It could be that you have a great business idea, but you just can't seem to create the momentum to get that going.

Or maybe you want to increase your social activities, have more meaningful friendships and get out more…but there always seems to be something else to do?

How about analysis paralysis?  Who of us hasn't tied themselves up in knots continually thinking about doing something but somehow not being able to actually get results?

Oh yes, and the big one!  We all know what we have to do to lose that 10lbs of belly fat or tone our legs or arms, but man is it tough to stick to a disciplined schedule required to actually realize our desire isn't it?

THE SECRET TO MASTERING SELF-DISCIPLINE FAST!

Look, we are all capable of moments of great progress – in other words, we have moments of self-discipline and that is how we get some things done, but the problem is we would like to have more of them – right?

So it isn't that we aren't capable of self-discipline or that we have to change into a radically different person, it is more a matter of tweaking the way we frame things in our life enough that we get far more self-discipline without the ongoing relapses into procrastination.

In the wonderful workbook Attracting Greatness, the steps and techniques that the most successful people in the world use to expand their self-discipline and live a life of constant achievement with tremendous fulfillment are extremely enlightening and useful.

When I applied these steps to my own life I developed my own system for mastering self-discipline, perhaps this will help you too:
1. Create, internalize and repeat daily your big WHY – what will a starting your new business bring you that you don't have now?  How will losing 10lbs make a difference in your life?  What would having 3 more close friends do for you?  How will this change YOU?  How will it change the way people look at you and react to you?  I like to write this all out – think of it as a YOU avatar where you have already achieved your goal.  Reinforce this daily to keep that big WHY front and center.

2. Outline a clear, detailed, workable and measurable plan for achieving my goals.  It must be detailed enough that on a given day when you just don't feel like lifting a finger, you know exactly what you expect of yourself that day AND it must be measurable so you are kept accountable.  Without this, #1 is just a wish or a dream, #2 will make it actionable

3. If/when I slip I like to have the negative side well defined – If I don't achieve #1 what will life be like?  This reinforces the pain of not making progress and that can be very powerful

4. Do what is MOST important first. I make the most progress when I take the outline in #2 and make sure I work on the major impact items first – that way if I slip further in the day, the impact is much less.  I am most productive in the morning, so that is the time I protect at all costs and do the most important tasks first.  Some days I take that energy right into the afternoon and evening, other days I just goof off in the afternoon, but either way I have completed the most important tasks rather than just cleaned my desk, checked email, watched a training video, etc…

5. Focus on ONE thing at a time. As busy people we take pride in how MUCH we can do at one time…multitask, but there is a huge cost to that – 1) We are less productive overall and 2) We exhaust our mental ability much faster leaving us drained…before we actually get the important stuff done.

Try this for a few days.  Take one important thing and schedule 20 or 30 minutes first thing in the day and just see how much you can get done by just focusing on that one thing.   Slicing your day out this way leads to much more productivity and much less exhaustion at the end of the day.

If you want to improve your self-discipline and craft your personal power plan, then get hold of Attracting Greatness and use it to quickly turn your days into fulfilling, productive, enjoyable experiences breaking free of today's limitations.

Finally! Real Change

Doesn't it so often happen that our intentions to change areas in our life exceed our ability to realize those changes?

We have goals we would like to achieve with our weight, health, emotional well being, careers, finances and with our relationships – some of them we have decided to make a top priority, yet even though we focus 100% on these changes, we can't seem to translate that desire into everyday change – how come?

After all, what is the toughest part of changing your life…is it:

• positive thinking or positive attitude?
• being clear on what you want?
• staying motivated?
• taking action?

Yes, these factors are definitely important, but lets face it…there is one question to change your life that seems to be the toughest to answer isn't there?

