Posts Tagged ‘Personal Success’

Do You Know What’s Wasting Your Energy

Right now, you’re living new day – one that has never happened before, a day that will never be repeated. Now is a new moment. And, in this new moment, you have a choice. And on your choice depends your personal development. You’re the one who chooses the thoughts that you are focusing on just at the present moment. Are those thoughts simply random? Are they negative thoughts? Are they relevant to what you should be doing at this moment in time? Are they positive thoughts (better than negative thoughts but they’re still just thoughts). The thoughts you’re entertaining are distracting you from doing. Stop wasting your energy, get rid of your thoughts, leaving room for the flights of fancy to rise to the top – because they are not thoughts, but inspiration and inspiration only comes to the clear minded.

In this new moment, it’s your choice as to your behaviour and actions (more likely to be reactions) too. And, depending on your choice, you can effortlessly change your life. How much energy have you literally binned already today? How much time have you wasted sitting in front of your laptop, staring blankly? How much of your precious energy have you wasted gossiping about and revelling in the misfortune or misdeeds of others? Bet you that you’ve misspent some precious time shuffling you’re “To Do” list until there’s no time left to do! Or how much of your time and energy have you devoted to doing things you basically shouldn’t be doing – like browsing the internet for things that have nothing to do with anything important, reading emails that were cc’d to you so someone else’s ass would be covered, wading through the sordid details of domestic violence that fill our daily newspapers? Each and every moment that you waste is a unique now you will never have again. And what we achieve in this life is the sum total of how we spend our individual moments.

At least, in reflecting on some of those searching questions you might begin to realize just how much of your time is wasted on doing things that are holding you back from living the life that you want. But these are energy-wasters that you’re aware off – here’s the big question. How much of your life are you wasting that you’re not aware of? Because, unless your subconscious mind is immersed in profitable activity in the present moment, it is still happily wandering arount your childhood years, thinking that your childhood experiences are actually happening now – and you have no idea whatsoever that that’s what’s actually happening. And that is the waste of energy that distances us all from the possibilities of the now, from the reality of the now, from the abundance of the now.

So, stop for a moment. Would you like to have a more exciting life? Then ask yourself if what you’re doing now, in the context of what you truly want out of life, is the very best investment of your energy. If it isn’t, don’t do it.

The Problem With Personal Growth

Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, you are in the company of people who have no idea that their subconscious mind is creating their lives at this very moment. They have no idea that their subconscious mind controls them and, by virtue of the fact that they don’t control their own mind, that they are actually crazy.

In contrast, you, having delved into the world of personal development (if you hadn’t you wouldn’t be reading this!), have some sense that your thoughts create your life. Many books have been written about it, numerous self improvement websites tell you that you can, indeed, fashion your own life experience. And perhaps you already have achieved some results to show for your endeavours.

However, therein lies the danger. If you are aware that your thoughts create your own life, that your subconscious mind can be controlled by you and that your resultant actions, behaviours, interactions and, therefore your life, can be directed by you – you have a weighty responsibility to yourself that you must rise to moment to moment. Because, just in the same way that many books have been written on personal development, much has also been written on just how badly things can go wrong for you if you know how the game of life is played and choose, either by act or omission, not to play by the rules.

Complacency is a far more subtle enemy than worry, stress or fear. It gives us a false sense of security that permits our mind do what it does habitually – slip back into its normal state of autopilot that allows our programmed subconscious mind start to disassemble the benefits that we might have gained from being more focused, more mindful, more present.

For almost everyone in this world – normal people – it is too great a challenge to awaken from the deadly hypnosis that our programmed subconscious mind wields over us. Indeed, for the vast majority of normal people, they will die without understanding that this challenge was even to be taken on. For those of us who do rise to this challenge and succeed, the real challenge is not to awaken but to stay awake and stay focused on a continual basis. We never know when life will throw a spanner in the works – one that will set us off down another path of self-sabotage, so we must do our very best to do what little it takes every day to make certain that our minds are tuned in and that we are as fully present to the best of our ability to the only place and time where life can be lived – the here and now.

Personal Growth: Forget About The Herd

Have you the guts to be different? Have the guts to stand out from the crowd, to stand apart from your own little herd? Have you got what it takes to set yourself apart from all the sad, pathetic people that you hang out with? Normal people are sad and pathetic – and most of us are normal. Years of psychological research and work in the area of personal development prove that the normal mind is out of control, preferring to take its cue from the events of our formative years rather than actually taking real action – the only kind of action that will achieve real results.

The only problem is that most of us are afraid to be different. I’ve come across many people over the years who explained to me that they couldn’t be a success because they’d be afraid of losing their friends! But the other side of that coin is that I know plenty of people who, years later, feel liberated by the fact that they no longer hang out with some of their old acquaintances! It seems that normal people hang out with other normal people as part of some bizarre support mechanism – normal people like being a member of their own little victim support groups!

