Self Improvement Made Easy

Although many of my clients are business people, because of my Personal Development work with aspiring teenage sports people I get to spend quite a bit of time with people who have not yet grown so inward looking that they miss out on the joys of living. The facts as seen from a psychological perspective are plain, simple and incontrovertible. Up to the arrival of puberty, the mind functions in a manner that is clear and focused – the immature brain is subjected to greatly reduced levels of electrical-impulse-induced vibration as the neural pathways are in the process of construction. Through adolescence, as those neural pathways are completed, electrical activity in the brain accelerates. By our early twenties, with the brain operating at full speed, we become hostage to the “stored knowledge” that we largely learned prior to puberty. Our perceptions of reality are created by that stored knowledge and our consequent reactions dictated by the resultant misconceptions.

So, even though we were at our most mentally effective when we were children, our entire childhood was pointed in the direction of becoming an adult. Our education systems are built to ensure conformity to the norms of mindless adulthood. Society at large expects people to better themselves, get a good education and then a good job. Children constantly fantasize about what they will be “when I grow up”. And many of the youths with whom I have worked closely, being torn apart, as all adolescents are, by the utter transformation of the brain, assume that, when they do eventually grow up, all will return to an even keel – all will be well again as it was in childhood. It’s a terrible thing to have to tell them otherwise. As one young guy said to me a while back “Some of my friends are behaving really badly at the moment – but, I assume, that, when they grow up, they’ll start behaving properly again!”

What evidence have you got for adults behaving properly? There is a lack of such evidence because no such proper behaviour is to be seen. As we’ve already said, the scientific evidence is clear – and when it comes to stating the facts on the normal adult state of mind, frightening. The normal adult might as well be dead. We went through our childhood and adolescence getting reading to participate in life’s great race – well, we should have been told “on your marks, get set, die”! As our adult minds make “sense” of today based on our stored knowledge, we really aren’t alive here and now.

To really live now, to see life and all its possibilities as they are, to be happy and carefree, we need to become like a little child again. We must slow our minds down, take time to calm the mental activity, to tune out the noise in our heads. Until we do, we will achieve nothing of great worth – least of all peace of mind.