Discover your purpose by Adding Exercise

Is living a life of happiness and purpose related to your level of physical fitness?  Yes!  It gives you the energy and emotional desire to go out and do more, thus getting you healthier from just moving around more!  I am sure there are other ways that it also increases your physical fitness, but what I really want to look at is if you are not living a life of purpose and are unhappy can focusing on physical fitness help you find your life direction?  I believe it definitely helps and has big impacts on my journey!  There are three main reasons that participating in fitness helps you with your direction.

1. Self esteem
2. Clearing your mind
3. Reduce stress

First, when you are exercising you end up establishing a higher self esteem.  When you are surer of yourself it is easier to move in the direction of your true calling.  You have the confidence to make the right jump or confront the issues that are affecting you.

Second, when you exercise it helps to clear your mind.  It allows you to zone out.  This helps because sometimes it makes way for a break through to occur with no other thoughts in the way (you often hear that great ideas came through in the shower, this is the same phenomenon).  These break through can be realizations that you are at the wrong company, it is time to retire or that it is time to start your own business.

Finally, exercise reduces stress.  Stress blocks logical thoughts making it harder to think and feel in an organized non emotional manner.  The less stress you have the clearer you are able to think and determine what you want from life.

So are you ready to add physical fitness to your life so you can begin to discover your true dreams?  It is much easier than you think and you don’t need to become an athlete to achieve this either!  I recommend three basic ways to add easy (and inexpensive) exercise to your day (talk with a doctor first if you have not worked out in a while!)

1. Walk – super easy just put on some shoes and hit the road.  Start small if you need to by walking around the block, keeping adding more every week.
2. Yoga – I love yoga as a way to not only get physical activity but to also find mental clarity.  There are enough styles of yoga out there that finding one you like is just a matter of trying different classes!  Try a local studio; buy a DVD or my personal favorite the web!  www.yogatoday.com is full of great teachers and lots of classes.  You can even start with the free class to see if you like it!
3. FitDeck Playing Cards – these cards make working out at home incredibly easy.  I have multiple sets and am always amazed at how fun and easy these cards make exercise! Even my four year old loves to do these with me!

Don’t wait another day, add exercise to your life and find that discovering your happiness is much easier!

Fitness and Money

Most of my clients come to me for assistance in learning about money and making progress with their investments.  However, we usually end up working on many issues that indirectly influence our money.  These cover everything from job and or business growth, family and life balance to health and fitness issues.  Each of these areas has a direct impact on our money and how well we manage it.  With this being the 3^rd week of the New Year and some of our resolutions starting to waver I wanted to focus on the one that most of my clients have in common – health and fitness.

How does fitness affect your finances?  The obvious one is that the healthier you are the lower your health care costs are, but it actually impacts us in other ways that are harder to monetize.  To me the biggest of these is that exercise and a healthy lifestyle decrease stress levels.  I know for myself that without exercise my stress goes up which creates a downward cycle.  I am less productive, my creativity comes to a halt and my patience is gone.    This impacts money because I don’t get as much business done, my writing is harder to accomplish (I get many of my ideas on cardio equipment) and my overall patience with myself is gone so I am more demanding – which creates more stress!  It ends up being a vicious cycle that impacts me and my money. 

Unfortunately in our hectic world the challenge becomes when do I work out?  Most of us are overbooked and quickly put fitness on the back burner because it is not screaming at us.  Yet it is one of the most important things to do, so how do we make it a priority?  I use three areas to get it to the top of my list:  Variety, commitment and make it easy!

1.    Variety – I keep it exciting and rarely do the same thing more than once in a week.  I spice up the cardio and alternate my weights program.  This way it is never boring and dreadful.

2.    Commitment – I make a commitment to myself and family that I will be the best me.  I know that this requires me to workout.  So it is on my calendar in ink and cannot change!

3.    Easy – I make sure that I am able to workout whenever I want.  Not only do I belong to a gym, but at home I have cardio equipment and some weight items.  This means I never have an excuse beyond I did not make it a priority.  I even have one of the best inventions ever for weight training that make it quick and easy to accomplish (FitDeck) so I really have no excuses.

So are you going to make fitness a priority so the rest of your life can thrive?  Your bank account and business with thank you for it!

 

 

 

Keep Going

How do we as professionals keep going when we don’t want to?  I wish I knew the answer every time I had a slow start day, but I don’t.  I believe every time we struggle it may be a different issue!  Is it a project that you don’t want to work on, do you need a vacation, or did your day get off to a bad start and you just need to reset?  How do you re-set your day? 

My re-starts:
Great music
exercise
mediation
bath
walk around block
long lunch
small tasks that keep me moving till the motivation comes back – like filing and paying bills

Yoga

Yoga is a powerful exercise, mediation, stretching, and spiritual experience.  This morning I had the chance to do 25 minutes before Max woke up.  It always amazes me how beneficial just a few minutes can be and how much I am energized by yoga.  Within that 25 minutes, I had woken up, stretched the morning kinks out and even worked up a sweet.  It put me in an instantly happy mood.  It is one of the few things that I believe can be beneficial to everyone. 

Many are afraid of yoga or consider it a new wave experience.  Yoga is much more simply a fantastic exercise that allows you to stretch, strengthen, relax and push all at once.  How to get started?

1. Pick a local class to join.  I recommend starting yoga with a live teach at a yoga studio so that you can learn the poses correctly.
2. If you don’t like it a first try another style.  There are many styles of yoga from Hatha which is a slow stretching style to Bikram which is 26 poses done in a heated room
3.  Keep going it takes time to learn, but is worth the effort

Tools for learning more about yoga or doing yoga?
http://www.yogajournal.com/
http://www.yogatoday.com

Enjoy