My life is ridiculous. Sometimes, I seriously question my own sanity, as I make a habit of my self growth. Since starting this blog in November, I have made a solid commitment to write in this blog every single day and work on new content all the time. After a few months of writing about nothing but personal finance, lucid dreaming, general aspects of psychology and perception, different philosophies, the Law of Attraction, and now – the first entry on personal fitness. But what is there to say? Well, first of all, I’m going to describe a bit of my background in the area of physical exercise. Prior to today, I’ve not done hardly anything(yeah, I’m bad, I know), and honestly, I mean nothing.

A great place to start, believe it or not, is exercise and workout videos. Yeah, I know some of them are lame, but try to find the best ones out there. Don’t pop in old tapes from the 1980’s – forget that idea. Today Kim and I did several sessions from a DVD called TotalMix – The Complete Total Body Workout System. This thing pretty much blew me away and surpassed my expectations. During my pre-teen years I spent a lot of time learning American Tae Kwan Doe from one of the best karate schools in my area, and we did nothing more than simple exercises most of the time. This DVD has the same thing, but these simple exercises it has you doing are wicked. After the first 15 minutes, I had trouble getting myself up off the floor because my abs were so tired. After another 10 minutes on the legs, I had trouble walking!

Before I move on past talking about this DVD, though, I do think it is greatly worth mentioning a few more things about it. Number one, I’m going to explain one element of it from a male and female perspective. Guys, if you think workout videos are dumb or useless, get this one – it is three gorgeous women guiding you through effective workouts that will create a great muscle tone. Ladies, if you have been looking for something that is not over the top, annoying, overblown, or just plain overly difficult, this is the perfect place to start a great new exercise routine, and it is taught from some great teachers in the physical fitness business. Secondly, I also want to point out that the reviews on this DVD are phenomenal – 4.5/5 stars on Amazon.

But you know, some people reading this may not even be ready to get into exercising at all. If that’s the case, just start walking. It may not sound like much, but think about this: for every 5 miles you walk, at 3.5MPH, you burn approximately 465 calories. If you eat 2,000 calories a day, you’ve burned all but 1535 of those calories. Over 7 days, walking 5 miles every single day, you can burn 3255 calories per week. For those of you who may not know what a calorie is, it is basically the simple unit of energy within your body that is burned from daily activity. A standard diet is nutritionally meant to be approximately 2,000 calories, or at least, 2,000 calories with all of the food groups is considered a healthy amount.

And if you get really used to walking, then start running. Tons of resources exist out there for runners, one particular website I used to go to when I first began running is Runner’s World, or RunnersWorld.com. Running is something that is often best done in intervals. If you’re running around your neighborhood block, try running a lap, walking two, repeat, or anything in between. Steve Pavlina, the popular personal development blogger, has also suggested that it is better to stick to building your interval sessions, “even if it’s run 1 walk 24.” I agree.

But perhaps the biggest factor in starting on your quick set path to better personal fitness is simply to make a commitment, hold yourself to that commitment, and don’t stop until that goal is completed. Make your personal exercise goals the goals you post up all over the place. Treat personal fitness just as you would any other area of your personal development. You might try following the philosophy of NOPS, formulated by Paul Scheele as I describe in Setting Goals and Achieving Goals With the Right Mindset. Just as you would do with any other goal, post that goal somewhere in writing where you will see it every single day, where it is constantly reminding you of your dedication to completing that goal.

Make promises to other people if you need to and hold yourself to those promises. If your goal is to lose 50 pounds over the course of the next 12 months, then tell everyone you know, “I’m going to lose 50 pounds in the next 12 months,” and repeatedly bring up the issue, talk about it, keep reinforcing this goal in as many ways as possible. When you make a promise to someone else, they usually will form an expectation with you. Believe me, when that expectation is staring you in the face every single day via writing it down, and people repeating it back to you, your guilt will start riding on your conscience when you’re no longer following what you know it will take to lose that weight or get that body that you’re planning to shape and form.

Exercise can be oddly deceiving in its ease. Some exercises look very easy and then once you’re actually doing them you find out how dramatically effective they really are. Another thing about exercise is that if you’re doing your daily exercise routine right, it is a simple process, and easy to do. But will you do it every day? Will you truly stick to your commitment? For some, it is a question of “motivation.” My outlook on “motivation” is sort of unique from other people in the sense that my motivation stems from the idea of unlimited potential. If you knew that you could eventually achieve the body of a sexy model just by following a particular exercise routine, wouldn’t you do that exercise routine, granted you had the time? What about your health? If you knew that you could easily add about 10 years onto your life by exercising every single day rather than not exercising and dying 10 years sooner, is there any more motivation you need?

The general process is simple and easy to do, hard to keep doing. Give yourself a chance to get setup on the right track. Exercise every single day for 30 days using a routine that is fun and short like the routine from the DVD I mentioned above, and don’t stop until that 30 day time period is over with. If you do that, you just might unintentionally form a conducive physical fitness self habit that will aid you in wanting to exercise every single day from that point forward. Give it a shot!

