Opinions

Most people have opinions on almost every subject we can think of and are prepared to tell anyone who asks what they are. Nothing wrong with this unless someone is looking for help on making an important decision or change in their life. What that person is really looking for is an informed opinion otherwise known as experience.
So how can we discover whether or not we are getting an informed opinion?
By using the skill of asking better questions. Instead of asking a person what they think about something we would ask do they have any experience with whatever we are interested in. In essence; does their resume have the skills to answer our need.
Your thoughts?

Traps

Our habits of thinking can easily lead some of us into a trap that we sometimes don't recognize. When we are satisfied with our viewpoint on a topic we have effectively established a filter on our senses and our thinking that stops from reexamining that viewpoint even in the face of new information. We literally cannot even see that new information because of our filters. Unfortunately this can occur at a very early age or be affected by work and personal interactions.
Our filters in essence create a box within which we look for our answers. This leads us into the trap of continuing to ask the same question over and over again and frustrating ourselves by always getting answers from our box that don't work.
Perhaps the way to break the trap is to start searching for questions rather than continuing to look for more answers within our filtered box. New questions can come from reading, movies, conversations, controversy and so on. When we start looking for questions we will often find that we have a answer to that question that resonates with us and changes the filters we use.
Your thoughts?

Patience

There are undervalued skills in this time of instant communication, instant social groups, instant news and needing instant results.
Most of us when we are making a change or achieving a goal tend to go overboard. Jumping into anything or everything that can stack the odds in our favor to complete the change/goal instantly without any consideration for our current habits and skills.
We often attempt most times to change too much and do it too quickly when it requires overturning the habits and thinking patterns we had for years and require new skills we don't currently have.
Perhaps the skills we need to develop and master before trying radical change are timing, appropriate choice of goals and above all patience.
Your thoughts?

No Escape

Many of us think that there is a perfect path of choices that would successfully give us everything that we desire and beat ourselves up for once more making a poor choice that we are currently painfully receiving the results of.
This decision of ours that we have once more missed making the perfect choice of actions now colors our perceptions for making future choices and we can often lose the opportunity of a choice due to not being perfectly sure of the result.
Where does perception of perfect choice come from?
We look at successful people and automatically assume that they are successful because they made perfect planned choices from conception of idea to final result. Nothing could be further from the truth. Every success has portion of it which when examined consisted of luck, timing, cooperation of others, opportunity, etc. which could not be controlled by the individual.
Perhaps then there is no escape from making mistakes as it is a natural part of being human and we are cannot have total control over all things impacting our lives and our choices. Then we could stop being afraid of making mistakes.
Your thoughts?

Biggest Block to Change

Why are we able to easily change some things and not others has intrigued us to the point of creating a whole self-help industry to answer that question. We have all made decisions or reacted to changes beyond our control with absolutely no problem. We just did it. So what is the stumbling block to the changes we want to make but can't seem to do?

Perhaps it is two simple words that create the block. Those two words are "I am". I am fat, I am stupid, I am no good at ....., I am ....? Whatever we say to ourselves and others is what we are because it is a belief we have created for ourselves and no one knows us like we do so, it has to be true and  thus we build our beliefs on who we are and how we function in this world of ours. It really is about our reality and only has to make sense to ourselves.

Perhaps the solution to change is simply deciding that "We are" something different and train ourselves to live that way just the way we taught ourselves to live the way we no longer want

Your thoughts?

Reasons

We can spend a great deal of time trying to discover the reasons for a particular situation we are in especially if we decide other people are involved. The moment we consider the situation may be caused by others we seem to go on a witch hunt. Who did it? Why did they do it? How do we prevent it from happening again? Just to name a few of the questions we could ask.
People take action according to their beliefs whether we agree or not so we could waste a lot of time and effort trying to answer why and never get it right. We can examine the situation for clues to preventing a similar situation occurring in future. After that we should just accept the results and move on.
Your thoughts?

Unhappy

We seem to have a consistent and never ending ability to make ourselves unhappy. If we are happy there seems to be a little voice in the background saying it won't last or in some way we don't deserve it. It is part of a protective cover we maintain so that we don't get hurt and we can say see I told you it wouldn't last.
The trouble is that attitudes like this are self-fulfilling. We make them come true so that we don't have to deal with the true underlying issue of self-worth, our purpose in life, or pay attention to open issues we have yet to deal with.
Being happy and making others happy is one of the few fundamental freedoms where it is directly our choice. So if happiness is a choice then why don't we choose it more often?
Your thoughts?

