Your Better Self

The Promise of This Book Do you want your life to be better but don’t know what to do or where to begin? This book will guide you to your better Self. Why your better Self and not your best Self? “Best” presumes an upper limit to your capabilities. “I did my best” is often used as an excuse for not doing any better. Whatever you believe your best is, it is merely a self-imposed restriction on what you think you can achieve. This book is about doing better than your best. It is about resetting your internal regulator so that your personal and professional achievement can exceed what you previously thought was possible or permissible. You’ll be shown how to call up resources you didn’t know you had to help you foil your fears, triumph over your troubles and diminish your distresses. This great store of potential comprises your better Self that offers exactly what is needed at the precise moment you require in order to fulfill your life’s true purpose. This book will help you properly set what you believe you can – and should – be, do and have in your life. It will assist you to live a better life than you ever thought you could. Your better Self defies definition. It resists being reduced to verbal expression and refuses to be confined by any language. Therefore, this guide is less descriptive and more experiential in its approach, sharing many stories and ideas about how you can get to – and remain in – your better Self. No one will have to tell you when you get there. You’ll know it instinctively. The author Franz Kafka commented, “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” This book provides sharp tools that will help you chisel out your better Self from the frozen parts of your potential. By reading this book, your better Self will quickly emerge from the shadows it has lived in for most of your life. You will experience a release from long-held self-doubt, insecurity and any sense of unworthiness to receive anything better in your life. You will know how to move confidently into success, abundance, peacefulness and joy. This book will help you experience your future now by introducing you to the wealth of possibilities at your command for a life overflowing with everything you’re truly worthy of. You will learn to manifest the motto of your better Self: “The best is soon to come!” Out of the soil of your soul will grow a wholeness that unites the apparent fragmentation of your current reality. Every part of you will be woven into a tapestry of truth about who you really are. I have designed the contents to engage your mind and your heart. Some chapters will touch your heart more than appeal to your mind. Others will cause you to think more than feel. But my intention is that they all will help you clearly recognize and fully experience your better Self. Ready? Committing to Your Journey Worthy aspirations beckon your better Self. Worthy aspirations seek improvement in yourself and others. Unlike mere inclinations to pursue pleasurable activities, they comprise the deep, soulful yearning to experience something better – more fulfilling – in your life. But if you perceive yourself as being unworthy of them, your worthy aspirations won’t tug at your heart and stimulate your thoughts enough to compel you to act. The first step toward your better Self is to honor your worthy aspirations as healthy prophets of a future you fully deserve. Early in high school, a friend of mine expressed his aspiration to be an artist. Instead of mindlessly scratching swirls and stick figures, he perfected his art by drawing portraits of the teachers. They were stunningly life-like. I ran into him many years later and asked about his art. He told me that “life had gotten in the way” and that he had not done much with it. But he quickly added that he had just taken a job teaching art to high school students. “You know the first thing I’m going to tell my students?” he said excitedly. Not waiting for me to respond, he continued, “I’m going to tell them, ‘What you want to be, is the art you see. Paint it out! Draw it out! Sculpt it out! Act it out! Sing it out! Dance it out! You are the art!’” Your better Self stirs when you’re moving toward manifesting your worthy aspirations. Manifesting a spirit in line with your worthy aspirations often requires thinking and acting in ways that can be uncomfortable. To think or do anything that is different from what you’re accustomed to will require commitment. While it is true that commitment precedes any great achievement as a vital ingredient of turning aspirations into reality, it can only grow strong as the result of the many little decisions that are made in service of accomplishing a goal. Once you take your first steps toward your worthy aspirations, commitment increases. Setting the goal to “lose weight” or “get into shape” requires commitment to changing the ways you normally think and act. It means doing something you’re probably not used to doing, like going to the gym. Choosing to go again to the gym stems from the many little decisions made moment-by-moment that in their totality comprise your continuing commitment to achieving your goal. Your commitment to your goals, both before and while pursuing them, empowers you to manifest your worthy aspirations. Commitment is also necessary to change anything about yourself you have come to hold dear. S. I. Hiakawa wrote, “The basic purpose of all human activity is the protection, the maintenance and the enhancement, not of the self, but of the self-concept of self.” Even when everything seems to go wrong in our lives, we resist changing the way we see ourselves.