Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Why Not Bet On Yourself?

"Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe."

Saint Augustine

The difference between a man of success and a failure doesn't often consist in the fact that one has a greater ability or best ideas, but in its courage to bet on his/her own ideas, to assume him a well calculated risk, and therefore to act.

We often associate the idea of courage to heroic actions on the battleground, in a shipwreck or in similar moments of crisis, but also daily life asks for courage if we want to be constructive.

To stay inactive, the fear to act, make nervous who owes to face a problem, one feel "in the cage", "hunted" and this manifests him with a quantity of symptoms physic.

Study attentively the situation; try to imagine the various phases of your possible actions and the possible consequences of them.

Choose the way of acting that it seems you more advantageous and apply it.

If we wait to act up to when we are not completely sure of the result, we will never move a finger.

Whenever you act, you can be wrong.

Every decision we take can reveal wrong, but this doesn't have to hold back us to continue toward the goal we have appointed.

You have to have every day the courage to risk being wrong to risk failing.

A footstep in the wrong direction is better whether to be immovable the whole life.

Monday, October 30, 2006

Do You Use Both Sides Of Your Brain?

"I never came upon any of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking."

Albert Einstein

In the majority of people the left part of the brain concerns the logic, the language, the reasoning, the cause-and-effect process, the analysis and all those so-called "rational" activities.

When this part is at work, the other (the "right") is found in the "wave alpha" or is of rest.

The right part, has in turn, to whether to do with the rhythm, the music, the images and the imagination, the color, the ability to compare the day-dreams, the physiognomy, the recognition of examples and maps.

I have always been fascinated from the book "Use your Head" of Tony Buzan, in which she sustains that if an individual is encouraged to develop a mental area that he had previously considered weak, this development, instead to escape energies to the other areas, seems to produce a synergy effect of good mental output in all the areas.

The brains of the great minds appeared at first sight unbalanced.

Einstein and other great scientists had all the characteristics of individuals in which the left part of the brain resulted dominant, while the contrary one was worth for exactly personality as Picasso or Cézanne.

But the history denied these theories.

To school Einstein was rejected in mathematics and among his various activities he showed up the passion for the art, the study of the violin, the practice of the sail and "immagination games".

The numbers, the formulas, the equations and the words with which Einstein dressed again the new image had for resulted the theory of the relativity, a synthesis among right part and it departs left of the brain.

The great artists were likewise revealed gifted in everybody and two the parts of the brain.

But the supreme example of that that a human being would be able to do if the two parts of the brain were simultaneously developed he is constituted by Leonardo da Vinci.

To his times he was unquestionably the most gifted man in all the following disciplines: art, sculpture, physiology, general sciences, architecture, mechanics, anatomy, physics and inventions.

The conclusion is that once more an holistic approach results that more proper for self-improvement and personal growth, because, to my notice, it allows to melt and to harmonize all the aspects and the expressions of our being.

In my experience I can confirm only whether to alternate rational activity to imaginative activity is a real secret of our auto-improvement.

Sunday, October 29, 2006

Do Not Rely Upon Approval Of Others

"Whatever task you undertake, do it with all your heart and soul. Always be courteous, never be discouraged. Beware of him who promises something for nothing. Do not blame anybody for your mistakes and failures. Do not look for approval except the consciousness of doing your best."

Bernard Baruch

The need to continually give test of itself to the other ones is the worse obstacle on the road of your personal growth.

If you surrender to this need you put you in the hands of the people of which you aim to get the consent and the admiration.

Those people who act with calm efficiency don't warn it.

The discourse is different in the case of children, because all, from small, they obey to the natural tendency to show.

Everybody wants that the others, and particularly his/her parents, approve them and share their pride for the acquisition of a new ability or for the attainment of a new victory.

"Daddy, look at me! Look as I swim, as I plunge me, as I skate, as I go by bicycle" and so on.

All, to that age, they have need that other people's eyes follow them with admired attention, because the childish self-concept develops him/her on the base of the reactions with which the adults welcome the overcoming of every new experience.

But you are not more than their children and therefore the need to make to notice you, or to show all the time how much you are worth it is not more admissible.

Unless you do not belong to that category of adults that they are not matured to sufficiency and they continue to aspire to the approval of those people that surround them.

If you won't know how to make to keep silent this need you will have to suffer quite a lot in the life, because you will feel you unhappy and deeply embittered and tormented by the internal doubts every time that the others won't pay you attention, or when they will disapprove you and above all when will not comprehend you.

Then you will find you closed in a vicious circle: you will strive never you to receive consents and respect and understanding and the others, realizing that you have a so great need of it; they would always purchase greater power on you.

If you desire really to become more independent, abdicates to be approved and also to be inclusive.

Not you even imagine how much energy you can free if you succeed in doing this.

The people that look for really to simply improve themselves don't have time to think about what the other ones they think.

This doesn't mean not to converse and not to listen to the others.

If you abdicate the consent and the approval of the others, paradoxically you become more attractive and charismatic, your power will increase, but you don't care to check the others, you want only to increase your knowledge and to improve yourself.

This attitude will serve from example to whom feels insecure, besides it will also stimulate in who is you near the desire to improve and to know.

Saturday, October 28, 2006

Learn To Cohabit With Uncertainty

"Uncertainty is the only certainty there is, and knowing how to live with insecurity is the only security"

John Allen Paulos

One of the most precious things that I have learned in my life is the ability to manage uncertainty.

The most part of us thinks that to know every detail of ones life is suitable, before crossing it, but is does not works this manner!

To avert the unexpected has become an obsession in our western culture.

In name of the science and the technology and of the human progress they have been finished unfortunately many errors.

What I want to say is that perfectly useless to try to gag our run.

I am not nevertheless favourable to the anarchy; every evolved society has to obviously have its rules.

Even if we don't like this, uncertainty is a constant that accompanies us for the whole life.

Have I wondered therefore why to fight it? If it exists also owes you to be a reason!

Then whether not to make uncertainty a new friend of ours?

