Personal Growth & Transformation Archives - Page 30 of 54

Why Waiting to Change Your Life Can Be Dangerous

There are days that your life will change forever, in an instant, never to be the same again. You don’t know it is coming. You haven’t prepared for it. It just happens to you. I had one of those days a couple of years ago.

I was facilitating a meeting for a group of Self Employed Women. As we were having lunch my phone rang and my husband’s name flashed up on the screen. “That’s strange” I thought. He never phones me if he knows I am running a business meeting. But when I answered it wasn’t my husband’s voice at the end of the line. It was a paramedic.

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Why You Can’t Live Without Passion

By Matt Coast / 34 Comments

I was watching a movie the other day called, “Peaceful Warrior.” There’s a character in that movie called, “Socrates.” He’s a very wise and intelligent guy. One of the things he said really caught my attention. He said, “Death isn’t sad. The sad thing is: most people don’t live at all.”

Most people don’t live. It seems almost esoteric or new agey to say something like that. But deep inside, I know it’s really true. Most people’s lives flash before their eyes. They go day in and day out just going through the movements. They’re not really… living.

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How Death Changed My Life (& Why It’s Important to Think About Yours)

By Robert D. Smith / 25 Comments

For most of my life, I kept a tragedy to myself. An event that I witnessed at a young age altered my thinking forever. It fueled the way I approach life. In recent years, I began sharing how death changed my life.

When I was a freshman in high school, I saw a good friend of mine die. Paul Kartlick was playing basketball in PE class one day and tripped. He hit his head on the outdoor concrete court and died on the spot. One moment we were playing basketball and the next moment he was gone. He was 14 years old.

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How $16 Changed My Life

By Trent Hand / 52 Comments

Before going any further into this post, I want to clarify two things: 1) This is not a product or promotion I’m pushing that costs $16; 2) This is a very low point in my life that I haven’t shared with many people. Now, with full disclosure out of the way, I’ll tell you what the title is all about.

In the summer of 2008, I worked as a sales trainer for a small marketing firm in Nashville, TN. Although during my career there I would work in over 7 different campaigns, at the time I was selling and training salespeople for a retail promotion involving At&t’s home services inside their cellular stores. Do you remember going into an At&t store and someone coming up asking you about your home phone service? Could have been me or someone I trained.

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Journaling for the Body and Soul

By Liz Seda / 47 Comments

All I could see was the blank page. I found myself staring at the journal that lay open on my lap. It was the third time in a week I’d made an attempt to start writing in my new journal and I was determined to begin with something other than ‘Dear Diary.’ Several minutes, one headache, and three aspirin later I closed the journal and decided I’d try again tomorrow when I was fresh.

The morning rolls around and I sit staring at that wretched blank page which just stares right back at me as if to say, “How many times are we going to go through this?” Finally I caved and I wrote, ‘Dear Diary,’ in black pen. Suddenly, the words that wouldn’t come flowed easily. I wrote for an hour. Who knew I had so much to say? I was fascinated.

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Are You Really Ready to Change?

By Alison Ottaway / 25 Comments

How do you feel when you look at your life right now – how your day has been lived, the way you look, the things you’ve done and are doing, where you are, the people you’re around, the life you’ve laid, the thoughts that surround you?

If there are things you want to change in any part of your life there’s something you need to know.

And it’s not pretty: Change isn’t for everyone. Change isn’t easy.

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Authentic Change and the Role of Choice

By Dr. Joseph Burgo / 13 Comments

Everywhere you look, in popular magazines and on media websites like the Huffington Post, there seem to be countless articles outlining the five or six essential steps to follow for some type of self-improvement. Americans are fixated on personal growth — becoming more effective in their professions, happier and more tranquil in their private lives, less depressed with higher self-esteem and a more satisfying sex life. The website on which you’re reading this post is devoted to promoting change. We all want to grow and change for the better.

In my experience, however, most people change very little over the course of their lives. They tend to become more the way they already are.

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Everyday Choices that Can Change Your Life

By Anne Hartley / 12 Comments

When I was 10 years old I changed schools. My sister had been a pupil at that school for two years when I started and was the school sporting champion. Because of my sister’s sporting prowess I was welcomed by the teachers and other students with open arms and for a couple of weeks I was popular. However, once the teachers and students discovered that I was hopeless at sport no one wanted me on their team, that was when I decided that I was always going to be hopeless at sport and that I was never going to be humiliated like that again.

I made the decision that I was going to avoid all forms of exercise.

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How to Use Fear, Pain, and Sadness to Create Massive Fuel For Your Dream

By Izzy / 39 Comments

It was hard. Really hard. I’ve seeing my mother cry 2 times in my lifetime… Now it’s 3.

“I don’t want you to go.” I didn’t know what to say, how to respond, what to do. So I did nothing. She hugged me, tried to hold back her tears, her emotions. But I’d already seen it, felt it.

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Embracing an Ever Changing You

By Deborah Fike / 23 Comments

At some time or another, we have all felt like we’re stuck in a rut. No matter what we try or what we do, everything around us stays the same. Even worse, when we try to change, we end up feeling like the same old person. No amount of New Year’s resolutions, self-help books, or community groups can make us feel different.

I certainly can relate to feeling stuck. Deciding to be a stay-at-home mom these past 18 months has meant my days have melded into one long string of diaper changes, laundry, reading board books, and singing the same songs over and over again. Sure, I attend play dates and library story hour, but time still runs together.

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How Cartooning Healed Me

By Sheila McCann / 20 Comments

I was down and anxious. It was only a few months after our move when I started feeling like a shell of my former self. I had never experienced anything like this. I had no appetite and no energy. I was in a dark space devoid of life. Lethargy met me at every turn. I was circling the drain. The best I could do was to get my kids off to school and climb back into bed.

After a few weeks, I began to wonder what was going on. Being an independent stubborn person, I decided to ride it out on my own. In retrospect, this was probably not the right way to go.

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