Are you switched on?

Are you connected?

How’s your ‘energy bill’?

That is, your ‘personal’ energy bill – the amount of physical and mental energy you need to be able to do all the things that you do.

Many people, including you and I, find from time to time that they start to ‘run out’ of energy towards the end of the day.

Or worse, wake up in the morning feeling already short of ‘get up and go’.

There’s a lot of talk, and rightly so, about saving energy, but that’s not about personal internal energy it’s about conserving the physical resources required to generate the power that creates the ‘energy’ we use in our daily lives for heating, lighting, cooking, running electrical appliances and so on.

Both on a domestic and industrial scale.

Do you know about a surprising contributor to energy wastage?

I’ve worked with businesses and organisations who were in the habit of turning the power off when the building wasn’t being ‘used’.

So it would cool down and have to be heated up again later.

Similarly switching off electrical equipment which also cools down and has to be fired up again later.

(And this has the added effect of inducing metal fatigue in the printed circuits so that they fail sooner.)

Sometimes people in the habit of constantly switching stuff off and on wondered why their energy bills were so high.

You see, it requires less energy in the long run to maintain something at a constant temperature than to keep ‘warming it up’ over and over again.

Are you using more personal energy than you need to?

The thing is that you and I consume less personal energy when we stay ‘connected’ to our personal power supply – when we stay connected to the ‘higher power’ within us that I talked about a few weeks ago.

But you and I also need to remain ‘switched on’ or in other words constantly aware of our powers.

You and I need to be able to exploit those powers, through that connection, in every situation we encounter.

Because if we’re ‘switched off’ then it does take time for us to ‘warm up’ to that connection in order to make use of the extensive powers that we all enjoy.

And when we sleep, which the body we inhabit and the corporeal parts of the mind that we draw on require us to do, so that they can recharge or ‘top up’ our ‘energy supply’- our battery if you like, you and I still need to stay connected.

Even if it’s only in ‘standby mode’, the power still needs to be ‘on’.

So that when ‘things go bump in the night’ or we are taken by surprise in any other way, we are able to respond, rather than just react.

And yes, you and I still need to ‘chill out’ from time to time by changing what we do and where we do it.

But when we are ‘on holiday’ we need to stay connected and keep the power ‘on’.

Sure, we can adjust the ‘volume’ or the ‘thermostat’ and we can even tune in to different ‘channels’ of our awareness from time to time.

Sometimes being creative, sometimes productive, sometimes focusing of relationships or wellness.

It’s not about the intensity of the connection or the ‘frequency’ in terms of what we’re thinking about.

The key is that the connection to our internal and ‘external’ or higher powers is always and continuously ‘switched on’.

So if you’re not right now . . .

Tune in and turn on.

And stay that way.

For a couple of weeks, I’ve been struggling with a word.

That word is ‘want’.

You and I use it a lot, as does everyone else.

But what does it actually mean?

And how does this screw up our affirmations and our communications with our subconscious mind, and the Law of Attraction in general?

You see, ‘to want’ means both a desire for something or to lack, or be without something.

And as a noun it means much the same, a lack or absence of something, or a desire or wish for something.

The thing is that the subconscious always seems to revert to the true meaning of the words you and I use rather than any more common or current ‘incorrect’ use.

So when you and I state that we ‘want’ something, meaning that we would like to have something and we say for example “I want a new car” – the interpretation is literal.

I want a new car = I lack a new car – which is a true statement. This gets interpreted as the status quo.

The subconscious answers, “Sure, you don’t have a new car, so what?  You lack a new car, statement of fact, nothing for me to do there then.”

And if you and I just go on ‘wanting’ things, clearly nothing  – no thing -is going to happen.

Because no ‘change’ in the status quo has been requested.

But if you and I were to say “I have a new car” then the reaction might be different – especially if we precede that with something like “I am so happy and grateful that . . .”

The subconscious turns around and says “Hey, that’s not right, better do something about it”.

Even a less defined phrase such as “I’d like to have . . .”, or “I expect to have . . .” works as well. It just modifies the timescale.

I was doing this a couple of years ago, just thinking about having (not wanting) a new car; so unexpectedly someone rear-ends me and writes of my current car, and I end up getting a new one.

