Whoa, my blog is still alive! Even after I haven’t fed it in such a long time. That’s pretty cool, it’s like a cactus I tell you.

Aaaaany how, you can pretty much ignore my last post about the RPG character, that’s quite stupid, real life is way more complicated and interesting (if you want it to be) than any RPG game you could come up with, so screw that.

I’m going to try to write here more often, so if there is anyone still out there. Whatever.

Just some quick news about myself. I’m going to be moving overseas to Bristol, England! Woot! Exciting

The reason for the move?

I just feel like  it’s time for me to experience something new to live and work overseas for a little while. Im 25 now and I’ve lived all my life in Cape Town, South Africa, barring a 2 week holiday a long time ago in Spain, Portugal and Madeira (where my mother grew up). So it feel it’s time to get a bit of World experience while I still don’t have any big responsibilities and commitments to keep me here.

Don’t get me wrong though, I’ll definitely be coming back. I love it here in Cape Town, eventually want to settle down here, but at the moment it just feels like the right move to make for both my personal and professional development.

Wish me luck!

If you don’t play video games that much, RPG stands for Role Playing Game.

RPG games work as follows. At the start of the game you choose for youself a basic character with some basic skills and abilities. Most RPG games are fantasy based, so you’d get something like an Elf, that has a greater initial speed, agility and is good with bow and arrows, a dwarf which is strong and is good with axes, humans that are sort of in between, or whatever the case may be.

You then proceed on your adventure through the game’s virtual world accepting challenges and helping people while earning money to buy your character equipment and keep him alive, and at the same time getting experience from the challenges he/she faces improving the their abilities.

These improved abilities through experience and increased money then enable you to accomplish ever more difficult and lucrative challenges.

Isn’t this the primary basis for real life personal development?

One cannot go from never exercising and being unfit to rigorously exercising everyday to accomplish the expert personal fitness straight away. We need to take it step by step. Build your skills and abilities up from the beginner level you currently are to the expert level you want to be at.

If you’ve ever played the game The Sims you’ll know what I mean.

So lets try this, pretend you are an RPG character and you start your game in Life. You have some basic starting abilities and skills, and you can follow a map of different skills you can acquire and what is required for you to achieve them and what you will be able to do once you’ve achieved them.

You may want to take examples and inspiration from The Sims as it is most resembles real life that the rest of the fantasy RPG games out there.You can give yourself rewards for reaching the next skill level in each category and penalize yourself for going down skill level. Make it fun.

I’m going to write down my RPG character and game rule, and I’d like you to try the same and share it with us.

I initially started this blog as a personal journal, which then evolved with my resolution to pursue continuous personal development and discovery and then, more specifically, how can I find fun and engaging ways to this, rather than it being a chore.

Now, if there is something I’ve learned during this process of evolving this blog and giving it an new look and feel, it’s how much of a perfectionist I can be in certain things. I’m not pathological by any means, but it can be frustrating sometimes, for myself even. I wanted something that was just right. I spent about two days looking though hundreds of themes and another half a day just tweaking the theme I liked best to be just so. No doubt the blog still doesn’t look as good as what professional designers could achieve, but I’m happy with it as it is. However…

After watching the Oprah show the other day, I found out about the website Quick and Dirty Tips. Oprah had Mignon Fogarty, aka Grammar Girl, on the show talking about grammar and Mignon’s rise to popularity in the online world as Grammar Girl.

So after the show I went to the Quick and Dirty Tips website and I couldn’t help but feel jealous for the awesome website design they have. The characters are so nicely crafted, the colors are rich, but not overwhelming, and just in general the whole feel of the website is welcoming. I just love it. I keep thinking, I want to have my own character there talking about something, I want to be apart of that, whatever that is It’s not a lifestyle website, but I get the feeling that there is a culture behind that website that is compelling and makes people want to the apart of it.

I think the same thing can be said of Oprah as well and a lot of other things in the world that come to be extremely popular. That doesn’t come easy. It takes a lot of work to build a culture and feeling like that within your business, website, or even yourself, in order to attract great people into your life.

That is something I’d like to do here as well. To develop this space into a place that you all will love and enjoy and have that feeling belonging and fulfillment. I’d like to create that culture here with you now, so please give your feedback and participate.

It all starts with a vision, I believe. To create that image in your mind, that feeling in your heart of what this place will represent and mean to you all. I’d like to share with you my vision for this space, and please feel free to comment and share your’s.

Personal Success means different things to different people, however what we all have in common is that we all want the best life for ourselves and for the people we love. We can’t all be rich and famous, else there wouldn’t be rich and famous people in the world, but we can all be successful and happy.

Everybody learns in their own way, however we all learn the same things. We are all so different and yet so fundamentally alike, so let like help like and unlike broaden our horizons.

In this space I will share with you, and hopefully you can share with us, simple and fun things you can do that will bring more success and happiness to your life. Examples of this could include:

• Creativity challenges that solve specific hypothetical problems people might have
• Fun tools that build your personal power so that success comes easily.
• Inspiring stories that provide valuable life lessons
• Your suggestions welcome…

I found out about this blog post from readsaid. Old guy thinking is a brilliant post, by Mark Hanington, about lessons “learned after 36 years of being a father, 33 years as a teacher…”
Absolute must read

I read a deep and insightful post today from Life 2.0 called Perspectives on Psychotherapy, which I recommend you all read. One quote they mentioned that struck a chord with me.

From a lecture by Wolter Keers in Gent (sent to me by Ray Sender) -

I had a meeting yesterday evening with a group of psychiatrists and psychologists. There I defended the proposition that there is only one psychic obstacle and that you can reduce all of psychology and psychotherapy, and all psychiatry to that one obstacle. That one problem is that we have forgotten that we are love.

