Zig Ziglar

10 simple ways to stop overthinking everything and take control of your life

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When you catch yourself spending too much time in your own head, consider how you can turn things around.

Here are 10 things you need to remember when you are overthinking anything in your life.

1) Tune into Yourself

The first thing to do is pay attention to your thoughts.

You can catch them getting away from you if you aren’t paying attention to them.

Pay attention to how you feel, think, and act when you in a state of overthinking. You probably aren’t producing a lot or getting actual work done.

According to a Spiritual Master this is what observing your mind means:

“Become an observer of the currents of thought that flow through your consciousness. Just like someone sitting by the side of a river watching the river flow by, sit by the side of your mind and watch.”

“In that simple observation you will see and experience that your thoughts and you are separate – because you can see that the one who is watching the thoughts is separate from the the thoughts, different from them. And you become aware of this, a strange peace will envelop you because you will not have any more worries. You can be in the midst of all kinds of worries but the worries will not be yours. You can in the midst of many problems but the problems will not be yours. You can be surrounded by thoughts but you will not be the thoughts…”

“And if you become aware that you are not your thoughts, the life of these thoughts will begin to grow weaker, they will begin to become more and more lifeless. The power of your thoughts lies in the fact that you think they are yours. When you are arguing with someone you say, “My thought is”. No thought is yours. All thoughts are different from you, separate from you. You just be a witness to them.”

2) Change Your Tone

Instead of focusing on what can go wrong, start making a list of all the things that could go right.

When you focus on the positive, good things, start to happen.

When you focus on the negative, you focus on everything that is wrong and lose sight of opportunity and possibility.

Here’s a brilliant quote from Ernest Agyemang Yeboah:

“If you think the world is full of darkness, let us see your light. If you think the world is full of wickedness, let us see your goodness. If you think people are acting wrongly, let us see your right action. If you think people don’t know, let us see what you know. If you think the world is full of uncaring people let us see how you care about people. If you think life is not being fair to you, let us see how you can be fair to life. If you think people are proud, let us see your humility. We can easily find fault and we can easily see what is wrong but a positive attitude backed by a right action in a true direction is all we need to survive in peace and harmony in the arena of life.”

3) Distractions Are a Good Thing

If you ever find yourself obsessing about a problem, try to shift gears and give your brain a break.

Focusing on something else, even for a little while, can help your brain get the much-needed digestion time it needs to process the information you’ve given it.

Not to mention, when you distract yourself, your brain has time to solve the problem in other ways.

We tend to consciously try to fix things, but subconsciously our brains are working to provide solutions we don’t see yet.

You know that feeling of ah-ha! When a solution suddenly comes to you? That’s what happens when you move on from a problem and start to focus on something else.

4) Let Go of Fear

Nothing can stop you from moving on in your life like fear can.

If you focus on the negative and the things that are stopping you in your tracks, you will never get anywhere.

Many people are actively working to work against their fears and they are accomplishing amazing things.

Don’t let your fear stop you. Or at the very least, use it to fuel you and prove yourself wrong.

Joe Henry explains that fear itself is actually more destructive than the potential of the thing that arouses it:

“Where something even deeper than the marrow knows that the cost of avoiding what one fears is even greater than the actual object of that fear and so the fear itself is even more corrosive even more destructive than all the frightening potential of the thing that arouses it.”

The good news? We can choose to not let fear control our actions.

5) Look at Things from a Different Perspective

Rather than try to solve problems from your own perspective, take a minute and put yourself in the someone else’s shoes. What would they do? How would they want the problem to be solved?

Sometimes we get so caught up in what we think that we forget there are multiple ways to approach a problem and we overthink it to death.

When you change your point of view, answers and solutions become obvious in different ways.

6) Progress Over Perfection

When you are in the middle of overthinking everything, remember that you don’t have to have the perfection solution to move forward with an idea or project.

Making progress is more important than achieving perfection, especially when it comes to work or relationships.

