The Many Loops of Life

Life is circular. There are a number of things most of us are aware about to support this view of things, like Karma and nature to name just the obvious ones.

Look at nature. We see the life-cycle of many things around us, yet often don’t realize that we are part of this cycle, living a cycle of our own. We dwell too much on the beginning and end of things, which often boils down to our fear or disappointment of having "all this end" some time, or even "When will this end?".

It doesn’t end folks, it doesn’t begin, it just goes round and round. I would like to talk about an aspect of the loop we exist in and how it is there for us to liberate or imprison ourselves in our lives. It’s our choice.

A common obstacle to doing something you want to do is the fear of what others will think. For some reason it is difficult for many people to admit to their friends that they want to inspire people or do something that will impact the world around them. This is tragic. We are all actually here to do that because there is one simple word that joins all the dots of life and clears the fog of "What’s it all for?".

Purpose

Purpose is the very thing that separates a mundane life from a fulfilling one and something which is constantly evolving. It is very rare that we all have one purpose that lasts a lifetime. Purpose comes and goes, but is the very foundation on which our happiness can be built on in any given moment.

So, with regard to wanting to contribute to others. There is a potential fear of standing out, that maybe one or more of our own flaws may be exposed in doing so and the all-too-often remark made by people that "He’s not interested in helping others, just making a buck" or "She only helps others to feel good about herself".

I’ve got a response to comments like that. "Shut up and find a purpose!". Yes I used to have those kinds of thoughts about people who were successful and contributed their time and or money to helping others. I would sometimes cynically mention that they were just exercising some good PR to grow their self image and therefore bank balance, but I think on the whole that is incorrect.

The result is what’s important. Also this:
If you want to help people because it makes you feel good then that is actually a good enough reason to do so. The holy grail of life in my opinion is to be happy. Is that fair to say? Nothing else is of much use if we don’t feel happy enough to appreciate, value and enjoy it.

So by helping people in your own way and making yourself feel good, you are flowing with the loop, you are dancing in time with the music of life and therefore fulfilling a purpose. Do you know one of the end results of fulfilling a useful purpose to the world around you? It is being taken care of, which at the point our world has evolved is usually in the form of being able to pay our bills and sustain ourselves financially.

This is the main reason I left the office in the first place. Yes I wanted to seek my fortune, become financially independent and live the life of my dreams, but if you have a dream for your life, it had better have some clarity about the purpose you have living it, or it won’t actually be much of a life, let alone sustainable.

This is not about being a "Do gooder", but it is about doing right by yourself, which means being true to who you are, which you can only be if you know "who" you are. My idea of purpose is changing all the time as I get to know myself more and since I left the office my dream and my intentions have changed, or rather they have evolved. I still want to do many of the things I set out to do. Some of them I have achieved, but I am aware that they will only ever be achieved with purpose behind them.

So what of this loop? Well let’s say you have a purpose to inspire people (I feel this is a purpose of mine. It is certainly an intention). You wish to inspire somebody by being yourself, maybe you write a book, write a song or simply help others see how they can improve their own life. You succeed in doing so and this makes you feel good. In fact it does more than that, it feeds you with energy, which makes you feel alive and incredible. This in turn inspires you to create an even more powerful expression with which you can inspire others and the result is that you inspire more people and so it goes.

If you help others in order to feel better yourself then you are actually building on your ability and effectiveness to help others even more, so anyone that says it is wrong to help others out of a desire to help yourself is wrong. They are simply assuming that your desire is to make money from appearing to help others. You can’t do that, at least not for long. People see through that S***T, even if it seems to go on for a long time.

I always go back to someone like Bill Gates because he always seems to be on the receiving end of criticism. No surprise, look at how many know who he is. Microsoft transformed the world and made it a much easier place to do business, make money, turn new ideas into reality and communicate with loved ones around the world, relatively cheaply. It has transformed the world. The result is that Microsoft made loads of money. Now I am the first to curse Windows for hogging too much memory and crashing at inopportune moments, but the point is that whether Bill Gates started Microsoft to become rich or because he wanted to do something good is irrelevant. Look at the result and I’m not even talking about his philanthropic work.

Making money helping people is perfectly OK as long as you are actually helping people. If you receive feedback that suggests what people are paying you for is not helping them then it is time to refine your purpose or how you implement your purpose.

What all of this boils down to is that leaving the office is not an answer to life’s problems. If you simply want to stop putting money in your bosses pocket and live life on you own terms, that is great, but make sure you know why you want to do that because it needs to serve a purpose, not only to work for you, but to make life fun.

Mmmm Experts?

I Read an interesting article on the BBC website recently, except the only thing useful I got out of it was the inspiration to write this article. I’m always amazed at the "We have the deifinitve answer" statements made by some scientific researchers. It’s very closed-minded and not the most useful approach to researching matters of psychology, but there you go.

So back to this article – linked here for you to agree or disagree with. It appears that research has concluded that ‘self help’ can actually be bad for you because people with low self esteem feel worse after making positive affirmations to themselves.

Hey sorry folks with low self esteem.
It seems the experts have spoken.
You can’t be happy and your life won’t get better!

That is the problem with fixed viewpoints. They contain too many assumptions, which are narrow-minded and hold back our progress. The assumption in this case is that people with low self esteem are beyond helping themselves.

