Live This Life
10
Top Tips For a Happier Life &
Why
Positive Thinking Works.
Live This Life
By Mark Dawes
Published by NFPS Ltd. at Smashwords
Copyright 2012 NFPS Ltd
Table of Contents
Chapter 3 - Let's go down the mind gym
Chapter 4 - Your Unconscious ‘Servo-Mechanism' to Success
Chapter 5 - The Mind as a Fertile Field
Chapter 6 - How to use Autosuggestion and Self-Talk
Chapter 7 - What Doesn’t Kill us Makes us Stronger
Chapter 8 - Joining the Dots of Life – Steve Jobs’ Speech
Chapter 9 - Failure – A Blessing in Disguise
Chapter 10 - The Arrow of Time
Chapter 11 - The Second Law of Thermodynamics and Entropy
Chapter 13 - Finding meaning in our suffering
Chapter 14 - Mindfulness Meditation
Chapter 15 – A Summary of Tips
Introduction
I have written this book for those of you who maybe experiencing current personal problems in your life, and for those of you who maybe experiencing change in your life and the uncertainty that change brings. I have also written this book for those of you who maybe experiencing pain in your life, be it either physical or mental, and for those of you are exposed to the unhealthy and unkind words and acts of others whose aim may be to destroy you or demoralise you into giving up and failing. I have also written this book for those of you who feel ‘stuck’ in a set of circumstances or in an environment in which you just feel like giving up because you cannot see any light at the end of the tunnel. This book is also intended for those of you who are unsure of where your life is taking you at this present moment in time and possibly do not know what path to follow.
My aim in writing this book is to give you a few key tools and concepts and a definitive strategy to help you change your life for the better, despite how you may be feeling and in-spite of your current emotional state and circumstances.
However I cannot take any accolades for what I'm about to write as none of this has anything to do with me. What I'm about to share with you is information that has found its way to me at some stage of my life. In essence, everything I'm about to tell you is universally available to everyone and anyone, and therefore no credit can be given to me at all. All I see myself in this process is someone who can signpost you along a route that will help you make better decisions, that I guarantee will improve the quality of your life for the better, should you choose to follow the advice in this book.
This book is fundamentally all about your mental attitude and how you choose to approach your life. Therefore, the mental attitude in which you read this book will also determine the meaning found within the information you uncover, and the purpose that meaning can provide for you in your life.
Your mental attitude is really important. It is the major factor, which attracts people to you in the spirit of friendliness, or repels them, according to whether your attitude is positive or negative; and you're the only person who can determine which it shall be.
If you are a businessperson or salesperson then your mental attitude, regardless of what you are selling, will determine your success or failure, irrespective of market conditions or the state of the economy.
Your mental attitude also determines, to a large extent, whether you find peace of mind or go through life in a state of frustration and misery.
In essence your mental attitude controls, very largely, the space you occupy in your life, the success you achieve, the friends you make and the contribution you make to future generations. In short, it will be no great overstatement of the truth if we were to state that mental attitude is everything.
Your mental attitude is the last bastion of control. It is the one and only thing over which anyone has been given a complete, unchallengeable privilege of personal control. The real unequivocal truth is that the only person who can dictate or choose their mental attitude at any given time and in any given set of circumstances is you. Others cannot take it from you, you have to give it away or hand over control. Once you understand this you are on your way to discovering one of the greatest secrets of universal power that every great person, survivor, inventor, explorer, prophet and sage has known throughout time.
It is a false truth however, to believe that we can control the thoughts and actions of other people. Trying to do so in an effort to lessen the negative effect of their thoughts, actions and deeds, only serves to increase our own frustration, anxiety, our fears and our distress.
The skill in mastering your mind is also relatively simple, but to do so you will need to do three things as preparation for this task if you are serious about achieving mastery of your life and living your life to its full potential.
