When I think about knowledge, reading comes to mind first. My mom is an avid reader and I’m sure that her joy for reading rubbed off on me as I grew up. As a teenager and young adult I was never without a book and my love for reading has endured to this day.
As I grew up, naturally my reading interests became more varied. For many years I was interested in and fascinated with self-help books. I delved into my psyche by exploring my childhood, my family, my fears, my obsessions, and my emotions. In many ways it was quite eye opening. As a teenager, I struggled with self-confidence; typical, just like every other teenager. I also went through the defiant and angry stages of the teenage years; also typical. As I look back I can say that I came through it all with a better understanding of myself and with greater self-awareness. I can also say that the books I read and the great people in my life helped me overcome many of my teenage challenges.
If you’ve passed your teens, I’m sure that you have your own stories about how you got through the tough teenage years. And if you’re raising teenagers now, remember to be gentle with them because it’s probably payback for the headaches you gave their grandparents. For me, the teenage years were filled with reading fiction and journaling; journaling was an important form of self-expression, which turned into writing short fiction, which was a wonderful escape from life!
My search for knowledge continues and that’s what this website is all about. With all the self-help books out there it’s almost impossible to say that one doesn’t know where to turn for information and advice on self-improvement. Whether you believe it or not, there are no great secrets to living a healthy, wealthy life. Whatever you are looking for in the way of self-development, there is information out there to help you achieve greater emotional, financial, spiritual, and physical well-being.
The self-improvement era paved the way for coaching. The coach’s objective is to work with you through knowledge transfer, training, and inspiration until you reach your personal self-improvement goals whether it be the perfect body, greater financial success, or happier personal relationships. Many people who have changed their life have learned one of the coach’s secrets: that acquiring new knowledge and incorporating new habits into your life is the key to success. Lack of knowledge can sabotage our goals because our behavior may in fact be counterproductive to whatever we want to achieve. But not everyone wants to have a personal coach and the reasons vary from not wanting to pay for coaching, to simply not wanting to share private parts of your life with a stranger.
I am an advocate of self-coaching because I believe that each of us already possesses the basic road map to achieving whatever we want, and we each have a pretty good track record too. Each of us is already equipped with the know-how to find the knowledge to get whatever we want. Think about your life for a moment. Whatever you have achieved to date, you have achieved because you wanted something and you set out to get it. Regardless of whether your aim was to finish an educational program, have a baby, get married, date someone you like, lose five pounds, get a new job, get a job, start a business, buy a car, buy your first house, move out on your own, or anything else, you learned the skills and steps required and acted upon them to achieve your end result.
The formula for living a wealthy life is really quite simple: Decide what you want and acquire the knowledge you need to get it. But isn’t that what you’ve always done? Isn’t that how you got to where you are today having accomplished all that you have? You have wealth in all the knowledge that you have acquired up to now. Continue to seek knowledge, because in order to attain greater wealth – wealth of any kind – knowledge will always be one of the keys that will help to unlock the door to self-development, greater well-being, and the life you dream of.