Use Change To Design A Healthy Life

Tell me what a man eats and how he treats his body, and I will tell you how long that man will live! Diet, yes. Living habits, of course. Attitude about life, naturally. They all matter.

Your human body is a marvel of construction. It is strong, resilient, capable of withstanding amazing amounts of abuse—but not endless abuse.

Disease, decay and early death are not products of any single excess or failure. Rather, they are the end result of living contrary to the laws of life day after day. The disease of the forties or fifties results from the mistakes of the twenties and thirties.

No one can help a man who refuses to help himself. If your life is to be a long and happy one, you must want to live! There is a whole beautiful, lovable and loving world to go on living in.

Doubtless our most important discovery in the past one hundred years is the knowledge that man is a part, a glorious part of nature. Nature’s pattern, above all else, is motion, constant motion, a never ending cycle of change. Electricity, as we now understand it, is motion. The universe is motion. Man himself is motion. Understand this, for it is basic in understanding yourself and your life.

Though you may hear the same name and return to the same house both evenings, you are, on Tuesday, a different person from the one you were on Monday. Twenty-four hours have wrought change; subtle change, true, but change none-the-less. You are a day apart from the one you were.

That is why it is so important for you to understand. Each day brings changes, both mental and physical. Your body is constantly changing. Are you aware of it? If not, then learn now, for you are about to apply this knowledge and change your life—mind and body!

Look at your hand. Turn it in the air, examine it closely. Is it the same hand you had yesterday, a year ago, ten years ago? It is not! In twenty-four hours, since this time yesterday, a small area of your hand has been shed and new tissue has replaced it.

Overnight a bit of you has been reborn. This is constant, never-ending. New tissue replaces old. You scrape your arm and it bleeds. Within a matter of days, that scraped skin has been naturally removed and new skin has replaced it.

Every organ, every bone, every single cell of life you call your body is in the endless process of change. A single red blood corpuscle has a life span of two months. This means that, in a period of 60 days, every blood cell you had at the beginning has done its work and ceased to exist, while new cells have been born to replace them all. This is the hope, the root of re-birth.

Your body is essentially a different body from that which you possessed ten years ago. New organs, blood and skin have all been reborn in a period of seven years. Grasp this fact. Understand it and understand how it applies to your own life.

What can it mean to you? What can it mean to the dream of a long and creative life? It is strange how so many of us accept the law of constant motion in all things that concern us except that most important matter of all, our health and life.

The housewife who finds her home cluttered with the dirt and waste of living does not hesitate to clean it out regularly. But that same woman frequently loses this understanding when she concerns herself with her own health and life.

If she is overweight, she may accept this, using such foolish phrases as “it is natural for me” or “that is a family trait.” If she suffers from headaches or chronic indigestion, she reminds herself that her mother or father suffered similarly and therefore it cannot be prevented.

She fails to apply the same logic to her body as she does to her home. She has forgotten that life and health, like all things which confront us, are of our own making,

Equally foolish is the man who, a year after his near-fatal heart attack, is back to his old habits. “Life is no fun eating the foods the doctor ordered and giving up nights in front of the TV with my favorite snacks Besides, doctors can perform miracles these days.”

What men have done, men can undo. This is the past history of man, and the promise of a bright future. Man is the living symbol of progress. He changes. He adapts himself to natural changes around him. He learns and applies his learning to making a better life for himself.

We have done this everywhere except for health and life itself! The longer we refuse to devote ourselves to an understanding of what makes for health, the greater the problem will become.

This is not just idle chatter. This is the substance of all that we have ever learned about health and rational living. If you cannot say, with certainty, that you want: to live—that you love life—then you are not prepared to build the kind of body and mind that will extend your life and end pain and disease.

If you know within yourself that life is precious, life is good, then more abundant health and happiness are yours for the building. If this is not so, then you have a job to do on yourself. Begin by accepting the fact that you, and only you, are responsible for creating your own life.

