How To Create More Closet Space

Most closets are too small. However, if you look at your closet you will see a lot of wasted space, usually below the clothes and above the clothes rod.

The logical solution is to put two bars one above the other, thus making better use of more space in the closet. To put in two bars, the top bar needs to be raised. You can do this by taking out all the wood shelves and bars and replacing them with plastic-coated, ventilated wire shelving.

There are three advantages to this type of shelving. One is that you can see what is on the high shelf more easily through the spaces between the wire. Another is that it requires less dusting since there is no solid shelf. A third is that if you wish to buy shelving without a bar, the shelf holds the clothes hangers apart evenly.

Now suppose you say, “That’s too big a job for right now. What can I do with my closet the way it is?” Let me tell you my situation. If it requires a hammer and nails and takes more than five minutes to do, I don’t do it. Neither my husband nor I are handy with building things and the few occasions when I have had someone do it for me have been unsatisfactory. So I look for easy-to-install “ready-builts”. In this case, add another shelf to the top of the closet with boxes and a board in order to make use of the empty space up there.

Of course, that shelf will be pretty much out of reach so you should use it to store only seldom used things. The unused space at the bottom of the closet can be utilized as a basket storage system. Look in department stores for suitable baskets. An easy-to-install lower bar can be hung from the one above by two chains. Look in catalogs for this. A low bar in the closet helps the children get in the hanging-up habit, too.

Now comes what I think is the most chronic problem of the clothes closet - shoes. If they are left on the floor, even if they are on a wire floor rack with a hump for each shoe, they are unsightly, gather dust, and make it impossible to dust easily. There are several solutions. I keep the boxes the shoes come in and stack them with the shoes in the bottom of the closet. I
write in large letters on the outside of the box a description of the shoes. When I get my shoes out I leave the top ajar and the box pulled out a little so I will know where to put them back. It works well for me.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Perseverance: Used As A Key To Success

Perseverance implies continuing to do something in spite of obstacles. Swimmers have great endurance, or perseverance, especially when attempting to set a new record. Mountain climbers and weight lifters push themselves to the limit when increasing their stamina. Students forge new pathways in education as they expand their awareness and move into undiscovered territory. Entrepreneurs rise above the mundane and set new limits in the social and business world.

You, too, have pushed yourself at one time or another especially when you were told to “give up.” What is that deep desire within you that prompts you to hold on? It’s your faith and belief that you can persevere in spite of all odds. Perseverance is the driving and staying power of “will.” It musters all your strength and energy and directs you toward your goal.

Toxic relationships and negative communications are barriers to growth. The pain and anger caused by toxic relationships is like an emotionally fused land mine which can go off at any time. When this land mine (or person) explodes, toxic reactions cause internal storms or upheavals affecting your physical and psychological stability.

Once you cultivate and develop perseverance, you can continue in spite of toxic and negative communications that cause pain. When negative thoughts and words penetrate your attitude, it’s like listening to a program that keeps telling you how you’re going to fail, rather than succeed. Negative thoughts or unhealthy suggestions from others fill your mind, both conscious and unconscious, with psychological messages that lower self-esteem. Negative thoughts or unhealthy suggestions from others also affect your body with physiological responses that can endanger your health.

Perseverance is key in helping you steer your way through negative and toxic feelings. Perseverance is the fuel that motivates you to courageously sweep over these land mines to detect and defuse them. Don’t allow the poison in these venomous relationships to affect you. The greater your self-esteem, the stronger your tolerance in dealing with negative situations. As you create more peak experiences and positive moments in your life, the greater will be your ability to persevere. Develop the will-power and desire to control your own destiny.

There are five personal factors that will help you to develop perseverance.

1. Develop the sense of being in control of your life.

2. Develop a network of friends or family to provide “social support.” A supportive alliance with a select few will help you carry your plans through to fruition.

3. Develop personality factors such as hopefulness and flexibility. Eliminate all negative influences and persons in your life.

4. Develop will power and a definite purpose. Continually move forward with your plans, dreams and aspirations.

5. Decide “I Can and I Will”

Popularity: 21% [?]

Does Everyone Have Equal Brain Power?

Are all memories created equal? It is virtually certain that different people have different brain abilities for different things. One of these differences must be in memory. But most of the differences in memory abilities that we see in everyday life do not seem to be due to differences in the brains we are born with, but to differences in how well we use the brains we are born with.

