Personal Development
How Personal Development Effects Us All
I have recently created a category entitled “Personal Development.” You may wonder why a website devoted to making social and political changes would have a category for personal development. My answer is that before we can make changes in our society and in the political process, we must make changes in our self. We must develop our abilities for goal setting, taking responsibility, controlling emotion, personal motivation, and education before we can make external social and political changes. A lot of you will already have these skills and will not need to read my posts and articles on these subjects, unless you just want a refresher. However, many of you will need to work on these areas of your life in order to make some real positive changes not only in your life, but in your community and ultimately, your country.
Now, you may read some posts in my “Grinds My Gears” section or other areas of this site that may make you ask yourself if I am a complete pessimist or have a bad attitude. I assure you that is not the case. I write about a lot of things with tongue in cheek so please don’t interpret my rantings as personal beliefs. I just like to have fun and sometimes it’s good to vent about things that you’re upset about, or that you find funny, or that you would like to change. I’ve found that once you write about things that stir emotion, you stir your own emotion, which creates motivation for you to get to work and start making changes. If all I did was write about how the grass is green, or how fast it’s growing, you would get really bored very quickly.
This post is really just my second post on Personal Development. I inadvertently wrote my first personal development post entitled “Projects I’m Working On“, and that’s when I realized that the goals of social/political change and personal development are intertwined. I want to provide information to my readers that will not only give them resources to make social and political changes, but to make personal changes as well, as these topics are all intertwined.
I don’t claim to be a personal development guru like a Zig Ziglar or Scott Peck. However, I’ve failed so many times that I am starting to succeed in certain areas of my life after learning from my mistakes and I feel I have a lot of insight to offer people.
Personal Development
Think about something that you would like to start or stop doing or change in your life. One of my biggest crutches in the past was smoking cigarettes. I’m told that quitting smoking is one of the most difficult things in the world to give up. I challenge those people and say that giving up eating is FAR more difficult than giving up smoking. At least after I quit smoking I was still able to have 3 meals a day! I of course say that tongue in cheek but I want you to think about that concept when you think about what you would like to change in your life. Think about what is necessary and what is a luxury. Focus on stopping the luxuries before you work on changing the things that are necessary in your life. For example, your job is necessary to earn money in order to pay rent, buy food, etc., so focus on stopping smoking before you focus on changing your job. You’ll find that focusing on changing the luxuries will at least concentrate your energy into a more focused niche and give you confidence after you start seeing results. After you make the luxury changes, you can focus on changing the necessities. The sky is the limit at that point, but start with baby steps (as my friend Michael Kwan said in his post “My Six Word Memoir“, “Take Pride, Pleasure in Little Things.”).
Our mind is our most complex organ and we have complete control over what we allow our mind to think, and ultimately, what we allow our mind to make our body do. If you’re sitting at your computer reading this article, I want you to think about something for me. Imagine you’re sitting at a nice restaurant and your server brings you a nice house salad with all of the greens you like… spinach, romaine lettuce, tomato, cucumber, carrots, and your favorite dressing.
“Would you like some fresh ground pepper on your salad?” asks the waiter.
“That will be nice,” you reply.
As the waiter grinds the pepper you catch a big whiff of the peppery concoction and almost involuntarily sneeze, but regain your bearings after a couple seconds.
In the next scenario, I want you to think about laying on the grass in a park or field on a nice sunny day with a friend. The grass blades are poking you in the back and neck a little bit. You turn your head to the side to talk to your friend and a blade of grass rubs your nose.
Finally, imagine you are part of an experiment where the scientist is rubbing the tip of your nose with a feather and they are testing how long a person can go without scratching their nose while it’s being tickled with a feather. The scientist rubs your nose from between your eyes slowly to the tip of your nose then rubs the tip of the feather inside your nostrils, and repeats.
Is your nose itching a little bit yet? Have you already subconsciously scratched your nose yet? How about your neck when you thought about the blades of grass poking you in the back and neck? If you realize that you’ve already scratched your nose or your neck without thinking about it, you are in tune with your subconscious. You can do anything you want in life.
If you absolutely know that you did not scratch either part of your body then there are two scenarios.
1. You don’t realize you scratched yourself
In this scenario, you are not in tune with your subconscious. You’ve consciously decided that you know everything on a conscious level. I don’t know how else to put it and nothing I have to say to you that matters anyway. You will need to work on opening the doors between your conscious and subconscious mind.
2. You know you didn’t scratch yourself, consciously or subconsciously
In this scenario, you are in tune with your subconscious. You have control over the actions you take consciously and subconsciously. You are far ahead of average. You have the ability to make any changes you want in your life because you understand both consciously and subconsciously that you are making decisions every millisecond both consciously and subconsciously and can control both areas of your mind.
What am I saying?
When thinking about making personal changes in our lives, we need to understand that we are making decisions both consciously and subconsciously every millisecond. We need to understand that and harness that power. Once we harness the power of the subconscious we can do anything. One of the keys to me being able to quit smoking and nicotine was that I understood that under NO circumstances, would I ever ingest any nicotine again. I made that decision on a conscious and subconscious level. I told myself “self, you are not going to EVER ingest nicotine in any form again no matter what, so don’t you even TRY to trick me, because I won’t fall for it.” And do you know what happened? Each time my subconscious was saying, “just have one” or “just try a nicotine patch to help with the cravings”, my conscious said “I knew you would say that… Nice try but I’ve already told you, NEVER again.”
Consciously make up your mind to control your subconscious. Don’t be like the first scenario above where you consciously decide that all your decisions will be made consciously, because that is just not reality, but consciously decide that you are going to understand your subconscious and use it to your advantage.
I have way too much information on this topic to complete in one post. I could probably write an entire book based on finding harmony between your conscious and subconscious. What I want to accomplish with this article is to bring awareness to everyone that our subconscious plays a large role in the decisions we make in life and to use that information for making positive changes. The changes you make in your life will effect everyone on this planet. If you improve your neighbors life, you will improve their children’s lives, and their friends lives, and etc. and etc.. When you decide to improve yourself and your society, you will change the world.
I am excited that I’ve started a Personal Development category because I will be able to share my experiences, be they successes or failures, and hopefully you can learn something or at least be refreshed on a particular concept. Maybe you’ve encountered the same situations as me or have hit the same walls and wondered “how will I ever get out of this jam?”. Hopefully we can share experiences in the forums section or even just by posting comments. I will try to post a personal development post at least once a week so add my blog to your RSS feed or add this site to your bookmarks and let’s start making positive changes in ourselves, with our family, with our neighbors and friends, and in our communities.
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Sarah Hartwell...
I wish everyone could live in peace! Also, congratulations on quitting smoking Matt! I have been t...
Copers...
Good post. I agree we need to help other people because what goes around comes around!...
Good post. My subconscious tries to trick me to! I’ve added your RSS feed
good blog