I host a two-day personal development programme – I’ve been doing it for over fifteen years – and I explain to clients that they’ve been given all the tools that are required to do whatever to achieve their goals, whether that’s make lots of money, find their ‘soul-mate’ (whatever that means!) or simply discover happiness. However, the problem with many people is that they want someone to take them by the hand. When you were young, your parents held your hand – your teachers did much the same, perhaps not literally. Now that you’re an adult, you need to grow up. You’ve got to take responsibility for your life – you’re the only one who can. It’s time to stop depending on the crutches provided by anyone else and start getting things done for yourself – that’s what self help and self improvement mean.

You’ve got to realize that the only person who can get inside your head is you. And, more importantly, you need to understand that, until you get inside that head of yours and take charge, nothing in your life will change. Over seven decades of research in from discipline of psychology proves that the normal mind controls the normal person and that this so-called normal mind is tortured by the ghosts of our early childhood. Neuro-psychological research also confirms that, when we take control of our minds, we enter what sportspeople describe as the ‘peak performance zone’ and transform our lives. But only you can do that.

You’ve got to tame your wild mind. It’s wild because, currently, it is a law unto itself. Your mind is consumed with your formative years and worried about what hasn’t even happened yet – and you’re stuck, helpless, in between. You’ve got to grab the levers of power – let your mind know who’s in charge. Train your mind to focus on the now – the place and time that it doesn’t want to focus on at all – the time and place that you actually live, where risks are taken, where opportunity knocks.

And, now that you’ve got to the end of this article, take ten minutes to, quite literally, smell the roses. Sit down and shut your eyes, experience the noise of the real world, the smells of now, the feeling of each breath that you take – the reality of the moment. Because, until you come to your senses, you’re wasting your life.

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 less hassle to not have your friends – or, as some of my personal development clients have told me, their nearest and dearest – looking at you as if you’re some kind of born-again weirdo! It’s always easier to fit in. And, it doesn’t matter what new skills 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 over seven decades of research that proves that. And not-too-bad is simply not good enough when you realize the life that you could have – effortless happiness, effortless success, peace of mind.

So, how will you 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 listen to anybody who tells you that you can change your life in five minutes – they want to make a fast buck. Pay no attention to anybody who tells you that success is all about making loads of money – they’re the ones who want loads of money and some of it is yours! Don’t listen 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 only change your life by doing.

Doing what? You change your life by doing things in your life differently. You start with little things – like try brushing your teeth with the hand that you don’t habitually use – then your mind gets used to the idea that, in every single thing that you do in your daily 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 other normal crazy morons 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, feel the awkward way you’re holding the brush, taste the toothpaste. It’s in the minute detail of everyday life that you will find reality. And when you discover reality, you will find that you can, indeed, achieve effortless happiness and success because, in reality, it simply happens.

Continuously reading self help books is much like collecting loads of holiday brochures and travel books about some beautiful place that you long to visit. You’ve poured over photographs, read all the recommendations, imagined yourself relaxing on that beautiful white sandy beach, immersed yourself in the idea of being there. However, you’ll never pluck up the courage to buy the ticket. What’s my point? Reading about how to achieve the life that you really want and actually doing what you’ve learned are two completely different things. Reading all those feel-good stories about how others have changed their minds and, as a consequence, changed their lives, may well give you that warm feeling inside. But tomorrow morning, when you drag yourself out of bed for another normal day, what has changed? Precious little! When you face another day of hassle, anxiety, financial shortage or battered self-esteem, what good will all your reading have done you? If anything, it will have made you even more restless and more dissatisfied than you were in the first place.

Reading, intellectualizing and understanding what’s required for you to change your life will make no difference to your life until you put what you’ve learned into daily practice. And therein lies the problem for so-called normal people – they’re afraid to take what they perceive as some risk-laden leap of faith.

If you’ve been lucky enough to come across a self improvement book that has step-by-step exercises on how to change your life (and they’re few and far between – most of them are ‘feel-good books’) then you must know by now that you don’t have to leap into the great unknown. All you need to take is take effortless daily steps that will awaken you from the self-induced hypnosis in which most normal people are just about existing.

If you want to change your life, you must change the way you’re living the life that you have at present. Change can start small – even by simply changing your morning routine – because small things startle your subconscious mind out of its comfort zone. Once out you will begin to realize that absolutely everything in your life can be done differently. When this realization hits you, you’ll find yourself in a completely different place – where things that were otherwise unconscionable suddenly become the logical thing to do – and effortlessly doable.

In other words, it’s you who has to start doing the things that will change your life, to stop reading and start doing.

A superficial scan at seventy years of research in psychology will tell you that not so bad is about as good as it gets! Normal people, to quote the acclaimed spiritualist Anthony deMello, sleepwalk their way through life never realizing that, in order to live life to the full, all they’d have to do is wake up! Unfortunately, the normal mind goes through life on auto-pilot – the research confirms that, using our psychological faculty of automaticity, we pay almost no attention to anything that’s going on. And, in paying no attention to our day as it unfolds, we completely miss the opportunities of life that are right in front of our noses.

