I found out about this blog post from readsaid. Old guy thinking is a brilliant post, by Mark Hanington, about lessons “learned after 36 years of being a father, 33 years as a teacher…”
Absolute must read

I read a deep and insightful post today from Life 2.0 called Perspectives on Psychotherapy, which I recommend you all read. One quote they mentioned that struck a chord with me.

From a lecture by Wolter Keers in Gent (sent to me by Ray Sender) -

I had a meeting yesterday evening with a group of psychiatrists and psychologists. There I defended the proposition that there is only one psychic obstacle and that you can reduce all of psychology and psychotherapy, and all psychiatry to that one obstacle. That one problem is that we have forgotten that we are love.

…

Love cannot be given to anyone, you cannot get love; you can’t make water wet, because water is wetness. Neither can anyone give you love, no one can receive love from you, you can only recognize love in yourself and you can recognize love in others.

There’s more, but head on over to the original post to check out the rest.

Let me just tell you one thing first. This is easier said than done.

There is a great post at Life Clever about flipping your thoughts, but I believe before you can flip your thoughts you first need to be aware of your thoughts. You need to be able to interrupt yourself when you’re experiencing negative thoughts and feelings, and this can be tricky. You might find yourself keeping up with this for a few days, but then you get stuck into something that frustrates or annoys you, or gets you experience some sort of negative thought that you forget to interrupt and flip.

In a presentation I once saw or heard by Tony Robbins, he speaks of undertaking a 1 week trial of positive thoughts. The idea is to only think positive thoughts for one week. This doesn’t mean though that you don’t think anything bad, but as soon a negative thought pops into your head, you immediately interrupt yourself and flip your thought into something positive. And, like I said, this can be challenging, as it means you need to be constantly aware of your thoughts and feelings.

I don’t have problems flipping my thoughts, but I definitely struggle at catching myself when I am in a negative state.

The key to personal development, or any sort of life skill for that matter, is consistency and perseverance, I believe. Unfortunately I’ve been rather slacking in the consistency department lately, when it comes to this blog.
As I mentioned before, I started on my “one-sentence journal”, however that didn’t turn out as easy to keep up as I hoped, but then again I’ve never been much of a journal person. Blogging is my journal.

And to get to the point of this post, so that I don’t just go on blabbing about nothing, there is a few links I’d like to share with you all which I’ve found especially share worthy.

There wass a post from ProBlogger recently which I found especially succinct in explaining my situation on this blog at the moment. When it feels like nobody’s reading your blog

Also, If you haven’t seen the following flash videos from Possibility Virus, I highly recommend you watch them . They’re quite inspirational and highly entertaining

• The Eight Irresistible Principles of Fun
• 5.75 Questions You’ve Been Avoiding

Have fun.

I recently found out about a LifeRemix from Guy Kawasaki’s Blog. LifeRemix is “a band of bloggers who enrich people’s lives through blogging” and looks a nice resource for people, like me, who are on a journey of continuous personal development and learning.

Anyway, one of the articles aggregated on LifeRemix, and highlighted by Guy, struck me as worth mentioning, as it is something I will try myself. The author of The Happiness Project Blog, Gretchen Rubin, wrote a post about starting her daily “one-sentence journal“, saying

The idea of keeping a proper journal was far too daunting, so I decided instead to keep a “one-sentence journal.”

which I think is kinda how I feel as well. I initially started this blog to journal my experiences, thoughts and feelings on a daily basis, but found it rather difficult to write about something worthwhile telling people everyday or even once every few days. But I still want to remember these times, I don’t want to look back 10, 20 years from now and think, what was I doing? So a one or two sentences at the end of the day is really simple and doable, and since I’ve already dedicated the last 1-2 hours of my days to practicing my writing and reading, this extra thing would fit right in with my current habit.

I’m not sure I’ll post each daily “one-sentence” here on my blog, since I don’t think it of much value to you, but I might post something after a week of my combined one-sentence journal entries, if looks interesting enough and you’re interested.

