Get Rid Of Self Help Books

Are you a big reader of self help books? Because there are millions of people who are forever reading, forever learning, constantly searching, deepening their understanding not reading that changes your life, but doing.

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.

Personal Development: Who’s The Next Most Important Stranger?

Think about it – the people who are currently most important in your life were once complete strangers to you. Whether by chance or what I might view as synchronicity – or, indeed, what a quantum physicist might view as a derivation of quantum entanglement – you are where you now are as a result of apparently random events at the core of which are people who were, when you met them first, complete and utter strangers.

When we were young we were told, as many children were and still are, not to talk to strangers. There may well be some sense in that from the perspective of protecting little children from the undoubted presence of some very strange people in this world. However, unfortunately, the subliminal message that stays with us into later life is that we should avoid getting involved with people whose path we might casually cross in the course of everyday life.

Indeed, as we go about our normal daily adult lives, the fact is that we’d never really notice a stranger anyway – because, in childhood, we developed a self-preservational psychological facility to categorize new people that we meet without paying any attention to who they actually are or the importance of the role that they migh play in our lives. As a consequence of our pre-programming and our ability for categorization, we pay no attention to people that we don’t know. The next time you’re on a tube, subway, train or bus or in an elevator, notice how carefully people avoid making eye contact.

What are these people missing? Potentially the next most important complete stranger in their lives. You haven’t the first clue who might totally change your career, who might be your next mega-customer in your business, who might become a life-long friend and mentor. You have no idea who might be the next person to change your life. And you won’t find out if you can’t take of your blinkers.

Wake up. Opportunity abounds – but is completely missed by the automatic normal mind that’s too closed and blind to see anything. Psychology asserts that the normal person only perceives what they expect to perceive and only experience what they expect to experience. What a death sentence we all are given – by our programming and by our own inaction and unwillingness to take the small leap of faith that making personal contact with a total stranger requires.

You need to open your eyes, you have to smell the roses, tune into life’s opportunities and go with the flow of a synchronous universe that is just waiting to respond to you. I’m not suggesting that you start behaving irrationally and outrageously in public places! I’m suggesting that you put up your antennae, start tuning into the here and now, let yourself off the hook of the normal outlook. Because, until you do, you normal life will never be anything but mundanely, repetitively and boringly normal – and it will be your own fault.

Personal Development: Knowing What Would Excite You

I come across so many people who want more out of life. I talk to many people who know they need something different but have no idea what that ‘different’ is. Many people are simply unhappy where they are – maybe their stuck in a loveless relationship, they hate the job they’re doing or, perhaps, they’ve just been doing the same job for so long that they get nothing out of it anymore. And often, those who take the route of personal development, want more from life but they don’t know what that ‘more’ is.

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.

Practical Self-Help Tips: Take A Breather

Once our day swings into action it’s very easy to be overwhelmed by the routine, the urgent (as distinct from the important), the latest minor crisis or, most common of all, useless thought. And even though you may have started your day properly, it is all too easy to become submerged and revert to our default state of unfocused mindlessness.

So, for a start, what does starting your day properly mean? Well, we make certain that we don’t leave home physically unprepared for the day ahead. We wash and dress ourselves – shaving or applying the odd dab of make-up as appropriate! Conversely, most of us automatically set out each morning mentally unprepared for what lies in store. Starting the day properly means making sure that, before you leave the house, you have taken the appropriate step or steps to clear your mind and focus your energy. I recommend approximately ten minutes mental preparation for the day ahead. Find somewhere where you won’t be disturbed, sit and focus on your five senses – one sense at a time. This will enable you focus on what is really happening rather than on the subconscious programs that otherwise run your life – those programs being your default mental settings.

Right, let’s say that you’ve got your day off to the perfect start, you’re tuned in, focused, mentally wide awake and ready for action. Little things like a delayed train, like heavy traffic, like someone asking you to do something unexpectedly – so many little things can knock us off balance. And we haven’t even mentioned the big things! It is so easy to wander automatically into mental oblivion as the day progresses. What we’ve got to do is make sure that, during the day, we pause to catch our breath – literally.

Ancient wisdom places great store on the opportunity that our breathing affords us to clear our mind of useless noise and distraction and, consequently, focus our energy. So, here’s an easy, quick and entirely practical tip – because, after all, you have to breathe anyway! Take a couple of moments – moments is all that it takes – during the day to turn your attention to the reality of the moment as you inhale and exhale. Focus your attention on what it feels like to breathe, how your body reacts with each breath that you take, how the air passes through the left, right or both nostrils. Give thanks for the reality that you are alive and breathing. Pay attention to nothing else for these few moments. If the cares or useless thoughts of the moment start invading your mind, take three deeper breaths to refocus your attention. As you breathe, understand that whatever might be driving you crazy right now will be completely forgotten in months, weeks, days or even hours. Realize that, with an focused, alert and ready mind, all things are possible.

