Category Archives: Attitude

Self Confidence

Mental Training Gives You Confidence

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One of the key contributors to procrastination is self-confidence.

There is no one in the world that is 100% confident all of the time. We all have areas in life where self-doubt creeps in and tries to tear down ideas or destroy dreams.

It’s important that you have the mental training that gives you the confidence to put your goals into action. There are negative statements in each of us. These are phrases designed to keep you from succeeding – or in some cases, from even trying.

You might be living with a negative mental teleprompter that feeds you lines that erode your confidence. This can cause you to have a battle that you can’t afford to engage in.

This negative mental attitude can damage your peak performance by causing you anxiety, depression – and even convincing you to give up. You need confidence on your side.

If your inner voice is feeding you lines such as, “You can’t do that” or, “You don’t have the skills, talent, money, or goals to accomplish this,” then it’s time that you shut it down.

What this negative self-talk is doing is poisoning the soil of your mind so that you don’t aim for peak performance because mentally, you’ve already lost the battle – and the war.

This kind of self-talk gets you to picture what can never be (anything good) or what you want (success) because you don’t deserve it. It’s time to silence that inner voice by correcting these false mental statements.

When you hear, “You can’t do that” in your mind, you need to give that statement the boot. Picture opening a door labeled, “I can” and kicking the negative “You can’t” right out of your mind.

This requires some mental training to do this. Don’t give your negativity an audience. Have some fortitude where you visualize giving the negative statement their walking papers for good.

Retrain your mind with positive thoughts about yourself and about what you can do. Replace every negative statement with a positive one, immediately. It takes practice to recognize when you’re being a downer to yourself.

If you have a setback, it’s not that you blew it. You just have to find another way. How you work in life and what you can accomplish will be settled within you long before you even make the first attempt.

Don’t allow yourself to dwell on any thought that stands in the way of your dreams because you deserve for them to come true. The mind is a tool that you can use to accomplish any task – whether it’s mental, emotional or physical.

Over time, as you implement the practice of positive self talk, you’ll notice that this becomes your new way of automatically viewing things – in a positive light. You won’t even have to try hard anymore – it just happens.

Train yourself to see the opportunities in every failure. This is a chance to learn and grow stronger. It’s almost like how we tear down muscles in order for them to grow back – bigger and stronger with every workout.

There’s a lot of discomfort in failure.  But mental training means you sit there and learn how to tolerate that feeling without quitting. Feel uncomfortable – it won’t kill you. Calmly practice working through those moments with calm clarity instead of frustration and panic.

Liberating, Free!

Three Truly Liberating Procrastination Tips

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Are you immobilized by procrastination and indecision? We all know that it is impossible to steer a car that’s not moving and the same is true with your life. You simply cannot direct and steer your life if you are immobilized by procrastination and indecision. It is what prevents you from doing the very things you need to do to make progress.

This debilitating behavior, or shall I say lack of behavior, is responsible for destroying so many dreams and aspirations. Action is the proper fruit of knowledge and doing what you know is often much harder than knowing what to do. This is actually a very accurate description of procrastination. It is the frustrating pattern of wanting to (consciously), knowing how to, but not doing it. It is the lack of action that keeps you from moving forward and making progress. Frustration sets in when you know you can do something, but still you don’t, and this frustration can easily turn into anger, a loss of self-confidence and even depression.

If you are the kind of person who’s actively improving and developing yourself, then there’s usually a gap between where you are and where you want to be. The only way to close this gap is to take action; to act on your desire for change and self-improvement. For this very reason you simply cannot afford to be stuck in procrastination. You must take action and liberate yourself from the disempowering effects of procrastination.

Procrastination is not so much a behavior as it is a way of thinking. The real problem is with your psychology and not with your behavior – the behavior is only the symptom. To liberate yourself from procrastination you must liberate yourself from the inside. It’s an internal shift that’s necessary and once you make the internal shift, it will automatically spill over into your actions. Here are three powerful procrastination tips that will help you liberate yourself from its immobilizing effects.

