How To Take Control Of Your Life And Enjoy Every Moment

By
Al Horne MBA Ph.D.
The APC Group
http://www.apcgroup.org/

2007 All Rights Reserved

Introduction:
This information presented in this book is designed to encourage you to have
a very deep and meaningful conversation with yourself. I am going to ask
you some very important questions. It is up to you to make the effort to
answer these questions. The effort that you make to answer these questions
will determine the benefits that you receive.
Some of this information in this book may seem simplistic or obvious. It
may sound complex or unfamiliar. One thing is guaranteed. This information
will cause you to think and examine your life and yourself. As a result of
this examination you will gain some insight into your own behavior, your
way of being and doing. All that I ask is that you read the entire book and
answer the questions. Please do not make any final judgments until you have
done this.
Lets begin:
The purpose of this book is to help you take control of life (your personal
journey) and be happy. You personal journey is the individual expression of
who you are. You are truly unique. There has never been anyone exactly
like you and there will never be anyone exactly like you.
What is most important in your life?
Please think about this question for a moment and write the answer in detail.
Then please rank the following in order of importance to you.
Loved ones
Commitments
Friends
Values
Obligations
Religious beliefs
Certain causes
Politics
Someone that is taking care of you
Someone you are taking care of
Business
A group that you belong to
Other (
???
)
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I would like to suggest to you that the most important thing in your life is
YOU.
Let us presume for a moment that the most important thing in your life is
you.
Please ask your self these questions and answer them on a scale of 1 to 10
1 is no (not even close) and 10 is yes (absolutely without a doubt)
I am living my dream ___
I have settled for a life that feels unsatisfactory ___
I feel frustrated that I am not getting what I want from life ___
I really know what I want to have in my life ___
I know how to get what I want in my life ___
I feel good about who I am? ___
I mostly do not enjoy life ___
My life seems to be controlled by others ___
I mostly enjoy my life ___
I have accomplished what I want to accomplish ___
I am confused about life ___
I am confused about myself ___
I like the people in my life ___
Life seems meaningless ___
I live my life for other people ___

Lets talk about who you really are and what you really want.
Knowing who you really are and what you really want
You are the cumulative summation of all your experiences. You evaluate,
judge and interpret your experiences based on your previous experiences and
the rules you have accepted. Sometimes these rules are based on what you
have learned from your past experiences but more often others give or make
these rules for you. These Rule Givers are the people in your life that you
hold in esteem or fear. The have had or now have power over you. You have
given these authority figures the power to tell you who you are because you
feel that they can provide you with what you want or tell you what you think
you need. You have learned to interpret the experience of who you are by
the rules that these people give to you and as a result of their reactions to
you. Who are these people?
They are your
Culture
Heritage
Family
Society
They make the rules that you live by.
They define for you what you what is real and what you want. They tell you
what your needs are. How you see yourself and how you see and react to
others is defined by this system. You define the universe by what is similar
to yourself and different than yourself. From the moment you come into this
world you are put inside this box by the process of conditioning and the
rules that you accept as a way of trying to get what you want.
You are blind to this box because you see everything in life as outside of the
box. Yet you interpret everything that happens to you from inside of the box.
If you look inside yourself you know that you are the product of the
cumulative effect of years of conditioning. You are the sum total of all your
experiences with these people and you live your life by the rules that you
have learned and the strategies that you have developed to get you what you
think you want.

Who are you and what do you want ?

