Author: Michele Foster

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11 Ways Clutter Is Messing With Your Health & Relationships

Here are some of the main effects to watch out for:

1. Having clutter can make you feel tired and lethargic.

Most people who have clutter say they can’t find the energy to begin to clear it. But the stagnant energy that stacks up around clutter actually causes tiredness and lethargy. Clearing it frees up the energy in your home and releases new vitality in your body.

2. Having clutter can keep you in the past.

When all your available space is filled with clutter, there is no room for anything new to come into your life. You tend to you look back rather than forward in your life, blaming the past for your current situation rather than taking responsibility for creating a better tomorrow.

Clearing your clutter allows you to begin to deal with your problems and move forward. It is vital to release the past to create a better tomorrow.

3. Having clutter can congest your body.

When you have lots of clutter, the energy of your home gets congested, and so does your body. Clutterbugs generally do not get enough exercise; are often constipated; have dull, clogged complexions; and show no vitality in their eyes. People with little clutter in their lives are generally more active. The choice is yours.

4. Having clutter can confuse you.

When you live surrounded by clutter, it is impossible to have clarity about what you are doing in your life. When you clear it, you can think more clearly and life decisions become easier. Being clear of clutter is one of the greatest aids I know to discovering and creating the life you want.

5. Having clutter can affect the way people treat you.

People treat you the way you treat yourself. So if you value yourself and look after yourself, people will treat you well. If you “let yourself go” and allow the junk to mount up around you, you may attract people who mistreat you in some way because subconsciously you feel that is what you deserve. When you sort out your home, you can improve all your relationships in the process.

6. Having clutter can make you procrastinate.

If you have a lot of clutter, you will tend to put off doing things until “tomorrow.” The clutter stagnates your energy and makes it difficult to get yourself to do anything. After clutter clearing you are likely to surprise yourself (and everyone else!) by wanting to do things you’ve put off for a long time.

7. Having clutter can cause disharmony.

Clutter is a major cause of arguments in families and between housemates, business partners, and coworkers. If you live or work knee-deep in the stuff and those around you do not, their lifestyle will not impede your progress, but yours most certainly can impede theirs. Clear up your clutter and then you will be able to get to the higher possibilities of what you can do together, which is much more interesting than arguing about mundane junk!

8. Having clutter can put your life on hold.

Don’t let your life slip away. Sit down right now and write a list of all the things you would love to do if only your clutter were sorted, and let this be the inspiration for you to get on with it.

9. Having clutter can depress you.

The stagnant energy of clutter pulls you down and can make you feel depressed. Feelings of hopelessness are compounded by clutter and can be relieved to some extent by clearing it, because you create space for something new to come into your life.

The reason I think this works is that many types of depression are caused by a higher part of your consciousness stopping you from doing what you have been doing because it is time for you to do something else.

10. Having clutter can dull your sensitivity and enjoyment of life.

Just as clutter mutes the sounds and dulls the atmosphere in your home, it also mutes your ability to live life to the fullest. Clearing the clutter allows the fresh winds of inspiration to enter your home and your life.

11. Having clutter can distract you from important things.

Do you own your stuff or does it own you? Everything you own has a call on your attention, and the more clutter you have, the more your energy is tied up in mundane matters. When you clear out your clutter, you leave yourself free to put the important things in your life in perspective rather than being constantly embroiled in the details of day-to-day maintenance.

Understanding how your clutter can affect you helps you to look at it in a new way and start to make new decisions about whether you want to keep it or not.

Excerpted from CLEAR YOUR CLUTTER WITH FENG SHUI (Revised & Updated) Copyright © 2016 by Karen Kingston. Published by Harmony Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.

Source: mindbodygreen.com ~ By: Karen Kingston ~ Image: pixabay.com

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5 Reasons to Clear the Clutter out of Your Life

Do you look around your home and wonder how it got so full of knick-knacks, or scan your office and ask yourself how it got to be so buried in neglected piles of paper? What about your calendar: Is it filled with appointments stretching indefinitely into the future? Is your email box so overflowing that you don’t even feel like wading in to try to address any but the biggest emergencies? All of this clutter, physical and mental, can interrupt your flow — both your ability to move and your ability to think. It turns out that your well-being could also become victim to what we might call the “clutter effect.” A collection of recent studies on stress, life satisfaction, physical health, and cognition all speak to the value of streamlining.

