Are You a Realist?

If one man tells you a horse, he’s insane

if three men tell you you’re a horse, there’s a conspiracy

If ten men tell you you’re a horse, you need to buy a saddle.

- Chinese proverb

 

I stared in disbelief at my Regional Manager. I could no longer hear the words coming from his mouth because all my attention was turned inside in a torrent of abuse aimed at him, the company, the industry, and of course, myself.

How could this be happening to me? How could I be turned down for the management development program when it had been de facto promised to me if I hit certain goals. Goals that had all been reached and most smashed.

As my brain scrambled to make sense of what was happening I heard him say one final thing  before the meeting came to a close and I was suddenly out in the cold, both figuratively and literally: Read the Rest of This Article »

Shut the Duck Up

We all have a voice inside our head that chatters to us constantly about the day-to-day situations we find ourselves in. It’s one of the three primary ways that we interpret external data by constructing conversations internally with ourselves.

Although we all have a voice (or quite often several different ones) we have our own particular versions some of which can be more helpful than others.

Does your voice support and encourage you when things aren’t going quite as planned or does it become aggressive, whiny, rude, pessimistic and thinks nothing of tearing a strip off you?

Is it often far more hostile and abusive to you than you ever would be to other people, even people you don’t actually like?

I once heard this voice likened to that of a bad tempered, miserable, old duck! Yes that’s what I said, a duck. Close your eyes and you can hear the voice in your head now quacking away at you.
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5 Questions That Will Change Your Life

If I could offer you free of charge 5 questions guaranteed to improve the quality of your life, make you happier, less likely to get into arguments, more likely to reach your goals and be more popular with other people, would you be interested in hearing them?

Of course you would, who wouldn’t? After all, they’re free and it doesn’t get much cheaper than that.

Well actually there is a slight catch. Yes they’re free and yes they’ll do all I claim and more, but only if you commit to embedding them so deeply into your neurology by constant and conscious repetition that they become second nature.

Then and only then, will they allow you to make the kind of quantum shift in your life that has your friends thinking your body has been invaded by a very clever, charismatic and slightly easier to get along with space alien.

1. What Else Can This Mean?

As a human being you have developed your own way of looking at things. You see the world through a filter or lens built up and fine-tuned on your beliefs and values. As such you only ever see your own reality, never reality itself.
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How To Visualize Your Success

Have you ever heard of visualization? Of course you have. Everybody’s heard of visualization and everybody partakes in it whether they realize it or not. How it works though is an altogether different matter. I want to take a closer look today at the mechanics of why visualizing works without necessarily delving into concepts and theories that cannot be proven.

The brain has great difficulty in distinguishing between what’s true and what’s imagined. There is an oft-cited example of an experiment conducted by Australian Psychologist, Alan Richardson. He took some basketball players and split them into 3 equal groups. One group was told to practice their free throw technique twenty minutes per day. The next group was told to spend twenty minutes per day visualizing, but not attempting free throws, and the final group wasn’t allowed to either practice or visualize. At the end of the test period the group that had done nothing remained as they were, but both the other groups showed similar degrees of improvement. The people who only visualized playing basketball were able to perform almost as well as the ones who had actually practiced.

“How can that be so?”

Firstly, the people practicing would miss some shots. Each time they missed they had in effect, practiced how to miss. The people that were visualizing would be hitting every basket so they were building up the feelings and memory of how to be successful.
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