Ignoring Lack to Create Abundance | Steve Pavlina

I’ve been enjoying an abundant year because I focus much more attention on abundance, appreciation, and gratitude than I do on lack, scarcity, and poverty. Some people would say that this mindset is the result of abundance; I recognize the mindset/heartset as the cause of it.

When I did the opposite and paid more attention to what was lacking in my life, I experienced a variety of scarcity-based experiences — sinking deeper into debt each year, being kicked out of my apartment due to lack of rent money, not being able to afford what I wanted, feeling stressed whenever my car broke down, always buying the cheapest items and having them break easily, etc. That place of being was compelling enough to capture my attention for a while, but after a number of years there, I got bored with it and decided to try out the abundance mindset to see what that’s like.

I would often read books or listen to audio programs that went on and on about the abundance mindset, but I figured that was easy for them to say because they were already living it. What if you’re not living it? Usually their recommendation was to start wherever you are, and some would insist that abundance is a mindset you can create regardless of your starting position. I didn’t really buy into that notion at the time, but mainly because I was desperate to try something new, I opted to give it an earnest effort for at least a few days to see if it made any difference. It’s not like what I was doing before that was working, so I figured it couldn’t hurt, and it might help lead me into new territory where a solution could be found.

I began by focusing on feeling grateful for what I did have, like being able to enjoy running along the beach or watching a sunset. I turned my attention away from lack as much as possible. I did my best to ignore my debt, my unpaid bills, and my creditors for a while. Obviously that created some consequences, and I further dealt with those consequences by largely ignoring them as well.

This is really a key point that I don’t want you to just overlook. It wasn’t just that I began to focus on abundance thinking. I also did my very best to ignore anything in my life that suggested lack or scarcity. I stopped looking at my bills. I stopped answering the phone since most of the calls were from creditors. I ignored my debt and stopped making credit card payments altogether. That sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But when I paid attention to those things, they would just bring me down and make me start thinking about what wasn’t working.

This shift of attention soon created external shifts in my reality. I became more creative, released a new product, and started making a lot more money. A year later I was debt free, partly from going bankrupt, which was a good thing because it wiped out most of my debt, and then I paid off the rest mostly in one fell swoop with an advance I received for a game I licensed to a publisher.

I continued to expand upon this mindset of abundance over time. I imagined enjoying time abundance too. I imagined being more generous, first with my money, but then I felt even better about being generous with my time and creativity. I donated thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours to non-profits. I wrote articles for free and hosted discussion forums for free. I didn’t do these things to get any particular result. I did them because I just felt motivated to do them. When I held onto that abundance vibe, I didn’t have to push myself to contribute anything. It just flowed out of me without really trying.

I’ve since created a massive body of creative work and gave it away to the public domain, and I continue to add to that collection each month. This month I started doing microloans as well and encouraged others to join our team, which has been making new loans every day.

I never would have done these things if I was focused on lack. The vibe of lack didn’t make me feel particularly generous; it merely made me project generosity as something other people should do more of, or something I should get around to “in the future” (which of course means never).

There is value in having experiences across the spectrum of scarcity to abundance. I’m glad for the experience of scarcity since it helps me understand and appreciate abundance more deeply. For example, I enjoyed my recent trip to Paris that much more because I know what it was like to not be able to afford such a trip and having it seem like an impossibility. Every day I spent in Paris, I felt grateful to be there. I didn’t take anything for granted.
Through personal testing I came to see that overall I prefer the abundance vibe to the scarcity vibe. Abundance is a better fit for who I am.

I neither require nor expect others to make the same choice I did. Lots of people find growth lessons in the scarcity vibe, and I have no doubt they’ll continue to explore it. I’ve tested that vibe and that mindset enough to know that it isn’t such a good fit for me. I’m happier and more fulfilled on the abundance side. But I wouldn’t be so sure of this if I hadn’t had those scarcity experiences first.

Many times when I write about abundance, there are people who will take issue with it. It’s interesting to see how they project a boatload of assumptions onto me and then argue with their own assumptions. Some seem to think that abundance is wrong. Others want me to pay more attention to poverty.

