Make a list

Make a list of all the reasons why you want to stop your habit, really give it some thought and list as many reasons as possible for giving up. For example if smoking is your habit and you wish to give up then you could put down things like its costs me x amount of money every year, it makes my clothes, hair and breath smell, it makes the whole house smell. By listing as many reasons as you can as to why you want to give up it will allow you to see in black and white what it is that you don’t like about your habit and why you should give it up.

Analyze yourself

Ask yourself what it is that you are getting out of your habit, are you really getting what you want from it? Do you really enjoy it? Or is the habit exactly that, just a habit that you have done for so long that you would feel uncomfortable without doing it? 

List positive things you could swap your habit for

Stop and think what you could do to replace your habit that would be more positive, for example you could take up a hobby, workout, read, go for a walk, do chores around the home or take up an adult education class. All of these can help you to take your mind off and break your habit.

Visualize

Visualize how you would feel and the changes there would be if you broke your habit, for example if you are a smoker and wish to quit then picture the differences it would make if you did quit and replaced smoking with say working out. Picture yourself being able to breathe easier, your taste buds improving, your clothes, hair and home smelling fresher and cleaner and what you could buy from the money you saved.

Take one day at a time

Always take one day at a time when trying to break a habit, never look into the future and start to think how will I cope in certain situations. Choose a day to give up your habit and stick with it no matter what comes up, keeping a journal can also help you to deal with kicking your habits and is helpful to get your thoughts and feelings out at the most frustrating times.

2.  Look for the things you like about yourself.  Write them down and then focus on one thing a day, e.g. ‘I am competent’ or ‘I am creative’ or ‘I am now creating my ideal life.’

3.  Forgive yourself. The past is over; know that you did the best you could with your level of knowledge and understanding at that time.

4.  Use affirmations to remind yourself of your sacredness. Put them on the fridge, mirrors, wherever, to remind yourself that you are unique. For example, ‘I like and appreciate myself,’ ‘I am a loveable, valuable person and deserve the best life has to offer.’

5.  Read books that inspire you.  Books such as daily meditations, thoughts for the day, sayings and quotations from inspirational leaders set the tone for creating an attitude of joy and/or peace before you start your day.

6.  Practice an ‘attitude of gratitude.’  We create much to be thankful for, our health, our abundance, and our freedoms.  Carry a small notebook with you and write down everything that you are grateful for all day long.  You will be amazed at all the blessings in your life – your friends, your family, your job, your warm home, the fact that you don’t have to worry about stepping on landmines or getting your head blown off as you step out a door.

7.  Be true to yourself.  Live the life you have envisioned for your self.  Don’t look to others for approval; look within, and you will find it all.

What practical tip will you put into action? Why not share some ways you found to accept your awesome self.

 Did you answer ‘No’  to the question? How many times did you hear you were bad girl or bad boy?  Hear this often enough you begin to associate your core identity with your actions. Making self acceptance difficult in appreciating the "true" you.

How often did you hear these words: "Don’t tell her that, she’ll get a "big" head. You learned praising yourself or someone else praising you was wrong. Most of us growing up got the message loud and clear that praising ourselves or others would lead to ‘becoming conceited’ or ‘slacking off.’

The tragedy from this false belief is the very opposite is true. What you pay attention to expands.  Self acceptance and appreciation of others is based on love and appreciation. In other words, as I am willing to love me, I am capable of loving you.

Much of us disguise our feelings of inadequacy through a tool called ‘constructive criticism.’ This form of for ‘your own good’  love actually let’s me artificially "puff" myself up by bringing you down.

I judge what you do and say based on my perceptions of "should." Then I tell you how to "do it right."  Constructive criticism leads  to feelings of inadequacy. Judging and rejecting yourself causes enormous pain

Unconditional love and self acceptance lead to feelings of self worth.  Remember: the most important task you have is loving and accepting yourself.

What is Self Acceptance?  

Self is defined as the entire person of an individual while acceptance defines an expression of admiration, approval, or gratitude.  Self acceptance equates to saying: ‘I accept myself exactly as I am.’  It is about acknowledging our unique gifts and knowing within each of us is a highly creative, skilled being just waiting for discovery. 

Self acceptance does not put others down or think yourself better; it means loving ourselves the way we came into the world.  You in turn love others for themselves.  Remember: I can only accept and love you if I can willing love and accept myself and acknowledge my own self worth.

