Affirmations are tools used to align the focus of your unconscious mind with your conscious desires. Inside our heads mental chatter takes place almost continuously, and deciding to use affirmations is simply making a decision to take control of that chatter and turn it in your favor.

Some types of affirmations work better than others and some don’t work at all. The good news is that there are certain ways of structuring affirmations that do work and can mentally prepare you to experience significant positive changes in your life. Here are some helpful tips on how I believe that affirmations can be used successfully.

Begin by Accepting What Is

This is an essential concept in making any type of positive change. Repeating things like “I am outrageously wealthy” when you’re dead broke or saying to yourself that “I can be the world’s best jockey” when you’re 6’7” is only going to set off your internal BS meter and leave you with a nasty case of cognitive dissonance. Affirmations rooted in denial are as effective as putting a new dress on an old Billy Goat. Underneath the dress there’s still a goat and everybody knows it.

Choose the Right Frame

If the new idea you desire to cement into your mind is too far fetched from your current reality consider starting your affirmation with phrases like “I am becoming” or “I am choosing to”. This demonstrates to your unconscious mind both your commitment to and the intent of your ultimate outcome and avoids setting off your BS meter.

For example, you might want to choose the affirmation “Each new day I am choosing to eat a healthier diet” instead of “I am a healthy eater”. Doing so will make the occasional empty bucket of Ben & Jerry’s on the nightstand a bit easier to overlook.

You may also choose to affirm that “I am becoming more organized each and every day” instead of “I am an extremely organized person”, especially if you happen to be repeating it while shuffling your feet through a pile of dirty clothes on the floor of your bedroom.

The Great “I am”

Choose this powerful affirmation starter by itself without qualification when you are affirming something that already exists to some degree that you simply desire to reinforce. For example, if you are a decent public speaker and can present without fear or hesitation, an affirmation like “I am energetic and friendly when up on stage” won’t clash with your current reality and can help cement in place your desired way of thinking.

Effective Affirmations Contain Strong Emotions

This is absolutely key. Using affirmations without emotion is utterly useless even if you’ve followed all of the advice to this point. Your unconscious mind has a lot to remember and it is much easier for it to recall information that was filed away with strong emotions attached.

Every thought to this point in your life has been stored away in your unconscious mind, with more weight given to thoughts based on the emotions attached rather than the chronological order in which the events occurred. That’s why it’s easier to remember significant events from your childhood than what it was you had for dinner last Tuesday (unless it was really good).

Repetition is Necessary to Cement the Desired Concepts into Your Unconscious Mind

You mind often has to hear a new concept over and over again in order for it to sink in. Our minds are bombarded with thousands of ideas each day and the ones that are going to stick are the ones repeated often enough with significant emotion attached. I recommend that you develop a pattern of saying your most important affirmations first thing in the morning and then again just before you go to sleep.

Back up Affirmations with Action

Affirmations are great tools to prepare your mind towards the pathways of success. Practically, they can improve your focus and replace a lot of the limiting beliefs and junk that tends to hold you back. But they are of no use if not followed up with definite action.

Affirmations without action are like cars without wheels. You can have the best design in the world but you aren’t going to get anywhere. Once you obtain the belief system that allows you to succeed it’s time to hit the road and start making things happen.

Summary

If you are going to utilize affirmations to help facilitate change in your life you will want to phrase them properly, attach strong positive emotions to them, repeat them frequently. and begin the process of bringing your new beliefs into reality by taking definite measurable steps toward their achievement.

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“The emotions of faith, love, and sex are the most powerful of all the major emotions.”

       -Napoleon Hill, author of “Think and Grow Rich”

The Importance of Emotion:

When it comes to manifesting our desires nothing is more important than the emotion we place behind our beliefs. Emotion is the catalyst that combines with the vibrations of thought to produce potent results. According to Napoleon Hill, emotions give thoughts “vitality, life, and action”. Positive emotions empower thought towards positive results, negative emotions fuel destructive thoughts, and the lack of emotion behind one’s beliefs often results in stagnation and confusion.

Why Faith is the Strongest Emotion:

Faith is an unshakeable belief in the outcome you have set for yourself. It firmly sets your expectations and thus influences your actions. Thinking that you desire to be rich, for example, sets up a vibrational frequency for that to take place. Fully believing that it WILL happen puts additional energy behind the thought and gives it added power. Conversely, desiring to become rich but believing that you can’t negates the impact of your desire and will prevent it from ever coming to pass.

Napoleon Hill calls faith the element which “transforms the ordinary vibration of thought, created by the finite mind of man, into the spiritual equivalent.” We live in a world where science, via quantum mechanics, is now telling us that perceptions do in fact create our reality. Thus it makes sense that having or lacking faith in our ability to bring forth our desires has a direct influence upon weather or not our desires will manifest. After all, what is faith but our impassioned perception of the way we believe things are going to turn out?

How to Build up Your Faith:

Our minds are constantly sending out vibrations, and the ones that have the greatest impact on our lives are the ones repeated the most and are infused with the most faith. Napoleon Hill’s recommendation is that we utilize repetition of thoughts infused with emotion via affirmations and autosuggestion. His reasoning is that our minds constantly attract vibrations that harmonize with our dominant thoughts. This is the true power behind synchronicity, serendipity, and the idea of there being no coincidences.

If affirmations are a key component of building up faith, how exactly does one go about creating effective affirmations? Some will even suggest that affirmations are useless, passé, and outdated. Continuing with this theme, my next post will focus on helpful tips for affirmations that work and the most beneficial ways to use them.

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Desire.   Somebody named a streetcar after it.  U2 created a song about it, and Napoleon Hill thought it was important enough that it topped his list of 13 “Keys to Success”.

Do you want to learn how to be rich, live abundantly, and achieve true happiness?  Too bad, because if so it probably isn’t going to happen to you. WANTING something to happen is mostly wishful thinking devoid of any power to achieve significant results.

DESIRE is self generating, self sustaining, and often referred to in such terms as burning, passionate, unbending, fervent, and all consuming. Desire succeeds where wanting fails because it refuses to rely on anything external or to accept excuses. It creates and attracts its own opportunities without regard to circumstance.

Some of the key ways in which WANTING and DESIRING are different:

Wanting will not survive minor inconveniences and other demands upon your time.

Desire will.

Wanting will not carry you past those difficult moments when the prospect of success seems remote.

Desire will.

Wanting will not embolden you to press on when everyone you know is telling you to give up.

Desire will.

Wanting will not attract the necessary circumstances and people into your life to help you achieve your goals.

Desire will.

Well then, if desire is the key it can do everything, right?  Nope.

There are a few select things wanting can do that desire won’t help you with:

Wanting can exist within the safety and security of your comfort zone.

Desire can’t.

Wanting is willing to accept excuses when things don’t turn out the way you would like.

Desire won’t.

Wanting gives into fears and peer pressure in order to fit in and avoid stretching your limits.

Desire doesn’t.

Napoleon Hill taught that to achieve big goals and dreams you must first learn to develop and maintain a burning desire for their achievement. Wanting is never enough. The object of your desire must be clear in your mind, and you must focus upon it with regularity.  Do that and you will have taken the first step from living a life of “want” to living a life infused with the power of DESIRE to make your dreams come true.

