If your new to self improvement then I urge you to contemplate this statement.

You become what you think about most of the time

Now ask yourself, what do you think about most of the time?

Are you worrying about something that might happen, do you seeing the bad in a situation before the good.

or

Do you think about how grateful you are and how things just work out the way they are supposed to.

When you become aware of what you think most of the time you might be suprised at what you find. It just takes a little effort in any situation to ask yourself “Does this thought help me or hinder me?” and when it doesn’t support you then choose something else.

We’ll get into the details of how you create “your world” and “experience of life” in due course, but I’m sure you can understand that everything that you are, everything that you do and everything that you will do in the future is simply based on what you think now!

If you don’t like something about your life, if there is something that you’d like to improve, start at the beginning and examine your thoughts, and if required choose to think something more resourceful.

All the most successful self improvement literature is based on the power of this simple premise.

You don’t need to buy anything or get anything to start making a change, just decide right now to think differently and you’ll lay a new path that you can control the direction of.

I hope I’ve got you thinking

If you like this I recommend you check out this article by the great Brian Tracy - You become what you think about most of the time

The world of self improvement contains an interesting mix of books, courses, seminars and teachers. These materials cover such a wide variation of information that you can appreciate how large the self improvement industry really is, but right at its core, the very first thing that matters is simply improving yourself.

• Be a better person
• Be better equipped to handle people and events
• Feel good about yourself
• Be confident, happy and in control.

The list can really go on.

But how does the mountain of self improvement really help anyone make that change?

We all have to start somewhere and I expect that many people start out in a similar manner to myself. I basically stumbled from one book to another, looking for answers that could change everything in an instant but failing to find anything so radical.

Ten years on and I know the reality of the quest that stands before anyone starting out,  so today I’m going to start a new theme on the coffee philosophy dedicated to presenting some logical order to the chaos and hopefully help a few of you find exactly what you’re looking for.

So over the next few months I’m going to blog about:

• Self Improvement Fundamentals
• People to learn from (not just the gurus!)
• Top books, courses and seminars

Stat tune for my first insight into the fundamentals later this week.

If you’re new to the blog another good post to check out is how to start your personal development journey.

This inspiring video of meaningful quotes is a pleasure to watch over and over again.

Sit back, relax, and allow these poignant words to touch your heart.

If you want to find out more about this video and the work that inspired its creation go to Finding Your Joy.

In Finding Joy, Mac Anderson has compiled an amazing collection of inspiring photographs and meaningful quotes into a gorgeous gift book. Some of the most beautiful things in life are also the most simplistic. Such is the wisdom found in this book, simple yet powerful.

The author, Steve Errey, introduces the concept of Inspired Participation:

Participation is an active process of engaging with your own life. Inspiration is doing what you do knowing that’s it’s a positive choice and means something to you. So Inspired Participation is about plugging into everything in your life, finding value in it all and letting yourself do what comes naturally.

I really liked this definition, it illustrates perfectly the importance of being in control of your life, and how this can lead to manifesting your desires.

Later in the post Steve’s 4th reason is Inspired Participation In Action, this is my favourite in the list and highlights the power of taking action. As I have discussed in a previous post, this has to be one of the most crucial areas to focus on to reach successful outcomes in any personal development quest. You need to get into the habit of taking action and very quickly you will notice powerful results.

So, I have since been busy creating a guide that you can download and print out so that you can get maximum use from the Life Wheel technique.

I have created two versions of the guide:

1. A Life Wheel with all of the relevant life areas to consider pre-populated on it. This is the classic generic template to be used to cover the broad range and spectrum of life areas.
2. A Life Wheel without any pre-populated life areas, this is great for those who want to create a very personal and specific Life Wheel tailored to them.

Both guides have useful instructions and next steps, in the coming days I will post a further entry expanding on the Life Areas and what they cover, as requested by Jim in his comment.

The guides can be viewed and downloadedby clicking the appropriate links below:

• Your Life Wheel - With Pre-Populated Life Areas
• Your Life Wheel - Without Pre-Populated Life Areas

This has led me to ask the questions:

1. Why do people give up on their Personal Vision?
2. What is the biggest killer?

Let me begin by sharing some insights into my own life.

I gave up a life as an employee in 2005, after realizing that my dreams, hopes and desires would never be fulfilled living an uninspired life.

