Road to Self-improvement

Perpetual happiness is far from an achievable state. In fact, moments of blissful happiness in one's life are often short and fleeting. Our species would not have advanced to this level, had we have been happy all the time. In truth, our achievements, in part, are based on our striving for happiness, as fleeting though it be. It can be equated to the euphoria of the sexual act; that too, is short and fleeting, but a great deal of time is expended in achieving it!

Our brains are not hard-wired for perpetual happiness. Human evolution seems to have been based more on the basics like, survival - food, water, shelter and sex. Once some modicum of comfort and security is achieved then time was available to think whether or not we were happy. So one would have to ask if self-improvement is grounded more in survival. Those who were able to improve their skills and abilities and adapt were the winners - survival of the fittest. They were not thinking "well am I happy", but whether they would spot an animal to kill so they could eat. So happiness was a full belly.

Self-improvement is not about changing your intrinsic persona, but improving upon your qualities, character, abilities, skills and outlook. In essence, self-improvement is not about changing who you are, but improving upon what you can be.

So if you have unrealistic expectations of abundant happiness, you're destined to make yourself more miserable, fall into the wrong company, join a cult, or get hooked on alcohol or drugs to achieve that feeling of happiness, and that too is a fleeting state, which more drugs will not correct.

I would caution a healthy scepticism towards anyone who espouses that you can achieve perpetual happiness, as this can leave you despondent, when no such remote results occur.

This blog discusses how to be happy and self-improvement. Contentment in life is more easily achieved coupled with self-improvement.

First off you need to focus on what your desire. Thinking about what you wish occasionally and then forgetting about it, or complaining about what is wrong in your life will accomplish little, but exasperation. And if you talk about it continually with your friends, they will get sick and tired of you.

Sadness and melancholy are exacerbated by focusing on the negative aspects of your life. You need to focus on the positive outcome first off, to achieve your goals. If you focus on the negative aspects of your life you will just bog yourself down in a quagmire. Self-improvement first starts when you focus on positives.

You can mull over and over in your mind a plan of action, but until you take the very first step of implementing your plan, it will not crystalize and bear fruit.

We often procrastinate in taking the first step for fear of failure. In truth, many successful people have failed many times in their lives, only to set themselves back on track and to ultimately succeed. Success is not the outcome, or the final destination, but the pleasure of the journey.

Happiness is in the pursuit of your passion! Self-improvement helps you attain your goals.

If you do not have an interest or passion, then you need to focus and act upon finding an interesting, positive pursuit.

Program yourself to Feel Good each Day and be Happy! The best time for your body to receive suggestions is right before bed and when you rise in the morning.

Before going to bed, repeat to yourself 5 times, "I feel Fantastic!". Upon rising, repeat this 5 times and raise your arms in joy. Say it loud in the morning. If you say it enough and with enthusiasm, your body will believe it, whether it's true at the time or not.

You have now programed yourself to have a better day and be happy!

Self-improvement involves taking control of your emotions and outlook and then implementing a plan of action for the rest of your goals!

Self-improvement Positively Affects Your Self-esteem and what matters most is how you see yourself!

If you have a lapse in achieving goals, don't focus on the negative. This colors your perspective and validates inner self criticism. Think positively and be happy. Remember, mistakes are opportunities to learn.

Don't dwell on them, but get right back into the swing of things. Think about what you did achieve within that particular goal and focus on the successful parts. This self-affirmation reinforces your positive self-image. On a daily basis you should do positive affirmations. Review your previous day's accomplishments while having your breakfast. Think about what you want to achieve today!

Every week notice what has gone well and pat yourself on the back, and then look at what didn't go so well and see if there is something you can learn from that.

If you focus on positive goals and implement a positive plan of action to achieve those goals then self-improvement will be achieved.

The key to pulling yourself out of a self improvement slump is to find ways to become passionate about whatever it was that you wanted to accomplish in the first place.

Keeping your motivational fires burning, lies in finding ways to continually be passionate about attaining your goals.

