Skip La Cour’s BodyBlog

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Telling entertaining stories to friends, family, and business associates is a great way for you to become more interesting person. Your ability to share stories with others is also a great way to “break the ice” in any new social setting.

Commit to learning just three (3) interesting stories this month. That’s all you really need. You don’t need an original story for every new person or new group of people. Don’t put pressure on yourself to be that creative. Originality isn’t important.

The NBC television network used a slogan in a commercial that promoted their rerun season. That commercial professed “If you haven’t seen it—then it’s new to you!” As long as the people you are telling the story to haven’t heard it before—it’s original.

These stories can be from your own life experiences or stories that you’ve heard from other people. It really doesn’t matter where they come from as long as they’re interesting. Every time you hear or read a good story, write it down.

Practice your story-telling skills. Just like everything else in life, you’ll get better at telling stories the more you practice. Each time you tell a story, practice telling it with more facial animation and body language. Embellish the story with more vivid and expressive words. Learn how to add more entertainment value each and every time you tell it.         

Knowing every single one of the benefits and rewards (material and emotional) that await you after especially challenging goals are completed will help you keep working toward achieving them. Identifying as many of these benefits and rewards as possible will keep you focused on the matter at hand.

Take the time to write them down. Get in the habit of reviewing this list on a daily basis. It’s important that you review this list every day—even when things are going well for you. Don’t wait do so only during the challenging times.

No matter how difficult your journey may seem at times, you must rely on your own mental and emotional strength to pull yourself through.

It would be nice to always have someone around who is always available to listen to problems, anticipate your needs, and support you when things aren’t going well, wouldn’t it? Unfortunately, people will not always be there for you because they must deal with their own challenges,

Life is a self-made proposition. Many people unfairly expect someone else in their life to give them emotional support or motivational lifts every time they are down. They get disappointed when others aren’t there for them. These unfair expectations of others can destroy relationships.

Don’t put the pressure on other people when problems come up in your own life. Put the pressure on yourself—right where it belongs. Taking the pressure head on may be just what you need to overcome your challenges. Heck, who knows? Maybe the other people in your life think that YOU should be there for THEM when you are wallowing with disappointment.

Learn to become self-reliant. Expect to get through the tough times yourself–and be thankful for those times when someone else is able to help you out. 

A person will set his or her goals based on what he believes about him or herself.

The majority of the people you surround yourself with must have the courage to live life at your level or higher.  If you don’t this type of individuals, you’ll find yourself working hard just to stay where you are-instead of taking your life to the next level. And, you’ll be able to stay where you are only if you’re lucky!

Making things easier doesn’t necessarily make your life better. You might inadvertently rob yourself from earning a sense of satisfaction in the process. Becoming more effective and efficient at what you do will make things better and keep you working toward the never-ending journey of self-fulfillment.

What’s “easy” will never become fulfilling.     

Never complain about how other people treat you. They see you the way they see you. You’ll never “convince” them that they should think any higher of you than they already do. If the world isn’t treating you the way you feel you should be treated, put the pressure on yourself-not the rest of the world. 

Longevity is a very important factor in your ultimate success. If you can “simply hang in there” long enough, the chances are great that you’ll eventually become very good at what you do. 

Everyone lives with angst. Successful people manage their angst better than most.

Angst is an important ingredient of your mental psyche. You absolutely must have some degree of continual angst in your life to remain productive, happy, and fulfilled.

Focus your attention on managing your angst-not completely avoiding it. Manufacture enough to keep you mentally sharp and hungry for improvement-but not so much that it totally overwhelms and disempowers you.

Satisfaction (and frustration, for that matter) is all a matter of perspective.

Try not to predict the quality of the workout you’ll have based on your initial "feelings." Feelings are not a reliable indicator of what you can and cannot achieve.

Why? Your feelings can change every 10 minutes. They can be up one minute and down the next. Hasn’t this happened to you many times before in different aspects of life?

Relying on your feelings can severely limit what you are truly able to accomplish during a weight training workout, cardiovascular training session, and even a work day. Conversely, your feelings can be overly optimistic and cause you to underestimate the task at hand.

Instead of relying on your initial feelings, objectively survey the situation you are presented. Will you feel the same way about the situation 30 minutes from now? Have there been times like these in the past when you outperformed what you initially felt you could? Have there been times in the past when something you were doing was much more difficult than you initially felt it would be and caught you off-guard?