We have all dealt with it at one point or another. There is always that person out there, that, somehow, is bent on giving us a really hard time, and more often than not – they’re having a hard time themselves. And how do they choose to express it? Anger. Anger, anger, and more anger, more rage than we can possibly fathom. One interesting detail behind emotion is its ability to build upon itself. And not only that, anger, in and of itself, has the capability to distort our every perception. Anger seems to have a health oriented energy that is negative, and driven by some kind of force all its own. It has been proven that those under more stress, who get more frustrated, who are angry more often than happy in their lives, usually do not live as long as those who are happy in their lives. And not only do happy people live longer, they live healthier during the time they’re alive. Considering this, and considering life is probably short enough as it is, we know that you do not want to spend any of your time being upset, feeling down, or being miserable. Even more, we know that we definitely hate feeling angry at other people…or do we?

I think one of the most important things to remember when it comes to anger, or any emotion for that matter, is its chemical induction process in the brain itself. When you get mad, or even when you’re happy, different neurotransmitters are being produced that permeate the brain itself. Your cells are constantly being affected in this manner throughout your daily moments, and whatever emotions you are feeling are always reflected by these neurotransmitters. Not only that, but beyond the chemical process there is, coinciding neurological pathways that are built. Your brain’s synaptic functions will begin to reflect your overall mood and make it easier to maintain that state. This is true for any mood, be it happy, sad, or mad. So with that in mind, we want to do two things. 1.) We want to spend more time being happy ourselves and 2.) We want to spend more time encouraging others to feel happy. And when I use the word phrase “encourage others” with the use of encourage, it is very important to note the definition behind encourage. It basically means that the most we can do for other people is to support their happiness, but not create it. It is our own choice of whether or not we are happy.

Many people have gone through a tough life, and most of the time, that tough life is not initially because of their own emotions, but the root of it perhaps began with their environment’s emotions. The problem? Most people do not realize they have a choice with how to perceive their environment, or a choice of how to deal with the emotional stimulus that constantly attempts to affect them. So if we live around abusive relationships, what often happens? We can tend to become abusive in the future to others just as others were abusive to us. You will even hear that out of the mouth of an abusive individual as some sort of odd justification for it, “Nobody ever cared about me! Why should I care about anyone?!” When you think about it logically, their question makes little sense, does it not? Sure, you could look at it morally and say, “Well, I guess you have the right to give other people what’s coming to them,” but that is, again, an emotional response. Is it the logical one? The clear minded one? The level headed approach. In a word: no.

I wrote about how to overcome negative emotions a while ago in Overcoming Emotional Attachment, and since that time it has become a great success with people. I think there is a massive emotional intelligence revolution going on, so to speak, in the sense that simple psychological systems are being created every single day that are allowing people to effectively change their perspective and their overall emotional state.

When you create an emotional state that is positive, you will then proceed to make positive thoughts, which then lead to positive action, which then leads to positive life.

So, assuming that you are a positive person, the key thing to remember is that when you get into an argument, or rather, a disagreement, the key point to remember is that they are angry, and not you. And do not just sit there and say that to yourself. In fact, if you feel angry, go ahead and be angry. You can control your response, however, even while feeling that particular emotion. The emotion is still going to take its course. If you have any opportunity, however, you want to let that negative emotion go. Just let it drop, with the same sensation as you might drop a paper weight, or even imagine it falling away from you with, in the scope of your life, a density than is as light as, and in likeness to, a feather. The lighter the emotion in your mind, the easier it is likely going to be to drop that.

If someone is yelling at you, trying to get their way when it is not conducive to either you or the majority of the people in that given situation, simply be firm, calm, relaxed, and say, “No, I can’t do that.” Let them yell. Let them scream. Let them whine and complain all they want! You may even find that if you can remain emotionally disconnected from that situation, you’ll have an upper hand in multiple ways. The number one way – you will gain control over your own actions in a way that you would not be able to if you were angry. Number two, everyone who is witness to the situation will see you as the more level headed person. Their anger will be snuffed out quickly, and then their only course of action will be to try something more intelligent. In this way, it can even be compared, almost, to teaching a child how they should behave.

Al Siebert PhD, author of Survivor Personality writes that anger is not meant to be something self destructive at all. When you are trying to stop a form of abuse, or just trying to get someone who is enraged to look at a situation better, the attitude you’ve got to have(as in a survival situation) is an attitude of “pessimistic optimism.” You must gain an undeterred determination to hold steady that this situation is going to get better, no matter what, and no matter what it takes. If that means permanently cutting off your connection with a person, getting them thrown in jail for abuse, then that is what it means. Your happiness and your freedom to live are your right.

Similarly, staying calm while others are angry can also cause us to look at our own actions as well. Not only should we simply be saying, “I’m always right,” but looking at the outcome of whatever it is you are dealing with in terms of your own actions in a calm and relaxed, yet alert, manner is going to aid things far more than if you were simply pulling out all the stops with a firm fist all the time. Consider the question, why is this person angry with me? And have I done anything to attract this particular person to be angry at me? Sometimes we can, especially unknowingly, and without intending, offend people by our own actions.

Most of the time, anger should never be something that is present in any disagreement, no matter what the issue. All situations have the ability to be solved calmly.