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188 articles by Willie Horton · showing 50

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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

Is Stress Messing Up Your Self Improvement?

We all want more out of life. Some of us want to change our lives radically – some of us have things about ourselves that we want to change. But, unfortunately, for most of us, life keeps getting in the way! The stress of everyday life – yes, millions of people are suffering from stress and national health services worldwide are leaking money trying to cope with the related health problems – stop us in our tracks.

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

Success, Happiness and Wasting Your Energy

Today is a new day – one that has never happened before, a unique day that will never be repeated. Now is a new moment. And, in this new moment, you have a choice. You have a choice - which thoughts you are you going to pay attention to just at this moment in time? The probability is that they are random thoughts – whatever nonsense has just popped into your head. And, as psychology proves, those random thoughts are more likely to be negative than positive.

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

How to Make the Best Life Choices

Everyone is at a crossroads each moment of each day – it’s just that we never stop to reflect on the fact that each minute decision we make can have life-changing consequences. A client recently recounted a story from his youth. He told me about he used to hang out with his best friend – and his best friend’s girlfriend. One Sunday afte oon, rather than doing his usual thing of going to the rugby club for a few pints, he decided he’d call to the girl’s house for a chat. The rest is history – they were married twenty years just a few days ago. As he said to me “If I hadn

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

Living the Dream

One of my clients, a well-known solicitor, recently introduced me to her partners by saying “Willie is living the dream!” She was referring to my living in high the French Alps, where myself and my wife moved five years ago with our three children – a better quality of life, skiing in winter, boating in summer, food, wine, the list is endless. But “living the dream” has nothing to do with location, it’s simply a state of mind. It’s the clear state of mind in which you find yourself every so often – when you’re “all there”, when so much gets done with such little effo

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

Driven to Distraction

A couple of months back, the New York Times ran a series of articles with the above title – all about the manner in which road accidents are almost invariably the result of a loss of focus or, in plain English, not paying attention. Again, I notice that Loughborough University in the UK has recently published research that indicates the extent to which we are distracted from what we are supposed to be doing by the modern phenomena of texts and emails. The research indicates that the vast majority of emails are replied to immediately – often within six seconds.

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

Living Dangerously

Are you living dangerously? If you're "normal" and research indicates that at least 96% of us are, then, in fact, you're not really living at all - you're simply existing. What passes for your life is in fact an ongoing automatic treadmill of habitual, reactive self-fulfilling prophecies. You see, years of psychological research proves that normal people devote only around 1% of their mental capacity to living in and experiencing the only time and place you can be - here and now.

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

How to Get All the Money You Need

Read the title of this article carefully – it doesn’t say “all the money you want” – just what you need. The defining line between needs and wants is a little more blurred than you might think because, when I use the word “need” it is used in the context of having everything that you need to live your idea of a perfect life. But this concept, in itself, is also open to misinterpretation because of normal definitions of success – which are generally competitive and comparative.

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

Personal Development: It’s the Thought that Counts

Our lives are the product of what we ourselves do to create them. Although, ultimately, we cannot fully control our lives, we can, in the right frame of mind, exert a huge influence on our success and happiness. Unfortunately, however, the normal person exerts little or no influence at all over the course of their lives because they have no concept of their own ability to grasp full control of the one and only thing that all us can control – our own state of mind. Indeed, I suspect that it has never even occurred to the majority of people that they can control their own state of mind.

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

More Strategies for Effortless Business Success

You may have already my article "Strategies for Effortless Business Success" - with the emphasis on the word effortless. In this follow up article, I want to explore what I mean by success - because most "normal" people really haven't got the first clue what the word actually means in the context of their everyday lives.

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

Taking Courageous Decisions

We’re in our eighth great year living in the French Alps. When we upped and left Ireland in 2002, many friends and clients remarked that we were taking a courageous decision – after all, our children were thirteen, eleven and eight years old at the time and were establishing their own little lives. Similarly, I walked away from a big job in banking in 1996 to set up my practice as a consultant and mentor – what I’m still doing today. Once again, at the time, many people told me that I was brave and courageous to do that.

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

Learning How to Control Yourself

Normal people are out of control. This is not an observation, a theory or an opinion. This is a statement of scientific fact. Decades of research, all the way back to 1936, prove conclusively that the normal person is not in control of themselves, rather they are controlled by their subconscious mind. And, because all this happens automatically, there is, in fact, no real control at all being exerted in the ordinary behaviour of everyday life. Reflect on this for a few moments.