In the groundbreaking formula contained in Attracting Greatness, it is mentioned that despite knowing exactly what you want to change in your life, having enthusiasm and a positive mental attitude, and even taking the first steps toward action…the challenge for most of us remains:

How do we wake up and change our life…or specifically "how do we make sure we make the correct choices, decisions, and take the right actions each day to progress us toward those objectives"

Changing your life will not happen with dreams, thoughts,  plans or sporadic actions alone, there must be daily change…and that is the really important part.

Some people call this self-discipline, others call it willpower, whatever the term the fact is that true life change will not occur unless you can make daily progress toward your objectives and goals.

The challenge is that the daily bad habits we want to turn into good habits have been reinforced with positives in our minds for long periods of time – that won't change overnight without something extremely dramatic happening in our life.

In other words, before we can leave the negative habits behind and begin consistently practicing the good habits that lead to meaningful change in our lives we must program out our bad habits and program in our good habits.

As an example, for me, I was able to stop a bad eating habit by linking that habit to a very close friend dying of a hideous disease. I actually went over the association in my mind again and again each day for several days until I found my mind no longer wanted that bad food as much anymore.

Unfortunately, you have felt how strongly bad habits can be ingrained in our psyche, so it often takes something pretty dramatic to change – for most people, that means ramping up the pain associated with negative habits and patterns of behavior while associating amazing pleasures with the newly desired habits.

Practice this fundamental principle of daily behavior change and you will finally realize real and amazing change in your life.

To get more on how to remove obstacles and attract incredible abundance, happiness and wealth into your life I suggest you devour and follow Attracting Greatness – it is the best overall system for real change I've come across.

The 5 Pillars of Greatness outlined in Attracting Greatness are certainly the keys to quickly transforming your life and really taking control of the ship, directing it into safe waters.

Give Yourself 30 Days

One technique that can make a massive difference in your life and get you unstuck is to follow this 3 point plan for finally developing goals and sticking with them long enough to see results:

1. What helps me apply the proper discipline is first developing a big WHY that motivates me to stick with a practice for 30-days

2. After you have the big WHY – create a set of visualizations that will help you to picture the ultimate outcome and benefit of sticking with the tactic.  If your goal is to start a new business, imagine what it will look, feel and be like 1-year from now, after you have put in significant effort and work.  What will your social life be like?  Who will you do business with?  What will your income level be?  Or, if your goal is to lose 10-pounds – visualize what you will look and feel like after 30-days?  How will your friends look at you?  What will they say when they see the "new" you?

3. Finally – make sure you stick with your practice for at least 30-days.  Set a goal to practice actions toward your goal each day – create a checklist and mark it off each day that you successfully take action toward achieving your desired outcome.

This is a terrific exercise – the discipline to maintain consistency, focus and ongoing action is exactly what it takes to turn a tactic or practice into a learned behavior.

Think of Tiger Woods – immensely self-disciplined with practicing golf, working out, nutrition – all of this is backed by huge WHY (be the absolute best EVER in golf) and lots of visualization.

Just watch each time he goes out to warm up, practice or take a shot – the first thing he does is visualizes the shot as being a total success – no matter how badly the last shot went, every future shot he sees as a success.

Imagine what will happen in your life once you have a plan like the one in Attract Greatness and apply the self-discipline of Tiger Woods to attract success and happiness in your direction.

For sure a common trend among the most successful and happy people is a high sense of self worth, an inner peace and and outward expressions of self confidence.

So yes, to help become happier, more productive, achieve greater things in your life it makes sense to build self confidence, but…

As is pointed out brilliantly in the "Achieving Greatness Program" , boosting self confidence does not always equate to more happiness or positive achievements.

If someone is headed down the wrong path – has already been influenced to hang around with the wrong crowd, take the easy way out or aligns themselves with values that are not congruent with their own, then raising their self esteem will simply make them more effective at following this wrong path.

Many studies have demonstrated that top criminals, gang members or otherwise mis-aligned people have quite a strong sense of self confidence, but are often unhappy, filled with anxiety and are certainly not what we would typically think of as high achievers. 

So, what's missing?

