Category: FEATURED REGULARLY

Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday features.

What are your steps to exercise success?

Posted on by Senia

Well, it’s about a month into the new year. How’re you feeling about exercise these days? What steps could you take right now – today – if you wanted to ensure your exercise success?

I read a sheet on this recently from a health club. Here is what they recommend. What would you recommend?

Five Steps to Exercise Success

  1. Make it personal – What works for you: for your lifestyle, time constraints, budget, likes, dislikes?
  2. Make it fit – Schedule time every day or whatever your frequency is. Work blocks of exercise into your schedule.
  3. Set some goals – Set a long-term goal and break it into weekly or monthly targets (amount of weight to lose, amount of weight to benchpress).
  4. Reward your efforts – Celebrate successes! Reward your commitment to improving your health. Try to make the reward not food.
  5. Get back on track – Anything can get you off track (a trip out of town, cold weather, a bit of a cold) – how will you get back on? Can you plan to restart, maybe with lower weights or half the exercise time to readjust.

Ok, and what would I recommend as my steps to success in exercise?

My Steps to Exercise Success

  1. Get to the gym – Decide how many times a week, and go those times hell or highwater.
  2. Play and Have Fun – Vary your routine sometimes or go with a friend or go to a weights or cardio class to play around with it and see what you like. Say hi to other people at the gym, get curious, enjoy it.
  3. Push yourself (e.g. Interval train) – go mild, then increase and go hard, then go mild, then increase and go hard (Body for Life has a good description of this). Interval training has a faster effect on your body, and it keeps you in the moment more about the exercising, doesn’t allow your mind to wander – it must be focused on the exercise.
  4. Reward yourself sporadically but often – Set yourself incremental goals like as one or two pounds per week weight loss or particular increase in weight, and reward yourself by getting on the phone with a good friend or by stopping by a goodwill and getting anything you like.

    What do you think?
    Q: What are your steps to exercise success?

Happiness and Morals

Posted on by Senia

“Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.”
~ George Washington

“Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values.”
~ Ayn Rand

“The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.”
~ Ayn Rand

“About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.”
~ Ernest Hemingway

“As a child I was taught that to tell the truth was often painful. As an adult I have learned that not to tell the truth is more painful, and that the fear of telling the truth—whatever the truth may be—that fear is the most painful sensation of a moral life.”
~ June Jordan

“Goodness is the only investment that never fails.” …and… “Nature is goodness crystallized.”
~ Henry David Thoreau

“If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. But do not care to convince him. Men will believe what they see. Let them see.”
~ Henry David Thoreau

“Ethics begins when we are free: it is freedom itself, when that freedom is considered and controlled.”
~ André Comte-Sponville

“How can you be happy unless you have some self-respect? And how can you respect yourself unless you control yourself, master yourself, overcome your failings? … Ethically speaking, it’s pointless wishing you were someone else. You can dream of being rich, healthy, good-looking, happy … But it is absurd to dream of being virtuous. Whether you are a villain or a good person is for you and you alone to decide: you are worth precisely what you want.”
~ André Comte-Sponville

“The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.”
~ Georges Bataille

“The only immorality … is not to do what one has to do when one has to do it.”
~ Jean Anouilh

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.”
~ Marcus Aurelius

“Happiness is inward and not outward; and so it does not depend on what we have, but on what we are.”
~ Henry Van Dyke

“Think of yourself as two people, and one of them is inside of you, and he’s a scorekeeper. And he keeps score of your idea of the world. … And when you have a conflict with your scorekeeper, that’s unhappiness. Happiness is being completely in sync with your own perception of goodness.”
~ Will Smith

“. . . happiness is the highest good, being a realization and perfect practice of virtue, which some can attain, while others have little or none of it. . . .”
~ Aristotle

Note: Posted on 1-26 for 1-25.

What Is Your Most Audacious Goal?

Posted on by Senia

Q: What is the wildest, most incredible, most intense goal that you could imagine for yourself?
What is the most audacious, courageous, gung-ho, must-do goal that you can see in your head?

Feel free to answer this question with an anonymous name. Or with your own name. Answer it as crazily as you possibly can. As intently as you can! Ganbatte!

On Goals

Posted on by Senia

Last week, I wrote about sleep. Next week, I’ll be writing about goals. Hence, some prelimiary quotes about goals.

A goal without a plan is just a wish.
~ Larry Elder

On setting things in motion …
What is not started today is never finished tomorrow.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

By losing your goal, you have lost your way.
~ Kahlil Gibran

What we see depends mainly on what we look for.
~ John Lubbock

Things which matter most should never be at the mercy of things which matter least.
~ Goethe (from this page)

What’s your advice for good sleep?

Posted on by Senia

What is your advice for good sleep?