Things don’t always happen the way you or I expect – unless we’re also specific about the circumstances of the change we desire to effect!

But most English speaking people use the word a lot, usually to express a desire for something.

Interestingly this doesn’t seem to happen so much in other languages as they use different word for different meanings of ‘want’ – or maybe it’s just that English speakers are rather more lazy about their vocabulary.

The answer is for you and I to think positively.

Rather than using ‘want’ when we desire something you and I can try using ‘expect’, or ‘desire’ or ‘will have’.

Or we can go the whole hog and treat that desire or expectation as already having been achieved.

Now, just as an aside, I’m using the word ‘try’ here meaning ‘test’ or ‘experiment’, as in ‘try it out’ or ‘try it on’. (There’s another word that’s frequently used incorrectly!)

The thing is that affirmations do work, but only when used properly; and the words used are very important, because everything you and I say in that context is interpreted according to the correct usage of the language we are using.

You know the phrase “Be careful what you wish for” and you’ve heard the children’s stories about the ‘three wishes’.

If you and I aren’t specific about the request for our desire, our expectation, or the fulfilment of our vision then we may end up going down a path we didn’t expect or nothing may happen at all.

No wonder so many people who’ve tried this out in a superficial way will tell you that it just doesn’t work.

Well, without someone who knows how to drive it, a car doesn’t work either.

Think carefully and have a great week.

I’ve hear that phrase a few times this week.

But I don’t buy it.

Everything happens for a reason.

And everything happens when it happens for a reason.

And then there’s that ‘Work Life Balance’ thing.

Now, I’ve never actually met anyone who wasn’t actually living while they were ‘at work’.

Well apart from the ‘working dead’ – you know, those people who hate their job, can’t wait for the time when they’re ‘allowed out’ and are usually thinking about something else while they’re supposedly ‘working’. I’ve met quite a few of them in my time!

But even they were still breathing – although sometimes it might not have seemed like it!

The thing is that ‘life’ is what you make it, or more to the point, what you think it.

Because whatever you think, in one way or another, happens, at some time or another, and often in a way that we didn’t expect.

Something ‘happened’ to me yesterday, as I was driving home one of the bolts securing the engine sheared off – so I can’t use the car for a couple of days while it gets fixed.

Which meant that I couldn’t do what I’d planned today and may need to change my plans for tomorrow.

I know that happened when it did for a reason – even though I haven’t figured out what the reason is yet.

You see, you and I need to be very careful what we think about and how we think it.

Somewhere along the way my subconscious had picked up maybe that I needed to be at home today, or I actually wanted to do something other than my plan and, as it always does, transmitted whatever it was to the higher power that causes things to happen – or not happen – or happen in an unexpected way or at a different time.

That’s how life works – and the ‘higher power’ can be whatever you choose to call it, even ‘humanity’ if you don’t subscribe to any form of religion.

Because even those who don’t have faith in God do have faith in Humanity.

If you’d like a more detailed explanation of this study books by Wallace Wattles, Price Pritchard and Raymond Holliwell. Listen to people like Bob Proctor, Mary Morrissey and many other inspirational (not ‘motivational’) speakers, or your Pastor. Imam, or other religious teacher.

You may have heard the phrase “God works in mysterious ways” – same concept.

So ‘life’ doesn’t just happen.

The thing is that our conscious minds crave order, structure and understanding.

You and I spend a lot of time figuring out how things work, we’re not easily satisfied with just what they do – we come up with questions; “how do they do that?” and “how does that work?”

In truth, it doesn’t really matter whether or not you and I know how ‘life’ works – it just works.

And we don’t need to label, classify or compartmentalize everything. Life is life as a whole. Life is continuous – it ‘happens’ all the time in everything we do.

We don’t put things on hold because ‘life happens’, we put them on hold because we choose to, one way or another, and whether we know we are or not.

And we don’t need a ‘work-life’ balance; life is happening all the time, it’s just a case of organizing it better, ‘working’ at the things we like to do and not allowing others to influence or guide us into doing @work’ or having a ‘job’ that isn’t compatible with our own way of thinking.

You and I need to remember that everything in our life is actually controlled by ourselves at a conscious or subconscious level. It may be brought into effect by a higher power but that only does what we ask it to do.

