The Prospects For Self-Improvement If Companies Embrace REAL Wellness is a post from: Self Improvement Made Easy

Bookshops are full of personal development books. This is big business – possibly the fastest growing sector of the publishing market. Also, personal development websites proliferate – offering all manner of inducements to purchase their program which is guaranteed to change your life in five minutes!

But none of these books or programs will change your life. They may well point you in the right direction, provide you with an understanding that had been absent from your range of experience or knowledge or suggest concrete suggestions on how to get more out of life, change your life, transform yourself or whatever. no doubt about it, there is some excellent stuff available – and some innovative and practical personal development online help – but none of it is going to be of any use to you until you put it into practice for yourself and regularly put it into practice.

It’s down to you to change your life. Only you can grasp control of the awesome inner power that is simply waiting for you to muster up the courage or energy to unleash it. The interesting thing is that much of the advice provided by websites or books requires very little work of you, requires that you make only very minor alterations to the way in which you use your mind. Unfortunatley though, having been in this business for over fourteen years, I have seen far too many people unwilling to take five minutes each day to make the other twenty three hours and fifty five minutes so much better.

And this leads me to the main point – one that I’ve already alluded to – you have to keep putting what you learn into practice. No book, program or package will change your life in five minutes. You’re not going to change your life in five minutes. However, five minutes each and every day is an entirely different proposition – if you make or take the time to ensure that your mind is up to speed each and every morning then your life will change beyond all recognition. Psychology tells us in no uncertain terms that normal people perceive only what they expect to perceive and only experience what they expect to experience – that the normal life is dictated by the sadly blind normal mind. Open your mind each morning, change your expectations and your life will change. But, in essence, it’s entirely up to you – no one else can do it for you.

Changing Your Life: It’s Down To You is a post from: Self Improvement Made Easy

Of course, you are aware of the odd useless thought that whizzes through your head – thoughts like “I can’t stand my job” (this has nothing to do with your job, it has to do with what you think about it!) “I wish I was out on playing tennis” (a thought that’s a complete waste of your energy if you’re in the middle of a client meeting!) “I feel inadequate talking to this person” (a thought linked to your perceived inadequacy as a normal adult, nothing to do with the other person). You might also be aware of one of the most corrosive forms of useless thought – the curse of worry. But there are the deeper, darker thoughts that skulk in the subconscious – these you believe to be hard facts. All our perceived weaknesses, all the things that we may not like about ourselves, all our shortcomings are no more than thoughts based on things that made us feel a certain way about ourselves during our formative years. They are dangerously toxic thoughts.

Useless thought presents us with three big headaches! Firstly, it distracts us from doing what we should actually be doing – to the extent that we only one percent do it! We’re not going to get much out of life if we haven’t bothered to turn up for the event!! Secondly, useless thought presents us with a familiar, habitual way of going through or, perhaps even, coping with our daily life. It’s a habit that we’re so used to that we’re not aware of it. Thirdly, useless thought prevents you progressing towards the life that you really want. Go on thinking useless thought and you will never change your life. We can all achieve whatever we believe that we can achieve – but if our resident useless thoughts are up against us, how will we ever believe?

You’ve got to break the cycle of useless thought. This is most effectively done by stopping yourself from having irrelevant, simple useless thoughts. Example! You’re walking down the street and a nice car drives past. That’s cool – but you should then walk on and pay attention to whatever happens next. But, you might say to yourself “That car is better than mine!” That’s a useless thought – it has nothing to do with the reality of the moment (the only time and place there is!). And it gives rise to other useless thoughts: “I wish I had a nicer car!” “I couldn’t afford a new car!” “I cannot afford a vacation either!” “What if I can’t keep making my home loan repayments!” Useless thoughts take normal adults down alleys and mug them all the time. It’s part of the way we are as normal adults. But we have to break the cycle of useless thought, if we don’t we will continue to live habitual mundane lives. Is that your life’s objective?

Chains Useless Thought: How To Liberate Yourself is a post from: Self Improvement Made Easy

So, here’s the key question: What is Awareness? Let’s make it even easier – what can you be aware of at any particular point in time? Of course, you could be aware of your thoughts – most people aren’t because, as decades of research prove, most people are aware of pretty much nothing at all. You could be aware that you’re feeling annoyed or stressed – but these so-called emotions are merely the product of the thoughts that you’re not aware of in the first place. You could be aware of how you feel about yourself – your own self-image – but that’s not awareness, that’s getting involved in the ongoing internal power struggle between you and your personality (remember, personality derives from the Latin word, “persona”, meaning a mask and your personality is nothing more than the amalgamation of all the personal “snapshots” you took as a child).