If you are like most people, you define this with the help of other people and
processes. The conditioning starts when you are young and helpless. Human
beings at birth are helpless for a relatively long period of time. Your needs
as a baby for warmth, food, comfort and safety are absolute. As a child you
had very little control over getting these needs met. As a baby you can cry
and kick your feet but without the help of others you hurt and ultimately
cannot survive. As you grow you gain more autonomy over yourself and you
learn. You discover that who you are is the most important thing.
Who you are and who you become is all about getting youre needs met.
This idea of who you are is defined first by you immediate family, then by
friends, schools, organizations, the media and your culture. The irony is
that to develop more autonomous capability you must define yourself in
relation to these groups. Fitting in and learning what way of being and acting
will get you what you to want and what others have conditioned you to want.
You learn that to be accepted by others is the ultimate strategy for getting
your needs met.
You arrive at a consensus with others. An agreement of what is right,
acceptable and what works. You are taught what is good and how you can
go about getting the approval and acceptance of the group. You learn that to
survive means learning and acting within these boundaries, systems and
rules. The process is the same if the system is the Taliban or Harvard
University.
To know who you are is to know what it is that you want.
Knowing who you are empowers you to get what you want and to have
control over you life. What you want or think that you want is mostly a
product of this conditioning process that began when you where very young
and helpless. You carry these wants, images and strategies throughout your
life. The problem with this is that it makes it difficult for you to discern
between what is functional and dysfunctional. What is enabling and
empowering. What works and what works better. You cannot see the world
except from within your box. You life becomes a process of trading one
desire for another.

You have these desires as a result of many forces and factors. Sometimes
you accept that you have these desires because that is what you have always
felt or you dont know anything different. Often you will feel manipulated
and obligated to others.
How often are these desires experienced out of the process of joy in doing?
Please write the answers to these questions in detail:
Are you happy with your current experiences? Why or why not?
Do you feel free to do these experiences? Why or why not?
Have you made the choice and the commitment to engage in these
experiences? Did someone else make that choice for you? Why?
Do you understand your experiences? Why or why not?
Are you doing these experiences as a result of previous experiences that are
no longer relevant in your life? If so, which ones?
Do you feel that you know what the outcome of these experiences will
ultimately be for you? How often are you right?
When do you intend to stop doing what you are doing that isnt joyful for
you and begin a set of new experiences that are joyful for you? What is
holding you back ?
Are you willing to trade the feelings that you get from new experiences for
the feelings that you are getting from your old experiences? Why or why
not?
When will you trade those old experiences for new experiences? Why then
and not now?
What new experiences would you prefer to have instead of the old
experiences? Why these experiences?

The result of answering the following questions will help you to determine
how often in your life you are doing what you really enjoy doing.
Please write the answers to these questions in detail:
What experiences really make you feel alive, vibrant and happy?
What experiences help you and empower you?
How could you structure you life so that you could more often participate in
the experiences that you enjoy?
What do you feel is preventing you from fully enjoying your life and new
experiences?
Are you living in the past and/or the future? What percentage of the time?
In your life journey what is your destination? Where are you now?
Are you feeling really alive now in the moment? How often do you feel this
way? Percentage ?
How often do you transport yourself mentally to circumstances, feelings and
activities in the past that are gone? That are negative? Percentage?
How often do you beat yourself up for what might have happened if only
things would have been different? Percentage?
How much time and energy do you spend trying to figure out why things
turned out the way they did? Percentage?
On the road of life, who is driving your car? Are you in the drivers seat or
are you a passenger? Do you feel like a back seat driver? Do you feel like
you are locked in the Trunk? Do you feel like you are you awake or do you
feel like you are asleep at the wheel? Why or why not?

Justification and Rationalization

You can justify it all and rationalize all of it to yourself but ultimately you
can only evaluate what has happened based on what is currently happening.
Write down the answers to these questions in detail.
Are you living the life you want now? Why or why not?
What is the importance of how you feel about any of that stuff in the past?
Does it make you feel good or bad?
What difference does it make in your life today?
What new experiences in the now are you trading for those feelings in the
past?
In your life journey you can only take one step at a time. Do you feel that
generally you are stepping forward or backward? What percentage of the
time?
Have you been hypnotized into suffering by the power of the suggestions of
others?
What suggestions do you accept as Fact?
Which of these facts are someone elses suggestions?
Have you been hypnotized by your own suggestions?
What type of suggestions do you make to yourself?
How do you feel about these suggestions?
What suggestions are others making to you?
How do you feel about these suggestions?
What could you do to change the suggestions you do not like ?
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What you believe is reality or becomes reality.

