My guest blogger today, Paula Eder, PhD, is one of the many wonderful people helping me celebrate Too Much On Her Plate Week, by generously offering you a gift to help you get rid of some of those things that are overwhelming you. For more information on Too Much On Her Plate Week – go here. To sign up for my special teleseminar with Paula (another free part of my holiday celebration): Honoring Our Time With Boundaries, go here.
Time management tips can teach you how to regenerate your vitality immediately by setting boundaries, utilizing these 3 powerful strategies:
1. Comprehend how your time choices shape your quality of life. Genuinely appreciating the full power of your time choices requires and builds grit. Why? You genuinely realize what an enormous responsibility you carry in your own two hands. Yet assuming that level of ownership actually creates courage, because life becomes infinitely more exciting! No more wasting energy in blaming others. Your moment-to-moment choices grow more meaningful. This brings your essential focus to here, now. “Here” is where you live. “Now” is where all your power resides.
2. Assertively prioritize activities that energize you. Consciously shaping your life through making your best possible time choices certainly helps you prioritize your activities. One of the most powerful techniques for energizing your time choices is to clearly identify your motivation. For example, if you resent going to work, you are draining your incentive and casting yourself in the role of the hapless victim, dragged through life by circumstances. You owe it to yourself to stop and consider the dignified reasons you go to work, like putting food on the table. Protect your energy by refusing to blame life for time choices you can make and remake at will. Then again, if your livelihood is demoralizing even when you invest your best efforts, you owe it to yourself to explore new avenues. Even in the most uncertain times, you benefit by examining and weighing the cost of each option. You will go through life more alert, more curious, and with enhanced vitality. And new doors will open.
3. Successfully establish boundaries to promote your priorities. To say “Yes” to one fresh opportunity, you must say “No” to others. This essential discipline is worth all the assertiveness and social skills it requires. Your zest for life is rallied in the following ways:
* Establishing a hierarchy of priorities strengthens your core. Who you are is determined largely by what you consciously choose, and what you are willing to relinquish in return. This is where the rubber hits the road, and where you gain essential traction to move through your day.
* Establishing boundaries shapes your life. If you feel obliged to say, “Yes,” to all demands, your life becomes no more than a receptacle for others’ agendas. Own your life. The more you simplify your commitments to support what truly matters to you, the more easily you can fulfill them without feeling depleted.
* Setting boundaries clarifies significant relationships. By presenting a defined self with clear priorities, you invite others to follow your example. Although submerged conflicts may surface in ways you first find uncomfortable, addressing those conflicts frees up enormous energy to be authentic and straightforward.
As you see, establishing and maintaining time boundaries is key to a healthy, fulfilling and productive life! Experience for yourself how following through, patiently and persistently, step-by-step, will yield remarkable dividends of vitality and optimism that affect ALL areas of your life.
Let time management address the whole of your life. If you are clear you want to live your best life, make time choices that will deepen and enlarge your moments, no matter what comes your way. This “heart-based” time management honors and enhances the significance of your life, each and every moment.
So, ask yourself: How can you seize the opportunity right now to make more meaningful time choices?
Paula Eder, PhD, The Time Finder Expert, is the founder of Finding Time LLC and the creator of the Heart-Based Time Management System. Known for her integrity, compassion, ability to solve problems, and her fervor for teaching and learning, Paula is fascinated with time and its ability to hold the most profound moments and the most mundane moments simultaneously. For more than thirty years, she has taught solopreneurs and small business owners how to successfully align their time choices with their life goals and core values. Paula helps busy people to make authentic time choices that lead to business and academic success, personal growth, vibrant health, and positive life changes. For more time thoughts and techniques, visit her blog at http://www.thetimefinder.com
