Posts Tagged ‘self improvement’

Personal Growth Looking At Life In A Different Way

The truth is that most people look at life through dark glasses and, as a result, everything appears gloomier than it should. This is normal because the subconscious mind is hard-wired to look at reality through our programming and it is more likely than not that the mind will focus on negative rather than positive programming. This mental blockage is what’s keeping your life on hold.

You have to alter the way you look at the world – this is the very essence of personal development. However, I’m not proposing that you look at the world through rose-tinted glasses – this would prevent you from noticing possible pitfalls or warning signs. Such an attitude disables people from knowing when to give up on something that is not working for them – for example, a dead relationship or a floundering business. In other words, what is widely known as positive thinking or a positive mental attitude is truly dangerous and often leads to the excuse of all: “I won’t do anything because I just know that things will get better!”

Something different, even innovative, is required. I am suggesting that you see the world for what it is – the reality of the present moment. Only in the here and now can you see the upside of opportunities that you might altogether otherwise fail to notice with those dark glasses on. Similarly, you will be acutely aware of downside of what you’re doing or thinking about doing – something that you could completely miss if you’re looking through those rose-tinted spectacles.

However, the reality and opportunity of the present moment can only be experienced, appreciated and capitalized upon if you ignore your hard-wiring – something that doesn’t come naturally to the normal adult. But it was second nature to all of us as children. In fact, it was that clear state of mind that enabled us to be programmed in the first place. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to relearn how to fully be in the here and now without adding your own personal spin or preconceived notions into the mix. You must stop making a nonsense of the present moment by relying on your conditioning.

You can do this by coming to your senses – I mean that quite literally. You’ve got five senses – you need to start noticing what they’re actually telling you. Research tells us that, as adults, we don’t pay a blind bit of attention to what our senses are really telling us. Instead, our programming has lulled us into a false sense of security that we know best. We don’t – we couldn’t, we’ve no perspective on the bigger picture of what life might be like if we let it.

To come to your senses, you need to spend some time each day, preferably early in the morning, training your mind to pay attention to what you actually see, feel, hear, smell and taste, without interpreting, without analysing, without jumping to your routine conclusions. Start working one sense at a time and see where it takes you.

Personal Growth And The True Power Of Now

If you’re keen on personal development or self improvement, you’ll have some appreciation of the importance placed by many experts on being focused in the present moment. Ekhart Tolle’s ‘The Power of Now’ extols the virtues of what might be described as presence of mind. However, Tolle, together with other personal development ‘gurus’, does not either adequately explain why ‘Now’ is just so important or, indeed, offer practical advice on being more ‘all here’.

First off, now is the only time and place that actually exists – the past is something you learn from (although psychology confirms that most people don’t learn but subconsciously live there) and the future is something that will only transpire the way you want if you’re prepared to be focused and effective in the present. Also, quantum physics suggests that the universe only exists now – and it confirms that universal energy responds to our energy – now. In simple terms, it is vital to be present. Being present gives you ‘presence’ – the true sign of all successful people.

The big problem is that we’re not present. Our subconscious is focused in our so-called formative years, whilst our conscious mind is distracted by useless thought – thoughts drifting towards negative worry and self-doubt. Consequently, it’s hardly surprising that research suggests that the normal person is only one percent present. If that’s true you are extremely unlikely to elicit much response from an otherwise responsive universe.

Basically, it is imperative that you develop your presence. But how? Being present means being focused on where you are and what you’re doing now. Most, according to lots of surveys, are not focused on what they’re doing, preferring instead to do what they’re doing whilst thinking that they don’t like what they’re doing! In addition, most people haven’t understood the simplicity of what focus is. Focus means paying attention – no more, no less. It means tuning into the reality of the moment, using the only mechanism that you have at your disposal to do this – your five senses. Your five senses are your only interface with the world. Yet we pay no attention to what our senses tell us, preferring to let our subconscious put its own interpretation on reality. We use our preconceived notions to make sense of now and, in the process, make utter nonsense of it.

