Entries Tagged 'Personal Development' ↓

2010 has seen me make a lot of habit changes in my life (which you can read about here) and by experiencing this, I’ve learnt so much to pass on to you. Sometimes the changes are big and life altering but often they’re just small things that will help you create days that runs just a little bit more smoother. Here are 12 mini-habits I’ve cultivated.



1. Taking Garbage To The Main Bins

When you’re finished eating, taking the food straight to the outdoor bin gets it off your plate (couldn’t resist) and it’s gone. A great idea is to get rid of your bin from your kitchen which forces you into the habit. You will always have a really clean looking house for when people come around and there will be no lingering smells or overflowing bins.

If I’m going downstairs, I take my paper bin every time, and just nip outside to empty it. It takes literally 10 seconds and keeps my house fresh and neat. This habit works well with a Raw Food Diet which I adopted and blogged about recently.You don’t have to spend forever cleaning dishes because fruit and veg doesn’t stick to the plates like meat. You eat, put the foods in the outdoor bins, rinse your plate and you’re done.

You also start to condition a mental habit which is “I’ll get things done now so they don’t grow into something huge I can’t handle”. This skill will naturally transfer to other areas of your life like your finances, health and relationships. Action will become your first response.



2. Enjoying Washing The Dishes

I genuinely enjoy washing the dishes. I love the warmth and the little rainbows inside the bubbles and the calm centred moment it offers me. Experience the vibrant colours of life. Stroke your face with a hot towel, feel the sharpness of the wind on your skin or the sun on your neck, watch a Dad teaching his son to ride a bike on the local park.

There is beauty in these things. They get you out of thought and in to experiencing this moment. The media industry imprints a view of life upon us to only be really happy in the big moments – weddings, job raises, the birth of a child etc. If this is true then are we due to experience at best average happiness for 99% of our life?

99% of life is small moments and to not appreciate them is a dis-service to yourself and everyone else. An unhappy you is useless to everyone. What sounds, sights and smells can you appreciate right now around you if you chose to? Enjoy your little slice of perfection.



3. Spice Up Dull Tasks

Every day I have to eat 100g of Brazil Nuts as part of my diet, it gets boring quickly. I do things like go for a walk and eat them or spread them throughout the day or eat them with Watermelon or an Orange. If your mind is focused on another task when you perform something boring then the task will get done but you won’t have to suffer through it.

You could listen to music whilst cleaning, return phone calls whilst riding your bike or make plans for tomorrow in your head when you’re sat in a boring meeting. There’s opportunities everywhere once you start looking around and you are only limited by your creativity.



4. Consciously Slow

The “super fast” side of personal development is mostly bogus. People who tell you productivity is about speed usually aren’t productive themselves. They tend to do lots of things but none of the right things and so the slower turtle wins the race. Do you agree with me here? Look at them in their eyes – are they deeply satisfied running about their lives? Do they have the complete lifestyle that you want or do you have a more suitable role model in mind?

I’m enjoying the ride and don’t plan on arriving early. I want to soak up all the experience life has to offer. Change happens in an instant but it takes time to manifest in the physical world so you might as well get comfortable and enjoy the journey. A great way is through slower movement.

Whenever your body is moving fast so is your mind. Consciously slowing down your body will immediately affect your mind and simplify your thoughts creating the space to get out of your thoughts and into experiencing this moment. Not to mention how sexy slow moving people look .



5. Read One Book At A Time

Do you have lots of books strewn around with folded corners and bookmarked pages left half read? Until recently, have about 5 or 6 on the go at any one time. You don’t get much out of books like that. So I developed a system for it. I created a complimentary flowchart diagram to simplify it for you too. It’s based around taking notes on books, digitizing the notes and only keeping in the long term a core selection of under 10 books.

Reading one book at a time increases your consciousness about what you’re reading. You have to finish the book before moving onto the next one so this will force you to pick better quality books so you don’t have to suffer through terrible ones.



6. Plastic Fantastic

Have you ever wondered if you could just never use cash and get by? I do 99% of the time. Places like bars have a minimum price of £2.50 ($5) to use plastic but just buy your friends drink and get them to give the to buy you the next one. We are creative enough to get around this. No coins feels great. My pockets now just hold my cash card, my house key and one pen. Simples!



