Chapter 4 | The Miracle of Your Personal Development - Part 3
(Part 3 out of 3)
Other aspects of your personal development:
Physical: Don’t neglect yourself. It says in the Bible: "Treat your body like a temple", that’s an excellent advice. Your body is the only place you can live in right now... :)
Keep a nutritious diet - the body serves as a system supporting your soul.
Mostly, people don’t succeed because they constantly don’t feel good. They have the skills, they have the talent but they lack the vitality.
Remember, your vitality and essentialness are one of the keys to your success.
Pay strict attention to your appearance – as you know, there is no second chance to create a first impression.
Here's a saying from ancient scripts: "God looks inward, man looks outward" – isn’t that vital information?
Of course, some will say: "Look, people shouldn’t judge you by outer appearance".
Let me tell you a secret, they are!
Certainly once they get to know you, they’ll judge you beyond appearance.
But initially, they’ll judge by the first impression.
Here's the best advice you can get: make sure your outer appearance is a perfect reflection of your inner self.
Spiritual: I believe we are creatures with exceptional wisdom in the realm of life.
This, of course, is my belief, and I'm not asking you to "buy" it.
What I do ask is that if you do believe in this (or any other) kind of spirituality, learn it; Learn its virtues and rehearse it. Don’t neglect your values, your integrity, and your ethics - nurture them.
Regarding this spiritual aspect, I find it necessary to refer to the value of prayer:
Most people turn to prayer only as a last resort when everything else fails, or they pray meaningless words and empty phrases.
As it is, they approach prayer with their minds full of fear and doubt, and their subconsciousness abides by these feelings and passes them on...
If you pray for something but simultaneously, have concerns your prayer won’t be answered – you’re praying in vain.
Sometimes, what you prayed for comes true. If you’ve been blessed to receive what you prayed for, search back and recall what your state of mind was while praying, and you’ll surely know that the theory described here is more than just a theory.
I’ll conclude with a quote from the movie "Feast of Love" based on a novel by Charles Baxter: "God doesn’t hate us. If he did, he wouldn’t have created us so brave".
Mental: Part of the challenge in personal development is to develop mentally - to learn, to grow, to change; in fact that’s the nature of education.
Personal development isn’t a short process.
It takes time to read all the material on this site.
Not everything can be accomplished within a twenty-minute reading – invest your time in reading.
Some people hardly do any reading - their brain simply degenerates, thus making them unable to defend their beliefs.
Mental development will allow you to think by yourself. In this context, Donald Trump said:
"People who can think for themselves, rarely will be one of the herd".
As parents for example, we have to prepare our children to debate important issues in life.
We debate for instance, for a few decades now, the issue - communism vs. capitalism.
Communism – capital belongs to the state.
Capitalism - capital belongs to citizens.
Communism – the citizens are too ignorant to know what to do with capital, therefore it should be passed over to the state which knows everything.
The state should manage everything and the citizens will only have to perform the tasks - glory reserved to the state.
Capitalism – glory reserved to the citizens. The state has to serve its citizens and not vice versa.
You must control your ideology, your philosophy, and you must be able to protect them.
If you can’t defend your beliefs, if you can’t defend your values and virtues, soon you will become prey to philosophies and values that won’t serve your interests.
Prepare yourself and your children to a debate on religious issues, spiritual issues, social, political, economic and other valuable issues that’ll help you accumulate both material and moral assets.
Develop your life philosophy and be able to protect it.
Chapter Summary:
* What happens outside happens to everyone and doesn’t determine your future. The key is what you do with it, and that does determine your future.
* What you now have, you pulled toward yourself through the person you turned out to be
* If you don’t like it - do something different from what you've done so far.
* You get paid for the value you produce in an amount of time - learn to invest in yourself more than you invest in your job.
* Four important lessons in life:
1. Learn to deal with winters.
2. Learn to use spring to your advantage.
3. Learn to nurture and protect your crop during the summer.
4. Learn to harvest in autumn without complaining.
* Difficulties on your road to personal development: postponing, blaming, excuses, lack of discipline and habits that should be changed.
* Make sure your actions don't go in the opposite direction of your declaration.
* Other aspects of your personal development: physical, spiritual and mental.
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Continue to Chapter 5 | Five Skills to Success
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* Chapter 4 | The Miracle of Your Personal Development - Part 2
* Chapter 4 | The Miracle of Your Personal Development - Part 1
* Chapter 3 | Expanding Your Knowledge Base - Part 2