Be Different or be dead

July 26, 2019

6 incredible exercise tips for teens

Staying fit is very important to live a healthy life. You don’t have to spend hours in the gym or starving yourself to remain fit. Simple and regular exercises or any other physical activity can help you become fit and healthy. Regularity is essential. It’s advisable to add exercise in your daily routine.

You can opt for running, join some sports team, swimming or doing a regular workout in the gym. Regular physical activities not only keep you fit and healthy but would also help you in feeling good about yourself and live a happier life.

As per Dr. James Kojan MD, Physical activities doesn’t mean that you have to be harsh with your body. You can always opt for some fun activities, like playing football, basketball, etc.

When we enter teenage, our body undergoes various physical and hormonal changes. It’s the stage in the life cycle which bridges the gap between childhood and adulthood. Most of the kids start deciding as per their own preference. It becomes more important for them to add regular exercise in their regime and follow a healthy lifestyle.

To get that perfect body shape, many teens start taking rigorous work out sessions or follow the exercise routines available online. Many times, these routines are not teenage friendly.

Being health cautious is very good. No matter whatever is your motto behind doing regular exercise, you should not ignore the safety factor. Below we have shared some exercise tips that would help you achieve your fitness goals.

Start with Fitness Goals

Setting a goal is very important. A goal would give teens an idea of what they want to achieve with exercise. Different teens have different fitness goals as far as exercise is concerned. Some want to add bulkiness to their body; some may want to reduce fat; others might want to increase their speed and flexibility, etc.

Once you have set your final goal, you may go for setting small sub-goals which would finally lead you to your main goal. It’s advisable to start with smaller and achievable goals. For example, running 2 km in a day or doing 10 push-ups, etc. This would not only increase your motivation level but would also help you in achieving your fitness goal without harming your body.

Always Think Positive While Exercising

It’s important to have a positive attitude while exercising. Positivity helps in keeping away the negative thoughts. One of the best and easy way to remain positive while exercising is to involve yourself in the physical activity that you like.
This may be swimming, playing any kind of sport, dancing, etc. Many people prefer company while exercising.

You can always invite your friends to play outdoor games with you, or you can also have your gym group. This would not only keep you active but would also help in doing exercise regularly. Another way to add positivity is by showing your friends and relatives how fit you are becoming day by day.

You can easily do this by updating your profile or posting your recent pics on social media. Likes and positive comments on your post would not only make you feel good about yourself but would act as a motivating factor to work harder and achieve your fitness goal.

Before Exercising Workout (Help Protect Against Injury)

Before you start to exercise, always go for a warmup. Stretching is advisable before going for a run, running on a treadmill for a few minutes before starting a workout in a gym are a few examples of easy warm-ups. These mild exercises warm up the body muscles and help in preventing injury during exercise sessions.

Stretching helps in increasing the flexibility of joints and muscles. Good trainers always recommend stretching after the completion of workout sessions, as it helps in relaxing muscles.

Stay Focused on Your Breathing

Breathing plays a very important role in exercise. It holds power to make or break your entire fitness regime. Whether be it any yoga posture or any other physical exercise, it’s important to know when you should breathe in or breathe out. Exertion part of any exercise is always accompanied by breathing out.

Revering breath may result in nausea and in extreme cases, fainting. Hence, having complete knowledge about the forms, postures, do’s and dont’s of the exercise is very important. If you are a beginner, it’s advisable to start your physical training under professional guidance. 

Don’t Overdo It

Many a times teens stretch their body to extreme limits and end up with some kind of muscle injuries. Physical exercise is very important to remain active and fit. But you should be aware of where to draw the line.

Overtraining may harm your body. Just remember in the teen years, your body is still growing hence, excessive pressure may harm your body growth. These are the reasons that teen should avoid carrying heavy weights as it may result in disruption of growth plates.

Reward Yourself to Stay Motivated

One of the best and easiest way to motivate yourself to do regular exercise is through rewarding yourself. Set a goal for yourself, and once you achieve it, reward yourself. You may set a goal for 20 push-ups, and once you achieve it, you may reward yourself by buying a gift for yourself.

