How to Silence Voices in Your Head | Eckhart Tolle with Oprah

When they announced on Facebook that Eckhart Tolle and Oprah were sitting down once again, questions for Eckhart began pouring in. Watch as he answers two of your most burning questions: 

 - How do you calm the voice in your head, and 

 - How can you clear your mind of bad memories? 

For more on #supersoulsunday, visit http://bit.ly/1pqTI5s 

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5 Success Lessons I Learned From Running Ultramarathons | Michael Winterheller

1. Be consistent.

Although I’m putting this at the very top of my list, it is something I actually discovered rather late in my training (actually after having run my first ultra): Whatever you do, you need to do it consistently. This is the foundation, and it has become a crucial basic ingredient in terms of everything else that I’ve learned in this regard.

Running a few intervals or doing long runs every once in a while won’t really improve your fitness (for all non-runners, these are the parts of your training that really make you sweat), and likewise stretching once won’t improve your flexibility. You need to do these things as a consistent part of your training, again and again.

I’ve found that it is very similar in the business world: To achieve extraordinary results and be successful, you need to put in the work on a very consistent basis, almost to the point that improvement itself becomes a habit for you. Stop wasting your time with one-off efforts to change things all at once, and instead focus on weekly or maybe even daily accomplishments that will deliver consistent improvement.

2. Do the right work at the right time.

The simple act of doing work is actually pretty easy—the same is true for running. When I first started training, I basically just put on my running shoes and ran. Speed, distance and elevation gain were more or less a product of my mood and motivation on that day. While I did improve at the beginning of my training, I soon hit a wall where improvement became almost nonexistent. I only started to improve again when I started to follow a training plan and developed a better understanding of what I was actually trying to achieve.

It’s the same in your professional life: Just doing work won’t get you very far. It is doing the right work at the right time that will propel you toward success and the achievement of your goals. Create a daily list of the things you need to do that day and arrange it according to importance and overall benefit in terms of moving you forward. Moreover, get started with tasks on that list first thing in the morning. Once you have checked off the top five items, you can start to combine the other tasks on your list with whatever comes up as part of your workday.

3. Rest days boost your workday efficiency.

Rest days are a must if you want to improve your running form, and also if you want to improve consistently. In the world of sports and fitness, the need for rest and time off is well-known. Every article on improving your race time warns about the dangers of overtraining or going into a race tired.

Yet for some reason in the business world, working late, working on weekends and being online 24/7 seems like the right thing to do. Working without sufficient rest might work for a while, but it won’t take you very far in the long run. You will become tired, you will lose your creativity and your productivity will certainly fall. This is true in the business world just as it is in the world of fitness. Stop trying to be superhuman all the time and enjoy some well-deserved rest; you’ll end up being more productive and creative—more successful—than before.

4. Challenges are an integral part of getting better

During my first ultramarathon, I reached a point where I thought I just could not take another step. I sat down on the side of the dusty trail and was ready to throw in the towel. The only problem was that I was in the middle of nowhere, there was no mobile phone reception and there were no roads even remotely nearby. Anxiety almost got the better of me when another racer came by who stopped and asked me how I was doing. When I told him that I was ready to drop out of the race, he replied that this was his 19th time doing the race and he came to the exact same conclusion almost every time. But he learned to get through the rough times and was able to finish. He offered me his hand, pulled me up and told me to keep going. I was so bewildered and inspired that I just did what he told me to do: I kept running and I finished the race.

This moment is one of my top inspirations whenever I encounter difficulties in my role as a CEO. I learned to not only deal with challenges in a much more productive way, but now I actually find inspiration in them. It might sound strange, but for me challenges offer reinsurance that I am doing something new, something big, something out of the ordinary. 
So next time you find yourself facing an obstacle, keep going and then give yourself a pat on the back. Why? Because chances are that you are on the way to achieving something great.

