My Failed Month of ‘No Sitting’

‘Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.’ ~Zen Proverb

In my second month of The Year of Living Without, I committed to not sitting for longer than 30 minutes at a time.

I have to admit failure here.

Well, not complete failure. I sat much less in August than I normally do, and was really pretty good in the mornings about remembering to get up (though I did forget a little in the beginning) and walking around, standing and reading, stretching, etc. I also was very active during the month, going for walks, runs, gym workouts, etc.

The problem came when I was tired, usually later in the afternoon and in the evenings. When I was tired, I just couldn’t seem to follow the plan. I would be tired from a long run (for example), and would lie down to take a short nap, and just wouldn’t want to get up. I forgave myself, and let myself rest. I told myself my body needed it.

Social situations were also awkward — when I would meet someone for dinner or tea, sitting is the norm. At first, I tried standing up, and explained myself, and felt weird standing up when they were sitting — I felt I was making them a little uncomfortable. So I caved there too, and decided not to make my friends or new acquaintances feel weird.

This Year of Living Without is not about making my life miserable, but about learning what it’s like to give up something I don’t want to give up. It’s about learning about resistance, and what it’s like to push back against that internal resistance.

I did learn about that in August.

Here are some lessons:

When you’re tired, it’s really hard to beat resistance.Rest before the resistance comes. Get lots of sleep to change habits.It’s hard to remember a day-long habit like not sitting for too long. Start with smaller sections, like just the morning, and then expand.In the beginning of a habit, have visual reminders where the habit takes place, so you don’t forget. Enlist the help of others to remind you too.Figure out what you’ll do in social situations before they happen. Talk to people before you meet with them, and tell them about your weird habit, and work out a plan together. Otherwise it becomes awkward and you cave in.Forgive yourself when you fail.Standing, stretching, doing exercises, cleaning, running, walking and generally being more active during the day makes you tired later in the day. I was surprised how tired I got.

Previously: My Month Without Coffee (update: I’ve been drinking coffee again recently)

This month, I’m going without video of any kind, which includes TV, movies, YouTube and other online video.

I resisted this idea mostly because it’s been my ritual to sit with Eva in the evenings and have a glass of red wine and watch one of our favorite shows for about an hour or so. This was our winding-down ritual, and it was something we shared. I didn’t want to give this up, and every time I considered it previously, I resisted. So I’m giving it up.

The biggest obstacle is losing that shared time with Eva (and the kids sometimes). I’ve suggested that we do something else together in the evening, but at the same time I don’t want to force her to give up TV if she doesn’t want to. So we’re still figuring this out.

My replacement habit is to write, read and do yoga in the evenings. So I’m actually looking forward to this. Actually, I’ve already started (3 days now) and am enjoying the extra time at night, but not enjoying missing the shared family time.

One small slip-up to report already: I watched this video about our smartphones disconnecting us from each other. I liked the video a lot, but then realized I wasn’t supposed to watch it. Oops!

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How to Turn Yourself Into A Powerful Leader

Do you talk, or listen? Do you demand, or motivate? Do you want to be a boss, or a leader? Leaders make great bosses but sadly, not every boss makes a leader. The fact that someone is in a position of authority doesn’t mean that they are respected or followed.

We can all name quite a few ‘bosses’, managers and small business owners who are tolerated, ignored or openly disrespected by their employees. As soon as they end up in the “my boss is a jerk” category, the company’s productivity plummets, the sales drop, and employees start sending out their resumes during work hours.

Fortunately, with the right knowledge and a little bit of effort, every boss can turn into a powerful leader.

Here are 11 tips that will help you turn yourself into a powerful leader who is followed, respected and admired.

When it comes to body language, a ‘fake it ‘til you make it’ principle works wonders in boosting your self-confidence and feeling more powerful. There are three quick changes you can make to your body language that will noticeably improve your self-image and send the right message to those around you:

Make eye contact. Look people in the eye when you speak to them. If you find yourself in public places or social situations, scan the room and look at people. Don’t stare though…it’s unnerving!Smile! Yes, powerful leaders do smile. They don’t frown. They don’t have an icy expression that sends shivers down people’s spine. And they certainly don’t look like they have just smelled a dead skunk. A smile is not a sign of weakness. It’s a message that says you are friendly, approachable and confident.Strong posture communicates confidence and authority, so straighten your shoulders, raise your head a little and stand tall.

