The GoalTribe Blog

So you’ve lost your job, huh? That’s sucks. Or does it? What if it’s the best thing that ever happened to you? What if it’s a blessing in disguise? I know you might feel terrible about it, but millions of people who’ve lost there jobs are deciding to re-interpret what unemployment means. They’re going from UNemploymed to FUNemployed. And you can too!

5 Steps for Turning UNemployment into FUNemployment

1. Drop the Guilt and Fear: These are new times. Lots of people are losing there jobs. You may lose your job many more times. It doesn’t mean you’re bad. It doesn’t mean you’re not taking care of your family. Feeling bad about losing your job is a waste of time. Surrender to the situation, be grateful for the fresh opportunities before you, and get curious and excited about what you could do with your time off work!

2. Take a Mini Retirement: This is an opportunity: an opportunity to start a new chapter in your life; an opportunity to catch your breath, an opportunity to take a Mini Retirement! Tim Ferris’ book “4 Hour Workweek” explains how counting on a nice retirement at the end of your life is no longer a valid strategy. There’s too much uncertainty with the economy, social security, finances and your health. It’s much smarter to take mini-retirements throughout your life. There is no longer a stigma attached to taking off 3,6 or 12 months between jobs.

3. Carpe Diem: So seize the day! Give yourself permission to have the time of your life! Whether you just have a lot more fun with the flexibility and time you have during your job search, or whether you take a full on mini-retirement - have fun with your unemployment!

4. Swap Time for Money: When you have a good job, you have money, but no time to enjoy it. When you’re without work, you’re rich with time but have limited money. How exciting! You just need to learn how to be clever & creative with your cash.

5. Do Something Stupendous! I hope by now your brain is running wild with ideas for things you could do with your time off. Do something exciting! Do something that people will be amazed by! Do something that makes a great story! Do something that will fill a photo album that will make you laugh, and smile and relive happy memories all the days your life. Make this unemployment a FUNemployment!

What might you do with your FUNemployment? Learn a language? See concerts? Teach your children to surf? Learn the accordion? Backpack South America? Volunteer to help save the rain forest? Write your memoirs? Finish that screenplay? Play your favorite video game to the end? Find a cure for baldness? Please share your ideas in the comments section!

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Related articles by Zemanta

• Unemployment survival guide (money.cnn.com)
• Your Job Search: Give Up Unreachable Goals (punkrockhr.com)

If you don’t exercise regularly, it’s probably because you haven’t found an exercise that you truly enjoy. That’s partly because we keep hearing about the same old types of exercise over and over again, but there are hundreds of ways to get regular exercise. Here are 101 different creative exercises that will suit every type of circumstance and personality.

Try the 30 Day Fitness Challenge Facebook App
The easy way to stay motivated to exercise!

Take a look through the list and pick several exercises that sound like fun. Consider whether you prefer to be indoors or outdoors, like to engage your mind or just bliss out, be social or be solitary, and any other insights you have about what you enjoy doing.

(Also see the 101 More Classic Ways to Exercise.)

1. Juggling
2. Stunt pogo sticking
3. Tree climbing
4. Mountainboarding
5. Unicycling
6. Practicing Jedi Skills (the Jedi Workout)
7. Walking on water
8. Picking up litter around the neighborhood, town, park or beach
9. Playing video games (Wii, Dance Dance Revolution, etc.)
10. Fruit picking (not too slowly!)
11. Volunteering (Try fitness oriented charities)
12. Fire juggling
13. Drumming
14. Bouncing with Spring-Soled Shoes
15. Sex
16. Ropeless jump roping
17. Sit and Be Fit
18. Kite Surfing
19.  virtual horseback riding (or iGalloping)
20. In the nude
21. Pogo sticking
22. Parkour
23. Tricking

24. Punching and kicking your way through your favorite action flick
25. Dancing your way through your favorite musical
26. Hula Hooping
27. Playing tag
28. Joggling (juggling while jogging)
29. Roller Hockey
30. Roller Derby
31. Leaf pile diving (includes raking!)
32. Gladiator Workout
33. Finding online workout videos
34. Wearing weight loss shoes (or sandels)
35. Playing capture the flag
36. Water balloon fights
37. Snowshoeing
38. Bicycling on Water
39. Squirt Gun Fights
40. Pillow Fights
41. Underwater Rugby
42. Underwater Soccer
43. Synchronized swimming
44. Hop scotching
45. Riverboarding
46. Marco polo
47. Slip and slide
48. Playing touch football
49. Snow kiting
50. Giving the dog a bath