You can adjust things as you go, but if you wait for the perfect time, place, solution, idea, concept, day, week, month or year, you will be plagued with that problem forever.

7) You Can’t Predict What Will Happen

While you might not be able to predict what will happen in the future, you can heavily influence it by making decisions in the here and now and having the confidence to trust your own judgment.

Sounds easier said than done, but it is possible to stop overthinking all the things that could happen: start by focusing on what is happening right now and deal with that first.

Then move on to the next thing.

“If you want to be happy, do not dwell in the past, do not worry about the future, focus on living fully in the present.”  – Roy T. Bennett

8) Set a Timer

If you are feeling frustrated with your inability to move past a problem, set a timer and allow yourself to continue to focus on it for only that length of time.

This will prevent you from waste an entire day or more on something that you can’t fix right now. Decide how much time you will dedicate to this problem and move on

9) Acknowledge Your Efforts

Even if you aren’t making the kind of progress you were hoping for, take a moment to acknowledge the effort you have already put into it and any small wins you might have had up to this point.

If the issue or problem is important to you, then you’ll be able to come back to it when you have a clearer head. And if not, then be okay with letting it go.

10) Practice Gratitude

While you are stuck in a period of overthinking something, take a moment to be grateful for the problem.

Afterall, it doesn’t have to be a bad thing that you are faced with solving this problem: it could be a good problem like how do I spend my lottery winnings?

And if it’s more like, how do I pay my mortgage, than start from a place of being grateful for having a house to pay for in the first place.

There’s always another way of looking at what is happening that can get you out of the cycle of overthinking and start moving you in a direction that is more desirable to you.

 

“Gratitude is the healthiest of all human emotions. The more you express gratitude for what you have, the more likely you will have even more to express gratitude for.” —Zig Ziglar

3 Things You Can Do If You Are Unhappy At Work.

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“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.” Martin Luther King, Jr.

I recently posted a question on our Facebook Community Page asking people whether their current job brings meaning and fulfillment into their lives and I have to say that the answers weren’t too positive.

I am sure that there are a lot of people in this world that don’t love what they do, people who don’t love their jobs and that is exactly why I decided to write this post. We live our lives based on the choices and decisions we make on a daily basis. Life is what we make it and if we really want to be happy, we need to become aware of this truth and we need to realize that: “No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.” Buddha

If you are stuck in a job that you hate, you have the power to do something about it, you have the power to allow/ bring happiness back into your life. Being stuck in a job we hate it’s not something we want for ourselves, for this will drain us of energy, making us and the many people  we love very unhappy. If you are stuck in a job you hate, here is what you can do about it:

1. If you don’t like your job, change it

Change your job, change your life. Like everything in life, if you don’t like your job you can always change it. You can always remove yourself from the situations that are not meaningful nor fulfilling to you. It can be scary I know, but keep in mind that short term pain will bring long term gain and if you are not happy with your job right now you will have to change it because if you don’t, you will not be able to be happy with your whole life, and you will become resentful towards yourself and those around you, living a life full of regrets, pain and anger.

Remove yourself from your job if it’s not meaningful and fulfilling, remove yourself from your job if you are unhappy with it and trust that there is something out there that you can do better than anyone else, and know that without your work – your meaningful contribution, the world will not be complete. Have some faith in yourself and the very wisdom that created us all, for I am sure nobody was sent here on this planet to be average and stuck in a job they hate.

“Discipline yourself to do the things you need to do the things you need to do when you need to them, and the day will come when you will be able to do the things you want to do them!” Zig Ziglar

2. If you can’t change your job, change your attitude

Attitude is everything! It’s not always easy to just leave a job that we don’t like because we all have these earthy responsibilities – mortgage, college fees to pay, car payments to make, etc., and of course, let’s not forget about the basic needs that need to be met. Until we manage to find a job that we love, a job that is meaningful to us, it will be beneficial if we could change our attitude towards our current job and towards our present life. You have no idea how much a positive attitude can help, and how happier we will become the moment we decide to look at the bright side of things, and trust me, there is always a bright side.

