Energy of Heart

 I was listening to Bob Proctor this morning--he's one of several people in self improvement whom I listen to--and he shared something that he learned from Earl Nightingale. Bob asked Earl how it was that he had mastered time management so well. Earl surprised Bob by saying he didn't manage time. He said you can't manage time. You can only manage activities. Wow! Talk about a change in a mindset. How often have you heard someone talk about time management?  I've even attended classes that were supposed to help one better manage time. The internal programming that has been set in the mind of most people is that we need to someone manage our time better to get more done. That's the paradigm. The belief set, that we can, somehow, manage our time. The problem is time cannot be managed. Everyone has the same amount of time in every day. When you can manage something, you can change it. It can be adapted, improved. It can be made better or worse. Yes, we can be more effec...

 When I was growing up as a teenage I was active in my scout troop. One of the skills that I learned (which has since become rusty) was compass navigation. Even on its own a compass is extraordinarily useful for helping you stay on course. Combine the compass with a topographical map and you could traverse an area. Then I started hearing about an awesome new technology that used satellites to identify your position on earth. Called the Global Positioning System (GPS) it was a quantum leap from the map and compass.  Initially it wasn't very precise as the military had it locked down, but over the years it's precision narrowed down to identify your position to within several feet, and then down to your exact location. I was taking flight lessons during several of those years, first in a single-engine airplane and a few years later in helicopters. The advance in technology was immense and in that time GPS went from being used solely as position awareness to being able to use if f...

 I'm looking forward to some future posts. Over the last several months I've added a few new habits and I'm working on how to add some additional ones. That's what I've been studying and learning about: how to add good habits and eliminate bad ones. This has been a challenge for me. I'm learning lots of great self-improvement and personal development information, and getting great ideas. Some of these I've already been doing or they need minimal adjustment. Others I want to incorporate into my life. And, I start but then the follow through drops out. So, how do I make those changes in my life? I determined that the key is to identify and incorporate habits that will lead to greater success. The question is how to do it in a way that those habits--ones that I need and others that I want--truly become a part of my life. Research has shown that 40-50% of our daily life is habitual behavior. Here's the kicker. Our daily life operates around habits at a much ...

 It's so easy to get stuck in the motion of getting ready to act. All the various things that we think we need to do before we actually take action. We need to get real and honest with ourselves. All of the "getting prepared" tasks and trying to make sure we have all of our ducks in a row before we pull the trigger are just stalling tactics. In our mind we think we're strategically planning how we're going to make the move. We're analyzing. We're learning. We take more classes. We read more books. We do what we can and then go back to improve some of those things that we may have missed. All the while we aren't making any headway towards our dream. Instead of our life taking a quantum leap it's a quantum dud. All of the preparing and getting ready tasks, all of the strategizing and trying to figure out tactical specifics before we act are just a way that our beliefs systems, our mindset, and paradigms are undermining our desires. It's done with...