Amanda Goldston was our guest on Moon, Moo & You: The Collective Wisdom on 3/31/09. It was a great show.
I liked how we all shared our collective wisdom regarding angel encounters, because we've all had them. Naturally those of us on the show were already True Believers. But even those who are skeptics have had encounters with Angels. They just may not have recognized them as such.
Amanda says that she talks to her angels all the time, but is careful not to do this in public for the very real possibility that she will be institutionalized. Yet in the age of cell phone conversations, everyone is seemingly talking to themselves in public, making it easier for us to keep our conversations with angels going uninterrupted!
Amanda has a deck of of Angel Cards she uses to intensify her ability to communicate. She says she also calls on different angels to deal with different challenges.
She says that we must remember to ask for help, and theses beings will be there to help the minute or second we ask.
Joan brought up an experience she had in a difficult life situation. She woke up with the distinct impression that someone was holding her hand. She thought it was Whitey, her husband, but there was no one there.
Joan asked Amanda if it was an angel who was holding her hand.
Amanda said this happens all the time.
When children are lost in the wilderness, angels often show up to care for them and aid in their rescue.
Angels wrap their wings around us all and love us until we learn to love ourselves.
Amanda said to look at angels as helpers, as connectors, as beings who hook us up to a larger dimension and reality.
Give your angel a name or not because Angels don't mind. They will answer to anything.
Meditate on who your angel is and how he/she can help you.
God is not limited to any religion, as well. Alcoholics Anonymous calls God the Higher Power and in reality anything or anybody can be the Higher Power.
This is available to everyone.
Joan's sister Betty came on the call to discuss an experience she had with the angels.
Her son was looking for a pair of pants. Betty went to the third story of her home to look for these pants.
The pants simply showed up for her without her having to tear up the entire room. This experience seemed so mundane, so trite. Yet by asking for help with the small things, we are practicing to remember for the times when major challenge arises.
Complete surrender is often a component of angel contact. If we ask and get attached to how it's supposed to look, we block the avenues available for divine intervention.
When we let go of outcome, the contact will suddenly show up.
Amanda taught us a great journaling technique of how to we can ask the angels for help, an exercise in "conscious surrender."
Draw a line down the center of the page. On the left, write down everything you can do to accomplish a particular goal you are working on, such as make a phone call or write a blog entry, for instance.
On the right, ask the angels to help the only way an angel can, by bringing into your life the people who can help, by bringing unexpected money and resources into your life. Then you let go.
In this state of surrender, you follow through on your hunches and intuition which allows the unseen forces to carry you effortlessly to your destination.
The less you fuss about outcome and the focus on fear, the more the mind can concentrate on peace and eternity. Resistance and tension melt away.
Think of the worst thing that can happen: loss of job, loss of income, loss if life itself. Visualize what you would do if anything like your worst fear actually happens.
When you go beyond the fear, the pathways are cleared for the good to come in.
These are comforting guidelines for the challenges that confront us. We do not need to stay immersed in' the reality that the world tells us is true: economic collapse, poverty, joblessness, hunger.
Unplug the TV. Pray to the angels. Open up a two way conversation with all the unseen forces in the Universe.
As I sit here writing these words, the silence that permeates this moment in time, the occasional birdsong as night falls, the glimpse of the Cardinal out my window as I think of Betty finding the pants for her son, all allows me to feel connected to to this gift of solitude and to the higher Universal Beings who everywhere surround us.
I know we are never alone. The angels wait for our invitation. The dogs who lie by my side tell me they are angels, too. The love they continuously radiate is an awesome gift to everyone they meet.
Angelic Intervention is ours for the asking. They clear the consciousness for higher energies to take the steering wheel.
As far as I'm concerned, my life is theirs. I am no longer in charge, not that I ever was.
The difference is that now, I finally know it.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Heal Your Life With The Help Of The Angels
Cinderella Was Not Saved - She Was a Happy Person All Along!
Would the prince have chosen Cinderella to marry if she was a miserable young woman? If her stepsisters were beautiful but miserable, would he have chosen either of them?
Are you living under the delusion that when you meet your soul mate you will finally be happy - that your misery is because you are not in a relationship or not in the right relationship? If this is you, you might be interested in what I have discovered in my 42 years of counseling individuals and couples.
Most people who are happy in their marriages were ALREADY HAPPY before meeting their spouse! Happy people make happy marriages. Unhappy people either don't marry or generally continue to be unhappy after getting married.
While Cinderella wasn't happy with her circumstances, inside she was a loving, happy person. And so was the prince. "Happily ever after" is often not the result of getting married, but the result of two basically happy people getting married to each other!
Over and over I hear from my clients: "I need a relationship to be happy." Over and over I say to them, "Focus on learning how to make yourself happy now and then you might find the relationship you are seeking."
If you think about it, it makes sense. If you were a basically happy person, would you be attracted to a basically unhappy person? Not likely.
When you make your happiness dependent upon another person, you are handing them responsibility for your emotional wellbeing. Why would someone else want this responsibility? And, since we are attracted to each other at our common level of woundedness, the chances are that the person you are attracted to and who is attracted to you is also looking to you to take responsibility for their emotional wellbeing. This is called a codependent relationship, not a happy relationship, and definitely not happily ever after.
There is certainly nothing wrong with wanting a wonderful relationship. But the chances of finding that wonderful relationship if you are unhappy is slim. When you are already happy, then you want a relationship to share your love, your happiness, your joy, your learning and growth, and your interests. When you are unhappy, the chances are you are looking for a relationship to make you happy, and this is likely not going happen.
Back to Cinderella. Because she was a caring person, she tried very hard to make her stepmother and her stepsisters happy. But they were never happy. Why? Because they were angry and blaming people, making Cinderella responsible for their happiness. No matter how kind and wonderful she was, it did not matter, because their misery was created by their own beliefs and ways of treating themselves and others.
The same is true in today's relationships. I have worked with many people who were never happy, no matter what their partner did to make them happy. As long as they were judging themselves and others instead of learning how to take responsibility for their own feelings, they were sad, empty, alone inside, hurt and/or angry. As long as they looked outside themselves for the source of their unhappiness, they were stuck being unhappy.
The way out of this unhappiness is to learn how to take 100% responsibility for your own pain and your own joy. Anyone can learn to do this, but, if you are stuck in the false belief that you need the right relationship in order to be happy, then you will likely not be motivated to learn how to do this.
A Different Kind of Resolution
by: Debra Wier
With the arrival of each New Year, I find that time seems to be passing more quickly. It’s that inverse proportion or time perception and age. It’s one I suppose we can all relate too; when you’re young time passes slowly and you wish you could speed it up and when you’re older time passes quickly and you wish you could somehow slow it down.
During childhood you can’t wait to become a teenager. Then you have the other milestones; at 16 you can legally drive, at 18 you’re considered an adult, and at 21 you can legally drink alcohol. Look out! 25 just sounds cool and 30 also has a nice ring to it as well. It sounds respectable, like you’ve finally grown up, got your act together, and you’re at the top of your game, hopefully. There are so many things to look forward to as a kid that we want to rush right into adulthood. I think it would be nice if upon reaching 30 we would go into a holding period and begin to age ever so slightly while time passes. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.
At any rate, you wake up one day and suddenly you’re 40 and you wonder where all those years went. Although 47 is still relatively young I find I spend more time than I should reminiscing about the things I used to be able to do that I can no longer do. More on that in a minute.
So this year, the New Year snuck up on me like a lightning bolt. I didn’t even think about any New Year’s resolutions until the first day of the year which didn’t exactly give me a lot of time to prepare. On Jan. 2, I decided that this would be the year I would get back in shape. Yes, that would be my resolution for the year; I would lose my excess weight and become lean and healthy and get in the best shape of my life. That doesn’t really sound so difficult. I was looking at it more like an exciting challenge.
So, in preparation for my new lifestyle I went to the grocery store that morning and purchased an assortment of fresh produce. Upon returning home, I made a big pot of homemade vegetable soup. The plan would be to eat the soup along with a portion of protein for a healthy lunch for the next few days. Planning is essential if you want to succeed and I now had a good idea about how I would fuel my body in the days ahead. The next step was to plan my workouts.
I decided to embark on a new and highly demanding fitness regime called P90X. It works on the muscle confusion principle. There are 12 different videos and you watch a different one everyday. Of course, you have to do the exercises as well. The idea behind muscle confusion is that your muscles continue to be stimulated because the routine is always changing and therefore you should get better results. Sounds good.
In order to begin the P90X routine you need to have a fairly good level of fitness as is stated in the videos. There is a fitness test you take and if you can meet all of the requirements then you should be in adequate condition to begin the program. I took the test and passed with flying colors except for one thing; the pull-ups.
