What personal issue troubles you the most? Are you too uptight or easily stressed? Do you work too hard? Do you struggle with an addictive personality? Are you compulsive about details, or do you forget them too easily?

 Building a personal development plan will help you to improve those aspects of your personality that you want to change. Personal development is the process by which people become more aware of their own strengths and weaknesses. They seek to solve problems and improve interpersonal relationships by capitalizing their strengths and minimizing their weaknesses. Before an individual can successfully accomplish this, however, he or she must take a serious look at problematic aspects of their personality and determine how to change them. Creating a formal personal development plan requires honesty, perseverance, and hard work.

First, evaluate your strengths and weaknesses as honestly and openly as possible. Then, decide which of these you are willing to work hard to change. Making these difficult decisions is a part of personal values development. Next, you must be willing to work to change those aspects of yourself that are least congruent with your own personal values.

Building a personal development plan often requires input from another, trusted person in your life. Find someone who knows you better than anyone else, and ask that person to offer his or her perception of your strengths and weaknesses. Explain your interest in self improvement, and ask this person to help you in your quest for personal development. Many self help books offer personal development tips that are extremely general. While these can sometimes be of use, they aren’t always very helpful in specific situations. Furthermore, it is almost impossible to construct a formal personal development plan without interaction and feedback from a trusted professional.

Other traditionally used techniques for self improvement include behavior therapy and support groups. Although these can be helpful, they can only assist people to focus on those aspects of negative attitudes and behaviors of which they are aware. These approaches focus on the symptoms, rather than the actual root, of the problem. A newer, more effective way to help people deal with personality issues and capitalize on their strengths is personal development hypnosis. Hypnotherapists can use this therapy to assist clients to develop a formal personal development plan. These professionals help people to objectively identify their weaknesses and to focus on creative, effective ways to work toward self improvement. Often, people who are critical thinkers or resistant to directional suggestions find the traditional forms of self help hypnosis to be less effective than people who are very suggestible do. For these critical thinking individuals, Ericksonian methods of personal development hypnosis, as well as Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), are much more effective. These methods are very successful in helping analytical people work toward self improvement.

People who struggle with stress in their lives often benefit greatly from self help hypnosis. During the therapy session, either through regression or simply the increased recall that is possible through hypnosis, the client may be able to explain some causes of stress that are subconscious and pervasive. After learning about the causes of the client’s stress, a professional hypnotherapist can then offer personal development direction that will help the client to eliminate stress from his or her life. Often, simply becoming aware of the causes is enough to motivate and encourage many people to work toward resolving these issues.

Individuals who struggle with addictions to food or tobacco often benefit from Ericksonian or conventional traditional types of self help hypnosis as well. Through hypnotic suggestion, they become less psychologically dependent on food or cigarettes to deliver feelings of peace and tranquility. Furthermore, hypnotherapy practitioners can help clients conquer the unconscious associations between food, cigarette smoking, or tobacco chewing and pleasurable activities such as reading or watching television.

Developing a successful personal development plan may take the help of a detached third-party professional. The challenge is to be able to honestly identify one’s strengths, and to use these strengths to overcome undesirable weaknesses. Many people have difficulty even admitting their weaknesses to themselves; they struggle even more with discussing these weaknesses openly in behavioral or group therapy. Self help hypnosis is an ideal tool for helping people to address these problems at the unconscious level, where they originate. Professionals who practice this approach can also help clients by offering direct or indirect suggestions for helping them in their quest for personal development.

Summary: Most people have some aspect of their personality or behavior that they would like to change. Conventional self improvement books and behavioral therapies that try to help people form a personal development plan are limited by their inability to address the problem behaviors in the unconscious mind, where the problems originate. Personal development hypnosis that uses either traditional or Ericksonian methods is an ideal therapy for helping clients to overcome their weaknesses by focusing on the root, rather than the symptoms, of the problem. Since many people are reluctant to admit their shortcomings to others, or they lack the necessary funds to afford the help of a therapist, quite often hypnosis recordings made by a competent hypnotherapist who is proficient at Ericksonian Hypnosis and NLP can be very successful.

A list of the common uses of hypnosis. © 2008 By Alan B. Densky, CH.

