Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could flick a switch to change your life?  What if you could simply press a button to achieve your hopes and goals?  Well, if you look around the internet a little – not much searching required, you will find personal development websites that suggest that changing your life can be just that easy.   Naturally, there’s no such thing as a quick fix when it comes to living the dream – otherwise everybody would be doing it.  But even though there’s no magic button that you can push, even though there your life won’t change in a single mouse-click, in fact, personal development or self improvement is a little bit like tuning in an old-fashioned radio.  And like old-fashioned radios, the signal keeps coming and going, you have to keep fine-tuning.

On the other hand, the normal mind is tuned out – or, perhaps, more like completely turned off!  Psychology tells us that the normal mind is about 1% tuned into the only place and time where life is lived – the here and now.   Most of your attention – and you’re not even aware of it – is focused on the things that you learned about yourself during your childhood.  These are the reference points that your subconscious mind uses to dictate your all-too-automatic reactions that everything that you think is going on around you.  And, as I said, you’re not aware of it at all. 

But life is going on before your very eyes and, if you’re normal, you’re trying to listen to life’ s radio station but hearing nothing.  That’s because you’re not paying attention.  If you want to change your life, you’re going to have to re-learn how to pay attention to what’s really happening now – this is how you tune and transform your life.   I say “re-learn” because, when you were a child, you were expert at paying attention – perhaps not at school because maybe school didn’t turn you on – but, when you were even younger, when, say, you got a new toy, you gave it and possibly the box it came in all of your attention.  You examined it, looked at it inside out, smelled it, licked it, shook it, held it up to your ear – you used all of your senses to fully experience the new toy.   Each moment is like a new toy – to fully understand what’s going on, you’re going to have to see it, feel it, hear it, smell it and taste it as if you’d never come across anything quite like it before.  And, of course, you haven’t because every moment is a unique one-off.

Yes, changing your life is as simple as tuning in.  The one maddening thing, however, is that the radio signal keeps coming and going – you’re going to have to learn to tune yourself in again and again.  Why not start each and every day with five minutes fine-tuning?