Think about it. First of all, those who try any self development technique with the attitude that they are broken and need fixing are not going to get results very quickly and in fact may feel worse in the beginning, but that’s got nothing to do with the ‘self help’ techniques: As described here. That has everything to do with their attitude. Any process of change, growth or improvement has to get messy and painful before it gets better.

Just think at how everyone of us came into this world. It wasn’t pretty! (but it is beautiful of course).

The fact is that it takes more than trying to affirm positive statements to yourself for a few days to change your life. In fact it takes longer than most people have the stamina for because you have to maintain the discipline to change your view of life and your view of yourself. You have to force yourself to think about things in a more desirable way before those thoughts become habits and that can take a while, by which time most people have given up. Some might even be heard saying "Well that didn’t work it just made me feel worse", so the way I see that article, all it did was conclude that we are stuck with our situation and if our situation is a poor one, then bad news, there’s no point trying to do anything about it.

I do have an issue with much of the media though. I don’t read the newspapers or watch the news. It’s mostly full of what certain groups of people want you to see and is rarely the whole truth, but I’m glad I saw this article because these days I am very clear about wanting to inspire people to find improvement in their life and I try and expose to people as much information as I can that will allow them the awareness that they have a choice.

In a nutshell, I don’t listen to any so-called experts. Not for long anyway. The best teachers in my mind are the ones who openly admit they are still learning and who are not above learning from their students either because teaching is a 2-way street, not dictation. Sounds like inspiration for another article!

The icing on the cake of that BBC article for me was this statement:

"A UK psychologist said people based their feelings about themselves on real evidence from their lives".

Did you get a degree to come up with that? Of course they do, it’s how most of us are conditioned since birth, which means that people have been creating a habit of whatever their attitude is for years. Try changing the root cause of the way you feel and then see what happens in the future.

I’d like to make a suggestion to the psychologists. Take a step out of your own boundaries and text books and conduct some research starting now with people who apply techniques to change the way they think and feel about themselves, whether they have low self esteem or not, then after several years, publish the results. You might learn something.

SELF HELP is just that. There is nothing in this universe that can "Self Help" you. In case anyone’s forgotten, "yourself" is you… or rather the character you have built over years in your own story of life.

There is always the option to change the story and actually some sequels are even better than the first story too!

Can it really be that simple?

We as humans do seem to have a love for over-complicating things. If there is a simple solution then we will often not trust that it can possibly be right, so we go in search of something more complex and time consuming. Maybe it’s something to do with our fears and so is just another way to continue putting things back and taking more time, so we can still have the looming restriction of time to blame for many of our problems and lack of progress.

I can be quite a procrastinator and a very clever one too. It used to take me months or years to notice that I was putting something off or getting distracted, it really was that chronic. My intricate schemes to procrastinate without me noticing are still there and are in fact getting more sophisticated, but I notice it more every day and even if I don’t succeed in overcoming it I at least accept it and don’t beat myself, anyone or anything else up about it.

More recently though I have come to the conclusion that I have all the information I need to create the most incredibly successful life. Even better than the one I have desired for years. I am at a very interesting point right now too and frankly, it is a bit scary. Hopefully what I write in this article will help anyone else who is in a similar position or who is worrying about their current life situation in any way. I believe that at times when I feel a bit helpless or powerless that the real truth could be that I am in the perfect position to exercise great power by leaving my worries alone and helping others to dispel their own, so here goes.

Not that it has anything to do with this article, but whenever I ask the question "What is it that you want to do" I think of the song "Loaded" by Primal Scream, which begins with those words. In fact it has a lot to do with this article come to think of it because I just realized that thinking of that song, which is nearly 20 years old now (Wow is it that long already?) I am taken back to certain feelings of what my life was like back then. I have some really great memories of the years that I was listening to that song and others of the time – the early Nineties. Funnily enough in the UK at the time we were experiencing a recession then too and music was a big healer for me and, it seemed everybody due to the fact that some of the best music I had heard for years was coming out around that time from the end of the 80′s.

Well what is so powerful about music, like "Loaded" is that over time my mind had made an association with that song and a particular feeling and music has this power. Other senses do too like smell and images obviously, but being a musical sort and very sensitive to things of a sonic nature, music is involved in some very strong associations made by my mind to how I was feeling at the time and in some cases, reminds me of people from the time too.

So as I asked the question "What is it that you want to do?", which always gets me focused I hit upon the significance of this realization and found the missing piece to a puzzle I have been trying to solve for a while now. How can I channel my musical passions and talents in a direction that will keep me interested, inspired and constantly creative, whilst inspiring other people and keeping them interested. I have felt for a quite a while that simply trying to sell CDs or MP3s, trying to get on internet radio, getting the most hits on Myspace and all the other social networks, "Going viral" and being picked up on the front pages of various traffic-heavy web pages, just like everyone else didn’t really inspire me very much. I wanted to know how I could actually make a difference, not just by trying to entertain people with my music, but actually having it serve a useful purpose and be entertaining in its own right too.