Often it is not a leader that people follow, but the powerful vision that they communicate. Make sure that you are very clear about your goals and verify if everyone is on the same page as you. It is your job as a leader to make it simple for your team to understand the mission and know their part in achieving it.

It is very easy to get distracted by new trends, new markets, and new projects, and lose sight of the big picture. Achieving and maintaining success takes discipline, focus and being clear on what the priorities are. When you extend yourself too far or start to micromanage, the quality of your work suffers across the board. Which brings us to the next point…

Anthony Robbins said it best, “A true leader is someone who inspires others to become more of who they truly are.” It is the responsibility of a leader to inspire, recognize and channel people’s talents in the best way to meet larger goals.

Sometimes, the greatest leap you can make as a powerful leader is stepping aside and putting more trust in your team. It is surprising what people can achieve when they are given responsibility and freedom to make their own decisions.

The ‘right’ people, in this case, are not the ones who think and act exactly like you. It’s actually the other way around. The best strategy for success is to hire people who are diverse, passionate and smart – and then listen closely to their perspectives.

It may be hard on our ego to accept that the best ideas don’t always come from us and that people in lower positions could actually be more talented or more experienced than we are, but powerful leaders, unlike wannabes, are more focused on getting results than making themselves look good.

This tip is pretty self-explanatory: nobody respects a leader who doesn’t deliver on their promises. What you do speaks much louder to people than what you say. Besides, your word is only as valuable as experience shows it to be. So practice what you preach and don’t ever give someone a reason to doubt your abilities.

Common sense and conventional wisdom work great in day-to-day situations for most people. The thing is…leaders aren’t most people and there is nothing ‘conventional’ or ‘common’ about breaking out of your comfort zone and taking a different route.

It would be naïve to believe that as a leader you will never encounter opposition or resistance from other people. There will always be somebody who believes that implementing new ideas is too risky and trying a different approach to business is a sure-fire way to fail. It’s perfectly normal. Be prepared to defend your point of view and challenge the status quo. It was Aristotle who said, “There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.” And he mentored Alexander the Great, so we should assume that he knew a thing or two about powerful leadership.

In order for people to follow you, they should believe that you are competent enough and more skilled than they are. It should be your priority to stay on top of things by constantly improving your skills, expanding your knowledge and gaining an edge on the latest trends and technology in your field.

Being able to discuss your work, confront your ideas or ask for advice from someone whose opinion you respect is beneficial for every leader – even a CEO. Passion needs to be balanced by wisdom that only comes with years of experience and repeated failures. You can wait to gain this experience, or you can find a mentor who will help you see things in a different way, and possibly prevent some costly mistakes.

Every successful person – every great leader – has always had a mentor. You should have one too!

There will always be people who will bring problems to your attention. It’s just the way it works. But as a leader they will expect you to have a solution ready. If you want to become a powerful leader, you have to train your mind to stay positive and focus on solutions. It doesn’t mean that you should be bubbling with joy and excitement all the time. But it’s important not to fall into the other extreme and lose your cool when the pressure rises.

Follow what I call the “PRST” Rule. That stands for “Praise – Recognize – Say Thanks”. Psychologists studying productivity at work discovered that in order to improve employees’ performance and motivation the ratio between positive and negative remarks should be kept at 3:1. It means that it takes three praises to neutralize the damage made by one negative remark. The same, by the way, is true for personal relationships and marriage (only the positive to negative ratio should be 5:1).

Make sure that you pay attention to your offhand remarks and make an effort to recognize people’s efforts. The U.S. Department of Labor says that the number one reason people leave their jobs is because they “don’t feel appreciated.” What does it cost you to say “Thank you,” or to praise someone’s efforts? Don’t take people for granted and they will appreciate you more as well.

What are your thoughts? What steps have you taken to become a more powerful leader?

It takes great leadership style to build great teams. 5 Leadership Styles that Help You Build a High Performance Team

Featured photo credit: Art by MarkACvia Flickr

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TED News in Brief: TED app featured during iPhone reveal, Pico Iyer breaks our hearts

News

Today, Apple thrilled the tech world by revealing its two new iPhones, one a candy-colored, lower-priced model. And we were very excited to see our new TED iOS7 app featured in the presentation, toward the middle of the grid above. More on that soon.

In Sunday’s New York Times, Pico Iyer (watch his TED Talk) searches for the value of suffering in a quietly shattering essay that ties together the aftermath of the Japanese tsunami in 2011 and our reaction to seeing the desperate suffering in Syria now.

