Clarify your values

Decide What You Stand For
What are your values? What do you stand for? What are the organizing principles of your life? What are your core beliefs? What virtues do you aspire to, and hold in high regard when you see them demonstrated by others? What will you not stand for? What would you sacrifice for, suffer for, and even die for? These are extremely important questions that are only asked by about three percent of the population, and that small minority tends to be the movers and shakers in every society. What are your values? What do you stand for? What are the organizing principles of your life? What are your core beliefs? What virtues do you aspire to, and hold in high regard when you see them demonstrated by others? What will you not stand for? What would you sacrifice for, suffer for, and even die for? These are extremely important questions that are only asked by about three percent of the population, and that small minority tends to be the movers and shakers in every society.

Write Out Your Key Values
When I first began this values clarification exercise some years ago, I wrote out a list of 163 qualities that I aspired to. I think I eventually came up with every virtue, value or positive descriptive adjective that referred to personality and character in the dictionary. And I agreed with all of them. I felt that they were all important and I wanted to incorporate every single one of them into my character.

Focus on Very Few Core Beliefs
But then reality sets in. I realized that it is very hard to learn even one new quality, or to change even one thing about myself, let alone dozens of things. So I scaled down my ambitions and began narrowing the values down to a small number that I could manage and work with. Once I had settled on about five core beliefs, I was then able to get to work on myself and start making some progress in character development.

Select Your Five Key Values
You should do the same. You should write down the five values that you feel are the most important for you to live by. Once you have those five values, you then organize them in order of priority. Which is the most important value in your hierarchy of values? Which would be second? Which would be third, and so on?

Learn To Make Better Decisions
Every choice or decision you make is based on your values. Whenever you decide between alternatives, you invariably choose the alternative that you value the most. Because you can only do one thing at a time, everything you do is a demonstration of what you consider to be the most important at that moment. Therefore, organizing your values in an order of priority is the starting point of personal strategic planning. It is only when you are clear about what you value, and in what order, that you are capable of planning and organizing the other activities of your life.

Action Exercises

Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action:
First, clarify your core beliefs and your unifying principles. Write them down and compare your life today with the values that are really important to you. How are you doing?

Second, organize your values in order of their importance to you. Which of your values is most important? Which is second? And so on. Do your current choices reflect this order of values?

Happy holidays!!
Ashley Sparks
http://www.InfernoMMA.com
479-715-6625

Setting Goals and Objectives: 5 Myths

Only 3% of adults have clear, written, specific, measurable, time-bounded goals, and by every statistic, they accomplish ten times as much as people with no goals at all. Why is it then that most people have no goals?
Myth One: “I already have goals; I don’t need to set any.” People who say this also say that their goals are to be rich, thin, happy, successful, and live their dreams. Buy these are not goals, they are wishes and fantasies common to all mankind. A goal is like a beautiful home, carefully designed, revised continually, upgraded regularly, and worked on constantly. If it is not in writing, it is merely a dream or a wish, a vague objective with no energy behind it.
Myth Two: “I don’t need goals; I’m doing fine.” Living your life without goals and objectives is setting off across unknown territory with no road signs and no road map. You have no choice but to make it up as you go along, reacting and responding to whatever happens, and hoping for the best. If you are doing well today without written goals and plans, you could probably be doing many times better in the future if you had clear targets to aim at and the ability to measure your progress as you go along. It is vital to have goal setting objectives.
Myth Three: “I don’t need written goals; I have them all in my mind.” The average stream of consciousness includes about 1,500 thoughts a minute. If your goals are only in your mind, they are invariably jumbled up, vague, confused, contradictory and deficient in many ways. They offer no clarity and give you no motive power. You become like a ship without a rudder, drifting with the tides, crashing into the rocks inevitably and never really fulfilling your true potential.
Myth Four: “I don’t know how to set goals.” No wonder. You can take a Masters degree at a leading university and never receive a single hour of instruction on goal setting and achieving. Fortunately, setting a goal is a skill, like time management, teaching, selling, managing, or anything else that you need to become a highly productive and effective person. And all skills are learnable. You can learn the skill of goal-setting by practice and repetition until it becomes as easy and as automatic as breathing. And from the very first day that you begin setting goals, the progress you will make and the successes you will enjoy will astonish you.
Myth Five: “Goals don’t work; life is too unpredictable.” When a plane takes off for a distant city, it will be off course 99% of the time. The complexity of the avionics and the skill of the pilots are focused on continual course corrections. It is the same in life. But when you have a clear, long-term goal, with specific plans to achieve it, you may have to change course many times, but you will eventually arrive at your destination of health, wealth and great success.
One last point. Goal setting has been called the master skill of success. You have two choices in life: You can either work on your own goals, or you can work for someone else, and work on achieving their goals. When you learn the master skill, you take complete control of your life and jump to the front of the line in your potential for great achievement.