If you are planning to follow a regular exercise regime, you can always start with some basic exercises. This may be jumping ropes, climbing stairs, going on cycling with your friends, etc. The primary aim is that you should do some kind of physical activity daily for at least 15-20 min without stopping. Be healthy and live a healthy lifestyle.

— Jessica Ann has written many blogs across the spectrum, but specializes mainly in weight loss and dieting. With several years in the field, Jessica has been helping people get healthy and fit and is dedicated to providing information for those who need it.

• Posted 7.26.19 at 04:14 am by Roy Osing
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July 22, 2019

8 easy things you can do to make your day better

Bealach na Bà, Applecross, Scotland

8 easy things you can do to make your day better.

Every day we get up — a good thing btw — and our day begins.

Most of us have a plan for the day. It might be a formal schedule of events and appointments with a timetable or it may simply be a vague idea of what we might do depending on circumstances and how we feel as the day progresses.

Regardless of the precision and granularity of our daily outlook, there are ways to make it more gratifying and rewarding so that we can look back over what we’ve done and say “WOW! what a great day! I can’t believe what I got done.”

Here are 8 ideas to harvest everything possible from your vertical 12 hours or so.

1. Focus. Focus. Focus.

Focus on every task; pretend that every single thing you do is the ONLY thing you will do. Laser like attention with no distractions will enable you to achieve the maximum amount possible with the best results.

Beware of multitasking; it’s a great way to avoid getting anything done. Flitting from one task to another may make you feel like you are making progress, but when you look back on your day you’ll find that YES you were busy, but NO you weren’t productive.

2. Squeeze every last morsel

Squeeze every bit of value from each task you perform during the day. This is an issue of superficiality versus thoroughness; shallow versus deep.

The best days ever are when you mine as much benefit from each task as you can. Rather than cut lunch prematurely short with a friend or associate, for example, take that extra 15 minutes to finish your conversation and enjoy the relationship.

And instead of rushing through a project to deliver the minimum expected, take extra time to create something different which might surprise the intended recipient.

3. Break away from your routine

Look for an opportunity to break away from how you normally do things and entertain yourself with an unplanned surprise.

We are all creatures of habit and tend to repeat past behaviour particularly when it has yielded good results. The problem is, you can get bored with yourself when you conform to past thinking and practices — mix it up and get more out of a moment. It will really boost your energy level and make you happier.

I did this constantly in the many presentations I gave on my BE DiFFERENT or be dead work. I would always change something, like the stories I would use to make a point or the language I would use to describe one of my concepts. I did it for myself so I would enjoy what I was doing. And staying fresh myself was an almost certain guarantee that my audience would be entertained.

4. Stop juggling!

Don’t take on too much. A daily plan with 10 things to do will likely fail. I’m a fan of selecting not more than three tasks to take on; having too many balls in the air can be deadly with little being accomplished on any particular task.

When your funnel for the day is too full, you may sweat a lot but your achievement level is low.

And under no circumstance brainstorm on anything, as the result will be an agenda chockablock full that tends to be frustrating with the consequence that your day underwhelms rather than excites you.

5. Have a beer

Your beer could actually be a beer if you have the luxury of having few obligations or it could be a “beer-like” relaxation moment — you should plan them onto your day — where you step back and take a deep breath before moving on.

Charging through your day without having a ‘beer moment’ will not only leave you exhausted and unfulfilled today, it will also leave you completely unprepared emotionally and physically for your next day.

6. Plan for the unexpected

Target to finish an hour early; if you’re an hour late you’ll be right on time. Remember that each day will have it’s fair share of unexpected events; unpredictable things that will require you to deviate from your plan.

To accommodate this daily dynamic you need to build capacity into your day so that you can respond and maintain your momentum.

What you don’t need is to be up against the clock. This stress will be THE deterrent to achieving joy from your day.
My approach is to be done by mid-afternoon. If I am, GREAT! I earned some beer moments; if not, I still have time to finish what I started.

7. Don’t clutter your evenings

Don’t fill your evenings with much; it puts too much stress on your day. It’s noon and you’ve hit a roadblock that will take more time than you’ve expected so panic — and unhappiness — kicks in.