Purpose

It is generally believed that we need to find our purpose in life to be fulfilled. I don't argue that point but wonder whether we have only a single purpose as is often thought for our lifetime.
We are constantly changing according to the circumstances in our life. Events occur that are not in our control, peoples' decisions which we do not control impact us, changing knowledge and experiences change us, we age and see new concepts and interact with new people, and so on.
Perhaps we need to find different purposes at different times in our lives to keep growing. Perhaps we need to reexamine our purpose or purposes throughout our lives to maximize our lives to the best of our ability.
We need to keep ourselves challenged and evolving throughout our lives and perhaps a single unchanging purpose is not sufficient to accomplish that.
Your thoughts?

Gateways

We can tend to believe that the choices we make could be temporarily made and undone by making another choice later on. Another perspective could change how we think about choice. Borrowing from the magical realm of fantasy we could call choices more appropriately as gateways that magically appear to us whenever necessary.
This would occur whenever we stop to ask ourselves a question:
Is there a better way?
Do we like the results we see in our life?
Why are others treating us this way?
Do we want to accept that offer, relationship, deal, etc.?
In short anything that makes question what we are doing.

Gateways seems more appropriate as once we have passed through the gateway of our choice then life can never return to what it was. Gateways could lead to paths that are harmful to us or good for us or appear to make no difference but in all cases it is a change in direction in our lives and should not be made blindly, in fits of anger, to punish others or ourselves.

We have the freedom to step through the gateway of our choice and by calling it a gateway rather than choice recognizes the importance of taking the right actions in our lives.

Your thoughts?

Life Perspective

For a number of people winning at life appears to be an ever increasing list of things to have or to be accomplished. They are never satisfied with what they have and therefore are always living in the future. Others seem to live with the chains of the past. Every failure to achieve something adds yet another chain preventing them from taking chances at all and therefore end up doing nothing.
In both cases the present escapes them and they are never happy with any aspect of their life. Why do we make it so hard to just enjoy our lives?
Is there a better perspective?
Instead of making life a perpetual contest we could perhaps change our perspective by asking instead what is the legacy that we will leave behind us when we die. If we have made a positive difference in even just other person then we have won. Our life has meaning. If we were to use the analogy that life is like a poker game then each moment is like having a fresh hand dealt. What has gone on before has no bearing on the current hand dealt other than the experience of getting to know the other players. It is the accumulation of well played hands that produce a winner not dissimilar to life.
The change from winning to legacy and the focus on how we play the current hand dealt by circumstances and our interactions with others could lead us to living a more fulfilling life.
Your thoughts?

Fantasy or Dream

There is a very subtle trap that we can easily fall into if we are not careful. When asked want we want or dream about we talk about our fantasies or our wish list. How do we know it is our fantasy? There is no specific plan to achieve it. It is like winning the lottery where we wish to win but wait for it to fall into our lap with no effort or sacrifice on our part and therefore little emotional commitment.
A dream is something we want to achieve and we feel intensely about it with a huge emotional commitment. We visit our dream each day and look for all opportunities to move toward our dream.
So if we are not making progress of any type (other than buying a lottery ticket) then we have a fantasy or wish list and recognize that.
Your thoughts?

Cause or Effect

We often see people spinning their wheels when tackling changes they want in their life. Are they weak willed, have no stamina to persevere, or can't bite the bullet and get on with it? I don't think that is the primary reason for not making the change. The main reason is that people confuse cause and effect and usually spend a lot of time dealing with effects.
We need to get more practice in designing our life rather just accepting it. We need better questions to ask ourselves to get at the cause and create effective change. Questions like:

1. What are the values that are controlling me?
2. How do I know when my values are being met?
3. What are my rules foe winning and losing?

What questions would you add to this incomplete list?

Defining Struggles

We are all familiar with the idea that struggles make us stronger and the more diverse those struggles are the more flexible we can be in managing change. This is the outer struggle that we all have with unforeseen circumstances, misjudgment, lack of proper planning, or caused by others. But I believe that there is an far more important struggle that has a greater responsibility for defining who we are.
I refer here to our inner struggles that no one sees but ourselves.
When someone takes advantage of us do we find some way to retaliate? When someone attacks us personally do we leap into the fight? You get the idea.
We could be very sneaky and find a way for payback that no one but ourselves would know about or we could just let it go knowing that sooner or later that individual we reap the rewards for their actions. We could take the stance that we are not responsible to correct everyone else to our standard of behavior and let it go.
This is the inner struggle and more clearly defines who we are than any external struggle.
Your thoughts?