I pay little attention to poverty, scarcity, and lack, not just in myself but in others as well. My focus is on abundance, gratitude, generosity, appreciation, etc. If you believe that what I’m doing is not enough, it’s because you feel what you’re doing isn’t enough. If you’re in resonance with scarcity, then “not enough” is something you’ll see wherever you look.

When you view one side of the spectrum through the lens of the other, your perceptions are greatly distorted. Just as scarcity may look upon abundance as greedy, excessive, selfish, elitist, narcissistic, etc., so can abundance look upon scarcity as lazy, wimpy, foolish, childish, stupid, etc. But these perspectives aren’t helpful to us… again, because they’re distorted.

You can only understand the options available to you when you experience them from the inside. And yes, this does mean that you can’t really understand an option until you’ve experienced it to some degree. From the outside looking in, you can get curious, but you can’t really gain much insight.

You’re free to do as I’ve done and test different mindsets/vibes to learn which set of experiences you prefer. You have laid out before you a whole spectrum of possibilities to explore.

Try to avoid the mistake of judging or condemning someone else’s position on this spectrum. Don’t expect others to change their mindset just because you have issues. If you feel resistance towards what others are experiencing, look to your dissatisfaction with your own vibe. Then remember that you have the power to make the shifts you desire, if you’re willing to embrace those shifts fully and completely instead of resisting them.

I’m quite pleased with my choices thus far, even as I continue to explore new points along the spectrum of possibilities. I’m fully aware that some people object to my choices and would prefer to see me focus more attention on problems like poverty. From the perspective of scarcity, they want me to change what they’re unwilling to. They want me to join them in their feelings of being not enough. From within the lens of scarcity, this may seem like a reasonable request, but from the perspective of abundance, it’s a rather silly thing to do.

The response to such requests is predictable if you understand how both mindsets work. Scarcity criticizes abundance for being not enough. Abundance finds scarcity’s request silly and so enjoys amusement at the entertainment value of it; additionally abundance is appreciative of the reminder of the contrast between scarcity and abundance. Scarcity doesn’t get its request satisfied and hence validates its experience of not enoughness; it can continue to live in its world where abundance is greedy and unresponsive to its needs. Abundance ends the interaction feeling appreciative; scarcity leaves feeling frustrated. This is a perfectly congruent outcome from all perspectives. Each vibe creates the experience that harmonizes with it.

A few people have been amusing me lately, which I’m grateful for, and I in turn have been doing my part to frustrate them.

If you desire to shift from scarcity to abundance, how do you do that? There are many techniques that I’ve shared in the past, so I won’t rehash that same content here. A good place to start is to watch the Creating Abundance videos. I actually apply this to an even greater extent today than I did when I created those videos in 2009. Now I’m spending much more time each day doing this kind of vibrational work because I find it extremely powerful.

This morning I woke up at 3:30 and then spent a good 2 hours imagining different aspects of my life as I want them to be and getting a clear lock onto the vibes that are consistent with my desires — the thoughts, feelings, and attitudes I believe I’d be experiencing if all my desires were physically real right now.

Then throughout each day, I do my best to hold onto these new vibes as much as possible. When I catch myself slipping into a vibe I wouldn’t likely experience on the side of my new desires, such as frustration or worry, I stop whatever I’m doing, take a deep breath, and reload the vibe I desire. Or if I’m tired and can’t do this very well, I just take a break to distract myself.

I continue to practice this because I find it very effective. Not only do I attract and enjoy more of what I want, but my new vibes also become increasingly repulsive to those whose vibes are incompatible, while becoming more attractive to those with compatible vibes and desires — people with whom I can enjoy co-creating abundantly.

Source 

Money and Your Path With a Heart | Steve Pavlina

There’s this idea that if we want to experience more financial abundance, we must identify and rewire our limiting beliefs about money, such as “money doesn’t grow on trees” or “money is the root of all evil.” But the people I know who have lots of money usually didn’t bother to fuss over their beliefs. In fact, current brain research tells us that dwelling on limiting beliefs can be self-defeating since you’re still reinforcing the same neural patterns by thinking about them, thereby making them stronger.