5. Surround yourself with people who inspire you and keep you moving forward.

Training for an ultramarathon can be a pretty lonely experience. You spend most of your time running through the woods or scrambling up mountains, accompanied only by your own thoughts and inner dialogue. While I did really enjoy this time on the trails, I also learned that you can become trapped within your own limits without realizing it. This dawned on me when I started doing some of my workouts at the local running track. All of a sudden I was able to compare my speed and endurance with other runners, and I was baffled by how fast some people can actually run. It’s not that I didn’t read about fast runners or see their video clips online, but that’s a very different thing from going full out and being passed by other runners who seemed to not be struggling at all. Now I love doing my workout on the track because it helps me to surpass my own limits, and also to gain inspiration to train harder and at the same time improve my pace.

Relatedly, whenever you have the chance to meet someone successful or learn something from your competition, make it count. Stop being intimidated and instead be inspired. Use their stories as encouragement in terms of questioning your own limits. Chances are good that you will be able to think bigger, be bolder and go further than ever before.

So can you relate to this?  Please let me know below!

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Your body language shapes who you are | Amy Cuddy

Body language affects how others see us, but it may also change how we see ourselves. Social psychologist Amy Cuddy shows how "power posing" -- standing in a posture of confidence, even when we don't feel confident -- can affect testosterone and cortisol levels in the brain, and might even have an impact on our chances for success. (Note: Some of the findings presented in this talk have been referenced in an ongoing debate among social scientists about robustness and reproducibility.)
"Our bodies change our minds ... and our minds change our behavior ... and our behavior changes our outcomes." 
"Don't fake it 'til you make it, fake it until you become it."
Please let me know what you think below!
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4 Benefits Of Tapping Into All-Natural, Stress-Relieving Sounds | Jonathan Goldman

Remarkable Changes You Will Feel Instantly 

When I tell people I’m in the field of sound healing, most of them look at me in surprise and say something like: “Yes, music can sooth the savage beast”.  And that’s correct.  But while music is part of the world of sound healing, the truth is it’s merely one small part.  Usually people think when I’m talking about sound healing, that they need to be a musician or a classically trained singer.  Nothing could be further from the truth. I’m talking about sound healing and the fact that we are all sound healers.  Yes, you are a sound healer.

Simple, self-created vocal sounds such as elongated vowels like “ah”, “oh” or an even a “mmm” humming sound can have profound and positive effects on our physical, mental and emotional states. 

Here are just a few of benefits that occur from making such sounds:

1. Lowers blood pressure and heart rate—there’s little need to tell you that stress is probably the single factor that contributes most to illness.  Self-created sounds can lower our BP, heart rate and reduce levels of stress-related hormones such as cortisol.

2. Increases melatonin, a hormone which. helps us sleep at night, and is being researched as a treatment for depression and cancer. 

3. Releases endorphins—those self-created opiates that work as "natural pain relievers".  By making elongated vowel sounds, you can reduce stress and pain.  Think about it—when we like something, we naturally make an “ah” sound. You don’t have to sing opera to experience the healing power of sound.

4. Increases levels of nitric oxide, (NO), a molecule associated with promotion of healing.  Nitric oxide was voted as the “molecule of the year”—it helps with vascular dilation and allows our blood to run smoothly throughout our body.  The importance of this cannot be overstated.

These are just a few of the many benefits that occur from our own self-created sound.  There are many more positive results.  Additional healing effects of sound are found in the new edition of my book The 7 Secrets Of Sound Healing, which has been re-released by Hay House.  I’ve been in the field of studying the power of sound to heal and transform for over 35 years and have taught this work throughout the world.  My greatest difficulty has been that people confuse sound with music.  But to experience the effects stated above, you simply have to hum or make a gentle tone. 

Feeling stressed out?  Take a nice deep breath and sound forth with an “ah” a few times.  Need to calm yourself down while waiting for an important meeting?  Just hum for a minute or two.  No one will hear you but you’ll feel a lot more relaxed almost instantly.  Believe it or not, YOU are a sound healer.  You can heal yourself with sound and you don’t need to be a musician or a singer.

Sound goes into our ears and into our brain, affecting our heart rate and nervous system.  This process, of course includes listening.  In fact, there’s a half-hour long musical sequence that’s included as a download with The 7 Secrets Of Sound Healing. I encourage you to utilize the power of listening to slow, gentle music, to release your stress and enhance relaxation.

