Category: Self Development

What makes some people more successful in life than others ?

What makes people happy?

Are success and happiness linked ?

These are questions which has been asked for hundreds of years and many answers have been discovered and rediscovered over this time. Many of the main answers relate to how you think about yourself and the world around you and simply by changing how you think will start to have a dramatic effect on your life.

One of the first principles which you must accept is that you must take full responsibility for the events in your life. It is no use blaming other people, the government, your boss etc. for the things that are wrong in your life. You have total control over how you think and act and it is up to you to decide to be happy and successful. Happiness comes entirely from a state of mind. If you decide to be happy you will be. The more you think about happiness and success the more it will will happen. Once you accept this first point you can take many positive steps towards success.

Probably the most important of these can be summarized in the following three steps:

Assess your main target in life

Choose a definite aim in life, one which you know is realistic for your talents and abilities, one which you know is something you really want to do and enjoy doing. Make up your mind that you will push as hard as possible towards that aim. To ensure success you must have a burning desire for this purpose and want to take the appropriate action to achieve this purpose. Write this aim down.

“Know what you want, when you want it, why you want it, and how you intend to get it.”

Set goals which are consistent with this target.

Goal setting is one of the most powerful ways to focus and achieve success. However goals must be in accordance with your main aim in life. If you strive for and achieve a goal which is not in line with your target, it will not help you to be happy even if you are generally successful. Goals can be of different length, short term, medium term or long term. Ideally have a mixture of all three. You should write your goals down, even this act alone will make it much more definite and much more likely to achieve. Read and review your goals often. Make your goals achievable and have at least some which you can see the path to achieving even if it’s not always clear how you will reach the longer term goals.

Take continuous action towards your goals.

Once your goals are written down aim to take definite actions towards these goals even if they are very small. It is essential to get into the habit of avoiding procrastination when you know there are tasks to be done. A great way to do this is to plan to only take a little action, sometimes as short as a few minutes at a time. Often this will get you going and you will devote more time to it than you originally planned, at other times you will realize that now is not such a good time, but you will have achieved a little bit towards your goal. Another great habit to adopt is to tackle the most difficult task first and get it out of the way. This usually makes all the rest of the task so much easier.

Following these easy three steps will have a very positive effect on your life and will dramatically improve your chances of success.

remove the root cause of your frustrations

Tomorrow morning I walk into a sea of new faces all expectant on their new journey and all new to the Health studies course on which they now embark.
Some of these new students will pass with Distinctions and some will just pass.
What dictates which grade they will achieve stands on how they learn to not only produce the coursework but also develop in their self esteem of who they are.

All of them come to me with preconceived ideas of who they are and what they are capable of achieving.

I teach a unit called Personal and Professional development as well as the Anatomy and one of my first lessons in this unit is a discussion of how teenagers struggle with their self -esteem. I use the story about a comment I heard in class one day where one student says to another…….

“I Am Dumb – I Have Always Been Dumb”
As I heard this comment I took the opportunity to stop them in their tracks and ask who had made the comment. When the student identified herself it gave me the ideal opportunity to highlight the fact that all of us have a mental picture of who we are, how we look, what we’re good at, and what our weaknesses might be.
At this period of time this female student had a low mental image of her academic abilities.
Her mental picture of herself had been formed over time, as she moved through Junior school and Senior school to where this young adult was right now… close to embarking out in her new career.
This mental picture of who we are is called our self-image and it is based on interactions we have with other people and our life experiences.
Our Self-esteem is not only about how much we feel valued, how we feel loved and accepted, by others – but also how much we value, love, and accept ourselves.

This is an aspect that young adults struggle with. It is a stage in their lives when they are trying to work out who they are and what is their purpose and consequently many  struggle with their self esteem.
I often marvel at their surprise  when I tell them that it is very common at their age to be selfish.
“Its just where you are at right now… so to speak”
“At this time in your life everything is all about you”
Their lives are focused on themselves and it is alright to be like that for now.
It is amazing the effect it has when I tell them this. I also tell them that I know nothing about their past. I know nothing about the exams they have failed or where they have gone wrong if they have.
All I know of them is what I see in front of me now.
If they want to achieve top marks then that is what I see and what I see is what I believe in.
I remind them that everyone’s self-image changes over time, self-esteem is not fixed for life. So if you feel that your self-esteem isn’t all it could be, you can improve it. I also remind them that in our class……
“NO ONE IS DUMB”… not even the teacher!

take care

Kathy

If self esteem is an aspect of your personality you feel you need to work on then its worth checking out this breakthrough system….

the Quantum Confidence system… that uses  the latest cutting edge brain technology to remove the root cause of your  problems and frustrations