Create Your Destiny

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

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

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 he went on to study were notable businessmen and inventors such as 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

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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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 an 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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