Willie Horton's Personal Development Ezine

A LITTLE SELF CONTROL WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE

You create your very own version of reality. Psychological research, stretching back to the 1930s, proves beyond doubt that the way that you think controls the way that you behave and the way that you behave creates your life. Your state of mind, or mood, dictates the way that you feel about every single situation and every single person that you encounter, moment to moment, each day of your life. Your mood dictates how you react to every perceived threat or opportunity, insult or compliment. You're in a mood, of one sort or another, all of the time and, unfortunately, you are actually incapable of controlling it. Your own mood is automatically dictated by your subconscious mind. And , left to its own devices, your subconscious mind will always choose - it's its default choice - to focus on what psychologists call your “stored knowledge” – everything that you learned about yourself and how the world works way back during your formative years. In other words, today's 'reality' is entirely dictated by things that happened to you or for you years or decades ago.

For over seven decades, research has proven time and time again that normal people cannot pay attention to what is actually taking place right here right now. Sure, we really do think that we know what’s going on - but we see everything through a fog of formative years' conditioning. Yes, we really do think that we’re taking real action when, in fact, we are do nothing more than automatically reacting to how our subconscious interprets current events. And our subconscious mind's interpretation is based on what might be best described as preconceived notions that are way past their sell-by date! Think about it for just a moment. If you knew how to act rather than react, would you get upset by something that will mean nothing tomorrow? Would you annoy your boss who holds your career in the palm of his or her hand? Would you lose your temper with your kids and make matters worse? Would you even get annoyed when someone pulls out in front of you in rush hour traffic?

But it gets even worse than that. If you know that you don't know what's actually going on, would you deliberately sabotage yourself with stupid and useless thoughts that make you feel inadequate? Would you deliberately miss a potentially life-changing opportunity because you think that you’re too shy? Would you collapse into a nervous heap when you’re called to the podium to make your presentation? Would you be lazy? Would you be grumpy? Would you suffer from stress? Would you crumple under pressure? None of these things make any sense – and yet that's how normal people behave most of the time – no wonder the World Health Organization believes that stress will be the biggest killer of the 21st century.

Normal people – and that incluldes you and me to a greater or lesser extent – are totally out of control. If you find that you're unhappy with yourself or your life, if there are things that you would like to change about you, your work or your life, if you’d like to achieve more or be more relaxed and chilled, it has nothing to do with what is actually happening to you or for you – it is simply the result of a subconscious mind that is out of control - yours. You might long for, wish or want for better times, greater things to happen, to be calmer, more assertive, more attractive or even have more money. But you know from your own bitter experience that life doesn’t always work that way. You think that you know, deep down, that you’re not courageous enough to take the kind of brave decisions that exceptionally successful people take. You’re wrong, you only think that life is what it is, you only think that you’ve got to work hard to be a success, you only think that the truly great things in life are beyond you. And every single one of those useless thoughts that tie you down and hold you back have absolutely nothing to do with real reality – all that crap is simply a figment of a subconscious mind that is lost in a past long gone.

Now, don't get me wrong, you cannot control your life – no one can. But you can seriously influence every aspect of your life if you take control of the one and only thing in life over which you can have absolute and total control – your own mood, your own state of mind. You’ve got to drag your subconscious mind away from its obsession with the past - sometimes, you'll have to drag it kicking and screaming! You must make it your business to re-learn how to pay attention to the reality of the present moment. This is something that you could do effortlessly as a child, so you don't have to learn anything new. You must consciously and deliberately set out to train your mind to come back to reality. A small commitment – perhaps only five or ten minutes each day – will change your life beyond all recognition. Those few minutes each day need to be spent in re-learning how to pay attention to what your five senses are actually telling you - what is being seen, felt, heard, smelled and tasted in the moment – without your warped subconscious mind putting its own irrelevant spin on things.

If you actually do go to the trouble of re-learning how to be present, you will take control of your mind and, because your own mind creates your behaviour, you will create a life based on who you really are, what you really feel, what you really want and what you can really achieve.