How to be happier

How many times during the last week that you have felt unhappy or experienced negative feelings? The answer maybe many?

Do you want to be happier? The answer would be absolute YES.

Can you see the contradictory, you want to be happier but you often choose to not be.

You probably argue that it is because of the external factors. Just imagine, you are an orange, no matter who squeeze you, you have orange juice. You may get the idea now, what inside you creates the outside! 

I remember when I was third year student, I felt lost and felt no progressing, studying just studying and feeling long time to go till I could finish it then work on my desire of helping people to make a difference in life.

I decided to cycle to HaiDuong to see my sister...

where my second sister, Tomorrow, was working; it was 70 km away from Hanoi, where I was studying. Friends told me “don’t be crazy ... but you are crazy anyway.” To most Vietnamese people, it was a crazy thing to do – cycle alone a great distance on a cruiser bicycle on a sunny day on a Vietnamese highway without a cycling track in 37 degree heat. Yes, I was crazy.

The hot weather could not keep me awake the whole way. I was sleeping while pedaling the bike. I woke up each time I heard the sound of the horns of vehicles on the road or the shouting of people on motorbikes or car drivers.

Finally, I arrived at my sister’s place, safe and sound. My sister was standing in front of the restaurant with a big smile waiting for me. When she came over and pulled my hands and dragged me to the kitchen to water and feed me, I knew that I was still alive.

I then asked my sister to see her living room. That moment became my biggest wake-up call, mentally and physically.

…the wake up call…

I couldn’t utter a single word when entering the room … it should not be called a room.

A tiny bed in a tiny dark dorm room with twelve beds with almost no way to walk through and where the sun could never shine in.

On one side of the room, my sister, Tomorrow, was standing. She had devoted her life to my family by working far from her own home at her early age. She had been through a serious accident, breaking one leg. But she brightened up the corner of the room with her cheerful smile.

And, there I was: with a good education, the support and love of my family, so many more options than I had and yet I had lost my self and the joy from my life.

On the side, where I was standing, I was doubtful, losing the joy of life, while having a good education and being supported by and the hope of my family.

*********I realised there was nothing missing but the grateful attitude for life*******my internal feeling that I create for myself 

Think about the public speaking, who told you public speaking is fearful - people told you - where the ideas come from - from people who told the people ---- 

We create the own prison for ourselves - what if I told you public speaking is exciting since the day you were born - you would feel excited to do it...

...You may not be able to change external factors - you can create the meaning for that --

You can always create and grow the orange if you want orange juice ....

How to sleep well

Why it is important? Your physical, mental health, your performance, your emotions, your relationships, all aspects of life.

What influence your sleeping quality?

Remember your sleeping quality comes from DAILY RITUALS (EATING, DRINKING, WORKING, RESTING) + THOUGHTS + EMOTIONS especially the habits before you go to bed. This means you have 100% control over that.

 How to sleep well:

1. Discipline

Your eating, drinking, working habits during the days

2. Transition from daily activities to sleeping

After coming back from work, doing yoga, going for a nice walk, reading a book

3. No social media, screens one hour before sleeping

4. Gratitude journal

5. Create environment for your sleeping well: light dim, candles, relaxing music,  let your worries rest as you also go to rest

How to raise your standards

We all know that we can live a better for a better quality of life and we know we have potential to do so, we just wonder how and where to start.

You can think about 5 areas that you want to raise to other levels that you feel better that can lead to any other areas better.

1. Joy

Associate the joy with the process of raising standards and in daily activities.

2. Health

When you are healthy, you feel energetic, you are more focused, you are more productive. You know if you have everything but not health, it is not meaningful.

Everyday your decision of what you eat, drink, sleep influence on your health. 

Remind yourself when you choose the apples or the fast food; cocacola or water; use the staircase or elevator; exercise in the morning or sleeping longer; yoga and going to the gym or going to party to drink

3. Focus 

Focus on one thing at a time, do not let the phones and laptops work against you, let them become your weapon, use them to set alarm to remind yourself to take a rest after each hour of intensively working.

