What’s the deal with all this personal growth and self development business? Why bother in the first place? Charles Atlas who earned himself the title as the ‘the world’s most perfectly developed man’ had this to say: ‘Truest SUCCESS is but the development of self.’

It’s so easy to treat personal development as ‘optional’ and so few people ever take the time to actively improve themselves. Your personal growth and self development is arguably one of the most important thing you can do with your time. You can even argue that to actualize your true potential is the purpose of being here. In many ways all your actions are geared towards ‘self improvement’. Everything you do, you do with a positive intent. This, however is mostly unconscious and for the majority of people it’s a case of pursuing ‘things’ and ‘stuff’ with the (all to common) assumption that when they get enough stuff they will be happy.

You don’t have to search too far to find just how wrong this theory really is. Every day we read about ‘extremely successful’ people who end up in rehab or who kill themselves. Why? To return to Charles Atlas true success is but the development of your ‘self’. At no point in your life can you just stop and say ‘now I am successful I think I’ll take the next 10 years off’. Unfortunately this is ‘the dream’ that so many people aspire to.

The key to a lifetime of happiness lies in personal growth. Real and lasting fulfillment in life comes from consistently improving the quality of your life. Life is dynamic and it has to keep moving. Like in nature, everything that does not grow, dies! You will either grow or die, and although you probably won’t die a physical death, you most certainly will suffer a psychological death. Depression is but one example of the effects of failing to grow as a person. If you are not growing you will feel like you are dying.

Every day life hands us opportunities to grow. They are mostly disguised as problems and unfortunately most people curse them instead of seeing the wonderful opportunities that they present. Earl Schoff once said ‘Don’t wish for less problems. Wish that you were better’. This is where personal growth comes to play and you must do it on purpose and with an active state of mind.

So why do people fail to actively participate in their own personal growth? Well, there are certain personal growth barriers that prevent them from actively progressing in any area of your life. The key word being ‘actively’. The three biggest personal growth barriers are three interrelated behaviours that tend to keep us immobilized and locked up in inaction. The result being the failure to progress with our lives.

Personal Growth Barrier #1: Procrastination

Procrastination is the irrational delay of tasks, especially important ones. On a conscious level you might want a specific result and you know what course of action to take, but still you remain immobilized. The failure to act is what keeps you where you are. It is likely that what you are procrastinating about is what you MUST do as this will help you grow in your ability to take action and just do it. Keep in mind that you only procrastinate about tasks that you value and at some level you know you will benefit from it.

Personal Growth Barrier #2: Indecision

Every single action is preceded by a decision. The ancestor to every action is a decision and the failure to act can be traced back to the failure to make decisions. The ironic thing is that not making a decision is a decision – isn’t it? Indecision is like a disease that you have to eradicate from your life. Indecision is simply the result of a fear of failure and by not making a decision you can’t fail right? Realize that nothing in the future has happened yet and fearing the worse possible outcome will almost certainly keep you from making the decision. If you don’t make the decisions you won’t take the actions and you will remain immobilized.

Personal Growth Barrier #3: Comfort Zones

Comfort zones are all those things that you are too familiar with and often to the point where you don’t even attempt anything else. Inside your comfort zones everything is known and you have this sense of certainty that you can comfortably deal with anything that comes your way. You’ve done it before and you feel ‘at ease’ with it. Stepping outside your comfort zones challenge your beliefs and it challenges your perceptions. Stepping outside your comfort zones however, challenges you to grow as a person you have to grow to get comfortable outside your old comfort zone. Most of your limitations are self imposed and controlled by what you belief you can or cannot do, what you like or dislike, what you think is right or wrong. You have to keep stretching your ‘self’ physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually to avoid standing still and remaining imprisoned by your comfort zones. Oliver Wendell Holmes once said ‘Man’s mind, once stretched to new idea never goes back to it’s original dimensions.’

All barriers are only that they are barriers. It often strikes me how these typical vehicle barriers at boarder check points are so ‘flimsy’. They can hardly stop a bicycle, yet they stop big sixteen wheelers. The barrier is more psychological than actual. So are the barriers to your personal growth. They can stop you, but they can’t keep you unless you allow them to. Simply acknowledge them and then move on. Personal growth is a choice and it’s an active process. To ensure a happy and fulfilled life that is filled with joy and appreciation you have to consistently grow and expand your ‘self’.

Having a health crisis can be a frightening experience. Whether you battle with cancer, depression, diabetes, pain, or another long-term condition at home or in a hospital facility, a feeling of isolation often accompanies these conditions. The result is decreased energy and, often, a lack of hope. Friends and family members who enjoy good health may not understand the particular emotional stresses you experience. The doctor pays keen attention to your medical care, but sharing your feelings and personal concerns is often not possible for lack of time.

Modern medicine well recognizes the importance of mental and emotional support in healing. For that matter, this is not a new insight. From ancient times, patients have benefited from a kindly word and the reassurance of being able to express their feelings and concerns.

Support groups such as AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) build upon peer support and show success where other approaches have often failed. The “Placebo Effect” is well known in medical circles, and it is based on HOPE and BELIEF. Endorphins have proven to be vital in the management of cholesterol, for instance, and endorphins are described as ‘feel good hormones’. In other words, a patient’s mental and emotional state is crucial to their success in healing.