The basis for any program designed to build self confidence must be an accompanying introspection – a discovery of what values and beliefs will truly make you happy. 

From this inner discovery can come a the launchpad for building self confidence that will help to more confidently achieve goals and objectives that will be fully in line with what makes you happy.

For example, the author of "The Parents We Mean To Be" Richard Weissbourd points out in this article that our focus to raise children with high self esteem, to be individually high achievers may in fact be training them away from what they internally value.  Instead of aligning their self confidence and associated behaviors with an inner value of giving, our kids are taught to ignore others and focus instead entirely on their own thoughts and actions.

So, we risk our children becoming highly efficient, self confident achievers but extremely unhappy, selfish and destined to health and emotional problems in the future due to not being aligned with their inner values, beliefs and life purpose. 

Is it important to build self confidence – Yes!

But, it is equally important to recognize our own internal values and life purpose in order that we target further self improvement on the right target.

What do you think – can self esteem be dangerous?

But, if we know self confidence is so important and we all seek more of it…why are our assumptions about this powerful concept so incredibly WRONG!

We all know the incredible results of building self confidence can have on our lives – right?

• We can instantly influence others to like us and do what we want
• There seems to be no end to our personal power and energy
• Suddenly, we can live a stress free life that is fun and crazy all of the time
• We can attract those who fall for us as if we had some magical, mystical power over them
• Things get done with much less effort – productivity is instant and work is a thing of the past
• We are healthier than ever, our bodies work optimally making sickness and disease go away
• Getting up in the morning is fun, we use our creativity and get to live at our best the majority of the time
• We are engaged in life enjoying every moment sucking in the sweet fragrance of peace and joy
• Fear doesn't stop us, our self confidence eclipses challenges and fears in our life
• Boundless courage to take on new challenges and do what we secretly have wanted to do for years is now the new normal in our life

Self confidence and self-esteem are the critical building blocks to improving the way we live, how much joy, health and wealth that we choose to attract…. but did you know….

These 10 Shocking Facts About Self Confidence

1. Nobody can "give" or even evaluation your current level of self confidence from the outside – no matter how close they are to you.  Your level of self-confidence that you cultivate in your life comes entirely from YOU.  Inside the Achieving Greatness Method For Maximum Success, there is a reference to several methods anyone can use to draw more self confidence from within their own life almost instantly.  The longer we go on expecting others to hand us  self esteem through their comments, actions or gifts, the longer we will do without true inner confidence. 

2. The key to self-confidence is not only a way of behaving or a positive mental attitude – instead our sense of value of self is based heavily on how aligned we are with our inner life purpose.  We can experience a great day and assume our self confidence is riding high only to come crashing down the next day when our day doesn't go as well.  Instead of working on any one moment or day, focusing on how well aligned your plan and actions are with you inner life purpose will ensure more consistent levels of peak self-esteem.

3. Ignore everyone who teaches you how to improve your self confidence WITHOUT teaching you how to draw your confidence from within.  Motivational speakers, trainers and gurus should be ignored UNLESS they get you closer to realizing your own inner purpose and existing volcano of self confidence within you right now

4. The loudest and proudest are not always the most confidenct.  In fact one of the things you learn if you live on this earth long enough and observe and interact with people is that the loudest are often covering up for a rather severe lack of self confidence, yet we often hold ourselves up to these people as we desire to be more like them.  Get over those comparisons – instead substitute a greater awareness of how you really feel within

5. Seeking approval is a disease – here's the cure…have a strong set of internal principles and objectives based on your life purpose so that you can deflect external criticism which is often the result of others who are less confident than you

6. Be clear with your objectives – fuzzy, ill defined objectives or goals lead to inevitable failure, you are setting yourself of for failure and low self confidence if you set goals that are simply general to be achievable.  There is nothing more empowering than having a short set of clearly defined goals based on what is truly important to you and making progress each day toward realizing those goals