Our brains are probably somewhat like our muscles: everybody is born with different amounts of muscle. And this is probably particularly true of the muscle that is your heart. So it is likely that some people have bigger, stronger hearts than others do at birth. But it is also true that many people can take whatever amount of heart they are born with - large or small—and train themselves up from couch potato to marathon runner. The differences we find in everyday memory probably are comparable. They are probably still mostly based on how much we exercise what we have, not how much memory we are born with.

This is not to minimize the fact that different people may be born with different memory abilities. We know or suspect that there are genetically-based differences in brains. Some of the evidence comes from identical twins. Identical twins are almost exactly alike in their genetic composition. And identical twins show remarkably similar intelligence and memory abilities, even when they have been separated at birth and reared by different parents, in different environments. They even show remarkably similar patterns of how those intellectual abilities develop childhood and adolescence. These similarities suggest that there is a genetic program for intelligence and memory, that partly determines the intelligence and memory that we have in later life.

At the brain level, less is actually known about actual individual differences in the brain, and even less is known about individual differences in nerve cell connections. But these also certainly exist. One known example: an area of the cortex of the brain - the gray matter - is the first stop for information coming from the eyes. This area of the brain is clearly important in vision. Species with good vision have more of it; species that lose their vision (such as some that live in caves without light) lose this brain region. In humans, on the average, this brain region is three to four times larger than it is in monkeys - some reflection of our superior brain power, we would hope. But we also know that in some people, this area can be three times larger than it is in other people.

Popularity: 22% [?]

Your Personal Time Is Just As Valuable As Your Business Time

There are 24 hours in every day, 168 hours a week - the same for everyone, no exceptions. No matter how your time is used, the maximum time available remains constant. Your waking hours are customarily divided between your business and your personal life. There is no one right time to stop thinking about your business life, any more than there is one right time to attempt to forget your personal life.

When you are living a satisfactory, successful life, your business and personal hours are closely intertwined, but you have learned to focus on business and personal activities at the appropriate times. On the job your primary focus is on business activities and goals. That does not mean that on company time you won’t plan a golf game, have an interesting conversation with a friend or coworker about your personal thoughts and feelings, or think about how achieving your business and career goals will also help you achieve some of your personal objectives.

The same is true when you leave your work environment. There is no mental switch that causes you to shut off thoughts about business activities and plans. In fact, it is when you’re away from work that you may come up with your latest and greatest business-related ideas, even though your primary focus will normally be on personal activities and goals.

There is, however, one important separation that must be made between your business life and your personal life. Don’t drag worry and stress from your work into your personal life,
and vice versa.

No man on his deathbed ever said, “I wish I’d spent more time at the office.” Yet business time priorities often seem to take precedence over personal-time priorities. Don’t let it happen. One reason you work hard is to have the money to do the personal things you’ve always wanted to do, such as travel, play more golf, buy a boat, and spend enjoyable, uninterrupted time with your family.

Your personal time is just as important as, if not more important than, your business time. Don’t allow business activities to cancel, interrupt, or control personal activities. If in your job or business you treat everything that goes wrong as an emergency, you will end up spending your life handling emergencies rather than spending quality time with those you really care about - your spouse, kids, parents, and friends. Jobs and businesses come and go, but these folks are with you for a lifetime. Start treating your personal time with them as the priority it should be.

Popularity: 27% [?]

Stressful Situations: How Your Body Makes Two Choices

People have the ability to choose to respond to stresses in one of two basic ways. They can choose either the syntoxic response (the ignoring response), or the catatoxic response (the fight-or-flight response).

A man could well choose the catatoxic response, for example, when his wife is being insulted from two rows back in the theater. Then he confronts the heckler and learns that the man is six-feet-four inches tall and a professional boxer, he may suddenly reverse his field and choose the safer syntoxic response, which is to ignore the heckler.

Again, depending on your upbringing, one or the other of these responses could easily be ingrained to the extent that you do not need to consciously make a choice. It will be made for you by your own reflexes. Human response to any stress, no matter how trivial, has been well documented to show that these choices come automatic, regardless of what we would like to have done.

Popularity: 23% [?]

How Negative Self-Talk Can Be A Dream Killer

Monitor your language. Listen to the way you respond to questions and situations. Make a conscious effort to develop a positive charge. You will find that people respond more eagerly to you.

