Archive for Personal Development
A Clear Mind And Happiness
Posted by: | CommentsAre you happy with yourself and with your life? In all probability that there are things that you would want to change about both your life and you, yourself – I’ve rarely come across anyone who’s unconditionally happy. People often think 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 happiness, however, is transient and superficial. Real happiness must be lasting and not dependant on having this or doing that.
The only place where you will find happiness is within. Sadly, that is way beyond the range of protected from them by what psychologists call ‘The Sentry’, a defence mechanism that we all have that prevents anyone else getting into our subconscious minds where they would then be able to brainwash us. Unfortunately, this ‘Sentry’ keeps us out as well! And with good reason – or, at least, it appears like a good idea until you take a closer look at how we operate – our beliefs about how the world operates and ourselves are stored in our subconscious. You wouldn’t want to go messing with that stuff, 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 aren’t 100% happy with who we are. That’s because our beliefs are not based on fact but on a build-up of what we call the conditioning or programming that we were subject to during what is generally described as our formative years. This programming or conditioning is the source of both your discomfort with yourself and, just as importantly, everything that you perceive to be wrong with your life currently.
What passes for reality is created by our beliefs – it is our own personal 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 version of reality. What’s occupying your mind, at a deep subconscious level, quite literally creates your life. And it isn’t real, it’s made up from what others did for us or to us during those formative years. So of course you’d want to go messing with your beliefs, because normal beliefs hold normal people back.
You’ve got to go beyond your beliefs. You need to get to the inner real you, to find true happiness – that is where you will find a you that is unstained by the crap of normal conditioning, unspoilt by all the beliefs that screw up our normal lives – bizarre 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 that nonsense. 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 – stop it. I teach my clients various forms of ‘mental calming measures’ – meditation if you will – you’ve got to calm down, wake up and see the light. Only then you will find effortless happiness.
And, You Think You’re All Stressed Out!
Posted by: | CommentsThe World Health Organization is of the opinion that stress will be one of the greatest health problems of the decade. Stress is indirectly responsible for tens of millions of lost days at work in the United States and Europe every year. Stress is the cause of dietary problems, sleep disorders, coronary disease, a very long list of all kinds of health problems – stress kills.
And, yet, stress does not in fact exist. You suffer from stress for no other reason that you believe that you’re stressed. Your mind is playing tricks on you! What’s going on around you doesn’t stress you out. Other people are not the cause for the stress that you’re feeling. How you evaluate and react to outside events and people is the root cause of your stress. You are the cause of your own suffering!
But, quite obviously, the wonderful news is that if you are the cause of your stress – you can make it vanish. If you’re creating stress, then you can choose to create something else – a stress-free life.
But, you’ve got to decide to manage your mind. By default, your mind controls you – you must turn the tables. First of all, you’ve got to realize is that how you’re feeling or what you’re reacting right now are decisions that you can take for yourself. If you don’t deliberately decide to focus on what’s really happening here and now – instead of letting your subconscious mind focus on what it thinks is going on – you will simply continue to exist in the vicious self-perpetuating cycle of stress.
So, what you’ve got to do is learn – or learn again in fact, because we were great at it when we were young children – to focus on real reality – what’s really happening right here right now. You can do this by zoning in on what you’re five senses are saying to you – in simple English, you need to wake up and ‘smell the roses’. You’ve got to come to your senses.
In our default adult state of mind we put our own personal spin on what those five senses of ours are telling us, using what psychology terms our ‘stored knowledge’ – unfortunately, this is a natural adult subconscious process. But, our stored knowledge was learned when we were young and impressionable and it prefers the negative. For example, it is the seedbed of every single one of our perceived inadequacies – the things that we don’t like about ourselves. You’ll never realize stress for what it is until you break this awful habit by simply paying attention to what you feel, see, smell, hear and taste.
But, you can’t start using your five senses when you’re in the middle of a stress attack. You’ve got to go into training to alter the way that you use your mind. In other words, you start practicing before you get stressed – preferably before your day gets going.
So, tomorrow morning, take ten minutes. Sit down, shut your eyes and simply listen. Next day, set aside ten minutes, eyes closed, to pay attention to what you’re feeling in your body. Work your way through all of your senses. You’ve got to start each and every day with five to ten minutes mental focusing. Soon, very soon indeed, you’ll suddenly realize that your perceived stress was a figment of your own imagination – and you’ll realize a whole lot more!