1. Detach Yourself From Your Behavior.

Realize that you are not your behavior. As soon as you start identifying with a behavior you become it. Just because you procrastinate at times does not make you a procrastinator unless you believe it. One of the strongest forces within the human personality is for your behavior to be consistent with your self-concept. Once you believe that you are a procrastinator all your actions will be filtered through this belief. Since all beliefs are self-reinforcing you will only strengthen this belief with your (in)action.

Instead, you must start by building a positive self-image and develop empowering beliefs. Choose different ways of defining yourself and forget about what you’ve done up until now. This is a fresh moment and you can change everything around, right now, by changing your beliefs about yourself.

2. You Don’t Have To Get It Perfect – You Just Have To Get It Started

One of the major causes for procrastination is this notion of wanting to get everything perfect. For some it even goes as far as waiting for the perfect time before they take action. Underneath this need to get things perfect lies the fear of failure and how your results will reflect on you. See, when you do nothing, nobody can judge or criticize you. Right? Wrong!

If you do nothing you will get nowhere. This universe is one that is driven by action. There are NO rewards for inaction. Only frustration and a longing for something that you know you can achieve, if only you do it. Instead of making perfection your goal, you should make starting your goal. As you do this and practice it you will soon discover the real secret: once you start, you build momentum and you end up doing much more than you ever intended to do when you set out to just get it started.

Perfection does not exist. Don’t be misguided by the illusion that you have to get it perfect. Its a weak excuse and one that will keep you immobilized. Liberate yourself and strive for a poor result that way you cannot be disappointed!

3. Change Your Perception

One of the most profound teachings that have its roots in eastern philosophy, is that when you change the way you look at things, things change. This idea can free you from virtually anything that might be holding you down. All of life relies on perception. What you take in with your senses are nothing but a vast array of sounds, colors, shapes, images and smells. None of it has any meaning in itself. You are the one that can give it meaning, and you are the one that gets to decide how you interpret this information.

Procrastination is nothing but a way of evaluating something and assigning a meaning to it that keeps you from taking action. At some level, mostly subconscious, you believe that taking action will be more painful than not taking action and by design; you will prevent yourself from taking action.

This is one of the most powerful procrastination tips and you can liberate yourself by starting to change the way you look at the things that you are procrastinating about. Ask yourself what else can this mean and instead of saying that you have to do it say that you choose to do it. The difference is subtle, but significant. Change the way you look at things and the things will change.

These three procrastination tips are by no means the begin all and end all of overcoming procrastination, but it will most certainly help to liberate you from being immobilized by procrastination and indecision.

The Decision to Change – Psalms Chapter 2

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Chapter 2 verse 1 asks the question; Why do the nations,  “those outside of us”, why do they angry? Why do these people only look at the negative, less important things in life?

Verse 2 describes the Kings and their councilmen coming together to conspire against the Lord, to conspire against the Messiah. And the lord for our purposes is the individual who makes life changing decisions for themselves! They are lord over themselves, masters of their own universe.

And their Messiah? They themselves are the ones who pull themselves through to the new place that they’re heading for, towards their life changing goals.

And finally, verse 3 describes how these kings and their advisors, these people who feel they are somehow better than us, above us, want to break their ties with us.

As we know, when someone makes a decision to move forward in life, to improve themselves, to change their paradigm, they need in essence to break the ties with those that currently influence them, with their prior “kings”.

Once we have made a decision to better our lives, a big part of what happens is that the people staying at the same level either leave or they break their ties with us. Alternatively, we ourselves need to break our ties with them.

A central reason we need to move on to another group of people is so that we are exposed to, and influenced by higher level people than ourselves. This of course is not to belittle the people that we are “leaving”, but rather so that we can be surrounded by people who have the habits, energy, and more successful ways of life we want to emulate and absorb. And those influences are what we need in order to move up to our new paradigm. And the people you leave behind, as cold as this may sound, aren’t necessarily on board with the better-you that’s on the way in any case. And this is why they are angry, and sometimes may even conspire against us.

Mid-chapter, in verse 6, God describes how He has set his goal on Mount Zion, on the mountaintop. Similar to Abraham heading out to sacrifice his son Isaac on Mount Zion, Abraham could not necessarily see the end in it’s entirety, he could not necessarily understood it in it’s full glory. And yet, he pursued it nonetheless. After all, it was the goal set out for him by God. So too must we relate in this way to the creator and it’s guiding system, within each one if us. 