Since then I have done a lot of soul searching while allowing my dreams to flourish and my inspired vision to take form, in order to make ends meet I have taken on some independent consultancy assignments but in the last 12 months I have been working hard to translate my vision from the imagined to something real.

Before starting out on this adventure I had no experience in business management , marketing, sales or product creation, these are all new skills that I am learning as I go along. I’ll be honest and admit that its been very hard work with one exception - I love what I’m doing, I’m inspired by a greater sense of purpose, and everyday I awake excited about what lies ahead.

But I’ve noticed certain thoughts and events can really slow me down and make me question whether I’m doing the right thing.

Early on in my quest I became aware that Distraction is my constant enemy, there are so many things that can cause a temporary distraction, whether it be email, telephone or just messing round on the Internet (looking for something that really isn’t that important).

When Distraction sets in, I lose focus, wasting good time and energy.

The answer was to remove all forms of Distraction from my environment and to set defined periods of the day in which to answer email and take phone calls. This has helped me overcome the majority of situations that this assassin operates.

Something to remember - Distraction cannot hurt you, it can only hope to take your attention elsewhere.

Next comes Fear - The “what if” scenarios and imagined negative future outcomes can seriously impact on personal motivation and belief. I’ve always been good at overcoming fear, my strategy is simple, I just do it anyway.

I have always found that Fear is nothing more than an assassin of illusion, just walk through it and the illusion will disappear.

But when Distraction and Fear fail to take you out of the picture then the head Ninja Assassin is called in, this assassin is called Doubt.

Doubt is subtle, it lurks in the corners of your mind, waiting for the opportunity to make you see how crazy you are. Doubt can hurt you because it niggles you, it makes you question your purpose, it makes you question your conviction.

If you don’t have the self-confidence and belief to overcome the feelings of Doubt you will likely ditch your personal vision and go back to the uninspired life you left behind.

I now believe that these 3 assassins are there to teach you, not hold you back, your belief in yourself and your personal vision is fundamental to meet with success, and your belief can be strengthened to new levels by overcoming these assassins.

When your belief becomes the ultimate fighting champion you have within you the power to achieve great things.

I say “welcome the assassins”, bring it on, my belief and conviction is withstanding.

Start with some simple questions and a Life Wheel

To find where you are right now in your life a useful technique can be found by making use of a Life Wheel (also known as a Wheel of Life). This is a tool used by many life coaches to help their clients identify areas in their life that need some focus and nurturing. It’s a quick method of visually illustrating areas that could be targeted for further work.

Like everything in this world, especially when it comes to personal development, in order for the Life Wheel to be successful you have to be 100% truthful with yourself and not attempt to control your responses to influence the wheel to look how you imagine your ideal life would be.

The diagram below presents and empty Life Wheel that you can use for this exercise, in a follow up post I will publish a PDF with the questions and Life Wheel on it for easy print out.

To complete the Life Wheel you assess each spoke of the wheel (Health, Finance etc) with a score from 1 - 10, with a high score such as 10 indicating fulfilment and a low score like 1 indicating dissatisfaction. For each spoke mark your score with a dot on the line, as you can see 0 starts in the middle and radiates out to 10 on the outer circle. When you have marked your scores join from dot to dot with a straight line and that completes your Life Wheel!

Reviewing your Life Wheel

Your completed Life Wheel should graphically show those areas where you are feeling fulfilled and those where you aren’t, perhaps the majority of it looks pretty balanced with the exception of a few spokes? Or conversely it might show that you are directing a lot of focus and attention to one or two areas to the detriment of many others?

To complete the exercise you should now plot on the Life Wheel the score for each area that you believe would be the ideal for YOU. Do these in a different colour pen or pencil and once again connect the dots and you now have a very clear picture of your current situation and one of where you want to be.

Where there are gaps these can be considered to be the areas to START focus your attention, list them down, and then rank them order of importance to you. For each area answer the following questions:

Examples from my Life Wheel include making time to pursue my hobbies and improve my fitness, to see and talk to my family more often, and to assess where my career is taking me.

As mentioned above there maybe areas that are shown to be taking too much of your time and energy, areas where you should seek to STOP placing focus and attention on. Write these down as items to be rid of or stop doing. Some examples that I want stop is reflecting on the past too much, procrastinating on the internet, and getting involved in gossip and nonconstructive office chat.

