7-3-2026

Starting Out

You!	Negative and Positive Cycles.
Belief Systems	Teenagers
Honesty	The Different Forms Of Love.
Choices And Paths	The Guilt Doctor And Patient
Challenges
Your Mind	Good And Bad Thoughts
Break The Cycle
Some Other Bad Habits…
Goals
One Way To Deal With Many Bad Habits
What Your Parents Did Not Teach You!
The Long Walk
Walking, Meditating And Relaxing
Steps To Success
Exercises And Health Plan
Negative, Positive and Arrogant Critics
Weakness

One year ago my life was full of strife, I was overweight, unfit, excessively tired with lots of stress embedded deep into my very soul, and panic appeared to be my middle name. I drank coffee like it was life’s own nectar and smoked cigarettes like they were logs to keep the fire in my head going. I have no idea what my blood pressure was at that time but it must have been impressive, in a negative way. I was thinking that the world had nothing left to offer me, I felt burnt out, tired and alone.

I had done what society expected of me, I worked late nights, I gave up most of my social life, listened to the hype of the new millennium, believed in the system and like many before me and many who will follow after me – I fell flat on my face, totally exhausted, broke, with no-one to turn to. My debts were piling up, my house needing many repairs, my car off the road, my family needing schooling and I needed money to feed and clothe them.

I was caught up in the river of technological computer hype that was flooding the world, and down that river I went on a raft that could barely hold water, but I had faith, after all it was written, everywhere there were the signs, this was the hyperspace, the dot com era, a time to earn the fast buck, the hype was building up a gigantic dam that was rising up to flood the world with glorious money, money for everyone who was there taking the trip, nobody could lose according to the many experts that were found on all those web sites that streaked around the golden globe of wealth. But the dam busted before it was full and my raft and many others sunk into oblivion.

What could I do? I could drown my sorrows, but I had, had enough of drowning. I needed a hand out of the river of despair, not to sink into it deeper. I struggled on with not much promise of success. What about the next turn, the river of Hope?

Many, many people fall into the trap of the miracle of modern society, the entire world was caught in the American Dream. You are told that if you put in a dedicated effort, long hours, don’t give up, make sacrifices, then the world is your oyster. It didn’t happen, I made many changes to my life and other peoples lives, but the end result was the same, all that work came to nothing, and if I continued to struggle to conquer the juggernaut of success, I was bound to fall into an early grave.

It was time to sit back, take some desperately needed time out and think, rest, meditate and pray for    answers. This book is about how I changed my life and how I can offer you answers (hopefully) before you fall into the same trap, if you are already as I was a year ago then you will find this book to be helpful while you try to mend your precious life, and get back to reality and to those who love you most, your family and God.

If you have been through anything like what I have you would have discovered that it was a very soul destroying adventure, its very hard to have confidence in yourself when it feels like the entire world around you is against you, and in some cases it may even be your own family.

What we need to do here is rebuild your life, we can do that by re-educating your mind. Not the way it was done at school, we will use a much more positive approach, designed to get your life back on track and back in working order. We will look at your mind and what it needs to feel refreshed, we will give it new life. We will work at blending your new attitude, your refreshed and re-educated mind and reborn soul and put them altogether to give you as a person new life so that you will once again believe in yourself.

A person who feels defeated, feels destroyed. But feeling defeated is just a feeling, and any feeling can be replaced with another, more positive feeling – this is another goal that I have in this book, I have a desire to give you new life and replace all the negative, soul destroying thoughts that you may currently have and replace them with happy, loving, joyful thoughts. But most of all I want to help you see the future as something to look forward to, something you want to be part of.

This book would also help those people who have gone through life with a low opinion of themselves and those having not much confidence in themselves and all that they do. Remember this is how I helped myself and I can vouch for the methods used here, but if it worked for me, it can surely work for you. If you are currently being supported by the government then you will find this a helpful system to guide you back to a feeling of self worth and from there, back into the work force.

We are going to look deeply into the internal circuitry of our souls to find out who we are and how we can lead a more relaxed and prosperous existence. Any suggestion of failure should not be considered in your endeavour to ‘get back on the road’ to life and recovery.

—

One of the things I want to attempt here is to take you back to sometime in your past, this was a special time for you, it was when you were young and ready for life. It would probably be before you left home. This was a time when you were mentally fresh and ready to forge ahead and enjoy life. Everyone goes through this in some way and we want to take away the things that have led you to the mistakes that you have in your life today. When we are young we are influenced by many things and many people, these things and people can help us make choices for our best interests or to the negative.

Take yourself back to the age of fourteen, this was when I will assume that you hadn’t been deeply influenced by your friends and the harsher side of life and that all influences after that time were not deeply inset into your mind.

I am assuming that you were not involved in drugs, alcohol, cigarette smoking and the like, at that age. if you were then, try to find that time when you were not so influenced, a time when you were young, healthy, and happy – innocent. You read good books, your games with your friends were harmless, you got on with your parents and you thought that they were there to help and love you.

You were mentally and physically relaxed with the dealings of the world and you were confident that the world was not there to harm you.

Your body was young and your physical health was good. Your mind was young and ready to receive positive information, your love for life was young, fresh and new. You were developing fresh ideas on what you wanted to do for the future, life looked exiting. After this period in your life many of your dreams, thoughts and hopes were dashed away in the storm of life.

Where your body is concerned we will guide you to getting it back into or close to the condition that it was when you were younger, but this time we want your body to be stronger and easy to use. If you are handicapped in anyway then please do your best to do as we suggest, you would probably have exercises that have been given to you from your doctor so we suggest that you do them often.

This will not be an easy task for most people and you may shed a few tears in the process, but this is the path we need to take to bring us back to your current age with a new physical and mental attitude and a good feeling about yourself and what life has to offer you.

Improve physical fitness.

Improve self esteem.

Got to bed early.

Be organised, yet free of the strictness of a timetable.

Relaxed in mind and body.

Be happy and helpful.

One way to look at it is like this. You are at this tender age and life is good. Slowly we pick up negative influences or negative habits and each negative thing and habit is a small piece of armour, like the Knights wore in ancient times. As we grow older we add pieces of small armour to our bodies, piece by piece, until we are weighed down by this armour. It doesn’t protect us like the Knights armour did, it loads us down and each piece of armour feeds us negative statements or remembrances from the past. Its like this armour is like heavy lead.

Finally we walk around with this tremendous weight on our bodies, we slump when we walk, we have lost the zest for life that we should have. The sparkle has left our eyes. Life is now a heavy burden.

Those that we are supposed to (and once did) love dearly, become part of this heavy burden.    The job that we once thought was exiting becomes part of this burden, you wonder “Where has life gone.” Self pity may seep into your brain, we may be jealous of other peoples happiness, we may feel defeated with the weight of that heavy armour. We may meet new people with suspicion and treat our old friends with contempt. We talk about them behind their backs, this for some sad reason makes us feel good because we feel unhappy and miserable. We grow tired and listless.

By making positive changes to our life, piece by piece, we will be removing that heavy armour and the end result is that (to some degree) we will be the person we once were, the person described above who was ready for the joys of life. We can start again, be reborn, we have learnt from our mistakes, we are older and wiser – these are advantages that we can use in our new start, our new beginning. We listen to other peoples suggestions, but we are influenced by what is “cool”, we know    better now, we know now that a suggestion is just that, a suggestion, we don’t have to act on other peoples suggestions.

We have a choice this time, we are not immature, we have grown and with that increase of age we are stronger and smarter – this time ‘we are’ ready for life and we will accept it in both hands and mold it to the way we truly feel it should be for us. Responsibilities don’t hold us down and make us unhappy and we are pleased to take on the new challenges that life will throw at us.

Happiness can be ours, and its there for the taking. But it will take work and a continuous effort on your part to succeed.

When we are brought down in the fight for survival our courage is dampened, we feel that the fight for survival is lost. We need to build up that courage again and face the fears that we have created in our minds. Sometimes its hard to face the people we once new because we may feel ashamed because of our failures, we fear that they may laugh at us and they don’t know that this is just a space of time that we are going through until we start over again.

Remember the prisoners during the wars, surrounded by guards, eating only the minimum of food. They faced torture from some of their captures. Many books have been written about these prisoners who faced death and they had no hope for the future,

In this world their is a great push for people to be independent, for us to show our stuff, prove to the world that we are something – we have better be fast or we may “miss the boat”.

