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How to stay healthy: 10 things to focus on everyday for your healthiest life.

How do you stay healthy?

1. Stay adequately hydrated. This will help you feel more alert and awake, it will help your body feel better (and more your joints lubricated), and it will help your kidneys.

2. Eat a healthy diet (varied color and type of fruits and vegetables each day; different protein sources each day). The cleaner you eat, the better you feel. Aim for a good variety so you aren’t missing any key nutrients. Take a multivitamin as a true supplement (it’s meant to add to your dietary success, not to be your dietary success).

3. Live a healthy lifestyle (minimize sitting; do meaningful exercise at least 30-minutes per day…do something physically and mentally challenging every day). Be outside – get some sunshine (vitamin D).

4. Maximize quality sleep. A high quantity of sleep can be helpful, but why sleep more than you need to? At that point you’re literally sleeping away time in your day, and time is the most important and scarce non-renewable resource we have. Focus on getting just the right amount of good sleep.

5. Interact with someone you care about each day AND treat them well. Be generous. It will help you mentally and make others feel good too.

6. Forgive yourself and don’t sweat the small stuff. In the grand scheme of life, it probably doesn’t really matter.

7. Be interested/learn something new every day. When you stop growing or getting excited to learn, you slowly start dying and becoming less interested.

8. Be involved with a good church (or other positive community). See, talk with, and interact with positive people in a positive environment often.

9. Spend less than you earn. Automatically set aside money to “pay yourself first” and invest. This will help you feel less financial stress and allow for you to spend on things you actually care about.

10. Have long-term goals. You should always be striving to improve yourself.

On hiring others and getting out of the way

“The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he wants done, and self restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.” – Theodore Roosevelt

Delegate them get out of the way! Don’t micromanage! You hired them because they are smart, qualified, and the right person for the job, right?

Once you’ve trained them and have the systems and processes in place for them to succeed, let them do it. There will be bumps in the road and nobody is perfect, but if you let them learn without catastrophic consequences, they’ll be better off for it and you will too.

Train your mind to be stronger than your emotions

It doesn’t matter how much you want something, if you don’t train your mind to be stronger than your emotions, you’ll constantly be taking one step forward and two steps back.

Think about wanting to get in the best physical shape of your life. First, you need to set a SMART goal. Then, you need to figure out why that goal is important to you. After that, you need to put a plan in place to achieve your goal. During the planning period, you may be doing research to complete the perfect plan (which doesn’t exist), but that should not stop you from getting started (done is better than perfect). Lastly, you need to find an accountability partner who makes sure you are actively and consistently working towards your goal.

If you let your emotions take over (especially your negative emotions), you’ll find an excuse to not do what you know you need to be doing! It feels better (at the time) to stay in your warm, comfy bed and sleep in. It feels better (at the time) to eat another serving or to have dessert or to have a bedtime snack. It feels better to sit on the couch and watch tv or scroll on Instagram. For every short-term pleasure, there is a long-term consequence. And if you really want to achieve your goals, you have to train your mind to be stronger than your emotions (and just doing what feels good in the moment).

So what’s more important to you? A little extra sleep? Or getting up, keeping that promise to yourself, and striving towards your goals?

Trust me, in the end, you will feel so much better about yourself knowing that you set a difficult goal and you achieved it. You persisted through the ups and downs. It was simple, but it wasn’t easy, and not many people are willing to do what you do to get what you want.

Train your mind. If you listen to your emotions, listen to the positive ones that are pushing you towards your goals. Use those! But steel your mind. Make it so strong that your negative emotions cannot overcome you when you put your mind to something.

On struggling…words from an NBA superstar

We all will face adversity in life. It is what it is. But our attitude will help determine how we get through it. Damian Lillard, one of the NBA’s premier scoring guards has gotten off to a rough start to this season. When asked about his struggles, he said the following:

“I always look at struggles as an opportunity to show my true character. When things go great there’s a lot of praise that goes along with that. A lot of people give you a lot of credit. They speak highly of you on social media, TV. ‘Oh Dame had 60, Dame had 50.’ They speak really highly of you. But I think it says more when you’re going through something and s— is kind of hitting the fan and you’re struggling and everybody’s got something to say and to me the real ones, they can keep on trucking and keep on going and still find a way to get the job done.

“And, me personally, I love when those opportunities present themselves. Because when I am riding high and when I do get smoking hot and when I get going people are going to look at it and be like, ‘We remember when you were struggling and you didn’t shy away from it.’ I think it will be more respect for the success when they see how you handle failure and how you handle struggle.

“So, personally, I embrace that. It’s not fun. It’s not easy but it’s part of my DNA. That’s how I got to this position. I’m not angry about it. I’m frustrated with it. I do see it as a challenge and it’s one I accept and I know I’ll come out on top like I always do.”

I especially love the last part that he lays out. He embraces the struggle! It’s what has made him who he is. He doesn’t get angry about it because what’s done is done. But he does get frustrated and use it as fuel. He sees it as an obstacle to overcome, and he has the confidence in himself – the belief in himself – that he’ll get the job done.

We should all embrace failures, struggles, and setbacks this way. We shouldn’t be happy that they’re happening to us, but what is moping around going to do about it? What is getting angry or pointing the blame elsewhere going to do about it? Ultimately, it’s your responsibility. Take it and figure out your next move to try to make it better.

Don’t give up! You never know how close you are to success…

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” – Thomas Edison

Don’t give up. You may need to redirect your focus or take another approach to solving the same issue, but don’t quit. Quitting when things get tough teaches you to take the easy way out. But it is only easy at that time. Every time you quit, you are hurting yourself. You’re hurting your self-esteem, your reputation (among others), and your aspirations for a better future.