Is Your Life Grinding To A Halt? A Little Self Improvement Is Required

The majority of my Personal Development clients, when I meet them for the first time, feel that they’ve become stuck – perhaps they feel that they’ve hit the so-called glass ceiling, perhaps they have a feeling that they’re going through the motions or that, in some vague way, they’ve come to the conclusion that there must be more to life than the daily repetitive routine. As one client said to me “Oh God, I can’t even get excited about my holidays anymore, we’re going to the same place in June that we’ve been for the last ten years”.

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.

Personal Development And Wasting Your Time And Energy

Right now, you’re living new day – a day that’s never happened before, a day that will never be repeated. Now is a new moment. And, in each new moment, you have a choice. And on your choice depends your personal development. You have a choice in regard to the thoughts that you are paying attention to just at the present moment. Are those thoughts simply random? Perhaps they’re negative thoughts? Have they anything to do with what you should be doing at this moment in time? Are they positive thoughts (better than negative ones but they’re still just thoughts). The thoughts you’re focused on are distracting you from doing. Don’t waste your energy, ignore your thoughts, but leave space for the flights of fancy to surface – because they are not thoughts, but inspiration and inspiration only comes to the clear mind.

In this new moment, it’s your choice as to your behavior and actions (more commonly reactions) too. And, depending on what you choose, you can quite literally change your life. How much energy have you simply thrown away already today? How much time have you squandered sitting in front of your PC’s screen, staring blankly? How much of your precious and vital energy have you wasted gossiping about and delighting in the misdeeds or misfortune of others? You’ve probably misspent some precious time shuffling you’re “To Do” list until there’s no time left to do! Or how much of your time and energy have you mis-invested in doing things you just should not be doing – like surfing the net for things that have nothing to do with anything important, reading emails that were copied to you to cover someone’s backside, wading through the sordid details of domestic violence that pad out each day’s newspapers? Every moment that you waste is a moment that you will never have again. And what we achieve in life is the sum total of how we spend each precious moment.

At least, in reflecting on some of these searching questions you might begin to realize just how much of your life is misspent on doing things that are holding you back from living the life that you want. But these are energy-wasters that you’re aware off – there’s something even worse going on. How much energy are you wasting and you don’t even know? Because, unless your subconscious mind is immersed in profitable activity in the present moment, it is still happily wandering around your childhood years, thinking that those childhood events are actually happening now – and you’ve no idea whatsoever that that’s what’s actually happening. And this is the waste of energy that divorces us all from the opportunities of the now, from the reality of the now, from the abundance of the now.

So, ask yourself this question. Do you want to change your life? Then ask yourself if what you are doing now, in the context of what you really want out of life, is the very best investment of your energy. If it isn’t, don’t do it.

Practical Personal Growth Tips: Take A Breather

Almost as soon as our day gets going it’s very easy to be overwhelmed by the routine, the urgent (not necessarily the important), this morning’s crisis or, most prevalent of all, unproductive thinking. Even if you have started your day properly, it is all too easy to become submerged and revert to our default state of unfocused mindlessness.

So, first things first, what does starting your day properly mean? Well, we make certain that we don’t leave the house physically unprepared for the day ahead. We shower and dress ourselves – shaving or applying the odd dab of make-up as appropriate! On the other hand, we unwittingly leave the house every morning mentally unprepared for what lies in store. Starting the day properly means making sure that, before leaving home, you’ve taken the appropriate step or steps to clear the mind and focus your energy. I suggest five to ten minutes mental preparation for the day ahead. Find somewhere where you won’t be disturbed, sit and focus on your five senses – one sense at a time. This will enable you focus on what is really going on as distinct from the subconscious programs that otherwise run your life – the latter being your default state of mind.

Right, let’s say that you’ve got your day off to the perfect start, you’re switched on, fully focused, alert and primed for action. Little things like a delayed train, like heavy traffic, like somebody asking you to do something unexpectedly – so many little things can upset us. And we haven’t even mentioned the big things! It can be so easy to wander automatically into mental oblivion as the day unfolds. What we’ve got to do is ensure that, throughout the day, we pause to catch our breath – literally.

Ancient wisdom places great store on the opportunity that our breathing offers us to clear our mind of useless nonsense and distraction and, in doing so, focus our energy. So, here’s an easy, quick and very practical tip – because, after all, you’ve got to breathe anyway! Take a couple of moments – moments is all that’s required – during the day to pay attention to the reality of the moment as you inhale and exhale. Pay attention to what it feels like to breathe, how your body responds with each breath in and out, how the air passes through the left, right or both nostrils. Give thanks for the reality that you are alive and breathing. Attend to nothing else for these few moments. If the hassles or useless thoughts of the moment start crowding your mind, take three deeper breaths to refocus your attention. With each breath, realize that whatever might be driving you crazy right now will be completely forgotten in months, weeks, days or even hours. Realize that, with an alert, focused and ready mind, all things are possible.

The Dangers Of Personal Development

Regardless of where you are or what you’re doing, you are in the company of people who haven’t a clue that their subconscious mind is creating their reality as you read these words. These so-called normal people have no idea that their subconscious mind controls them and, by virtue of the fact that they don’t control their own mind, that they are actually crazy.

