October 31st, 2009 by Antony
Everything that you are experiencing now is your brain’s perceptions of them, it may not be real. That is why hallucination is pretty much ‘visible’ to only that one guy. However, the hallucination or actual happenings have the same effect on your mind. In other words, your brain cannot tell the difference between something that had really happened or something that is make-believe. You can fool the brain by vividly imagining scenarios and the brain will believe it is true. This is also known as creative visualization. It is a vital step in the formation of our beliefs.
If you have ever skipped lunch, you will have probably experienced it too. Mental images of your favourite cheeseburger start to saturate your mind. You can see it now. As you grab the burger, you can feel the texture of the bun and the sweet meaty scent drifting into your nostrils. You take a long and slow bite, the cheese and patty goes so well together. You can feel the amount of saliva in the mouth now. If your visualization skill is that good, you will probably find yourself drooling.
Even though there is no burger, your mind can imagine one and still send signals to your body to start salivating. So how will this affect our beliefs?
Your beliefs are never absolutely true, they are merely generalizations and ill-conceived notions. Just like the burger, they are never real, they are just fractions of the real things and subjected to third party influences. If you can remember the beliefs analogy I gave, those evidences or truck parts, are contributed by other people or yourself and contain only a fraction of the truth, never complete. Your beliefs are a combination of feedback and generalizations from you and your environment.
Hence, you can also manipulate your beliefs to achieve peak performance, by using creative visualization techniques. In the simplest term, you can choose which truck parts to go with your ideal engine and optimise the truck’s functioning. You can construct your own belief and either let it work for you or hold you back. So how do you change or modify an existing belief?
Firstly, you must find enough reasons to change your current beliefs. This first step helps to build a strong emotional reason for change. Secondly, you have to challenge every piece of evidence that had supported the faulty idea, by proposing counter-evidence. Now that the truck is bare, you can easily replace the faulty engine with a new one. Thirdly, replace the old idea with a new and better one. Fourthly, support this new idea with evidence. You are now integrating the new and better truck apparels with the engine.
However, the work is not done yet. Fifthly, you must write this new belief down. Remember that no beliefs are completely true. Writing it down helps you to review your beliefs and facilitate future changes.
Always remember that your beliefs are reliant on your perceptions and they can be fooled. Use this fact to your advantage and create better and more empowering beliefs. If you realise that a current belief no longer serves you well, you can always change it simply by
(i) finding enough reasons to change
(ii) disproving the evidence supporting your old beliefs
(iii) putting forth a new idea
(iv) supporting it with relevant evidence and then
(v) writing it down.
Always be aware of your beliefs and remember that you have control over them.
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October 30th, 2009 by Antony
If you are facing social anxiety or shyness, here are some helpful tips that may give you a better chance in overcoming it. Try to come out of hiding and be more courageous in facing your fears.
Steps to overcome social anxiety:
First, you have to make sure of yourself that you are committed and willing enough to undergo the process of conquering your phobia. This is not simple, due to your fear of being humiliated. But that is just the fear sticking in your mind. Convince yourself that you can undertake this simple task.
Note down stuff that make you feel uncomfortable, like certain situations or people – perhaps strangers do this to you. Try visualizing over and over being in such situations or with those people until you have managed to convince yourself that there is nothing to be afraid of.
The next time you see the people you are uncomfortable with, try and manage to say just even a simple greeting or simply acknowledge how they look. The more you give a positive impression, the more confidence you will build up for yourself.
In situations that you are not comfortable with, try to remember them and record them in your thoughts. In this way, you can sort of playback the things that went wrong or what makes you uncomfortable in that situation – until finally you will catch your reactions so you can correct them.
Relaxing is a big help in conquering social anxiety, even if it might seem a little strange. Relaxing your mind will give you a clearer outlook on scenarios and situations that you are afraid of. Relax your muscles and stop your uncontrollable trembling and unwanted movements. Relaxing your breath so that your heartbeat will be controlled too also helps. Sometimes when you are in a situation you are not comfortable with, you might start by breathing heavily, kind of like panting or labored breathing. Repeating this over and over again will help you achieve your goal of a desired level of socializing.
We all know that this is a very hard process, but believing in your self will make the process lighter and more possible to overcome. Not giving up what you believe in will eventually work. Try not to look on your mistakes with frustration.