Similarly, if we take our larger goals as reachable but not necessarily 100% clear as to how they will come about or even how they will manifest exactly, we will in the end reach them. And these goals of ours, our better selves, our new paradigms, will act like our own God-sent Messiah to bring us to the Mountaintop to the accomplishment and achievement of our goals, our own personal Mount Zion.

The chapter ends directing us to serve the Lord with fear and rejoice with trembling (versus 11 and 12). Serve your goals with the fear of losing site of them lest you let them fall by the wayside. Rejoice as you strive towards them, as you take and successfuly complete each step towards them. 

Verse 12 concludes, embrace purity, the purity of your path and of the process of reaching your goals, your new paradigm, your mountaintop. And should the attainment of your goals take longer than planned, that purity will subdue any anger that may arise. Blessed are they that put their trust in God and in their own goals as well.

Later Now

A Short But Accurate Definition Of Procrastination

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We have all experienced procrastination at some point in our lives. For some its something that comes and goes while for others it is a frustrating habit that often prevents them from ever achieving any of their dreams and goals.

There are many definitions of procrastination, but they all seem to point to one common characteristic in behavior, or rather, lack of behavior. When you procrastinate you are quite literally stuck between advancing and staying where you are. Consciously you want to advance, but subconsciously you want to stay. On a subconscious level you are preventing yourself from taking the very actions that you know you need to take to achieve the results you desire from a conscious or rational point of view. The frustrating thing about procrastination is that although you know what you want, and even how to get it, you still remain immobilized and unable to act on it.

Probably the most accurate definition of procrastination is that its the irrational delay, aversion or even evasion of a task or action. Its irrational because we cannot explain this behavior from a rational point of view. We can only explain and understand it from an emotional point of view because the reason why we procrastinate is because at a subconscious level we have an emotional association to the task that prevents us from taking the action. Wanting one thing and then doing the opposite seems stupid and completely irrational, but that is why procrastination can be such an odd behavior to deal with effectively.

The definition of procrastination, when translated from the original Latin, means in favor of tomorrow and although you might intentionally postpone your tasks there is an underlying reason why you do it which is irrational, emotional and stored in your subconscious experiences. You might want to loose weight and even though you can see how fat you are and how your health and vitality is deteriorating, you still can get yourself to exercise. Why is this? Well, on a rational level its very obvious that you MUST take action, but on an emotional level it seems too painful to give up the foods you’re addicted to and to sacrifice an hour of TV-time to go and kill yourself on the treadmill.

This association to exercise and changing your diet is nothing but a belief and an association that exists in your mind. Because you believe it, you will act upon it, even if it only exists in your imagination. On a very basic level all our actions are driven by need to avoid pain and the desire to gain pleasure. Procrastination is nothing but this basic truth in action. When you procrastinate you’re your beliefs about what will be painful and what will mean pleasure are what prevents you from taking action. Since your beliefs reside mostly in your subconscious level of thinking, you will be immobilized even if you say you want the opposite.

The definition of procrastination as an irrational behavior is indeed a very accurate one and explains the frustration when you can’t seem to get yourself to act on your conscious desires. Procrastination guarantees a life of frustration and striving. You must overcome procrastination if you really want to make any significant progress in your life.

Here’s a new definition that you might want to adopt to empower you to be more effective and to consistently act on your ideas, dreams and desires:

Procrastination is a call to action. It is a signal that you must act on the very things that you do not want to act on and DO the very thing that’s holding you back. It is the necessary resistance you need to be able to grow, develop and gain confidence that only comes from actually doing it. When you do break through the short term pain that held you back you come out on the other side with an increased sense of esteem for yourself and you start to see yourself and your abilities from a different perspective. The fact that you are procrastinating about something means that it hold significant enough value for you to be uncomfortable with not taking action.The things that are holding you back most are that which will free you most – once you take action. What will free you most is taking action. Not because of the absence of procrastination, but despite the procrastinating.

