HAVE A PROBLEM?

SOLVE A PROBLEM TODAY DAY

Find that precious 15 minutes today,

even while commuting, walking to work,

or dealing with family issues at home or at work.

Then:-

 Focus on one thing that Is bugging your progress

right now

 Maybe it means there is something not going right

for you, or maybe one thing you haven’t done

and yet should to do..

NOW!

 Think it through, even make notes.

 Decide what you would like to do about it and

what should be done first
.

 Do it – SOLVE IT! Today!

TODAYS TASK!

A SPIRITUAL ACT FOR TODAY!

Our Senses are challenged almost minute by minute

with material issues, temptations and challenges.

It is all too easy to overlook the true essence
of who and what we are.

Decide now today to find a special spiritual place

to spend no less than a quarter of an hour there alone.

Sit Quietly and take in the grace and spirituality.

It may be in -a church, a mosque, a synagogue

-a park or river seat with a spectacular view.

-or in a garden.

-a peaceful walk through historic buildings.

Don’t think too much. Just commune with it!

RESEARCH FOR YOU TODAY

Today is Google day!


Think of one thing which is bugging you in you mind- some thing that is stopping you from making progress, and you don’t truly know why.

Now write down some phrases or words that sum it up.

And then, set the simple goal to find 15 minutes in your day to go the internet,
and research it!

Gerry Neale's Action Points No.1 Bulletin

Action On Helping Others To Set Goals
Think about these and find ways to weave them into your activities:

1. Apply simple psychology you have learned and help others.

2. Always encourage members of your family, children and even our
    grandchildren to focus on achieving more in their future by setting
    Goals.

3. Teach them how to set simple goals.

4. Action something with or for them each day and encourage
    them to do the same.

Remember!
\
“ If it’s going to be, it’s up to me!”

Good Thinking and Good Luck Today!

Gerry Neale

Direct Link To Amazon Books

With My Goalsetting, Why Isn’t It Working: I Don’t Know What Is Wrong?

If you want a great book to help you review your childhood and connect you with the "You" of today then read " You Can Change Your Life" by Tim Laurence. ISBN 978-0-340-82523-5. There is an easy Link above or to the left, if you want to do it now.

Remember, you can think you have chosen a goal in the belief that you want to achieve the end result you have visualised. Yet the reality can be very different! A parent or a teacher can have laboured the point in your childhood that you are useless at it or would never make the grade and you mandated that in your mind at the time.

So what have you done? You have set a goal, not so much to achieve the desired outcome for yourself, but to prove the parent or teacher wrong! Every-time you fix your mind on the goal, then inadvertently and sub-consciously you raise the spectre of the adverse comments made all those years ago. One goes on giving those comments air-time. Tim Laurence in his book will show you how to disassociate from that childhood memory and then you will be able to commit to the goal entirely on its own terms.

But if nothing else, if I have identified the source of the your problem, then that will give you chance to dismantle the longstanding criticism resident in your mind. You can reflect objectively, as you are now, on those remarks made years ago and then tell yourself over and over that they may have been well-intended remarks but they were quite simply wrong then and are still wrong now.

Good luck

The Great Wisdom Resident Within Each Of Us

We have the truly amazing capacity, most of us, to listen to a friend in trouble and then give really good advice. Rarely do we do it. But there is an even more startling feature to most of us.  

We don't follow our own advice!

Take a tip and try this: Imagine you have just discovered you have a twin. Imagine too, he or she has exactly the same problem or issue you have got. He or she has no idea how to resolve it and has asked you to advise. So there the two of you sit in armchairs facing each other. Listen carefully to what you advise your mythical twin to do.

Hope you will find that helpful.

Oh! Best you do, of course,then follow your own advice. This could be applied immediately or it could be to see a professional advisor you have identified!

We have much greater wisdom stored within us than most of us give credit for.

Enjoy your day whichever time-zone you are in.

Coming to terms with abuse as a child

Gerry Neale has just posted some more articles on coping with child abuse on EzineArticles. If you have any comment on them do make one or if you want to be notified when more are posted fill in the EzineArticle mail box to receive them automatically.

Top 40 Ezine Article Author

Gerry Neale has just joined the elite top 40 authors on Psychology on Ezine Articles. Currently he is in the top 50 on Achievement and in the top 60 on goal-setting. Many other directories are now carrying his articles. Some of these include articles or references to his key hobbies of writing fiction and non fiction, of painting in mixed media ink pointillism and watercolour, and of writing lyrics to existing music.