51. Miniature Golfing
52. Baton Twirling
53. Sledding
54. Hacky Sacking
55. Making snowmen (BIG ones!)

56. Building snow forts
57. Walking in place while watching tv
58. Boot Camp Workout
59. Swimming with Porpoise Flipper
60. Learn Self Defense
61. Geocaching
62. Orienteering
63. Window Washing
64. Cleaning the garage
65. Clean the attic
66. Landscape the yard
67. Doing laundry
68. Trampolining
69. Inflatable jumping castles
70. Swinging
71. Playing Twister
72. Cheerleading
73. Canyoning
74. Bouldering
75. Snowkiting
76. Skysurfing
77. Belly dancing
78. Circus Skills (Look for circus schools)
79. Gardening
80. Riding a Scooter

81. Clubbing
82. Walkling (juggling while walking)
83. Poll dancing
84. Street luge
85. Arm wrestling
86. Stability balls
87. Rock Climbing
88. Sandboarding
89. Sea Kayaking
90. Ice climbing
91. Exotic Dancing (link 2)
92. Laughing (laughter yoga)
93. Karaoke (with a lot of dramatic dance moves!)
94. Dodgeball
95. Frisbee Golf
96. Ultimate Frisbee
97. Long boarding
98. Car washing for charity
99. Beach combing
100. Sand dune climbing
101. Samurai Sword Classes

Even More Creative Ways to Workout

1. Hot tub treadmilling
2. Body Juggling
3. Wave Jumping
4. Stationary bike racing
5. Extreme clowning
6. Composting
7. Mountain Unicycling
8. Extreme clowning
9. Reality TV Workout
10. Exercise in pill form

11. Exercising on art
12. Punk Rock Yoga
13. Equestrian Yoga
14. Tangolates
15. Unicycle Trials
16. Mongolian Wrestling
17. Sumo
18. Laser Tag
19. Paint Ball
20. Airsoft
21. Outrigger Canoeing
22. Creeking
23. Surf Kayaking
24. Dragon Boat Racing
25. Bicycle Polo
26. Ice Yachting
27. Land Sailing
28. Free Running

Now pick some of these exercises that sound fun and try them! Or dream up your own exercises now that you’ve got the idea.

Do you need help staying motivated to exercise? Motivation is our specialty! We took the top motivational strategies proven in clinical research and built them into our new GoalTribe Facebook app: The 30 Day Fitness Challenge. Get help from your friends to exercise 3 times a week for 30 days! Please give it a try and let us know what you think!

Got some other exercise ideas? Please share in the comments!

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Part of creating a fulfilling life for yourself is discovering the things you love to do and filling your life with them. It’s amazing when your profession is your passion and you volunteer doing things that are both profoundly helpful and enjoyable to you.

But inevitably you end up having to do things that make you want to scream, or make your eyes glaze over like a Dunkin Donut.

Don’t dispair! You can adjust your enjoyment of these things with a few simple tricks:

1. Know Why: Why are you doing this task? Focus on the outcome you’re after and how it will feel to achieve it. For example, how great will it feel to have all your finances organized and fully understand them? And how will it feel to be able to spend knowing that it’s in budget?

2. Watch Your Focus: When working on a project we tend to keep focusing on problems and things which aren’t complete yet, so we can fix them. But be sure to take a moment to look at what’s going right. What’s great about this?

3. Watch your Body: Often if you’re doing something you don’t like, you’re holding that tension and stress in your body - in your muscles, your breathing and your face. Get up and move a little, shake out your body, take a deep breath and let out a sigh as if you’re looking out over a beautiful scene. Let you body relax. Smile. Feel how that change of state feels in your body and try to keep that relaxation as you work. Remind yourself regularly to check how you’re using your body - and relax!