Psalms and Procrastination – Chapter 1

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Let’s leverage the Bible and it’s teachings to overcome procrastination.  Much can be learned from scripture. Here’s a look at Psalms (Tehilim) ch 1, v 2 & 3.

V2. But his delight is in the law of the Lord; and in his law doth he meditate day and night.

V3. And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.

It’s about vicarious victories. That is, sometimes, many times, modeling after other people that have been successful at what we ourselves want to achieve is a great way to push ourselves to achieve, to succeed. To overcome obstacles.

It’s also about hanging around with the right people. The beginning of the chapter, and of the book of Psalms by the way, the very first verse, talks about how the happy one is the one that does not find themselves in the company of the evil, or at least of negative people, of bad role models.

The second, tells us to seek positive role models. And Who of course is the most positive of all role models? It is none other than God Him/Herself!

Verse 3 is very telling as well. It’s about the fruits of our actions. The one who models themselves after successful people, and in this case God, will find themselves as if they are planted along the river side. Just like a tree takes its sustenance, its energy, its power, from the flowing waters of the river. And those flowing waters, and that successful self placement, are what allow the tree, and what allow us to grow  and to bring the fruit in its time.

That’s a very important point. To overcome fear, low self confidence, impulsivity, all underlying causes of procrastination, keep in mind that the fruits will come in the right time, if you put yourself in the right situation, and use the right Role Model.

Costs of Procrastination

Procrastination Comes with a Cost

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Be honest – are you one of those people who puts things off? It’s ok – we all do it. It’s human nature. “Why do something today when you can do it tomorrow,” or so the saying goes. But procrastination (to give it it’s “proper” name) can cost us more than we can imagine.

Why do we procrastinate? In general, we procrastinate because the task we are putting off is unpleasant in some way. Either we don’t like doing it (like making that phone call…), or there is some physical discomfort (like going to the dentist). The task may even be boring and monotonous, or just plain difficult. Its about avoiding some sort of stress, be it fear, anxiety, low self-confidence and the like.

But the effects of procrastination, the costs, can run deeper than just not doing the task. Other problems it may cause are:

Being branded as lazy: When people notice that you haven’t completed particular tasks, you can be branded as a lazy person. Not only can this affect your job or personal life (promotions and the like), but it may mean the tasks you really want to do are offered to someone else who is considered more reliable!

Creates clutter: Many unfinished tasks can leave a lot of clutter around – books, papers or other items that are needed to perform the job.

Bad for morale: There is nothing worse than knowing you have a job you need to do, and knowing at the end of the day that the job wasn’t done. It can make you feel down, and even preoccupy your mind while you’re trying to concentrate on other things.

You have no leeway: When you put something off, jobs accumulate. This means if an urgent task suddenly comes in, you have no leeway to drop everything and work on it – there are too many other outstanding things that need doing.

The task becomes more unpleasant: The job itself may not change by putting it off, but the feeling in our mind of how unpleasant we think the job will be grows. We think about how we have to explain not doing the job to other people, and the whole situation feeds on itself and becomes ugly.

Now to be fair, sometimes procrastinating isn’t a conscious action. Particular jobs just never seem to get done, even though you never consciously decided not to do them. But at other times you do make the decision not to do the job at the moment, and just put it off.

But you can save yourself a lot of mental clutter, and perhaps even more discomfort later on, if you just adopt a “do it now” attitude. Decide that you’re just going to get the job out of the way when it comes it, no matter how uncomfortable it may be. By doing the job straight away, often you will realize that the discomfort you associated with the task was simply your mind feeding on itself as you were putting it off. And the sense of relief you get from finishing the task is well worth it.

So, now you know about procrastination you have to ask yourself the question – “what am I going to do about it?” Hopefully you will decide to banish procrastination from your life, and reap the rewards of that decision!

Stay Focused

10 More Ways to Focus on One Thing at a Time

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Focusing on one task at a time can help you get more things done, compared to multitasking that can divide your attention and in the end you will be doing less than what you are supposed or expected to produce.