With the marriage of LTO and BAH I think I have found the answer and if not I am pretty close to it. This is what is currently behind my work and it has given me such a boost in my levels of love for what I am doing that I am even starting to surprise myself with the insight and the ideas I am now putting down on paper. The premise of what I am doing on my current project is based on the approach to living life by design, encompassing the power of associations made by the mind between music, feelings and emotions.

So I am excited. Not only am I pleased with what I am writing musically, but I am also pleased with what I am writing literally and I cannot wait to see what other people think of it and what I love about it is that I am not making "Meditation music" or "New-Age music". I am making accessible music: Rock, Pop, Country, folk and contemporary music. This means that it will stand by itself simply as good music; Well not for everyone, but that goes for anything anyway doesn’t it?

So just ask yourself the question every day. "What is it that you want to do?" and be prepared for a revelation!

What is it that you want to do? Share it here and give it some power, even if you don’t know how you will achieve it yet.

I would love to hear your feedback too.

Do Only What You Love.

Is This Just Possible? I’m going to be really imaginative now and write an article about the current economic crisis! Wow, what can be said that hasn’t been said already? Well actually I don’t know if what I’ve got to say has been said already or not. Probably most of it has, but I still want to get something across that I thought about today, which is something I think is crucial to consider for our future from this moment onwards.

I am feeling particularly good. My wife is pregnant, it is our first child and we discovered today at the hospital checkup that there is already a tiny little heart beating, which just blew my mind. I’ve not really given child development any conscious thought before, but that really does impress me that after just 11 weeks, there is a heart already pumping away, full of life and gusto, just itching to experience the life it chose to come here for…

And that was what got me thinking and excited for the rest of the day. You see, as I continue on my journey ever creating the life of my dreams, facing personal obstacles, overcoming them, becoming conscious of limiting beliefs I never knew I had and breaking them down, my wife is always very supportive and often says to me that I have her power to rely on whenever I need any. That’s a lovely sentiment I think and I can’t think of a better way to express support for somebody.

Well since we have another little being in our household, my wife often reminds me that our little baby is here to share her power with us to help us fulfil all of our dreams. Again a lovely sentiment, another reason I love being married to somebody from a totally different culture and perspective to my own.

So eventually I start to get to the point of this article. Thank you for staying with me on this one…

The Point of This Article!

Let us say that when a baby is developing it knows what it is here for and when it is born into the physical world that knowledge fades and the rest of its life as a human being is for it to rediscover its personal expression of life, its own particular strength, uniqueness and contribution. Its value. It’s what we’re all here for, to deliver the value of whatever natural, unique expression we were gifted with.

But what happens often, not always, but often is that we find ourselves steered onto a path that is not best suited to what we are naturally gifted with. More often than not we are conditioned into following a path that is considered to be the most safe, sensible and secure, which is nothing more than a perpetuation of the last generation’s experience, determined by the generation before that. What shapes our future much of the time is our past or more importantly the past of our parents, school teachers and other influences on us as we grew up. Of course this is all done with the best of intentions behind it, but it was all based on an illusion.

Think about this:

"You must focus on following this proven model of life, which includes a job you don’t like, a belief in a reality that is only a reality because of the amount of perpetual belief in it in the past, a reality that states ‘Life is hard, dreams don’t come true, so you have to settle for the best you can get’ which if all turns out well, you will reap the benefits of life in the form of a retirement and a pension that will cover your costs and pay your bills, maybe allow you a few nice vacations and maybe, at last, a new car before you die".

Now if it was worded like that then do you think it would be a convincing argument to go that route?

The fact is – and it was always fact before the current downturn in the world economy that having a salaried job is not guaranteed as being more secure than creating your own income. As soon as you are made redundant your income stops and you have to start all over again. At least if your business suffers setbacks, you can rethink your approach or even diversify and see an improvement far quicker than having a single source of income cut off and you having to find a new one, at least as good to replace it. Pensions are a gamble nowadays. You pay an organization your money for your whole working life, so they can play with it and enjoy it. If it is worth anything when you retire, you will be able to live off that money. If it’s not worth anything then sorry and good luck! There is no predictability in any economy, therefore there is no more risk living life one way than there is any other, at least financially speaking, which seems to have become the benchmark of whether something is worthwhile or not.

Be Grateful For This Economic Meltdown

All of these facts are becoming more easy to see now for more people. The collapse in the economy in that respect is a very good thing. It is an opportunity for awakening. It could just be possible that we as parents will, because of the realization that all paths in life have unpredictable elements that we do not so easily fall into the trap of discouraging our children from pursuing the things they love to do because "There’s no money or security in it". Instead it will be far more natural to embrace our children’s uniqueness and talents and help them grow it in such a way that they grow the belief in themselves to know that is their path in life and create their own careers based on what they do best, without having to fight between what is in their heart and what is in their head.

Let’s be attentive to our children, encourage them and plant the seeds of belief in their head, so there is no conflict. In fact if we allow that then I believe we will become more aware of what it is that we love to do in our hearts and will gain the courage to follow it with a new belief in what is possible for our own lives. The other bonus is that your kids will not even think to blame you for their own "Messed up lives" because they will be far more certain and empowered creating the lives they chose and not the life you unwittingly chose for them.

