The Bi-Weekly Personal Development Ezine from Gurdy.Net

MAKING SENSE OF YOUR LIFE

All too often in our daily lives we find ourselves in situations in life that could be described as less than ideal, whether it’s in our job, our relationship or, indeed, just in terms of how we feel about ourselves. Did you ever wonder how you got there? Well, the answer is extraordinarily simple – it’s your own doing! We make choices on a moment to moment basis and all the choices that you have made in your adult life have added up to get you to where you find yourself in this present moment. Unfortunately, however, we are completely unaware of most of the choices that we make because we make them subconsciously – or our subconscious mind makes the choice for us – in other words our choices are made for us automatically.

That’s great, you might say, you don’t have to contend with having to decide on every little thing that you have to do – lots of stuff gets done for you without your having to think about it at all! For example, you don’t have to decide how to brush your teeth each morning, your subconscious mind simply gets the job done for you effortlessly. Of course that is great – but only up to a point, because, in absolutely everything that you do throughout the normal routine of your day, your subconscious mind is making similar automatic choices. And your subconscious mind doesn’t make its choices based on where you are, what you are doing or should be doing, who you are with or what is actually going on. Your subconscious mind makes its decisions based on what psychology calls your stored knowledge. Again, you might say, that’s cool, I’ve been learning as I go and don’t have to relearn stuff to enable me get through my normal day. Again, that is cool – but only up to a point. In fact, you haven’t been learning as you go – psychology confirms that you have learned precious little about how to behave and how to get the most out of your life since you were eleven or twelve years old.

You see, the big problem is that your moment to moment decisions are made for you based on a body of stored knowledge that was largely learned before you reached the age of eleven or twelve. So, if you’re now thirty five years old and you meet someone who might be important in progressing your life, your business or your career, your subconscious mind will dictate your evaluation of that person, what is taking place, your resultant choices and your consequent behaviour – based on data, or your stored knowledge, that is more than twenty years out of date.

This is the way that the normal mind operates – and you are completely unaware that it is happening. Little wonder that normal people cannot see the wood for the trees. Little wonder that normal people miss out on so many opportunities to better themselves that are, quite literally, staring them in the face each and every day – yes, every single day! Little wonder that normal people keep making the same mistakes – repeating the same failed patterns of behaviour that have got them into those less than ideal life situations. Little wonder that the normal life is mundane and repetitive – and that so many normal people feel dissatisfied and unfulfilled.

In order to make more of your life, you’ve got to drag your subconscious mind – it may do a little kicking and screaming – from its automatic obsession with your past into the reality of the present. You’ve got to come to your senses – I mean that literally, you’ve got to reacquaint yourself with what it’s like to fully experience the here and now – seeing, feeling, hearing, smelling and tasting what’s going on. Otherwise you will simply automatically assume that a new person that you meet or a new situation that you encounter is similar to what you’ve experienced before – and you will miss the opportunity to move your life onto a different plane.

On the one hand, however, paying subconscious attention to the here and now is simply something that doesn’t come naturally to us as normal adults. On the other, we were all experts at paying complete attention to the here and now when we were children – before that watershed age of eleven or twelve. We’ve got to relearn how to experience what is really going on in the here and now – because, when we do, we will start taking positive action to change our lives rather than simply and automatically repeating old behavioural patterns that have landed us in our current mundane existence.

So some retraining is required. You can start small, because all great journeys start with the first step. Let your first step be taken tomorrow morning. For once in your adult life, you deliberately and consciously decide how you’re going to brush your teeth – don’t leave the decision up to a crazy mind that’s living in your childhood. It may seem like a puerile exercise – but it will shake your subconscious mind from its deadly slumber and set your mind up to look at everything from a fresh and present perspective. Brushing your teeth with the hand with which you don’t habitually brush your teeth is like going to the mental gym – you need to work out, you need to get mentally fit, at seven o’clock in the morning in the bathroom, when it doesn’t matter – because then you’ll become fighting fit in the cut and thrust of your everyday life and that is when it really does matter. In starting with something so apparently ridiculous as changing the way your brush your teeth, you will change your life.