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Before The Secret became a huge commercial success, Napoleon Hill had it all figured out.

Around the year 1908 journalist Napoleon Hill was both challenged and given an opportunity by Andrew Carnegie to spend twenty years of his life interviewing the most successful, brilliant, and influential minds of the day without any offer of monetary compensation. He accepted the challenge, and among the people went on to study were notable businessmen and inventors Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, Teddy Roosevelt, John Wanamaner, Charles Schwab, Wilbur Wright, and Dr. Alexander Graham Bell.

Napoleon’s goal was to uncover the key common elements that underpinned extraordinary success and to share this knowledge with the rest of the world. The results of his efforts were published in 1937 in his bestselling book Think and Grow Rich.

Far from a dusty old relic, the topics he wrote about would many years later become a cornerstone of the new age, manifest your destiny movement. For example, the title of chapter one is “Thoughts are Things”, and the book’s opening notes mention the phrase “the secret” sixteen times, not including the occasions when he refers to the concept as “Carnegie’s secret”, or “this secret”.

Yet despite the sale of almost 20 million copies, most of the book’s concepts never became mainstream, so when a number of his ideas were re-introduced in the 21st century in conjunction with “The Secret’s” books and DVD’s, much of the content was thought revolutionary when in fact it was almost a century old!  Actually, the key ideas that Napoleon documented and “The Secret” re-introduced are timeless in nature and have benefited humanity for countless centuries. The first step in successful utilization of this knowledge begins with awareness.

In the video clip below he recounts how Andrew Carnegie shared with him the life changing idea that:

“everyone comes to the earth plane blessed with the privilege of controlling his mind power and directing it to whatever ends he may choose.”

He also touches on the concepts of gratitude, choice, and ultimate personal responsibility. Check it out:

Did you actually watch it? I know, I know, seven minutes is an eternity in internet time!  Over the next few postings I will go through some of Mr. Hill’s work in more detail because I find it fascinating and because I believe that his ideas are both powerful and relevant. Many people, myself included, can benefit by becoming better acquainted with the priceless knowledge that he captured.  Stay tuned!

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Let’s see, I just finished reading Eckhart Tolle’s first book, but now he’s got a new one that’s a big hit on Oprah…gotta make time for that one. Yesterday I finished listening to an audio series by Deepak, but there’s the one from Anthony Robbins that been gathering dust on my shelf, mocking me every time I walk by without popping it into the DVD player. Then there’s those books I ordered from Amazon last month on linguistics and psychotherapy, the articles I NEED to write for my own site and all of those really insightful RSS feeds I haven’t gotten to yet but that I know I REALLY NEED to read. After all, I pared down my subscription feeds to a mere eight so that I wouldn’t feel overwhelmed anymore. But gosh, I’m so far behind and I NEED TO catch up. Maybe I’ll block out a couple of hours a day until I am able to feel as though I’m all caught up. After all, all of this stuff is supposed to make me smarter, happier, and just an overall better person. But man, there’s so much to do…

S T O P !!!

Personal development is supposed to be fun. After all, if it sucked so bad there wouldn’t be so many of us pursuing it. Face it, you have to get the grass cut and do laundry and at least slow down for red lights, but are your neighbors going to complain to the homeowners board if you’re not up on the latest in present moment awareness or if you haven’t reframed all of your limiting beliefs? The fact is that so many of us are engaged in the ongoing process of personal development because of the incredible rewards it offers. But that doesn’t mean it can’t also be fun.

Personal development is the journey of continuing to learn and grow as a person alongside whatever else happens to occupy your day. Unless of course you’ve made it your full time endeavor to assist others with their own personal growth. Then it pretty much is what you do. If so, you certainly don’t want a client or a subscriber knowing more than you about the latest and hottest success guru, do you? Or worse yet, have some smarty pants commenter on your blog point out something insightful that you yourself weren’t capable of thinking of. God forbid!!!

Personal Development is supposed to be fun!

Even when you are doing it for a living. Especially when you are doing it for a living. Who cares if somebody knows more than you about the latest emotional healing technique, soul reading method, dowsing procedure, or the hottest author from Oprah? What a blessing if this is so! It means that somebody else has already put in the effort to acquire the knowledge and all you have to do is learn from them as they share the best of what they’ve come to know. Often this beats the heck out of starting from nowhere by yourself and trying to achieve the same level of understanding. That’s less work for you and more time to play Halo3.

Personal development is not a race, and we are not judged objectively by our friends, relatives, coworkers, fellow bloggers, or anyone else I can think of. Subjectively, people can and will judge the hell out of you, but why should you care?  Setting your internal compass to the widely scattered courses charted by the opinions of others is guaranteed to get you nowhere in particular and feeling a whole lot less than authentic as you try to keep making corrections to the course of public perception.

Truth is, there is no objective outside source of how you are growing personally because personal growth happens from the inside out. YOU are in charge of discovering your own unique purpose, deciding weather you are going to live to it or not, and interpreting what every experience you have means to YOU along the way.

You can even choose to not have a purpose, not to grow, and not to listen to or read any anything from any of the gurus I mentioned previously. There’s no boss cracking a whip over your shoulder if you should fail to “get it”. The life you live is its own reward or punishment. You can just go out and have fun for the sake of having fun, and when you get tired enough of repeating certain experiences over and over you will eventually become self motivated enough to become interested in personal growth. It’s the ultimate in freedom of choice.

Here are Some Tips on Making Personal Development Fun Again:

1.  Don’t take yourself too seriously.

Seriously, just don’t.  There rest of us are too busy taking ourselves seriously and we demand that you focus on us instead of worrying about what we think about you. We’re not thinking about you…we’re too busy thinking about ourselves.

2.   Personal growth doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Real growth only happens when you interact with other people.

All the books and tapes don’t mean anything if you act like a sh*t towards the cashier, the waiter, or that customer service rep on the phone who isn’t personally responsible for the problem you’ve been experiencing. Measure your growth in the responses you generate from others and make it a point to have a good time while doing so. The smiles you get back will be plenty of reward, and you’ll find yourself smiling inside as well.

3.  Realize that trying to be the most knowledgeable person on all things self improvement is an impossibility and attempting to do so would be a huge pain in the ass.

There’s a huge ego investment in feeling like you have to know more than anybody else so that you don’t ever look foolish or be caught sounding ignorant. If you’re ever guilty simply refer back to #1 above.

And in Conclusion:

Live with authenticity. Be happy being yourself and work to change the things you don’t like along the way. It’s pretty much a never ending process so there’s no need to try and rush out and get it all done at once. Enjoy the process, and above all, be aware of how you show up and the way you treat others. Hey - didn’t some long haired guy with a beard and sandals say the same thing a couple thousand years ago?

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*Caution*  If you believe that there is only one “right” way of thinking about life and spirituality, you may be offended by or otherwise become upset with the remainder of this post. All
others feel free to read on.

Several years ago I read the book Conversations With God by Neale Donald Walsh. Mr. Walsh grew up in a Catholic environment, left it behind, and after a sequence of less than optimal life events was inspired to write a series of books based on what he understands to be his “Conversations with God”. Having also grown up in a Christian environment and coming to question a lot of the same things that he did, the book was one of my initial stepping stones into a greater understanding of life and spirituality.

