In life one of the things that we strive for areself improvement and motivation. We reach for this because we want more out of life. There are countless ways to improve ourselves, including striving for a better job, setting out to build a successful business, or even just flat out living a more ethical and moral lifestyle in general. When it comes to the lifestyle of Zen, and self improvement and motivation, one of the areas that must change is to become a positive forward thinking person. Negative thoughts cloud the mind and prevent even the best of us from accomplishing anything. It's no secret that the most successful and highly motivated people, think in an extremely positive way.

The question that we must ask is how do we become positive thinkers when we're surrounded by a world of negativity? This just like anything else is accomplished by practicing and training your mind. Not only do you have to believe in yourself, you have to trust in your ability to make excellent decisions. Self improvement in the form of positive thinking is a great builder of self confidence and in turn a great motivator. Whether it is love, relationships, career or business positive thinking is what is needed to build a very high morale. The other side of this is not being a positive person or to put it more bluntly, being totally negative. Negative people have clouded judgment; they don't believe in themselves and have almost zero self confidence. They are people that don't think that they can change anything about themselves and go about life feeling sorry for the hand that life has dealt them, never doing anything about it. This is why incorporating a lifestyle of Zen and self improvement will lead to being highly motivated.

Sustaining long term motivation is a challenge for everyone. Sure, when an idea is new and fresh, finding enough motivation is not a problem. But as time goes on, and that freshness goes away, being able to find the motivation to continue to do the "right" things becomes much more difficult. Having a Zen mindset will assist individuals at pushing out all of the distractions (especially the emotions involved with self improvement) and thus making it much easier to find the motivation to continue. The less emotions are involved, the less they will be a factor in determining whether or not the necessary actions are taken for self improvement.

The Zen lifestyle accomplishes this through a number of ways, one being the meditation aspect of it. The added focus that one gets from sitting and concentrating on breathing in and out like a door opening and closing, along with training the mind to release control are excellent ways to remove the negative energy that flows through our minds and bodies. With what we're forced to endure all day, in the form of the news reports, television and print media, it is so important to have an outlet for releasing this negative energy. This is where we can benefit from the self improvement and motivation aspects of the Zen lifestyle.