Rush, rush, rush, the big push is on – show your independence, be somebody. This type of talk has never appealed to me at all, I prefer, and I suppose most people ‘really’ want to have a family and a dream that includes their family. This kind of talk is creeping into the school structures around the world, I can only guess that the people who promote this type of lifestyle are trying to help people, but advising people to ‘live for themselves’ and show their independence is to my way of thinking setting these young people up for the fast lane and a very unhappy existence.

“Everyone has the right to be independent, everyone has the right to do as they wish, as long as they don’t step on their brothers or sisters toes!”

My understanding of humans and human nature was that man and woman got together and had children, this in turn created the family unit. This unit is the strength of society. Many animals live this way which is purely natural, but they don’t have the logical thinking that mankind has so maybe those animals are not so smart – or are they? It appears to me that we humans are all individuals who live in a family unit and blend with the rest of the human race.

Animals & Us!

I have read this many times but I thought that I would repeat it here because of its connection between man and animals and what we need to think of, when we think of the differences between us and the worlds animals.

You!

Who are you? You ar a very important human being, you have a soul, mind and a body. You are special in your own specific way, no individual has ever been the same as you in the past and nobody will ever be like you in the future. You are the original cast of you. When you’re mind and soul and body were molded together only one item was made, this makes you very special.

This book is about you and the advice I hope to give you that will show you that you are a special individual that came into this wonderful world to do something special for the world and all those who meet you. You have touched many peoples lives and you will continue to touch peoples lives.

Whether you touch other peoples lives in a positive or negative way is up to you.

From when you were a baby until now you grew into the person that you are today, only you followed that special path to your current existence. Your trek through life has been a special experience for many people as well as you, these peoples lives would not be the way that they are today if it hadn’t been for your existence. Have you watched the movie “It’s A Wonderful Life”, you know the movie with Jimmy Stewart as the leading actor, this movie shows the main character how special his life is and how other peoples lives would have changed if he hadn’t known them. Your life is like that character in that movie.

Sometimes a person finds them self in a position that they don’t want to be in, this position can be of many forms, mostly its negative. In order for a person to remove them self from an undesirable situation the person needs to obviously make changes to their life.

One thing that would help a person greatly change is a motivator (A goal), a reason to change. Something at the end of the rainbow. For some people it may be love, a happier existence, to be more in touch with God, a new job with a higher salary, or even more money. While reading this book think about the motivator that you have chosen as you do things, this will help you to keep trying even when things may look bleak. Put a sign up in your bedroom, a big sign, with the name of your motivator on it so that you will be constantly reminded of what is driving you to change your life. Your motivator needs to be something that you really, really want. Maybe something you have wanted for many, many years. A good example is a person who spends many years dreaming of a happier life, or more money to change their lifestyle, maybe more money to help other people, many people have been motivated by this.

You can take a photo of yourself or with your family and cut out the images of you and glue it onto a background of what you want. If you want a better life that includes a house at the beach then find a beautiful picture of a house at the beach and glue the image onto it and hang it on your bedroom wall. The main idea behind this is to show your subconscious mind day and night what you want.

Put a lot of thought into what you could use as a motivator, you may even have more than one motivator – the choice is yours. Think of yourself as setting a goal (or goals) and then changing many different parts of you to achieve that goal.

You can also use this popular idea, take a large sheet of blank paper and glue images of what you want onto it, arrange the images anyway that you want. You can write the name of the item under each image so that you can read each item one at a time to get it to ‘sink’ into your subconscious mind. If you want a new car then add a photo of it to the image, get the idea!

If you were to draw a circle on a piece of paper and then draw lines to split the circle into pieces, like a pie chart, then you could consider each piece a part of your human nature, all of them together make up the entire you. Depending on the person that you are, how many of these pieces need to change would depend on the situation that you are in. It depends on what you want to be.

Many things in your life caused you to be who you are today. Think for a moment about your early years from One to Five. Not many people can remember much around this time in their lives so an easy way to do this is think about things that you were told during these early years from your parents, brothers, sisters and other relations. Some people (such as myself) don’t know a lot about our early years, the main event I know of is when I broke my leg at the tender age of three, the rest of its very vague.

Now try this, think about your life from Five to Ten, what do you remember, write these events down if you want. And do the same for every five years up to your current age.

Think about the events that you have listed and how they have helped you create your current views, and values.

These events or experiences (and many others) have helped to mold into who you are today. I am sorry to say that many of these events were negative. All people suffer some negative events, its a part of life and what we have to go through to be who and what we are today. But for many people like me it was not what I wanted to be. I decided to change my life and this book is about how I did it and how it can help you do the same.

Emotions

During our first five or six years of life we learn a great deal about emotions and how to recognise them and use them in the correct manner as long as we are brought up in a family that has a good strong foundation of love and common sense.

Many children are not taught correctly how to use their emotions due to bad parenting, selfish parents, parents who are bad role modal’s for their children, being put in child care and the care giver is only (really) interested in making money and giving the very basic needs to the child (after all the child is normally part of a group of children and the care giver cannot possibly be a mother and father to all of them when they need the emotions that only a parent can give because those emotions are based on true parental love), brothers or sisters who confuse the small child with bad behavior patterns.

Do you feel that your emotions are ‘all mixed up’ and you have trouble using the right emotions at the correct time?

Are you confused when you feel an emotion but you are not sure why, like crying for no reason, getting angry for no reason, feeling frustrated over tiny events that are really not worth being frustrated over?

If you answered yes to any of these questions then their is a good chance that you have a problem organising your emotions and were never really taught when to use the correct emotions at the right time.

Don’t let your sorrow or other emotions affect your thinking, if emotions affect your thinking then you are obviously not thinking straight. If your heart is broken then you may make decisions that you otherwise never would have made, sometimes emotions should be given some time to wear off or wear down enough for you to think clearly.

When you think of something that you would really deeply like to be doing and it brings tears to your eyes, tears of sorrow, because it looks so much like an impossibility, then think of what it would be like to be young and think how much you would like it to happen and believe that you had the time to make it possible. Its easy to believe that it could happen because you are not wearing the negative armour of life that you have collected over the years. There is hope!

When you were young did you ever say something like this to your self?

“I want to live at the beach with my husband (or wife) in an old two-storey timber beach house. With a big garden full of flowers and vegetables, the sun soaking your bodies, fresh beach air pouring in from the vast and wonderful oceans, running our toes through the warm, sand and my arm around the one that I love who helped you bring those children in the world with the Creator looking down at you all with love.” This can still happen – and it will happen – make it happen!

Take of that armour and make it happen, your dreams and desires have been confused by the hustle and demands of the modern world, a world created by modern man to make money for modern man.

Honesty

You will need to be very honest with yourself when reading this book. Like me you will need to look at your faults and your good points to find out who you really are. You can try this, think of yourself away from everyone you know and all distractions in your life and you are living alone in a cabin 50 miles from anyone.

Take away your earing’s, dread locks, tattoos, fancy clothes and other additions you have given yourself.

Think of yourself as a person, in simple clothes living a simple lifestyle. There is no telephone, no television and no other influences on your life. Who would you be?

If you meditate, think of this while you meditate. Society teaches us to mimic all our friends and in an effort to be popular we copy our friends so that they will like us and as we grow older we change to what others expect us to be, we grow further and further from being who we really are or what we really originally wanted to be. We are guided by our family, television and other people opinions, it no wonder that so many people feel mixed up and confused.

Choices And Paths

Your life is about the choices that you make, some you make out of habit, some because you think that a particular choice is the right choice to make at a given time.

Try to think of your life in paths. By the time a person reaches the age of about 15 they have many different paths that they could take, the rest of that persons life is like that as well. Depending on the choices that you make in life, that will be the path that you take.

Lets say when you were 15 and you decided to drop-out of school, you can see that this would lead you on a different path than if you decided to stay at school until you were 18 years old.

If you look at big choices more carefully you may avoid some big mistakes during your lifetime.

So the choices that you make will take you on different paths to the future you desire.

Why then do some people seem to deliberately make very negative and heart breaking choices?

Have you ever met a woman who often talks about finding true love but always ends up in bad relationships? There is a good chance that she makes the wrong choices because of the way that she was brought up by her parents or parent. If the mother always chose bad partners then there is a good chance that the daughter will unconsciously copy her mother and do the same. Her mother may have spent many years telling the daughter about the places that she went to and the things that she did giving the daughter all the information that she needs to make the same kind of mistakes. The daughter needs to mentally break herself away from her mothers teachings.

