happiness | The Caleb Barney Collection

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.

Tips to wake up happy during the early hours of the morning

Tips to wake up happy during the early hours of the morning…

1) When your alarm goes off, get up with a smile. Be excited that you get to your work out, read, have some alone time. Don’t snooze. Don’t procrastinate.

2) Go to the bathroom and splash some cold water on your face. Run your wrists under cold water too. This will help wake you up.

3) Whatever you think about, you will become…if you think about how tired you are, you’ll remain tired. If you think about how excited you are, you’ll get excited. Train yourself to think positive thoughts.

4) Drink plenty of water. After not drinking any water for ~8 hours, your body is dehydrated. After drinking ~16+ ounces of water, then you can get something caffeinated.

5) When setting up at night before, try not to get too much screen time, review your upcoming day, drink some water (but not too much), lay out your workout clothes for the next morning, and go to bed early to make sure you get enough sleep.

Don’t be the reason you don’t achieve your dreams

We all will fail in life and the secret for many people’s success is that they’re willing to fail more often and more quickly than those afraid of failure. They understand that failing is a natural precursor to success. You have to try new things – different things – if you want to improve your life. Sometimes, you’ll have great intuition and choose the right action to propel you towards your goals. Sometimes you’ll get lucky. But almost always, if you fail to take action (or if you do the same thing over and over and expect a different result), you’re going to be stuck in the same place. So even though it may not look like you’ve failed from the outside looking in, is it true? Sure, you don’t have one moment to point to where something didn’t work out. But isn’t the end result of not achieving your dreams a bigger failure than swinging for the fences and occasionally striking out?

There are a lot of reasons why people don’t achieve their dreams, many of which are outside of our control. We can accept that because if we try to control everything (even things we have no power over), we will be fighting a losing battle. But what we can do is control our thoughts, words, actions, and attitude. We decide what we read, who we listen to, who we hang out with, and how we talk to ourselves. We decide what words to say (I can, I will, how can I?) and what words to not say (I can’t, I don’t know how, I give up). We decide whether we want to get up each morning when we say we will or whether we hit the snooze button and sleep in, or whether we follow through with what we said we would do. Are we generally happy and not complaining? Are we putting out positive vibes where others want to be around us or are we so negative that others actually feel worse after hanging out with us?

Don’t be the reason why you don’t achieve your dreams. Live intentionally. Plan your next steps and follow through with them. Think big and act big. You need to take enough action and occasionally swing for the fences instead of always playing it safe. If you don’t ever reach your lofty goals, that’s fine. But when you think back, have no regrets over why you didn’t achieve it. Give it your all, do it ethically and in a way that is true to you, and go from there.

What are you willing to sacrifice for the things you want?

It takes a lot of effort and sacrifice to reach the next level of success.

A lot of us take it easy on ourselves. We say, “I did enough for today.” When really, we just did the bare minimum.

If you set ambitious goals, you’re going to have to work a lot harder than you currently are. So the question becomes, are you OK with good enough? Or do you want spectacular? Do you want extraordinary?

If you’re reading this, that means you have access to the Internet. Maybe you’re reading it from a smart phone, a laptop, or a tablet. But relatively speaking, you’ve “made it.” You’re better off than so many other people in the world already in terms of finances. You likely live in a first world country. You likely don’t have any major concerns regarding food, water, or shelter. Life for you as it currently is should be considered “good enough.”

But do you want more, and if so, what are you willing to do for it? So many people want something. They desire it, but only if it falls into their lap. They want it to happen, but they aren’t willing to do what it takes to get what they want.

Only you can decide how badly you want something. If you want it bad enough, you can make it happen. You can set time aside to work towards it. Sometimes that will mean waking up early or staying up late, sometimes that will mean refraining from buying something, sometimes that will mean reading instead of watching tv, but almost always, there will be a sacrifice that needs to be made if you don’t want to coast through life for “good enough.” Now it’s just a matter of reminding yourself how important your goal is and determining if the sacrifice is still worth it.

Be consistent and enjoy the process

If you learn to enjoy the process, the rest will fall into place. You’re more likely to end up with the result your desire and learn to be happier (both during the process and with the end result).

For example, instead of just saying, “I want to lose 25 pounds,” try to figure out what process you need to follow to do this. Do you need to cut out sugar and processed foods, work out for 30 minutes or more five days per week, drink more water, get better sleep, etc.? If you can learn to love doing those things, you can easily achieve the result you desire. And then when you get to your goal, you’ll also be much more likely to keep those healthy habits because you actually enjoy doing them! No more of this “yo-yo” dieting. No more working out really hard for 3 months and then not working out at all for the next 6 months.

You have to be consistent to achieve results. And the more you enjoy the boring, consistent process, the better results you’ll see.