Is It A Good Idea To Tell Others About My Goal?

The question of whether it is wise to share your goals with others is a significant feature of goal-setting. It is important to comment on the potential impact of confiding in others. Doing that could potentially involve people close to you or those you meet on your journey.

“To tell them…..,or not to tell? That is the question!”

The first all-embracing caution I would give is: ask yourself why you want to do this! If you are looking for moral support, then do not share your goal with anyone whom you have any reason to believe is likely to find fault with it.

Worse if they rubbish it and throw doubt on your own personal ability to achieve it! It is pretty obvious that all you will be doing is setting yourself up for a crushing disappointment. It will give a great opportunity for your negative self-talk to kick in and join this so-called friend and rubbish you as well!

And frankly there is little advantage either in sharing it with someone whose response is likely to be, “Well, it sounds very nice, dear.”

But suppose you have a partner or friend, or you meet someone along the way who is always one to focus on the best course out of problems, on finding solutions, on ways and means to help people towards their destination. Now that is different!

Such people do not come two-a penny! But they can be found and are very valuable for non-judgemental reality-checking of your goal as well as pointing out additional opportunities you may have to achieve it.

If you are so committed, so crystal clear in your path to achievement and lacking in all doubt as to success – (not an absolute condition found in many goal setters!), why tell anyone!


However you may judge that you can be confident that telling people about your intent will not compromise your commitment, and could be very useful marketing and fact finding for you.

All I would say is, “OK But tread carefully! If you are so confident and committed then why tell them anyway” And I would add, “By all means do the marketing or research but does the actual goal need to be shared?”

Essentially there is no problem in any of this if you are experienced in focussing on your future. If you have learned how to be resilient in the face of criticism and doubt, then that inner strength can be called upon at will to act as a buffer. You can plough on undaunted.

If however you are new to this then think twice. Yes, research what you are committed to achieve but confine your confidence to yourself or to a trusted and treasured friend or mentor.

I have posted this article on my blog, conscious that the full version would be rather too long to post on-line. Part 2 has an additional feature which should make one reflect about why one feels the need to tell other people. Do refer to it, if this a subject which is of significance to you.

Part 2:

The second element regarding confiding in someone about one’s goal is more imprecise, yet could be very revealing about the level of one’s self-esteem.

Ask yourself again why actually you want to tell particular people?

Could the answer possibly be that within yourself, you feel some nagging doubt as to whether on your own, you can go the distance needed to achieve the goal. So, barely consciously, you conclude that you could tell certain people who you feel already hold sway and influence over you.


Why would you want to do that?

Because then you will feel well and truly obligated to them to see it through otherwise then you will be letting them down! The sub-conscious request you are issuing is that they will keep the pressure on you! Why impose even more pressure on yourself!

Now this happens more often than we care to admit, so do beware! And what does it suggest to us? Does it not reveal we still lack some inner conviction about our goal? Best then we rid ourselves of that doubt ourselves privately. Intensify the visualisation. Employ the other ingredients to successful goal setting.

Why?

There is a more significant issue at stake here. Imposing some form of ‘Have to’ on ourselves is crazy. We need to find, where-ever we can, the points we need to cause us to ‘want to and love to’ do it. In fact we should have striven to remove from our preparation for our goal, all unhelpful pressure on our sub-conscious caused by an inner sense of ‘have to’.

All we need is to reinforce the deep sense of ‘wanting to’ to get to that picture of our goal achieved, which we have taken such pains to create in our mind.

Let us assume you have actually succeeded in creating the image. You have the picture in your mind and filled with positive emotions. Do you still have some doubt? Of course, you would be inhuman if you did not have some!

We reassure ourselves that a bit of apprehension and anxiety is healthy and useful.

So wham! We make it ten times worse! We tell several people of our intentions in order to put yet more pressure on us to perform!

Whatever for!

We need every ounce of our mental and emotional strength to apply positively to our goal. Why undermine ourselves by having now to use some of that energy defensively to keep faith with these friends!

But reflect on this deeper point as you have, to your credit, checked this out:

• How far in your life has your cognitive behaviour become a situation where
most of what you do is somehow and so often at someone else’s behest?
• Is it actually more difficult for you to want to do something for yourself?
• And does even thinking about it somehow seem self-indulgent?
• Well, don’t let it. You are worth it and it is far better that you do not undermine your wish to succeed:

So think twice, even three times whether you tell anyone and if so, select carefully! Far better to achieve it and then tell people afterwards how you did it!