I suggest these three things:

  • Create a relaxing bedtime ritual. Create cues for sleep.
  • Go to bed 10-11pm.
  • Read in bed until you’re tired enough to fall asleep.

Q: What do you find are the best things for you to do to get great sleep?

This is Quetion Friday. Thanks and happy weekend! For fun, check out yesterday’s quotes on sleep.

How to Get to Sleep on Time

Posted on by Senia

I’m getting married in the mornin’!
Ding dong! The bells are gonna chime.
Pull out the stopper!
Let’s have a whopper!
But get me to the church on time!

~ My Fair Lady, Get Me to the Church on Time

How can you get to sleep on time? On your time. At the time you want to fall asleep? WebMD has 12 tips for better sleep. I completely agree with one of the tips:

Allow yourself one hour to unwind before bed. Brush your teeth one hour before getting into bed and wash your face slowly with warm water. Set the mood for relaxation before bed. This is not a time to be rushing about or planning the following days events. Do this earlier in the evening.

What can you do to relax as completely and as simply as you can before bed?
Can you
* Light a candle,
* Have some camomile tea,
* Brush your hair,
* Meditate,
* Breathe,
* Read some poetry?

What can you do to prep your body that it is about to go to bed? What cues can you give to your body (smell – light-fragrance candle, sight – darken the lights, touch – put on pajamas and night clothes, taste – brush your teeth, hear – put on classical music)? Or other cues? How can you give your body a clue that sleep is about to happen?

That is the single-best thing you can do for your body to get ready for sleep – to put it in the mood for sleep. I suggest getting ready for bed between 10 and 11pm. You need to be in bed by 10 or 11pm for optimal functioning, in my humble unscientific in this case, opinion.

And, yes, this will take longer than your usual routine, and yes, you’ll need to factor that time into your day, but it will pay off in healthy, full sleep.

One more tip: get ready for bed, get everything ready (including all these above cues), and then just get in bed and read. Read books for fun, not necessarily books for work or for homework. Marsha Norman says that if you’re a writer, you should read for four hours every day, and if anyone asks you what you’re doing, tell them that you’re busy and you’re reading. And for those of us who are not writers, reading is so opening, so exhilirating, so freeing, so full – it is the ideal pre-bedtime activity. Reading takes us into different worlds. And by doing so absolutely prepares us for bed.

IN SUMMARY:

  • Create a relaxing bedtime ritual. Create cues for sleep.
  • Go to bed 10-11pm.
  • Read in bed until you’re tired enough to fall asleep.

Note: I know these above won’t work for everybody. That’s why they’re my opinoons and my suggestions only.

More Quotes on Sleep

Posted on by Senia

Here are some earlier quotes about sleep!
Here’s a silly riddle for you from riddlenut:

I weaken all men for hours each day. I show you strange visions while you are away. I take you by night, by day take you back, none suffer to have me, but do from my lack. What am I?

Answer in the comments.

And a couple more:
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
~ Edgar Allen Poe

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.
~ Egdar Allen Poe, “Nevermore”

Sleep is the best meditation.
~ Dalai Lama (1989 Nobel Peace Prize)

That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.
~ Aldous Huxley

I have never taken any exercise except sleeping and resting.
~ Mark Twain

There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep.
~ Homer

Question Friday: What are you optimistic about for 2007?!

Posted on by Senia

I am playing off the Edge question of the year for 2007.

Q: What are you optimistic about for 2007?

My answers:
* I am optimistic about the fairly steady state of the world.
* I am optimistic about my friends making a good living this year.
* I am optimistic about a healthy life this year.
* I am optimistic about the idea that more people will give philanthropically this year.
* I am optimistic that I will publish a book this year.
* I am optimistic that the world is changeable.
* I am optimistic that I can be who and how I want to be this year.

This is Question Friday. I’d love to know what you think. You can make your answers anonymous if you like by writing ‘A–‘ or something like that at the name prompt of the comments.

Then Providence Moves Too

Posted on by Senia

The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.
All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have
occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in
one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material
assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Begin it now.

This is a quote that is often attributed to Goethe. This website attributes this quote to Lord “Johnnie” Fisher – British Admiral. The Goethe Society of North America explains here the controversy and mistaken attribution to Goethe.

In any case, I love this quote. Great quote for entrepreneurship.

What are you most looking forward to about the holidays?

Posted on by Senia

Q: What are you most looking forward to about the holidays?

Often, there are a lot of things to do around the holidays. What are the best things that happen from the holidays? What are the best things that could happen!? What are the best things that will happen this year?

* Meeting good friends of good friends
* Smiling a lot
* Warm indoors places
* Cooking together with people
* Asking lots of questions
* Playing board games!

:) … And you?