Changing your life's mind isn't that difficult, afterall

(photocredit: linh ngan)

Mental Reprogramming Made Easy - 30 days to whatever new you that you could want...

Here's today's inputs:

• "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell;
• his quoted concept that it takes 10,000 hours (about 10 years) to master a new skill;
• another concept that it takes 28 days to change any habit;
• Google Reader as a method for changing your inputs.

One review of Gladwell's book (in a farming magazine, no less) says that a person's success (or failure) has been building up for a long time, that anyone suddenly hitting the popular wave as an expert in their field - well, they've been studying for this moment their whole life. Or at least devoting the last 10 years to it seriously.

Which explains the concept Napoleon Hill (and others) have said, that most life successes show up when the person is mid-life.

I've started taking my own advice and beginning to read my Google Reader daily. (One tip is to set it up to just read the headlines as a quick filter.) What I ran into is exactly what I thought - I didn't want to read a lot of this stuff, and so will have to continue to weed and prune my "garden". And there is a lot of other stuff I want to surround myself with.

The trick is to do what you really like to do in life. Things that bring you pleasure, that get you excited. And then do these in a flat-out fashion that really helps other people improve theirs.

After 30 days, you'll get an inkling of how to do it. And if you switch fields away from anything you really are already expert at - well, it's going to take ten years before you're really good at it. (So keep a part-time day job, or move in with family if you can stand it.)

But if you take stock of what you have always been successful at, and all your skills, you can probably figure out where you've been headed all this time - at least the general direction. Ray Kroc started McDonald's after a lifetime as a salesman. He was 40-something at the time, and stumbled onto a pair of brothers who really knew how to make french fries... Died rich and happy. Stories of Microsoft's founder's success show that he played a lot of poker - which enabled him to sell IBM an operating system for their new PC when he didn't even have one.

Anyway, you've been tooling around for quite a while and now you can do something about it. All this self-re-programming stuff is just installing a hopped-up carburetor on your factory-built engine - supercharge it.

1. Surround your self with stuff you are really interested in -
   
2. and look up your back-trail to see what you are already good at.
3. Then, find your "unique selling proposition" and go out to conquer the world! (Or at least a sizeably remunerative part of it...)

7 Life-changing Principles: The ways it's all laid out - too easy, but we make it complicated

(photo credit: turtlemom_nancy)

There are some simple truths which can make your life easier - if you believe in them.

Here's 7 simple principles you can improve your life with and go about living a much easier life. But I don't tell you that you have to believe in these, only that you can...

1. The world is what you think it is. This is one of the oldest principles out there - and only survived through oral history. But it surfaces in every religion and every philosophy there is. Modern "positive thinking" also adopted this from older New Thought writings, which in turn lifted them from Eastern beliefs - which were influenced by that older oral tradition. "Thoughts are things." "We become what we think about." "What you can conceive and believe, you can achieve." All these are the same concept.
   
   
2. Now, after that, examination shows that there is no such thing as "chance." Everything is caused in this universe. If something "happens" to you which is a "surprise" - just go back and figure out why you left this up to someone else to decide. Of course, you have to really believe that the first item above is true before you can say with any certainty that this second one could be.
   
   
3. Another principle from those older (Huna) principles: "There are no limits." Essentially, this means that we are all connected somehow. Quantum physicists have been proving this for nearly a half-century by now. Of course, this tends to support #2 above, and also #1. But realistically, you have to believe in #1 before you'll believe #3 - so it's a bit of a self-serving cyclical belief structure. This starts to explain this universe we live in - if you take the quantum view of things. These scientists discovered that what a person thinks determines what happens to him - but also that we are connected to each other in very strong ways, regardless of how separated we may be physically. Which leads us to:
   
   
4. All your thoughts are shared - and so are everyone else's. Braden and others have gone down this route. But you can figure this is where some of your "inspiration" comes from. We are permanently connected to each other and our "separateness" is a convenient fiction. Of course, this explains psychic phenomenon and a few other things. You've probably ran into anecdotal evidence of this in your own life from time to time. Such as a mother and child knowing when it's time to feed, as well as when the other is under stress.
   
   
5. So, practically, there is nothing you can't know and understand. Tapping into this would then be a way to gain advantages in your life - personally, financially, socially. And if you look up the subject of genius, you'll see that you can find ways to bring out your own native genius abilities - which methods have been known throughout the centuries, by many different writers in many different times and places. Only our modern Internet Age has made all this data readily available for anyone with an Internet connection to find.
   