Take a hard look at your belief system and the statements that you make to
yourself about who you are and what you can or cannot do. If these
statements dont feel right to you then make the commitment to change
them.
If these statements are creating actions that do not produce the results that
you want. Change them. If you are repeating negative suggestions to
yourself, start repeating positive suggestions. The power and the process is
the same! Only the results are different!
If people are repeating negative suggestions to you, use that to become more
aware of how reality in being shaped in your mind. Change your mind and
change your actions.
Wake up!
Do you feel bound by expectations, judgments and conflict? These are the
holy trinity of the reality you are creating. They are what you think you want
and at the same time they prevent you from being happy. The root of these
demons are your memories of the past.
Memories are the tools that empower you to function in a conditioned life of
events and experiences. Your memories bind you to a reality that does not
really exist. If you can learn to manage these demons then you are on your
way to a happy existence. Mastering these memory processes is one of the
ways of being happy and gaining control of your life.
Memories and expectations are the life blood of your world. They form the
framework or box that you put everything into. They distort what is
happening now by keeping you in an artificial world of what you expect to
happen based on what you believed happened in the past which was also
based on this same never ending cycle. When everything (all the memories
and expectations) line up in your mind the way you want them to, then you
pronounce yourself as happy or sad or confused or whatever.

Think about this.

You get the most joy in the unexpected and the new. You learn the most
from these new experiences. These new experiences are not based on past
memories. You grow from the exploration of what is unbound by your
habits. You operate best without an expectation of what will happen or what
is best or worst.
This way of being is viewed as crazy by society because the goal of
society is to get needs met and to create wants and to make rules by which
both happen.
You are constantly being conditioned by society to run your own personal
universe the same way every second of every minute of your existence.
When you flip a light switch you expect light and when you tell somebody I
love you, you expect to hear that back in return. And so on with every aspect
of your life. Your life becomes a constant effort to predict and control. Your
happiness will then depend on this cycle. The problems come when life is
unpredictable and the happiness comes when life is unpredictable. If you
create your happiness on the interpretation of the results based on your
expectations. You can count on being unhappy a great deal of the time.
You will always have expectations. The key is not to make those
expectations the basis for your happiness. Rather, make your happiness the
basis for your expectations.
What you are judging will happen is creating your reality. Judging what is
good or bad becomes your main function in life. On what basis are you
making these judgments? It all goes back to your conditioning.

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Write the answers to these questions in detail:

How have you been conditioned to judge what is good or bad?
How is that working for you?
How could you suspend your habitual judgments
Are you willing to see what happens?
Are you willing to experience life in a different way and as a result think and
believe differently. Are you willing to create a new life and change? What
does this new life look like?
Are you willing to do this with your relationships?
Are you willing to see people in a different way?
Are you willing to have them see you in a different way?
Are you wiling to explore this and see where it takes you?
What do these new life situations look like?
Conflict brings anxiety.
Conflict is inside of you because your different conditioned selves and your
desires expect and judge. Somewhere in this process you feel incomplete.
Mostly this happens because you are engaged in all or nothing thinking. You
believe it has to be one way or the other.
Write the answers to these questions in detail.
Why does you life have to be one way or the other way?
What actions will you take to make it different?
What new positive expectations will you have about you life?
How will you create new circumstances for you life in the future?
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The world is always asking you to make decisions which will ultimately
create the need for more decisions. Are you wrapped around conflict as you
search for opinions and opinions about opinions?
Paper or plastic?
Stocks or bonds?
Long hair or short?
Plaid or plain?
The cycle never ends. Society tells you to believe these decisions are very
important and that these decisions determine your happiness.
Write the answers to these questions in detail:
What decisions is society asking you to make about your life?
Are they really important?
Why are they really important?