But most of all, I encourage you to experience and explore the powerful ability of your own self-created sounds to heal and transform. 

It’s an extraordinary gift that we can all reawaken in ourselves and in others as well.  What a blessing!

Let me know what you think below!

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Law of Attraction - Train Your Brain to Learn Faster (Psychology) | Brendon.com

Work out what you want your life to be about, what your mission is, what you are passionate about, and you will be motivated to become a master learner.  You have to work out the why for everything to fall into place.  

If you are going to stay on a learning habit, then you have to have a bigger vision for yourself!

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Making Personal Development Fun | Vlad Dolezal

Think back to when you were a child, building a lego house. (Or using a similar building set.)

You would set off to build a house… then halfway through decide to make it a horse ranch instead… then get distracted by another idea and end up with a space ship with a pack of horses on one wing and a swimming pool on the other.

That’s how personal development feels when you approach it in a fun way. You have a certain intention, but then you get distracted by something interesting, experiment with a few different tidbits, and end up with something completely different than you intended. Yet the result is even more awesome than your original plan, and you had great fun along the way!

Still, some people insist on approaching personal development like building a lego house according to set-in-stone instructions. They stress about getting every brick in the right place, then get annoyed when they don’t progress fast enough, then start procrastinating because the process is boring and doesn’t challenge their mind and then they end up dropping the project and complaining that building lego houses doesn’t work.

Personal development can be just as fun as building a lego house, if you approach it the right way.

If you think personal development should be hard, it will be

There’s a funny thing called selective perception. Put simply, you only notice things you are looking for.

So if you’re looking for hard complicated ways to improve yourself, when you find an easy solution, you drop it because “that can’t possibly be right”. Then you come up with the most weird and convoluted ways to make your self-improvement difficult, because that’s what you’re looking for.

Here’s the thing. Personal development done right is easy. It’s effortless. It’s fun!

Building your own character is just like building a character in a computer game, or like building a lego spaceship:

• you tack on a bunch of random stuff because you feel like it
• you keep experimenting and see what you like the best
• the process is just as much fun as the result
• there isn’t a final outcome – it’s an endless fun process, where you keep changing and tweaking things because you feel like it. The fun of a building set comes from building things, and the same is true with personal development.

I have tried all sorts of habit changes myself, like waking up early, meditating, being vegetarian, keeping a daily to-do list, or consciously changing my body language (that one was especially fun).

Some of them have stuck and some haven’t. But every single one of them was fun to try! (Yes, even waking up early).

How to Make Personal Development Fun

Here are a few ways to make personal development fun:

1. Forget about the outcome
2. Think of it as a fun experiment to see what happens
3. When you read/hear about cool ideas, TRY THEM
4. Do it with a friend (either offline or online)
5. Tell other people about your experiments (that’s one reason starting a blog is great)

Aaaand… yeah. If I ended right here, you would most likely go off nodding, thinking you learned something interesting but leaving your behavior unchanged.

I’m not a big fan of list posts for exactly that reason. That’s why I let this list occupy such a small part of this post.

Instead, I will give you one thorough example, to help you drive the concept deep into your subconscious. This will stimulate your subconscious mind’s creativity and get it thinking of how to make other personal development ideas fun.

An example of making personal development fun

You can approach any part of personal development as a game. I’m going to take open-mindedness as an example here:

…

Think of lying on a grass meadow on a warm summer day, with a friend, watching the clouds above.

“That one looks like a car,” you say pointing at a cloud.

“It looks like a dog to me…” your friend replies.

What is your reply? Do you jump up angrily and shout “NO, it’s definitely a car! You’re completely wrong!” and storm off?

Or do you say “Wait… hang on… oh yea! I can see what you mean. I’d actually say it’s a bit more of a tiger, but I can definitely see where you’re coming from with the dog.”

And then you can have more fun guessing all the other interpretations for that cloud. Maybe it can also be a motorcycle, or a pretzel…

And considering other people’s point of view is just like that. For a moment, you suspend all judgment, and see the world as they see it. And then you think of all other interpretations of the same situation, just to see what fun things you can come up with.