Who would have thought that Sir Isaac Newton knew so much about the area of self-help and motivation? Well probably not anyone. But doesn't the word Newtonian sound so authoritative. I thought so.

Way back in the 17th century Newton provided the world with his now famous three laws of motion. I have attempted to adapt his three laws and apply them to our lives and what we do with them. Seeing how most of our success does not begin until we get off our butt and actually do something, laws on motion should fit in pretty well.

Newton's first law states that an object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion with the same speed and the same direction unless acted on by an unbalanced force.

What does this mean to us? Well it means the hardest step is actually getting our project started. If you are on the couch you are probably going to stay on the couch. If you have already become that man or woman of action it is probably going to be hard to stop you.

Taking the first step is the hardest sometimes. The second step gets a little easier and so on and so on.

And the closer you get to your goal and the more you start to realize that your goal is attainable, the less likely you are to stop in your efforts to attain that goal.

There are forces though that attempt to stop you. Sometimes on a daily basis. Those forces could be financial issues, exhaustion and stress. The challenge is to keep going forward. Because once you stop the harder it will be to get going again.
Dan Bimrose is the creator of coffeeandprozac.com a website devoted to helping people help themselves. His "Attack Your Life" series aims to give people simple, easy to understand methods to profoundly change their lives. Help with depression, anxiety and stress. Link to original article

Newtonian Laws of Self-Improvement - Second Law
By Dan Bimrose

The effectiveness of Prozac, these scientists say, has little to do with the amount of serotonin in the brain. Rather, the drug works because it helps heal our neurons, allowing them to grow and thrive again."

"The best way to think about depression is as a mild neurodegenerative disorder," says Ronald Duman, a professor of psychiatry and pharmacology at Yale. "Your brain cells atrophy, just like in other diseases [such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's]. The only difference with depression is that it's reversible. The brain can recover."

The latest research says that depression is caused by the death of neurons and that the reason prozac can cure depression is because it stimulates neuron growth, but so does exercise, sunlight, social activity, talk therapy, and a variety of other, much neglected things.

Self-improvement sometimes means getting rid of Toxic People in our lives!

Step1

RECOGNIZE THEM FOR WHO THEY ARE. Toxic people radiate negativity. You can recognize them by their negative outlook on life, their gloom and doom attitude and their inability to encourage others.

Step2

DON'T FEED THE WILD LIFE. Since misery truly loves company, toxic people love their problems. By listening to their constant complaining, you are feeding them with the fuel they need to keep their fire of discord burning. Stop feeding toxic people with your time and energy and they will move on.

Step3

How to Get Rid of Toxic People continued...

Surround Yourself with positive, successful and intelligent people. People who would not allow limits or obstacles to overcome them.

Successful people rise above the norms, and above society. They make things happen, and provide opportunities along the way for others. They are Masters of Possibility. They are winners.

Avoid or reduce your exposure to Toxic People who are counter-productive to your own self-improvement and personal goals.



You know who they are!

Leonardo da Vinci believed that, to gain knowledge about the form of a problem, you must begin by learning how to restructure it in many different ways. He believed that the first way you look at a problem is entirely too biased. You are only seeing the problem from one perspective: yours.

Einstein once said, ...You cannot solve a problem with the same type of thinking that is creating it.

... when you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break bounds; your mind transcends limitations; your consciousness expands in every direction;

and you find yourself in a new world, a great world, a wonderful world; dormant powers, faculties and talents become alive,

and you discover yourself to be a larger man by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be."

- Christian D. Larson, Business Psychology, 1912

If you have financial problems, repeated and consistent visualization of what your life will be like when money is no longer an issue will keep you motivated to do what it takes in order to achieve that financial success.

Self-improvement compels one to think outside of the corner they've boxed themselves into.

Learning to release resistance can at first be counter-intuitive. We cannot release resistance directly. Attention given to anything, whether our intention is to get rid of the thing or summon it, causes MORE of that thing in our experience. To truly release resistance to a circumstance is a function of allowing the circumstance to exist and putting our focus on how we want things to be instead. However, there is a difference between focusing on how we want something to be and focusing on that it is not that way yet. How we feel about something is our indicator of allowance or resistance. The better it feels, the less resistance (and more allowance) is present.