If a bad conversation might result from your efforts, at least look on the positive side, that you at least made an effort to converse with people. Counting even the slightest success and learning to examine what turned out wrong will give you a more optimistic outlook.
Once you have gone through these procedures, repeat them again and again and you will notice how easy it is the next time around. And as it becomes easier and easier, it means that you have overcome your social anxiety.
It will really take a lot of work, self confidence, positive thinking, a lot of guts and a lot of practice to undergo these steps. But this is a lot easier than being locked up with your phobia until you get older and older. If you just leave it alone, it becomes harder to beat.
There is always hope to overcome shyness. Believing alone will not take you there, but exercising what you believe in will lead you to success.
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October 29th, 2009 by Antony
There are many people that will try to teach you how to build your self esteem. But not everyone knows how to really build self esteem. When a person has great self esteem, he is able to participate more actively in life. His life becomes richer, and he will find his relationships with the people he loves will improve. Here are some tangible ways that you can use to build
your self esteem:
1. Visualize yourself taking a more active role in your life drama. This means that you will see yourself being less shy and introverted, participating more in family, work or school, and community activities. Take note this does not mean being aggressive – it just means you will try to play more of a part in your immediate environment.
2. Visualize every day that tomorrow will be a better day for you. When you do this, you create a mindset that allows you to be better prepared to take advantage of great opportunities that come your way – opportunities which used to pass you by before.
3. Write down your dreams, goals and aspirations on paper. This serves to reinforce them in your mind.
4. Break down these dreams, goals and aspirations into two categories: short term and long term. Doing so allows you to work on your short term goals on a daily basis one by one. In time, you will find that your long term goals become achievable. Being organized this way helps keep goals realistic.
5. Get a close friend and ask him how he perceives you. If possible, get more than one friend to do this. Then compare and contrast this with how you view yourself. You may find that your friend or friends have insights into your character, traits and attributes that you may not have noticed before.
Yes, it is true – most of the time we are blind to our own personality characteristics and flaws. Especially flaws. Like the tv evangelist Joyce Meyer once said, often we view ourselves through rose-colored glasses while examining other people through a magnifying glass. So we may need help from other people occasionally in our attempts to improve ourselves.
6. Be careful, though, that you do not immediately believe comments from other people. There are some people who just cannot accept it when others are happy. They will make it a point to try to influence your way of thinking. The question is though: why do you believe them? Perhaps you are trying too hard to be likable to other people that you adhere to the belief systems held by other people even when your good old common sense tells you to do otherwise.
7. Try to identify areas in your life where symptoms of low self esteem are most prevalent. Perhaps you are conscious about your looks. Maybe someone once told you that you have terrible teeth so you stopped smiling altogether? Or perhaps it is your walk that you are conscious about? Your clothes? Your hair style?
Everyone has an aspect of his life where low self esteem can be felt. You can identify such areas so you can work on improving how you perceive yourself in those areas.
If your hair style gives you low self confidence, there are many great hairstylists nowadays who can help you with that. A good orthodontist can provide braces for you. Fashion consultants can be found who can assist you in reorganizing your wardrobe for work and leisure. The point is, if you look hard enough, you can find ways to improve in those areas where you experience low self esteem.
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Peter Murphy is a peak performance expert. He recently produced a very popular free report: 10 Simple Steps to Developing Communication Confidence. Apply now because it is available only at: conversation starters
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October 29th, 2009 by Antony
It is natural to feel disheartened or discouraged at first when you set out to achieve something worthwhile to you. You look at the situation around you, you look at your environment, at yourself, and you wonder, “How is it ever going to be possible for me to achieve whatever lofty vision of my life that I am now holding in my mind?” “What exactly do I have to do to achieve whatever goals I have set in my mind?” “Why is it so difficult to achieve whatever goals I have set in my mind?”
You now seem to be a product of your environment than your environment being a product of you. The truth is, it is a simple matter of flipping the coin, metaphorically speaking, because your situation now and the ideal situation that you want are both on the same coin, but on opposite sides.
Your decision to begin doing something about your life is akin to the flipping of the coin to the other side, to the side that you want. There is nothing complicated or difficult about it, except what you and your mind is making of it. All that stand in your way happen to be the same old set of problems and obstacles that have been facing you since you were born. These were the problems that you had refused to deal with earlier in life or those that you had not fully overcome. Now they have returned to face you again.
