http://www.rockyourday.com Stay Focused, Work Smarter and Stomp Stress Flat, Baby! Mon, 23 Aug 2010 01:16:25 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en (Note: This post was first published in June 2009 - but my Spidey Sense is telling me to send it out again because people need to hear it.) Somewhere on one of my old Brian Tracy CDs there's this great line he says about how in order to really take control ... http://www.rockyourday.com/abandon-your-rescue-fantasy/ Life is incredibly distracting.   No matter how enthusiastically you set goals, it's just too easy let yourself  get pulled away from taking action on them because of daily urgencies and reactive thinking - and then it's weeks/months/years later and you're sitting around, asking "where did all the time go?" The thing ... http://www.rockyourday.com/how-to-keep-urgency-from-ruining-your-life/ J. Paul Getty was quoted for his formula for success: "Rise early, work hard, strike oil."  When I first ran across this quote ten years ago, I had to laugh, because it looked like Getty was saying you have to work hard and hope to get lucky. But fifteen years later, ... http://www.rockyourday.com/how-to-get-exactly-what-you-want/ “People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.” - George Bernard Shaw I've always ... http://www.rockyourday.com/creating-your-circumstances-part-1/ All of us have at least one area of our life where we feel trapped (either by an external circumstance or by an internal personality trait/habit), and it's been dragging us down for years.  We feel powerless to change it, and miserable at the prospect of being stuck as a ... http://www.rockyourday.com/how-to-stop-telling-your-sad-sad-story/ As you work to change your habits you'll find that it's incredibly easy to backslide into old patterns of behavior you wish you could move away from.  We talked earlier about how wishful thinking makes habit change hard (and how another root problem is that you don't really want to ... http://www.rockyourday.com/habits-3/ Last week we started talking about why habits are hard to change, and focused on how much we really prefer the payoffs of out bad habits (a painful truth, but the truth nonetheless).  If you haven't read the post yet, go back and read it first so you can understand ... http://www.rockyourday.com/habits-2/ Ever wonder why some habits seem so damn hard to change?  Most people do, but very few get past the stage of simply wondering "What's wrong with me?".   Unfortunately, an emotionally loaded question like that will likely stop you in your tracks, locking your focus on uncomfortable insecurities and making ... http://www.rockyourday.com/habits/ Some people keep track of goals in notebooks and others log them online, but most of us keep at least a few important goals in a special, time-honored place: the back burner.  These are goals we tell ourselves we want to attain, but somehow we never seem to make it ... http://www.rockyourday.com/ignore-obstacles/ Ever have one of those tough-as-hell weeks where it feels like the world is unloading both barrels at you - where things fly at you at such an vicious, unrelenting speed that you feel like life is pushing your limits simply to see where your breaking point is?  Where the ... http://www.rockyourday.com/how-to-get-through-damn-near-anything/