Good luck!

Psychology Simplified: Creating Want To’s and Not Have To’s! Part 2 by Gerry Neale

 

An Employer’s “Want To” Can Become Employees’ “Have To’s” in the same instant, if great care is not taken! If a business truly wants to succeed, it is self-evident it needs a ‘success’ culture amongst its staff. And that success is far more likely to come - and to come quickly, if it is sought by staff who feel they are working with the grain, and not against it.

The cynical employer might say, ‘Look here, who is in charge here? Who is the owner of this business? Someone has to provide the leadership! If I want this done, done it should be!’

Mercifully such attitudes in management are less easy to find. And it is not leadership that is at fault: it is just certain types of leadership. Also, if you are reading this, then I can assume that you are already looking for better ways than Lording it over your staff!

One feature often missed about employees is that most yearn for that feeling of wanting to come to work. They want to feel good about the job they do and the employer they work for. They know too well that inner sense of wretchedness linked to turning up to work for someone they don’t want to work for and doing what they don’t want to do.

Now, of course, there can be personality clashes involved that can be at the heart of this. There can be personal problems at play too.

Yet, surely, any employer in the 21^st Century does not deserve his business to succeed if he turns his back on sources of information like this.   

It is my belief that one can be a truly gruff and up-front boss and yet still be respected and even loved by ones workforce. If manifestly one is fair, just and faces reality head on, the respect follows. Many who have been employed for years know they would not want to bear the burden of running a business themselves. Yet they will respond immediately and proportionately the more they feel they are treated as stakeholders in the business and its future.

Years ago, I was involved in a non-executive capacity with a friend in a business dealing with breaking down messy and corrosive substances. In certain respects he was difficult to work for and capable of making his own and other’s life difficult. His prudence was legendary. He bargained hard but fairly. He expected full commitment from the staff yet gave it to them as completely..

Any costly or minor mistake by one of them, invariably drew the remark from the Boss, “I shall never get my Rolls Royce now!” Yet it was no jest!

The time came when, prudent though he was, he felt he could realize a life’s ambition to own such a car. He shared the thought and the doubt with the staff, hardly any of whom voiced dissent. However such was his prudence that when a minor recession suddenly hit, he hesitated.

Even though the business was insulated from the worst of it, the Rolls Royce was to be put on hold. Remarkably, the staff would not have it! They wanted to work for a company where the Chairman had such a car! So the car was acquired.

But the story did not stop there. With the Rolls Royce bought, the proud Chairman would drive it to the factory and then purposely park it in the most obstructive place possible, even in the gateway itself.

It was a certainty that in no time any one of the staff would need it moved. It could be the yardman in the filthiest overalls, who would come in swearing uninhibitedly at the Chairman in person. The response was that the car keys were lobbed to him coupled with reciprocal abuse at the yardman, threatening all manner of sanctions if the seats were dirtied!

It was their car! Not just the Chairman’s! And they all got to drive the Company’s flagship!

Were there disputes? Of course! Was there discontent occasionally? Yes! But the lesson for me was to see how, even in appalling working conditions with little to redeem them, employees could be treated in ways where they were respected and trusted. They did of course dream of a very different life. Yet they did want to come to work and manifestly took pride in the business..

 

When it boils down it, most people are pretty clued up. Whether they are employers or employees, they know that it is human nature to prefer to do what we want to do, not what we have to do.

Business success for its participants is not and should not be only about money, important though that is.

The trick is clearly not to look for complex solutions, but to apply simple psychology. If shown reasonable respect – and, yes, affection too: and if encouraged with realism shared, I am in no doubt about the result. Our Have to’s may not be eradicated entirely, but they are substantially reduced and diluted by additional Want To’s generated by empathetic leadership.

Psychology Simplified About The Sub-conscious Mind And Making Our Future

All manner of accounts have been written over time about the nature of our sub-conscious mind. Distil any five articles or descriptions into one and there is no doubting the result comprises an extraordinary picture of this feature of human beings. Among the almost unbelievable complexities thrown up by research are some simpler truths available to us. They shine out like gold nuggets in the dim light. And they point to equally simple actions we can take for our own benefit.