…

Love cannot be given to anyone, you cannot get love; you can’t make water wet, because water is wetness. Neither can anyone give you love, no one can receive love from you, you can only recognize love in yourself and you can recognize love in others.

There’s more, but head on over to the original post to check out the rest.

Let me just tell you one thing first. This is easier said than done.

There is a great post at Life Clever about flipping your thoughts, but I believe before you can flip your thoughts you first need to be aware of your thoughts. You need to be able to interrupt yourself when you’re experiencing negative thoughts and feelings, and this can be tricky. You might find yourself keeping up with this for a few days, but then you get stuck into something that frustrates or annoys you, or gets you experience some sort of negative thought that you forget to interrupt and flip.

In a presentation I once saw or heard by Tony Robbins, he speaks of undertaking a 1 week trial of positive thoughts. The idea is to only think positive thoughts for one week. This doesn’t mean though that you don’t think anything bad, but as soon a negative thought pops into your head, you immediately interrupt yourself and flip your thought into something positive. And, like I said, this can be challenging, as it means you need to be constantly aware of your thoughts and feelings.

I don’t have problems flipping my thoughts, but I definitely struggle at catching myself when I am in a negative state.

The key to personal development, or any sort of life skill for that matter, is consistency and perseverance, I believe. Unfortunately I’ve been rather slacking in the consistency department lately, when it comes to this blog.
As I mentioned before, I started on my “one-sentence journal”, however that didn’t turn out as easy to keep up as I hoped, but then again I’ve never been much of a journal person. Blogging is my journal.

And to get to the point of this post, so that I don’t just go on blabbing about nothing, there is a few links I’d like to share with you all which I’ve found especially share worthy.

There wass a post from ProBlogger recently which I found especially succinct in explaining my situation on this blog at the moment. When it feels like nobody’s reading your blog

Also, If you haven’t seen the following flash videos from Possibility Virus, I highly recommend you watch them . They’re quite inspirational and highly entertaining

• The Eight Irresistible Principles of Fun
• 5.75 Questions You’ve Been Avoiding

Have fun.

I recently found out about a LifeRemix from Guy Kawasaki’s Blog. LifeRemix is “a band of bloggers who enrich people’s lives through blogging” and looks a nice resource for people, like me, who are on a journey of continuous personal development and learning.

Anyway, one of the articles aggregated on LifeRemix, and highlighted by Guy, struck me as worth mentioning, as it is something I will try myself. The author of The Happiness Project Blog, Gretchen Rubin, wrote a post about starting her daily “one-sentence journal“, saying

The idea of keeping a proper journal was far too daunting, so I decided instead to keep a “one-sentence journal.”

which I think is kinda how I feel as well. I initially started this blog to journal my experiences, thoughts and feelings on a daily basis, but found it rather difficult to write about something worthwhile telling people everyday or even once every few days. But I still want to remember these times, I don’t want to look back 10, 20 years from now and think, what was I doing? So a one or two sentences at the end of the day is really simple and doable, and since I’ve already dedicated the last 1-2 hours of my days to practicing my writing and reading, this extra thing would fit right in with my current habit.

I’m not sure I’ll post each daily “one-sentence” here on my blog, since I don’t think it of much value to you, but I might post something after a week of my combined one-sentence journal entries, if looks interesting enough and you’re interested.

In our latest VeloCITI program group discussion session we had this week we spoke about Understanding, or more specifically the principle from 7 Habits of Highly Effective People that to be understood you first need to understand. What is the correlation between this and psychological air you might ask? Or better yet what is psychological air?

Let me explain the latter first.

We all pay attention most to what we most urgently need. Let’s say, for example, the air was to be sucked out of the room you were in at the moment. Very soon you won’t be thinking of anything else but getting air, you’re not going to be listening to anything I say, your only thought would be to get air.

Now the same thing is true for feeling understood. We all have the need for people to listen to us, to understand us. Not necessarily so that they can give advice or help us, but sometimes just so that we don’t feel alone, we have someone to understands and is with us, on our side.

If you want to people to listen to you, to understand you, you first need to understand them. Give them the psychological air they need, and they will be free and open to listen to what you have to say and in turn understand you.

“The one human quality that must be developed is self discipline for success. The will power to force yourself to do what you know you should do when you should do it, whether you like it or not, whether you feel like it or not. Success is tons of discipline.” — Brian Tracy

I believe that waking up early in the morning is one of the better habits one can have, but to develop this habit, or any habit for that matter, takes self discipline.

I remember back in high school waking up everyday at 6am to get to school on time. Even on weekends and holidays when I worked at my cousin’s shop I would wake up early. I in fact found it difficult to sleep passed 6:30am, I woke up naturally at that time.
However, since leaving high school, and the part-time work I was doing at that time, to go study IT at College full-time, I started to lapse. Things were much more relaxed on College campus. The lecturers didn’t nag you to come to class, as long as you didn’t pitch up mid-way into the lecture, and after the first few lectures you got a feel for which lessons you had to attend and which ones you could skip. Especially in 1st year, there was a lot of free time padded in between classes. And so I started to slip from the discipline of waking up early I had developed in high school.

I’ve come to realize now that high school taught me discipline, but it never taught me self discipline.

The difference? Discipline is, as Brian Tracy said it best, “The will power to force yourself to do what you know you should do when you should do it, whether you like it or not, whether you feel like it or not”.
Self discipline, in my opinion, is doing this for yourself rather than in general. This means loving and valuing yourself as much as you value others.

This is a huge deal for me, as I’ve always put other’s needs before my own, which deeper down means I didn’t value myself as much as other people. This is where my self discipline is lacking.
I have discipline to do what needs to be done, regardless of whether I like to or not, when I comes to things that need to be done for other people, but I often lack the self discipline to do for myself what needs to be done regardless of what I want.