The self-development market of speakers, books, seminars and more, is huge. Does that mean there is a ground swell of people who are looking for a better deal in life? That seems to be the case, for if people weren’t exploring this field, there would be no market for bestseller books and courses, or documentaries such as The Secret.
Over the past years I have read a fair number of books on self-development, but have never really followed through on acquiring any new skills I might have come across, even if they appealed to me. Mostly I suppose it’s been that the effort of working and earning a living had taken over everything in my life. There was no energy left for anything else. For the past few months however, I have had some time to spend on myself, which has been wonderful. With that extra time, I have allocated some effort to re-visiting this topic, and seeing what is available on the internet, the world’s biggest library.
At the moment I am exploring the idea of the Law of Attraction. This law states that human beings attract what happens to them. Because we are thinking the thoughts, we set off vibrations, which make us attract the objects/experiences/events that we think about. This could be as basic as getting a slight headache, of course for people suffering from migraines their headaches are anything but basic, for me it is because I never get headaches, to earning a good living. If we receive life experiences into our lives because we imagine them, then we would need to be really careful as to what we imagine. Taken a step further, it would then be really important to only take on images, whether via TV, newspapers, books, other people etc that will contribute positively to our lives.
That thought takes me back to my previous post on ageism and the article I had read in the local free sheet about the activities on offer in the Golden Opportunities sessions. Computer tasters, advice on back ache, bingo activities for 50+ people. What these activities are encouraging is for people over the age of 50 to think of themselves as old and not that capable. A computers taster would infer that the course has been designed to be acceptable to people with a fairly low level of intellectual capacity. A featured topic of these activities is a discussion on backache. That means that because one is over 50 it is automatically assumed that one would have back problems.
Taking it back to the Law of Attractions, this would mean that participants in the Golden Opportunities sessions would end up getting back ache after a few months, whether they had back problems or not. They would attract it to themselves regardless, because the thought is being put into their minds. This is what happens to you when you get to be over 50, you get backache. If you are over 50 you also wouldn’t really understand how a computer works, so we are just going to give a taster. My older sister for instance, is attending a computer course for ‘Seniors’. By the sounds of it, it is a basic course. My sister was a maths boff at school. She could write software for computers if she tried. Now she is proud that she can cut a CD?
Yet there are many people who do extraordinary things way beyond the 50-year cut-off date. A long distance runner by the name of Wally Hayward ran and completed within the allowed time an ultra-marathon road race of 90km at the age of 79. At the age of 76 Nelson Mandela was the first democratically elected president of South Africa. And that is after having spent 27 years of his life on a prison island. These are just two examples out of many, many inspirational people, who accomplish amazing things.
How did they do this? And how do people continue to go beyond what popular belief is the cut-off point to what should be achievable. Could this possibly link into the Law of Attraction theory in that these people have visualised this achievement, have continued to support it in their minds and often in writing or verbally, and have actively worked towards this success. This leads me to think that providing activities to people over the age of 50, which do not challenge them, but in fact confirm their frailties and limitations, is really a very, very bad idea then, or not?
Anja Merret lives in Brighton, UK. She has recently started a blog and writes on issues that interest her from self-improvement to tech stuff for amateurs. Anja has had a varied and interesting career journey. She started as a high school teacher, changed professions to become an admin manager at her late husbands law firm because this allowed her the flexibility to look after her small children at the time. After many years she left this position to try her hand at an art gallery, moved across to public relations and finally found her niche in education again managing a computer training centre for many years. During this time she also involved herself in writing standards and qualifications in the new media field. 10 months ago she moved from South Africa to join her younger daughter. She now writes a blog and also looks after the business interests of her daughter who is a Flash and Accessibility expert. She has BA (Hons) MBA degrees and on rare occassions she feels like a frustrated wannabe academic. That passes quickly though. http://www.anjamerret.com