Let’s try to contemplate the future for a moment, and our own future within it.

Do we instinctively view it with dread or with excitement? If we are normal, we would almost inevitably say, some of both. If one was pressed more and asked what proportion of both, what would be our response?

My first guess is that most people would have to think about the question for more than a moment or two. My second guess is that in so doing, anyone looking to answer the question would become clearer on how our picture of The Future and of our own future within it can affect our confidence, our aspirations and our happiness.

If The Future looks terrifying to us, seems to be devoid of any certainty, chaotic and full of dread, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to tell us just how defensive and reclusive that thinker could become.

Equally, suppose the view of The Future was the opposite, wouldn’t our suspicions be aroused by such a thinker? I have in mind someone who sees life ahead as amazing, fantastic, a wonderful and exciting dream, an absolutely perfect place to be and certainly way, way better than where we are now or have ever been before! Again we’ve no need for the rocket scientist to be able to see that such a thinker has little likelihood of realistic and practical roots in their present or the past.

Yet in both cases the sub-conscious has been asked and has responded with a picture. So what does that mean for us? Where is our sub-conscious mind trying to position us as we contemplate our own future?

With a little too high a dose of doom and gloom, won’t we shrink back and become mildly defensive and even a little reclusive ourselves?

If we then try to compensate for this stance, sub-consciously or consciously, don’t we need to start constructing control systems to reduce the chaos we perceive ahead? Won’t doing this perhaps fool ourselves into believing that we are managing our lives well. Won’t this authorise our subconscious to contrive and invent on-going control systems which will rule out and all but smother chance encounters and opportunities?

On the other hand, what happens if consciously we increase the dose of Optimism? Immediately we trigger within us more positive perceptions of the future.

Let’s agree with ourselves that we have done pretty well to get to this point in Life. Let’s further agree that here in our own present moment, we can claim justifiably to have learned a lot from our past which equips us for our future. There is much to be positive about!

Now! Can the World around tap into this private, more positive, upbeat but practicable approach forming in our mind? Personally I believe it can and does. But what does undoubtedly tap in this new view of ourselves and our future is our sub-conscious mind! Feed ourselves with more upbeat messages, assessments and aspirations and our sub-conscious goes into overdrive to find even more.

The simple truth is our sub conscious does not have, and is not, a mind of its own. Its resource base is the sum total of all that we have fed it since birth. But feed it with a different diet of information, and yes, the nature of its resource changes.

And Yes! Yes! Yes! Its extraordinary creative powers are fired into action, causing us to behave to our new view of the future.

“Learned Optimism” is a skill! Read the book of that title by Martin Seligman!

Good luck but remember we can also create our luck!.

   

Psychology Simplified Regarding Our Blindspots

There are many quirkish features to the way we are wired up, cognitively speaking. You must have mislaid a letter only to find it where you have looked five times! And I bet you have lost your car keys only to find them just where you left them! The latest lost and found item to test our sanity is our mobile phone! How easy it is to mislay that: then look for it and not see it right under our nose! But there is an explanation!

Mislay your keys or your phone and what happens on the back of that realisation? We tell ourselves with conviction that we have lost them. Most likely, there is our other voice within trying to convince us lamely that we have merely mislaid them, But the trouble is that it is not strong enough and gets shouted down by the voice asserting we have lost them.

What then would happen if we were to suddenly find them, remembering we have convinced ourselves that we have lost them? And we’ve done more than that! Now our head is fast filling with the realisation of the inconvenience and problems resulting from the inevitable loss!

What ever would happen if we found them right now? Wouldn’t we feel pretty foolish, because self-evidently we hadn’t lost them when we were certain we had?

So why is it we can we look in all the places we could have left them, not see them, only eventually to find them staring at us in one of those self-same places? Aren’t we all guilty sometimes for even feeling convinced that someone must have slipped them back there - when we weren’t looking - just to make us feel more foolish still!

But foolish or not, why did we have this blindspot in the first place? How could we have actually looked straight at the very lost item on each search and still not seen it?

The reason is depressingly simple - as well as disturbingly revealing on how we are wired up.

What happens is this: first, the keys we don’t have; next the dominant voice tells us we have lost them; then the subconscious part of our brain accepts the message unquestioningly and does its utmost to convince our conscious mind of that reality; then, worse, it convinces our whole psyche that to find them would not be a good idea, because it would not be believable to us! So quite literally, we don’t see them for looking at them!

