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Many people believe that if they are “spiritual” or wish to succeed in life, they should ignore unpleasant things that happen to them, in effect denying that they have happened and/or have had an effect on them. But it will  have the opposite effect, hampering personal development and growth. Read more…

Many people are holding their personal development up by ignoring an important step – accepting repsosibility for their actions. Read more…

I had a conversation recently with a young man who I know has strong spiritual values. He told me he had been advised to keep his spirituality out of his work as it would put people off. The guy is not a fanatic, “shouting from the roof tops” type; rather, he is quiet, devoted to his wife and his children, and he’s not likely to try to force his views on anyone. Read more…

When was the last time that you told your partner, children, parents and other loved ones that you love them?

It’s so easy to get wrapped up in our work and neglect our personal relationships. For the self-employed, this is a real danger; we spend as much time as we can chasing and delivering work and forget the reasons why we are doing it. It’s so easy to neglect the personal; growth in the business is little satisfaction if there’s no one to share it with, if our “significant others” leave us because they feel neglected. Read more…

It’s that time of years when those people in Christian countries who believe in the Christ of the Gospels celebrate the sacrifice of his death and resurrection; the rest of the population get a long weekend!

Like most of the spiritual greats, Christ’s message was a spiritual message about unconditional love; love of God, of self, and of others. Whether you believe in him as a historical figure or as an allegory, or a mixture of both, his life was an example of service leadership and of sacrificial love. Read more…

A while back I wrote a post called 10 Things I Wish I Had Known And Stuck To From Early On. Here’s another ten things I’ve learned, occasionally quickly, more often only after repeatedly banging my head against a brick wall! Read more…

Smile at someone - do it now!

How often have you said “I wish I had done that, but I didn’t have the time?” I’ve certainly done it and wrote at length about some of the lessons I’d learned about this in the article 10 Things I Wish I Had Known And Stuck To From Early On. Here are 14 tips to help you to put an end to procrastination. Read more…

On a scale of  1 – 10 where 1 represents not intelligent and 10 is very intelligent, how do you rate your intelligence? Don’t scroll down the page until you’ve evaluated yourself, or you will spoil the fun.

In rating yourself, how did you define intelligence? Traditionally, educators have followed the example of the IQ or similar test and focused on attainment in maths and your mother tongue. Yet, this is a very narrow definition of intelligence.

How come when children enter school at age 5 they are pretty much all of them creative. yet when they go to senior school at 11 or 13, very few of them are creative? What’s happened? Why do we not include creativity in our definition of intelligence?

Look at someone like Gillian Lynne – teachers thought she was failing at school because she never appeared to be paying attention and was always fidgeting. The world was indeed fortunate that she was sent to a psychologist who recognised the signs and saw that she interpreted the world through physical motion. He suggested she be sent to stage school. These days, most psychologists would have diagnosed ADD/ADHD and put her on Ritalin! Why do we not include physical expression as a form of intelligence?

The huge irony in this is that IQ tests were never intended to test how intelligent we are in terms of degrees of intelligence. Alfred Binet, one of the co-developers of IQ tests, was commissioned by the French government to develop a test that would identify children whose intelligence was blow a minimum threshold so that they could receive remedial schooling. He rejected the idea of using his test to compare intelligence or to select individuals on the basis of their scoring well.

Lewis Terman, who revised Binet’s test and developed what is known as the “Stanford-Binet” test, had a completely different agenda. He was a major player in the eugenics movement and all that that implied!

There is an increase in interest in areas like Emotional and Spiritual Intelligence, particularly in the workplace. I suggest that we need to rethink what we mean by intelligence in school too.

But I am interested, how did you define intelligence when you were rating yourself?

Have you ever paused to consider how much your personal growth can be really stymied by guilt and forgiveness issues(or often a lack of forgiveness, to be more accurate)? Why? Because they suggest to us that beauty does not lie within us, but in others. It urges us to listen to voices outside of our own and in many cases, to give away our personal power to the owners of those voices. Going further, it even suggests that other people know more about us than we do! Read more…

Are you living life or surviving it? Are you growing, becoming the person you want to be or are you following the herd? The title of this article comes from a Garth Brooks song in which he sings “Life is not tried it is merely survived if you’re standing outside the fire.”

As well as being inspired by the lyrics of that song, this article was also partly inspired by reading this article at ecademy. In it the author writes a lot of statements beginning with “You must…”, all of which are social media “imperatives.”

Yet one of the great opportunities offered by Web 2.0 and 3.0 when it arrives is that is that it’s all about choice. You choose how you want to carve out a presence, if any!

Or to put it another way, to ” embrace it in my own way and own good time and in a way in which I feel comfortable.” Ruth Edwards Read more…