A more effective approach is to largely ignore your so-called limiting beliefs. Put your focus on what you desire first and foremost. The tricky part is figuring out what you actually desire.

I found that the best approach for me, financially speaking, is to follow my path with a heart and to admit that money just isn’t that important to me in the grand scheme of things. So I actually seek to minimize the role of money in my life, making it mostly irrelevant. I create enough financial abundance that I don’t have to devote much mental bandwidth to fussing over money. Money is there when I need it; otherwise I can largely ignore it. This frees up my attention to express my creativity, to explore relationships with people, to travel, to read a lot, and to generally enjoy and experience the aspects of life that matter to me so much more than money ever will.

When I tried to center my life around money, it didn’t make me happy. I found it pretty stressful actually. It set me up for a competitive relationship with others. And I wasn’t very good at making money for the sake of money anyway. I didn’t find myself particularly motivated to do the things that would make me more money. I would procrastinate on seemingly profitable work and spend time learning about personal growth instead, which for much of my life was just a side hobby.

Eventually I saw the folly in investing so much energy into trying to make more money, especially when I wasn’t doing a very good job of it anyway. I realized that I don’t actually want to fuss or stress over money in my life. I don’t really want to make a lot of money. That isn’t a true desire for me. A more genuine desire is that I’d like to live without giving much attention to money. I’d like to live as if everything I desire is free.

Growing up, I was inspired by the characters in the universe of Star Trek: The Next Generation. They didn’t seem to need money. Technically they did have money in their universe, but money was so unimportant that hardly anyone talked about it — except for one race that everyone made fun of. The people in that universe worked because they wanted to work, not because they got paid. Money was irrelevant because they lived in a universe of abundance. They had unlimited food, cozy quarters, quality healthcare, and speedy transportation. Having all their needs met gave them the freedom to focus on other parts of their lives: hobbies like music or painting, recreation, intimate relationships, reading, exploration, and more. They lived in the ultimate personal growth playground.

I was inspired by that idea and asked myself how close I could get to it in the real world. Obviously this reality isn’t the same idealized fictional universe, but I could at least get closer to it if I tried. I realized that one step was to earn a certain threshold level of income in such a way that it wouldn’t require me to do a lot of grunt work to maintain it, and then all my expenses would be covered. That’s what got me interested in passive income.
I’ve been experiencing that reality for many years now, and honestly… I love it.

In order to play the game of life this way, I made decisions that many people would consider foolish. That’s because their priority is to make more money. My priority is to have a life. I’m not interested in getting rich or retiring. I’m already doing what I’d do if I were retired. So I deliberately pass up many opportunities to earn more money, so I can give less attention to money and more attention to personal growth, relationships, and more. I’m very pleased with this trade-off.

I don’t want to waste my life fussing over money. I did that during much of my 20s, and I 
think it was a mistake to live that way.

What may surprise you is that I learned to live this way even when I was broke. The key is how you focus your mind. To really enjoy life, focus your mind on what you love most, and bring that into your life now — not later, not when you have more money. Whatever you think money will add to your life, you’re probably wrong about that. Add those elements to your life now. So if you think money will allow you to travel more, start traveling now, even if you’re doing a lot of couchsurfing. Realize that you already have the means to do what you tell yourself you’re going to do when you have the money. You’ve just been programmed by social conditioning to think you need more money, but you don’t. And besides, you aren’t really going to be more motivated to earn extra money if you aren’t already following your path with a heart.

Take time to experience the simple pleasures of life. Put more attention on what you can enjoy and experience right now. That doesn’t actually require money. You can enjoy a long walk for free. Long walks are still one of my favorite pleasures.

When I couldn’t afford to buy books, I would go to the library and check out five or ten personal development books and audio programs and go through them. I very much enjoyed doing that, and it was free. I still do this today, typically averaging about one audiobook per week.

Today I can buy the best organic produce. I don’t have to look at prices when I shop. I like to shop as if everything were free. Whatever the bill is, I know I have plenty of money to cover it.

When I couldn’t afford the best food, I bought the best that I could afford and learned to appreciate it. I tried different foods. I learned to cook. I expressed my desire to have growth experiences through whatever level of abundance I could muster.

