Your Self Improvement Blog

Far too often, many personal development websites and self help books focus on finances or the amassing of personal wealth as the route to “living the dream”. Too often, people define their dream in material terms – the kind of lifestyle that they want, the holidays, the cars, the houses. As a resultIn other words, living the dream is linked in most people’s minds to having nice stuff and lots of it!

If you hang your hopes on specific material thingsachievements, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. If you give things the power to make you happy and, effectively, you give the very same things the power to make you unhappy. And, of course, it’s the very same with people. I have one particular friendwho, having been told by a self-styled self-help “guru” that he should literally hound a girl that he fancied if, having her would be what would make him happy. He set his heart on a particular person, telling himself that, if he had her, he’d be happy. She was having nothing to do with him so he ended up very, very unhappy. In the same way, if you set your heart on a particular job and end up not getting it, you’ve simply set yourself up to be unhappy.

You don’t control your life. Normal people, who – to summarise decades of psychological research – are as good as dead from the neck up, don’t even make any impact on their lives at all. They never realize that the one thing in their lives that they can control is their state of mind and, if you were to grasp a hold of that awesome inner power, it would make a huge difference in your life. However, many people who do grab a hold of their mental power point it in a direction that can only lead to further frustration and unhappiness. Personal development websites and self help books tell them to set their minds to the specifics of what they want – in other words, they things that they think will make them happy. Such “experts” encourage them to write down details of what they want, to cut and paste pictures of what turns them on onto “vision boards”. The quick fix tricks of the personal development trade!

But that’s not what living your dream is all about. Living the dream is about living the good life – about having ample, experiencing contentment, having happy times and wanting for nothing. Above all, living the dream is a state of mind – a fact elegantly emphasized by research from the Universities of Chicago and Milan and neatly and succinctly explained in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s wonderful book, “Flow”.

In other words, living the dream is about inner happiness and peace. It doesn’t preclude nice material accoutrements – but neither does it depend upon them. You’ve got to get your head straight, know what’s most important to you in life and set your mind on what it would be like to “have it all” in those terms – and on your terms. A little reflection is required to get back to basics – not bread-line living basics, but the key things that make life the wonderful journey adventure that it can be.

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