So wake up – if you’re feeling not too bad today, then that’s simply not good enough! Why would you go through life in a comfort zone that has you, in fact, not uncomfortable enough for you to do pull yourself together and change your life? Do you have to experience a disaster or rock-bottom to wake up? All the evidence suggests that that is the case. The personal development author, Ekhart Tolle, had to suffer something like a total breakdown, ended up destitute on a park bench, before it dawned on him that he should wake up!

Don’t sink so low. Don’t let short-change yourself. Don’t let life pass you by while you’re complaining about how horrible your job is, while you get hassled over money, while you get stressed out by the peaks and troughs of what you call life. You feel the way you feel because you’ve made things that way. And only you can change your life – you can transform it. It’s as easy as waking up.

So, what does this waking up involve? Focus on, pay attention to reality, not the stuff that’s going through your head and making your life routine, mundane and unsatisfying. Open your eyes, see the reality in front of you. Come to your senses, smell the roses. God gave you five senses – isn’t it time that you used them?

Do you want more from your life? Because, if you do, you’re going to have to get some idea of what that more might be. There’s little point in longing for something else when you’ve no idea what that something else might look like and feel like. In other words, you’ve got to have some idea of what turns you on.

In chatting recently with a client who has been doing the same job for the last ten years, I was taken by the extent to which she hadn’t the first idea whatsoever of what she wanted to do in life. She was looking at her options from the normal narrow-minded perspective of her perceived strengths and weaknesses, her past work experience and, most chillingly, her perceived need to pay the bills. You may consider those last few words to be rather strange – bills are real, they must be paid. But unless you’re an absolute idiot, you won’t do something that would leave you unable to look after the necessities of life.

The problem is that our commitments always seem to be uppermost in our minds. Recent research that suggests that the normal people are obsessed with money and afraid that they will not have enough of it (whatever enough might be). Forget about your financial commitments – they will simply look after themselves if you put your heart’s desire first. I’m not suggesting that you be silly about deciding how you want to change your life, I’m merely suggesting that You have to get your priorities right.

To set your priorities, you need to know what would really – and I mean really, really – excite you. What would make you leap out of bed each and every morning? What would turn you on so much that you wouldn’t have to work, it would be a labour of love? Ask yourself: What is my ideal life? And, most importantly from the point of view of your all-important subconscious mind (the part of your mind that creates your reality), what would your ideal life look like, feel like, sound like, smell like and taste like?

A strange question? Not at all – the subconscious mind believes in the snapshots that it holds dearly within its depths. These snapshots are five-sensory – no surprise, you make sense of the world by using your five senses and it is through using your five senses that you were programmed to live the mundane life that has you so disillusioned right now. If you turn on your subconscious, a really exciting life will follow effortlessly – oh and by the way, your financial commitments will be more than adequately catered for.

What is it that takes the wind out of our sails so easily? How come we can be so fired up one minute and then suddenly so flat? Actually, the answer is all too simple – flat is your default state of mind. Yeah, believe it or not, research tells us that only the very rare person is tuned in sufficiently to actually be adequately focused and attentive to get all that can be gotten out of the normal day. As if that wasn’t enough, research also asserts that, left to its own devices, our minds slip towards negativity. It’s the way we’re wired – and all the personal development or self improvement in the world won’t personal development or self improvement isn’t going to change that wiring.

But a committed approach to self improvement will change the programs that we run. Again, left to its own devices, our subconscious mind is content to watch reruns – to keep running the same old irrelevant programs that make our daily lives mundane, uninteresting, repetitive and uninspiring. You must grab a hold of that remote control! Self Improvement will teach you how to switch channels and enable you stop watching the same old nonsense. It will teach you how to tune in to reality TV – the reality of the here and now.

Sadly, this feeling of mindless-couldn’t-give-a-damn simply creeps up on us all by default. And that will always, for the rest of our days, be our default state of mind unless you set about developing a mindful, focused, tuned in state of mind – and not only have you got to do this each and every day, you’ve got to find a mechanism to ensure that you can recapture that state of mindfulness when you feel that you’re slipping down the inevitable slippery slope towards mindlessness – because, as sure as night follows day, you’ll start sliding the moment your back is turned.

Sure, I’m mixing my metaphors, between computers, TV and slippery slopes – but you understand? Our mind is always waiting to mug us – we’ve got to be on the alert as much as is humanly possible.

Everything becomes stale in life unless you constantly keep renewing and reinventing. However, But it’s not your life that grinds to a shuddering halt, it’s you! Or, more correctly, it’s actually your state of mind that becomes so anaesthetized by the continual routine that passes for living, that you just disappear 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 were, in fact, taking everything in. By 11 or 12, we started closing up shop. By nineteen or twenty, 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.

