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You could say that music chose me rather the other way around as far as my  vocational path was concerned. Despite my parents disapproval, I really wanted to do nothing else but be a guitar player and that was that. The life style suited me perfectly,doing what I loved doing, staying up late, getting up late, and generally living the rock ‘n’roll life style I had always dreamed about. Any kind of discipline that “other people” had to develope to do their jobs just didn’t apply to me-I just had to turn up to the gig!

This was all fine and dandy when I was young but as I got older though there were times when I found I needed to earn more money than I did with my meagre musos income. This meant actually getting up early of a morning  and doing something for someone else day after day, just like everybody else did, and came as a rude shock to my lazy carefree attitude to life.

To start with I found it very tough, especially as I simply was not fit enough to do the job the landscape gardening job a friend had offered-it was very physically demanding. I used to come home suffering from nervous exhaustion and this affected my sleep patterns. But I actually like this kind of work so was determined to stick with it. I needed the money and really that was all that was on offer.

After I had been doing the job for a month or so I noticed a change in my attitude. Initially I had doubts about whether I was cut out for this type of work and many times considered quitting. But sure enough, I gradually felt  fitter and more able to meet the physical demands of the job with each passing week, and my sleep situation settled in to routine as well, meaning I had no problems getting up early in the mornings-inconceivable a few months earlier. Hell, I even started to think this lifestyle actually suited me what with a fit and healthy lifesytle and the learning of new practical skills to boot.

Now I will say that it was my financial situation that kept me disciplined and gave me the will power to not give in to how dreadful I often felt in the early days of doing this job. I certainly would not have considered it otherwise. But it also taught me that I really did possess self discipline and will power-something which I had never to call on for much up to this point in my life. This also made me realise that whether people need to use it or not, everyone also has it.

Whats more, these attributes can be developed through practical training methods. For success in anything, they are considered essential tools. So what are they? Self-discipline is the ability to stick to actions, thought and behavior leading to improvement and success. It is the rejection of short term gains and gratification in the pursuit of a higher and better goal. Will power is the inner strength to decide on a course of actioand see it through to its conclusion regardless of any form of resistance, difficulty or discomfort (oh I remember the discomfort!) It bestows the ability to overcome laziness, temptation and negative habits, and to carry out actions that are tedious, unpleasant or require efforts that are contrary to ones nature.

You don’t have to live like a monk to achieve these attributes but you do have to make some changes to your usual lifestyle. Mine were forced on me through necessity and were somewhat of a wake-up call, but yours can be a little less drastic. By refusing to satisfy some of our less important and unecessary desires we can learn to become mentally stronger. Some intentional actions that are contrary to our usual responses such as refusal and rejection of harmful and pointless activities will begin to build our inner store of inner strength. Try giving up drinking or smoking, walking rather than driving, stop buying snacks and fizzy drinks etc.

Practicing these day today activity changes will exercise  and strengthen your mind so that you will be able to kill procrastination, overcome laziness and develop the perseverance needed to achieve success in anything you chose to take on.

Is it truly possible to be the master of every thought that you chose to enter your mind or not, as the case may be? To be able to filter out all  unwanted and unproductive thoughts automatically without too much conscious thought so they pop in and pop right out again in the blink of an eye? Sounds like a tall order doesn’t it.

The mind seems to act like some restless creature that won’t lie still and be tamed sometimes, constantly on the go, flitting from one notion to the next at random. In fact most of our bodies functions are done without any real conscious thought from breathing and walking to heartbeat and blood flow around the body. So it is with the involutary nature of our thoughts. They are sometimes like unwanted guests, just coming in sitting down for a bit, making a mess, then waltzing off again.

Our minds cannot help but think about what ever it sees, analyzes,questions and reasons it, before it “rates” its importance. Your mind processes this information almost instantaneously and decides on this importance rating by using a “filtering” system. Everyone’s filters are different and account for why some people will attach such significance to one subject, while for someone else, that same subject will hold none whatsoever.