Challenges

Your life has been made up of many Challenges, how you react to these Challenges affects your future paths. If you have a problem then that problem is a Challenge, if you see your problems as Challenges you should find them easier to ‘take on’ and take up the Challenge. Problems are just the Challenges that you meet each day. If you say “I have a problem.” it sounds negative and just another of life’s ongoing hassles. If you say “Ah this is a challenge, how can I meet it head on and beat it?” it sounds more positive and you feel that you want to attack it and win.

If you cower away from challenges then your life will be dull and boring, we weren’t made for this non-existence, read history books and look at the challenges mankind has made to get to where we are today. This should encourage you.

If you have a debt to pay then think of it as a challenge and do your best to beat it.

Some people get very negative about all the debts they get or challenges that come their way, they state that they wish life wasn’t such a hassle, but they are more than happy to accept life’s little pleasures as often as they can. In fact these people only try to live with pleasures but they find as life goes on these pleasures become dull and life becomes boring, and then they try to find more or different pleasures to satisfy their cravings. Having the correct attitude will help you get through life as a much happier person. So please consider taking on life’s challenges and making yourself happier in the process.

Life is not ‘Pleasure and pain”, life is “Pleasures and mental capability.” If you take life’s pleasures in moderation then they become more pleasurable, life has more meaning.

Your Mind

Your mind is a brilliant computer that was made for figuring things out and making decisions. If your life becomes dull then your mind becomes dull. We all need to exercise our minds often to achieve a good feeling about ourselves. If you watch television for hours on end, day after day your mind becomes dull. Why? Because you are not doing anything with your brain except accepting messages and pictures, your brain needs work to do, that’s what it was made for. You have to find challenging things to do to keep your mind happy and active. Have you noticed that the happiest’s people in the world are those people that are physically and mentally active.

More and more people these days are wasting their brains away on television and space invader type games. All in the constant pursuit of life’s pleasures with as less work as possible. As one millionaire put it “When a person watches television, they watch other people making money.” That about says enough doesn’t it? You sit down to be (hopefully) entertained watching a movie while television companies, producers, directors, advertisers, actors, actresses make more money than you will ever see in a lifetime. And do you complain that you are always needing money?

A real crime is the huge sales of XBox, Play station and the like to the worlds young people. Its mind boggling the massive amounts of money these major games companies make and the sad destruction of many children’s youthful years.

Its time to get that mind in action, so lets do it.

Break The Cycle

How you can break the continuous toxic cycle!

What I did was look very closely at the image of my father and mother in my mind and looked at the negative things that they did, and to my amazement I found that I was copying many things of them.

It may take a while for you to associate bad habits that you have with bad habits that you parents had or still have. If you have a relative or family friend who you can trust and who knew your father and mother when you were growing up, you can ask that person to help you as they will remember many habits that your parents may have had back then but not now. A sad fact with this type of research is that many parents are offended when you attempt to find out if you copied any of their bad habits. If your parent look deeply and honestly at themselves many of them will find that they got many of their bad habits of their parents as well, so it was passed down from parents to children and so on… Some parents can get very angry, some threaten to disown their children. I mention this so you will be cautious and think carefully before mentioning this type of research to them. I never mentioned it to my parents at all.

Things my parents did when I was a child, these things became embedded inside my brain and I thought (since they were my closest examples) that this was the way I was to behave, as a parent, father and individual. These bad habits grow up with you and stick, often, like glue to your soul.

I am not taking this as an opportunity to put my parents down or put your parents down, most of us love our parents but some of our parents suffered the same negative effects from their parents and with most of us its the Monkey See, Monkey Do act and what we are trying to do is Break The Continuing Revolving Cycle.

My father was not (in my opinion) a good example to copy and learn from, and often we didn’t see him anyway. So I decided to concentrate on the things that I didn’t like about him and remove them from my life. This was not easy and some things took a long time to change. I asked my family if I did things that my father did, the reason that I did this was that I new that some things are harder to notice from the inside (from inside me) and outsiders (my family – people out of me) were able to help.

In some families this may not work, if you have a partner that often points out your mistakes and faults then it would be better not to ask that person as they will probably make you feel bad and unhappy and that is the opposite thing that we want to happen to you.

I actually made a very deep conscious effort to not copy my father with these faults, it was a hard non-stop effort but the rewards are great and your family will really appreciate your efforts.

So everytime I caught myself doing something negative that my father did I said to myself “This is what my father did, I will not do it as well” or “This is what Dad did and I will not do it as well, its bad.”

This constant, non stop treatment has worked wonders for me and my life, I didn’t need professional therapy to do this just hard work and a strong will to not do the bad things that my father did. I wanted my children to love me and respect me, not dislike and cower from me.

I thought about the things that both my father and mother did that:

Made me sad.

Hurt my feelings.

Were unjust to a child or children.

Gave me physical or mental pain.

Made me angry at them.

Unfair treatment.

All forms of abuse.

Smoking cigarettes.

I know of a teenage girl who, when she doesn’t get what she wants, picks up dishes and smashes them on the floor. I found out that this was what her mother did as well, so the daughter had her mother as a role modal and was copying her. The world is filled with many such cases.

If you are a parent you know that it is often a good thing to be firm with your children where discipline is concerned. I am asking you to be firm with yourself to get the results that you want.

Some people may have to go to therapy classes to do this, I suppose it depends on the person and what kind of upbringing that they had.

The same applies for the way some people treat their partners.

We have all heard people say at some time in our lives “She drinks just like her mother did.” or “His father was an alcoholic as well.”

Sit down and think very carefully about the way you treat your partner. If you are unconsciously copying your parents bad habits, its not your fault, so don’t let anyone try to tell you that you are to blame for this bad behaviour. The secret is to notice that you are doing some things wrong and then finding ways to stop yourself. You may have to have therapy, go to AA or the like.

Bad habits to look out for are:

Yelling often.

Guilt.

Losing your temper for no apparent reason or over small things.

Are you an alcoholic?

Do you take drugs and did either of your parents?

Hitting your partner.

Hitting your children.

Child abuse.

Breaking things when you are frustrated.

Verbally picking at your partner or children and thinking its funny, most of the time you are the only one who is laughing.

Some Other Bad Habits…

One of the (In my opinion lethal) habits my mother had was threatening my sisters and I with “Wait until your father gets home…” or “Wait until your father gets home, you are going to ‘get it’.” This used to constantly put in our heads that Dad was this horrid monster that was going to do bad things to us when he got home. In fact for most of our lives Dad didn’t hit us, but due to this constant poisoning we became very scared of him. If you have this habit, it will be because you are having trouble disciplining your children and you find that your children’s father, as a threat, helps you control your children during the day when he is not there. You need to find other ways to punish or discipline your children, its not fair on fathers (who were at work and not even at the scene of the crime) to be made into a person of terror. It makes me wonder just how many fathers went to work to earn money to feed his children only to find out as the years went by that his children seemed to avoid him. The big surprise to these fathers would be to find out that his beloved wife was the culprit of this crime.

Not only parents can cause you to pick up bad habits, and older brother or sister or friends can do just as much damage. So you will have to do a bit of mental research and some serious and honest soul searching.

Goals

A positive step in the right direction to a better life and a good way to restore a persons confidence is to have a goal sheet, you can use this to affirm (to state positively to yourself) goals that you want to achieve. All goals on this sheet must be carefully written and of a positive nature.

You need to motivate yourself without the help of others, then no matter what others say and do, you will always have positive thoughts fed into your mind on a continuous basis.

When you write down a goal, you plant the seed that this goal will grow from, but like all seeds it must be fed. A seed needs good clean water and good nourishing food. You feed your goal with positive affirmations and positive emotions.

You don’t have to aim for a high paying job or to become a movie star. If being a good mother or father is what satisfies you then that’s fine. Different things make different people happy. You may just want to improve your outlook on life or handle a situation better. Set goals to what you want, not what others want for you. This is about what you ‘feel’ is important to you.

Positive thoughts are like a flower in the desert, a dolphin jumping out of the water on a hot Summers day, a light in the darkness. By feeding yourself positive thoughts you are feeding your soul a positive path to walk on. This path is laid with individual bricks, these bricks are goals. Each one is achieved with each step, and each step takes you closer to your ultimate goal.

This path is like the ‘yellow brick road’ to success, nobody else needs to see this path, what’s important is that you see this path and you know where it leads.

