W. Beran Wolfe said, “If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden. He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar button that has rolled under the radiator.” I believe that the latter part of this quote holds the key. It’s probably true that if you’re searching for happiness, your trying to hard. Why? I believe that happiness is right there inside of us – always. We do not need to search for it. Although some happenings do make us temporarily happy, happiness is not in the money we earn, or what we buy with it. It’s not in how well we do at work or in life that determines if we are happy or not – unless we set it up that way. I figured out, that in the past, this had always been my problem. In the past, I made it impossible to feel as happy as I do now, unless something turned out exactly the way I wanted it to. I am learning now, that happiness is a state of body and mind I can choose to experience, no matter what the surrounding circumstances.

Nathaniel Hawthorne said, “Happiness is as a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but which if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.” Happiness exists readily in each of us. It is natural. Joy is within us all. Happiness is simple, but we have forgotten that we need not look for it. Happiness is always there if we allow it to be.

Don’t Wait – Be Happy Now

So why wait to be happy? Please don’t misunderstand. I know we can’t always be happy. There are times in life where it isn’t going to be possible in that moment. Obviously, when a loved one passes away or gets sick, we naturally feel sadness and grief. Sadness and grief have a part in life. However, we do need to be careful that we do not stay in those emotional states and dwell in the negative feelings more that we need to. That could form a bad habit that can lead to less happiness for us down the road.

So, changing our focus back to happiness now, what are we waiting for? Is looking for happiness outside of ourselves going to work? I looked inside myself and found, that I can choose to feel happiness whenever I want, because it’s inside, regardless of what is going on outside of me. I have learned that how we feel comes down to the meaning we attach to happenings.

So what if I didn’t impress my boss. Should I be miserable for days? So what if I missed the ball game I really wanted to attend? Should I take it out on my family? So what if I didn’t finish in first place. Should I feel like a loser for months? So what if I didn’t reach my goal this time. Should I feel worthless and quit on the goal? No – I have a choice! I can choose to try again, take the positives from any situation, know that I am learning and creating self improvement and enjoy the journey!

I hope you choose to enjoy your life’s journey.

Someone can want to have good health for example, but do they follow the disciplines of a person who seeks to have good health? If not, that persons philosophy needs to be changed in order for desired results to come about. After all, the old saying goes, “an apple a day keeps the doctor away,” right? It’s not a can of coke and a candy bar a day…no way! Who sold us on that plan for health? Obviously, the personal philosophy here in this example is at fault.

How do we develop an effective personal philosophy? This is a lot simpler than you may think. Take anything you want to improve in your life that you may not be producing desired results in. You already know what does not work. I would suggest that you no longer follow that pattern. What does work? If you are in trouble financially, you may be overspending. If you are overweight, you may be overeating. If your relationships are suffering, chances are that you are not giving them enough care. You see, by knowing what does not work, we can see what can work. Change your philosophy to include taking disciplined action daily to improve each area of your life. Spend less and save more.
Eat less and exercise more. Pick up the phone or take 15-20 minutes to write a friend or loved one a personal letter. This shift in your philosophy can make all the difference!

Focus on What You Want

Focusing on what you want is important in developing an effective personal philosophy. Why? Imagine wanting to achieve a promotion at your job, but never focusing on adding value to the business. In most cases, this type of philosophy will cause you to never achieve the promotion. Imagine wanting to achieve financial freedom, but constantly spending your time in front of a television watching programs that do not help you achieve that goal in any way. Imagine wanting to look thin for a party, but overeating and not exercising at all. We need to focus on what we want. Our personal philosophy will ultimately shape our destiny, so we want to create an effective personal philosophy by beginning to focus in on what we want and not the opposite.

Making a Change to Your Personal Philosophy

How can we change our personal philosophy? An effective way to change your personal philosophy is slowly. Do one discipline at a time. You want to avoid overwhelming yourself. If you are in financial trouble, you need to study your finances. You need to find the cause of the problem. You need to cut out some things that are not contributing to your overall financial success. Are you over budget each month? Are you spending money poorly? Are you saving any money from your income? Focus on what you want. Don’t say I don’t have any money or I don’t want to be in debt. Change your philosophy. Instead know that your current philosophy is not generating desired results. Focus on the results you want. I want to be saving 5% of my income each week. I will spend my money wisely and repay my debts at 3% bi-weekly. This is just an example of course, but I know you get the idea. Your personal philosophy of how you currently operate needs to change. If you fail to make any change and continue to run the same pattern of poor judgment how will it turn out in say, 3-6 years from now? It would be disaster. Don’t continue falling into the trap. It’s much easier to change your philosophy and avoid the pain.