In our latest VeloCITI program group discussion session we had this week we spoke about Understanding, or more specifically the principle from 7 Habits of Highly Effective People that to be understood you first need to understand. What is the correlation between this and psychological air you might ask? Or better yet what is psychological air?

Let me explain the latter first.

We all pay attention most to what we most urgently need. Let’s say, for example, the air was to be sucked out of the room you were in at the moment. Very soon you won’t be thinking of anything else but getting air, you’re not going to be listening to anything I say, your only thought would be to get air.

Now the same thing is true for feeling understood. We all have the need for people to listen to us, to understand us. Not necessarily so that they can give advice or help us, but sometimes just so that we don’t feel alone, we have someone to understands and is with us, on our side.

If you want to people to listen to you, to understand you, you first need to understand them. Give them the psychological air they need, and they will be free and open to listen to what you have to say and in turn understand you.

“The one human quality that must be developed is self discipline for success. The will power to force yourself to do what you know you should do when you should do it, whether you like it or not, whether you feel like it or not. Success is tons of discipline.” — Brian Tracy

I believe that waking up early in the morning is one of the better habits one can have, but to develop this habit, or any habit for that matter, takes self discipline.

I remember back in high school waking up everyday at 6am to get to school on time. Even on weekends and holidays when I worked at my cousin’s shop I would wake up early. I in fact found it difficult to sleep passed 6:30am, I woke up naturally at that time.
However, since leaving high school, and the part-time work I was doing at that time, to go study IT at College full-time, I started to lapse. Things were much more relaxed on College campus. The lecturers didn’t nag you to come to class, as long as you didn’t pitch up mid-way into the lecture, and after the first few lectures you got a feel for which lessons you had to attend and which ones you could skip. Especially in 1st year, there was a lot of free time padded in between classes. And so I started to slip from the discipline of waking up early I had developed in high school.

I’ve come to realize now that high school taught me discipline, but it never taught me self discipline.

The difference? Discipline is, as Brian Tracy said it best, “The will power to force yourself to do what you know you should do when you should do it, whether you like it or not, whether you feel like it or not”.
Self discipline, in my opinion, is doing this for yourself rather than in general. This means loving and valuing yourself as much as you value others.

This is a huge deal for me, as I’ve always put other’s needs before my own, which deeper down means I didn’t value myself as much as other people. This is where my self discipline is lacking.
I have discipline to do what needs to be done, regardless of whether I like to or not, when I comes to things that need to be done for other people, but I often lack the self discipline to do for myself what needs to be done regardless of what I want.

You can delegate responsibility, but you can’t delegate accountability to anyone.

If someone gives you a job to do, you can get someone else to do it, but you are still accountable to produce the results. If the job isn’t done right the only person to blame is you, because even though you’ve delegated the responsibility, you are still accountable.

… learn Self Management.

Time management presupposes you can make time do something for you. In reality you are managing yourself, not time. How can you manage time? Time doesn’t do anything for anyone, it just goes forward, all the time, non-stop, no comprise. You can’t make it do anything else.

This might just be a semantic details, but I feel there is fundamental difference to learning self management rather than “time management”, it’s the fundamental difference between being efficient and being effective.

Are you happy? Isn’t that the ultimate goal in life. To be uncompromisingly and abundantly happy.

After watching some great TED presentations about happiness, I’ve come to learn happiness is not gotten by how much you get. There is soo much more to life than how much we get.

Tony Robbins outlines 6 things very person needs and with clear examples and arguments why.
Rick Warren, best selling author of “The Purpose Driven Life”, shares his insights into finding your purpose and being truly happy. Other presentations I’ve seen so far, which is also worth checking is that by Dan Gilbert and Barry Schwartz, sharing other insights into happiness which is worth taking a look at.

Also, slow down. Life isn’t a race. it’s a journey. Take the time to be grateful and thankful for what we have. If you can’t think of anything to be grateful for, then you’re not thinking hard enough, or at all.

I recommend watching each presentation in the order I’ve linked it in this post. When watched after each other they can be very powerful and moving