Many people who have lived in bad situations have used goals, God and positive thoughts to get them through it and on to a much happier future.

It can take a bit of thinking to come up with a list of goals that you feel will inspire you to a better life and lift you up mentally to the end result that you need. Take your time to make this list. As you see fit you can add or remove goals as the months and years roll on.

Read this list to yourself as often as twice a day if you can. The list can be long or short, that choice is yours. You can take advice as to what you can add or remove from the goal list but I strongly advice you to use your own discretion, you and only you know what you really want.

What do you do?

You write down the things that you want in the future, you can also write down the improvements that you want for yourself. Write your goals down carefully making sure that no negative things can come from them. Here are some examples of goals.

Goals:

Buy a new car with cash.

Pay of a loan.

Pay of your house loan by a date and year of your choice.

Go on a world trip by a date and year of your choice.

Self Improvement:

Be more assertive.

Be more loving.

Love your family.

Don’t lose your temper.

I want to have more patience.

Visualise the results that you want while reading your goals. An example is if your goal is a car of a certain type and style then ‘see’ yourself in that car, feel the steering wheel in your hands. Imagine changing the gears or adjusting the car stereo volume control, smell the upholstery – get the idea!

If you use positive goals then you and all the people that know you will feel the results. You will be loved more and you will become the person that you desire.

If something bad happens in your life, it is not because of your goals and its not because your affirmations are not working. Bad or trying situations are challenges and you can change your goals to suit these challenges. It is important to grow with your goals, don’t let setbacks take away what you have already achieved. Your goals are like a seed in the ground, they will grow and grow as long as you keep feeding them. And then when you have reached your goals they will bloom just like that summer flower.

Be reasonably realistic when setting your goals. By stating “In two weeks time I will have a million dollars” you would be very unrealistic because you are not giving your mind a chance to get used to the idea of what you want and it doesn’t have enough time to work out how you can get it. You can set your goals in steps like this:

6 month goal.

1 year goal.

2 year goal.

5 year goal.

By organising your goals in steps you are giving your mind (And subconscious) a chance to work on the goals.

The 6 month goal would probably be the easiest to achieve. The five year goal could be the ‘big one’, like the world trip or paying your house off, being the boss of the company that you work for. Get the idea, you are making a plan for the future, a plan that is Negative and will give your life new meaning. You will have more to live for, something to feed your inner soul so that you can grow in a positive and healthy way.

You can also set small goals during your day. If you work in an office and you are behind in your work, get a bit of scrap paper and write down a goal to finish this work by the time you go home that evening. Put the piece of paper where you can see it, or put it in you pocket and when you are feeling that things are getting to much for you, reach into your pocket and feel the paper, this will remind you of what your goals was and help you get motivated again to succeed.

People who set goals are ‘go getters’, but they are also people who need to know where they are going and we all feel comfortable knowing where we will be in the future and we do want to know what we will be doing in time to come.

Goals can help you fight negative emotions as well, like depression.

Sometimes you may have reaffirm goals. You may find after setting a goal and saying it to yourself every morning and every night for 2 months that the steps to that goal become second nature and you think you can remove that goal and add another goal in its place. Then you find that as the months go by that the first goal seems to be slipping from your memory so you have to add it to your goal sheet again. Think carefully before you remove a goal, a good thought is to keep a goal in your goal sheet until it is achieved in full.

One Way To Deal With Many Bad Habits

This is the only method that I have used with good success. I can do this by myself and I don’t need to go to therapy classes and the like to succeed.

First I get a piece of paper and I write goals on it. Along with my normal goals I add somewhere on the page a goal to remove a bad habit. This is the formula:

Affirmation + Goal + Anchor = New Positive Habit.

For example lets say I have discovered that I yell at my children and I am aware of this as a bad habit. Yelling at my children is a bad Anchor that I picked up sometime during my lifetime and I want to replace that bad Anchor with a new positive Anchor. I write a new goal down on my goal sheet something like this:

I must not yell at my children, when an issue comes up I will talk to my children calmly and I will carefully sort out the issue with them.

And I can also add other positive comments on the goal sheet to add fuel to the new goal like:

I do not lose my temper.

I love my children dearly and do not want to hurt them.

I am a calm person.

I love my children dearly (With this one you can have a photo of your children nearby and you can look at it fondly as you speak. This can also be helpful if you feel you need to reaffirm your love for your children to yourself).

If I say these goals (Affirm – to state positively) in the morning and at nighttime I will make positive statements twice a day that tell me and my subconscious that I am a calm person and that I will not yell at my children. This system does work and it won’t take long for you and your family to see the results.

Yelling at my children really pulls at my heart strings, and it makes me feel really bad to hurt those who I love so dearly, especially as its not their fault as they are innocent and yelling makes me the guilty party. Note that I have to admit this in order to fix the problem.

When I say this particular goal I say it with great conviction and I may even use hand movements to make the point. Also I may need to go to a place that’s private and say my goals out loud, this is really important. So try to go where nobody can see or hear you and you have total privacy. If you share a good honest relationship with your partner or family you may not have to go to a private place, its really up to you and them, and how you feel about your goals.

What Your Parents Did Not Teach You!

What about what you were not taught? With many families being brought up with single parents and poverty the parents may not have the time or resources to teach their children all that a child needs to know in order to be compatible with the rest of the world.

Did your parents teach you good manners?

Were you taught how to dress correctly, do you have dress sense?

Do you know what the procedure is at a wedding or formal events?

At the risk of being embarrassed go to your local library and find books about subjects that you may not know much about. Then take these books home and slowly digest the information and put it to good use. If your parents or guardian did not teach you much in the line of good manners, then find books on that subject and practise your new knowledge on your friends and family. You may or may not let your friends in on what you are doing, that choice is yours.

Learning items like those listed above can possibly be hard for some people to attempt because of their pride or age, please don’t let these things limit your chance to learn something new and brighten your life at the same time. You could also look around your town or city for a church and contact the occupants to see if anyone would be willing to give you ‘hands on’ advice. Many people who work in or volunteer for church work would help you for either a small fee, a small donation to the church or for free. They are normally discrete in their efforts to help the public and you could always ask if they would not give away any information about what you are doing there.

The Long Walk

Walking is a well known way to get exercise, but it has many other advantages especially to a person who is distressed, sad, or just not feeling to good about them self. Many famous people have taken long walks for exercise and relaxation, two examples come to mind: Charles Dickens and George Boole. Both were great thinkers and well known in history, so well known in fact that they still have an effect on this century even though they left this Earth a long time ago.

It is popular these days for more than one person to go on a long walk, the reason is obvious. With the large amount of crime it is much safer to travel in pairs, there is a major drawback with this system if you want to get the full benefit from taking a long walk.

After spending years working at a computer desk I needed a reason to get out of the home as well as rest and exercise. I needed rest from the computer.    After discussing the idea with my family we came up with what we call The Long Walk.

The Long Walk consisted of roughly 11 Km of road, most it was country road, the distance was new to me as I hadn’t walked a long distance like this for many years. The advantages were many.

First I went on this walk with my children, little Grace struggled as she was only about 7 years old at the time. Her teenage sisters and I kept up a good pace (so we thought anyway). I actually found The Long Walk a struggle, I got sore legs, and then I was overcome the heat and sweatiness, then I got hungry and thirsty. The Long Walk seemed like a big hassle to someone like me who had spent such a long time at a computer typing for exercise. I was overweight and unfit.

But I was determined not to give up. Our first biggest mistake was going for The Long Walk at about midday in the Summer time. It was a silly idea and it made the walk a hot, dusty trek of torture. Finally we thought of leaving later in the day, in the evening when the weather was much cooler. This was perfect and by this time my legs were not so sore and I was getting along at a good speed.

When I walked with my children we would talk and then not talk for ten minutes and The Long Walk went along like that. This was fine for a while when I decided that I felt like going for walks by myself. I have a distinct advantage here over the fairer sex as I am a male, and as we all know there is a much smaller chance of a male getting attacked compared with a female. I knew that if I was attacked by more than one male that I may have a problem, but I still decided to forge ahead.

So one morning I got up early at about 6:am and started out on The Long Walk. After a few km’s I noticed that I was thinking a lot as I had no distractions, nobody was talking to me. I also took along with me an apple and when I walked past a park that was at the end of The Long Walk I stopped at the park, ate my apple and gazed at the birds on the lake, letting my mind rest and soaking up the cool breeze and natures images. This was good and restful and a nice way to calm down after the walk.