You can even find a friend who’s also interested in practicing open-mindedness and challenge each other with issues and ideas to be open-minded about.

One more thing. Notice how I never once mentioned how will open-mindedness be useful to you? That’s because focusing on the outcome will make it seem like a chore. Consider the outcome when choosing what habits to try, but once you get started, forget the outcome, and enjoy it like a game.

Personal development is fun. All you have to do is approach it in the right way.

…

Now stay with me, this is important. You might be tempted to skip the last few paragraphs.

Maybe you’re thinking of commenting, or retweeting this post.

Don’t. Not yet. Before you do anything else, I want you to use the information here.

Because while comments and retweets are nice, they’re not the real thing. The real thing is helping you improve your life.

So in a moment, when I say the word “now”, I want you to stop reading and start thinking. Think about your personal development, and how you could make it more fun. Then think of some specific actions you can take in the next 24 hours to make it more fun.

When you’re done, then you can go do something else. And if you come up with an interesting way of making personal development fun, please share it in the comments! 

Okay, ready? Three, two, one…

This blog post ends now.

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Contribution: Key to A Happy Life | Tony Robbins

When you think of your life, do you think about what’s missing? Or do you think about what you have?

If you always think about what you don’t have, you will tend to hold on to everything that you do have, because you feel that you have so little and thus not much to give. But listen to Tony as he explains how giving in times of extreme discomfort, when you feel “lack” and not abundance, can be the most valuable.

"The secret to living is giving."

Let me know what you think!

How to Make Personal Growth More Fun (and Easier) | Henrik Edberg

“People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.”

Dale Carnegie

When you read this blog, other blogs and books on personal development it’s easy to get drawn into an atmosphere of this being really serious business.

And for someone who needs help it can be. If you are really out of shape or have a huge debt or haven’t had date in ages or just don’t know what to do with your life then it’s no fun.

However, as usual, I want emphasize what works here. And through my own experience these last few years I have discovered that taking this as deadly serious business makes things harder than they need to be.

So today I’d like to suggest a bunch of ways to make personal growth and achieving what you want more fun.

Think of it more as light and breezy fun rather than going to war.

No, you are not going to war. Thinking that you are can help you to ramp up enthusiasm and aggressiveness in the beginning. It seems to help you.

So you make any personal development goal – or just anything you want out of life – in to this epic struggle. Perhaps just in your mind or also by reading more and more about a topic.

The more you think and read about a topic the more complicated it seems in your mind and is also becomes “heavier”. What may have been pretty straightforward in real life becomes this huge struggle, where you are Rocky Balboa taking slow painstaking steps uphill against horrific odds. Yep, it’s a real inspiring thing as you struggle as the heroic underdog.

It’s also a great way to make things so much harder for yourself. It’s you putting up imaginary obstacles in your own mind that aren’t even there in reality. The Rocky way of thinking about these things is very seductive. But life becomes so much lighter and easier when you just let that stuff go.

It’s a bit counter-intuitive and it took me quite some time to understand this. You think that an overly serious attitude may seem like the right attitude to help you achieve your goal.

But a more relaxed and fun attitude where you tell yourself that what you are doing isn’t really that complicated, epic – millions of people have probably done what you want to do in last 1000 years or so – or super serious is often more effective to get the result you desire.

Of course, sometimes things will suck but I think that if you can approach things this way you’ll get more enjoyment on your path to your goal and you won’t put up extra obstacles on that path.

You can bring awareness to what you are thinking while on the daily walk on that path by asking yourself questions like “Honestly, am I overcomplicating this?” or ”Am I taking this a bit too seriously?”.

Find out what you have fun doing.

If you don’t like jogging don’t do it. Not everyone has be a runner to get exercise. Be curious and explore different options, perhaps soccer or table tennis is a better option for you? 
Finding what works and feels good for you makes it a lot easier to stick to the plan and be consistent each week rather than feeling like you have drag yourself to the gym again.

Detach from the outcome.

This is one of my favorite tips for making it easier to take action and to do so consistently. It makes the doing more enjoyable and there is less inner resistance or projections into the future that can screw things up.