My Perceptual Shift

Starting with Neale’s book and continuing over a span of about two years I underwent a radical perceptual shift in my beliefs. I moved from the perspective of there being only one “right” way of looking at things (my religion) to lamenting the time and energy I had spent on that religion and perceiving the folly of religion in general. Today I am of the opinion that we are each here having this life experience for our own unique purpose and that organized religion fulfills that role well for some and not for others.  Personally, I am not one of them.

My Current Beliefs

I believe that to judge, condemn, criticize, or think less of others because of the belief systems they hold is akin to looking at them through a set of distorted glasses. Attempting to judge another’s limited perspective of reality through our own limited perspective of reality often proves to be nothing more than folly.

That being said, I do believe that each of us should stand for something. We shouldn’t all be Pollyanna. Note: that’s 2 should/should not statments in the same paragraph from a person that doesn’t normally believe in using such terminology and recommends against it in coaching. I do recognize however, that these are purely my own shoulds and should nots and I am happy with the limitations I self impose by using them.

I believe that if you perceive a particular religion’s beliefs or practices to be harmful to you or your children you are entitled to speak out accordingly and react nonviolently. The rest of humanity can make their own decisions and doesn’t need you to “save” them. Conversely, if you believe that your version of religion or spirituality has merit, you have the right (at least here in the USA and pretty much anywhere on the net) to speak up and say so. Go ahead and grab the soapbox. That’s what I’m doing right now. But don’t get mad when others choose not to believe, or worse yet, think yourself any better for having discovered “THE TRUTH”.

My Truth?  I personally believe that we each create our own experiences in this life, that our spirits are eternal, and that there is no “hell”, no external “judgment” and no “72 virgins” awaiting us when we get done.  I believe that we all originate from the same divine source from which there is no beginning and no end. I believe that thoughts are things and that everything is energy and a part of divine consciousness. I also believe very strongly in the concept of personal responsibility.

Why This Post?

The reason for this post? It was probably long overdue. It started when I found some notes that I had made when reading Mr. Walsh’s book which I have included below. These were, if you will, some of my earliest “Conversations With Source” and were written down while I was home having breakfast a few years back. I decided to share them because after not seeing or thinking about them for awhile, they still hold a large measure of what I perceive to be “truth”. Weather or not you agree is something for you to decide. You can label the responses as being from “God”, “intuition”, “source”, “Universal Mind”, the “field of pure potentiality” or your late Uncle Ted. To me it doesn’t matter. I consider the responses to be from the Divine Source of all things to which I am inseparably connected.

The Conversation:

How real are this counter top and this bowl of cereal?

As real as they need to be to serve your purpose here.

Why is everything coming together so clearly for me now?

Because you have chosen it to.

So much of what I want to ask, I begin to “know” in the process of asking.

Wonderful isn’t it. And that is how it “should” be.

Does this mean I’m getting close to achieving “mastery”?

As you define it, yes. And who’s definition other than your own is of particular use to you?

I get bored rather easily don’t you think? I have a very short attention span for someone talking to God, don’t you think?

You are a product of all your creations to date. This is who you have chosen to be.

And if I don’t like a particular manifestation of who I am?

Choose differently.

I think I know the answer, but there really is no end to this process of learning and growing, is there?

You have answered yourself well. I have nothing to add to it.

I feel I have just scratched the surface of all of the love and joy and wonder that I am capable of. That I’ve been living for many years as a mere shell of what I can become. Can I really have the kind of life I desire?

That is for you to decide and you only. Everything that has happened to you to this point in this life has its reason for occurring. That reason is you. You have brought these events into existence to make you who you are right now. Yet I can see that the light has “turned on” within you, so to speak, and that you are ready to make real progress towards your soul’s mission.

And what mission is that?

Again, it is whatever you want it to be.

Aren’t we going around is circles here?

You’re the one asking the questions.

I feel as though the main purpose of this world for us is growth, and the biggest growth occurs within relationships.

Good. For you have much growing to do. And I see that you are eager to learn. Be at peace and let the right situations manifest themselves to you. Eliminate your ego as quickly as possible, and don’t limit your blessings to what you can presently see. Force nothing. Love. Be. Accept. When the right situation is at hand you will see it for the true blessing it is.

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Have you ever experienced a time when it was difficult to visualize success?  A time when it seemed that hope was distant on the horizon and your immediate path was frustratingly unclear?  At that point you may have known what it was you wanted to achieve and yet had little idea about how to make it happen. When this occurs it’s very easy to lose your motivation and cease to make progress because you feel as though your efforts aren’t producing much anyhow, so why bother…?  Unchecked, negativity creeps in and all of a sudden you are not only confused but also discouraged. It can happen to the best of us, and when it does here are some ideas to help you regain your motivation and re-energize yourself:

Understand the importance of Perception

Everything in your world simply is and awaits your reaction. You are the one who provides the meaning. For example, imagine a couple sitting at a sidewalk cafe on a Saturday afternoon. They both see the same trees, the same grass, the same street and sidewalk, the same people sitting or walking nearby, are both breathing the same air, etc. They have been together for several years and share a common history. Should their emotions differ it is probably to the extent that they have different patterns of interpreting the world around them. If one has a way of filtering information through the lenses of what went wrong before or what may go wrong in the near future it will color their emotions accordingly. Conversely, if the other thinks hopefully about the future they will most likely experience an entirely different emotional state. Nothing about their present situation is any different except for their respective interpretations of it. Take charge of your emotions by realizing that circumstances have no power over you except that which you give them by the thoughts that you create to interpret them. Choose the ones that are most helpful to you and will bring you closest to achieving your goals.

Narrow Your Focus

If you’re like me it can be very easy to become distracted while multi-tasking. When I get bogged down, I find it much easier to focus my concentration on only one thing until I begin to have an effect on achieving what it is I desire. Making progress however small is gratifying when you are trying to pull yourself out of an emotional slump. Concentrate on one thing at a time and begin to see how you are indeed making a difference.

Stick With It

If the purpose you are striving towards is important enough to you, giving up just because the going is tough isn’t going to make you any happier. Sometimes it helps to project your thoughts forward a few years and ask yourself this question: “If I quit now, will I likely find myself at a similar junction again having to overcome this same obstacle again somewhere down the road?”  If so, decide to do whatever it takes to clear that hurdle now so that you won’t have to face it again.

Pace Yourself Emotionally

When you first embark on a new project or goal staying motivated is easy. You believe that you can do it, you are fired up, and nothing is going to slow you down. Until something does. Then something else does.
All of a sudden you’re off track and behind schedule and staying motivated isn’t as easy
as it was at the beginning. Going in with a more realistic expectation that there will be ups and downs, challenges and setbacks, and emotional peaks and valleys will help you to weather the course.

Understand there is order in chaos

If you have a plan to achieve something
and are dedicated to making it happen, there is a order in the chaos and that order is you.  Plans will change, the path you charted out at the beginning may prove next to worthless, yet if you stay focused upon the outcome and give consistent effort, solutions will appear that you could not have possibly conceived that will help transport you to your ultimate destination.

Eliminate Negative Self Talk

Negative self talk only serves to make you feel bad and rob you of your energy. If you catch yourself slipping, change gears and focus on appreciating all it is that you already have
and the things you have achieved.

