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July 2007 Newsletter: The secret - One day at a time
This
Confidence newsletter is sent each month to subscribers of
www.yourmostconfidentself.com from Kate Burton and Brinley Platts,
the authors of "Building
Confidence for Dummies" and creators of the Your Most Confident Self
website. Thanks everyone who is planning to take the opportunity to review "Building Self-Confidence for Dummies" (same book, new title) on Amazon. We're grateful, and we hope this reconnects you to the material, perhaps reminding you of a good intention or two that you set up and forgot about temporarily. There is no doubt that things go better and quicker when you decide what you want, set up your intention consciously and follow through. So why don't you do it all the time?
Back in the 1970s, whilst I was still in college, I met an author who inspired me. His name is Peter Russell and he had just written the best-seller of the year about Transcendental Meditation called simply "The TM Technique". This book has long since disappeared from my bookshelves but this morning Peter turned up again when I "browsed" my way into his web site (www.peterussell.com). He hasn't been idle these last 30 years and his site is packed with interesting and esoteric stuff, but the thing that immediately caught my attention was a little calculator he has there that will give you your age in days in about 10 secs flat. Mine, if you are interested, is 20,289, and I'm a bit annoyed at myself for missing my big day, 23 Sept last year, when I should have celebrated my 20,000th day on the planet. I looked up what I was doing and I was recovering from an overnight flight from Chicago where I had been speaking at a conference. What a flight that could have been!
Peter recommends that we all give up counting our age in years (an appealing idea to many over-40s) and change to days. Days are shorter and easier to manage; at the end of each day you can look back and take stock, asking yourself how you have been, what you have learnt, what you can be grateful for. He claims that days are the natural cycle of our lives: the cycles of lightness and darkness, wakefulness and sleep. In some parts of the world, where the seasons are not so marked, the day is what counts. This day, next day, every day.
So here is the challenge. How do you make every day significant in and of itself? If yesterday was full of good intentions, half-delivered, how do you make today better? On my computer I have a Post-it Note that reminds me it's not what I do that counts so much as what I get done (I have another one asking me how I would be doing things differently if I were prepared to let them be easy). How can you live consciously "one day at a time" and avoid the fate of Bill Murray in Groundhog Day where every day is identical to the last (until he finally takes the learning and "gets it"). There is an answer, and you're already an expert in all that it takes.
Which brings me to what I really meant to write about for July before stumbling across Peter. There's no doubt what will be the publishing sensation of this year: "The Secret" by Rhonda Byrne, personal-development's answer to the Da Vinci Code. Back in February an American friend of mine told me I had to read it and watch the video, and I did manage to get a copy in Boston before it was available in the UK (this was hard though, as they were flying off the shelves even then). Oprah, Helen Degeneres and Larry King have all featured Rhonda Byrne on their network TV shows and it has sold over 4,000,000 copies in English alone with 30 other translations now available or underway. It is likely to become one of the best-selling self-help books of all time and is being constantly praised and endorsed by celebrities. So what is the "secret" and why is it causing such a sensation?
Quite simply, according to Byrne, the secret law of attraction can give you whatever you want. I'm indebted to a book reviewer for the following: "Who can resist this claim? The law of attraction, which Byrne says is the most powerful law in the universe, states that people experience the logical manifestations of their predominant thoughts, feelings, and words. This gives people direct control over their lives. A person's thoughts (whether conscious or unconscious) and feelings bring about corresponding positive or negative manifestations. The theory is very simple: your thoughts become things. You are the most powerful power in the universe simply because whatever you think about will come to be. You shape the world that exists around you. You shape your own life and destiny through the power of your mind."
Hmm... big claims and there's a lot to think about packed into that paragraph. Here is my simple take on it all. Your thoughts, especially when overlaid with strong feelings (which are always related to your personal values and beliefs), are fundamental to your focus, to your choice of action and therefore to your results. This is the direct link between what you think about and what you get and, equally important, the meaning you make of what you get. The key phrase is the claim that "thoughts become things", popularised by yet another personal development guru, Mike Dooley (see www.tut.com). It's not magic, it's not even really a secret, it's how you've achieved everything you have and you're already expert in it.
So, repeating what we wrote in Building Self-Confidence for Dummies: for your thoughts about today to become things simply take a few moments to picture how you want your day to be. Remembering to add a little movement, colour and emotion to your imagining, think about where you will be and who you will be with, see yourself doing what you need to do, perfectly, imagine how you'll be enjoying the activity, imbued with a sense of purpose and achievement. Then let it go - go out there and let it unfold in the way you imagined. Tonight, take a few minutes to make some sense or meaning from what really occurred. Maybe it didn't go exactly as you visualised it, that's okay, take the learning and feel grateful for what you achieved and what you learned. Tomorrow, and every day from now on, do it again. This is the real secret: not just dreaming but doing.
By the time you reach 20,000 days on planet Earth you will be the undisputed master of your universe.
Best wishes Kate and Brinley
Building Confidence for Dummies by Kate Burton
and Brinley Platts
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