Remember earlier, when I mentioned reminiscing about things I used to do in my twenties? Well, I used to be able to do pull ups and dips. While I could only do 7 pull ups and 7 dips, this is still quite respectable, especially for a woman as both exercises require tremendous upper body strength. Since I now have about 50 extra pounds I’m carrying around, pull-ups and dips are next to impossible. This isn’t an issue of not thinking positively enough, it’s an issue of weight to muscle ratio. I simple have too much weight and too little muscle to hoist myself off the ground no matter how much I visualize this happening. However, I know that I have the power to change this. I simply need to lose some fat and build some muscle. I’ve done it before so it can’t be that hard.
We had already purchased a pull-up bar in anticipation of starting the P90X program. It’s the kind that goes either inside of a door frame or on top of two opposing door frames. We mounted it on top of two opposing door frames as we felt it would have added support and there would be no chance of it coming down. It mounts by twisting the bar until the tension is great enough to hold it sturdily in place. Since the only portion of the test that I failed was the pull up portion, I decided to go ahead with the P90X program and instead of doing pull-ups I would just replace them initially will lat pull downs. Sounds like a plan.
In order to do lat pull-downs I would simply throw a rubber workout band over the bar, sit beneath it, and pull the band down towards my shoulders. I was part way into the routine alternating between push ups and lat pull downs and all was going well until I did something extremely stupid.
I wanted to get more resistance from the band I was using and so I kept backing up until I was about 6 or 7 feet away from the pull up bar. Can you see the problem? I just never thought that I’d be strong enough to pull the bar loose with just a rubber workout band. This thought never occurred to me but oh how I wish it had.
What happened next was truly one of the most painful things I’ve ever experienced. I was seated on my knees with my butt on my heels and began to pull the bands and this time there was adequate tension as I had moved away from the bar. It looked as if I was pulling back like how you would pull a sling shot. Then all of the sudden, the bar broke loose, came flying at me, smashed into my head, and knocked me on the floor. The sound it made was like a baseball bat hitting a baseball; one incredibly loud crack!
As I fell to the floor, I screamed and my husband came running in. The pain was so intense that it would be hard to describe. It brought tears to my eyes. I ended up with a very swollen forehead as the bar hit me on the left side of my head about an inch above the hairline. At first, only my forehead was swollen. Then the next day as the swelling moved down my face I had two black and swollen eyes. I had two black eyes for a couple of weeks as the swelling continued to move downward. My head was very sore from the severe blow. I still can’t believe I didn’t lose consciousness and fracture my skull. It’s possible that I did fracture my skull but other than the swelling and bruising and headache, I had no other real symptoms so it doesn’t appear that there’s any brain damage.
I’ve learned two things from this ordeal: one is that I have a really hard head, which I suspect my husband has known for years, and two, is that instead of making resolutions I’ve decided it’s best to simply make better decisions.
By always making the best decisions, I would have avoided ending up in a place where I needed a resolution. If I had made the best decision in regards to my fitness regime, I would have most likely realized that what I was doing might not have worked.
So rather than make any resolutions, I’ve distilled the whole process down to one thing: I’m simply going to make better decisions in the first place and try to avoid becoming a human target for a giant slingshot!
20 Things I've Learned From My Cat
We’ve had the good fortune of sharing our home with our cat, Puddin’, for nearly 16 years now. This means she is going on 80 in human years. She was a young stray when we found her or rather, when she found us. She was hanging around the place I used to work and since she was so persistent with her little meow, I simply had to pet her. She certainly was a lovable cat. It was dark outside so I didn’t really get a good look at her.
After I came home from work, I told my husband about the cat and suggested we drive by there since we were going out. He said, “That cat isn’t gonna be there, that was 2 hours ago! Besides, what would we do with it?” Well I wanted to go back anyway, just in case. I really had no plans of taking her home, at least consciously. I mainly just wanted him to see her.
When we arrived back at the office, I got out of the car and called her. I said something goofy like, “Where’s Mom’s baby?” She instantly came running out from under a bush across the street. My husband said, “Well I’ll be damned!” I took this as some kind of sign and my husband just fell in love with her immediately. He said we needed to take her home and feed her because he could feel her ribs. “Yeah but we don’t even have a litter box or cat food or anything and I’m not sure I want an indoor cat. What if she has fleas?” I had a million excuses but we decided we’d just feed her and keep her as an outdoor cat. Yeah right! That idea lasted for all of about two seconds.
We took her home and since we didn’t have any cat food we gave her tuna and milk. We let her come in and we put the food on a plate in the foyer. She lapped everything up in record time. Now that I could see her in the light, I thought she was the most beautiful cat I’d ever seen. It was those huge eyes; so big and beautiful. She reminded me of an owl.
After her feast, we opened the door for her to leave but she didn’t want to go back outside. NO WAY! As far as she was concerned, she had hit the mother lode, the jackpot, the lottery! The funny thing is she’s never been out since! She loves being an indoor cat and loves living the life of Riley.
We originally named her Savannah but then started calling her Puddin’ because my Dad had affectionately called her that once. It was a name she responded to quite well and it seemed to be a better fit. So we kept calling her Puddin’ and it just stuck. She unfortunately has a slow metabolism, and is now a big fat butterball, weighing in at nearly 22 pounds. While she no longer does back flips and now needs to be carried up the stairs, she continues to bring us much joy.
If you are lucky enough to share your home with a cat, then you know the wonder of the fabulous feline. If you are one of those people who doesn’t like cats, I’m sorry to hear that. I don’t understand how anybody can dislike any animal; it makes no sense to me.
Animals behave as designed by nature. They are usually not mean spirited unless they are mistreated. Obviously, I wouldn’t have a pet shark because their behavior isn’t really all that compatible with humans.
Just because cats don’t jump all over you, slobber on you, and lick you to death doesn’t mean they don’t love you. They simply have a different way of showing it. Whenever I hear someone say they hate cats it reminds me of not liking someone because of their skin color. I guess prejudice isn’t limited to human beings.
There’s an Irish proverb that says, “Beware of anyone who dislikes cats”. My feeling is that people who don’t like cats simply don’t understand them or don’t take the time to.
I’d like to share a few things I’ve learned from my cat. If you’re a cat lover then you can relate, if you’re not, then I hope perhaps I’ve made you more open minded to enjoying these magnificent creatures.
Things I’ve learned from my cat:
1. Sleep does the body good
2. Comfort is highly underrated
3. Baroque music is soothing to the soul and silence is golden
4. Getting your back scratched is one of life’s great pleasures
5. You learn when you explore; after all, the world is your oyster
6. Stretching after a nap is highly recommended
7. Showing no expression makes us appear less judgmental
8. You can learn a great deal by being a good listener
9. Don’t hesitate to give affection to those you love
10. Your crap should be covered at all times
11. It’s essential to be fastidious with your grooming habits
12. Even if you’re smarter than everyone else, there’s no need to let it show
13. Don’t worry about what others think of you
14. It’s best to live life on your own terms
15. When you go out on a limb, be sure to land on your feet
16. A persistent little nudge can pay off big time
17. Attitude is everything. Even if you’re just a kitten, see yourself as a lion
18. Independence is wonderful and so is companionship
19. If you have that wide-eyed, innocent look, it’s easy to get anything you ask for
20. Purring is an excellent way to show appreciation
Thursday, October 8, 2009
How to Research Any Job Market
A lot of job seekers today just jump on the queue, without prior knowledge about the company or market they are applying to. What happens after? They end up more disappointed and frustrated.
Only those who understand how to stand out can get the job. More so, remember no one will recruit a liability not even to talk of a novice. Never worry you are about to be exploded!
So let roll!
In carrying out your job search, you need to have several kinds of information at your disposal. You will need to research industry trends, details about the particular company you are or will be applying to, even details about the human resources manager. What I am saying is that, assuming you are applying to bank now, which common today, you first like to know about what is happening in industry which is BANKING, ok! Then later you will move to the particular bank you are applying to and the type of HR manager they have.
Cleared? Fine, let's ride on.
While carrying out these research put in mind the following questions so that it can serve as a guide during your search. They are;
What is it about this industry do I need to know so that I can ask and answer questions intelligently?
where can I get information about them?
What type of information am I looking for?
What do I need to know about the HR manager that will help me to write a better application letter and also be able to answer questions more confidently during the interview?
Remember carrying out a research is not like eating your best food, and that is why many job seekers shy away from it. If you consider the rate at which people are employed through a newspaper advert. You will found out that only a few find their job via these means.
Once you can research the market properly, then you will have a better idea of what you going in for. More importantly you will be able to tailor your CV and application letter more effectively due to the level of information you have at your disposal.
