A few years back, during one of my Personal Development Workshops, I mentioned that, in the majority of cases, if you ask someone how they are today, the answer that you’ll get is “not so bad”! On the second day of the workshop, one of the group told us that, on his way in, he was listening to the radio. Nine or ten people had ‘phoned in for a quiz and, in every case, when they were asked how they were this morning, their reply was “not so bad” – without exception! And although I assumed that this type of half-hearted response was typically Irish – but I’ve subsequently found out that it’s universal. The French tell you that they’re ‘pas mal’, the English respond in much the same vein. And even my American clients tell me that, when they reply that they’re having a great day, they’re just trying to convince themselves!

A quick scan of seven decades of research in psychology will tell you that not so bad is about as good as life gets! Ordinary people, to quote the acclaimed spiritualist Anthony deMello, sleepwalk through their lives never realizing that, in order to embrace life to the full, all they’d have to do is wake up! Unfortunately, the ordinary mind goes through life on auto-pilot – the research confirms that, using our psychological powers of automaticity, we pay precious little attention to anything that we do. And, in not paying attention to our day as it unfolds, we completely miss the possibilities of life that are right in front of our noses.

So wake up – if you’re not too bad right now, then that’s simply not good enough! Why would you go through life in a comfort zone that has you, in fact, not uncomfortable enough for you to do pull yourself together and change your life? Do you have to meet with a disaster or rock-bottom to wake up? All the evidence suggests that this might be so. The personal development writer, Ekhart Tolle, had to suffer something akin to a total breakdown, ended up destitute on a park bench, before it dawned on him that he should wake up!

Don’t sink so low. And don’t yourself down. Don’t let life pass you by while you whine about how horrible your job is, while you get hassled over your finances, while you get stressed out by the trials and tribulations of what you call life. You feel the way you feel because you’ve made things that way. You can change your life – you can transform it. It’s as easy as waking up.

What do I mean by waking up? Pay attention to, focus on what’s real, not the stuff that’s going through your head and making your life mundane, routine and unfulfilling. Open your eyes, see the reality in front of you. Come to your senses, smell the roses. You’ve got five senses – isn’t it about time that you used them?