Putting it into action

The final step is to construct a plan of action to address the areas that your Life Wheel has uncovered, this is often easier said than done, you really have to commit to following through with the improvements that you have identified. Try and set aside some time every week to work on them, maybe take yourself to your favourite coffee shop to reflect and contemplate on them, or go for a walk in the local park, or do whatever feels right for you to allow you the time and space to work on the areas you have identified.

As you can see, from being fairly vague about your life and what it is you truly want, in the space of an hour or two you have an informed view of where you are and already have identified some good and bad points to start setting some goals around, which will be the subject of my next post…

Remember though that this is a journey, and as you progress and gain new insight and experiences your Life Wheel will undoubtedly change, so in that respect it’s always good to revisit it after you have achieved a few goals as you will be able to note your progress.

The first thing that comes to mind when asked about my purpose is huh - I really have no idea!

In fact it feels such a massive thing to define that I’m scared I’ll get it wrong and end up living a life driven by a weak or uninspiring purpose, and when things get too hard to do then it’s simpler to not think about it.

Having studied over 10 leading resources on defining My Life Purpose I still found it a monumental and difficult task to complete. In fact I’m amazed that after following so many different and time consuming techniques that I still failed to create something that made sense to me.

I must admit that some conflicting techniques probably contributed to my troubles. One significant statement comes to mind that I found on a high profile personal development web site.

The advice suggested that I would know that I had defined my purpose when the statement brought tears to my eyes! I’m sorry but this just made the process more difficult and sounds like true BS to me.

Recently I developed a different approach to defining a Life Driven Purpose but before I reveal this simple and effective method I’ll set a few statements of clarity to avoid any confusion or feelings of monumental significance.

1. Your Purpose can change, it’s not set in stone, today is might be X but in a few months time it might be Y, saying that I wouldn’t recommend changing it drastically every 3 months but I hope you get the idea.
2. It’s not a monumental statue of power, its just something to inspire you, motivate you and give you direction.
3. Think of it like the North Pole on your compass, sometimes when you need to find your way get our your compass and realign your direction with your Purpose (true North).
4. Your purpose is just an extension of what is most important to you and therefore it should be aligned with your personal values.

I’ll talk in more detail about your personal values and how to use them to define your Purpose next week, but for now let me reveal my secret technique.

The simplest and most effective way to define your Life Driven Purpose is to listen to your inner voice and find your Burning Desire.

Ask yourself - what burns inside you every waking moment?

You may have learned to drown out this inner voice but sit quietly and listen and I’m sure you’ll soon be able to reconnect.

When I used this technique defining my Purpose was simple:

To seek out opportunities to grow, improve and experience, so I can dream big, breathe deep, create with passion and live well

Is Personal Vision the real deal or just self-help BS?

We examine its purpose and test the theory to find out for ourselves.

What is Personal Vision?

We’ve selected this simple definition:-

Your Personal Vision is your mental picture of the life you want to lead. It is a picture of your life in the future.

A Personal Vision is a complete picture of your life including everything that is important to you; this includes things like your finances, health, work, family, friends, recreation and personal growth.

What is the Benefit of Personal Vision - why should you do this?

Many Self-Help Gurus (and some scientific research) suggest that people with a clear Personal Vision are much more likely (than people without vision) to:

• Be happier and more satisfied with their lives
• Experience less depression and anxiety
• Be physically healthier
• Be more focused and less likely to procrastinate
• Spend more time taking action toward their goals

So the benefits are definitely worth taking the process seriously.

How do you create your Personal Vision?

You need to take the time to think long and hard about what you really want for your future and then write it down with as much clarity as possible.

I’ve got to say that the ‘How to’ may sound pretty easy but it can take much longer than you may expect.

To be effective your Personal Vision needs to include who you want to be, what you want to do, how you want to feel, what you want to own, and who you want to associate with.

The key thing is not to get hung-up trying to explore and imagine every corner of your life, just focus on getting the most important things covered. It’s also worth remembering that your Personal Vision will evolve (just like you will), be open to this and feel free to update your vision as and when required.

If you would like some help in creating your own Personal Vision then the following questions will give you a place to start. Before you begin we recommend you spend about 30 minutes alone, preferably in a quiet place to quieten your mind and think clearly.

Once you feel relaxed and clear it is time to think about Your future, that is what you really want from life. During this exercise it is important to let go of any limitations you feel exist and treat it more like a game, let your imagination flow.

1. Where would you live?
2. What would you do?
3. Who would you choose spend time with?
4. Who would you be?
5. What would you do for fun?
6. What were the forgotten dreams of your youth?

