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Simple Steps to a Better Life

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Happiness
Happiness

This is a guest article by Willie Horton, www.Gurdy.net

Websites like Gleb’s are a superb resource for anyone who has decided to embark on life’s most exciting adventure – the journey of personal development and self-discovery.  Why?  Because personal development is a lifetime’s work, it’s an ongoing journey that will take you to places that the normal mind cannot imagine.  Too often, people are under the false impression that, once they embark on this journey, their lives will be changed immediately and irrevocably – as if struck by lightning.   Unfortunately, even if you are struck by lightning, its effects will eventually wear off.

On the other hand, I have seen people “struck by lightning” where, having decided that they wanted to change their lives, their lives changed for them very quickly – they immediately saw real and concrete benefits from being more focused, more mindful, more tuned in to the opportunities that life is offering you and me today – if only we had eyes to see.   But, even for these people, the effects wore off and they found themselves gradually return to “normality”.  And normality is a dangerous thing because decades of psychological research prove that to be normal is to be mad.

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Introducing the Generally Thinking blog

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For the past few months, I’ve been following a great blog called Generally Thinking. Today I’ve finally got the time to recommend you some of the articles I really liked.

What is Generally Thinking blog about?

Maintained by a psychology student Warren Davies, Generally Thinking is a blog with two major areas of focus: identifying your personal strengths and being happy. I am interested in both topics, and it’s been great so far to see Warren’s view of how strengths are identified and cultivated and why some people are happier than others. I’m a very happy person myself, but reading some of the articles on Generally Thinking helped me understand why I’m happy and to therefore plan some of my future steps in a way that they allow people around me to be happier as well.

Great articles on happiness

Here are just some of the really good posts I’ve found:

Articles on identifying and developing your core strengths

Generally Thinking is a young blog, but I really like how Warren always refers to other sources of information – this isnt’ a common trend in most of personal development blogs. Sometimes we all really need this extra bit of scientific proof that something works and something doesn’t.

Let me know if you like the blog, and stay tuned for more!

Happy For No Reason course review

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Happy For No Reason
Happy For No Reason

I’d like to offer you an review of a course I’ve recently gone through – the Happy For No Reason course by Marci Shimoff. As you know, being happy and motivated are some of the strongest features of my nature, and so it gives me a pleasure to suggest something you might really use to be happier.

What Happy For No Reason is about

The name of the course kind of gives the idea away – you can and should be happy, and there shouldn’t be a certain reason for that.

For some people this is more obvious than for others, but happiness is one of the basic things you have been given in this life. You don’t have to earn it (however it’s a popular belief that you do), it doesn’t need much effort to be truly happy (again, many people just refuse to accept how simple being happy really is), and making someone else happy doesn’t mean you’re giving your own happiness away – instead, you gain back just by seeing how your smile and attention can make somebody’s day.

Marci had done a great job of analyzing the most common reasons people feel unhappy, and results of her research are presented in a simple to follow guide. All the material is presented on audio CDs, but you need to work with the guidebook to record your thoughts and track your progress as you get used to being a happier person.

Seven Steps to Being Happier

Without giving too much away, I’d like to touch briefly on how Marci can help you.

All the material is organized into seven major steps to your happiness. These steps combine a few lessons each, helping you to take care of your mind, heart, body and soul and achieve a true transformation. There are happiness habits offered along the way, 3 for each of the seven steps. To help you gain an even better understanding of the material, Marci has taken interviews with her friends and colleagues on topics relevant to each of the seven steps. Some of the names you can easily recognize, while others may not mean much to you if it’s going to be one of your first courses – but either way the interviews are great because each one of them is an inspiration on its own.

If you had been reading books on personal development and had taken steps towards improving yourself and changing your views on life, you will probably recognize a quite familiar pattern of a complex, organized approach to becoming a happier person. Like all the other aspects of your well-being, happiness requires changes in everything you think and do, even though some of the changes may not follow the desired direction right away.

What to expect from the course

Marci’s work had been the best course I’ve taken so far (and the first one from Learning Strategies I’ve looked into), and I’m pleased to be able to recommend it.

I’m quite a happy person myself, so going through the course didn’t help me change overnight (especially since its’ advised that you take plenty of time, about a week for each step) into the happiest person on the planet. Still, it was great to learn a few new habits and to simply take the time to think more about being happy and making it possible for my family to feel happier too.

Even though the course focuses on all the improvements and positive changes, it invariably helps you address the negativity which prevents you from enjoying life as it is.  It is very important to firstly recognize the things which make you unhappy, and then to reassure yourself that hardly any of these things can prevent you from being happy in the long run. If you choose to be happy and agree with yourself to maintain your happiness, it will quickly stop being a task and turn into one of your most natural states.

So here’s what to expect from the Happy For No Reason course:

  • if you’re unhappy or even plan miserable, you’ll feel better and learn the ways to gradually rediscover the joy and happiness once again.
  • if you’re doing okay but lack the happiness spark in your life, you’ll certainly get an idea or two to go from feeling not-too-bad to a really-good kind of experience
  • finally, if you’re mostly happy already – you’ll draw new inspiration from the interviews and get ideas on how to make happier someone who means a lot to you

I had spent a few weeks working on this course and definitely enjoyed it, especially the interviews. I’m not sure if it’s going to change your life and I can’t promise it will make you a happy person, but if you’re ready to take a few steps in this direction – who knows how far you will get? Good luck!