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

Time Management: Focus on Only What is Important

Do you have enough time to do all the things that you really should be doing today? Or, like most people, do you find yourself labouring under a mountain of “to dos”, never getting through it and then find that you simply haven’t done some of the things that you really wanted to or should have done? Are you a slave to others’ demands at work? Are you trying to juggle job and family responsibilities and finding that you’re getting neither done properly? Are you one of these people who has to take home work at the weekend to “catch up”?

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

Irritated? Annoyed? Stressed? Don't Scratch That Itch! Meditate

I constantly tell my clients that meditation is like your life in miniature - in other words, everything you encounter during meditation mirrors your daily life. So, for example, during meditation, your conscious mind will distract you - with an average of 50,000 random thoughts whizzing through it, it's bound to!

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

How to Meditate to Change Your Life

I've been working with clients for over fourteen years - helping them understand how they can grasp control of their mental energy, their inner power. But intellectual understanding is one thing. Actually experiencing your inner power is quite something else altogether - and something that will make a complete difference to your life - if you know how to put it into everyday practice. To that end, I've been teaching my clients "mental exercises" for all those years.

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

What Goes Around Comes Around

We all have some sense that we reap what we sow – or what goes around comes around – but quantum physics actually scientifically proves that karma is a powerful force in our lives. As quantum physics might put it, energy in : energy out.

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

Are You One of the Normal Crazy People?

Join all the dots plotted by over seventy years of psychological research and you’ll immediately come to the blindingly obvious conclusion that normal people are crazy. You probably don’t even have to look far for concrete evidence of this psychological fact. Normal crazy people are all around us! You’re probably one yourself!!

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

The Waste of Worry

Have you ever woken in the midst of a beautiful night’s sleep and just been drifting off again when some inane silly little thought flits across your mind? And another linked thought comes to join in and soon you find yourself off on a train of thought that takes you to all the places that you really don’t want to go. So many people, myself included, talk of the ridiculous and outrageous thoughts that don’t only keep you awake at four o’clock in the morning – they scare the living daylights out of you.

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

Inspirational Leadership

It only takes one person to believe. That statement is littered across so many texts, over so many centuries - from spiritual literature, to the chronicles of the great explorers and inventors, to the field of professional sport.

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

You Simply Need to Turn Yourself On!

The average person goes through their adult life in a daze. Research indicates that they are incapable of devoting any appreciable level of attention to anything. It suggests that they only experience what they expect to experience and that the routine tasks of everyday life are done completely mindlessly. If that weren't enough research also indicates that the average person gets what they expect out of life - and that their expectations are very low, given that they are predisposed to being negative. Wow - what an awful, but accurate, picture of the average life.

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

Will This Be Your Happy New Year?

Another “New” year is upon us – but what has changed? Research (in the Universities of Chicago, Milan, Harvard – the list is quite long!) tells us that, in general, normal people lead repetitive lives where little ever changes. Sure, you might have made an important career change, met the love of your life (for now!), launched a new business, or captained your club on their way to winning the cup in the year just ended. But, so what! Little, under the skin (personal or corporate) ever really changes. How many New Year resolutions were a repeat of a previous year’s? Does t

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

The Fine Art of Effective Communication

On many of my workshops, I quote a piece of well known research into the effectiveness and impact of communication. The effect on those with whom we communicate is dictated by body language, tone of voice and our words. Body language accounts for an enormous 56% of the overall effect, tone of voice accounts for another 36% and the actual words we use only account for 8%. I also discuss acclaimed communicators, like Jack Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Barak Obama and, unfortunately, Adolf Hitler.

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

Meditation Doesn't Do It For Me!

Many people have said this to me - what exactly they're expecting it to do for them, however, is the rock that they think they're perishing on. Re-read that sentence - it's a loaded one. Our own thoughts and expectations can present a barrier to what we do in life. We know this already from everyday experience. Our inner barriers are well documented throughout the history of psychology. We trip ourselves up with our own useless thoughts. And, all too often, we bring our useless thoughts on meditation to our meditation.

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

Why is it so Important to Live in the Now

I was recently asked why authors such as Ekhart Tolle, Deepak Chopra and Tony deMello (and myself for that matter) place so much emphasis on the present moment. My reader also asked me to explain why living in the past or future can be so detrimental - and that's where this article starts! Very often, we look back on our past - fondly, with regret, sometimes with longing. There's no harm in that - after all, it is our life experience to date that makes us who we think we are.

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

Are You Simply Too Lazy to Live Your Dream?

As a once senior banker, I know all about inertia. Studies from various parts of the world show that the majority of bank customers are unhappy with the levels of service they receive. In addition, many bank customers are aware that, at various times in their “relationship” with their bank, they have been inappropriately treated or overcharged. However, when it comes to current or checking accounts, the rate of customer movement between banks is tiny in comparison to the amount of customer dissatisfaction – they’re simply not dissatisfied enough to bother to make the change and, as

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

Stop Reading Self-Help Books!