That approach was very motivating. It gave me a reason to actually earn some money. My reason for earning money was to help express my desired life path — a path centered around personal growth, exploration, and relationships. The real shift happened when I stopped using a lack of money as an excuse for not pursuing that path. I released the fear of not having enough. I started pursuing this path when I was broke. The money came later.

In my experience, needing money has usually pushed it away. When I don’t adopt a needy relationship to money, I seem to attract plenty of it. It flows to me quite naturally as a result of following my path with a heart. When I’m on this path, I’m feeling good about my life, my self development, my connections to people, and my contribution to the world. That state of being is very attractive. It attracts people, opportunities, business deals, and more. And that state of being doesn’t depend on having any particular level of income.

What if I want to increase my income? Trying to increase it directly seldom works. What works for me is to expand my path with a heart first. Internally I must open my heart to greater challenges or new levels of experience. If those experiences require more money, then the money will flow into my life — but only when I take the first step and get moving.
Quite often when it seems like money is a block to having certain experiences, that’s a false belief. We block ourselves because we aren’t ready. We’ve turned our backs on our light. In truth we are very powerful and creative beings, capable of summoning wonderful experiences into our lives when we’re finally ready to embrace them — and all their rippling consequences.

I used to think that traveling overseas was a really big deal. I turned it into this behemoth of complexity. I definitely used a lack of money as a reason for not traveling more. I also used the excuse of being in a relationship with a woman who didn’t like to travel. But once I realized that those limitations were just excuses and that of course I was a powerful enough being to summon the experience of travel into my life, I simply made it happen. It felt like there was a push to get moving initially, but afterwards it felt more like allowing than pushing.

Once I started traveling more, I began getting a lot more free travel invites. As I shed the belief that I needed money to travel, I found myself being able to enjoy amazing trips while spending very little money. For instance, people would invite me to speak at their events, and they’d pay for my travel expenses and provide a place to stay. I recently received an invite for my fourth free trip to Europe within the past two years, to speak at the Lifestyle Design Convention in Zurich in January 2015. I haven’t been to Switzerland yet, so I’m really looking forward to it.

But of course this wouldn’t be happening if I wasn’t following my path with a heart. Part of that path involved facing and overcoming fears. I used to really dislike public speaking. Now I love it! It’s such a beautiful way to share a positive message and connect with people.
I’ll probably be getting speaking invitations with free travel opportunities for the rest of my life. I love speaking, I love traveling, and I love meeting new people, so this adds a lot of happiness to my life. This unfolded very gracefully by following my path with a heart. I didn’t have to push myself to do work I disliked to earn more money just so I could travel. I made travel a part of my life first, to the extent that I could afford it, and then it expanded, including the expansion of opportunities to fuel it.

You may be assuming that money is the ultimate fuel, the ultimate enabler, the ultimate resource in life. If that were true, then people with lots of money should be so much happier, shouldn’t they? But the data shows that once you get passed about $75-80K per year in income, happiness doesn’t increase with additional income and often decreases.

I have many wealthy friends who earn 10 to 100 times as much as I do. Most of them, however, actually seem less happy than I am. Some of them have told me they’re jealous of my lifestyle. They have empires to manage. They travel 150-200 days per year because they believe they have to. Otherwise they wouldn’t make as much money, and they might have to start laying people off. They often seem worried about potential threats to their revenue streams. Some of them are disturbed by the fact that I’ve uncopyrighted most of my work since they believe that intellectual property is their most valuable asset. But what does their income matter if they aren’t as happy as they could be, if they’re experiencing chronically higher stress levels, if they spend a lot of time worrying, if they wrap their self-esteem into their achievements (which sets them up for an inevitable fall)?

I think that especially in the U.S., we undervalue what actually makes us happy in life. We push ourselves to earn more, but why? If the path to get to that next level of income isn’t fulfilling, and if the money isn’t likely to fulfill you either, then why expend so much energy on an unfulfilling path? Why not put happiness and fulfillment first in our lives — and then see what it does to our incomes?

