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My thanks to David Bohl of Slow Down Fast for including Having Goals Will Make You Blind! in this week’s Carnival of Personal Development and Happiness. David did a great job filling in for Alex Blackwell, who is taking a little break.

The carnival is filled with lots of great posts that will both teach you and help you apply your learning. Some of my favorites include:

4 Reasons to Become a Generous Giver. Matthew Paulson at American Consumer News touches on a subject that is near and dear to my heart: personal philanthropy. There a lot of emotional and financial reasons to give to charity, especially during tax time.

Lorraine Cohen at Powerful Living suggests Creating a Theme Year as an alternative to New Year’s Resolutions. Once you’ve identified a theme, she helps you through a series of questions that will increase your chances of following through on that theme.

Steven Aitchison at Change your thoughts contributed the very funny and inspiring GOYA method for Personal Development. I don’t want to give away any secrets, so I’ll just say it deals with getting started on any task.

A couple of weekends ago I decided to devote my whole weekend to relaxation and personal development. I was feeling quite burnt out and tired and rather than continuing to drag myself down, I chose to be proactive and take a “time out.” It’s easier and more affordable than you might think to have a weekend like this. In this post, I’ll show you how.

Ingredients for a Personal Development Weekend

• 1 Part Standard Issue Hotel Room. Substitutions are allowed and encouraged. The only requirement is that a PD weekend should happen in a place where you can find peace and quiet. You may find this in a secluded campground, or a cute Bed & Breakfast, or even your own home. Let your comfort level and budget be your guide.
• 1 Part Place with Something to Look At. This is for taking breaks, getting something to eat, and walking around. I chose a town relatively near my home that has a lot of old buildings.
• Something to Write In. Your Something to Write In doesn’t have to be fancy, but I find that having a nice journal makes the reflecting process more fun.
• Music. My recommendation is something relaxing and some guided meditations. My tool of choice for this is my Sony Walkman mp3 Player
• Liberal Dose of Nature. Part of the renewal process for me involves lots of quiet outdoors time and walking around. This may not be your thing, but I encourage you to think about your need for natural light and fresh air.
• A Pinch of Personal Development Products. Try not to go overboard here. One or two systems are about all anyone can digest in a weekend. I decided to focus on some Neuro-Linguistic programming experiments and some journaling exercises.
• Tea. I guess you could choose a different beverage, but I don’t know why you’d want to!
• Be Sure to Omit: Television, alcohol, and attention stealers like email, IM, and text messages.

Directions - Friday
Take the back way to your destination and use the drive time to unwind. Listen to some good music, or maybe a guided meditation. Enjoy the scenery.

After you’ve checked into your Standard Issue Hotel room, go into the little town for dinner. Enjoy dinner and leave the waitress a large tip to cultivate the spirit of generosity.

Go back to the hotel room and take a hot bath. Do a little yoga, listen to a meditation, and SLEEP.

Directions - Saturday
Wake up when your body tells you to. Meditate using a guided meditation, listen to some music, or just observe your own breath. Remember to put the “Do Not Disturb” sign on your door, unless you’d like to meet the housekeeping staff

Spend a little time on your personal development systems or exercises - maybe do a little journaling or write a letter to someone you love. Make some tea and walk around town for a while.

After lunch, head out into nature and walk some more. Take photos if you’re inclined. Be silent and listen to the world for at least 5 minutes.

Pick up some dinner, drive back to the hotel, and take advantage of the empty pool and hot tub. Shower, stretch, meditate and SLEEP.

Directions - Sunday
Wake up when your body tells you to. Meditate using a guided meditation, listen to some music, or just observe your own breath. Go out to breakfast, or linger over the complimentary continental breakfast at your hotel. Read a book or chat with other customers. Take another short walk and prepare to head home refreshed and feeling great.

I hope you’ve all had the chance to have a Personal Development Weekend. If you have, please tell us about it in the comments.

I’m very happy to say that Never the Same River Twice had posts appear in two carnivals this week, and one from last week that I foolishly missed.

Lorraine Cohen hosted the Personal Development Carnival this week at her Powerfull Living blog.

And at Creating Abundant Lifestyles, Wanda Grindstaff hosted the Success and Abundance Mindset Carnival.

Also, and I apologize to Ananga for missing this last week, the Living by Design Carnival was featured at Living by Design.

Instead of highlighting only a few of the posts this week, I strongly urge all my readers to look at the Carnivals, read through the posts, leave some comments, and maybe Stumble or Digg your favorite posts.