Our filter settings began to be set in, you’ve probably guessed it, our childhood years-and have been undergoing a process of fine-tuning ever since. Every thought, word, occurence or experience has an effect on our minds and conditions our thoughts. These thoughts are thus produced non-stop and we seemingly bath in a sea of them. This incessant flow of thought requires a lot of energy and can occupy a lot a time.

Unfortunately the thoughts produced are mostly fairly unuseful or negative thoughts, and in this scenario too many of them can feel like we are being overwhelmed by too much of this kind of thinking, and a sense that we are “drowning” in this sea of negative thoughts. This can lead to a sense of helplessness, that feeling of having little or no control over what thoughts enter our minds.

Being constantly dogged by unwanted and negative thoughts is a form of enslavement. These obsessional notions and mental mind games can begin to affect our health and lead to forms of mental illness such as anxiety and depression.

But this should not be. Why let our thoughts rule us when our minds should be their master? Why not be at liberty to enjoy only beneficial and desirable thoughts that will bestow inner peace rather than your mind bossing you with relentless and mostly futile work?  The state whereby you can chose which thoughts enter your mind and which don’t is true freedom.

Using the untamed animal analagy, you can train your mind using concentration exercises and meditation techniques to attain the self discipline and obedience required to “bring your mind to heel”,  and make it stop the flow of unecessary and negative thoughts from entering it. If you put in the effort to achieve this you can realise true mental mastery.

Maybe it is turning into one those weeks after all. You may have read about the flood that I was greeted with on my return to my apartment a couple of days ago. It is still a right old mess and starting to make everything else smell a bit damp and mouldy. Not too nice to live in. But I am staying positive about the situation and just trying to get on with things despite being now cooped up in one room.

So just when I was getting used to a slightly different way of doing things at home and thinking that I was still able to do what I need to do work-wise on a daily basis, I somehow managed to delete the homepage of this blog by messing about with my ftp program. Now I am not the most tech-savvy person around but usually, if I do something on my computer that I really didn’t mean to, and it causes what on the face of it looks like a distaster that will ruin days or weeks of work, with a bit of thought and a calm approach I can put it right again.

Well if you are reading this I must have been able to do it this time as well. But, I have to be honest, that at the time it looked like I had really managed to screw myself. I stared at the screen of my ftp client long and hard but nothing popped into my head as regards how the hell I was going to reverse what I had done. And just a little, I started to panic that I had lost weeks and weeks of hard work. I realised that if there was any chance of getting the blog back to its original and fine-looking self I was going to need help.

Now, the guys at the help desk of my web hosting are very quick in their response to support queries so with quiet confidence I sat back and awaited a reply to my problem. Time passed. And a bit more. Still no response. This was unusual, so I started to think about the consequences of the lost/wasted time this was costing. I began running through all the work I had planned to do that day but now couldn’t. And I started to feel a general air of gloom descend on a day that I originally thought was going to be productive and positive.

What had happened was that a perceived calamity which in all truth I made out in my mind to be far worse and of greater magnitude that it really was in all probability had turned my initial positive mental attitude into a negative one. My thoughts had been positive to start with, but had been eroded and replaced with negative ones. This can happen to us all too easily if we let it.

But there are ways to limit this kind of mental slide from positive to negative. There are techniques we can learn to mentally take a stepback from whatever life throws up to try and ruin our day. It may take some practice (looks like I need more!) but it can be done.

What did I do? Well I wrote this blog post of course-in notepad! I took a few moments to guage my reaction to this set-back, and then tried to practice what I preach and look for positives in seemingly negative scenarios. A bit of self anaysis and talk can be a good thing, as it allows you to put things into perspective more logically, gives you a chance to weigh up your options and then proceed with the best plan of action.

Yesterday wasn’t the worst day I’ve ever had-but it was just like it! Actually it depends on your point of view or, your mindset and attitude.

I came back from a gig (I am a musician as well as a blogger) to find a note from the Fire Brigade telling me that the apartment ustairs had had a burst pipe in their kitchen, soaked through the ceiling , flooded my bedroom and consequently I would need to spend the night elsewhere!

Now much as this was a “surprise”, shall we say, it didn’t send me into a flat spin worrying about the consequences of something that was clearly “just one of those things” and no-ones fault as such. Even if I had been there when it occured, I wouldn’t have been able to do much apart from try to move the bed out of the way of the deluge, which would have been difficult considereing the size of my place.