Here are 10 more ways to stay focused:

  1. Accomplish small tasks first. This will give you enough time to do the rest of your tasks without worrying about the minor ones that could disrupt your normal work routine or pattern.
  2. Never ever start a new project for your business, unless you are completely sure that the previous one is done. Remember that you should also not think about the remainder of your tasks or taking additional workload that can affect your concentration and productivity.
  3. Flexibility is key. Do not force yourself to complete one task if you know that you do not have enough resources to do so. Doing a task haphazardly results to poor quality of work. What you need to do is to try doing as much as you can, and leave the remainder of work for tomorrow, until everything gets done.
  4. Stop procrastinating and start working! If you stop making excuses why you were not able to finish your tasks on time, it means that you have the wrong attitude towards work. Instead of making excuses and blaming others, why not focus and start working on one task at a time.
  5. Learn to delegate other tasks. While it is important to be efficient, it is also important that show effective management and work focus through assigning or delegating tasks to other members of your team. Note that handling everything on your will ensure that you won’t get anything done. Now, if you learn how to properly delegate work, you will see that each employee or person will learn how to focus on one thing and be productive at the same time, including you.
  6. Beat laziness. If you are lazy, even if you are doing just one task – to market your business online, you will never get anything done. Stop being a sloth and move quickly but accurately.
  7. Keep yourself from feeling rushed or always in a hurry. If all you can think about is break time, as well as the end of your work day – you will not be able to concentrate on your task. Do not rush, take your time and find a comfortable work pace.
  8. Avoid information overload. If you keep stuffing your brain with too much information that you may not be able to make use of, the chances of confusion and distraction is extremely high. Deal with data or information the same way when you eat at a new restaurant. Trying each dish one at a time to completely savor or taste every flavor for better appreciation.
  9. Do not force things to happen. Face it, if the only thing that you can think of is to get the job done the soonest time possible, you are forcing a result out of your chosen task. Let things fall in to place by focusing on one aspect of your campaign at a time – completion of your task is just within reach.
  10. Be one with your work – this means that both your mind and your body should be really into the project that you need to complete. If you are not grounded, your attention will be divided, your mind and body will not work together.

Finding your focus is never easy, that is if you do not have the right attitude and mindset. However, if you put your mind to it, you will be able to completely focus on the important things first before jumping on to the next one.

Win

Simple Steps To Beat Procrastination

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One of the better means that can be employed to beat procrastination is being aware of how to manage time in the best and most effective manner and though procrastination is a very common occurrence in our lives, there is still a need to overcome procrastination so that many of the adverse consequences of procrastinating do not end up spoiling your life. Thus, any help you can get cure your procrastination would be welcome and so there is a need to look at some of these steps that can do the trick for you.

A very simple step you can take in order to beat procrastination is to do the task that you consider is the worst at the top of all your other tasks. The advantage of taking this option is that much like swallowing a frog, once you get that into your system the rest of the tasks will pass off much better and will be easier to do. A second step that you can take if you want to cure procrastination is to break down tasks into easily manageable smaller tasks, Remember, the best way to climb a mountain is to take one step at a time. The wisdom of breaking down tasks into smaller tasks will make more sense to you and thus prove an effective remedy to procrastination.

Those putting off exceptionally difficult tasks can learn how to overcome procrastination by thinking of the task in small pieces rather than a large problem. Think back to other projects that were completed and relate them to the existing one. To help learn how to overcome procrastination avoid planning long projects, start with ones that can be done in five or ten minutes and do not stop until the either the time expires of the job is complete. Either way it will be a positive step in the right direction.
You can also beat procrastination by delegating work to others including friends, and once you get a task begun, the rest of the task becomes easier to perform and in the same vein you can also try and do parts of a particular task that is more pleasing to do first and then do the rest of the task later. That way, the unpleasant tasks don’t seem so unpleasant and you will have taken a step forward which often is the hardest part about doing your work on time.

Another useful method that can be employed at conquering procrastination is taking just fifteen minutes on every task that needs to be performed in which time you can get the task moved ahead and then a momentum can be built that will make the rest of the task easier to complete. Other steps that you can take to beat procrastination include tracking your goals and trying your best to keep the tasks moving ahead, and best of all you should have a system of reward and punishment for tasks completed on time and those have remained unfinished respectively. The best part of procrastination is that it is something that is not permanent and though you may be successful, procrastination can still affect you, and remember that with some of these simple tips, you can easily beat procrastination.

