Posts tagged Self Development

Nothing great ever happens by accident. Successful people from all walks of life don’t just wake up one morning as high achievers! For change to happen, a plan of action has to be made, targets have to be set and a commitment to see it through has to be adopted.

Prior to commencing your training course, take the time to think about your personal goals, and work out a study programme with targets or indicators of success along the way. To help you get started, use the acronym Smart to qualify the goals you plan to achieve. Smart stands for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and targeted.

Use the following five D’s to help you get emotionally involved with the result of your efforts. Write your five D’s down in a contract to yourself.

DEFINE what you wish to get out of your soon to be acquired new skill-set, to keep you motivated along the way. Be specific about the material things you’re looking forward to, the kind of home you want, the sort of holidays you’ll take and the type of car you’ll drive.

DESIRE is what stirs us deep down. Think about why you’ve decided to take this course, and why it’s important to you. The more emotionally involved you get with your desire, the more you’ll stick with it. Pin point whether it’s the job, the status, the challenge, or the control etc. that drives you.

DEDICATION is a measure of how commited you are to a successful end result. Plan your time each week so you know exactly when you’re dedicated to studying. This not only helps you to get into a routine, it’s also an indicator for those around you that you’re engaged in something that’s important to you. They won’t expect you to get involved in different activities when your diary shows a study period if you’ve been consistently sticking to your routine. Setting aside ‘official’ study times helps you to concentrate, and prevents you from thinking about other things that you could be doing. It also frees up your mind to enjoy leisure time outside of study periods.

DETERMINATION. Having a contract with yourself will make you more determined to stick with the programme. You’re the one who will lose out most if you give up on yourself.

Having a plan and targets to work towards gives you a DISCIPLINE that helps you to power through the tough times that will occasionally strike you.

Once you’ve done this, sign it and do NOT put it away in a drawer. This is a working document and should be read every day for at least one month so you buy into it and it becomes your new way of life. If and when things get tough, read it again for another month. Always have it close to hand while you study and show it to your partner, kids (if you have them), friends and parents. This will help you to see your goal through.

Remember the theme song from the Rocky movie, “The Eye of the Tiger”?

When Rocky fought his opponent he had the focus of ‘the eye of the tiger’. When that song was written they couldn’t have had any idea the significance it would take on when a new Tiger took the world stage and changed sports forever.

I don’t care if you are a golf fan or a sports fan or if you think there is too much hype over this one particular athlete-yes golfers are athletes.

Tiger Woods is a force to be reckoned with. I could write a book about not only his accomplishments in the sports world, but also his accomplishments as a human being, but many books have already been written. In fact I wrote about Tiger in my book, “Breakthrough to Success.”

Look at what Tiger does in terms of how you live your life. Could you stand up to the level of excellence that Tiger requires of himself? If you raised your expectations, do you think you would be performing head and shoulders above your competition?

I’ve always been a huge fan of his because not only is he a consummate professional, he has such intense focus that you can see it on his face when you watch him on TV. I have also had the pleasure of standing just a few feet from him on more than one occasion and watching that focus in person.

Over and over again I heard the announcers at the tournament talking about how nobody would believe this if it was a movie. It would just be too much of a fantasy and the whoever wrote a screenplay that played out like this would be laughed out of a movie mogul’s office. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a movie or a sporting event with this many interesting characters and twists and turns.

Tiger is larger than life and his life is richer, more nuanced, and more interesting than any movie script. And this weekend he was Rocky, but he wasn’t fighting an opponent, he was doing what his dad had taught him. He was playing full out because that’s the only way to do it.

There were so many amazing shots from this one tournament. You can probably find them all on Youtube. But it’s not about the shots. It’s about the measure of the man. During the tournament some of his fellow golfers, who should feel really ashamed of themselves right now, wondered out loud through their pettiness and jealousy how hurt Tiger really was.

Tiger on the other hand downplayed his injury to not take the focus off the Open while he played through incredible pain that would have made almost any other player call it quits, especially when he was so far back that it didn’t look like he had any chance at all of winning.