Do you know people who tell you their whole life story even if you don’t ask? Well I hitched a ride with a friend the other day and as soon as we got into the car, she launched into a negative conversation about how much she hated her job. She despises it. I know. She told me and told me and told me and told me! Well, she was giving me a ride, and I couldn’t very well tell her to be quiet in her own car. So I listened.

She went on and on about this job and how bad it was, and finally I interrupted. “If it’s that stressful and if it is causing you that much pain, why don’t you just quit and do something else?” She replied by saying something that put her in the chorus line with a lot of other people going nowhere in their lives. “I would, but …”

Sound familiar? It did to me, so I began testing a theory on other people. I went around for several days asking people what they were doing for a living and if it was their passion in life to do that. If they said their work was not their passion, I asked what their real passion was and why they were not doing it. Invariably, they would reply, “Oh, I would, but . . .”

The “buts” just kept coming up. How many times have you heard one of those words or phrases used as an excuse? How many times have you heard them come out of your own mouth? Too often, we repeat negatively charged words as if we are in a trance, and, in a sense, when we use them we are sleepwalking through life. We seem to be instinctively adept at finding excuses for canceling our own dreams. I think “but” and words like it are dream killers. I think many of us would accomplish more in our lives if we put “but” and his family to rest and plunged into life.

“But” is a crutch; it is an excuse for procrastinators and those of us who lack the courage to live our dreams. It allows us to validate our inaction. When hard times hit, we need to look for reasons to move forward, not for reasons to idle through life.

When you don’t move on life, life moves on you. It is important for you to learn to monitor your language because by listening to yourself and changing your language, you can change your attitude from negative to positive.

Popularity: 22% [?]

Improving Your Attention

If you want to remember something, you have to pay attention to it. This may sound simple, but the most common reason healthy adults forget is because they fail to focus. Distractibility can account for memory lapses no matter what your age.

Attention is the most sensitive aspect of intellectual functioning. It is therefore quite vulnerable to being disrupted. In order to acquire information so we can later remember it, we must be mindful and focus on what we are trying to learn. In other words, the problem isn’t that we forget, but that we don’t “get” what we want to remember from the outset. Does this sound easy to you? It is. But think for a moment of all the things in your daily life that you really don’t pay attention to. Consider the following questions about information we encounter every day:

* What color is at the bottom of the stoplight?
* What word appears over the image of George Washington
on a quarter?
* What letters, if any, are missing from the telephone dial?
* How many light switches are in your house or apartment?

How did you do? Chances are you don’t know the correct answers to some of these questions, even though these are things that you come across, sometimes frequently, over the course of a typical day. Why? Because we are not always mindful of things we do or see every day. Only by focusing our attention can we adequately acquire information and have it later when we need to remember it.

Can we improve our attention? Absolutely. How? Here are two basic habits we can develop to improve attention and maximize memory fitness immediately:

1. Be Aware: If you are aware that you are hearing or seeing something you want to remember, you will be more likely to pay attention to it, to “get” it, and to “have” it later when you want to remember it. Increased awareness of the need to remember will increase your attention toward that information.

Have you ever lost your car in a parking lot? Or forgotten whether you turned off the oven? Well, imagine if you had been more aware that you needed to be mindful of where you parked or whether you turned that knob. If only you had thought to yourself, “Okay, I need to pay attention now so I will remember what I’m doing.” Being more aware in those situations would have encouraged you to pay closer attention and made it more likely that you would remember that information later.

2. Make the effort: Next, you must try to focus your attention. Being aware that you need to pay attention without making the effort to do so is like sleeping with the unread text book under your pillow the night before final exams. It never worked, did it? Well, the same rule applies here. It isn’t enough to know you must be mindful of something you want to remember: You must then do it. So when you park your car at the mall and want to be able to find it a few hours later, simply make the effort to look around and pay attention to where you are. Most likely there are some signs or other landmarks to help you remember where you’ve parked.

Popularity: 20% [?]

Forgetting Too Much?

Do you sometimes find yourself going to your refrigerator, opening the door, and then staring inside and wondering what it is you wanted? If you want this to stop then just simply make an association the moment you think of what it is you want from the refrigerator.

If you want a glass of milk, see yourself opening the refrigerator door and gallons of milk flying out and hitting you in the face! Try this idea, and you’ll never stare into a refrigerator again. That’s all there is to it. It’s like grabbing your mind by the scruff of the neck and forcing it to think of a specific thing at a specific moment.

