By Christine Scivicque

The decision to make a major career change can trigger all kinds of nasty anxiety and ruthless paranoia. What if I fail? What if it’s nothing like what I’m expecting? What if I regret leaving my current gig? But, as we all know, you can’t live a fulfilling life if you waste your time and energy focusing on the “what ifs”. The more effective course of action is to focus on taking productive steps to minimize the fear that inevitably comes with any major career shift.

1. Self-Analyze

Take steps to understand your motivation for making this career shift. What about this new career appeals to you? What makes it feel like a smart move? How does this new career align with your values and long-term life goals? Spend some time thinking about the overall vision you have for your life and see where this new career falls into it. When you know that this career move is in line with your life as a whole, you’ll feel more secure in your decision.

2. Research

Reach out to people who are already in the career you’re looking to go into. Invite them to lunch and ask for an honest, “insider’s” perspective. Try to get the whole scoop: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Don’t sugar-coat the reality of the career. You need to go into it with eyes wide open. You’ll also want to ask about the skills and resources you’ll need to do the job. You may need to start preparing for the transition months or years ahead of time.

3. Be Realistic

When switching career paths, you may find yourself down at the bottom of the corporate ladder once again. The seniority and experience you’ve accumulated thus far may be completely ignored. You also will likely end up taking a pay cut along the way. You probably won’t just walk into the perfect position you’ve been dreaming of. Be realistic about the amount of time you’ll need to devote to this venture to see it through to your ultimate goal.

Transitioning into a new career will always be somewhat of a leap of faith. You’ll never know how it’s going to work out until you’re in it and, yes, it could be disastrous. However, by taking the steps outlined above, you can certainly reduce the risk of a negative outcome and you will definitely feel more confident about your decision. Ultimately, if you really want to make a big career change, choose a reasonable date and commit to doing it by then. Once the date is picked, your motivation will skyrocket and things will start to fall neatly into place.

Author Bio: Chrissy Scivicque is a writer, nutritionist and career coach. She trains others to manage their career path with a holistic point-of-view. You can find her at EatYourCareer.com, a blog dedicated to helping you create a nourishing professional life. Stop by and pick up your FREE mini-workbook to find out just how nourishing your career really is and how you can make it even more so.

By Melinda Elliott

There’s a lot of information out there about how to achieve your goals. About how to stay motivated, how to focus on your dreams and not be distracted by failure and set backs. But that all assumes that you know what you want out of life, that you already have goals you’re eager to achieve. Recently, in response to a comment I made about pursuing one’s goals on The Change Blog, I got a poignant reply that asked "But what if you haven’t found anything worth doing, any goal worth pursuing?"

Great question – focus is wonderful, but if we aren’t looking at the right things how useful is it? Sure we can learn from failure, but what do we do with those lessons if we’re not really doing anything? How can we find out where we should be looking for our satisfaction in life?

Step 1 – Make a list of what’s important to you.

Do it quickly and without censoring – it’s ok if your list includes your cat or your new shoes. Your choices reflect a snapshot of your life right now and don’t need to be lofty or impressive. Here’s my quick list (in no particular order): my daughter, my friends, writing, coaching, my house, my central heating, my cat, my favorite TV shows (blush), learning, my blog.

Step 2 – Ask "Why is this important?" for each item on your list.

Here are my answers:

· My daughter because she is my contribution to the world at the most basic level and because she’s fun, loving and makes me happy.

· My friends because they support me, teach me, and make me laugh.

· Writing and my blog because they ignite my passion and I feel like I’m able to help people with them. And they’re fun!

· Coaching because I’m helping my clients live better and clearer lives.

· My house because it provides me with a beautiful and safe place to be.

· My central heating because it keeps me warm and comfortable.

· My favorite TV shows because they take me to places where life is silly and adventurous and because they often provide me with a fascinating glimpse into human nature.

· Learning because it makes me a better person and helps me grow.

Step 3 – Use your answers to identify your values.

Look for themes in your answers. When you read over your list, what pops out at you? What shows up more than once? Are there items that have something in common? I see the following themes in my list: contribution, fun & laughter, learning, helping people, comfort.

