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The 80/20 Rule

I’m sure most of you have heard at least somewhere about the 80/20 rule.  It is applied in many circumstances and a lot of the time in relation to wealth than 20% of the people have 80% of the money.  Well the 80/20 rule also applies to personal development and our issues as well.
Sometimes when someone starts to look at what they want to change about themselves they are flooded with information.  What starts as something small like wanting to have more self esteem ends up in this huge list of habits and traits that you find annoying until it gets overwhelming and you give up altogether.  And I’d give up too if the reality really was you had to address each one of those issues directly.
So I have good news for you.  The 80/20 rule is also applied to you, meaning that if you concentrate on tackling the 20% then the 80% will take care of itself.  The reality is the ‘symptoms’ that you think are your issues are not really your core issues, they are just the 80% fluff that are buffering your issues.  Which is why it’s hard to get rid of them even though you’ve probably tried at numerous times to feel more positive, not binge drink or know you are deserving.  But strangely what I hear from people is that they always revert back to how they were originally.
Psychology actually has a term for it, it’s called the hedonic treadmill, meaning no matter how hard we try we’ll always end up back at the same place.  But not only is that depressing it’s not true either.  If you tackle the core of your issues, why you are that way to begin with, then you will not always revert back to the same old you as you’ll be changing yourself deep within.
The 20% of issues are the biggies and when we look at those head on, like a ripple effect in a pond the 80% of issues tend to get sorted out indirectly.  It’s a decision about whether you just want to put a band aid on your scraped knee or if you want to figure out how you hurt it in the first place.
Here’s an example of the 20% so you know what I mean by our core issues:

• Feeling abandoned/rejected/betrayed by people especially your partner.
• Feeling that you are not good enough in your own eyes or other people’s eyes (which is really what low self esteem is).
• Having control issues, trouble letting go and being vulnerable.
• Trusting in life and others (including yourself).
• Feeling you have to be a good boy/girl and get the approval of others.
• Feeling criticized and put down by others close to you and then putting that on yourself.

I find most people have between 2-5 core issues in their 20% and then the rest are just symptoms of their core issues.    So don’t go crazy thinking of everything under the sun, think of the issues that really effect you on a deep level, the ones you know you have carried for a long time.
All the other elements are symptoms, feelings generated from this 20% such as feeling angry or resentful, feeling needy or wanting to withdraw, feeling depressed and anxious.  On top of that personality traits then build on these symptoms so they can feel very fixed and permanent like that is who we are, not just part of our personality that got the wrong message somewhere along the line.
If you really want to change your life and make a difference, you need to find your 20%.  What is really going on for you under the anger, anxiety, depression or low self esteem and what made you that way.  When you address things from this level the changes you make are permanent and ripple out effecting every area of your life.

by Shelley Viskovich - Counsellor & Body Psychotherapist 

The Top Ten Lessons Steve Jobs Taught Us

This week we saw the passing of Steve Jobs.  Jobs was an innovator, a thinker, and a creator; but most importantly a human being just like each one of us.  So what does this have to do with a health club's blog?  Not a lot, it is more about stopping and having a look at ourselves.   If we could capture some of this man's passion, his creativity, tenacity, courage and confidence just imagine what we could do...in "every" area of our lives!
The following article is from Forbes US.  We hope you enjoy.

Three weeks ago, I wrote a post about the top ten lessons Steve Jobs could teach us.
I had a feeling – like I suspect many others – that he only had a few more days with us on this Earth.
He’s irreplaceable.  We’ll never see anyone else like him.  Edison, Einstein, Henry Ford… he has left an indelible mark on our society in the last 35 years and for many more to come.
Yet, despite his greatness, he also taught us that he’s just a man.  He got up every day, like you and me.  He kissed his family goodbye and he threw his heart and soul into his work – his passion — just like we can.

