The Seven Minute Difference: Small Steps to Big Changes

We are now well into 2009. Research shows that by this point, 95% of New Year’s resolutions are distant memories, with very little change to show for them. Do you need to make some significant changes in your life? Perhaps you have wanted to be more productive at work, receive a promotion, or simply upgrade your professional skills. You might want to organize work life or simply use better judgment in managing your time. You want to find time to do the things you believe to be most important in your life – to regain control over your health, finances, and other aspects of your life.

It doesn’t take a New Year’s Resolution and it doesn’t take months or even weeks. It can take as little as seven minutes. Studies have shown that the average corporate executive has an attention span of seven minutes. Coincidentally, the brain is limited to remembering only seven pieces of information at time, according to Harvard psychologist George Miller. Therefore, if you want your life to change, you must work within your own mental capabilities. There are literally hundreds of things you could accomplish within a seven-minute window of time. Each day holds tiny opportunities to make life better. Once you recognize that fact, it’s a fairly easy decision not to let these opportunities pass you by.

One of the greatest gifts each of us has been given is the ability to choose. Change happens in an instant. It happens the moment you decide to change. Now is the time to decide to be different. Haven’t you wanted more out of life? More results? More fulfillment? More leverage? Even, more fun?

Too often, we think of change as being complex, unmanageable, and beyond our grasp. When we think that way, we ignore the fact that the biggest, most meaningful changes are really the result of a series of small seemingly insignificant changes. These simple micro-actions are the tiny choices corporate executives and sales people can use every moment of every day that can make the difference between mediocrity and excellence.

Here are seven simple micro-actions that could impact you or your company almost overnight. Of course, just because an action seems easy doesn’t mean it’s necessarily the right one to commit to doing. As you read this list, choose one or two of these micro-actions that would make the most difference in your life and try to focus on adding them into your day. If you will truly make a commitment to be different, at the end of a month or so, you may be amazed at how these tiny efforts can positively impact your future.

1. Drink more water. Almost all of us want to improve our physical health. We set these big goals to lose weight and get in shape, only to find ourselves with a drive-through cheeseburger in our hands eating lunch at 2:30 because we are overwhelmed at work. Big goals are wonderful, but small goals are often more successful. By swapping soda pop for water, improving health and loosing weight is easy. Those liquid calories can really add up.

2. Handwrite two thank you notes per day. We live in an email world and there is very little personal correspondence any more. In less than seven minutes, you can thank a customer for their recent order – write a note to an employee for a job well done – or send a card to a supplier. You will be shocked at the impact your effort will make on your customers, employees and suppliers. They will remember this gesture for months. When was the last time you received a personal thank you note? How did it make you feel?

3. Read ten pages of a non-fiction book every day. According to the American Booksellers Association, 58% of American adults never read a book after high school. If you truly want to be different tomorrow than you are today, choose to be more knowledgeable. Knowledge truly is power and it allows you to grow and change in amazing ways. By reading only ten pages of a book every day, you could read a 300-page book every month! That means you could read twelve life-changing books a year.

4. Outline a daily plan of action. Every day, before you leave work, spend seven minutes writing down the top four to seven tasks you need to accomplish during the next work day. Prioritize the list, so that you tackle them in their order of importance. When you arrive at work the next morning, the list is there to guide you to do the vital tasks first.

5. Review your current skills. Take seven minutes to answer the question, “Are there any new skills I need to develop that would help our company move forward or that would help me personally be more competent in my current position?” Is there new technology that could streamline your processes and systems to save time and money? If you want to be more competent tomorrow, then you must constantly ask yourself what knowledge and skill sets you must acquire to be a more valuable asset to your company.

6. Create the story. Strategies may create great company structures, but stories create customer loyalty. Does your company have a compelling story that differentiates you from your competition? Spend seven minutes listing your company’s strategic advantages and differences and then focus on those strengths. Make sure your customers understand your strengths. Begin to tell your story. Tell your employees, tell your customers, tell everyone. Strategies look good on spreadsheets, but stories create breakthrough growth.

7. Recognize and pursue the things that matter most to you in life. It is important to prioritize how you will spend your work day. If I offered you $86,400 every day with the one restriction that you must spend it wisely that day or lose it, what would you do? Of course, you would spend it wisely. Yet, each one of us is given 86,400 seconds everyday and the same proposition challenges us: spend them wisely or lose them. Take seven minutes to determine what is most important to you at work and at home and then pursue those things with vigor.