Now, How to carry out the research!
As you start off, researching the company trends, what you will be looking for are:
The main growth area.
The main players in the market.
The main challenges and problems facing the industry.
Now you know what you will look for, and then make a visit to the nearest university library or any other well equipped library around you search for their reference guide on your chosen industry trends. If this do not work then you go on-line and make your search on the common search engines, this does not take much time to find out.
Now next step is for you to narrow down your search to some specific companies which you are aiming for in your job search. While doing this, keep in mind these key facts about each of these organizations. These can be categorizing into six, they are;
Strong and weak point.
Major challenges.
Organizational structure.
Organizational culture.
Company size like: number of staff, profit, market share, profit, etc.
Main competitors.
To make the search easier for you, get hold of the companies report, or as I said earlier go online and get your hand on this information.
If this do not work find a means of speaking to their employees about what it is like working for that particular company, ask them about their competitors, strength and weakness, every other thing you deemed fit.
Now we are done with the company, let's move further to your specific job.
In doing this effectively you will need to know the following things;
What will be your task and responsibilities
What is the required qualification?
The typical salary job
What are their human resources like?
Laying your hand on a thing like this will make you better prepared with your CV and most importantly the interview.
WARNING
If you do not do your research so well, the company may say or do something that will as been ignorant of their business, which may ruin your opportunity of been taken. But if you do it will you will increase your chances by 100%.
For you to do it right it is better you have a file for all this research so that you can keep a track of those information it can be of help during your interview.
ACTION PLAN QUESTIONS
1. Why do you need to research your Job market?
2. How do I carry out the search?
3. What do I need to know about my chosen company?
4. What questions do I need answered as regard the Job I am looking for?
Does Psychotherapy Work?
Many years ago, when I became a psychotherapist, all I knew was the traditional psychotherapy that I had learned in school, and that I had personally experienced with many different therapists and many different forms of therapy. For 18 years I practiced what I had learned, and I was never happy with the results.
I saw that people often felt better for the moment, or resolved a particular issue, but that when new issues came up, they didn't have a process for dealing with them. In all the years of my own therapy, I had never learned a process either - a process for loving myself and taking 100% responsibility for my own feelings and needs. In fact, taking responsibility for my feelings was never a part of any of the therapies I had experienced. I had learned to express my feelings - which often turned out to be a form of control - but not how I was creating my own feelings of anxiety, depression, anger, hurt, guilt and shame.
I no longer practice traditional psychotherapy because, in my experience, it doesn't work. For the past 23 years I have worked with clients with the Inner Bonding process. In fact, I have many psychotherapists in my practice learning this process, because they are discouraged with the results of traditional psychotherapy in their work and in their own lives.
WHAT WORKS AND WHAT DOESN'T WORK
So, does psychotherapy work? It does if what you are learning about is how to connect with your own feelings and take responsibility for them; how to discover the false beliefs that are creating your painful feelings; and how to connect with a personal source of spiritual Guidance that teaches you the truth and the loving action toward yourself. It works when you are willing to learn to take loving action in your own behalf and share your love with others. It works when you are willing to stop blaming the past, your parents, your partner, society, events, or God for your suffering and learn that you are the cause of your own suffering. It works when you are willing to stop seeing yourself as a victim of others and circumstances and learn to be loving to yourself.
What does not work is spending years analyzing the past. While the past shaped our beliefs, and it is important to understand where we learned what we learned, dwelling on it is a waste of time. In my experience, if we stay current with discovering the false beliefs that cause our painful feelings, the past will become illuminated. When we realize, for example, that we spend much time and energy judging ourselves, it is easy to go into the past to see where we learned this. Did one or both of your parents judge you? Did they judge themselves? What was the role modeling you grew up with? Did either of your parents take responsibility for their feelings, or were they victims, blaming each other or you or others for their misery? It is not hard to learn about the past when we are willing to examine our current choices and behavior toward ourselves and others.
YOUR SPIRITUAL CONNECTION
Psychotherapy that does not include developing a spiritual connection does not work. Our spiritual connection is the Source we need to turn to for wisdom and comfort. In order to deal lovingly with the challenges of life, we need to know that we are not alone, and that we always have our higher Guidance to turn to for the truth and loving action toward ourselves and others.
True healing is about learning how to take full, 100% responsibility for our own feelings and needs. It is about moving out of self-abandonment and emotional dependency and into emotional freedom. When you find a therapist, facilitator or coach who helps you to do this, then you will find great benefit.
The Golden Rule
by: Rick Walker
"So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you"
Mt 7:12 - NIV
We have all heard the Golden Rule but do we really understand it, particularly with regard to our daily interaction with others?
I have been reading the discussion of "The Golden Rule" as presented in Chapter 16 of Napoleon Hill's "Law of Success" and have had an epiphany! I always took the Golden Rule to suggest that you will receive the same (or similar) response from others in similar fashion to the way you treat them. Treat people nicely and people will treat you nicely (and who doesn't want to be treated nicely?). Treat people poorly and expect to be treated poorly.
Is this, however, what is meant by "Do unto others ..." and, more importantly, who does it REALLY benefit the most?
Day to Day Interactions
In our day-to-day lives, we all interact with people; family, friends, business associates and strangers. And, so much of our day is influenced upon the outcomes of those interactions or, more specifically, how we respond to those outcomes.
If we take the transit system or, as an even more emphatic example, an elevator to work, we are very familiar with the manner in which we stay isolated in our separate world, interacting as little as possible with those around us. We have our protective barriers erected against possible interaction. We read books or the newspaper, plug ourselves into our iPods or work on our lap-tops. No end to the ways in which we can communicate the fact that we don't want to ... well, communicate.
If we have an exchange with a taxi driver, vendor or just bump into someone in the street, depending on the nature of both their response and our own, such an incident can set a "mood" for an entire day, if we let it. Some days, simply getting up "on the wrong side of the bed" in the morning can spoil a day, if we let it.
These are, I suggest, examples of how we might "manifest what we visualize into our lives", examples of how "attraction" and "magnetism" colours our interactions with people, how the "Law of Attraction" works when dealing with "mankind". Our mind set, our disposition dictates how we treat the world and, in return, how the world treats us.
"Such as are thy habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of thy mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts. Dye it, then, with a continuous series of such thoughts ..."
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
Classic Examples
As an extreme example, let's consider the character Scrooge in Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol". The story begins by defining Scrooge's character as "... a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!" ... before he meets Jacob Marley and the three ghosts. As Scrooge moves through every aspect of every day, his interactions with one and all are confrontational and distasteful. He is an entirely unsavoury character with whom to associate and overpowers everyone he encounters with his self-, or more accurately, money-centred consciousness. There are some exceptions, the most notable being his nephew who exudes Christmas cheer despite his uncle's ugly disposition. Scrooge exemplifies the definitive bad attitude toward his fellow man. It is very enlightening that his disposition is a direct result of his money centred consciousness.
He treats everyone he encounters with the character resulting from his money centred consciousness, every human interaction is based on an extreme "cost benefits analysis". In return, he receives cautious, timid, thoroughly cowed responses from his employees, disbelief and disappointment from businessmen (seeking charitable donations) and contempt from his business peers when informed of his death (Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come).
At the other extreme, let us look at another Christmas classic - "It's A Wonderful Life". George Bailey goes through his life (as reviewed for Clarence, his guardian angel) always giving of himself for his family, friends and "Building and Loan" clients, even going so far as to extend loans to his clients immediately after his wedding in response to a desperate financial crisis. He is presented, in many instances, as resenting his circumstances (but, tellingly, not resenting those he has helped). These responses are consistent with the core beliefs of his character. When life presents him with his own desperate, individual crisis, his family, friends and even strangers all come willingly, even eagerly, forward in order to provide the necessary assistance, far in excess of his actual requirements.
"A man reaps what he sows ... Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up"
Gal. 6:7 and 9
Admittedly, these are carefully constructed plots for story purposes, however, they do portray contrasting examples of the human experience and, more specifically, they exemplify "The Golden Rule". Both characters get back responses from their fellow man consistent with the core beliefs of their characters which dictate the nature of their interaction with their fellow man.
Where Scrooge presents a miserly disposition to those whom he encounters, he receives a similarly negative response in return. In contrast, where George Bailey exemplifies a generous and caring disposition in his daily life, he is offered respect, admiration and, when desperately needed, generosity in return. This generosity, as I stated above, was far in excess of his actual needs.
So, when we go about our lives on a day-to-day basis, what is the nature of the character we exemplify toward others; our family, friends, business associates and the strangers we meet. If we typically offer the world an unfriendly disposition, should we not expect, over time, to develop an unfriendly character? On the other hand, if we make active attempts to greet those whom we encounter in a friendly manner, should we not expect to develop a friendly disposition in our character?