However, outreach to peers can be difficult when one is bedridden or homebound. Close friends and family members come to visit, but their time is limited. Transportation to social events may not be readily accessible. Even attending a social event may cause more pain or embarrassment, and for someone who is depressed, the mere idea of going somewhere may seem insurmountable. Hours can creep by in loneliness and isolation.

The internet provides a wonderful tool to overcome these obstacles. Contact with peers is just a few clicks away. Someone with the same or a similar problem is always there. Time and space become irrelevant in a platform that spans many different time zones. Instead of lying awake at night, alone with thoughts and concerns, a patient can now logon to a forum where many give and receive comfort by sharing their concerns and hopes. There are even medical doctors online who can answer questions and give advice.

The anxiety of an upcoming medical procedure or test diminishes when someone else who already went through it shares the experience. Many useful tips come from patients who share the same conditions. From something as simple as “how do I use my new crutches?” to “what can I do to overcome my painful depression?” someone online has an answer or a suggestion.

Moreover, some things that one cannot begin to discuss with friends and family are easier to express in an anonymous environment. An internet based support forum protects privacy while still allowing an intimate sharing of thoughts and emotions. This breaks the isolation and loneliness and offers a place for communication.

Communication alleviates fear and brings hope, and hope elevates the body’s ability to overcome illness. This not only supports healing but also provides much needed social interaction and quality of life, even in illness.

We all like to smell good. Bad body odor can be a huge turn off at all times. If you are out on a hot date on a sweltering day without spraying yourself with a suitable deodorant you can assure yourself that your date is never going to call you back. A good perfume can score you a lot of points in a romantic setting. If you are going for a job interview you really should take care of a possible body odor problem. You do not want to antagonize your interviewers by hitting them with some bad body odor the moment you come in, do you?

Ultimately, it all boils down to personal hygiene. A good bath can free you from the woes of bad odor, but only for a while. That is why they came up with deodorants and perfumes in the first place — to keep you smelling good. Body odor can be an issue even among friends. Often, friends are unwilling to bring up the embarrassing subject of the bad odor that comes from you. Unless you have a bunch of really close and honest friends, this is a problem that you are going to have to discover and resolve all by yourself.

There really is no excuse to not buy perfumes. After all, they are available in a whole range of prices. Depending on your personal preferences, you can buy cheap perfumes, or you can buy outrageously expensive ones. The point is to find a scent that agrees with you. Given the wide variety of perfumes available in stores, there has to be a fragrance that fits you to the tee.

Remember, the fragrance that you use daily says a lot about your personality. Do you go for musky fragrances or do you prefer natural and earthy ones? Are you the kind who loves the smells of fruits and flowers or would you prefer a smell that is sporty?

If you have not found the fragrance that suits you best, maybe you should experiment a little. Try out a bunch of different fragrances and then decide which makes you feel the best about yourself. The ideal perfume is one that fills you with a sense of confidence. Now, if the perfume advertisements are to be believed, the best fragrances also make you irresistible to the opposite sex. Do you really need more reasons to urge you to go out and find your own signature scent?

The induction is the process that helps people go into a state of hypnosis, where they will be more susceptible to suggestion, and where their unconscious mind will take messages onboard. People choose to go into this state because they want to achieve a certain change or improvement in a specific part of their lives, usually.

How a hypnotist carries out an induction can vary greatly. Different techniques work well for different people. There can be hundreds or even thousand of induction scripts or approaches.

In therapeutic hypnosis, known as hypnotherapy, we generally use a technique we call progressive relaxation. This means helping the person to become progressively more and more relaxed until they eventually fall into the state of hypnosis. It’s a gradual process, helped along by suggestions of continued relaxation. I’ll ask them to close their eyes, of course, and then ask them to start to take some nice long deep breaths. This really helps to relax people.

One way that I find very effective in getting people to relax is to have them concentrate on different muscles, or different body parts. Obviously when you do this, you naturally become more relaxed. I like to start with their heads, face and neck muscles, and work my way down, along their entire body, focusing on one muscle or body part at a time, until they are completely relaxed, literally from head to toe. You could do it the other way around I suppose. I choose to work downward as it correlates with sinking deeper into total relaxation. We always refer to that process as going down, further down. So I just prefer to use the technique working downward.

The hypnosis induction technique that most people would be familiar with is obviously what they’ve seen in stage hypnosis. That’s a very different approach from therapeutic, hypnotherapy inductions. In stage hypnosis they use a very authoritarian approach, very direct induction. They have to. They need to keep a crowd of several hundred people entertained, which necessitates impact. Plus there is a visual impact achieved when a hypnotist executes an induction, a very sharp, direct induction, and the subject falls to the floor or otherwise gives some defining visual signal that he’s hypnotized.

The handshake induction is somewhat commonly recognized as well, but in reality, a stage hypnotist would not attempt this technique without first assuring himself that the subject is already hypnotized, or at least highly susceptible.

In hypnotherapy we have no need to make a visual impression on an audience. The same is true of self hypnosis recordings. In self hypnosis recordings a laid back approach is used, composed of many different elements, and is usually based on the theory of progressive relaxation. It is highly effective. Try it for yourself!