Herd behaviour is bizarre and you’ll never change your life until you walk away from the herd. Herd behaviour is positively dangerous to both you and all your fellow herd members. Once the herd agrees – albeit subconsciously or by omission – that some bizarre behaviour is alright, anything goes. Some years ago this was proved in frightening detail by what has subsequently become Philip Zimbardo’s infamous Stanford prison experiment – so-called because the experiment took place at Stanford University and involved student volunteers from Stanford. The volunteers were randomly split into two groups – one group would be the prisoners, the other group the prison guards. And, even though the experiment was scheduled to take two weeks, it was stopped after six days – the prison guards had become obscenely violent, the prisoners totally submissive. The outrageous behaviour of the former group, through, was OK – everyone in that little herd agreed with it so none of the guards was behaving, in their little parallel universe, in an unacceptable manner.

All normal people behave inappropriately – because they never behave from a clear and focused state of mind that is fully acquainted with the here and now. Normal behaviour is dictated by the subconscious mind and our normal environment. Normal behaviour could not be appropriate because it has nothing to do with the reality of the present moment.

As such, even though the Stanford Prison Experiment is an extreme illustration of normal behaviour (it is one of quite a number of such experiments that all come to the same conclusion), it does point out just how dangerous it is to run with the herd. More importantly, at a more fundamental level – and one that is affecting your ability to achieve effortless success and happiness – this normal herd mentality is preventing you from doing what your heart desires.

So distance yourself from the herd – once your back is turned many of them will forget about you – and start putting your own life first. Step out of the norms of herd-like behaviour – you will be amazed at how liberating it really is.

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.

Bettering Yourself: Who’s The Next Most Important Stranger?

Consider this – the people who are the most important in your life were once complete strangers to you. Whether by coincidence or what Deepak Chopra might consider synchronicity – or, indeed, what the science of quantum physics might consider as a derivation of quantum entanglement – you’ve ended up where you now are as a result of apparently random events at the core of which are people who were, when you met them first, complete and utter strangers.

When I was you I was told, as many children were and still are, not to talk to strangers. There may well be a lot of sense in that from the point of view of protecting one’s children from the undoubted presence of some very strange people in this world. However, unfortunately, the subliminal subconscious message that stays with us into later life is that we should avoid engaging with whoever we might casually encounter in the course of everyday life.

Indeed, as we go about our normal daily adult lives, the fact is that we wouldn’t really notice a stranger anyway – because, in childhood, we developed a self-preservational psychological ability to categorize new people that we encounter without paying any attention to who they actually are or the importance of the role that they migh play in our lives. As a result of our pre-programming and our ability for categorization, we pay no attention to people that we don’t know. The next time you’re on a subway, metro, tube, train or bus or in an elevator, notice how diligently people avoid making any kind of contact at all.

What are these people missing? Perhaps the next most important total stranger who could change the course of their lives. You have no idea who might change the course of your career, who might be your next mega-customer in your business, who might become a life-long mentor and friend. You simply don’t know who might be the next person to change your life. But you won’t find out if you can’t open your eyes.

Pull yourself together. Opportunity abounds – but is totally missed by the normal automatic mind that’s too blind and closed to see anything. Psychology proves that the normal person only perceives what they expect to perceive and only experience what they expect to experience. What a life sentence we all are given – by our programming and by our own inaction and unwillingness to take the small leap of faith that making personal contact with a total stranger requires.

You need to open your eyes, you’ve got to smell the roses, become aware of life’s opportunities and go with the flow of a synchronous universe that is just waiting to respond to you. I do not propose that you start behaving irrationally and outrageously in public places! I’m suggesting that you put up your antennae, start tuning into the here and now, let yourself off the hook of normal living. Because, until you do, you normal life will continue to be mundanely, repetitively and boringly normal – and it will be your own fault.

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.

Changing Your Life: Believing And Achieving

How would you feel about the proposition that you can achieve anything – absolutely anything – in which you can believe? Well, that’s what you’re actually doing at the moment – you’re living the life that you believe you can live. Psychology explains that we only perceive what we expect to perceive and only experience what we expect to experience. Unfortunately, because of our socialisation into a normal world and upbringing by normal parents, our expectations are normal and these normal expectations are way short of where we could set our sights.

Psychology also tells us that our lives are dictated by our subconscious mind’s view of life. We learn our ideas of how the world works, who we are, what our strengths and weaknesses, our own self image during our early years. These perceptions, which over time gradually become deeply held beliefs are stored in the depths of our subconscious and, in as adults, when faced with a situation where we have to take action, our actions will be governed not be what is actually happening but by what we perceive as happening, based on our subconscious beliefs. In this way, normal people are cannot see opportunity when it stares them in the eye, because it’s not something that they are expecting.

The end result of all this is that our subconscious perceptions, learned during our formative years, are our beliefs. These create our expectations and our behaviour and, in this way, our beliefs create our lives. Or, put another way, you achieve what you believe. In fact, normal people live down to their expectations.

