Archive for category Start Thinking
Eating the Elephant
Posted by davev in Start Thinking, Take Action on December 7th, 2009
By Brian Tracy
You have heard the question, “How do you eat an elephant?” The answer is, “one bite at a time.” This metaphor applies to achieving any big goal, as well. How do you achieve a huge goal? You accomplish it one step, one task, one measure at a time.
Identify Your Most Valuable Task
Ask your boss, “What one thing do I do that is more valuable than anything else?” Whatever his or her answer, look for ways to perform more and more of that task and to get better and better at doing it. It is absolutely amazing how much you can accomplish if you break your tasks down into bite-sized pieces, set deadlines, and then do one piece at a time, every single day.
Continuous and Never Ending Improvement
If you want to increase your hourly rate and your income, look for ways to get a little bit better at the most important tasks you do, every single day. Read one hour per day in your field. Listen to audio programs on your way to and from work. Take additional courses whenever you can. These activities will propel your entire career onto the fast track. When you invest an extra one or two hours per day in self-improvement, the cumulative effect on your greater ability to get results can be extraordinary.
Save Your Pennies and the Dollars Will Save Themselves
If you want to become wealthy, begin to question every single expense. Set a goal to save $3, $5, or $10 per day. Put this money away in a savings account and never touch it. As it grows, invest it carefully in well-chosen mutual funds or index funds. Make daily, weekly, and monthly saving and investment into a habit, and keep it up for the rest of your working life.
Become a Learned Person
If you read fifteen minutes each evening, rather than watching television, you will complete about fifteen books per year. If you read the classics of English literature for fifteen minutes each day, in seven years you will have read one hundred of the greatest books ever written. You will be one of the best-educated and most erudite people of your generation. And you can achieve this just by reading fifteen minutes each evening before you go to bed.
Increase Your Income
If you are in sales and you want to increase your income, keep careful track of how many calls, how many presentations, how many proposals, and how many sales you are making each day, each week, and each month. Then set a goal to increase your number of calls, presentations, and proposals per day. Set a goal to increase your number of sales each week and each month. Every day, measure yourself against your own standards.
If You Measure It, You Can Manage It
In each area of your life, analyze your activities carefully and select a specific number that, more than anything else, determines your level of success in that area. Then focus all of your attention, all day long, on that specific number. The very act of focused attention will cause you to perform better in that area, both consciously and unconsciously.
Action Exercise
Set a minimum, specific amount for daily, weekly, monthly saving and investment, discipline yourself to put away those amounts.
Take Those Rocks Out of Your Head!
Posted by davev in Start Thinking on December 2nd, 2009
Your thoughts can no more tell you what is true about your possibilities
than can a set of stream-side boulders know the nature of the waters
that rush by them.
The Secret of Knowing Without Thinking
Imagine for a moment what your life might be like if you never again were to pick up a complaining thought or feeling. Think of how your days would flow without carrying the additional weight of those inner voices always telling you, “I’m too tired,” or “This is too much for me!” The weight of the world would be replaced by a new sense of freedom. Fresh, new energies would flow.
If this is the kind of inwardly carefree life you really want, then look closely into these next two ideas that together tell one story of freedom: leaving troubled thoughts right where you find them is the same as not picking up what troubles you. And if you can leave just one of these weary thoughts behind you, then you can leave two, and three, and four, and fifty!
Most people tend to worry that if they don’t worry, something bad will happen to them. But what they don’t see is that these worried thoughts they’ve picked up by mistake are the very storm they fear will come!
You may wonder, “But what happens if I make a mistake? How can you tell which thoughts and feelings are the right ones to leave where you find them, and which ones do you pick up? What if I choose wrong?” You needn’t worry about such questions. Here’s why.
There’s a way to know, without ever having to think about it, exactly which of your own thoughts and feelings are your friends, and which are foes — a totally thought-free way to understand which of your thoughts are practical and necessary for everyday life, and which are stealing your life with unsuspected self-compromise. It’s true. You possess unsuspected powers of perception just waiting to be awakened. The following technique will help you get started.
Stop reading this for a minute and allow your eyes to fall on something familiar in the space where you are. Notice how your mind immediately gives that object a name. Having done this part of the exercise, keep your attention on whatever you’ve selected, and then continue to watch how more thoughts come into your mind about what you’re seeing.
