Posts Tagged ‘Change Your Life’

Want More Out Of Life? You’ve Got To Change Your Life!

Most of us want more out of life. This is not to say that you’re unhappy with what you have. In fact, the secret to happiness is wanting what you have. However, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be constantly striving to scale higher heights of success and happiness because you can never stand still in life.

And, then, of course, there are people who are desperately unhappy with their lot in life – the majority of people contend that they are unhappy in the work that they do, a frightening number of people worry about their finances and then there are people who are just downright unhappy with who they are.

What you need to understand is that you’ll get precious little out of life by wanting or by being unhappy with things as they stand. The one thing that is stopping you getting something different out of life is the blindingly obvious fact that you tend to do everything the same. Keep doing the same things and nothing’s ever going to change. If you want change in your life, you’re going to have to do actually change your life!

Like doing what? Like all great journeys, changing your life starts with the first step. A small step will suffice because what you’ve got to do is recondition your mind – to get yourself used to the idea that, in everything that you do in life, you have a choice to do something different, something new. Perhaps the most powerful exercises that I suggest to my personal development clients is that they use the very routine that has anchored to their current life to destroy the habitual, repetitive patterns of behaviour that have so constrained them, their view of life and the endless possibilities that life holds for them.

I suggest the same powerful mechanism to you. Break routine by using your routine. Every morning, you are presented with a long list of routine tasks that you’ve done in a routine manner all of your adult life. If you were to brush your teeth with the hand that you don’t normally use, you will have achieved two, potentially life-changing, milestones. First of all, you will have woken up to the obvious truth that, in everything that you do in your life, you can choose. This realization will enable you break every single destructive habit that has been holding you back in your life. Secondly, because you’ll be brushing your teeth differently, you will need to pay more attention to the task. The super-successful call this ‘focus’. Focus simply means paying attention – to whatever it is that you’re doing right here, right now.

Life is made up of moments – every moment that you pay attention is a moment well spent – you relearn how to be fully focused, fully aware of what needs to be done when the big decisions in life call for real action – not the habitual reaction of the normal doomed-to-failure mind.

Self Improvement: Knowing What Excites You

I’ve met many people who want more out of life. I talk to lots of people who know they want something different but have no idea what that ‘different’ is. Plenty of people are simply unhappy where they are – perhaps their stuck in a loveless relationship, they hate their job or, perhaps, they’ve just been doing the same job for so long that they’re getting nothing out of it anymore. And often, those who take the route of personal development, want more out of life but they don’t know what that ‘more’ is.

Do you want more from your life? Because, if you do, you need to have some idea of what that more might be. There’s no point in longing for something else without knowing what that something else might look like and feel like. In other words, you’ve got to have some idea of what turns you on.

In chatting recently with a client who has been doing the same job for the last ten years, I was amazed by how she hadn’t the first idea whatsoever of what she wanted to do in life. She was looking at her options using that sad old formula of her perceived strengths and weaknesses, her previous experience and, most chillingly, her perceived need to pay the bills. You may find those last few words to be a little strange – bills are real, they have to be paid. But unless you’re complete idiot, you’d never do something that would leave you destitute

Unfortunately, however, our commitments always seem to come uppermost in our minds. Perhaps this has something to do with recent research that suggests that the normal person is obsessed with money and fearful of not having enough of it (whatever enough might actually mean). Forget about your financial commitments – they will simply look after themselves if you put your heart’s desire first. I’m not suggesting that you be stupid about deciding what you might like to change in your life, I’m merely suggesting that You have to get your priorities right.

To set your priorities, you need to know what would really – and I mean really, really – turn you on. What would make you leap out of bed each and every morning? What would turn you on so much that doing it wouldn’t be work but a labour of love? Ask yourself: What is my ideal life? And, most importantly from the perspective of your all-important subconscious mind (the part of your mind that creates your reality), what would your ideal life look like, feel like, sound like, smell like and taste like?

A strange question? No way – the subconscious mind believes in the snapshots that it holds dearly within its inner recesses. These snapshots are not visual, they use all five senses – after all, you make sense of the world through your five senses and it is through using your five senses that you were programmed to live the mundane life that has you so fed up right now. If you turn on your subconscious, a really exciting life will follow effortlessly – oh and by the way, all the bills will be more than adequately catered for.

