INTRODUCTION

Most people leave their quality of life to chance – big mistake!

Here’s a challenge. Stand with your legs slightly apart. How do you feel? If someone was to give you a shove, I bet you could stay exactly where you are – easy.

Now stand on one leg. A little wobbly? Perhaps, but you’ll quickly adjust and find your balance.

Finally, as you stand, put your head back, close your eyes and lift one leg from the floor. This time you’ll be lucky to stay up straight for more than a few seconds. Hopping helps, as does waving your arms around, but the fact remains it’s tough to get a balance with your eyes closed standing on one leg. But that’s what you do every day with real life. It’s tough. . . blinding. . . and full of wobbles.

So what’s the solution? It is common these days for people to talk about achieving the elusive ‘work/life balance’. I can’t help thinking this implies that if you try to be brilliant in one area of your life then other parts suffer so you need to ‘balance’ things out. This has always seemed crazy to me as I would argue that you can have a brilliant life in all aspects so long as you open your eyes, plant your feet firmly where they should be and know how to work each part to ensure that you get the results you really deserve.

This book shows you how to do that, and in simple steps. Using a powerful tool called the Wheel of Life, you will soon identify which areas of your life need some attention right now and which areas you are doing well in. This will enable you to focus your energy and valuable time on specific parts of your life, those where it’s most needed.

And here’s the exciting part – it’s not difficult. In fact, creating a brilliant life is easy when you know how. And the know-how is all right here. This book is your own personal guide to living a brilliant life. One that gives you the most satisfaction, the most happiness, the most achievement, the most feelgood moments and the most fulfilment.

The way we’re going to do it is to break down your whole huge, complex life into key areas, such as work, family, money and health. You won’t want to work on absolutely everything at once, and so I’m going to help you give yourself a simple score on each area, to see where it is you need to focus your attentions first (the lowest scores are where simple actions will make the biggest difference to your life – and fast). We’ll then break down each area into smaller chunks to again give you the chance to identify and improve the areas where you personally need most help. The techniques I’m going to share with you are a distillation of the very best tips, tools and techniques – the stuff that when whittled down to the barest essentials, really makes the biggest difference. They are in the main simple – some will give you a very quick result, others will need more effort (always worthwhile in order to get the best results). By taking the time to start now, you will soon be living a Brilliant Life.

How to get the most out of this book

When I started to study personal development and self-improvement, I found myself using lots of different tools and techniques and testing each one for a short period of time before making up my mind whether or not this was going to be a part of my life. The fact is some of the ideas I learned actually contradicted each other but, rather than making an instant decision about what was right or wrong, I would test out the different tools and techniques first. Then and only after applying them for a few days, weeks or months, would I make my own mind up. May I suggest you do the same as you read How to Have a Brilliant Life? Don’t discard any of the ideas until you’ve tested them out in your own life first. What may not work for one person may work brilliantly for you.

The ground rules

It is essential to read and work through Chapter 1 in its entirety – this will give you the foundations. Thereafter you can jump around from chapter to chapter or heading to heading, deciding which area you need to work on next. The good news is that you may only need to read half of the book to see the biggest improvements in your life, right now.

How to Have a Brilliant Life is designed to be a guidebook to life that you can use now and many times in the future. You will discover that chapters that seem irrelevant to you now will become important later. Life’s like that too. Read the parts you need to read now, and turn to the rest as and when you need them.

As you’re working on a very important project – your life – you may want to keep both a pen and highlighter nearby as you read through the sections. Certain sections will jump out at you – highlight these and jot your own thoughts in the margin. Use this book as a workbook – not simply something you read. By doing this, you will get so much more from every page and be able to review your progress in the future.

And, finally, don’t lend this book to anyone. Normally, I’m a big fan of sharing knowledge, but this is going to be a private journey just for you. There will be lots of personal information in this book from the things you’ve worked through and the notes you’ve made, so I imagine you’ll want to keep this safe.

Are you ready? Then let’s begin. Here’s to your Brilliant Life!

MICHAEL HEPPELL