Forget about multi tasking that does not advance your life. Work intensively for one task and take a break to get back focus.

4. Kindness 

Be kind to others, challenge yourself today to go out to:

·         Say 'Hi' and smile at a person you meet on the road

·         Give a compliment to your loved one and a stranger

·         Give a compliment to a person in a coffee shop or restaurant that you normally go to

·         Share the cake you make with your neighbor

·         Write a thanks card to your co-workers

5. Courage

Enable to raise your standards in any area, you want to be more courageous, even you may feel scared, but you will do it any way.

The more you do it, the more courageous you become. You will make the muscle of courage stronger each time you overcome the fear and the doubts to do things that advance your life, to be more joyful, to more healthy, to be more focused, to be more kind.

With that you nonstop taking action to advance your life, to nonstop loving living and giving.

Thanks for being couragoeous and kind to stay until this last word and the video.

The power of habits: how to sustain your daily habits - HOOK tool

Your daily HABITS are the vehicles to success
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'HOOK' tool is to help you MAINTAIN your daily habits.
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mp3: http://podcastgarden.com/jenvuhuong

If you have goals, you need good habits to achieve the goals. For example, if you want to be a writer, you want to have a habit of writing everyday. 

You want to maintain the habits everyday. You know if you can maintain, you can achieve them. 
HOOK moments will help you with maintaining the habits:
1. Intangible HOOK: create a happy image to associate with the goal that you have. For example, if you want to be a writer, you want to have an image of the moment you write everyday and finally the book finished, you can touch the book and smell it.

2. Tangible HOOK:
Set up alarm on your phone 3 times per day to remind your self to keep the habits.

For example, if you are a writer, you want to set up the alarm every morning that you need to write at 7am maybe 1000 words.

You also can set up the alarm for your intention when you write, for example 'focus'

If you trigger your brain enough, it will run automatically later on.

3. HOOK for each activity

You can create the HOOK moment for each actitivity you do to just remind yourself to be like you want. For example, if you go to meet a friend, you dont want to get distracted by phones, you create that alarm before the meeting happens, you see the reminder 'focus, be present' when meeting your friend.

Or if you enter a meeting, you want to bring joy, you create trigger to remind you about that. You can associate good feelings you want to experience with each activity, when you keep reminding yourself long enough, it will run automatically for you.

If you keep doing it, you nonstop love live give to achieve your goals.

How to turn defeat to success

We all have big dreams, goals, purpose and we may sometimes do not get the results as we desire. For example, if we write a blog, nobody reads it. If we just program an application, nobody uses it. We feel like we failed. No matter what you call the experience, the idea is how to move on and let it motivate you.

1. Choose empowering meanings for the experience 

Ask yourself the question - What can I learn from the experience? What can I learn from people? What can I do it differently? 

You immediately change your focus to move toward. At the end of the day, you want to move forward, you need to train your brain to have that habit. You may argue it is not easy to do. Yes, that is why you need to do it more often. When you create that rule for your brain and practice it often enough, it will automatically run anytime anything happen. 

You always fall forward.

2. Gain momentum

You don't want to just feel down and stuck in the circumstances. You want to take immediate 3 actions. Why 3? Not so many and not so little so your brain will easily accept it!

For example, you can just send an email to your friend to ask for feedback. Or simply just go for a walk and enjoy the sun. Or just go to a coffee shop and write down your journal. Or just simply go to a meeting to meetup with people.

When you feel that you connect again with life and you are not alone, you release the feeling of failure.

3. Serve more 

You want to ask yourself - how can I serve better today!

How can I contribute more to life!

If you change your focus to people, you become bigger than your circumstances, you see things from more empowering perspective.

You nonstop taking action and live a nonstop loving living and giving life!

How to heal your trauma

How to love more instead of jealous

Jealousy can kill our joy in life and our relationship. We dont need to allow it to do that to us.

