Happy Holidays from Warrior Spirit, and Looking Back with Gratitude

The blog has danced around that topic for a long time, but in 2015, the focus of posts will be providing you with specific tactics and strategies you can adopt in order to become a truly consequential person.

Since the path of the Spiritual Warrior revolves largely around self-mastery, you'll see a lot of that, but there's going to be a lot of other life strategies and tactics as well.

The Last Practice for 2014

And in the spirit of the year-end holidays, a time of reflection, here's the first exercise you can try: gratitude.

Gratitude is such an important mindset to cultivate, not just because it feels better than always focusing on negatives, but because it actually makes you more effective. By highlighting all the good things in your life and the potential positive effects of challenges, you train your brain to believe that things tend to work out.

This, in turn, helps you be more adventurous, try new things, and allow for vulnerability in your life (for the positives on vulnerability, check out this article).

So, how can you feel more gratitude? Simple. Just spend time recalling the good things in your life.

Take some time over the holidays to recount some good things that have come your way, whether those are people, the chance to focus on yourself, new opportunities, or consistency in things you have relied on for a long time.

And if you think things have been all bad, remember that everything that has happened in life has brought you where you are now, so if you doing okay, you have something to be grateful for, and you can even be grateful for difficulties because they teach you the value of the good stuff and make you that much stronger.

Give yourself at least fifteen minutes of uninterrupted reflection, and write down what you come up with (writing thoughts allows you to develop them more fully than just thinking without actually putting anything on paper).

Be specific. Write WHY you are grateful for things.

Feel free to share what you come up with in the comments or via email (warrior (at) khaledallen (dot) com).

In the New Year, I'll share some strategies on setting a course for excellence that doesn't just rely on a hopeful but empty resolution.

Enjoy the rest of 2014.

- K.C. ***

P.S: If you're curious where I've been taking chess lessons, or if you've ever admired the abilities of such awesome leaders as Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, FDR, Teddy Roosevelt, and Ender Wiggins, and would like to develop your own strategic thinking, check out the amazing (FREE) chess lessons at Chesscademy. They offer really good, comprehensive lessons going from the pure basics all the way up to specific openings and the theory surrounding them.

I've mostly finished the classes, and now I do a chess puzzle every morning, and it has definitely helped me act with more direction and clarity in my non-chess life.

(Full disclosure: If you sign up with the above link, you will help me win a sweet wooden chess set. I'd recommend the site anyway since it's an amazing resource for the spiritual warrior needing a bit of strategic training, but I just wanted to be clear. I use the site everyday, so I know it's a great resource).