1 Psychology 0f Personal Effectiveness All You Need To Know About How To Live Happily & Effectively Timothy W. Starkey, Ph.D., ABAP Miami Dade College Psyc CLP 1006 Hialeah Campus Room 1214 M/W/F 8:00-10:15 AM May 7- June 16 (2007) (Home) or (Cell) Hours 1:00 to 5:00 PM On Mondays & Wednesdays Chapter 6. Create A Vision

2 No one on their death bed wishes they had spent more time at the office.

3 The question is not whether we will die, but how we will live.

4 Joseph Campbell says… Follow your bliss. So often we let the outside world dominate our choices of what to do, we end up doing what we “ought” to do or “should” do, and little of what might have made us happier. No one else can tell you what you love to do. It is your responsibility in life to discover what that thing is that you experience as bliss, and then to seek it out.

5 Getting Clarity Pretend you’re having your 100th birthday party and you’re surrounded by family, friends, and newspaper reporters. One of the reporters asks you to name the 5 or 6 things in your life that you’re now most proud of, the things that you now see were the most important. Now take out a sheet of paper and write down what these 5 or 6 things might be, from the perspective of your 100th birthday party.

6 The Importance of Listening

7 6 Steps for Securing Your Goals Step 1 ~ The goal must be stated in positive terms and in a way that you can achieve it yourself regardless of the behavior of others. Step 2 ~ Make certain you know how you will know when you have reached your goal. Step 3 ~ Describe your goals as specifically as you can. Step 4 ~ Are your goals compatible with each other? Step 5 ~ Assess what you already have and what you are going to need in order to reach your goals. Step 6 ~ Make a plan (and then BEGIN your plan and revise it along the way as necessary)

8 Visualization Mental imagery is perhaps the most basic way that your mind represents and stores information. For most people, our earliest memories from childhood tend to be fragmented images rather than conversations or events. Imagery is the primary medium by which your unconscious mind operates. Freud developed the concept of the unconscious mind to describe the part of the mind that contains aspects of our functioning that we’re totally unaware of. Freud believed that the mind was like an iceberg which is mostly (90%) hidden from consciousness. But beneath the surface of consciousness is the much larger unconscious region containing thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories that are not accessible to our conscious mind, but which greatly influence our feelings, choices, and everyday behaviors nonetheless.

9 The Process of Visualization We use representational systems to encode information in our brain. There are 5 primary representational systems relating to each of our senses: auditory, visual, kinesthetic, gustatory, and olfactory 1. Begin by mastering voluntary relaxation skills; this is a crucial part of using visualization to master stress.When you relax completely prior to your visualization exercise, you are creating on “a blank sheet of paper” (you mind isn’t filled with negative thoughts and imagery). 2. Garbage in, garbage out ~ Positive images are the equivalent of health food and negative images are like feeding yourself junk food. 3. Visualization is more than just images ~ You don’t have to be able to imagine a clear, crisp hi-res image of something to use visualization. It is sufficient to have a “sense” of what it would be like if your imagined future or outcome were occurring.

10 End of Chapter 6