You need to relearn how to pay attention. We were all expert at this when we were young children. The effortless way to re-learn is to set a little time aside to re-focus one sense at a time. I suggest that you find somewhere quiet to sit tomorrow morning. Close your eyes and notice how all the sounds around you become more pronounced. They’re not, of course, it’s just that you’re paying more attention. Notice what you’re feeling in your body – feelings that you wouldn’t notice when you’re normally inattentive. Next time you sit down for five minutes you might focus on how your body’s responses each time you breathe. Five minutes each morning will vastly sharpen your ability to pay attention for the rest of the day – you will be more present, more focused, more in tune with what’s going on and the opportunities the moment offers.

And you can start measuring your presence by reference to your results. You’ll be more responsive to situations and people that they might otherwise fail to see or avoid completely, you’ll be more open to doing things that you wouldn’t otherwise do. And, on the basis that the one thing that has you stuck in a rut is the fact that you rarely do anything different, bold or courageous, this can only be a good thing. Through your presence you will not just be open to new opportunity – you’ll actually create your own opportunities. The net result is that, at least, your life will move forward – in the right direction. At most, your life will never be the same – you will achieve effortless and measurable, success and happiness.

The Search For Happiness

The purpose of life is to be happy – at least according to the Dalai Lama. However, most people aren’t quite sure what happiness actually is. Is happiness being surrounded by loads of nice things – nice house, second home, fancy car, nice clothes, exotic vacations? Because, it seems that over the last few years, many people fell into the trap of evaluating their happiness based on what they owned – and comparing their ‘happiness’ to what others had. I actually had a client telephone me a while back to tell me that his wife was going to leave him because she said and I quote ‘The neighbours go on better holidays!’ Wave her off, I said!

Happiness isn’t about having lots of nice things – it doesn’t exclude them, but they’re not the be all and end all. Happiness is about having good times or, as I tell my clients, ‘being gurdy!’ It’s a feeling that you have that all is well with the world and your place in it. It’s a feeling of wanting for nothing – not not wanting to venture further on the sensational adventure of life’s rollercoaster – but simply of wanting nothing more right here right now.

Happiness is a now thing. Bad news flash – the normal mind is not present now, so it simply cannot experience happiness. Research tells us that the average mind is focused in the past (especially on the childhood experiences that have made us who we are) and wandering in the future (either looking forward to something good, wanting for something that we don’t have or worrying about something or other that we don’t want to happen). Given all the facts no way is it possible for the normal mind to be happy – on an ongoing basis.

To be happy, you’ve got to become abnormal. Normal people don’t bother to turn up to their own lives – and there’s over seven decades of research that proves this beyond a shadow of a doubt. To experience effortless happiness ( including effortless success) you’ve got to turn up to now – the only time and place that life is lived. You’ll need a focused and tuned in mind to be present – there are many different ways that you can develop your focus and innate skill for paying attention. But your happiness and success depend upon it – you happiness is directly linked to your ability to pay attention – again an ability that the normal mind cannot master. You must relearn how to pay attention – it came naturally to you when you were child when you experienced everything new with every one of your five senses. To be successful and happy you need to come to your senses all over again. When you do, you won’t have to go in search of happiness – happiness will simply find you.

Personal Success: How To Deal With The Crap In Your Head

Haven’t you got crap in your head? Undoubtedly you have – we all have. However, if you’re paying attention to the crap in your head, you are simply creating the crap that you have in your life. You’re what you’re thinking. Unfortunately, it isn’t just the thoughts that you know you’re thinking that create your life, it’s somewhat more subtle than that. In fact, more than anything else, you are what you think subconsciously. Your subconscious mind runs – or ruins – your life. All your behavior, every single thing you do, all your reactions and every single interaction with others – with those who are close to you, your mates, workmates and even with people who you don’t even know – are all dictated by your subconscious. And the gynormous problem is that, because of the way your subconscious mind is wired, all this happens automatically.

However, you’ve got an even bigger problem. Your subconscious mind is crammed with crap. It’s crap because it has nothing to do with who you are or what you’re supposed to be doing right here, right now. All this crap is a hangover from your childhood, when you were young and impressionable – from what we all know as our formative years. And, even though all the automatic behaviour happens subconsciously, every so often you actually know that this crap is ruining your life. at times you might feel down, suffer from stress, negative or depressed. You might think that you’re useless, uneasy or inadequate. At certain times, or in some situations, you might feel nervous or anxious. Perhaps you feel that you’re lacking self-confidence or that you’re being dragged down by low self-esteem. But this is just crap created by crap! This is the crap that has your life stuck where it is – and you’re letting it happen by paying attention, whether you know it or not, to the crap that’s buried in your head.