Time magazine’s list of the hottest university classes, as expected, contains a few TED stars — Nina Jablonski, Laurie Santos, Sebastian Thrun, Peter Norvig, Dan Ariely. It’s also an insanely fun read, full of quirky profs and niche topics you suddenly need to know everything about. Anyone else feel like going back to school?

The Stir takes a look at what Brene Brown’s “Listening to Shame” means for moms.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington, artist JR (read about his TED Prize wish) headed to the Atlanta neighborhood where King grew up and pasted enormous images from the march on local buildings. Photo, above.

Sylvia Earle (watch her talk) has written the intro for a buzzed-about new book on the rise of jellyfish in our degraded oceans. As Jeremy Jackson said in his TED Talk: As we crash fishery after fishery, our ocean will come to be dominated by bacteria and jellyfish.

The Lasker Awards (which MetaFilter calls “America’s Nobels”) were announced this week, and Bill Gates (check out his talks) and Melinda Gates (watch her talk) share the Lasker~Bloomberg Public Service Award. (Another award went to three inventors of the cochlear implant.)

We love celebrities, Robert Sapolsky admits in the new Nautilus. Why? “Because we’re primates with vested interests in tracking social hierarchies and patterns of social affiliation. And celebrities provide our primate minds with stimulating gyrations of hierarchy.”

This week, the comic “Betty” (above) references Amy Cuddy’s TED Talk “Your body languages shapes who you are” and her praise of power posing. While Cuddy does not recommend power posing as a way to get the upper hand in a relationship, she does say it’s a great way to boost confidence before a job interview.

Cass Sunstein (an economist and coincidentally the husband of TED speaker Samantha Power) reviews TED speaker Sendhil Mullainathan’s new book, Scarcity, cowritten with Eldar Shafir. The book offers an astonishing look at the pervasive effects of scarcity — of food, of time, of attention — and how it affects your power to make good decisions. Bonus: Within the review, Sunstein surfaces a knockout quote from another TED speaker, economist Esther Duflo (watch the talk):

“We tend to be patronizing about the poor in a very specific sense, which is that we tend to think, ‘Why don’t they take more responsibility for their lives?’ And what we are forgetting is that the richer you are the less responsibility you need to take for your own life because everything is taken care [of] for you. And the poorer you are, the more you have to be responsible for everything about your life…. Stop berating people for not being responsible and start to think of ways instead of providing the poor with the luxury that we all have, which is that a lot of decisions are taken for us. If we do nothing, we are on the right track. For most of the poor, if they do nothing, they are on the wrong track.”

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The Thinking Habit That Changed My Life

I remember one evening, when my life was pretty different and I was overweight and deeply in debt and a smoker and had such a hard time changing things … I wasn’t feeling too good about my life.

I felt horrible about myself, and wondered why I was stuck. I felt hopeless and helpless, and generally depressed about the state of things around me.

Then I looked up at the sky, and saw the stars set in a deep blue-black canvas. And I thought, what a miracle life is.

And I resolved to mentally list the things I had in my life that were good.

My list of good things was something like this:

I had a wonderful wifeI had 5 amazing children (now 6)I had loving parents and siblings and grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousinsI wasn’t sickI had a jobI had decent shelter and foodMy family was healthyI could see, and appreciate the beauty of the world around meI could taste delicious foodI had great books to read

The list went on, but you get the idea. Even when things seemed horrible for me, actually I was OK. And more than that, I had some amazing blessings in my life.

That night I resolved to count my blessings more often. I resolved to be grateful for what I had, for the people in my life.

I started the habit of gratitude.

Now, this seems like a trivial and maybe trite and hokey thing to many people. I’m here to tell you that it’s not trivial, and as trite/hokey as it may seem, it changes lives.

Here’s what happened to me, as I changed my thinking from one of negativity, to one of gratitude:

I appreciated my wife Eva more, and told her so, and felt good about having her in my life, and we deepened our relationship.I also appreciated my kids more, and instead of getting mad at them so much, I would notice their lovingness, their curiosity, their humor and playfulness.I appreciated my other loved ones more, and while I don’t always tell them how grateful I am for them, I do think it a lot, and do tell them much more often now.I was kinder to others around me, at work and everywhere else, because instead of seeing the faults in everyone, I saw the good, and was grateful for them.I needed less, because instead of thinking about what I don’t have, I was grateful for what I did have.Little things bothered me less, because instead of complaining about every little thing, I would find things to be thankful for.I appreciated nature all around me, smaller things that I might have missed before, beauty in everything.Habit change became easier, because instead of focusing on how hard the change was, I found the joy in the changes, and joy in seeing myself overcome challenges.Each and every moment became cause for gratitude, and living in the present became easier.