The themes we identify reflect our values and what’s most important to us in our lives. And this is where goal setting should begin.

Step 4 – Use your values to set your goals.

The goals that inspire you most will be based on your values, on what’s really important to you. You might already be working on some of them – I’ve set clear goals around my writing and am beginning to revamp my coaching practice. But when I look at my list I realize that I’m not putting much effort to making sure that I have enough fun and laughter in my life right now, so I might want to set a goal to find more ways to play.

When you set your goals:

• Make your goals bite-sized – A goal of "Learn the skills I need for my next promotion" sounds achievable, while a goal of "Become CEO by the time I’m 30" is probably going to set you up for failure.
• Make your goals positive – You should work toward what you want, not away from what you don’t want. "I want to find a loving partner" inspires while "I don’t want to be lonely anymore" already feels defeated.
• Realize that as you work toward your goals they’ll probably change – As we learn and grow from the work we do to move toward our goals we often connect with new, more resonant goals. After I set up my coaching practice I started writing newsletters to attract more clients. But I found that I loved writing as much as I loved coaching, and my goal shifted from attracting clients to creating a blog.

The bottom line is that when our goals tap into the beauty and energy of our values they make our hearts sing. They feed our hungers, we can’t wait to get started working on them. So my answer to the reader who asked about finding a goal worth pursuing is that the answer is in your heart, it’s in your longings, it’s in the things you want more of.

Author bio: Melinda Elliott is a writer and Life Coach. Visit her blog The Easy Place.

By Stacey Porto, CC

“Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.” ~Aristotle

Moral excellence, as Aristotle says, is a result of habit. Like anything else we want to master, to become morally excellent or more virtuous takes practice. Typically, we don’t go through our day thinking about whether we need to practice more kindness or more commitment or even more love. Morals or virtues are usually ingrained in us and come naturally, right? Yes, but if we became more mindful of the difference that the practice of virtues can make in daily life, we will undoubtedly lead a more fulfilling and happy life. Mainly because we are striving for excellence; our personal best based in virtues such as love, kindness, gratefulness, courage, and integrity.

By practicing the following six virtues, your life can radically improve in the form of better relationships, peaked performance, and fulfillment of your dreams.

1. Commitment

Without commitment, we have little direction or purpose in life. We fall victims to our circumstances, rather than being captains of our ships. But to commit to a worthy cause, to something that holds meaning for us, whether it’s a highly noble one like starting a nonprofit or simply promising to exercise regularly, is when things turn around. Now we have focusing power, there are no more questions, no more being on the fence or wavering in the face of fear, temptation or criticism. The moment we commit to something, thoughts become action and with true commitment, we become unstoppable.

Think about what you are committed to or not committed to in life. Our commitments either move us towards our goals or further away from our goals. The beauty is that we have a choice. We can continue committing to things that are not working for us or to nothing at all, which can lead to frustration, unhappiness and even addiction, or we can commit to things that matter to us and give our lives purpose.

2. Faith

How hard is it to have faith when things are not going well in life? This bad economy has surely tested the faith of many people. People have lost their jobs, foreclosed on their homes and lost their 401K’s. Yet, without faith, it’s tough to even get through another day. Having faith provides a spiritual foundation that allows us to push through difficulties again and again.

Take for example Nelson Mandela who endured 27 years in prison through faith. He had faith in what he stood for, the people’s support and in his eventual freedom, which gave him the will to persevere and keep his sanity. However, faith can be a challenge because we are trusting in things that we cannot see, and that’s not always easy. But when you are faced with a difficulty, practicing faith and trusting in the journey can help you press on and give you peace knowing that things will work out.

3. Forgiveness

When Dr. Wayne Dyer, a well-known personal development author and speaker, forgave his deceased father for abandoning him at just 4-years-old, his life turned around. Before he forgave his father, Dr. Dyer was overweight, in a bad relationship and drinking too much. His writing was not doing what he wanted. But after he forgave his father and released a lifetime of anger and bitterness, his whole life took off. He wrote the book Erroneous Zones, and 14 days after he wrote it, the book became a worldwide bestseller. He got back into shape and stopped drinking.