Your own personal crap won’t go away – but you can choose whether or not you pay attention to it – either consciously or, in actual fact, subconsciously. That’s what personal development or self improvement is all about. You see, as a grown adult, you can actually take charge of your subconscious mind – choose, in each moment, what you’ll pay your attention to. So you’ve got to decide to pay attention to reality instead of letting your subconscious mind just lead you by the nose into ever decreasing circles of crap. The only thing that’s really real in your life – the here and now. This is where you could actually be the very best you if you could just stop paying attention to all your inner crap. Start paying attention to now – to what you see, feel, hear, smell and taste. This focus will drag your subconscious (sometimes kicking and screaming) away from its hard-wired obsession with all the unreal crap. As things stand, you don’t really experience anything real because you see it through a fog of crap. You must clear the fog – it won’t clear on its own because it’s your personal fog. Clear the fog by understanding that it isn’t there at all! There is no fog.

All that’s real is what is here now. So train yourself to experience your five senses – make sense of the here and now instead of nonsense. It’s life changing.

Opening Up To Happiness

Are you happy with your life or, indeed, with yourself? In all probability that there are things that you would like to change about both your life and you, yourself – I’ve rarely encounter anyone who’s truly happy. People often believe that if they improve themselves, get fit, buy a new car, go on a great holiday that, then, they’ll find happiness. That kind of ‘happy’, however, is superficial and passing. True happiness should be lasting and not based on having this or doing that.

The only place that you discover happiness is within. However, that is way beyond the range of protected from them by what psychologists call ‘The Sentry’, a defence mechanism that we’ve all got which prevents other people getting into our subconscious minds to brainwash us. The big problem is that this ‘Sentry’ keeps us out as well! And with good reason – or, at least, it certainly seems reasonable until you venture a closer look at how we operate – our beliefs about how the world operates and who we are are stored in our subconscious. You wouldn’t want to go messing with those, would you? Or would you? Because most of us believe ourselves to be inadequate at least in some aspect of our lives, most of us are simply not totally happy with who we think we are. That’s because our beliefs are not grounded in fact but on an accumulation of what we call the programming or conditioning that we were subject to during what you might call your formative years. This programming or conditioning is the source of both your unease with yourself and, just as importantly, everything that you believe to be wrong with your life currently.

Our reality is created by our beliefs – it is those beliefs that automatically dictate our behaviour, our actions, our reactions and our interactions with everyone else. It is through this process that we, ourselves, create our take on reality. What’s going on in your head, at the deepest subconscious level, quite literally creates your life. And it ain’t real, it’s made up from what others did for us or to us during those formative years. So of course you want to go messing with your beliefs, because normal beliefs hold normal people back.

You need to mess with your beliefs. You must get to the real, inner you, to find true happiness – that is where you’ll unearth a you that is unstained by the crap of normal conditioning, unsullied by all the beliefs that screw up our normal lives – silly beliefs that keep us in our place – like we should know our place, like you’ve got to work hard to be a success, like pain is never far behind pleasure, that all laughing comes to crying – fill in your own list.

Forget all that crap. Indeed, forget about who you believed you were and discover who you really are – and the life that you can really have. Your mind’s been focused on normal crap – put an end to it. I teach my clients various forms of ‘mental calming measures’ – meditation if you will – you need to calm down, wake up and see the light. Only then you will find true happiness.

Depression And How To Beat It

Even though the evidence of depression may be all too real in your life, depression isn’t real. If you think that you’re suffering from depression, it’s just your imagination because depression is the direct result of your subconscious mind’s obsession with useless thoughts that you took on board during your formative years. It is normal for your subconscious mind to dwell on the past – everyone’s does – it’s simply that the crap that yours is focused on is probably a little (or a lot) abnormal. This is not your fault – your subconscious mind was impressed with those thoughts by others, people and events that made you feel bad, guilty, dejected during those childhood years.

