This Week's Insight
 

Stop Stressing Yourself

 

We all have our moments – whether we just feel flat and can’t put our finger on it, or we’ve got concrete things to worry about.  It seems, nowadays, that many people are worrying about money, for example, an activity that always perpetuates money worries – as I’ve mentioned to you more than once in this Ezine!   We all have cares, big ones or small ones – but what we must not do is worry.   Not only does worry drag us away from being as effective as we possibly can in the here and now, it leads to stress and stress leads to illness.

I was asked by a journalist last week as to the effects of stress on our health.  For starters, the World Health Organization in Geneva believes that stress will be the biggest killer in the twenty first century.   Stress leads to sleeping disorders – and we need quality sleep to physically rejuvenate the body – research has recently suggested that death would occur after being deprived of all sleep for thirteen straight days (how they came to the conclusion I’m not so sure – I assume no one was killed in the process!!).  Seriously though, it’s not just sleep that’s affected by stress.  Loss of appetite, over-release of adrenalin, additional stress on the circulatory system with all the related knock-on effects, irritation of the digestive system – leading to ulcers etc.... it’s a long list.

The WHO, in publicizing their concerns related to stress, also published a list of thirteen recommended ways of combating or avoiding stress in your life.   Apologies to all my pharma clients – there wasn’t a single drug on the list.  The list included listening to music, tai chi, yoga and growing your own vegetables.   The one I would really like to highly is meditation.  Meditation is like a superfood or modern-day penicillin – meditation cures all ills.   Did you meditate this morning?  If not, why not do it now!

This Week's Personal Development Video Seminar - "Routine is the Big Enemy"

The one thing that's stopping you do something different, more effective, more productive, more exciting - life-changing - in your life is that you keep doing the same thing! Makes sense when you think about it - routine is stopping you from having the effortless life that we can all have. And, sooner or later, everything in our lives becomes routine and familiar - and familiarity breeds contempt or, at the very least, mind-numbingly mindlessness. If routine is killing you, routine can also be your saviour - fight the "system" from the inside - here's how.... Watch the video...

The Free Weekly Business & Personal Development
Issue Number: 48
Video Ezine from Gurdy.Net
November 9, 2009
 
© Willie Horton 2009
This Week's Book - is not a book!
This week's suggested book
Tai Chi for Relaxation and Good Health - Wagland and Ip

DVD Ref 7-321900-998673

Can't very well recommend a book after that article! So, here's a really accessible DIY DVD for anyone wishing to explore and practice the branch of Tai Chi devoted to harmonising and raising our vital energy Willie Horton

Hun Yuan Tai Chi 24 Form is the union of internal energy with the physical body.  Once you have learned the twenty four movements, the whole sequence takes only eight minutes and can be easily fit into a busy schedule.  This DVD contains over twelve hours of exercise sequences to help you perfect your understanding of the Form and movement.
Publisher's Note
Just how mad are so-called 'normal' people!!
Every week we take a look at a real-life story that simply proves that so-called normal people are 'all over the place'!

I recently took part in the annual weekend of cleaning the mountains.  Yes, you heard me.   The local communes organize volunteers to get up them thar hills and get rid of all the crap the tourists left behind during the ski season.  And it’s unbelievable – people seem to simply discard almost anything without a care as to what it’s doing to the environment, the wildlife, not to mention the poor sods that have to clean up after them.
But, then again, isn’t this just the normal behaviour of normal people?  I read an article during the summer about how a young girl was rushed to hospital in Dublin after she had stood on the remains of a disposable barbecue set that had been left on the beach with some sand kicked over it to conceal it.   She was one of a number of people who had to receive treatment – there were a lot of broken glass related injuries too.
Couple of questions, therefore, for all of us this Monday morning.   Are you one of those people who put your rubbish in the back of the seat in front of you on airplanes?   Do you use a public toilet with the same care as you use your toilet at home?   Are you one of these people that some of hotelier clients have major problems with – the ones who hit the malls whilst on holidays and leave their hotel bedrooms like a bombsite with discarded shopping backs, wrapping, etc?