This document may NOT be re-printed. All Rights Reserved. Unique “spun” versions of my hypnosis articles are available for publication directly on your website without charge, as long as the byline and the links back to Neuro-VISION are kept intact.

Alan B. Densky, CH has helped to guide the self development efforts of clients since 1978. He specializes in stress related symptoms and addictions, and offers a comprehensive list of self help hypnosis titles on his Neuro-VISION self-hypnosis for self-development website.

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Life Lessons From Sport – Are you Playing to Win?

I have always believed that sport can provide many valuable lessons for life, team work, discipline, fair play, learning how to lose as well as win, to name but a few.

Watching some of the tactics in recent matches at the soccer world cup made me think about how often in life are we playing to win, or merely not to lose. For many, the fear of failure is so great, that it prevents us from taking the chances necessary to succeed. But in playing safe, we run the risk of never achieving anywhere near our potential.

Thomas J Watson, the founder of computer giant IBM was once famously quoted:

“Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple really. Double your rate of failure. You’re thinking of failure as the enemy of success, but it isn’t at all… you can be discouraged by failure — or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because, remember that’s where you’ll find success. On the far side.”

Think of a tennis match, if the first service goes out, the server will usually try a safer, more predictable second serve. This often results in getting beaten by the return. In cricket, the batsman or team that are merely aiming to survive will often score much less than if they had played with more adventure. Consider also the football teams who are so focussed on defence that they have little or no chance of ever winning.

The same is true for life away from the sports field. Imagine for second a pendulum, with failure to the left and success to the right. The more the pendulum swings into failure, the more it will swing into success. Conversely if it stays in the centre or just oscillated slightly into failure, it can only ever experience little success.

How then can you challenge and embrace failure? Often the perceived fear of failure is far worse than failing itself. Courage isn’t the absence of fear but acting in spite of fear. Take a deep breath and go for it! Build up your courage muscles by taking just a few tiny steps every day.

Are there sales calls that you are putting off or talking yourself out of, is there a business or personal connection that you would love to make, but have convinced yourself that they are going to reject you? Do you desire to learn a new skill, take a course or start a new venture but are fearful of what ‘others’ might say?

As my friend Dr Terry Cole-Whittaker titled her bestselling  book – “What you think of me is none of my business”. Worrying about what other’s might think is truly a waste of time and energy and is a poor excuse for not achieving the success in life that you seek.

As you go about your day today remember that pendulum. Take it back just a little further into failure and celebrate as it swings into success.

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The Value of An Hour – John Assaraf

When I was 21 years-old, a gentleman asked me what I thought the value of an hour was. I honestly did not know how to answer the question. He went on to teach me one of the most valuable lessons I have ever learned.

He suggested that the value of an hour was priceless. This confused me some, so this is what he said to me.

“If you invest one hour each day in understanding yourself and your environment better, you will accumulate nine 40-hour weeks over the course of a year!”

Yikes! As you can imagine I was blown away when he put it to me that way.

Nine 40-hour weeks? This seemed impossible until I did the math. 365 days, times one hour each is…yup, nine 40-hour weeks!

He went on to ask me how good I could get at something if I did it all day, every day for just over 2 months. Well, you already know the answer to that.

I thought I could be awesome!

He went on to tell me that over the course of just five years, I would have invested the equivalent of 1,825 hours of focus on whatever I desired to accomplish my life.

Imagine for a minute, how good you can become at anything that you did one hour a day for the next year. How fit could you get? How much more in love would you get and give? How much more money could you earn?

Let me suggest that one hour is a small price to pay in comparison to the payoff. Just one hour a day may be the razor’s edge you need to really get the results you want in your life.

For me, the decision was easy. I have been studying human potential and the mind for over 20 years. Each time I think I’m getting a good handle on it, I am gently reminded of how much there is to observe and learn.

Is getting what you want worth an hour a day? I certainly hope so.

I still manage to set aside my hour to read motivational stories or listen to inspirational people. They are the fuel for my mind and it keeps me learning and yearning for more.

Please adopt an hour a day for yourself! Pick one area of your life that you want to improve and commit the next 90 days to that one thing.

I assure you that the results you achieve will be well worth the decision! And remember…you can’t take out of life more than you put in.

John Assaraf

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John is putting together an interview series with 21 of his friends and influences in what promises to be a fantastic series called Success Manifestors

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