If everything were predictable and controllable, we would already live in a society caricature as that feared by Orwell (1984)

I believe that uncertainty is also a great opportunity to free our creativeness and to know better us deeply.

And I don't speak only of the ability to resolve complex problems or find a way out of critical situations.

Uncertainty is anywhere: in our sentimental relationships, as in the career, in the health, in the relationships with the others.

The secret consists of continually working for to become more solid, more invulnerable to the fashions, to the publicity, to what they think the other ones is correct to do or not to do.

If you turn off the television and go out to make a beautiful run on a beach and breaths deeply the fresh air of the sea and listening the gulls, will understand then something of very important.

There is something of fascinating and of mysterious in the uncertainty: the animals the plants and all of other being that live on our earth they are not sure to exist tomorrow still, yet does life go every day on and manifests him in thousand extraordinary ways, have you ever wondered why?

A individual cannot consider him/her really free and he/she can never improve himself/herself same if he/she doesn't also accept to cohabit with Uncertainty

The Oriental says that the void is the origin of every thing. I believe that in this affirmation there is a lot to reflect.

Friday, October 27, 2006

How-to Deal With False Self-Confidence

"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. "

Sir Winston Churchill

The people that appear gifted in a false mastery of itself in almost all the circumstances are insecure people or they are "absolutists".

What type is the absolutist and because we speak here instead of speaking of self-learning and self-improvement?

The stereotype of the absolutist is that of an authoritarian individual, normally male, that expects blind obedience from all the others to which he can impose there own authority.

It deals with an aggressive, impatient and arrogant type, dogmatic, of narrow thought, one with which you absolutely cannot be reasoned.

The archetype of the absolutist could be one as Hitler.

I don't have difficulty to affirm that my father was an individual absolutist.

My father is dead 11 years ago.

Certainly I am thankful to him for the ethical principles that he has taught me and for the fact to have me beloved, even in his own way.

Nevertheless I have always had a hostile relationship with him really in regard to the ideas on the reality of the world and the relationship with the others.

He was without any doubt a type absolutist and pessimistic, while I always consider me eclectic, creative and optimist in any situation.

I have to also thank my father to have been different from me.

This has always pushed me to compare me with my deeper insecurities and with the image that I had made of me during my infancy.

I can quietly affirm that the run of personal growth that I began on myself really his death's year (1995) and that still continuous it is the true reason for my search and my personal improvement.

I don't believe is necessary for anybody to have a hostile relationship with his/her own father to have an auto motivation to improve oneself.

Nevertheless the extraordinary things that I have learned in my career and in my life and that have brought me to my success I owe them to the hostile relationship with my father.

Thursday, October 26, 2006

Strength Vs. Weakness

“Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.”

Albert Einstein


A person cannot simply defined as "strong" or "weak".

If you are suited to classify people in such terms, you will realize that there is no base, any criterion to establish the strength or the weakness inside yourselves or of others has not a comparison in the reality.

What the true strength and what is the true weakness? This is a philosophical question.

Who was stronger: Martin Luther King or the man that has murdered him? Adolf Hitler or Albert Schweitzer?

Does the champion of the world of lifting weigh or that woman that to save his/her child succeeded in lifting the car breaking her back?

When you will have thought well there, following what according to you they are the parameters for establishing the true human strength, you will discover that you will be strong even in the relationships with your family, only to turn yourself in cowardly as soon as you find you in front of your boss or of your colleagues.

Even you feel weak on Monday but "superman" on Thursday.

In effects each of us is a whole strength and weakness and if he/she is wanted to think in a holistic way, it is necessary to melt all the dichotomous and to see every part of his/her own behaviour as an unique thing, interpretable as a whole that contains elements of strength and weakness.

You observe your past.

When you are behaved you in a way that you could define strong now, even internally a lot of weak you were frightened.

If sometimes happened you feel a little cockerel, to feel you the strongest, the best of the neighbourhoods, you will probably be behaved you by bully, in a way that all the fears pointed out that you had inside.

Every time that observe someone that behaves in such way to induce you to a cataloguing of strength or weakness, remember that there is always some strength behind the weakness and, vice versa, not all of this that is weak is I deprive of strength.

To face the life in a holistic way will allow you to perfectly accept yourselves as aware human beings that nobody can ever impose you to make to acknowledge you that you are weak.

When you determine your future according to your good way of thinking, here that is transcending your weakness and you face the life in the best of the ways.

So you become commander of your ships no more than the simple passengers that accept the orders of others.

But all of this will be possible only if you will accept yourself and others as human beings since the beginning and always consider then weak and strong in the same moment.

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

How-To Overcome Maturity vs. Childish Dichotomy

“The rate at which a person can mature is directly proportional to the embarrassment he can tolerate.”

Douglas Engelbart

Often among adolescents these sentences are repeated: "When will you grow!" "You are always a child". "Why you behave as a child?"

Dichotomy maturity vs. childish is almost exclusively used to insult the others and is not practically ever used by those people that have a true trust in himself/herself and know how to think for himself/herself.

In effects, in our culture it comes particularly used by the teen-agers when they want to mortify other teen-agers.

At school, girls consider themselves more mature than boys and often they judge a boy as mature or childish.

These girls are those whose face is smeared, they wear stuffed bras and they stop playing.

For quite a lot years they don't know how to do anything else other than to give judgments on her “maturity” of the people.

The worse insult that one can be receive is to be considered “immature.”

And who are those that they (the girls) consider “mature?”

The best fighters, the biggest, the tallest, the more bully, the more absolutists and, in short, the mature boys more superficially.

Whoever can have an immature idea on what in reality it is the human maturity, above all if one is never detained to think what understood maturity can be in the higher sense.

On my opinion the first true footstep toward the maturity, consists of recognizing that nobody is completely child or completely adult and that it would be a well sad thing if someone were it.

Who behaves in capricious, or foolish way, as immature in some occasion, he/she is also able to react in serious and responsible way in other circumstances.

The adult that is strictly monitored, organized, orderly and complete at work, he/she could be also able to let himself/herself go, to behave as fool, to be childish in certain circumstances.