"Manifest the Change You Desire in the World"
To be clear, all I am proposing is a simple smile, and possibly a "Hello", to the people we meet in the course of our day. A little daily courtesy to the coffee vendor in the morning. Simply small acts of courtesy and kindness in your day. It has been said that smiles are contagious. Perhaps smiles are similar to love in that it might be very hard to give them away as they are always given back.
"... our brains become magnetized with the dominating thoughts which we hold in our minds, and ... these "magnets" attract to us the forces, the people, the circumstances of life which harmonize with the nature of our dominating thoughts".
Napoleon Hill
If we are going about our day with a cheerful disposition, we should reasonably expect to get cheerful responses from those whom we know. We may not get a cheerful response from the strangers we meet, however, give some thought to how someone you didn't know, passing by with a smile, may have been a ray of sunlight in your day. Furthermore, it's hard to have a bad day if you are smiling.
Who Really Benefits?
In the scenarios presented above, all those involved in the proposed exchanges realize some emotional response out of the exchanges. However, I suggest that you are the greatest (or worst) beneficiary of the exchanges. I believe we reap what we sow. If we present a pleasant and outgoing (positive) demeanor to those we encounter in our day, we become pleasant and outgoing and develop a corresponding positive attitude.
If, on the other hand, we present a disagreeable, negative demeanor to the world, we will drive people away and develop a negative attitude to the world over time (to match our negative demeanor - negative response feedback loop).
To take this argument further, in order to develop the character traits we desire in ourselves, we need to be actively exemplifying them in our daily lives. If these character traits are foreign to us, then we need to initially act" them out in order to eventually possess them. I believe this is what Napoleon Hill suggests in "Think and Grow Rich" and "Law of Sucess".
If we walk around, day-in and day-out, with a frown on our faces, how long until we develop a frown on our heart (if you will permit the metaphor)). Conversely, if we pass our day with a smile on our faces, acknowledging and relishing the good things we encounter every day, how long until we develop that same smile in our heart.
"But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control"
Gal. 5:22
At the very least, begin and end your days with a smile and good word for the members of your family. A smile from your wife or husband as you head off to work and smiles from your children goes a long way to easing the stress and tension in a day.
We reap what we sow. With these words in mind, I suggest we go out and sow a cheerful day. Doing so will place a cheerful disposition on ours souls and, over time, we will reap cheerfulness from those we meet.
"A man passes for what he is worth. What he is engraves itself on his face, on his form, on his fortunes, in letters of light which all men may read but himself. ... ".
Emerson.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Memory Fitness
Whether you call it a “senior moment” or a “mind glitch,” the truth is that as we get older our memory and thought processes are just not what they used to be. A friend of mind claims that for the past ten years she hasn’t remembered the name of any new person she met. Another describes those frequent moments when the word is right on the tip of your tongue but for the life of you it just won’t materialize. Still another says her memory has gotten so rusty lately that her kids take advantage of it, sometimes having her believing that she approved an expenditure, when she can’t even remember them asking about it!
Just as daily weight repetitions in the gym strengthen certain muscle groups, mental exercises strengthen and enhance memory and thought functions over time. The following are some exercises you can use to increase your memory fitness:
• Do crossword puzzles and brainteasers on a regular basis.
• Play games that use memory like chess, bridge, or Trivial Pursuit.
• Memorize your shopping list by visualizing your trip through the supermarket. See yourself stop at each aisle putting what you need in your cart. When you get to the store, use your memory to select the items. Bring a written list along to be sure you haven’t forgotten anything.
• Each time you come to the end of a chapter in a book you are reading, imagine yourself summarizing it as briefly as possible to someone who has not read it. Do the same for the whole book when you finish it.
• Link together items that you need to remember into story form. If you need to do errands that include going to the hardware store, the dry cleaners, and the post office, your story might be: You get grease on your clothes at the hardware store so you must go to the dry cleaners. While at the dry cleaners you find an envelope in your pocket that needs to be mailed.
• When meeting someone for the first time, repeat her name as you are introduced. Ask a question about the spelling (is that Ann with an E at the end?) Find a distinctive feature about the person and picture it with the spelling of the person’s name. Associate the name with a song, a rhyme, or a celebrity (Example: if you meet someone named Marilyn, associate the person with Marilyn Monroe.)
Along with aging, memory loss is often the result of chronic stress. If you are going through a particularly stressful time in your life, you will most likely experience difficulty in remembering things. Try the following to help with the forgetfulness caused by stress:
• Put your keys in the same place in your purse and leave them in the same place when you enter your house.
• Try to park in the same place when using parking lots you frequent regularly.
• Keep a small notepad handy and write down things you know you need to remember.
• Purchase a small digital recorder or use the voice recording feature on your cell phone to record things that occur to you while away from home.
• Use timers to remind you of appointments and when you need to take medication.
• If you take more than one medicine a day, purchase a pill reminder box and use it so that you will not have to guess whether you've taken your medication or not.
• Slow down!
Sometimes memory loss is just a symptom of a too busy life but it also can alert us to a problem in the brain. Most of us have at one time or another worried that we had early Alzheimer's Disease. If you are concerned whether your forgetfulness has an organic cause you may want to read Understanding Memory Loss, an online booklet by the National Institute on Aging that can help you figure out whether you should seek an evaluation.
If you are having difficulty remembering things, it may be due to stress, anxiety, or depression. Life is challenging and when we are challenged we forget things. Besides the exercises above, you may want to visit a qualified mental health professional for help.
When you cannot remember something, it often makes you feel anxious or stressed. Good self care for you may include improving your memory. Using memory exercises, finding stress reducing strategies that work for you, and educating yourself about what is normal and what is abnormal memory loss can help. Of course, you have to remember to do them!
Living with Loneliness
Loneliness can make one feel sad, anxious, and depressed. Most people feel lonely at some point in there life. You don't have to feel lonely if you decide to take control of your loneliness and do something about it.
Loneliness is feeling empty inside. It is a feeling of separateness and isolation. It is a feeling of being out of touch with other human beings. People experience loneliness when they do not have someone to depend on, a close family, a group of friends, or relationships with people at work or school. A person can be lonely even when surrounded by other people. We can feel lonely when there is a lack of intimacy in our relationships.
Loneliness occurs at all stages of our life. We may have felt it during our teenage years, as a new parent, when the children left home. Perhaps we never found Mr. or Ms. Right, or maybe we experienced the pain of divorce or the death of a spouse. Loneliness can be transitory and ebbs and flows during our lifetime. Different times of year often make lonely people even lonelier. It sometimes even causes feelings of loneliness in people who have many relationships.
You can learn to live with your loneliness by taking a proactive approach to it. The following are some ideas that can help. Keep an open mind as you read them. If you find yourself shaking your head and telling yourself you can't possibly do something about your loneliness, realize that only you can change the way you feel. If you don't like feeling lonely choose to take action to change.
Accept the reality of your loneliness. It is neither something to be ashamed of nor something to hide. Everyone, at some point in her life, has periods of loneliness-some people accept it, others try to deny it. Accepting it is the first step to finding some relief.
Express your loneliness. You may do it through tears or by writing your feelings. Expressing your loneliness to yourself can often give you insight as to what is causing it.
Question whether you need help in dealing with your loneliness. Feelings of "aloneness" can often stem from depression. You may want talk with a therapist or speak with the leader of your religious community about it.
Push yourself to have contact with others. Call your local community center, church, synagogue, or senior center. Ask for a list of groups and activities. Select one that appeals to you and then make yourself attend a meeting or program. It will feel awkward at first but you won't be the only person there who doesn't know anyone. Even if you are, each person there had to come for the first time at one point.
Sign-up for a class. Most towns and cities have community colleges or recreation centers that offer adult education. Choose a class that interests you-photography, creative writing, bowling, or maybe even French.
Introduce yourself to someone who also appears alone. If you feel awkward and don't know what to say, pretend you are interviewing that person for a newspaper article. Most people are flattered when someone shows an interest in them.
Suggest meeting for coffee or attending a concert or play together when you meet someone with whom you feel you have something in common.
Understand that it takes time to establish intimate relationships and build trust. But, nothing is going to happen until you start.
Volunteer your talents. Call your local volunteer center to see what services are needed. Choose an activity that brings you in contact with other people. Regularly scheduled time with other people can offer you a respite as you work your way out of your loneliness.
Join an on-line community. If you have Internet access, find sites of interest to you that have discussion groups. You can read what other people have to say and share your feelings anonymously until you feel safe.
