Nurture from Within To Improve Your Life in Anything

Those whose career is stuck in their field, including many beginner traders, often seek for help with a narrow focus on acquiring specific skills to advance their careers. Yet, what I learn from helping many others is that skills and knowledge in specific domain can only carry a person a bit further. The better solution is to improve the person from within in terms of physical and mental health such that the person becomes more capable in all aspect in life which, of course, including career development.

Physical Health is the Foundation to Better Mental Health

Many young adults I trained for trading firms lack the physical health to put the hours they need to learn new things. Their employers would not wait for them to improve themselves. If there were two new recruits, the one who can dash to the minimum requirement first gets the job. It means being able to learn many new things quickly. Scientifically, it is known that those people who exercise regularly and rigorously can learn faster and better. The irony, however, is that people who desperately want to improve their financial situation and develop their careers are often those who do not take care of their physical health.

It does not take extreme measures to improve physical fitness to acceptable level. What it takes is making physical activities and exercises a routine in your daily lives. Just 15 minutes cardio exercise a day will go a long way. Many people have the wrong idea about doing exercise in the first place. The whole meme of going to a gym being the equivalent of doing exercise is so wrong. In case you wonder, yes, exercise for fitness can be done pretty much anywhere.

A related issue happens among the adults over the age of 30. Human bodies are not built to last beyond 50 to 60 years. Regular rigorous exercise is one of the key factors between a healthy life or one crumbling slowly over time. This problem is even worse than the one with young adults because older people must exercise to slow down the aging effects. Many older people understand that they need to exercise but they fail to do it regularly. There is really no excuse for them to not taking care of themselves. All it takes is set aside a little bit of time daily so that you can take care of yourself. It is not too much to ask for, isn’t it?

Instead of Eating Healthy Try Eating Healthier

When we talk about physical health, a discussion about diet cannot be avoided. First, eating more health is a relative term. Avoiding junk food does not mean that you have to go all organic or avoiding all fatty stuff. Eating just a bit healthier with more vegetables and less junk food is already a good start.

Second, avoiding soft drinks and sweets for two weeks you will no longer crave for sugary stuff. Drinking enough water daily by itself is already a healthy habit.

Third, eating frozen vegetables may not be as healthy as eating the fresh ones but it is better than eating fries or heavily processed carbohydrates.

In short, to improve your diet, work with things you have access to and be creative. There is no need of a straight meal plan. What is needed is using your brain to make smart choices when it comes to eating healthy.

Mental Strength Can Be Trained

The shrinking of overall attention span and patience are the two biggest problems I have seen among young traders and pretty much majority of the young male adults. Their inability to focus combined with the lack of patience makes them not able to acquire any advanced skills or crafts. This becomes obvious when something of interest caught their attention, they would be able to work on it fiercely but the passion disappears quickly. The usual choice these young adults made is to move onto the next thing that interest them. At the end, they develop no expertise in anything yet they think they know everything.

Meditation are known to develop our ability to focus. It takes time though to improve someone with very little attention span to start with. In order to get anything of importance being done, be that analyzing something complex or learning something difficult, the ability to focus our minds on the matter for at least half an hour is a necessity. in other words, we are talking about training from one minute attention span to full concentration for at least 30 minutes. This can take months to happen as rewiring of the brain is a physical process much like training our bodies to lift heavier things.

Patience can be managed and eventually developed when one has stronger ability to focus. Hence it is not a consequence of having stronger attention span. Better ability to focus is often a pre-requisite for the development of patience but there are exceptions.

Patience can be developed through many means. Learn to accept the world being out of our control through reflection of everything we do and everything happening around us is one way. Practice to suppress the urge to speak by listening carefully to every word another person is saying and then thinking through what you want to say before you deliver your words is another effective way.

Opening Up Your Mind

When we are doing better physically and mentally, we are capable in understanding things better and more quickly. It also helps us to cooperate with others better thanks to our more positive attitude. With an open mind towards what is possible in the future, you open the door to possibilities that would otherwise pass by you. Some people call this luck. Maybe part of it is luck but your effort in creating the condition to allow you to perform better at anything contributes significantly in making things happen too.

Be mindful of your own physical and mental wellness. Then take the time and effort to nurture them from within. You will profit from the benefits for years to come.

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