You’ve got to give yourself different beliefs – you have to believe that you can achieve everything that you really want out of life. You’ve got to be able to make a massive impression on your subconscious mind to enable it focus on what you want to achieve to the extent that it believes that it is part and parcel of and a logical step up from your current life. Believing is not wishing hoping and wanting, believing is seeing, feeling, hearing smelling and tasting. Your only interface with the outside world is your five senses. They are what you used to form your views of yourself and life in general during your early years. As adults, we pay little attention to those senses, preferring to use what we learned during our childhood to make sense of today – and, in the process, make nonsense of it!

You must explain to your subconscious mind what it would be like to achieve your goal. It has to see it, feel it, hear it, smell it and taste it as if you already have it. You can make the all important impression on your subconscious mind by handwriting the experience of the outcome, as if you’re there already, using all five senses, writing in the present tense. But – and this is a big but – be careful what you wish for, for a focused subconscious will set about bringing about what it believes to be the life that you live – after all, that’s what its’ doing already.

Personal Development – You’ve Got To Be Brave To Be Different

How many good ideas have you had that you just never did anything about? Have you ever noticed that some really successful people are where they are because they took action to progress some really simple idea – the kind of thing that you say to yourself “I could have thought of that!”?

Well, we’re all inspired now and then – it’s just that the normal lazy person will laugh it off as a flight of fancy. And that’s what makes normal people normal – that’s why so very few, who actually do something about their good ideas are abnormal – abnormally successful, exceptional people.

So, next time you catch yourself wishing that your life were different – and if recent surveys about just how much people don’t like their jobs are anything to go by, wishing your life were different is a regular occurance – realize this: for your life to change, you must act yourself. It is you who’s got to do something a little different, a little brave and a little courageous. Not a lot – a little will do for starters.

However, you’ll say to yourself that you’re not the kind of person who could set up a successful business or develop an innovative idea. You’ll say to yourself that you’re not the type who takes risks – you’re not the kind of person that would ever appear on the front of Fortune Magazine. But it’s only this defective thinking inside your own head that’s keeping you off the front pages of international magazines. It’s simply the pathetic little voice inside your own head that’s blocking your way.

Is your life not bad enough for you to do something about it? Are you not uncomfortable enough to get up off your normal ass and start living instead of trudging along? Perhaps you’re fearful that others will sneer at your ideas or the idea of you being a success? Don’t waste your energy worrying what others are thinking about you – they’re not – they really don’t give a damn.

You’re the one who has to lead your life – otherwise you’re just going around in ever decreasing circles. It’s up to you to take action – otherwise your dying words will be “what was that all about?” It’s up to you to do something – and that something has to be done now. There’s no point in waiting for a miracle – you’ve got to get the ball rolling yourself.

So, today, do something different, do something brave – even if it’s only shaving with the hand with which you don’t habitually shave! Once you do even something insignificant differently, you set your mind up to do many things differently. And until you do something differently, nothing different will ever happen.

Personal Development Is No Use Unless You’ve The Results To Show For It

I talk with many people – clients and readers of my Personal Development Ezine – who enthuse that they have become far calmer, more mindful and tuned in as a consequence of the various little “mental exercises” that they practice to banish distraction and move themselves in the direction that they want their life to go. I often get feedback from some who tell me that their lives have changed and that they have seen many of their objectives being achieved almost effortlessly. But others wonder why, if they are developing calm, clarity and presence of mind, they don’t see their goals simply materializing in their lives.

In addressing this issue, I often quote what a good friend from Northern Ireland said to me at the height of the so-called “Troubles”. He said “Obviously, for some people, doing their mental exercises is a bit like the way some of my fellow-countrymen go to Mass on a Sunday, kneel down and pray and, on a Monday, go out and shoot someone!” A well made point – if your efforts at personal development don’t make an impact in the ordinary course of your everyday life, there is really no point in fooling yourself into thinking that you’re on the road to the life that you want. Personal development isn’t supposed to make you feel good for just a few minutes during the day, it’s supposed to change your life and if it isn’t doing that, then you’re doing something wrong.

As I write this, I’m expecting a client who is going to spend the next couple of days with me here in the Alps. I received an advance note from him – what he called his “agenda” – and, in that note, he asks how to bring the calm and focus that you get through meditation or mental exercising into the rough and tumble of everyday life. My answer to him will be simple. During the course of the day, especially when the going gets tough, you’ve got to regularly stop yourself, notice state of mind and compare it with the calm and clarity that you get during your personal development exercises. If you’ve drifted from your benchmark calm then you’re going to have to take a momentary step back from what’s happening, take a few deep breaths, and restore the mental calm and focus that will make the difference to your actions and personal effectiveness in the here and now.

Personal development isn’t personal development if you’re not seeing concrete results in the course of your everyday life – if your life is still all over the place, you’re simply lulling yourself into a false sense of success where you may well make decisions or taking what you think is action that may well make your life worse rather than better.

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.