Re-connect with distant relatives or old friends. Plan a reunion with people whom you haven't seen in years. Bring together a group of your old high school buddies or cousins with whom you've lost contact.
Exercise at a fitness center. There are fitness centers in every price range. Find one that seems to have people your age. Exercise helps ease the feelings of depression. Strike up a conversation with the person on the treadmill next to yours. Meet people during a stretch class or swimming lessons.
Take a bus trip for single people.
Seek help from a qualified counselor or therapist to try to learn how old patterns or communication problems keep you isolated or unable to develop relationships. Social anxiety is real for many people. Counseling can help you learn ways to deal with social anxiety so that you will find it less stressful to find new relationships.
Choosing to reach out to another is difficult but the rewards make it worth the effort. If you are ready to address your loneliness and do something about it, congratulate yourself on your willingness to take control of your life and then take the first step.
Sometimes people who feel alone also feel hopeless, powerless, and depressed. If you think your loneliness has gone beyond your ability to help yourself, you may want to seek out a qualified counselor or psychotherapist who can help you figure out why you feel so lonely. There are lots of reasons and many times it takes an outside, objective, person to help you figure out why this is an issue for you. Seeking counseling does not mean you are crazy nor have a mental illness. In fact, seeking counseling or therapy is an example of a healthy behavior.
Monday, September 21, 2009
"Thinking First, Doing Later" - (It's All About The Thinking)
by: Virginia McBride
What is the most frequently heard complaint in business? How about, "I don't have enough time?" Do you say it to yourself? Do you say it to other people? Do you take work home? Do you return to work on the weekends? Do you identify the cause of the complaint of not having enough time? After all, we all have the same amount of time in every 24-hour period. Now, let's turn the complaint around. How do you use your time?
ANSWERING THE QUESTION - For starters, look at your calendar for the last week or month. What occupied the bulk of your time? What do you remember of each event? How many meetings did you attend? How many of those meetings were simply up-dates of past work or on-going work? How many phone conversations did you have? What was the purpose of those calls? How many people were involved simultaneously in the calls? How many lunches were on your calendar? What was accomplished during those lunches? Get a sense of what gobbles-up your time, especially what is non-productive.
If you do not maintain a calendar, take any work-day and document how you use your time. To see patterns, divide the day into modules that are small enough for you to identify wasted time. Fifteen minutes is a good working module. Record everything, even the "snack breaks." At the end of the day, ask yourself, "If I were leaving for vacation to Paris on an airplane tomorrow morning, how would I have changed my day?" Do not allow yourself to move "work" to your vacation. Be brutally honest.
WHAT'S MISSING - Chances are good that no time was set aside specifically for thinking. Everything was DOING! However, thinking, especially before doing, accelerates your doing.
For example, suppose someone asked you to move a pile of dirt from Point A to Point B. How would you complete the task? What steps would you go through? Whatever the situation, ask questions for clarification. These are mostly Yes/No questions. Do you care what the pile looks like at Point B? Do you have a preference for how the pile is moved? Must the entire pile be moved to Point B? Is there anything you want us to NOT do? Is there anything you want us to avoid? Clarification, even if detailed to the point of being picky, takes just a couple of minutes. In the end the job is done the way the pile owner wanted it done. Sadly, the rule of the workplace is there is never enough time to do something correctly the first time. Yet, there is always time to fix it later.
PLAN YOUR THINKING TIME - One, establish a thinking module that you can insert regularly into each day. Personally, I find that I can generally protect, without interruption, at least one 15-minute module during each day. No phone calls accepted. No instant messages read. Only thinking about my chosen focus. On good days, I can carve out bigger modules of time for focused thinking.
Two, establish a thinking agenda. Generally, I start with a "frustration" agenda. These may be problems that I am facing or ones for which I have responsibility. These may also be ideas that I want to develop for future programs, services, products, etc. These may also be "wish lists" of things I wish I could get to. These may also be priorities that I must address.
Three, whatever your choice, ask any clarification questions of yourself that come to mind. Write them down. If you do not write them, they have a funny way of flying away on even the most gentle breeze - especially if your 15 minutes expires.
Four, answer all of your clarification questions. Then document what additional questions came to mind that were not specifically for clarification. These most frequently are HOW and WHY questions. Answer the HOW questions first. The answers you get may refocus your thinking on the WHY questions.
Five, with the clarification complete, you are now free to think about who else should be involved in thinking about your choice. When you have them identified, send them a message - convene a meeting, if you must - that you would like them to spend at least 15-minutes a day for the next five days thinking about how to "deal" with the "frustration." Ask each person to write one idea each day and send it to a designated person who will compile all of the suggestions. (If you regularly use project management software, post the compilations there. If you do not have a simple software, check out for their BaseCamp product.) The compiler then forwards the list of ideas to everyone who contributed.
At the end of the week, prepare a total list of the ideas. Ask your idea people to vote for the top three that they believe should be moved forward for additional thinking. File the non-selected items for future thinking adventures.
Six, with much significant thinking completed, take the top three ideas and repeat the process. What additional thinkers should be included? Your original thinkers can offer suggestions. Repeat the process as long as you are getting quality ideas or you are expanding your group of thinkers. At some point, when you feel you are ready to move to decision-making and execution, close the idea session.
MOVING TO THE FUTURE - As you close the endeavor, ask your idea-providers how the process worked for them. Identify participants who would like to be included in future thinking events. Continuing, ask what changes they would make to the process, how they would evaluate their sense of productivity during the thinking event, what items they believe should be the next focus, how should people be chosen to participate in the next thinking event?
Finally, take a quiet moment for yourself to reflect on the thinking process and the thinking event. You were all "DOING the THINKING." Was everyone working? You betcha! Big time! And, the brains of most of the participants returned repeatedly to thinking about their focus throughout the day and week, well beyond the stipulated 15-minute module. Chances are good that everyone felt excited about the thinking and about the possible outcomes of the thinking.
If you lead by showing that you value thinking, others will follow you. By contrast, if you lead by showing that you value doing-without-thinking, people will mirror your behavior. Remember, thinking is exciting. Learning about "collective thinking" as a productivity tool is incredibly valuable and powerful. Now, ask yourself how you can use the "Thinking First" positioning to shorten the "work-week" while increasing productivity throughout your company. Thinking first accelerates your doing, your best doing!
Integrating and Putting It All Together
by: Lloyd Irvin
Across 17 chapters, mental preparation concepts and techniques have been discussed in detail in this book. We now look at how to bring it all together in an easy step-by-step approach for a grappler or combat athlete to start applying these methods on a regular basis. Some key points from earlier chapters will be highlighted here to emphasize their importance in a comprehensive mental preparation program. The steps outlined here take into account all aspects of mental preparation discussed in this book. It gives you a complete and integrated approach to mental preparation. Grapplers and combat athletes who believe that they are already good at some aspects of mental preparation can choose the ones in which they believe they need help.
Twenty Steps to an Integrated Mental Preparation Program
STEP 1: At the very top the heap, the very first thing you should do is goal setting.
Several aspects of your mental framework are dependent on the goals that you start out with in your grappling or combat athletics career. Your goals will
• decide your motivation levels
• define you career track
• define your ambition
• indicate your level of commitment to the sport
Goals have to be set over an extended length of time (i.e., long-, medium-, and short-term goals), to give you the right perspective on where you are headed. You have to also periodically set performance-based goals based on your assessment of the skill areas in which you are deficient. Let's take a look at an abridged version of the key issues in achieving your goals.
Achieving your goals:
Your long-term goals (5-10+ years) are your vision for yourself and path that you hope your grappling or combat athletics career will take in the coming years. Your preparation has to start now, both mentally and physically if you want to participate in a national title or world title in a few years.
Getting mentally ready for major tournaments is a composite of your preparation and experiences over several years. Learning and skill development go through a gradual progression in eventually preparing you for the cherished big fights.
Medium-term goals (1-5 years) require that you constantly assess what is happening within the grappling and combat athletics fraternities, look for opportunities, evaluate the competition in terms wins and losses, and so on.
Short-term goals (6 months), given their immediacy, will require planning the exact dates when you should practice, train, and get yourself physically and mentally ready. The fitness regimen that you will follow, your diet program, your mental preparation, and the coaching sessions that you plan to attend all fall into place when you do the planning to achieve your short-term goals.
Performance-based goal setting:
This requires that you and your coach make an objective identification of weak areas or deficiencies in your and go about finding ways to improve your skills in those areas. These deficiencies could be in technique or they could even be in mental skills. You basically have to identify those aspects of your preparation that need enhancement to deliver peak performance. Since this type of goal setting is performance related, players feel motivated enough to see it through and overcome the weak, in their performance. What emerges is a goal-directed, mental skills training program, whereby the goals that have been set could be measured over time.