Authentic awareness is being aware of the present moment. To paraphrase the Buddha, when I am walking, I am aware that I am putting one foot in front of the other. Only in the present moment is reality to be found. In fact – scientific fact as explored by quantum physics – only in the present moment does anything exist and all that exists is changing from one moment to the next.

And then there is the question of choice. We have a stark choice that has a fundamental impact on our lives – we can choose to be aware or we can (and this is the unaware choice made by normal people) choose to live in a make-believe world created by our own, predominantly negative, thoughts. This is a choice that we must make time and again, in each moment because no one becomes aware and stays aware – it is an ongoing process in exactly the same way that the reality of our universe is a continual process.

The life you are living is how it is as a consequence of your action, reaction or inaction in the present moment. The average person reacts to their own thoughts and perceptions. The abnormally successful person acts on the basis of the facts in the moment and, as a result, creates a life that is exciting, spontaneous, adventurous, fulfilled and successful. Now, do you think you might be up to making that choice?

Success And Happiness: What Is Awareness? is a post from: Self Improvement Made Easy

Newsflash! – the one sure way of holding yourself back is wondering why you’re not going forward! Frustration is a waste of our precious attention and energy. Wondering why what we want to happen hasn’t happened yet is a useless, negative, self-defeating thought – you might as well say to yourself “well, I kinda knew that it wasn’t going to happen anyway!”

You and I have a finite amount of energy available to us and your personal development goal must be to marshal that energy and target it, like a laser beam, on getting on with both what we have to do now and heading in the direction of whatever it is that you want out of life. Frustration, worry or even wondering about when, how or if something will happen is a dangerous distraction, a self-destructive use of your energy – it’s like you’re targeting your powerful laser beam back on yourself! You have to be so careful where you point that laser beam because it can be equally constructive or destructive.

Unfortunately, if you’re normal, your laser beam isn’t turned on at all. Psychology informs us that the average person pays little or no attention to anything and invests a mere one percent of their energy in doing what they’re supposed to be doing. And if you’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing now, when are you going to start? The only place and time that you are is now – the only time and place that you can focus your energy is now. Wishful thinking, daydreaming, wanting or needing are destructive uses of your energy because these mental ramblings have nothing to do with the scientific reality that everything only exists now.

Therefore, if you’re frustrated that you don’t seem to be making progress, it’s your frustration itself that’s tying you down. If you feel that you’re stuck in a rut, it’s that very feeling that will perpetuate your discomfort. You must to direct your attention to the urgency of living in the here and now. Now is the time and place that demands your focus – not some of it, like normal crazy people, but as much of it as you can marshal. The very input of an abnormal amount of energy into the present moment will trigger an abnormal response from universal energy. This is how abnormally successful people are so successful – they put their energy into the present and, as a result, they have presence. This must be your goal also.

Is Frustration Destroying Your Best Efforts is a post from: Self Improvement Made Easy

In addressing this issue, I often refer to what a client from Northern Ireland said to me at the height of the so-called “Troubles”. He said “It must be that, for some people, doing their mental exercises is a bit like the way some of my fellow-countrymen go to Mass on a Sunday, kneel down and pray and, on a Monday, go out and shoot someone!” A well made point – if your efforts at personal development don’t make an impact in the ordinary course of your everyday life, there really is little or no point in fooling yourself into thinking that you’re on the road to the life that you want. Personal development isn’t supposed to make you feel good for just a few minutes each day, it’s supposed to change your life and if it isn’t doing that, then you’re doing something wrong.

As I write this, I’m expecting a client who is going to spend the next couple of days with me here in the Alps. He sent me an advance note – what he called his “agenda” – and, in that note, he asks how to bring the calm and focus that you get during meditation or mental exercising into the cut and thrust of everyday life. My answer to him will be simple. During the course of your everyday life, especially when the going gets tough, you’ve got to regularly stop yourself, notice state of mind and compare it with the calm and clarity that you get when you’re doing your personal development exercises. If you’re state of mind has drifted from your benchmark calm then you’re going to have to take a momentary step back from what’s going on, take a few deep breaths, and restore the mental calm and focus that will make the difference to your actions and personal effectiveness in the present moment.