I Am A Treasure Hunter

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Treasure Hunting - Coins
Treasure Hunting - Coins

Sometimes your hobbies don’t make much sense to others, but still prove to be immensely helpful and entertaining for you. Today I’d like to explain why it’s the case with one of the more recent hobbies I’ve acquired.

My approach to treasure hunting

One beautiful morning a few months ago I was walking across my company’s parking lot in the morning. It was an unusually sunny day, we don’t get that many of them here in Ireland. I was happy and ready for the challenges of the day, almost anticipating a quick scan through corporate email and immediate start with daily technical chores. As I was walking, I stumbled upon a coin. A brand new, shiny 2c coin. I picked it up and realized that it immediately improved my day by a tiny bit. That’s how it all started.

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Develop Your Creative Genius with Tony Buzan’s Advice

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Last month I had a pleasure of attending the lecture on Age Proofing your Mind by Tony Buzan himself – the author of countless books on mind mapping and a passionate discoverer of new abilities of human mind and new frontiers of its power.

It was a great lecture, and I enjoyed it a lot. I have heard about Tony before, and did read quite a few articles and posts on mind mapping. Finally, I really like the approach and use a software version of it for some of the creative processes of mine. But I’ve yet to read a single book by Tony, so it was great to hear all his most known sayings in person with vivid examples and explanations.

On creativity

Studies prove that babies and kids up to 3-5 years are the most creative individuals among most of us, they are 95% creative in solutions and reactions to life. As we grow, our creativity somehow drops. By the time we are students graduating from a college, we’re only 25% creative on average, and most of the adult life we’re only 10% creative.

Now, this is what many people say is normal. But I really liked Tony’s point of view when he said: normal is not natural.

Naturally, human creativity only grows with age. It is true! If we look at our history and culture, there are countless examples of people who created most important and influential works of their lives in their last, not first, years. Da Vinci, Verde, many others- they all spent their lives perfecting their art and their mind, only feeling ready for their masterpieces by the age which most people consider to be a hard rock bottom of their creativity.

On human brain and our activity

A revelation for the audience was that on average we use less than 1% of our brain’s abilities. Tony asked everyone to guess the percentage and we all had a quick discussion about it. I was the most pessimistic of my group with 3-5% activity range. I must say, less than 1% was a shock even to me!

So why not spend a bit more? Why not use this amazing tool available to us – our mind?

We take for granted the common limitations like the degrading memory or inability to constantly come up with creative solutions to our challenges. But once again, this normal situation shouldn’t be considered natural: if we only spend some time developing our mind’s abilities, consciously concentrate on getting better at creative thinking and writing, our mind will flourish and keep amaze ourselves and everyone around us with incredible results.

What it takes to be a genius

Not much, really! We all are quite equal when it comes to out potential for becoming the next world-famous genius.

Here are the two distinctive ways to tell geniuses apart from everyone else:

1. A genius has great and big daydreams.

Think and plan to make it big, don’t limit your future achievements by agreeing with yourself what’s possible and what’s not in your current situation. Your brain follows the images it sees or gets through self-affirmations, so unless you have big daydreams and plan to produce something incredibly powerful and useful for as many people as possible, you won’t achieve much.

Humble thoughts will get you even more humble results, so prepare yourself for achievements of your lifetime by daydreaming something massively good.

Example: Thomas Alva Edison  didn’t just dream of inventing a light bulb, instead he put all his knowledge and persistence together to invent a whole system of electric lighting to be used by all the mankind: light bulbs, electricity generators, electrical wiring and a range of sockets, plus much more. His vision of providing the light to everyone at any given time helped him make it through thousands of failed experiments before he finally made a breakthrough.

2. Genius works to make daydreams come true, to make them real

This is another thing not many of us pay attention to – it’s not enough to just have a vision, an idea which can potentially be useful. You have to be prepared to work on this idea, to make mistakes and face failures, to resist opinions of others and to persistently make progress towards your ultimate goal.

When you think about it, it does take a lot to be curious and unstoppable in a genius-like way – quite possibly, this is what makes some people successful and others unsuccessful – just their being faithful to their own daydreams!

Your brain needs a diet to stay active and healthy

If you want to make sure your brain stays active throughout all the years and increases its activity and potential instead of slowly degrading as you age, here’s some of the things you should include in your daily life:

  1. Plenty of oxygen – this essentially means regular exercise

  2. Sensory stimulation – be creative and re-discover your own senses – touch, smell, taste and see things as if you suddenly became a different, much more curious person

  3. Lifelong learning – never stop discovering new subjects and expanding your knowledge – even if something is not directly related to your career, pick a topic every year to read a book about or watch an educational TV series on

  4. Take plenty of rest – enough sleep, regular showers and relaxing physical activity when your mind gets distracted from its everyday worries – running is a great activity for this.

  5. Friendship and love – be friendly and kind to people; make new friends regularly and try to stay connected with all the generations and not only your own age group; fall in love and enjoy this wonderful experience

  6. Eat healthy food – nutrition is very important for your body and brain in particular

That’s it. Tony spoke of many more things which fascinated me, and I’m sure I’ll learn more as I read his works in the future (I’ve brought a book in mind-mapping which he signed for me during one of the breaks!), but these notes above is what I’ve taken home from that evening. Hope you enjoyed the article and will use some of the advice, I can see how even some of it can really make a long-lasting positive change in our lives.