7. Deal with FEAR - get to the root of why you are afraid, what are you afraid of and why.  Put fear into perspective – learn to embrace what you are today afraid of as a means to achieving a bigger outcome – your life purpose.  Much of our fear is rooted in not being liked or included when the exact opposite is true.  Let me ask you…who do we follow the most, those with weak, floppy ideals and behavior or those that are strong and lead the pack?  Putting yourself out there is THE way to get respect even though we all fear taking this leap

8. Give back – before you get.  Many of us are guilty of setting goals for giving conditional upon getting something back.  Unfortunately we never see the universal response to unconditional giving which can be great.  Step up and help someone right now, you will get double back and your self esteem will be dramatically boosted

9. Balance the risk of doing with the risk of NOT doing.  We tend to only look at what IF instead of the what IF NOT.  Yes, we need to consider risk, but 90% of the time our assessment of risk is completely wrong as we over-estimate the risk of taking a certain action and severaly underestimate the lack of acting

10. Yes – self-confidence can be developed – and in a very short period of time.  Many believe that they are born and must always lack self confidence, that there is no way they can turn their shyness, anxiety, fear and lack of courage into a more positive, proactive, self confident life when we have seen it done thousands of time with students of the "Achieving Greatness Success Formula". 

Which leads us to the most shocking tip about your level of self confidence of all…that you control every ounce of your current and future self confidence no matter who you are, where you have been or where your life will go in the future.  Go back and read the benefits of improved self confidence at the beginning of this post – you are in direct control of these factors in your life.

Your ability to activate that change starts with the fundamental belief that YOU, and YOU alone are the catalyst behind how self confident and self assured you are and ultimately, how positive your life is in the area of health, relationships, happiness and finances.  Are you SHOCKED?  I hope so, that means you will take action.  Start by visiting The Achieving Greatness Formula and putting your plan of action together now.

Could it really be that building self confidence improves your overall level of health, energy and even allows you to attract more of what you want, and less of what you don't, into your life?

In 'Beyond Greatness' – the manual for Getting Unstuck, the immense roll self confidence plays to our business, health and life success is presented in-depth.  It becomes one of the 5 major pillars you need to turn your life around and experience unbelievable harmony and success in your life. 

Think about the last time you were really looking forward to a situation in your life, where you embraced the situation with eagerness – even excitement and you felt incredible about the entire event? 

Perhaps it was a meeting with your boss, a job interview, a hot date, an afternoon spent with your kids, or a day you stayed at home in bed. 

Do you remember how you felt?  How fast did the time seem to go?  What does it feel like, even now, thinking back on that time?  Do you think regretfully or do you try and figure out how to experience it again?

Building self confidence is relative – some of us exist at 80% self confidence, but that 20% may impact very important parts of our lives such as our business, financial security or relationships. 

Others start from a lower level of self confidence, which simply means there is even more benefit to improving. 

3 Ways To Tell If You Are Self Confident

Self confidence is not a permanent thing.  We may be completely confident with a best friend or our spouse, but when it comes to raising our kids we may lack confidence.  How about speaking in public, some people, through building self confidence, have become quite comfortable, but most of us are not.

If we are not confident in all circumstances, and we know other people can tell, how can we tell ourselves so we can work on the problem?

1. Do You Talk More Than You Listen?  A surefire sign that you are not self confident is when you feel the need to talk rather than listen.  Listening means you must open yourself up to the situation, to some extent leave yourself vulnerable to hearing the opinions and judgements of others.  Try being aware of your own behaviors when you get nervous, notice how you are afraid of silence or what others will say so you try and fill in with your own chatter.  This one is easy to catch.  Respond by building your self confidence targeting these specific situations. 

2. Letting People Walk All Over You.  The inability to be assertive (not aggressive) and clearly, calmly and objectively communicate to people your feelings, desires and requirements is a surefire sign that you have low self confidence.  Building self confidence should incorporate some training on how to be assertive, even when you are not comfortable.  So much stress in people's lives today is self-inflicted, they lack self confidence, cannot express themselves appropriately and therefore end up in situations they would otherwise have avoided. 