So how do we find them eventually?

  

Don’t we tend to stop finally and challenge our current thinking? Don’t we, shake ourselves and tell ourselves as convincingly as we can, that we really can’t have lost them. ‘They must be there somewhere!’

In consequence we now go looking to find them, but without that dominant wish to prove we have lost them! And Hey!Hoe, we find them where we left them!

Oh! You might say, but some just give up and don’t go on that final search. What about them?

Yes I would agree. But it is amazing to me how – after a day or two, or a week, or a month later, many of those who did give up, then find them, you know, this time, when they weren’t looking!

Psychology Simplified on Success and Failure

We can do very strange things around our life’s successes and failures. Yet with the minimum of change and self-discipline, we can transform our lives. And it involves two simple and opposite thinking tricks for it to work wonders for us.

With successes, which can be frequent if we are a champion sports star, but for most of us such achievements stand out in our lives as unique and especially rewarding memories – that is, if we let them stand out at all.

There is a weird affliction surrounding success from which many of us suffer. What are its symptoms?

Memory loss when it comes to remembering the success, when one would have thought we never would have forgotten it. .

Another symptom can be an adopted delusion that the success was a freak or a stroke of luck and therefore cannot somehow be treated as a real success after all. Worse, we can compound this reticence on the odd occasion we are actually reminded by someone about our previous success, by denying it happened, or by seeking to change the subject, lest our embarrassment at the reminder of our being successful gets the better of us - not the other person, who seems to want to talk about it..

Yet, to feed our sense of effectiveness, to enhance and grow our self-esteem, we should be doing the very opposite and reminding ourselves of every success we have had and even every near-success.

We are a very impressionable species, far too easily conditioned in our thinking. Underplay or understate the significance of the successes we have had in our life and effectively we are undermining our own image of ourselves..

We should remind ourselves daily to feed our impressionable minds with positive reminders of how well we did; how we prepared for the success; how we actually achieved the success. This not only sponsors our sense of self-worth once more, but it puts us in a much more effective frame of mind to succeed again tomorrow, next week and next month.

Vital is it, if we are an employer that we benefit from the positive efforts of our staff. Yet it is just as important for them, that we remind each and any one of them of their successes in their work or in their life generally - and keep reminding them.

If we are parents or grand-children, then congratulating children and grandchildren, itemising the traits and elements of their success, reminding them on an on-going basis builds their opinion of themselves.

We should do it with our partners too.

So – in handling success, does this give us a clue on how most of us handle failure? I wish!!

Don’t we forget, play down and change the subject on our life’s failures, just like we do with success? Wouldn’t that be consistent behaviour?

NO! NO! Most of us don’t do that at all. We remember our failures. We burnish their memory onto the very fabric of our minds. We recall the sense of failure we felt at the time, the anguish, the embarrassment, the loss of self-respect.

And we do it repeatedly, often for years after, when we are still alive to tell the tale and had other lesser dramas which tested us but somehow we got through.

So what we do here then? Do we try to blot the whole episode and all its aftermath out of our minds?

It’s “No!” to a lot of that that too!  What we need to do is to forget the failure itself and pledge to ourselves that we will give it no time in our thoughts in our lives ahead. But it is fundamental at the same time that we should focus on how we got over the failure; how we recovered and re-established ourselves.

Better still we should go a stage further and remind ourselves that while success cannot be guaranteed, getting though and past failure can. This is true particularly if we adopt a mentality which makes us search for ways out of a dilemma, rather than wallow in it..

There it is then. Too many of us forget our successes when we should remind ourselves of them constantly – and remind others of their successes. Equally, too many of us waste time and emotional energy reminding ourselves of our failures, when we should blot those memories out by recalling how we recovered from the disappointment and re-established ourselves.

Good luck and don’t hesitate to keep doing this to restore your sense of self-worth and self-esteem.

Becalmed

Psychology Simplied: What is Our Reality & Where Does It Take Us By Sir Gerry Neale

There are a few pretty disappointing and even scary facts about the way we define reality. The first is that while that first sentence of this article implies we all define reality in the same way, the truth is we most definitely do not. We each define our own! And research shows, most of us only see what we want to see to establish our sense of reality.

And it is either helping us move forward or it is holding us back.