I’m sorry for asking – but we need to ask ourselves do we let ourselves go from time to time and, in tolerating little bad habits, we end up living comfortably with big bad habits – ones that are as good as killing us.
Presence - inspiration - leadership.  Learn how to achieve exceptional business success
Latest News and Info
Check out all my videos on YouTube - there are over 300 of them!
Willie's latest article on EzineArticles.com - "Crazy Parents - Crazy Kids"...read the article...
Or Willie's latest article on SelfGrowth.com - "Building a Winning Business Team"...read the article...
Follow Willie on Twitter...click here to sign up to his regular Tweets...

 

Lead Article

Stop Reading Self-Help Books - Seriously

by Willie Horton www.gurdy.net

 

I am forever being contacted by clients recommending a variety of self-help books.  And, yet, a client recently mentioned to me that he had been on a workshop where another participant told him to “Stop reading the books – and start living it!”   The truth is, that you will only find true wisdom within.  You will only find your true potential within.  You don’t have to read others’ experiences or exhortations – you have to, at some point, sooner or later, start walking the talk – you’ve got to do it for yourself.

 

Many – or most – of the self-help books available on the market talk about our inner power, our innate ability to unleash the “giant within”.  However, continually reading books will not do it for you – books contain other people’s wisdom, other people’s experience, other people’s journeys.  You’ve got to take your own journey.   And that journey starts in this very moment – it doesn’t start with a New Year’s Resolution, with some future commitment.    In this very moment, you have, entirely within your own power, the ability to start truly living – way beyond what so-called “normal” people take for living.

You see, “normal” people don’t live – they exist in a pseudo-world of automatic reactive behaviour, based on what they internalised when they were young and impressionable.  In our formative years, we “learned” how the world works, what was possible and impossible, who we are and what our place is in this world of ours.   Research indicates that little (or nothing) of what we learned approximates to the truth of what you and I can really achieve.  Research indicates that we were socialised or normalised, that we live to a set of norms that confine us into an existence which sells us far short of all that we could actually and otherwise be.

The same research indicates that those who follow the norms are predisposed to being negative, believing the negative and mindlessly accepting that life is the way the vast majority of people believe it to be – a struggle, where you have to work hard to be a success, where nothing comes easily, where you live and die on the same set of rails that have been previously travelled by all the other normal people.  Of course, if you buy into that nonsense, that is how your life will turn out – because we all create, through our subconscious beliefs, our very own self-fulfilling prophecies.

Time to wake up from the nightmare!  Time to realise that you have, within your very own self, the innate ability to be all that you can be.  Time to realise that you can create the life that you really, really want because, in the day to day of your current everyday life, you are already creating the life that you expect – it’s just that normal people live down to their expectations.   Decades of research prove conclusively that we experience what we expect to experience, that we perceive what we expect to perceive, that we live the lives we expect to live.

Unfortunately, we are surrounded by normality and find it hard to break free.  Sure, we might like to read about it, might like to dream about it, but most people will die without having realized their wildest dreams, without having realized what normal people perceive as unrealistic ambitions.  These dreams are only wild or unrealistic because they don’t conform to the norms expected of normal people.   These dreams and ambitions are yours for the living if you start using your mind abnormally – the way extraordinarily successful people use their minds.   The only difference between you and people like Bill Gates, Muhammad Ali, Donald Trump, Mahatma Gandhi and all the rest is that those guys refused to accept the norm.

You can turn your back on the drudgery of normal too by changing your state of mind.    Normal people’s minds are in an awful state – one bombarded by 50,000 random thoughts each day, one where their subconscious constantly focused on what was learned during their formative years – a past long gone. 

As I said earlier, now is the moment in which you can change everything.   Now is the moment in which you can start living exceptionally.  There’s no time like the present.  Indeed, now is the only time and place you or I have – doesn’t it make sense that we make the very most we can of the here and now.

This is done by turning your mind’s attention away from the nonsense that is pulling the normal world over your eyes.  This is done by developing – or re-developing, because we could all do it as children, before we became normal adults – your innate, natural ability to invest your precious energy in the present moment.   If you invest your energy in now, you will be more present than the normal person.  You will have what normal people call “presence” – the kind of presence and influence that the people I mentioned earlier on have exercised in their lives.

You invest your energy in the present by paying more attention to the here and now.  You are blessed in that you have, at your disposal, five senses with which you can actively engage to experience the wonder of what is going on now – not what normal people think is going on – but what is actually happening.  You might just find that, in doing so, you’ll find that all the opportunities you need to achieve effortless success are before your very eyes.  Open them.