How To Get Your Raise

Salary raises in recent years are handed out with what seems to be automatic regularity for a variety of group reasons. More helpful would be concern for the individual who wants to make a habit of success.

Today we are faced with periodic pay raises to meet increased costs of living, faced with pay raises based on seniority, faced with pension plans, Social Security, medical benefits, and on and on. The biggest obstacle in the course to success today is the comfort we can heap on mediocrity.

When raises are handed out at periodic intervals for the above reasons, the man whose contributions to increased efficiency entitle him to a raise is more apt to be reminded of the raises he has already received than the raise he deserves. As a matter of fact, the man whose superior talents entitle him to a raise is too often considered as a problem.

If group raises have become a fixture, no employer likes to choose between a group raise or a discontented crew. The net, and much more serious result, is that extra effort and the employment of superior talents tends to be discouraged.

Some management policies about wages may have worked in the past but are overdue for replacement. First would be the policy for annual reviews. Once-a-year may make it simpler for management but the policy ignores individuals who progress faster and contribute more than their associates. The unhappy result---the incentive to achieve excellence is lowered.

Another is the management-by-exception graph on the wall supposed to indicate the course of sales or production moving upward. Theoretically, the supervisor should be able to detect and recognize superior performance.

Instead the supervisor usually spends time helping or dealing with the lazy, inefficient individual who is lowering the group record. The average worker who does what is expected is considered to be no problem and needing no special supervisor attention beyond the usual pep talks.

Too often the gifted or exceptional individual is considered as much of a problem as the below-par man. While management by exception weeds out the incompetents, it usually continues to breed mediocrity by failing to recognize merit.

The superior employee is doing well without special attention by management. "Good old Harry (or Mary) is valuable and trusted to step up and solve any unexpected emergencies. Besides, recognition might lead to promotion and then there would be the trouble of having to hire and train a replacement."

In spite of the obstacles, there are techniques for getting raises that have worked consistently for thousands of people in all kinds of work. They are: (1) Be sure you have earned your raise. (2) Be sure your supervisor knows you have earned it. (3) Be sure he knows that you know you have earned it. (4) Be sure he knows you know he knows.

In spite of what most of us were taught, there is no "fairy" just waiting to reward us with a salary raise for all our hard work. The responsibility for getting a raise belongs to the person who wants it-you.

Are you fully informed on what you have been doing, and how well you have been doing it? Until you make your own appraisal of your situation, you will not know where you stand.

You have the same prerogative as management. Keep a written record of what is expected of your job, and especially keep track whenever your performance has exceeded that which was expected of you. In that way you can document your claim to having earned a raise.

When you take your talents for granted, you assume that they are equally obvious to others, and that is rarely the case. Whenever you have an idea that would be a more efficient or cost saving procedure, let the supervisor know-possibly the best way is by asking for advice on how to implement the idea.

You want cooperation from the supervisor. It is important that the person recognize your idea as a way to improve life for both of you-not as a plot to undermine his job. Most people seem to put the emphasis on "making good" instead of "doing better."

Two important things happen when you begin to keep a record of your above-par work. First, you are "thinking rich" when you are looking for your highest values instead of your "get along" values.

And second, when you are conscious of your written progress report, you will begin looking over the job to see what more contributions you can make. This approach transforms the day of work from routine into one that is making use of your own unique talents.

Keep in mind that even the fairest of employers must profit from your enterprise. Does your idea do the job faster, better or at less cost? The written record will help clarify your position and reveal why you are uniquely deserving of a raise.

It should reveal that you have self-confidence, without arrogance or egotism. It should indicate knowledge of your own worthwhileness, a belief in your value to the company, and a genuine concern in doing whatever may be necessary to continue your-and the company's-progress.

Journey From Insomnia Through Nightmares To Clarity

Normally, a short time spent reading in another room is the best way for me to get back to sleep—staying in bed just does not work when I get a bout of insomnia.