I’ve said it before You Are Success. It doesn’t depend on the economy or outside forces, even when you were young taking on the beliefs of your parents, it wasn’t them planting the seeds in your head, it was you making a decision about what they meant after you interpreted it a certain way..

So to conclude I believe this current recession, depression or whatever else people are sensationally calling it, is most likely the exact thing this world needs because if there has been a recession in anything in the past it has been in awareness. It’s time to wake up. Our life purpose is to write our own life story, not to take out pensions, so we can afford to pay our health care bills for the final chapter in a story that we just found ourselves playing a bit-part in.

I don’t want to wait until the final act to start playing my part. Do you?

Information Overload

Recently I posted a song over at The Weekly Songcast called Overloaded. over the last week I have begun to see a parallel with that song and the amount of information I have been receiving in my email inbox recommending products that will change my life, make me more money and clear away all my problems.

Well I have nothing against this, but it has reminded me of something that I went through a while back when I first started to purposefully and consciously take steps towards the life I wanted and what I went through was information overload. I tried to soak up so much information and didn’t want to miss out on what could be the best program, course or book that I bought so many I couldn’t really apply enough of my attention on all of them. I’ll be honest and say that there are still a number of books I paid for that I have not yet read after a year or two.

Lessons Learned

I learned a great lesson from this and I want to pass on what I learned with the intention of helping anyone else who has the desire to improve their life situation. It could save you some time and money!

First of all I want to explain my position. I myself recommend different products of a "self improvement" nature, so I am not complaining about those who are sending me emails recommending such things, as I do. However it highlights something to me that I feel is important because there is only so much information that one can assimilate effectively.

Have you purchased a self improvement program, Law of attraction course or Ebook in the last month? If you have, my recommendation to you is to focus on that until you have integrated the lessons contained in it. After all you are aware this is an investment in your life aren’t you, seeing as you paid money for it. Make sure you get your money’s worth!

There are other programs that may have a different slant on the same thing that may even do a better job of helping you integrate their teachings, depending on your preferred teaching and presentation style, but look; These things cost a lot of money and if you want to get your money’s worth then stick with one at a time. If you buy a course, program or membership with a teacher or facilitator then ignore any follow up emails from them about somebody else’s program that they also recommend. Don’t get distracted or lured into the doubting voice that says that maybe the program you have just bought is not quite enough by itself. It will be if you stay focused and apply what you learn.

There are currently about half a dozen programs that I am really interested in getting, mostly for research purposes so I can write honest reviews of them from experience, but even from a research point of view there needs to be focus and I am studying already. I also have a policy of only spending money on such things that I receive from my writing, so I need to make more of that before I invest any more!

Maintaining Focus is Key

Its common sense really. If you have a load of books all waiting to be read then your focus on one will not be as strong all the while you are itching to get to the next one. Why would you be so eager to move onto the next one? Well maybe because you paid good money for it and want to get on and start getting what you paid for. I am saying this from experience. I only ever benefited from any of these programs when I focused on one specific one for a period of time without the distraction of thinking about any other method or program, instead of trying to go through them all concurrently.

So that’s my view on it. Why would somebody (like I did) buy one product before finishing the last one? Well the main reason is that very clever marketing technique of scarcity. "Act now before the price goes back up", "Don’t miss this one time offer, only until midnight tonight", "There are only 1,000 copies of this course, so make sure you don’t miss out"

You know what. I have learned that if I am fully engaged with a program at the time of receiving one of those offers then it is just not the right time for me to take that offer, unless I am totally happy to spend my money and leave it sitting on my shelf for the next couple of months, by which time I may have missed the "Money back guarantee" period by the way!

What most of these self improvement programs , especially law of attraction based ones teach you is to work on becoming more connected to your intuition, something I think is essential and valid. I believe I have become much more connected with my intuition since starting this kind of study and direction in life. This has given me the confidence to trust that I am not going to miss out on that crucial piece of information that will change everything in my life if I don’t "BUY IT NOW" and if I never have a chance to study it then, hey that’s just not what I need.

Only When You Are Ready

It is said that you get what you need when you are ready for it and if you miss one opportunity, you will be presented again and again with another until you are ready enough to see it and act on it, which to my understanding means that if you are fully engaged and enjoying the process of " product A" right now then you do not need the distraction of "product B". This is the reason why programs fail for many people because they never get to fully complete the one they were doing when the next one showed up.

In short you have to trust yourself from the inside and be strong. You don’t need to buy lots of different programs. If you do your research before hand and find one which you feel is most in line with the way you like to study and learn then go with it. You may find it is the only program you will ever need.

I hope my lesson in information overload has helped you because I sincerely want you to start living your dream as soon as possible and I don’t want to see you stalled by doing program after program, waiting to be "Ready enough" to change your life. It slowed me down, so the positive learning I can take from that is to pass on the lesson and forewarn you.

Choose wisely and stay on top of the information available to you. You will grow much quicker because the truth is, what the many programs and products out there are doing is awakening you to resources, knowledge, strength, power, energy and ability you already have inside you just ready and waiting to be accessed. All of the programs I have used have essentially pointed to the same thing and the only thing that really made the difference for me was me, once I had got it deeper than just my mind. With the discipline to stick with one process and not get sidetracked I believe that you can accomplish whatever it is that you want when embarking on a self-development program because the only one who really knows how to change your life is you.