7. One Pen

I use one pen, and it has my name on it. People know its mine and it’s always with me. Doing this will make sure that you never have that feeling on the phone or when you pat all your pockets looking for those darn elusive pens! Plus, it looks great when you’re always prepared with a pen.



8. Paperize Your Productivity

When it comes to staying organized I stick with good ol’ pen and paper. It’s so easy to get drawn in on-line to the latest shiniest new application and we start to forget the original purpose is to be productive. With pen and paper its easy. There’s no adverts to distract you, you just write your goals and they stay there. If in doubt, write it out.



9. Stop Talking So Much

We have two ears and one mouth. Is God having a little joke with us here? Some say he’s showing us to listen twice as much as we talk. Talking uses a lot of energy. Do you ever find that people who talk a lot are trying so hard to connect with the other person but the other person just wants someone to listen! It doesn’t work. By doubling your listening in conversations, you will connect much deeper, appear profound and save yourself lots of energy.



10. Pay off Lots At Once On Smaller Bills

If you have a small monthly bill then consider opening a new account and depositing 6 months worth of payments and setting up a direct debit. You decide what a small amount is. This unloads the hassle from your mind and allows you to concentrate on other areas of your life safe in the knowledge that this one is sorted for the medium term. Simply remind yourself to restart payments by writing a reminder in your diary a couple of weeks in advance.



11. Always See An Opportunity to grow

Develop a certainty that every event and person in life is there to make me grow. If someone is annoying you, you can grow from it. It’s an opportunity to develop your humility, patience, unconditional love and even humour. It could be the push that you need to find a new group of friends or an opportunity to show your partner your moral strength. There is always an opportunity for growth.

Can doing yard work for an elderly relative be framed as a chance to catch up and get some exercise? Could you frame working at a dull job for a while as disciplining yourself to be persistent for when you finally quit and work for yourself? Can’t your annoying boss be a lesson is laughing at yourself and humility?



12. Benefit From Social Networking Without Wasting Time

I use a site called “SocialOomph“ (The free option) and Twitters Official Facebook Application (Always Free). Combined, they can save you lots of time with social networking. The Facebook/Twitter Application lets you update Facebook via Twitter. I set it up so every Tweet appears immediately on my Facebook, reaching all of my online friends in one swoop. The coolest bit about this is that SocialOomph allows you to schedule Tweets.

You set a Tweet now, and it appears at a time of your choosing. In the morning I might write 3 statuses that are published at 9am, 2pm and 9pm. You can update your friends on how your day has been without ever having to visit the tempting Facebook interface and let it post for you. I give myself a timed 30 minutes in the morning on Facebook and that’s it for the day. It’s so efficient and I heartily recommend it. It spares you energy and lots of time to pour into other areas of your life that excite you more.

I’ve read a lot of personal development books over the years and along the way you sometimes read about a person who leaves a mark on you. Long after you’ve or read about them you still find yourself daydreaming about what they are like. We all love meeting people who stretch our limits of what is possible for a human to achieve because on some level we want to know that we can achieve far more than where we are right now.

Reading about role models can make you uncomfortable sometimes because they might be doing so much better than you in an area of your life that it makes you feel like you’ve failed. Try your best not to dwell on these thoughts though and let them be your inspiration rather than feeling shame or inadequacy.

I like picking role models in my life and surround myself with them. Why do you think people put up posters of Muhammad Ali or Martin Luther King? Their subconscious sees it and it becomes part of their personality. If you read enough about them and have their thoughts circulating around your head that you will become like them. As Buddha said, we are an accumulation of all we have thought. It’s impossible to have thoughts in your head over the long term and not be affected by them.