While you have been facing these same monsters all your life, and your efforts in avoiding or overcoming them have exhausted you, remember that their very existence in your life serves you. They serve to teach you valuable lessons, to make you stronger. They are your teachers, and like any other real, human teachers, what you get out of them depends directly on you.
Teachers are not here to spoon feed you, especially these teachers which come in the guise of problems and obstacles.
Teachers have a lesson plan, a syllabus, they have their own teaching materials to adhere to, and you as a student have no choice but to adhere to their plans if you wish to gain anything worthwhile from them.
Therefore, I tell you, flip the coin of your life from the side that says, “There is nothing I can do about my life right now” to the one that says, “I will do something about my life now” and then do it.
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October 28th, 2009 by Antony
Causality. You may have heard this word or heard someone utter this word before but have you ever asked yourself what does causality mean? How does it affect you? And most importantly, how does it affect your success?
Causality is derived from the words cause and effect. It basically means that for every action you take, there will be a reaction or consequence to that action. But will the reaction or consequence that occur be truly what you hope and want to achieve? Or will the reaction turn out being something you completely loathe and did not wish to obtain in the first place? For example, when you consume a sumptuous buffet of numerous exotic and mouth watering dishes and got gastric pains in your stomach, did you intend for that to happen in the first place or did you initially just want to fill up your empty stomach?
In fact, success is very much like the law of cause & effect. Success does not happen by chance. It is very dependent on the concise decisions and focus you make and the effective actions you take (cause). Only then will it be possible to see the positive results and outcomes that you intended to achieve (effect). This can be demonstrated by a simple analogy of a student who decides and focuses on scoring outstanding grades for his examination and studies hard and smart. Subsequently, he achieves remarkable grades and eventually tops his class.
Internet marketing is another very relevant example of how causality is very much correlated to success. A simplified example – an internet marketer may probably have the vision and focus of wanting to be wealthy. He then takes steps to attract traffic to his website, entice his customers with a striking sales letter, introduce unique products and provide substantial content. This will consequently generate massive sales and profits for his website and himself.
The testing and tracking of variables such as unique visitors, conversion rates, subscriptions, direct sales and affiliate sales, etc, obviously manifest the relevancy of the law of cause and effect especially in internet marketing – or in any area of life whatsoever.
So the next time you hear or think about causality, do yourself a big favour by asking yourself the following:
1) What decisions and choices do I want to make?
2) What specific, effective actions should I take?
3) How will these decisions, choices and actions affect my success?
4) Had my results and past successes been accidents? Or were they direct results of my taking specific actions?
There is definitely no doubt that you can achieve better degrees of success if you always bear in mind the law of cause and effect.
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October 26th, 2009 by Antony
Anger, if it’s not healthily released, expressed or misused, can be a dangerous attractor for the dark side.
No, I’m not talking about the negative side of some esoteric, mystical life-force or energy field here, although you can describe it that way without being too wrong (or very accurate either), but negative consequences, experiences, events, circumstances, people or incidents which could suddenly and unexpectedly assail you.
You see, we live in a universe of cause and effect. Yet don’t let the simplicity of how that sounds fool you. The truth is, our universe, inasmuch as you want to define it through your observation of it via your consciousness, is both a Newtonian system of cause and effect relationships as well as a random, chaotic system of bubbling, toiling and troubling quantum soup.
Whatever you do has an effect not only on yourself but to everyone and everything else around you, and the repercussions, reverberations, effects and consequences of your actions can spread throughout the entire Universe, in sometimes very large and sometimes very small ways.
But your actions leave an impression on the universe nonetheless, and these impressions in turn may or may not come back to affect you, or they may affect other people close to you or even remotely related to you, “even unto the seventh generation”.
The individual affects the collective and the collective affects the individual.
Call it Karma or causality or the butterfly effect or the quantum equilibrium process or Tikkun Olam, but this system is real and it works to provide some form of balance to the universe.
Suffice to say, what you do to yourself or to others have effects in relation to your actions. What goes around, comes around. What goes up, comes back down. What you plant inside, reveals itself outside. What you push, pushes you back.
Whether what you get back in return is good or bad (according to your perception), depends, of course, on what you decide, when you first made the choice to do what you intended to do.