The approach that worked for me was to surrender the socially conditioned path. I gave up the path that said I have to earn lots of money first, and then I can do whatever I want and be happy. After trying that for many years, I found it foolish and unfulfilling. I actually resigned myself to being broke, figuring it would be worth it to be perpetually broke if I could at least spend a lot of time doing what I found fulfilling and enjoyable. But much to my surprise and delight, that path with a heart turn out to also be the path of abundance. 🙂

Source 

Mile Wide, Mile Deep | Steve Pavlina

Have you ever heard the phrase “inch wide, mile deep” with respect to picking an area of focus for your education, career, website, business, etc? The idea here is that you should narrow your focus and concentrate on becoming highly skilled in one particular subfield. Then you’ll be able to carve out a space within your industry where you’re competent enough to compete… and hopefully make a good living.

You can do that. It does work to a certain extent. But this article is about why you may not want to do that.

You don’t have to use the inch wide, mile deep approach to niche down if it bothers you to do so. Many people have mixed feelings about it, and rightly so. There are some big consequences to consider.

I don’t use this approach for my work because I don’t like the lifestyle consequences of sticking to one niche for so long. I’d be bored within a few years no matter what I picked, even if I picked something I love. I like variety too much. This life is precious to me, and while I love doing deep dives, I don’t want to be so myopically focused on any one aspect of life or business for so long that I miss out on exploring the other aspects that also interest me.

You could say that my niche is personal growth, but that isn’t really a niche at all because anything fits into that huge space: productivity, relationships, career, finances, health, lifestyle, values, spirituality, social skills, and more. Name any topic you can think of, and I can link it to personal growth.

Mile Wide, Mile Deep

I prefer the mile wide, mile deep approach. It works well too, but the mindset and framework are different if you want to succeed with it. There are some consequences to accept, but you may actually like those consequences.

To make this work in business, it’s important to focus on the long-term relationship with your audience instead of deliberately trying to nichify or brand yourself into a corner. You want to connect with them as human beings with lots of interests, problems, challenges, and desires – i.e. people just like you – not as monodimensional prospects who care about your niche.

It’s important not to brand yourself in the typical branding sense if you want your audience members to relate to you as a real, multidimensional person. If I brand myself as anything, I prefer to just call myself an explorer. It turns out that many people like being able to maintain our relationship across a wide variety of interests – I like it too! – and branding myself into a singular niche would only get in the way of that.

Doesn’t it kinda suck when you discover a guru you really like, but all they do is speak and write about the same narrow topic over and over again? Wouldn’t it be nice to connect on some other dimensions too, especially if you like and respect the person? How many emails or blog posts can you read about the same thing until you’re drowning in boredom and looking for the unsubscribe button?

The 50-Year Audience

Ask yourself this: What kind of audience could you keep for 50 years? Who’d stay with you that long? In which niche could you expect to still be working in 50 years after you start, assuming you lived that long?

I’ll bet a lot of people in your audience would love to connect with you based on other interests beyond your main niche, and you’re probably not inviting them to do so. So they can’t bond with you as closely as they would with a real life friend with whom they may share multiple interests. But what if they could bond with you that closely?

Motivation can be a lot harder in a nichified business after the first few years. Eventually the repetitiveness and lack of variety start to grind you down. I see this happening in so many friends. The passion just drains out of them after a while. And it shows up in procrastination, lifeless work, and frequent fantasizing about doing something else. What once seemed like a great niche is now stunting their growth as human beings, providing them with too little stimulation and variety. Eventually they begin to think there’s something wrong with them for being experts in their field and not feeling driven anymore.

My business is a lot of fun to run because on any given day, week, or month, I can tackle any topic that interests me. I can switch topics seemingly at random, and I often do. This year I did three-day workshops on abundance, mental development, lifestyle design, and entrepreneurship. I spoke about relationships in Mexico and character development in the UK. I love, love, love that kind of variety.

Even after 12+ years on this path, I’m more in love with the work now than during the first 5 years. Whichever direction my current interests twist and turn, a sizable audience has proven they’re willing to come along for the ride. Of course I lose some people now and then, but in the long run, the narrow-minded, mono-focused people get filtered out as they smash into walls at every zig and zag and can’t keep up with the course changes. Meanwhile the ones who make it through multiple years with me are the ones who, like me, love the variety and enjoy connecting with and learning from someone who’s very much like them – a multidimensional human being.

