In his classic work, "Think & Grow Rich", Napoleon Hill stated
that 98% of people are in the jobs they have through INDECISION,
i.e. because they never made the decision about what they wanted
to do in their lives in the first place. Sadly, nearly a century
later, we can say exactly the same thing.

Decision is the key to transformation. Yet, most of us never
learn this from our parents, from school, or indeed from anywhere
else. It is one of the key character traits distinguishing high
performers from the vast ranks of the mediocre. Can you DECIDE
upon anything? If you can, almost anything you want in life can
be yours.

If you think back in your life to some of your greatest
achievements, those things you are most proud of, you will see
that behind it all there was a decision you made at some point,
and persisted with against all opposition, right through to the
successful conclusion.

For me, it was the three tortuous years I spent labouring away on
my Ph.D, doing a subject that was so complex that after a while,
all I had left was persistence and determination to see the
decision I had made through to its final conclusion.

Indecision explains why many people feel that they have a life
purpose, but have no idea what it is. We have lost the use of the
decision muscles that should normally enable us to manifest into
our reality what we decide upon, and persistently hold in our
minds. Ask a child what it wants to have and you'll get a long
list. Ask an adult the same question and you may well be greeted
with silence.

The problem is that all too often that people hunger for instant
gratification. The ability to engage in delayed gratification,
i.e. working hard for a goal NOW in order to see it realized at
some point in the future, seems to be a dying art. Hence our
ability to make decisions and see them through to a fruitful end
has grown very weak. For many people, the biggest decisions they
ever make in a year is where to go on vacation, how to get there,
and where to stay! Sad but true.

Decision is, by definition, behind every truly great achievement
anyone ever makes. Most of the people who live to be a hundred
actually DECIDED at some point in their life that they wished to
live to a hundred. Most millionaires, at some earlier point in
their life (often when they were heavily in debt), DECIDED that
they were going to be millionaires. The Buddha's enlightenment
came only after he DECIDED to seek Enlightenment and persisted
for six long hard years until the achieved it. Edison DECIDED to
invent an electric lightbulb and persisted despite 10,000 failed
attempts.

Decision coupled with Persistence is unstoppable. Napoleon Hill
also commented that, in examining the lives of Thomas Edison and
Henry Ford, the only quality he found in them that remotely
accounted for their success, i.e. was NOT common in ordinary
people, was that of Persistence.

Interestingly, the most successful people make decisions quickly
and change them slowly. They persist with the decisions they have
made. However, failures are very slow to make any decision at all
(most never make any), and they change the ones they have made
very rapidly indeed. Which description applies to you?….

It's not about making the "right" decision in the first place,
but rather about making the decision you have made "right". If
you wait to make the "right" decision, you could wait forever. If
you make your decisions "right", this means that you work with
the decisions you have made, adapting them as necessary to the
situation at hand.

Yes, of course it helps to make the best decision possible in the
first place. This is where excellent research and accurate
thinking come into play. You should do your best in this respect.
However, you also need to set some sort of deadline or limit to
this to be prevented from engaging in "paralysis through
analysis". At some point, you have to DO. Thereafter, you adapt
your thinking to actual circumstances, in order to ultimately
bring about what you have decided upon.

For instance, you may decide to live to be a hundred. However,
you then work with the existing health systems available to reach
that goal, adapting and choosing what is available to your
personal needs. You may decide to earn a certain sum of money,
e.g. a million dollars. From then on, you adapt your thinking to
the many means available.

You don't give up on the decisionn itself, although you may give
up on a specific means of achieving it, and instead move towards
another. Flexibility in the means of obtaining the outcome of
your decision is okay. Flexibility in dumping your decisions the
whole time is NOT.

The Latin root of the word decision means "to cut off from all
alternatives". This is what you should do when you decide. Don't
leave yourself a life-raft so that you can give up later. A
famous example of this kind of decision is Hernan Cortez, in his
conquest of Mexico. When the Conquistadors first arrived in
Mexico, Cortez literally DID burn their boats. There was no way
back home. They could literally only go forward and conquer. That
is how just a few hundred Spaniards, thousands of miles from
home, took on, and triumphed over, the power of the Aztec and
Mayan Empires. Decision!

Decide, and then act as if you could not fail. Interestingly,
this attitude of mind attracts to you forces from the universe
that are fully capable of supporting you and bringing your
decision into manifestation. If you ask a lot from life, you will
receive a lot. If you ask a little, that is what you will get.
Interestingly, the universe has no favourites and does not care
either way how much or how little you ask for. As and you shall
receive, is the way it was once expressed.

The key is to KNOW what you want, DECIDE to get it, and then
PERSIST until you have done so.