The fact that someone is brought to encourage the others to act according to rigid behaviours arbitrarily defined mature, it doesn't try anything else other than if not the presence of a dichotomous thought.

This dichotomous thinking originally ignores the holistic phenomenon of each of us and always a little child and a little adult, a little mature and a little immature, until there will be life.

To follow to a self-declarated "behaviour of maturity" represents a serious limitation.

In this way you cannot feel new and exciting experiences and, more important thing, you won't ask you what really is human growth.

You won't see its unlimited nature, you won't be able to expand and to constantly revise your philosophy to decide what person's type you want to be and finally you will stop growing.

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

To Express Oneself Is Not a Moral Matter

"All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded the individual."

Albert Einstein

I believe that it is harmful to assume a moral attitude on matters that in effects they don't have some moral base.

For instance to express oneself or the incapability to do it, fundamentally is not matters of ethics apart the fact that is ours to have to put the talent that the Creator has given us into practice.

Nevertheless to express oneself can morally become wrong for what concerns your conscience, if you were brusquely hissed, shameless, humiliated and perhaps punished as a child to have spoken, to have expressed your ideas, to be you 'shown.'

A child treated in this way 'it learns' that it is 'wrong' to express himself, to make himself/herself before expressing his/her ideas as ideas of a certain value, or even it learns that it is wrong to speak.

If a child is punished for having shown him angry, if he/she comes shameless because he/she has been afraid, or taken around because he/she shows a particular affection for someone, he/she learns that to express his/her true feelings is wrong.

Some learn even that sins and 'wrong' only to show the 'bad feelings as the fear and the anger, but inhibiting her bad emotions the expression is inhibited of also those good.

The meter to judge the emotions doesn't consist in the goodness or in the wickedness of the emotions themselves, but in the opportunity or inopportunity of the emotional reactions, according to the causes that produce them.

If every time that a child expresses his/her opinion he/she is scolded and put again to his/her place, he/she will learn that he/she is correct that he is 'anybody', and wrong 'will to be someone.'

A conscience so distorted and non-realistic makes us cowardly really.

We can become stump sensitive and to be worried excessively of the fact to have or not the right to also reach the success when we extend to a worthy purpose, coming even to ask us if we deserve it.

I believe that the first thing of which we have to be aware is that we have to allow for the conditionings of our infancy.

To overcome these conditionings the only way is to show to ourselves that we deserve the success instead and rather that this is one birthright of ours, in how much all of us were born with a particular vocation.

This vocation is our human potential, it is our oneness and also the deepest expression of the spirit of the mankind.

Monday, October 23, 2006

The Ideal Career Is To Become You

"The best careers advice to give to the young is 'Find out what you like doing best and get someone to pay you for doing it.'"

Katherine Whitehorn

Dear friend, you probably won't believe what I am about to tell you, even if it deals with the greatest truth that I have discovered during mine career.

I suppose you is enough young and that you are interested to some advice on things like job and career.

Everybody always told you that every respectable person it has to have a proper role in the society, therefore a job dignified, a family, and so on, true?

There is nothing wrong in this, I absolutely agree.

However what happens when you go out of the college?

It is like to wake up from a long numbness: you brusquely realize you that life is an enormous arena, where it is necessary to compete, to race more of the others, to be the most cunning, true?

It will very probably be your turn to go up through the ranks, therefore if you will do better and you will respect your superior perhaps it will be then you granted to advance.

But unfortunately the things are not always so easy, you have ever wondered, why?

You think that the guilt is of the world, in which we live, of the society, of the political, of the nations?

The fact that life is hard for everybody it is not a matter of guilt, neither of fortune or adversity, is only a matter of as you see yourself.

I speak to you for direct experience and because I lived it in first person.

There are certainly people that have helped me, as my father, so many others have hindered me, but to me they didn't interest neither the favours neither the obstacles.

To me it interested to stay free to have my experiences and to go on.

What really interested me was to keep on doing something in which could be free from schedules and from directives, this means to say to make self-employed and to never have boss.

Besides my discipline and my ethics imposed not me of to try to get favours from anybody, included the obligation of to reciprocate in expectancy them.

In the meantime it interested me to learn how much more it was possible from every experience, also to loss of the monetary profit.

I had to make this at any costs. Will you ask yourself why? I perhaps have had some self-esteem problems during my infancy but now it does not matter: in to do this I have continually looked for the energies inside myself.

What I have learned is that there is an enormous potential inside each of us, a mysterious strength, a reserve of creativeness, of energy and of intelligence unbelievable.

Others are only on your mirror: the problem is that you don't know it. You can only experiment it.

In 1995 I had run for an important project of consultation, it treated of a charge of great responsibility, but I was the more young of the team and there were some most elderly colleagues and more experienced of me.

Do you know it how I got that charge? (What the figure yielded me of around $25.000,00 for 17 days of job, not bad!)

Showing to the project leader at the same time 2 things:

The first one was that if they didn't give me that job I lived the same and what if they were them to lose the opportunity to do a beautiful it shows up with the client.

The second was that I absolutely felt me sure of me and to be able to develop that assignment.

In 1995 I practised disciplines of the mind as the yoga one and meditation, "re-birthing" techniques and the "job to the mirror" of Louis Hay.

The results have been impressive and superior to any optimistic expectation.

It considers that I had never developed in precedence a similar charge and what the client was a great Italian industrial group.

Besides I didn't originate from their field.

My colleagues had to the shoulders a career as executives of firm, while I was a simple advisor in subject by law of the job and pay rolls.

My preceding experiences in the formation were limited to small interventions on behalf of regional corporate body of formation and in favour of young students, not of pictures and business executives.

Okay, I had a MBA but any experience as business educator in great firms.

At the end of the project, everybody was happy, the questionnaires apprised you of end course of 117 pictures and executives were all positive ones regard my performance.

The person responsible of the society of consultation (the project leader and senior consultant) has to retract him on the opinion about me and the customer was happy about the project, which went to good end.