The advantages of The Long Walk started to appear more and more as I walked by myself, I found that as I walked that problems that were upsetting me or problems that I had previously not found answers for were appearing in my mind, I would think about the problems as I walked and sometimes when I thought of the problem (Challenge) the answer to the problem would appear in my mind, sometimes the answer would appear later on in the walk.

So I not only was, getting fitter, but I was solving many of my life’s problems. I now had time to think, toss issues around in my head, breathe in the fresh air and come up with answers that had previously alluded me. Another interesting thing happened, I found that often I would talk to myself in my head, I would ask myself what I had planned for the future, what I would do the next time I went to town. I was having conversations with myself and then answering myself with answers so that when I did go to town (Or whatever) I knew exactly what I would be doing.

And then I started praying, I found I would pray to God. I would ask God for help with problems my family and I were having. I would ask for help. I prayed for guidance. I told God of what I was thankful for, and thanked God for the challenges I had been given. It seemed natural to pray out amongst the trees and farm animals on either side of the road, and I found that when I got home I felt a lot better and revived, all in all, The Long Walk turned out to be a very good idea.

Here are some suggestions that I have for you. You can sit down with your family or friends and work out a walk that goes around part or all of your town, this depends on the size of your town, it has to be a good long walk with lots of nature around you to be of any real benefit to you. If you live in the city then you have a bit more of a problem setting this up,    but by no means give up the idea. Talk it out, maybe you can drive to an area out of the city to walk, you can park the car, go for your walk and then finish the walk back at your car. If you have no car then maybe you can design your walk so that you can take in the city parks along the way, or maybe you can walk around the perimeter of the entire park area.

If you must (And most people will want to) walk with a partner, explain to your partner that you want “thinking Time”, if this partner is a good friend or family member they should respect your want to have at least some of the walk to yourself. You could tell them that you need this time to think or pray. You may find that over time you and your partner are talking more and more, try to keep a check on this and don’t let talking ruin your special time. If this upsets your partner and they become offended, think about what is more important, talking or solving your problems. Most people when they are at home or at work don’t find the time to get some good sunshine, fresh air and soak up natures delights. It is important that you find this special time for yourself so don’t let yourself down.

Walking, Meditating And Relaxing

When I go on walks I do this to relax. If you are going on long walks then this would be something that you may want to do at the start of the long walk, it will fill your lungs with much needed oxygen and relax you as you walk. As you walk breath in for six steps, make sure that you are walking at a brisk pace. When you breath in try taking the air in through your nose. At the end of the six steps breath out through your mouth, take six steps to complete the breathing out process. If you are worried that people are watching you open and close your mouth like a fish you can open your mouth slightly and then slowly breath out, or you can breath out through your nose.

When you breath in or out it shouldn’t be a hard task, breath slowly and easily. You can increase the or decrease the speed of your walking so that you can be comfortable in this exercise. You can also increase the amount of steps to either breath in or breath out.

After doing this for a while you will find that you are more relaxed and you find that this relaxed feeling can last for a long time. I do this so often now that its pure habit and it should be your aim to make it habit as well. I do this exercise for at least ten minutes at a time.

This exercise would be very helpful for people who have to walk to appointments or job interviews. Walking also give you a chance to think about the interview and what you will say.

Steps To Success

My first choice was to look at myself, find out what I wanted for myself and what I could do to help my family. Also I wanted to remove bad habits.

I wanted to be fitter.

I wanted to be closer to God.

I wanted to learn how to relax.

I wanted to feel confidence.

I wanted to feel in control of myself.

List the things you want on a piece of paper and be sure to be honest with yourself.

The next step was to start up a goal sheet and list the goals that could achieve the list above.

The next step was to be fitter and feel physically happier with myself. To do this I would start up and exercise plan which I would do daily.

Exercises And Health Plan

Health and fitness is very important on your road to recovery. There is a strong connection between physical fitness and mental fitness, if both are well looked after then a person tends to find life much easier to handle. We want to lose weight, if you are overweight, and build up that body and get it trim and healthy. Even if you have a thin build you still need to improve your fitness especially if you have not played any sports or do regular exercise. Contrary to some peoples belief thin people do die of heart problems. Many people who work in offices live on junk food and coffee, these will have to be removed from your diet. You don’t necessary need to give up coffee but it be good if you could drink less of this addictive drink and replace it with other more healthier liquids such as water and fruit juices.

If you are a cigarette smoker then the first thing we want you to do is smoke less and then give the cigarettes up completely later on. You will smoke less with the time that you put aside for physical fitness.

The idea was to exercise to get fit and feel better about myself without buying any expensive equipment. Thankfully many years ago I had got my first belt in Karate so I had a reasonable idea about what I wanted to do. Physical fitness is important to any persons recovery and confidence. I personally recommend the martial arts due to the teachings in this system, in particular Karate which I have studied in the past. A Karate student feels confident not only because they feel that they can protect them self in a moment of need, but they can also protect their family and friends if the need arises. This confidence soon blends into other parts of the Karate students life, even to the extent that the student is admired for their new personality.

My main disadvantage was that, due to an accident when I was three years old, I had one leg shorter than the other, this in turn (as the years went by) set my hips on an angle and I was told was wearing down the discs in my lower (and maybe the entire spinal cord) on an angle. Over the years back pain was a problem that I had got used to. I had pain killer pills but the side affects were worse than the back pain, so I gave the pills up about eleven years ago. I have a deep aversion to using pills to solve my problems and I have found over the years to be very careful so that I don’t hurt my back by picking up heavy objects correctly and exercising carefully.

Although a doctor means the best from the knowledge that he or she possesses, I prefer to think of the doctor as an advisor and I make my choices from the doctors suggestions. I have found over the years that I have made only a few small mistakes in this area of thought. What your doctor suggests should be very carefully thought out and if the need arises there is no harm at all, except possibly to the doctors pride, to get a second opinion from another doctor, possibly a doctor out of your town or city.    Always consider that the doctor has many years of experience in his or her occupation and should have (at the very least) enough general knowledge about your mental and medical complaints to offer suggestions that should be close to the answer that you need as the doctors patient.

You can do many exercise without it costing you a cent, or if you join clubs for fitness in many cases only a small monthly fee, this depends where you are in the world.

This is what I recommend in the home for morning and afternoon exercise:

(You will need to add stretches and warm ups)

A good long walk of maybe an hour in duration.

100 Star Jumps, you can do them in small increments until you get fitter.

One to two minutes jogging on the spot, you can increase this time as you get fitter.

100 Punches.

20 Press ups.

Punches:

I am not attempting to get you into violent sports by suggesting punches, by attempting the punching method that I describe below you will find it a good way to warm up and lose weight and improve your muscle structure and flexibility. By punching with your right and left hands you are exercising your hands, arms and chest area, if you twist at the hips with each punch you are also exercising that area. If you have a punching bag by all means use that, if you don’t then you have a few options. You can make your own punching bag by getting a sack and filling it with dirt or sand, tying the top and hanging it from a beam, the roof or ceiling.

To stop you hurting your hands when you punch a bag you can strap your hands with bandages, or material. You can cut old material into strips for this purpose. You can also buy or borrow some boxing gloves if you can. If you decide to do it the hard way and use your bare fist then you will find that over time the skin will toughen up and you won’t need gloves or any sort of covering to protect yourself. This is what martial arts people do, they toughen the skin because they know that if they have to protect themselves with their fists they will have to use their bare fists and it won’t hurt so much hitting a hard object like a persons head or chin.

This is how you make a proper fist (Without boxing gloves) so that when you hit the bag you won’t hurt yourself.    Hold your arms at your side and straighten your fingers, make sure your fingers are touching, now roll your fingers up tightly until you have made a fist. Bring your thumb over until it is in front of the first two fingers and press it down tightly. You use those two fingers to hit the bag. You have a tight fist so that you knuckles don’t move and make a crunching sound, you also protect your fingers this way and they won’t break if you are doing it right. If you are unsure even after reading the instructions here contact a martial artist and ask them to help you

Your stance:

Stand in front of the punching bag with your feet ‘shoulder width apart’, this means spread your feet until they are apart by the same amount as the width of your shoulders. Face the bag and reach out with one of your hands and lay the palm of your hand flat on the bag, this puts you at a good distance from the bag. Make fist with your hands as described above, drop both hands down to waist so that your thumbs are facing upwards and outwards. Your hands should now be close to your hips.