A few of my role models are :

• Eckhart Tolle - My main spiritual mentor. This is the man that truly sparked my understanding of “the self/ego” and realizing that on a level beyond physical things. I am already perfect. Before this all personal development felt selfish but now I have a clearer understanding of what my true nature is I don’t feel this anywhere near as often. His first book is easily the most influential of my life, bar none. It allowed me to feel a deep unshakable peace unlike anything else I’ve ever experienced and a knowing that all was good in the world. He inspires me to stay present and watch the craziness of the human mind.
• Lao Tzu - Although he’s dead, I feel his book the Tao Te Ching contains eternal wisdom and is one of the deepest spiritual book around today. Eckhart Tolle has been carrying around a copy of it with him for decades. He also speaks to my creativity. He uses a minimalist kind of poetry to connect with you.
• Dean Karnazes (Runner) – This man is all about persistence. He ran 100 miles in under 24 hours non stop, ran a 200 mile race on his own and his book “Ultra Marathon Man” is incredible.
• Steve Pavlina – Before reading of Steve Pavlina, I was a typically convinced Atheist (don’t worry there isn’t a Christian rant coming up!). I read some of his posts and found that he was really logical with his thinking in some areas which connected with me deeply but he also wrote on spirituality! This was a shock to my system because to me you couldn’t combine the too. I found my spiritual side through him and he is the biggest influence in my life in terms of cutting edge personal development. He’s where all my passion for personal development comes from. I thought his blog was good but his book is just on another level and helped me achieve so much in 2010 already.

You’ll often find that your role models combined will reflect a mixture of your current personality and where you’re heading.Your role models will change over time. People can only teach you so much and there is such a variety out there that you should never stop looking to learn more.

Who would you say are your top role models in your life at the moment? What does this say about where you are and where you are heading? Do you feel a deep connection with them or are you just answering the questions?!?!

Role Models Are Within Us

I once heard that reading a book is like sitting down with the greatest minds in history. I wanted to take it a little further and actually sit with them but I’m not into digging up graves. Let me explain.

I know that all other people are a projection of my mind and take that as a given. If you don’t agree with me here, show me where “other people” exists. Lao Tzu doesn’t exist anywhere in external reality. He’s dead but I still think about him so where is he alive? I have a mental concept of him from all I’ve read and thought about. All I have ever had of Eckhart Tolle is a mental concept as I’ve never met the guy. Unless you’re directly interacting with something right now you can never be 100% sure if it exists, can you?

Asking For Guidance

The next step here is in your mind to ask for guidance from them. Sit down with them in a room in your mind and ask them questions and listen for the answers. Be prepared with a blank document as this can be seriously realistic and I sometimes find myself typing 600 miles an hour from the answers that I’m receiving.

Really interact with them though. Try and experience them with as much depth as you can. Use your vision, smell, feeling etc and deepen the feeling that you’re actually there. I find it useful to make their characters seem realistic and life like. The have bodies, regular clothing, habitual tendencies and I say goodbye at the end etc.

You will create the experience of sitting with someone you truly admire and to your mind this was real. It’s like if someone tells you that you are going to die your mind will react with an immediate state of fear. If it’s one of your friends calling you playing about then there was no actual danger but you still experienced the fear. Your mind believes what it’s told.

What I love most about this technique is that I know that the answers are within me. They’re not in some external place that I have to travel to or strive for. I have all the answers and it’s just a process of finding them and using the right techniques.

Problem Solving

This is really useful when facing a problem in your life where the answer is not clear and you could do with multiple perspectives from outside of your own repetitive thoughts. You can go to all of your role models and ask each of them for their view and then go through your notes. I was amazed the first time I did this and honestly thought it was a stupid idea but the experience is eye opening. When I got up, I felt like I’d been chatting along with people who I admired and it made me feel fantastic!

Strengthen Your Connection

Maybe the person you have as your role model has a biography or autobiography and you could read that. This really helps you get into the same state of being as them. Listening to Tony Robbins motivational tapes every day will get you into a state very similar to his and the same with Eckhart Tolle for spiritual depth. You are the combination of the top 5 people you associate with. If you can’t physically meet them then this technique works wonders.

If you have no role models at the moment then that’s fine. Pick something that you’d like to become amazing at and then go and read about someone who is already where you want to be and by developing your mental concept of them you can ask them questions.

It’s really just a technique for accessing a higher self you but works really well. To be honest, it works just as well to create a totally fictitious character who has all the characteristics that you want and talk to this person. Now you can connect and recieve guidance from all these amazing people without ever moving a muscle.