If you know what I’m talking about, then I really suggest you to take some actions – it may not seem like this from the first glance, but in fact exercising everyday doesn’t take THAT much effort and in the long run exercising everyday is really easier than sinking in the feelings of guilt and low self – esteem month after month, year after year.

I wrote this article with intention to help you to start exercising everyday. However, these are general advices – I’m not a professional coach or health specialist, and this article is based mostly on what I’ve learned from my own experience or from advices of various people/

There are many different people who want to start exercising everyday for many different reasons, but I really hope that no matter what your reason is, you will find something useful in this article.

1. Understand why you want to exercise everyday and what you want to achieve.

I’ve noticed that many people have only fuzzy feeling that they should exercise everyday, mixed with guilt for not doing that. Please understand me correctly – it is better to exercise with this fuzzy mindset than not to exercise at all and sit on the sofa because you don’t know what you want. Don’t fall for the trap of this type of procrastination – you can always gain clarity along the way.What you need to understand is that clarity of what you want and why you want it really helps. It not only motivates you, but also helps you to find the best approach for getting the results you want.

As I said before, there are many different people with many different reasons and goals. One of the most popular goals is to gain ideal weight and to maintain it. Or it may be to recover after some trauma with specific exercises. Maybe to finally learn roundoff -> backhandspring -> backflip in order to get into cheerleading team. Or maybe you always wanted to be a contortionist or a dancer… Or maybe you simply want to establish a habit of doing some basic exercise in order to be healthy and to have more energy in the long run.. And the list goes on and on.

It is important for you to clearly ask yourself what you want, because you can’t hit the target if you don’t know where target is, right? Even if you want to exercise for ten minutes everyday and you don’t have any further goals with it, clarity will help you because you will understand that in order to do that you need to build a new habit, and for that you can use various techniques (one of which I will shortly explain later)..

By the way, if your goal sounds naïve and doesn’t make sense for other people – like you simply want to do splits, you don’t know why and you are not planning to become contortionist and to make money from it, relax and don’t over-rationalize. If you always dreamed on being able to do split and this will make you happier, then just go for it!

2.Throw your excuses to a recycle bin.

When it comes to exercising, people have many excuses. Most common excuses are not having enough time (…when the truth is that no matter how busy you are, you can always find 10 or 15 minutes to move a little bit everyday if you really want to) or not having enough energy and being too tired to exercise ( Gosh, how are you planning to gain more energy? Sitting on the sofa eating candy? Read “Powerful sleep” e-book to learn about connection between energy and exercising… In short – exercising regularly and living active lifestyle will give you more energy than watching TV for three hours a day seven days a week or playing WOW nonstop… ) or not having “the right mood” ( Who told you that you need to have the “right mood”? Go and exercise no matter what your mood is, yeah it’s that simple!).

Think about it – what’s the point of running this cycle forever and ever:

Thinking that you should exercise -> Telling yourself some lame excuse -> Procrastinating -> Feeling bad about yourself

If you will run this everyday, it will only bring you guilt and low self – esteem. Seriously, constant inner conflicts and thinking “I should do it” and not doing it steals huge amounts of energy from you – the same energy that could have been used for achieving real and measurable results. What I suggest for you is to either throw your excuses into a recycle bin, or throw your goal of exercising everyday, and live happily ever after either exercising or not thinking about it at all.

How do you think, which option is more beneficial for you in the long run?

3. Start TODAY!

We all know what procrastination is.

“I’ll start tomorrow/on Monday/from the New Year” – this one is very common when it comes to exercising.

When you are procrastinating in this way, it seems for you that it’s nothing because it won’t hurt if you will start one day or one week later. Yeah, I guess it wouldn’t hurt – if you would really start then. The problem is that every time when you are saying for yourself “I’ll start tomorrow” you are strengthening the habit of procrastinating and putting it on tomorrow’s to do list instead of really exercising – that’s why when tomorrow will come, you will say for yourself “I’ll start tomorrow” again. Day after day, tomorrow after tomorrow you won’t notice how weeks, months and even years will pass – I’m saying this from my own experience.