Reclaim Your Sense of Humor

Not much seems funny when you lose your motivation and can’t seem to find your way. The best way to change this is by simply deciding to do so. Look for the humor in things large and small, even in taking yourself so seriously to begin with. With a little change of perspective, the world can seem like a whole lot nicer place and that goal of yours not quite so out of reach.

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Have you ever experienced a time when you felt down and out, a victim of life, and wondered how you were going to make it through another yet another hopeless day?  What if, in one of your deepest personal valleys, you were called upon to not only to immediately snap out of it but to utilize your personal power to help your company out of its biggest jam ever and the failure to do so might cost you your job?  Oh, and did I mention that all the while you were scared to death about the results of some important tests regarding your health?

Author Jon Gordon’s newest book, “The No Complaining Rule” is a fictional account of one woman’s response to this unique call to action. Her name is “Hope”, and though at first she appears to have lost most of it, through the process that Jon demonstrates she is able to overcome being a chronic complainer in time to heal both her company and herself.

In the book, Jon demonstrates the negative effects of mindless complaining and provides a solution to change the mindset of chronic complainers both in the home and in the workplace. One of my favorite quotes from the book is when Hope comes to realize personally and then share professionally that “the measure of our success will not be determined by how we act during the great times in our life but rather how we think and respond to the challenges of our most difficult moments”.

For anyone living or working with chronic complainers, and also for those who suspect that they themselves may be guilty of a little too much complaining , this book offers practical advice on how to overcome this negative, and as Jon shows, costly habit.  The “No Complaining Rule” will teach you how to spend less time and energy focusing on problems and provide you with practical tools to seek out solutions.

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Having enough energy to get through the day is something that millions of people worldwide are desperately seeking. A Google search for the phrase “increase your energy” yields over 250,000 matches that cover a plethora of approaches as varied as the people who think them up. There are many people who lack sufficient energy to get through the day, as well as a great deal of well intentioned yet conflicting information on how to overcome this. Over the years, I have personally tried such things as:

deep breathing, adopting a vegetarian diet, eliminating caffeine, drinking more caffeine, eating small but frequent portions, eating a big breakfast, eating a small breakfast, taking natural vitamin supplements, taking afternoon naps, working with weights, bicycle riding, doing yoga, getting up early, getting up late, meditating, and many others.

No Magic Diet, No Specific Exercise Routine

The problem was that none of these activities nor any combination thereof gave me the type of energy boost I was looking for. Sure enough, over time I could see how some approaches worked better for me than others, but nothing proved to be the panacea I was looking for. Could so many people be wrong with all of the great ideas they were promoting to increase the amount of personal energy? Was there something I was missing? How come I still didn’t seem to have enough energy?

One day without searching for it, the solution hit me like a bolt of lightning. I realized that there was no magic remedy for a life filled with vibrant energy, or at least nothing that any vitamin pill or specific diet or exercise routine could provide.
The reason had nothing to do with physiology and everything to do with psychology.
It all boiled down to one word: Attitude.

Attitude is Key

If your attitude is positive and you have the general outlook of appreciating the things that occur in your life, you will usually have more than enough energy to get through the day. Yet if you have a negative outlook that focuses upon problems and what’s wrong with your life, you will typically find yourself dragging through the day without enough energy to get everything done. In fact, I’d venture to say that the person who goes about his day appreciating what he encounters and the people he meets can eat bon bons, smoke cigarettes, and have ½ a pig for lunch with fries and a coke and still have more energy than someone who is negative and worrisome and yet is otherwise healthy and a good steward of their body. The first person will probably die sooner due to a heart attack or some other health related malady, but they’ll probably enjoy their journey on this planet a lot more than the one who tries to do everything “right” and still chooses to walk around with a negative focus.

Appreciation Kills Stress

Why is this so?  It has to do with stress. Stress is the product of worry and frustration and robs us of significant amounts of energy. When we allow ourselves to “stress out” we burn up most of our energy on the tasks of feeling bad and worrying.

Appreciation is the opposite of stress, and the beauty of this solution is that it is practically impossible to feel appreciative and stressed at the same time. Try it. Think about something that would normally stress you out. Got it?  Good. Now think about someone or something that you are genuinely appreciative for and focus on that feeling for a moment. What happened to all that stress you were just holding onto?  If you are like most people it probably just disappeared!

In each moment we get to choose our thoughts, and the implications go far beyond the metaphysical notion that “thoughts become things”. Over time they do, but even more immediate is fact that our mental focus has the ability to either energize us or rob us of the energy required to create the types of lives that we desire. The best of intentions matter little when you’re plopped on the couch wishing you could somehow find the energy you need to push on.

Test for Yourself

If you desire to radically change the energy levels in your life, I encourage you to adopt the idea that changing your attitude tops the list. Try it out for yourself for one week and then come back and tell me if I’m wrong. If so, I’ll refund every penny you paid to read this wonderful article.

If you truly focus upon being appreciative and looking for the good in all situations, I believe that over the course of a week you will find that you have much more energy available and experience a significant reduction in stress. If not, email me and I’ll offer to sell you some magnetic bracelets specially blessed by my Cousin Louie, or maybe some special healing crystals recovered from the magical waters of the Fountain of Youth.

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Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.

Henry Ford

There is no better way to stay fit than to exercise, and “use it or lose it” is a reality that refers equally to body and mind. If you desire to think sharper, react quicker, and make better decisions you will have to keep exercising your mind to maintain it in good working order. Overall, this means spending less time engaged in passive activities and more time spent doing things that will stimulate the brain.

Some of the biggest time gobbling passive mind activities are pretty well known, such as spending too much time in front of the television, waiting for that guy in Nigeria with $8 million to bequeath to send you another email, or hoping your significant other will hang the roll of toilet paper the right way this time. Other more innocuous mind wasters include reflecting negatively upon your past, aimlessly surfing the net, and listening to political speeches in an election year. Actually that last one isn’t as bad as what usually follows, which is 3 or more talking heads explaining to us what the candidate who just spoke had to say. Have we really dumbed down that much as a society that we need to be told what the man in the suit just said; or are we simply too lazy to make the effort to interpret the obvious all by ourselves?

In keeping with Mr. Ford’s admonition, I’ve made a list of some of the tangible benefits of putting your mind to work on learning new things:

You may find something new to become passionate about.  Passion is a key to life, and discovering additional ways to uncork it can serve to juice up other, less inspired areas of your life.

Learning new things can make you more interesting.   Think the girls at the party still want to hear about your Dungeons and Dragons exploits; or that speaking in Klingon is somehow considered sexy? If you’re repertoire is old and stale, learning new things can help make your more social and enhance your appeal to others.

Learning keeps you alert.  You can’t run on autopilot when trying to master a new skill or venturing off into the unfamiliar. Breaking with routine to undertake new tasks instantly wakes up dormant areas of the brain that can be useful far beyond the task at hand.

Use it or lose it.  Your brain is a muscle like any other. It will atrophy without use.

