the contemporary shopping lifestyle

Sometimes in life it’s all about me, me, me and whether you’re the kind of person who fights that or is comfortable with that, we can all do with a reality check every now and then. A great way of shocking your system to make you realise what is important in life is to do something for someone else, whether that be a small act of kindness or a show of gratitude. And there’s no better time to start than right now.

Here are some great ways to do something good for someone today (in no particular order)

1. Say thank you
2. Tell someone how much you care about them
3. Hold a door open
4. Let someone out in traffic
5. Offer to carry someone’s bags
6. Offer to do a chore at home that you wouldn’t usually do
7. Plan a surprise meal for someone special
8. Tell someone you love them
9. Spend some time with someone, doing what they want to do
10. Pay for someone else’s shopping
11. Write them a letter
12. Create a video or photo slideshow for them
13. Offer someone a lift
14. Talk to someone
15. Smile at someone

I know this article is short but you don’t need to explain the idea of doing something good for someone, it just makes sense; we just need reminding every now and then.

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About the Author
My name is Ben and you can find more posts like this at my blog www.thenewhorizonsproject.co.uk. The New Horizons Project is a blog that focuses on positive thinking, success, and motivation with a sprinkling of unusual influences, including films, martial arts, eastern philosophies, and Buddhism. It will challenge you to see the world differently.

I was sitting at home last week watching television with my wife when we stumbled upon a show that she had enjoyed watching in the past, so we left it on. I wasn’t particular interested in the programme myself but the theme of this certain episode was the 7 deadly sins and this, as with most things nowadays, got me to thinking. How many of us live our lives unaware that we are committing one or more of these vices?

The 7 deadly sins, for those of you who aren’t clear on the background history, are a list of vices or sins used in early Christian teachings to help educate and inform all Christian followers of the immoral sins that the common man was prone to. There is, according to wikipedia, no listing in the bible of the these sins, also known as the capital vices or cardinal sins, but Pope Gregory I used them to great effect in the 6th century to make the followers of the Roman Catholic Church aware of the main mortal sins and vices that would bring eternal damnation in the after life. Nice!

It was Pope Gregory I who revised the list of 7 deadly sins to those that we know today. They are…

1. Lust – this is understood as obsessive or excessive thoughts and desires usually of a sexual nature.
2. Gluttony – is the over-indulgence or over-consumption to the point of waste.
3. Greed – this is similar to lust and gluttony but is primarily concerned with money and gaining material goods.
4. Sloth – is the often described as laziness or indifference but can be also linked to not using one’s talents or gifts.
5. Wrath – is the uncontrollable feelings of hatred and angry towards both ourselves as well as others.
6. Envy – like greed, envy is described as an insatiable desire for someone else’s material goods or success
7. Pride – this was known as the most serious of the sins listed by Pope Gregory I and was considered as the sin that would lead on to the other 6 deadly sins.

Just take a moment to look again at the list above and being honest with yourself, tick off the ones that you are guilty of. Do you over-indulge, are you greedy, always wanting more, do you misuse your talents in life, and are you envious of others around you? You might not commit these sins everyday of your life but you maybe guilty of being too greedy or full of pride at times.

Now as a Buddhist myself, I do not believe that committing these sins will bring we an eternity in the fires of hell but I do believe that by perpetrating some of these human natures I am bringing suffering not only upon myself but also causing others to suffer to. By being lustful, slothful, or envious of others I cause my self pain and misery that will restrict the happiness I can experience in my life. By being greedy, over-indulging, or angry towards others I cause others to feel pain and to understand suffering, which will minimise both their happiness as well as ultimately my own. Going through life unhappy and causing pain to others is clearly no way to live, so why is it that people spend their lives this way?

If you can associate with any of the sin or vices listed above and you want to remove them from your daily life then you can do so by focusing of one at a time. I have written about changing a habit in a month previously in my article, How to Focus your Enthusiam, and you can use the same technique here. For the next 30 days focus on one sin and everyday day try to concentrate on doing the opposite of that particular vice. You could try meditating on the positive things every morning, writing yourself little notes that you can refer back to throughout the day to motivate you. You could even write a positive statement and set it as your PC’s screen saver.

Here are some things to focus on.