Even though it’s normal for your subconscious to dwell on past deeply-rooted thoughts, this obsession doing you damage – you have the evidence of it in your daily life. Again, you shouldn’t feel bad about this – everybody’s subconscious mind is doing the same damage – at least you have the advantage over others in realizing that you’ve got a problem.

But that problem is completely down to what your subconscious mind is thinking about. What you must do is drag your mind away from those self-destructive thoughts and redirect your attention to the only time and place that’s real, the only place and time that you can fully live – the present moment. If you succeed in turning your attention to the present moment you will experience something that you probably have never experienced before – depression is an illusion, there’s no such thing as anxiety or fear, there’s simply this world full of possibilities and opportunity – and quantum physics proves that that wonderful world is simply waiting to respond to your hopes and dreams.

Pills or medicine won’t enable you experience the difference between reality and the illusion of stress – they may well make the pain go away for a while but your subconscious mind will always slink back to those thoughts that aren’t real but just an imprint of a past long gone. The one way that you will experience reality – one devoid of depression – is to learn how to clear your mind. This is no big deal because, as a youngster, you had a totally clear mind – that’s how those bad feelings were impressed upon you in the first place. All you have to do now is re-train yourself to pay attention to what your five senses are telling you, just right now – without adding your subconscious mind’s warped interpretation onto the facts.

I know that the best way to relearn how to pay attention to the reality of your five senses is meditation – preferably, for starters, guided meditation. It will take you a while to get into it, you may find it difficult, but a little commitment will produce the enormous benefit of your being able to live your life to the full.

Are You Plagued By Fear, Stress, Worry?

Are you feeling anxious or tense? Are there things that you worry about? Are you ever nervous? Do you get easily flustered? Do you feel that you suffer from stress? If you perceive yourself to be suffering from any of these problems, then you’re letting your mind play tricks on you. Your inner self cannot be anxious, nervous, stressed or fearful. The real you is simply not capable of suffering from stress or worry. All these afflications are symptoms of your personality – when you feel any of these symptoms, it’s only your personality tripping you up.

What you must realize is that your personality – from the Latin persona, meaning a mask – is simply a mask that not only conceals the inner you from everybody else, it has fooled you into believing that it is, in fact, who you are. However, psychology explains that your personality is an accumulation of snapshots of events and people that made an impression on you during your childhood – what we normally call our formative years. You took snapshots of these things because they were important enough to make you feel good or bad about yourself at the time. Unfortunately, psychology also confirms that the normal person is much more disposed to dwell on the negative rather than the positive snapshots.

Your subconscious mind is still obsessed with those photographs and this obsession is what creates your personality. Essentially, your personality isn’t real – it may have got you to where you are and you may be very fond of it – but be careful you don’t fall in love with an illusion.

To rid your daily life of the symptoms from which only your illusory personality can suffer – worry, stress, anxiety, doubt, fear, frustration – you need to move beyond that personality, your perceived strengths and weaknesses. You’ve to go searching within for the inner you because not only does the real you not comprehend stress, worry, doubt, not only is the real you fearless, the real you is able to achieve effortless happiness and success. The wonderful news is that you don’t have to look far to find the inner you – it’s crying out to be discovered. You’ll discover the real you in the peace of a reflective moment, in the experience of one of those wonderful “natural high” moments that we’ve all experienced at some point in our lives – where peace and happiness reign.

However, you don’t want or need to wait for the next peak moment to get over the illusions of stress and worry. You can do that right now by trying a little meditation. When you meditate you start to experience that anxiety, tension and fear are simply toxic thoughts and that a clear and focused mind (the real you) simply has not time for that kind of nonsense – it has much more important work to do.

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.

Self-Help: You’re Not Your Behaviour

Normal behaviour is rarely appropriate. How could it be! Because normal behaviour is created automatically – you don’t have to think about it, you just react – by your subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind is highly effective at enabling you react – it is this ability that has got the human race to the pinnacle of success! But, as we’ve already said, normal behaviour is rarely appropriate – because your subconscious mind is constantly focused in the past – your childhood years – and it uses this past ‘stored knowledge’ to dictate today’s automatic behaviour. With information that is way past its sell-by date being used to enable you react, how is your behaviour going to be appropriate to what is actually going on now?