Since then I understood that some situation doesn't exist neither of favour neither of difficulty, they exist only your mirror and you.

If you succeed in convincing the mirror (your unconscious) that you are able to do that job and that you deserve it to you, anybody, I say, anybody on this world can ever stop you!

Sunday, October 22, 2006

Imagine Yourself As A Successful Person

"Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are."


Malcolm Forbes


Understanding that our actions, our feelings and our behaviour are the result of our mental images and beliefs it gives us the key that psychology has always looked for the change of personality.

This opens a new door to the conquest of ability, success and happiness.

The mental images give us the opportunity to practice new inclinations and to have new attitudes, things we would not have been able otherwise to do.

This is possible because your nervous system cannot appraise the difference among a real experience and one vividly imagined.

If we represent ourselves as individuals acting on a certain way, it is as if this pits our reality behaviour: the mental exercise helps us to reach the perfection.

You act and feel not in conformity with the reality aspect of the things, but according to the image that your mind has built.

You have some mental images of yourselves, of your world, of the people that surround you, and you behave you as if you thought that these images and not the things that they represent are the real reality and the truth.

It achieves therefore of it that if our ideas and the mental images that concern us are distorted and unreal, then also our reactions to the environment will likewise be wrong.

If you want really to improve your knowledge, your career and your future, then you have to make 4 simple things:

First: to pick up action of your actual situation and being aware that this can be changed, if really you desire it with all of your strengths.

Second: to replace new mental images of success with the film that your are actually watching transforming yourself from a spectator to the protagonist of your life.

Third: relax you and allow acting your unconscious for you. In the meantime tried to take care of you really of yourself and not think to other.

Fourth: to feel to deserve all this.

If you will follow then these 4 simple rules the probabilities that nothing happen they become very low.

Your future of success is waiting you, something unbelievable and spectacular!

Saturday, October 21, 2006

Cultivate Faith and Courage Inside Yourself.

"It takes vision and courage to create, it takes faith and courage
to prove."

Owen D. Young

Faith and courage are developing exactly in the same way, but the purposes are different.

If you have to employ your time worrying you, why not worrying you constructively?

Begin to establish and to define the more possible and suitable results.

Begin with this statement: "we suppose that"; we suppose that the best result will be verified.

You remember then to yourselves that this "may happen", not that it "will happen", it would be too soon, but only that it may happen.

After all remember you that such a positive result it is possible.

You can accept and to mentally assimilate these gradual doses of optimism and trust, and after having thought about the desired final result as a defined possibility, you start to imagine how it can be.

You delay on these mental images, you establish the details and complete you them.

Above all it is important to focus yourself on the state of mind, on the emotions that you feel when you evoke these mental images in your mind.

When these images will be detailed more and more, when they will be repeated in continuation you will see once more that they will start to be revealed the suitable feelings as if the favourable result had already been reached.

This time there will be feelings of faith, trust in him same, courage, all reunited ones in a complex: "that feeling of success."

Friday, October 20, 2006

How-to Demystify Your Life Planning

“Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans”

John Lennon

Delete the word "retirement" from your dictionary

Convince you that anybody won't put never you to rest, because after you will have left your job you will be still efficient and able to produce and life will reserve you never-ending affairs and pleasant occupations.

Stop to sadly think to your future and rather try to live in the good possible way your present.

If you believe that one day - it doesn't care if next or remote - you will retire only to kill the long hours of boredom on the benches of the public gardens, heating you to the sun in winter or looking for a few of shade during the warm season and unwillingly reading the newspaper, you are furnishing a bad service to yourself, because you resign you without motive to accept a very diffused cliché and also very false.

You will never and will never feel useless if you will know how to actually enjoy at the end, fully and freely, every moment of your life and the age it will be never an inhibiting factor, unless you expressly want this.

The retirement will never come, provided that you learn since now to live every day of your life in the full meaning of the term.

If you develop a job that detest but you resign you to get by, consoling you with the idea that you will repay you when you will retire, because you will finally be free then to devote you to an occupation of your pleasure, you cradles you in a dangerous illusion.

That why when you won't be "tied to the chain" anymore, the long strain of a deprived life of satisfactions will have devoured you all the energies and you will feel indeed probably useless and convicts to be to rest.

Thursday, October 19, 2006

The Myth Of Intelligence and The Happiness

"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are
in harmony."

Mohandas K. GANDHI


To answer of yourself involves that you put a great deal aside some
diffused myths.

The first one of these myths is the notion that intelligence is
measured by the ability to resolve complex problems, to read, to
write, and to make of account to concerns levels to quickly resolve
abstract equations.

This concept of intelligence recognizes in the formal education and
in the cleverness of the good student the true measures of the
personal realization.

It stimulates a sort of intellectual snobbery that has given
depressing results.

We have reached the point of restrain that who is more distinguished
in the studies, who is a genius in one some discipline scholasticism
(mathematics, sciences), who uses a rich vocabulary, who has memory
for superfluous facts, who is a devourer of books, he/she is also
"intelligent."

But the clinics for mental illnesses regurgitate of patients that
have all these bank drafts in order, as after all also of many
patients that don't have them.

A more sincere barometer of the intelligence is an efficient life,
happy, lived every day and every minute of every day.

If you are happy, if you live every moment for all of this so that
it is worth to live it, you are an intelligent person.

The capability to solve a problem is a useful addition to your
happiness; but if you know that, also being incapable to resolve it,
you can always choose your happiness or, how much less, to refuse to
choose you the unhappiness, you are intelligent then.

You are intelligent because you hold asunder the weapon most
effective against the nerves, or nervous breakdown.

To the intelligent people the nerves don't break because they
respond of themselves.

They choose the happiness instead of depression.

Because they know whether to face the problems of their life.

It notices well that have not said to resolve the problems.

Rather than to measure his/her self-own intelligence from the
ability to resolve a problem they independently measure to them
from their ability to maintain themselves happy and respectable
independently from the solution or not of the problem.

You can start to consider yourself really intelligent on the base of
the state of mind in which you decide to face the difficult
circumstances.