Here are the Top Ten Lessons Steve Jobs taught us:
1. The most enduring innovations marry art and science – Steve has always pointed out that the biggest difference between Apple and all the other computer (and post-PC) companies through history is that Apple always tried to marry art and science.  Jobs pointed out the original team working on the Mac had backgrounds in anthropology, art, history, and poetry.  That’s always been important in making Apple’s products stand out.  It’s the difference between the iPad and every other tablet computer that came before it or since.  It is the look and feel of a product.  It is its soul.  But it is such a difficult thing for computer scientists or engineers to see that importance, so any company must have a leader that sees that importance.
2. To create the future, you can’t do it through focus groups – There is a school of thought in management theory that — if you’re in the consumer-facing space building products and services — you’ve got to listen to your customer.  Steve Jobs was one of the first businessmen to say that was a waste of time.  The customers today don’t always know what they want, especially if it’s something they’ve never seen, heard, or touched before.  When it became clear that Apple would come out with a tablet, many were skeptical.  When people heard the name (iPad), it was a joke in the Twitter-sphere for a day.  But when people held one, and used it, it became a ‘must have.’  They didn’t know how they’d previously lived without one.  It became the fastest growing Apple product in its history.  Jobs (and the Apple team) trusted himself more than others.  Picasso and great artists have done that for centuries.  Jobs was the first in business.
3. Never fear failure – Jobs was fired by the successor he picked.  It was one of the most public embarrassments of the last 30 years in business.  Yet, he didn’t become a venture capitalist never to be heard from again.  He didn’t start a production company and do a lot of lunches.  He picked himself up and got back to work following his passion.  Eight years ago, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and told he only had a few weeks to live.  As Samuel Johnson said, there’s nothing like your impending death to focus the mind.  From Jobs’ 2005 Stanford commencement speech:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

4. You can’t connect the dots forward – only backward – This is another gem from the 2005 Stanford speech.  The idea behind the concept is that, as much as we try to plan our lives ahead in advance, there’s always something that’s completely unpredictable about life.  What seems like bitter anguish and defeat in the moment — getting dumped by a girlfriend, not getting that job at McKinsey, “wasting” 4 years of your life on a start-up that didn’t pan out as you wanted — can turn out to sow the seeds of your unimaginable success years from now.  You can’t be too attached to how you think your life is supposed to work out and instead trust that all the dots will be connected in the future.  This is all part of the plan.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

5. Listen to that voice in the back of your head that tells you if you’re on the right track or not – Most of us don’t hear a voice inside our heads.  We’ve simply decided that we’re going to work in finance or be a doctor because that’s what our parents told us we should do or because we wanted to make a lot of money.  When we consciously or unconsciously make that decision, we snuff out that little voice in our head.  From then on, most of us put it on automatic pilot.  We mail it in.  You have met these people.  They’re nice people.  But they’re not changing the world.  Jobs has always been a restless soul.  A man in a hurry.  A man with a plan.  His plan isn’t for everyone.  It was his plan. He wanted to build computers.  Some people have a voice that tells them to fight for democracy.  Some have one that tells them to become an expert in miniature spoons.  When Jobs first saw an example of a Graphical User Interface — a GUI — he knew this was the future of computing and that he had to create it.  That became the Macintosh.  Whatever your voice is telling you, you would be smart to listen to it.  Even if it tells you to quit your job, or move to China, or leave your partner.
6. Expect a lot from yourself and others – We have heard stories of Steve Jobs yelling or dressing down staff.  He’s a control freak, we’ve heard – a perfectionist.  The bottom line is that he is in touch with his passion and that little voice in the back of his head.  He gives a damn.  He wants the best from himself and everyone who works for him.  If they don’t give a damn, he doesn’t want them around.  And yet — he keeps attracting amazing talent around him.  Why?  Because talent gives a damn too.  There’s a saying: if you’re a “B” player, you’ll hire “C” players below you because you don’t want them to look smarter than you.  If you’re an “A” player, you’ll hire “A+” players below you, because you want the best result.
7. Don’t care about being right.  Care about succeeding – Jobs used this line in an interview after he was fired by Apple.  If you have to steal others’ great ideas to make yours better, do it.  You can’t be married to your vision of how a product is going to work out, such that you forget about current reality.  When the Apple III came out, it was hot and warped its motherboard even though Jobs had insisted it would be quiet and sleek.  If Jobs had stuck with Lisa, Apple would have never developed the Mac.
8. Find the most talented people to surround yourself with – There is a misconception that Apple is Steve Jobs.  Everyone else in the company is a faceless minion working to please the all-seeing and all-knowing Jobs.  In reality, Jobs has surrounded himself with talent: Phil Schiller, Jony Ive, Peter Oppenheimer, Tim Cook, the former head of stores Ron Johnson.  These are all super-talented people who don’t get the credit they deserve.  The fact that Apple’s stock price has been so strong since Jobs left as CEO is a credit to the strength of the team.  Jobs has hired bad managerial talent before.  John Sculley ended up firing Jobs and — according to Jobs — almost killing the company.  Give credit to Jobs for learning from this mistake and realizing that he can’t do anything without great talent around him.