I am forever being contacted by clients recommending a variety of self-help books. And, yet, a client recently mentioned to me that he had been on a workshop where another participant told him to "Stop reading the books - and start living it!" The truth is, that you will only find true wisdom within. You will only find your true potential within.

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

Start Your Day on the Right Foot

How did you start your day today? When you leaped – or dragged yourself – out of bed, were you ready and alert for all the wonderful opportunities that today will offer, or did you slouch, on automatic pilot, to the bathroom in the normal early morning daze. If, of course, you were awoken by an alarm clock, then your day started off on the wrong foot right from the word go, because your subconscious mind wasn’t ready to wake up. Bearing in mind that your subconscious mind runs your daily life, an unprepared subconscious means you’re completely unprepared for the day ahead – like a

Primary topic: Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

Treble Your Income? Why Not Get Your Priorities Right?!

From time to time I take a look at what "competitor" websites are offering in the so-called personal development or self-help sector. After all, we all need to know what we're up against - and we all need to put bread on the table. But how much bread should that be? Because, what I've found is that many websites promise that you'll treble your income in weeks - or that your income will "explode". Most of the websites I look at are focused on money - and making more of it.

Primary topic: Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

Kissing Your Stress Goodbye

I've often quoted the World Health Organization's contention that stress will kill more people in the developed world in the 21st century than anything else. And, as far as I can see, they've got it spot on - it appears, from surveys, research and my own work, that the modern workplace is not a pleasant place, that the well-wo statistic that most over two-thirds of people don't like what they do to earn money, is actually grinding people down.

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

Experience Will Transform Your Life

Having just completed another 'Client-Only' Advanced Workshop, I continue to get the impression that there is a gap between intellectually grasping and understanding the very simple and scientifically proven concepts on which my workshops, books and websites are based, on the one hand and actually putting the simple and practical actions into place, on the other. And that gap between understanding and doing is down to experience.

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

Self-Help and Self-Defence

Be careful what you wish for ‘cos you might just get it... so says the old expression. Of course, wishing, hoping or wanting won’t get you very far in life because, at the end of the day, we get what we believe – not what we wish for – and believing is not wishing, hoping or wanting, believing is seeing, feeling, hearing, smelling and tasting what you want as if you have it already.

Primary topic: Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

Change Your Life : It’s About the Choices You Make Today

Perhaps you’re stressed out – or you’ve had enough of your awful boss. Maybe you’re overweight and simply haven’t had the staying power to shed those pounds. Maybe you’re lonely – looking for friendship or a relationship but you freeze every time you’re in company. Perhaps you almost collapse every time you have to stand up in front of an audience to make a presentation – or are getting more and more frustrated by the way you shout at your children when you know that you don’t mean to.

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

Positive Mental Attitude – Exploding the Myth

What’s the difference between positive thinking and positive mental attitude? Because, as far as I can figure out, positive mental attitude is just a fancier name for a way of thinking that is becoming increasingly discredited. Your attitude is created by your subconscious mind – the part that stores your belief systems – your beliefs about how the world works and your place in it.

Primary topic: Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

How to Live Life to the Full

Ever wonder what you’re doing here – what life is all about? Ever wonder why life’s ups and downs toss you around like a piece of driftwood – why life seems to go swingingly for some people but not for you? Ever wonder will there be an end to stress and worry – whether, some day, you’ll be able to sit back, smell the roses and say to yourself “I have it all”? These questions, which bother us all in some shape or form, are simply answered if you understand that life is lived in moments, just as the universe exists in moments, and that it is in these moments of time and space

Primary topic: Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

How to Motivate Yourself

For the last thirteen years, in each two-day workshop, I've asked my clients if they love themselves, if they think they're perfect. No-one answers "Yes". It's damn difficult to motivate yourself if there are things about yourself that you don't like. And, indeed, chances are that there are things that you don't like about yourself that you've been meaning to change but never do. After all, research shows that most people have similar New Year's Resolutions from one year to the next!

Primary topic: Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

Seen Jumping from a Moving Car…

We live where others holiday (it was recently suggested to me that I’m simply say this to annoy people – but it’s relevant to what follows!) – on skis in winter, with bikes and boots in summer. And the only people who are stressed or fighting around here… are the holidaymakers!

Primary topic: Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

Are You a Leader - Or Are You a Loser?