Forgiveness can change the course of our lives as it did with Dr. Dyer’s. It allows us to place our attention on other things in life instead of dwelling on our anger and resentment towards the offender. If there is someone you have not forgiven, think about how your lack of forgiveness is affecting your life and consider making amends with the person so that you can live your best life.

4. Gratitude

Gratitude is one virtue that, if practiced, our lives can improve right away. Our natural tendency is to think negatively, which can hurt our well-being. Gratitude helps us to shift negative thoughts to positive ones, and positive thoughts prevent negative emotions.

Also, grateful people, according to scientific research, recover more quickly from illness, cope better with stress, and benefit in greater physical health. There is always something to be grateful for in life. It’s not always easy to be thankful, especially during hard times, but by practicing gratitude we focus our thoughts on what is working in life and this can help us to make positive change.

5. Courage

What incredible insight C.S. Lewis had when he said, “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.” It sure does take great courage to persevere through obstacles. You need courage to be honest with someone about how you really feel. Integrity requires courage because you are doing the right thing no matter how tough it may be.

Think about being courageous when practicing virtues and you will find that becoming more virtuous will start to come easier.

6. Love

With love, all things are possible, fulfilling relationships, self-confidence from loving ourselves and service to others, for example. And when we look at any situation through the eyes of love, we will experience more peace and harmony and create the same for others. This may seem like a Pollyanna approach to life, and not always easy, but it’s a more enlightened way of being and peaceful path to follow rather than feeling angry and hurt.

Next time when a person or situation causes negative emotions, step back for a moment and make a choice to see that person or situation in a loving way. For example, if someone criticizes you, instead of getting defensive and angry, take a deep breath and make a choice to tell them how you feel, but with kindness and love. You will find that this practice can make for a more peaceful and happier experience for you and for them.

Author bio: Stacey Porto, CC, a certified life coach, is founder of Virtues for Life, www.virtuesforlife.com, a website designed to inspire and coach people in the daily practice of virtues so that they can become their personal best and, consequently, live more extraordinary lives. Subscribe to our Virtues for Life blog here for our latest posts. Also, have you practiced a virtue that made a difference in your life or someone else’s? Please write to us with your story. We would love to hear from you.

By Srinivas Rao

Several months back I interviewed a blogger named Jenny Blake who runs a successful blog called Life After College, and has actually just signed her first book deal. As I was going back through my chat with her about the process of writing a book, she said one thing that really stood out to me. She said that far too many people are victims of all or nothing thinking when it comes to the seemingly daunting task of writing a book.  Most people don’t even start because they think that it has to be all or nothing: write the entire book or don’t write it all. When you think about goals in general that’s not at all how they are accomplished.

Let’s take a look at how we can overcome all or nothing thinking and actually accomplish our goals.

Bite Size Pieces

One of the first things you should do with a goal is break it up into bite sized pieces. According to health experts that’s how we need to eat for a healthy digestive system. So, wouldn’t it make sense to do that in the way we accomplish our goals. When we break goals up into bite sized pieces a few things happen. First, you have measurable and visible progress. It’s also much easier to take baby steps and approach it in bite sized pieces. Let’s take a look at two examples of goals that can be accomplished in bite sized pieces:

1. Writing a Book: Writing a book is actually not that hard. If you’ve run a blog for over a year and have posted 3 times a week, then you have already done enough writing to write a book. Let’s say you committed to writing one page for a year and you did it every single day. At the end of the year you would have a 365 page book. You could then edit, write your book proposal, and contact a literary agent. Essentially you’d be on your way to becoming a published author. If it doesn’t work out, who cares? You’ve got a masterpiece that could fuel your blog content for a year or two.
2. Losing Weight: Let’s say that you have a goal of losing 25lbs. That’s not an easy feat even if you are a fitness junkie. In fact if you focus on the 25lbs, then you will never feel like you’re making any progress, and you’ll likely say “screw it” to your goal of losing weight. Let’s say you approached this plan, 1lb at a time. Then you will feel like you are making progress every time you check the scale. It’s about perspective and when we approach a goal this way our perspective shifts to a much more optimistic one about the fact that it’s possible.