So 4 ideas:

1. Awareness jealousy is just either fear of lost or fear from the past experience

Fear of lost may also come from your past experience or the behaviours of the person in the past. So you want to sit down and have a conversation with yourself, witness the thoughts which normally go with 'What if...' then let them go.

If it comes from the past behaviours of the person that triggers your brain 'she may do it again...you now want to sit down and talk through, ask instead of assume.

2. Believe in yourself again and give yourself credit 

Sometimes you dont believe in yourself so you have the fear of lost, remember you have been through a lot. Dont think when the person leaves, life ends. Remember if you love with all your heart, you let things come and go, when the person goes, something new will come, dont try to hold back. 

3. Dont hold back your love, love on the person even more 

The only way to make you feel loved is to love, the only way to receive love is to love.

When you are willing to love, you are willing to receive.

When you love more, jealousy goes.

4. Renew your relationship with your self or with the person

Do something new together every week to love yourself and the person.

How to develop growth mindset

We all want to feel fulfilled in life. Growth is one of the most fundamental factor to make us feel alive and fulfilled. We all can develop better every single day to have a better quality of life.

Here are 4 ideas to develop a growth mindset:

1. Self-belief: Believe in your ability to figure things out

Why? If you don't believe in your ability to figure things out, you will not even start or if you start, you easily quit along the way. 

How can you enhance the belief by creating a rule whenever you meet any project: I will try no matter what happen, it is better to not try! You can think about one experience you had in the past that you did well, so you can figure other things out too. Or you can use visualization to imagine you figure the project out and achieve the goal. Get excited about it.

For example: if you are an engineer, you need to make a presentation in public. Tell yourself, I will give it a try, engineering is much more complicated but you could study it, so why not public speaking - just speak. The difference is society associates the doubts and fear with public speaking while it can be the opposite - excitement. You design a beautiful product, you want to share it, you dont want to let the doubts take away the chance to bring your products to benefit others.

2. Question your doubts

Why? To free to move on. The doubts hold you back to try new things, to change for better.

How? You can question the doubts - what are the evidence for the doubts? Think about you have gone through a lot until today. And you can do it much better.

Change the doubts become curiosity - and the ability of giving it a try and figure things out. For example, even you are scared of public speaking - that what you think - you will say - let me try - I never experienced it so let me try - I will learn a new thing.

3. Master your skills by continuous learning 

You want to master your skills by reading, listening, learning from others....

You want to develop a curriculum for your skills. When you master your skills, you become more confidence and believe in yourself and vanish the doubts.

4. Learn from difficulties

Growth mindset people always look at what they can learn from a situation. 

How to be more discipline

You want to be more self-discplined to master your skills or to just improve your health. Self-discipline is important for anything you want to achieve.

1. Scheduling 

Without scheduling, you will just go around and randomly respond to the world. Before you get the discipline muscle strong, you want to schedule the time to practice it.

Spend 30 minutes every week to schedule how your new week look like with how many major project, which day will you do it.

Set up the alarm or put it as notes, stick it every where that you can see or in your phone.

2. Visualisation with emotional connection 

Every morning, you want to visualise to imagine yourself doing and achieving the goal. Without emotion, our brain does not motivate our action to achieve it.

And visualise 3 goals if will achieve on that day

3. Intensive blocking time 

Start with the important tasks to you before responding to anyone. 

You want to set up the block time for each important task and then you can fully focus on it, allow yourself to fully be in it, and other time is for relaxing.

For ex: I have to write today, I am gonna write before responding to anyone.

4. Social reward 

You want to celebrate so your brain know it is good so it will keep it up.

For ex: if you finish one video, call a friend and share it. If you finish reading a book, share with your friend.

How to master your emotion

Here are 4 ideas to develop a more enduring sense of self and inner strength:

1. Self-relience. You decide to take charge of your life. That you know you are the one who is going to change things. You’ll never know your true self until you decide to more deliberately control your focus, time, and actions.

