5 Steps to a New You

By Keith Williams

Five Steps to a New You discusses the many causes of behavior that create personal problems in the health of the mind, body, weight, relationships, and finance. This compact read offers tips to repair personal flaws that will create a meaningful and rewarding life. You will learn what you will need in order to improve and also learn the easy and effective step-by-step methods to convert your ideal dream life into reality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781984588432

Book preview

NEW YOU 1

THOUGHT

CHOOSE TO IMPROVE

Why are you who you are?

Why do you do what you do?

Why do you have what you have?

The countless choices that you make each day throughout your life continue to accumulate and form the answers to these questions. You recognize these answers as your beliefs, attitudes, and habits. Now you can quickly respond to most decisions because you’ve already made similar choices before. Now when you make a similar decision, your stored solution will automatically spring into your consciousness and repeat itself.

These are some examples of previous tough choices that you’ve likely made before and are likely to repeat:

• Listen or talk?

• Tell the truth or lie?

• Finish the job or quit?

• Go for a walk or watch TV?

• Solve the problem or avoid it?

• Take an old path or a new one?

• Start a new project or watch TV?

• Get into a panic or become calm?

• Learn a new subject or watch TV?

• Think positive or negative thoughts?

• Ignore someone or be kind to them?

Your Thoughts and Attitudes Rule

The noted self-improvement author Dale Carnegie said, Happiness doesn’t depend on who you are or what you have, but solely on what you think. This concept alone easily explains all that you need to do to improve your life—simply forcefully improve your beliefs, attitudes, and habits. This offering explains in detail how to create a better thought as a replacement for a poor thought.

This following urging-us-to-think message was sent to you from way back in the 1800s by that great philosopher Aristotle: Once you expand your mind, it will never return to its original limits. As if that were expressed in a foretelling science fiction movie, recent research by neuroscientists has revealed that the human brain has plasticity and changes its shape each time it learns a new skill. So after you learn a new subject, you’ll be able to learn even more because your brain capacity could become greater and greater and allow you to continue to become smarter and smarter.

If it is unused or abused, a powerful super mind will have little advantage over most other minds. It seems wasteful to use a powerful computer only for emails, but it seems far worse to squander a powerful asset like a brain.

Don’t waste that great mind of yours. It needs exercise just like any other part of your body. You have the choice to either use it or watch it slowly stagnate and wither away. Your brain is amazing as it contains your complete essence—beliefs, attitudes, and habits that control each little thought and make you act the way you do.

Increase Your Brain Size

Do all you can to make that brain of yours more interested, interesting, and useful. Your mind isn’t set in cement, so soak in as many new subjects as you possibly can. Further upgrade your mind and enrich your life with the activities below or your own methods, but use them often:

• Exchange thoughts with others.

• Solve logic and work problems.

• Read a piece of interesting nonfiction material and review what you’ve read.

• Master new abilities or activities—interesting academic subjects, an enjoyable sport, a computer, a fun dance, or a musical instrument.

• Test your use of calming meditation for a period of fifteen minutes a day for two months to improve your clarity of thought and prevent the onset of cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease. This is also a great habit that can give you a peaceful happier life.

• Practice thinking ahead by making quicker and better decisions in simulated hectic life situations.

• Create a piece of furniture or art.

Your Logical and Unfeeling Left-Side Brain Area

This area of the brain deals with receiving and sending all the emotionless communications that you receive from computer-age devices, people, and all the countless videos, magazines, books, music, and other forms of information.

Most of us frequently use this area of the brain rather than our emotional right side perhaps because we’re so used to watching our numerous video screens. An example of a left-brain tendency is demonstrated as you observe a group of people sitting together in their own little world manipulating their phones. It would seem that they’d rather be at one with a machine rather than connect with their friends for emotional companionship.

Your Emotional and Intuitive Right-Side Brain Area

We constantly search for happiness, and this area of the brain is where we create that elusive emotion anytime that you wish. You automatically enter this area of thought when you’re totally focused and drawn to all that you see, think, and feel about the objects and events that are directly in front of you. Perhaps you’ll also enter this brain area when you witness a selfless act, see an absorbing work of art, hear a perceptive thought, or think pleasant things about someone you love.

This area of your brain can also be a limitless source of intuitive thought to create great ideas or useful products. You can either automatically or consciously steer yourself into this area of thought whenever you want to deeply consider or solve a problem.

