Life Planning

Life Planning is not only about Finance. It is about searching for meaning. You should save enough money to support yourself in search of your dream.

20 tough questions for easier future.

1. How would you live your life?
2. What would you do with the money?
3. Would you change anything?
4. What will you do in the time you have remaining to live?
5. Will it change your life?
6. If so, how will you change it?
7. What dreams will be left unfulfilled?
8. What do I wish I had finished or had been?
9. What do I wish I had done?
10. What did I miss? The sequence of scenarios
11. What's standing between me and what I want?
12. What's my plan for overcoming each of these obstacles?
13. What do I have, in terms of personal strengths and outside resources, that will help me deal with these obstacles?
14. What skills and knowledge do I need to add to accomplish this change?
15. Are there other people I can call on for help in overcoming these obstacles?
16. What's my time line for overcoming these obstacles?
17. How can I make these changes happen sooner?
18. Do I need my family's support for making this change?
19. If so, how can I rally that support?
20. How can I evaluate and monitor my progress toward my goals?

EQ - Stress handling

Seven strategies to overcome Stress

• Set realistic goal - when you set attainable, healthy goals and write them down, you will stay focused have a high probability of accomplishing them. Put these goals into your computer to flash reminders to you on a regular basis. Visualize attaining these goals each night as you fall asleep and you will maximize your ability to achieve them!
• Positive self-talk - The best way to eradicate those "weeds" that fill the "garden" with healthy grass. Try telling yourself positive, self-enhancing thoughts every time you catch yourself being negative. Try reading motivation quotes, stories, bibles and you'll see!
• Pick an optimistic interpretation of events - finding a silver lining in every dark cloud that comes your way. When you view unfortunate events in your life as temporary and not permanent indicators of a weakness, you can continually ward off the stress of life events. More importantly, an optimistic interpretation of events has been shown to lead to remission of disease and the generation of T-cells, which are critical components of our immune systems! The key here is choice. You always have the choice in how you will see a situation and deal with it.
• Improve your diet and exercise habits - Caffeine is known to increase anxiety. Blueberries are known to enhance brain power and memory. Aerobic exercise (e.g., rapid walking, swimming, jogging, tennis, etc.) produces hormones that counteract stress hormones in our bodies. So, why not eliminate caffeine (coffee, tea, soda), add blueberries to your diet and increase exercise? Everyone can do these simple things. Of course, maintaining ideal weight and keeping fit also eliminate the negative self-talk and resultant stress that arises from looking into the mirror each morning!
• Embrace opportunities for relaxation - So many of us fill our lives with work and parenting responsibilities, that there is no time is allotted for relaxation. One of the best stress busters is regular relaxation breaks. These can range from spontaneous mini-vacations (e.g., weekends), to a relaxing walk in a serene place (e.g., the beach or near a babbling brook), to taking 15 minutes twice a day to meditate right in your office. There are many excellent relaxation tapes, yoga exercises, and visualization/hypnosis tapes on the market. The key to this is to make the time, be sure you will not be interrupted and stick to your plan. Recharging your emotional batteries is healthy and easy to do, as long as you take charge of yourself to allot the time and make relaxation part of your weekly routine.
• Stay close to positive people and influence - find positive, optimistic, successful people to get close to, who will encourage you to move away from your habitual, "inside of the box" ideas. What a breath of fresh air that will feel like to you!
• Search for opportunities for fun and laughter - LAUGHTER alone alleviated his pain and pushed his debilitating disease into permanent remission, a ton of research has shown the immense power of fun and laughter on both our emotions and our bodies. Sadly, the average youngster, age 6, laughs more than 100 times a day, while the average adult laughs about 15 times. We now know that the primary antidote to stress is fun, laughter and engaging our sense of humor. Whether it is reading a joke book, watching a funny movie or sitcom, or using your creativity to lighten up your workplace, bringing fun into your life is immensely important for your health. Endorphins, which override stress hormones and produce a sense of release and calm, are released by the brain every time we laugh or engage in a fun activity. In fact, the immune system is impacted in a powerful way by fun and laughter. Someone once said the "people don't stop laughing and having fun because they get old...they get old because they stop laughing and having fun!" So, by making sure that your life includes frequent episodes of laughing and looking at the funny side of events that take place in your life, and in the world...you will surely add life to your years and years to your life!

EQ - structure of subjective experience

Structure of subjective experience:

• External behavior - what can be observed by other people in our body posture, gesture, in our voice, muscle tension, breathing, etc.
• Internal processes - what we imagine, what we are saying to ourselves
• Internal state - what we feel internally, our emotions, our moods

External behavior, internal processes and internal state are inextricably bound up together, as the relationship between these elements is systemic.

Thoughts are systemically associated with emotions. Someone who feels depressed will have pessimistic thoughts. You can also reverse this: someone who always evaluates their experiences in a negative way will feel depressed.

