Challenging the conventional belief that people are stuck with the character attributes they are born with, The Science of Character reveals how it is possible for anyone to build up their core character strengths and use them to achieve greater personal, academic, and professional success and happiness. The scientific research behind this film confirms the positive power of perception. It shows that if we focus on the strengths we have, along with developing specific strengths we may not have; it has a lasting effect on our happiness and sense of …
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67 Personal Development Pitfalls to Avoid
Often times, what we don’t do is an important key to our success. For example, you may eat healthy and exercise regularly to stay fit, but if you like to jog on the freeway at rush hour it could easily counteract your fitness routine. The same principle applies to personal development. We may be focused on gratitude, visualizing our desired outcomes, and taking consistent action in the direction of our goals, but are we doing things that could unknowingly sabotage our efforts? To help you avoid the danger of hidden, personal development pitfalls I thought it …
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How YOU Can Change the World
If you had the power to fix any problem and change the world, what would you choose to fix and why? Recently I asked this very question on facebook and twitter. We all recognize that there are plenty of things going on in this world that cause unnecessary pain and suffering. I asked this question because I was curious to know which issues were of greatest concern to those I interact with. As you can imagine, there were a lot of caring people with something of value to contribute. Here’s a …
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How to Be Yourself, Your True Self
Why do so many people feel confused about who they really are and how did the issue of personal identity become so challenging? While it may seem like you should automatically know how to be yourself, in reality that is rarely the case. When you think about it, so many things in life depend on our ability to connect with our true self. After all, how are we supposed to know what we should be doing or who we should be doing it…
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Permission to Feel Happy and Successful
Do you want to feel happy and successful? The answer is obvious, we all want those feelings. In addition, we would also like to feel loved, appreciated, and valued. We all have the same basic human needs and the desire to feel fulfilled in these areas is a normal part of our emotional makeup. Most of the articles I write focus on practical strategies for creating positive changes in your life because I want to help you fill those important basic needs so that you can enjoy a higher quality of life. But there is another vital aspect to living a happy, healthy, and …
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Does the Good Life Lead to a Happy Life?
Everybody wants that thing called “a good life.” Well here’s my question, what does that even mean? Exactly what is it that moves a life from “an average life” to “the good life”? For that matter, who gets to decide what constitutes a good life? If you asked a hundred people those questions, chances are you would get a hundred different answers. But even in the variety of answers, you would find several common areas that are important to almost everybody. So, while your definition may vary from mine, there are many things that we would both consider necessary for the good life. Do you feel like you are already living…
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The Power of Positive Thinking in 3D
When you employ the power of positive thinking, how do you apply it? Are you working to overcome a limiting mindset or to adopt a positive one? Do your positive thoughts include pictures, sounds and feelings? While you’re at it, what is your vision for your life based on? Did you form it around your past, your present or your future? You and I have these movies we play in our head. They start with a dialog and then move into pictures. Then they become moving pictures, and finally, we attach feelings to them. Motivated by our personal vision These mind movies and the feelings that come with …
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What Determines Your Personal Value?
The way we perceive our own self-worth as a person has a profound influence on every aspect of our life. Today’s culture sends a lot of mixed signals that can easily distort our views about what makes us a worthwhile person. Unless we develop a well grounded understanding of the true nature of personal value, we will probably end up adopting one or more of these distorted views. How Self-worth Affects confidence Our confidence in our own abilities will ultimately be the deciding factor when it comes to taking action and producing results. A lack of self-confidence acts as a restraint, holding …
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Do You Lack Motivation?
At first glance, lack of motivation can often seem to be caused by laziness or procrastination , but looks can be deceiving! If you’re struggling to stay motivated while working on your goals or any other endeavor, a little introspection can be just the thing to provide clarity and insight about what’s…
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Using Transference to Increase Self-Confidence
A question that keeps coming up about self-confidence is this. Why is there a difference in self-confidence depending on what we do? If we are confident in one area, why doesn’t that confidence cross over to other areas? Have you ever wondered about this? Before we address this question directly, let’s make sure we are clear on some important concepts. Self-confidence is not the same as self-esteem! The first thing we need to understand is that self-confidence and self-esteem are not the same thing at all. Now I have read countless articles that claim they are the same, so let’s define the difference and rid ourselves of this misnomer. Simply put, self-confidence is …
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First Comes the Fear Then the Blessing
Why is it so easy to let fear stand between us and our dreams? You know how it works. First we think of something that we really want to do or accomplish. Then we start to list all the great benefits this new venture will bring into our lives. And just when we are really getting into it, some part of our mind comes up with, “yeah but, if we do that then…” You know what follows, a list of negative possibilities designed to throw a wet blanket over our great idea. And what do we call that wet blanket? We call…
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Do You Find it Difficult to Trust Others?
