Your Self Improvement Blog

For over 14 years, in my two-day workshop, I’ve asked my clients if they think that they’re perfect. No-one answers “Yes”. It’s damn difficult to motivate yourself if there are things about yourself that you don’t like. And, indeed, chances are that there are things that you don’t like about yourself that you’ve been meaning to change but never do. In fact, research shows that most people have the same New Year’s Resolutions from one year to the next! And, as if that weren’t enough, people then read so-called self-help books and try to talk themselves into feeling good and being motivated.

Self-affirmation is pretty much a waste of time. Positive self-talk peppers the conscious mind with feel-good statements that don’t make the conscious mind feel good! Because the conscious mind feels nothing – it just thinks – around fifty-thousand random thoughts every day. And most of those random thoughts are either useless or self-destructive. You’re wasting your breath!

It’s your subconscious mind you want to get in touch with. That’s where you’ll find your self-doubts and your misconceived self-perceptions. It’s your subconscious mind that uses those warped self-perceptions to create your everyday behaviour – your perceived strengths, your perceived weaknesses and their related self-defence mechanisms. It’s your subconscious mind that was programmed with your view or yourself during your formative years. Today, it’s your subconscious mind’s out of date self-view that creates your reality.

Your visual subconscious took snapshots of the things that impressed you when you were young and impressionable. Your snapshots are programs that run today to enable you behave automatically through what psychology calls automaticity. Automaticity is great for getting habitual repetitive tasks done without you having to pay them any attention. But your entire life is habitual and repetitive, your work colleagues and your nearest and dearest are so familiar to you that everything you do to them, for them and with them ends up being habitual and repetitive. In other words, automaticity “enables” you do almost everything without thinking about it. You don’t even have to bother to turn up!

Research confirms that you only put 1% of you into the here and now. No wonder most people don’t love themselves – they don’t know themselves. How could they, they’re not all there!

So, to motivate yourself you need to stop behaving automatically. Let’s make it simple by starting small. Stop doing little things automatically and, sooner or later, you’ll start doing really important things mindfully too. So, tomorrow morning, brush your teeth with the hand with which you don’t habitually brush your teeth. The result will be that you will be more “all there” than normal and you will have started to dismantle your repetitive pattern of normal mindless living. This will drag more of your subconscious mind’s attention into the here and now, so that you’ll pay less attention to the snapshots that have been creating your life.

Talking yourself into being motivated won’t work – the normal person isn’t listening anyway! You simply have to be a little more present than normal – that’s all! Then you’ll be more effective, more efficient, more turned on – about yourself and life. Then, when you’re more turned on, more alert and more present, you have presence. Presence makes you more impressive. So, not only will you motivate yourself, you may well motivate others around you too!

Popularity: 5% [?]