Punching:

From this position, with your fists at your hips, first move your right fist toward the bag (Do this slowly at first) when your fist is about halfway to the bag turn it around so that your thumb is now facing towards the ground and hit the bag. After making contact start to bring your right fist back to the same position at your hip and at the same time move your left hand forward to strike the bag the same way the left fist did, with the same hand, wrist movement. Your punching becomes a piston type action and you will find that you are pumping the punches at the bag. Whether you punch softly or in a hard, forceful manner is up to you. With each punch twist at the hips, this puts more power into the punch and exercises that area. When you throw a punch never extend your arm fully, leave your elbow slightly bent otherwise you could damage the elbow area.

You can vary your target on the punching bag as if you were fighting a real opponent.

Shadow Punching:

You can also aim at an imaginary spot on the wall and ‘pull your punches’, in other words don’t hit the target. This can be done the way that boxers punch or the way I described above. You can do this to warm up before exercising.

Swimming:

If you have a swimming pool or beach near to your home then I suggest running and walking in the water and swimming which is known to work most of your bodies muscles due to the resistance of the water when you move.

If you have problems with your knees, ankles and hips, walking slow and fast in water can help build the muscles around the bones to strengthen the joints. Go at your own pace until you feel the strength in these areas improving with time.

Old Sport Equipment:

Do you have any old sport equipment in your garage? Have a look you may be surprised what can accumulate in a garage after a few years. During me period of recovery I took up tennis again. Mind you its not normal tennis. Lets me tell you the rules, you never know you may find it the challenge that you need. I also dragged out our Total Gym 1000 that my family purchased about 4 years ago.

My family and I play 1 to 30 points with hardly any rest between serves, maybe a couple of seconds. We don’t have any serving rules, the object is to serve to the opponent, after that you can hit the tennis ball anywhere you like. We find that we get a lot more exercise that way. Its all designed to be fun. All your competitive sports should be played for the fun of the game, especially while you are learning a game or recuperating from a stressful life. Many people have tried to lose weight or have that rule that they ‘hate to lose’ embedded in their soul and they complete in a new sport with the efforts of a ‘Pro’ and the result is sometimes a heart attack or they hurt themselves because they are not use to that sort of exercise. Take is easy, you have only one life to lose. Be good to yourself and the results will be what you want.

Weakness

This is a subject not many people want to talk about, and can you blame them! To many people the mere thought of showing, let alone hinting, at any form of weakness is paramount to being one of the hardest things that they could do. We all suffer to some degree this problem, I am willing to admit that I don’t like my weakness’s pointed out to me, especially from someone who I don’t really like.

How can we get over this problem?

First we need to find what our most fearful weaknesses are.

Negative, Positive and Arrogant Critics

We have a Positive Critic who makes statements like to us, in our minds:

I am happy with that effort.

I’m so happy.

I love my job.

I am a valuable family member.

Dad was right, I am smart.

As you can see from the list above our Positive Critic helps us along with happy positive statements, these are the statements that make us feel good about ourselves.

From what I have read and discovered we all have a Negative Critic which has a tendency to cause harm when a person is feeling guilty or unhappy with themselves. This Negative Critic appears to be a part of our mind and it makes negative statements to us which sometimes can be very destructive and do us a lot of harm.

We need to learn how to keep our Negative Critic on a leash so that it doesn’t have the power to hurt our feelings or worse, like make us feel destructive towards ourselves.

The Negative Critic makes negative statements to us like this:

Gee, I am so stupid!

Why do I stuff things up all the time!

No wonder everyone thinks that I make mistakes!

Same as usual, stuffed up again.

Nobody could be as dumb as me.

Dad was right, I am an idiot!

Your Negative Critic knows the correct things to say to you (in your mind) to get a reaction that will make you feel bad, or even work you up to thinking that you have a problem that is much worse than it really is.

A person may find that they have a small accident one week, then another a day or so later, then another a week later and then their Negative Critic steps in and sees an opportunity to cause some harm and you find yourself making negative statements that can create a very real problem for your sanity and well being. People then may start noticing that you have had some small accidents recently and they add fuel to the fire by making degrading or negative statements like, “Joe is always hurting himself.” or “Hey Joe, you had better wear a crash helmet around all day!”, “What a fool, Joe is always tripping over his own two feet!”, some of these comments would be said in front of poor Joe and Joe feels conscious that other people are now noticing his little accidents and he starts to panic and wonder when the big accident is going to come in the future. You can see how this can build up and get out of hand in Joe’s head. By this time Joe has a serious problem but its not having accidents, although in the future Joe could very well have a big accident because his Negative Critic will ‘keep at him’ often, Joe’s problem is how he feels about himself. Joe needs a positive answer.

I have a suspicion that some peoples Negative Critic’s are worse than others because of bad comments that were made to them as a child either from a parent, guardian, brother or sister, friend, school teacher or others who have been able to pass negative suggestions to them in such a way and so often that they “burn” these suggestions into their mind. After this, these suggestions can easily be recalled by their Negative Critic at a moments notice causing a degrading and unhappy feeling to the person who owns the Negative Critic..

The example above ‘Dad was right, I’m an idiot!” shows this, it would be reasonable to suggest that any person who made this statement to themselves was ‘put down’ often by their father who called them an idiot. Think about it, do you say negative statements similar to those above to yourself, if this is so then do you recall during your younger years somebody making the same ‘put downs’ like the ones you say to yourself?

If you know where the harm came from then you can see that those comments are not a ‘real’ part of you and you can now take positive steps to get rid of them.

Try:

Affirmation + Goal + Anchor = New Positive Habit.

Replacing the Negative Critic’s negative suggestion with positive suggestions can really help. If you catch yourself saying “Why do I always have accidents!” try replacing it with these suggestions:

I don’t have accidents often!

I must be more careful in the future!

An person who suffers from arrogance has a very active Arrogant Critic. They could have become this way as a protective measure from childhood. Maybe they were not happy making mistakes and they hated people laughing at them so their Arrogant Critic stepped in and helped fool them into thinking that they were actually better than those who once laughed at them. Bullies are known to be arrogant.

Everyone has an ego which sometimes tries to run rampant, keeping this in check can be a real struggle, especially when we have lots of people around us telling us that we ‘are so special’ and ‘better than others’ Here again, our Arrogant Critic will step in and keep these statements coming to keep up the false facade.

.

We have an Arrogant Critic who makes statements to us like this:

Man I am so good, nobody can beat me.

I am the best.

Everyone love me because I am superior to them all.

The Arrogant Critic affects these people to such an extent that they start to change in a physical way such as walking with their chest pumped out and looking at other people like they are worthless, while they walk (or strut) around their Arrogant Critic is saying “Hey, I am so cool, look at those losers.”

Even though this person may make the same mistakes as other people, their Arrogant Critic keeps them ‘pumped up’ with arrogant statements which are used to cover up the negative effect of the mistakes that they make. So much so, that the real person that they are is hidden from themself. Other people notice their mistakes but the arrogant person passes these mistakes off quickly before they can do any real damage to their high opinion of themself.

They tend to have friends that will ‘beef up’ their own opinion of themself. These people really need help but nobody can help them until they admit that they have a problem. The suggestions made for the Negative Critic could help people who have an over active Arrogant Critic, but they must first be willing to admit (at least to themselves) that they have this problem. Once again, I stress that we need to be totally honest with ourselves because our quest is to find the real truth about ourself and not the truth that we may be hiding from ourselves.

Good And Bad Thoughts

We all have good and bad thoughts, but one of the secrets in life is to have control over your bad thoughts to the extent that they are nearly non-existent and those that still exist are easily put aside or pushed out of your mind. If you have many good thoughts then you know that you are obviously a good person, no good person can have a library of bad thoughts running around in their head because eventually they would give into the constant natter of the bad thoughts.

So good thoughts are what we want and bad thoughts are what we don’t want. Can bad thoughts be controlled – Yes they can! How?

You could try:

Affirmation + Goal + Anchor = New Positive Habit.

But we have other solutions as well…

Some people have spent a lifetime with bad people and bad thoughts from the environment that they were brought up in, this constant battering of their brains installs bad thoughts in their minds from a very young age, if this is you then I have good news, you can change bad thought patterns. It will take time but the effort is worth it.

What is often called The Criminal Mind would harbour many bad thoughts, and yes those minds can be redirected in the Good Thoughts direction as well.

