I want to give you a quote by a great lady in history, Eleanor Roosevelt who said:

“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience by which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.” Eleanor Roosevelt

Basically what Eleanor Roosevelt is saying here is that the more we face our fears the less our fears will seem like a fear, they will eventually just become little challenges in our lives.

Think back to the first time you went to school, how terrifying was that? for some it may have been a great experience, but for most kids it’s a kind a terrifying situation.  However once we got used to it, it became a good experience, on the whole, apart from the ups and downs that school life brings us.  So the more we face our fears the less fearful it becomes.

Installing fear into our identity

What a lot of us do is install a fear into our identity, therefore making it a lot harder to get rid of the fear.  For example I asked an acquaintance a few weeks ago if he was going abroad this year for his holidays.  He advised he was afraid of flying so wasn’t going abroad. His wife then said, ‘we’ve never been on holiday for years because of Bob’s’ (We’ll call him Bob for now) ‘fear of flying’.  Bob then began to tell me stories about all the events he had missed because of his fear: his friends wedding, a free holiday to his mothers villa in Italy, a weekend away to Barcelona he had won on the radio.  Fear of flying had become part of Bob’s identity, he had installed it into his psychology and others identified it as part of his identity as well, like his wife and his friends.

If we make a fear a part of our identity it will be harder to overcome the fear and the longer we hold onto it the harder it becomes to let go of the fear.

I asked Bob what had made him afraid of flying and he replied it was because of a particularly turbulent  flight he had been on about 10 years ago and he said he would never get back on a plane again.  I then asked if he had ever been in a car accident and he advised he had been in two, one quite bad and the other a minor accident.  I asked if he still drove his car, and he advised he did and it suddenly dawned on him what I was getting at.  He then began to explain why it was different.  I wasn’t trying to be a smart arse or anything life that I just wanted to point out the flawed thinking, when he thought about his fear.  The truth is, that Bob has chosen to be afraid of flying.

Fear is a choice

This might sound a bit controversial, but any type of fear is a choice we have.  Yes we may have a physical reaction to snakes, if we are afraid of them, but there is a choice to stay afraid of them.  If we faced up to our fear on numerous occasions we would realise there is not much to be frightened of with most of our fears, so when you say you are afraid of something you are really saying I have not faced up to my fears yet.

The rule of 3

When you think about something you fear  and it could be a phobia, an event, a situation you are dreading ask yourself three questions:

What is the worst that can happen?

What is the best that can happen?

What is the middle ground of the two?

Have you overcome a fear?

Have you ever overcome a fear in your life, if so it would be gerat to hear about it and how you overcame it.

I first discovered it over 12 years  when I signed up for the manual and have been receiving emails from Gary Craig ever since.  It is one of the tools which has helped me in my life and I think you will love it if you start using it as well.

I am not affiliated in any way with the company.  You can download the manual at www.emofree.com and the other ebook I mentioned in the video can be downloaded here Attracting Abundance with EFT

The video is by no means a comprehensive look at EFT it is a very brief introduction and to really get you thinking about it and trying it out for yourself.

If you have any stories about using EFT to help in your life I would love to hear about them in the comments below.

http://www.stevenaitchison.co.uk/blog/2008/06/02/guided-meditations/

Well of The Wyrd – Guided Meditation

Download audio file (Well0fTheWyrd.mp3)

Put on a pair of headphones find a quiet place and listen for 8 minutes, or if you want to listen to more of the music and drift off to sleep on it I have let the full music track play for 23 minutes.

The music is a beautiful piano piece from the composer Chris Mullett and the script is from Susan Granquist.  The Well of the Wyrd is a place where you can ask any question and receive the answer from.  You will walk, alone in a forest, but feel safe and secure as those you love and have loved will be beside you.  On the journey you will meet a woman who will take your question and answer it for you in the form of gift.

I hope you enjoy this, I have listened to it several times and by the end I have felt relaxed and calm, and that’s even listening to my own voice, which I hate doing (You know when you listen to yourself on a video or something and say, is that really me, I sound weird, that’s how I felt when listening back to this).

What is split testing?

Putting it simply, imagine you have a page where you are selling a product you are promoting.  You promote using adwords and social media.  Okay, so have the sales page and there is traffic coming to it, you are using this as the base sales page to measure against.  You then make another sales page which is exactly the same except this time you change the headline on that sales page.  You then drive traffic to the two sales pages and find out which one performs better i.e. which brings in the most sales or the most signups to your newsletter.  You then take the best performing sales page and use that as your base sales page.  You then make another sales page and make it exactly the same except you change a graphic and then find out which ones performs better.  You keep doing this until you have optimised your sales page.  Yes it takes time but you will see your sales gradually going up over time.

How you can apply this principle to your life

This is a very powerful way to change your life for the better and sometimes you can often see results within a few days.  The truth is if you keep doing what you’ve always been doing you will always get the same results.  So if you are getting crappy results from something in your life it’s time to change something that you’re doing in that particular area.