Success And Happiness – All You Have To Do Is Pay Attention
Posted by: | CommentsI have been publishing a Free Personal Development Ezine for the past few years – twice a week, articles and short videos – and from the comments that I get I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s lots of people out there who moan about their lives, without taking the appropriate action to change. Most people are not happy in their job but just keep soldiering on. The normal mind is numbed by the routine of daily life. Many people are unhappy in their relationships. And, of course, most people are unhappy with themselves – their shape, weight, lack of assertiveness, low self-esteem, eating habits, lack of fitness… But what they all – and there’s a whopping great chance that this includes you – don’t understand is that every single aspect of their lives would change beyond recognition if they just sat up straight and started to pay attention.
Yes, you heard me – just like your teacher told you in nursery school! Psychological studies suggest that your happiness and success is directly linked to your ability to pay attention. That sounds weird – but just think about it. People who are successful know how to focus – and focus is just a fancy word for paying attention. Presence is one of the main hallmarks of success – successful people have presence – which simply means that they focus to an abnormal extent on the here and now. Or, in plain English, successful people are committed enough to turn up for their own lives! They pay attention to the present moment – they give it their total attention.
Compare this with your average Joe who, research concludes, is missing in action! The normal mind is, to use an Irish expression, ‘not all there’ – you’re all over the place. The normal mind is paying attention to your ‘stored knowledge’ – what you learned in your formative years. Your normal mind has no interest in the present and that’s why normal people are firmly strapped onto the daily sorry-go-round!
You need to pay attention, focus, get your head in gear. And, in real reality, it’s no big deal if you haven’t decided what you want out of life (how many people?!) – what’s most important is that you pay attention to what’s taking place right now – you simply cannot tell what opportunities you might spot (which you’ll never spot if you’re not all there!). Paying attention is about the here and now. Paying attention is about doing what you’re doing without paying attention to your self-sabotaging thoughts (from ‘I can’t stand my work’ to ‘I hate myself’). Focus is all about being present, having presence and going with life’s flow.
Hasn’t it dawned on you that all the fantastic things that have ever taken place in your life (sure, even if you’re a sad case, something good happened some time) happened in a spontaneous manner? You can turn back on life’s spontaneity, all you’ve got to do is turn up to the reality of life – in this present moment – focus on what’s really happening, not what your weird, ordinary mind would have you believe is happeing.
Personal Growth – Taking The Journey Or Looking At The Brochures?
Posted by: | CommentsEvery year millions of people spend their hard earned money on tens of millions of self improvement books. Each and every year surveys confirm that an increasing number of people are unhappy in with their life, don’t like their work, concerned about their finances or suffering from stress. This does not compute!
One problem, of course, is that many self help books are nothing more than feel good books – no different from a good novel that you can’t put down but that makes absolutely no difference to your life. Again, quite a few personal growth books are penned by multi-millionaire self help gurus, who couldn’t get their head around the cut and thrust of normal everyday existence. The Brian Tracys and Deepak Chopras of this world aren’t finding it a challenege to pay the mortgage or the school fees. Practicing the seven steps to this or the seven secrets to that is no problem when you’re rolling in it!
But, the greatest problem that I have with personal growth books, however, is that they don’t provide ordinary everyday people with the practical and simple steps that can be taken to change your life. These books don’t give you any appreciation that personal development is something that you have to practice not just every day, but many times every day. The reader doesn’t understand the commitment needed. Nor will the reader be able to conceive of the enormous benefits – because he or she has yet to do what it takes to experience them for themselves. Above all, I’ve yet to read a personal development book that offers the ordinary person a compelling enough reason to fully commit to changing their life.
Basically, self improvement books are like poorly produced vacation brochures. They encourage you to read about the destination but they don’t compel you to actually book your package deal and take the journey. That’s why personal development writers are getting wealthier while the normal guy in the street looking for a bit of practical advice is getting more frustrated.
Self help means just that – it’s the ultimate do it yourself. If you went out and bought a new electric drill or circular saw, you’d go through the user’s manual and then use your new tool. Unfortunately, we were not provided with a user’s manual – but we do need to get to know how we operate before we can operate ourselves to the best of our ability. Before you can alter the course of your life, or just become happier, you need to know why you’re not happy at the moment, or why you’re not wholly comfortable with who you are. Psychological research gives us a great deal of understanding about how we work – but the problem that I have with psychology is that it’s mainly negative.