Force yourself to do it at first, and it will become habitual before you know it. Forming these associations may strike you as a waste of time. You won’t feel that way once you’ve tried using the idea. You’ll see, after a short while, that the ridiculous pictures are formed in hardly any time at all. Even more important is the time that you’ll be saving.

Popularity: 27% [?]

Having Success Is A Choice - Not An Accident

In a lifetime, you make literally millions of choices that affect your future success. Most choices, after you make them a few times, become ingrained in you. You know from past experience what works for you, so you repeat the process. You only get into trouble when you don’t get good results but keep doing the same things over and over again. It may seem hard to believe, but many people operate that way - most in fact.

You literally can opt to be happy or miserable by the choices you make. If you choose to be happy, you need to explore what makes you happy. Identify whether happiness is a sense of accomplishment when you make an A in school, achieve a specific weight-loss goal, make a difficult sale, complete a mini-marathon, win over the sourpuss at the checkout counter, or whatever. Accomplishments make you feel good, and you’re happy as a result. After you determine what makes you happy, choose to do those things.

People who are unhappy are generally unhappy because they think that other people should be doing things for them. From time to time, people write in to their motivational teachers: “I want to thank you for making me successful.” But realistically, those people can’t accept credit for making anyone successful, nor should they accept responsibility for causing anyone to fail.

People who choose to follow the success procedures that many current teachers offer get good results, but it takes action. And to be honest, instructors give those principles to several hundred thousand people each year, and by no stretch of the imagination do I believe that all of them follow those principles and become successful. I do believe that people of good character who follow these procedures are far more successful than they otherwise would be. However, following or not following motivational suggestion is their choice, so if they follow the procedures and are successful, they are the ones who did it - not the instructors!

On the other hand, if they say, “I attended your seminar, read your books, and listened to your tapes, but none of it worked for me,” I have to question whether they actually followed the principles carefully, whether they followed those principles believing that they would work, or whether they followed them with the idea that “I’ll do it, but I know it’s not going to work.” Success is a choice in all areas of life; that’s why the good teachers will deal with the physical, the mental, the spiritual, the financial, the personal, the family-related, and the career-related.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Establish New Perceptions For A Better Attitude

Understanding and integrating your self-image is a powerful way to overcome any barrier to growth or change. Your “will” to unify and integrate your self-image and personality depends on the process of individuation. Individuation is a process in which the person moves away from environmental support to self-support. The person becomes self-sufficient, determining his or her own way, rather than depending solely on others for support.

Individuated people are self-actualized and live in the present, accepting life for what it is, right now. As an individuated person, you’re also influenced by your courage and willingness to change - the courage to accept yourself for who you are, and the willingness to change and become authentic and self-responsible. When you respect and trust yourself, you become fully responsible for your decisions and your life.

The process of individuation also helps you listen to your innermost needs. It helps you to become totally self-accepting and recognize yourself as a person with conviction. This conviction, or strong belief you have about yourself, means that you count and exist as a unique part of the human race. Once you commit yourself to higher achievement, you act and speak in a more congruent way, and you’re encouraged to take more risks. When you make a commitment to achieve more financially, emotionally, mentally and physically, or find personal meaning in your life, you become more enthusiastic. Your ability to concentrate also increases.

When you establish new perceptions about who you are, and what you want to achieve, you become more sensitive to your environment and to others. Becoming aware of your authentic self-image facilitates a dynamic, creative process through which you affirm yourself and give new meaning to your relationships with others.

Becoming aware of your authentic self-image awakens you to a new attitude. Your new attitude and positive self-image promotes changes in your habitual, routine way of doing things. Creating empowering beliefs and behaviors redefines your self-image, encouraging you to take positive action. Become aware of your self-determination and self-confidence that are always available within you. These qualities increase your ability to communicate more effectively and build relationships based on a concern for the growth, protection, and welfare of others. As you become more self-determined, you become more motivated to contribute to the welfare of others. You recognize ability and like to be recognized for your ability. Developing self-reliance and self-confidence, while actively and assertively helping others, is the mark of a truly courageous person.

Your success self-image consists of healthy feelings and behaviors needed to achieve your desires. Empowering beliefs and actions will keep you on the road to continual self improvement. Awaken the happiness and joy that exist within you.

Popularity: 27% [?]

Next Page →