STEP 2: Commit yourself to consistency in mental skills preparation and follow the techniques on a regular basis. Mental skills work best if they are practiced and applied regularly. Develop a daily regimen. It can be as low as half an hour per day, but the positive results will be evident within a few weeks.
STEP 3: If you nurse a bloated ego, tone it down much before the match begins. A bloated diminishes the urge and ability to learn during practice sessions. You need an ego in order to develop the right competitive frame of mind, but too much of an ego can eventually pull you down. Use tips provided in Chapter 7 to deal with a big ego.
STEP 4: Sizing up your opponent is the next thing you should do in your mental preparation.
a) Analyze the history of the opponent's performance in terms of wins or losses and skills weak points displayed in previous matches.
b) Try to recall and bring to the fore any tactics that your opponent uses, so that you can build a strategy to neutralize them.
STEP 5: Apply the four-point approach to strategizing.
• Play to your plus points
• Be aware of shortcomings and vulnerabilities in your opponent
• Be aware of your own vulnerabilities
• Be flexible and develop alternative strategies
Build-in "If statements" to make your strategy as flexible as possible. Also, develop specific tactics to make your strategy workable.
STEP 6: Use simple methods like writing, audio-recordings, or computers to store your plan and strategy and commit it to your memory. Writing things down is one of the easiest ways to commit something to memory. Your recall of the information will significantly go up. It is also readily available to you for reference whenever you need to refresh your memory.
STEP 7: Use simulation to recreate the challenges and stresses in a real match.
STEP 8: Learn to visualize in order to mentally extend your practice time and to rehearse your moves in your mind on a regular basis.
Steps 9-14 have to be learned and applied almost simultaneously for the best effect. These steps address the many issues related to the critical mental process of achieving "Focus."
One of the most critical aspects of mental preparation is in applying all the mental skills required to achieve the multidimensional quality of focus.
Multidimensional facets of focus:
• If you are motivated, it brings focus to your game.
• If you have a healthy ego rather than a bloated ego, it brings focus to your game.
• If you concentrate on the task on hand, it brings focus to your game.
• If you are alert and attentive, it brings focus to your game.
• If you have a winning attitude, it brings focus to your game.
• If you have ambition and killer instinct, it brings focus to your game.
• If you have passion for the game, it brings focus to your game.
• If you shed mental baggage and negativity, it brings focus to your game.
• If you are consistent with your training, it brings focus to your game.
• If you develop your memory retrieval skills, it brings focus to your game.
STEP 9: Identify your motivators. Motivation is the fulcrum on which your sports career hinges.
If demotivated, use the tips provided in Chapter 7 to tide you over the depressed feeling. For instance, never view a single failure in isolation-you have to take a collective approach to your triumphs and failures. Your self-assessment has to straddle a set of tournaments rather than any one tournament where you could not achieve a win.
STEP 10: You can learn the "Distraction Breakers" and/or "Concentration Builders" to improve your involvement in your matches. When you concentrate, you will be able to use your mind at optimal levels to call on all aspects of your preparation and prepared at all times. Each of these can bring a high level of focus into your learning process and your performance in a match.
STEP 11: Analyze your attitude to the game and toward competition. Attitude is all about developing the right mindset and outlook to play in a competitive game. Attitude actually comprises three distinct traits:
a) Professional approach to competition: The "Assertive" approach is without a doubt the most professional approach to competition, and it is the best way to develop a winning attitude.
b) Determination and grit
c) Passion for the game
STEP 12: Override negativity by getting rid of mental baggage such as injury trauma, game failure, or problems in your personal life. Regain control over your thought processes and move ahead.
STEP 13: Make good use of practice sessions to develop both technique and mental skills.
• Prior to starting your practice, spend a few minutes thinking about what you would like to do, learn, and improve. Clearly outline issues that you want to deal with, such as styles, moves, concentration, intensity, alertness and so on.
• Display proactiveness and drive during training and treat it like a real game.
• Exercise control over your thought processes during training in much the same way that you will have to do in a match.
• After the practice session, spend a few minutes reflecting on what you learned and what you can follow up on in your spare time.
Maintain a performance monitor diary or audio recording.
STEP 14: Improve memory retrieval to efficiently apply the mental skills techniques.
Learn to use the "Image Cue Technique" and the "Structured Memory Technique:” They will help you with quick retrieval of your game plan, your styles, and your moves, during a match.
Steps 15 and 16 have to be followed a lot more diligently in the last few days before a match begins because that's when confidence wanes and stress sets in.
STEP 15: Use confidence-building techniques like positive self-talk, and "weeding-out," to build confidence in yourself. Learn to believe in your abilities.
Confidence + Belief in Self = Toughness
STEP 16: Relax: Try out the many relaxation techniques outlined in the book.
STEP 17: Deal with emotions-anger, fear-using the techniques provided.
STEP 18: Continue to use mental preparation in the few minutes before the game. These include breathing exercises, visualization and self-talk. The breathing exercises will help you stay calm visualization will bring top-of-mind the key styles and techniques that you want to use, and self-talk will maintain your confidence at high levels.
STEP 19: During the match, concentrate on the game as it unfolds, play your game as you planned it, be proactive and aggressive, pay attention and gauge your opponent's strategy, and be wary and alert at all times. You should also refocus as often as necessary so that you don't lose track of your game plan. Use breathing techniques if necessary to assist you in refocusing.
STEP 20: Post match review - Be brutally honest with yourself when you evaluate your performance. It will help pinpoint any weaknesses in your technique or mental skills. You can then run these weak areas more often in your preparation for the next match.
10 Top Things That Go Wrong With Willpower, and How to Fix Them
by: Luc Reid
1. Not having a clear goal in mind
Not knowing exactly what you want, or knowing that but not keeping it in mind, makes it very hard to remember what you need to do or why. If you don’t have a clear, short explanation of your goal that you could give anyone who asked at a moment’s notice, talk with a friend or write down your ideas until you can summarize your goals without even having to think about it. Then make sure to tell yourself about your goals regularly.
2. Trying to pursue more than one goal at a time
While it’s not absolutely impossible to pursue more than one goal at a time, doing so dilutes attention, focus, and mental resources. We only have so much time, attention, and effort we can put into changing our lives: trying to do more than one thing at a time is inviting trouble. What’s the single most important goal you have in front of you? Once you’re well on your way with that single, most important goal, it might be possible to get started on a second one.
3. Not being committed
Being committed to a goal means accepting it, taking complete responsibility for it yourself, and being willing to submit to the changes it will require in your life. (See Why Self-Reliance Requires Surrender.) If you’re not fully committed to your goal, feelings of resentment or rebelliousness, or a tendency to blame forces outside yourself for being in the situation you’re in, will block you from moving forward.
4. Failing to plan out specific steps
Knowing your goal is important, but in order to make real progress toward it, you’ll need to know exactly what you expect yourself to do. At any moment, you’ll need to know what the step you’re working on is and what the next step will be when you’re done with that.
5. Not setting aside time
You won’t make much progress toward your goal if you don’t set aside time to work on it. If you just try to fit it in when you have spare time, you’ll find your goal often gets lost in the shuffle.
6. Not keeping up a feedback loop
Having a feedback loop means stopping regularly (at least once or twice a week) to look carefully at what you’ve been doing to reach your goal and noticing what you need to work on, pay more attention to, improve, handle differently, or keep up. Some techniques for doing this include journaling, meeting with a group, blogging, participating in an online forum, or talking with a friend who’s helping you keep on track.
7. Not paying attention to your thoughts
Building willpower or reaching a goal means changing habits, and changing habits means paying more attention to when decisions are arising and what factors are influencing our decisions. Bad choices are very often choices that we rushed past or didn’t think carefully through at the time. Understanding what’s going on in our own minds when making choices doesn’t always get us to make better choices, but it’s a necessary step to getting better and better at making those choices. For one way to become more aware of your choices and thinking, read How To Improve Willpower Through Writing Things Down: Decision Logging.
8. Not enjoying the steps
It’s easy to think of the steps we need to take to reach a goal as being painful or difficult, but finding the pleasure in those steps simplifies everything. See Using enjoyment as a tool to reach goals.
9 Not preparing
If we wait until we’re actually faced with choices, we may not be prepared to tackle them well. Some choices even pass by before we realize they were coming, unless we prepare by looking ahead. An example is lateness: being on-time means planning intelligently for when to leave for an appointment and getting everything ready beforehand so that it’s possible to leave at that time. Even for choices we recognize as they come up, we may not be mentally or emotionally prepared to tackle them. Paying attention to broken ideas, meditating, and organizing are some of the techniques we can use to prepare ourselves to do better.