Breadth AND Depth

You might be thinking that you can’t possibly go a mile wide and a mile deep. You have to go for breadth OR depth, don’t you? It’s an either-or decision. I think Leonardo da Vinci would call B.S. on that, and so would I. Breadth and depth enhance each other. You can have both. 
In fact, I think it’s a lot easier – and way more fun – to go for both.

If you explore a lot, you’ll become a better explorer. You’ll be able to go deep faster and more efficiently by building skills across multiple areas.

Most importantly, your mile deep will not be in the same spot as someone else’s mile deep. You’ll do your deep dives differently than nichified deep divers.

Your deep dives will also be more holistic because you’ll be able to connect the dots with other deep dives you’ve done. You’ll be better than most people at seeing the big picture and understanding each niche within the context of the others. And that’s going to allow you to offer up some really unique insights, the kinds of insights that even the so-called experts within a field aren’t commonly sharing.

There’s a huge advantage to being unattached to niches as well. You can be ridiculously disloyal to all of your niches and yet still be considered something of an expert within them. You can step into the role of expert within one niche and fire a shot at another niche, then switch sides and fire back. You can explore some really interesting paradoxes this way and find new truths beyond them. I’ll just have to let you chew on that one for a while. This one is hard to describe unless you’ve already experienced it.

Is Your Niche Draining Your Motivation?

Motivation is another key factor. You can dig more and deeper wells if you keep your motivation high. Do you think your depth is really going to be all that deep if your motivation is falling below a 6 out of 10? What if you’re constantly at a 9 or 10 for your motivation, but you jump around a lot? Can you imagine some situations where the 9+ will likely outperform the sub-6?

I’ll readily admit that there are some problems better suited to the stubborn sub-6 who can chip away for years. But there are other problems where the 9+ will win hands down. You can choose to tackle either class of problems. Do you have a preference?

You can actually solve many of the same problems with either approach. You’ll just use different strategies. For instance, a sub-6 might make money with a regular job or with stable self-employment, doing the similar work day after day. A 9+ might earn income by working in bursts, such as by setting up passive income streams (also called evergreen) or by doing income-generating projects.

Also, when you get burned out on some particular niche, you can always take a pause, switch to something else, and come back to it with a fresh perspective. You can go surprisingly deep when you’re able to stave off burnout indefinitely. And every now and then you’ll get lucky just by trying lots of different approaches to many different areas of life. Sometimes gold isn’t buried that deep; it may be buried where no one has bothered to look yet.

The Social Consequences of Nichification

There’s the social aspect too. If you niche down, you’re going to take a lot of your social life into that inch-wide pit with you. By resisting your own nichification, you could enjoy a more varied and arguably richer social life vs. one that’s overstuffed with the same types of people. Partly this is because you can offer up dozens of different interests that people may share with you. Some people will notice that they have a LOT in common with you, and they’ll often reach out to you. If you present more facets for people to connect with, you can attract a great variety of connections as well as more compatible connections.

Also, who really wants to be friends with a mono-focused person? If you go the niche route, there’s a good chance you’ll attract a lot of people who want to connect with you mainly because you’re an expert on that one particular thing. That can be cool for status and income, but it can also lead to a feeling of being used by other people and by society. Do you only want people to relate to you as a tool for their own advancement? That gets lonely after a while. It can also lead to a love-hate relationship with your work.

And there’s the health aspect too, although this tends to be more indirect. As odd as it may seem, boredom can actually become stressful in the long run. When you’re bored with your work, it takes more effort to push yourself to get things done. Your brain doesn’t automatically generate high levels of motivation if it isn’t engaged and stimulated. When you don’t feel highly motivated to work, it’s harder to get results. And when your results start to slip because you aren’t working as productively as you used to, this can create feelings of inadequacy, which makes everything worse. Eventually the external pressures will begin to pile up, and that can create a lot of stress. And that isn’t healthy in the long run. Sadly I’ve seen this happen to a lot of people who nichify themselves into a corner. The worst cases are usually lawyers (no pun intended), one reason being that they often earn a few hundred dollars per hour and get used to that level of income, but they have to keep doing the same work over and over to maintain their lifestyle. Try finding a lawyer who loves his/her work after a decade in the same niche, and I’ll show you a four-leaf clover. I’d probably want to hire that lawyer too… if I ever happened to need one.