The Personal Development Blog recently posted a group writing project asking other bloggers to define personal development. If you’ve spent any time at all in the personal development blogosphere, you know that this term is very loosely defined. It can encompass things like productivity, personal finance, relationship advice, and physical health. All of these topics are great and very important for living a happy and fulfilling life. However, in my post, I really want to get at the heart of the issue.

Over the course of several days of noodling and struggling with a frame for this post, I realized that real framing question for me is…

What is the Purpose of Personal Development?
It seems to me that personal development is a means to an end. I’m not all that interested in developing myself just for giggles. In fact, I often find personal development painful and difficult. I realized that I persist at it because I have an underlying motivation. It should come as no surprise, given the topic of this blog, that, for me, personal development is…

A collection of tools, philosophies and disciplines designed to help individuals respond proactively to change.

What IS Personal Development
The underlying premise of this blog is that rapid change is widespread and persistent in our current society, and that it can wreak havoc on individuals and organizations that are not centered and focused. For me, personal development is all about helping individuals discover their true selves, or whatever Truth has relevance for them, and helping them gain the strength and insight needed to hold onto that unchanging center, even in times of chaos.

This isn’t a new concept at all. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus wrote that human being don’t have any control over their external circumstances. All that we can do is control our reactions to those circumstances. The Buddha taught his followers to maintain perfect equanimity – balance – regardless of external circumstances. For these teachers and other, True Happiness lies in honoring the True Self.

Personal development is just another way to find what is Real.

If you are interested in reading more definitions of personal development, check out the Personal Development page at the Million Dollar Wiki. Also, be sure to visit Gleb Reys’ great Personal Development Blog.

There are some pretty crazy sounding ideas floating around in the personal development web space. One of the craziest sounding I’ve encountered is called Emotional Freedom Techniques, or EFT for those in the know. According to Wikipedia, EFT is “a psychotherapeutic tool based on a theory that negative emotions are caused by disturbances in the body’s energy field.”

The main tool of EFT is called “tapping.” It is supposed to function a bit like acupuncture without the needles. Basically, a person using EFT uses his or her fingers to tap on key meridians to alter the energy flow in the body. When done effectively, the body’s energy balance is restored and the negative emotions go away.

A Rocky Start
I first read about EFT and tapping over a year ago when I was browsing through some personal development sites. Like many people, I thought the whole thing seemed a little silly. However, I know that acupuncture has been shown to be at least scientifically plausible, so I decided to give it a try. I printed out a guide, practiced it a few times, and was pretty disappointed with the results. Basically, it didn’t seem like tapping did anything to get rid of negative emotions. I thought that was the end of the story.

Tapping Revisited
About a month ago, I came across an EFT website called Tapping.com. It didn’t take me long to discover that this site features some great (free) videos that explain all of the fundamentals of the techniques. I downloaded the Introduction to Tapping video immediately.

…And it sat on my desktop for about 3 weeks. I just couldn’t get interested enough to watch a 15 minute video.

That all changed when I woke up this morning. I’ve been feeling a lot of anxiety lately about a big work project that is taking me quite far out of my comfort zone. When I sat down to try to accomplish something on the project, I realized that my anxiety was distracting me, preventing me from getting any work done, and making the situation worse.

Since I was already sitting at the computer, I figured I had nothing to lose by watching the tapping video. I dutifully followed all of the instructions and tapped on my anxiety. At the end of the 15 minutes, my anxiety had decreased from about a 7 on a 1 to 10 scale all the way down to a 2 or 3. I was able to work the rest of the day with only minor distraction or feelings of anxiousness.

Enough About Me, What About You?
Advocates of tapping and EFT say that it can be effective for a variety of emotional and psychological issues such as anxiety, depression, and even addictions. There are a lot of outlandish-sounding claims made on some of the websites (“Cure Your Heroin Addiction in 3.2 Seconds!!!”), so I don’t blame anyone for taking all of this with a grain of salt. However, it really only takes 15 minutes to learn the techniques, and it isn’t going to hurt you – unless you poke yourself in the eye when you’re tapping

Tips for Tapping Success

• Be very specific with the emotion you tap on. Really take the time to feel it, locate it in your body, and give it a name.
• Keep your focus on the emotion. As you tap, the emotion you’re working on will change. It change location in your body, or change intensity, or even transform into a different emotion. It’s important to track those changes and adjust your focus appropriately.
• Practice with the video. My biggest mistake with my initial encounter with EFT was trying to pick it up from printed material. I’m sure that works for some people, but I’m too much of a visual learner. Tapping.com has provided hours of video that explain all of the fundamentals. I highly recommend them.
• Keep working on it. By the end of my workday, I felt my anxiety coming back up to about a 5 on a scale of 1-10. This overwhelm is not productive, so I tapped on it some more to keep it at a low level.