The majority of my Personal Development clients, when I meet them for the first time, feel that they’ve become stuck – perhaps they feel that they’ve encountered that so-called glass ceiling, maybe they feel that they’re going through the motions or that, in some vague way, they sense that there must be more to life than the daily repetitive routine. Indeed, one individual said to me “My God, I can’t even get excited about our vacation anymore, we’re going to the same place in August that we’ve been for the last six years”.

Everything becomes stale in life unless you constantly keep renewing and reinventing. However, But it’s not your life that grinds to a shuddering halt, it’s you! Or, more correctly, it’s actually your state of mind that becomes so anaesthetized by the day to day routine that passes for living, that you just disappear into oblivion. The problem is that you stopped experiencing new things during your teenage years. The normal mind is wide open to all new experiences during early and mid childhood – this is when our sponge-like capacity to absorb means that we really were, indeed, taking everything in. By 11 or 12, we started pulling down the shutters. By 19 or 20, we were a done deal. After that, with the exception of truly momentous events in our lives – like the birth of a child, or a bereavement – we experience nothing much. We think we are experiencing, but actually what our subconscious mind is doing is interpreting everything on the basis of old stored knowledge and pigeonholing the new it accordingly. In other words, the normal adult state of mind is completely unaware, numb, reactive, divorced from reality and simply going through the motions.

Life never grinds to a halt – the universe and our world and everything in it is reinventing itself again and again. Opportunities abound, adventures beckon, new people are waiting to change the course of your life (in the same way as once total strangers changed it in the past). But you’re numb, cocooned in the apparent safety of a normality that is literally sucking the life out of you. Not only can you not see the opportunity and adventure of life – because you’re not looking or seeing – even if you could, you wouldn’t feel up to making the choice to get onto life’s wonderful rollercoaster. That’s because, as adults, we’re used to not choosing. The normal adult almost never takes the opportunity to choose their own thoughts – preferring to let the subconscious do the choosing for them automatically.

So, if you’ve arrived at an crossroads or impasse, it’s up to you to take the right route, it’s up to you to choose, it’s up to you to get your life moving in the direction that you want it to move. Nothing in your life will ever change unless you’re prepared to make some changes yourself.