Dedicated to your success,
Ashley Sparks
http://www.InfernoMMA.com
479-715-6625

Focus tip #1

As a martial arts instructor we work to help our kids (and adults) improve in many areas including focus. This is a first in a series of tips to help each person with improving their focus.

As adults, we have many routines that we follow. We wake up at a certain time, eat our meals at the same time, go to work and follow a set schedule when we are there. We recognize our goals for the day and get things done accordingly. A part of educating children is teaching them about organization, goals and finding a way to help them remember.

All the best!
Ashley Sparks
http://www.InfernoMMA.com
479-715-6625

Balance in life

Like pieces of a puzzle, the many different aspects of your being come together to form the person that you are. You work and play, rest and expend energy, commune with your body and soul, exalt in joy, and feel sorrow. Balance is the state that you achieve when all of the aspects of your life and self are in harmony. Your life force flows in a state of equilibrium because nothing feels out of sync. While balance is necessary to have a satisfying, energetic, and joyful life, only you can determine what balance means to you.

Achieving balance requires that you assess what is important to you. The many demands of modern life can push us to make choices that can put us off balance and have a detrimental effect on our habits, relationships, health, and career. In creating a balanced lifestyle, you must ascertain how much time and energy you are willing to devote to the different areas of your life. To do so, imagine that your life is a house made up of many rooms. Draw this house, give each part of your life its own room, and size each room according to the amount of importance you assign to that aspect of your life. You can include family, solitude, activities that benefit others, healthy eating, indulgences, exercise and working on self. You may discover that certain elements of your life take up an inordinate amount of time, energy, or effort and leave you with few resources to nurture the other aspects of your life. You may want to spend less time on these activities and more on the ones that fulfill you.

A balanced lifestyle is simply a state of being in which one has time and energy for obligations and pleasures, as well as time to live well and in a gratifying way. With its many nuances, balance can be a difficult concept to integrate into your life. Living a balanced existence, however, can help you attain a greater sense of happiness, health, and fulfillment.

Dedicated to your success,
Ashley Sparks
http://www.MyInfernoFitness.com
479-715-6625

The fighting spirit

“Average” is what the failures claim to be when their family and friends ask them why they are not successful.
“Average” is the top of the bottom, the best of the worst, the bottom of the top, the worst of the best.

Which of these are you?

“Average” means being run-of-the-mill, mediocre, insignificant, a nonentity.
Being “average” is the lazy person’s cop out; it’s lacking the guts to stand in life; it’s living by default.
Being “average” is to take up space for purpose, to take the trip through life, but to never pay the fare, to return no interest for God’s investment in you.
Being “average” is to pass one’ s life away with time, rather than to pass one’s time away with life. It’s to kill time, rather than work it to death.
To be “average” is to be forgotten once you pass this life.
The successful are remembered for their contributions, the failures are remembered because they tried, but the “average,” the silent majority, are just forgotten.
To be “average” is to commit the greatest crime one can against one’s self, humanity, and one’s God. The saddest epitaph is this: “Here lies Mr. and Mrs. Average – here lies the remains of what might have been, except for their belief that they were only ‘average’.”

Happy Holidays!
Ashley Sparks
Inferno MMA
(479) 715-6625

Are you in a habit of being on time?

Being late for an appointment or a date can seem like a small thing that really doesn’t matter, but it communicates volumes, whether we mean it to or not. Being kept waiting is an experience that almost no one enjoys, because at best, it wastes their time, and at worst, it indicates a lack of regard. It’s as if we’re saying that our time is more important than their time, so we don’t need to honor them by showing up when we said we would. When we are running late, it means a lot if we call and let the person know, especially if it’s going to be more than ten minutes. However, if we are chronically late, it may take more than a phone call to properly address the issue.

If it’s become a habit of ours not to be on time, we may want to look inside ourselves and see what’s going on. It’s easy enough to make excuses about our behavior, or to project responsibility on the other person, perceiving them to be uptight if they are irritated by our tardiness. What’s more difficult, and more meaningful, is looking at ourselves and asking why it is that we always, or often, show up late. Sometimes this happens out of a lack of self-regard, as if we aren’t really important anyway, so why will anyone care if we’re late, or don’t show up at all. Chronic lateness can also stem from being disorganized, or simply trying to do too much in one day. Another possible reason for being late to a particular appointment, or date, is that we don’t really want to be there. We communicate our disinterest or boredom by not showing up on time.

Whatever our reasons, if we raise them to the conscious level, we have an opportunity to live a more conscious life. As we begin to understand the deeper reasons behind our inability to show up on time, we have the option to communicate clearly and consciously about how we really feel, rather than communicating unconsciously by being late.