Let’s say one day you get angry. You get very, very angry. Angry about, against, with or for what? It could be anything. You could be angry with another person, or yourself, angry about the whole world in general, angry against God, against the system, basically, you’re angry, and it doesn’t matter who or what caused you to be angry in the first place (the truth is, all anger comes from yourself, as is all other emotions), but you are very, very angry.
Your first impulse would be to direct your anger against something or someone, regardless of whether or not he, she or it had been responsible for that initial ‘transgression’ against you.
You just want something or someone as a punching bag, for you to vent your frustration.
By all means, it is healthy to express your anger in a non-destructive or at least minimally-destructive manner, and I’m sure you know of some methods to do that, for example, yelling your lungs out in a place where no one can hear you, jump, run, swing, punch (not people I hope), etc.
But I propose one very, very powerful way, a way that is not only neutralising but constructive. Not only does it erase your anger, it would also set in motion a series of events that would affect you and everything else around you in a tremendously positive way, it’s almost miraculous. It’d be like turning fire into ice or snakes into harmless, cute squirrels.
My method is this – if you should ever get very, very angry for any reason whatsoever and you feel like venting that anger against something or someone and you know that your venting of anger would harm that something or someone and set off a negative chain of events, then stop and do this instead :-
Do something very, very good, beneficial, charitable, kind and helpful to another person or thing, in such a selfless and altruistic manner, that it actually hurts you (initially) to do it.
For example, if you one day happen to feel angry because you think your employer had somehow forgotten to give you due credit (and compensation) for your hard work, and gave that credit to someone else instead who you feel was less deserving, I want you to find someone perhaps in your company, or perhaps anybody you know, or even any stranger on the street, whom you know needs even more help than you and is in a worse-off position than you, and help him or her to the point that it would hurt you if you would help him or her.
Yes, don’t you remember what one great teacher once said about offering your other cheek if you were slapped on one and giving your cloak also if you were robbed of something? What he probably missed out was the part where you would be compensated for what you’d offered, perhaps seven, ten, infinite times more.
The principle is simple :- If you feel unjustly treated, reverse that injustice into an opportunity for abundance to increase its flow into your life by altruistically giving yourself to another, until it actually hurts you to help another. What you get back in return will be infinitely more satisfying, more rewarding, more fulfilling than what you would have gotten if you had chosen the more reactive, immature and vengeful action. In fact, if the person you choose to give-to-until-it-hurts is the very person who had done you wrong in the first place, that would be even better!
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October 25th, 2009 by Antony
One of the most useful skills or abilities you can and should learn to develop is to install any belief – any belief – of your own choosing deep in your subconscious mind.
Beliefs, as you should know by now, are the most potent things humans have. I’m not talking about religious beliefs, which are an entirely different matter. I am talking about the beliefs one has about oneself.
You may be practising the most powerful goal setting, positive thinking, affirmation or creative visualization technique ever, but without faith in the method and faith in the truth that you really can change your life, it is all useless.
What do you believe about yourself? What are some of the beliefs that you hold, whether consciously or not, concerning or against yourself?
I’m sure there are some good ones and some undesirable ones. Any belief you have can either push you towards – or obstruct you from – your goals.
What do you want to believe about yourself? What are some of the beliefs that you want to have concerning yourself?
Write these beliefs down in the form of statements resembling traditional affirmations, such as, “I am consistently taking appropriate actions that are aimed at improving myself daily”.
We’re going to work on each of these beliefs that you want to install one by one. Choose one from your list, the belief which you feel is one that you most need right now.
Make sure you choose something which is relatively believable now, than something which is far out too inconceivable (like “I believe I can fly by flapping my arms”).
Next, check that you really, truly, deeply want to install this belief into your subconscious mind. Employ the relentless effective questioning technique. Use every imaginable question to sort of “interrogate” yourself why, why, why you wish to install this belief.
Ask yourself these questions:
Why do I want to believe in this belief? How can I believe in this belief? What if I am already believing in this belief?
Do I really want to believe in this belief? If “Yes”, continue. If “No”, go back and refine this belief you want to install. Or choose another from that list.
Next, check that this belief you choose can integrate with your current value system, without contradicting any beliefs you may currently hold.
You may not need to make your belief conform 100% to your system, as some beliefs are true some of the time, and not true the rest of the time. That’s normal.