3. Body Language:  Take note of your body language throughout the day, how do you stand – arms to your side or crossed in front of you, rigid or relaxed?  By taking queues from your own body language you can quickly identify situations where building self confidence will gain you the most advantage. 

Now we're on the right track, using the techniques listed above we can identify those situations, times, events and people that shatter our self confidence so we can work on building our self confidence in context of our daily lives. 

5 Ways To Improve Your Self Confidence

Take these 5 techniques for building self confidence and apply them to the areas you know need work and watch your business and personal life soar.

1. Learn to Listen To Yourself:  Weak self-confidence ultimately comes from a lack of awareness of what we think, believe, or feel about a situation.  When we don't know what we want we leave ourselves open to external opinion entirely, never learning to listen or trust ourselves.  This makes us dependent on others which progressively reduces our self confidence.  Building self confidence starts with becoming more aware of ourselves. 

In 'Beyond Greatness' we provide specific meditation, yoga and introspective exercises that have proven to enhance our self awareness.  From these exercises comes an unbelievable trust, peace of mind and trust of self that manifests itself as improved self confidence.  How about that, by spending a few minutes each day working on ourselves we can automatically build self confidence. 

2. Learn To Trust Yourself:  So, you are now listening to your inner voice and know what you believe and feel – but do you trust what you hear?  When you enter a situation that makes you apprehensive, do you trust that you can deal with the situation?  Many of us do not.  To some extent, life experience improves this for most of us – we become more confident as we go through more in our lives.  We must know that we are strong, much stronger than we give ourselves credit for.  Through affirmations and visualizations we can place ourselves into situations that previously resulted in low self confidence as a method of building self confidence. 

3. Consult Others But You Are In Control:  It's ok to listen to others, and even be influenced by others but be sure to always pull the decision back into your realm.  You are in control of your life and nobody has the same level of understanding, awareness and reason to alter your behavior as you do.  This one's a little easier to fix – be sure to maintain control in situations you may previously have surrendered control, a terrific way of building self confidence.

4. Embrace Mistakes:  Life is uncertain, business is even more uncertain – know that you will make mistakes as everyone does.  Trust that mistakes are actually a friend toward building self confidence.  Why?  We learn more from mistakes than we do from successes in life.  So, the faster you can make progress in your life and make the mistkes that must be made along the way, the quicker you will achieve the level of success you desire.  Trying to avoid mistakes, dwell on them or try and explain them is wasted time – instead embrace them, deal with them in the moment, learn from them and carry on.  Now that's building self confidence.

5. Think Big:  No doubt you have heard the concept that if you shoot for the stars you may hit the moon, but if you shoot for the moon you may get lost in space.  The bigger you think, the less importance each setback, mistake, decision or situation has in your life.  By thinking big, building self confidence is an automatic advantage. 

Self confidence is the root of most happiness, achievement and health and for that reason, we would do well to work diligently on building self confidence.  Fortunately, self confidence can be learned and not something we must be born with, so the sooner we get to work on applying the 5-step system, the quicker we will see results.  One, two, three – Go!

Obama has an uncanny ability, as did Bill Clinton in the beginning of his career and Ronald Reagan certainly had it too…to convince people who were down and out, struggling for their last dollar, dealing with personal and family issues, perhaps even those that had previously given up on our political system – to come along for a journey where he will place you on his shoulders and bring you to the promised-land. 

Imagine hitting the next town in the face of some bad press, gathering 40,000 people in a room and then launching into a 45-minute speech where you must win the room – and indeed all of America – over with your oratory.

That takes guts!  That takes self confidence.  The more self confidence you have, the more belief others will have in you and soon you have created an awesome bandwagon – the challenge then becomes living up to the oratory, and that takes an immense amount of self confidence. 