If you want to change the course of your daily life, if you want to go on that journey, if you want to live life as it should be lived, you must start with the baby steps of, firstly, understanding what makes you tick and, secondly, the tiny changes that can be simply and consistently made to fine tune what is an immensely powerful piece of equipment… you.
Control Yourself And Change Your Life
Posted by: | CommentsIt’s within your power change your life – but only you can do it. There is no significance in what is happening in the everyday detail of your life, what challenges you face in life or what problems you think you have. Life’s ups and downs are just that – what goes up must come down and it works the other way around too! And our ups and downs pass – sooner or later. There is but one constant in life. And that is who we can be – not who we perceive ourselves to be, which is an entirely different and misconceived thing altogether.
Unfortunately, the average mind doesn’t know who they really are or the heights to which they could rise. And if I told you to focus your mind, you wouldn’t know how. The normal mind is overwhelmed by its own destructive thoughts and the synchronized thoughts of herd-like behaviour. But even the herd can break free – consider how ordinary people in oppressed places like Tunisia, Jordan and Egypt are rewriting the Middle East’s political landscape. Again, recall the way popular revolt tore down the Berlin Wall. If the seemingly immovable objects of entrenched regimes can crumble so easily, then how much more easy can it be for your own misconceptions about who you are and about your life to vanish.
You’ve got to remember that, the only place that your misconceptions about who you are and the kind of life you could have are in your own imagination. They may appear to be real, they bring about concrete results, often for the worse, in your everyday life – but they are, nevertheless, the creation of your own conditioned imagination. Psychology confirms that we’re all conditioned during our childhood by the people and events that left the deepest impression on us. And psychology has discovered that you and I are predisposed to thinking the worst about ourselves. All this conditioning, which swirls below the surface of our minds, dictates our behavior, how we react and, consequently, what others think of us, do for us or to us. Our thoughts create our lives.
Bearing that in mind, how obvious is it that, if you could change your thoughts, you would change your life? The whole edifice of your apparent life would crumble as surely and convincingly as the Berlin Wall. And your life would start afresh. However, it’s not quite as simple as it sounds. The Berlin Wall was set in concrete foundations – the foundations of your life are far more subtly secured in your subconscious. So, rather than trying to dismantle your thought structures and belief systems, it is far better, far more effective, if you completely ignore their unreality by turning your mind’s focus to reality – the reality of the here and now.
Freedom from all your fears, doubts and worries is discovered by focusing your mind on what you are truly seeing, feeling, hearing, smelling and tasting right here, right now. Understand that, learn how to do it and your life will never be the same again.
This Very Second Will Effect The Rest Of Your Life
Posted by: | CommentsTake a look at the title with great care – I’ve used the word ‘will’, not ‘can’. Where you find yourself in your life at this very moment in time is as a result of every split second decision that you have made, moment to moment, up to now. How about an example. I write personal development articles – lots of them. Say I woke up earlier feeling flat and did nothing about the way I felt, I might not bother writing my next article until tomorrow. That means nobody will ever read the article that I’d considered writing today – and someone who could otherwise have read that article, could have changed the course of my life. Perhaps it would be someone famous, perhaps a leader of online opinion who could take up my article as a consequence of which it would go viral and explode the traffic to my website. The possibilities are infinite – and the possibilities and opportunities in everyone’s life are infinite as well.
However, we’ve got one huge problem. If you take a look at any of the research in the field of psychology, you’ll discover what you probably are not even aware of – we all make our decisions automatically. Or, more accurately, our subconscious makes all those moment to moment decisions for us. And, unfortunately, the normal subconscious mind makes those decisions based on what psychology would call our ‘stored knowledge’. And that’s a very big problem. We each learned all the important bits of our stored knowledge before we were four years old! In other words, you make your decisions today based on knowledge that is way out of date. How you behave, your bad habits, how you’re feeling, what you think about yourself, what you think about your life and other people is all automatically triggered by your stored knowledge. In effect, as a normal adult, you never take any real decisions at all. And the result? Your life at present.
Considering that each decision we take, in each and every moment up to now, has got us to where we are, we are in fact the authors of our own lives. The good news is that, as our own authors, we can completely re-write the story by starting to make real choices and, as a result, take real action that really will transform your life – not ‘can’ – will. So, the very next thing that you have to do, do it differently. Something as easy as brushing your teeth with the ‘other’ hand will awaken you from your automatic sleep and set the an entirely new direction. Because, when you get used to making small choices for yourself, it leads to making the big choices that, as a I say, will really transform your reality.
