Learning to say no

Its 9:30 pm on a Thursday night and one of your closest friends calls you to go to the party you've all been looking forward to for weeks now. You remind yourself that you have a Biology quiz tomorrow morning that you still haven't studied for, but "what the hell, its Thursday and I need a break from this long week...I'll just wing it." When morning finally comes and you nearly miss your class because you’ve overslept, you realize that you are entirely unfamiliar with the test material on the quiz. Sound familiar?
This situation has happened to me all too often and I'm sure you can easily relate depending on your situation. Many of us, myself included, have continually kept up with trying to please different people in our lives at the expense of losing sight at what really matters. Whether it is the failure to say no to a group of friends about going on a vacation outside of your budget or simply not having the willpower to say no a decision that is might put a damper on your long term goals. These problematic situations occur because we have yet to condition our minds to make good decisions when encountered with a seemingly “tough” choice. In the entire scheme of things, if I skipped out of a particular party and was actually able to study the material to its entirety for a better grade, there would likely be no negative repercussions except the ones I’ve created for myself in my own mind. Therein lies the problem itself; many of us seem to simply hallucinate that there actually is a problem because we are conflicted with our short-term and long-term goals at the moment. A feeling of “I want to go with the party to have fun right now” usually doesn’t coincide well with “I need to get good grades so I can get into grad school.” Once we can train ourselves to continually make good decisions on a regular basis, it becomes a matter of just finishing what is truly important rather than exploring other pathways to sidetrack you.
Alright, so now that you have identified what might have posed a problem, how do we fix this? What usually works for me is to focus on the things that might be negatively impacted as a result of a bad decision. Essentially, put your complete focus on the ramifications that WILL occur if you chose the pathway that might sidetrack your future. Don’t tell yourself that they might, but rather make it known in your head that you shouldn’t even take a slight chance. After having put yourself in a number of the same situations, it will become rather easy to say no.
If this situation or situations like this come up often and you feel stuck in the middle, you should probably take a step back and look at the relative effect of these bad choices. Usually when we have to think twice about a question and its relative effect on our future aspirations you already know what you should do.

Creating their own demise

About a week ago during one of my regular blogging brainstorms I came across an interesting topic I was initially planning to discuss today, but after watching an interesting movie that had multiple topics and issues related to my topic, I will hold off on my earlier ideas and discuss them at a later blog entry. As I have mentioned throughout my earlier posts the personal development and the self-help gurus linked to the personal development world have a notorious dogma attached to them. These recurrent beliefs were further strengthened during a movie I saw over the weekend. Darren Aronofsky is the director of the film “Requiem for a Dream” which depicts the fate of four individuals pursuing their twisted version happiness. Each of these four individuals has a dramatic theme linked in an attempt to give the audience a provoking underlying message. Among these four individuals is an older woman who feels that her ultimate destination of happiness will come from making an appearance on television; an appearance on television would make her feel like she is wanted, young, and important again. This particular “vision” of happiness that she has comes from an individual on television named “Tappy Tibbons”— essentially a parody of Tony Robbins through an infomercial throughout the movie.

            As the movie progresses, the audience gets the feeling that the older, and more naive woman is being exploited by Tappy Tibbons. She follows his every message and quirky ways of thinking so much so that her entire demeanor changes for the worse. The message that I get out of this movie about self-help gurus is unmistakably clear—these gurus are out to exploit the naive and simply have no real value in helping those with a legitimate need for help. It is through this parody that one is able to clearly distinguish much of the distaste and disgust that some individuals have for Tony Robbins and others like him. As I have continually written about much of the dislike towards the self-help community and the leaders involved I would like to touch on some of the reasons why I think that many are not taken seriously.

             Clearly, the movie is picking off of some of the peculiar techniques that many of the self-help speakers have used at their seminars, but maybe it is the fault of the self-help community that have single-handedly created their loss of credibility through the years. Between the bizarre TV ads, miraculous claims, and other seemingly unimaginable