So, if I’ve convinced you of the benefits of lifelong learning, you may be wondering what are some examples of the types of activities you should seek to incorporate. To get your mind jump started I have included a few rather simple ideas you may want to consider. The key is to pick out activities that you are not currently doing so that you can stimulate your mind in unfamiliar ways.   For example, you can:

1. Study a new language
2. Read a book
3. Take up a musical instrument
4. Start a blog
5. Play word games or puzzles
6. Play Sudoku
7. Choose to become more observant of the world around you
8. Write poetry
9. Take up dancing lessons
10. Travel to new places
12. Do things with your non-dominant hand
13. Try adopting the opposite point of view you normally take in arguments
14. Study martial arts
15. Paint, sculpt, or draw
16. Take a road trip
17. Go hiking in nature
18. Start a journal
19. Try a yoga class
20. Attend a live sporting event that you don’t know anything about.

There is really no end to a list like this. By simply making a commitment to exercise your mind and continuing to expose yourself to new ideas and concepts, you may be able to delay or even ward off the effects of the aging process on your brain. Your mental reaction time will improve, your focus will be sharper, you will become more interesting, life will begin to seem more vibrant, and you may even give up the urge to watch old Star Trek reruns or to hang the toilet paper roll backwards.

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One thing that fascinates me is the process we go about of translating our experiences from the events that take place to the words we use to express them linguistically and store them in our minds. OK, I know that sounds really boring but it’s not. Trust me. In the same way that… well I couldn’t come up with a good enough analogy so maybe it is boring to most people and maybe I am kinda geeky that way, but understanding and decoding the words we use to describe our lives and the events that take place is an extremely useful process that as a coach helps me to assist people in living happier and more fulfilling lives.

One of the things I like best about coaching is being able to help people go from internal states of frustration or feeling “stuck” to helping them decode their representations of experiences so that they perceive a greater array of choices and therefore a greater ability to make an impact on their world and live the types of lives that they desire.

Ways we Filter our Experiences

When something happens we filter the experience through our 5 senses. The data we process is necessarily incomplete, but the process works well when we select data that is optimal for the task at hand. Remember the last time you had a conversation in a crowded room? Your ears were able to perceive a variety of sounds, yet the ones you chose to focus on and record in memory were probably those of the person you were most interested in listening to. A primary step in filtering reality is the decision we make of what we choose to record through our senses. Actually this is the second step, since we only perceive through our senses a very narrow band of what actually takes place in our environment. Don’t believe me? Consider a dog whistle or radio waves. Dogs can hear the whistle but you can’t, and your radio can pick up signals broadcast over the airwaves that you can’t perceive but are most definitely out there. Oh, and there’s also gamma rays, ultraviolet rays, the Cubs winning the World Series, and all those dust mites living on your pillow…(yecch, I’ll stop now)

Anyhow, buy the time information reaches our brains, our neurology has filtered it to the extent that we are able to perceive it. We then we filter that information through our past experiences and our opinions in order to make quick and efficient decisions. We then attach meaning to new events through the language we choose to describe them, both to ourselves and to others.

Labeling Limits Choice

If we are afraid of snakes and one happens to slither up next to us in the yard, we may label the experience as “I saw this really big, ugly snake”. That sentence may not have been the reality of what happened but rather the label we chose to apply to it. If the experience was emotional enough we then may go on to formulate an opinion that “my backyard is dangerous!”, and depending on the intensity of the experience we might even come to the assumption that “all backyards are dangerous!” In doing so, we have gone from the reality of there being a snake in our yard to the assumption that all backyards are dangerous.

As we begin to believe statements like these, our choice of available options become limited (we can’t go out in our backyard) and our representation of reality becomes skewed from how it actually is. The snake may have been harmful or not - more information was needed before deciding never to venture out into the backyard again. Yet the language we used to code the experience results in self limiting the amount of choices we have and can reduce the amount of enjoyment we get out of life (no more backyard barbecues).

When people limit their choices due to how they represent experience (consciously or otherwise), they can experience frustration in living the type of life they desire or in achieving the types of goals they would like to achieve. Some other choice limiting statements that I’ve heard are:

People don’t like me.
I regret my decision
I don’t know how to impress people
Conflict is painful
She never listens
Changing is difficult

Decoding the Process

A very interesting part of what I get to do is that I help people step backwards through this process from labels of experience to the actual experiences themselves. Often, as people begin to decode how they’ve labeled their experiences they begin to see other options and choices available - choices that they had missed because their labels of experience had taken them away. New choices are perceived, and from these new choices spring fresh opportunities for clients to live the types of lives that they desire.

When Coaching can Help

If you reach a point in life where you find yourself unable to achieve an important goal, nurture your relationships or overcome self limiting beliefs, you may want to consider working with a professional coach who has a background in linguistics. There are a number of competent coaches, myself included, who are trained in NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) and who possess the knowledge and tools required to assist you. The key part is selecting a coach with whom you can relate well and who has the skills required to help you get where you want to go in life. If you ever find yourself in such a situation, you can check out my coaching programs for ideas regarding how I may be able to help.

Words are indeed powerful, and if the Cubs ever do win a Word Series I’m probably going to hear a few choice ones from the fans of those “lovable losers”. Its the 4th of July holiday here in the states, so I’m heading out to my backyard (to hell with the snakes), to enjoy a wonderful barbecue and then downtown for some fireworks. Happy 4th everyone!

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Since you are reading this blog I’m going to assume that you have at least a passing interest in personal development. I’m also willing to bet that you’re probably more considerate and respectful than the average Joe when it comes to your relationships. How am I doing so far?  Am I an intuitive genius or what?  In fact, I’ll even go out on a limb and make the assumption that you have a life filled with people you love and care about. Now if I’ve got you all wrong and you’re nothing but a lowdown piece of crud, click here.

All kidding aside, a real trap that well meaning people can fall into if not careful is that of consistently putting themselves last. I’m not talking about little things like holding the door open for someone or being nice to people in general. What I’m saying is that neglecting your needs and priorities on a habitual basis to cater to the needs of others means that you sacrifice your personal growth, put your own dreams on hold, and eventually begin to lose your unique sense of identity. Think about it. If your life is defined by everyone’s needs but your own, how do you define who you are outside of the context of anybody else? When you are all alone, who are you? If you’ve dedicated the bulk of your existence to serving others, you might find this to be a very difficult question to answer.

Ok, so I’m not saying that you should body slam little Joey at the family picnic to get his place in line for the last bologna sandwich. I know that special circumstances in life such as caring for an young infant, or a spouse suffering from illness, can and most likely will occupy more of your time. The danger I’m speaking of occurs when, as a pattern of living, you consistently put yourself last regardless of circumstances. When it becomes so ingrained in your personality that you never dare to voice an opinion on where to go out to eat because you want to make sure that everybody else gets what they want, all of the time.

Everyone is Shortchanged

You have wants, needs, and desires that no matter how hard you might try to ignore will never go away. When your life’s focus is predominantly on others and away from yourself, you will begin to neglect your own desires to either make or keep others around you happy. If this continues, you will eventually wind up resenting yourself, the people you seek to make happy, or both.

Because not enough attention is paid to self, personal growth stops, and you start becoming less instead of more. Life is dynamic, not static. As you become more resentful and have less to offer you may even wind up being less pleasant to be around. Everyone is shortchanged, including those you are seeking to please.