Now, while you’re witnessing both that object and your growing stream of associative thoughts and feelings about it, just drop these thoughts and feelings.
You can still see the object, and you still know what it is — but now you are knowing without thinking. This is your introduction to an unconditioned relationship with life.
In this form of higher attention, of knowing without thinking, you can see that the meaning of the object before you has not changed. The difference is that now its meaning speaks directly, silently to you — instead of you listening to your thoughts tell you about its meaning.
When it comes to seeing a chair or a pencil, this new kind of thought-free state may not seem too profound. But this practice can, and should, be enlarged to encompass your whole life.
The benefits behind the ability to understand something, or someone, without having to go into thought, cannot be over estimated. You may not be able to think your way out of a nagging problem, but you can see your way clear of it. This special kind of inner seeing is safety. Waking up to yourself is the same as letting go of all those self-defeating thoughts and feelings that have been telling you how to win.
Correct This Unseen Cause of Self-Punishment
Posted by davev in Start Thinking on November 18th, 2009
The first serving of any punishing wish or act towards another always goes to the one who dishes it out!
The Secret Teaching of the Ages
It is impossible to change the relationship that you have with the world around you without changing the relationship that you have in yourself, with yourself. Before you can become the kind of human being who never again hurts another — either in thought or deed — you must change the relationship you have with yourself.
This is the secret teaching of the ages. Inside of it, we learn about the necessity for a new kind of mind. We learn about the possibility of a world within ourselves that is presently guarded — not by something that is keeping us out because it is something so elevated, powerful, and high that there’s no way that we can scale it — but because we have yet to scale the depths of our own ignorance.
We refuse to understand the pain that our own ignorance causes. We refuse to recognize that it’s impossible for us to have the pain we have with other people without ourselves being a participant in it. Ultimately, we refuse the beautiful lessons that life brings to us, and instead of going through the transformation they are intended to produce for us, we become individuals who simply wrap ourselves deeper and deeper in the same nature that is the source of our suffering.
The new mind begins to discover that the reason that it continues to be a prisoner is because it continues to live from a prisoner mentality. A prisoner mentality is blaming anything outside of you for the pain you have. Was there a person who did something terrible? Yes. This planet is full of toxic, cruel human beings — victims themselves of a pain they can’t escape. Does that mean that you should spend your life running, hiding, resenting what was? That you should stay wrapped up in some kind of dark state because something in you revisits the past? No! Up to this moment, you haven’t known that the pain you feel isn’t because of what’s taking place in the present, but is born out of something inside of you that has become a prisoner of your own past.
Something in you calls up a person, or a condition outside of yourself that reminds you of a person, and at that moment, what happens? Something in you grabs onto whoever it was that you blame for your pain, and “bang” — bitterness, sorrow, regret, or rage results. You grant power to the nature that defeats you every time you think about what someone did or didn’t do.
There is freedom in realizing — seeing the truth of the fact — that whatever is holding you captive right now has no right to do so. None! The split second that you see you’re a captive of your own mind, you have the freedom to challenge it with the new understanding that belongs to your new, true mind — a mind that can’t be made a prisoner of anything.
Refuse to carry forward with you one more day any thought that tells you there is someone to be punished for the way you feel. Refuse to be made a subject of ignorance, to live in the darkness of days past, calling it the present moment because of how much pain there is in it. Your mind will begin to move in new ways because it is living in a broader world, and it is no longer a captive of its own past emotional content.
The First Step to Being True to Yourself (and Everyone Else)
Posted by davev in Start Thinking on October 22nd, 2009
Only when the pleasure of being by ourselves either equals or exceeds that contentment that we feel in the company of others, are we capable of being unshakably true to ourselves, as well as those with whom we gather.
Touch the Timeless Truth of Yourself
When faced with the prospect of living with an emptiness that seems capable of swallowing us whole, most of us elect to do the only thing we believe is possible under such dire circumstances. We start right away working out fresh ways to fill ourselves once more. The drill is familiar: find someone or something new with which to make another beginning. Do whatever is needed to bring an end to the emptiness. There’s only one small problem with these solutions: they don’t work! That is unless we believe that being compelled to fill a hole in our soul over and over again is the same as being whole.