What’s your experience of information overload? I’d love to hear your comments and what you learned from the experience.

Letting Go is Not Giving Up

One of the most frustratingly difficult things to get your head around is the principle of letting go of attachment. Letting go is often misinterpreted as "Going with the flow" when in fact going with the flow is actually akin to resignation and giving up in my opinion, whilst trying and doing without any inspiration is just pushing your intention further away. Rather than going with the flow it is more a case of being the flow. Confused? Frustrated? "SO WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO THEN!"

Yes I understand the frustration. Before I continue with this article I would like to share a story that one of my readers sent me in an email the other day which I think helps explain what letting go actually refers to and I found the account she told me to be very inspiring and enlightening in the ways of detachment to how things you want to happen, bringing your intentions closer with tremendous force.

And From Nowhere, an Elephant!

Here is the account, as it was written in the email I received:

‘I’m really making loa [Law of Attraction] a part of my life and I was telling a skeptical friend about it on a journey last week. She said "okay then manifest an elephant if it’s so good" I said that I wouldn’t really believe an elephant would appear so it therefore wouldn’t work. However feeling ridiculed and down-hearted about it I asked that I would see an elephant on the journey…..Well within 5 minutes we spied a lorry in a lay by with a huge pink elephant painted on the side! I was blown away and so was my friend.’

This is a very simple example demonstrating what can happen when you have an intention and you trust that it will manifest. By having no attachment to how it will come about or how people will perceive you depending on the outcome, you are keeping open all possible channels for the realization of your intention. If for example you were focused on your goal being achieved in a certain manner, all your actions will be placed on the dependence of one possible outcome, which greatly restricts the universe to deliver your intention in the most effective way – Case in point, the above account did not stress that the outcome must be a real, live elephant, so there already is the openness to the outcome by expected or unexpected means. Oh and by the universe I mean You. Your awareness and connection; your subconscious that never sleeps and continues to carry out your orders to it – Forever at your service, responding in exact accordance with what you give it to work on.

Get Out Of The Way

In truth I do not know exactly how this all works, but that’s ok because I think if I were to rationalize it I would just be getting in the way of the process. I used to spend great energy trying to get my head around all this stuff and the more I thought I knew intellectually, the more I just confused myself and created doubt about whether I doing things the right way or not, which is a clever trick of the conscious mind to get you back into the habit of attachment and interfering with the process.

There is nothing to say you won’t be successful in the above example, but it could take so long that you may have given up before it is realized. If you wanted to be a millionaire, but believed the only way you could achieve it was by playing the lottery and just spent all your time buying lotto tickets and dreaming about winning the lottery then think of all the other possible opportunities you could have not even noticed that would have given you the chance to become a millionaire. You could eventually win the lottery at the age of 99 after buying a ticket every week for your whole life and then die the next day after having achieved your goal. What was the goal, winning the lottery or experiencing all the things that the money you won could help you experience? Go create your millions, don’t wait for lady luck to give it to you.

The whole energy of attachment is like hope. Hope is a word viewed as a positive for most people, but it is really a way of suspending your creativity and activity, handing the responsibility for the creation of your life over to people and circumstances out of your control and I believe that relying on hope actually keeps you standing still because hope is not a strategy or a plan and it certainly doesn’t contain any intent.

To reference another article at The Neural Recon Report "You Are Success", once you know yourself and by that I mean know what you want, what it is that naturally makes you the flow then you don’t need attachment to how things will happen because every waking moment you are doing "your thang" you will be feeling what it is to have achieved your goal anyway, negating the need to wish it here sooner, in a certain manner or holding it forever in the future and hey presto, before you can say "Manifest me an elephant" you will see the manifestation of your intention in stark reality because it is always created in you first, right now before it appears in your physical reality.

Sound like nonsense? Stop trying to be rational. Do you really think that us humans know everything about our universe? If so we might as well stop everything right now then because there’s nothing left to learn!

Lose Your Head, but Don’t Lose Heart

All the while you try to get this with your head, you are slowing it all down. It really is about trust and faith – faith in your own ability to create your life (I’m not talking about religion) – Because once you know yourself, know that you have everything you require to make it all happen, by LETTING GO then there is no choice but to trust the process. You don’t even need to question the validity of what you are doing. By looking inside yourself and finding the fire there is all the energy you need to do what it takes, to know what to do and when to do it; what to learn, who you are and that it is not going to happen, but is happening all the time. You will be able to achieve any goal you desire with this method because you will be starting from the only point that will guarantee success: What is a desire in your heart and not your head.

I agree that it would be so much easier to have faith in this process once you have a very real experience of a success that shows you in certain terms the unfolding. You’ve probably had an experience like that, whether it was big or small, but you felt a great achievement although it felt like you did nothing. That’s the process and it is available for you to create at all times.

And what if this is all wrong and none of this means anything? Well I can tell you that whatever the reality of this universe and how ever things really work I know that living a life of suffering is a crap deal and all the while we hold onto certain beliefs, wanting to be right, even if being wrong provides a chance to be happier, holding onto how things must happen in our lives for us to be happy etc. then we are creating our own suffering and I choose to live in a manner that creates joy and fulfillment, so even if I reach my last day on Earth without having made my millions I will know that I lived the life of a rich man because I felt the feelings of living an enriched and fulfilled life.