Practice a basic fundamental or success principle in the areas of health, relationships, finances and career. What are these basic fundamental success principles? Many people know them, in fact most of us do—but we do not apply them regularly. Do some crunches instead of sitting on the couch all night or go for a walk. Make that a daily discipline. Keep what you have to gain in your focus and make the changes.

The are a lot of people out there that think that self improvement is of no importance, use or value. They believe that the self improvement industry itself is bogus; That all self improvement coaches are taking your money and results are never achieved. Everyone is entitled to their opinion for sure. However, the fact remains that if we want to make a positive change in our lives, self improvement is necessary. We can wish or just hope. This will not help us change for the better. Action is needed.

What am I Improving?

In order to create something in our lives, we need to go from point A to point B. Where I am now to where I want to be. For example, if we want to improve our relationships, how do we do this? There obviously is a way, right? We can think about it, but to obtain certainty of a method that would work to achieve our goal of improved relationships, we could simply go to the library (for free) and read books about the subject. So, what has occurred? We had a need to fulfill. We decided that we wanted to fulfill the need and, we sought a method for improving ourselves to obtain that result. The rest is all about applying the method and noticing if we are getting the desired results.

What if I Fail?

I have great news! We can only totally fail if we stop trying to get the result. We must keep trying until we get the result. Why do most people give up? From my experience and learning, we stop trying because we start to associate a lot of pain to not getting the result we wanted. Most people do this after the first or second attempt. I have a question for you: What if we associated more pain to the consequences of not getting the result we wanted? That would motivate us to keep trying, right? So failure comes only when we give up. Remember, just because you did not produce the result you wanted, does not mean you are not improving yourself and it does not mean that you are a failure. What it means is that you now know what does not work and you can move on to produce another result that can get you what you want. See - you are improving!

Constant Self Improvement is the Key

So what does self improvement do? From my experience, self improvement is about learning to conduct ourselves in a manner that helps us achieve our personal goals. These goals are in our health, relationships, spirituality, finances, career, communication, beliefs, contribution and leisure time. For example, if all I want to do is wake up in the morning, peek in on my kids and kiss my wife before I embark on an hour commute to work and then return back home after 10-11 hours - I am fully entitled to live this way, if I want to. I know this is a generalization, but if I wanted to improve this situation, I would need to change something. I would have to look at the beliefs I have that are driving my behavior. Is it fear of failure or loss that is driving me to live this way? Am I afraid that my boss will not give me a good raise if I leave work too early (based on his beliefs)? The question that I would ask is, what can I do to improve this situation? From my experience, improvement starts from within. Self improvement begins with changing our thinking. Our thoughts are causes that are put into effect by our actions, which yield the results in our lives and literally create our destiny! To improve our lives then, we must improve our way of thinking.

Final Thoughts

Self improvement is useful as you can see from the examples in this article. If you want something bad enough, you can only achieve it if you believe you can. Remember, if you believe that you cannot do something, you are absolutely right! Believing that you cannot do something will stop you dead in your tracks. You will not even attempt. Imagine if Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein or anyone for that matter believed that what they wanted was not possible. These people were not considered geniuses because they were born that way. They made distinctions through and through in their lives from facts! The facts are that everything that has come into existence on this earth has come from human thought and action. The pyramids, skyscrapers, space travel, cell phones, you name it. If there is a will, there is usually a way. Facts can never be refuted. The law of cause and effect is always working – we need to learn, evaluate and take action to improve our lives and it all starts within ourselves.

Today’s self improvement article is going to focus on the power of goal setting. Why is goal settingso important? Goal setting is a fundamental principle to creating life long success in our lives. The reason for this is that goals give us a direction—a road map for knowing what we want to have, be or do in life. I believe that without goals, we are leaving our lives up to chance. 

So the power of goal setting comes from knowing what we  want, but more specifically, exactly what we want. 

Isn’t this true? Most people have a general idea of what they want; a better job, a bigger house, better health, happiness and more money. Those terms aren’t exactly specific. We can say we want to have more money for example, but that is more of a wish. The power comes from being specific. For a personal income goal, we could say, “I will earn an average of $25,000 a month selling real estate by December 1, 2010. That’s specific and measurable.

