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My thanks go to my good friend and business partner Keith for stepping in and writing another belting edition of Adam Up last week. We have had some lovely feedback.

[Keith butting in rudely:-

Several of you have asked what the open rate of the e-mail was with a title of 'Do Not Open'.  Well my marketing experiment surprised me as there was virtually no change from normal.  I expected more opens out of curiosity.  So - the leading headline for opens remains as 'Bad News'.  If you didn't see my post last week this will all make no sense but you can catch up here -

Back to Adam] 

I was indeed in class teaching my Intensive Hypnotherapy Diploma Course last week (for 9 days in total) and what with me also having worked the previous weekend running my monthly diploma course, I realised that I had not taken a full day off for 4 weeks...

Because it is not until 2015, and because we know how people need to plan in advance (especially as it is 9 days away from home for some people, and a full week off work for others) we are offering for one-week only an early bird discount like no other - we are offering a full £800.00 off the course fee!!

If you book on the 2015 intensive hypnotherapy diploma this week (deadline 27th March), you'll get it for less than £2000.00. This is unheard of - especially if you see the depth of education you get with this course.

• I have attached the latest prospectus to this e-mail.  (see attachment)
• You can also read more about the Intensive course on our website.  
• If you have any questions please e-mail me or drop me a line in our Support Desk. 
  

Back onto this week's Adam Up main article... 

Having finished class on the Sunday, I came in on Monday morning to catch up with urgent emails, then I sent out all the manuals and materials to my students I had been in class with all week, and I took the rest of the day off, then had the full day off on Tuesday. What a day I had.

My darling wife works so hard caring for our children, that I told her to take the day off and that I would stand in for her. I made breakfast, made packed lunches, took my son to pre-school, went with our baby daughter to toddler group with all the other Mums, I picked up our son, got them both off for their naps, made dinner, watched kids TV, played fun games and before I knew it, it was all over and everyone was in bed.

In bed that night, of all the places to be reminded of something important, the baby character from the TV comedy Family Guy quoted Henry David Thoreau. It is a quote I absolutely love and will share more fully here: 

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms."

― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

This quote was so timely. It reminded me of how I wish to live my life - with purpose, with joy and on my own terms. I felt that the day I spent with my children had exemplified that.... And also illustrated how much my own sense of purpose has changed in recent years. My work, my running, my studying are all true loves of mine. Living by the sea, enjoying my garden are true loves still. The time I get to spend with my children, watching them develop, laugh and discover is just something else.

I had a theme that I wanted to examine this month, but it is eclipsed by the fact that I wanted to write about having a sense of purpose. At the end of my 9 days in class last week, we examined values and explored our own sense of purpose and how we might help our clients to live with purpose as part of a therapeutic treatment plan, it reminded me of the importance of having a sense of purpose and subsequently living with purpose. 

A sense of purpose connects with our sense of self in the most fundamental way: for some people it relates to what's beyond their own identity - their spirituality. For some it is the core of who they are. For others it is the sense of what they value and believe. For others still, it is simply a way to live life, or a driving force that motivates us to live a particular way. Once we discover a sense of purpose it enriches us at many levels.        

An alternative way of looking at a sense of purpose is to say that it is a sense of meaningfulness; which informs and directs our actions, however large or small, and connects them easily to each other and to our future in a way that is congruent with who we are. 

I have a great and close friend who left a very well paying job to coach football to children in inner city areas of London. He shared his love of football with the children that he wanted to have more in their lives. After a couple of years, he became more and more disillusioned, not with the children or their parents or even with the communities that he worked in, but with the system which he saw as perpetuating the problems and providing a cycle of deprivation for them and what he wanted to achieve. The pressure of what he wanted to do began to get the better of him and he realised that he was acting differently towards the children and those colleagues he worked with. He lost his sense of purpose with which he had entered this role and after a couple of extra months, he left his role and went back to his well-paid banking job in the city. 

I contrast this to a lady I worked with whose children had left home and husband had retired. Her previous sense of purpose had been on looking after her family and devoting her time and energy and love to her family. She found that she was a little bit lost and not knowing what to do with herself, something experienced by many.  