What would motivate you into changing your thoughts from bad to good?

What would be the point of all this effort be to you?

What advantages are there for you if you do take the time to change your thinking pattern from bad to good?

Reading good book material will help you greatly in this effort, the classics have the value of being easy to read with no bad language and having a good story line. Books by Charles Dickens are a good example. You need to focus on entertainment material that does not have content that could trigger or remind you of bad thoughts. Many, many good fiction books have been written that have good language structure, a good story, examples of good and bad characters and they are long enough to hold up your attention for a long period of time and you soak up the information in each book. When you read a book that was written by the likes of Charles Dickens you also take in many words and thoughts that good people use.

If you read four Charles Dickens books, one after the other, over a period of time (maybe a couple of weeks) then you will find that you will be using words that are used by Charles Dickens in his stories. Your writing will also improve like this as well in the same manner. What you are doing is soaking your brain with material that is the opposite to what you are used to. The human brain will take in any information that you give it, so give it good information and you will find that you will pick it up in your daily life activities.

Look for books that are written by writers who are known to use good language and have stood the test of time. Even after a hundred years these books are still widely read all over the world. Modern pulp-fiction is not well known for its good content or good English, and remember what we are trying to do is improve the way we think and we want to learn good thought patterns.

Reading biographies will help as well.

Avoid videos, television programs and magazines that promote violence, bad language and sexual content. These are designed to catch the attention (and money) of the lower classes. If you really want to change your thoughts patterns then you really have to make this effort.

Avoid friends that have nothing good to say or friends that have bad habits. You will find that after you have successfully changed your thinking from bad to good you will probably not want to associate with friends like that anyway (or anymore). Being with them will just take you back to where you (in your mind) don’t want to be.

Read books about hobbies or making things, we are trying to re-educate our minds to the extent that we will change for the better ourselves, this can be lots of fun as you have a very good excuse to sit down and read for hours for the pure fun of it.

Negative And Positive Cycles

These are events that happen when you are with people on certain occasions. The same cycle of events always happens with these people or person. They could be your work mates or your family and you adapt how you react and behave when you are around those people. Look closely at your    life and see if you can find any negative cycles that are currently happening, if you find any use your goals and look at other ways to break these cycles of events. Try to change these events into something happier, more positive.

The Different Forms Of Love

People love a great deal of things for many different reasons, but do we really know what is love?

What is the feeling we get when we are in love with another person? When we love family members our love is different from the way that we love the family dog or cat.

Some people when brought up in bad family relationships say that they love their mother or father but they don’t like them. This is a special child to parent love, but because of the way the child was treated they don’t like the parent who treated them badly.

Love was never meant to break up families or for a person to wait their entire life for somebody who was never to come.

Teenagers

Having teenager trouble? Are you as teenager having parental problems?

Parents, when dealing with a teenager think about what exactly a teenager is.

A teenager is a product of:

Public, home or private schooling.

A product of today’s society.

A product of your teaching (guiding).

YOU, your parents, other relations, and your friends were their Role Models.

Lets look at you before you look at your teenager.

Do you:

Have tantrums.

Use bad language around your children or teenager.

Throw things around when you get mad.

Lose your temper over the silliest of things.

Drink alcohol or take drugs in front of your teenager or children.

Have any bad behavior problems?

You can’t blame your teenager if you behave badly and then unreasonably expect them not to copy you. You get away with it, so why shouldn’t they – that’s the way they think!

Did you spend a lot of time with your children, if not, then who was their role modal to help set them up for life? Was that person a good role modal? Maybe you should find out more about that person.

Your teenager copied what you did while they were growing up, think really carefully about this. Think about how you affected your teenager. I am not putting the blame on you if your teenager is badly behaved, but we must be honest with ourselves and our children. I found out that I had made many mistakes and I told my children about this and apologised, it was hard but worth it. My role modal’s were not good and I explained this to my children and they understand how I got confused and forgave me. I am a different parent now and proud to be that way.

Many people have been brought up in what they call these days Toxic Families. These are families that have Family Secrets that involve bad behavior. Many people don’t even consider their childhood to have been bad (well not to bad, right!). Many years have passed and the cat is out of the bag as they say, we now understand and know about Toxic Families, if you want to know more about this subject look it up at your local library or try a book store. You may get a big surprise.

A result of parents drinking at home when they have young teenagers who are trying to be like their parents who drink and party all the time is that the teenager takes up other bad habits because they generally cannot afford alcohol, like glue sniffing, petrol sniffing and the like. Children and teenagers will go to great extents to copy their parents and want to feel grown up. Teenagers (and children) have a deep need to feel older and copy their parents. Remember parents that party often, are role modal’s, if you are a parent like this, please admit it and do whatever you can to stop it immediately. Its no fun for the children – just ask them. Get professional help. Parents doing this are setting their children up for a big fall and maybe even an early grave, they are also setting their grand children up for the same miserable childhood. This kind of damage goes right down the family line, I know I have seen it often.

A teenager gets information and advice from:

Parents.

Brother and sisters.

Mentors.

School friends.

Boyfriend or girlfriend.

Peer groups.

Best friends.

Teachers.

Councilors (maybe).

If the teenager    goes to any clubs or after school classes they will also get advice from the people who run these activities. And possibly more people.

Do you wonder why they may not listen to you with all these ‘outside’ opinions drifting into their tender little ear holes? Parents were only one item on the list above. Teenagers are really just young children coming up to adulthood and willing to learn fast from people they trust and they can easily be misguided. Teaching them to be careful before they become teenagers may help. I suggest that all through your children’s years that you sit with them and talk to them often, I know that it helps greatly.

With all these people willing to offer advice to your teenager what realistic chance have you to really get through to your teenager? Probably a reasonable chance but you have to be careful. If you ‘put down’ the advice from any of the above list (other than you) then your teenager will feel that you have insulted their friends or whoever was giving the advice. Teenagers are sensitive and proud about the choices that they make and the last thing they want to hear from you as a parent is any negative advice concerning information that they received from a friend. They want to hear you tell them that they have made a good choice of friends – even if they haven’t, they want you to be proud of them.

I will repeat my previous statement – Teenagers are SENSITIVE and PROUD!

Think about yourself when you were a teenager, did you have trouble with your parents? I bet you did, at least to some degree. Teenagers need space – but you still need to guide them.

Think about yourself as a young teenager who looks up at some people and thinks that those people as ‘someone worth looking up to’, your teenager thinks they are allowed to make their own choices of friends and it (naturally) upsets then when you interfere. I am not saying that you shouldn’t interfere, I think you should if your teenager is being badly misled, but you as a parent have to approach these types of problems carefully and slowly with lots of thought on your behalf.

Watch out for your own friends interfering when you deal with your own children. Try to handle the situation yourself if you can first before your friends give their advice. Maybe professional help should be sought before you speak to your friends. You may trust your friends but in many cases its the blind leading the blind, so be careful.

One way that seems to work well is to offer your teenager a deal, this deal has to work for the parents (you), your family and the teenager. The teenager shouldn’t get to much special treatment because the younger children will feel that they have been neglected and they may resent the new things that the teenager is allowed to do. Saying “Its because they are older than you.” doesn’t work. And anyway as the younger children become teenagers they will expect the exact same special attention (which by this time you may not be willing to give due to mistakes that you made with the first teenager). Worth thinking about…

Teenagers like the rest of the children (and even adults) make mistakes or do something wrong, if you have to punish them then be sure to carry out your threat. Don’t say that you will do such and such and never do it, your teenager is not that silly and he or she will see that you are not going to go ahead and carry out your threats.

The Guilt Doctor And Patient

Guilt is a normal emotion and we are supposed to suffer from guilt when we feel that we have accidentally, mistakenly or deliberately done something wrong. Guilt is a natural emotion. We need to feel guilty so that we know that we have done wrong. I am sad to say that some people have learnt how to create and feed guilt to a person, to the extent that it can have very severe affects on a persons life. The person who creates the guilty feeling (The Guilt Doctor) in you may feel unconfident or be scared that you will leave them and ‘have your own life’ so they continuously feed guilt at you to keep the game up.

You were first given these feelings as a child so you more than likely would think that it is normal behaviour and not even realise that you are being badly treated. You don’t like it but you will put up with it because it comes from someone who says that they love you, and you love them, and you trust them, and therefore you have no reason to doubt them.

