Stop Reading Self-Help Books!

I am forever being contacted by clients recommending a variety of self-help books. And, yet, a client recently mentioned to me that he had been on a workshop where another participant told him to "Stop reading the books - and start living it!" The truth is, that you will only find true wisdom within. You will only find your true potential within. You don't have to read others' experiences or exhortations - you have to, at some point, sooner or later, start walking the talk - you've got to do it for yourself.

Many - or most - of the self-help books available on the market talk about our inner power, our innate ability to unleash the "giant within". However, continually reading books will not do it for you - books contain other people's wisdom, other people's experience, other people's journeys. You've got to take your own journey. And that journey starts in this very moment - it doesn't start with a New Year's Resolution, with some future commitment. In this very moment, you have, entirely within your own power, the ability to start truly living - way beyond what so-called "normal" people take for living.

You see, "normal" people don't live - they exist in a pseudo-world of automatic reactive behaviour, based on what they internalised when they were young and impressionable. In our formative years, we "learned" how the world works, what was possible and impossible, who we are and what our place is in this world of ours. Research indicates that little (or nothing) of what we learned approximates to the truth of what you and I can really achieve. Research indicates that we were socialised or normalised, that we live to a set of norms that confine us into an existence which sells us far short of all that we could actually and otherwise be.

The same research indicates that those who follow the norms are predisposed to being negative, believing the negative and mindlessly accepting that life is the way the vast majority of people believe it to be - a struggle, where you have to work hard to be a success, where nothing comes easily, where you live and die on the same set of rails that have been previously travelled by all the other normal people. Of course, if you buy into that nonsense, that is how your life will turn out - because we all create, through our subconscious beliefs, our very own self-fulfilling prophecies.

Time to wake up from the nightmare! Time to realise that you have, within your very own self, the innate ability to be all that you can be. Time to realise that you can create the life that you really, really want because, in the day to day of your current everyday life, you are already creating the life that you expect - it's just that normal people live down to their expectations. Decades of research prove conclusively that we experience what we expect to experience, that we perceive what we expect to perceive, that we live the lives we expect to live.

Unfortunately, we are surrounded by normality and find it hard to break free. Sure, we might like to read about it, might like to dream about it, but most people will die without having realized their wildest dreams, without having realized what normal people perceive as unrealistic ambitions. These dreams are only wild or unrealistic because they don't conform to the norms expected of normal people. These dreams and ambitions are yours for the living if you start using your mind abnormally - the way extraordinarily successful people use their minds. The only difference between you and people like Bill Gates, Muhammad Ali, Donald Trump, Mahatma Gandhi and all the rest is that those guys refused to accept the norm.

You can turn your back on the drudgery of normal too by changing your state of mind. Normal people's minds are in an awful state - one bombarded by 50,000 random thoughts each day, one where their subconscious constantly focused on what was learned during their formative years - a past long gone.

As I said earlier, now is the moment in which you can change everything. Now is the moment in which you can start living exceptionally. There's no time like the present. Indeed, now is the only time and place you or I have - doesn't it make sense that we make the very most we can of the here and now.

This is done by turning your mind's attention away from the nonsense that is pulling the normal world over your eyes. This is done by developing - or re-developing, because we could all do it as children, before we became normal adults - your innate, natural ability to invest your precious energy in the present moment. If you invest your energy in now, you will be more present than the normal person. You will have what normal people call "presence" - the kind of presence and influence that the people I mentioned earlier on have exercised in their lives.

You invest your energy in the present by paying more attention to the here and now. You are blessed in that you have, at your disposal, five senses with which you can actively engage to experience the wonder of what is going on now - not what normal people think is going on - but what is actually happening. You might just find that, in doing so, you'll find that all the opportunities you need to achieve effortless success are before your very eyes. Open them.