10. Taking setbacks too hard
Changing habits is hard, and doing a difficult thing day after day often means some short-term setbacks or failures. Failure doesn’t need to be a pattern: it can be taken as a learning experience. Consider that if a person is trying to quit smoking, their chances of succeeding are much higher if they have tried and failed to quit smoking before than if they had never tried. Even failure is a step forward. It’s not trying at all that we have to watch out for.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
How to Strengthen Willpower Through Practice
by: Luc Reid
One of the most encouraging pieces of information I’ve turned up lately about self-motivation is that willpower can be strengthened by practice. However, the exact kind of practice is important if you want good results.
Some articles I’ve read liken willpower to a muscle, and suggest that all you have to do to strengthen willpower is to exercise that muscle. A New York Times blog entry makes the recommendation as an example that you try strengthening willpower by making yourself brush your teeth on the wrong side.
The problem with this kind of view is that it assumes willpower is the same thing as self-control, ignoring the other pieces of the puzzle.
Willpower usually involves overcoming ingrained habits we don’t like (like staying up watching television too late every night) or developing new habits that we do like (like taking ten minutes to straighten up at the end of every work day). And while building or breaking habits can be done with self-control to some extent, trying to increase your self-control in general in order to build or break a particular habit is like trying to build a brick wall by lifting weights: sure, you’ll get a stronger over time, and be able to lift the bricks a little more easily. But why not concentrate on the wall? You’ll build up muscles that way anyway.
Concentrating on building the wall means
■ having clear goals
■ understanding what kinds of decisions are going to help get us to those goals
■ recognizing the times when we have such a decision to make, and
■ making the right call at those times.
General self-control only helps with that last piece, and it’s not the only tool we can bring to bear even for that.
The other pieces have a lot to do with self-awareness (mindfulness) and self-understanding, and there are some good techniques to help those things along that I’ll discuss in other posts.
For now, here are some simple guidelines for practices that help build willpower and get you some immediate results at the same time:
1. Begin by choosing one area of your life where you want to make progress
2. Figure out what kinds of decisions you want to see yourself making in that area
3. Put special effort into noticing when those decisions come up
4. Pay attention to your mood and what’s influencing it. Are you more likely to make bad decisions when something’s bugging you? What kinds of distractions keep you from paying close enough attention to your decisions?
The more aware you become of your own mental processes, the more automatically you recognize the chance to make good decisions and can take advantage of them.
There’s a particular technique I’ve been experimenting with called “decision logging” that seems to be very promising in terms of building up willpower and clearing away mental obstacles; I’ll take the opportunity to blog about that in the near future.
Takeaways:
■ Exercising willpower can help make willpower stronger
■ To make good decisions, we have to first figure out what kinds of decisions we want to make
■ Good decisions come in part from understanding ourselves and being aware of our moods and reactions
7 Key Self-Motivation Strategies for Writers
Writing–especially writing and trying to sell large projects, like novels–is a clear-cut example of an area where self-motivation is essential. While this post is written especially for writers, the techniques I’ll talk about can be applied to practically any kind of project where self-motivation is needed.
Motivating ourselves to write can be hard: blank pages stare at us implacably, or we get 75,000 words into a novel and then realize there’s a basic flaw that will require a huge rewrite, or we’ll get dozens of rejection letters for every acceptance.
Writers generally need enthusiasm for a story to do a really good job of writing it, need to sustain their involvement in a project for months or often years, and need to be able to face rejection after rejection without giving up. Even very good writers typically see many rejections before they sell their work (Stephen King, when he started his career, put a big nail in his wall and spiked each of his rejection letters on there as he went. Fortunately, it turned out well for him in the end, although he collected hundreds of rejection letters before he really got off the ground). Self-motivation is tough in this kind of environment. Here are some tools for maximizing it. These notes can be useful to any writer, but they’re mainly written with fiction in mind.
Pick Your Project Very Carefully
A certain kind of writer tends to write whatever they’re most passionate about, regardless of length, genre, marketability, and so on. Another kind of writer tends to write whatever seems to be the most salable, whatever the market seems to be crying out for. A third kind of writer tends to follow some particular pattern dictated by their writing practices, being propelled neither by passion nor by saleability but by process. All of these approaches have their good points, and each can have real drawbacks under certain circumstances. The approach I would suggest is different from all of these: it’s to put extra effort into brainstorming, then making a careful selection from the possibilities.
What I mean by this is that when it’s time to start a new project–say the last project is finished, or has been scrapped, or needs to sit in a drawer for a while before you can get any perspective on it, or this is your first novel–instead of looking for an idea for a new project, you look for a lot of ideas for new projects, using a variety of methods to come up with them. Review ideas you’ve jotted down or the ones that have been in your head. Look at some of your favorite books and see what you like most about them. Sit down and brainstorm at least two or three ideas out of the blue.
But why go to all this trouble when you have an idea you already know you’re burning to write, or that you think will sell well? Because our first ideas are often not our best ones, and a little time spent picking the right goal can save a huge amount of time working on the wrong one. It’s well worth slaving away at this brainstorming phase for a few hours even if at the end of it you opt for the idea you were interested in in the first place, if for no other reason than to understand deeply and clearly exactly why that idea is the best one for you to work on. And many times careful consideration of possibilities will yield a much better idea than anything that would have come up on its own.
Then comes the choosing. Passion counts for a lot: it’s very difficult to make a reader passionate about a book that the writer wasn’t passionate about when it was written. But other factors should probably figure in too, unless you’re only writing for yourself. Marketability? If you really want to sell your work, it would be ill-advised to ignore this unless you’re of the opinion that it’s impossible to tell what will sell. So writing a vampire novel because you love writing about vampires isn’t a bad idea, and writing a vampire novel because they’re in demand (let’s suppose) can work out well, but by far the best reason to write a vampire novel is that you’re passionate about it and someone’s clamoring to buy that kind of thing.
This applies to any decision: we often try to make choices based on one overwhelming factor, like buying something because it’s the cheapest or because we’re enchanted with it. But any of our priorities we put aside when making an important decision will come back to haunt us later. If the cheapest item breaks long before the more expensive version would have, or if the thing we’re enchanted costs so much that we end up short on the rent …
But what does choosing well have to do with self-motivation? There are two key things: first, it’s not that helpful to motivate ourselves toward a goal we don’t actually want to reach. While even working toward a wrong goal can be educational, the same can be said of working toward the right goal, and the right goal has the additional benefit of paying off, which is an educational experience in itself.
Second, if we are working toward a wrong goal, sooner or later we will realize it isn’t something we really want to achieve (or we’ll achieve it, and the expected payoff will never materialize), and then we’ll be back to zero, with the sense that work gets us nowhere.
Always Keep In Mind What Excites You
Whatever gets you excited about writing a book is worth thinking about regularly. If you find your writing has turned into drudgery and you’re just trying to slog through until the end, you’ll have a lot of trouble motivating yourself and may not produce particularly great writing either (though there can be exceptions to that last part). If you hit this point, one approach that can propel you forward is to ask yourself “What would really get me excited about this project right now that I’m not already doing?” Kill an important supporting character, cause a disaster, give the protagonist what they’ve been striving for and see them realize that it isn’t their real goal at all, add a new character who churns things up … this is another case where more excitement for the writer tends to mean more excitement for the reader. All of this has to be kept in balance with your vision for the story, but if you can’t think of anything that keeps you excited about the writing and is consistent with your vision, maybe it’s time to rethink the vision.
The exception I know of in which drudgery can yield good writing is when you know your story much better than your reader, and so what feels like old hat to you is new and fresh for the reader.
If You Stop Feeling Motivated, Retrace Your Steps
Here’s a question that can be handy in projects that seem to have lost their drive: where was my motivation when I last saw it? Sometimes feeling like you’ve lost your enthusiasm means that you took a wrong turn somewhere. Maybe your interest in the story was being kept up by a minor character who according to your outline (if you use outlines) needed to leave the story a little while ago, but the story hasn’t interested you as much since. If so, it might be worth rethinking that decision. Maybe a character did something that violates who you were hoping for them to be, or made a choice to serve the plot instead of doing what they would really want to do if left to their own devices. Maybe you’re writing a section of the book that isn’t really needed.
Regardless, always be ready to take advantage of this great advantage of writing, that you can make a complete mess of something, but then go back and do it better and get full credit as though you had written it perfectly the first time. There’s a post on this subject on my writing blog: Avoiding Your Story
Use Support, Encouragement, and Deadlines
One of the best motivators for a project is to have a real deadline, with a real person is waiting to see your results. This can be accomplished through joining an active writer’s group, blogging about your writing and including planned deadlines, getting one or more writing buddies and reading each others’ work, signing up for a writer’s workshop for which you’ll need something to be completed by a given date, working on a project for a contest or market that has a firm deadline, or getting truly interested friends or family members to read your writing as you go. It’s powerfully motivating to realize that someone is waiting breathlessly for the next chapter of your book.