And yet, Tiger not only didn’t quit, he forced a playoff and played another 19 holes on Monday. And then he made the impossible inevitable by winning…again!

Watching him play in the U.S. Open at Torrey Pines for 4 days instead of the usual 3 was a treat and at the same time painful. My heart ached every time I saw him wince when he hit the ball or when his caddy pulled him up by the arm when he couldn’t get up by himself or when the pain of taking another stroke had him almost doubled over in pain.

And I wondered how he could keep going, where did he find the inner strength to focus enough to pull it out day after day?

Ironically during the tournament there was a commercial running with audio of his dad talking about how Tiger would never meet anyone else as mentally tough as him in his entire life.

He certainly proved his dad right that weekend. I’m sorry I won’t be seeing him play the rest of the summer, but I know he’ll be back next year better than ever because striving for excellence is just his natural way of being.

The question is, is it yours?

A great deal has been written about the benefits of reflecting on things in our lives that we can be grateful for. What happens when we do this, is that we are then in a high vibrational state. Also, we are actually in a state of abundance when we are in a state of gratitude and appreciation.

According to the Law of Attraction, we end up getting more of the very things we focus on, so by actually focusing on what we are grateful for, we will end up getting more of the same things. Don’t you find that when you give a gift to someone who shows genuine appreciation, you are more inclined to want to continue to give them gifts. Certainly, our motive for gift giving is not to receive in return. However, it is human nature to want to feel appreciated.

I think we have all had the experience at least once, when we have spent a lot of thought and time choosing what we thought was the perfect gift for a person. We might even have spent a lot of time making it ourselves. How do we feel when they open the gift and hardly even acknowledge it. If you are anything like me, you feel very hurt. You might even reason with yourself that you don’t think you want to give any more gifts to this person in the future.

So realizing how hurt we feel in that situation, let’s make sure that whenever we have the opportunity, we express our gratitude to others for how they enrich our lives. Let’s not wait until we receive a gift from someone to do this. Our kind words could be just what that person is looking for right at that moment, and you never know, we might even make their day.

I recently jotted down a list of ten things that I am most grateful for. I suggest you do the same. Perhaps my list can help you with yours, but we are all different and yours will be unique to you and your life. My list of ten is only the tip of the iceberg. Here they are.

* My family

* My faith

* My community

* The beauty of nature

* Books

* Old and new friends

* Meditation

* Good food

* Health

* Mentors

Let’s remember that gratitude and appreciation is a two-way street. Yes, we need to reflect and meditate on all the fantastic aspects of our lives right now and be grateful for all the blessings we have received, but we must not forget to voice our appreciation and gratitude to all those we come in contact with every day, who are warm, kind and considerate towards us. Just think for a minute — how pleasant were you to the clerk at the grocery store today, or to the waiter that served you your lunch yesterday?

Believe me when I say that just a smile and a warm word of thanks can make an enormous difference in peoples lives. Try it, and I promise you that you will not be sorry. The joy you give to another person when you do this will come back to you a hundred fold…guaranteed.

Your intuition or your sixth sense is vitally important to your future success. Let us first define intuition. Intuition refers to the ability to sense or know immediately without reasoning.” A good question that is often asked is how does a person improve their intuition? To answer this question I will need your help. I want you to think of someone in your life who you consider to be highly intuitive. Most people who are highly intuitive have the capacity to observe details about their surroundings and details about who they are. Let’s call this hyper awareness.

When you talk to someone who is highly intuitive they tend to do more listening than talking. They observe everything you say and how you say it and more importantly what you did not say. By doing this and observing the environment in which the communication took place, they are able to read between the lines and sense more about you than you ever thought possible.