How did I do that? By following my heart, my dreams and doing what I love for as much of the time as I could. I only wish I’d started living like that sooner, but hey I’m doing it now and it works for me. I recommend it!

I would love to hear your comments about success when letting go of the attachment to the outcome.

Photo: Phoebe

Are you a hard worker?

If so, in all honesty does it pay off? I ask this because the more I look around these days, especially as I adapt to a life where I am thinking about things in a totally different way to the way I used to, I see hard work as "wrong turn" in life. Somewhere a very grave error of judgement was made and now you find yourself being a hard worker and as irony would have it the world seems to be full of people who don’t work as hard as you do and seem to be much better off than you are. How did that happen?

Well before I continue with this article I want to draw your attention to an article I found the other day about hard work and where the beliefs of the virtues of hard work were initially instilled in people to the point of them being adopted automatically by about 90% or more of the world’s population.

The article is here and it is both fascinating and enlightening. The Puritan Work Ethic

Now, after reading the above referenced article (if you read it) are your views on hard work the same? In truth, any views you have on the subject are most probably so deeply engrained into your sub-conscious that you may not even realize you have any views on it. In fact your views on hard work may not appear to you like opinions, but simply hard fact, imposed on you by reality.

What is prevalent in most of our minds is the notion that hard work is something of a noble virtue, even though the truth of it is that nobody else really cares how hard you are working. Hard work is something to be done out of a feeling of guilt… of something. I don’t actually know what of to be honest, but as mentioned in the article on the Puritan work ethic I agree that hard work can be defines as something we don’t want to do.

Look at The Rolling Stones. They are granddads and they still spend countless hours touring, which is tiring in your 20′s let alone your 60′s. It cannot be denied that they are busy guys and much of the time probably physically tired as well, but do you think they look at what they do as work, let alone hard work? This is the point. They make more money nearly every hard worker on the planet combined and they spend their life playing and they are not the only ones of course.

The expectation of this view of the typical view of a hard workera hard worker is one that brings with it the assumption that said hard worker possesses all the virtues of a so-called good person. Is it possible that this hard-working guy could be a stressed out, wife-beating alcoholic, pushed to breaking point by the very fact that he has to work so hard doing a job he hates, hating most of his life in order to provide all that he does for his family?

Am I being too harsh here?

I know I have a biased viewpoint about this because I don’t believe you should do a job you don’t like, just so you can afford to hand over your money to someone else who has lent it to you over the period of your whole life. There is more of a reason to be here than simply to apply for a lifetime debt and then spend the rest of it paying it back. What of the lender. Is he slaving away for 40 hours a week? I’ll leave you to answer that one for yourself.

This is a very controversial topic because it flies in the face of one of the most deeply set and widely agreed-upon beliefs in existence. Beliefs that span religion, language and background. It is only a tiny percentage of the world that believe the opposite that are living the lives of their dreams. With the internet having evolved as it has, it is becoming more visible and real a possibility to people than it used to be. I can understand that the notion of following your dreams and doing what you love bringing about the life you both desire and deserve would be a joke in, say the 1950′s just after a world war, people were left with nothing and not much of a choice of what to do next. Of course I can see that, but the fact is that is was still the truth back then and it was possible despite it being very difficult to believe what with the physical evidence around. Its just that now we have so many more channels for receiving information and we are being made aware of things at a rate quantum leaps ahead of even 20 years ago, let alone 50.

I have come to terms with the fact that I have always been at odds with the thought of working for a living, even though I have done so and have been productive for my employers in the past. I never used to believe myself to be a business man or entrepreneur, but with more awareness, which comes with following my heart I can see that that is what I always wanted to be.

For many years I used to think that maybe I was a bit of a lazy, irresponsible person. I wasn’t on the property ladder like many of my peers and I wasn’t interested in moving up within my career into management. I preferred to be one of the engineers. Seeing as I hadn’t got a family or dependents to support I was content with the salary and if I’m honest, although I have had some pretty good jobs in the past in terms of salary and perks, I never really did that much work. I did make sure I got out of doing a lot of work, but always made sure I did what I felt was important and effective. Of course, your boss only notices when you do something that either saves the company money or averts or solves a major, business impacting disaster, so I made sure I was always at the forefront when I saw an opportunity to play a part in doing that.

Well if I am lazy then I have no problem with that. I try to increase my value to others everyday, even if those increases are not yet apparent to most. I do not spend my day laying on a beach, doing nothing, but I don’t graft and I don’t worry about whether I can pay the bills or not. Worry is a prayer for what you do not want (John Assaraf).

Let me begin with a personal account:

In my post There is a Positive Message in Every Situation it is quite evident that in my experience the events that unfolded at that particular time were there as a result of implementing conscious changes and the workings of the Law of Attraction. My situation with my job and lifestyle was very comfortable, although consciously not the lifestyle I wanted. However because it was comfortable and I was safe my sub-conscious was starting to fight the changes that I was consciously making. On the positive side I was also able to see that I was getting a clear message from the universe. Having a strong desire to live in another country with the woman I love I have to admit I was procrastinating, quite extremely about actually going there and starting a new life. All the usual rationalizing was going on in my head like waiting until I had a certain amount of money saved etc. In fact that was really the only excuse I was giving myself. It would be over-dramatic to say that I closely escaped death that day, but the truth is that it could have, and according to most people’s reactions should have been far more serious than it was. This gave me evidence that the message was very clear and real. I had been given a huge shake to wake me up to the reality of my situation without being given all the long-term problems. It was quite simply an ultimatum. “Are you going to get it this time or not?”