The Guilt Feeling is an affect that is taught to a child when they are young. A parent, care giver, brother, sister, family friend or relation, for various reasons makes the child feel guilty when it is young, this in turn creates a lifetime of guilt for the child. Sound crazy, well it is.

Do you find as an adult or teenager that you get guilty feelings when you deal with family members?

Do you get guilty feelings when you deal with your partner, boyfriend, girlfriend, husband or wife?

The guilty feelings that I mention above are not normal feelings that a person should have, they are deep set and the person infected finds the guilt to be overwhelming to the extent that it nearly (or does) control their life.

I will use a mother as the Guilt Doctor in these examples, the Guilt Doctor could be anyone though.

You may be talking to your mother and she suggests that you do something with her that day, but you already have plans to do something else and you tell her so, then she lays on the guilt. It is done very carefully, she may:

Cry or sob uncontrollably.

Tell you that she needs you because you are so special in her life.

Tell you that you are deserting her when she needs you most.

Inject a few, well placed words into the conversation that slowly get you to see her way, words that have worked before to great effect to win you over.

Get other family members to ‘rally’ to her aid and they call you in an effort to get you to help her.

But it does have the desired affect and you find that you are overcome with guilt and you go to great embarrassment to cancel your appointment to be with your mother. Any embarrassment is better than having guilt ruin your day while you are elsewhere. You know that you will worry about your mother and feel bad because you didn’t help her. In other words, you won’t be happy unless you do as she wants.

What is worse is that other people who know you such as your husband, wife or children can (unwittingly or not)detect the way that you react to guilt as they get to know you more, and they may use it against you to get what they want out of you. So you are set up for life to be a pawn for other people. You know deep inside that something is wrong but you find that it is hard to pin-point, but you struggle on trying to keep everyone happy and you feel that your life is not very important and you never really get to do the things that you want to do.

It is important that after reading the above text that you find a way immediately to stop this happening to your life. Your life will have new meaning and you will find that you have more freedom to do what you want. How can we deal with people who infect us with guilt feelings?

First you need to sort yourself out and make sure that you have your feelings in order. You need to have more confidence in yourself so that when a conflict comes (and it will) you will be able to deal with it. When you decide to change the way that you react to peoples guilt injections you may find that their reaction will not be good, in fact some people may get very upset.

Lets have a look at the guilt act. If you talk to your mother (probably face to face) you will need to tell her that you will not allow her to inject you with guilt feelings from this date onwards, explain that you have your own life now and that she cannot control you or your life in this unhealthy way. Let her know that you are willing to enjoy life with her as a daughter or son but in a fair relationship, if you are busy doing something else then your mother can call on somebody else to help her. She must agree to your terms, and as long as your terms are truly fair then you have no guilt and nothing to worry about. Pray for guidance when dealing with tense family issues like this, it may be just what you need at this time when you may be feeling alone in this fight for your freedom from constant guilt.

If your mother says to you that such-and-such will happen because of what you have said to her then you must realise that anything she does after you have spoken to her is Up To Her which means she is at fault for anything she does. You are Not To Blame for her reactions. In other words you Will Not Have Guilt for anything that she does to herself or anyone else, those are truly her decisions and not yours.

How a person reacts to anything you say or do to them is their own business (even if they are a close relative) and you cannot take the blame for their behavior. By trying to make you feel guilty or to take the blame then they are trying, desperately to keep the old guilt system going when it looks like you may Get Away from them and live your own life. Many Guilt Doctors will deny any bad behavior and they will attempt to soften the situation (in the Guilt Doctors favour) by mentioning all the good things that they have done for you over the years and that it appears that you are being ungrateful.

Believe it or not but some parents may even have some sort of (real or not) physical attack and end up in hospital which will give you an incredible guilt feeling. Who wants to be the blame for mother being in hospital or nearly dying? I know I don’t and I bet you don’t either. She may tell other people in your family what happened and how you treated her and they may get you aside and make you feel even more guilty by blaming you for putting her in hospital. Try to remember that your other family members may also be under her ‘control’ by years of guilt treatment and you will be going against the flow of the family system, this makes you an enemy (even if they love you). You have to be tough to deal with this situation. If the Guilt Doctor (the person injecting you with guilt) does go overboard and overreacts then it is probably time for you to get professional help like a therapist.

Don’t feel that you are weak, taking on a guilt doctor is not an easy task and remember the guilt doctor has been injecting people with this guilt for a long, long time and the habit would be hard for the guilt doctor to break. I suggest that, for a while (maybe many months) that you keep away from the guilt doctor and get used to not having them influence your life. Get out of the Guilt Doctors control, this means not communicating with them for the entire period that you are away. You may feel at first as if something is missing from your life, but the thing that is missing is a bad habit, the habit of being a pawn for the Guilt Doctor.

Your arguments against being away could be:

My mother is old and she needs me to run around for her.

She has already had a heart attack, I could be the blame for her next one.

She may die if I am not there to help her.

Where would mother be without me to help her? (Even though you have a family to care for).

I love her and feel needed when I am with her.

If you look closely and honestly at the list above you will see that they are all part of the guilt feeling.

If your concern about the Guilt Doctor is so strong that you feel that you cannot get away (The Guilt Doctor will try to stop you) try and find somebody else to look after them. Normally somebody else in the family can do this task without much trouble, but convincing them is another matter. You need to make the choice and stick with it, don’t turn back to the past – its gone and you are free to do as you choose.

Your mother got herself into the position that she is in today and now is the time for her to take responsibility for her actions and her life.

You may find that your husband or wife does not approve of you not having anything to do with your mother, this could be because they have already ‘caught on’ to the guilt affect and they want you to stay the way that you are, a pawn for everyone to use as they desire.

When you have been away from the Guilt Doctor (maybe on a holiday – fresh air, new places, new thoughts etc) think about what it was like to be a Guilt Doctors patient and how it made a difference to your life. Now it is time to make some decisions, you need to work out where you want to go from here.

Do you:

Want to go back to being a pawn for the Guilt Doctor?

Want to be rid of the Guilt Doctor for life?

Be strong enough to never be injected with guilt from anyone forever?

For many people     

The Push Pull Effect

When a person pushes another person away you tend to find that you push back automatically. The Push Pull Effect is like that. When a child is small they may have a parent or other relation who spends lots of time with that child, this person can deliberately or not push the child’s love and affection away by being evasive or constantly telling the child to go away from them.

They push you away and you rebound back to them, or they push you away and you find that you are pulled back to them – the Push Pull Effect.

Later on when that child has grown up they find that they are attached (with invisible strings) to that person who used the Push Pull Effect on them, they find it hard to break away from that person.

Do you find that you want to ring a person or parent up all the time, yet you can’t really figure out why?

Do you find that you follow a person or parent around when they visit you? They may walk into another room while you are talking to them and you find that you unconsciously follow them and keep talking, yet they don’t do the same to you. This is an example of the pull that they have on you. You will also ‘go out of your way’ to impress them or try to be loved (or liked) by them, sometimes you may wonder why you go to great extents to help them or impress them.

The person doing the pushing in this case will be your mother, but it could be anyone else. We use the mother as an example only.

To keep you ‘hooked’ to them they may ring if you haven’t seen them for a few days, or email, write to keep in touch constantly, to keep you hooked on the fishing line. During our lives we meet people and we leave people behind as our life changes, but some people seem to always turn up often but we don’t really know why we are associating with them.

A victim of the Push Pull Effect would have trouble finishing a relationship and their ex-partner will keep turning up to visit them and they cannot understand why it is that they cannot get rid of the ex-partner or turn the ex-partner away. The ex-partner either enjoys this situation or feels that they need you for some reason and they don’t want to be totally separate from you.

You will need to break the invisible line that keeps pulling you back to that person, we must all be able to go through life having the friends and people we like with us because we like them honestly, not because we are subconsciously forced to like them.

If a child is pushed away by its mother, as the child grows up the mother will continue this infective Push Pull Effect treatment on the child. the mother will not stop doing this until the child finds a way to stop being treated like this and that is normally when the child has grown up, if ever.

The best cure would be a separation from the pusher until you feel confident enough to see the pusher again, if you want to see them again. Once you recognise the Push Pull Effect in your life then you can consider your options. Its easier to break this type of bad relationship once you know that it exists. I have seen the Push Pull Effect in action on many occasions and it is always sad to note that the person being pulled has no idea what is happening to them.

The Push Pull Effect is a lot like the Guilt Doctor technique and the two can work together easily, totally confusing the person who is the victim.