* * *

Don’t swallow the nichification pill without reading the warning label first. It’s not the only way to build a following or a business, and depending on your personality and interests, it may actually lead you into a nasty pit of despair. Give some careful thought to the lifestyle consequences of nichification first, and decide whether it’s truly the right path for you.

If you don’t pick a niche, you’ll probably have to build more skills, face more fears, and build a stronger social support network. For people like me, those are powerful reasons not to niche down.

Source

Awaken Yourself And Focus On A Trajectory Of Well-Being | Abraham Hicks

Abraham Hicks' powerful audio on how to awaken yourself and focus on a trajectory of well-being. 

Source

Solving Problems by Blaming Others | Steve Pavlina

Many times when people get stuck working on some aspect of their personal growth, it’s because they’ve defined their core problem in a way that it can’t really be solved.

One of the most common forms of this is when someone defines their problem as a mental or psychological one. I see this all the time from people trying to overcome procrastination. They usually define the problem as a lack of motivation, drive, self-discipline, passion, etc. Sometimes they see it as a lack of clarity or focus. Other times it’s succumbing to too many distractions. But ultimately they believe that the source of their problem is their own mental programming, so the solution is to upgrade that programming in some fashion. In other words they need to work on their mindset, attitude, thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and so on.
But most of the time, this is a dead end. The results of their efforts are usually weak, even after years of serious inner work. They will often make some progress, but it’s like going from a 3 to a 4 on a scale of 1-10.

Some people keep trying anyway, figuring that this must be a really difficult personal challenge. Others essentially give up. Some oscillate between making an effort and then giving up for a while.

What if there’s a better approach that can create faster and more consistent results? Many people have already considered this possibility. They’ve usually tackled the problem in lots of different ways, each time with renewed hope that maybe this time there will be a real breakthrough. They’ve already come at this from the passion angle, the big why angle, the pain/pleasure angle, the self-discipline angle, the chest pounding rah-rah angle, the NLP angle, the Law of Attraction angle, the inner child angle, and many more angles.

Is Mental Reprogramming a Trap?

On my own decades-long path of personal growth, I’ve often experienced the most stuckness when I kept searching for solutions without taking an additional step back to question how I was actually defining the problem. It’s common to define our problems in mental or emotional terms. We love preaching that thoughts are causes, so if we want to create different results, we must change our thoughts. We say that our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs give rise to our actions, and our actions create our results. Or we say that our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs vibrationally attract that which is in harmony with them. Either way, success begins with the contents of our minds. It’s always assumed to be a software problem, isn’t it? To change our results, we must change the software than runs in our minds. But is this actually true?

Several years ago I was at a leadership retreat with about 100 speakers, authors, and trainers from the personal development field. Joe Vitale gave a lively talk in which he invited us to share the names of our favorite methods for creating inner change. Two volunteers recorded these suggestions on a large whiteboard on the stage. In short order they filled up every inch of the whiteboard, but the ideas kept coming in. Joe instructed the volunteers to keep writing over what they’d written, and they filled up another layer on top of the first. After a while the sheer volume of techniques began to make people chuckle – it was more than any one person could study in a lifetime. I loved Joe’s fun way of demonstrating just how many techniques we’ve already invented for trying to reprogram our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs.

Do we need to create more? Will people grow faster if we crank out a thousand more techniques for mental and emotional reprogramming?

Some of my biggest breakthroughs occurred after I struggled for years with the mental reprogramming method and then finally gave up on it. There was usually a period of surrender during which I gained some perspective and decided to approach the problem from a totally different angle – but NOT one of the mental reprogramming angles this time. 

Actually I’m taking way too much credit when I assert that. The truth is that much of the time, I simply stumbled upon a different way of approaching the problem, often when I wasn’t actively working on it. Frequently this came in the form of out-of-the-blue suggestions from other people.