Such an extreme event was the best thing that could have happened to me that day if I choose to ignore the immediate inconvenience. I didn’t suffer any mental trauma and it has made me so much stronger and more determined than before. I remember feeling this after I survived the 2004 tsunami in Asia. I was a powerhouse for months after that event. I got very creative, I recorded an album and it was the best thing I had created in my life. I cleared £12,000 of debt in a year and I got close to big success with my music in California (for the second time), but it seems, just as I was on the brink of success that is when the programming was almost back to default and without even realizing it I have been back on autopilot again for nearly a year. This time it is imperative to keep the discipline and I have lots more new information and inspiration to do this, so my next goal is even more focused than the last one and I won’t let any negative thought or feeling by myself or anyone else influence my focus this time. This time, success is the only option.

You may find things that are seemingly undesirable “happening” to you once you decide to change your life and empower yourself. If you are able to accept that you are attracting them then you will have access to great power to move into another gear, achieving your desired goals. I don’t think of it as “I attracted a car crash”. I attracted whatever experience and sign that I needed at that time to get me in the necessary mindset to walk the path that will bring my chosen desire into being.

I hope, from reading my personal experience of taking this path will help to strengthen your experience and to give you guidance. You must be very careful and very aware of your thoughts. Negative ones will just slow down your progress and idle ones will just confuse the hell out of the universe and will put you in alignment with confusion and chaos. If your desire is defined very clearly, without any confusion in the detail you will be able to see the signs once you look a little deeper into it.

For many people who are just beginning to apply what they are learning about the Law of Attraction, it can be quite a bumpy start. You must have heard mention many times before, especially in the area of business that most new ventures collapse within the first two years. This however has nothing to do, necessarily with a poor business model or even poor business sense. It has more to do with the subconscious mind and the perception of what is happening.

It is common for statements to be made like “I tried the Law of Attraction and it didn’t work” or “Since I started applying this in my life, nothing but bad things keep happening to me and I know I am not attracting those because I don’t want those, so it can’t be true”. These are two very, very real signs that the Law of Attraction is very much working.

So you tried it out and it didn’t work? How long did you “try” it for? The Law of Attraction is ALWAYS working. It doesn’t start when you “try” it and it doesn’t stop when you decide it’s not true. It has always been working, perfectly. It doesn’t get things wrong, like the Law of Gravity. It was always there, before Isaac Newton discovered it.

Anyway I want to explain the situation that confuses and frustrates those people who get it and really want to apply this incredible law to their lives, but seem to be coming up against “bad stuff”. Once your awareness of something is heightened you notice much more of it. Your conscious mind gets a filtered version of all the millions of things in your environment that you have no awareness of because anything you are not aware of is deemed unnecessary for your conscious mind to know, so naturally once you introduce a new knowledge of something you notice it more. The Universe is not selective. It does not know well from bad. It knows vibration of energy, which we all are and everything is. Whatever your focus in your mind and this is all to do with the sub-conscious mind, you will experience at some point in the physical world that is your perceived reality.

Let’s say you have a thought. It is something that means a lot to you, good or bad. That attachment to your thought generates an emotion, which is very powerfully charged and causes you to sub-consciously create a meaning to that thought, either about yourself, someone else or the entire world. All the beliefs you have shape your reality.

Once you are actively taking steps to change your program your sub-conscious tries to kick in and revert to what has become your default. The sub-conscious does not do any thinking. It carries out commands. If you write a computer program and you have an incorrect line of code, the program will still continue to execute that line of code and the result will always be the same whether you want it to work or not. Your subconscious is no different. Consciously you have a new intention and are exercising new habits, a new regime and new lifestyle. However if you are not disciplined then the default program will override any good intentions you may have and you will slide back to your old patterns, even without really noticing. It is this change that you have instigated that causes the sub-conscious to fight tooth and nail to keep you back. This is because it is protecting you. The programming you have developed from parents, teachers, friends, experiences etc. is what your mind knows you to be and so any change is considered a danger.

I believe it is perfectly normal that you will start attracting chaos and mayhem when you embark on a fundamental change such as this. This chaos could be simply the manifestation of the conflict in your mind; any conflict will create confusion and an unclear projection of your desired reality or it may be the universe’s way of sending you the signs and messages as to what action you need to take to continue the journey you have chosen.

What must be made clear is that what you believe of yourself is not true. Every belief you have of yourself is a constructed limitation, a category, therefore if you believe you are something then you cannot logically be anything else. Do you consider yourself to be a successful person or not. Deep down in your mind you have made a decision either way about this, so even if you are saying to yourself now that you believe you are successful is that just wishful thinking or do you really believe it, not just say it? This is key because you would be amazed at some of the things you may believe about yourself, which are totally in conflict to the person you think you believe you are.