   
6. You can change your personality into anything you want or need it to be. This is known to be true completely outside of any of 1-5 above. But those earlier 5 points explain why it happens. Thoughts determine actions, which consistently performed produce habits, which then form personality. Any habit can be changed (according to many recurring and overlapping studies) in about 30 days - if you simply force yourself to do something different every time you are about to do something "habitually" you want to change. People can start drinking water every time they want a cigarette - and wean themselves off that physical need. (Which is one explanation why some people gain weight when they quit smoking - they can substitute food for cigarettes.) Of course this means that criminals and pedophiles can change their minds. And there are even some studies which show that changing your personality (habitual ways of thinking) will change your DNA to a greater or lesser degree. And of course, that throws another larger set of studies saying that people are genetically one way or the other - well, I love that study which says 50% of all scientific studies contradict the other 50%.
   
   
7. "Effectiveness is the measure of truth." And so, you choose what you want to believe based on whether it's workable for you or not. Means you can throw this post away, along with all the data above and keep living anyway you want. The final proof of anything lies only within you. And people will continue to find things in their lives which support any way they like to live. Liberals always find support for liberal policies, conservatives likewise. Criminals can always justify their actions, and the religious can find some scripture which supports any particular way of action they choose. Like Henry Ford said, “If you think you can do it, or you think you can't do it, You are right.”
   

So there you have it. If you believe in what I've gone over above, then you've got it made. And if you think I'm full of it, you're also on the right road. Because either way, you're right.

I post this because maybe you had an inkling that you could have more control over your own life, or that you could get out of a stressful situation you are going through. These above principles are just ways you can change your life and live it easier.

How do these make your life easier? Well, when you are happier, life is easier overall than when you are all stressed out, right? And if you can change your mind about something you find you don't want to keep doing, then you can do things you really like to do. Doing things you like to do as a routine basis will help you be happier all the time. So, by changing your thoughts - and tuning into positive, helpful thoughts of people around you - you can then change your life into anything you want it to be.

But of course, that's your choice. And no one else's.

Thought you'd want to know that.

Cheers.

What you run into when you start to change your mind...

Changing your mind will run you into some interesting fixed ideas.

Kinda like finding a pole in your way when you're driving down what you thought was a clear street. You can run into all sorts of things when you start to change your mind on purpose.

I've covered before how we are constantly re-programming ourselves - it's part of learning, which is something we never quit doing every second of every day and even while we sleep.

But I was even surprised when I started down this road -- surprised how many strong ideas I'd held onto which were in turn holding me back. Those can even be painful, it seems.

The stronger the idea, the harder it is to let go of. Critical thought is one. Being able to differentiate and find better ways of doing something is a valuable skill. Running people down or finding fault isn't. It's just how you view the same action and what you expect to gain as an ed result which determines how you are going to approach something.

But if you have this nagging, almost carping criticism going on in the background, it's really a hard addiction to crack. Because that is what it is - habits are addictions: you don't think you can live without them and you can't envision your life without them. But they are simply chronic ways of thinking which limit your abbility.

Of course, they come with their own justifications and emotional reasons to justify their existence. And these make perfect sense. However, you can't see how they need to be changed until you start seeing something's got to be in your own road. And then you see the outline of he beast, and WHAM -- you just hit something in that road in front of you.

Most often, it comes with a (cracked) mirror, since that is your own reflection looking back at you. You see, you put it there years ago to deal with something your life and now it's just not needed anymore.

But don't figure that just because you know it's there that it's going to be easy to deal with, or easy to move. Sometimes it just goes *poof* and the whole thing blows over like a single dark cloud. Other times, it has to be painfully-inched-out-of-your-way-with-incredible-effort-at-every-single-step.

And there's no particular sense as to why it moves or doesn't move. But the point is that you are really only going to get it moving if you start purposefully changing your mind.

Here's the kicker, though: evolution/learning is a constant process. So you are going to be finding these "instant roadblocks" from time to time as you move through life. Some will be easy to change and others not. The trick is to realize you are continuing a learning process and so are going to be getting "lessons" from time to time.

How to make your lessons easier

The easiest way is to take everything that happens to you as an additional lesson. Some inconvenience which occurs on your lines can be resolved, but it can also be learned from. Simply ask yourself, "What is the lesson here?" And intuitively, you'll probably receive some sort of hint about that.

Any situation, as Huna sages tell us, can be analyzed four ways: 1) Objectively, 2) Subjectively, 3) Symbolically, and 4) Holistically.

When you "seek the Silence" daily, you drop in your request to learn solutions to whatever problem you are running into. Then you are expecting an answer in some form or other.

This is simply another version of manifesting, which several people cover (like Joe Vitale's "Spiritual Marketing" and Jack Canfield on "The Secret" DVD):

1. Be still, relax completely.
2. Concentrate on the peculiars of the situation you want to resolve - all the details.
3. Simply request a solution to the Universe.
4. Consider next that your solution is here, applied, and the situation resolved.
5. Let go. Move onto something else.

Some find, as I do, that the best time for this is just before going to sleep at night.

Charles Haanel's "Master Key System" gives all the theory of this and 24 lessons to get these practical points into your own life.

Good Hunting!