And the only way to stop “I’ll start tomorrow” cycle is to actually start today – do anything, but do it today (you can even read the rest of this article later).

Get going. Start today.

4. Exercising is a pleasant thing (and if it’s not, then make it so!).

I’ve noticed that most people tend to look at exercising as a torture. Well if you are one from those people and you really want to establish and maintain a habit of exercising everyday, I suggest you to change your attitude. Easiest way to change your attitude is to find some form of exercises that you really like and you are passionate about.

Maybe you already know what it is. If you know what kind of sports you really like and you have no specific goals except to move a little bit everyday, when I would suggest you to simply reschedule your time in a way that you would be able to engage in these activities everyday or at least few times a week (..You can always come up with something classic like running for other days of week or something that meets your specific goals such as exercises designed to get six-pack).

It may require not only an investment of time but also an investment of money – but from my point of view it’s a good way to spend it and if you really want to exercise everyday, you can always find a way to cut some other expenses (…such as don’t eat at Mc’Donalds so often or don’t buy tons of potatoes chips.. Or spend less money on alcohol or killing yourself (…whoops, mistype, I guess I wanted to say “cigarettes” here).

However, if you are one of those “Sport is not for me! What does it mean “why?”, I hate it that’s why!” people, when I suggest you to explore possible options a little bit. Maybe you will surprise yourself? Who knows, maybe you hate team sports but you’ll fall in love with running or yoga, or maybe a little bit of competition is all you need? Or maybe you want something funkier as dancing or something with traditions and philosophy – martial arts, for example?

No matter from where your association “Sport = torture” arises, you can always find something completely different from that – something that you’ll really like. Oh c’mon, give it a try!

In case you have some specific goals, like to loose weight or to make your bottom look hot, I suggest you not to get attached to the idea that you may achieve your goal only in one way – the one that looks boring for you. Just do some research; there are many ways to burn calories and shape your figure!

If there is no other way and you have to complete some specific set of exercises everyday in order to achieve your goal, there is still something you can do (…because it just doesn’t makes sense to keep this “Oh my God, not again!” attitude, don’t you think so?). You can change your associations towards that exercise set. Try to find something pleasant in your exercises. You can change your environment a little bit in order to do that – maybe to put some nice music on, or dress in nice exercising outfit. Or you can focus on exercises and try to feel joy of movement itself – joy that your body is alive and it becomes more flexible, or stronger, or healthier. Or maybe that tiredness after exercising and feeling proud of yourself that you did them can be that pleasant thing for you.

..and if you can’t even imagine how it can feel pleasant in any way, I bet you can always find person who enjoys doing this kind of exercises, and if they can explain it to you why they like them, it will be easier for you to create pleasant associations yourself. For example, you want to do splits – the problem is that you hate flexibility exercises. How crazy a person should be to like all that pain and soreness?! Meanwhile, there are a lot of people who enjoy flexibility exercises and contortion, because they associate pleasant feelings to it. Try talking to them and see stretching from their point of view. I really suggest you to do that, because it will be hard for you if you only like results you get, not the way you are going to achieve them – because results are in the future, and achieving them is in present moment. Remember, journey is the reward!

..And one important thing – keep in mind your health too – overtraining or training to exhaustion is not healthy, people! You want to increase your health and well being, not to get injuries, so please have some common sense with this!

5. Use 30 – Days trial method.

In my opinion, if you want to exercise everyday, easiest way to do that is to develop a habit of exercising everyday. Yes, I know that I’m genius and I should get a Nobel Prize

I think that easiest way to develop a new habit is to do a 30 – day trial. 30 day trial is very simple thing – that means that you commit to do something (in this case to exercise) everyday 30 days in a row no matter what. If you want to know more about 30 day trials, read Steve Pavlina’s article here:

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/04/30-days-to-success/

“Well why can’t I simply exercise everyday and that’s it?” – you can ask.