In the life, all we have to fight big way the same battles.

To less than not to live uprooted from any social context, all we meet
difficulty that resembles him.

Disagreements, conflicts, compromises, belong to what ones intends
for belonging to the human kind.

And also the money, the old age, the illness, the death, the natural disasters, misfortunes, are all events that set some problems to practically the whole human being.

Despite such events, however, some succeed in avoiding the demolition and paralysing unhappiness; instead others collapse, they fall in the inactivity or victims of exhaustion.

Those that recognize that the problems belong to the human nature, and that don't measure happiness from the absence of the problems, they are the human beings most intelligent that are known, and they are also rare.

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Do Not Identify Yourself With Your Errors

"An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field"

Niels Bohr

One of the errors that we easily can commit is to confuse our behaviour with ourselves

We make this error to be able to conclude that, since we have acted in one determined way, we are catalogued as a certain type of person.

Everything will be clearer if we can become aware that the errors concern something that we do, that refers to the actions, and to be realistic we should use verbs of action rather than to describe them with names that describe a "state"

For instance to say, "I have failed" (verbal) it is not anything else rather than to recognize an error and this helps to be successfully in the future.

Vice versa, to say, "I am a failure" (noun) it doesn't describe what you have done, but what you think that the error has done of you.

This doesn't help to learn, curtains rather "to fix" the error and to make it permanent, this has shown more than once during clinical-psychological experiments.

All the children learning to walk at times they fall and we say: "he/she is fallen" or "he/she has stumbled"; not that "it is a living tumble."

Besides not all the parents recognize that all the children, learning to speak, they make errors or they stumble them, they hesitate, they interrupt them, they repeat syllables and words.

It is normal for an anxious or too worried parent to conclude: "He/she is stuttered."

Such attitude or such judgment given not on the child actions, but on the child himself/herself they negatively influence him/her and he/she starts to think himself/herself stammering for real.

Every progresses into speak comes so jammed and the stuttering has the tendency to become permanent.

Eminent psychologists have shown that this principle is valid for every "bad habit", inclusive the emotional ones.

Don't identify yourself with your errors, but allow yourself to be able you to do them and above all to learn from your errors.

To avoid the tendency to identify yourself with your own errors owe to maintain a certain awareness of yourself and certain equilibrium.

If you succeed in doing this, you will have gotten a big result in the road that brings to your personal growth.

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Discover Your Life Mission

"Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone
must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfilment. Therein
he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated, thus, everyone's
task is unique as his specific opportunity to implement it."


Dr. Viktor E(mil) Frankl

Your debts, the family liability and all the others problems will be
repaired only if you allow yourselves to have a purpose in the life.

If you have always been a responsible person, if you have always paid,
if you have been conscientious, it won't be necessary to suddenly
abandon these values to become some hermits and to go to live in a
cavern in the middle of the wood.

You can choose to have satisfied and responsible; facing all of this
that you have chosen, provided that you have the wish to eradicate the
fear of the changes, the fear to be wrong, because these two things
represent the most greater obstacles to become a free person.

If you use excuses and various arguments to defend your actual
situation, provoked by the decisions you took in precedence, you will
surely end to realize a system of life full of obligations and deprived
of internal peace.

On my opinion, instead, there is anything more important than the
feeling to have your own mission and a proper life purpose.

If you want a healthy and lively life, you cannot disregard this
aspect.

Monday, October 16, 2006

About Long Term Motivation

"It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed."
Theodore Roosevelt

I have intuitively known always how much important was to feel your own life purpose, more than simply to have it.

Everybody says that is important to have a life purpose, but few are able of to feel it in him/her own intimate.

Nobody can ever explain you how to reach this state of the mind.

Only you could know which is your higher motivation.

If someone asked me this question: "How my own motivation could be defended?"

I would respond: "In 3 ways: "

First: moving it possibly on the most elevated plan and never doing it depend out on other things or other people.

Second: to bring your sense of motivation on the long term, never in the brief one.

Third: to cultivate and to maintain your motivation every day of your life.

Why it is so important to have a long term motivation?

Because this helps yourself to maintain the rudder of your life and it practically makes you invulnerable, anything can happen you.

For me life is as an enormous white sheet that there has been given the first day of school: the day in which we were born.

It is to us to fill it with some scribbles deprive of sense or with the greatest work of art ever conceived by some human being.

Nobody can judge what you do with that sheet. A thing however it is certain: opportunity implies responsibility.

An ancient proverb recites: who sown the wind reap the whirlwind.

Sunday, October 15, 2006

Self-Knowingness Is More Important Than You Think

"You can't know your real mind as long as you deceive yourself."

Bodhidharma

Mr. Dyer in "The Sky Is The Limit" says:

"You and whoever on this planet were born free, to cultivate the whole creative potential that is inside of you and to live in peace with your conscience.


Nevertheless it is possible to complain one's birthright only if one is firmly convinced to accept all the social, or external risks, derived by the wish to ignore the external pressures that try to force the people to seek external rewards.

The search of external rewards excludes the inside satisfaction that derives from being convinced to do what one believes despite the unavoidable external consequences."
(translated again from italian to english)

I find this excerpt one of the highest concepts ever written about our self-improvement potential.

I have put in practice these extraordinary suggestions several times in my life and I have to confirm that these things are truthful and crucial in every real self-improvement path.

Only a remark: take care of the way you try to know yourself!

You should be aware that the way and the conclusions of your check-up too they are influenced by your previous beliefs!

That is why a self-knowingness process is never an easy step.

You have to feel ready and convinced and inspired to really want to start a deep analysis of yourself.

"Who am I?" "What I want to realize?" are crucial questions and it worth they should be treated with a particular attentiveness.

Finally is very important to know oneself, because without this I think you will never build a successful method to learn and to improve yourself.

Be sincere with yourself! This is the key to self-knowingness.

Saturday, October 14, 2006

Intellectual Humility As A Precious Tool

"There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle."”

Albert Einstein

I partially agree with the Critical Thinking Community definition of "Intellectual humility".