This might not make much sense to a lot of people so I will give you an example from my own split testing.

Example 1:

Rich Schefren has found a statistic that states that a lot of people spend more time on their emails than they do with their kids.  This is a quite sad, but in people’s quest to become independent and start their own business it’s very true in a lot of cases.  I know I spend a lot of time with emails, I have around 20 websites, only about 5 that I really work on and I check my emails as they come in and deal with them there and then.  The first thing I did was check how much time I spend on my emails each day, I don’t mean opening them and reading them I mean opening, reading and acting on them i.e. check out a website someone has sent me a link to.

The results for 1 week astounded me.  I spent, in 1 week, 12 hours dealing and acting on emails – 12 hours! I found that a disgusting statistic.  For that same week I spent 9 hours purely with my children, that is going out with them alone, or sitting down with them at dinner, taking them to school, sitting with them for their homework, fooling around and watching TV.  I have my laptop downstairs and work all night so my wife and children always have access to me but that’s not what I am talking about here I am talking spending time away from the computer and with my children.  Only 9 hours with my children as opposed to 12 hours on my emails.  I did spend more hours with my wife but not that much.

So, split testing this.  The next week I checked my emails midday and at 4pm.  I deleted all the emails that would not drive me forward on my online business quest or bring in more money.  I kept the personal ones and dealt with them there and then but all the other ones, if they did not drive my business forward or did not bring in more money I deleted them.  This meant deleting the next big marketing ebook promotion, deleting the cool link to a youtube video, deleting the cool website link that someone sent me, deleting the newsletters I am subscribed to and deleting the ones that promise me an extra 2 inches.

The end result:

You’ll see from the chart that I spent a lot more time with my children and I certainly was a lot happier and felt a lot better by being away from the computer.  My children, I hope, were a lot happier at spending more time with me.

Now, I have a base measurement I can work with.  The best result was spending 5 hours on email and 14 hours with my children.  I now work with this and try and find ways to spend even less time on email, this could be done by hiring a virtual assistant to screen my emails but I am not at that stage yet but you get what I mean.

Example 2:

I used to have a terrible time getting my children up for school in the morning.  I would wake them up to 7am, wake them up again at 7.05am and then start shouting at 07.10am at 07.15am we had fell out, my children might be in a bad mood, I would be pissed off and by the time everybody was ready we might be late for leaving for school at 08.10am.

This went on for months before I tried waking them up at 06.45am.  I would wake them up gently, give them a hug and ask if they wanted an extra 5 minutes, I would wait until they confirmed that they wanted an extra 5 minutes.  I would then give them 10 minutes and wake them up again.  The second time I told them that they had had an extra ten minutes and it was time to get up.  The transformation was amazing, no more shouting in the mornings, no more rushing about and we always get to school on time.  That extra 15 minutes made a huge difference to me and my children in the morning.

With split testing your life you constantly tweak until you get to a result you are happy with.  Another thing you’ll notice with split testing your life is that it’s got to be measurable, if it’s not measurable it’s going to be hard to test and change.

Other areas of your life you can split test

I have found this is a great way to self improvement and can be done on almost any area of your life. I have found that I am much more conscious about how I can improve my life and where it can be improved whereas before I might moan about certain areas of my life and how bad it was.  Now, if I am unhappy about something I try and find a way to improve it.  The more I split test the more I think about ways to improve my life and my families life.

A word of warning, I would only do a few split tests to get you into the swing of things.  Some tests might take a few weeks whilst others might take a few days or even a few hours depending on what it is.  Once you get into the swing of it you will be able to do a lot more and your self improvement will take huge leaps.

Some people do this unconsciously but I hope now that you will see that split testing can be a fantastic self improvement tool.  If you decide to try it or already do it let me know your results, it would be good to know how you get on with this self improvement tool.

See Alex’s Topic Starter to help you join in the conversation.

Basically Alex asked me if I thought the ‘Law of attraction’ is a gimmick.

First off I would like to say that I can understand why a lot of people are sceptical about the ‘Law of attraction’. I think this is because of the rather cheesy way that the film ‘The secret’ came across and the books by Esther Hicks are a bit ‘out there’. Taking away all the hype and the cheesiness of the films and books out there, the underlying principle that our thoughts literally control and lives and the energy around is something I wholeheartedly believe in and something I practice every single day of my life and something I teach my children.

I don’t think it is a gimmick, but what I do think is the way that it is being marketed just now puts a lot of people off the idea that our thoughts control the energy around us. I believe the energy around us can touch other people a few feet away or a few thousand miles away which is where ‘the attraction’ part comes in.

Alex, do you have any personal stories or any anecdotes where the ‘Law of Attraction’ has worked for you?

What are your thoughts on the subject, leave your comments or follow the conversation on Alex’s blog (RSS feed) and see the responses