Yes You Can – By Acting On Your Inspiration

How many good ideas have you had that you simply never did anything about? And have you ever noticed that many of the most successful people got to where they are because they did something about some really simple idea – the kind of thing that you say to yourself “I could have thought of that!”?

Of course, the difference between you and successful people is down to one simple thing – they take action, normal people don’t. The normal person prefers to resort to useless self-defeating thoughts like “I could never do something like that” or “I wouldn’t know how to go about it” or, the most common one of all “There’s so much I could lose”. You’ve got to be abnormal to be a success. You’ve nothing to lose except, perhaps, the normal humdrum mundane ordinary life and that daily sinking feeling that your life’s never going to amount to much.

We all know lots of people who simply don’t have the guts to go with their instinct and consequently will never live the dream. One individual in particular springs to mind. He couldn’t be certain that he would earn enough money (whatever enough is) if he were to do what really excited him. And he never found out – he succumbed to cancer in his thirties having settled for the comfortable predictable option of doing more of the same with his life.

His time ran out more quickly than most. But that should confirm in your own mind that time is running out for you and I as you read these words. You’ve had opportunities in you life that required bold decisions and you didn’t take them. You’ve got into an adult lifetime’s habit of taking the easy option, the one that guarantees more of the same. But abnormally successful people don’t see what they’re doing as bold or courageous – they simply see it as something that they have to do.

So what is it that you have to do in your life? What is it that you really want to do? And, if you did it, you know, you’d discover that you’d never have to work another day in your life because it would be a labour of love. And a labour of love is done both effortlessly and to extraordinary effect. If you’re doing what really turns you on you simply cannot but succeed.

So listen to your inspiration – pay attention to the bright ideas that occur to you that are outside the norm. You’ve got to understand that the norm is simply a set of dos and don’ts agreed upon by normal people who, psychology tells us, are stark raving mad. The normal person’s subconscious controls them – not the other way around. It’s that pre-programmed subconscious that whispers “No you can’t” when, in fact you can achieve anything that really turns you on, anything in which you truly believe.

Personal Development – Making Up Your Own Mind

All too often we find ourselves in situations in life that are far from ideal. Have you ever wondered how you got there? Well, the answer is ridiculously simple – it’s your own doing! We actually make major life choices on a moment to moment basis because every single choice that you have made in your adult life add up to where you find yourself at the present moment. Sadly, we’re completely unaware of most of the choices that we make because we make them subconsciously – in other words, your subconscious mind makes your choices for you.

That’s excellent, you may well say, I don’t have to cope with having to decide on every little thing that I’ve got to do – all the small things get done for me automatically! For example, I don’t have to decide how to brush my teeth, my subconscious mind makes that decision for me. Obviously, that’s great – but only up to a point because your subconscious mind doesn’t make its choices based on where you are, what you’re doing, who you’re with or what is really going on. Your subconscious mind arrives at a decision based on what psychology calls your stored knowledge. However, you might say, that’s cool, I’ve been learning all my life and don’t have to relearn stuff to enable me get through my normal day. It’s not cool – you haven’t been learning as you go – in fact, you’ve learned precious little about how to behave and how to get the most out of life since you were about twelve years of age.

You see, the big problem is that your moment to moment decisions are made for you based on stored knowledge that was pretty much learned before you reached around eleven or twelve. So, if you’re now thirty five years old and you bump into someone who might be important in progressing your career, your business or your life, your subconscious mind will decide what’s going on, your resultant choices and your consequent behaviour based on data that is more than twenty years out of date.

No wonder that normal people can’t get more out of life. No wonder that normal people simply cannot see the many opportunities to better themselves that are looking them in the eye every day – yes, every single day! Little wonder that normal people keep making the same mistakes. No wonder that the normal life is at best, ‘not too bad’.

You need to drag your subconscious mind – it may do a little kicking and screaming – from the past into the present. You’ve got to come to your senses – I mean that literally, you’ve got to reacquaint yourself with what it’s like to experience the present moment – seeing, feeling, hearing, smelling and tasting what’s going on. Start small – why don’t you choose how you’ll brush your teeth – don’t leave the decision up to a lazy mind that’s living in your childhood. In starting small, you will change your life.