I first got this tip from the ancient Sanskrit Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita. It says:
“To action alone hast thou a right and never at all to its fruits; let not the fruits of action be thy motive; neither let there be in thee any attachment to inaction”

This tells me to understand that I cannot control the results of my action. I can’t control how someone reacts to what I say or what I do. And that I should do what I do just because it is something I want to do rather than because of some outcome I’d like. But at the same time I should not let these two ideas lead me to become passive and get stuck in sitting on my hands and not taking action at all.

Basically, I do what I think is right and that is my responsibility. And then the rest (the possible results), well, that is not up for me to decide about or try to control. I let it go.

Now, I apply this when I do something. I can get motivated by future results before the doing the activity. But when I start doing any those activities I detach and change how I think. I just focus on showing up and doing. This may sound a bit weird or hard but after a while it gets easier and easier to do that shift in your mind and to not start projecting into the future while you are doing.

You can apply this to:

• Working out. By focusing on just showing up and doing the workout you won’t get discouraged when you haven’t lost x pounds after a week. You become more patient and more emotionally stable when you don’t think about losing that weight all the time. If you just show up and work out – and control what you eat – the pounds will come off.

• Blogging. If you don’t have to worry about what people may think about your next post then it becomes a lot easier to calmly write what you want instead of getting stuck in some kind of writer’s block.

• Social interactions. If you detach from an outcome such as someone liking you at a party or on a date then you’ll be less nervous. You won’t try to impress people. You will be more like how you are with your closest friends, relaxed and easy going. Just being yourself is an often cited and sometimes criticized piece of advice. By detaching from outcomes – while still of course using your common sense – it will be a lot easier to just be the best version of yourself.

Focus on the positive things from the past.

It’s easy to fall back into the common habit of focusing on your past failures. Doing so can make you feel like giving up. Or like this is a war. Or like getting out of your comfort zone is just one big hassle.

So I suggest changing your focus. Remember when things went well.

Awash your mind with positive memories.

Realise it can be fun to get out of your comfort zone despite what your mind and feelings might be telling you before you get started. Think back to the previous times when you have broken out of your rut. Focus on the positive memories, when you got out there, when you took a chance. And you’ll recall that it wasn’t so bad, it was actually fun and exciting and something new to you.

A lot of the time we automatically play back our negative experiences – or negative interpretations of events – in our minds before we are about to do something. And we forget about the positive memories and our previous, positive achievements. Avoid that trap. Let the fun and good memories flow through your mind instead and let things become easier.

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Grit: the power of passion and perseverance | Angela Lee Duckworth

Leaving a high-flying job in consulting, Angela Lee Duckworth took a job teaching math to seventh graders in a New York public school. She quickly realized that IQ wasn't the only thing separating the successful students from those who struggled. Here, she explains her theory of "grit" as a predictor of success.
"Grit is passion and perseverance for very long term goals."
"Growth mindset: The belief that the ability to learn is not fixed: that it can change with your effort...When kids read and learn about the brain and how it changes and grows in response to challenge, they are much more likely to persevere when they fail, because they don't believe that failure is a permanent condition."
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Emotional Intelligence - EQ | Travis Bradberry

As the bestselling coauthor of Emotional Intelligence 2.0, I'm often asked to break down what emotional intelligence is and why it's so important. Here goes...

Emotional Intelligence Is the Other Kind of Smart.

When emotional intelligence first appeared to the masses in 1995, it served as the missing link in a peculiar finding: people with average IQs outperform those with the highest IQs 70% of the time. This anomaly threw a massive wrench into what many people had always assumed was the sole source of success—IQ. Decades of research now point to emotional intelligence as the critical factor that sets star performers apart from the rest of the pack.

Emotional intelligence is the “something” in each of us that is a bit intangible. It affects how we manage behavior, navigate social complexities, and make personal decisions that achieve positive results. Emotional intelligence is made up of four core skills that pair up under two primary competencies: personal competence and social competence.

Personal competence is made up of your self-awareness and self-management skills, which focus more on you individually than on your interactions with other people. Personal competence is your ability to stay aware of your emotions and manage your behavior and tendencies.