This article in the American Prospect discusses the New Yorker photo and article covering Obama's "supernatural self confidence" and how it has helped him achieve the great things in his life he has achieved so far – and why so many people are willing to follow him even given an age of skepticism for politics that is unheard of in the past. 

What about you? 

If you have struggled to achieve the next level of career, relationship, health, friendships or just happiness, ask yourself if you are truly self confident and if that self confidence projects outward in your quest for greatness in your life.

In "Beyond Greatness", great weight is placed on one of the key pillars of improving your achievement in life – self confidence and it's cousin, self esteem.  Without these key characteristics success will be unattainable – and to those few who have been able to achieve a peak of success in their lives without self confidence, they success soon causes them to come crashing down unable to sustain without the fortitude provided by high self esteem. 

The signs are all around us, to be truly successful in our lives we must be able to guide others around us, persuade them toward our point of view and communicate effectively with partners in business, friendship and intimacy – self confidence is the single most important factor to success in our lives.

A common approach to tackling self discipline is to micro-manage our behaviors – become much more aware of our behavior within a typical day with the hope that we will recognize where we run off course and can right the ship – so to say.

The challenge with this approach is that micro-managing is tough, subject to interruption and error and hardly ever works as a long-term approach to improving self discipline – so what other way do we have?

Self awareness should be both "strategic" and "tactical" where the "strategic" element is awareness of what you want to help others achieve, what your value will be within society that will 1) Make you feel fulfilled, and 2) Will be seen as valuable enough that people will pay you for your value – how much you want to be paid is another aspect of self awareness and something you need to come to terms with.

In 'Beyond Greatness' we point out the key pillars to "getting unstuck" in your life and finally propelling yourself toward greater achievements that are fulfilling, make you happy, allow you to make an impact on others – if your goal is to get paid handsomely for that ability – that will come too.

Once you have the self-awareness of what you passionately, desparately want to achieve – then self-discipline will come easier (not automatically – there will still be distractions and aspects of achieving your goals where you will experience resistance).

Then, you can apply your tactical self awareness to make sure you are staying on track – and yes, then ruthless self discipline can certainly be effective.

In my case I operate at two levels…for any objective I know there are times when I need to be "ruthless" – say for a few weeks to finish a book. After that, I don't need to be as ruthless, but still focused and on-track.  I immediately know when an objective or goal is NOT something I have a deep desire or passion for, that's when self-discipline becomes most challenging – if not impossible.  The opposite is also true, when you are living in alignment with your passions and desires – self-discipline becomes much less of an issue and you get to enjoy the journey as well as the ultimate achievement.

How about when you try and get your kids to see things your way, are you confident in your ability to teach them important lessons from your experience or do you fear the whole exercise turning into a confrontation that will only make things worse?

Thinking about the number of situations we end up in everyday where we must comminicate with other people – often struggle to get our true feelings, talents and desires heard, suddenly the importance of personal power becomes so obvious.

A fundamental principle to improving yourself – including your ability to exhibit more personal power – is your ability to control your mind.  Understanding that we can gain more control over the way think, act and behave is critical to improving our personal power. 

Here are 5 keys to getting more personal power in your life, do you have others?

1. Self-confidence.  It is impossible to command personal power without a very strong sense of what is important for you and a knowledge that you can stick to your convictions being confident in doing so.  You hear people mention that he was "very comfortable in his own skin" which is simply a way of saying he was so self-confident.  In most social situations people want to be led, directed or at least be comfortable that the direction they will go will work out.  If you demonstrate self-confidence, then you immediately put people at ease convincing them to follow your direction.

2. Listening More Than Speaking.  When you think of personal power you may first think about "powering" your way over other people – not true.  Yes, you need to stick to your convictions, be consistent and unwavering in your positions, but you also must listen.  Why?  When we listen intently we will hear and see (through body language) triggers highlighting how we may convince those we are communicating with toward our point of view.  By understanding where they are coming from first, you can then re-position your message to best fit their situation giving you greater personal power.