Once it had all sunk in, if you’ll excuse the pun, I started thinking about what I had to do in light of the situation. Of course it isn’t the end of the world when something like this occurs and I wasn’t about to treat it as such. So I moved a few bits and pieces out of the room, threw all the bedding into the wash, emptied the buckets that the firemen had kindley put there to catch the water and set about contacting my landlord and the folks upstairs about insurance etc.

After I had done these tasks I thought about how this change in circumstances was likely to impact my life. I thought about the damage that had been done to the room and its contents and  how I was going to replace damaged items.I also thought about where I was going to sleep and for how long. Certainly these were fairly immediate problems that needed to be worked out. But rather than start thinking too far ahead and possibly getting myself into negative mindset over it all, I tried to see if there were any positive apsects to this unfortunate situation. There were.

Firstly I could sleep in my living room. Not ideal, but I had bought a new couch with a pull-out bed in it for visitors but had as yet not used. I needed to test it out and this was my opportunity. Not onlythat but I figured it might actually make a nice change to wake up to another view! As the carpet would need to be thrown away and replaced, I wondered how to get  this done cheaply as it may not be covered by the insurance. A buddy of mine is a carpet fitter and said he could do a “mates rates” job on the living room but at the time my landlord wasn’t interested in spending the money. Now he will most likely bite my hand off to get both rooms done together so cheaply. Another plus point.

Lastly, I get the room redecorated and the insurance will cover this. The people upstairs said they would even give me the money for a new mattress. So a bit of inconvenience for sure, but with a calm approach and a positive mindset, a potentially negative situation can be  turned into a positive one with a bit of optimistic thought and a view of the bigger picture long term. It can be done.

Now where’s that mop?

This afternoon I have just been listening to an mp3 interview with a guy called Mike Brescia. He runs a very successful self development website called Thinkrightnow.com. In the interview he explains how he moved to Southern California and lived in a leaking van whilst getting fired from every job he ever got hired for. One of the jobs he was giving valuable stuff away and couldn’t even do that! He started thinking that this was who he was and how his life would probably go.

Everybody told him he was lazy, inept and a loser. People told him he wouldn’t accomplish anything and Mike started to believe all the negative stuff he’d been told all his life by his family, friends and colleagues. Like most, the abiding mantra that he believed was that “Life sucks and then you die”. This attitude affects everyone and all the self improvement books, courses and therapy in the world won’t help us until this can be changed. And not until we are ready to change. There is another saying that I particularly like-”When the student is ready, the teacher will appear”.

From the time we are small we are bombarded every second of the day with information and messages about what we should think about ourselves, our aspirations and the world around us. This information is presented to us often very negatively and reinforces our beliefs about our limited chances of success in life. The enviroments that we grow up in can often be less than encouraging for our prospects, but even for the priviliged few born into money and jobs etc. success is not guaranteed if their thinking is not conducive to success.

So thinking the rights thoughts is key to success. This can only be done through a program of re-education and mind reprogramming. In Mike’s case he set about reading and studying self help books and soon realised that this involved being exposed literally 24 hours a day to positive messages and motivational thoughts and emotions.

He identified the ones he thought would be most useful to him, and recorded these over a 60 beats per minute music backing a technique that he learnt about from another source. He listened to these all day every day whilst working his latest sales job and didn’t get fired!  His attitude had started to completely change about himself and he became a very successful salesman.

He realised that he had hit on a way of re-inventing oneself, or rather uncovering the real core you that you know is in there somewhere-if you could only clear away all the baggage and “life moss” that has stuck or been stuck to you over the years.

This method has evolved into the programs that Mike has at his site www.Thinkrightnow.com. He has devised a variety of different programs to effortlessly transform people into the individuals they always wanted to be simply by changing the way they think. Results can be very rapid, such is the power of his method.

The programs themselves can be reviewed on a 14 day free trial basis so you can see if you like them before making any commitment to buy. Head on over to www.Thinkrightnow.com and check out this amazing and life changing audio program.