When we think of cluttering, the first association many have is with the inside of a hoarder’s home. However, cluttering can simply involve the accumulation of more possessions than can fit into the available space. If you have a lifetime of memorabilia strewn around the rooms of a 25-room mansion, all will fit comfortably onto shelves and tables. It’s an entirely different matter if that same amount of stuff ends up in a cramped two-bedroom apartment.

A relatively recent investigation on perceptions of the environment and well-being examined the set of relationships among clutter in the home and subjective well-being. University of New Mexico’s Catherine Roster and colleagues (2016) examined how clutter compromises an individual’s perception of home, and ultimately feelings of satisfaction with life. The underlying premise of the study was that because many people identify so closely with their home environments, the extent to which it’s cluttered can interfere with the pleasure they experience when being in that environment.

Roster et al. defined “home” not simply as the physical dwelling in which you live, but more generally as “the broader constellation of experiences, meanings, and situations that shape and are actively shaped by a person in the creation of his or her lifeworld” (p. 32). Clutter makes it difficult to navigate through that lifeworld and to get done what you need to in order to live comfortably within it. When your countertop is full of appliances as well as strewn-about mail and random gadgets, it’s going to be much more difficult to get that countertop looking satisfactorily clean and shiny. Roster and her colleagues identified a sample of adults with mild to moderate cluttering problems through “The Institute for Challenging Disorganization” (ICD), a non-profit organization intended to help those who are, as you might guess, organizationally challenged. In addition to rating their own clutter-related behaviors (such as not being able to find things due to clutter), participants in the sample of nearly 1,500 adults aged 18 and older rated the extent to which they felt attached to their homes, saw their possessions as an extension of themselves, and felt their home gave them psychological comfort.

The two factors of attachment to home and possession self-extension positively predicted the individual’s sense of the psychological safety of the home. Clutter, though, was negatively related to the psychological sense of home and, ultimately, to well-being. As the authors concluded, “Clutter is often an insidious and seemingly harmless outgrowth of people’s natural desire to appropriate their personal spaces with possessions … when [clutter] becomes excessive, it can threaten to physically and psychologically entrap a person in dysfunctional home environments which contribute to personal distress and feelings of displacement and alienation” (p. 38).

Getting rid of the clutter in your home, with or without the help of other non-organizationally challenged individuals, seems to be a key factor that you may not have realized is so important to your feelings of happiness. This process may be painful at the time, but it should help you overcome this important obstacle to your well-being. Here are five reasons to start streamlining your life today:

1. Low subjective well-being

Living in clutter impedes your identification with your home, which should be a retreat from the outside world and a place to feel pride. As we see in the University of New Mexico study, having too many of your things in too small a place will lead you to feel that your home environment is your enemy, not your friend.

2. Unhealthier eating

An Australian-U.S. study conducted by Lenny Vartarian et al. (2017) showed that people will actually eat more cookies and snacks if the environment in which they’re offered a choice of foods is chaotic, and they’re led to feel stressed. When the experimental kitchen in which participants were tested was disorganized and messy, and they were put in a low self-control mindset, students in the Cornell University lab ate twice as many cookies as those in a standard, non-chaotic kitchen. In other words, you’ll reach more for the sweets in a cluttered setting when you’re feeling out of control.

3. Poorer mental health

In examining a century of research on stress and well-being, University of South Carolina’s Paul Bliese and colleagues (2017) noted that, in some of the first studies conducted of stress and the workplace, a comfortable environment was seen as essential to “mental hygiene.” Although recent research has veered more toward mental than physical comfort, a case can be made for the workplace being as clutter-free as we know from Roster’s research that the home should be. Other research on workplace satisfaction has pointed to the advantages of employees being able to personalize their surroundings, but when those surroundings become cluttered, this should have diminishing returns. Certainly, feeling stressed by a cluttered inbox is enough to cause anyone’s mental hygiene to deteriorate, as you can most likely attest to from your own experience.

4. Less efficient visual processing

It’s actually harder to read people’s feelings when your visual surroundings are filled with random stimuli. In an examination of the impact of clutter on perceptions of scenes in movies, Cornell University’s James Cutting and Kacie Armstrong (2016) found that when the background of a scene is highly cluttered, viewers find it more difficult to interpret the emotional expressions on the faces of the characters. If this finding holds true in daily life, it means that you’ll be less accurate in figuring out how other people are really feeling when you’re seeing them amidst a clutter-filled room.