‘Life’ doesn’t ‘happen’ to you and I. Our lives and everything that goes on in them is controlled by our thoughts. And that includes illnesses, ‘accidents’ and everything else ‘bad’ that goes on.

That may sound harsh, but you and I also need to remember in this context that we can only control our lives, we can’t control anyone else’s, except possibly by physical force, which of course doesn’t work in anything other than the very short term.

Our thoughts, our own thoughts, cannot be controlled by anyone else. They can be influenced and they can be guided, but the bottom line is that you and I have control of our lives.

You see, you and I need to be very careful what we think, we need to notice what we’re thinking and relate what ‘happens’ to what we’ve been thinking about.

You and I need to remember that the subconscious and the higher power don’t understand or recognise ‘negatives’ including those words we might think are positive but are actually negative (more on that another time).

What ‘happened to’ you today?

Think about if – what thought caused that event?

It will be there somewhere!

Take care of your thoughts, notice what you’re thinking and notice the results.

Live is just one event.

Have a great one.

I was recently prompted to consider the concept of ‘power’.

And I came to the realization that it is very much misunderstood by most people.

I don’t mean things like physical power, steam power or electrical power and so forth; what I’m thinking about is perhaps best described as psychological or personal power.

The power to make decisions.

You and I make decisions all the time, on a second by second basis. Our lives are a series of continual decisions – especially if we include all the unconscious decisions we make while we’re asleep.

But power, real power, is more than that.

The thing is that most people ‘give away’ a lot, sometimes almost all, of their personal power.

You and I less so, but we still do.

It happens in different ways, and depending where in the world people live, they may or may not have a choice.

In ancient history groups of people, extended families and tribes came to understand that to operate more effectively as a group, certain individuals would be ‘empowered’ by the group to undertake specific responsibilities and tasks.

Those powers were delegated by individuals on a basis of mutual respect and understanding and were always on a temporary basis – power was delegated, not given up.

And we still do this in many circumstances and situations – you and I delegate tasks that we don’t really want to do to others who are probably better at whatever it is than we are.

Thus, you and I ‘loan’ our personal power to others in specific circumstances – but retain the power to take it back.

The problem with groups of people delegating power to make decisions for them was that in many cases the people who had taken on that power rather liked having this control over others and didn’t want to give it back.

And to preserve this power for themselves they institutionalized it into various forms of ‘government’, some more extreme in terms of the actual power they had over people, than others.

Democracy is supposed to be the most benign way of governing as people are given the opportunity to vote some people out of ‘power’ and vote other people in.

But the people who are doing the voting don’t actually get back their personal power.

They just transfer those decisions being made for them by the ‘government’ to different individuals within the ‘establishment’ of that State.

Alongside the State there are to other entities that drain personal power from individuals.

When people are employed they exchange some of their decision making power to the ‘Company’ they ‘work’ for – albeit in exchange for money.

More insidious though are the Religious organisations who attempt to persuade people that they have no power anyway, that it all rests with a ‘higher power’ and that if they want things to change in their lives they have to beseech this ‘power’ to help them.

This gave the Religious organisation huge power over its adherents, especially when this communication with the higher power had to go through ‘official’ religious channels.

Because of this, many people of faith (those who believe in a higher power) have been controlled by Religions claiming to have the authority of that power, and many outside a Religion still believe they have no power of their own.

The truth is that we all have the power to make our own decisions – even if we have (or believe we have) given it away.

That power lies inside

But that power is not just our personal power. We are all already connected to ‘higher power’, within us and surrounding us, and this is borne out by numerous philosophies, metaphysics and the source materials on which all faiths are established.

You and I have the power – and the ‘higher power’ –  to make our lives what we want and to be who we want to be.

“You Got the Power”

It’s your life, exercise your power!

“Don’t speak until you’re spoken to”

And

“Children should be seen and not heard”

Two of the favourite sayings of my mother and both grandmothers as I grew up.

And then at school it was “Don’t speak out of turn” and “Wait for permission to speak”.

Obviously ‘permission’ was granted (or might be) when I ‘put my hand up’, but I could never quite figure out when it was my ‘turn’.

Then there was “You should keep your opinions to yourself” and “Be careful what you say”.

And of course “Mind your own business” and “Don’t be nosey” (or words to that effect) if you started to ask questions about people.

