How to Love Your Life: Master the Six Key Dimensions of Psychological Well-Being
Here’s a pop quiz. Which of the following statements are true for you?
- I like most aspects of my personality.
- I have experienced several warm and trusting relationships with others.
- I have confidence in my opinions, even if they are contrary to the general consensus.
- I am quite good at managing the many responsibilities of my daily life.
- Some people wander aimlessly through life, but I am not one of them.
- I think it is important to have new experiences that challenge how you think about yourself and the world.
These six statements represent six key dimensions of psychological well-being; that is, how good you feel about yourself and your life.
I’m sure you’ll agree that your sense of well-being profoundly influences how you perform in every area of your life, especially work and creative pursuits. In fact, as I’ve written, happier people are generally more creative and productive than their less happy peers.
With that in mind, here are six ways to increase your well-being, love your life, and in turn, create more positive energy to do great work.
How 750Words.com Reinvigorated My Morning Pages Writing Practice
For nearly a year, I’ve been doing Morning Pages, the daily writing practice originated by Julia Cameron in her book The Artist’s Way.
Basically, your task with Morning Pages is to write 3 pages of stream-of-consciousness writing each day, first thing in the morning. If you’d like more info about the how’s and why’s of Morning Pages, download Julia’s PDF here.
Until recently, I wrote my Morning Pages longhand. You know, with pen and paper. I’d pour myself a hot cup of coffee or tea, sit down at the dining room table, and write in the early-morning silence. It was a sweet little morning ritual that I enjoyed for most of 2010.
About two months ago, my enjoyment started to fade. Mainly because the light over my dining room table casts the shadow of my hand onto the paper as I write, and it bothers my eyes. I didn’t notice the shadow initially, but lately, it’s become a huge distraction. So much so that it’s turned my sweet little morning ritual into a frustrating chore.
Fortunately, I discovered 750 Words, billed as “the online, future-ified, fun-ified translation of Morning Pages.” Why 750 words? Because in the writing world, 250 words is the standard number of words per page (multiplied by 3 pages equals 750).
Seven Good Things I Did for My Body in 2010
1. Gave up nicotine – I was never a smoker, but since my early teens, I was addicted to smokeless tobacco (aka snuff, Skoal). On Sunday, December 5, 2010, I finally gave it up.
It was a battle initially, but the cravings have decreased, and I’m out of the woods. Strangely enough, the frequent, low-grade headaches have disappeared too.
2. Switched from coffee to tea – Coffee is very acidic, and combined with my nicotine habit above, the near daily heartburn was brutal. Not to mention the negative long-term effects on my health. Although I still grab a cup of java from Dunkin Donuts now and again, my daily drink of choice is now a steaming mug of Stash Premium Earl Grey Tea.
3. Switched from dairy milk to almond milk – this was part of my overall goal to reduce the amount of animal products I take into my body. There’s plenty of research out there that shows it’s a healthier way to go. Plus, Ellen (my vegetarian girlfriend) recently read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and it wasn’t pretty. (If you decide to try almond milk, make sure to get the unsweetened kind)
4. Cut way back on sugar - Refined sugar is deadly, and excess sugar of any sort has been shown to contribute to a slew of health problems (see The 76 Dangers of Sugar to Your Health). Plus it plays havoc with your energy levels throughout the day. I now read all food labels to check for added sugar and avoid almost anything that has it.
5. Made it a habit to take 1000mg of Vitamin C each day – Vitamin C’s list of benefits keeps getting longer. I can’t remember the last time I had a cold or went to the doctor.
6. Added more vegetables to my diet – I still have a long way to go here, but it was a great start. I’m even eating veggies for breakfast, as well as on my pizza now and again.
7. Cut way back on TV – Research shows that too much TV sucks the life out of you, and contributes to obesity. I wrote about my own TV addiction several months ago, and kicking that habit was one of the best things I ever did. Amazon.com is pretty happy about it too, because they sold me a’lotta books in 2010.
How about you? What did positive changes did you make in 2010?
What’s on tap for 2011?