Habitual Excellence

Why not make excellence your habit?

Imagine leading a life that is truly filled with excellence and not just Okay.

It’s been said mediocrity is the enemy of excellence.

Simply meaning either one can become powerful habitual pattern of your life. The moment you begin to accept mediocrity in yourself or others you influence, that will become the habit.

If you demand excellence in attitude, performance and results, from yourself and others, that is what you will get and experience as well. Whichever you choose, will become your habit.

Why? Because anything that is done repeatedly, over and over again, become habit.

Visualize a life of excellent, health, wealth and happiness.

Excellent health would give you greater energy to train and do the things you want to do each day and allow you to accomplish more each and every year. Looking and feeling fit, toned and flexible, with energy to burn.

Excellence in wealth would free you from financial worry and concern. Allowing you more choices and opportunities for learning, growing, achieving and having more fun in life.

Excellence in happiness would mean that you are happy with what you are doing, where you are going, and the relationships and people you are surrounded by everyday.

You’d have excellent friends, co-workers and a happy family life as well. You’d be smiling, singing, whistling, humming and/or laughing…more than 95% of the people on the planet.

This is what happens when you develop habits of excellence in your life. Start today by committing yourself to step up your game.
Decide right now that you are going to do everything you do better.
You can start by developing an attitude of excellence.

Give excellent polite greetings and do excellent push ups. Practice having an excellent smile and share it with as many people as you can. Strive for excellent results in everything you do, go the extra mile to create a better outcome in every area of your life.

Habits we train…are habits we gain.

Like any habit, we must first decide and then we must take action.

Massive action, with conviction, commitment and follow through. It takes time and repeated actions to anchor in any new habit.

Dedicated To Your Success,
Ashley Sparks

A little white lie

White lies, little lies, big fat whopping lies, curly tailed lies, and curl you hair lies, and any other type of lie you can think of. Why do people lie so much?

Why do we lie?

When was the last time you found yourself in an awkward position, and instead of telling the truth, you lied to protect someone’s feelings or you didn’t want the truth to hurt? Yes, even that is actually a lie.

Some people lie for fun and for gain. After you review this article, you may change the way you do things. It is a bit of a departure from the comedy movie “Liar Liar” with Jim Carrey. At least in the movies, it turns out all right. Just think what it would be if your profession required you to lie as part of your career?

And of course there is the person that doesn’t lie for gain or for that matter, anything else, the compulsive liar. They just must lie about most everything. They even start to believe their lies, and become delusional.

What does lying do to you?

Whenever you create a non-truth, you are setting up a negative vibration in your body. This vibration has a direct effect on the most finely tuned component in your bodily system. That component is your brain. Where do all the signals originate that control all the functions of your body? Your brain, of course. So, if you are putting wrenches in the gears of the way your mind works, what do you think is going to happen?

Most of you know about those little white lies, and some of you know about more forms of lying. Some of you may have it honed to an art form. No matter what, they all add up. I refer to this as “congestion” This congestion gets in the way of you making decisions, of seeing the world clearly, and leads to breakdowns of the system itself.

“If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

I heard it as a child, and it has stood the test of time. I changed it a bit though.

“If you cannot say the truth, don’t say anything at all.”

Break the habit.

I had the opportunity to talk to someone that wanted to break their habit of lying. On advice from a psychologist, they were to wear a rubber band on each wrist, like bracelets. (Of course, you know what’s coming next…) Any time they lied, for any reason, they were to snap their wrist with the rubber band bracelet. Unfortunately, they did a lot of lying. That person eventually had to go to the emergency room of the hospital to have the blisters on their wrists treated. Point in fact; lying is a habit that you may find difficult to break.

But, I don’t lie!

I have heard that before, too many times. Here is a safer, less painful way to find out how much you lie. Get yourself a notepad and pen that you can easily carry with you. For a 24-hour period, in your normal every day routine, any time you lie, or say something that is not true, write it down, and the circumstances around it, including any justifications. You will most likely be amazed at how often you lie throughout your day, and why.

What do I do next?

Now that you have built your scorecard, make an effort to not lie as much the next day. By keeping score, you will find it easier to decrease the amount that you lie over a period of time. Think of it as a “Liars Diet”. (Ha Ha!)

What do I have to gain by not lying?

You can start with “respect”. But this will affect many things that you probably have not even considered; even your health. The reason is when you clutter your mind with “junk”, which should not be accumulating, your brain does not have the ability to function effectively. This affects your physical body as well as your mental abilities.

You will affect your mental clarity, your decision making process, even your health. All of these things, and more, are affected any time you are causing congestion. (Lying is only one source of congestion.)