Does Meditation Provide You With Contentment
Posted by: | CommentsMillions of people meditate – many do so regularly. Yet many polls show that the vast majority of people are far from happy. Almost all of my personal development clients practice regular meditation – but a lot of them still find themselves stressed, worried and all over the place during the rest of the day. So the important question is can meditation give you peace of mind?
First of all, many people don’t even discover peace of mind during their meditation! Their heads are all over the place, mind wanders or often they end up submerged by completely irrelevant thoughts. All too often, when meditating, they get even more hassled than they were in the first place because they believe that they don’t know how to meditate. However, even if you’re an expert at meditating and get real peace of mind out of it, it’s par for the course that that same clarity and peace of mind doesn’t follow you through the day. You revert to your hassled state of mind.
As normal people we are hard-wired to be mentally all over the place – it’s a simple fact of life. And that’s the way we’ll stay unless we take concrete steps – not just when we meditate but during each and every day. You need to appreciate is that meditation should be viewed as a method of mental discipline. Basically, even if you are distracted during your meditation, the act of seeing it through disciplines your mind. You shouldn’t worry, you shouldn’t fret, you should just get on with your session.
More importantly, most practitioners don’t understand the link between meditating and what’s happening in their daily existence. You must call yourself to attention during the day to evaluate how you’re feeling. There’s more than a fifty-fifty chance that you’ll be all over the place in comparison to the calm that can embrace you during a good session of meditation. Having established your current state of mind, you need to take action to bring yourself back towards the optimum peaceful state of mind. This doesn’t have to be drastic action. It could be something small, like getting up from your desk for a few minutes to take a breather – literally, pay attention to your inward and outward breathing, nobody else will know the difference. Or you could go outside for a cigarette and really enjoy it – yeah, even smoking can be a meditation. The key thing is that you take a pause, check up on yourself and turn yourself back on to the reality of the here and now.
As I mentioned, meditation is a discipline. Discipline yourself often – not just with a quick session of meditation before the day gets going, but during the day. Otherwise, the calm that you experience during meditation (even if it’s only once in a while) will be of no practical assistance to you as the day progresses. And, if meditating doesn’t make a practical difference in your life, why bother?
Meditation – What’s It All About?
Posted by: | CommentsI have been hosting my own Personal Development Seminars for the last fifteen years. Some time back a good friend attended the Workshop after which he asked “How long have you been doing Meditation Workshops?” I replied that I had never seen meditation as the central element of what I do – that I see meditation as a means to an end. On that same workshop, I had a participant who had been meditating for the preceding 22 years. He told me that he may as well have been “scratching his backside” for those minutes every morning because he hadn’t understood the link between that meditation and the rough and tumble, hassle and pain of normal daily life. He got his few minutes peace each morning – but all the good it did him!
In other words, meditation is simply a tool – and, like a hammer, you can use it for the appropriate purpose or you can wallop yourself with it! Meditation is no more than a means to an end and it will not make any difference to your life unless you are clear in your head why it is that you’re meditating and what you really want from your life as a result of your meditation. Quite simply, meditation is a way to unleash your real power and attaining your heartfelt dreams. Meditation disciplines an otherwise completely undisciplined mind. If you don’t believe me just run your eye over seven decades of psychological evidence which confirm that the normal mind is out of control. Meditation gives you back control of your mind and, as a result, control of your life.
Armed with that understanding, you might start to appreciate meditation in a wider context. It’s not an end in itself. Before you ever sit down to meditate ask yourself what your key objectives are. I’m not talking about the normal crass nonsense that self improvement gurus talk about – I don’t mean fast cars, palm-fringed seashores, fancy condos and speedboats. My concern is what really matters to you – and only you can answer that question. But, if you don’t address these issues first, your life is going to be just as confused after your meditation as it was in the first place.
So you need to know why you’re meditating. With your objectives in mind, meditation is transformed and transforming. Through calming your cluttered mind, through getting rid of the noise in your brain, meditation enables you refine your focus and come to your senses (all five of them!). Meditation will help you focus on the reality of the moment – after all it’s your actions right here, right now that determine where your life is going.
Self Improvement – Stop And Check How You’re Feeling
Posted by: | CommentsDiscover that there is no great mystery regarding personal development and self awareness. The essence of personal focus – the key to real success – and personal growth is found in asking yourself one simple question. How are you feeling? Yes, a truly simple question – the response to which can provide you with both a major insight and a major opportunity. Personal development or self improvement is all down to awareness and, most importantly, self awareness. In short, how you feel right now! Observing how you’re feeling is not the first step on the road to awareness, it’s the only step – assuming that you reflect on your findings in a mindful and focused way.