Personal development isn’t personal development if you’re not seeing concrete results in your ordinary life – if your life is still all over the place, you’re just lulling yourself into an even more dangerous place where you might well make decisions or taking what you think is action that could make your life worse rather than better.

Personal Development Is Worth Nothing Unless You’ve The Results To Show For It is a post from: Self Improvement Made Easy

But how could this happen? Because it’s easier to stay the same – it’s easier to stay “not too bad” when everyone else around you is not too bad as well. It’s easier to not have your friends – or, as some of my personal development clients have told me, their family – looking at you as if you’ve become some kind of born-again weirdo! It’s simpler to fit in. And, it doesn’t matter what new stuff we learn, sooner or later, to a greater or lesser extent, we revert to type, we re-set to default, we go back to being normal. But normal is crazy – there’s seventy years of research that proves that. And not-too-bad is simply not good enough when you think about the life that you could have – effortless happiness, effortless success, peace of mind.

So, what will you do to change your life? Because, after all, if you want it to change, you’re the one who’s going to have to do something new, something different. Don’t pay any attention to anybody who will tell you that you can change your life in five minutes – they want to make a fast buck. Don’t listen to anybody who tells you that success is all about making lots of money – they’re the ones who want loads of money and some of it is yours! Pay no attention to people who keep recommending the latest wonderful book that they’ve just read to you – you won’t change your life by reading – you change your life by doing.

Doing what? You change your life by doing things in your life differently. Try starting with little things – like try brushing your teeth with the hand that you don’t habitually use – and your mind will get used to the idea that, in every single thing that you do in your life and in every single situation in which you find yourself in your life – you have a choice. You have a choice – can choose to live automatically and mindlessly like all the normal crazy people that are content to be not-too-bad, or you can choose to focus on the present, feel the toothbrush’s bristles on your teeth, notice how differently you’re holding the brush, taste the toothpaste. It’s in the small detail of everyday life that you will discover reality. And when you find reality, you will realize that you can, indeed, achieve effortless success and happiness because, in reality, it just happens.

What Good Will A Self Improvement Course Do You? is a post from: Self Improvement Made Easy

Everything becomes stale in life unless you constantly keep reinventing and renewing. However, But it’s not your life that grinds to a shuddering halt, it’s you! More to the point, it’s actually your state of mind that becomes so numbed by the day to day routine that passes for living, that you simply sink into oblivion. The problem is that you stopped experiencing new things during your teenage years. The normal mind is wide open to all new experiences during early and mid childhood – that’s when our sponge-like capacity to take everything in means that we really were, indeed, taking everything in. By 11 or 12, we started closing up shop. By the end of adolescence, we were a done deal. Subsequently, except for truly monumental events in our lives – like the birth of a child, or a bereavement – we experience nothing new. We think we are experiencing, but actually what our subconscious mind is doing is interpreting everything on the basis of old stored knowledge and pigeonholing the new event accordingly. Effectively, the normal adult state of mind is completely unaware, numb, reactive, divorced from reality and simply going through the motions.

It is not life that grinds to a halt – the universe and our world and everything in it is reinventing itself again and again. Opportunities abound, adventures beckon, new people are waiting to change the course of your life (in the same way as once total strangers changed it in the past). But you’re numb, wrapped up in the apparent safety of a normality that is literally sucking you dry. Not only can you not see the opportunity and adventure of life – because you’re not looking or seeing – even if you could, you wouldn’t be up to taking the choice to leap onto life’s spectacular rollercoaster. That’s because, as adults, we’ve got used to not choosing. The normal adult rarely takes the decision to choose their own thoughts – preferring to let the subconscious do the choosing for them automatically.

So, if you’ve arrived at an crossroads or impasse, it’s up to you to take the right route, it’s up to you to choose, it’s up to you to kickstart your life in the direction that you want it to go. Not a single aspect of your life will ever change unless you make some changes yourself.

Has Life Ground To A Halt? A Little Self Awareness Is Required is a post from: Self Improvement Made Easy

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.

Normal Living And Personal Growth: On Your Marks, Get Set, Die is a post from: Self Improvement Made Easy

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.

Looking Forward To Something? Your Personal Growth [spin]Requires That Live More Now is a post from: Self Improvement Made Easy