The Dalai Lama states, "The purpose of our lives is to be happy."  Happiness in my mind equates with joy.  The joy, without which all other joy is diminished, is joy in one’s self.  The cornerstone in determining your health, your success, and your abundance and prosperity in life comes down to one word: Self acceptance

This week something interesting happened to me. My friend Karen  made a gift for someone, and they absolutely loved it. Her friend admired it through a series of ohhs and ahhs, and asked Karen how long did it take to make.

Karen shrugged and said, "Just a few hours" – when in fact I know she spent more than 30 hours working on it. She poured her heart and soul into it. Why then, did she diminish it? Why did she feel the need to lie about how much effort she  put into that gift?

I must admit, I gave that question some long, hard thought.  I realized I’m guilty of doing the same thing Karen did. I myself followed this same pattern much of my life.

I kept hiding my Light. You know that song, "This Little Light of Mine, I’m Gonna Let It Shine?" I constantly diminished the fact I stopped the cycle of abuse and created an new legacy. How freaking Awesome is that"! Until I could say those words and acknowledge my accomplishment, I still felt stuck and empty inside.

I wonder how many of us are afraid to let our "lights" shine? How many of us hold back a large part of ourselves? I wonder do you too hold back your light?

Maybe we are afraid of the label: "braggart." After all, nobody likes a boastful, prideful person. From a young age, my parents taught us modesty and humility. This in itself is not a bad thing… these are good qualities to develop.

My parents took it to the extreme. It was wrong, actually sinful, to feel good about our accomplishments. They called it pride, one of the seven deadly sins. I’m no stranger to those sins. I am accused of committing every one in my early youth.  (you can read more about me here) But where do we draw the line? Are we not allowed to take pride in our own accomplishments at all?

A very big difference does exists between sharing our gifts with the world, and showing off. When I look back across my life, I realize I felt ashamed and embarrassed by my own abilities and strengths.  Out of fear, I denied them and hid them at every available opportunity.

If I shared those gifts with the world, it would call attention to me, attention I didn’t feel worthy of accepting. I was also afraid of ridicule and condemnation. If I shared my heart and soul, I would be laughed at, made fun of, told I was wrong, worthless and doomed for hell. Guilt overcame me, afraid of going to hell.  My confidence and feelings shoot down with each rejection.

Maybe you too share similar experiences? Do you ever feel of hesitant about sharing your gifts? Do you been hide your light, holding back an essential part of yourself?

How dare we hide our Lights! They are not ours to hide. A loving God of Light gave them to us – the same light that shines within. I learned while in recovery each of us has a little spark of the Divine within. I will admit I found it hard to accept at first. When we deny that part of ourselves, we also deny God within us!

We have a responsibility to share ourselves with the world; not in a way that proclaims us to be better than anyone else, but in a way that uplifts and enriches others. We owe it to ourselves, we owe it to the world, and we owe it to God, the one who gave us  our gifts and abilities. What good is a gift that doesn’t get used?

Imagine a flower afraid to bloom, rain afraid to fall, the sun afraid to shine. You need to shift your perspective and realize that by hiding your lights, you do not serving anyone. Love, unexpressed, is not love at all.

I know what it is like to think you own nothing to share. We spend most of our days feeling like an empty shell. However, nothing is truly ever empty. There is a Magical Essence uniquely in you.

Nature abhors a vacuum. Ah, remember that, from Science class? Though you may feel empty, there is something inside of you. It may be chaos or joy, optimism or pessimism, hope or doubt – but something is there. If you don’t like what it is, you possess the ability to change it by the power of your thoughts.

Know that you do possess something to share with the world. If you will dare to reach down inside your soul,your Magical Essence and feel around for your hidden treasure.

You will find a long forgotten dream tugging at your heart. A sense of excitement you once experienced, a knowingness that you could change the world and make it just a little bit brighter. Reclaim that dream. It never really left you, it just got covered with negative thoughts and false beliefs. Clean it off and set it upon your mantle of hope. Infuse it with new life, and allow it to come into Being.

Remember that you are the only one holding yourself back. Marianne Williamson wrote an awesome poem… Our Deepest Fear. Print it and put it on your wall.

Realize your Magical Essence and experience success More Easy with my FREE gift, The Treasure Chest of Success.

from the book Return to Love by Marianne Williamson

Self Belief… believing in yourself is a major key to happiness and success. The people who experience the most success use daily, positive affirmations. No matter what, these individuals believe they can achieve and so they do.

Replace your limiting beliefs with effective affirmations on self belief and trust.

Positive Affirmations for Self Belief and Trust

By Edwina Troutt MacKenzie, Hermosa Beach, California inspiring true story of surviving the disaster.

On the 100th anniversary of the Titanic’s sinking, As appeared in Guidepost

Whenever people ask me what I remember most clearly about that night on the sinking Titanic, I am hard put to choose. And yet, sometimes I think it just might be the stillness—the  stillness and the hymn we sang to blot it out.