I agree only on this: ". It (Intellectual humility) implies the lack of intellectual pretentiousness, boastfulness, or conceit... " And on this: ". It does not imply spinelessness or submissiveness."

I disagree instead on the concept that intellectual humility necessarily should be defined as: "...Having a consciousness of the limits of one's knowledge, including a sensitivity to circumstances in which one's native egocentrism is likely to function self-deceptively;"

I am sorry but I have to contradict them.

I prefer to point out the individual potential and creativity rather than the consciousness of oneself limits.

I have ever tried to look at the big picture in a positive manner, and all the time I was right.

On my opinion Intellectual humility is a sign of maturity and shows that one is at ease with oneself and respect the needs of others.

In pursuit of happiness, humble people respect their own abilities and value their accomplishments.

There is nothing wrong with self-reliant individualism and the single search for happiness and success.

Some people prefer to work alone. Others find value in working together.

The most important thing is to respect both oneself and other people's capabilities, while remaining aware of human nature, which is not perfect.

I think everybody of us is trying to do one's best in this life.

Why I am talking about intellectual humility and self-learning method?

Because I am convinced that intellectual humility is a virtue, not enough (or not at all) considered in modern cultures.

If you are building and constantly following your own self-improvement method and in the same time you stay intellectually humble, your consciousness will increase and also other peoples will appreciate you.

Intellectual humility is itself a value and a precious instrument in your self-improvement arsenal.

Friday, October 13, 2006

Cultivate your passions and convert them into a new job!

"Doing what you love is the cornerstone of having abundance in your life."

Wayne Dyer

Who said that a job has to be boring and repetitive while the hobbies serve only to relax and to distract you?

It is proven that people that have combined their hobbies whit their job get extraordinary results.

In fact if you have some hobbies you have also specific affairs and passions.

It is more likely that you succeed to get notable results cultivating your hobbies, because you like to do them, therefore you put there more energy and more appointment.

What is hobby for anyone else, for you is a job, or vice versa.

Why then people have to be paid to make non interesting things while that what do they know how to do better they do free it?

I find whether to combine hobbies and job is not only a great opportunity to improve your life, but it is also even ethical.

If you do your job with enthusiasm and passion, then you become more productive, no matter you are an entrepreneur or an employee.

If you are more productive and happier, do you know what happens? The society will benefit, because you produce more and above all better.

The environment will benefit, health will benefit, your colleagues will benefit, everybody will benefit!

I know what you will say! It is not always easy to combine hobbies and job; you are often forced to do a job even if you don't like it.

Ok! But are you are not forced to do it forever! You can improve your position, your career, whenever you want.

In addition, if you not only measure your success from the quantity of money that you succeed in producing but also from the quality of the life that you conduct while producing that amount of money, then you are becoming a more wise person.

Thursday, October 12, 2006

Inspiration Is The Key To Your Success

"Try not to become a man of success but a man of value."

Albert Einstein


You reflect for a moment on this fact: if you feel particularly inspired, you make the best you can in your assignments, why?

What is inspiration? To my notice the inspiration is a particular condition of our
Conscience that makes us feel that we have taken the right decision, it makes us feel
well, relaxed and in peace with ourselves.

A great psycho-physical equilibrium it is necessary to feel been inspired and to put
This inspiration into practice, I said equilibrium, not the illumination!

Another decisive component for a good inspiration is the memory of a precedent success in similar situations to those that we are living now.

It is fundamental to be aware and to have trust in your own abilities, therefore to be aware that you are doing the best you can in your job or in your study.

When you are making the things in which you believe, do them with passion and with great enthusiasm: the inspiration will automatically arrive.

The inspiration is possible when you are satisfying your more elevated needs, first among all that to realize yourself, and not only your material or contingent needs, without need of the approval of the others.

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Awareness Is To Celebrate Your Oneness

"As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Awareness means to be conscious of your personality and oneness.

Personality is something magnetic and of mysterious.

Personality is something unique that lies inside you, it is easy to recognize but difficult to define.

Personality is not something that is purchased or is created from nothing rather something that frees from the inside.

This real self is in the intimate of every person attracts, it magnetizes,
influence and it imposes him to the others with an enormous power.

We have the feeling to be to contact with something of reality and of fundamental.

On the other hand an artificial thing anybody doesn't like it and the majority of people detests it.

Because everybody loves a child?

Not certain for what he can do, for what he knows or for what he has, but simply for what he is.

Every child has that "plus" of personality.

The awareness that serves you to build your method of study is not anything else other than the rediscovery of your personality.

It is absolutely necessary to be aware of his/her own personality, otherwise the method doesn't work.

And it is really this that makes to work the method: your personality.

You need to be aware of it however!

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Self-Esteem and Learning Method

“You know more than you think you do.”

Benjamin Spock


Self-confidence serves you to believe that you can make a certain thing.

Self-esteem serves you to understand that however things will end up it is not your value as human being to be at stake

What does the self-esteem belong to learning methods?

A method is a succession of actions, techniques, approaches and relationships.

All these things have in common a thing: they are tightly personal.

Nobody can transfer you a method that was all right for him, but it is not proper for you.

You have to find your method and the only way to do this it is to know yourself and the way according to which you report yourself with the rest of the world.

There is for example who learns better listening, who reading, who writing.

There is who learns soon better the morning, who in the afternoon, who to late night.


There is who learn better alone, who learn in a more collaborative way.

There is who learns only in the worse moments of his/her own life, when he/she is called to face the most terrible difficulties.

Others have a particular attitude instead to learn in every moment: these are the more fortunate because for them to learn is always a game and the most natural way of to satisfy their eternal curiosity.

Nothing can be learned if it is not in relationship with someone or with something: and to do this is necessary to have self-esteem.

If don't have respect of yourself, you are lost, you don't understand because you owe to learn something, it doesn't interest yourself in any way to learn nothing.

Besides you are not able to effectively manage the relationships and therefore you will find hard to follow whatever method.

Naturally this is my opinion; therefore I am the only responsible of what I affirm.

