Certain Beliefs

As we go through life we can develop certain beliefs about ourselves that contribute to the image we have of ourselves. Often these are negative or constraining beliefs that might be based on a single incident in our childhood and yet we continue to believe these things are us. These are our limiting beliefs.

Our limiting beliefs hold us back from achieving our full potential because we believe them to be true. Examples of limiting beliefs might be; I can’t remember peoples names or; I’m no good a spelling. So we don’t engage with people because think we won’t remember their names, or we don’t write because we think we can’t spell.

Here’s an exercise; list down ten things you believe about yourself that are limiting your potential. If you can’t think of ten that’s OK, just list as many as you can.

Now take the three that you feel are having the most impact on your life and write these down separately. Here’s three from my own stable of limiting beliefs:

  1. I can’t remember things in exams, I go to pieces
  2. I am a poor presenter
  3. I am an introverted person

Got three for yourself? Good.

Now for each of your limiting beliefs write the most positive, affirming statement that you can devise. Again here are my three:

  1. When taking exams I remain calm and in control and the information I need flows into me
  2. I am an excellent presenter and an accomplished public speaker. When presenting I find the information I need comes to me when I need it.
  3. I am an outgoing person who mixes well with other people.

Finally take a separate card and write out your new beliefs. Place the card where you’ll see it several times a day and when you do say the affirmations to yourself. Say them over and over again and you will come to believe them. The process isn’t instantaneous, after all it took some time for the original limiting belief to become ingrained and so it will take some time for the new belief to take root; but stick at it because they will become your new reality.

Litter

One of my pet hates is litter.

Litter seems to be an endemic problem in Ireland. I live in a rural environment; but if I walk up the lane outside our house I find it littered with plastic bottles, drink cans, crisp packets and all manner of rubbish.

I live near Clonakilty in West Cork. A picturesque town that has recently won awards for being Ireland’s tidiest town as well as an international ward for its floral displays. Yet its streets are littered with dog excrement!

Two events really prompted me to post this,

  1. I was driving home one evening from work when a crisp packet was thrown out of the window of the car in front.
  2. Mrs. H. and I were sitting in our car in the car park at a local beach. The car park backs onto a small grassy area at the edge of a wetland reserve. Another car pulled in and child (aged about ten) got out, threw an empty coke can onto the grass and got back into the car. They left a few minutes later, no one else got out of the car.

What does this blatant disregard say for the Irish respect for their environment? OK, I know I shouldn’t generalize; but the level of litter in general makes me think this is a general problem.

Now I’m going to extrapolate. I believe that respect for the environment is a reflection of respect for the self. If I don’t respect myself then I’m not going to respect my environment and if I’m not respecting my environment it’s because I’m not respecting my self.

So what does all this littering say about the way the Irish respect themselves?

Whatever Happened To insighta.com?

I first read about insighta.com in one of Gretchen Rubin’s posts on Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain.

Towards the bottom of the posting (great sketches by the way Gretchen) she mentions the site insighta.com which I duly surfed off to investigate.

The site appeared to be a social site devoted to personal development topics. You could link in your blog postings for other members to vote on. If you got enough votes you’d get the article posted on insighta.com’s front page.

It seemed cool so I thought I’d give it a try. That was back in mid-April so I thought I’d check out how things were going after a month. I was most surprised to find the site replaced with a photography site.

Does anyone know what has happened to the personal development insighta.com?

Beyond SMART Goals

You know, making goals SMART doesn’t make them happen. A great deal more effort needs to be put in before a SMART goal becomes a realized goal. However there are some things you can do to bolster your SMART goals and shorten the odds that you’ll achieve them.

  1. Compelling Reasons. What are the compelling reasons for you to complete this goal? Write them down! If you’re struggling to think of some compelling reasons then take a step back and ask yourself, “Why am I committing to this goal if I can’t think of any compelling reasons to do it?”.
  2. Additional Benefits. Under this heading list all the additional benefits you’ll accrue by achieving this goal. For example the additional benefits for my weight loss goal would include:
    • More of my clothes will fit
    • I’ll have more energy
    • It will ease my hiatus hernia

    to name but a few.

  3. Challenges To Be Overcome. Get these out on the table right up front, don’t let them lurk in the background waiting to leap out and trip you up. By identifying the challenges up front you might recognize early on that extra steps will be required to get you to your goal and you can plan for these now.
  4. Resources You’ll Need. Again identifying the resources you’ll need to accomplish your goal as early as possible will give you the opportunity to build these into the plan and avoid nasty surprises later.

This upfront planning is well worth the effort. It helps integrate the goal into your subconscious and identifies things early on that might otherwise knock you off course. By getting a grip on them now it will boost your confidence in your ability to achieve that goal.

The "A" in SMART

You’ll probably know by now that the “A” in “SMART goals” stands for Attainable. In other words a goal must be attainable for it to be worth pursuing.

The examples I gave of unattainable goals were things like taking lunch on Pluto or becoming the next king of England. These were deliberately extreme examples; but when we get closer to home where do we draw the line between what’s an attainable goal and what isn’t. If we decide a goal isn’t attainable then are we just making excuses and holding ourselves back?

Let me give you another example. Suppose you’re a high level executive and you’re considering setting a goal; “Become a CEO within 12 months”.

  • Specific – yes,
  • Measurable – yes
  • Attainable – I’ll come back to this
  • Relevant – yes
  • Timely – yes

So that just leaves attainable. At first you think this goal is relatively easily attainable; until you realize that it will take you away from your wife and young family who need your support. Eventually you come to the conclusion that this goal isn’t attainable because of family pressures.