The first is to have a clear defined purpose of what you want to achieve and then suspend all disbelief, nagging doubts and internal criticism. What I mean by this is, not to give up before you even try because you can’t imagine or see an immediate benefit straight away. Now, this does not mean that you have to have your life’s ultimate goal clearly defined already, or have a five-year plan in place for the achievement of a major goal. It simply means having a clear understanding of the things you want in your life, be they short term or long term goals, that will move you forward as opposed to holding you back. For those of you who are going to be relatively new to this kind of thinking may I suggest that to start with, you set yourself some smaller achievable goals that will motivate you to take action, so that you can see the benefit of what you are about to prove to yourself relatively quickly and easily.
Secondly, never give up. At the beginning you may find some things difficult, but you should never give up, because continual effort, no matter how small, in a defined direction can create massive changes over time, as you will soon realise as you read through this book.
Thirdly, do not accept failure nor see any setback as a form of failure. Keep on going no matter what. Use everything as feedback, making minor adjustments where necessary to move you towards your clearly defined purpose.
Just think about this. If you could make one small change a day that would change your life within two months would you be willing to try? If the answer to that question is no then simply put this book down now. However, if you are willing to explore that possibility and suspend any negative belief, nagging doubt or the small voice of internal criticism, then read on.
Chapter 1 - 50 Folds of Paper
What you are about to read now is taken from book called “The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell.
“Consider, for example, the following puzzle. I give you a large piece of paper, and I ask you to fold it over once, and then take that fold of paper and fold it over again, and then again, and again, until you have refolded the original paper 50 times. How tall do think the final stack is going to be? In answer to that question, most people will fold the sheet in their minds eye, and guess that the pile would be as thick as a phone book or, if really courageous, they'll say it would be as tall as a refrigerator. But the real answer is that the height of the stack would approximate the distance to the sun. And if you folded it over one more time, the stack would be as high as the distance to the sun and back. This is an example of what in mathematics is called a geometric progression. Epidemics are another example of geometric progression: when a virus spreads through a population, it doubles and doubles again, until it has (figuratively) grown from a single sheet of paper all the way to the sun in 50 steps. As human beings we have a hard time with this kind of progression, because the end result – the effect – seems far out of proportion to the cause. To appreciate the power of epidemics, we have to abandon this expectation about proportionality. We need to prepare ourselves for the possibility that sometimes big changes follow from small events, and that sometimes these changes can happen very quickly."
This is why, one of the first things you need to do in order to create massive change in your life, is to suspend any limiting disbeliefs.
There also seems to be something special with regards to the number 50. When you were first conceived, for example, you were a single strand of double DNA in your mother's ovum. That one, single strand, divided 50 times only and in 50 replications it became 100 trillion cells (which is more than all the stars in the Milky Way Galaxy), with each cell doing a phenomenal 6 trillion things a second. Don’t believe me? Then watch the following You Tube video and be amazed:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4GtimvTX6Q
Now think about this. How many times does an infant child fall over before it finally takes its first step unaided? It is certainly more than 50. In fact it is probably hundreds of attempts if not thousands. And the child will keep on falling over because it simply applies 3 simple rules:
1. It has a clear defined purpose of what it wants to achieve – it wants to walk,
2. It will never give up until it finally achieves its desired objective, which is to walk unaided, and
3. It has no concept of failing because it doesn’t know what failure is (it hasn’t been taught that as yet). The child simply makes minor adjustments and improvements’ to each effort it takes in moving towards its clearly defined purpose.
I guarantee you that if you apply these 3 simple rules to your life from now on, you can only move forward and improve your life for the better.
What I would like you to understand from the information in this chapter is that you, as a human being, are capable of geometric progression. You must be, because that is how you developed from one single strand of DNA. Therefore, if you apply the same ‘epidemic’ to your thinking, can you now see what you are really capable of? And you have the God given capability to do so and all of the universal resources available to you to make it happen.
Chapter 2 - You Are God-Like
It is a well-established fact in all the major religions of the world that God gave everyone free will. The only reason the Creator did so was to give you complete control over your thinking. Why? - To allow us to be Creators too, to be the designers of our destiny and the architects of how we choose to live our life and that proof exists in the Bible.
In the Gospels of the New Testament Jesus said that the kingdom of heaven exists in each and everyone of us, and that God made us all in his image. If this were true, why then would God, who created you in his image, produce a flawed copy? The fact is he didn't. You are perfect in every way and all the power, resources and energy of the universe is universally available to you as it is to God himself – and you have to work very hard to screw that up!
