What's your PB?

To any track athlete or swimmer, a Personal Best, or PB, is all: it is the single best indicator of their progress . . .  and place on the global stage.

But how can we adapt this simple and useful measure to progress on our personal growth journey? When our goal is not to win gold but to become more whole, better at coping with life, is there an equivalent to a PB?

Yes, there is!

For anyone engaged in personal development, improving Emotional Intelligence (EI) or such self-improvement process, there is a simple, easy to measure indicator of your progress:

My PB used to be about a week. When one of my biggest issues cropped up it would get me angry and/or depressed for about a week before I was able to let it go, accept what had happened and get on with the rest of my life. The time between the gun going off and regaining my full, calm, composure was typically 7 days. That’s how wound-up I was!

The trigger will vary between us: it might be something a politician says, it might be smoking, it could be anything: there are few of us who don’t get irritating by something. And it’s these triggers that help those engaged in EI improvement to know what to focus the growth process on. Then as we face our demons, undertake appropriate forgiveness and inner-healing, so our PB comes down. An enlightened person’s PB will be seconds, or less. At the start of the process we might never really let-go of some issues!

So the PB scale isn’t linear. It might go something like this:

Never – Years – Months – Weeks – Days – Hours – Minutes –
Seconds – Blink of an eye.

It’s an on-going process and having such a simple measure can reassure us that progress is indeed being made. Thus, for example, as an open-minded engineer I like to think I can accept new ideas pretty easily. But I do get frustrated by those scientists who insist on ‘evidence’ before they’ll even consider the possibility of any theory than varies one iota from the long-established norm. Faced with such a situation I would have been cranky and depressed for weeks. Earlier today I found myself, quite by chance (LOL! The university of life works in wondrous ways) listening to just such a unmoving scientist on the radio. I got angry. Then I felt depressed. But now, an hour or so on, I can smile at it knowing that ‘they can’t help it’. My PB has improved from weeks to hours! OK, still some work to be done, but practice makes perfect.

For or Against?

In the personal development arena, victim thinking is a major issue. So many of us can’t help feeling that the whole world is against is. And, of course, if that’s what’s in our heads so the universal law of attraction applies and we bring that very situation to is. All classic justifications for positive thinking. But is it as simple as that? Can we just switch our thoughts to more constructive ones?

Anyone who’s seriously tried this will probably tell you that whilst such an approach can work to some extent (often with amazing results) it’s often far from easy. The thoughts and beliefs we’re intent on updating are often so deeply engrained that we might as well try to change our place of birth! (The two factors often having a major impact on each other).

From my own experiences I’ve identified a number of others issues that are relevant here:

Awareness: as I become more aware, so I become more aware of the many ways in which those around me (in normal everyday life) if not ‘against’ me are probably not ‘for’ me!

There’s two facets of this. Firstly as my own level of awareness increases so I become more conscious of the reality of those I share a street/town/country/world with. I see that most are so caught up in their own rushed lives that they don’t even notice me, let about care about me. This is in stark contrast to the village and community in which I was brought up: where folks generally did care and look-out-for each other. 

Maybe it’s just a sign of how things have changed in the 50 years between the 1960’s and the 2010s. Somewhen, probably the Thatcher era of the 1990s followed by the current ‘head in screen’ Tech age has made British society at least (and probably many others) far more self-centred, with the norm being to cut yourself off from everything and everybody else. No wonder so many of us have victim thinking! It’s not that the world is against us, more that the societal norm has so favoured personal success (in a limited, material, sense) that there is little sense, in many quarters, of ‘belonging’, of being cared for or cared about.

In my own case, there’s another factor which exasperates the situation: Since as long as I can remember I’ve been an observer: I like to see what’s going on, I notice. I suppose it is this that has made me a good Quality Assurance person and a good researcher. I can spot trends . ..  or things that are out of place. I’m not swayed by superficial factors but able to tune in and get a real feel for a situation. 

Thus, as I look around me and tune into today’s reality, I can’t help but note, for example, how little time most people seem to have .. . for themselves or what they feel they need to do, let alone for anybody else who happens to be sharing life with them. It’s nobody’s fault, just what society have become, in many areas, over recent decades. Again it is no surprise that victim thinking, and all the heath and societal issues that go with it, are at such high levels.

So what’s the positive thinkers response to this? How does the Law of Attraction apply when the reality is that, so often in modern society, we are isolated. We are on our own.

Yes, we can, and probably do need, to seek out kindred spirits, to practice acts of random kindness, to smile at others even if many such attempts at engaging will get no obvious response. When enough of us do such things, when enough of us return to showing that we care, then the Law of Attraction will respond. Miracles do happen . . . but rarely when we want them to!

We’ve all got a heart!

What a lovely, and moving, opening ceremony to the Rio Paralympics. Such a powerful message: we’ve all got a heart. Whatever our ability . .  or disability, wherever in the world we come from, we all have a heart. OK, for a few lucky transplant patients, it might have started out as somebody else’s but we, every single one of us, have a heart.

And not just a heart that pumps blood around our body: we all have a heart that

needs to feel it belongs, that needs to care and be cared for. That’s what makes us human beings!

Worth remembering that.