One Thing Every Day

If you do one thing every single day towards the accomplishment of a goal, it’s close to inevitable that you will in fact accomplish that goal. You may not be able to quit smoking completely today, but you can give up a cigarette just for today and smoke again tomorrow if you feel the need. Just don’t get caught in that trap of all or nothing thinking. You may not be able to shed 25 lbs today, but you can eat healthy for today and deal with tomorrow when it comes.

The End Results

The end results speak for themselves. By going through your goals in this manner, and letting go of the all or nothing thinking that hold so many of us back from reaching our full potential, you have an opportunity to truly accomplish everything you want.

Do you have any examples of how you’ve broken a goal up into bite sized pieces? Please share them in the comments.

Author bio: Srinivas Rao is a personal development blogger at The Skool of Life where obsesses about riding waves and turning his time in the Ocean into life lessons. He’s also the host and co-founder of BlogcastFM, a podcast for bloggers.

By Christopher R. Edgar

In this post, I’ll talk about something that doesn’t seem to make sense. Why is it that, when we’re working on a project that’s deeply important to us, we tend to procrastinate the most?

I’m sure you’ve experienced this while doing a task that seemed “make or break” to you. Maybe it was a project that was for an important client or worth a lot of money. Maybe it was a paper you were writing for school that was worth a big part of your grade. Whatever it was, I’ll bet you noticed yourself putting it off more often than your usual chores.

Why Procrastination Makes Sense

Why does this happen? In my experience, when a task seems really important, that usually means our ego is deeply invested in it. In other words, our self-worth is riding on how we perform. If the project goes well, we’ll think well of ourselves. But if we screw up, we’ll see ourselves as screwups.

It’s understandable that we’d put off doing a project like this. After all, if we finished the work, someone might think it’s not good enough. We can avoid that risk by not trying and never finishing.

I think this is one reason so many people have a breakthrough novel they’ve been “meaning” to write, or a dream business they’ve been “planning” to start, for many years. They haven’t tried, because they know how much their self-worth would suffer if they failed.

What’s The Worst That Could Happen?

How do we let go of this habit of putting off our most important work? The key, I think, is to recognize that we’re basically okay and worthwhile, no matter what mistakes or setbacks happen in the project we’re doing. In my book, this is what I call developing a sense of inner foundation.

One way to have this realization, I think, is to seriously ask yourself what would happen if the project you’ve been putting off doesn’t work out. What’s the worst-case scenario that might come about if you wrote that groundbreaking novel and nobody read it, or you started that dream business and no one bought anything from it?

What I think you’ll recognize when you ask this question is that, in fact, life would probably go on if you failed. You probably wouldn’t disintegrate or spontaneously combust, and you’d likely live to write another book or start another business if you so desired.

Getting Grounded

At a deeper level, it’s also useful, when you’re feeling anxious about how a project will turn out, to do what’s often called getting grounded — to bring your attention into your body, and feel its power and stability. Yoga offers some great ways to do this.

One technique you can use, without even getting up from your chair, is called breathing into your spine. To do this, focus your attention on the base of your spine, around the tailbone area. If you have trouble doing this, press your hand against your lower back, and tune into the sensation of pressure you feel there.

With your attention focused there, take a few deep breaths. Notice how this reminds you, on a physical level, of your strength and solidity. As you can imagine, this is great for moments at work when you feel paralyzed with worry that your project won’t turn out well.

It may seem like a paradox, but the more we see ourselves as safe and adequate, no matter what results we get at work, the more we get the ease and efficiency we want in what we do.

Author Bio

Chris Edgar helps people find focus, motivation and peace in their work through his writing, workshops and private coaching. Chris is the author of Inner Productivity: A Mindful Path to Efficiency and Enjoyment in Your Work. You can find out more about Chris’s work at www.InnerProductivity.com.

