Take a few moments to answer the following questions by reflecting on your current lifestyle and circumstance

• Are you successful financially or do you have credit card debt and are living from paycheck to paycheck?
• How do you rate your love life? What about your sex life? Is it fulfilling?
• What about your social life, are you the life of the party or the outsider trying to sneak in?
• How much do you like your body shape? Is it satisfying when you look in the mirror or are you feeling a little ashamed of the extra pounds you have put on over the past weeks, months, or years?
• Do you have a really exciting life? Do you often jump out of bed and can’t wait to start a new day?

Success or Failure is Usually a Pattern in One’s Life

I love writing about personal development mainly for two reason. First it allows me to reflect on myself. Secondly it forces me to constantly work on growing, improving and developing myself, otherwise I would have nothing new to write about.

Each time I meet a person who’s very successful in one area of his (or her) life, I keep noticing a reoccurring pattern. Usually he is successful in several other areas of his life. Here is a related article about how to become great and successful in any field.

Similarly, each time I meet a person who’s a failure in one area of his life, generally that failure seems to be a pattern throughout other areas of his life. Now I must clarify, by failure I’m talking about a reoccurring failure over at least months and years where there isn’t any progress, instead a lot of disappointment and even setbacks. I’m a big believer of trying and failing until one succeeds however this isn’t the kind of failure I’m talking about in this article. A good example of what I mean by failure is someone who’s constantly getting a new job for 6 months and then quitting it and repeating this for 3-4 years instead of maybe thinking he needs to switch his career choice in the first place. Another good example is someone who’s trying to lose weight who has been trying one diet after the other for 2-3 years now, losing the pounds and putting them back on, instead of starting to question if diets work in the first place. I can certainly relate to this last example which is why I started my Project Weight Loss where I’m working on implementing healthy eating and exercising habits for a lifetime and losing the weight slowly instead of just following a fad diet.

7 Common Roadblocks to Success

1. Caring What Everyone Thinks of You and Your Actions
2. Always Looking for a Shortcut Instead of Putting in the Hard Work
3. Giving Up Too Quickly
4. Living a Crappy Life
5. Always Choosing Instant Gratification Over the Long Term Payoff
6. Letting Fear Take Over Your Life
7. Surrounding Yourself with the Wrong Crowd

Desire without attachment to outcome might sound like a paradox at first. How can you desire or want something and yet not care about whether you get it or not?

While desire without attachment is an old personal development concept, I myself haven’t came across any great explanations of it, and therefore it took me a while to understand it.

What are some of your future goals? Maybe it’s to increase your income, get in shape, lose weight, improve your social skills, or find that special love of your life. These are all worthy goals. Having goals is essential for personal development and growth.

Without goals your life situation will become boring, dull, and predictable. Basically your life situation is your current circumstances and lifestyle. It’s important to differentiate between your life situation and your aliveness. As I mentioned your life situation are your current circumstances and situations in life.

Your aliveness on the other hand is separate from your life situation. Your aliveness is your present moment, it’s here and now regardless of your past or your future. The quality of your aliveness is completely up to you.

Have you ever met a disabled or handicapped person and thought how difficult it must be? well you were focused on their life situation, their circumstances. Maybe when you started talking to them, and getting to know them better, you realized that they were happier than most people. How come? Because they are conscious of their aliveness. They realize that while they can try improve their life situation (by taking physical therapy or getting an operation), they wont let their life situation dictate their current state of aliveness and happiness.

The difference between your life situation and your aliveness is essential to understanding the concept of desire without attachment to outcome. Ofter we associate our aliveness with our life situation thinking that losing weight or making more money will make us happy.

Losing weight or making more money might improve the quality of your life however it will not make you happy. If you have bad financial habits, and say you win 10 million dollars tomorrow, you will eventually end up wasting all that away the same way you waste your current income. It might take you a little longer, just like how most lottery winners end up accumulating lots and lots of debt several years after their winning date. This is also why lots of Hollywood celebrities and famous music artists end up abusing drugs and going into rehab after becoming very successful. Basically with all the money they just made, they can now afford to really indulge in their addictions and destructive habits, to the point where they end up having to get professional help.

So as you can see money might increase the quality of your life, but it certainly will not solve all your problems. Does that mean that you shouldn’t desire riches and wealth? of course not. You certainly should. With lots of money you get a lot of freedom, you can travel the world, eat the best foods, live in luxurious houses, and even do a lot of good for the community. However while having that desire you must realize, that making more money does not equal happiness. This is a great example of desire without attachment to outcome. You desire the money, and work hard to get it, yet you are conscious that it’s not your salvation, and therefore you chose to be alive and enjoy your current life situation. This is why your aliveness and your life situation are separate.

You can work on improving your future life situation, however you can improve your aliveness right now. Your aliveness is your current state of happiness. There is no reason for you not to be happy in the current moment no matter what your life situation is. Happiness is a choice. Once you are monitoring your aliveness and are happy, you will realize that yes you can desire future goals, however you will not beat yourself up about your progress or the outcome (which you can’t control anyway) since you are already happy in the present moment.