1. Lust – rather than thinking about your sexual desires and urges focus on improving the quality of all of your relationship. Try spending more time with loved ones and simply enjoy their company. If you find this hard then try exercising or something else that will help you forget about your desires.
2. Gluttony – in the year of the Ethiopian famine in 1984 the European Union spent £256,000,000 on destroying 2 millions tons of wasted fruit and vegetables. Before you prepare the big meal or by that chocolate bar or piece of cake think about whether you really need it and whether you’ll actually eat it all. If you know that you always leave food after meals then prepare less. Focus on only eating and preparing what you need rather than what you want.
3. Greed – instead of thinking about obtaining lots of material goods and more money try focusing on giving to others. Root through your stuff and selling some of it on eBay or have a yard sale but rather than keeping the money for yourself or buying more stuff, give the money to a local charity or buy someone in need something that they can really use.
4. Sloth – rather than spending the month watching television or sitting in front of the computer wasting time needless surfing the internet for things your note interested in go and outside and get into nature, do some exercise, read a book, learning a new language, or write a story.
5. Wrath – if you are the kind of person who angers easily then focus on calming yourself or on trying to see the good side of people. Be more compassionate in everything you do for 30 days and see how much your mood improves. Read me article on compassion Compassion for Other – a lost necessity for more inspiration.
6. Envy – to help cure envy, so to speak, try to enjoy being happy for people’s success and celebrate with them on their achievements. A good dose of compassion is a great way to help overcome envy.
7. Pride – is something that many of us have too much of. To help overcome pride, try to focus on the magnitude of the world and universe around you. Notice how much of a small cog you are in the universe’s giant machine you actually are.

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About the Author
My name is Ben and you can find more posts like this at my blog www.thenewhorizonsproject.co.uk. The New Horizons Project is a blog that focuses on positive thinking, success, and motivation with a sprinkling of unusual influences, including films, martial arts, eastern philosophies, and Buddhism. It will challenge you to see the world differently.

Often times I will find myself saying the following two phrases while trying to motivate someone: “Turn on that Mental Switch,” and “Unleash that Animal within you.”

If you didn’t already know it, we are all animals. Yes, human beings are sentient beings, but that does not mean that we let our minds and bodies go to waste. We as a race have been able to accomplish amazing things with our body and mind, however the “layman” or the average guy still goes to a 9-5 job, does what his boss tells him to, and is amazingly unhappy.

This unhappiness (in my view) is directly linked to a lack of challenge. We are always “fed up” with life’s problems, and “fed up” with our inability to pursue our dreams. But in reality, we are afraid of pursuing our dreams. I am at a very delicate age in my life where I’m supposed to be pursuing a position in a large company where I perform some sort of grunt work for a high salary and stay there for five years “just for the experience.” Well, I won’t have any of that. I’m not doing anything “just because everyone else does it.”

Yesterday, I was talking to a certified personal trainer and we were disagreeing on training methodologies. He kept talking and talking and talking about things I already knew about but did not agree with it. At one point I said: “But just like with the rest of my life, I always ask myself, do I really believe in what I’m doing or am I just doing it because it’s a system that’s been in place and works.”

To that statement, my friend responded, “But what does belief have to do with anything? Working out is a tool, nothing more or less, to what your goals are.”

That is exactly where I disagree. In reality, any program will work for you if you believe in it enough and are consistent with it. You will get your six pack if you stay on that machine long enough and actually work hard as opposed to talking on your cell phone and complaining how you are unable to achieve your results.

That is why I spent 6 months bodybuilding with nothing to show for it. I did not believe in the routine and so I was bored and was probably doing half the things wrong. Something like Crossfit, on the other hand, makes perfect sense to me because of my martial arts background. I bet you if I walked into the dojo right now, my Sensei would be blown away with my level of conditioning. If I were doing bodybuilding for the past two years, then I would go in there and get my butt kicked by a complete beginner.

What are you doing with your life?

So, yes the phrase “different strokes for different folks,” holds water. But if that’s true, then why the hell are all of us doing the same exact things? Why are we all going out and getting internships in companies we don’t want to work in and are unhappy? Why are we all working at restaurants waiting tables when our real passion is acting? Why are we all listening to our bosses when we have better ideas than he has?

