Self Improvement Made Easy

Clarity of mind is the only state of mind worth being in – you have to focus your mind. That way you appreciate what’s really going on around you and you’re in a position to act – rather than react, which is what we normally do. Being clear and present alerts you to the opportunities of the moment so that you can grasp them. Otherwise, your normal distracted mind won’t notice opportunities at all. And a clear mind, focused in the here and now enables your subconscious lead you towards the life that you want. Otherwise, even if you’ve taken the perfect psychological snapshot of your “ideal life”, your subconscious, which normally focuses on negative snapshots from our childhood years, will continue to mess up your life.

Effectively, if you’re not in a clear state of mind, you’re tripping yourself up – blocking all your best efforts, making sure that you stay in the kind of normal life in which you currently find yourself.

Everyone with whom I’ve worked over the years knows the difference between clarity of mind and the muddled-headedness that is the norm. They’ve experienced the difference clarity of mind makes in their daily lives – sometimes straight away. But cultivating your clarity of mind takes time – maybe just five or ten minutes each day – but it’s bizarre the number of people who can’t take or make those five or ten minutes to make the remainder of their day so much better and to make the rest of their lives so much more exciting.

By cultivating your mind, I mean a little mental exercising or training. Many of my clients prefer these phrases to “meditation” but it all amounts to much the same thing – taking a few minutes to reacquaint your mind with the actual reality of the here and now, stopping your automatice mind assuming that it knows what’s going on in the here and now – years of research proves that it doesn’t have a clue!

But, mental exercising is just the same as physical training. Bet you didn’t know that the average gym membership lasts just six weeks and that the average new member actually goes to the gym just twice! Yeah, we have good intentions but it appears that we actually prefer to be not-to-bad than happy, healthy and fit – both physically and mentally.

So, here are a few ideas to enable you “cultivate your mind” without having to go to the mental gym! Number One: do something that “gets you in the zone” – like going for a walk or jogging, like listening (really listening) to music. Number Two: do some of your routine tasks differently – like brushing your teeth with the “other hand” or having something completely different for breakfast (or actually having breakfast!). Number Three: during your lunch break, or a coffee break, go somewhere on your own for five minutes and just watch the world go by – see, feel, hear, smell and taste what’s going on. Oh – and Number Four: sign up for my free Personal Development Ezine. It goes out every Monday and Wednesday – many of my readers call it “their fix” or “dose of reality” and some say that even seeing the email in their inbox reminds them to be more focused!

The thing is, clarity of mind is all about paying attention to what’s going on now. Normally our minds are whizzing around at high speed paying attention to stuff that isn’t going on – stuff buried in our subconscious or worry about something in the future. You need to calm your mind down – then you can really speed up at doing all the the really important things that you should be doing, without the normal distractions.