Instead of the usual magazine I grabbed a never-read and long-forgotten book My Brother’s Keeper by Marcia Davenport. The author was probably thinking about the mysterious house occupied by the Collyer brothers somewhere on New York’s upper Fifth Avenue when she wrote the book.

The novel starts when the police, after neighborhood complaints, finally break into the once fashionable but now ruinous mansion. The first brother was dead of starvation in one of the few rooms in the house not stuffed to the ceiling with newspapers and assorted junk. Eventually they found the second brother buried under a junk trap he had designed to catch intruders.

The story is a replay of how two men of education, charm and ability followed a life of self-destruction to such a bizarre ending.

I had already viewed a couple television programs showing the tons (yes, TONS) of junk removed from homes of some modern day hoarders. People keep buying and/or saving in case the things could be used someday. I was flabbergasted that anyone could live under such conditions.

The experts explained that an obsession for collecting can escalate as the years go by. Anyone who has tried to help a parent downsize before moving to a smaller place knows how much emotion and pain can result. Memories get tied to the strangest items.

In that 50-year old novel the reason for collecting stacks of newspapers was that they might read them when they had more time. That was my explanation for printing out all the emails, courses and reports that I had stacked around the home office.

My problem: There is always something new or better—so the stacks to read kept getting bigger and bigger and the actual working space on the desk kept getting smaller and smaller.

Considering all of the printouts, was I really so different from the hoarders on those TV programs? Or was it only a matter of degree? More information was arriving daily!

Being surrounded by stacks of paper (no matter how neatly arranged) is a quick way to feel overwhelmed. You unconsciously forget all about priorities and start whittling away on the easy projects just to get some space. Or is it excuses called procrastination?

The “great” plan is to get a big block of time when all your creative energy can be concentrated on the top priority project! But those little projects take longer than they should have. Time and energy are wasted on what is best described as busy work of no real importance while top priority waits for attention tomorrow.

One of the basic laws of work: The more you have to do, the more important it becomes to concentrate on one job at a time. Work organized for successful accomplishment is work organized to direct full attention upon the job at hand, with no dissipation of energy on nagging distractions.

I ended up having to spend a couple days sorting, filing and discarding. The big surprise was the quantity of paper going into trash bags—most of the time while I questioned why it had ever been considered important in the first place. (Next project is the cupboard filled with “stuff” from my home sewing phase.)

It is amazing how much life has improved now that I start my day with a clean desk. No distractions—one project at a time. The number of projects quickly completed has multiplied as well.

There is power in the now! I like this feeling of freedom and space. Also, I am now far more careful in selecting what deserves space in my home--in every room.

Your Secret Weapon--Ideal Posture

Good posture makes everybody look 150 percent better. You look thinner – taller – and your clothes hang better. It is probably the most consistent connective thread running through every man and woman of style.

There is a certain magnetism, self-confidence, and to-the-manor-born charisma about a strong, graceful carriage. It is a body language that works.

But there is much more to good posture than your mother might have told you. It is during a state of ideal posture that the muscles will work most efficiently. Poor posture not only takes away from esthetics, it compromises how we were designed to function, eventually leading to pain and/or injury.

Old, unconscious habits of misalignment, never detected and thus never corrected, directly cause muscle and joint pain, fatigue and general bodily difficulty. Most of us do not realize this crucial connection, much less know what to do about it.

Whenever we get injured, we experience pain. The body will seek avoidance of pain even if it means moving in ways we would appreciate as poor posture. That wrong way of moving may become a habit by the time healing is completed.

Some therapists seem to believe that the absence of pain equals recovery…it does not! The body must be retrained to use muscles correctly. Continued misuse may well lead to serious problems later in life.

Extended sitting is one of the primary causes of poor posture. Not only do people sit most of the time they are at home, eating or watching TV, the seated workplace is the most common in the world today. Some people sit almost every minute of their waking day, aside from walking to the bathroom.

