The path to self realisation is never ending and we all step along it, treading in the footsteps of those who have passed this way before and leaving footprints for others to follow. Of the many lessons that we need to learn is to be kind to ourselves or, as my lovely wife, Helen, puts it “Do for yourself what you would do for others” This is her twist of “Do to others as you would wish them to do to you”. Her point is that whilst many of us take great care to encourage and support other people despite…
Personal Growth
I have achieved the most amazing results with Mind Power. I have a condition called Essential Tremors (ET). This causes uncontrollable shaking. With some people it can be the head, with others the legs, often in the form of so called restless leg syndrome and in my case, shaking hands. Over the last ten years it has become progressively worse despite increasing dosage of chronic medication. Eventually it got to the point where I could not drink coffee with clients because I would have to use both hands to hold the cup and I could no longer read my own…
Quote of the month -“I just lower my expectations until I am pleased with my achievement” Where did that come from? No, it wasn’t Angie Motshekga, the ex-Minister of Basic Education! It was my response to my lovely wife, Helen, when she said something about me being so proud of my body (we train regularly) whereas she is never satisfied with her achievement. But really, I was only joking. The real me believes in aiming so high that I can never actually achieve what I aim for, but by striving for the impossible I almost invariably achieve the improbable. That’s…
You may have read books on the power of the mind. There are plenty of them out there. Why? Because the mind is so powerful. Many years ago I coined an expression for one of my consulting techniques. I called it “Dreaming dreams”. It works. Like this – Forget about where you are at, ignore how you are going to achieve your goals, simply imagine you are already there. Picture the perfect business, lifestyle, golf shot or whatever it is you would like in life. Just one dream at a time – don’t make it too complicated. Focus on the…
Two diametrically opposed interpretations My darling wife had always believed that this meant that if you kept jumping from one thing to another you would never gather value, whereas I had always understood it to mean that if you stood still you would be overgrown with moss and stagnate. So I googled it and she was right. But then there came up another interpretation which was consistent with mine. So which is right? Well, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to answer that one. It all depends on the meaning of the word “moss”. If it means wealth,…
Again, I owe this one to Sedley Burger way back in 1983. There are four stages of learning – Unconciously Incompetent. This is when you don’t even know that you don’t know. Like a baby who doesn’t know that it can’t drive a car. In this state, you won’t ask questions to add to your knowledge because you wouldn’t even know what questions to ask. You need to become aware of your lack of knowledge before you can move beyond this level. Often it is someone else who brings this to your attention. It happens more often than you may…
Yes, I worry, just like the rest of you. Stupid really. If you think back on all the things you worried about during your life to date, the chances are that none of them happened or, if they did, like when I was bankrupt at the age of 40, you lived through it and almost certainly came out of it a better person. But then, does worry have some value perhaps? This got me thinking and I came up with 5 stages of worry – Carefree Concern Worry Fear Panic So when does worry help us in life and when…
My wife, Helen and I have debated this quite often. For me it is a strong driver, for her it is a cop out justification. Her argument is that people should best live within the norms of society and not “do their own thing” which could involve crime, drugs, hurting others etc. I agree with her entirely, so it all boils down to how one reads the meaning of the expression “Unto thine own self be true”. I read it as meaning that your inner guide is the best guide to being a better person. There are those of you…
Sometime back I posted “Plan to live forever”. You have to do this when financial planning because you do not know when you’re going to die, so you can’t plan to spend your last cent on your coffin. I noticed in the latest copy of Fitness magazine an article entitled “How to live forever” and that naturally cuaght my eye. so here’s how (according to them) – 1) Regular exercise 2) Balanced diet with frequent small meals 3) One glass of red wine each day 4) Regular exercise of the brain 5) Sex at least twice a week (!) I…
The older you get and the longer you’ve been in the job, the less likely you are to respond well to change. And what happens? Change happens! And you are fast becoming a dinosaur. So why do we resist change? Isn’t it something to do with comfort zones? Even success can become a comfort zone. You build a company, you give great service, you charge commensurately high prices, you get money in the bank, you build your property or investment portfolio, everything is going great. Do you change anything? Do you constantly search for new ideas, new ways to improve…
