Alfonso Aguilo

"Character and success in your life"
100 stories and reflections on the personal improvement

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ALFONSO AGUILÓ PASTRANA was born in Madrid in 1959. He has a graduation in civil engineering and y PADE of IESE, but he abandoned quickly the exercise of that profession to be dedicated to diverse works of educational ant formative nature. Since 1991 he is vice President of the European Institute of Studies of the Education (EISE) and y since 2007 President of Asociación Madrileña de Empresas Privadas de Enseñanza (AMEPE) and member of "Junta Directiva Nacional de la Confederación Española de Centros de Enseñanza (CECE)". He has published more than two hundred articles in diverse magazines and specialized publications, as well as ten books on themes of education and anthropology:  "Your son from 10 to 12 years", "To educate the character", "Questions around the faith", "The tolerance", "Character and personal value", "To educate the feelings", "25 present-day questions about the faith", "Is it reasonable to be a believer?" and "The God's call".  In 1999 he created in the internet the site www.interrogantes.net and since 2002 he is Director of Tajamar. 

(1) interrogantes = questions

Many people do large investments of time, energy and money to expand each time more their own knowledge and to improve their own personal abilities.  Nevertheless, most of the times those people present later serious lacks in which refers to the education of their own character: pessimism, indecision, disorder, insecurity, dependence of the states of spirit, difficulty to work in team or to relate to the others, or other defects in their way to be that suppose an important ballast, not only for their worth as professionals but also for their happiness and their fulfillment as persons.
The character of a person is, very often, what marks the ceiling of his possibilities in the professional area and in his family or friendship relations. Most of the times, what lacks us is not more know-how, titles or languages, but a better relation with the others, to dominate the states of spirit, to learn to organize us, to manage to be cordial and optimistic, to understand better the alien and the own problems, to cultivate more what gives light and sense to our life and so on. Almost everyone senses that he would have to improve in many of those aspects, but few know how to achieve it.  Through stories, examples and anecdotes of the everyday life, in these pages there are reflections on how to accede to that change: a change that passes for changing ourselves and in many cases by changing before our perception of the problems. 

Summary

I. Character and personal improvement

1.  The force of the education
2.  Seeing in others our defects
3. To become adult
4.  The force of the expectation
5.  Intelligence guided intelligently
6.  Intelligent reactions
7.  Happiness and money
8.  The attraction of the virtue and of the goodness
9.  The risk of the slowness
10.  Sense of humor

II. To rely on the others

11.  Personal interdependency
12.  Playing in team
13.  The abyss of the solitude
14.  To allow the others to convince us
15.  The reasons of the others
16.  The forms are important
17.  Way of explaining and brains
18.  Spontaneity, to where? 
19.  Having conversation

III. Be centered in the others

20.  The exaltation of the ego
21.  Believing in the others
22.  Fear to the interference
23.  Corresponding
24.  The little glass in the eye
25.  People interested in the others
26.  To give energy to the others
27.  The true love
28.  The false compassion

IV. Liberty, ideals, commitment

29.  The ideals of the youth
30.  To feel interpellated
31.  Question of habits
32.  The impatience of the men
33.  The moral solitude 
34.  Simple solutions
35.  Human models
36.  The shadows and the fears
37.  Religion and moral education
38.  Respect to the sacred

V. Character, autonomy and authority

39.  Latent decisions
40.  Authority and authoritarianism
41.  The theory of the germs
42.  An exterior impulse
43.  Learning to say"no"
44.  Independence and education
45.  Closed minds
46.  The judgment of the children
47.  Self-control and coherence
48.  The problem of being a fool
49.  The great men

VI. Overcoming the difficulty

50.  The miracle of the perseverance
51.  The test of the pain
52.  The blows of the life
53.  The interior liberty to elect
54.  Intelligent memory
55.  Successes and failures
56.  Be recovered
57.  The pain of the others
58.  Defending the rights of the others 
59.  The human will

VII. Constancy and tenacity

60.  The man that planted trees
61.  Tenacity
62.  The passiveness
63.  Expectations of failure
64.  To escape to the past or to the future
65.  Investing in the future
66.  Willfulness
67.  Illnesses of the will
68.  Living better with less
69.  Austerity and temperance
70.  The mirror of the desires

VIII. The risk of the addiction

71.  The myth of Sísifo
72.  Inadvertent addictions
73.  The lion and the gazelle
74.  The avoidability of the disaster
75.  Addictions and love
76.  Love and liberty

IX. The risk of feeling oneself a victim

77.  The inner dialogue
78.  The spiral of the complaint
79.  The comfort of the rout
80.  The rhetoric of the self-considered victims
81.  The temptation of the innocence
82.  The sound barrier

X. Pride and egocentrism

83.  Arrogance I? 
84.  Escaping from oneself
85.  The spiral of the grudge
86.  The sense of fault
87.  The risk of the self-deception
88.  The control of the wrath
89.  The satisfaction of the desires
90.  A new code

XI. Reflection and renewal

91.  Resistance to be renewed
92.  The power of the language
93.  The sorrow of reading
94.  Capacity of admiration
95.  Coherence and proximity
96.  To take risk to loose
97.  A head well furnished
98.  The true culture
99.  Eagerness to learn
100.  The tacit knowledge