You can, but I really recommend you to do 30 day trial for establishing new habit. It is really easier to do it this way than to simply exercise everyday – because simply exercising everyday might not be as simple as it seems. 30 day trial is much easier because you make a clear commitment for a fixed amount of time – that means that in this way you get rid of all mental chatter like “Oh, I’ll start tomorrow” or “I’m tired today”, and also you know that you only have to do this for 30 days, so you can think “Oh okay, I’ve only 16 days left to do this and then I can quit if I want”. And the good thing is that after 30 days you should be able to see clear results and judge by yourself if it’s really what you want – and if you decide that you want to continue exercising everyday, then it will be simple because the habit will already be established, and you will only have to maintain it.

6. Make a plan.

When you decided to use 30 days trial method, don’t do things randomly – think about what you want and write a plan. Don’t worry about its efficiency or your lack of knowledge. There are many sophisticated methods how to achieve various exercising goals faster, and it’s very good if you know. You will do research on them later – now you need a plan which you can execute immediately. Write what you know (if you don’t know anything, remember what you did in physical education lessons in school and write a plan based on that knowledge). You will have time to gain knowledge and make corrections later.Once you’re done with designing you exercise routine,take your daily planner and plan the time when you want to exercise each day. Specific time – “in the evening” doesn’t count. Write it in your daily planner and set reminders for yourself. That’s it, you’re good to go!

It’s possible to happily exercise everyday without plan with specific times and reminders, but while you are establishing habit it will be a lot easier for you because it will leave little space for procrastination or rationalizing.

By the way, what helped me:

I made a table in MS Word (okay, that’s my dark secret – I don’t know how to do anything with MS Excel!), which contained 21 day (I was doing 21 day trial then), a column for each day, and all exercises for that day, a square for every exercise. Then I printed that table and put it on my room door, so I would see it very often. I bought a red pen, and every time when I would finish an exercise, I’d check it out from my table. The more days went by, the more “checked” signs I saw on the table… And my motivation to finish my trial without missing a day grew, because I felt happy every time I saw that table (…and as I said, I’ve been seing it really often ). For me it was very simple yet very effective method. I still have that table with all days marked with “checked” marks!

7. Start small.

Many people wants to take a leap that is too big for them – they were not exercising all their lives, and now suddenly they decide to train everyday like athletes who are preparing for Olympic Games. Yes, it may work if you have tremendous self discipline and determination. However, more common thing is that you will exercise for few days in the row and then you will get too overwhelmed and simply drop it. I really suggest you start small – you don’t have to exercise everyday for an hour, you can exercise for twenty minutes, or if this is too much for you then you can exercise for ten or even five minutes. It’s really better to exercise for five minutes everyday for 30 days in a row and then to exercise for the rest of your life than to exercise for one hour everyday for three days in a row and then drop it forever (or keep coming back and dropping it again and again, failing to establish a real habit of exercising everyday).

8. Surround yourself with the right people.

Yes, you can do everything all alone, but it is really easier if you have friends who like the same type of sports that you do. I suggest you to put some efforts to find some people who do the same thing you do and to keep in contact with them. If you are going to some kind of gym, simply say “Hi!” to someone you see there often. Google it – find some forums where fans of the same sport meet, or find someone on sites like http://www.43things.com who have the same exercising goals as you do and then contact them. Discuss your progress with them, organize some meet-ups to exercise together, offer a friendly competition or bet who will achieve a goal first, if your sport has competitions – invite someone to go together, and remember to share useful information and techniques which helped you. Amazing power lies in surrounding yourself with people who have the same goals – and who knows, maybe you’ll make some new life – long friends this way?

9. Find something that inspires you!

Find something that motivates and inspires you. Be creative!

