Ali Younus
Have you ever realized that success is not just a question of working hard; it is also a question of working smart? And doing everything the better way requires strategies. We learn these strategies as we grow up, we watch people, especially the successful ones, and see what strategies they use. Then we try them ourselves and practice till we master them all.
Many of the high school strategies simply don’t work in college. In the same way, our old strategies about our surroundings do not work in real life. And we learn these with our experiences. But the real challenge is not just learning these strategies but being willing to make them a part of the way we think and act. It is no doubt a tough challenge but the choices we make can have impacts on our future life.
It is as said by Brain Tracy
“Life is like a combination lock; your job is to find the right numbers, in the right order, so you can have anything you want”.
Any journey to success should begin with clarifying some successful life skills. Instead of setting goals that we consider benchmarks of success, it’s better to make a list of the skills which we think can drive those goals.
Here are some useful ones to follow
1. Master your body clock:
We have a very sophisticated internal body clock that governs almost everything we do without us even realizing it. This affects everything and informs us about the best times for our bodies to engage in different daily activities. Regular times for sleep mostly benefit us all and we achieve more efficiently from our working hours. We are naturally designed to have two periods of sleep a day: a long one at night and a much shorter one in the early afternoon which is called “nap”. At these times, we tend to be susceptible to micro sleep and this actually affects the quality of our life.
2. Time Management:
The most commonly used term “Time Management” is just a poor description. We cannot manage time, the only thing that we have the power to manage are the events in our lives in relation to time. We often wish for more time but there are only 24 hours, 1,440 minutes, or 86,400 seconds in a day. So it’s all about how we utilize our time. It actually depends on the skills learned through self-analysis, planning, evaluation, and self-control. Time is both valuable as well as limited just like money therefore it should be protected and used wisely. We must know how to spend our time, set priorities according to our time, get organized, and schedule our time properly. By practicing good time management, we will be able to be more productive, have more energy for completing our tasks, feel less stressed, and will be able to do more things.
3. Stay Healthy:
Rejuvenation is essential both physically and mentally; it enables us to accomplish tasks more quickly and easily. Therefore it is very important to give care and attention to ourselves. We must take time to relax, and try to keep a healthy balance between our work and personal life. If you haven’t invested time for personal well-being then you better reconsider your time management strategies and select ones that work better for you.
4. The Inner Voice:
At times, a little voice in our head keeps giving us messages. Sometimes these messages tell us that we are being very clever and doing extremely well whereas at other times it tells us that we are being “stupid” or we can never do anything in our life. How we feel when the messages are negative and how we feel when messages are positive, affect our whole life patterns. Some people never try new things because they are too scared to do so they stay behind. Being a positive learner is about the language we use when we talk to ourselves. The internal voices inside our head i.e. Yes, No and I Don’t Know, are the inner voices of our thoughts. The good thing is that we can program our voice and become the voice and person we wish to be.
This means our Inner Voice is powerful, which means “We” are powerful. The more we choose the program as a “Yes” voice, the more powerful we will be!
5. Stop Talking:
It is as Patrick Swayze said once,
“I’m trying to shut up and let my angels speak to me and tell me what I’m supposed to do”
When millions of feelings are running wild in your heart and you know it wouldn’t be good to share those feelings than “Shut Up” is what is best you tell yourself. It’s much more relaxing once you tell your bitter and confused heart to put a cork in it. Sometimes we just need to stay silent because no words can explain properly what is going on in our minds and heart.
6. Listening:
“The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention”. Rachel Naomi Remen.
The key to all effective communication is to listen, it is the ability to accurately receive and interpret messages in the communication process. Listening is an extremely important skill and that is the reason many top employers provide listening skills training for their employees. Listening is a skill that underpins all positive human relationships which are the building blocks of success.
7. The consequences of focusing on the negative: Gossip
“Gossip needn’t to be false to be evil – there’s a lot of truth that shouldn’t be passed around”. Frank A. Clarck.
We cannot avoid gossip or maybe we do not want to as it influences our perceptions in a more abstract sense. The harmful effects are given with gossip. One of the worst effects it causes is a pain to others, whether it’s true or not but it is hurtful to others. It keeps haunting you, if you gossip about someone else then you rest assured that at some point you will be the target. Sometimes you think that what you are talking about is innocuous and unimportant but think about this: would the person you are gossiping about think it’s innocuous?
8. Mastering your own Mind:
Sometimes, thoughts automatically pop up in our minds as a result of previous experiences. These feelings if inaccurate, leave us unhappy and in a negative mindset. There are ways of dealing with these negative thoughts and feelings and we can learn to be more objective ad logical in our minds.
Perhaps, it’s time for us to become high-performance users of our own brains. There is growing evidence that attention and emotion regulation are skills that can be trained through the practice of mastering our own thoughts. Once we learn to master our thoughts, then we will be better able to practice substituting more reasonable thoughts in place of negative ones.
Remember, mastering some basic but successful strategies can result in greater personal happiness; greater accomplishments at home and at work, increased productivity, and a more satisfying future.
It’s simple, we all make choices but in the end, our choices make us.