“Happiness is an attitude. We either make ourselves miserable, or happy and strong. The amount of work is the same.” Francesca Reigler

3. Keep your dreams alive

It s so important to keep our dreams alive, knowing that: “All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.” Walt Disney

No matter where you are, no matter how horrible your job may be and no matter how much you hate it, if you manage to keep an eye on the things you want, if you manage to keep an eye on your big, bold and beautiful dreams you will be happy. Every experience has something to teach us and instead of being resentful we can chose to be grateful for the lessons they are helping us master. If you don’t like your job, change it and if you can’t change it, you can always change your attitude, and that will make all the difference. Let’s not complicate our lives and let’s not be to harsh on ourselves because if we don’t practice love, gentleness and forgiveness towards ourselves, chances are that nobody will. Always look to make the best of everything that happens to you, of what you have and where you are and allow yourself to learn from every experience and every interaction, allow life to make you better not bitter.

“Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn’t learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn’t learn a little, at least we didn’t get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn’t die; so, let us all be thankful.” Buddha

How to Achieve and Sustain Balance in Your Everyday Life.

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I believe that being successful means having a balance of success stories across the many areas of your life. You can’t truly be considered successful in your business life if your home life is in shambles. ~Zig Ziglar

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It seems there are times when we all feel that life would be so much easier if we had more time in the day or if we could only cater to this or that a little bit more. We wear so many different titles in our lives, parent, son/daughter, spouse, brother/sister, friend, significant other, co-worker, etc.

How do we fill each of those roles successfully when we are only one person? Where is that line, how do we find it and once we do, how do we stay balanced? Well, since cloning humans is still far off, we have to look at why it is so hard to achieve and sustain balance in our everyday lives.

Many of us use the wrong definition of Balance, which is probably why we have such difficulties finding or achieving it. In today’s society, we look at and define ‘balance’ as a verb; meaning to arrange, adjust, or proportion the parts of symmetrically. Now how could anyone ever hope to BE a verb? By this definition Balance is an action that we try to DO all day every day – no wonder we become so exhausted when trying to ‘balance’ our lives. What most of us fail to realize is that; when it comes to our daily lives, Balance is necessary but it is not about symmetrical distribution or weight. We shouldn’t feel as though we are walking a tightrope or constantly being pulled in different directions. The balance that we all seek to acquire is actually a noun defined by: mental steadiness or emotional stability; habit of calm behavior, judgment, etc.

Simply said Balance is acquired internally and reflected outward…it is never the other way around. The answer is simple – the balance we all seek is within ourselves. It is important to allow ourselves some time in our busy schedules to unwind and clear our minds, even if it is only five or ten minutes a day, because this is where we begin to understand what we need from ourselves to reach mental steadiness or emotional stability.

Solitude is not the absence of company but the moment when our soul is free to speak to us and help us decide what to do with our life. ~Paulo Coelho

The daily stress that we often carry comes from the lack of balance or the feeling of being stretched too thin. We often feel overwhelmed, unable to be everything to everyone or unable to be many places at the same time. However if you stop to think about it – is that really what is required of us? Balance is not about being everything to everyone all at once. Balance is about understanding ourselves, what we do and do not want; who we are and are not; what we are and are not capable of and staying true to ourselves.

We need to find the “middle way” in our own lives. It is the art of finding balance. Reflecting upon our lives, we soon discover what serves us well – nurturing calmness, ease, and simplicity. We also discover what it is that leads to entanglement, confusion, distress, and anxiety. Wisdom is being able to discern the difference, then knowing what we need to nurture and what we need to learn to let go. ~Christina Feldman

Instead of allowing ourselves to be defined by all of the titles we wear daily, we should instead define those titles by simply being ourselves. What this means is; once you have a clear understanding of who you are and what you want, your priorities will fall into place and you will be able to naturally and effortlessly achieve the state of habitual calm behavior and judgement. This then provides the desired sense of peace and balance that we all seek.

Source: Purpose Fairy