You may be wondering, “If I don’t take action to end my sense of emptiness, what am I going to do? If I don’t make effort, then how am I going to make myself feel whole?” From evidence gleaned from our own life experiences, the following answer ought to ring true: When it comes to experiencing an overall sense of peace, happiness, and abiding contentment, we are not created to be self-filling beings. Instead, we need to realize that self-wholeness appears by itself within us.
Much in the same way as a sun-baked field of wildflowers has as its only balm the spring rains, so, too, does each season of our emptiness have but one true solution: the stirring touch of that Celestial Life that seeded us with this sense of emptiness in the first place. Why are we created to experience such a seemingly bottomless emptiness in the center of ourselves? Because in coming to know this dark half of the Living Light’s great unseen life, we might — of our own free will — learn to quench our thirst — fill ourselves with those life-giving waters that are ever-streaming out of its eternal source.
Our True Self is, in part, a secret field where a never-ending cycle of ebb and flow plays itself out in passing expressions of alternating fullness and emptiness, much as runoff winter waters from great mountains rush down to fill valley lakes parched dry by the passage of summer.
But the greater part of our Original Self is to these mountains and their valley lakes as is the whole of that countryside in which these same landmarks dwell, for even though the round of seasons come and go, causing endless changes within it, nothing really changes about it. Our True Nature lives in the ever-changing, yet never-changing Now; that vast country of higher consciousness wherein we are empowered to welcome all forms of fullness and emptiness as our friends, instead of mistaking ourselves a friend of one and foe of the other.
If we would awaken to a conscious relationship with these ever-flowing forces that are the lifeblood of our True Nature, and if we are to realize that this awareness alone can free us of our fear of being empty, then what is asked of us becomes clear: we must stop trying to create conditions for ourselves through which we hope to escape the fear of our own emptiness. We must willingly slip into these seemingly dark waters of ourselves, where, if we will wait there quietly enough, we will awaken to find ourselves in the higher atmosphere of a new world. For our spiritual daring, we will gain an intimate knowledge of these invisible eternal forces at work within us; one emptying us, even as another moves into its place to fill that open space with its new and unmistakable presence. If these words sound promising, it’s because they are. As this priceless self-knowledge born of higher self-awareness grows in us, we will realize that the freedom we seek is found everywhere and all at once. We will no longer fear the end of things because at last we have seen that within ourselves, the truth of who we really are is as the beginning of life.
Keys to Being the Ruler of Your Own “Castle”
Posted by davev in Start Thinking on October 12th, 2009
There is nothing that life can deliver to your door that is not effortlessly handled in the same moment you remember this truth: nothing has the right to enter into and remain in your heart or mind without your consent.
The Secret for Effortless Living
“What if I don’t like what Life brings to me?”
“Try to see that it is not what Life has brought to you that you don’t like. It is your reactions that turn the gift of Life into the resentment of it.”
“I don’t want to sound ungrateful but speaking plainly, I’m tired of being unhappy. What difference does it make why I feel this way?”
“Because these unhappy feelings are born out of Life failing to conform to your ideas of what you need to be happy. This shows you, if you will see it, that Life itself isn’t denying you happiness. It is your ideas about Life that have failed you. Give up these wrong ideas instead of giving up on Life. Be increasingly willing to see that they are nothing but a constant source of conflict. Your false nature will tell you that you must have these self-protecting ideas; that you can’t live without them or you will lose something valuable. What you must do, in spite of any such protest to the contrary, is to see that you can’t live with them. All you will lose is your unhappiness.”
“Is there a simple guideline to follow when it comes to distinguishing between what Life wants and what I want? How can I easily tell which is which?”
“Always remember the following. If any want is the source of anxiety or sorrow, that want is yours and not Life’s. If the want has pain, it is in vain. To let Real Life flood in, pull yourself out of the flood of self-wants that promise a future pleasure but only deliver a present pain.”
“How do I pull myself out of the flood of my own wants?”
“See that you are being washed away by them and you will grow tired of being bounced along. Here is a key. Never accept the presence of any mental or emotional suffering as necessary no matter how much importance these impostors lend to a particularly pressing want. By refusing their dark presence, you make space for the real Present. This is where the Life you want and that wants you is waiting.”
Let Life bring you itself. Welcome it. At each instant, it is new, full — untouched and undiminished by any moment before it. To enter into this full relationship with Life is to give yourself to your Self. Fulfilling the true purpose of Life is fulfilling yourself. They are one and the same. Want What Life Wants.