The other day one of my friends had a very interesting note on Facebook. She listed out all the things that she wanted to do growing up. Here was my response to her note:

Hey, you can certainly follow through with all of those, but you don’t need to hit them one by one. For example, here are some of the skills I use with Shah Training:

1. Writing - Writing my posts
2. Film - Filming and editing my videos
3. Marketing - Marketing and promoting the website
4. Business - Expanding and developing Shah Training into a brand and business
5. Acting - As a brand, I need to develop and show off a personality. I’m just not another “gym” I’m a person with a message
6. Athlete - All my workouts are athletic in nature
7. Teaching - Personal trainer, speeches, and writing
8. Fighter - Although at this point i do not want to be a pro fighter, I do incorporate a lot of fight training into my workouts and see it as a great way of getting n shape
9. Psychologist - There is an element of “fear” in my workouts, and so my trainees go through a lot of psychological s**t that helps them break through to a whole different level of living. Also, I consult my friends with problems.

So yeah, basically I’ve combined a whole bunch of skills into one. When starting this site, I just wanted to incorporate writing, my love of fitness, and marketing into a project. All the other skills just sort of came into effect as time went on.

Good luck!

So my point to my friend was that you CAN do everything you want in life. You just have to be creative, have an action plan, and hang in there when things get tough.

About the Author

Parth Shah is a Strength and Fitness Consultant specializing in developing practical, sustainable fitness solutions for his clients. He is currently going through his own personal physical transformation. His thoughts, ideas, and philosophy can be found on his website, ShahTraining.com. (Feed - http://feeds.feedburner.com/shahtraining/UQuk)

In this day and age it’s becoming ever more important to manage the perceptions that others have of us. This is even true in an age of ubiquitous media, social networking, insta-uploads, tagging and blogging. Before you know it, that heat of the moment comment or deed can be captured by someone’s digital camera or video and broadcast out to the whole world via, Facebook, twitter, or blog posts. And once it’s out there it’s out there for good. Understanding how much of ourselves is online for public viewing is itself difficult to determine - who has time to trawl all the social networking sites trying to track down any personal content we may have had ’shared’ to the world by our unwitting friends (or ‘witting’ [is that a word?] foes). In this article I will describe two ways you can track your online presence; one DIY approach and one using a new startup that will do the work for you.

The quick and dirty way to find out what the Web has on you is to set up a Google alert. Google alerts are automatic keyword searches that run at specified intervals and any such search will send you the results straight to your email inbox. For example, I have google alerts set up for my name, my blog and also several keywords that relate to the content of my blog. Every day I get an email from google that informs me if any new content has been made that features any of the keywords I specify.

The second, and more comprehensive approach is to use one of the many up and coming companies out there that provide several different ways to track and manage your online presence. One such company, called Garlik, will look you up online and see what’s out there for public consumption. On their website they claim: “Garlik’s DataPatrol helps people take control of their personal information and protect themselves against identity theft and financial fraud…”.

The research Garlik has done shows how such online personal information can and has been used:

Recent research has shown that more and more [people] are making decisions based on digital status. Already 16% have chosen their new home based on how their prospective neighbours appear online. 1 in 5 (20%) have researched a prospective boss online before accepting a job and 32% have searched online to find out more about trades people and professionals, from plumbers to lawyers, before hiring them to do a job.

Once you sign up to their services, you get:

• Continuous monitoring of the Web and other Internet sources for your personal and sensitive information
• Weekly report updates with easy to use tools to manage your results
• Alerts if we find your personal and sensitive information exposed online
• Quarterly report on your local area
• Expert support & advice if your personal information is at risk

Garlick provides tools for companies, or individuals and even a neat little Facebook app called QDOS that will give you a broad overview of your online profile across four dimensions:

• Popularity

Who you know and the extent of your online network.

• Impact

How much people listen to what you say online.

• Activity

What you do online e.g. shop, chat, blog.

• Individuality

How easy you are to find online according to your name, your age etc…

So if your having difficulties changing jobs, gaining a promotion, selling stuff on Ebay or Amazon, or even getting a date!, you may want to check out what the WWW is saying about you…after all, online you’re nothing but a number, and numbers are the easiest thing in the world to track…

About the Author

Steve Munroe works as a technology consultant at IBM, He lives in the UK, runs, plays guitar and once, long ago did a PhD in computer science.