Only when, and for some people it is a very big Ask, we each accept full accountability for what we will find in our search for reality, will we get near to what it is. Otherwise we stay nearer to what we want to feel our reality is or to what we want to think it is.

As we stand in a town square or in a city station, we can let our senses take in the scene we are part of. We can and should remind ourselves that what we judge to be going on around us can only be based on what we ourselves recognise or have had some previous experience or knowledge of. Most of what we see and hear is familiar.

To prove the point, imagine yourself in a very different city with a very different culture of values, dress, and behaviour. See yourself in a country somewhere quite unrelated to our own. Much of what we see will seem very odd, even unacceptable.

Our senses tell us it is a very peculiar place. Yet the truth is that the perceived reality of that foreign place is only weird because first we do not know the origins of activities and behaviours we can see acted before our eyes. But second , and far more significantly, we consciously and sub-consciously search our entire memory bank to give us something to compare it with and we can't find it. So what do we do then! We tell ourselves these are very odd people we are amongst!

We ignore the truth that the conclusions we are making are much more a reflection of our own culture where there is no point of reference, than it is a helpful assessment of the place in which we suddenly find ourselves.

We can even feel the activities there to be so odd we want to get back to the "reality" we are familiar with. Alternatively, we can of course prefer what we see and immediately want to adopt this new reality, and forsake our previous one.

Why can this be so important to the way we think and behave?

If we feel that the reality we live in represents a reassuring comfort zone in which we feel happy and safe, then I guess we can just continue to make sure that we do nothing to question or endanger that interpretation of reality.

If on the other hand we want to be shot of that form of existence, to leave it, to shed it as some sort of oppressive cloak over us, then there is a fundamental advantage to be had if we analyse that unpleasant sense of current reality from every angle.

Questioning how things seem to be, however displeasing, and analysing what has caused the unsatisfactory state of affairs to be will soon stir a real change of heart within us.

If we have known in our heart, we are not in a good place and we have visualised a new, different and preferred place which is where we want to be, then a strange and positive desire will be unleashed within us to get to the new place or new life.

Oddly, the more we check out and become crystal clear about our current position, the more our desire intensifies still more into a force of unbridled energy. It seems designed to carry us forward until we arrive in the new guise or new place or role we have fixed in our minds.

To state it simply, the mind cannot hold two contradictory notions or pictures. The strongest mental picture will always win out over the weaker. Having a really vivid picture of where one wants to be is one key part of the motivation puzzle. But critical also is that we should have the clearest picture of the undesirable position we are in.

The mind cannot cope with the contradiction and provides us with the drive to correct it.

Psychology Simplified: Creating Want To’s and Not Have To’s! By Sir Gerry Neale

The Psychology of Want To’s rather than Have To’s is well known to some but still unrecognised by many. Yet it governs not only what we do and how well we do it as adults, but it should dictate the psychology of the response we seek to get from our children and grandchildren, from those we employ or from those we ask to supply us with a service.

If we ourselves really want to do something, then look at what happens to our resolve. Obstacles in our path are minimised in our mind, any inconvenience is tolerated and frustration stifled until we have done it. We drive on wanting what we seek.

On the other hand, if the required task is imposed on us as a “Have To”, then there is a different psychological dynamic which gets to work. Our resilience level drops. We will probably give up the moment we experience any obstacle. We will show a low tolerance level and we will verbalise any frustration we feel in defeatist terms.

This “Have To” Psychology can give rise to some odd cognitive reactions within us. Wittingly or unwittingly we can develop personal psychological strategies apparently to strengthen our goal or mission, but in unhelpful ways for ourselves.

In its simplest form, we can so easily make a list of to do’s and we can notice how we will will gravitate first towards the want to’s before we deal with the “Have To’s, the unpleasant ones which are left until last.!

We can then see so clearly even then, how with the Have To’s that we can continue postponing them. Only when they become an absolutely Have To do will we actually do them.

Acknowledging this feature of ourselves, consciously or sub-consciously, Let’s look at the strangest trick we can play on ourselves. We play it knowing that we enjoy and do most Want To’s. We do it knowing that we can leave Have To’s until the very last minute but they always have to get done.

Supposing we fix a major goal which we know we want to achieve. But at the same time, in our hearts and minds, we doubt we can achieve it if left to our own devices. We let negative thoughts and doubts nibble at our resolve.

