Psychology 0f Personal Effectiveness
All You Need To Know About How To Live Happily & Effectively
Timothy W. Starkey, Ph.D., ABAP
Chapter 6.
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Miami Dade College
Psyc CLP 1006
Hialeah Campus
Room 1214
M/W/F
8:00-10:15 AM
May 7- June 16 (2007)
305-279-0758 (Home)
or
305-338-1615 (Cell)
Hours 1:00 to 5:00 PM
On Mondays & Wednesdays
Create A Vision
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No one on their death bed
wishes they had spent more
time at the office.
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The question is not
whether we will die, but
how we will live.
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Joseph Campbell says…
Follow your bliss.
So often we let the outside world dominate our choices of
what to do, we end up doing what we “ought” to do or
“should” do, and little of what might have made us happier.
No one else can tell you what you love to do. It is your
responsibility in life to discover what that thing is that you
experience as bliss, and then to seek it out.
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Getting Clarity
• Pretend you’re having your 100th birthday party
and you’re surrounded by family, friends, and
newspaper reporters. One of the reporters asks
you to name the 5 or 6 things in your life that
you’re now most proud of, the things that you
now see were the most important.
• Now take out a sheet of paper and write down
what these 5 or 6 things might be, from the
perspective of your 100th birthday party.
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The Importance of Listening
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6 Steps for Securing Your Goals
• Step 1 ~ The goal must be stated in positive terms and
in a way that you can achieve it yourself regardless of
the behavior of others.
• Step 2 ~ Make certain you know how you will know
when you have reached your goal.
• Step 3 ~ Describe your goals as specifically as you can.
• Step 4 ~ Are your goals compatible with each other?
• Step 5 ~ Assess what you already have and what you
are going to need in order to reach your goals.
• Step 6 ~ Make a plan (and then BEGIN your plan and
revise it along the way as necessary)
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Visualization
• Mental imagery is perhaps the most basic way that your mind
represents and stores information. For most people, our earliest
memories from childhood tend to be fragmented images rather
than conversations or events.
• Imagery is the primary medium by which your unconscious
mind operates. Freud developed the concept of the unconscious
mind to describe the part of the mind that contains aspects of our
functioning that we’re totally unaware of. Freud believed that
the mind was like an iceberg which is mostly (90%) hidden from
consciousness. But beneath the surface of consciousness is the
much larger unconscious region containing thoughts, wishes,
feelings, and memories that are not accessible to our conscious
mind, but which greatly influence our feelings, choices, and
everyday behaviors nonetheless.
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The Process of Visualization
We use representational systems to encode information in our
brain. There are 5 primary representational systems relating to
each of our senses: auditory, visual, kinesthetic, gustatory, and
olfactory
• 1. Begin by mastering voluntary relaxation skills; this is a
crucial part of using visualization to master stress.When you
relax completely prior to your visualization exercise, you are
creating on “a blank sheet of paper” (you mind isn’t filled with
negative thoughts and imagery).
• 2. Garbage in, garbage out ~ Positive images are the equivalent
of health food and negative images are like feeding yourself junk
food.
• 3. Visualization is more than just images ~ You don’t have to be
able to imagine a clear, crisp hi-res image of something to use
visualization. It is sufficient to have a “sense” of what it would
be like if your imagined future or outcome were occurring. 9
End of Chapter 6
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