The Solution

There is nothing wrong with a life of service. Simply bear in mind that to lift up others you must maintain your strength. You do that by tending to your own needs and taking excellent care of yourself. You add value to others and the world around you in proportion to the extent that you are a well rounded, self actualizing human being. You will experience the greatest joys of giving when you give from your abundance, not from your lack. So take care of yourself, tend to your needs, and purpose to live out your dreams!

It is from this state of what some would call selfishness that you are best suited to be truly selfless. There is nothing selfish about striving towards your highest potential, enjoying life more, and in the process sharing the best of who you are from an authentic perspective of happiness, inspiration, and love.

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The other day I went up to the highest mountaintop to visit my favorite guru. Living in Florida that didn’t take too long, as our tallest mountain in the state would barely gain notoriety as a speed bump in Texas. Heck, you can ride halfway up an elevator in New York City and be higher above sea level than my favorite local guru ever gets. Well anyway, after ascending to the peak and dropping some cash in his hat (most gurus aren’t free you know), he proceeded to dispense the following nuggets of wisdom:

What you resist, persists
Don’t struggle against the tide
Fully embrace the moment
Wax on, Wax off

Having offered such revelation, the guru appeared quite pleased with himself and trotted off towards his cave. Yes, there was a cave on top of the mountain here in Florida…work with me a little. Anyway, off he went, and pretty quickly too. This guru didn’t even have a beard or a cane, just a number 8 t-shirt and a billy club.

Not completely satisfied I’d gotten my monies worth, I stopped him dead in his tracks. “Wait a minute”, I said. “I’ve seen ‘The Secret’, cant stand Alabama football, have already read Eckhart Tolle, and I must have watched ‘The Karate Kid’ several times growing up. I came all the way up here with my bottle collecting money just to hear you recite a bunch of tired old quotes?”

Suddenly, his eyes lit up with a sparkle. You would have thought I’d just offered him a ride to the Burning Man festival on a magic carpet - mood altering substances included. He stops and stares me down. “Words are meaningless!” he says. “Understanding is everything.  What do these words really mean to you?”

Put on the spot, I began to spout off all the latest mumbo jumbo I could remember from one of the positive thinking books I had been reading and some of the new age movies I had recently seen. Unfortunately, Mr. Guru wasn’t impressed. I began to sweat. Did I come all the way up here just to get told off and be made a fool of?  Hell no!  I was mad, and I was going to let him know about it.

But then something happened… I remembered something from all of those self help books and their advice on maintaining a positive state and not letting the ego take over. Darn, I was messing things up and of course I of all people should know better. I began to criticize myself inside my head for having messed up, and then congratulated myself for recognizing the error and taking appropriate action. It was actually quite a conversation. I thought I was having it to myself, yet Mr. Guru was watching me the whole time and had this to say immediately afterward:

“You fool, you have just proven that you haven’t understood a single thing! All those self help books have been wasted upon you. Better they were used as kindling for a homeless man’s fire pit!”

As I nervously looked on, he began to explain. “You may think you know a little about enlightenment, yet your actions speak otherwise. Lets take a look at that list again:

What you resists, persists.
Fully embrace the moment
Don’t struggle against the tide
Wax on, Wax off

“My words to you are as applicable inside your mind as they are in the outside world. All except the last quote, of course. I just threw that one in to see if you were listening.”

“If you are angry, do not seek to deny it, but rather acknowledge your emotion of anger as part of what is. Your anger is real in the moment, and only through acceptance and acknowledgment can you discover what it was that brought on the emotion in the first place. From there you are free to choose your response. Yet you subverted your anger and then became angry at yourself for being angry in the first place. Judgment. You completely lost touch with the moment and whatever it may have had in store for you. You threw good after bad. Finally your ego took over and told you how wonderful you were for ‘understanding how the process works’ and getting your mind back on track. You were so lost in your thoughts I could have tied your shoes together and pushed you over the mountainside and you never would have noticed.”

Next, he said: “That brings me to my points about embracing the present moment and not struggling against the tide. Don’t ever think that things have to be a certain way in life. They don’t. However they are, they just are. You can never change the past by your actions in the present. Similarly, you can never undo your emotional responses by your internal criticisms of them. Whatever emotion you feel, acknowledge it fully and listen to what it is trying to tell you. If it is laughter you feel, then laugh. If it is gratitude you are overcome with, don’t wait until it is time to meditate or pray to show your appreciation. Life is not so much about understanding as it is about being. Remain present in your internal dialog and cease to place judgment upon it or to deny what is. Embrace your thoughts, overcome them if necessary, learn from them and enjoy them, for they are real and now is all there is.”

The guru, satisfied with his response to me, asked me if I had any more questions. I told him that I did indeed have one more.

“Go ahead my son, ask away”, he said.

So I asked him: “What… is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow (sans coconuts)?”

He pondered this for a moment.

While he was lost in thought I tied his shoes together and pushed him down the hill.

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I saw an interesting show on PBS last night. The title was “Prescription” by Deepak Chopra, and his topic of discussion was happiness. I found it highly interesting and want to share some of the things he discussed.

Deepak starts with framing the traditional method of thinking that is so ineffective and yet so highly integrated in Western society; the mindset of conditional happiness. “I’ll be happy when” and “I’ll be happy if” are the two most common ways that we deceive ourselves.

How often have we said things to ourselves like I’ll be happy “when I get that job”, happy “when I meet that special person”, or I’ll be happy “when I change careers”? Sometimes we even tell ourselves things like I’ll be happy “if I am healthy”, or “if I have better relationships” etc.

Deepak makes the simple yet profound suggestion that we turn this relationship between conditions and happiness around as if looking at the equation in a mirror. Starting from a position of happiness as your default state is much more likely to provide you with the conditions you are seeking, as opposed to waiting upon those conditions to occur so that you can choose to be happy. If you choose happiness first, you are more likely to be healthier, more likely to have better relationships, and more likely to have a successful career.

He then goes on to explain that there are 3 things that determine our overall happiness:

Our Biological Set Point

This is the default way that we perceive the world around us. Deepak explains that there is some basis in genetics here, but that we can change our “set point” via meditation or cognitive therapy. Neuro-Linguisitc Programming (NLP) is also very helpful in this area, specifically within the context of reframing negative and/or limiting beliefs, and helping one to explore and potentially change one of their maps of reality.

Our Life Situation

The studies he cites indicate that this is a relatively minor factor in a person’s overall happiness, saying that only about “8-15%” of our overall happiness level is dependant on this. People who dispose themselves to the notion of being happy will be happy, while those who place conditions upon happiness will typically always have some sort of outstanding condition that remains unfulfilled.

Our Voluntary Actions

The choices we make are the biggest determinants in our overall level of happiness. Broken down within our choices are the ones that give us pleasure and the ones that provide us with a sense of fulfillment.

Pleasurable choices are things we choose to do that cause us to experience feelings of happiness, such as eating food, listening to music, having sex, drinking wine, etc. All of these are rather self explanatory.

Fulfillment choices are the things we choose to do that provide us with a sense of accomplishment and contribution to the world around us. They encompass how we express our creativity in ways that benefit and bring happiness to ourselves and society as a whole. Deepak notes that as spiritual beings (regardless or religion), the best way to experience fulfillment is by making choices and doing things that make others happy.