If you use this last approach, by the way, you may want to ask the person to write down any feedback they have, but only to give that feedback to you right away if it’s absolutely crucial. The rest can be collected at the end so you can consider it for the second draft. Getting constant feedback can cause constantly reworking what you have, which … well, let’s just make that subject a section to itself.
Don’t Spend All Your Time Reworking
Yes, often writing can be improved by editing or rewriting, but only to a certain point. After a while, more work on the same project will begin to suck the life out of it. Make your story as good as you can make it at the moment, then send it out without spelling errors or major problems. You can set it aside and revisit it once you have perspective, or rewrite it after a rejection if you have a major new insight about it, but don’t just keep fiddling with it it’s perfect: nothing ever is, to the best of my knowledge.
Writer’s Block Is Just Fear of Writing Something That Isn’t Good Enough
On my writing blog I have a lengthy post about writer’s block, which I’ll summarize here as it applies to motivation: it’s always possible to write something, even if that something turns out to be meandering gibberish. So writer’s block doesn’t prevent a person from writing: it makes them hesitant because they might write something bad. Since everyone writes something bad sometimes, this isn’t as dire a situation as it may feel like at the time. Screwing up is an appropriate thing to worry about with surgery or disarming bombs, but it usually just gets in the way to fret about it with something like writing. Remember, you can always fix it in the next pass, and sometimes bad writing ends up being an exploratory draft (a great term I first heard from Orson Scott Card) that will reveal exactly what you need to do to write the really great draft you’re going to put together next.
Don’t Get Too Attached
It’s hard sometimes to look at something you’ve put a lot of work into and decide to scrap it, whether it’s plans for a new business venture that isn’t going to work out, a relationship that turns out to be between the wrong two people, or a brilliant passage in a novel that doesn’t belong there. When you’re faced with these problems, take a step back and ask yourself what will really give you the best result in the long run, then keep the thing or remove it based on that choice (and if applicable, whatever responsibilities you may have taken on).
This doesn’t quite add up to “kill your darlings,” as writers are often urged to do, or as Samuel Johnson put it “wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.” That’s overstating it. Some things you do that you love will just not fit in the project you’re working on, and it’s important to focus on making that project as good as it can be instead of on justifying all the great things you did along the way. Doing great things is its own justification, and it tends to be instructive as well, whether or not they work out in the end. Fortunately, contrary to Johnson’s point, sometimes great passages are doing exactly what they’re supposed to and ought to be left in.
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There’s more I could say on this subject, but I’ve covered the main recommendations I set out to cover, and future posts will have more. In the meantime, how do these recommendations work for you? And writers, what particular self-motivation issues do you run into in your writing?
Why Tackling Big Tasks Doesn’t Have to Be a Big Deal
by: Luc Reid
Some of the tasks that are hardest to get ourselves to do are the big, overwhelming ones like cleaning out a junk room or garage, doing a full-scale edit on a novel, or organizing papers or files. Often we think about these kinds of tasks as requiring one big push, a big chunk of time that we imagine will be available sooner or later.
That kind of approach to a task can work out badly in at least two ways. First, a task that we think of like that may never get done. Second, even if we do accomplish the task, before long we may find things quickly getting back to the same situation we were in originally. When these kinds of problems rear their ugly heads, it’s time to think about breaking the big tasks down, not only into smaller pieces, but into habits.
What I mean about breaking a task down into a habit is looking at what kind of regular behavior can make the problem go away permanently. For example, regardless of whether older papers are filed or not, if new papers keep piling up, there will always be something out of order, and more often than not it will be a big stack (or three, or twelve …). This kind of situation calls for adopting a new habit, possibly even a new rule, about how new paper is handled, regardless of the old stuff. The new habit can be based on an event (for example, every time a new paper comes into the office that isn’t actively in use, it gets recycled or filed) or on a schedule (for instance, all papers get filed every Thursday morning).
Notice that this new habit doesn’t require old problems to be taken care of before it comes into play. It’s easier to be motivated when no old problems are looming, but not letting a problem get worse is still a meaningful and relieving change from ever-renewing chaos.
New habits can even help take care of old problems. For instance, with filing the new habit might be to file each new thing as it comes in along with at least one old paper. In this way, the filing gets done slowly but also fairly painlessly, and it reinforces the value of the new habit. What’s more, doing a little bit of a task that used to seem huge and unmanageable can be very freeing and empowering, often supplying the necessary motivation to get a lot more of it done.
Alternatively, old problems can be handled in small chunks separately from new habits. For instance, you might tackle a junk room or a filing job just 15 minutes at a time whenever you have a free moment.
Regardless, clearing the old problem away can be enormously freeing in terms of the pressure it relieves. Strangely enough, under the right circumstances taking care of something you’ve been avoiding and perhaps even been a little fearful of can be powerfully enjoyable, if you can push past the initial jitters and focus on the progress you’re making and not the problems you may have had in the past.
Friday, September 11, 2009
What To Do When Self-Motivation Comes And Goes
Here’s an issue Merrie Haskell, a writer, mentions in a comment to an earlier post: “I’ve noticed that I go through periodic surges of willpower. (I guess that’s what I mean.) I will be in a rut for months, and really feel stuck; then wake up one morning, and like a switch has been thrown, go into hyperdrive.”
Merrie’s hyperdrive clearly works for her: she’s sold well over a dozen short stories, including sales to two of the most demanding science fiction and fantasy markets, Asimov’s Science Fiction and Strange Horizons. Clearly doing something well isn’t the same as feeling motivated to do it all the time. So what’s happening?
The short answer is that self-motivation–whether for writing or for any other project–is complex, and there are a number of factors that can influence it. The longer answer names some of those factors, and as we name them, we can begin to see that they influence each other, so that one advantage can turn into a lot of advantages, and one obstacle can turn into a lot of obstacles.
We won’t be able to look at all of the elements of motivation in this one post, or go into any in depth, but we can see some of the more prominent pieces and how they fit together.
Motivating ourselves has some basic requirements. For instance, we usually need to believe what we are trying to do will provide the result we want, to care about the result, and to believe we’re capable of achieving it. In addition to those basic requirements, there are some pieces that can really support and enhance self-motivation, like the support of others, feedback loops, and recognition. Lastly, to consciously pursue a goal, we need to take certain steps, like clarify what the goal is, gather the information we’ll need to make good choices, and figure out where the time will come from to achieve our goal.
If any of these pieces falters, the others can be disrupted, or at least slowed down. For instance, if I’m in the middle of writing a novel and lose faith that anyone will ever be interested in reading it, my enthusiasm is likely to crash. This is a crisis of believing that the goal will achieve its purpose, one of those prerequisites I mentioned.
What makes this worse is that even if I regain that confidence soon after, it has already had a chance to influence other elements. For instance, losing confidence that the novel will be read makes me stop writing, and when I can’t get up the enthusiasm to write, I could lose the belief that I can finish the thing at all. Losing these beliefs can cause me to stop feeling enthusiastic about the goal I picture myself achieving. I stop having writing to show to friends and downplay the importance of the project, which could cause the friends to decide I’m not interested in it any more and withdraw their support for it, which deprives me of the feedback I’d been getting that helped keep the project going. And so on.
So what do we do about these insidious slides? Tackle them one piece at a time. Fortunately, we have an advantage in getting back on track, which is that just as the failure of one element tends to lead to the failure of others, getting one element working encourages the others to work, too. For instance, seeking out someone who’s been enthusiastic about pieces of my novel that they’ve read so far can help rekindle my enthusiasm for the project and my belief that it’s worthwhile, at the same time that it brings in the support of others and provides me with feedback. Clarifying my goal for the book (say, a novel in a given genre of a given length, finished by a given date) and making a plan to meet that goal can get me writing regardless of whether I feel enthusiastic or not, which moves me closer to the goal, which tends to make me more enthusiastic.
This process may sound familiar: it has a lot in common with mood congruity, which I discuss in another post. In either case, the solution is the same: if you break out of the pattern you’re in to do one positive thing, you’ll be going in the right direction.
Takeaways:
■ Strong self-motivation means a number of elements are working together to move the project forward.
■ Problems with one element of self-motivation can cause problems with other elements.
■ If you find yourself losing momentum on a project, find one motivating thing you can concentrate on and focus on doing that, regardless of whether you feel enthusiastic about it at the moment or not.