If you’re ready for BIG benefits that can come with your second adulthood, this is a time to seek new territory and explore ideas and goals within a simple concept of self-help. Whether you have reached retirement already, or are heading that way eventually, Seniors today consider looking to new challenges that engage and inspire creativity and curiosity, with a ripple effect of many health benefits. All you need is an open mind and a willingness to engage in challenging new activities. You will gain higher self-esteem, a greater sense of meaning, and an opportunity to find even more purpose in your life. An excerpt below (from the article linked at the end of this blog) is a good teaser!
Change One Thing:
Bill O’Hanlon is an author and therapist who popularized the simple idea of changing just one thing at a time. His methods were called “possibility therapy” and according to his view, people don’t make big changes all at once. Rather, they change just one thing at a time and that one thing opens the door to new things that the person can change and so on and so forth. The genius of this philosophy is that it shrinks the challenge of self-improvement down to manageable baby steps that anyone can handle.
A person who wants to conquer a particular fear may recognize that their fear is holding them back from experiencing things that they’d like to experience. O’Hanlon’s perspective was that rather than trying to conquer the fear, a big, multi-faceted project in most cases, it would be better to simply make some small behavioral change related to the fear. For example, a person who is afraid of traveling abroad, but who wants to travel abroad, may go to the airport once a week, a place they otherwise would never visit. This once-a-week outing would lead to a cascade of other changes and experiences. A person who is afraid to contact an estranged loved one may start the process of change by volunteering at a local homeless shelter to get to know and understand people better in general. The goal of this method is for the person to do one thing different than what they would normally do in order to move toward the desired change without necessarily knowing the exact path to that goal ahead of time.
Change Your Mindset:
Intention plays an important role in changing your mindset. Intention is the vehicle that people use to go from one state of existence toward a personal growth goal… In addition to setting an intention, positive affirmations can help change a prevailing mindset. Of particular value are positive affirmations that follow the rules of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). NLP affirmations are calibrated to speak directly to your unconscious mind in a language that it can understand to yield the maximum benefits.
Rather than just reading a book and doing positive affirmations, one of the best ways to foster personal growth and self-improvement is by seeking out new experiences. New experiences can benefit people of any age, but most people have a need for specific experiences. These are experiences that cause a person to confront a fear or overcome a long-standing prejudice. Often, people who engage in these kinds of experiences enter into a mental/emotional state known as “flow”. In this state of mind, the person feels fully engaged in the experience they’re having and they often lose touch with their day-to-day problems. There are 9 components to “flow” that define the experience and the state of mind:
Follow this LINK for an article that simplifies this process. Scroll down in the article to find the details behind the Change One Thing idea for an easy plan to make your life a new adventure!