Self Improvement: Are You Fooling Yourself?

Given the huge growth in sales of self help books and the proliferation of personal development websites, wouldn’t you think that you would by now have witnessed an important shift in human awareness – a marked improvement in the human condition? Not only is there little sign of improvement, everything points to the opposite – increased levels of anxiety and worry as the economy slips and slides having been hijacked by a small number of people obsessed with their own greed; an increase in anti-social behaviour and violent crime and the ongoing inappropriate behaviour of people who should know better on the international stage of politics and international diplomacy.

We must ask ourselves what are all those people who are indulging in self-help books doing? in fact, in the course of my work I meet or speak with quite a few of these people and, undoubtedly, whilst some are making major strides in their lives, there are many who, as in every other facet of their lives, are going through the motions, fooling themselves into thinking that their mental state, attitude, behaviour and lives are being transformed.

It’s very easy to follow a course of personal development and slip into a routine not dissimilar to all your other routines – habitual, repetitive, automatic and ultimately mindless. The moment anything becomes routine, it becomes useless to you in the pursuit of a better life. As a result, I come across many people who have convinced themselves that they are cultivating their mindfulness – but who have ended up doing something else mindlessly! I’ve talked with plenty of people who meditate, who tell me that they’ve never felt as calm and focused in their lives – but, if they were to stand back and reflect on it, they would find that their lives are disintegrating around them.

If you have embarked on the journey of self improvement you should immediately see positive results in your everyday life. If you see no tangible results or benefits in terms of both personal effectiveness and the downstream benefits in your professional, personal and financial life, you are fooling yourself. And the longer you fool yourself the more dangerous it becomes – because you will convince yourself that your life is changing for the better when, in fact, you are becoming more divorced from reality.

There are very useful and practical personal development resources available – but they are tools that have to be put to the right use. They must be used during the moment to moment cut and thrust of your day – not just whilst you’re sitting in the lotus position at six o’clock in the morning! Mindfulness – and all that flows from it – is something that has to be practiced within the day – not in preparation for it. Until you bring what you’ve learned in your self-help books and personal development courses into the very moment to moment behaviour of your daily life not only will things not improve, they’ll get worse.

Changing Your Life: It’s Up To You

One of my friends recently offered one of his best-loved self-help books to me – it was the most recent in a long list of recommended reading. In talking with him, I enquired as to how he was finding putting into practice his learning from all his reading. I discovered that, in fact, he was a life-long student of living life to the full but was likely to never actually take the plunge. He told me that a friend of his had suggested to him that he “stop reading all the books and starting doing it!”

Bookshops are full of personal development books. This is big business – possibly the fastest growing area of the publishing market. In addition, personal development websites proliferate – offering all types of inducements to buy their package which will change your life in five minutes!

But none of these books or programs will change your life. They could well point you in the right direction, provide you with an understanding that had been absent from your range of experience or knowledge or give you practical ideas on how to get more out of life, change your life, transform yourself or whatever. no doubt about it, there is some top-class stuff out there – and some innovative and practical personal development online help – but it will be no use to you until you put it into practice for yourself and keep putting it into practice.

Only you can change your life. Only you can grasp control of that awesome inner potential that is simply bursting for you to unleash it. The intriguing thing is that most of the advice provided by websites or books requires very little work of you, requires that you make only very minor alterations to the manner in which you manage your mind. Sadly, however, having been in this business for over fourteen years, I have seen far too many people unwilling to take five minutes each day to make the other twenty three hours and fifty five minutes so much better.

And so I come to my main point – one that I’ve already alluded to – you have to keep putting what you learn into practice. No book, program or package will change your life in five minutes. You won’t change your life in five minutes. However, five minutes each and every day is an entirely different matter – if you take or make the time to make sure that your mind is up and running each and every morning then your life will change beyond all recognition. Psychology proves in no uncertain terms that normal people only perceive what they expect to perceive and only experience what they expect to experience – that the normal life is created by the sadly closed normal mind. Open your mind every morning, change your expectations and you will change your life. But, the bottom line is, it’s entirely up to you – no one else can do it for you.

What Good Will Personal Development Training Do You?

