Be Great in 2008
Want to be your best? Here’s how to improve your health, your career, your mojo and your potential
Welcome to self-help season – that time of year when you resolve to shed your old self (perhaps literally as well as figuratively) and decide to improve different areas of your life. While you could spend the better part of January reading the myriad of books, articles, and blog posts about how to stick to your New Years’ resolutions, we thought we’d break it down and give you the round-up about how to improve every area of your life – fast.
Your health
Julie Silver, M.D., an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and the author of “Super Healing” (Rodale, 2007), says the fastest way to improve your health is to gauge how much activity you are getting.
“A great way to see if you are active enough is to wear a pedometer and track your steps for a week,” she says. “Are you close to 10,000, or do you need to increase your activity level by taking an extra walk?”
So what should you be aiming for? Silver says you should try to increase the number of daily steps you take by 500 each week, until you have reached 10,000 per day. “As you increase your steps, you will start to feel stronger and have more endurance as well as more energetic.
At the office
Mel Robbins, a life coach and the host of the Sirius call-in radio show “Make it Happen with Mel Robbins,” says a quick way to improve your performance at work is to do a “gap analysis.”
“Ask yourself what is the job you want to have and what is your current position,” he says. Robbins says to use the analysis as a jumping off point to start amassing the skill set and expertise to narrow the gap. And where should you be conducting your gap analysis? On the treadmill, Robbins says. “I tell all my clients to exercise in the morning before work. It is the single best way to walk into the office ready to attack the day.”
In the bedroom
Cathie Helfand, the co-director of Marriage Quest Retreats (www.marriagequest.com), says a simple way to improve your sex life is to get in the mood.
“Go get a massage, or do something relaxing,” she says. Helfand also says don’t let a big meal or a night out on the town get in the way of your sex life. “Eat and drink in moderation, because being full or drunk is not conducive to a carefree sex life.”
Your potential
Tom Ruff, the founder and CEO of Tom Ruff Company, a pharmaceutical sales and medical sales placement company and the author of “How to Break into Pharmaceutical Sales: A Head Hunter’s Strategy” (Waverly Press, 2007), says he has reached some of his big goals (Ruff has five offices and has successfully placed 2700 people in jobs), by setting very specific goals. “When I look back on some of the most significant things I’ve accomplished in my lifetime, I realize that the majority of them came from defined goals that I wrote down and structured around a timeline with benchmarks along the way.”
Hannah Seligson is a writer based in New York and the author of “New Girl on the Job: Advice from the Trenches” (Citadel Press, 2007).
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