Self Help
A major part of being able to find, cultivate and maintain strong, happy personal relationships comes from understanding how self help or personal development works.
For those sceptical about this aspect of life, it's just something you accept or reject depending on your own make up.
However, it's well worth pursuing and learning about even if, right now, you are caught up in the critical, disbelieving mindset of the masses.
You see, to help yourself in many areas in life, you have to know how to develop your own personal "self" to become a greater version of yourself.
To do that, you need to break free of the mass mindset that is controlled and directed by the popular media and be yourself.
Be Yourself
That may sound like I'm asking you to ditch all your friends and become a reclusive hippie type and get into strange, airy fairy behavioural patterns that you may find amusing or even way out right now.
I'm not!
You can keep your outward appearance of normality and conformity if that's what you want to do and keep all your friends too! What you need to change is what's going on inside.
That requires a shift in thinking and belief away from the herd mentality to one of enlightenment and greater awareness of what life is all about. It literally means waking up from your life-long slumber cocooned in the safety of numbers.
Awakening from What?
At this point, you're either ready to leave and go back to the false sense of security you've always had in life, or you're going to read on because you're curious enough to want to know more about what I'm talking about concerning waking up.
If that's the case, great!
What a lot of people don't know, simply because they're not aware, is that their lives are being lived for them by a very powerful and agenda-oriented media. Everywhere you turn, there is a constant stream of information being broadcast at you about how life should be (and in fact is for most people).
It's a kind of brainwashing that is going on at an almost undetectable level because the media being used is widely accepted as the norm. I mean the television, radio, newspapers and magazines and the Internet.
These are all in a switched on state 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
Almost all your knowledge of current affairs is beamed to you on the TV news on all channels at various times of the day or night (or 24/7 in the case of 24 hour news channels). If you miss it on the TV, a radio playing somewhere will get that information to you.
If you are isolated from TVs and radios, then you'll see it in a newspaper somewhere (perhaps you'll catch yourself reading someone else's paper as you sit on the train or the bus). Failing that, people you know will almost certainly be talking about it among themselves and you'll overhear it or get involved in the conversation.
And if all else fails, you'll get drawn in by social media on the Internet!
All in all, the powers that be have at their disposal a most powerful and all-encompassing way of getting the information they want you to know about and accept into your head.
That's what you're asleep to and not aware of it even happening. That's the slumber you need to wake up from!
Why?
Well, you can stay in that brainwashed sleep state and keep believing all is well in your life. Or you can tear yourself out of the cocoon and look out at what's real.
The Reality of Life
When you take that courageous leap from sleep to wakefulness, a surprisingly emotion-jerking thing happens.
The initial disbelief turns to a kind of anger at having been kept in the dark for so long once you really start to see things the way they really are.
Life is not quite as clear-cut and organized as you once believed it was. People are not quite as free-thinking and creative as they think they are. You start to see exactly how everyone else seems to be living in a dream-world and they don't even know it.
A word of caution here: It is not a good idea to start voicing your new-found awareness to the still happily sleeping masses. They won't believe you, won't accept what you're saying and will likely ostracise you for daring to blurt out that kind of crazy talk!
We enlightened, awakened people make up a surprisingly small minority of the population. The masses (and their ruling masters) call us nutcases, conspiracy theorists, trouble makers, crackpots etc and often go out of their way to avoid us.
Spiritual and life enlightenment can be a rather lonely place were it not for a growing number of others waking up and gaining insight into the lies they're being fed by our rulers and masters (usually lurking behind the label "government").
Help Yourself
However, this article is not exactly about being a fringe conspiracy activist or anything quite so radical. It's simply about becoming better aware of what surrounds you and how to recognize lies from facts and then use that information through personal development to live a better life.
The most important fact you need to get on board with is that improving your life is something that only you can do. No one else will do it for you. This one is on you!
Once you have accepted that your life is in your hands (or to be more precise, in your mind), you can go about improving your education, growing your knowledge and using what you are learning to make the improvements you want to make. To help you do that, I am sharing my own knowledge and experience right here in this site.
Further Reading
In this section of the website, I'm adding more detailed and better focused articles to support this introductory look at personal development or self help. You can select a clickable title from the list below: