This Week's Insight

The Drug of Approval

We all like the approval of our peers, our friends – even our families! We all like to feel appreciated and valued. And what we don’t realise is that the vast majority of those from whom we seek approval really don’t give a damn.

And, yet, from our earliest years, we have been taught to depend upon approval – whether it was being applauded for singing our party piece as a youngster, or being one of the lads as a teenager, all this need for belonging or approval takes us light years away from being all that we can be.

Ask many of my clients about how people, whose approval they previously sought have fallen by the wayside as they themselves seek out a more meaningful, fulfilling and exceptionally successful life. Ask them how many of their erstwhile friends really rejoiced when they became more successful, more circumspect, more focused, less prone to the swings and roundabouts of seeking approval from the crowd.

Why seek approval from that crowd – they’re mainly normal people, they’re all mad. Who, in their right mind, would seek to ingratiate themselves to lunatics? We should spare our energy from being wasted wondering what others think of us – they don’t – they’re too busy spending their time wondering what we think of them – it’s a merry dance that has nothing to do with the reality of what’s actually going on in the here and now.

What you need to do is get comfortable within your own skin, get to know the real you intimately – then, you can simply say to yourself “I approve of me”

LATEST NEWS AND INFO

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This Week's Personal Development Video Seminar - "Normal People are Lazy"

Are you too lazy to live your dream? Research indicates that so-called "normal" people are not too uncomfortable enough in their repetitive "not-too-bad" daily lives to do anything about achieving their goals or dreams or, for that matter, even sticking to the odd New Year's Resolution. Yet, all you have to do is make a tiny time commitment, only a few minutes each day, to change all the other 24 hours of everyday into a life of effortless happiness and success - on your terms... Watch the video...

The Free Weekly Business & Personal Development	Issue Number: 35
Video Ezine from Gurdy.Net	August 10, 2009

This Week's Book

Genesis Unveiled - Ian Lawton

ISBN 1-85227-028-4

In a ground-breaking reappraisal of the most revered ancient texts and traditions from around the globe, Ian Lawton uncovers startling evidence that could change the way we think about our origins. The texts point to a lost ‘golden race’ that walked the earth tens of thousands of years ago and who held a far more sophisticated worldview than we readily associate with early man. There exists a universal mythology of fallen angels and sages bringing wisdom and civilisation to the earth. Lawton has spent ten years analysing the foundations of this belief and has formulated an extraordinary hypothesis: that the evolution of the modern human race received its most supreme cultural impetus around 100,000 years ago – the time of the first ritual burials – when highly advanced souls first incarnated in human form. These ‘angels’ taught their fellow humans that the soul lived on after death; that the physical world around them was not the only reality and that higher states of consciousness could be achieved by following a spiritual path. However, the texts also reveal that this worldview became increasingly marginalised, replaced by a preoccupation with the material and physical world until, ultimately, the forgotten race perished in a worldwide catastrophe of 11,500 years ago – at the end of the last Ice Age. With chapters on mythology, evolution, archaeology and science, Genesis Unveiled is a remarkable and scholarly work that bravely combines history, philosophy and theoretical physics to spectacular effect. Enlightening and educational, this impressive analysis of how the world’s secular and religious belief systems have failed to properly interpret records of our extensive cultural prehistory attempts to provide credible answers to the most timeless and profound questions: where to we come from and why are we here? Above all, it argues that the hidden history of our forebears has profound implications for the human race at the start of the twenty-first century.

Publisher's Note

Don’t let the title put you off – this book is essentially a compendium of extracts from some very ancient Eastern and native writings and spiritual traditions that goes some way towards proving that long ago, our ancestors had a far better understanding of awareness, life, peace and happiness than us so-called civilized people have - Willie Horton

Every week we take a look at a real-life story that simply proves that so-called normal people are 'all over the place'!

A couple of ski seasons back, friends of ours here in the village (yes, I do have friends!) had their long-standing best friends to stay for a week – husband, wife and two teenage children.

The week started with the visiting best friend, Mark, telling his hosts that he didn’t like their taste in music – but, not to worry, he’d brought a selection of his own CDs! He then explained how he only ate Weetabix (a wheat cereal) and sliced toast for breakfast – and that he simply couldn’t eat “the French muck!” every morning – they shouldn’t bother to get it for him. He then proceeded to go back down the valley to buy his own breakfast supplies.

Ski lessons started – the visitors embraced the challenge with gusto apart from Mark who, having never put a foot on a ski before, began to explain to their ski instructor that her approach to teaching was all wrong. He tried to get a different instructor but the resort was full and, as a result, I think she took pleasure in torturing him for the rest of the week.

Our friends then suggested that they take a day off work to meet the visitors on the slopes for lunch. “Don’t bother your ass!” responded Mark “The restaurants up high are appalling.” Mark’s long-suffering wife, Delia, confided in our friend later “Mark goes back down to the car park each lunchtime – he brought a supply of dried fruit and nuts with him on the holiday!”

You know the old saying, everyone’s a fruit and nutcase!! More of Mark next week!!

IMPORTANT - The Gurdy Online Workshop

From some of your comments, it seems that not many people realise that my long-running personal development workshops have been developed into a full, step-by-step Online Workshop - with 29 video seminars (varying in length from 8 to 15 mins), lots of self-exploratory questionnaires and 30 "mental exercises".

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That's because there's a good deal more in the Online Workshop than I could ever cram into a two-day workshop - and, of course, all this comes to you at a small fraction of the cost of the face-to-face workshop.

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Lead Article

Alternative Medicine!

by Willie Horton www.gurdy.net

For many years, Eastern medicine – acupuncture, Vedic medicine – was termed “alternative” by a Western society whose medical traditions could only be described as youthful or adolescent by comparison. As an Ayurvedic surgeon from Cambridge said to me last Autumn, “If I’d studied conventional surgery at somewhere like Stanford or Harvard, I’d be using text books that are fifty years old, at most. In Bangalore, I was using texts that were five thousand years old.” But the “developed world” knows best!

I’ve been talking to a variety of business people – people suffering from the stresses and strains of the current global economic environment – over the last few weeks. It’s a case of “same old, same old” – to quote one of my clients – people immersed in the communal self-pity of a self-destructing economic super-class for whom enough was always “please, Sir, can I have some more!” Surely, if there was ever a crying need for alternative medicine, this is it!

As I write these words, I prepare myself for a breakfast session with a large audience of professionals and business people – seeking some insights into how one might ride out the current economic storm. Being business people, they are used to complex advice – with the associated price tag – to what, are in fact, very simple problems. Whether it be “three-sixty degree feedback”, strategic analysis, corporate cultural audit, “dashboarding” or whatever (there should be a whole dictionary of deliberately overly complex business jargon – maybe there is!) these are the corporate equivalent of modern medicine, when the business world is actually in dire need of alternative approaches – alternative medicine!

If you stop to reflect for a moment, you will discover that everything in life – whether that be relationships, business, family matters – is very, very simple. It’s only us who complicate it. I run a small business – having been doing so successfully for almost fourteen years. Before that, I ran or partly ran larger organisations. The challenges, pitfalls and problems are the same – the only difference is scale. Regardless of the size of organisation – or apparently complex relationship or family issues – you might have, a little reflection is a major help.
Take time out – perhaps even only an hour – to reflect (not think through or problem solve) – to do nothing at all and let yourself be inspired. As I’ve said to many people, the Buddha reputedly became enlightened after searching for decades, whilst simply sitting under a tree. And the penny finally dropped for Sir Isaac Newton (or was it an apple!) when he was doing much the same thing. We all need to allow ourselves to be inspired – but we all need the mental space in which to allow that happen. This does not require three-sixty degree feedback, dashboarding or God knows what – it requires space, time and an eventual understanding that everything is simple – so don’t complicate it.

In giving yourself space, a few key things become blindingly obvious – what are the really important things we need to focus on (a client recently told me that he sort of knew what they were but was paralysed by “gloom and doom” induced panic) – what are the things we’re doing that we shouldn’t be doing (not always obvious until you take that all important one step back) – why are we in this at all (whether that’s a business or a relationship, very often the fact that you’ve been doing it for a long time blinds you to the fact that maybe you should either be doing something else or doing what you’re doing whole-heartedly) – what do we want out of it (you need to ensure that you have your priorities right and know, in as far as that’s possible, what you’re definition of success is).

Armed with a little clarity of mind, everything becomes simple – and a definitive course of action becomes clear. The problem is that the normal mind is clogged with noise and (according to research 50,000 random pieces of) garbage. The normal mind is incapable of seeing the blindingly obvious, because the same research tells us that the normal mind only sees what it expects to see. Ask the normal person how they are, and they’ll invariably tell you that they’re “not too bad” – expect “not-too-bad” and you’ll never perceive just how effortlessly and exceptionally successful you can be.

So, we need to get back to basics, administer a dose of alternative medicine. We need to see the wood for the trees and smell the roses – all corny old sayings that, if you stop to reflect for a moment, you will find have a deeper meaning. And therein lies the key – put some time aside every single day for reflection, to develop your clarity of mind, to enable you expect what would normally be unexpected and to thereby achieve effortless success and happiness.