Now for those of us in that immediate post-war generation it was clear that our parents had to some extent been ‘trained’ in this philosophy for reasons of national security but it goes back a much longer way and can be found in the works of Dickens and Shakespeare.

The trouble is that all of this seeming ‘common sense’ is seriously inhibiting to both individuals and to society as a whole.

These phrases cause permanent damage when repeated often enough (which isn’t much). They inhibit peoples’ potential to a massive degree and the conditioning is extremely difficult to eliminate having been imprinted at an early age.

But it still goes on, for one reason or another.

I still find it very difficult to initiate conversations with people I don’t know, and even amongst friends and colleagues I find myself ‘waiting my turn’ to speak.

And when I do, I often feel just a little bit guilty, or that I’ve ‘got away’ having taken a bit of a risk.

Current generations are attempting to find a way round this conditioning thanks to the technology you and I now have available.

So instead of opening real conversations, we send emails (yes, like this one) and post our thoughts on ‘social media’.

We avoid the imprinted constraints by writing and not ‘speaking’.

Unfortunately, in the majority of cases, the majority of emails, the majority of tweets, posts and longer articles on social media, we are talking to ourselves.

No-one is ‘listening’. It’s a one way street, a one way conversation, in fact, not a conversation at all.

Only when people are outrageous, offensive, or deliberately provocative does a conversation start, and then it tends to be an argument.

This is borne out by the fact that those who use the internet and social media for marketing are delighted with a response from just a handful of people out of every hundred recipients.

‘Everyone’ is ‘talking’, but very few are listening and even fewer responding.

There is very little ‘sensible debate’ where someone doesn’t attempt to create some sort of ‘stand-off’ or turn it into a ‘slanging match’.

The internet has become a sort of ‘tower of babel’ with everyone talking at once, no-one listening and no-one really understanding what is going on.

And then there’s the ‘fake news’ and generally false information, opinion masquerading as fact, and just plain nonsense.

Of course like in the old days with the newspapers, radio and TV – if it’s on the internet it must be true!

So we now have a reverse of the previous position when ‘everyone’ was listening to the few who had been given the ‘authority’ to talk.

All that has happened is that the direction of travel down the one way street has been reversed.

But it gives you and I an opportunity.

We need to open conversations with real people in real time, we need to encourage people to do the same and to attend events where people are speaking in real life, such as lectures and debates.

We need to ‘network’ with different groups of people ‘live’, not on the internet.

But most of all . . .

We need to talk.

Speak soon

I spent 20 years working as a distance learning tutor for MBA students, helping them to get the best out of the programme by reviewing their assignments and so forth.

There were two key concepts that most students, of all ages and experience and from many countries, had difficulty grasping.

Most were used to the idea of ‘exams’ where they were expected to reiterate the knowledge that they had been taught, at school or university, and perhaps apply a little extra insight from reading and research outside the curriculum.

What they didn’t ‘get’ was that the ‘masters’ level of degree education isn’t about knowing stuff.

It’s about applying that knowledge, and experience, to situations and ‘problems’.

At that level, it’s ‘taken as read’ that students already know the majority of what they need to know and even where new information is supplied it’s still all about applying it and not just ‘knowing’ it.

The other thing was that I received a large number of assignments where the student hadn’t actually answered the question but talked around or re-described the situation; probably a sub-set of not realizing that they were actually supposed to provide a solution, or alternative solutions to the question set.

Yes, education should be about learning, either through teaching the knowledge or giving students the resources to discover it for themselves.

But somehow, until people get to the ‘higher degree’ level, school and university doesn’t really tell them much about the ‘how’ of things – how to put all that precious knowledge into action, how to make it useful, how to use it to develop and improve their lives.

(As an aside, I eventually gave this work up because it became more about checking how much was the students’ ‘own work’ and how much had been copied from the internet!)

Now you and I have a ton of knowledge, we know lots of stuff, but how much do we use?

I can’t say that I’ve found much use for that O Level in Latin and much of the Science I was taught is now out of date as new discoveries have been made – but somewhere in my brain it’s still all there!

Knowledge for its own sake, when you and I just ‘store’ it is, like money, of very little use. It only becomes valuable when we apply it to something.

So to what do you and I apply that vast store of knowledge that we possess?