The effective questions to ask yourself are:
Does this belief contradict any other beliefs I currently hold? Can this belief provide for me the kind of emotion I need?
How does this belief help me to move forward, even accelerate, in the attainment of my worthy goals? What must I risk, let go or sacrifice if I choose to believe in this belief right now?
Is this belief appropriate in the context it is applied to? What are the implications, whether positive or negative, of me installing this belief in my system?
If you find that after asking yourself these questions you are still comfortable with this belief, move on to the successive step of installing it!
To install this belief, you need a 2-phase process of clearing and filling, very much like emptying a tank of old water, and then filling the tank with fresh, clean water.
The clearing phase of the belief installation technique consists of the following questions to ask yourself:
Are there any objections, conscious or not, to this belief at all?
What are the objections, counter-arguments, contradictory statements or conflicting beliefs that may prevent me from attaining the effectiveness I need when installing the desired belief into my system?
What are the blocks that I hold in my mind that may undermine this belief’s effectiveness? What are the editor’s objections to this belief I am introducing?
Can I find any specific events that counter-prove the conflicting belief (not the belief that you want to install)?
When have I found that this blocking belief (not the belief that you want to install) does not prove true in my life? How many times has this happened (referring to the above question)?
Why is this objecting statement not true at all? How is this objecting statement not true? Is it even true 100% of the time? If it is true only for less than 50% of the time, can I consider it a valid statement of truth that I should believe in?
What are the chances of this conflicting belief proving true in real life? If it only proved true for less than 50% of the time, or not at all (0%), will I then still consider it valid? Or would I deem it null and void?
How can I reduce the chances of or even prevent from this conflicting belief to present its ugly head in real life?
If something that counters the belief that I want to install does happen, what will I do to remedy the situation? How can I evade it in the first place?
After the clearing phase, comes the filling phase. Think through each of the above questions deeply, taking a considerable amount of time if possible.
Add more questions of your own more or less resembling those I wrote above. It doesn’t matter if you’re actually asking yourself the same questions over and over again.
Ask these “filling” questions:
What will I gain if I believe in this belief? What will I lose if I do not believe in this belief? How will I feel when I am believing in this belief?
What will I be like when I am believing in this belief? What will my world be like when I am believing in this belief?
What will I be saying to myself when I am believing in this belief? How soon am I able to fully believe in this belief?
How do I know I am truly and deeply believing in this belief? How is this belief true?
What are the evidences, proofs and testimonies that prove this belief true? What are the logical reasons for this belief to be true?
What are the emotional reasons for this belief to be true? Does this belief “just feel right” for me?
Do I now realise that just believing in this belief gives me a certain kind of excitement or emotional upliftment?
What events have happened in my past that may prove that the belief is true?
How can I recreate the conditions that have caused that event (mentioned above) to occur so that I can effect another similar, more powerful result that will in turn strengthen my belief in this belief?
Again, in addition to the questions I crafted above, write down your own, even if it’s more or less similar to mine.
The above processes of asking questions, thinking about them, and answering them, can all be done on pen and paper, or simply in your mind, while in a quiet, focused and relaxed state of mind.
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October 25th, 2009 by Antony
Keeping negative emotions inside of you are one of the most important causes of failure. This is, of course, not to say that you should be pollyannaic (one who is always positive and happy, even if the sky falls on his family).
Yes, some negative emotions are important, if not necessary, for you to feel, like grief when a loved one passes away, or a little guilt when you do something wrong to someone and you want to apologise. A moderate dosage of these kinds of “necessary” negative emotions is healthy.
However, the trap comes when you wallow in these emotions for extended periods of time. You just can’t get yourself to “move on” when you “really, really, really” want to.
No matter how much pollyannaic positive thinking you apply, no matter how many times you repeat your affirmations, no matter how much you try to just ignore your emotions, they just keep coming back to haunt you.
Let’s now see how we can handle this:
First, we must examine the root cause of negative emotions. We must find the base upon which these negative emotions stand and uproot it from the terrain of your mind.
For most of us, the trigger that sparks off most negative emotions is usually an event – an external event that happened to us, which is usually beyond our control.
If it is an event that is beyond our control, why bother? It’s not your fault. Instead, it is more healthy to focus on the things which exist within your sphere of influence, those factors which you are in control of.