2. Rule to direct your thoughts. Emotional mastery requires that you give yourself cues. You literally have to tell yourself how to feel and how to respond to life’s challenges. Start the morning by telling yourself how you want to feel today. Give voice to your feelings and command yourself to say and do things that make you proud.

3. Self-expression. Self-confidence is cultivated when you choose to express who you are and to believe in your ability to figure things out. That’s real confidence. You lose it when you conform with others and lose your faith in yourself. You must believe that  no matter the situation or struggle you find yourself in, you’re going to figure it out. Give yourself the gift of belief, and soon you’ll try newer and harder things and expand the very definition of your self.

4. Understanding others.  We understand ourselves the more we connect with the lives and feelings of others. So, in order to develop any emotional mastery in life, it’s important to ask people about their experiences and emotions. Notice we say “ask.” Don’t guess. It’s in making assumptions about others that we obscure true learning, about them and ourselves. You want to know yourself? Talk more with others. Authentic conversations about real life and other’s emotions makes us ask, “What do I think of that? How would I feel? Who would I be in this situation? What do I want?”

How to be mindful

 Activation of your senses in the moment.

1. Observe where you are.
2. Observe how you are.
3. Observe your impulses and the “drama mind”
4. Meditate 

How to enjoy life

Enjoy life by bringing the joy and happiness to your life. It is my tip for anyone who has asked me 'How to enjoy life?' Or people asked 'What to bring to my events' I go 'Bring your self and the joy.'

How to bring more joy in life?

1. Take responsibility for bringing the joy, be the person who brings the joy

Set a rule for yourself that you will bring the joy to any meeting you go to, any people you meet.

2. Bring the humour 

Interrupt the negatitivity flow by bringing humour 

3. Be helpful 

4. Be supportive 

Be your BEST

Do you strongly feel about your BEST self?

How can you live up to your BEST everyday and then you can get things done well, you feel great about yourself, you feel great about life.

1. Have clarity about who you are

- Ask yourself: what is the self that I felt great when I was it, I achieved goals when I was that self, people also felt great to be around me, what would be the self?

- If you do not feel it strongly which mean you have not practiced often enough. Remind yourself to now practice living upto that person

- Use three words to describe your best self and use triggers (e.g., alrm on phone, or reminder on laptop, or post it on your business card) to remind yourself living up to that self

2. Continous improvement

- Read, listen to inspirational materials after you wake up and before you go to sleep

- Surround youself by like-minded people

- Go to seminar, talk

Just invest in yourself everyday

3. Live with services and kindness

- Ask yourself every morning, what can you do to serve people better everyday

- Be nice to others, just simple like a smile

Shine your BEST self everyday!

jenvuhuong.com

Day 9: How to keep your integrity

How to stick to your words because our time and energy equally important, we need to respect others' time and energy as our time and energy. We do not want to say Yes then cannot delivery that may damage the relationship with others. 

4 ideas that will help you stick to your word:

#1. Know the Why and Don’t commit to everything:  Stop committing to things that you’re not passionate about or not sure that you can commit or really crucial for others. Don't think that it is good to say Yes to please people because having to say sorry as you cannot commit after saying Yes is even worse. You may think people feel good when you say Yes but the bad feeling when you do not delivery is much worse. So if you say Yes, you need to be aware of your WHY and people WHY.

#2. Respect other people’s time. Your time is not more valuable than others. Respect others’ time much as you respect and want to protect your own. Remember that everybody has priorities, life, and responsibilities. Your decision to cancel on them disrupts their day and life, and that’s not fair. You don’t want people ruining your schedule so don’t do it to others.

#3. Reevaluate before breaking your word: Sometimes, we say ‘yes’ to a lot of things but we forget the WHY when we start working on them. We forget why we said ‘yes’ in the first place and lose passion, and so we quit. Before you cancel on anything, try to remember why you originally said yes. In other words, revisit the WHY so that you’re willing to endure the struggle.