The short answer to the question is “none!” – unless, of course, you put what you’ve learned into practice. And that’s where most of us fall down. Great, they spent a day or two and it was great, they felt renewed, uplifted, ready for action. Unfortunately, however, research indicates that it takes approximately six weeks for the benefits of the average training course to wear off – completely – and personal development training is no exception.

Why? Because it’s easier to stay the same – it’s less hassle to be “not too bad” when everybody around you is not too bad as well. It’s easier to not have your friends – or, as some of my personal development clients have told me, their nearest and dearest – looking at you as if you’ve become some kind of born-again weirdo! It’s always easier to fit in. And, it doesn’t matter what new skills we learn, sooner or later, to a greater or lesser extent, we revert to type, we revert to our default settings, we go back to being normal. But normal is crazy – there’s over seven decades of research that proves that. And not-too-bad is simply not good enough when you consider the life that you could have – effortless happiness, effortless success, peace of mind.

So, how will you change your life? Because, after all, if you want it to change, you’re the one who’s going to have to do something new, something different. Don’t pay any attention to anybody who will tell you that you can change your life in five minutes – they’re after a quick buck. Pay no attention to anybody who tells you that success is all about making wads of money – they’re the ones who want loads of money and some of it is yours! Pay no attention to people who keep recommending the latest life-changing book that they’ve just read to you – you won’t change your life by reading – you only change your life by doing.

Doing what? You’ve got to do little things in your life differently. Try starting with little things – like try brushing your teeth with the hand that you don’t habitually use – then your mind will get used to the idea that, in every single thing that you do in your daily life and in every single situation in which you find yourself in your life – you have a choice. You have a choice – can choose to live automatically and mindlessly like all the other normal crazy morons that are happy being not-too-bad, or you can choose to focus on the present, feel the toothbrush’s bristles on your teeth, feel the awkward way you’re holding the brush, taste the toothpaste. It’s in the small detail of everyday life that you will discover reality. And when you discover reality, you will discover that you can, indeed, achieve effortless success and happiness because, in reality, it simply happens.

Has Life Ground To A Halt? A Little Self Help Is Required

Many of my Personal Development clients, when I meet them for the first time, feel that they’ve become stuck – maybe they feel that they’ve hit the so-called brick wall, perhaps they feel that they’re going through the motions or that, in some vague way, they sense that there must be more to life than the daily ritual that passes for living. As one client said to me “My God, I can’t even get excited about my holidays anymore, we’re going to the same place in August that we’ve been for the last ten years”.

Everything becomes stale in life unless you constantly keep renewing and reinventing. However, But it’s not your life that grinds to a shuddering halt, it’s you! More to the point, it’s actually your state of mind that becomes so anaesthetized by the continual routine that passes for living, that you simply sink into oblivion. The problem is that you stopped experiencing new things during your teenage years. The normal mind is wide open to all new experiences during our childhood years – that’s when our sponge-like capacity to take everything in means that we really were, indeed, taking everything in. By eleven or 12, we started pulling down the shutters. By nineteen or twenty, we were a done deal. After that, except for truly monumental events in our lives – like the birth of a child, or a bereavement – we experience nothing much. We think we are experiencing, but actually what our subconscious mind is doing is interpreting everything on the basis of old stored knowledge and pigeonholing the new experience accordingly. In other words, the normal adult state of mind is completely unaware, numb, reactive, divorced from reality and simply going through the motions.

It is not life that grinds to a halt – the universe and our world and everything in it is reinventing itself moment to moment. Opportunities abound, adventures beckon, new people are will change the course of your life (in the same way as once total strangers changed it in the past). But you’re numb, wrapped up in the relative safety of a normality that is literally sucking you dry. Not only can you not see the opportunity and adventure of life – because you’re not looking or seeing – even if you could, you wouldn’t be up to making the choice to jump onto life’s wonderful rollercoaster. That’s because, as adults, we’re used to not choosing. The normal adult almost never takes the opportunity to choose their own thoughts – preferring to let the subconscious do the choosing for them automatically.

So, if you’ve reached an impasse or a crossroads, it’s up to you to take the right route, it’s up to you to choose, it’s up to you to kickstart your life in the direction that you want it to move. Nothing in your life will ever change unless you’re prepared to make some changes yourself.