How Content Marketing Helps You Make a Difference While You Make a Profit
“I believe Marketing with Meaning is less about ‘context’ – or finding the best time to get in front of a consumer’s eyeballs – and more about ‘content’ or creating something that people find valuable in itself.” – Bob Gilbreath, Marketing With Meaning
Over three years ago, when I still owned Solostream, I wrote and published a tutorial on how to install WordPress. I also did a video version of the tutorial for folks who learn better through video.
When I first published the tutorial, I did so mainly because I thought it would be a valuable resource for new WordPress users. I thought it would make it easier for them to get their WordPress site up and running with as little fuss as possible. Sure, I also hoped it would provide some value to Solostream in the form of backlinks and goodwill, but little did I know then just how much value it would actually provide.
Today, that one article alone attracts about 2500 visitors to the Solostream site each month, and that number is steadily increasing. Folks find the tutorial either via backlinks from other sites or – more often – through a simple Google search.
Gandhi’s Top 10 Fundamentals for Changing the World
I love this. Download it, and get it printed at Kinko’s. Compliments of francesca.
6 Keys to Being Excellent at Anything
From Six Keys to Being Excellent at Anything by Tony Schwartz.
1. Pursue what you love. Passion is an incredible motivator. It fuels focus, resilience, and perseverance.
2. Do the hardest work first. We all move instinctively toward pleasure and away from pain. Most great performers, Ericsson and others have found, delay gratification and take on the difficult work of practice in the mornings, before they do anything else. That’s when most of us have the most energy and the fewest distractions.
3. Practice intensely, without interruption for short periods of no longer than 90 minutes and then take a break. Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the highest level of focus to any given activity. The evidence is equally strong that great performers practice no more than 4.5 hours a day.
4. Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses. The simpler and more precise the feedback, the more equipped you are to make adjustments. Too much feedback, too continuously, however, can create cognitive overload, increase anxiety, and interfere with learning.
5. Take regular renewal breaks. Relaxing after intense effort not only provides an opportunity to rejuvenate, but also to metabolize and embed learning. It’s also during rest that the right hemisphere becomes more dominant, which can lead to creative breakthroughs.
6. Ritualize practice. Will and discipline are wildly overrated. As the researcher Roy Baumeister has found, none of us have very much of it. The best way to insure you’ll take on difficult tasks is to ritualize them — build specific, inviolable times at which you do them, so that over time you do them without having to squander energy thinking about them.
11 Things to Eliminate in 2011
“When you’re brave enough to let go of anything you don’t absolutely love or need, what you have left is the space for stillness and possibility.” – Cheryl Richardson
This is a writing prompt from Sam Davidson as part of the Reverb10 project.
11 Things: What are 11 things your life doesn’t need in 2011? How will you go about eliminating them? How will getting rid of these 11 things change your life?
I love this writing prompt. As a die-hard minimalist, it feels more natural to remove something from my life rather than add something. With that in mind, here are 11 things I intend to eliminate in 2011.
1. Creative Blocks – For me, 2010 has been an amazing year marked by personal transformation, renewal and foundation-building. Not to overstate it, but in many ways, I’m a much different person than I was at this time last year.
In general, that’s a great thing, but with all that inner turbulence, it’s been a challenge for me to be as creatively productive as I’d like. After all, it’s hard to write about things I don’t yet fully understand or have the language to express.
To address this challenge, I recently hired a writing coach to help me gain clarity and develop a more productive writing process. Although we’ve only had two sessions, it’s already paying dividends, and I plan to continue that work into the new year. At the same time, I continue to develop habits, systems and structures designed to eliminate creative blocks and streamline my creative production.
The end-game of this work is to become the divine creative force we’re all destined to become, and positively impact as many people as possible in the process.
2. Skeletons in my Closet – Okay, so I haven’t killed anybody or broken any laws, but there are some things about my past that I’ve yet to write about publicly. No, it’s not unusual to keep certain stuff private, but it consumes a lot of energy. It’s also hard to talk about optimal living without revealing parts of my life that lead me to it in the first place. I’d rather share myself fully and openly and redirect the energy to something more important, like dancing, laughing, making love or changing the world.
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