Intuition can also be applied to all aspects of life beyond communicating with others. Have you ever noticed that when you have a pressing challenge that occupies your mind for some time that somehow almost through thin air the right answer comes to you? Often we call this a hunch or inspiration. What do you do when you experience a hunch or inspiration? Do you follow through and investigate it or do you let it fall through your fingers like it never existed? Have you ever experienced getting the same hunch over and over again separated by long periods of time? When inspiration or a hunch comes to us, particularly repeatedly, this is a signal that we need to pay attention to.

Where do these hunches come from? To answer this question I’ll need to involve a little bit of quantum physics. Don’t worry we will not go into too many esoteric details here.

Do you realize that you and everything around us is made up of energy, space and matter? If you look at inanimate objects under a microscope you will see that they are made up of molecules, and every molecule is made up of atoms, and every atom is made up of electrons, neutrons, and protons. Each has a positive or negative electrical charge and a whole lot of space. If you continue looking under the microscope you will see that these atoms are vibrating at a high speed of vibration.

If you do not believe me let us consider an ice cube. If we add energy in the form of heat to an ice cube we’ll get water. If we continue to add more heat energy to the water we will get steam. What has really changed here? At a molecular level nothing has changed, however, the ice has disappeared and has become steam in our atmosphere. What changed was the rate of vibration of the water atoms contained in the ice. Now that we understand this critical principle, I think you will agree with me that everything around us represents energy. If not, well, youll need to review your science textbooks.

If everything around us represents energy then the thoughts we have also represent energy. Correspondingly, since energy cannot be created or destroyed and it can only change its form based on the laws of thermodynamics then it is quite possible that we can pick up the energy of others and we can transmit energy to others. This has often been called telepathy. A short example is to think about people you know and have met that you got a bad vibe from. Nothing may have been said but you just knew that, that person was trouble.

If we acknowledge that it is possible to receive energy from others we must also entertain the idea that it is possible to receive energy from a source outside of human thought. Energy flows to and through us. In very much the same way that an acorn can grow into a large oak tree, you and I can take the energy that flows to and through us to take ideas in our conscious and subconscious minds and convert thought energy into its physical equivalent. The process of recognizing the energy that flows to and through us is what our intuition is all about.

If you want to become more intuitive you have to become hyperaware of who you interact with and your surroundings. You have to get in tune with reading vibrations so that you can act on your gut feelings and hunches. Your success depends on grabbing those ideas and little flashes of intuition and putting them into action in your life.

According to the Mayan Tzolkin calendar we have begun the next 260 day cycle, just days before the New Year in our traditional calendar. Is there significance to this shift, other than making affirmations and resolutions? The glyphs and numbers point to beginning again on many levels.

In the perspective at time we are on an ever-increasing inward cycle. I see this as a spiritual awareness cycle, one I hesitate to describe as upward, though it includes higher vibrations. We can have empowerment through those higher vibrations without the ownership and understanding of those levels.

The greatest tool available to you today is the one most overlooked, the ability to slow down. Logically speaking, if you want to be balanced, in the middle, you need a counterbalance to the rapid change we are experiencing. This means focusing as well on our earth connections.

So much attention is placed on finding our spirituality. Whether it is traditional religions, meditation, yoga or some other practice, we do seek to experience self. When we talk of self we talk of spirit. We are not trying to find ourselves, just bring more of our spiritual consciousness into our lives.

How do we bring about our consciousness in our physical world? We do so by connecting to our world. Sounds a little backward, doesnt it? By connecting our time and space reality we draw more of our scattered awareness to the here and now. This is step one in creating a potent body mind spirit mix.

How does the Mayan calendar help us in our integration between body and spirit, and help us to grow into greater awareness? Each 260 day cycle contains many cycles, and these cycles pulse back and forth from the spiritual reminders to the physical influences. We are gently guided and given opportunity to make the most of each day. In order to rise to the next level we need to let go of the old.

When we bring ourselves into balance, opening our awareness to our spirituality while connecting and releasing through our connectivity to the planet, we are empowered. We have the resources of both levels available to us. This is an Edison moment, bringing in that pulsing positive and negative or yin yang flow that illuminated that light bulb.