By Mark Harrison

“Do not suffer life to stagnate; it will grow muddy for want of motion: commit yourself again to the current of the world.” – Samuel Johnson

Motion, or change, is the one constant in life.

We are always moving, whether it be forwards, backwards or in circles. Most of us would, I imagine, want to be moving forward – achieving something, becoming fitter, stronger, wealthier, more skillful, happier. Yet so many of us get stuck in a rut, going over the same ground like a mouse in a wheel.

Dreams

“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.” – T E Lawrence

All things start in the mind. The great cathedrals and mosques of the world, the pyramids, the modern world – cars, planes and space ships – all the wonders of the ancient and the modern worlds – they all started as ideas, dreams. The idea of a flying machine would have been astonishing to people a few hundred years ago – most people would have ridiculed such a notion – but someone dreamed about it and now planes are part of our daily life.

It is a great tragedy that so many of us allow life to crush our dreams. There was a time when we dreamed of great and fantastic things; learning to dream again is one of our most important tasks as adults. If you have no dreams, you will be like that mouse in a wheel: there may be a lot of motion, but there will be no progress.

Determination

“It is for us to pray not for tasks equal to our powers, but for powers equal to our tasks, to go forward with a great desire forever beating at the door of our hearts as we travel toward our distant goal.” – Helen Keller

In his wise and witty book ‘How to Get Rich,’ Felix Denis suggests that we need to distinguish between desire and compulsion. Desire – or dreaming – alone will not get us anywhere; it is a necessary prerequisite, to be sure, but we also need to have a strong inner compulsion to make those dreams come true. If our dreams are a ship, then we need a captain to get the ship moving and to keep it going. We need self-belief, passion and commitment. Would the aeroplane have been invented if Orville and Wilbur Wright had not been driven to see their dreams turn into reality?

Set backs and failures are inevitable, but giving up cannot be an option if you want to succeed. I do not mean to suggest that life should be a struggle – in fact, I believe just the opposite. The captain of a ship is not straining to stay on course, and the more skillful the captain, the more easily and naturally he seems able to direct the vessel. But without desire, we will not have the energy to keep going, to keep moving on, even in the face of apparent defeat. We will get lost in the desert, perhaps lost in an ecstasy of dreams, and we will never see the land of milk and honey.

Action

“The great end of life is not knowledge but action.” – Aldous Huxley

Action emerges naturally from determination. If you are determined to achieve your goals, then you will act. But there is a right way to act and a wrong way. Determination should not be equated to struggle nor, indeed, to speed. Many small actions can achieve great results – a journey happens one step at a time, and a great tower is built one single brick on top of another. The ‘dripping tap’ soon leads to a filled bucket. Lao Tzu, who lived twenty-six centuries ago, wrote ‘nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.’ Or, if you prefer a more contemporary quotation, I think it was Charley Brown who said ‘Nothing much seems to change from day to day, but pretty soon everything’s different.’ Wisdom, indeed.

Faith

“We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.” – Henry David Thoreau

Without goals and without the determination to achieve them, we will get nowhere. But In the end, life is a mystery. We cannot know the future. So we need to be open to the natural flow of things and let life take us where it will, not fighting, not resisting. There is an intelligence greater than you or I – call it providence, call it God, call it the Tao – and we should always seek to be in concert with it. Fighting against nature is futile; working with the natural grain of things can bring great success with little expenditure of energy.

Chuang-Tzu tells the story of an old man swimming in a fierce river; he disappears under the surface, and some disciples of Confucius, who have been watching, rush to save him. However, the old man reaches the riverbank unharmed, amazing the onlookers. When asked how he managed to survive, the old man replied that he had allowed the currents to carry him, flowing with the river and not fighting against the water’s motion.

Enormous sailing ships can move vast distances carried only by the wind, and end up on strange, unexpected and yet wonderful new shores. Without a dream and a commitment to action, the ship would never have been built or set sail, but without an understanding of the natural course of nature, without setting out at the right time and following the wind and the tides, the crew would work to get nowhere.

Author bio: Mark Harrison writes at Effortless Abundance. Check out his latest book, Thirty Days to Change Your Life.