The modern environment is not favorable to good posture. It is practically impossible to sit both correctly and comfortably in a chair. Most chairs are so constructed that maintaining correct alignment while sitting is out of the question.

They are the wrong size, the wrong shape, and the wrong degree of firmness. The seats of many chairs are too long from front to back for anyone under five foot four inches or so. Place as many pillows as you need behind your back so that you can relax a little and still be held upright.

A big part of improving ones posture is to become active. However, most of us need guidance to understand where our alignment is wrong and how to correct it—and finding that guidance may take some effort.

Weak muscles tend to get weaker and strong muscles tend to get stronger when standard gymnasium exercises are poorly supervised. It is human nature to enjoy doing the things we are “good” at and avoiding those where we feel clumsy or that hurt.

Simply looking and studying correct posture charts does not help much. It takes a trained observer to discover the flaws and problems in how we stand, sit and move. It may include assessment of our home and work environments.

There are a few excellent bodywork methods that are wonderful for improving alignment and helping you move with more fluidity. Some have been popular with dancers and athletes for years. They include yoga, Tai Chi, Pilates, Alexander technique and Feldenkrais method.

The emphasis is on doing and being. Your mind is directed toward your body, concentrating on what is happening as it happens. Learning, growth and integration are brought about by the activity itself. Exercise is more pleasant when your mind is totally engaged with your body.

It is well worth experimenting to find the method that appeals to you. You will come to look forward to the stimulation it will provide. As time passes you will find that without conscious effort you are walking and sitting straighter, moving more gracefully.

Your muscles will become firmer and sleeker, better shaped, stronger without being large and bulky. And you will be calmer and more relaxed, with a new sense of control and inner harmony. These effects are subtle at first, and it takes time for them to develop, but they are real.

Only when your body is in balanced alignment, each part working in harmony with every other part, can you experience the power, lightness and ease intended by nature.

What Penalties Do You Pay By Thinking Poor?

A man getting ready to change jobs had made plans, worked out his program and taken the first steps. To put himself in the right frame of mind, he took his wife out for dinner and dancing and “had a ball.”

This was the way he expected to celebrate after he had the job, but he thought that celebrating ahead of time might give him the feeling of success, and help him achieve what he wanted. His “thinking rich” worked!

You can see the “think poor” and “think rich” ideas at work in children. Boys of the same age often want bicycles. They may want them as aids to playing with friends, aids to making money, or merely because other children have bikes and they want to “belong.”

One boy wants the bike because he can finish the morning paper route faster and have more time with his pals. He is thinking differently from the boy who wants the bike because it will allow him to deliver packages to more people in the same amount of time.

The first boy is thinking in a limited way, only about himself; the other is “thinking rich” about expanding his world to serve more people. By thinking rich, the second boy increased his service and efficiency because he understood the value of how he used time.

Narrow outlooks are evident in adults as well. Too often adults continue to follow thoughts of what profits they will get personally rather than first considering how to be profitable to others.

Worry is a doubly vicious form of mental harassment. It consumes an enormous amount of mental and physical energy while contributing nothing to one’s welfare. It is like a wasteful disease. It produces “think poor” thoughts that create more room in which worry can expand.

There can be no half-way measures with success. Talent unused is talent wasted. Some people seem to believe that by using only half their talents on the job, they will have the rest in reserve to be called up in emergencies.

One might as well say that the Olympic high jumper should practice with the bar set at three feet to keep his talent in reserve for the great day when he will be called upon to jump seven feet, six inches. With his muscles subdued by that kind of training, he will never make it, and with your best talents subdued by “think poor” thoughts, neither will you.

All of us suffer from fixations (like a $50,000 debt) that cause us to freeze in the face of the enormity of the thing instead of looking for the ways to cut it down to size. Your brain creates these fixations when it is conditioned by “think poor” thoughts, and will just as readily banish them free of charge and with little effort when you train it to “think rich.”