Mindfulness

The Importance of Developing Mental Clarity

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Sometimes new ideas or opportunities can come at you in warp speed. That’s because we live life in the fast lane and that’s not likely to change. But it does mean that you have to be ready to grab the chances that come your way.

Life is not a yes or no experience. It’s more multiple choice. You won’t be presented with simply one choice or one route to take in life. Instead, you’ll get hundreds of choices that come your way every day of your life.

These choices that you make will decide whether you experience success or suffer through a setback. Sometimes we make choices based on what we’re focusing all of our mental energy on.

We can become so focused on accomplishing something a certain way or before a certain time that we close our mind off to any other options. This means a different opportunity – a better one – can get overlooked.

You should always take the time to develop mental clarity about every move that you make in life. Don’t allow yourself to be led by your emotions and don’t make snap decisions.

If you’re presented with an opportunity that requires immediate action, you’ll want to be careful that if you take this action, it keeps you on the track you want to be on.

Some opportunities really are a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and if you travel toward them, you’ll get success. But others only have an empty journey that takes us farther away from what we intended on doing.

Check every idea and every opportunity to be sure that it lines up with your plan – that you don’t have to lower your morals or change who you are to grasp the chance.

It’s better to remain true to who you are and the vision that you have for your life than to be misled by too good to be true opportunities that can affect what you really want.

This is why it’s important to have goals. Goals can help give you clarity when things become less clear to you. You can check every opportunity that arises against your goals.

Every opportunity that you take should bring you closer to your overall end result. If it doesn’t, then it could be a wasted experience. Having mental clarity can help you get in touch with your inner self and quiet the clamor that comes with a busy life.

It can let you see whether or not you’re engaging in peak performance in how you’re managing all areas of your life. Clarity comes from being mindful. Practice making thoughtful decisions and get in the habit of living life from a clear perspective.

Move forward

Not Moving forward? 10 reasons why!

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1.You are focusing on the wrong things or tasks. Sometimes, the thought of success and doing a lot of things for your business can get you to miss on seeing the real picture such as what your business actually needs.

2.Your projects’ aims or goals are not clear. What does your business actually need? What do you want to see it do for your business? Set your goals straight.

3.You think about yourself and what multiple projects can do for you compared to what it can do for your business. Come on, everything is not about you, and although being able to accomplish a lot for your company can make you look good, it would still help if you plan for the good of everyone else.

4.You overload yourself with too much information that you fail to distinguish which ones are relevant to your company. Pick out and use only the pertinent information, otherwise you will end up confused and unable to complete your tasks with accuracy.

5.Distractions can get the best of you. This means that having a lot of things on your mind can keep you from focusing on your goals. And take note, distractions are not just about other tasks that you have in mind, distractions also include friends, partying too hard and too often and those times that you spend lollygagging during office hours.

6.Disorganized and dysfunctional work system. Of course, this is pretty much understandable, considering that fact that having a disorganized system can greatly affect you and your company’s productivity.

7.You get affected by too much negativity from yourself and other people around you. Obviously, if you let yourself be taken over by all those negative comments such as: you are not good enough for the job, or that you are too much of a perfectionist that you can’t seem to focus on what you want and what you have to do. And if you procrastinate too much, this attitude will also pull you down. Besides, making up excuses for not being able to accomplish something is totally wrong.

8.Too much multitasking and very little single tasking can seriously affect your productivity. If you are taking in and doing too many things, you will find yourself being pulled away from your actual goals.

9.You are too afraid to fail, that’s why you think of several strategies to succeed. But in reality, instead of being led to one major achievement, you end up being a major collector of failed projects and tasks. Failure should not be taken negatively. Failure should be your fuel to propel you towards success.

10.Lack of strict rules and work ethics. The thing here is that, you should always have to have a strict set of rules to make sure that you and your team would be able to move according to your original plans.

Certainly, you can add more to this list. Just think about your old work practices that didn’t seem to work to your advantage. And now that you know what you have to avoid or what causes you and your work to stagnate, it’s up to you to work on things the right way.