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This Week's Personal Development Article

Very Best Wishes for 2010

The Choice is Yours

What kind of a day are you having today?   Because, it doesn’t matter what day of the week it is – Monday or Friday – it’s a beautiful day.   If you’re not having your perfect day today, then you’re wasting the only opportunity you have right now to be effortlessly happy and successful – doesn’t matter where you are, who you’re with or separated from, what you’ve got to do – it’s you that makes it a beautiful day.   It’s what’s going on in your head – and only in your head – that makes the moment what you think it is. 

If you’re waiting for your beautiful day to happen – waiting  for better times around the corner – then you’re not fully living in the only time and place you have – here and now – today.    You have a choice – and it’s a very simple, moment to moment choice.    Your first option is that you can choose to allow your subconscious mind to pay attention to the old self-doubts, the childhood “snapshots” with which we were all programmed during our formative years.   You can decide to listen to what many of my clients call the “voices in my head” – the one’s that whisper “No, you can’t!”   This first choice – of effectively letting your mind run you – is the default choice for all normal people – and, research shows, that there’s a 96% probability that you’re normal.   As a normal person, you may not realise that you have this moment to moment choice, that it’s something that is being decided by you subconsciously, moment to moment.  But that’s neither here nor there – you do have a choice and it is a choice that, by default, you make completely and utterly mindlessly.  After all, otherwise, you’d be aware that you’re making the choice!

However, as a potentially responsible abnormal adult, you have an alternative to the option that we’ve just explored.   You can choose to pay attention to what is actually going on in the present moment, rather than paying attention to the past.  First of all, the past is long gone.  Research indicates that most of us live in our past – albeit subconsciously.   Rarely do we learn from our past and move on to the only place and time we have – the here and now.   By the “here and now” I actually mean, quite simply, this present moment – and this present moment, moment to moment.  The present includes what you are actually doing – or, more to the point, supposed to be doing – just not.  Normal people only 1% do what they’re supposed to be doing, whilst 99% of their mental capability pays attention to thoughts like “I don’t like this job!” “I’m bored!” “I wish I was somewhere else!” or, at our deepest level, those voices that I mentioned earlier.

Using your mind in this way is like trying to run the hundred metre dash having deliberately, just before the start, tied your shoe laces together.  Not only are you never going to win, you’re going to fall flat on your face before you even get going.  Isn’t that what normal people do every day?  Isn’t that why normal people get fed up, worn down?  Isn’t that why the normal life is “not so bad”?

But you and I have the chance to be abnormal – or to set new norms for those of us who want to rise head and shoulders out of the humdrum of everyday normal life.   You and I can choose – and deliberately choose – our second option: Pay attention to NOW.   If you don’t, you’ll continue being normal, you’ll continuing working to succeed, or, indeed, working hard just to be not so bad.  If you do take control of your mind, by directing your attention to the present moment, you suddenly change everything.  Why?  Because, moment to moment, each decision we make takes us down a particular path where we have further moment to moment decisions to make.  In other words, our daily lives are full of thousands upon thousands of possibilities and opportunities – all lost on the normal person, who trundles from one mindless non-choice to the next.

Recent research indicates that your ability to be happy and successful – to hit that “peak performance zone” – is intimately correlated with whether or not you’re paying attention to the here and now.   When we hit a natural high as a result of an extraordinary life experience that “takes our breath away”, parts of our brain, never otherwise activated, light up – because we  engrossed in that moment.   Research proves that the process also works the other way round – deliberately choose to engross yourself in the moment and you will hit that natural high.  That is the secret to paying attention to Now – engross yourself in the moment.  Use all of your senses to experience the moment – even if that moment is something that your silly, confused, normal mind thinks you don’t like.  Just engross yourself.   In doing so, you become more effective – because you’re more “all there” – more efficient, because you’re really doing what you’re doing – and you’ll have presence – simply because you will be more present.   And, as you know, presence is the hallmark of all highly, exceptionally or abnormally successful people.

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