In contrast, you, having delved into the study of personal development (otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this!), have some feeling that your thoughts create your life. Many books have been written about it, numerous personal development websites explain that you can, indeed, fashion your own life experience. And you may well already have achieved some results to show for your endeavours.

However, that’s when it can become dangerous. If you do know that you shape your own life, that your subconscious mind can be brought under your own control and that your resultant behaviour, actions, interactions and, therefore your life, can be directed by you – you have a great responsibility to yourself that you must rise to moment to moment. Because, just in the same way that many books have been written on personal development, much has also been written on just how badly things can go wrong for those of us who know how the game of life is played and choose, either by act or omission, not to play according to the rules.

Complacency is a far more subtle enemy than worry, stress or fear. It lulls us into a false sense of security that permits our mind do what it does best – slip back into its normal state of autopilot that allows our programmed subconscious mind start to destroy the benefits that we might have gained from being more focused, more mindful, more present.

For the vast majority of people in this world – normal people – it is too great a challenge to snap out of the deadly hypnosis that our programmed subconscious mind wields over us. Indeed, for the vast majority of normal people, they will die never knowing that this challenge was even there to be attempted. For those of us who do confront this challenge and succeed, the real challenge is not to awaken but to stay awake and stay focused on a continual basis. We never know when life will throw a spanner in the works – one that will set us off on another path of self-sabotage, so we must do everything in our power to do what little it takes each day to make certain that our minds are focused and that we are as fully present as we can be to the only place and time where life is be lived – the here and now.

Start Doing – Stop Reading Self Help Books

Continuously reading self help books is much like gathering a stash of holiday brochures and travel books about an exotic destination that you would love to visit. You’ve poured over photographs, read all the reviews, imagined yourself sipping a cocktail looking out over that breath-taking sunset, immersed yourself in the idea of being there. However, you’ve never got around to buying 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 taken the required action and, as a consequence, changed their lives, may well give you that longing feeling inside. But tomorrow morning, when you drag yourself out of bed for another normal day, what has changed? Little or nothing! When wake up to another day of hassle, stress, financial worries or battered self-esteem, what good will all that reading have done you? If anything, you’ll find yourself even more restless and more disillusioned than you were at the outset.

Reading, understanding and intellectually appreciating what it takes to change your life will change nothing in your life until you put your learning into regular practice. And that’s just too big a hassle for so-called normal people – they’re fearful of taking what they perceive as some really risky leap of faith.

If you’ve been lucky enough to come across a self help book that gives you step-by-step instructions 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 small daily steps that will awaken you from the self-induced hypnosis in which most normal people are merely existing.

If you want to change your life, you’ve got to change the way you’re living the life that you have at present. You start small – by doing something as simple as changing your morning routine – because small things get your subconscious mind out of its comfort zone. Once out you will start to understand that absolutely everything in your life can be done differently. When this realization hits you, you’re going to find yourself in a completely different place – where action that was otherwise unconscionable suddenly become obvious – and easily doable.

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

Achieving Success – Waiting For Something To Happen?

Most people are going through each day wishing, hoping, wanting or holding out for something to change. “I wish I could just get that lucky break.” “I hope that tomorrow will be better.” “I want to win the Lottery!” Unfortunately, what all these people don’t realize is that nothing “just happens” in life – you have to do what you have to do yourself to set things in motion. To make matters worse, there are just too many self-help books out there that give the impression that, to get abundant success, all you have to do is believe. As a result, I’ve met more than a couple of people over the years who have convinced themselves that they believe in in the achievement of their goal and, having convinced themselves, they now believe that all they have to do is relax and wait for it to happen. That’s just like believing that you’re going to win the Lottery but not bothering to buy a ticket!

It is you who makes things happen in your life – you’re the one who will change your life. You must get up of your backside and do the brave and courageous things that the normal person wouldn’t dream of doing – that’s why they’re normal, not-too-uncomfortable, not-too-bad on the mundane sorry-go-round of their ordinary everyday existence. And that is why highly successful people are highly successful – they’ve done what had to be done, taken the brave and courageous decisions, thrown themselves wholeheartedly into getting what they want out of life.

You do realize that there’s nothing brave or courageous about doing the things that will lead you towards what you truly believe in – what would be viewed as courage or bravery by normal not-too-bad people is just the obvious and logical thing to do for those who believe and are driven to succeed. But what action do you need to take? Well, for starters – and this is pretty damn obvious – if you want something different to happen in your life, you’re going to have to do something different. You don’t have to do something outlandishly different – start with something small, you’ll be intrigued where it will take you. By small, I mean something as apparently insignificant as brushing your teeth with the other hand! Yeah, you heard me – you’ve read that sentence correctly! Doing something this small in a different way will destroy the habit of an adult lifetime – the habit of doing all routine things automatically. When you break down little habits, you re-set your mind to take a totally different view of absolutely everything that’s going on – you’ll begin to notice opportunities that were there already – you just didn’t see them.

But what if you’ve already done something brave or courageous and it failed? Didn’t you know – only losers give up! Statistics show that the most successful people in sport, business or politics, take failure in their stride, see it as a new opportunity to go at it again. After all, if you really want your life to change, you’re not going to quit that easily, are you?