Emotions are skills - a self employed person cannot allow themselves to become ill. This can give them the ability to become resistant to diseases.

Emotions are decisions - after a successful job interview, you feel happy. Your state determines the conclusion you draw about the situation.

Behavior is emotion - being self confident, will look in the eye, shake someone's hand firmly.

Any emotional state can be accessed from broadly tow categories: the Body End or the Mind End of our bodymind.

The Body End

• Search for the context where you naturally experience the emotion (e.g. on stage I want to be clown, ..)
• Activate external behavior: body posture, gestures, voice, etc
• Activate internal sensations: breathing, warmth, muscle tension, etc

The Mind End

• Activate beliefs, values and internal representations. This includes those of situations where we naturally experienced an emotion and even where we imagine what it would have been like if we had experienced it or would be like if we do.

EQ - happy

Belgan cycling champion has the following motto:

"Somebody is unhappy because he does not know he is happy."

EQ - operation presuppositions

Some of the operational presupposition:

• The brain only learns quickly
• Mind and body are components of the same system and what affects one inevitably affects the other: any separation is artificial
• We simultaneously communicate at unconscious and conscious level
• We continuously process information through our five/or more senses
• All distinctions we are able to make concerning our environment and our behaviour can therefore be usefully represented through our senses
• Recognizing responses requires sensory channels which are clean and open
• The most important information about a person is that person's behavior
• The intention behind a person does fundamentlly positive for them
• There is a context in which every behavior has value
• Behavior is geared for adaptation, and present behavior is the best choice currently available to a person within his or her model fo the world
• The positive worth of any individual is constant, while the value and appropriateness of their internal/external behavior can be questioned
• A person's behavior is not who they are: we can disapprove of what a person does and yet respect who they are
• Changing the process by which we experience reality is more valuable than changing the content of our experience or reality
• The map/or our thinking is not the territory/reality
• We operate from our internal maps rather than from the external reality
• THe words we use are not the event or item they represent
• Respect for the other person's model of the world is essential for effective communication
• Rapport is about meeting individuals at their map of the world
• The meaning of communicating is the response that it elicits
• There is no failure in communication, only feedback
• All results and behaviors are achievements, whether they are desired outcomes for a given task/context or not
• Resistence in a person is a sign of lack of rapport: there are no "resistant" people, only inflexible communicators
• We have within us all the resources necessary to achieve any desire change
• There are no unresourceful people, only unresourceful states
• It is when we are a tour most flexible that we have the highest probability of achieving the response we desire
• Any procedure carried out should increase the range of choices available
• Behavior and change are to be evaluated in terms of context and ecology
• Modeling successful performance leads to excellence if somebody can do something, anybody can
• I am in charge of my mind, and therefore my results

Intelligence - Your thinking is not the reality

When we observe reality,l we filter the reality and make out our own "drawing" of this reality. This drawing isn't the reality. However, people often confuse their thinking and the reality it is based upon.

Rene Magritte's famous painting on which a pipe is painted, along with the text "This is not a pipe." The reaction off Magritte when someone questioned hime on this? "I told the truth. The pipe is a drawing. And a drawing of a pipe is not the real thing. Indeed, try smoking using the pipe on this painting ...."

"Everything is said by someone. Every reflexion brings forth a world." and "What we say - unless we are lying - reflects what we live, not what happens from the perspective of the independent observer."

That's why at the same time, we may find that different "thinking" describing the same reality are in existence at the same time. None of these maps equate to the reality. The usefulness of a map depends upon the context you want to use it in.

However, as you peel away the illusion (those false assumption), you will get closer to the reality as uncolored as possible. That's why what a scientist consider a "rational explanation" today may be proved invalid tomorrow.

As thinking may be wrong. It is easier to change your preception of the world than it is to change the world itself. Hence our need to learn to apply the following saying: "To change the world, start with yourself." Also, we find that human map of reality are in constant evolution. People DO change their minds. When two people communicate, they cannot help but influence the other party in the discussion in some way.

EQ - get control

All too often, it seems that people lack perseverancce when they need it most or lose control over their emotions in difficult situations. Aristotle expressed it this way:

"Everybody can get angry - that's easy. But getting angry at the right person, with the right intensity, at the right time, for the right reason and in the right way - that's hard."

Intelligence - Classic person

Characteristic of an intelligent person:

• An intelligent person's reasoning is often based on images;
• They can make connections between different domains and look at problem from different perspectives.
• They trust that their unconscious will help them in solving problems.
• They can see the big picture but can also zoom in on all relevant details and take them into account.
• They can easily adapt to new contexts and rapidly master a new domain.
• If they encounter difficulties in finding a solution to a problem, they will translate the problem description and use other knowledge to find an appropriate answer.
• They tend to base their reasoning on the structure which underlines a problem and organize their response accordingly.
• They often have a clear vision of the future and of their mission to best contribute to this future.