Personal development is now a multi-million dollar industry.  Self-help and popular psychology books are one of the fastest growth areas in reading.   Life coaches and self-proclaimed gurus promise that you can “be all that you can be”, “reach your unlimited potential” and “unlock your inner power”.   And many websites offer you online success and self-fulfilment as if you were buying the latest movie or music CD.

So, how come the world is not a perfect place?   How come there are so many unhappy people?  How come suicide is on the increase in every country in the developed world?   How come the World Health Organisation believes stress will be a huge killer in the 21st century?
No-one can promise you happiness or success.   No-one can guarantee that you’ll unleash your unlimited potential.  No-one can claim to have the answer for you.  

All anyone can do is point the way – you have to walk it yourself.   Gurdy.net can open the door for you – but you’ve got to walk through it.   Gurdy.net provides you with the perfect recipe for happiness and success – but you’re going to have to bake the cake.
What is the perfect recipe?   What are the key ingredients?

Mental Calm.   The normal person has up to 50,000 random thoughts each day – noise that hassles you.    Learn how to turn off that noise and turn yourself on.    There are many approaches you can take – listening to music, setting time aside to do nothing, special mental exercises, meditation.   You need to look at the list of ingredients on offer and decide which ones work best for you.

Presence of Mind.   You need to learn how to be present – in the here and now – not pestered by distractions or self-defeating thoughts or worries.    By learning how to experience the moment using your five senses – seeing, feeling, hearing, smelling and tasting the reality of the present moment, you develop your own presence.   The likes of Eckhart Tolle is a powerful believer in “The Power of Now” – the present moment is like a portal through which you can find peace and happiness.

Real Acting.   Normal people react – happy and successful people take real action – they act.   And, most reacting gets you nowhere, reactions are generally negative and make matters worse.  You can learn how to stop reacting to people, situations, stress or even the day of the week (who likes Mondays?) by breaking the cycle of everyday habitual behaviour.   There are lots of ways you can do this – you need to find which ones are right for you, which ones turn you on.

Belief.   I’m told (often by my clients!) that lots of people suffer from “low self-esteem”.   Now, how helpful is that point of view.  You need to believe in yourself, in your own abilities and, in particular, your ability to have the kind of life that would really turn you on.   Exceptionally successful people understand that believing is not wishing, hoping, wanting or planning.   Believing is seeing, feeling, hearing, smelling and tasting what you want – before you even have it.   Again, there are a number of ways you can practice the art of believing – you need to experiment and find which ones turn you on.

Perseverance.    The average length of new gym memberships in Ireland and UK is six weeks!  And most new members only go to the gym once or twice.   People are lazy and lazy people easily give up.   Calvin Coolidge said that the only thing that will bring about success is perseverance.   You need to be committed to your own success and happiness – don’t you think it’s worth it.   This is key – and this is why all those books, all those workshops, all those gurus cannot promise success and happiness – you’ve got to commit yourself, no-one else can.

Effortless success and happiness is something anyone can experience – not just when you’re on holidays or having a good time, not just when it’s Friday (not Monday), not just when you’re winning, but when you’re losing too.   You can experience success and happiness most of the time – perhaps all of the time.

But getting peak experience, tuning yourself, your mind, to the level of peak performance required is like getting physically fit and then staying fit – you’ve got to work at it everyday.   I don’t mean “work” as if it were drudgery or a struggle – I mean you have to set a little time aside everyday to develop your mental and spiritual fitness.    You’ve got to work your “mental exercises” into the fabric of your ordinary everyday life.

If you do, your ordinary everyday life will become extraordinary everyday.   For the last twelve years my clients have been telling me that the benefits are immediate and can be enormous.  I know it from my own life – but that’s no use to you – you’ve got to experience it for yourself, on your terms.