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This Week's Personal Development Article

TAKING COURAGEOUS DECISIONS

We’re in our eighth great year living in the French Alps.  When we upped and left Ireland in 2002, many friends and clients remarked that we were taking a courageous decision – after all, our children were thirteen, eleven and eight years old at the time and were establishing their own little lives.  Similarly, I walked away from a big job in banking in 1996 to set up my practice as a consultant and mentor – what I’m still doing today.  Once again, at the time, many people told me that I was brave and courageous to do that.   But, then, I recently received an email from an Irish client – on his first day in Sydney, Australia, having moved, lock, stock and barrel with wife and family, for a new life.  He joins another client, in Auckland, New Zealand, from whom I hear regularly, who took a similar plunge a couple of years back.

As we all agree, these “courageous” decisions are only courageous to the normal person.   They are obvious logical next steps for those who have turned their back on pathetic normality.   You might think I’m being harsh in labelling normality as pathetic but, when you consider that the normal person uses about 1% of their mind to experience and live the present moment and, as a consequence, end up existing rather than living, pathetic just about sums it up.

To achieve happiness and success you have to be different.   There are vast swathes of data that confirm that normal lives are “lived” in fear and worry – about money, self-image, insecurity at work – and that normal people settle for their lot in life, given that the majority of them express a dislike of their work.  But normal people also express another fear – a fear of being different, that, if they are different, they’ll lose some of their friendships, that people will look askance at their non-conformity and that they will, somehow, live apart from all the people and things to which they have become accustomed.

So, what price are you prepared to pay for being effortlessly happy and successful?  Are you prepared to have people who really don’t think twice about you fall away from your circle of acquaintances?  Are you prepared to devote a few minutes each day to clearing the garbage and trash from your normal muddled mind?   Are you prepared to forfeit the mundane of your everyday life for a journey of self-discovery and abundance?  Because, if you are, the decisions that are viewed as courageous and brave by normal fearful people will become a natural and integral part of your way of living, of your daily life.

I mentioned that a commitment of a few minutes each day is required.   Just five or ten minutes will take the other twenty- three hours and fifty minutes to a whole new level.  What do you need to do?   Well, the constant noise that distracts the normal mind needs to be ignored – you’ll never switch it off, it’s part of your default adult state of mind, you simply need to learn how to ignore the noise.  This is done by dragging your attention away from that noise and placing it firmly in the reality that is going on before your very eyes – in the here and now.  The process is simplicity itself – you simply re-train your mind to experience what your five senses are telling you.  Your normal adult state of mind constantly interprets and re-interprets the data coming in from your five senses.  But, because you use your so-called “stored knowledge” – which is based on your normal life – to interpret the here and now, you misinterpret what’s actually going on and react accordingly. 
You need to cut out your interpretive “skill” for a few minutes each day and experience what you see, feel, hear, smell and taste.  Doing this for a few minutes each day will sensitize you to real reality during the course of your normal day – you will see things for what they are, you will no longer see them through the fear, anxiety, stress and self-doubt which are part and parcel of normal living.  You will be liberated from your own perceived fears, you will enter the flow of life.  And that flow will take you to places that the normal mind cannot imagine, it will prompt you to move in directions that become so obvious that you will wonder how you didn’t perceive these things before.  You will take decisions, not through some tangled decision making process, they will simply and obviously become the right things to do.  You will take bold, brave and courageous decisions – but they will no longer be brave or courageous – they will simply be obvious.

This different life starts whenever you choose and there is no time like the present – for each present moment is an opportunity for you to start living.  The alternative is horrible – that you wander aimlessly and mindlessly through “life” and wind up an embittered old man or woman, ruing the turnings that you hadn’t got the guts to take.   The choice is yours – your life is in your own hands.