By doing this, by only focusing on optimising your power over the things which you have control over, you are, in fact, contributing to the expansion of your sphere of influence, and therefore, you’ll have more things that you have control over, thus, maximising your effectiveness.
The more you focus on what you do control,
The more things you can control.
The more things you can control,
The more effective you become.
A negative emotion could also be an event that is within our control. And this is all the better to handle. The trick now is to identify what had caused you to not attain what you wanted that then triggered your negative emotion.
Here’s where you can use Effective Questions to ask yourself what had really caused you to (to put it bluntly) fail.
Ask the most important question – Why?
Ask “why?” relentlessly, till you get to the core of the matter. Use “why?” as your shovel to dig down deeper and deeper and deeper – do not stop – until you reach the base, the root, the real cause of the problem.
But what about those negative emotions that just “come out of the blue”, without needing it to be triggered by an external event at all? If you can use the Relentless Why technique above with this, you’ll find that somewhere from your past, there is an event that caused this negative emotion to occur.
And also, sometimes, quick fixes to external events that trigger our negative emotions simply cannot heal us of the wounds these emotions cause to us.
This is where more effective questions come in. Not affirmations, not positive thinking, not thinking blissful happy thoughts. You need some really deep, really penetrating effective questions.
Step One – The Clearing Process.
Ask yourself these:
How do I feel?
How do I really, really feel?
Am I sure I am really feeling this? Or is it something else? Another emotion that is disguised as this present emotion?
Do I want to feel this?
Whether you answered Yes or No to the above question, ask -
Why do I want / do I not want to feel this?
What would be the negative consequences of me feeling these emotions for extended periods of time?
Do I want these negative consequences?
How painful can these negative consequences be?
What would be the positive consequences of me getting rid of these emotions?
Do I want these positive consequences?
How pleasurable & delightful can these positive consequences be?
What would I gain from freeing myself of these negative emotions?
Would it be possible that these negative emotions are the very cause for my present state of failure?
Would it be possible that if I rid myself of these negative emotions, I would finally attain the success I desire?
Step Two – The Motivating Process.
Next, ask yourself these questions:
What do I want to feel?
What do I really want to feel?
Why must I want to feel these more resourceful, positive emotions?
How can I feel these more resourceful, positive emotions?
What if I can feel these more resourceful, positive emotions right now?
How would it feel like to feel these positive emotions right now?
Can I feel these positive emotions right now?
What do I have in my life right now that can help me to feel more positive about myself right now?
Who do I love, and who loves me, who can help me to feel more positive about myself right now?
What can I be happy about in my life right now?
Why must I maintain this positive emotion?
How can I maintain this positive emotion?
What if I am already able to maintain this positive emotion right now?
Only 2 phases – clearing the glass of the old water, and filling in the glass with new, cleaner, healthier water.
Do this, and you should have gained yourself a position of power and control over your emotional states. A power, if compared to other forms of power, that is incontestible.
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October 23rd, 2009 by Antony
Have you ever taken self esteem tests? A self esteem test is designed to measure eight indicators of self esteem: degree to which you procrastinate, the number of moral rules you feel you should adhere to, your flexibility in taking risks, whether you practice positive thinking or not, the degree to which you blame yourself when things go wrong, how shy you are around strangers, the number of meaningful relationships you are able to maintain, and the level of self-acceptance you practice.
Here are some questions that would appear on a sample self esteem test:
1. How often do you procrastinate on tasks that are necessary?
2. How many times do you reject invitation to an event though you would really like to attend it?
3. How often do you tell your boss you cannot come to work because you are ill (even if you are well?
4. How often do you dawdle over decision making because you cannot make up your mind?
5. How often do you share genuine feelings with the people around you?
6. How often do you avoid doing a task that you really have to do?
7. In what parts of your life do you feel guilt or self-recrimination?
8. Do you think that you should feel more self esteem and be more comfortable with other people?
9. How often do you experience conflict between doing what you feel is necessary to do and doing what you just want to do?
10. How often have you been informed that you look at life too seriously?
11. How often are you open to constructive criticism?
12. How often do you rely on the input or advice of people in authority, even when they are strangers to you?
13. Do you believe that people think your opinions matter?
14. How often do you try to learn new knowledge so that you will gain a new perspective into the topic?
15. How long have you been a member of a group, cult or religious organization that imposes rules, beliefs or truths that you value very much?