I was recently asked the difference between a "Leader" and a "Manager or CEO". A very important question at a time when those with real leadership qualities will outshine the "normal" people who've risen to a position for which, in reality, they are ill-equipped. Which leads me to the title of this article. I prefer to be a little more upfront and call a spade a spade. Because, if you're not a "leader", regardless of what position you hold in your work or in life, you're missing out on the unlimited possibilities that life has on offer for you.

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

Self-Help: Getting Your Priorities Right

No doubt you have heard the old saying that no one, on their deathbed, would ever say that they wished that they'd spend more time in the office! Well, given the mass hysteria that is the fear and panic that has been gripping world economies over the last few months, some don't even have the option of spending more time in that office anymore! I don't say that lightly, it's just a fact of the times in which we live - but a fact created by collective state of mind. For those of us who live in these times, there is an extraordinary onus on us to stay (or become) calm.

Primary topic: Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

Playing with Other People’s Lives

First of all, we all know what the title means – children’s lives toyed with by teachers, children bullied in the schoolyard and employees bullied in the workplace. We’re all aware of domestic violence, psychological violence in the home and the workplace and the manner in which Governments play with people’s lives probably demands a whole article – or book – of its own.

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

How to Build Self Confidence

In conversation with a jou alist a few days back, I was asked what tricks I knew that would help build self confidence – he said that he had been discussing this with a number of other people, in preparation for an article he was writing on the subject.

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

A Clear and Present Mind - Meditation and Flow

Most people lead normal lives. Those lives are, generally speaking, repetitive - where anything spectacular rarely happens. Of course, the normal life is punctuated by the spectacular - falling in love, marriage, the birth of a child, the odd special holiday. But, generally speaking, normal lives plod along. Research tells us that at least 96% of us are normal and that normal people are rarely really engaged in or attentive to what they are doing in the here and now - research estimates that the normal person is only 1% engaged.

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

How We Label People Hurts Them and Us

I have long been of the view that “normal” behaviour is bizarre. After all, the Universities of Chicago and Milan calculate that so-called “normal” people use just 1% of their mental capacity to do what they’re doing in the here and now. The rest of their mental energy is wasted on looking forward, worrying but, most destructively of all, looking backwards – because that is where the subconscious mind lives. And this subconscious, focused in our formative years, automatically creates our daily reactions – and our daily behaviours. Just by way of example, I recently mentione

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

Want Nothing - Prefer to Have it All

A number of years ago, a friend of mine asked me if I was happy. I replied that I was 100% happy at the time, to which she responded "Oh, that's very sad!" I went on to explain to her that one finds happiness within (where else would you expect to find it?) and that my being happy didn't mean that I didn't want to achieve more, that I didn't want more of all the good things that life has to offer. I used the word "want" but, in truth, what I meant was "prefer". You see, generally speaking, we haven't got a clue as to what we really want.

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

Life Lessons: Recognition

We all have the ability to recognize – someone we already know, a difficult situation when we see one, an opportunity that’s staring us in the face or a problem that needs our attention. However, our psychological ability to recognise is just as much a curse as it is a blessing. We take in raw data through our body’s five senses – a psychologist would term this “bottom up” data – through the process of cognition. At this point, the data, of itself is meaningless – we need to interpret it. This is done by adding our “stored knowledge” or “top down information” to the

Primary topic: Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

Has a Self Help “Guru” Ripped You Off?

We have recently witnessed the furore over the deaths of three people in a “sweat lodge” in Arizona during a “Spiritual Warrior” retreat run by self-help guru James Ray who has now been charged with three counts of manslaughter as a result. Allegations from participants in the retreat include that people who were complaining of feeling faint or dizzy or who were clearly feeling the effects of dehydration were forced to stay in the sweat lodge, whilst others claim that a thirty six hour enforced fast also played its part in the tragedy.

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

Self-Esteem and Your Inner Voices

In chatting recently to a client who was on the brink of making a major upward career move, I was told that, whilst he was totally relaxed in almost a carefree way about everything that seemed to be just effortlessly happening around him, in his odd quiet moment he still heard a little voice inside him whisper “No you can’t!” We all have voices in our head, some that egg us on, some that put us down, some that put us under such pressure that we are paralysed when it comes to our moment to perform.

Primary topic: Personal Development
Personal Development
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By Willie HortonRecently published1 topic

Get Over Your Faults and Failings

We all have our faults and failings. That is a statement of ordinary, honest fact. However, the vast majority of us mistake our inappropriate behaviour for some inherent character flaw that leads everyone to whom I have ever posed the questio "Are you 100% happy with yourself?" to immediately and forcefully answer "No!" All my clients tell me that they have "inadequacies", things they'd like to change about themselves. But when we dig deeper, two things become apparent.

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