The list goes on and on, but each of these things is incredibly powerful. Not trite. Not hokey. Pure wonder.

So how do you pick up this habit? It’s interesting, because so much of our lives is spent in unconscious mental habits. Without knowing it, we complain, we nitpick, we stress about little faults, we see the bad in people and situations. Changing that doesn’t happen immediately.

But. You can change a little at a time. Start with a small gratitude session, and really be thankful. Really feel the happiness that something or someone is in your life.

Take a moment to make a list, right now, of the things in your life you’re thankful for. You just might be looking back on this moment years later, as the moment your entire life changed.

If you’d like help forming the gratitude habit, please join us in the Sea Change Program — this month we’re working on the Be Grateful Module, forming the gratitude habit a little bit each day.

I offer a few articles and a live webinar on the topic, along with forums and accountability groups to help you stick to this (or any other) habit.

Join us now: the Sea Change Program

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No Time to Workout? Here's How to Keep Fit and Exercise When You're Traveling (Or Don't Have Access to a Gym)

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6 Makeup Mistakes That Make You Look Older than You Are

Makeup is an art, and it can help women feel more beautiful and attractive. There are different types of makeup. Not everyone knows the art of makeup. The word makeup refers to a set of cosmetics (foundation, mascara, eyeliner, lipstick, eye shadow, powder, blush and perfume) that are used to make one look more beautiful by emphasizing one’s facial features. Making one’s self more beautiful and attractive through makeup is not an easy task. Sometimes, women make certain mistakes when applying makeup, which causes them to look older than their true age.

So, beauticians always recommend to apply makeup very carefully. Make up should be done according to the time of day and by keeping in mind the type of skin an individual has. Day time makeup is different from night time makeup. Some of the very common makeup mistakes are the following:

Use foundation when you need it; otherwise don’t use it. And if you do need it, don’t use too much. Foundation that is too thick will settle into fine lines and sap the glow from your skin. If your skin is dry, the foundation can look patchy and flaky. To avoid this, always apply moisturizer after cleansing to make the skin soft and appear nourished.

The skin of younger women glows and radiates light. Powders diminish this lighting effect and tend to emphasize lines in the skin. The thin lines that appear after applying powder start looking like wrinkles and make your skin look dark, which eventually makes you look older than your age.

Sometimes, women wear dark makeup along with dark colored clothing. This combination can cause you to look older than you are. Beauticians always suggest choosing makeup colors that compliment the colors of your face and your clothing.

7 Makeup Techniques to Make You Look Slim

Don’t skip the eyeliner! Eyeliner is a great way to emphasize your eyes and make them look more open. In most cases, you should choose brown over black, since black can appear very harsh. When applying eyeliner, you should always make sure the color fades into your skin. You don’t want harsh lines; instead, you want the eyeliner to appear smooth and blended.

How about having matching contact lenses with your dress and makeup

Lip liner can emphasize your lips and prevent your lipstick from feathering out into tiny lines around the lips. However, you should always be extremely cautious when you select your lip liner. If you line your lips heavily, or use a color that is very dark, they will look tight and pursed. For the best result, your lip liner must match the color of your lips, not the color of the lipstick.

The boundaries or borders of the lips become softer with age. To prevent your lipstick from bleeding color, utilize your finger or a lip brush so that you do not apply too much pigment. Focus the lipstick in the middle of your mouth, and blend it out with a finger.

Using beauty products with conscience helps your inner beauty too: Cruelty-Free Cosmetics: Beauty Products with Conscience

Featured photo credit: Eye makeup woman applying eyeshadow powder via Shutterstock

Mahnoor Malik is a regular contributor to Adclout.com.She has well know experience in Business and eCommerce writing. She is very passionate about computers/internet, bridal dresses ,music, physics, psychology, gaming, women dresses and find humor & wit in almost everywhere. And has deep knowledge of Makeup Accessories

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5 Reasons Why Journaling is the Ultimate Tool for Self-Development

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