16. How often do you use words like: everyone, all, none, nobody, never, always?
17. Do you believe that you require a lot of proof before you can assess a situation and create your own conclusions?
18. Do you have terms of endearment that you use to label things and events in your life?
19. Do you believe that if you do not achieve a desired outcome in an endeavour that it automatically makes you a failure?
20. How high are the standards in life that you set for yourself and other people?
21. How often do you apologize for circumstances not in your immediate control?
22. Do you always feel that you are being observed by other people or that they are talking about you behind your back?
23. Do you believe that the people you live with think your possessions take up too much space when they say that the house is too cramped?
24. When you compare yourself to other people, do you find that they are better than you in some way (i.e. more beautiful, smarter, sing better, etc.)?
25. Do you believe that other people fail to respect you?
26. Do you feel awkward striking up a conversation with other people, to the point that you stutter or make mistakes talking to them?
27. Do you try to stay in the background even when your actions prove that you deserve to be at center stage?
28. Do you believe other people perceive you as being distant or aloof?
29. How many people can you name as belonging to your circle of friends?
There are many more tests out there that you can take to determine your level of self esteem. This is just one sample of the various self esteem tests available.
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Peter Murphy is a peak performance expert. He recently produced a very popular free report: 10 Simple Steps to Developing Communication Confidence. Apply now because it is available only at: conversation starters
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October 22nd, 2009 by Antony
Focus. That is the single most important ability determinant of your success. The lack of it is also the single most common problem faced by a major portion of the general populace.
The average person cannot focus his or her mind on any one thought, task or thing for extended periods of time if he or she wants to.
Just try this – picture a circle of any colour you choose for at least 68 seconds. That’s only 8 seconds over a minute. Do this without letting any other stray thoughts, images or inner voices intrude in your mind. Not even one speckle of a thought should creep in your mind, other than that circle of your favourite colour centered in your imagination.
Try it now!
Ouch! Treacherously difficult, isn’t it?
I notice a few things after several unyielding trials at meditation and concentration exercises.
If I am focusing on an image or visual object in my mind, that visual object or image tends to “morph” into something else, shifting shapes, changing colours and moving about with a life of its own.
I think that this stems from our mind being bored by our forcing it to concentrate on only one perception at a time, after having been exposed to a life-time of perceptual cognitive bombardment.
It just fights to let other thoughts and perceptions come in to kill its boredom, like a baby that is quickly bored by one toy and wants to play with the next.
If I am trying to focus on a word, a principle, a concept or idea, the intangibility of that thought and vagueness thereof simply demands other related (and un-related) ideas and concepts to flood into my mind, thus killing my concentration exercise.
Either way, I’m trapped.
The supreme kind of focus that is achieved by meditators and the highly successful (meditators are not necessarily highly successful, and vice-versa) only comes about through disciplined training and diligent daily practice.
But I’m not going to tell you to go through that kind of rigorous training to sharpen your focus until it becomes as a laser beam.
Most people do not have the time nor the stamina to take the torturous path braved by those few. Maybe you’re one of them, like me, maybe you’re not.
Don’t worry if you’re from the previous group. It’s not now, but not never either, just, perhaps another time for you.
But do we really need that kind of perfect and supreme concentration ability? To be able to only think one thought and let no other, not one inkling, come in? To focus so deeply and intently on one idea and be immune to distractions both inner and outer?
The answer is no. We don’t have to shave our heads bald and don robes to sharpen our mind. There is a way for you to help yourself focus your mind and all your resources on achieving a certain objective when you really, really need to.
It is through questions.
That’s it. Just ask yourself questions about, relevant and pertaining to the thought, idea or thing you want to focus on. Only questions relevant to the object of your focus. Nothing that strays too far away from the theme or subject matter.
Questions are naturally thought focusers. That means, by their very nature, questions are designed to make your thoughts focus on what is being asked about.
Just think of riddles or puzzles. I just got one in my email concerning the 3rd word in the English language that ends in “gry”.
Here it goes:
“There are 3 words in the English language that end in ‘gry’. One is angry and the other is hungry. Everyone knows what the 3rd word is, and everyone uses it every day. If you listened carefully, I’ve already told you what it is. What is the 3rd word?”