You will never successfully complete the task if you’re stressing about the dinner engagement you have arranged with a client, for example. As a matter of fact you will probably screw that appointment as well.

So balance your day with your evening if you want to get the most out of both.

8. Be crazy

Do something outrageous during your day. Off the wall! This achieves two things: one, it is an amazing source of energy, and two, it surprises people around you and gives them a (hopefully positive) different perspective of who you are.

Doing what is not a normal dimension of your persona is a renaissance for your day; it’s an injection of adrenaline that feeds your creative juices and has an amazing impact on the balance of your day.

Again, this is all about intervening on yourself; finding a way to break the normal trend you assume to surprise yourself. Breaking your norms will definitely enhance how you feel about your day.

Having a good day doesn’t have to be a formidable task. If you try a few of these ways to brighten one of your days, I guarantee you will be able to put together a run of them in no time at all.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 7.22.19 at 04:37 am by Roy Osing
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July 8, 2019

6 reasons why being broken is better than being beautiful

Source: Unsplash

6 reasons why being broken is better than being beautiful.

The stereotype of success these days is based on the notion of perfection; a flawlessness that people believe is somehow responsible for yielding consistent brilliant results.

Successful business strategies are described as ones that get it right the first time. They have amazing insight at the outset to predict with uncanny accuracy what people will desire in products and services.
And their creativity unleashes the imagination of the crowd who flock in ridiculously long line ups to buy the latest and the greatest.

Successful people are portrayed in elegant attire, sporting a body image devoid of any unsightly signs of the ordinary.
Their body image exudes the winner attitude and destiny.

Does anybody buy this? Does anyone really believe that incredible business performance is a function of getting it right the first time, or that physical perfection is the necessary precondition to personal success?

There are no silver bullets to success in my experience. Rather, success is normally achieved (notwithstanding the odd blistering single magic act that rarely happens) by a series of actions taken in relentless painstaking fashion aided by unmatched sweat, passion and emotion — by being broken in one way or another.

Here are 6 reasons why being broken will get you where you want to go and why being beautiful, while a fashionable notion, is a non-starter for capturing the prize.

1. If you’re broken you’re prepared when you fail

You know your first attempt at anything rarely succeeds and that the future “never unfolds as it should” (i.e. the way you hoped it would).

Broken prepares you for the journey of change that every new idea is destined to endure. Broken implies imperfection at the outset, and this is the reality of virtually 99.99% of the solutions we create to the challenges we face.

There are very few immaculately conceived plans and strategies that produce the exact results expected; every plan is flawed in some way with degrees of imperfection that are realized only when the real world does not conform to the assumptions made about it — actual product sales, for example, rarely mirror their original forecast.

So if you enter the race to win knowing full well that your plan is flawed in some way (which you will discover only after you are in the middle of full-on execution), you will be well positioned to spot irregularities and take corrective action.

People who assume their plan will work are not prepared to shift when it doesn’t; their feet are stuck in mud, unable to recover from unexpected body blows.

2. If you’re broken you know action speaks louder than words

Broken demands action. Broken can’t be productive by pontificating or exercising the intellect; by merely thinking about what has to be done to create a higher level of performance and better results — the brain can’t DO anything.

The only way better outcomes are produced is by taking decisive action in the face of uncertainty; without knowing if what you do will produce the result you want.

Broken promotes the strategy of trying; making as many attempts as you can to accommodate the impact of real world events on your plan, because if you don’t try, little happens in terms of returning to winning ways. You get stuck believing that eventually your original plan will see that light of day.

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.” — Albert Einstein

Broken demands that you act first and think second and that you TRY incessantly.

3. If you’re broken you know you have to work harder than others

Broken requires hard, excruciating and often painful work. Broken can’t be fixed by slight-of-hand or by finesse; the appropriate solution often cannot be found neatly or elegantly.

Successful broken strategies are not produced by sophisticated algorithms that cleverly manipulate the independent variables at play, rather they are created by hard work put in by individuals who are unafraid to get dirty.

