30 days: Change your habits, Change your life

“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat
those two impostors just the same; […]
yours is the Earth and

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everything that’s in it, And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my
son!”
Keep your attention on what you want and keep moving
forward.
Do you remember the saying, “In six months we are going
to laugh about it!”? 
Why not laugh already now?
This phrase
actually got me through my International Business studies. I
remember many nights before the exams at 3 a.m.—a few hours
before the exam—when I was totally stressed out in the dorm room
of my friend Jorge and on the verge of a breakdown (failing those
exams would have meant dropping out of college or worse still… be
thrown out) and he always just laughed and said, 
“Marc, in six
months we are going to laugh about tonight!”
We actually even
now—20 years later—still laugh about those stories. Try this
technique! I hope it helps you as it helped me!
Action Steps:
1. Think back on other hard times in your life and how you got out of
it and maybe even found something positive in it after some time.
MAPPING LIFE:
1. Make a timeline of your life—from birth until now. Mark every key
event in your life on the line. All and any moments that changed
your life.
2. Write down the great moments, the successes above the timeline.
3. Write down the challenges, the tragedies, the failures below the
timeline.
4. Examine the events below the line and write the positive effects of
them above the line.
(For example, somebody close to you died. A positive could be that
you value your life more. Or perhaps you got fired from a job. This
opened doors to an even better job that you have now.)

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93
Get a coach
Make the most of yourself....for that is all there is of you.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
After having a huge impact in business life, coaching is also
becoming more and more available for private persons in the form of
life coaching. Many people have the wrong concept that you only
take on a coach when something is wrong, but people like Eric
Schmidt actually take on coaches to get even better, or to have a
neutral, objective partner with whom they can bounce back and forth
their ideas and who keeps them grounded.
A coach can help you to achieve clarity on what you really want in
life, encourage you to keep on going when you would normally stop,
help set better and more rewarding goals for yourself, get results
more easily and quickly, overcome fear, communicate much more
effectively, experience a faster personal development, overcome
self-sabotaging habits, find your true purpose and to live aligned with
your true values.
During the coaching process, you will learn to take responsibility for
everything in your life and take better decisions. Coaching achieves
extraordinary results because you and your coach become a team,
focusing on your goals and accomplishing more than you could do
alone. You take more action, think bigger, and get the job done,
because of the accountability the coach provides. A coach knows
how to help you to make better decisions, set the best goals and
restructure your professional and personal life for maximum
productivity. Coaching works because it brings out the best in you. A
coach is trained to help you find your own best answers and will

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support you in the course of that process. Coaching is usually done
during regular, weekly sessions by telephone, skype or in person
which last between 30 and 60 minutes. In every session coach and
coachee work on the coachee’s goals, creating options and setting a
plan of action for the coachee’s next steps. While working toward the
coachee’s goal, the coach also works on the coachee’s personal
development. You can find coaches, for example, in online
directories of Coach U or the International Coach Federation (ICF).
Most coaches offer complementary strategy sessions. That’s how
you and your coach get to know each other and find out if you are
comfortable working together. Chemistry is crucial in a coaching
relationship.