Summer Dieting Tips

Every Challenge is Doable if You Chop it Down to Size

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It’s very easy to get so worried about the challenge facing you that you just freeze up and quit. It’s very easy to get discouraged. It’s very easy to feel that your problem is so big and so scary that there’s really no way you can get out from under it.

You might as well just give up. You might as well lose all hope. If any of these enter your frame of mind, you are simply just taking the path of least resistance. You’re looking at the situation from the perspective of somebody who wants to do the least work.

If you are serious about coming out on top and achieving unstoppable victory, every challenge does not have to be scary. Every challenge does not have to have the potential of crushing you and stealing your dreams.

Instead, if you have the right mindset, every challenge is actually going to be an opportunity. Think about it. If you are faced with a challenge that really pushes you back against the wall and incentivizes you to step up your problem-solving skills, what do you think will happen?

That’s right. Your natural imagination, resourcefulness, and creativity are triggered. You figure out a way. If you can’t get through the front door, you will try the roof. If the roof doesn’t work, you try the basement. If the basement is blocked off for whatever reason, you will try the side door. If that doesn’t work, then you will try the back door.

If today is not an option, then you will try tomorrow. If that is off limits, then you will try the next day. In other words, you challenge yourself to become a more competent person all around by tackling every challenge you come across.

One of the most powerful revelations you could ever realize is that every challenge is doable if you chop it down to size. Every challenge actually has many different moving parts. If you pick these apart and you attack one piece at a time in many different sequences, chances are you will achieve a breakthrough.

If anything, you become a different person as you go through this problem-solving process. This is what a lot of people miss out on. They’re always looking for the short cut or, worse yet, they’re waiting for somebody to pull them out of their situation because they have completely given up on coming up with a solution of their own.

Summer Dieting Tips

You Get Less Competent the More You Run Away from Challenges

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Believe it or not, personal competence is actually like a muscle. If you haven’t been to a gym before and you start lifting weights, what do you think will happen?

Well, it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that in the morning, you’re not going to feel all that well. It seems like your muscles are aching all over the place. It’s like they’re screaming at you to stop working out.

You put a tremendous amount of pressure on muscles that are not used to that stress and pressure. What do you think will happen? That’s right, a lot of pain. The secret here is that you must work through the pain.

A lot of people are under the impression that if their body is telling them that it’s in pain that this is their signal to stop. This is the most common mistake rookies make. When you listen to your body, you’re basically listening to that part of yourself that is telling you to take it easy. You’re listening to that part of yourself that does not want to be stressed, confronted and challenged.

What do you think it will ask for? That’s right. It will ask for you to take it easy. It will ask you to do something else that is more pleasurable. It’s going to ask you to just lay off anything that may involve discomfort, inconvenience or sacrifice.

But it turns out that if you want to make the pain go away, you go to the gym and lift more weights. Sure, it feels like murder the next day, but if you keep going, the pain evaporates. It turns out that the pain is temporary. It’s the small price you pay to achieve higher levels of muscle discipline and strength.

The same applies to your competence. If you want to just focus on your current level of expertise and knowledge, you’re not going to improve. You’re not going to be curious about what else is out there. You’re not going to challenge what you think you know. You’re not going to break things apart and try to put them back together and figure out how to connect the dots and see the big patterns.

You’re not going to achieve any of that. Those are the things that will take your knowledge to the next level. Those are the things that will enable you to become a greater expert and authority in whatever field you’re in.

Unfortunately, a lot of people think that they can coast or take it easy based on their current level of expertise. They end up running away from challenges. They focus on the things they know. They focus on the “tried and proven.”

Unfortunately, the more they do this, the less competent they become because the value of their knowledge erodes over time. Also, if you don’t want to challenge yourself, chances are you’re not going to figure out better ways to articulate what you already know.

Summer Dieting Tips

Self-esteem without Competence is a Recipe for Failure

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For the longest time, in the United States and elsewhere, educational policymakers bought into the idea of self-esteem. Please understand that self-esteem is a good thing. Nobody’s disputing that. However, according to this educational policy philosophy, for students to perform well in life, they need to have their self-esteem built up and encouraged early on.

Again, just like the observation that self-esteem is a good thing, this seems pretty good on the surface. What’s there to argue about. The problem is if you are going to be building your self-esteem based on affirmations and being made to feel good about who you are without any accomplishments or physical results produced by your efforts to back it up.

self-esteem | Wonderfully Fit PT

You are building your house on sand. This is precisely what happened with generations of youth fed on the steady diet of self-esteem stimulation. That’s really what it is. You just stimulated the formation of self-esteem not through actual achievements, accomplishments, sacrifice, hard work and other traditional indicators of success.

Instead, people got self-esteem by being respected for showing up. That’s it. That’s all you need to do. You just need to show up and you get a prize for participation. According to this school of thought, your feelings are paramount.

If only things worked that way. Sadly, a lot of people who base their self-esteem on the fact that they happened to show up know deep down inside that their confidence is hollow. They know that this is not the way real life works. They know that the world may have some rude surprises waiting for them. No wonder, many people with supreme self-esteem are very frustrated and confused.

As long as you’re feeling okay about yourself, then there’s really not much difference between what you think and what everybody else thinks. You are entitled to your estimation of yourself, the rightness of your action, so on and so forth.

What this created is self-esteem that produced very hollow self-confidence. People definitely can feel that they can do stuff, but they can only do it in theory. When they’re actually given challenges to produce and deliver results, most people, who focus primarily on self-esteem without the matching competence, fall apart like a house of cards.

Self-esteem without competence is a recipe for failure. If you’re having a tough time in any area of your life or you feel you’re frustrated or stuck in any area of your life, maybe it’s because of this. Sure, you feel good about yourself and it seems like you have a high estimate of your ability to get things done.

Unfortunately, unless and until that high estimation is based on actual experience and results, you’re just wasting your time. It’s probably going to be very hard for you to overcome challenges. It’s probably very tempting for you to just quit the moment you’re confronted with actual difficulty.

If you’re suffering from any of these, thankfully there is a fairly straightforward and simple solution. Click here for the solution.