What holds you back from becoming the person you want to become? What if that obstacle could begin to crumble in only seven minutes? Today is the day to stand on the edge of life with a new sense of determination and hope. Change really does happen in an instant. It happens the moment you decide to change. Now that decision is yours to make – either you are In or you are Out. It is that simple. Draw a line in the sand and say, “I’m in.” Then, begin to discover how the smallest decisions can have a huge impact on your life – seven minutes at a time.

Five Easy Steps for Permanent Change

Changes in your life require new behaviors. New behaviors take time to become habits and habits are needed for permanent change. Here are five steps for helping you make new habits.

First you need to decide what you want specifically to happen. If you went to the airport and told them, “Give me a ticket,” what would the airline employee ask? “Where would you like to go?” If you told them, “Just give me a ticket to anywhere,” what would they do? They would probably have airport security take you away and have your mental stability evaluated. People say they want change but they just don’t know what the change will look like. So easy step one is “Visualize your Goal”.

Second you need to determine what you’ll get from making the change. Let’s say you’ve decided to become healthier and lose weight because your doctor told you that you were too heavy. Everything we do is for one of two reasons, either to avoid pain or increase pleasure. So you might ask yourself, “What will happen to my health if I change my health habits?” You might see yourself as slim and trim and more attractive to the opposite sex. That would be changing for a pleasurable reason or reward. A different question could be “What would happen if I don’t change? This might lead you to see yourself having a heart problem limiting what you can do in life. This would be changing to avoid pain. So you’ll change either to avoid pain or to receive a pleasurable reward. The second easy step is “Determine the Reward You’ll Get from Making the Change.”

The third easy step is you have to decide what is it you have to do to change. Let’s stick with the decision to become healthier and lose weight. What steps would be needed to reduce your weight and become healthier? The steps might be exercise more, reduce your intake of fatty foods, eat more fiber, and reduce your portion size. You also need to give yourself a start date to start. So the next easy step to make a change is to “List What You Need to Do and Give Yourself a Start Date.”

Your next easy step for change is to take action. You have decided to lose weight and become healthier. You have made exercise a key component of your plan. Now you need to start so you begin exercising on Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays mornings at the gym. This easy step is simply to “Take Action”.

Your final easy step is to maintain what you have decided to do. You have decided to exercise every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 6 Am. The first week everything goes well. The second week you start off good on Monday, Wednesday you drag yourself out of bed but by Friday you decide you need your sleep so you stay in bed. The next week you exercise on Monday but you sleep in the rest of the week. Of course this won’t work. You need to stick to your plan. So this easy step is “Stick to Your Plan.”

Now let’s review the steps:
1) Visualize Your Goal then ‘
2) Determine the Reward You’ll Get from Making the Change
3) List What You Need to Do and Give Yourself a Start Date
4) Take Action
5) Stick to Your Plan

That’s it, five easy steps that you can use for permanent change.

Stop Smoking with Hypnotherapy

As an ex smoker, I can completely relate to the challenges involved in giving up smoking and to the feelings of guilt, frustration and embarrassment of being a smoker, when you would really rather not be. It’s just not socially acceptable now days and as a women, the fear of developing the classic smokers face, puckered lines, grey complexion and dark circles was enough to enable me to find my motivation!

Fortunately, if you haven’t yet found the support you need to stop smoking forever, hypnotherapy can be an effective solution. Hypnotherapy Herts is a Hyoniotherapy practice based in Hertfordshire. In this article you can discover 5 of the ways in which Hypnotherapy Herts can help you stop smoking with ease and quickly.

1. A Free Consultation – Hypnotherapy Herts provides a free consultation to those who make the decision to use Hypnotherapy Hertfordshire to stop smoking. During this initial consultation motivation is assessed. This is a very important step in your commitment to stop
smoking. A good hypnotherapist will not work with a person who is not really that motivated to make the change. If they do, they are wasting your time and money. Hypnotherapy Herts would help you to identify whether you feel things ‘must change now’.

