Success and Self Improvement Audio Books

Leisure Audio Books have recently launched their website containing over 6000 audio books which are available for immediate download on to your MP3 Player or IPod.

They have a good selection of Self Help Audio books which include books on motivation, success, personal growth, time management and interpersonal skills.

Best sellers include:

• The Awakened Mind System by Dr Jeffrey Thomson, which uses pulses of sound combined with a lush ambient soundtrack. As you listen, your own brainwaves begin to reflect the Awakened Mind pattern
• How to Dejunk your Life by Dawna Walter - An inspirational guide to fighting clutter and sorting your space.
• Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell - A look at why major changes in our society so often happen suddenly and unexpectedly.

Visit Leisure Audio books for the full selection.

Articles on how to Increase Attention Span

I thought it was about time that I wrote some articles on how to increase attention span.

This may sound like a simple thing because if you want to remember something, you surely just have to pay attention to it. However, the most common reason healthy adults forget is because they don't manage to focus. Just being easily distracted can account for memory lapses no matter what age you are..

Attention is one of the most sensitive aspects of the intellect. This means that it is quite vulnerable to being disrupted. In order to soak up information so we can later remember it, we must be mindful and focus on what we are trying to learn. Sometimes the problem isn't that we forget, but that we don't "get" what we want to remember from the outset.

Does this sound easy to you? It is. But think for a moment of all the things in your daily life that you really don't pay attention to. Consider the following questions about information we encounter every day:

* Where did you park the car the last time you went to the Grocery Store?
* What color is at the bottom of the stoplight?
* What letters, if any, are missing from the telephone dial?
* How many light switches are in your house or apartment?

How did you do? The chances are you don't know the correct answers to some of these questions, even though these are things that you come across, sometimes frequently, over the course of a typical day. Why? Because we are not always mindful of things we do or see every day. Only by focusing our attention can we adequately acquire information and have it later when we need to remember it.

Can we improve our attention? Absolutely. How? Here are two basic habits we can develop to improve attention and maximize memory fitness immediately:

1. Be Aware - If you are aware that you are hearing or seeing something you want to remember, you will be more likely to pay attention to it, to "get" it, and to "have" it later when you want to remember it. Increased awareness of the need to remember will increase your attention toward that information.

Have you ever lost your car in a parking lot? Or forgotten whether you turned off the oven?

Imagine if you had been more aware that you needed to be mindful of where you parked or whether you turned that knob. If only you had thought to yourself, "Okay, I need to pay attention now so I will remember what I'm doing." Being more aware in those situations would have encouraged you to pay closer attention and made it more likely that you would remember that information later.

2. Make the effort - Next, you must try to focus your attention. Being aware that you need to pay attention without making the effort to do so is like sleeping with the unread text book under your pillow the night before final exams. It never worked, did it? Well, the same rule applies here. It isn't enough to know you must be mindful of something you want to remember: You must then do it. So when you park your car at the mall and want to be able to find it a few hours later, simply make the effort to look around and pay attention to where you are. Most likely there are some signs or other landmarks to help you remember where you've parked.

Come back soon for more articles on how to increase attention span.

Unlock the Power of Self Improvement

When we look at a certain object, a painting for example – we won’t be able to appreciate what’s in it, what is painted and what else goes with it if the painting is just an inch away from our face. But if we try to take it a little further, we’ll have a clearer vision of the whole art work.

We reach a point in our life when we are ready for change and a whole bunch of information that will help us unlock our self improvement power. Until then, something can be staring us right under our nose but we don’t see it. The only time we think of unlocking our self improvement power is when everything got worst. Take the frog principle for example –

Try placing Frog A in a pot of boiling water. What happens? He twerps! He jumps off! Why? Because he is not able to tolerate sudden change in his environment – the water’s temperature. Then try Frog B: place him in a luke warm water, then turn the gas stove on. Wait til the water reaches a certain boiling point. Frog B then thinks “Ooh… it’s a bit warm in here”.