I like flexibility and acrobatics, and my motivation goes up when I watch related videos on youtube, or when I watch some gymnastics competitions, or when I watch or read interviews with gymnasts or acrobats, or when I watch circus shows, or when I read articles or books about sports which involves psychological and philosophical aspects, or when I watch inspiring sports or martial arts related movies or even commercials. And I <3 quotes!

Find something that fires up sparkle in you, and then redesign your schedule and environment in a way that you would expose yourself to this information everyday.

..Don’t be so serious – a little bit (or a ton) of playfulness and creativity will bring you better results!

First, I want to ask you a question. Do you know what an acronym is? Well if you don’t, that’s ok, I wasn’t very attentive in English lessons either. An acronym is a word formed from the first letters of other words. What has it got to do with our topic? Word fear itself is an acronym – FEAR stands for False Experience Accepted as Real, and in my opinion, this is a great definition for this negative emotion. Things you are afraid haven’t happened yet. Or, to be more accurate, they did – in your imagination. But how does this process look in our simple everyday life?

Well, I guess it’s pretty obvious, especially with most common fears – like the fear of height. If you say “I am afraid of height”, that means not that you are afraid of height itself – you are afraid of falling from that height. There may be many reasons for this fear – maybe you’ve felt from height and injured yourself in the past, or maybe you’ve seen a movie about a terrible plane crash, or maybe… But it doesn’t matter what the reason is, the principle of fear itself is the same – you picture yourself (this could take only few seconds, and you may not even notice this process) falling or injured, and then comes this incredibly pleasant feeling when all your body freezes and sometimes you even can not speak clearly because you are paralyzed by your fear. But hey, wait a minute! Look around yourself. You haven’t felt yet and you are not injured – this is only your imagination playing with you. That’s obvious, right?

Now, let’s take a closer look what our false experiences accepted as real do for our lives. Let’s say, that you have a deeper and more complicated fear than the fear of height. Let’s say, you have a fear to fall in love. Of course, you are not afraid of falling in love itself – in fact, you want to fall in love. You are afraid of being hurt. You have all those cheesy minds in your head, like “What if s/he’ll stop loving me?”, “What if s/he’ll cheat on me?”, etc. Again, it doesn’t matter from where your fear rises – maybe you had heartbreak in the past, or maybe your mother simply told you that all men are pigs. It is still the same process – you imagine how your beloved one cheats on you, then you imagine how painful it would be for you, and then you are afraid to fall in love because of this imagined pain? Well, I’m not a psychic (yet ;P ), but I guess I can predict a few things… I think it will be very hard for you to have successful relationships. And if you are in relationship with the right person, even with the one who truly loves you, you won’t be happy. Why? Because the deeper you’ll fall in love, the more obsessed you will be with your cheesy thoughts – and this might very successfully ruin your relationship. And more bad news – if you don’t change your thinking manner, you may suffer your entire life because of this. To suffer all your life in loneliness or in bad relationships only because you’ve imagined pain and now you are afraid of it – doesn’t that sound like a brilliant idea? And the same process applies for all areas in our lives – from career and business to spiritual growth. The question is, what can we do about it? The answer is to make a conscious decision to understand the nature of our fears as deep, as we can.

Have you ever asked yourself “Are my fears useful for me?”. Although the answer seems obvious, you can understand valuable things from it. If something hasn’t happened yet, are there any benefits of being afraid? And if something is going to happen, and you can’t change it, what to be afraid of then? Or maybe something is already happening – will your fear help you to improve your situation? Or if something is happening and there is no way to improve situation, will your fear make you feel better or help you to learn something from that experience? And if something already happened, can your fear change the past? If not, what’s the point of being afraid?