9. Stay hungry, stay foolish - Again from the end of Jobs’ memorable Stanford speech:

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

10. Anything is possible through hard work, determination, and a sense of vision – Although he’s the greatest CEO ever and the father of the modern computer, at the end of the day, Steve Jobs is just a guy.  He’s a husband, a father, a friend — like you and me.  We can be just as special as he is — if we learn his lessons and start applying them in our lives.  When Jobs returned to Apple in the 1990s, it was was weeks away from bankruptcy.  It’s now the biggest company in the world.  Anything’s possible in life if you continue to follow the simple lessons laid out above.
May you change the world.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2011/10/05/the-top-ten-lessons-steve-jobs-taught-us/

Denmark imposes 'fat tax' on food to curb obesity

Denmark has become the first country in the world to impose a "fat tax" on unhealthy foods.

The move will place a surcharge on foods high in saturated fat. Butter, milk, cheese, pizza, meat, oil and processed food will all be subject to the levy.

The aim is to reduce people's intake of fatty foods. But consumers have begun hoarding provisions ahead of the price rise and some scientists have suggested that it would be better to target people's salt or sugar intake.

The Nordic country introduced the tax Saturday, of 16 kroner (£1.85) per kilogram of saturated fat in a product.

The tax was approved by large majority in a parliament in March as a move to help increase the average life expectancy of Danes.

In September, Hungary introduced a new tax popularly known as the "Hamburger Law," but that only involves higher taxes on soft drinks, pastries, salty snacks and food flavorings.

The outgoing conservative Danish government planned the fat tax as part of a goal to increase the average life expectancy of Danes, currently below the OECD average at 79 years, by three years over the next 10 years.

"Higher fees on sugar, fat and tobacco is an important step on the way toward a higher average life expectancy in Denmark," health minister Jakob Axel Nielsen said when he introduced the idea in 2009, because "saturated fats can cause cardiovascular disease and cancer."

Linnet Juul says the tax mechanism is very complex, involving tax rates on the percentage of fat used in making a product rather than the percentage that is in the end-product.

Linnet Juul's organization is pressuring lawmakers to simplify the tax, but said he is unsure what will happen when the new, centre-left government takes office. AP

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/denmark-imposes-fat-tax-on-food-to-curb-obesity-2364715.html

Monday, 3 October 2011

**Five easy tips for more ENERGY**

Do you wake up every morning and bounce out of bed, ready to take on the new day? Probably not, well here are some simple suggestions for moms — or anyone! — to live a more pep-filled life.

"Today we're giving out our energy to so many different spaces. It's really important to focus on how to bring some energy back in your life,"
Here are her top five tips for a diet that will rev your engine:

1. Aim for better energy, not just more. "The pursuit of more energy can lead to harmful highs and lows, as people often turn to espresso, sugar, or supplements. I tell my clients to aim for 'better' energy by following the next four steps."
2. Watch your portion sizes. "Think of one carbohydrate serving as about the size of your fist and one protein serving as the size of your palm. I don't recommend cup measurements because caloric and nutritional needs depend on your body size."
3. Be a "qualitarian." "The type of fuel dictates how your body runs. Try to make the highest quality choices available, and you will get more nutrients. Our bodies perform best on foods that it recognizes — in other words, non-processed foods."

4. Eat every three hours. "Your body is a race car not a street car. Fill up about every three hours and your body will use this as energy, rather than store it as fat. This also makes smaller meals less daunting, knowing that you'll eat again in just a few hours!"
5. Include protein, fat, and carbs in every meal and snack. "Carbs provide a one-hour boost, and protein and fat each offer one hour of longer-lasting energy. This works perfectly with the three-hour eating plan and helps your metabolism work most efficiently."

a sample day’s eats on a vitality-boosting diet!

7 a.m.: Whole Grain waffle/toast topped with nut butter and berries; herbal tea

10 a.m.: Coffee or latte with nuts

1 p.m.: Half of a turkey, avocado, lettuce and tomato sandwich on whole-wheat bread; side salad or vegetable soup

4 p.m.: Other half of sandwich from lunch; square of dark chocolate

7 p.m.: Fist-sized portion of whole-wheat pasta with two meatballs (or swap in 2 tablespoons hemp seeds for a meatless option); sauteed greens

Diet Tips from Ashley Korff, RD

Tuna, Chickpea and Roast Tomato Salad

At Coffs Coast Health Club we have been talking a lot lately about obtaining more energy to get you through your days.  We have found this delicious recipe and it will get you from lunch to your late afternoon appointments; supplying you with a good source of protein from the tuna & chickpeas without laying the fat on.  
BONUS...it's easy to mix up and take with you for a  lunch on the run. 