These questions should help give you a little push in the right direction, but to keep you from straying too far from your true self you should be able to state why you want the vision you describe. If you can’t provide a reason why then you may be describing something you think you want but deep down it doesn’t really matter.

Who supports and actively promotes the technique?

One of the habits set out in Stephen Covey’s “The 7 habits of highly effective people” promotes the technique with the statement:

Begin with the End In Mind.

Stephen Covey recommends formulating a “personal vision statement” to document one’s perception of one’s own vision in life.

Personal Vision is promoted as a fundamental technique by almost all Self-Help Gurus, in fact a random selection of 3 books from our extensive library resulted in a positive reference to the power of creating your Personal Vision.

There are also a number of methods being promoted to expand on this basic technique, in the last 12 months we have seen Vision Cards, Vision Boards, Mind Movies and Vision Desktop Wallpaper.

I’ve got to admit that my research for those supporting Personal Vision is overwhelming.

What our tests show

We performed some tests based on 4 people all following the same method over a period of 3 years.

The results do support in favor of the power of Personal Vision but not with 100% success.

Interestingly, 3 of the 4 found they did indeed move in the direction of their vision, accomplishing many of the goals they set. They also report feeling happier and more in control of their life then before the experiment began.

Our fourth test subject struggled to describe a vision that was congruent with their true self, it appears they described the life they had been raised to ‘aspire to’ and not the life that they truly believed was for them. This had disastrous consequences for them as they were working harder than ever before doing something they hated to create a life they didn’t really want.

This goes to show that there is more to getting this right than just creating a Personal Vision, the individual must be able to connect with their true self or the vision process may actually guide them into a life they do not want.

How does it work?

Leading brain research shows that the brain is a goal seeking machine, it loves to seek out what it has been programmed to do. To assist in this process the brain’s Reticular Activating System (RAS) becomes activated when given focused instructions and this can help you notice opportunities, people or events that could lead to the desired outcome.

Our evidence suggests that creating a Personal Vision does in fact provide clarity and focus to the brain, thus activating the RAS and then greatly increases the individuals chance to move in the direction of that vision.

I feel it is important to point out that the test subjects did not use Personal Vision alone but combined it with Goal Setting and Action. In my opinion these two approaches are crucial steps in the process to create favorable results. Personal Vision is just the beginning, it is your thoughts that are the seeds to anything you do and your Personal Vision is the clarification of your thoughts, but you then need to do something with it.

Conclusion

The research we found combined with the tests we performed provide conclusive support in favor of creating a Personal Vision. There is no doubt that it forms a key part to getting what you want in life, but it doesn’t provide the complete answer, just the beginning of a process that includes other steps like setting goals, identifying resources and taking action.

If you haven’t yet created your Personal Vision do you know what you are doing and where you are going? Be careful you don’t let someone else dictate where you’ll end up!

I recommend you try our Life Energizer System, it will guide you through the process and help you create your Personal Vision and the Goals required to take you there.

In this post I want to highlight just a few things that I have learned about personal development and wish that I knew a few years ago when I first started - hopefully you will not fall into the same traps that I did.

Stop Reading and Listening and take ACTION!

For the first few years I read and listened to any number of resources that I could get my hands on. I read the classics from Tony Robbins, Bob Proctor, Jack Canfield and James Allen and listened to audio books by Steven Covey, Brian Tracy and Robert Kiyosaki. After all this did anything change? Did I notice that I was living a different life? Was I getting everything that I wanted? NO! Sure, I had a head full of ideas and had a few moments whereby I thought “I can relate to exactly what you are saying, I should take your advice” and then something cropped up like needing to cook an evening meal or having to work late. Those good intentions quickly slipped away from the front of my consciousness and were forgotten or put on my To-Do list.

So after committing a lot of time and effort I was no further forward and I was beginning to get a bit frustrated. I had a few weeks off, in fact I went on my honeymoon, and that’s when it hit me - you have to take ACTION. Only you can change your life, all the reading and listening to the worlds gurus isn’t going to change anything until you wake up one day and put their teachings into practice. Think about that for a moment - everything you have read is just a resource, a guide, some best practices and techniques, only YOU can take these resources and use them to change your life.

So on my return I made the conscious decision to take action, the notes I had made whilst reading the books are now becoming part of my daily life, I am trying to make some of them habitual, creating a library of positive things I need to do and think about each day.