• Self-Awareness is your ability to accurately perceive your emotions and stay aware of them as they happen.

• Self-Management is your ability to use awareness of your emotions to stay flexible and positively direct your behavior.

Social competence is made up of your social awareness and relationship management skills; social competence is your ability to understand other people’s moods, behavior, and motives in order to improve the quality of your relationships.

• Social Awareness is your ability to accurately pick up on emotions in other people and understand what is really going on.

• Relationship Management is your ability to use awareness of your emotions and the others’ emotions to manage interactions successfully.

Emotional Intelligence, IQ, and Personality Are Different.

Emotional intelligence taps into a fundamental element of human behavior that is distinct from your intellect. There is no known connection between IQ and emotional intelligence; you simply can’t predict emotional intelligence based on how smart someone is. Intelligence is your ability to learn, and it’s the same at age 15 as it is at age 50. Emotional intelligence, on the other hand, is a flexible set of skills that can be acquired and improved with practice. 

Although some people are naturally more emotionally intelligent than others, you can develop high emotional intelligence even if you aren’t born with it.
Personality is the final piece of the puzzle. It’s the stable “style” that defines each of us. Personality is the result of hard-wired preferences, such as the inclination toward introversion or extroversion. However, like IQ, personality can’t be used to predict emotional intelligence. Also like IQ, personality is stable over a lifetime and doesn’t change. IQ, emotional intelligence, and personality each cover unique ground and help to explain what makes a person tick.

Emotional Intelligence Is Linked to Performance.

How much of an impact does emotional intelligence have on your professional success? The short answer is: a lot! It’s a powerful way to focus your energy in one direction with a tremendous result. TalentSmart tested emotional intelligence alongside 33 other important workplace skills, and found that emotional intelligence is the strongest predictor of performance, explaining a full 58% of success in all types of jobs.

Your emotional intelligence is the foundation for a host of critical skills—it impacts most everything you say and do each day. Emotional intelligence is the single biggest predictor of performance in the workplace and the strongest driver of leadership and personal excellence.

Of all the people we’ve studied at work, we’ve found that 90% of top performers are also high in emotional intelligence. On the flip side, just 20% of bottom performers are high in emotional intelligence. You can be a top performer without emotional intelligence, but the chances are slim. Naturally, people with a high degree of emotional intelligence make more money—an average of $29,000 more per year than people with a low degree of emotional intelligence. The link between emotional intelligence and earnings is so direct that every point increase in emotional intelligence adds $1,300 to an annual salary. These findings hold true for people in all industries, at all levels, in every region of the world. We haven’t yet been able to find a job in which performance and pay aren’t tied closely to emotional intelligence.

Emotional Intelligence Can Be Developed.

The communication between your emotional and rational “brains” is the physical source of emotional intelligence. The pathway for emotional intelligence starts in the brain, at the spinal cord. Your primary senses enter here and must travel to the front of your brain before you can think rationally about your experience. However, first they travel through the limbic system, the place where emotions are generated. So, we have an emotional reaction to events before our rational mind is able to engage. Emotional intelligence requires effective communication between the rational and emotional centers of the brain.

“Plasticity” is the term neurologists use to describe the brain’s ability to change. Your brain grows new connections as you learn new skills. The change is gradual, as your brain cells develop new connections to speed the efficiency of new skills acquired.

Using strategies to increase your emotional intelligence allows the billions of microscopic neurons lining the road between the rational and emotional centers of your brain to branch off small “arms” (much like a tree) to reach out to the other cells. A single cell can grow 15,000 connections with its neighbors. This chain reaction of growth ensures it’s easier to kick this new behavior into action in the future. Once you train your brain by repeatedly using new emotional intelligence strategies, emotionally intelligent behaviors become habits.

Please let me know what you think below.

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Will Smith shares his secrets of success

Will shares what motivates him in various interviews, all brought together in this clip.  What comes across most is his incredible work ethic!
You don't set out to build a wall, you say "I'm gonna lay this brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid.  You do that every day, and soon you have  a wall!"