Albert Einstein suggested that a problem cannot be solved at the same level of thinking at which it was created. Here I equate "problem" with "circumstance". After all, a circumstance we don't want is indeed a problem. If Einstein is correct, we need to think on a new level to change our circumstance. We need to focus our attention on thoughts that cause allowing energy or, at the very least, that don't cause resistance.

RECOGNIZING RESISTANCE

A thought that creates resistance is one in which we say something is one way and it should not be that way. When we reject something in its entirety as wrong or bad, we generally introduce resistance. "I'm having a terrible day," is usually a resistant thought. "Nothing is going the way I want," is another. With this kind of "problem" thinking, we leave ourselves very little room to affect change.

When we can summon the wherewithal to say, "My day isn't all bad," and think, write or talk about those aspects that ARE working, resistance is released. Perhaps what Einstein had in mind with his observation about the level of thinking it takes to solve a problem, is to think on that more subtle, component level. Focusing on those aspects of a circumstance that do work summons more workability.

The steps of noticing what we don't want in our lives and having what we'd prefer show up in our consciousness happen with no effort on our part. Becoming effective is a function of getting good at step three. The more we can notice resistant thoughts that come up for us, and practice choosing thoughts that release that resistance, the better our results - and our experience - will be.

Why you are asked to do something different it takes you out of your present state of mind and opens you to new perspectives. Try it out.

KeriSmith

For most - if not all - of us, our path in life requires continual adjustment. There are things we want but don't have. There are things we have but don't want. And there are things we have that would be fine with a little alteration. For some, this process of course correction is natural and flowing. But for many of us, we grow impatient and/or discouraged.

Compounding our discomfort, we attract into our lives more of what we focus on. When we focus on something we want, we attract more of that thing or condition. If we focus on a condition or thing we don't want - a problem - we attract more of THAT thing or condition.

Unwanted situations will always come up whether we like it or not. The good news is that those things and conditions which are not to our liking are the birth of all creation. How would we ever know what we do want without the contrast of what we do not?

As humans in an attraction-based universe, we live in an endless, looping, 3-part creative cycle. A thing or condition we want to be different gives birth to a preference, the new preference then exists in our consciousness where it did not before, and finally we receive the new thing or allow the new condition into our experience.

When we've identified what we don't want which happens constantly (step one), step two begins. We become aware of what we do want. We begin to notice things. If in step one we had the thought, "I want or need more money," we might now begin to notice other people with money or things that cost money. What we now desire exists as a concept in our consciousness, but we don't have it yet in our experience. How we feel about this new desire is our most valuable clue about how we are doing with step three. The better and more optimistic we feel, the better we are doing.

Step three is where the artistry of law of attraction really comes into play. This is where we receive the manifestation of what we've so far only summoned into our consciousness with the first two steps. Doing this takes allowing. By allowing, I mean the releasing of resistance.

RELEASING RESISTANCE

Even though it may not feel like we are resisting what we want, we are. For even in resisting the circumstance that we want to change, that same resistance is at work preventing us from receiving the thing we do want. Resistance is energy. When we focus in a resistant way, that energy is present in all areas for us.

Deep within you lies a "voice" your own voice, which has been created based on your past experiences, even the experiences you think you have forgotten about, or you don't think about on a daily basis are buried deep within you.

This inner voice that constantly speaks within you will be repeating those original events and messages to you daily and your future will be created from them.So if the events were negative then many of your inner messages will be.

For people with low self esteem your inner voice will be your own worst enemy, your saboteur and critic, constantly belittling your efforts, punishing your mistakes and criticizing.

Calendars:

Do you ever find yourself berating yourself for something that you've done? Have you ever found yourself struggling with something that you know you should do but keep talking yourself out of? That's your inner voice.

If you are struggling with doing what you really want to in life, check out what your inner voice is saying to you. Maybe it's letting you know that there is no way you can achieve something.

article continued here

A Knock at the Door