Steve is the author of the Blog: Work-Life Innovation, which explores ways of working smarter and living fuller. The blog focuses on working creatively in order to find the space both temporally and psychologically to be able to enjoy the really important things in life, which for Steve are: family, learning, travel, excitement, health and creativity.

If you look closely there are life lessons in everything, from music, to movies, to life experiences, to the internet. The trick with anything like this is to know what to look for and where to look.  Once you know what to keep your eyes open for, life lessons can appear all the time, all over the place. One of my favourite places to find life lessons is in movies. I’m a big sci-fi fan and thought that I could use one of my favourite sci-fi trilogies to help show how you can find life lessons in anything if you just know where to look.

To me every film no matter what it is about holds a potential wealth of thinking and if you open your eyes and your ears you can usually find them. Some film makers intentionally try to put symbolism and philosophical ideas into their movies in order to get the viewer to think and some would rather just have their audience enjoy their time watching their work, The Matrix is one of those films which is simply stuffed full of great thinking that has been intentionally put there just for you.

Lesson 1: Have self belief.

Don’t think you are, know you are. - Morpheus

How many of us have self belief in our abilities? I’m not talking about arrogance because that is a different thing entirely, what I’m talking about is the faith that you need to have in yourself sometimes to attempt things you have never tried before or those things that you fear. This kind of belief in yourself is built on over time and in that respect is like trust, developed gradually not suddenly.

In this scene in The Matrix, Morpheus is trying to get Neo to stop thinking about how good he should be and start to be as good as he thinks he is. We can all be guilty of this at times, we start to be consumed with thinking about how good we are or how good we want to be and never actually live up to that expectation because we’re consumed with thought rather than action. Thinking you are something or someone is what most people spend their lives doing. Knowing that you are something or someone is something many of us seldom do. Stop dreaming the dream and start living it.

There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path. - Morpheus

TheNewHorizonsProject.co.uk on Self Belief: “I Can” The Can do Attitude

Lesson 2: Life is Impermanent.

Everything that has a beginning has an end. - The Oracle

Dictionary.com defines Impermanent as: Not lasting or durable; not permanent.

Many people believe that things are forever and become attached to them. Then, when as with everything in life these things are lost, or destroyed or simply disappear they are shocked and devastated, unable to deal with the grief of loosing that thing that they have come to love. The Oracle’s use of this statement, “Everything that has a beginning, has an end” is used to try and get Neo to see that life (The Matrix) in impermanent, it is not long lasting or permanent. As in the life, The Matrix (being designed that way) will not last and will eventually come to an end.

The important lesson to be learnt here is simple. Begin to accept that everything in life will eventually come to an end. You will not be a child forever, eventually you will pay off your mortgage, your boss won’t be mean to you forever, friends and loved ones will move away, you will eventually win through in your endeavors if you stick at them. The trick to living with impermanence is to minimise your attachments to things because when you are not emotionally attached to things you do not suffer and mourn when they are gone.

TheNewHorizonsProject.co.uk on Impermanence: The Pre-Occupation with you – A Different View Point

Lesson 3: Denial is not honesty, no matter how you dress it up.

Denial is the most predictable of all human responses. - The Architect

Denial is something we can all relate with. We either deny our involvement in situations or we refuse to accept the truth when it’s staring us right in the face, whatever your preferred type of denial we are all guilty of too much denial in our lives. By failing to accept our responsibilities or by not accepting our faults and failures we not only hurt others but we hurt ourselves because we are not being honest in our lives. The Architect, in this scene, is showing his contempt for humans and pointing out their most useless and destructive response to life.

Maybe there is something in your life that you have being failing to accept the truth about. Maybe you’ve been telling yourself false truths because the reality is far too hard to deal with; either way you’re suffering from denial. The best way to over come this is to focus on the positive things in life and also to try and be more honest with yourself.

About the Author
My name is Ben and you can find more posts like this at my blog www.thenewhorizonsproject.co.uk. The New Horizons Project is a blog that focuses on positive thinking, success, and motivation with a sprinkling of unusual influences, including films, martial arts, eastern philosophies, and Buddhism. It will challenge you to see the world differently.