He then goes on to explain that happiness and enlightenment are not one and the same. You can experience happiness without enlightenment, you will probably experience some level of unhappiness and frustration during your search for enlightenment (should you choose that path), and that you experience the greatest level of happiness upon attaining an enlightened state. I will be writing more about this in subsequent postings.

For those of you who have TIVO or a DVR and haven’t seen this program, I definitely think it’s worth checking out.

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Most people have a rather strong opinion about this. Do you believe that it is ever OK to quit? Or were you taught growing up that “winners never quit” and that to do so is a sign of weakness? As you read this right now, you can probably recall a time in your past when you were faced with such a decision. What did you do and how did it work out? It may even be that you are faced with such a decision in your life right now.

Many people struggle over the question of quitting or moving forward at various points in their lives in issues ranging from relationships, career choices, hobbies, to membership in religious organizations, social clubs, etc. Often times making the decision to quit or continue on can become so clouded with emotion and prior conditioning that we fail to objectively consider the choice based upon our goals, priorities, and values as they currently exist. Of course, to do so you need to be aware of what your goals, priorities, and values currently are to be able to consider them, and most people don’t normally keep track of them over time to notice weather they have changed along with them as they have evolved. Pursuing outdated goals or trying to live to outdated values that seem incongruent can be a rather pointless and frustrating endeavor. Yet turning your back on a worthwhile pursuit because you are weary, worn out, frustrated, or temporarily defeated is equally unlikely to make you happy. Indeed, giving up on something and later realizing how close you were to success can be quite demoralizing and leave you kicking yourself for having done so.

So, the next time you are faced with a decision to quit or push on, here are some helpful questions to consider. They are by no means exhaustive, yet thinking about them can start the process of objectively considering weather on not to keep on doing what you’re doing.

Questions to ask Yourself:

1. Is my current course of action likely to bring me the outcome I desire, regardless of weather the journey is currently pleasant or enjoyable?

2. Am I still interested in obtaining the original outcome?

3. Should I modify my desired end result in any way?

2. Is it the only the end result I’m seeking, or is the journey equally important?

4. Am I frustrated and seeking to quit only because I like things easy and they’ve now become difficult?

5. Do I need to consider another approach to achieve the same outcome?

6. How have my values changed since I undertook this objective or made this commitment?

7. Am I just being lazy?

8. Is my desire to (quit/continue on) primarily to make someone else happy?

9. Whose idea was this anyway? Is it my goal I’m pursuing?

Questions not to ask Yourself:

1. What will my (friends, parents, neighbors, etc) think if I quit now?

2. What will people think of me if I try my best but still end up failing?

3. Why can’t I just be more like ______?

When You Need to Stick it Out:

If you’ve determined that the outcome in mind is your own, is consistent with your values, and you are pursuing it because you genuinely desire the end result you are most likely on the right track. You may currently lack sufficient direction and have discovered that there are resources you need to acquire - you might even doubt yourself a little bit. But because this is something you really want, giving up is most likely going to make you feel much worse. There’s nothing wrong with stepping back and reevaluating, then making a concentrated effort when you’ve regrouped and are ready to go full speed again. If fact, it can serve to invigorate you and send you off again with fresh motivation and perspective.

When to Consider Moving On:

There can be a lot of guilt associated with giving up on something that you put a lot of time and effort into. Society may look down on you. People may talk about you. You may even put yourself down for being a quitter. If however, you’ve identified that the outcome you’ve been pursuing doesn’t mesh with your values, is not taking you where you want to go, or worse yet is taking you further away, then it may be time to consider quitting and moving on. Yes, I said the “q” word. Sometimes it is OK to quit.

You may find that there are crossroads in your life when you begin to realize that your values have changed, your priorities have changed, and you are not the person you once were 5 or 10 years ago. You have evolved. If your goals and pursuits have not taken that same journey with you, it may be time to put them aside for ones that better serve you.

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Does life ever seem too hectic? Like there’s time for everything except for enjoying yourself and doing the things you’d like to get done?

Regardless of your individual circumstance, be it rich or poor, single or married, parent or childless, you have choices available to you in each moment that determine how much enjoyment you get out of your life. The great news is that the choices are up to you and no one else. Your life is experienced and eventually defined by whatever you happen to be doing in each given moment. Sure, some people are more fortunate than others in what options they have available to them, but in each and every moment of our lives we get choose what meaning we assign to our experiences and how we choose to feel about them. You really do Create your Destiny. As you go through your day, consider how the following suggestions could help you live a simpler, more contented life:

Prioritize. Figure out whats most important to you and begin to live you life accordingly. What people? What personal goals? Career goals? If we’re not careful we can end up spending way too much time on non-essential busy work and neglecting the things we feel are most important. Refuse to get caught up in the minutia. Begin to let the petty but urgent stuff fall by the wayside in favor of the longer term things that will bring you the type of life you really love.

De-commit. You really can’t do it all if you jam your day full of commitments, so why set yourself up for failure? Diligently examine each task you undertake to see if it is something that serves your life purpose, is absolutely necessary, or brings you some level of happiness. If you are someone who feels as though lots of people depend upon you and therefore in many cases you couldn’t possibly say no, I’ve got news for you. If you died tomorrow the world would somehow manage to go on without you. Really it would. It’d be one heck of a funeral though, and if you were there to see it you’d be mighty impressed. Seriously, I’m not talking about abandoning your commitments, but rather examining each one and determining where they fit in terms of your priorities. Do what is necessary to live according to your values and then start paring away at the rest.

Slow things Down. I know you’d love to but you just can’t, really I do. But if you really can’t, then who is really in charge of your life? That can be the subject of another post entirely, but the bottom line is that you have more choices than you think. My suggestions: eat slower, drive slower, and be present in whatever it is that you are doing. If you stop the constant rush to get on to the next task or the item on your must do list, you may begin to realize that life is ALWAYS experienced right now, in each moment, during whatever it is that you happen to be doing. Right now is always all there is. Stop trading now for later, be present, and explore what there is to appreciate in each moment. There might not be much, but it sure beats grumbling and complaining (usually).

Carve out Some Alone Time. Spend time alone with your thoughts in quiet and stillness. Listen to yourself. What is your body telling you? What are your dominant thoughts? Get to know yourself and discover what it is that truly makes you happy. Meditation is a great way to experience this if you haven’t tried yet. If you haven’t, don’t knock it until you do.

Reward Yourself. Take a moment or two each day and reward yourself for the efforts you’ve made to take control of your life. A dessert, A mental pat on the back, a cold beer or a hot cup of tea. Whatever works best for you – you’ll know what it is. Take the time to enjoy yourself and show yourself some appreciation for the great job that you do being you.

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Your intuition is part of you. It is not some outside entity or a spooky voice that lives inside your head telling you to pour maple syrup all over old Aunt Thelma and throw birdseed at her in the park on Sunday morning with whilst blowing into a bird whistle. Well, at least I hope not. Your intuition is simply a part of your consciousness that has access to information beyond the range of your 5 senses.

Your intuition helps guide your mind in the direction of your most dominant thoughts and deepest desires. So if you’re a creep then your intuition will probably be pretty creepy. But if you are a positive minded person with the best in mind for yourself and others, then using your intuition will help you make better decisions along those lines. However, your intuition is of no use to you when it is ignored. So, here are some simple steps you can take to begin to develop your sense of intuition.