In the Gospel of Thomas, one of the Gnostic Gospels that was found in a cave in Nag Hammadi, the Disciple Thomas states that Jesus said: "If those who lead you say to you, 'See, the kingdom [of heaven] is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom [of heaven] is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty, and it is you who are that poverty."
What this means is that heaven, and all of its wonder, isn’t to be found anywhere outside of you. It exists inside of you, but to access it you need to know yourself and realise that you are God-like. You are the creator of your world.
Also in that extract from the Gospel of Thomas the word “poverty” is used, but it is used in context to describe a person’s thinking, not their financial or social status. What it translates to is: think in terms of poverty and you will live in poverty because you will never recognise the universal power and resources available to you that you already possess. However, think in terms of abundance and you live in abundance. The Gospels also say that Jesus said: “Ask and it shall be given to you. Knock and doors shall be opened to you”. What the Gospels don’t tell you to do though, is ask intelligently and to make sure that you knock at the right door!
A positive mental attitude therefore, is the habit of keeping the mind busily engaged in connection with the circumstance of things one desires in life, and away from things one does not desire. However, the vast majority of people will go all the way through their life with a mental attitude attuned to what they do not want. Their mental attitudes are dominated by fears and anxieties and worries over circumstances, which somehow have a way of making appearances later. In short, they create that which they fear the most. They ask for the wrong things and knock on the wrong doors.
To emphasise this point more clearly consider this. Sometimes when you go shopping you will make a shopping list, and on that list you will write all of the things that you must remember to buy, because you either need them or want them. Have you ever considered writing a shopping list of all of the things that you definitely do not want and that you must remember not to buy because you definitely do not need them? Well the answer to that should be a resounding no, because there would simply be no point, and if you did you would probably end up coming back from the shops without some of the items you wanted or needed because you were too busy thinking about what you didn’t want.
Yet when it comes to our lives, how many people can give you ‘lists’ of things that they definitely do not want, but when asked what they do want they draw a blank? Then, when what they do not want materialises they say: “why does it always happen to me?”
Well the reason is if you keep on focussing on what you don’t want in life you’ll eventually get what you don’t want because you’ll help create the situations and circumstances that will give rise to the possibility of it materialising. The Chinese even have a proverb for that which says: “Be careful what you wish for”.
The worst part of this tragedy is that these people who do this actually blame other people for the misfortunes that they have brought upon themselves by their own negative mental attitude. Yet blame is only an excuse for lack of personal responsibility.
However, someone who is trained in how to use their mind will find the seed of an equivalent benefit in every set of circumstances presented to them. In short, they find meaning and purpose in everything, good or bad, and have developed a natural ability to turn any adversity into their advantage.
More importantly, they take responsibility for their lives and refuse to live in someone else’s limited mind-set and dogma.
Chapter 3 - Let's go down the mind gym
An example of someone who has this ability is an elite athlete. Elite athletes learn how to block out images representing doubt, which is an important skill if you wish to become successful and perform at the highest level.
What they become experts at is when an image of difficulty or negativity pops into their heads, they become extremely adept at changing the internal movie, quickly editing it to imagine success. This skill is as important - if not more important - than any physical training they do. They look to the future with definiteness of purpose and focus on it so it becomes a permanent fixture in their minds eye, like a lighthouse that stops negativity dashing their hopes and aspirations on the rocks of failure.
Tip 1: Be definite in your positive outlook to life. Set your sights on what you want, as opposed to what you don’t want, and you can start by changing all negative thoughts to positive ones. Engage all of your senses in doing this, just as you did when you were a child.
Experienced athletes engage all of their senses in their mental rehearsal. They do not only have a visual, internal image of the future event, they also hear it, feel it, smell it and taste it. They are fully focused on the outcome they desire and not on failure. This does not mean however, that at times they do not fail. In fact athletes fail 85% to 95% of the time. However, they do not see this as failure, they find the seed of equivalent benefit in the output that they have produced, and look for ways of incorporating learning and meaning as a means of constructive feedback to improve their performance, thus aiding them in moving closer towards the ultimate goal or outcome they desire.