5. Less efficient thinking

“Mental clutter” is a state of mind in which you can’t inhibit irrelevant information. University of Toronto’s Lynn Hasher proposed a number of years ago that mental clutter is one of the prime suspects in the cause of age-related memory losses. Her research today (Amer et al. 2016) continues to support that proposition. If you’re unable to get through the material clogging up your neural networks, so the theory goes, you’ll be slower and less efficient in processing information. As a result, you’ll be incapacitated when it comes to short-term memory tasks, and even in longer-range mental exercises when you have to come up with information you should know, such as names of people, that you can no longer find within your disorganized repository of knowledge.

Streamlining seems to have its advantages, then, not just as a housekeeping tool, but as an essential process for maintaining your happiness in your home environment and at work. At the same time, cutting through the clutter can benefit your physical health and cognitive abilities. Start getting out that trash bag, whether virtual or physical, and you’ll soon feel better able to enjoy your surroundings while you think more efficiently and cleanly.

Source:  psychologytoday.com ~ By: Susan Krauss Whitbourne Ph.D. ~ Image: pixabay.com

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15 Highly Successful People Who Failed On Their Way To Success

Famous Failure, Elvis Presley

Before their success, some of the world’s most successful people experienced epic failure. We celebrate their success but often overlook the path that got them there. A path that is often marked with failure.

Their crowning achievements stem from drive and determination as much as ability. Persistence and certitude are the difference between success and failure.

Here are 15 highly successful people whose glorious succeses are remembered but their failures are lesser known.

Get motivated, accept failure as merely a chance to learn, and remember the words of American writer Elbert Hubbard:

“There is no failure except in no longer trying.”

1. Oprah

oprah

She’s a billionaire with her own TV channel and a penchant for giving away cars but Oprah Winfrey was fired from her first TV job as an anchor in Baltimore.

Last year, Oprah reflected on her experiences during a Harvard commencement speech:

“There is no such thing as failure. Failure is just life trying to move us in another direction.”

Creating your own TV channel is a sure way never to get fired again!

2. Steven Spielberg

His cinematic output has grossed more than $9 billion and brought him three Academy Awards, but the master of the blockbuster was rejected TWICE by the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts.

As their way of saying “Oops, I guess we were wrong about you” the school built a building in honor of Spielberg.

3. Thomas Edison

In what might be at once the most discouraging statement and worst teaching practice of all time, Thomas Edison was told by his teachers he was ‘too stupid to learn anything’.

Edison went on to hold more than 1,000 patents, including the phonograph and practical electric lamp. Death most likely spared his teachers the ignominy of their incorrect assessment.

4. Walt Disney

Disney

Can you imagine your childhood without Disney? Well it could easily have been if Walt had listened to his former newspaper editor. The editor told Walt he ‘lacked imagination and had no good ideas’. Undeterred, Old Walt went on to create the cultural icon that bears his name.

Disney’s take on failure:

“I think it’s important to have a good hard failure when you’re young… Because it makes you kind of aware of what can happen to you. Because of it I’ve never had any fear in my whole life when we’ve been near collapse and all of that. I’ve never been afraid.”

5. Albert Einstein

His name is synonymous with intelligence yet it wasn’t always that way for Albert Einstein. As a child he didn’t start speaking until he was four, reading until he was seven, and was thought to be mentally handicapped.

He went on to win a Nobel Prize and altered the world’s approach to physics. I guess he was just thinking of the right thing to say for those first four years…

6. J.K. Rowling

JK

Before there was a wizard, there was welfare. Rowling was a broke, depressed, divorced single mother simultaneously writing a novel while studying.

Now one of the richest women in the world, Rowling reflects on her early failures:

“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.”

7. Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln’s failures were broad and numerous. He achieved the unique feat of leaving for a war a captain and returning a private (the lowest military rank).

He next took failure in his stride during multiple failed business attempts. Undeterred, Lincoln marched into the political realm, where he launched several failed runs at political office before his ascendance to President.

8. Jerry Seinfeld

Before the show about nothing, Seinfeld was a young comedian on the stand-up circuit. His first time on stage didn’t go so well. On seeing the audience he froze and was booed and jeered off stage.