Let go of the Need to Know Why

Remember, intuition deals with information your brain has access to beyond the range of your 5 senses. Trying to gain a complete logical understanding of why you have a certain “hunch” or “feeling” typically won’t work. While you would certainly want to check out your intuitive hunches by logically forecasting any foreseeable consequences such as safety to yourself and others, over analyzing and stalling can cause your window of opportunity to close, leaving you further confused and probably feeling pretty frustrated. So, once you determine that acting on a particular hunch is safe even if you may be logically uncomfortable with it, you must move on to the next step of

Taking Action

Like any other skill you develop or any muscle in your body, your intuition becomes stronger and more reliable the more often you use it. It may not always be right, but are you typically 100% right relying on logic and reason alone? If you could improve your decision making ability even 10-20% by learning to trust your intuitive instincts and blend them in with conscious reasoning, wouldn’t you consider yourself better off for having done so? What if you could do even better?

Learning to Trust

To develop trust in your intuition, you can start keeping track of how often it turns out to be right. It probably won’t be close to 100% initially. In fact, it may never reach 100% accuracy. Don’t be dismayed. Practically no one has gone through the trouble of tracking the accuracy of their “normal” decision making process, therefore you won’t have any basis of comparison on which approach is more accurate . Rest assured however that your conscious decision making ability isn’t quite 100%, else you wouldn’t have bothered to read this far into this post. The whole point of keeping track is to give your logical mind less reason to doubt intuitive responses because it now has some empirical data to latch onto. Feel free to skip this step if it doesn’t resonate with you. In fact, if you can skip this step you are probably one step closer to using your intuition effectively.

Summary

In summary, your intuition is a part of your consciousness that is able to see the whole picture, taking into account both sensory information and some mysterious spooky logic that makes people run around naked in caves chanting mantras to statues of strange looking animals while drinking a frothy homemade brew that must surely include eye of newt, hair of bat, and other such tasty things.

Seriously, remember when I wrote that our 5 senses constantly filter out much of our reality so that our conscious minds can process the data effectively to accomplish the task at hand? Your unconscious mind has access to all the raw, unfiltered information that you were exposed to, and your intuition uses the data that was screened out in ways that are helpful to you and that you otherwise would have missed. When it picks up on some pieces of information that you had screened out or otherwise disregarded but that is of importance to you, it lets you know in the form of a feelng, a hunch, or a lingering thought. That’s basically it. Paying attention to, trusting in, and acting upon your intuitive hunches gives you more data to work with and helps you make better decisions. Well, that and channeling the space aliens from planet Kitmankoo of course. I gotta go, ’cause right now they’re telling me to go make some pizza. Yumm, pizza.

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Why do we regularly ignore the wisdom available via our unconscious mind (our intuition)? I believe the 3 main reasons have to do with ignorance, ego, and fear.

IGNORANCE

Most people never come to understand the power available to themselves via their unconscious minds because they’ve never take the time to seriously consider it. Thus they live entirely by means of reason, prudence, and logic. These are people who say things like “I’ll believe it when I see it” and so forth. Most people of this variety consider themselves “down to earth”, “realists”, and “practical” in nature.

Ignorance disappears whenever what it is you are ignorant about pops up on your personal radar screen. You didn’t have a clue about it but now its there. At this point, you can either choose to pretend it’s not so (deny it), refute the the new information (doubt it), or accept it as a new aspect of your ever changing environment. Quite often, we go through that exact progression when adopting new beliefs:  Denial - Doubt - Acceptance.  Its entirely normal, and is something many people had to deal with once Galileo figured out the sun didn’t revolve around the earth, and when Columbus made it back to Europe without falling off the edge of the planet.

EGO

Our identification with the human experience resides within our ego. If we’re all a part of the collective unconscious, then it is our egos that help us stand out from the crowd. Through our egos we express our individuality, our smartness, our sexiness, and our coolness. Our egos are what make us “us”, and this is not a bad thing at all. Lose the ego completely and you become very spiritual, very knowledgeable, and also probably very boring to others. Gurus on mountaintops aren’t usually very busy on Saturday nights, though admittedly neither do they care.

The key is to find a healthy balance, yet many people resist accessing the collective unconscious via use of their intuition. Why? Because it requires us to think differently. Thinking differently may generate new ideas, and some of some of these new ideas might threaten our established self image. For the ego that’s a big no no. On the whole we’re very proud of who we are and resistant to change how we identify ourselves. Our ego’s sense of self identification finds comfort in stability, even if the stable nature of our lives is uncomfortable. Its much easier to resist new information at first and later accept it only when it becomes blatantly obvious. The ego only begins to acquiesce to intuition after we fall flat on our faces one too many times relying solely upon our senses and ignoring how we feel.

FEAR

Our fear of trusting in our intuition resides in the idea that it somehow seems too nebulous. We assume that what we can see, smell, hear, taste, and touch must be “real” and have “proved” this to ourselves too often to believe otherwise. At one level this is a good thing, because pretending a brick wall isn’t in front of you and attempting to run right through it typically doesn’t work out too well. The problem with trusting exclusively in our senses is that we filter all of our sensory perceptions in order to understand what they mean. So what we think is “real” by virtue of our senses is still largely a matter of perception.

Trusting in our intuition can seem uncomfortable. We’re afraid of making important decisions while feeling uncomfortable about the process and often retreat back to the familiar safety of our senses. After all, if we make a decision and fail based our senses who will blame us? We acted on “legitimate” information. But if we trust in our intuition and act upon a “hunch” that doesn’t work out, we might look downright foolish to everyone around us. That scares us, often enough that we don’t even bother to try.

So, how can you learn to trust in your intuition? Stay tuned and check out my next post titled “Trusting Your Intuition”.

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Our true nature is that of pure consciousness. No distinction between conscious and unconscious, simply pure consciousness. At the level of pure consciousness we are all part of the same eternal, omniscient, interconnected whole and are able to tap into a wealth of information unavailable through our 5 senses. Part of our human experience is to learn how to interbalance the temporary division between what we call our conscious and unconscious minds.

Dr. Wane Dyer states in his book “Manifest your Destiny” that “each and every one of us is the whole of humanity”. Deepak Chopra writes in “The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success” that “pure consciousness is our spiritual essence”. We are each unique and indivisible parts of the collective consciousness, and the knowledge contained therein is available to us all. Its just that we don’t have complete access to it through the sensations of sight, smell, taste, touch, and sound.

Would you ever think of walking up to a buffet stocked full of your favorite foods and shuffling away with nothing but a handful of crackers? Or how about checking in to a 5 star hotel and then huddling in the basement amongst a pile of old rags? Kinda pointless, right? Yet as crazy as these examples sound, we frequently settle for much less than whats available when it comes to using our minds.

Most of us grow up learning to trust implicitly whatever we can perceive with our 5 senses and doubting anything else that can’t be objectively verified. Phrases such as “I have to see it to believe it”, “Just the facts, ma’am”, and “I’m from Missouri, show me” pervade our language here in America. Not wanting to be duped, we often perceive, decide, and act solely upon the information filtered through our 5 senses which constitutes a very smal