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The Seven Deadly Sins – The Secret to Language Learning

This is my confiteor, my confession, my mea culpa. I speak 10 languages and I have achieved this result by sinning. What’s more, I have not committed just any old sin. I have indulged in the seven deadly sins.

1. Extravagance

I love showing off my languages. I am learning Russian. If I hear Russian speakers, I will immediately accost them and inflict my grammatically incorrect Russian on them. I even do the same with Korean, which I speak even less well. Don’t even mention the languages that I speak well. If I detect the slightest accent, I attack. I am a shameless show-off. Yet I am totally unconcerned about the accuracy of my language. I do not care if I am full of mistakes. If they do not understand me it is their fault. I just want to show off. Look at me! I can communicate in your language! Shameless!

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Don’t Hang Your Happiness On Others

By Alex Fayle / 21 Comments

Where’s the line between your happiness and the happiness of others?

A lot of people blur the boundary and hang their happiness on others. Unfortunately by doing so, they pretty much guarantee unhappiness for everyone involved. No matter who is in your life, whether it’s children, spouse, friends or family members, your happiness has to come from within first. And then once you’re happy, you can help others work on their happiness in a healthy way.

But isn’t it better to give of yourself and make sure others are happy? Isn’t that the selfless thing to do?

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How to Double Your Chances for Success

By Mr. Self Development / 23 Comments

“If you shoot for the stars, you’ll at least hit the moon.”

Want to reach your goals for next month? Here’s the best way to do it….

Let’s say you want to lose 4lbs next month. Instead of putting together a workout routine where you’ll lose 4lbs, put together a workout routine where you’ll burn enough calories to lose 8lbs; instead of working out 1 hour a day, workout 2 hours a day.

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How To Improve Your Life Starting Today

By Mr. Self Development / 39 Comments

I can’t think of anyone who doesn’t want to significantly improve their life. The good news is: Every moment is an opportunity to become better than we’ve been in the past. This is a brief article on how to improve your life starting today. I challenge you to take action on each of these items; they will change your life if you do.

1. Become an Eclectic Reader

An eclectic reader is a reader who reads information from a variety of sources. Reading daily from a variety of authors with different backgrounds and beliefs is an excellent way to expand your mind and change your life. It’s not necessary that you agree with “everything” the authors say; you can learn something from anyone. Reading from a multiplicity of sources gives you the ability to take-on new concepts, thoughts, and principles that stretch your mind to greater dimensions and new perspectives, allowing you to receive ideas which have “never” been conceived before.

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How to Use Fear to Find Your Passion

By Cath Duncan / 21 Comments

We’ve all heard the phrase, “Do what you love.” The idea that we can and should do what we love doing in our work, and that we should choose experiences that make us feel good in life, was a pretty unconventional idea 20 years ago. These days, however, it’s an ideal that most of us believe in and want to live by.

So then why aren’t we all doing what we love? Why aren’t we all following our passion?

Do you know what you love?

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The 4 Things You Need to Succeed

By Mr. Self Development / 45 Comments

I was talking to a friend yesterday who said the reason he hasn’t succeeded is because he doesn’t have the money to start his own business. He said, if only he had a good friend who could lend him the money he could succeed (he may have been referring to me as that “good friend,” I don’t know). But the reality is, you don’t need lots of money to achieve success.

There are 4 things that you need to succeed, and they don’t cost anything:

1. The first thing you need is “Time”.

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7 Foods That Make You Happier

By Mary Ward / 15 Comments

Our mood can affect everything in our daily life. When we’re in a bad mood or depressed, we don’t feel like ourselves and we have a hard time concentrating or just making it through the day. When we’re happy, we feel on top of the world and ready to take on anything. The food we eat can have a great impact on our mood, and if you want to look and feel good then you need to be sure to include some of the foods that will naturally lift your spirits. Here we look at several foods that are sure to raise our spirits and make us feel happier overall.

1. Milk: those foods that are rich in calcium will naturally help to boost our spirits. Those that suffer from depression are told to take a calcium and Vitamin D supplement, and the good news is that 1-2 glasses of milk a day can be a natural mood booster that can help a person to feel happier and more productive.

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Who Says You Can’t Go Home? — I’ll Take Bon Jovi over Thomas Wolfe Any Day.

By Ruth Harrison Moody / 9 Comments

If you grew up and went to school in Western North Carolina back in the ‘70’s as I did, you couldn’t seem to escape Asheville NC writer Thomas Wolfe and his haunting admonition that “You can’t go home again”. It was one that seemed to threaten an unavoidable and ominous loss, turning up everywhere from lit classes to libraries to shelves in not a few homes.

Thomas Wolfe’s ghost haunted me all the way to my new college as I left home for my freshman year. Following career and family choices led me away from those same beloved mountains about which Wolfe wrote. His whispered doom came to tea a time or three over post-college years spent in the mid-west.

As life took me away, I assumed that the loss was part of the price we pay for simply moving forward through the days and years, another angst-ridden negative talisman hung about the bowed-down neck of life. In those days, it seemed smart and hip to be depressed and cynical. This old set of habitual thought ran head-long into my on-going quest to build a positive life and it demanded a reassessment.

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A Forgotten Key to Personal Growth

By Justin / 17 Comments

If you want tips on how to become more productive, how to increase your motivation or even just how to become more confident, there are more than enough resources out there. Many of us feel that all of these little steps ‘improve’ who we are and take us to the next level and in some ways I guess that’s true. On the other hand, I don’t like to think of this advice as changing us as people, but more like exposing who we really are.

Some people get obsessed with self growth and get hooked on looking for the next ‘secret’ and ‘tactic’ they can use to take their life, or just their personality, to the next level. Today I want to cover a personal growth key you may be totally neglecting, and one that probably has more effect on you than any other. What is that key, you ask? That’s easy: your health. As with productivity, motivation, confidence or any other aspects of life you feel are necessary to work on, there’s tons of information out there about your health. So much so in fact, that I’m sure you were already thinking that before my last statement. However, most of the health advice you read is about:

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15 Simple Ways to Get a Bit More From Life

By Ali Luke / 10 Comments

Having just started a blog with the tagline “getting more from life”, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to do this myself! A lot of personal development or change advice focuses on the longer term (especially in areas like finance or career), but here I want to look at squeezing the most from the little moments and how to feel satisfied and fulfilled in the shorter term.

Some of the suggestions below are things I’m already doing, some are ones I plan to do. I’d love to hear some of yours too, so please do add to this list in the comments, if you have any favourites that I’ve missed out!

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How Re-Structuring Routine Interactions With Others Can Promote Positive Growth

By Armen Shirvanian / 5 Comments

Imagine waking up, greeting one positive person, receiving an e-mail from a person passionate about what they are doing, then sending an e-mail to a person about something you are passionate about, before you go about your other activities. A daily experience like this is not out of the realm of your potential routine. Getting to a point like this involves adjusting who you interact with, and approaching the people you don’t want to interact with, but have to, through a new mindset.

First, I want to preface this by saying this isn’t meant to create a pseudo-reality that is separate from the one others are in. At the same time, there are some who are in a state of growth who are positive to be around, and promote your good health and low stress, and there are some who have a negative demeanor, with little to no concern for you, who will likely only end up raising your blood pressure and stress levels. I often point out that personalities are fairly fixed in place, so the same person that causes you unnecessary stress today is very likely the one who will do so at some time in the future.

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