The Top Eight Things I've Learn this Week

1. Begin great enterprise by building confidence and self-esteem.
2. Feelings are not facts.
3. Dare to be average; dare to have average goals; dare to aim for normality, competence, the everyday achievements, and the good over the great.
4. Greatness is not in doing a perfect job, but in always being the best person you can be.
5. You feel the way you think; automatic thinking arises from signifying, opinionating, judging, categorizing, manipulating logic, emotions and perceptions to suit preconceptions, which in turn arises from inadvertence and ignorance, which in turn is cured by clarifying awareness.

6. From a fascinating article on how learning occurs at http://www.winwenger.com/part81.htm

"What it really boils down to is this:  though the inputting is important, it is only when we output it that we actually learn. Regardless that the method of inputting may be anything (and some methods of input may have more virtue than others), no real learning occurs until we actually voluntarily output whatever it is that we want to learn. On the one hand, the input is significant because without the input there would be no learning, but at the same time the stress should not be placed on the input but on the output, because that is where the real learning occurs.

"Once you understand this, you will understand everything that is wrong about the public and most of the private school systems. The public (and some private) schools try to shove the information down the students’ throats through various inputting methods. But the students will never learn the information until they start outputting it! This is why so many of the public and private school students fail. The ones that succeed have somehow willingly and consciously output the information (through thinking about it, writing about it, speaking about it, drawing it, etc.).

"Certainly accelerated learning has developed many advanced and far faster methods of input than the usual ones. And, though the majority of them are coupled with effective outputting techniques (to facilitate real learning), many times people lose the correct focus on the output. Not to disparage the accelerated learning movement (far from it), we have to remember that real learning comes when we receive conscious internal feedback from our own voluntary output."

So it's really important to DO something about what you learn!

7. I want a therapist not only experienced in mood-altering and consciousness-raising cognitive therapy, but also a psychoanalyst with a Jungian orientation who is also learned in bodywork and healing modalities, with excellent active AND passive counselling skills. I want to work such a therapist with over a period of some years.

8. I need to change my financial circumstances ASAP, much more sooner than later, if I want to enjoy the quality of life I deserve and take responsibility for the likelihood of future expenses greater than my present modest means. (What a garbled sentence!)