I don't believe that people learn only when they are forced, both from theirs errors, from a coercive educational system or from an educational system poorly sensitive to the needs and to the specificities of the single individual.

I believe that learning is a natural need of anyone of us through his/her life.

Monday, October 09, 2006

Are You Self-Confident Enough?

"God helps those who help themselves.”

Benjamin Franklin


I am firmly convinced that self-confidence is something to farm all life long.

It is something crucial in our personal development and it is very important to always improve and to protect it from doubts.

Ignore your past failures and go on.

When an individual, unsociable and timid as a violet, is hypnotized and he/her believes or thinks about being a bold and confident orator in himself, his/her reaction-model change instantly, and he/she spontaneously acts as spontaneously he/she believes.

Its attention is completely turned to the wanted positive purpose and thoughts and considerations of any kind on the failures of the past they are literally banished.

Now the point is that the subjects that are submitted to hypnosis not only have this power, but also any person during the normal state of vigil is able, if he/she really wants, to replace a negative suggestion with a positive one and "to act as if."

This is possible to do alone also it with a lot of training, discipline and a great awareness of itself and his/her own potential.

The "PSYCHO-CYBERNETICS" of Doctor Maxwell Maltz has disclosed me the secret of this discipline and I am still strongly thankful to him because I have put them into practice several times with success, both in my sentimental life and in the professional.

Build your self-confidence, grow it! This is the best investment you could ever make!

Sunday, October 08, 2006

The Responsibility of a Self-learner

"Talent without discipline is like an octopus on Roller skates. There's plenty of movement, but you Never know if it's going to be forward, backwards, or Sideways."

H.Jackson Brown, Jr.

Yesterday I was talking about method. Learning method and self-improvement method are on my opinion the same thing.

I also was talking about what are on my opinion the ingredients of a personal method: self-discipline is the first ingredient.

I mean you need a certain level of self-discipline en developing your knowledge.

A first reason for using self-discipline is the necessity to control and even change your negative past opinions, especially about yourself.

Bertrand Russell said: "ideas can be changed by other ideas, not from the wish.

Standard conventions exist in almost all the people: the opinion to be able to face with your decisions and to your own responsibilities and to make to be worth our own independence.

The opinion that there is a 'something' inside of us, which it is not had to allow to be grazed by some unworthiness.

A second reason to use self-discipline as ingredient to build your own method is the responsibility toward yourself and your efforts.

To succeed sometimes you may need to change some opinions and behaviours.

The rational thought has to be joined to a depth sentiment and with an intense desire.

To accomplish this kind of things you need self-discipline and a great attention.

Make you an image of what you would like to be and of that that you would like to have

You have to be confident and presuppose that such things are feasible to rise in you a depth desire for them, thrilling you of it.

Saturday, October 07, 2006

Do You Own A Method To Learn?

"The potential in you is new in nature, and no one but you can know what you can do, nor will you know until you have tried."

Dr. Ari Kiev

Dear friend, have you noticed that I am often referring to "How to improve" rather than "What You Need to Improve"?

I have dedicated this blog to the subject of "How-To" for an exact reason: give advice about methods.

There simply too many places on the Internet where you can find information about everything, but they are not sufficiently places where you can find suggestions about how to build your own method.

Wich methods? I am talking about self-learning methods and also self-improvement methods.

I have no magic formulas. But I have experience, because I learned the great part of my life as self-taught, so I know what has worked and what did not.

The most important thing I learned is the importance to have and owning a method and to follow it regularly.

First of all a self-improvement method is a mix of self-discipline, self-confidence, self-esteem, awareness, intellectual humility and self-knowingness.

I cannot easily divide the concepts of self-learning and self-improvement, they forms a whole, on my opinion.

Maybe you do not believe me, but I am sincere: I have never learned something that was not also functional to my self-improvement.

I do not believe in "pre-built" learning methods. I was uneasy at school time, especially when I was forced to follow an other people's learning method, not my own.

You need to know yourself, your purposes, your style, your preferences, then you need to continuously adapt what can you absorb to your own context.

In doing that, it is preferable that you maintain your own perspective and I think a critical approach is also suitable.

In the next posts, I will better explain you what my believes are, and I will give you more details about my method.

Friday, October 06, 2006

Do Not Allow Others To Steal Your Time!

"Time is the most precious element of human existence. The successful person knows how to put energy into time and how to draw success from time."


Denis Waitley

Time is passing very quickly, time is precious, time is money, and these are facts.

Would You Know What Is My Main Worry?

Maybe fear to lose money? Fear to lose credibility?

Health troubles? No!

My main worry is to do not let others to steal my precious time!

Do not misunderstand me!

I am not saying we do not have to grow our good relations with family or friends.

I am talking about a recurring habit I noticed many, many people have: to comply excessively, to fit oneself, to obey.

Most people (and most organisations too) are literally sucking your energies time after time.

I have ever fought against bureaucracy for example, the worst time stealers in the world!

Again I've ever fought against arrogant and pressing people (I don't take care if they are suppliers or customers!)

Why to let them to entail this way?

The following is one of my most preferred great minds excerpt, which best explain what I mean:

"Never enough you can be surprised of some slowness of the human mind in front of this problem:

The men don't allow that one occupies their farms, and for the least divergence on you argue of you withdraw they rage him and they are ready to strike with stones and arms;

Quietly they leave then, that others enter their life, rather they are themselves to introduce you those that little by little they become his/her masters of it.

And it is well difficult to find one prepared to divide with others his/her money:

but everyone hands out his life to hundreds people. All are stingy when it comes with holding him well tightened the patrimony, but they are generous in throwing out time:

and to think that this is the only thing of which would be very decent to be stingy!"

Lucius Annaeus Seneca - Seneca's Letters to Lucilius.

Thursday, October 05, 2006

Take Care Of Your Planet

“What's the use of a fine house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?”

Henry David Thoreau


I have always known that the to know doesn't necessarily make the wisest man.

To increase your knowledge won't serve you to anything if in the meantime you won't also have worried about the planet in which you live.