On top of that I signed up for a Life Coaching course. In my old theoretical days it was easy to dismiss the notion of attending a night class, what could a local Life Coach teach me that the worlds best couldn’t deliver in a book or on audio? How wrong that assertion was, enrolling in this class has been one of the most positive things I have ever done, here are few reasons why:

1. It helps you overcome the fear of the unknown - you put yourself into an unfamiliar place every week with a group of strangers, I’ve found that quite exciting to start with, and then as you get to know the group you want to continue to attend to see and speak to them and hear about their progress.
2. The tutor is brilliant, he isn’t a fake, he has real depth of experience and his passion for helping other people is inspiring. He isn’t motivated by money or fame and just wants to teach us how we can put into practice the techniques relevant to us in order to reach our individual goals.
3. It is motivating to think from week to week how you are putting into practice the things you learn and then start to notice small changes. As with all of these things, the small steps help you reach that bigger goal.
4. You can be specific in the areas of you life that you want to improve, more often than not you can fall into the generic trap of thinking everything is bad in your life. With the help of a tutor you can cut through that and get to specifics, and realise that there are many good things going on and it’s just a few areas that with a little work will complete the whole.

The last few weeks have been very liberating, to deliberately choice to take ACTION has resulted in any number of good things happening and I have a real desire to keep going. I think that this has to be the most important thing for anyone embarking on a personal development journey, I’m not naive enough to think that taking action is common sense to most people, but I know it’s very easy to fall into the trap of expecting things to happen just because you read some best selling books!

Don’t become a self help preacher

This is another thing that I wish I was aware of when I first started, it certainly would have saved me a lot of embarrassment and not hacked off a number of friends and family.

What’s the first thing we want to do when we learn something new? We want to show it off of course! From a young age we are encouraged to show off our skills to impress our friends and family. This is all well and good, but as soon as you cross the line and start projecting your so called skills onto the people around you, you are then asking for trouble.

I know from experience that this is a bad course to follow. On many occasions I have listened to friends tell me about their particular challenges or difficulties and I thought I would do them a favour and give them the benefit of my self help knowledge! How stupid and arrogant can you get? Preaching to your friends and telling them of their faults is a quick fire fire of pissing them off. That isn’t being helpful, if you have sound guidance to give then fine, but constantly preaching how great your life is and that theirs could be to if they followed your path is pompousness at its finest. Be aware of what you are projecting onto others and don’t expect what works for you to work for anyone else. With a few pointers here and there you can let them find their own path without resorting to preaching and alienating those around you.

It can get very expensive if you let it

Last time I searched on amazon.com for the term personal development it returned 52000 hits in the Books category alone! Now that’s a lot of books, at an average price of £6 each that can start to add up if you starting buying a serious number of them. Add to that the cost of seminars and programs such as Silva Life System and you could spend a lot of your hard earned cash in this area.

Lets get one thing straight here - I am not saying that you shouldn’t be paying for learning, motivation and inspiration, just make sure you spend your money wisely and get a sound return on your investment.

We have some fabulous resources listed on this site and only list what we have used ourselves and believe to be best in their field and specific category. On top of that we have free tools such as the Life Energizer System and free book summary’s called Distilled Wisdom.

Like anything, it’s your choice to be responsible for the decisions and purchases that you make, just make sure you totally understand what you a buying and what exactly you are going to get out of it. If you keep attending conferences and seminars and nothing in your life has changed, ask yourself when the email or mailshot for the next one comes through if it would be a good investment to attend it? That’s the nub of it really, you are investing your own money in in yourself, in these times of credit crunch make sure you do it wisely.

Filter out the fluffy feel good rubbish

My last point, and it’s one that I reckon a few people will connect with, there is an awful lot of crap out there that is branded personal development and you need to be aware of it. In my time I’ve read far too much fluff and self help clap trap that has not has a positive impact on me whatsoever. Why would it? It has no substance, nothing that I can embrace or am willing to follow through with to create a positive change.

It’s all very well some well intentioned or otherwise person telling you that you can have whatever you want, that all your dreams are possible, but it’s just not true! As our Life Coach told us the other day, very few of us could ever reach the heights of Tiger Woods or Tom Cruise, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t aspire or work towards our dreams, it just means that you need to be rational and practical about them.

Have you fluff filter active at all times in order that you dont waste your precious time and energy focusing on fuzzy, feel food emotions that aren’t going to give you real change in your life. When you find something good, you should seek to apply what you have learnt and continue to do so for a lifetime!