Brain management is a task you should undertake daily. It has been shown when people regularly do things that help their brain function properly and exercise their brain; it lessens the onset of complications like dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

Enjoy!
Subscribe to my blog and suggest it to your friends please!
Ashley Sparks
Inferno MMA
479-715-6625

Are you labeled?

We live in a culture that uses labels as a means of understanding the world and the people living in it. As a result, many of us find ourselves laboring under a label that has a negative connotation. Unless we can find a way to see the good in such a label, we may feel burdened by an idea of ourselves that is not accurate. It is important to remember that almost nothing in this world is all good or all bad, and most everything is a complex mixture of gifts and challenges. In addition, different cultures revere certain qualities over others, but this does not mean that these qualities are inherently good or bad. For example, a culture that elevates outgoing behavior will label an introvert in a negative way, calling them antisocial. In truth, the ability to spend time alone is one that most great artists, mystics, and visionaries share. Owning the positive side of this label can lead us deeper into our gifted visions and fertile imaginations.

When we look into the lives of any of the great people in history, we always find that they had quirks and eccentricities that earned them less than ideal labels from the societies in which they lived. Many famous artists and musicians were considered to be isolated loners or disruptive troublemakers, or sometimes both, yet these people altered history and contributed to the world an original vision or advances in our understanding of the universe. If we can remember this as we examine our own selves and the labels people use to describe us, we find that there is a bright side to any characterization.

If you have been labeled, remember that all you have to do to see the positive side is to turn the label around. For example, you may be considered to be overly emotional, and the fact that you are perceived this way may make you feel out of control. But notice, too, the gifts of being able to feel and express your emotions, even in a world that doesn’t always encourage that. You might begin to see yourself as brave and open-hearted enough to stay alive to your feelings. You may also see that there are certain paths and professions in which this is a necessary ability. As you turn your label around, the light of your true nature shines to guide you on your way.

The ongoing problem with bullying in schools

The number one reason for enrollment in the past few years has been a growing problem with bullying in the schools. This has been brought to our attention by the parents that are actually aware. We are sure there are parents that do not even know it is happening.

Why is there an increase in bullying occurring?

For a number of reasons, and today is our first step in making sure of two things. First, that the bullying stops, and second that if a child is ever faced with this type of situation, he or she will know how to react!
When we look at the type of children that tend to be bullies it is very clear that they are children who lack self-confidence. Hence, they take their anger and frustrations out on someone else. This not only happens to children at school, it happens in relationships, work and sports, as well. The reason it happens is because these individuals lack self- control. Every one has a bad day, or goes through a bad stretch in life, but those who have self control, are able to channel their anger. Maybe you are reading this and saying, “I am angry. I am not releasing my frustration on an activity like martial arts. I’m releasing it on my family or friends.” Well, if that is the case then you should be talking to an instructor today about getting involved in one of our programs.

When I first started training in the martial arts, I had a temper. However, I was never a bully towards other people. The arts showed me how to use my self control. It showed me how to count to 10 and take a breath before reacting. There are many people around me who have gained self-control and self-confidence from training in the martial arts, as well. By building a high level of self confidence, one is able to prevent bullying. This is done through individual accomplishments. When a student makes it through Black Belt Testing, it should be a transformation. For me it was a life changing experience. After finishing my test, I knew that I could do anything I wanted. Also, after going through the fighting part of the evaluation, I felt confident in the fact that I could defend myself. I noticed changes in situations or confrontations with others. I was not nervous; I did not get loud, just a cool, calm, and collected approach to resolving the situation.

What are we going to do to prevent this behavior amongst members of the school and the community?
We are going to offer a Bully Prevention seminar to help our members take care of these challenges with bullies, in a cool, calm, and collected manner. Self- defense will be a last resort; first we will take a few countable measures that can prevent an altercation. But first, we must start with self-confidence; this is the single most important attribute of defense!

When your children go to high school, unfortunately it is even more difficult. Bullying, peer pressure, and social activities can become major obstacles for them. And one thing that I have noticed is the children who make the martial arts a life long commitment and train from a young age all the way through high school, have far less challenges than children who stop training. The point is that in order to reap the benefits of the martial arts, one must keep active.

Bullying will continue, until we reach a level of self-confidence where bullies will avoid us. There is no quick karate or martial arts move that can stop it. It is a life commitment of confidence, self-control, and self-defense training that can take years to develop. So start now the most important move is taking the first step. Here at Inferno MMA, we are on an on-going mission to educate people in bully prevention. Call us today and set yourself or your child up for our free seminar.

I would appreciate any feedback!

Ashley Sparks
http://www.InfernoMMA.com
479-715-6625