4. If you’re broken you know that you’ve got to constantly keep moving

Broken requires competence in juggling. Broken solutions are rarely singular; they’re not produced by a single cause. For example, an underperforming product rarely happens because of one breakdown in the go-to-market chain. It’s not just a price, customer communications, supply or value proposition issue but is most likely a mixture of all of them to varying degrees.

Fixing broken, therefore requires a balancing touch to skillfully mix a bit of this with a bit of that — revise the value proposition to communicate uniqueness among the competition, adjust the price accordingly and modify customer communication tactics.

Broken generally requires synthesis and integration; a TWEAK mentality that applies many potential solutions simultaneously rather than rely on the traditional sequential approach of try this >> study the results >> try something else.

5. If you’re broken you know that you will make mistakes and you must learn how to turn them to your advantage

Broken creates insane loyalty.

The popular notion is that getting things right the first time is the ultimate goal; avoiding mistakes and errors is the way to achieve high levels of performance. In business avoiding mistakes eliminates the need for rework which in turn mitigates against margin dilution. In one’s career, when you don’t make mistakes your veneer as an unblemished professional is maintained.

Well, I’m afraid to say that mistakes are here to stay — humans and technology don’t always perform the way we expect — so we need to find a way to leverage them for success.

Being broken forces us to do just that. It prepares us for the fact that events will not always go the way we intended, and it drives us to salvage something from the screw-up that will place is in a better position than if the mistake never happened.

Being broken makes us recovery experts. It teaches us that there IS a way to turn a soured event into an amazingly successful experience. It teaches about the power of surprise and the unexpected.

6. If you’re broken you know you must depend on relationships with others

Broken results in a deep respect for relationships because if you don’t have a circle of trusted friends you’re disadvantaged. Broken people understand they can’t achieve anything substantial as an “only child” but rather through the collective efforts of their tribe.

Broken is real; beauty is superficial. Real delivers results; beauty is a distraction.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 7.8.19 at 03:13 am by Roy Osing
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July 1, 2019

Why success demands that you are out-of-step with others

Source: Unsplash

Why success demands that you are out of step with others.

How many degrees do we need? What academic credentials should we gather, and from which institution?

What courses should we take to attract potential employers?

Who should we hang out with to take advantage of their network?

Why are there so many people with amazing degrees doing jobs that are way below their qualifications — taxi drivers with PhD’s?

How can I climb the ladder when there are so many other people who want the same thing?

How can I get noticed in my company and show what I am capable of?

I want to take on more responsibility and prove that I am worthy of a promotion: how do I get it done?

So many questions behind the challenge to be successful, and so many opinions on how to achieve success — and here’s mine.

I have seen many people with incredible academic backgrounds fail to reach their potential.

I have seen many highly skilled professionals fail to move up in an organization and achieve their career goals.

I have seen experienced managers and leaders not rewarded for their contributions.

Is Google your best friend?

And, in my view, the common denominator in all of these circumstances is the fact that most people generally tend to practise rote; they follow the established doctrine of their trade.

When approaching a challenge, they employ the toolset that everyone else uses. When facing a “How should I do it?” question, they go to Google for the most commonly used approach.

And they hunt for a best practice; a method that has worked for others that they hope will work in their particular circumstances. And they try to copy it.

Copying what others do has no long term redeeming value and being in-step with the crowd is a formula to define YOU as a common version of everyone in it — welcome to your role as a member of a common denominator.

Join the out-of-step crowd

In my experience, I have seen success follow out-of-step people; those who reject crowd thinking and find best practices repugnant.

People who consider a Goggle approach as a solution to morph to be a better fit for their particular situation.

People who are constantly asking themselves “How can I do this different than everyone else?”

People who look for weird, off-the-wall methods and outcomes as an expression of their individuality.

Out-of-step people make the world an interesting place to be. And they are rewarded by receiving the recognition and reward they deserve.

Think DiFFERENT

My message to you: everyday when you get out of bed, decide that you will do something — some little thing — that is different than the in-step crowd.

If you make ‘different thinking’ part of your daily routine eventually it will become part of your persona and will begin to govern the outcomes you deliver.

And success will follow. I guarantee it…

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 7.1.19 at 04:12 am by Roy Osing
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