Self Improvement

Everything in your life starts with you. Self improvement will lead to life improvement. You are the foundation of your life, the decisions that you make, the actions that you take, they are what create your life. If your life is not the way you want it to be then only you can change it. Yes you can get help from other people, but only if you accept their help.

It is often difficult for a person to accept the fact that they are totally responsible for the condition of their life. I mentioned this briefly in Fear of Success but I will expand on it here.

Laying blame and shame on other people or things is the fastest route to losing control of your life. When you place blame outside yourself you have said that somebody else has more control than you do. Essentially you act like a leaf in the wind, blown all over the place by other peoples desires and whims. This will often lead to depression, you can not succeed if you are depressed. How can you change your life if you give control to outside sources?

Accepting Control

This does not mean that you never let others control you, of course you do. When you get a job your boss will tell you when to work, police officers will control your actions, so will traffic signals. In fact when you look at it a large part of your life is controlled by other people and things. You are still responsible, it is still your decision whether to accept their control or not. Most of the time these controls are good and you accept the control for the benefit of yourself an others.

One time I was stuck in traffic, there had been an accident and a police officer was directing traffic onto a different route. When I came up to him he waved for me to turn left, I refused to accept that control. He started to get annoyed and waved even harder. Then I pointed to the nurse who was pushing a wheelchair across the intersection, he understood.

What if I had blindly followed his control and hit those pedestrians, who would have been responsible? But your honor, he made me do it, ha! If someone was having a heart attack and you were driving them to the hospital would you sit and wait at stop lights?

So the first major step in self improvement is accepting full responsibility for your life. Read Self Control.

Controlling the Uncontrollable

Are there circumstances that you don't have control over? Apparently so, floods, fires, accidents etc. But you are still in control of your reactions to them. You can let them defeat you, or you can face them head on and handle them.

How about when someone close to you dies, you do not have control over that and your initial reactions are not likely to be controlled. Then what, do you give up, go into such grief that you stop living your life? You have just ended two lives, maybe even dishonored their memory by blaming them.

Wouldn't it be so much better to thank them for the time you did have together. Would you give up the memories of those times and say it would have been better to never have known them, of course not. Honor their memory by living your life to the fullest, even do some of they things that they always wanted to do.

In another page I will show you how much more control you have over life than you realized, see Creative Visualization. For now let us continue with self improvement.

Things to Do

There are many obvious steps to self improvement, exercise, better diet, education and so on. The fact that you are reading this shows that you are on the right track.

How about tackling some of the areas that you know you are weak in. I used to be very shy, at social gatherings I would usually sit in a corner hoping that someone nice would talk to me. I would have to know someone for quite a while before I would initiate a conversation. The thought of talking to a crowd of people was terrifying.

Shyness is a very uncomfortable and limiting affliction. I decided to face it head on, I went to auction school. I could have chosen a public speaking course or anything that would put me in front of an audience. It took a little time but after running a few auctions and public presentations I started to enjoy it. Now I love standing in front of a crowd, I even took an acting part in a local play, it was great.

A simple self improvement technique is to do something new every day or at least once a week. It does not have to be big, take a different route to work, try some different food, shop in a different store. If you continually try new things or change your routines then any fears you may have about making major changes will be reduced. All of this will help you increase your Self Esteem, which is so vital to being successful.

I am continually working on this website so there will be more pages to help in your self improvement. See Mind Power, Leadership, Self Control and Anxiety and Depression.

You have already started by reading these pages. Keep going, take control, make some changes and improve your life. Remember your success depends on you.

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