If you’ve been planning to give up smoking but keep putting it off then today might be the day to start. Today is the Great American Smokeout – but even if you’re not in the US you can use today for motivation.

So choose to stay smoke free today. Choose to improve your health and fitness. Choose to save money for other things.

Make today a day of positive choice. And if the urge to have a cigarette does get too strong for you, don’t look at it as a failure. Instead really taste that cigarette, think about the noxious chemicals inside it and visualise what it’s doing to your lungs. Smoking a cigarette and really thinking about it can be a powerful incentive not to smoke any more.

So choose not to smoke, whether it be for a day or just an hour. Then make the same choice again. And again, and again until it becomes a habit.

How’s your day been? Have you had “one of those days”? If you haven’t today you will have done so at some point.

You know the sort of days I mean. Nothing seems to go right, the universe keeps throwing problems at you and you end the day with more worries than you started with. We all have days like that from time to time.

It’s so frustrating. You crawl into bed feeling tired and annoyed at having achieved nothing – and wake the next day demotivated before you even begin. So you have another bad day.

It’s a downward spiral that we can easily get into. So try to stop it before it starts. You can’t always stop the bad days happening – the universe is like that – but you can contol the way you respond to them.
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Henrik Edberg has a great post over at The Positivity Blog. It’s called 11 Questions That Could Help You to Vastly Improve the Quality of Your Life in 2009 and is well worth a read.

One of the questions that made me stop and think more than the others was number ten: “Am I detached from the results? “. Now one of the things I’m constantly talking about is the importance of remembering why you’re doing things, using the reasons to provide guidance and motivation. At first sight this would seem to be at odds with staying detached from results.

Yet I completely agree with Henrik when he says:

But when you play/blog/work etc. stay unattached to the outcome. Just focus on what’s in front of you. Things will become easier. You’ll create less inner anxiety and pressure for yourself. And you will perform better because you are focusing on what’s right in front of you and not weighing yourself down with a lot of imagined or real expectations from other people and self-created negativity.

How to reconcile the two approaches?
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There’s an excellent sketch show on CBBC called Stupid. One of the recurring characters is the “Want it? Can’t have it!” girl. Her gimmick is offering something that someone really wants then, at the last moment, pulling it back.

I don’t know about you but sometimes I feel the universe is like that: it holds out the promise of something you really want, let’s you get so close and then, at the last moment, snatches it away.

Obviously that’s an unhelpfully negative viewpoint. How can we reframe it into a positive?
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Today I want to do a little time travel. Don’t worry, it’s just a thought experiment – we won’t be meeting any Daleks! The experiment is in two parts, the first of which is probably familiar to you. The second might be new.

Let’s start by assuming you can travel back in time to have a word with your earlier self. How far back you go is up to you – one year, five, ten, whatever. What advice would you give your earlier self?

I’m not talking about the winning lottery numbers here! I’m thinking more in terms of general advice (“You need to change career” or “If you don’t get fit you’ll have major health problems”) and priorities (“Spend more time with your family”). In particular I’m thinking of things that you probably knew at some level back then, but either ignored or were just “too busy” to implement.

If you’d had that advice back then, advice from yourself of all people, would you have acted on it? I suspect you would. And that could have changed your life today for the better.

OK, on to part two. You can probably guess what’s coming next…

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