How to you spend your free time?

Let me see. If you’re one of the millions of corporate blokes out there, you laze in front of TV, get drunk, read some old Men’s magz or just doze off. And while you’re at it, your brain shrinks while your belly bloats.

Aha! Is that a blush on your cheek? I thought so.

Leisure time that’s simply passive downtime is a monumental waste of time. It’s time that could have been spent more productively and yet enjoyably.

Consider the following activities that can get you a major rush. Read the rest of this entry »

There is nothing greater that comes in the way of success then fear does. It literally can paralyze people from making those decisions to live a greater existence. We all know what fear feels like. It is probably the most common limiting emotion and, for many people, the most common emotion, period. Not only do we fear new things, we also feel fear in addition to other negative emotions. We feel guilt, and we’re afraid to feel the guilt. We feel pain, and we’re afraid to feel the pain. Even when we feel fear, we’re often afraid to feel the fear. That’s known as “worrying about your worries,” “an anxiety attack.” Read the rest of this entry »

Your self-concept is wrapped up in a set of descriptions and images - of good success scenes or bad failure scenes that you’ve experienced. It is also carried in a set of personality trait labels you use to tell yourself and others what you are really like. Your self-evaluations are important because they influence most areas of your behavior, defining the limits of what you will attempt. You avoid an activity if your self-concept predicts you will perform so badly as to humiliate yourself. For instance, if your self-concept includes the belief that you would be a poor ice skater, you might never try it, and will indeed remain a poor ice skater. Often people excuse themselves with “That’s just the way I am.” By using this excuse, they deny themselves opportunities for personal growth.

If you could listen in, you would hear non-assertive people saying all kinds of negative sentences to themselves. They selectively remember some criticism of themselves, exaggerate it to monstrous proportions, and repeat it over and over like a chant. The man battling his bulging waistline might be saying, “I am ugly, fat, and disgusting. No one can stand to look at me. I am a fat worm. I’ve got no will power.” The shy, retiring boy at a dance might be saying, “Those girls are whispering about me. My pimples are horrible. If I talk to that girl, she’ll insult and ridicule me. I never know what to say to girls. I’ll die if she cuts me down.”

The fact is that people are often their own worst downers. They say to themselves, “I am irrational, emotional, stupid, dull, ugly, shy, cold, submissive, fat, ineffectual, overbearing, bitchy, childish, a bully, a miserable father (mother), a lousy speaker, a failure, and over-the-hill.” We all have our own lists. People can be terribly brutal with themselves. Out of the whole animal kingdom, only humans are endowed with this capacity to make themselves miserable. Can you imagine your pet cat or dog moping around, saying such brutal things to himself?

Worse yet, in many cases our negative view of ourselves may be communicated to new acquaintances before they have time to form an independent impression of us. If we tell people we are inadequate, they may do us the disservice of believing us. A woman in one of Sharon’s assertiveness classes repeatedly advertised herself poorly by prefacing each remark with, “I doubt if my idea is worth anything, but…” Without realizing it, the class did indeed pay less and less attention to her ideas - at least until they stopped to examine the subtle message her remark conveyed.

The toll of a negative self-concept is that it limits what we are willing to try, forestalling opportunities for growth and enjoyment. Doomsday prophesies about our social failures tend to be self-fulfilling. The shy woman who retreats from friendly overtures is indeed judged to be cold, aloof, disdainful, and the man who was turned down for approaching her is even less likely to make another overture to her (or vice versa!) The student with anxiety about taking a test “goes blank” to such an extent that he does indeed fail just as miserably as he had feared.

Imagine this: Think about entering a new situation. To meet that situation, imagine that you received an extra burst of energy, your senses sharpened, and there was a tingling - an excitement - in your body, and you became more sensitive and aware.

Doesn’t that sound great? The very thing we need to do our best in a new situation! Well, it’s precisely what does happen each time we enter a new situation. Most of the time, however, we call it “fear” and we don’t like it.

Contrary to popular belief, our parents didn’t teach us to feel fear. Our parents did teach us to use fear as a reason not to do something and they did this from love. A child cannot logically determine if its physical well being was or was not endangered when attempting each new activity. Read the rest of this entry »

And that’s Plan.

We almost always get to our goal through means other than the ones we put on our schedule. So why plan? Because people who don’t make long-range plans seldom get to where they want to be. In short, a plan will get you to your goal, but not in the way that’s on the plan.

So, plan. And, be prepared not just to change horses in midstream, but to change to a boat in midstream. Keep your goal, your dream. Stay firm and fixed on that. Be prepared, however, for whatever methods come along to get you there. Especially methods not on your plan. Plan on it.