Normal Madness, Reality And Your Your Perfect Life

Forget about the news! Throw away your newspapers! The TV channels and newspapers are focused on bad news that lulls us into the false sense of security that we’re not all that crazy when compared to others. But that’s just the news. What about so-called “reality TV” – so-called “normal” people entertaining us with their bizarre behaviour?

These programs are a danger to what’s left of your mental health (I say “what’s left” because research in the fields of psychology and Personal Development proves that “normal” people are really quite mad). These programs comfort you in the mistaken belief that, at least, you’re not living live next door to the neighbour from hell, that you don’t have to jump into a vat of man-eating spiders at work today or that your girlfriend or boyfriend isn’t going to high-tail it with someone they’ve fallen for on paradise island!

Maybe things are not too bad. However, the real problem is that not only do these programs have little to do with reality – they actually confirm you in your illusion that your life is real. In fact, however, your life is as off-the-wall as those programs. Want to confirm this? – take one step back and reflect on the behaviour of some of the people that you meet every day. There are people bitching about other people, people delighting in other’s misfortunes, husbands beating wives, wives beating husbands, bosses bullying staff, staff spending half their working day on the internet – no one’s actually living the life that, in reality, they should really be living. Unfortunately, the normal mind divorces us from real reality. We think we know what’s going on and then automatically react to it. This is not a theory, it’s scientifically proven psychological fact.

Your life has precious little to do with real reality. Your reality is a figment of your imagination. It is created by “snapshots” you have in your subconscious mind – these are your beliefs about how the world works and, more importantly, about yourself. These beliefs are constantly being reinforced by the other normal crazies that you hang around with. However, if you slowed down for a moment, came to your senses (you’ve got five of them – better start using them), and experienced the moment, you could well realize that reality is this wonderful now where you can create the life that you really, really want. And that’s not some fanciful theory either, there’s plenty of evidence to prove it – think about it, your mind is creating your reality at the moment. So, if you change your mind you really can change your life.

Therefore, not only should you dump the newspapers and turn off reality TV – you need to be very careful, what you listen to and who you hang out with. You have to be permanently on your guard to ensure that you don’t let yourself be overwhelmed by the nonsense that passes for normal behaviour every day.

How To Be Successful – Focus Your Mind

If you want to change something in your, you’re going to have to do it yourself. The $64,000 question is, of course, what is “it”? What action are you going to have to take to create the life that you want? Because – and you must realize this – your life, your success and happiness is up to you alone. So, is your failure or dissatisfaction!

As a long-standing client said to me recently, “I realized that if I wanted to change my life, I had to actually change my life!” He’s been a client for a few years and, as with all my clients, I encouraged him to take time first thing each day to make sure that his mind is clear and uncluttered so that he can operate in what athletes might call “the peak performance zone” during the day ahead. Some clients spend five or ten minutes sitting watching the world go by (it’s an art! – it enables you experience the beauty of the present moment with a clear mind through focusing on your senses). Some ensure that they do not do their early-morning chores is a routine way (an extra-ordinarily simple way to focus the mind). Then there are those, like my friend, who meditate – in his case, for up to an hour each morning. And, to make sure that he has the space and time to do that, he started going to bed an hour earlier in the evening. Or, as he said himself, he changed his daily life, by an hour, to ensure that he actually changed his life. And, what a change.

The thing is that meditation disciplines an otherwise undisciplined normal mind. Meditation focuses the mind – and focus is the key to success. If you don’t learn how to focus your mind, you’ll never achieve anything extraordinary. You’ll be like everyone else who will tell you that it’s always someone else’s fault that there life isn’t a success – their ”nearest and dearest” , their boss or their clients, the system that’s unfair or the cover-all excuse “I’ve never got the break that I deserved!”

How about giving yourself a break! Grab a hold of the one thing that you can control in your life – your own mind. Don’t let others mess with your head, don’t let life’s ups and downs take you on your very own rollercoaster of ups and downs. Take or make the time to free your mind before the day gets going – otherwise, like all other people, you’ll easily get distracted, you’ll effortlessly waste half the day on stuff that doesn’t need doing and, most of all, you’ll be a hostage to the useless and self-defeating thoughts that are part and parcel of the normal, sad, not-so-bad life.

Your success is entirely up to you. All you have to do is focus your mind and change your life.