Look closely at what occurs in your life everyday because this is the only true reflection of what you perceive your life to be. All your beliefs, fears and focus are being presented to you all the time. With this insight you can take steps to change the ones that you feel are holding you back and stopping you in getting what you truly want from your life. It is not only up to you, but it is all, so far been created by you.

Instead of getting angry and taking that last statement personally (I would have done that in the past myself) be pleased that the truth is that you can change things. With this knowledge imagine how amazing your life can be if you start actively putting focus on the life you want rather than the life you don’t. Can you think of anything better than deciding on the life of your dreams and then creating it?

If you found this article to be of value to you then consider making a donation and at the same time make a suggestion on what you would like to read here in future. I get very excited at the prospect of writing for people who are genuinely interested in what they read here.

What was the first thing you thought this morning when you woke up? I want you to think very hard about this because it’s what I believe to be one of the key factors in determining whether or not you are experiencing a good day, week, month, year…… life!

This morning I found myself cursing at my alarm clock. This is important to mention… I found myself cursing. I was cursing before I was even fully awake and didn’t fully realize the importance of such a thing until about half-way through today, when I decided to write this post. I then began to see the evidence of my unconscious, automatic behaviour at work determining my day’s mood.

I thought I was being clever this morning. Having the awareness that I was in a bad mood. I started telling myself that I wasn’t being very present and that the reason for this was because I didn’t get much sleep and I had to attend my shift at work instead of doing what I really wanted, which was to continue work on my latest musical project, but later, as I sat at work pondering the mornings passing’s, I realized that it all came down to that point when I awoke. On an unconscious level I chose to be grouchy today, no matter what, how or why! I had therefore configured my outlook to focus on all the things that I didn’t want today and as we all know, focusing on what you don’t want is a non-starter if you like feeling good about life…

There is no logical, rational reason for my tetchiness today. Any explanation for any feeling is simply laying blame to external causes of which there are none. To take responsibility I can say that I chose to be negative before I woke up and had already cemented that intention before I was awake enough to realize what I had done. Of course, I could so easily have not realized it at all and continued to find outside excuses for my feelings, meaning I would have been attaching false meanings to everyone and everything around me. For that realization I am truly grateful!

Do you realize what this means? Most of us, most of the time are doing our world a terrible injustice in not acknowledging the truth, instead projecting our own version of it back onto the world. That’s a lot of different truths by the way, no wonder there is conflict a lot of the time!

I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with this, its just that if you can spot it, like I did today and accept it then you have taken a big step in your own personal growth. It will make a difference when you know you can choose to have a great day; not necessarily blissful and happy and smiley every day, but great in that you are present to all that life has to give you, both supportive & challenging and you can make a difference.

Sometimes I sit down and just write. I’ll write anything and everything that pops into my head. Sometimes so many things are queued up waiting for my writing hand to catch up that some thoughts that come out disappear and get forgotten before I put pen to paper.

I have been trying lately to do this as often as possible. In fact I think it will serve me well to practice this every day as I think anyone who wishes to grow should do. This very post is a result of such activity today, edited of course into a context of some sort. Leave The Office is already documenting my personal growth whether I intended it to or not, but now it is much more of a conscious process and therefore I hope I can use it to benefit anyone else who is wanting to grow more consciously and achieve the life of their dreams.

So, on the subject of dreams I’ll ask the question what are dreams made of? The idea of this question is to envoke some deep thinking into what really lights you up. Everybody has different dreams to each other, but I am not asking about the content of your dream, but the fabric of it.

Our dreams are what drive us to do certain things when we are present to them and aware that our actions, determined by our thinking create what we experience in our lives. Everything in your life starts with you. The more you are in touch with your dreams and what it is you wish to become and experience in your life, the more likely you are to realize that dream. The details become as real as anything in the physical world, right now and by having such defined and refined details to focus on you will be aware enough to notice and act upon any opportunity that comes your way that will move you towards your dream.

What does this mean? Well if you are dreaming about being rich or successful, but have not put any details in that mental image then what is there to focus on? Most likely the point of focus will be that you are not rich or successful and any event or opportunity that arises that could help you toward your true dream will go unnoticed, or at best seen as an unimportant or even undesirable event.

I was thinking about this yesterday as I sat in front of my log stove, feeling the warmth and watching the flames dancing around with total abandon, without a care about who was watching them and after a while there was nothing between myself and the fire. I felt it’s energy and I understood it. I was the fire. It’s very difficult to put into words without sounding all new-age and spirtiual, but I know how firmly I have my feet on the ground and I don’t feel strange conveying that experience.

It felt like I was in a world where I was already living the life of my dreams. If the voices of doubt about your dream from outside or even your own "outside" negative voice is loud enough it will stop you dead in your tracks and your dream takes a sucker punch. Those flames did not have that problem. They have no ears to any judgements and therefore live exceptional lives, the life of their choosing. This is just like people who live amazing lives.

I now strongly believe my dream is possible, which is progress from a number of months ago, but whilst I believe it is possible, I need to work on weakening the belief that it is difficult.

Leave The Office is about breaking out of the "I don’t want" or the "I can’t" way of thinking into the "How can I" and "I will".