2. Informal Change Techniques: Leverage
At Hypnotherapy Herts, a range of techniques are used to move ensure that you will be completely ready to stop smoking for good. One of the ways that this is done is via a process called getting leverage. This basically means helping the client to recognise and experience the impact of the problem behaviour, such as smoking, on themselves and those around them. It involves bombarding you with information about the impact of your smoking behaviour on your body and mind and the dangers of smoking will feel very real to you after this process. It will help you find your motivation and will identify those who are not motivated.

3. Informal Change Techniques: Setting Well-Formed Goals
NLP takes goals setting seriously and has developed criteria for goal setting that results in the goals being achievable and likely to be reached. Setting these types of goals involves you acting as if you have already achieved your goals to give up smoking. You will get to really visualise and begin to experience in your mind your life as a person who does not smoke. You will want to move towards this life after this process.

4. Formal Change Techniques – There are several formal change techniques, which are effective for helping you to stop smoking. The most appropriate technique will depend on your unique problem. Here are a few: 1) The Swish Technique can be used if you wish to replace a highly contextualised problem behaviour with a more positive behaviour. It works to eliminate behaviours that occur in specific situations after specific triggers. 2) Parts Integration is very useful at uncovering the positive intention of your smoking habit and dealing with incongruent behaviour and feelings. 3) Like To Dislike – This technique is based on information about how we code memories in our brain. We tend to code things we like in a different way to things we don’t like. So, its possible to recode your memory of smoking into something that you cant stand.

5) Hypnosis with positive suggestion. Of course, part of your stopping smoking treatment at Hypnotherapy Herts will involve you getting to sit back and relax whilst your unconscious mind does the learning! During this process you will be guided to a deep state of relaxation, whilst the therapist also directs your unconscious mind with suggestions and metaphors to stop smoking. You will also be supported to develop positive coping strategies. Acknowledge that your smoking habit has served a purpose in the past, in that it has likely been a method for coping. Hypnotherapy and NLP techniques (neuro linguistic programming) will enable you to develop positive coping strategies that serve you in the present and future.

Thinning hair, hair loss and especially baldness are stressful and traumatic issues for men as they grow older. At least 50% of male population of earth suffers from hair loss problems and this percentage is higher for men in developed world, due to tense life, unhealthy nutrition and pestiferous climate. Moreover, if your father had hair loss then you probably encounter with the same hair condition because “male pattern baldness” is a hereditary disease.

Treating hair loss has interested physicians and scientists through out history and many natural and pharmaceutical cures has been proposed. Recently, medical researches have finally proved the overall cause of hair loss. An androgenic hormone (named dihydrotestosterone or DHT) gradually increases in the receptors at hair follicles as men grow up and as a result, hair follicles shrink, hair becomes thinner, progressively falls and eventually no new healthy hair grows.

The understanding of the cause of hair loss does not mean that there has been success in discovery of hair loss treatment. Many pharmaceutical, beauty products and natural remedies “promise” to improve hair health but nothing can be considered as panacea. Below there are some natural treatment (some have been used for centuries) that concern hair loss. Of course, treating hair loss may last long and therefore you should be patient and determined. You will not see a new head full of hair after just one or two treatments. Nevertheless, repeated use will probably offer you a better looking, healthier and fuller hair.

A widely used home remedy is with use of herb Aloe Vera. It is believed that by rubbing your head with leafs of Aloe Vera, you achieved balanced scalp’s Ph, improved circulation to the area and stimulated hair follicles able to provide new healthy hair.

Another popular treatment with essential oils suggests before going to bed, to apply to head a blend composed of 4 essential oils and 1 vegetable oil: 2 drops of lavender oil, 2 drops of rosemary oil, 2 drops of thyme oil and 2 of cedarwood oil based in 50 ml of jojoba vegetable oil. After applying, massage your scalp for half an hour or more, in order the blend to have the time to take action and then give it a rinse. If you are not experienced with aromatherapy blends, you can benefit from essential oils by just adding 4 drops of bay oil to your normal shampoo.

Finally, follow these everyday advices for stronger and healthier hair. After shampooing your hair, you dry it naturally or use a hairdryer. Remember that you should never rub or wring your hair with a towel to dry it. This will damage the brittle and breakable hair. You can also wrap a large and thick towel around your hair and wait until the towel absorb the water. Moreover, if you choose the hairdryer solution, do not overdo with it, because too hot or too much drying leads to undesirable results. Additionally, keep in mind that sleeping in a tight braid can cause hair breakage or loss of hair over time.