His choices: pack it in and accept comedy isn’t his thing or return to the same stage the following night and have the audience in hysterics. He opted for the latter and went on to become one of the most successful comedians of all time.

9. Theodor Seuss Geisel

Known to generations as Dr Seuss, the much-loved children’s author had his first book rejected by 27 different publishers. His books that weren’t good enough for these publishers went on to sell more than 600 million copies worldwide.

10. Stephen King

In another instance in the never ending series “Book Publishers Making Dumb Decisions”, mega novelist Stephen King had his first book Carrie rejected 30 times.

Dejected, King dumped the book in the trash. His wife retrieved it and implored him to resubmit it which led to his first book deal and spawned his illustrious career.

11. Vincent Van Gogh

A Van Gogh painting will cost you upwards of $100 million nowadays. But in his lifetime, Vincent Van Gogh couldn’t get rid of the things.

He sold just one painting, ‘The Red Vineyard’, during his lifetime, and the sale came not long before his death. Unfortunately for Vincent, others got to enjoy the financial spoils of his lifetime of toils.

12. Elvis Presley

“You ain’t goin’ nowhere, son. You ought to go back to drivin’ a truck.”

These are the words that greeted Elvis Presley after his first performance at the Grand Ole Opry, after which he was promptly fired. Disposing of the keys to the truck, Presley went on to become the world’s biggest star with a legacy that endures.

13. Michael Jordan

MJ

Either he was part of the greatest high school roster of all time or his coach made a huge mistake in cutting Michael Jordan from his high school basketball team. Six Championships and five MVPs later, Jordan became arguably the greatest basketball player of all time.

Jordan famously said:

“I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot, and I missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

14. Charles Darwin

The man credited with much of how we came to understand the world today, Darwin was considered an average student and abandoned a career in medicine as a result.

Darwin embarked on a lifetime study of nature that led to the seminal ‘On the Origin of Species’ and forever altered the way humankind looks at our existence.

15. Sir James Dyson

You know that frustrating feeling when you don’t get something on the first attempt?

Multiple that by 5,126 because that’s the number of failed prototypes Sir James Dyson went through over the course of 15 years before creating the eponymous best-selling bagless vacuum cleaner that led to a net worth of $4.5billion.

Source: lifehack.org ~ By: Sebastian Kipman ~ Image: pixabay.com

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Five Ways To Make Peace With Failure

Five Ways To Make Peace With Failure

Let’s face it.  We all make mistakes.

Most of us know that failure is a reality of life, and at some level, we understand that it actually helps us grow. Intellectually, we even acknowledge that the greatest achievers — past and present — also routinely experienced colossal failures.

But still, we hate to fail.  We fear it, we dread it, and when it does happen, we hold onto it.  We give it power over our emotions, and sometimes we allow it to dictate our way forward (or backward). Some of us go to great lengths to avoid failure because of all the pain and shame associated with it.

Why is it so hard to let go, forgive ourselves and move on?  And how can we keep failure – or the fear of it — from derailing us?

Here are five strategies:

1.  Don’t make it personal.  Separate the failure from your identity. Just because you haven’t found a successful way of doing something (yet) doesn’t mean you are a failure.  These are completely separate thoughts, yet many of us blur the lines between them.  Personalizing failure can wreak havoc on our self-esteem and confidence.

There was a man who failed in business at age 21; was defeated in a legislative race at age 22; failed again in business at 24; overcome the death of his fiancée at 26; had a nervous breakdown at 27; lost a congressional race at 34; lost a senatorial race at age 45; failed to become Vice President at age 47; lost a senatorial race at 49; and was elected as the President of the United States at the age of 52. This man was Abraham Lincoln. He refused to let his failures define him and fought against significant odds to achieve greatness.

2.  Take stock, learn and adapt. Look at the failure analytically — indeed, curiously — suspending feelings of anger, frustration, blame or regret. Why did you fail? What might have produced a better outcome? Was the failure completely beyond your control? After gathering the facts, step back and ask yourself, what did I learn from this?  Think about how you will apply this newfound insight going forward.

Thomas Edison reportedly failed 10,000 times while he was inventing the light bulb. He was quoted as saying, “I have found 10,000 ways something won’t work. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.” The Wright brothers spent years working on failed aircraft prototypes and incorporating their learnings until they finally got it right: a plane that could get airborne and stay there.