It has always struck me as ironic that on the night the iceberg ripped that long gash in our starboard hull—April 14, 1912—the sea itself was serene. The air was frosty cold, but there was no wind and the sky was crowded with stars, all brazenly large.

It was calm aboard the Titanic, too, long after the collision, and an unreal attitude of nonchalance existed right up until the moment we were told we should get into the lifeboats. ("Only a precautionary measure, ladies.")

Only then, as we collected around the boats, was there jostling and pushing, even though none of us knew at the time that those boats could take only 1178 people and we were 2207 passengers and crew.

"Stand back, stand back. Be British!" an officer barked, but the deck was sloping forward; water was pouring into the Titanic’s bow. I was just about to clamber into a lifeboat when a man stepped forward holding a bundle.

"Who will take this baby?" he cried.

Impulsively I reached for it, and with the child screaming in my arms, I found a seat for us. Even as we rowed away from the Titanic’s  side, with distress rockets booming and blazing above us, we did not think the ship would sink, for we still believed that she was unsinkable.

In all, it took three hours for the Titanic to die. That last hour was a time of mounting terror as we watched what we could not believe—the ship’s stern rising out of the water, hundreds and hundreds of men and women still aboard, an orchestra playing ragtime tunes, lights twinkling.

When at last the Titanic stood straight up in the water, tall and slender as a skyscraper, the master of arms in charge of our lifeboat—his name was Bailey—suddenly stood up.

"Scream!" he shouted at us. "Scream!" as though our noise would mask and nullify what was about to happen. There was no help we could give to those still aboard the huge sinking ship; screaming, at least, was something we could do.

And so it was that as the Titanic slid roaring and rumbling into the water, we were all yelling. In the midst of death we were filling our lungs with screams of life, like babies out of the womb.

Then the stillness. That unforgettable silence. The oars of our boat trailed lifeless as our rowers slumped forward. All of us sank within ourselves, unable to speak, think or feel. The baby whimpered in my arms. A low moaning rose from the women mourning husbands and children. We were exhausted, afraid, forsaken.

Once again Master of Arms Bailey got to his feet. His eyes flashed in the starlight and his walrus mustache quivered as he said in the stillness, "Please. I want you to sing with me. Sing now, all of you. Please." And his deep, resonant voice rolled out with, "Pull for the shore, sailors, pull for the shore…"

The men at the oars straightened. Here and there a faint voice picked up the words. Cracked and quavering at first, the voices seemed to draw strength from the old church hymn that so many of us had learned growing up in England.

"Pull for the shore, sailors, pull for the shore!

Heed not the rolling waves, but bend to the oar,

Safe in the lifeboat, sailor, cling to self no morel

Leave the poor old stranded wreck, and pull for the shore."

With that hymn, we were God’s people again, each bending to his or her task, trying to make others comfortable, soothing the children, consoling the bereaved, doing what had to be done throughout the remainder of the night.

When morning came, so too did the rescue ship Carpathia, and soon we were safe on her decks, the baby I had held in my arms safe in its mother’s arms again.

I was 27 years old the year the Titanic sank, an unmarried young woman on her way to live in America. The memory of that disaster has never left me for as much as a day, but it has not been as ugly to recall as some might think, for one can always bring something good out of every bad experience.

I learned that night to concentrate on living life. During those hours when death and life were suddenly so starkly delineated, I realized once and for all that there is no real certainty in man’s world. Unsinkable ships do sink.

Yet I believed then, as I believe now, that there is certainty in God’s universe. When we sang that old, very familiar hymn I was reminded that we in that lifeboat were among the living, and when one is alive there is work to be done—oars to be pulled, shores to be reached.

So it was that the Titanic taught me that I should never waste my time pondering the riddle of death—and I never do, for I am much too busy accepting life.

Visit Guidepost to Download your FREE ebook, True Inspirational Stories: 9 Real Life Stories of Hope & Faith

*Note:  Edwina Troutt Mackenzie, the second-oldest survivor of the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, died Monday, December 3, 1984 at the age of 100… The sunken Titanic was found August 1985, eight months after her death

Your beliefs are never neutral. They will either move you forward or hold you back. You choose what you believe. It’s important for you to believe in your dreams and goals. If you, don’t nobody else will.

Self trust is a vital ingrediant to experience success with your dreams and goal. develop self-trust. The essential quality of self trust is neccessary for pursuing your dreams. If you don’t trust yourself, and believe in yourself, you won’t take the risk and actions toward your big dreams.