My argument here is that this goal, and many like it, are attainable if we’re willing to pay the price. The price in this case is spending time away from the family.

In fact almost any goal, even the daft ones I mentioned above, are attainable if you’re prepared to pay the price.

So where does that leave us when trying to assess attainable goals? We need to decide:

  1. How badly we want the goal
  2. What the price will be of attaining the goal
  3. Are we willing to pay that price?

If we are willing to pay the price for attaining the goal then we must recognize that this is our choice! If we’re not willing to pay the price to attain our goal then, again, this is our choice. In exercising those choices we are empowered to shape our own future.

Choose What To Do

A recent article from Mark Forster came up with a useful idea for those of us who tend to get distracted away from the items on our to-do list by other less productive pursuits.

Mark suggested that rather than use a time log, to record everything we’ve done; use an “event log” to record everything we’re about to do.

What advantages does this have over a time log? Basically if you have to stop for a second and write down what you’re about to do before you do it then you have to make an active choice as to what it is you’re going to do. So when I complete this posting I might write down:

21:57 – surf on over to gamestar

and I must just stop and think, “Hang on, I still need to sort out the laundry. Gamestar will have to wait”.

You get the idea? I’ve made an active choice as to what I’m going to do rather than just let the fancy take me where it will.

In the next day or so I’m going to give this a try and I’ll report back how I got on.

The Little Steps

I was listening to the radio this evening, with it being Saturday the football results from the UK were on and I heard one of the commentators refer to the “gigantic step” one of the clubs had taken today.

That got me thinking. You know we all expect instantaneous results these days. Look at the Internet, instant information, instant purchasing power. We want to buy something, we don’t have to save for years we can get instant credit. Heck, even my porridge is instant these days!

We live in a world were we want it and we can get it now. Or do we? If we have a goal then our underlying belief maybe that this too should be instantly attainable and when it’s not we may loose heart, loose focus, loose direction. However we have to remember that it’s the little steps that take us steadily forwards and that will eventually lead us to our goal. Those little steps that we take every day are the ones that will eventually lead us to success.

That gigantic step the club took was a gigantic step out of the relegation zone. Perhaps if they’d been taking little steps all season they’d not have been in the relegation zone today.

The Journal Reviewed

The Journal is an excellent tool for recording just about anything you might want to refer to in the future. Use it as a traditional journal or to keep notes, recipes, addresses, anything. Then find the information using comprehensive tagging or search facilities. A very versatile tool.

Review of The Journal
Rated as 5/5 on May 12 2007 by David Hollingworth

5/5

I’ve been using The Journal from DavidRM Software for many years, so many years ago that I can’t recall the original reason for downloading it. Since then it’s become a true companion with a wide variety of uses.

The Journal has two main layouts. Firstly there’s the traditional calendar based journal which you can configure to create entries as page per day, a page per week, a page per month or, in fact, just about any date range you can think of.

For example one of my main uses for The Journal is as a weather almanac. In here I have three calendar journal categories. First journal has daily entries as a brief summary of the weather each day. Secondly I have a weekly category that has one entry for every week starting on a Saturday. Finally I have a category for the monthly climate reports that creates an entry on the first of every month.

As well as the calendar based entries The Journal also has looseleaf entries that can be used for general note taking or, in fact, to record any information that isn’t particularly date related. These entries can also have sub-entries to create a nested structure for organizing your information.

The Journal comes with a host of additional features. These include:

  • Stop watch & count down timer for timed writing exercises
  • Colour coded ‘topics’ for categorizing and filtering information
  • Posting direct from The Journal to a number of popular blog engines
  • Full rich text entry into the journal with ability to create your own format styles
  • Spell checker and thesaurus
  • Full search capabilities
  • Set events, tasks, appointments in the calendar and get pop up reminders

The list is pretty much endless so I suggest you go try The Journal for yourself. You get a huge 45 day trial period and the eventual purchase cost is very low.

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Be Careful What You Wish For

After all this talk about loosing weight last weekend I contracted a virus that had some unpleasant gastric side effects. This is the reason the blog has been so quiet this week.

I’ve not weighed myself yet; but I’ll be darned disappointed if I get on the scale tomorrow and I haven’t lost anything at all. Mrs. H commented this afternoon that if I lost any more weight of my face I’d look dead! Nice!

Now I’m not really suggesting that my desire to loose weight triggered the earlier unpleasantness; but there is still something to be said for being careful how we envision our desires and goals. For one thing the sub-conscious doesn’t understand the word “not”. So if you say, “I will not smoke”, all that gets through is the, “will smoke”. Not the desired effect at all. It’s far better to say something like, “My life is free from the need for cigarettes”.

Feedback Loop

Here’s something I learned today;

That if something goes wrong it’s not a failure – it’s feedback!

When I read that I thought, WOW! That’s a revolutionary way of looking at what’s happening in my life. If I’m not progressing in the way that I want to then it’s not a failure it’s feedback.

What do we do with feedback?

Feedback is called feedback because it feeds back into the system and modifies it so that the situation that produced the feedback doesn’t happen again (in the case of negative feedback) or does happen again in the case of positive feedback.

This morning I got on the scales again, it being Saturday which is weigh day in our house. Well I was disappointed at first to find that my weight was exactly the same as last week and the week before.

Then I thought, “Hand on! This is feedback, not failure! The feedback is that I haven’t modified my behavior enough to start loosing the weight. I must make more effort to start the weight loss process”. Which is a much more positive slant on the situation.