Life never grinds to a halt – everything in our universe is reinventing itself moment to moment. Opportunities abound, adventure beckons, 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 relative 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 get onto life’s spectacular rollercoaster. That’s because, as adults, we’re used to not choosing. The normal adult almost never takes the decision to choose their own thoughts – they would prefer that the subconscious do the choosing for them like an automaton.

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

Unfortunately, too many personal development books are nothing more than feel good books – no better than a good novel that you can’t put down but that makes absolutely no difference to your daily life. Unfortunately, quite a few personal growth books are penned by millionaire self improvement ’gurus’ , who have little understanding of the trials and tribulations of ordinary everyday life. The Brian Tracys and Deepak Chopras of this world don’t struggle to pay the bank 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!

The biggest issue that I have with self improvement books, however, is that they don’t provide the average Joe the simple, practical daily steps that you can take to change your life. These books don’t provide the reader with any appreciation that personal development is something that you’ve got to put into practice not just each day, but again and again during the course of the day. The reader doesn’t understand the perseverance that’s required. Nor will the reader be able to understand the enormous benefits – because he or she has yet to do what it takes to experience them first hand. Most importantly, I’ve yet to read a personal ‘success’ book that provides the readers with a compelling enough reason to fully commit to changing how they go about their lives.

In short, self improvement books are like badly written holiday brochures. These books encourage you to read about the destination but they don’t convince you to actually buy your ticket and take the journey. That’s why personal development authors are becoming wealthier whilst the normal guy in the street looking for a bit of practical advice is getting more frustrated.

Self improvement means just what it says – it’s the ultimate do it yourself. If you purchased a new electric drill or chain saw, you’d read the instructions and then use your new toy. Sadly, we were not delivered with a user’s manual – but we do need to get to know how we work before we can operate ourselves to the best of our ability. Before you can alter the course of your life, or become a happier person, you need to know why you’re not happy at the moment, or why it is that you’re not fully comfortable with who think you are. Psychological research gives us plenty of information about how we work – but the problem that I have with psychology is that it’s mainly negative.

But, if you really do want to change your life, if you want to take the wonderful journey, if you want to experience life as it should be lived, you’ve got to start with the baby steps of, firstly, coming to terms with what makes you tick and, then, the tiny changes that can be easily and consistently made to tune up what is an immensely powerful piece of equipment… you.

But there’s a massive problem. If you take a look at any of the research from the discipline of psychology, you’ll understand what you probably are not already aware of – we all make our decisions on auto-pilot. Or, more accurately, our subconscious makes our moment to moment decisions on our behalf. Sadly, the normal subconscious mind makes those decisions based on what psychology would call our ‘stored knowledge’. And this is the nub of the problem. We learned all of our crucial stored knowledge before the age of four! In other words, you make each decision today based on so-called knowledge that is way out of date. The way 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 triggered automatically by that out-of-date stored knowledge. In fact, as a normal adult, you never make any real choices at all. What’s the result? Your life now.

Considering that each decision we take, in each and every moment up to now, has brought us to where we are, we are in fact the authors of our own reality. The good news is that, as authors, we can re-write the story by starting to take real decisions and, as a consequence, take the real action that will change your life – not ‘can’ – will. So, the very next thing that you do, do it differently. Believe it or not, something as simple as brushing your teeth with the ‘other’ hand will awaken you from your mindless sleep and set the an entirely new direction. You see, when you get used to making small choices for yourself, it leads to making the bigger choices that, as a I say, will truly change your daily life.

Recently, a client and I discussed the importance of regularly and continually taking even the smallest of steps to ensure that they stayed on their chosen path – their own Personal Development journey to effortless career success and personal health and happiness. The idea that even two or three minutes meditation in a day is infinitely better than no mental exercising at all was likened to us putting another penny in the slot so that, sooner or later, pennies will drop for us. I don’t know about you but, when I was growing up, we often went to the amusement arcade where you rolled pennies down a slot, onto a moving platform that had loads of pennies – most of them appeared as if they were about to cascade over the edge, into my hand!

In life, in business, in meditation, we simply do not know which penny will tip the balance in our favour. But the one sure thing is that, if we stop putting our daily penny in the slot, we will not reap the benefit of the pennies that we have already invested. Indeed, we will come to the incorrect conclusion that we have wasted all our previous pennies. Every penny counts – every minute that you invest in your own Personal Development no matter how seemingly insignificant, every moment spent in mindfulness, leads you to a greater awareness, a greater level of presence, opens your mind further to the incredible possibilities that this life holds for us and, indeed, the opportunities that may well be staring you in the face if you only had eyes to see.
For everyone with whom I have worked, sooner or later, pennies drop. But, if you really want to Change Your Life, you’ve got to put your next penny in the slot – right now…