Personal Advancement

I ran into an article the other day on “the high price of materialism.”

There wasn’t a great deal to it, the long and short of it being, apparently that “the pursuit of material objects makes us more unhappy.”

Which I think is right, as far as it goes; unfortunately, it’s only half a loaf.

As put so eloquently in this Alan Watts piece, we are raised from the ground up to never be happy in the moment.

We’re taught that happiness is always dependant on something coming up — buying that new car, finding that new relationship, getting that big promotion.

We are in a culture that lives and breathes “It would make me happy if only ______.”

Which is, of course, just flat wrong.

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I use a lot of the concepts in these books as part of my coaching practice; I’m often asked about where to go to find out more information or get more depth on a particular subject, so I decided to put up a page for everyone’s convenience. The books and e-books presented below are books that I’ve found to be helpful in both my business and personal life, in one form or another They also specificly exclude a whole lot of other books that I’ve not found to be terribly helpful. As you peruse these books (or any others), it’s sometimes helpful to keep a couple of ideas firmly in mind — first, you sometimes have to sift a lot of sand to find the gold dust. These books represent some of the more promising areas of the stream, but many of them do require some thought, study and experimentation to seperate the great ideas from the noise. Second, and perhaps more important, the best ideas in the world won’t help you if you don’t put them into motion.

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For better or worse, with all good intentions, most of us were taught to focus on “what’s wrong” rather than “what’s right”.

When you were growing up, when you made mistakes, how often was the focus placed on what you did wrong, rather than what you did right?

We live in a culture of cynicism – trust no one, life sucks and then you die. It’s everywhere – on TV, in the newspaper, as an essential part of our daily vocabulary. We are trained to be cynical, to find fault in ourselves and others, to feel badly when we make mistakes, to talk badly to ourselves (aloud or not), and depending on how much exposure we’ve had to modern therapy, even to talk badly to ourselves about talking badly to ourselves.

We attract more of what we focus on. So what does this kind of behavior get us? You guessed it, more of the same.

It’s a vicious circle.

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Blink your eyes.

It’s a simple thing, isn’t it? It’s a familiar action, firmly under your conscious control. Yet if a bug flies towards your eye, or you bring your finger close, it happens automatically. Walking, in fact, is something of a controlled fall, leaning forward and then catching ourselves, balancing on two narrow columns. In fact, if we had to think about each little action involved in walking across the room, most of us would never get there.

Yet we do.

Our lives have been an ongoing process of learning complex tasks to the point where we achieve “unconscious competence” and turn the task over to our trusted assistant, our unconscious.

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What do you think about when you think about peace?

Perhaps you’ve heard it before — it’s a story that’s made the rounds for a long time; the author’s name is apparently long-lost.

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“…then when you wake up one day about forty years old, you say “My God! I’ve arrived! I’m there!”

And you don’t feel very different from what you always felt.

And theres a slight letdown, because you feel theres a hoax.

And there was a hoax.

A dreadful hoax….”

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