There is no trick to setting up a mind-training program. Part of your brain is always working—on regulating your heart beat, breathing, digestion, and other automatic functions.

This subconscious part of your mind also responds to commands from your conscious mind, enabling you to walk, run, drive a car and perform all the routine tasks of living without having to concentrate your mental powers on every step, turn of the car wheel or blink of the eye.

The greatest but most misused function of the subconscious is to collect all your experiences, evaluate them, and file them in your memory for future reference. At some time or other, when faced with a knotty problem, you have said the equivalent of “let me sleep on it.” And if you actually did sleep on it, feeling strongly that you would have the solution by morning, the chances are good that you woke up with the answer.

It is this mysterious obedience of the subconscious to the commands of the conscious mind that only recently has come to be appreciated. Now we know that if the conscious mind “thinks poor,” the subconscious responds in the same low key.

If you think you do not have time to do all that must be done, if you feel that you are a hard-luck victim for whom things always turn out badly, your subconscious will influence your conscious mind to waste time on projects that are bound to turn out badly.

Conversely, if you “think rich,” this same subconscious will go to work with enthusiasm, slaving away for you even while you sleep. The readiness of your subconscious to go to work for you is one of the great discoveries of recent years.

What this means to you is that when your conscious mind makes a habit of success, your subconscious mind will also make a habit of success, awakening you every morning with “think rich” ideas and answers. When it is conditioned by “think poor” thoughts, your subconscious drags you out of bed to go “back to the salt mines,” already defeated before the day begins.

Only your conscious mind can determine what you want out of life, and guide your subconscious accordingly. And once it has been mastered, it becomes the obedient servant that works day and night to help you achieve your objectives.

Build Success Into Your Thinking

Today, in spite of all of our labor-saving devices, we still hear the complaint: “There isn’t enough time for everything that has to be done.” We are still looking for some magic time-stretcher, and all too often ignoring the time savers that we have.

We still have the same number of hours as our grandparents, or even great-grandparents, had, and on a man-to-man basis each of us can produce eight times as much in a 40-hour week as the best could do in a 60-hour week. We are better fed, housed and clothed.

Our nightly entertainment, at the flick of a television dial, provides a range of diversions from grand opera and Shakespeare to slapsticks. We have all of this—riches beyond their wildest dreams—and yet as many of us “think poor” today as did in their time. Why?

How often growing up did your elders say: “Be content with your lot.” “Let well enough alone.” “A penny saved is a penny earned.” “The rich get richer while the poor get poorer.” “Get an education and find a job that’s secure for life.” “A penny saved is a penny earned.” (There’s plenty more, but you get the idea.)

We call ourselves enlightened, but that kind of “thinking poor” is still with us. Any person in the United States has available to him through town, city, and state libraries more information than did all the world leaders prior to the 20th Century combined, and just as much as any world leader of today.

Compared to us, men like Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford, were poorly informed, and what information they had was often poorly organized, and even more often inaccurate. But they “thought rich” and rich thinking helps to create riches.

Though the advances of the last quarter of a century have been called vast or overwhelming, every survey by academic, commercial, and governmental agencies indicates that greater advances will be made during the next decade than during the previous quarter-of-a-century.

Not only will this open new opportunities that didn’t exist a few years ago, but it will create a great need for success-oriented people to match the accelerated rate of expansion. Those who get the leading jobs will be the ones who think rich enough to get them.

The Idea Comes First

Money is only frozen energy. It becomes useful only after you defrost it and exchange it for what you want. The way you think, therefore, influences the way you use money. What you think you want, you buy—assuming you have the money.

If you want something enough, you will devote the time and energy needed to acquire the money with which to buy it. By the same token, if you don’t want much—if you “think poor”—you will only work enough to get the “poor” things you want.

Make rich thinking a habit for it will work wonders for your career. It is not that thinking makes it so, any more than in the words of the old song, “wishing will make it so.” But success-oriented thoughts, supported by knowledge of your own achievements and guided by intelligent planning, will certainly make it so.

