that affected you in some way, and even the people you met is a wonderful tool for marking your progress as you move down the road of life.  It allows you to see the big changes over time as you make little changes in your daily routine, and to realize that you are indeed making progress. That being said:  I'm a HORRIBLE journaler. The basic problem is that I forget to do it.  I haven't made it a positive habit in my life yet, and for whatever reason, it's just not something that I've found a good method to make myself do it. That is, until now.  Introducing OhLife .  OhLife is a journaling website.  It's totally private, no one else can read your journal unless you give them your password.  And here's the best part:  it sends you an email every day at...

Last night, I didn't get a lot of sleep.  My nearly three-year-old daughter seems to have an inability to go to sleep by herself if she wakes up in the middle of the night, and she comes in to our room to either hop in bed with us or have one of us come back to her room to lay down with her.  So last night it was my turn, and I didn't have a very good night's sleep because of it. As a result, I was slow waking up this morning, and with it not being a workout morning I slept in about an extra half hour instead of getting up and getting my day underway properly.  Bad news.  And the practical upshot of this is that I'm feeling more cranky than normal (I'm usually not that cranky, period). During my bike ride, then, which was going along very pleasantly with some beautiful cool weather and not too much of a negative breeze slowing me down, I came across two ladies riding ahead of me.  As I caught up to them and was getting ready to pass them, we hit a stop light...

There's no doubt that goals are important.  They give us focus and purpose as we move through life, and give us something to strive for. But just as important is having a reason to complete those goals.  Without a big enough "why," our goals are useless to us.  There's no reason to get them done if we don't have a really good and powerful reason to want them to get done.  And the reason can be "good" or "bad." One of the reasons I want to develop some residual income, for example, is so that I can help get my family some freedom to do things like travel.  Both my parents and my wife's live in the western US, now (Arizona and Washington) and we'd love to be able to get out and visit them.  I love to travel anyway, as does my wife, so this is a big goal for me.  A big "why." Another goal I have is to get into outstanding shape.  And there's not any other reason for that than I want to look good and feel healthy.  Hones...

No matter what business we're in, there's a point where we're all in "sales." And that doesn't necessarily mean that we're trying to actively coerce people into buying something they don't want, but rather we're trying to get our point across and let our opinion be known in a way that people will act upon our words. If we're looking for a job, we're selling our personalities and skills.  If we have a job, we're offering opinions on the best ways to do things based on our experience.  And even in our lives, we're offering opinions about things we've enjoyed or found useful to our friends and family.  It's just the way we live in a world where we don't have some sort of hive-mind allowing us to just act - we have to influence others or we don't really exist in the world. And for people whose self-confidence is low about giving opinions, this can be a real challenge in being an effective person in the workplace, h...