Chickpea, tuna and tomato lovers will love this filling salad for lunch or dinner.

Serves: 2 person(s) Preparation Time: 25 mins Cooking Time: 15 mins Ingredients: 400 g canned chick peas, drained 150 g cherry tomatoes 2 mL light sprays olive oil spray 180 g tuna in springwater, drained 100 g mixed lettuce Directions: Pre-heat oven to 180 degrees Celcius. Place chickpeas and tomatoes on a baking dish lined with baking paper. Spray with a little olive oil spray. Cook for 15 minutes. Put all ingredients into a bowl and toss. Variations: Add chilli and/or black pepper and/or other herbs, if desired. Nutritional Value Calories 308 cals Kilojoules 1,286 kJ Fat 6.4 g Carbohydrates 32.7 g Protein 30.7 g Cholesterol 0.0 mg Sodium 653 mg Saturated Fat 1.3 g Fibre 1.5 g Calcium 12.0 mg Total Sugars 5.0 g

recipe from http://www.calorieking.com.au/

Treat Treats as Treats

Treat treats as treats - and other smart rules to eat by

In the movie The Hurt Locker, there's no shortage of tense, nerve shredding scenes involving bomb disposal in hot dusty streetscapes, but the image from the movie that really sticks in my head is a long way from Iraq. It's in the climate-controlled aisle of an American supermarket where the camera pans along shelves of breakfast cereal that seem to stretch for ever. I thought of this as I read Rule 36 of Food Rules, the new book by US writer Michael Pollan: 'don't eat breakfast cereals that change the colour of your milk'. Even if you've never read Pollan's best sellers, The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defence of Food , you'll recognise his memorable one liners: 'eat food, not too much, mostly plants' and 'don't eat anything your grandmother wouldn't recognise as food'.
If anyone deserves a prize for making us stop and think about how far modern food has drifted from the diet humans were designed to eat, it's Pollan. And in Food Rules he distils the wisdom of the earlier books into a road map to help readers navigate an increasingly complex food supply. His bottom line: that populations eating a typical western diet - lots of processed food, and meat, lots of added sugars and fat and lots of refined grains end up with higher rates of obesity, heart disease and cancer than those eating more traditional, less industrialised foods. "What an extraordinary achievement for a civilisation: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick," he says.
Here's some of Pollan's rules.
Treat treats as treats.
There's nothing wrong with special occasion foods, Pollan says - as long as every day isn't a special occasion. But outsourcing our food preparation to the food industry has made formerly expensive or time consuming foods - from French fries to pastries and ice cream - easy and accessible. The fact that these foods take time to make from scratch is no longer the barrier to eating them often than it used to be. Pollan's advice - make these foods yourself and eat them less - or limit the ready-made stuff to weekends or special occasions. Or use the "S' policy - "no snacks, no seconds, no sweets - except on days that begin with the letter S".

Eat only food that will eventually rot
The more processed a food is, the longer the shelf life, and the less nutritious is typically is, he says.
Eat animals that have themselves eaten well.
The diet of the animals we eat influences the nutritional quality of the food we get from them, Pollan writes."We feed animals a high energy diet of grain to make them grow quickly, even in the case of ruminants that have evolved to eat grass. But even food animals that can tolerate grains are much healthier when they have access to green plants - and so, it turns out, are their meat and eggs. The food from these animals will contain much healthier types of fat (more omega-3s, less omega-6s) as well as appreciably high levels of vitamins and antioxidants."
Don't get your fuel from the same place your car does.
"Except perhaps for the milk and water, it's all high processed imperishable snack foods and extravagantly sweetened drinks..."
Avoid food products containing ingredients that no ordinary human would keep in the pantry
Chemicals added to food are designed to extend their shelf life or get you to eat more, he says. "Whether or not any of these additives pose a proven hazard to your health, many of them haven't been eaten by humans for very long, so they are best avoided."
Eat when you are hungry, not when you are bored.
Try to be aware of why you're eating and ask yourself if you're really hungry - before you eat and then again along the way. (One old wives 'test: if you're not hungry enough to eat an apple, then you're not hungry). Food is a costly anti-depressant."
Food Rules. An Eater's Manual is published by Penguin, rrp $16.95.
 


by Paula Goodyer