Once you desire a goal without attachment to outcome you suddenly become free of fears and self defeating habits. You will not feel guilty about your slow progress and beat yourself up about it. Instead you will do your best, and let the progress and result take care of themselves, because in the present moment you are already happy and complete. Fear will no longer slow you down, fear no longer can hold you back since you have no attachment to the outcome.

As I’ve been working on improving my social skills, I tended to let fear hold me back. Basically I was sometimes scared of talking to strangers and not receiving a good response, basically fear of rejection. What’s behind that fear? well I made the mistake of associating reaching my goals (having great social skills) with happiness. And therefore whenever I would experience rejection, I would feel that my social skills stink, and start feeling bad. This of course has slowed down my progress in improving my social skills. Now that I’m conscious of my aliveness, and already feel happy the way I am, I rarely ever hesitate to approach strangers, because I’m no longer attached to the outcome.

Your state of aliveness depends heavily on you accepting everything the way it is. This doesn’t mean that you wont work on improving your life situation, however there is no reason for you not to feel complete and happy right now. Once you accept everything the way it is, then you can desire without being attached to the outcome and really start transforming your life situation.

If you can’t accept your current life situation and are always looking to the future for happiness you will never be happy. Because no matter how many goals you achieve you’ll always want more, they’ll always be a next level and you will never stop to enjoy the present moment.

The practical application of desire without attachment is to set performance goals not outcome related goals. For example if you want to lose weight, decide on how often you will exercise (performance goal), instead of your actual weight loss. You can of course have a goal weight, however concentrate on your performance not the outcome. While trying to lose weight be conscious of the present moment and be greatfull for your current life situation. Enjoy life for what it is, and don’t try to delay your happiness until you reach your goal.

image source:dbking

Surrounding yourself with the success models will automatically steer your life and your efforts toward success. A success model is someone who either has achieved a goal you are working towards or can guide you in the path towards achieving it. On the other hand surrounding yourself with the wrong crowd will make it much harder for you to succeed. Whenever you spend a lot of time around a person, you naturally become more like them whether they are a good or a bad influence. Here are tips on how to surround yourself with success models.

1. Get a clear idea of your goals and personal values

   Without having clear specific goals, and personal values there is no way to tell if you are surrounding yourself with success models or failure models. There is a difference between a goal and a personal value. A goal is a futuristic want you are working towards achieving. A good example of a goal is wanting to lose weight. A personal value, is a preference, a trait or characteristic you like that you can start implementing right away. Some of my persona values are positivity, optimism, randomness, humor and open-mindedness. Once you have goals and personal values you can start evaluating whether a friend is a success model or not.

2. Spend less time with the wrong crowd

   You will start realizing that some of your close friends or maybe even relatives aren’t a really good influence on you. Maybe they don’t believe that achieving your goals is possible and tend to always put you down when you bring them up. Or maybe their personal values don’t align with yours. Whatever the case is, just try to spend less time with them. Also when spending time with them, make sure you are steering the direction of the conversation. For example if they bring up a negative subject, just switch the conversation by starting to talk about something positive. Get them talking about things they like or love so that you can experience their positive side.

3. Build your social skills
   In order to have more choice in the quality of friends and relationships you create you must have good social skills. When I was younger I had bad social skills, and was great full for any friends I made whether they were good or bad. As I started working on my social skills I started having a lot more choice in the friendships I make. A quick tip to improve your social skills is to simply introduce yourself to strangers when you’re out. I usually just say “Hey, I’m Andrew, Whats your name?”. It’s a natural reaction for a stranger to introduce him/her self back. Just carry on the conversation from there. You might be really nervous trying this out at first, but just do it at least 10 times, and it will start becoming easier. I will be discussing social skills in future posts, however this tip I gave you will help you get started.
4. Get involved in workshops and social groups related to your goals

   If you want to lose weight, you should join weight loss support groups or go to group fitness classes at your gym. This will help you come into contact with others who are working towards your goal of losing weight or staying fit. It will certainly also increase your chances of making friends with similar goals. As you spend more time with those new friends you will automatically move closer and closer towards your weight loss goal. For example if you were to go out to eat with one of those new friends they will tend to order healthier foods. This will encourage you to also order healthy foods or menu choices also. I just used weight loss as an example goal, however this strategy works with any other goal.

5. Offer value to your success models

   Once you have made friends who are success models make sure you are offering them value. Don’t just become a vacuum that only sucks value from them. Otherwise you will notice the relationships will deteriorate and they will be trying to avoid you. You just need to ask what is valuable to my new friend? Maybe there is a skill they are trying to learn that you can teach them or help them in learning. Maybe you can introduce them to other cool people. Maybe you can invite them to fun events and parties that you go to.