"He who says he can, and he who says he can't are both usually right."
"Being realistic is the most commonly travelled road to mediocrity."
"If we dream something, if we picture something, if we commit ourselves to it that that is a physical thrust towards realisation that we can put into the Universe.."
Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.
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The two kinds of stories we tell about ourselves | Emily Esfahani Smith

We’ve all created our own personal histories, marked by highs and lows, that we share with the world — and we can shape them to live with more meaning and purpose.

We are all storytellers — all engaged, as the anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson puts it, in an “act of creation” of the “composition of our lives.” Yet unlike most stories we’ve heard, our lives don’t follow a predefined arc. Our identities and experiences are constantly shifting, and storytelling is how we make sense of it. By taking the disparate pieces of our lives and placing them together into a narrative, we create a unified whole that allows us to understand our lives as coherent — and coherence, psychologists say, is a key source of meaning.

Northwestern University psychologist Dan McAdams is an expert on a concept he calls “narrative identity.” McAdams describes narrative identity as an internalized story you create about yourself — your own personal myth. Like myths, our narrative identity contains heroes and villains that help us or hold us back, major events that determine the plot, challenges overcome and suffering we have endured. When we want people to understand us, we share our story or parts of it with them; when we want to know who another person is, we ask them to share part of their story.

An individual’s life story is not an exhaustive history of everything that has happened. Rather, we make what McAdams calls “narrative choices.” Our stories tend to focus on the most extraordinary events, good and bad, because those are the experiences we need to make sense of and that shape us. But our interpretations may differ. For one person, for example, a childhood experience like learning how to swim by being thrown into the water by a parent might explain his sense of himself today as a hardy entrepreneur who learns by taking risks. For another, that experience might explain why he hates boats and does not trust authority figures. A third might leave the experience out of his story altogether, deeming it unimportant.

People who believe their lives are meaningful tend to tell stories defined by growth, communion and agency.

McAdams has been studying narrative identity for over 30 years. In his interviews, he asks research subjects to divide their lives into chapters and to recount key scenes, such as a high point, a low point, a turning point or an early memory. He encourages participants to think about their personal beliefs and values. Finally, he asks them to reflect on their story’s central theme. He has discovered interesting patterns in how people living meaningful lives understand and interpret their experiences. People who are driven to contribute to society and to future generations, he found, are more likely to tell redemptive stories about their lives, or stories that transition from bad to good. There was the man who grew up in dire poverty but told McAdams that his hard circumstances brought him and his family closer together. There was the woman who told him that caring for a close friend as the friend was dying was a harrowing experience, but one that ultimately renewed her commitment to being a nurse, a career she’d abandoned. These people rate their lives as more meaningful than those who tell stories that have either no or fewer redemptive sequences.

The opposite of a redemptive story is what McAdams calls a “contamination story,” in which people interpret their lives as going from good to bad. One woman told him the story of the birth of her child, a high point, but she ended the story with the death of the baby’s father, who was murdered three years later. The joy over the birth of her child was tainted by that tragedy. People who tell contamination stories, McAdams has found, are less “generative,” or less driven to contribute to society and younger generations. They also tend to be more anxious and depressed, and to feel that their lives are less coherent compared to those who tell redemptive stories.

Redemption and contamination stories are just two kinds of tales we spin. McAdams has found that beyond stories of redemption, people who believe their lives are meaningful tend to tell stories defined by growth, communion and agency. These stories allow individuals to craft a positive identity: they are in control of their lives, they are loved, they are progressing through life and whatever obstacles they have encountered have been redeemed by good outcomes.

Even making smaller story edits to our personal narratives can have a big impact on our lives.

One of the great contributions of psychology and psychotherapy research is the idea that we can edit, revise and interpret the stories we tell about our lives even as we are constrained by the facts. A psychotherapist’s job is to work with patients to rewrite their stories in a more positive way. Through editing and reinterpreting his story with his therapist, the patient may come to realize that he is in control of his life and that some meaning can be gleaned from his hardships. A review of the scientific literature finds that this form of therapy is as effective as antidepressants or cognitive behavioral therapy.