How could it be appropriate when you understand that the normal person is permanently in this automatic reactive mode? Unfortunately, it’s just the way we’re built. If you’re having a good day, your behaviour can actually be mildly effective – that is in comparison to how effective you could really and truly be had you taken the trouble to focus on what’s actually happening and act, rather than react. But even at that, normal people only have good days now and again. It’s the normal not-too-bad days that have consigned your life to that mundane, repetitive, not-too-bad life – you know, the one where good stuff almost never happens, the one where you don’t like your job or the one where your relationship has gone flat – the ordinary stuff of the normal life. And on those routine not-too-bad days, your behaviour varies from less than effective through inappropriate to completely outrageous. People losing their cool in rush hour traffic, people who bully their subordinates at work or playing with their workers’ lives. Husbands who beat wives, wives who beat husbands – or just the everyday not-too-bad feeling of ‘I wish I was doing something else’ and all the stress that that brings with it.

The problem is, however, that we tend to confuse our behaviour with who we are – a criminal mistake that leads us into recrimination, guilt, frustration, anxiety and even more inappropriate behaviour. You are not your behaviour. How could you be? Your behaviour is dictated by your personality – all the weight of ‘stored knowledge’ in your deep subconscious. Your personality has certainly little or nothing to do with who you really are – there’s a wealth of psychological evidence built up over the last seven decades to prove this conclusively.

So here’s the deal. You’re only able to take truly appropriate action (as distinct from normal reaction) by consciously side-stepping your ego or personality – this is the essence of personal development (rather than personality development). You will not be able to do that until you realize that every single inappropriate action comes from that source. What’s done is done – if damage was done, go and undo it. But you only damaged your own self-image, then, get over yourself and get on with your life – starting right now.

Self Help: Exploring The Law Of Attraction

A great deal has been written and said concerning the so-called ‘Law of Attraction’. It has become popular through videos and bestsellers, like ‘The Secret’ and by television talk-show hosts such as Larry King. And yet most do not understand what this ‘attraction’ actually means. Does it mean that you can attract into your life the kind of good things that you crave? And, if so, how can you actually put the ‘Law of Attraction’ into action to change your life for the better?

First of all, you must understand that the ‘Law of Attraction’ is working in your everyday life already. This may be a big surprise for you but what you need to realize is that the life you lead is an exact mirror image of what is going on in your head. Unfortunately, much of what’s going on in the normal person’s mind is doing them damage rather than good because, left on its own, the subconscious mind is both negative and focused in the past, constantly ‘enabling’ you – and that’s obviously the wrong word – to keep repeating all the learned behaviours that are, right now, creating your reality. In other words, as a result of the normal mind’s inner turmoil, it follows that the normal life is also in turmoil.

It doesn’t matter if you know[spin] [spin]this or not, the ‘Law of Attraction’ is a given fact of life. I’m not sure, from reading some of the reams of stuff – often misleading stuff – on the subject, that you will have fully grasped the extraordinary importance of this situation. But say that you appreciate the situation. Let’s say that you already have a firm grasp of the fact that, to quote ‘The Secret’, your thoughts become things – what’s going on in your mind manifests in your life. Great, you’ve grasped this fundamental concept intellectually – but intellectually understanding these facts and being able to get this ‘manifestation’ working for you, rather than against you, is a totally different ballgame.

If you do not consciously take action each day to make certain that you’re in the right mental state, then it really doesn’t matter how much you understand the way life works, you’re simply deluding yourself into the nice cosy misconception that this ‘Law of Attraction’ can change your life in a positive way.

To truly practice the so-called “Law of Attraction” you need to clear your mind. There’s little or no point trying to fill your mind with thoughts of things that you want – people don’t know what they really want. Here’s a far better idea – fill your mind with the only place and time we have – the here and now. If you do that, you will drag your subconscious away from its obsession with both the past and the negative. You will become extraordinarily focused – efficient, effective, inspired and inspirational. In focused state of mind you will attract the very best in life, enabling you rise to places that normal people cannot go.