I firmly believe that one of the duties of every intellectual man is to make others aware of the delicate equilibrium between the man and the nature.

It is not my intention to repeat here things that are by now obvious, as the increasing environmental degrade, and I don't even have interest to emphasize alarmist messages.

What interests me is to underline the relationship between the improvement of itself and the respect for the natural environment.

I think besides that of environment and of energy one speaks a lot, but one does a very few things in concrete, in him or her every day life.

I don't even believe is had to return back in the time and being against the economic and technological development.

I have always sustained the development of the ideas, of the science, of the technology, and of the economic liberty.

Nevertheless I believe that without a holistic approach, an approach that holds in consideration both the economy and the environment, humanity simply will get nowhere.

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

About Persistence and Repetitive Tasks

"We Are What We Repeatedly Do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."

Aristotle

Many people misunderstand the meaning of the term "persistence" and tend to confuse it with "repetition".

Other people consider repetitive tasks as a demotivation-determining factor, especially when they are talking about employees and job descriptions.

I am not sure that repetitive tasks have necessarily to be considered as a curse; all the while in most jobs they are necessary too.

Our grandparent knew that repetition in hand labour was something mystic and honourable.

By the way most religions say that "work ennoble man" and even they sanctify it.

Nevertheless I would point out that this has nothing to do with technology, modern ways of life and productivity matters.

I had a colleague for a long while, about 25 years, in my previous organisation, a data-keeping and data processing small business.

Our firm was pretty well reputed and appreciated from our customers.

I was the only responsible, while he was indeed my associate but without firm-level responsibility (I did prefer to name him 'colleague')

For example my colleague did prefer repetitive tasks rather than have to modify habits and change all the time ways to do his job.

I did prefer, on the contrary, to continuously study how to change and improve ways of doing things inside our organisation, to raise efficiency, quality and productivity of our performances.

What I learned from this experience? Both we were right!

Simple and vain repetition of tasks is not enough to improve and to succeed in a modern, competitive environnement.

But if repetition, diligence and punctuality are joined with creativity and a strong desire to succeed and to excel, then, this is Persistence.



Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Avoid False Limits Searching For A New Job

"I am not judged by the number of times I fail, but by the number of times I succeed; and the number of times I succeed is in direct proportion to the number of times I can fail and keep on trying."

Tom Hopkins

"I am too much young", "I am too much old", "I am a woman", "I have no diploma", "I have no professional experience", and so on.

All these affirmations sounds like a final judgement.

Many people often repeat these sentences when are searching for a new job.

This is specifically true on my opinion, when you are fired and have trouble for sentimental reasons in the same time!

You feel bad and insecure, I know. Therefore you need to be aware of it and to react as soon as possible.

Unfortunately this may happens, so what do you do?

You are searching unconsciously to confirm these negative thoughts in any way, transforming them into reality.

These affirmations refer to situations that simply cannot be changed without a magic wand!

I am talking about self-imposed false limits. Why are they false?

Because there is no reason to consider them as a handicap, on the contrary you have always the power to transform these facts in your secret weapons!

The limit is only a pretext to emphasize an aspect of your situation.

It is up to you to reverse passive and paralyse thinking into positive!

Monday, October 02, 2006

The Importance Of An Independent Perspective

"Other people's opinion of you does not have to become your reality."

Les Brown

Perhaps when you were a child someone who you held important it kept on repeating you that you were not worth anything.

Every day becomes more fool. You are an incapable. You are not enough handsome. You are an incapable. You will not succeed, and so on.

Only few children are encouraged. The major part of them is doubted.

When you were a child you probably gave a great importance to what the other ones said of you.

Well, for the rest of your life, you are the only person who has the power to make these people responsible.

How much more you accuse these people, so much more bushels confirming their opinions on you.

Dear friend, unfortunately me too, like many other people that I know well, I have not been encouraged from small.

What I have learned the hard way, experimenting once more on myself, it is that each of us has the power to change these negative opinions.

It needs to accept her not to fight her. It is necessary to estrange them from us.

This way only, these opinions won't have some power anymore on us.

It deals with replacing a negative hypnotic thought with a positive one.

When you succeed in inserting the key in the correct lock, then you will free forever yourself from the chains that they made you enslaved.

The power of your thoughts and your beliefs is absolutely enormous.

Ten years ago I read a book of a German Hypnosis Specialist, "The energy of your thoughts", he called Erhard F.Freitag.

I have to thank a lot this person, and also Dr. J. Murphy, because the things that they affirms are true and I am witness of it.

Thanks to the positive thought I have been able to overcome a long series of conflicts and insecurities that I brought behind me.

In the book of Dr. Freitag a sentence has struck me in particular way and I textually brings it here:

"An Opinion Does Not Become The Truth Only Because A Million People Represents It."

I will bring this sentence within me forever.

Think with your head, and certain you will never repent of this.

Sunday, October 01, 2006

Try To Do Things Stepwise

"Men are disturbed not by the things that happen, but by their opinion of the things that happen."


Epictetus


A cause of confusion and the consequent sense of nervousness, anxiety and nervousness is constituted by the absurd habit to want to do too things in once.

The student studies and watches at the same time the television.

The business man instead of focusing himself on the content of the letter what he is dictating, he contemporarily thinks about all the things that he should do in that day or even in that week.

Such habit is particularly insidious because it is rarely recognized.

When we feel anxious, nervous or worried thinking about the enormous workload that we will have to develop, we know there is something wrong.

This feeling of nervousness is not caused from the job but from our mental attitude.

"I should be able to complete everything now."

We become nervous because we try to do the impossible one making inevitable disappointment and sense of uselessness.

The truth is this: we can make only one thing at a time.

Only if we understand and we convince there of this simple and obvious truth we will be able to mentally stop wanting to make the things that come later.

In addition we will be able to assemble our attention and our ability to concentrate on what we are doing now.

Working in this way will feel there relaxed and free from any feeling of anxiety and from the harassing thought of the time, able therefore of to assemble us and to think about the best solution.