So what do we do? What strange perverse game do we play actually against ourselves? Instead of keeping the goal a Want To; Instead of keeping it secret, we tell others who are influential in our lives? We tell figures of some sort of authority over us. Why? Because we sense it will turn the goal from a Want To into a Have To. Why so? Because we know that now they all know, they will make us do it, or at least they will think less of us if we don’t achieve It.
So now we have put this extra pressure on ourselves. And we have thrown all our cognitive machinery into confusion. Our sub-conscious senses our will and determination coming into play for us on the one hand, but on the other hand is presented with a Have To which its natural instinct is to avoid.

Of course certain things in our daily lives have to be done. The secret of enjoying and succeeding in getting something done is converting everything into a Want To and most definitely not a Have To. How do we do that? We do it simply by comparing the preferable results of doing it now with the unpleasant effects of all that can occur if we don’t do it. We work up the preferable effects in our minds doing everything to covert it into a Want To.

The dividends from such psychology can be great if we get really good at doing it. We can use it to encourage children, grandchildren, employees, partners and others in our lives to create and live by Want To’s not Have to’s

Psychology Simplified: Improving Self-Esteem By Sir Gerry Neale

That anyone of us can think ourselves out of the game, unable toi accomplish something and therefore all in all to want low esteem, is not earth shattering. We all know people who have a lower self-esteem than us and ones with higher.

However many of us making any assessment of self-esteem, whether our own or someone else, can make a significant mis-judgment. If they assume that our calculation of our self-esteem level should be the sum total of all our abilities and disabilities and somehow averaged, they would be mistaken.

In fact, each of us is a walking bundle of self-esteem assessments, often arrived at very arbitrarily.

Let me explain. Ask a golfer what his or her handicap is and most will tell you quite authoritively what it is. They are aided of course by a well tried formula which enables them to assess their current performance level or effectiveness

Not many activities have this feature. Suppose we are given a list of activities and asked to assess our effectiveness. What do we do! Actually what we do is to call on our sub-conscious to give us the rating on each one!

Let me explain! If your good at golf your handicap might be 1 to 10, moderate 10 to 20, Ok 20 to 30, and glad to have someone to play with 31 to 36!

So imagine this. You are given a list of 10 activities and ask to give yourswelf a rating (1 being really good and 36 needing a lot of improvement. I would like you to do score yourself in your mind as you read and note what happens. Ready?

Ball room dancing - cooking Thai style – Tennis – Drawing - Writing short stories – Singing - Eating sensibly - Using the Internet - Remembering birthdays and anniversaries - Public Speaking.

Do you notice how some you score highly; others you are pretty down on yourself and the remainder you are damning of yourself. Why? Either because you are good or because you never done them or your parents or teachers told you were wasting your time even trying!

If when we think about it, we can’t do much well then we could assume we should have low esteem to match our assessment of our low overall level of effectiveness. Yet so often our lack of ability is not just because we haven’t done it before, but because frankly we don’t much want to!

But some fascinating scientifically proven facts about us and the psychology behind self-esteem have emerged in recent years.

First, look at something you are good at, and then recall what character traits we employed to get so good at acquiring that skill. Invariably we would find it was something we wanted to do and presented with tuition necessary, we applied ourselves and did it.

So we can rightly deduce that if we get good skill tutorials for another activity and apply our proven character traits, then hey presto we can excel in the new skill too. But it is so much easier if we actually want to. (See another article I have written called The Psychology of Have-to’s and Want to’s.)

The consequence is, just we have skills now, apply ourselves in the same way to new skills and up will go our self-esteem.

One final feature of this is worth mentioning on the psychology behind self-esteem. A scholarly book by Albert Bandura, an eminent Psychologist called “Self Efficacy” and published in 1997 (ISBN No 0 -7167 – 2850 – 8 ) would turn any reader into an expert on psychology of self-esteem and self-efficacy.

But interesting proof is recorded in the book. Whether or not we have the ability to carry out a certain task to a certain skill level, it seems that if our self esteem tell us that we can do it well and a prior test says we cannot, we still do it to our assessment. But the contrary is true too. Assess ourselves low when objective testing suggests we should success, then low self esteem wins again!


Sir Gerry Neale has lectured and trained under-graduates and graduates at the University of Westminster in cognitive thinking and has mentored courses for corporate strategic planning and how to position the organisation’s and the individual’s thinking in relation to them. He has conducted counselling and life coaching programmes with individuals in person and on-line.