First, we are often presented with situations or problems that require the application of what we already know but you and I are also confronted with issues to which we don’t know the solution, or the actions we need to take.

Many people faced with this situation will get depressed or anxious thus escalating the ‘problem’ to a level at which it may overwhelm them, but you and I will take one of two routes.

We either seek out the knowledge we need to solve the problem ourselves, or we find someone else who does have the knowledge and skills we need to resolve the situation.

If you and I don’t have the tools (knowledge) we need we find someone who has.

We may get them to do what needs to be done, or share their knowledge and show us how to do it – problem solved.

Secondly, you and I are on a continuous path of personal development and growth towards the lives we would love to live, towards who we really want to be, and this requires us to continually increase our knowledge pool through continual learning.

We seek out what we need to know to develop ourselves and then apply this knowledge internally, and externally in our relationships with others, to grow towards that vision.

The thing is that, although we can’t delete the knowledge that we have even if we don’t need it, we do need to know what we need to know to achieve our goals and vision.

So don’t stop learning, don’t stop discovering new stuff, but do make sure that it’s stuff that you do need to know!

Back in the day, when I first started looking at what is now commonly called ‘personal development’ it comprised a few obscurely titled books that could usually be found in the ‘Occult’ section of the bookshop or public library.

This of course was in the BC age – ‘before computers’ – which probably now makes the year somewhere between 40 and 50 PC – and you can use that acronym any way you like!

The idea that you and I could actually ‘change’ ourselves outside the formal education system was considered a bit far fetched to say the least – despite the fact that the theories and philosophy of ‘personal development’ had certainly been around for millennia.

As the number of books available increased they became separated from the volumes on witchcraft and magic and were moved into a ‘self-help’ section – which didn’t really encourage sales as people were reluctant to be seen browsing that area and identifying themselves as in need of ‘help’.

So the ‘Personal Development’ industry came about.

Since the Seventies, and extrapolating back to the ‘beginning’, Personal Development has been primarily about providing people with information through books, lectures, workshops and now via electronic media, that they could use, or not, to ‘improve’ themselves.

There was, and still is, very little hands on, practical and productive education available in this sector.

It has always tended, with exceptions’ to be rather ‘take it or leave it’ – “this is what you should do, go do it”, leaving it up to individuals as to whether they put this wealth of ideas, theories and philosophy into practice or not.

The Network Marketing industry in particular, has been responsible for introducing ‘personal development’ to millions of people by thrusting books, audio recordings and live ‘motivational’ presentations upon them and expecting them to ‘improve their attitude’ in the hope that they will perform better.

But unfortunately, without giving them any help to put things into practice.

The thing is, as you and I know only too well, it’s one thing to read a book, watch a video, or discover a great new idea, but it’s another to take action and put any of this into practice.

You see, the problem is that the personal development philosophy comes up with ideas and paradigms that conflict with those you are I are subjected to on a daily basis.

It’s well nigh impossible to avoid being subliminally programmed with all sorts of things in the world around us. Even if we avoid the media we’re constantly bombarded with advertising and opinion and the more we are exposed to all this the more likely it is that our subconscious will form paradigms reflecting this environment.

Unless we do something about it.

The more frequently we see or hear something, and that’s not about reading or listening, the more likely it is to become a paradigm, or a programme or ‘app’ in our subconscious – we can’t help taking this stuff on board.

So you and I need to frequently and continuously ‘re-develop’ the real estate in our heads.

Either by changing or replacing what’s there or by building on new ground  – and there’s always space in our heads for something new!

But there’s a snag.

It’s quite difficult, maybe impossible, to do this by yourself.

Just in the same way as it’s impossible for sportspeople to win championships by themselves, you and I need other people to help.

You and I need coaches, we need mentors, we need teachers and perhaps most of all people to be accountable to making sure that we do implement the new ideas and philosophies we need.

Even those of us who are coaches and mentors need coaches and mentors, and so on.

Yes, we can put the new structures in place, we can know what it is that we need to do, and we can even have a massive intention to do it.

But without a blueprint or plan to actually put this into practice and without coaching to help us implement that plan, nothing is going to happen.

As Trevor Mills one of my old mentors used to say, somewhat jokingly – “A plan is useless until it deteriorates into action”.