Your Life Story:

You life story is mostly the stories that others tell you about who you are and
what you are worth. These stories start at your beginning. They are the
stories of your race, country, family, society and humanity. They are the
stories that define who you are. What is expected of you, How you should
behave.
If you realize that they are only stories. You can appreciate them for what
they are. The drama may be appealing like a good movie and you wont
take it too seriously. Ultimately it is about living the movie that you want to
live.
What are the stories that you tell yourself ?
You weave your cloth of stories from the thread of your thoughts every
minute of every day on the loom of your expectations and judgments. Be
aware of this and choose to create something beautiful and useful.

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You are weaving the stories you tell yourself into the tapestry of your life.
Write the answers to these questions in detail:
What kind of stories do you tell others? Are they mostly happy or sad ?
Why?
What specific stories do you tell others about who you are and your life
experiences?
Are they the same kind of stories others are telling you?
If you stories became a cloth. What kind of cloth would it be?
If you life story was a tapestry. What does the tapestry of your life look like?
Is it more like a door-mat or a Magic Carpet? Why?
Could this be changed? How?
If you life was a song. What kind of song would it be?
Would it be happy or sad?
Are you wiling to choose to tell a different story, weave a different tapestry
or sing a new song about who you are and what your life is or is not?
Is the choice yours? Describe these new stories.

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Summarization and Conclusion

Life is what it is! Isnt it?
Remember that you have been conditioned to want what others want or
wanted for you. Your current wants may be partially based on how others
have taught you to define yourself and your identity. That identity is mostly
defined by the rules and definitions of your culture, society, family, the
media, friends and people you feel have power over you. The essence of
happiness is to know and understand who you are and to have a realistic
perception of the basic fundamentals of what works for you in your life.
Life is a journey of finding out what life is.
How can you know this?
If you look to life for the answers. You will see that life is the unity and
interconnectedness of all things and a process of creation and destruction.
Life is not fair. No model of life can be life. Life is not a dress rehearsal for
the real thing. It is the real thing.
If you want your life to be something other than what it is. Congratulations!!
You woke up this morning! You have another chance.
Life can make you what you are or you can make life what it is.
Take control of your life, enjoy every moment and make it the best that it
can be.
If you would like to participate in the coaching process to help you make
your life the best that it can be. Please type out your answers to these
questions and email them to me at apc_group@hotmail.com . We will set up
a personal coaching session to talk about the questions and your answers.
If you are interested in additional educational materials. Books, CDs or
Software. Please email us with your request.
If you are interested in participating in workshops or training programs
please let us know. You can check our website for a schedule of activities.
You can reach us at The APC Group website. www.apcgroup.org
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Epilogue.
My experience of creating this book.
I believe that these words will be read and be of benefit to others. These
ideas drive me forward.
I choose to sit and type on a keyboard as an expression of my thoughts and
feelings. I traded that experience for the opportunity to do a different
activity. The reason I did this activity is that it satisfies a desire that I have I
have to express myself.
While typing on the keyboard, I was also listening to music, drinking tea and
observing my environment. Sometimes I would check my email. Of course I
could not be doing any of those activities if I had not created the situation for
myself with the help of others. The music system, the computer, the Internet
access, the tea are all a product of my connection with others.
Ultimately we must all interact with others. Ironically we often see ourselves
as individual containers for our feelings, thoughts and experiences. Yet to
live, to thrive and to be human, we must interact with others. We are social
animals.
To me life is about learning. To learn about others is to learn about myself.
and I have dedicated my life to learning about others and myself.
I believe that to grow, to take control of your life and to be happy is the
ultimate purpose for you life.
If you feel that I can be of service to you to help you on that path. Please
contact me and lets talk about what we can do together.
You can contact me via the following ways
Web site: www.apcgroup.org
Phone : 619.680.3603
Email :apc_group@hotmail.com
All The Best
Al Horne MBA Ph.D.
If you have read this book you will know that the secret password is
Love

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