How do you plan? Simple. Take a segment of time, take a goal, and divide up the latter into the former. Keep dividing it up until you have your next action step - something you can do right now to move toward your goal. Let’s say you want to produce a play within the next year. Get some kind of calendar that divides a year into units with which we’re all familiar - months, weeks, days, etc. Twelve months from now, write, “Play opens.” You have the goal (the play), and you have the time twelve months). Now, chop up the goal. Read the rest of this entry »

Affirmations are powerful elements of creative visualization. To affirm means “to make firm.” An affirmation is a forceful statement that something is. It is a manner of “making firm” that which you are imaging. Used deftly, affirmations effect a positive mind control within ourselves that naturally lead to lasting behavioral changes.

Many us are aware that we experience continuous inner “dialogue” chattering in our minds. The mind is busy “talking” to itself, keeping up an endless commentary about life, the world, our emotions, our anxieties, and our neighbors.

The words and ideas that run through our minds are vital. Most of the time we aren’t consciously aware of this stream of thoughts, and yet what we are “telling ourselves” mentally forms foundation of our subjective reality. Our mental commentary influences and colors our perceptions about what’s occurring on in our lives, and it is these thought forms that ultimately attract and create everything that happens to us. Hence, understand this: the mental dialogue we indulge in serves as a powerful mind control which persuades us to growth- or stagnation.

Anyone who has enjoyed meditation realizes how difficult it can be to still this inner “mind chatter,” in order to connect with our deeper, wiser intuitive soul. A traditional meditation discipline involves simply observing the inner dialogue as objectively as possible. Read the rest of this entry »

When you commit to a goal, the methods to achieve that goal will appear. When the methods do appear, they may not be (and seldom are) dressed in familiar garb. Many people are in the habit of saying “no” to all new experiences. Part of this, of course, is the comfort zone: “It’s new, so don’t do it.”

Alas, saying no to something before we know what we’re saying no to has a rather nasty name - one that no one likes to hear applied to themselves. That word is prejudice. It means, of course, to prejudge something. Human beings do it all the time. How many opinions do you have of people you have never even met?

By watching TV, we all have had the chance to meet a number of famous people who we initially “knew” only through the media. Many of them lived up to (or down to) their reputations. Others did not. Some people who had “bad reps” in the press were, in fact, delightful. Others, who are known to be magnificent individuals, were, in fact, monsters. Read the rest of this entry »

I got a pile of stuff. Collections of old laptops, comics, shirts that no longer fit and even tax returns from 1997.

“Joe,” I told myself “I gotta throw some out. Otherwise, how can new stuff come in?”

Sigh. Till 2006, I never followed through on my self-chastisement. The stuff keeps piling up and investing in new cabinets added to the stuff.

How many of you suffer from the collection bug?

Stepping back, I realize that collecting nonestop can be dysfunctional at times. It’s the mind whispering, “you better hoard, coz you’ll never get something like this again.”

That’s a self-defeating mindset. It gets you on a poverty mode of thinking.With such thoughts, its impossible to see new opportunities and take on grand challenges that may truly expand one’s horizon’s beyond the current myopic view. Why? You’ll perpetually be hiding, hoarding and protecting. How can you grow under such conditions- how can you attract things beyond what you already have?

Today, I begin throwing out stuff.

If you’ve just graduated college, you’ve probably begun hiding away all those books and papers. Finally: freedom!! It’s time to get really rich and make a name for yourself. Career. That’s the real world, right?

Wrong.

Graduation is no excuse to stop the learning process. Failure to study is folly! The new information your constantly process determines your edge in life. School learning is static and often decades out of date.

Here’s how to grow your IQ by 50%- after college. Read the rest of this entry »

Picture this: You know someone personally who has a thrilling, exotic life. Some friend of yours - maybe your sister, or your spouse - teaches in Japan, or writes in a cabin in the Rockies, or flies to Hamburg to make a deal with Mercedes-Benz. You daydream about how great it must be to live like that, but know it will never happen to you. You’ve stepped back from the exciting opportunities that came your way, because you wanted safety. Whatever courage is required to take risks, you’re pretty sure you don’t have it. You’re hugging the shore, but you can’t take your eyes off the horizon.

A lot of people hug the shore and are perfectly comfortable hugging it - but you are not comfortable. You are full of longing and regret. Deep down, you want adventure. You know perfectly well that you’ve stayed at your job too long. You know you’ve got more of the explorer inside you than you ever use. You know that a different kind of person would have sprung into action, seized the day, moved to new territories long ago, but somewhere you learned to hang on to what you have and not try for more. Read the rest of this entry »