Power Quotes on Belief and Trust

Want more Power Quotes on Belief and Trust? Receive your FREE Self Empowerment Thoughts Power Quotes eBook with 5 easy success steps you can start using right away to program your subconscious to tap into your inner magic.

So what motivates someone to churn those creative, or even inspiring juices into something?

A positive attitude.  A positive attitude often leads to believing in yourself and your potential. Keeping positive attitude in whatever you do will make things easier, and even enjoyable.

Enjoy these 7 Musings on a Positive Attitude.

Keep in mind a positive attitude can help you realize things by turning the impossible into the possible.

1. Take passionate action towards living your life by design. Talk is cheap. Action = deposits in the bank of a passionately authentic future. Without action, passion is void. A dream will still be a dream without motion.

2. Commit to yourself to create powerfully full life you will love. Instead of reacting, commit to creating from your heart and soul, out of love rather than fear. You may find yourself  amazed when the transformation begins.

3. Recognize and embrace your ideas and thoughts that each one is perfect regardless of its outcome. Every time you hit on something that may appear too extreme, why not give it a shot. The outcome may surprise you. If you don’t like the results, decide to use that moment to learn from the experience or make an appropriate shift.

4. Dwell completely in a place of gratitude. Learn to utilize what you have in your hands and make use of it in the most constructive way. Shifting towards gratitude is the best positive attitude you can maintain.

5. Use a Passion Formula of Recognize/Reevaluate/Restore in place of the Shoulda/Woulda/Coulda whirlwind. The former is based in increased knowledge and abundance while the latter focuses on scarcity and lack.

6. Stay positive by keeping humor at the forefront of thought. Learn to laughing at and with yourself when possible. You may find yourself quite entertaining when you loosen up!

Do recognize sadness and grief are also part of life. Do acknowledge these emotions. Life also offers so much to allow you to mope around in self pity. Humor, when appropriate, is very passionate: life-giving.

7. Believe  you are the architect of your destiny. No one can take your passionate future from you except for you! Create your life authentically. As long as there’s still breath in your body, there is no end to how much you can accomplish in a lifetime. The concept of thinking big is all about enjoying your potential. Celebrate a discovery that is born within your mind and made real with your hands. Watch everything flow into place with perfect, passionate precision.

All too often people get wallowed up by the trivial things in life. They end up missing out  on the wonders, happiness and success our Creator planned for them. So instead of subjecting yourself to a perceived life of doom and gloom, make your path by taking the first step with a positive attitude.

Every thought or belief you hold, contributes to the collective consciousness. We often hear, "What difference can I, just one person, make in this world?" If you let go of the belief that we’re all separate from each other, and understand that we are truly all connected, you come to realize that when you shift your belief system from the reactive and primal unconscious system, and choose to consciously create positive energy vibrations, you create a ripple effect. Just as crime epidemics are spread through negative consciousness, acts of generosity and kindness spread as well.

Our habitual thoughts create belief systems. If you operate in an unconscious state, you aren’t creating with intention. Your life is created by default. What you focus on, you experience. If your belief system is one of helpless, hopeless, empathy, fear, whatever it might be, you experience situations that allow you to remain helpless, hopeless, empathetic, fearful. Your personal beliefs and vibrations also contribute to the collective experience and impact others.

For example, when you go to work, if you complain about your job, your salary, company politics, your beliefs and emotions are spread to others. Pretty soon, your co-workers are complaining about the same things. Your message is being spread by your faithful followers.

Remember that your attitude is contagious, and your habitual thoughts create experiences that keep you in your current state of emotion.

Focus on Feeling Gratitude

The most effective way that you can feel good, and raise the vibrations you’re sending out into the Universe is to think of something you feel grateful for. You might have 10 things that don’t go right, but if you focus on that 1 thing that does go right, the other 10 things will have to improve or disappear. That’s the way the law of attraction works. It cannot function in a vibration with something that doesn’t match – you can’t be grateful for something and unhappy with that thing at the same time.

By raising your energy vibration, you change not only your life, but the world around you.

The Amazing Power of Your Thoughts by Dr. Robert Anthony

Dr Robert Anthony spent the last thirty years unravelling the mysteries of the mind. During that time he earned a PhD in behavioral psychology from Pacific Western University, worked as a psychotherapist, a NLP practitioner, a master hypnotist, authored over 15 books, appeared on ABC, CBS and NBC television a personal performance trainer and a coach. His client list includes Fortune 500 companies.

His Secret of Deliberate Creation program will show you how to get started NOW and give yourself the jolt you need to make that final change to move you from where you are to where you want to be.