3.  Stop dwelling on it. Obsessing over your failure will not change the outcome. In fact, it will only intensify the outcome, trapping you in an emotional doom-loop that disables you from moving on. You cannot change the past, but you can shape your future. The faster you take a positive step forward, the quicker you can leave these debilitating, monopolizing thoughts behind.

Don Shula is the winningest coach in the NFL, holding the record for most career wins (including two Super Bowl victories) and the only perfect season in NFL history.

Shula had a “24-hour rule,” a policy of looking forward instead of dwelling on the past. The coach allowed himself, his staff and his players 24 hours to celebrate a victory or brood over a defeat. During those 24 hours, Shula encouraged them to feel their emotions of success or failure as deeply as they could. The next day, it was time to put it behind them and focus their energy on preparing for their next challenge. His philosophy was that if you keep your failures and victories in perspective, you’ll do better in the long run.

4.  Release the need for approval of others.Often our fear of failure is rooted in our fear of being judged and losing others’ respect and esteem. We easily get influenced (and spooked) by what people say about us. Remember, this is your life, not theirs.  What one person considers to be true about you is not necessary the truth about you, and if you give too much power to others’ opinions, it could douse your passion and confidence, undermining your ability to ultimately succeed.

Oprah Winfrey was fired from her first TV job because someone thought she was “unfit for TV.” Stephen King’s first book, Carrie, was rejected by 30 publishers. Walt Disney was fired from his newspaper job because he “lacked imagination and good ideas.” Winston Churchill failed sixth grade and was considered “a dolt” by his teacher. Jerry Seinfeld was booed off the stage the first time he tried comedy. Soichiro Honda was rejected by an HR manager at Toyota Motor Corporation when he applied for an engineering job, leaving him jobless until he began making scooters in his garage and eventually founded Honda Motor Company. ‘Nuff said.

5.  Try a new point of view.  Our upbringing – as people and professionals – has given us an unhealthy attitude toward failure. One of the best things you can do is to shift your perspective and belief system away from the negative (“If I fail, it means I am stupid, weak, incapable, and am destined to fall short”) and embrace more positive associations (“If I fail, I am one step closer to succeeding; I am smarter and more savvy because the knowledge I’ve gained through this experience”).

Indeed, one can hardly find an historic or current-day success story that isn’t also a story of great failure.  And if you ask those who have distinguished themselves through their achievements, they will tell you that failure was a critical enabler of their success.  It was their motivator.  Their teacher.  A stepping stone along their path to greatness.  The difference between them and the average person is that they didn’t give up.

Michael Jordan said it best: “I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot, and I missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Source: forbes.com ~ By: Susan Tardanico ~ Image: pixabay.com

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How to Overcome Failure: 9 Powerful Habits

Overcoming Failure

“Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.”
C. S. Lewis

“I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.”
Michael Jordan

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Samuel Beckett

Oftentimes things go OK or even better than that.

But on some days they don’t.

You make a mistake, have setback or you simply fail. It’s no fun. But you can’t avoid it either unless you avoid doing anything at all.

So what’s needed is a smart and self-kind way to handle such situations instead of letting them lead to vicious self-beatings and to them dragging you down into negativity for the day or month.

This week I’d like to share 9 habits that’ve helped me with that. I hope they will be useful for you too.

1. First, just accept how you feel.

When you’ve just failed it will most likely hurt. Sometimes a bit. Sometimes a lot.

That’s OK. Don’t try to push it away by distracting yourself or by trying to push the responsibility onto the rest of the world (if you deep down know that this one’s on you partly or fully). And don’t try to paint it over with a smile.

I’ve found that it works better to not let yourself be lead away by those options or impulses.

But to just be with what I’m thinking and feeling. To try to accept it, to let it in and to hurt for a while instead of trying to reject it all and to keep it away.

Because when you let it in and accept it then it will go faster and in the long run be less painful to process what has happened.

If you reject how you really feel then those emotions will pop up at unexpected times later on and can make you moody, pessimistic, angry or sad.

2. Remember: you’re not a failure just because you had a setback.

When you’ve had a setback it’s very easy to start thinking that you will always keep failing in this area of your life. It’s easy to start thinking that YOU are indeed a failure.