Freedom

The topic of freedom means many different things depending on who you talk to. However, I believe that we only have one fundamental freedom for everyone. That freedom is to make up our own mind on something.
Too many people have abdicated this freedom in favor of belonging, fitting in, going along, etc..
Making up your own mind does not mean being a dissenter or argumentative but deciding for yourself what is right, good, bad, and so on. Before we can moan about our life we need to make sure that we are exercising our most fundamental right to make up our own mind instead of following public opinion.
Your thoughts?

Seeking Happiness

We all goals that we are actively seeking such as wealth, relationships, dream job, and so on; but, few seem to be actively pursuing happiness. We seem to adopt an attitude that it is beyond our control and just accept and be thankful if it should come.
We need to take responsibility for our own happiness. How? By studying in minute detail all the events and things that make us feel great and actively taking steps to bring more of them into our lives on a consistent basis. We need to pay attention to what is going on in our lives and use that knowledge to make our lives better in every way.
An interesting challenge for those who believe they have no control over how they feel.
Your thoughts?

Twisting Reality

We can be very adept at twisting reality without a great deal of purposeful thought. How do we do this? Think back to any occasion when you wanted something so much that it could be called an obsession. It could be an item, a relationship, an event, well you fill in the blank.
What happens is we lose our perspective. Our intense desire makes us look at unfolding reality with rose colored glasses. We ignore anything that would thwart our accomplishing our desire and focus on any detail that would indicate we would achieve it. A very slanted perspective.
We can often come to believe that we have it within our grasp and are shocked when it evaporates before our eyes. It can be very difficult to keep our perspective in the face of great desire when it is also that desire that focuses us and drives us towards our goals.
Again balance is the key and I have to admit that I have fallen into this trap despite my best efforts.
Have you had this happen to you and what do you do to help yourself?
Your thoughts?

Web of Lies

We all I think have a tendency to want to look good in other peoples eyes. Sometimes this leads to little cover ups or little lies to maintain our image. The trouble is that one lie usually leads to another and before long we can have a web of lies surrounding what was nothing more than an embarrassment.
Perhaps casual or work relationships don't require absolute truth all the time in order to maintain relationships but intimate relationships do. If we have to hide ourselves from our significant others through lies then a time could come when we live the lies and end up destroying the trust of the relationship when found out.
Interesting topic and I would like your comments.

Possessions

The interesting paradox is that we appear not to be free without possessions and yet once we have have them we are again not free. A place to live, food to eat, and something to do that takes care of those needs are necessities when there is only ourselves and multiply as soon as we have others joining our circle such as family or friends.
This is not a bad thing unless we allow it to take over and we become focused on obtaining possessions for their own sake; then it becomes a rat race that takes us further from ourselves. This trade off is something we all have to face and decide for ourselves rather than just going with the flow and ending up in a place we don't want and don't know how we got there.
Awareness and attention is always necessary to make proper and appropriate choices for ourselves.
Your thoughts?

That is Just Who I Am

Whenever I hear someone using those words I immediately think that either they really don't want to change or are afraid of failing to make the change so preempts that by that statement. Certainly speaking for myself change does contain elements of uncertainty and a fear of not accomplishing the change I want to make. Everyone wants to look good to others.
Who we are is simply what we have or our upbringing have conditioned us to being. It is learned behavior, our choice of emotional labels, and our perceptions. Change therefore really deals with the need to change our conditioning. When we look at change in this light then we can expect that change could be difficult but there is no element of failure just learning how we have applied our conditioning to maintain our perception of who we are.
Each set back is simply bringing back into our current awareness the perceptions that we need to work on or being our choice; accepting. Our life and the quality of life is our choice. In either case we can no longer use the excuse that is just who I am.
Your thoughts?

Personal Realities

We really do live in our own unique reality made up of our beliefs, assumptions, emotional content, and mental viewpoint. Because of this we usually take everything that happens in our reality very personally. Every time we get angry, sad, happy, and so on; we are taking things personally.
When we want to make changes it is often our personal reality that becomes our greatest hurdle to making the change we want. Therefore, there can not be a lasting change without altering our personal reality; often, in the form of perception.
For example, if we are constantly upset, angry or sad then we have a gap between our personal reality (perceptions) of what should happen and what actually happens. As reality rarely adjusts to our perceptions then we must adjust our perceptions in order to change our personal reality. Perhaps we are taking things that happen as we live from day to day as being very personal and therefore triggers our emotional response when in fact it was never personal at all.
Our assumptions are our choice and can changed by ourselves and bring a closer match between our expectations and reality and lessening a great deal of our emotional turmoil.
Would be interested in your thoughts on the subject.