OK then, stop whatever you’re doing right now and consider the question. Maybe you feel happy, calm, relaxed, full of good health, full of the joys of life. However, chances are that you’ll find yourself to be feeling one or more of the following: stressed, annoyed, tired, on edge, anxious, worried, hassled, confused, helpless, fearful… The fact – and it’s a psychological fact – is that, if you feel any of these things, you’re stuck in the world of make believe – your own subconscious mind makes you believe that you really do feel that way.
What you must realize is that it isn’t what’s going on that stresses you out or worries you – it’s what you think about your life at this moment in time that is doing the damage. Grab a hold of your head – you’ll take charge of what you’re feeling and, as a result, you’ll start influencing what’s going on in your life.
If you open your eyes to the reality of where you are and what you’re doing right now and compare reality with how you think you feel, you will realize that the real world is quite different from where you believed you were living. Right now, as you breathe in and out, you don’t have any real or lasting problems. Worries, like everything else, simply pass on. To prove this, ask yourself what you were worrying or stressed about this time last year – or even last week! In this moment of insight you might also notice that there are things happening right in front of you that you’ve been unable to see because you were blinkered by your own negative subconscious conditioning. These things are called opportunities – open your eyes and you’ll discover that you’re surrounded by them.
Control Your Mind – It’s The Only Way To Ultimate Personal Development
Posted by: | CommentsIf you don’t understand how to focus your mind, you will never live your dream. You’re never going to achieve anything exceptional and you will be always haunted by the self defeating beliefs and voices in your head that are part and parcel of normal everyday life. How you focus your mind, how you control your mind is the key to getting all the abundant things that can freely flow in your life. You’ve just got to let them flow. In other words, you need to learn how to focus your mind, for becoming an expert ‘focuser’ is the ultimate self improvement.
Focus simply means paying attention. Some people will tell you that you have to focus on your goals – but those goals of yours, whatever they might be, will only be achieved in the future if you learn how to concentrate your energy in the present. Focus is a now thing. How you do what you’re doing in this moment doesn’t only influence if you’ll achieve your goals, it determines the very course of your life. I’m not exaggerating – because if you don’t focus your mind on what you’re actually supposed to be doing just at this moment in time, not only can you not do it as best you can, more importantly, your mind, by default, will pay attention to stuff that not only is completely irrelevant to the here and now but stuff that is holding you back from doing your very best.
What you must realize is that our default state of mind is to focus on what a psychologist might term our ‘stored knowledge’. This stored knowledge tells us what’s happening in our world and then determines how we react. There’s a problem though – all of our most important stored knowledge was learned when we were young and impressionable – some of the most important stuff being learned before we were three years old! So, if my objective is to rise to the top of some multi-national, or introduce my super-duper software to an eagerly waiting world, or buy my holiday home in the Caribbean, has what I learned as a toddler got anything to do with the adult me?
Not only is it irrelevant, it is negative. Think about it, all our feelings of inadequacy bubble up from our stored knowledge. You’ve got to consciously and deliberately, stop your mind focusing on your stored knowledge – and the only real alternative is to pay full attention to the real world – the here and now. Not only is it the only time and place in which we all actually live, paying attention to now makes everything easier and makes you better at whatever it is your currently supposed to be doing. But such focus does not come naturally – so you’re going to have to cultivate it. And as the word, cultivate, suggests, this is something that you must do both regularly and continuously.
And the best place to start is right at the start of every day – the old Irish proverb that a good start is half the job is spot on. If you don’t tune your mind in first thing each morning, you’ll be on that slippery slope that is all too easy to slide down. Why? Because you’re used to it, that’s how you’ve been existing for all your adult life.
So, start right now, take five or ten minutes to turn off the constant noise that’s addling your mind. Sit down, somewhere where you won’t be disturbed, shut your eyes and experience your own breath. Feel how it is to be sitting in the chair. Hear how it is to actually hear all the background noises that your normal mind ignores. Take a few minutes out a couple of times during your day as well to repeat the exercise. You could sit on a park bench and see what it’s like to simply look at what’s going on, you could hear the birds, smell the roses.
The key to your success lies in your ability to pay attention – not on the future, not on your goals and dreams, but on the only what’s real, right here, right now.