Furthermore, writing down goals and reviewing them daily is an extremely powerful way to manifest them. When we write down a goal, something powerful has happened. The easiest way I can explain it, is that when we write things down, we are saying to ourselves that we want to remember them. This means that there is a great amount of significance attached to what we wrote, as well as emotion. We are committing to making the goal a reality!

Emotion is one of the key factors in manifesting what we want. Without emotion, there is nothing but uninspired thought or again, wishing. I want you to say two things to yourself 1) I wish I had a bigger home 2) I want a house with a swimming pool, a two car garage and a fireplace that I can relax in front of when I feel like it. Feel the difference between the two. Which one has more emotion?

Review Your Top Goals Daily

Reviewing your top goals daily is imperative! What is so important about reviewing your goals? When you look at your goals everyday, you will begin to focus on what you want.  The best time, I believe we should review our top goals, is right before we go to sleep at night.  While you are asleep, your mind will begin to think about how to make your goals become reality. This is our subconscious computer going to work – unlike us, it never sleeps!

Off course, just thinking about your goals is not enough! Action will be needed. You will need to create a plan for achieving your goals, and be able to adjust when you hit a road block and overcome the obstacles. So first, decide what you want, write it down and go to work on it. Most importantly, never give up!

Key Points:

• Goals must be specific and dated!
• Review and act towards achieving your top goals daily.
• Identify the obstacles in your way.
• Create an action step to overcome the obstacles – and take action!
• Oh yeah, and if you want to see your dreams become a reality, never give up!

Is Positive Thinking Really That Simple?

So is this really true? We are the ones who control the thoughts we think, so we can control the direction of our lives. In fact, our thoughts are probably the only one thing in life that we truly can have control of. So, positive thinking is a choice we can make. Oprah Winfrey, is one of the most successful people in the world. To quote Oprah, “I know for sure that what we dwell on is who we become.” Is it this power of concentrated positive thought that has led Oprah to be one of the most successful people in the world? I believe it is. I think that positive thinking is so powerful, that if we would harness it’s power and constantly think about, focus on and concentrate on what it is we want in a positive way, we can achieve it. After all, isn’t this how we achieved all of what we have today? Think about your life and what you have achieved. Didn’t you first create the thought in your mind of what you wanted, think positively about it and finally get the result? In other words, our thoughts are totally creative. Thinking positively about what we want is one of the most powerful forces know to getting what we want.

To quote another extremely successful person, W. Clement Stone, “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” Whether thinking positively or negatively about situations, results, relationships, beliefs and feelings, we are in control, as we are constantly creating them by the way of our thoughts.  It’s amazing what happens when you think positively about a goal. You will begin to figure out how to achieve it. However, when you think negatively about a goal, your brain literally shuts down. The creative thought process disappears, and so does the achievement of the goal.

Positive Thinking is a Choice

Yes, positive thinking can help us get the results we want. Positive thinking is a choice we can make. Positive thinking should be a habit that we all learn to use, as it can shape our lives for the better.  You will find many resources on this site intended to motivate, inspire and spark you into making positive thinking useful. The goal of this self improvement article, is to help guide you in a direction that will help you in all that you do, by using positive thinking to your advantage. It’s up to you to expand your thinking and your life. Nobody else is going to do if for you. It’s true that it’s much easier to be swept away by circumstances that are out of your control, right? The distinction to make here, is that you are the creator of circumstance.  We can change our circumstances at will, by deciding to use positive thinking as a means to self improvement and personal change.

Final Thoughts

Is positive thinking going to help you succeed at achieving something, just because you’re thinking positive? The answer to this question is no! Just thinking positive alone, is not going to help you climb the mountain of success. If your looking to the west for the sun to rise, your going to be disappointed. You can think really positive about seeing that sun rise while facing west, but you’ll never see it for obvious reasons. If you have a worthwhile goal, and you know the exact steps to getting it, then, thinking positively when faced with challenges along the way, will help you create solutions and achieve breakthroughs. Remember, negative thinking is useful as well, if we use it to see what does not work. However, negative thoughts like, “I can’t do that”, “Why do I always screw up?”, and my favorite “I can never get things right!” will shut you down physically, emotionally and mentally.

Finally, no one is perfect. We all get down at times. Don’t think that you have failed if you keep getting negative. It’s habitual. We created these habits over time through repetition. So, by making positive thinking a practice, we can really begin to positively change our lives.