Self Improvement Made Easy

I was talking to a client’s Colleague last Wednesday – she started the conversation by saying “Bet you’re looking forward to the weekend?” When I mentioned to her that it was only Wednesday, she replied “Ah, but the weekend’s on its way once it’s Wednesday lunchtime!” Indeed, as I write this on a Wednesday evening, I’ve already got a couple of emails finishing with the line “enjoy the weekend!” or a similar message.

We spend so much of our lives looking forward. First of all, there’s the negative sort of looking forward – we all know and love this one as “worry” – as a matter of fact, I just received an email from a friend asking me how could he stop the ridiculous worries that pop into his mind at 4 o’clock in the morning. And someone else recently told me that he was worried because he couldn’t think of anything to worry about! Psychology indicates that we’re hard-wired for worry – that, of the 50,000 random thoughts that zip through our minds each day, we’re more inclined to focus on and believe the bad ones.

And, then, of course, there’s positive looking forward. “I can’t wait for my holidays”, “I’m really looking forward to the lads’ night out”, “I’m going to take up golf when I retire”, “Are you looking forward to the weekend?” Recently, as I stood in front of twenty Personal Development clients on a Monday morning in Dublin, Ireland, one of them asked me if I was looking forward to flying home to my family and the French Alps at the weekend. My answer was “I simply can’t figure out how to think that far ahead – if I did, I wouldn’t be here with you now!”

Life is supposed to be lived in the here and now. What you do in this present moment has a direct and fundamental impact on your success or, more normally, abject failure in comparison to the success that you could actually achieve. If you waste your time – even a little of it – looking forward, then you’re screwing up your own life on an ongoing basis, permanently. Little wonder that normal people are “not so bad”, small wonder that psychological research has discovered that the normal person only uses about 1 percent of their mental energy to be in the only place and time that’s real – the here and now.

The course of your life, which is defined, if you think about it, by apparently random events, will be changed for the better if you stop looking forward and start looking at what is before your very eyes. Those apparently random events happen only now – and many of them will take you to where you want to go in life, if you just open your eyes and see them. These random events are called opportunities! – and life is full of them if you’d just be more present now.