#4. Recovery. If you cancel on someone or fail to deliver, you’ve broken your word. You need to buy back your character, reputation, and integrity with an act of kindness, generosity, or attrition. You’ll have to go beyond your original commitment. Not only does this type of act regain your reputation, it also supports you on your journey to being a good person. When you mess up, be more generous. 

jenvuhuong.com

Day 8: The BEST you

3 IDEAS about having CLARITY of your best self:

1. Define your best self - use three words to describe your best self 

2. How does your best self interact with people - use three ways to describe your intention when interacting with people

3. What made you succeed - use the successful patterns to achieve new goals

DETAILS: 

1. Your best self. 

- Have clearly thought about who you want to be and who your ideal self would be on a day-to-day basis.

- Articulately describe who the person you are trying to become 

- Exercise: 3 words to describe your best self > reminding yourself to live up to that person (for example: in your notebook; your phone) > share it with people to keep accountability 

2. Interactions With Others. 

- Have clarity about how you want to interact with others

- Know your values and people's values, respect other ideas

-  What kind of impression and relationship you want with others

- Exercise: before you walk into meetings, spend some minutes to set clear intentions for how to interact with others

3. What Makes You Succeed

- What specific things made you succeed in the past?  Are you doing those things consistently this year? Define your successful patterns and reinforce it, apply it with bigger scales, bigger effort and you will get bigger results.

Exercise:

+ The conscious awareness of the tactics, habits, and mindsets that have made you successful in the past: 3 key patterns

+ Re-scale it and re-evaluate to see what work, what does not work

+ Learn from the people who have achieved big results in the field that you want, you also can model them and you may be surprised that they may share with you what you already know, so the question is that - Have you done it consitently?

Day 7: What to do when you feel lost

Yes you can find yourself again!

3 ideas to do when you get lost: 

1. Engagement. You don't need to suffer feeling lost by yourself. Just engage with your friends and your family to gain another perspectives. Just go for a drink and listen to people's stories or tell your stories and  share your stories. Just need to look at things in other perspectives. 

2. Giving more. Just give more, care more for people. When you think for others more than yourself, you get engaged with your deep self again. Do some volunteer work, do something nice to others. 

3. See it as the way it is but not worse. At least you don't make it worse, see it as the way it is. Gain momentum by getting things done. When you take action, even small thing, you gain the momentum again. 

jenvuhuong.com

Day 5: How to stay focus

To be more focused:

1. Take control of one hour after you wake up: 20 minutes feeding your mind by reading/listening personal development materials + 20 minutes planning gratitude mindset goals of days and improvement in doing things + 20 minutes exercise 

2. Triggers/blocking time to refresh after each task 

3. Take control of one hour before going to sleep: reading and writing gratitude journal instead of surfing 

Day 4: Decision to FOCUS/MEANING

Make a decision to what to FOCUS: 

- what you can control? what you cannot control?

- what is working? what is not working?

- what you do not like? what to do to change it?

Make a decision to give MEANING?

- learning or the end?

- must or should?

DECISION TO MAKE EVERY MOMENT!

BELIEVE again

BELIEVE again

Believe again in our dreams

Believe again in our ability of figure things out

Believe again in life

1. Think about everyday as an new opportunity to believe again in ourselves, dreams, and others

2. Believe in our ability of figure things out

3. Believe in the power of choosing which meaning to give into life

Believe in ourselves then people believe with us and believe in themselves...

Believe in u!

PASSION: Infinitive RESOURCE of energy: 29 days challenge to breakthrough

PASSION: PASS MISSION TO ACTION 

1. Identify your mission in life 

Remember you are more than your physical body. Knowing that you live not only for you. 

If you do not know exactly your mission, just learn to progress everyday. 

2. Action

What to do to develop your skills everyday. If you know your mission, then you just need to take action that matter to your mission.

Remember the key elements is to grow and to give.

3. Honor the struggle and bring joy to what you do