The question “What is the 3rd word?” got my mind thinking so hard, and all my thoughts, for that moment, so focused and intent on finding the elusive answer to that puzzle that it distracted me from the actual answer itself that is already presented to my face (for the answer, go do a search on Google).
Or think back to a time when you were doing an English comprehension paper. I can recall myself doing my ‘O’ Level English Comprehension Examination paper. The article has got something to do with early child development and the human brain.
When you were trying to answer the questions, what do you do? You were searching for the answer in the comprehension article, right?
Or if it was a thinking-type question, you were also searching for the answer in your mind, in your memory, trying to find related ideas and concepts that could somehow match what the comprehension question demands.
If you were observant, I’ve already told you the purpose of focusing.
Okay, I won’t play riddles with you. The chief purpose of concentration or focus is to search for something. You want to search for something, you focus on it.
Scholars, monks, philosophers, thinkers and writers who are in search of what they hold to be the Ultimate Truth, focus on it in order to find it. Some fail, some succeed; and the difference between the two is how much they know about what they are actually focusing on (or searching for) and why.
So here’s one tip to help you focus better:
KNOW what it is you want to achieve with your focusing. What are you searching for? Where are you heading for?
How does one KNOW? How does one attain knowledge of something? One asks. Therefore, questions help one focus.
For example, you want to focus on a book that you’re reading. You can’t seem to understand what it is about, either because the author sucks or you are not focusing well enough on the contents and ideas presented.
Let’s assume it’s the latter case.
First, ask yourself some questions about WHAT information or knowledge that you want to extract from reading this book.
Second, think about HOW you’re going to go about and retrieve that information or knowledge that you’re seeking in the book.
Third, just for added motivation, ask WHY you want to or need to have that knowledge or information you’re searching for in the book.
Fourth, formulate a few What, Why, How, Who, Where, When questions (whatever applies) to get you into “Search mode”; pretty much like a search engine, in order to get you to FOCUS on only those parts of the book that can provide you with the answers to your questions.
While you notice the CAPS that I wrote in the previous few paragraphs, do you see the connection now between focusing, searching for answers and asking questions?
Or let’s say you’re doing one of those concentrating-on-an-object exercises. You know, like candles, fruits, pictures and stuff. I don’t know what the purpose for these kinds of exercises is, other than that they help you train your mind to focus, somehow, albeit on seemingly unconstructive things.
First, ask yourself WHAT that thing actually is (I realise how silly this sounds, but I have a gut inner feeling that I’m on the right track, and I trust my intuition very, very much, and I don’t want to betray it). Okay, so, it’s an apple. Ask yourself what it is that makes an apple, an apple. What are the elements constituting an apple that determines it to be an apple.
Second, ask yourself HOW an apple becomes the way it is. Think about how it was originally planted in the Earth as a seed. Think about how it grows, with the proper nourishment of sunlight, water, minerals, nutrients and other things you learn in high school science.
Third, think about WHY an apple exists. (Laughing out Loud) This is where you can get existential-philosophical. What purpose does it serve in our reality? In this world? In the universe? Ask why is it red? Or green? Why is it juicy and scrunchy? Why is it sweet? What makes it so?
Fourth, generate more questions surrounding that apple. The more you ask, the more you’ll find that you’re thinking deeper and deeper about that apple, and while you’re thinking deeply about it, you’re actually focusing on it, and you’ve exercised your focusing abilities, and hence have enhanced it, by an incremental percentage; and I think if you’re focusing on it hard enough, you might just feel compelled to grab it and take a MUNCH!
Fascinating, isn’t it?
I’ll end this article with a few Meta-Questions:
Why must I focus on the most constructive thought at any given moment?
How can I focus on the most constructive thought at any given moment?
What if I am already focusing on the most constructive thought at any given moment?
How do I know I am focusing on the most constructive thought at any one time?
How soon can I be able to easily focus on the most constructive thought at any given time?
What is my purpose for focusing my mind on this thought I am thinking now?
How can I know that my purpose for focusing my mind on this thought I am thinking now is positive, constructive, optimal and serves to better my condition in the best possible way?
What am I really searching or seeking for while I am focusing on this thought?
What am I focusing on right now? (Ask this question from time to time, to keep track of your thoughts. Most people spend 99% of their time letting thoughts pass in their mind unchecked)
Why am I focusing on this thought right now?
Can you think of more questions already?
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