Appreciate your sensitive, creative, and emotional joyful feelings when you think on the right side of your brain. Look for the niceties you experience from the people, activities, and objects that surround you. These inputs have tremendous power to make your life truly meaningful and worth living. Be in touch with your emotional self—your intuition, your creativity, and your life—and touch them often.

An outstanding way to use the right side of your brain is to venture outside and observe the limitless variety and subtle beauty of nature. Explore as many various locations as possible. Alert all your senses to focus on each detail since the sizes and changes in objects are often quite miniscule. Perhaps you’ll be lucky enough to appreciate a few of these goodies:

• anything unusual

• an old twisted tree

• a new plant growth

• anything interesting

• a subtle light pattern

• a cloud with animal form

• a new object in your path

• an unexpected bird’s song

• the feel of rough tree bark

• a squirrel climbing a tree

• beauty anywhere in anything

• dark threatening storm clouds

• white clouds in a deep blue sky

• the aroma of freshly cooked food

• mixed colors dancing on the water

Uncontrolled emotions aren’t so good if they create poor thoughts that create poor actions that create temporary happiness and poor results. Don’t permit your uncontrolled emotions to lead to poor judgments and poor actions. Do everything you can to improve yourself, not only for your sake but also for those you love. Be smart and put a leash on those rascal emotions because it’s possible that they could ruin more lives than just yours.

Test yourself to see if you become uncomfortable when you use this right-side-brain emotional area, especially when you haven’t received any of your cherished entertainment inputs for too long a time. How will you react when you’re alone and spend a tiny ten-minute period either outside in nature or inside in silence? Will you look anxiously at your phone, fidget nervously with some other type of busy work, or will you be focused, calm, and comfortable?

You and Those Other People

Don’t be miserable and unhappy if you’re not better at something than someone else. You don’t need to be superior or trample on others in order to improve. It’s simple to become happier with your work and everything else when you give each endeavor your very best effort. This gives you a free pass to be completely satisfied after you complete each task or encounter. This attitude even applies when a recent task you’ve completed or an encounter with someone else went poorly because you’ve done your best.

If you expect someone to behave in a certain way, you might as well expect to be disappointed and angry when they don’t obey your rules. Instead, expect variation and flaws. Enjoy whoever or whatever is in front of you at any one moment. Be positive, respectful, and sociable to every person you happen to meet—let them know you’re interested in them and care about their lives.

Negativity Is a No-No

Two shoe salesmen visited their new sales area to estimate potential sales. The negative vendor told his director, "No one wears shoes, so this area is bad."

The positive salesman said, "No one wears shoes, so this area is good."

It’s easy to guess which salesman was likely to succeed.

Many of us frequently use the no attitude too often. Our negativity can hide in many forms to sneakily attack us from behind. Negativity has numerous clever disguises with which to clobber us, including worry, fear, discouragement, failure, unhappiness, excuses, regrets, competition, indiscretions, and mistakes.

Don’t Excuse Yourself from Life

Excuses are a form of negativity that gives us an easy reason either not to start or not to finish a project. The more you choose to use them as a crutch to hobble your way through life, the less you’ll be able to do whatever it is you need to achieve success. Other people can easily see through your excuses for what they really are, a way to avoid work, responsibility, or unpleasantness. Avoid your use of excuses if you ever want to accomplish any goal.

Warning: don’t use these common negative and weak excuses listed below. They want you to fail, and they’ll do their best to make you fail. They’re waiting to stop you in your tracks anytime that you have the slightest chance to succeed. Recognize them for what they truly are and easily brush them aside.

• I’ll try.

• I can’t.

• It’s too hard.

• I might do it a little later.

• It likely won’t work anyway.

• Someone else couldn’t do it.

Fear Not

Fear can be a good thing if it prevents you from doing a reckless act that could harm yourself or someone else. However, fear and its bully boy brothers, doubt and negativity, are patiently waiting in the back of your mind to attack your courage and resolve. Fear can prevent you from attempting and achieving any new challenging venture. It can slow you down if you worry that you might take the wrong path. If you constantly believe that you might make a bad choice or that you’re incapable, unlikable, or sick, there’s a very good chance that you’ve given the green light for those things to happen and cause your life to worsen.

After some fearsome, horrific, scary, state-of-panic situation has finished its actual path, this is often the common and humorous result after the situation is finally over—only a small fraction of those mistakes, difficulties, or failures that people feared, doubted, and worried about actually ever happen. Fear and its frightening accomplices are actually blustering bullies who aren’t nearly as tough as they’d like you to believe.

When it does attack, plan beforehand to casually brush fear aside like some pesky insect. It is a