Motivation Board

My new and improved pin board is finally completed. Everything on the board was carefully chosen to help motivate me and Dave (but mostly me).

Here it is. I put down wrapping paper for the background, bought some fun push pins, picked the best of my old board, printed what I need for the new one, and voila!

Here are a few details of favorite parts:

A picture of Dave and I from a friends wedding. We both looked at it and said "Oh I need to lose weight," and our weight loss motivation picture was found.

Bryan Jonathan was our wedding photographer. We have promised ourselves to book another photo shot with him if we hit very serious weight loss goals. Oh yeah, and Dave asked me to stick a Nerf dart to the board.

How could this not motivate?

My bib from the Northy Shore Inline Marathon, the year I got my personal best.

My goals for re-training my brain to be happier. Also, for an update, I have been very diligent with journaling my three gratitudes and my positive journaling.

Re-Train Your Brain

I re-watched one of my favorite TED Talks last night. If you haven't seen a TED Talk, you should. There is something for everyone. But as I was saying my favorite talk is by Shawn Achor and his talk is "The Happy Secret to Better Work." TED summarizes this 12 minute talk in two sentences: "We believe that we should work to be happy, but could that be backwards? In this fast-moving and entertaining talk, psychologist Shawn Achor argues that actually happiness inspires productivity."

 

So, reason number one to watch this talk is Achor is hilarious. What better way to improve your happiness than to laugh? Reason number two is it will change how you view happiness and help you feel more in control of your happiness. If it doesn't work for you, don't call me a liar, just know that it worked for me.

 

Shawn Anchor, My Personal Hero

More at GoodThinkInc.

This cite also has information about his book- now on my reading list, book review coming soon.

Anchor states, "If we can find a way of becoming positive in the present then our brain work even more successfully as we are able to work harder, faster and more intelligently." To help people do this, at the end of his talk, he gives concrete examples of how to re-train your brain to be happier and why they work. With such clear steps and with such a wonderful overarching goal, I have my new 30 Day Challenge (conveniently many of these things overlap with my original challenge).  

 

Creating Lasting Positive Change

• Three Gratitudes- Writing down three different things you are grateful for each day for 21 days (I'm sticking to 30) retrains our brains to look for the positive in our lives.
• Journal- Writing down one positive thing that happened in the last 24 hours allows you to relive it.
• Exercise- Teach your brain that your actions matter.
• Meditation- Helps us get over the "cultural ADHD" where we try to do more than one thing at once.  
• Random Acts of Kindness- Write one positive email when you open your email and create ripples of positivity.  

Dirty 30

Hello all. It's been too long. I've been busy. I'm taking a drawing a class Monday nights and loving it. I've been focusing on keeping a cleaner apartment and eating more fruits and veggies. Oh and I turned 30. And what better time for a 30 day challenge? Birthdays always seem like good times for reflection.

30 Days Of:
1) A clean apartment. My goal is to use my new cleaning chart to keep ahead of the typical chaos that takes over my apartment.
2) Being active. My goal is to do something every day. I will run at the Metro Dome Tuesdays and Thursdays. Dome running goes through the end of March so then I will have to transition to running outside.