Are you naturally trusting, or do you tend to be suspicious of other people’s motives? Have you ever been taken advantage of by someone you trusted? Do you feel that trusting others is naive? Sadly, there is no shortage of people in this world who will try to take advantage of you. How many weird emails do you get telling you that you have won a lottery, or there’s a question…
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Cultivating Optimism and the Spirit of Renewal
Why is it that everybody gets so excited at the beginning of a new year? Simply stated, people love the idea of renewal. The mindset of: “out with the old, in with the new” is very appealing for several reasons. If the previous year has felt stressful or tedious, then the prospect of a new beginning carries the feeling of renewed hope and possibility. If the previous year has been rewarding, then there is the anticipation of even greater rewards in the year to come. It seems to be a basic feature of human nature to be optimistic about the future. Is that how you feel? Are you looking forward to positive changes in the year to come? The beauty of optimism Optimism is a beautiful…
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Why Goals Are Not the Same as Wishful Thinking
There seems to be a lot of confusion when it comes to the difference between having goals and plain, old, wishful thinking. I often hear people talking about their personal goals and find their enthusiasm to be very encouraging. Everyone should have goals. When I ask these same people about their strategies for reaching those goals, it’s not uncommon to hear the phrase “I’m going to try.” I know their intentions are good, but the simple truth is that trying is not a strategy. In fact, it’s usually a combination of wishful thinking topped with a token amount of effort. What does…
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Empowering Belief Systems
What kind of beliefs are truly empowering? Which ones will help us to reach our goals and succeed in improving the quality of our life? The answer is simple really, belief systems that empower us to make positive changes. This would include beliefs that allow us to change how we feel about things, and those that allow us to change our own behavior. Beliefs and perception Feelings and behavior define who we are as a person. Most of the time our behavior is just the outward manifestation of our feelings, and our feelings are a reflection of how we view things through …
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The Value of Money and the Value of Time
We all recognize the value of money, so imagine you have a very special kind of bank account. In this account you have an undisclosed amount of money that was deposited there by a generous but anonymous donor. Each day the bank credits your account with an allotment of money from your account balance, but at the end of the day something very strange happens. Instead of carrying your balance over from one day to the next, any unused portion of the funds is automatically zeroed out. The next day, there…
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Motivation and Your Emotional Vocabulary
I have often said that the mind works in pictures, and that is true. So how can words radically alter our feelings if our mind files everything in pictures? It’s true that we can picture something in our minds without having words to describe it. But once you have a picture in your mind that you want to communicate to someone, what’s the first thing you do? The first thing you do is try to find words to describe that picture, right? Now it…
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Harness the Power of Your Emotional Vocabulary
We all recognize that we get results by taking action – no action means no results because one depends on the other. We are also aware that there are a variety of motivators that can prompt us to take action. One of the challenges in personal development is learning to control those motivators so that we can intentionally move ourselves to take action and produce results at will. Emotions are the most powerful of all the…
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How Does Personal Development Change Lives?
Let’s do a little visualizing and see what kind of personal insight we can gain. Take a minute and close your eyes as you think about your ideal scenario for your life. To make things interesting, allow yourself to abandon all limitations. If you could create your version of a deeply satisfying, enjoyable, meaningful, empowering life experience, what would it look like? What…
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Can You Allow Appreciation to Change Your Life?
We are all aware of the benefits that come from being appreciative and grateful. But sometimes that’s easier said than done. In the face of a sinking economy, do you find it difficult to be appreciative? When it feels like your very way of life is being threatened, can you still find reasons to be grateful? Yes, sometimes finding the good in a situation can seem like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Yet, the benefits of being in a state of genuine appreciation in spite of what’s going on around us are worth investigating. This…
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Stop Thinking to Grow Your Intelligence
Scientists estimate that we use somewhere between 1/10 of 1{2879bc8f2cf0c7badc0ba0b91bc88170008fa0b1cee68ceb4afb7fd46d4bfeb9}, and 1{2879bc8f2cf0c7badc0ba0b91bc88170008fa0b1cee68ceb4afb7fd46d4bfeb9} of our mental potential for conscious thought. That’s not very much, is it? When considering these statistics, two questions immediately come to mind: 1) If those scientists are operating under the same limitations as the rest of us, how can they make such an estimate? 2) Why can’t we access a greater percentage of our mental potential? Okay, I admit it; the first question was just to put things in perspective. So let’s talk about that second question. If the potential is there, how can we access it and put it to better use? How the mind operates Understanding how the thinking process works helps …
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Has your Analytical Mind Taken Over Your Life?
Thinking ability is an amazing gift and it allows us to accomplish wonderful things. The human mind is the greatest problem solver on the planet, and it is eager to provide you with the answer to any question, and the solution to any challenge. The thinking side of life As soon as you present your mind with a question it goes to work analyzing and calculating. It combs your mental file cabinets in search of relevant information. It quickly…
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What is Your Brain Doing While You Are Sleeping?
We assume that the brain is doing something while we’re asleep because we dream. But is dreaming all that is going on up there? Are dreams just random static coming out of our sleeping brains, or is our brain doing things behind our backs while we are asleep? When we get tired, we sleep so we can shut down to rest and rebuild. It seems logical that the brain would follow a similar pattern. After all, don’t we get tired of thinking and want to turn the process off after…
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Confidence and the Courage to Take Action
There is an important relationship between confidence and courage? Have you ever felt that a lack of confidence was holding you back from living up to your true potential? When you think of reaching out for your greatest goals and dreams, do you fear that you won’t have what it takes? Courage is one way to overcome feelings of low confidence, but what kind of courage are we talking about? We’ll get to that in a moment. First, I just want to say that if you find yourself struggling with confidence, don’t be too quick to assume that your feelings are based on any kind of personal inadequacy. There are many reasons why confidence is such…