Even making smaller story edits can have a big impact on our lives. So found Adam Grant and Jane Dutton in a study published in 2012. The researchers asked university call-center fundraisers to keep a journal for four consecutive days. In one condition, the beneficiary condition, the researchers asked the fundraisers to write about the last time a colleague did something for them that inspired gratitude. In the second condition, the benefactor condition, the participants wrote about a time they contributed to others at work.

The researchers wanted to know which type of story would lead the research subjects to be more generous. To find out, they monitored the fundraisers’ call records. Since the fundraisers were paid a fixed hourly rate to call alumni and solicit donations, the researchers reasoned, then the number of calls they made during their shift was a good indicator of prosocial, helping behavior.

After Grant and Dutton analyzed the stories, they found that fundraisers who told a story of themselves as benefactors ultimately made 30 percent more calls to alumni after the experiment than they had before. Those who told stories about being the beneficiary of generosity showed no changes in their behavior.

Grant and Dutton’s study suggests that the ability of a story to create meaning does not end with the crafting of the tale. The stories the benefactors told about themselves ultimately led to meaningful behaviors — giving their time in the service of a larger cause. Even though the fundraisers knew they were only telling their stories as part of a study, they ultimately “lived by” those stories, as McAdams would put it. By subtly reframing their narrative, they adopted a positive identity that led them to live more purposefully.

Excerpted from the new book The Power of Meaning: Crafting a Life That Matters by Emily Esfahani Smith. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Copyright © 2017 By Emily Esfahani Smith. Reprinted with permission.

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Weekend workouts can benefit health as much as a week of exercise, say researchers | Ian Sample

Risk of early death is as low for those who meet recommended activity targets in one or two sessions a week as it is for daily exercisers, study shows.

People who cram all their exercise into one or two sessions at the weekend benefit nearly as much as those who work out more frequently, researchers say.

A study of more than 60,000 adults in England and Scotland found that “weekend warriors” lowered their risk of death by a similar margin to those who spread the same amount of exercise over the whole week.

The findings will reassure people who find it hard to make time for a daily exercise routine and opt instead to break a sweat once or twice a week in the hope of keeping fit.

“Millions of people enjoy doing sport once or twice a week, but they may be concerned that they are not doing enough,” said Gary O’Donovan, a physical activity researcher and author on the study at Loughborough University. “We find a clear benefit. It’s making them fit and healthy.”

The UK’s National Health Service recommends that to ward off an early death, people should spend 150 minutes a week performing moderate exercise, or 75 minutes a week doing vigorous exercise. As a rule of thumb, moderate exercise can be done while maintaining a conversation, whereas during vigorous exercise talking at the same time is too hard.

In the study, those who met the physical activity target by exercising through the week had a 35% lower risk of death than the inactive adults, with cardiovascular deaths down 41% and a 21% lower risk of cancer death.

But the weekend warriors also saw substantial health benefits if they met the physical activity target too. Their overall risk of death was 30% lower than the sedentary adults, with the risk of cardiovascular and cancer deaths lower by 40% and 18% respectively.

“Weekend warriors are people who meet the recommended volume of physical activity each week through only one or two sessions. There are doing a large proportion of vigorous exercise and that makes you fitter than moderate exercise,” said O’Donovan. Men and women benefited equally, according to the study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association: Internal Medicine.

The results are based on medical data gathered for 63,591 adults aged 40 and above between 1994 and 2012. Nearly 9,000 of the study participants died in the period.

For those who have resolved to get fit in the New Year, O’Donovan recommends to start with moderate exercise, such as brisk walking, and then to set realistic, incremental goals to boost confidence without running the risk of setbacks due to injury. “A middle aged or older person should do as much as 12 weeks of moderate exercise before introducing vigorous exercise,” he said.

Ulf Ekelund at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences in Oslo said the study emphasised what researchers have found time and again: that even a small amount of regular exercise wards off death. In the study, those who exercised a little had a 29% lower risk of death than those who did no exercise at all. “The novel finding is that it appears the duration, and possibly the intensity, of leisure time physical activity is more important than the frequency,” Ekelund said.

“My take home message is that the greatest risk reduction and the greatest gain for the individual and for public health is if those who are physically inactive take up some activity,” he added.

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