When talking about fear I think that it is very important to understand one social phenomenon, so called victim mentality. To put it short, victim mentality is incredibly stupid, but incredibly popular attitude that says “We are only victims of life and we have no choice”. Why is this attitude so popular? Because of the brainwashing done through media, in my opinion. And why can we see enormous amounts of brainwashing there? I believe that the answer is simple – if you think that you are a victim of life, it’s much, MUCH easier to sell you stuff you don’t need or stuff that is even harmful for you. Drugs can be a good example – if you think that you are not in charge of your life (…and that means your health too), and you think that you have no impact on your health and if flu comes you will get ill because it doesn’t depend on you, you will more likely buy some pills that can save you from that flu (because TV says so!). On the other hand, if you believe that you are responsible for your life and health, I guess you won’t buy some magical pills from flu – you simply will make a decision to be healthy no matter what. You won’t need those pills. It’s no wonder that many people are afraid of everything – starting from diseases, ending with car accidences or assaults – how can you not be afraid, if everything in your life happens randomly and you have no control over it? “Wait Agota, what are you talking about?” – you ask,- “Well health is health, ok, but what about car accidences, assaults, nature disasters? I can’t control these things!”. Well, my answer is: how deep down the rabbit hole you want to go? And yeah, I have watched “What the bleep” recently.

Now I’m reading a book from Victor Frankl named “Man’s search for meaning”. It is a book from two parts – essay about Frankl’s experiences in concentration camp, and an introduction to logotherapy. I am reading this book because I’ve read a brief story about Frankl and his ideas before, and I there were words that gave me the “aha” insight about fear and it’s emptiness. Although I haven’t finished this book yet, I want to share these words with you:

“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate.”

In our society, we are conditioned to respond in certain way to certain events. We are conditioned that if someone calls us idiots, we must be angry. If someone cheats on us, we must have a broken heart. If we were assaulted or raped, we must fall in depression and be mad on the whole world. If we were seriously injured in the car crash, we must think that our life is ruined. And we are not only conditioned to react in certain ways – we are conditionedto think that these reactions are the only ones available for us, and we can’t choose how to react, because we react in automatic manner. But is it really the only way?

One of my favorite quotes by Buddha sounds like this: “Everything is created by the mind alone”. As I understand it, this means that all our happiness as well as all our suffering rises from our own minds. This means that we can’t blame external factors for our suffering – we can’t blame someone who hurt us. Why? Because our suffering itself exists only in our own mind, it doesn’t exist outside of us. It’s not external events that count. It’s the way we perceive those events is the cause of happiness or the cause of suffering. And how we choose to perceive them – it is our decision.

And now, let’s go back to the question about car crashes, assaults and nature disasters – “things we can’t control”. Although I strongly believe that we are the ones who attract ANY events, people or circumstances to our life, often we can’t see some things that are coming because we are attracting them from very deep level of our consciousness, and we are not always able to understand ourselves to that level and see what’s happening down there… And when we have already attracted a certain event, let’s say a car crash, we may not be able to control the event itself, but we are ALWAYS able to choose, how we will perceive that event. Will we blame others, fate or some higher power and let ourselves to fall into depression? Or will we understand this event like a lesson and opportunity to become better human beings in order to grow? In short, will this event cause us happiness, or will this event cause us to suffer? This is the thing you CAN control. This is your decision.

And how is this all related with our main topic, coping with fear, you ask. Directly. Why? Because in the Frankl’s words and in the Buddha’s quote you can find the answer how to deal with fear, you can find a key to fearlessness. Now think carefully – if you are afraid of suffering, and you know that suffering depends from your own mind and not from external circumstances, and you know that you can choose your reactions consciously, and you have a trust in your ability to choose, then… What to be afraid of then?

Another interesting thing about fear is that a fear of something is always a fear of loss at some level, whether it would be a loss of life, health, certain person or emotional state. We always want to have guarantees, we want to know that we won’t lose things we are afraid of losing. And you know what the funny part is? You are going to lose them anyway.