People are like Frog B in general. Today, Anna thinks Carl hates her. Tomorrow, Patrick walks up to her and told her he hates her. Anna stays the same and doesn’t mind her what her friends says. The next day, she learned that Kim and John also abhors her. Anna doesn’t realize at once the importance and the need for self improvement until the entire community hates her.

We learn our lessons when we experience pain. We finally see the warning signs and signals when things get rough and tough. When do we realize that we need to change diets? When none of our jeans and shirts would fit us. When do we stop eating candies and chocolates? When all of our teeth has fallen off. When do we realize that we need to stop smoking? When our lungs have gone bad. When do we pray and ask for help? When we realize that we’re gonna die tomorrow.

The only time most of us ever learn about unlocking our self improvement power is when the whole world is crashing and falling apart. We think and feel this way because it is not easy to change. But change becomes more painful when we ignore it.

Change will happen, like it or hate it. At one point or another, we are all going to experience different turning points in our life – and we are all going to eventually unlock our self improvement power not because the world says so, not because our friends are nagging us, but because we realized its for our own good.


Happy people don’t just accept change, they embrace it. Now, you don’t have to feel a tremendous heat before realizing the need for self improvement. Unlocking your self improvement power means unlocking yourself up in the cage of thought that “its just the way I am”. It is such a poor excuse for people who fear and resist change. Most of us program our minds like computers.

Jen repeatedly tells everyone that she doesn’t have the guts to be around groups of people. She heard her mom, her dad, her sister, her teacher tell the same things about her to other people. Over the years, that is what Jen believes. She believes its her story. And what happens? Every time a great crowd would troop over their house, in school, and in the community – she tends to step back, shy away and lock herself up in a room. Jen didn’t only believed in her story, she lived it.

Jen has to realize that she is not what she is in her story. Instead of having her story post around her face for everyone to remember, she has to have the spirit and show people “I am an important person and I should be treated accordingly!”

Self improvement may not be everybody’s favorite word, but if we look at things in a different point of view, we might have greater chances of enjoying the whole process instead of counting the days until we are fully improved. Three sessions in a week at the gym would result to a healthier life, reading books instead of looking at porns will shape up a more profound knowledge, going out with friends and peers will help you take a step back from work and unwind. And just when you are enjoying the whole process of unlocking your self improvement power, you’ll realize that you’re beginning to take things light and become happy.

Welcome to the Success and Self Improvement Blog

Hello and welcome to the Success and Self Improvement blog. Here you'll find lots of tips and ideas for becoming successful in whatever you do. You'll learn more about how to motivate yourself, how to become a leader, improving your time management skills and more.

Everything that happens to us happens has a purpose, and sometimes, one thing leads to another. Instead of locking yourself up in your cage of fears and crying over past heartaches, embarrassment and failures, treat them as your teachers and they will become your tools in both self improvement and success.

So, when does self improvement become synonymous with success? Where do you start? Here are a few tips:

• Stop thinking and feeling as if you’re a failure, because you’re not. How can others accept you if YOU can’t accept YOU?
• When people feel so down and low about themselves, help them move up. Don’t go down with them. They’ll pull you down further and both of you will end up feeling inferior.
• Take things one at a time. You don’t expect black sheep’s to be goody-two-shoes in just a snap of a finger. Self improvement is a one day at a time process.
• Self improvement results to inner stability, personality development and dig this …. SUCCESS. It comes from self confidence, self appreciation and self esteem.
• Set meaningful and achievable goals. Self improvement doesn’t turn you to be the exact replica of Cameron Diaz or Ralph Fiennes. It hopes and aims to result to an improved and better YOU.
• When you’re willing to accept change and go through the process of self improvement, it doesn’t mean that everyone else is. The world is a place where people of different values and attitude hang out. Sometimes, even if you think you and your best friend always like to do the same thing together at the same time, she would most likely decline an invitation for self improvement.

We should always remember that there’s no such thing as ‘over night success’. Its always a wonderful feeling to hold on to the things that you already have now, realizing that those are just one of the things you once wished for. A very nice quote says that “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” We are all here to learn our lessons. Our parents, school teachers, friends, colleagues, officemates, neighbors… they are our teachers. When we open our doors for self improvement, we increase our chances to head to the road of success.