3. Have a Purpose.  Society looks to follow someone with great purpose.  Look at how society follows its heroes.  You need to become a hero for your cause giving you the increased personal power to achieve the things you most want to achieve.  The most important charcter trait in heroes is that they have a purpose and do not waiver from that purpose for any reason.  What is your BIG purpose?

4. Be Consistent. If you are a person that changes his or her convictions as much as your clothes then don't expect to increase your level of personal power.  People who achieve great things in life tend to simplify their gameplan to a very small number of BIG objectives and then fight for constant consistency in their pursuit of these goals.  How consistent are you?  By aligning your actions more consistently with your goals you can make a giant step forward toward increasing your personal power.

5. Always Promote Upwards and Communicate Downwards.  You may have great convictions, amazing ideas, a truckload of enthusiasm and miles of skill – but you won't achieve true personal power until you learn to become comfortable working with those above you.  To achieve greater personal power, overcome the very common fear of dealing with those you look up to whether they be lead people in your company, mentors in your chosen self-employment field, people you admire for their strong relationships, healthy and happy people, etc… You cannot achieve greater personal power by continuing to spend time with underachievers – you've got to raise your standards, overcome the natural resistance to engage those that are have more personal power than you do.

In case you are feeling a little overwhelmed, Rome wasn't built in a day, neither do you have to make massive change in all 5 areas today.  Small, incremental steps following these 5 areas will get you more personal power followed by major acceleration in achieving the major goals within your life. 

Do you have other factors you have found important for increasing your personal power?   Let us know by commenting on this post. 

For more great reading and research on the topic of self-improvement, visit Peak Personal Development.

Laziness is an epidemic – forcing those caught in its trap into dangerous defensive behaviors such as addictive behavior as you seek to make yourself feel better in the face of not accomplishing things you really feel you should be.

Laziness doesn't come from a lack of goals, though it certainly may be an indication that your goals are incorrect.

Laziness also doesn't mean that you don't accomplish anything – but it certainly may mean you are not accomplishing the things that matter to you most.

Another problem with laziness is that you can't hide from it — it is like a cancer that impacts you from within.  Even if you are able to hide your laziness from those around you, its effect on your psyche is inescapable. 

So what causes laziness…here are just a few explanations:

• fear
• frustration
• lack of control (or perceived lack of control)
• past learned behavior or conditioning (yes, laziness can be learned)
• mis-alignment between goals and beliefs or values
• lack of purpose

Of all these factors, fear is perhaps one of the most common causes of laziness.

Fear not only has an emotional impact, but often a physical impact as well such as negative stress, increased heart rate, and of course…the built-in instinct to flee (kindly given to us by our ancestors).

Certainly – our own self-image has a big role to play as well.  To the degree that we are not self-confident or self-assured, we are more suceptible to being fearful living life in a constant state of fear or worry about being able to handle situations.  Those with a negative self-image, low self-esteem due to past experiences or tragedies in their lives are often caught in a web of laziness that they just can't seem to escape from.

Whatever our past, we must realize that we can set off in a brand new direction.  Despite the past we can set any course we want for our life moving forward.  Being able to deal with fear is something we can decide to take on – HEAD ON starting today. 

Overcoming fear will need to become a learned behavior – that means taking small, and then bigger steps consciously many times until plowing through your fears becomes a much less painful and much more rewarding experience.  If you really want to overcome laziness, then challenging your current reaction to fear is essential.

Simply moving beyond fear once is a good start, but it's not enough to turn it into a learned behavior.  Just like eating one healthy meal is not enough to change a lifetime of eating habits, the behavior must be repeated again and again until our underlying behavior pattern is changed. 

Kind of reminds me of running and hitting that euphoric state. It took me 3-years of running to get to the point where I actually experienced the endorphin run – before that it was just a ton of painful exercise. 

In the coming weeks we will publish some exercises that you can use to begin expanding your comfort zone, learn to overcome and manage fear and make your feelings of laziness disappear forever.

Jeff