4. Take a Break: Studies have shown that you can’t concentrate too continuously for too long without it affecting your mood and performance. It’s recommended to take a short break every half hour or so. In fact, one study showed that people who watched YouTube or checked FaceBook at work were more productive because they could relax with a laugh or a smile very quickly! (Just don’t let it get carried away.)

5. Reframe & Find Meaning: Often you just picked up a bad attitude, belief or feeling about the task that is just unfairly making you suffer. You think you hate finances - why? Where did that belief come from? Take some time to write out all the ways in which that belief is making your life miserable, then write a new belief like - “I love mastering my finances!” and then write down all the reasons that could be true.

I got to thinking about this topic from the conclusions Glen came to on his inspiring 7 Day Discipline Challenge.
Read about his challenge here: http://www.pluginid.com/pure-self-discipline/

And his conclusions here: http://www.pluginid.com/self-discipline-challenge/

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Life was not meant to be a dull bore. It’s meant to be an uproarious, laugh-out-load, grin-from-ear-to-ear, technicolor thrill ride! And if there are boring details, or painful projects you need to complete along the way, there are hundreds of little tricks for injecting juice, joy and fun into anything.

I just read the PickTheBrain.com blog post The Ultimate Motivation Hack, which explains how adding fun is the key to staying motivated. It inspired me to continue to the conversation with 40 creative ways to make boring activities much more fun:

1. Rock Out! Play music that really makes you happy.

2. Don’t just turn on the top-40 station, get online and get MP3’s of the music that made you feel like conquering the world when you were a teenager!

3. Turn it up! Can’t turn it up? Get headphones.

4. Need to think while you’re working? Explore energizing music without lyrics like classical… or my favorite work music – Goa Trance!

5. Or perhaps you prefer relaxing, serene music that makes you smile. Experiment with genres to see how different music affects you. Try jazz,rock, easy listening, world, country, electronica. I recommend Pandora.com to listen for free.

6. Play music that reminds your favorite vacation

7. Sing along – preferably at the top of your lungs!

8. Change Locations. Do your project somewhere you normally wouldn’t.

9. Do it outside in the sunshine and fresh air

10. Do it at a coffee shop

11. Do it somewhere you’ve never been before

12. Ask if you can do this project from home

13. Focus on the Fun. Too often we focus on problems we need to address rather than the hundreds of details that would make us feel happier.

14. How will this positively impact you? Your loved ones? Your finances? Your health? The world?

15. What’s go right in this moment? What could you be grateful for? What are you proud of?

16. Give Them Something To Talk About – How could you turn a mundane project into a story worth sharing?

17. How can you do it in a new, creative, crazy, profound or noteworthy way?

18. What if you did it faster than anyone thought possible?

19. What if you did it while you were in the bathtub?

20. What if you added some creative flair?

21. Can you work on this while spending the whole day in bed?

22. Change Clothes. What you wear can have a big affect on how you feel.

23. Wear your craziest outfit

24. Wear vacation clothes (and put on music from your last vacation)

25. Do the project in your pajamas, in your underwear or naked!

26. Put on a suit or your dressiest clothes

27. Wear your coziest house clothes

28. User your Body. Studies have shown that body motion is directly connected to emotion.

29. So walk tall, stand like someone who is alive, electric and ready to take on the world

30. Smile a huge, big smile (proven to help even depressed patients reduce medication)

31. Breath deeply. Take a few deep breaths every few minutes. Let out a nice sigh as you exhale.

32. Dance – while cleaning, while walking, while doing anything. Tap a foot, bop your head, let the world see your happiness.

33. Excite your Senses

34. Surround yourself in flowers

35. Find the most exhilarating paintings, screen-savers or wallpaper to decorate with. Find images that you actually make your heart swell in a way you can feel.

36. Find a scent to fill your workspace that makes you happy.

37. Try pure peppermint flavoring, with no sugar or additives, to give you a calorie free zing throughout the day

38. Play stand-up comedy on Hulu.com while working

39. Listen to great inspiration speakers like Tony Robbins, Zig Zigglar or Wayne Dyer while working

40. Have a DVD of continuous thrill sports playing in the background – skydiving, snowboarding, surfing. Whatever excites you.

What do YOU do to make a boring project more fun? What things can you do to spice up any activity? Please tell us in the comments section.

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