Copyright Asoka Selvarajah 2005. All Rights Reserved.
_______________________________________________________________

Asoka Selvarajah is a writer on personal growth and spirituality, and the author of "The 7 Golden Secrets To Knowing Your Higher Self". His work helps people achieve their full potential, deepen their understanding of mystical truth, and discover their soul's purpose. You can subscribe to his FREE ezine, and get his FREE ebook "Inner Light Outer Wealth" at:
http://www.aksworld.com/AspireToWisdom.htm?imk=Blog _______________________________________________________________

You have permission to reproduce this article in your ezine, website or offline publication as long as you do so in its entirety, and include both the copyright notice and the resource box at the bottom.

Some years ago, my mother was diagnosed with cancer and had to go
in for emergency surgery. The cancer was happily not of a fatal
nature and, despite an operation that unexpectedly took her to
then point of death, she survived and recovered fully.

However, this situation brought to light matters that you need to
consider carefully. You see, prior to this revelation, nobody
in our family had ever suffered from cancer before. Indeed, we
had come to think of ourselves as "immune"; a problem that
affects other people, but will never touch us. Now we know
better.

Perhaps you have considered yourself similarly immune to
life-threatening illnesses like this? Or perhaps you know all too
well the dangers from having suffered a personal loss, or
experienced the trauma of drastic surgery?

I am not a medical doctor and therefore I cannot give you medical
advice. However, I can tell you some of the trains of thought
that ran through out minds at the time, and discuss with you some
of the things we wish we had done better.

In a situation like this, it seems to be important to get as many
of the facts as possible, and retain control of the situation as
best you can. It is all too easy to let the doctors and nurses
take control, take whatever drugs they tell you to, and generally
delegate total responsibility for your body to them. That is
unwise. You need to have as much information as possible, before
permitting all kinds of drastic measures to be taken on your
behalf. Sometimes the cure is worse than the illness.

Your body is ultimately your responsibility. Whether you do
everything or nothing that the doctors advise is a decision for
YOU to make. After all, it is you who have to live with the
consequences for the rest of your life. Too many people defer to
"experts". However, these experts have a lot of people to deal
with, often cannot give enough of the individual attention
required, and by necessity must shortcut the patient life
history process, and even the diagnosis and therapy
procedures in order to make any progress against the countless
numbers needing help.

Practically speaking, this means it is wise to get a second
opinion, especially in the case of a major diagnosis like cancer.
If you need to spend time in a hospital, you should find one that
is VERY GOOD or EXCELLENT. They are NOT all the same! The
treatment you get by the staff in one hospital can be the polar
opposite of that in another. That is what happened to my relative
in the last week. Taking time to find out the difference can have
a big effect; even life or death eventually.

Have you heard that "prevention is better than cure"? How very
true. We now find ourselves reviewing the way we have lived our
lives and asking if things could have been done better. Diet is a
classic example of something most people could do better.
Moreover, it is an area that modern medical science spends almost
no time on, and consequently knows little about.

Much of the time, we eat and drink as we wish and do not give a
second thought to the consequences. You hear something is not
good for you, but you don't take it too seriously. When you are
you*ng, you believe you can live forever. Not true. Moreover,
what
you do throughout your life adds to the total score, in terms of
acquiring a crisis illness like cancer or heart disease.

There exists a vast range of useful knowledge about healthy diet
and living, about exercise and relaxation. Why not pay serious
attention to it NOW, instead of waiting until you have the fear
of God kicked into you? It's not about becoming a "health freak".
It's just about taking sensible measures to become AWARE of what
you are doing to yourself. Get the owner's manual for your
body/mind and read it. At least then you can say that you DECIDED
to abuse yourself and get this illness, rather than admit that it
crept up on you as a result of ignorance or misinformation!

We worry about the causes of illness. Yet, the fact of the matter
is that if the body's defense and repair systems are properly
maintained, and not allowed to deteriorate with increasing age or
misuse, they will remain adequate to fight off even the worst
diseases right into extreme old age. It IS possible to do a huge
amount to slow the body's deterioration. So why not do it?

Serious diseases may be diagnosed overnight, but they are
unlikely to ever have been created that rapidly. On the purely
physical level, they are usually the result of a long process of
continual attack against the body's gradual immune systems. As
long as the latter are maintained, disease can definitely be
fought off better than if the defense system is badly
compromised.

However, the physical body is the grossest level of our being.
There exists also the mental and spiritual. It is rightly said
that disease (or better dis-ease) manifests on the spiritual and
then mental levels long before it manifests on the physical.
Hence, wellness is truly a total body concept, and not purely a
physical matter. Nurturing is needed at all levels of your being.