It happened to me again. I felt let down and cheated by someone I totally trusted. This had happened before with someone else and I had forgiven him – completely. Those of you who have read (and re-read) Andrew Matthews’ great cartoon illustrated books (we keep all three on our reception coffee table) will recall Andrew saying that life will throw lessons at you in the form of small pebbles. If you ignore them, you’ll get bricks, and if you ignore them you’ll get a great big boulder on your head and then maybe you’ll learn the lesson that the…
You remember your schooldays or your early working days? You’d come up with a great idea, start putting it together, maybe even taking it to market, then someone would copy you! How bad was that? How dare they? Now, you imagine that nobody ever copied you. Why would that be? Because you didn’t do anything worth copying, that’s why! So how does that make you feel now if someone copies you? You should feel honoured and invigorated to keep coming up with new ideas since you’re obviously a person worth copying. One of my clients and his two siblings bought…
If you think you can or you think you can’t, chances are you are right. (Henry Ford). OK. Try this one. Run through in your mind all the people you know. Try to find someone who succeeded in achieving something despite believing that they couldn’t. Find anybody? Unlikely. Now search for people who are unhappy with where they are at, who envy where others are, who wish they had other peoples’ luck. Find anybody? Plenty. Thinking you can is not becoming a wannabe, a starry-eyed dreamer (although dreaming dreams is powerful if used properly), it is what it says it…
No, I don’t believe in psychokinesis. At least not the repeatable type apparently practiced by Yuri Geller, but I do believe in the power that the mind has over itself. That’s why I love graphs. They help my mind control my mind. Let me explain – My PA, Thuli, says that the reason that I am so slim is that I have the right genes. She’s right, I am blessed with “slim” genes. But what she does not acknowledge is how hard I work to stay slim. Weight training 5 days a week, 5 small meals a day, all the…
Did you read my post on “Sunk Costs and Elephant Spray”? I postulated the possibility that we might cancel our trip to New York. Guess what? We cancelled our trip to New York! Not because of the weather over there as it turned out. Rather that I had an emergency operation on 10 February and only came out of hospital on the 16th. We were due to fly on the19th. Amazingly, the hotel – The Wellington are giving us a full refund despite my having elected for the non-refundable option. And KLM are giving us a full credit valid for…
A few years back, in those dark days of power cuts, we bought a generator for the office. Everybody was buying them at that time so we had to wait for it to be imported. By the time it arrived and was installed the power cuts had pretty much come to an end. We’ve had about two short ones since then, so the genny simply switches itself on every Tuesday and runs for 15 minutes to recharge its battery and that’s all it does. Does this bother us? All that money just for that? Not at all, it’s like the…
Over the Christmas break I got extremely annoyed with someone for whom I felt I had just bust a gut. I went around with a face like thunder for long enough for my wife to become very concerned. Now, I work hard at improving myself and part of the challenge is to manage my own emotions. This means that I was going seriously off the rails because I was letting someone else control them for me. Not good. In fact, very not good. Now there are a number of approaches to this kind of problem 1) Vent your feelings on…
I remember distinctly, when I was a kid, I read or heard the expression “He always had a smile on his face”, so I tried walking around smiling all the time. All that happened was my face muscles started aching and I looked pretty stupid! But now I know what the expression means. The guards at Waterford estate, where I live, always wave and smile at the residents as they drive in and out. When we bought an office building in Woodmead Office park, I noticed the difference immediately. It took me about two years of waving, smiling and greeting…
Once you have read, and learned from, your long line of self development books – “Your Eroneous Zones”, “Think and Grow Rich”, “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”, “The man who sold his Ferrari” , “Follow your heart”. Steiner, Yogi Ramacharaka, Andrew Mathews, Paulo Coelho, Carl Jung all excellent books and authors, you may be looking for the ultimate read. Well here it is. “Light on the Path” . In its printed form it is only 1/4 the size A4 and 39 pages of normal print. In pdf it is only 14 pages long. But it is so profound that Yogi Ramacharaka…
I owe this one to Sedley Burger (here’s Mark, his son, carrying on the business). He taught us Relaxaction and it has remained with me for 40 years. It is a method of relaxation including a subconscious call to action that follows similar steps to hypnosis, except that you do it with yourself (self hypnosis, I guess). Amongst it is the expression “Love yourself, love others and love life”. Why in that order? Because you cannot love others if you do not love yourself. So what do we mean by loving yourself? Well, take a step back and have a…