Deep, empowering wisdom is also an important ingredient for a happy, healthy and productive life.  While it is true that some wisdom comes with age, there is no one stopping you from pursuing more of it right now.  Become a wisdom seeker and see how quickly your life improves!

What primary values have you adopted for your life?  Have you examined your key values recently?  Are they the best values you could have?  And if you do have good ones, are you living up to them faithfully? These are all important questions for each of us to ponder.

Do you have a clear, actionable, and rewarding (to both yourself and others) purpose for your life? Do you have a life purpose that makes you excited to wake up each day and pursue your dream?  If you don’t, it’s not too late. You can change your purpose or adopt a new one for your life any time you choose.

Being able to make and keep commitments (to yourself and others) is an important skill for mastering life.  Thinks about it. You can’t make anything big or important happen without coming up with a plan and then sticking to it. Commitment is not a feeling and it is not dependent on your circumstances.  It is a promise that you pledge to fulfill and it there are usually consequences if you fulfill it…or not.

Your communication skills will either advance you in life or hold you back. To be a good leader, executive, or manager, you need excellent communication skills. Same for being a good husband, parent, teacher, coach, trainer, author, or presenter. And how you communicate with yourself is also an important but often neglected life mastery skill.

Leadership skills are not just for leaders. That’s because we are all leaders in our own lives. We all interact with others and often want to inspire them or help them to be great. We are all part of groups, organizations, and communities where our leadership skills will come in very hand.

Love is often a poorly understood emotion. It is not something we get from other people. It is something we GIVE to other people (respect, acceptance, admiration, appreciation, commitment). But in order to give love to others, you first need to practice giving it to yourself. Loving yourself does not have to be deserved. You can love and accept and appreciate yourself wherever you are in your life right now.  Never forget that…and never forget to regularly do that. 

Self esteem may seem like self love but it’s different. Self esteem is how you view and value yourself. We often look at how others view us to determing our self-worth and self-esteem.  While this is inevitable, you don’t have to give it much weight. Learn how to evaluate yourself without putting too much emphasis on the opinions of others. But always try to be truthful, and remember, other people can generally see our flaws better than we can.  It’s still up to us to acknowledge our strengths and our value and to hold tight to that, even if others misght disagree.

We live in a judgmental society. In fact, our brains have evolved to be high-powered negative judgement “machines.” This is why it’s so important to counter those tendencies by remembering to view both yourself and others with lots of compassion and forgiveness. For some tips on how to do this, read “The Book Of Joy” by the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu. The Dalai Lama can teach us all a great many things about compassion and how to be a more compassionate human being.