She joined a friend one evening to go a yoga class and enjoyed it so much; she attended more of them to use up her time and energy. To the surprise of friends and family, she embarked on a teacher training course over a long period of time and set up yoga classes for older people. She became friends with other instructors who took on some of her classes that were getting busier and busier. She ended up writing a best selling book on yoga for older people and went on national and international tours demonstrating her skills and knowledge, something that she had not really known about herself before. She had found a new sense of purpose, and it made her life more meaningful in a variety of ways, she was discovering things about herself that she had not been aware of before which had now given her a sense of independence and identity beyond that which existed before.

Having some kind of a vision and a sense of purpose is so useful. I am not necessarily saying that you all need to know what you want for the rest of your life, of course not, but that you give yourself a sense of purpose. I have a kind of professional mission statement that came from my early work in these fields; I encountered so many people that had dreams but had no resources, abilities or knowledge of how to achieve them that I vowed to help as many people as I possibly could achieve their dreams - this still motivates me today within my professional work. This still serves as one of my purposes in life. However, I have other purposes on a daily basis and on a yearly basis that change and become organically different - certainly that has happened a great deal in recent years as I have become a father. 

There is a notable difference between setting yourself goals to achieve and having a sense of purpose. There is great value in goal-setting, and I use goals with so many of my clients, especially those in the sports arena - yet having a sense of purpose drives us differently:

• The goals you set yourself have the potential to be achieved. Your purpose is not finite. Your purpose provides the fuel that drives us towards our goals and their achievement.
  
  
• Our goals can take us to places we don't want if they do not have a well-formed outcome. It is very rare to be misled by a sense of purpose.
  
  
• The goals we set ourselves can often fail to live up to what we wanted. Having a sense of purpose always rewards you.
  
  
• Goals can create internal conflict. Like when we have a goal of wanting to stop smoking. We want to be healthier, but a part of us likes the time we get to be by ourselves when we smoke. We can often want things in the short term which get in the way of our long term plans. Having a sense of purpose unites all of ourselves and remains harmonious throughout.
  
  
• All our goals exist in the future whereas your purpose is an expression of who you are and who you choose to be. It grows out of our past and relates to our present and future.

So what is your purpose?

In the 1960s the American psychologist Abraham Maslow made a distinction between 'survival needs' and 'self-actualisation needs' he also created a hierarchy of needs. Maslow said that survival needs include food, shelter, warmth - things which if we did not have we might die. Self-actualisation needs are the things, which give our lives meaning: love, challenge, creativity and purpose. He illustrated that unless our survival needs are met we can't begin to notice, let alone satisfy, the self-actualisation needs. The need for a sense of purpose is one of these - and if you have been struggling at a survival level you will not have had any spare energy to think about things that go beyond it. Survival honours your purpose: that you have invested the time to read this ezine article today suggests that whatever may have happened in the past, you now are looking to focus on self-actualisation.  

You see, a sense of purpose goes well beyond achieving the basics in life. These basics and things beyond that are frequently quite solid and specific, whereas purpose is abstract and more inclusive. Wanting to have a new car is a goal: being able to travel freely with a sense of independence may well be a means to a purpose. Travelling might mean being able to expand your horizons and have more experience by which to serve your fellow man for example.           

Having a sense of purpose is something which agrees with you and your life at all levels. A goal may well fit with a part of you, but not with another. Goals can provoke internal conflict, purpose cannot. Your purpose may evolve or change the way it seeks to express itself; but it does not run out. Remember my friend who wanted to coach under privileged children? He eventually retrained as a hypnotherapist and set up a private practice and it was with me that he trained with and thus we became friends. He learned how to help others and he also specialised in working with children. His purpose had not changed; he just found a way that allowed him to express it more easily and freely.

Finding Purpose:

Your sense of purpose is likely to be driven by your beliefs and values. Therefore, it is also likely to include many aspects of your own identity; it may well even go well beyond that. I have met people who have known what their purpose in life is since they were a young child. I would say that most people discover their purpose as they go along. If your purpose seems to be hidden, you might want to reflect on the patterns of your life so far.        

Have a think about the issues that you have been most concerned with? What gets you most excited in life? What are your values that you promote or defend? What really matters to you? We have seen already how patterned our behaviours and thinking can be. However unconscious or subtle your life purpose may be, it may well have been informing us and guiding us all along and throughout our life.      

The illness of someone very close to me as well as lots of issues of my own in earlier life led me to discover hypnosis, self-hypnosis and the personal development fields that in turn led me to do vastly different things with my life, though these things have been different, my underlying purpose has been similar and has been honoured in many different ways. I love that. My work now goes beyond meeting people and training; it goes into books, articles, audio programmes all over the world and none of it would have been possible if I had not had an underlying purpose propelling it.   