Our mind is always chasing illusion of a thing that simply doesn’t exist in our world – and that thing is called security. Why do I say that security doesn’t exist in the realm of human beings? Because where death exists, there is no place for security. Fear of loss rises from an illusion that it is possible for us to have something permanent in this life, and also from ignorance of inescapability of death. Death is going to take away almost everything from you (why almost? because there is something that goes with you when you are leaving this place – that something is the things you’ve learnt and the karma of your actions, both good and bad) – it will take away all your riches, all your material possessions, all your friends and even your family. And the problem is that you can disagree with everything I’ve said… Except this part about death, because it doesn’t matter, what your attitude or religion is, death is inescapable. And here comes the important question – why should you be afraid to lose something if you are going to lose it anyway? What’s the point of being afraid?

We are often looking to the world from short time, one life perspective (I have a very strong belief in reincarnation, so I’m talking from this point of view), and that’s why we often can’t separate important things from unimportant ones. What things you experience in your life will be important, let’s say, two lives from now? If your most terrible nightmares came true, will it be important then? My close friend answered to this: “I’m afraid to do something stupid”, and by something stupid he meant something bad that will affect his spiritual growth negatively. Yes, you can do something very stupid, that will have negative affects on your next lives, but you shouldn’t be afraid of that… Why? Because this is your decision – to act wise or to act stupid, and it’s your decision, even when nightmares are becoming reality – you can learn from this experience and accelerate your growth, or you can get angry and start spiritual degradation process, that can continue through many lives. That’s YOUR choice.

Talking about choices, when fear starts creeping into your mind, you also have a choice – to be hypnotized by it’s whispering, or don’t listen to it and look straight to your fears eyes… And if you choose the second option, how do you think, what would you see? I bet that if you dare to look deep enough, you will see… its emptiness.

I’ve been thinking about launching my own personal development blog  for a while.Okay,let’s admit it – I’ve been thinking about it really seriously from this autumn (..and not so seriously – much, much longer ) .

So, I decided to prepare properly.

I decided that I won’t start a blog without having at least 25 good articles (..okay,there was someone who kept telling me to launch a blog anyway, and as we see now, he was right ).

And of course goal setting came to help – I made a clear and simple plan and I scheduled time for it’s execution.I was supposedto write  an article a week, and after 25 weeks I was supposed to have 25 articles, aren’t my math skills brilliant?

Also, I started reading different articles on blogging,making plans how to monetize my blog, how to create traffic, how to market my blog,how to network with other people in blogosphere..

I kept telling myself, that I’m simply taking this seriously..The truth was (..and I knew it!) I was simply procrastinating.

..and then came hardships related to moving to London, and then one job, then uneployment, then another job , then one more job, then another one which turned out to be a scam , and then finally the good job with which I was happy and I wanted to put my time and efforts to become successful there..

So there were always reasons for not writing articles, and at  first it was “Oh, I’ll start tomorrow” , then “Oh, I’ll start next week” and finally “Oh,I’ll start during summer holidays”.

Then I decided to get blogging out of my mind until the summer.And then I decided that maybe I should start writing now.And then that I shouldn’t.And so on and on and on..

Gosh,do you know how much energy consumes inner conflicts like that?

..and remember,now it is not autumn,it is February..OMG, it’s almost spring!

Enlightement came gradually in the past few days:

“Mmm, it would feel good to have a blog” – that’s what I thought when wordpress.com would pop up in my browser history.

“Mmm,it would be nice to have a blog” – that’s what I thought then the girl from “90210″ was updating her blog from school cafeteria.

“Launch my own pesonal development blog” – that’s what I wrote on my http://www.43things.com life list.

“What the heck?” – and that’s what I asked myself when I looked at my http://www.43things.com list again. – “It takes only one day for me to actually launch a blog.Yup, I don’t have 25 articles, but I have at least one.”

And also now at this moment I don’t have a monetization plan.And I don’t have a marketing strategy.And I don’t know much about search engines optimization..I even don’t have “About” page.

..and this blog entry is complete improvisation too.

But you know what? I have a blog!

Stop rationalising. Stop procrastinating. Take the first step.