Don’t fall for such a destructive and sometimes seductive self-fulfilling prophecy.

Instead, remind yourself that:

  • Just because you failed today or yesterday doesn’t mean that you’ll fail the next time.
  • The truth is that this won’t last for the rest of your life if you keep moving forward, if you take action and you keep learning and it doesn’t label you as some kind of failure (except if you decide to create that label in your own head).

Seeing what’s negative as a temporary thing instead of something permanent is an essential key to an optimistic attitude and to keep going forward in life.

3. Be constructive and learn from this situation.

See it more as valuable feedback and something you can use to improve rather than only a big blow and setback.

I’ve found that the simplest and most helpful way to do that is to ask myself better questions (instead of the common ones that send you off into a negative spiral).

Questions like:

  • What’s one thing I can learn from this?
  • How can I adjust my course to avoid this trap/making the same mistake and likely do better next time?
  • What’s one thing I can differently the next time?

Take some time with these questions and be honest with yourself as you answer them. There’s no rush and while some of the answers may be immediate others might take an hour, day or even a week to pop up.

The important thing is to start thinking about the situation from this perspective and to be constructive about things instead of getting stuck in denial or negativity and apathy.

4. Remind yourself: anyone who wants to do things of value in life will fail.

We often mostly just hear about people’s successes. But the path to those milestones tends to have many setbacks. The story of someone’s success may seem only bright and fast-moving in what’s told in the media or we see in our minds.

But the reality – and the useful way to approach setbacks – is most often more like this quote by Michael Jordan:

“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

5. Let it out into the light.

Another powerful way to handle the emotional fallout and the thoughts that come from a failure is to not keep it all bottled up inside.

But to let it out into the light by talking it over with someone close to you.

  • By venting about it while the other person just listens you can sort things out for yourself, help yourself to accept what happened instead of pushing it away and release that inner pressure.
  • By having a conversation about the situation you can see it from another perspective and through someone else’s eyes. This person can help you to ground yourself in reality again, to encourage and to perhaps even to find a way forward.

6. Find inspiration and support from your world.

A conversation with someone close to you can be very helpful.

Another thing you can do is to learn from those who’ve gone where you want to go. Read about how they handled setbacks and low-points before or during their success in books, on websites or online forums.

Or you can simply tap into the enthusiasm or motivation of someone else by listening to a podcast or audio book for maybe 30-60 minutes. This may not be specifically about your current challenge but can help you to shift your mood and mindset back towards optimism again.

7. Move forward again, don’t get stuck in mulling this situation over for too long.

Processing the situation and accepting it is essential.

But I know from experience that it’s also easy to get stuck in the same thoughts going around and around for week or a month.

The habit that has helped me with this trap is to take what I learn from questions like the ones I shared in tip #3 and to make a small rough plan for how I want to move forward from here.

So I take some time to sit down and write that one out.

8. Take action on that plan right away after you’ve drawn it up.

The plan you come up with will just be a start. You can course-correct later on, along the way.

So you don’t have to make it perfect. Trying to do that can sometimes just be a way to procrastinate because you fear failing again or because it is hard to start moving after this rough and disorienting thing that happened to you.

Split your start of a plan up into small steps and then take action on just one of them.

If you still have a hard time to get going then go for a very small step, just 1-5 minutes of action forward. The important thing is to get started and moving forward again so make that easy on yourself.

9. Improve your self-esteem.

A last thing that has helped me in general to handle setbacks is to improve my self-esteem.

  • By doing so failures don’t become something that so easily drags me down and I recover more quickly from them.
  • It also makes it easier to see what happened with more clarity and to take responsibility when I am responsible but also to see when someone else is partly responsible or when I just had bad luck that I could honestly not have predicted. And that helps me to not think that everything that goes wrong in my life is 100% my fault.

But how do you improve your self-esteem?

A good start would be to use much of what you find in this article. Like remembering that YOU are not a failure, that everyone have setbacks, to be constructive in the face of adversity and so on.

By doing these things over and over and making them habits your self-esteem improves.

And over time a smaller setback may just bounce off of you and a larger one will not be the same blow as it used to and the shock and climb back up from what happened becomes easier and not something that is as paralyzing anymore.

Source: positivityblog.com ~ By: HENRIK EDBERG ~ Image: pixabay.com

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