Some have said that the reward of being satisfied with one’s lot is that at least one has peace of mind. The idea suggested is that if one does not strive to better himself, he will not be hurt and frustrated if he does not make it.

Quite the opposite is true. Man is a proud creature, but pride, unless it is false, can be based only on achievement. When a man’s work become so routine that all sense of achievement is lost, pride suffers, and all the platitudes about contentment cannot soothe an injured pride.

To put it more strongly, achievement on which to feed one’s pride is as necessary to the complete man as income on which to feed his family. A poorly fed pride means a poorly fed family, with a further loss of pride and a greater increase of worry and frustration.

Are You Clinging To The Myth About Job Security?

Job security is a myth that must be replaced by the reality of ability security! But the very reasons that make jobs insecure—obsolescence, automation, decentralization, company mergers and the like—are in themselves symptoms of progress and greater productivity, and therefore more security.

Changes can vary between painful and disastrous for the man who is unprepared for them, while the man who is prepared welcomes them for the opportunities they provide.

And the changes will be coming faster. Some of the Department of Labor statistics suggest that within six years one out of seven of us will be employed in a job category that does not exist at the present.

When a university teacher repeated that prediction to his class it was greeted with groans accompanied by bitter cracks such as “How can you study for a career if it is not going to be there?”

The teacher’s response: “You are not selling the label put on a chosen career, but the intelligence and talents of the man who chooses it. Your career label can change, but there will always be a demand for your abilities.”

We no longer have the luxury of believing that the college degree has us set up for life. Occupational security exists only when confidence in known abilities exists. It is only through being your best self that you can live up to your potentialities.

You are well on your way to performing at your best when every morning you can face the day filled with expectation instead of resignation.

The added factor is that what is best for you is best for the others around you. The successful man is not he who gets ahead by climbing over others, but he who gets ahead by producing the values that are of service to others.

Remember that you will not be the only one who is producing services of value. If no one is competing with you, if you never have to dig to find the best that is in you, you may never know just how good your best might be.

Never worry about the competition. Worry produces fear and hate, and fear and hate can take up so much room in your mind and so color your thinking that you cannot present your best side at all.

The Chinese proverb “A bit of fragrance clings to the hand that gives flowers” also goes for the verbal or written bouquet. Say something nice to someone, and a bit of its niceness will cling to you. The man who finds good things to say about others will find others saying good things about him.

And while one man saying a good thing to another is only one man expressing an opinion, when a lot of men begin saying good things about one man, you have got a consensus.

This is not “do-gooder” advice that I am thrusting at you. It is cold, practical business advice. When you speak well of and to your associates, they will think and speak well of you. Look for what is good in others, and they will look for what is good in you.

Let us carry that one step further. To repeat, the successful man is not the one who climbs over others but who is of most service to others. The higher you go, the more people you can serve, and to be practical about it, the more people you will have serving you.

It is rather discouraging when the average employee is not giving you their best abilities. Your own success is being slowed down by the inertia of employees who are living to punch the time clock on the way home to freedom.

This will not be the case if you have made a habit of recognizing that best that is in you, and the best that is in your associates. The best employer is the man with the best employees, and he doesn’t get them until he learns how to recognize and appreciate a good employee when he has one.

This valuable educations starts when you begin to look for the best qualities in your associates. Then when you get your promotion, you will be able to use their best qualities in support of your own, and the executive with that kind of support has at least twice the strength of the executive who stands alone.

In this world the real shortage is in the number of people who know how to use their best abilities for the advancement of themselves and others. When you prepare yourself for progress, you are preparing to double your earning power while doubling your hours of leisure. When you prepare yourself for a label, such as a title on the door, you are saying you want to leave things as they are.

Now which do you really want—all the fantastic wonders of the future, or the world pretty much in the condition your father has it now? The entire career to which you thought you had devoted your professional life may have been merely a preparation of your talents for this new job you were really born to do.