Read lots of self help books? Because there are millions of people who are forever reading, forever learning, forever searching, broadening their knowledge not reading that changes your life, doing changes your life.

Endlessly reading self help books is just like gathering loads of holiday brochures and travel books about some beautiful place that you would love to visit. You’ve seen photographs, read all the reviews, imagined yourself sipping a cocktail looking out over that breath-taking sunset, immersed yourself in the idea of being there. However, you never actually make the reservation or purchase the ticket. What’s my point? Reading about how to achieve the life that you really want and actually doing what you’ve learned are two entirely different things. Reading the feel-good stories about how others have taken the required action and, as a consequence, changed their lives, may well give you that warm feeling inside. But tomorrow morning, when you drag yourself out of bed for another day of ‘not-too-bad’, what will have changed? Precious little! When you face another day of hassle, doubt, financial worries or battered self-confidence, what good will all that reading have done you? If anything, it will have made you even more restless and more dissatisfied than you were at the outset.

Reading, understanding and intellectually appreciating what it takes to change your life will change nothing in your life until you put what you’ve learned into daily practice. And here we encounter an obstacle that is simply too big for most normal people – they’re afraid to take what they perceive as some really risky leap of faith.

If you’ve managed to come across a self improvement book where you’re given step-by-step exercises on how to change your life (and they’re few and far between – most of them are ‘feel-good books’) then surely you’ve realized by now that a leap of faith is not necessary. All you’ve got to do is take easy steps each day that will awaken you from the self-induced hypnosis in which most normal people are only existing.

If you want to change your life, you have to change the way you’re living day to day at present. You start small – even by simply changing your morning routine – because small changes get your subconscious mind out of its comfort zone. And once out you will begin to understand that absolutely everything in your life can be done differently. When this realization dawns upon you, you will find yourself in a completely different place – where action that was otherwise unconscionable suddenly become the logical thing to do – and effortlessly doable.

In other words, it’s you who has to start doing the things that will change your life, to stop reading and start doing.

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?

It just takes a few minutes to discover the world of difference between being focused and being stressed out – I’ve been enabling people to focus for nearly sixteen years and I know how it works. And each Monday and Wednesday, my personal development online subscribers are sent simple ideas and exercises on how to focus their mind – and it’s free! Every week, people all over the world sign up to my online workshops to learn exactly the same thing. So, what is focus all about?

At the outset, you need to realize that being focused doesn’t come naturally. The normal adult mind is either thinking about the past or anxious about the future. The worry you’re aware of – research shows that the majority of people are worried about their finances, worried about how their children are turning out, worried about work, worried about retirement. For every stage of life you’ll find a set of worries. And all worry is about events that didn’t happen yet – and, more bizarrely, things that we really don’t want to happen! What type of idiot would squander their energy on the things that they don’t want to happen? A normal idiot!

Whilst we’re all aware of worry, we’re generally not aware that our subconscious mind is focused on the past and it’s because of the past that we worry about what we don’t want to happen! We learned the stuff that we hate about ourselves when we were young – and our subconscious mind keeps on playing the same old cracked record. And you aren’t aware that this is happening, so you’ve never realized that you could do something about it.

The thing is, you don’t have to do anything to sort things out if you train yourself to focus your mind on the present moment. Yeah, that’s what focus is – a now thing. It’s where you live your life, this is where you could do your very best if you were focused, the here and now the only place that you can be, you’ve no choice. The choice you have, however, is whether you’ll bother to turn up to your life or not. Once you decide to turn up, everything will be transformed.

So, how do you focus? Well, this is your first training session, right here, right now. Sit down somewhere where you won’t be disturbed for five minutes. When you’re comfortable, shut your eyes and do nothing except listen. You’re thoughts will try to distract you but, when this happens, just latch onto the next sound that comes your way. When you try something as simple as this, you teach your mind to pay attention to what is actually happening now – and that’s what focus is.

Even if you just started with a few minutes of sitting and listening, you’ll experience something really important – the real world has nothing to do with the stuff in your head that you’ve been paying all your attention to.