This may sound old-fashioned, but we DO need to take long-term
preventative care of ourselves through proper exercise, diet,
and spiritual recuperation, rather than just expecting the
doctor to fix us up when something goes wrong. We are not cars,
and doctors are not mechanics. It doesn't work that way, as you
will find out if you ever become seriously ill.

Hence, you are well advise to start researching healthy diet,
exercise, relaxation and similar topics right now, and not wait
until it becomes critical. It does make sense to integrate
conventional medicine with the best of the so-called
"alternative" systems out there. However, caution and careful
research is advised. Claims are made repeatedly for all kinds
of products without any evidence, until it becomes almost 
self-evident that they are "good for you". However, you need to 
ask yourself what the basis is for your opinion; an age-old 
proven healing system, medical scientific research, or merely 
because everybody says so?

In the case of my mother, the irony is that she DOES take much
more care of herself than most people. But even so, we were left
pondering the things that she did NOT do or know that might have
led to the gradual compromise of her body's inner defense system.

Hence, good thorough preventative care can definitely reduce the
risks of serious problems later. In most cases, the human body,
if properly maintained and cared for, can live to be at least 120
years old under the current technology. With future technology,
that figure can only rise. So, if most of us die long before the
age of 100, you have to ask why…..

Relatives and friends should try to give the afflicted person an
ear to express themselves and be heard at all times. Listening is
frankly better than too much talking. You don't want to stifle
the person with opinions, theories or even subtle blame.

Practical supportive advice, such as discussing the medical
opinions and diagnosis makes sense. However, telling the person
that they caused it through their own negative mindset, or
something like that, will not help much. Rather, it makes more
sense to give the ill person space to express their feelings;
their fears, hopes and doubts, without concern that they might be
constantly contradicted. 

Also, if the illness/surgery is not likely to be fatal on the
short term, does it make sense to recommend that the ill person
start getting all their affairs in order "just in case"? That is
frankly a question for you. Certainly, these matters should be
attended to well in advance. But at this moment of serious
illness?…

My own preference, if the person is not on his/her deathbed, is
to focus the dialog on healing, and all the options for doing
that. Whatever you focus on, you often tend to get more of. Focus
on the solution and you get hope and the possibility of a
breakthrough. Focus on illness and possible death, and the sick
person could become depressed and unresourceful in seeking their
own healing solutions.

A balance needs to be struck. You can't be artificially positive
and refuse to talk about other aspects of the situation. However,
it cannot pay to be morbid or focus on the negative side for too
long. Your role in helping such a person is to lend the helping
hand that aids the ill person to feel hope, purpose and meaning
to their life, even in the midst of a major crisis.

The body DOES have incrèdible recuperative powers that modern
science cannot explain. However, it does seem to be connected to
will and a determination to win through. Hence, helping the
person to feel that this is possible is important, where
appropriate. If surgery is however the best option, then that
needs to be decided through discourse between physician, the
person involved, and his/her family and frien*ds. The natur*al
therapy route may NOT be the best route if things have gone too
far, or if the will of the person involved is not inclined
towards a longer and slower solution. Each person is different,
as is each crisis illness situation. There is no simple formula.

Of course, it is also important to remember that serious
illness can often be a gift to us. It can awaken you to the
value of every day of your life, and the people and situations
you have taken for granted. Many people who have had
life-threatening illnesses consider what a great benefit it has
brought them. As with any challenge or problem, you can use a
grave illness in yourself or someone close to you to learn a vast
amount. I have recommended to my relative that she keep a journal
at this time of her thoughts and feelings.

These are some thoughts from someone who once thought himself
"immune", but finds he is not. If you ever thought like this, you
may want to reconsider. If you already know you are not, you
should definitely ponder some of the issues mentioned here. It is
never too late to take preventative measure. There is now a huge
amount of valid health literature that can significantly improve
your life and lower drastically the chances of your coming down
with a life threatening illness. Prevention is always better than
cure. The latter may be unnecessarily prolonged, traumatic, and
even painful. And you definitely don't need any of that.

Copyright Asoka Selvarajah 2005. All Rights Reserved.
_______________________________________________________________

Asoka Selvarajah is a writer on personal growth and spirituality, and the author of "The 7 Golden Secrets To Knowing Your Higher Self". His work helps people achieve their full potential, deepen their understanding of mystical truth, and discover their soul's purpose. You can subscribe to his FREE ezine, and get his FREE ebook "Inner Light Outer Wealth" at:
http://www.aksworld.com/AspireToWisdom.htm?imk=Blog _______________________________________________________________

You have permission to reproduce this article in your ezine, website or offline publication as long as you do so in its entirety, and include both the copyright notice and the resource box at the bottom.

You can visit Asoka’s Mystic Visions site at: http://www.aksworld.com