I consider myself very fortunate to have discovered my sense of purpose in one area of my life. I have also been fortunate to have discovered the tools that I needed to put my sense of purpose into action and many of those tools that I have used I share here in my ezine and on my blog and within my audio programmes. So, what if you have not yet found your sense of purpose? This is true of many, many people.         

It has been my experience that people cannot discover their purpose is often due to them not having learnt to value or tune into themselves. Many people even associate and confuse self-awareness with 'selfishness', and self-consideration with 'self-absorption'. If you happen to be one of those people, then an important initial step to take in finding your life purpose may well be to deal with these beliefs and the personal history that developed those beliefs. This does not mean ignoring your past and any connection to it, because you learned a lot from your past, despite my views on analysing it too much. We are all amazing learning machines, we just continue to learn and learn. Much of what we consider to be usual about ourselves are things that we have had to learn and they can pretty much all be changed or 'un-learned.'          

We can continue to learn from our past without being made a slave to past conditioning. If you are thinking that you have been limiting yourself in this way or you are thinking that you always have been a certain way, therefore you simply must stay that way forever, then keep on using the skills in this programme, develop them and tailor them to yourself. Life continues to show us more and more opportunities to explore and exercise our life's purpose, it has been my experience that when we actually start looking and noticing and being aware of ourselves, our purpose is usually there.

Ask yourself some more questions and write the answers down:

• What am I passionate about? What pushes my buttons or turns me on?
  
  
• What is it about this that gets me so involved?
  
  
• What does it do for me? Regardless of how unusual the answer to this may be, really take note of it and ask yourself "What does that do for me?" Keep on asking that question, "and what does that do for me?" until you cannot ask it anymore. What you are doing is asking what the purpose is behind it and you get more and more significant answers as you keep asking the question. When you get to the stage where you can't ask the question any further, you have discovered the purpose behind your passion.
  
  
• What did you love as a child? Is it still important to you? Again, ask yourself the questions from the previous one to get your purpose behind that thing. Is that purpose still valid? Has it changed? Have you lost touch with it somehow?

As I have encouraged you to do most weeks in these ezine articles, think of some action you can take to show yourself that you are living with a sense of purpose - even if it is as simple, but as lovely, as spending a full day being Mum instead of Dad as I did.

Joke Of The Week

I was in a public toilet and had just sat down when I heard a voice from the next cubicle.
He said "Hi, how are you?".
Embarrassed, I said "I'm doing fine."
The voice said "So, what are you up to?" 
I said "Just doing the same as you, sitting here!."
He said "Can I come over?".
Annoyed, I said, "Rather busy right now."
The voice said, "Listen, I will have to call you back, there's an idiot next door answering all my questions".

Hahaha, I love that. It has been a while since my joke of the week was from my good friend Angela Ford, and that was from her once again! Thank you to everybody who continues to contribute to the jokes in the Hub and those who email me jokes every week. I love getting them.

If you want to train to be a hypnotherapist, there has never been a better time, we are thriving in this economic climate! 

If you'd like to train, check out here for a course prospectus, dates and application form for this year's diploma, fully approved and accredited in several countries... 

The spaces are going at some pace right now though... 

My training school is one of a few in the UK to currently offer the externally verified HPD (Hypnotherapy Practitioner Diploma) which matches government occupational standards and is the equivalent of National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) level 4

If you are on Twitter, I publish some absolute gold material if you are interested in the fields of hypnosis, hypnotherapy and self-hypnosis, do come and follow me: http://twitter.com/adameason 

Do come and join us in the Platinum members area if you wish to learn more, I mean much more about the fields of hypnosis, hypnotherapy and self-hypnosis. There's over 150 hours of video footage, even more audio material, hundreds of articles to read, and lots of free eBooks too. You get massive savings on all my audio programmes in there too. Our Platinum Section is revamped and relaunched and now has many hours of CPD trainings, specialist workshops and tuition as well as all the video footage from my diploma course and my cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy course, go have a read about it.

Please remember to tell friends, family, colleagues and anyone else you know how they can receive Adam Up each week by registering at my homepage.

I'll be back next week, enjoy living with purpose this week ... I thank you for reading...  Goodbye for now.

Bulooo!

Adam.