The more this has happened, the more it became clear that one of the biggest challenges of personal growth is to define our problems correctly, so that we can actually solve them. If we identify the source of a problem incorrectly, it can set us on a path of spinning in circles for years with little to show for our efforts. So it’s really important to be flexible in how we define our problems. If our action steps aren’t leading to real progress, or if we can’t even feel motivated to take consistent action, maybe our problem needs a better definition to begin with.

Some problems that I found really difficult to solve even after years of struggle, I was able to solve relatively quickly when I defined the problem in a totally different way.

What if the Problem Really Is External?

During my first attempt at college, my academic performance was dismal. I barely passed the first semester and failed the second and third semesters, resulting in expulsion. The sad thing is that I only had 3-4 classes each semester. As I endured these awful results, I had a hard time motivating myself to go to class. I just couldn’t get myself to want to do it. The classes were boring, the homework uninspired and tedious, and I didn’t see the point of it. Trying to motivate myself to do the schoolwork was getting me nowhere.

After getting expelled from school, I got a job in a video game store for $6 an hour. A year later I decided to re-enroll in college and try again, starting over as a freshman. This time I blasted through the work like it was nothing, getting mostly As and a few Bs, graduating with two degrees in three semesters (computer science and math), and receiving an award for being the top computer science student that year. I took 10-13 classes per semester instead of the 3-4 classes I took the previous time. That may seem like an insane contrast, but this success became possible when I changed how I defined the problem.

When I struggled with low motivation in school, I initially assumed there was something wrong with me that I had to fix or improve. I was slacking off, deficient, not trying hard enough. Everyone around me seemed to reinforce that assessment. If I got a D or an F, it was an evaluation of my performance. Supposedly going to class was a challenge that I had to rise to each day, something I had to stretch myself to achieve.

But I could never motivate myself well when I framed the problem that way. Why? Because that definition of the problem wasn’t accurate. It wasn’t actually true. I had to turn the whole thing upside down.

I ultimately solved this problem by reversing the problem definition. What if I was actually an awesome student all along, and the school itself sucked? What if the school wasn’t designed to properly motivate someone like me? What if the teachers just weren’t very good? 

What if I was too much for them to handle?

Okay, I know that might sound a little silly, but have you ever thought that you might actually be an amazing student too if you had the very best school with the very best teachers educating you? How could you possibly fail under such conditions? Is it really your fault if you perform badly in school? Could you not just as easily interpret those Ds and Fs as the teacher’s self-assessment for poor performance as an educator?

The real truth was that I didn’t feel challenged enough, and because of that, I sabotaged myself from even going to class. When I did go to class, I was bored. The teachers didn’t engage me. They didn’t bother getting to know me. How could they in a freshman computer science class with 500 students packed into a massive auditorium? For the most part, the teachers seemed like dreadfully dull and uninspiring people, so I didn’t care to get to know them either. Sometimes it was hard to stay awake in their classes. If they had a real passion for teaching, they certainly didn’t show it. As far as teachers go, most of them sucked.

At the time I was going to UC Berkeley, which my high school guidance counselor told me was ranked #1 in the nation for computer science. I don’t know exactly what that #1 ranking was for, but I don’t see how it could have been for excellence in teaching.

Think of any movie you’ve seen about a really awesome teacher – creative, engaging, passionate, witty, caring, etc. My teachers were the opposite of that.

This one-minute video should give you an idea of what it was like:




Not Dead Poets Society. Not Stand and Deliver. Not Mr. Holland’s Opus.
More like Dead Delivery Opus.

It took me a long time to see this though. If you have a problem in school, it’s automatically assumed to be your fault. You lack motivation as a student. You don’t have the right mindset or attitude. You must not be driven enough. You should work harder and study more. You need to think about the long-term consequences of your actions. All that B.S.

Well… I found that attitude towards my weak academic performance even more demotivating. The admonitions to make more of an effort only seemed to hasten my path towards expulsion. But even worse than getting expelled was buying into the erroneous beliefs regarding why I got expelled.

Fixing the Externals

Taking a year off was one of the best decisions because it allowed me to reconsider these assumptions, and I saw that they just didn’t add up. If I was having motivational issues, then how come I didn’t suffer from a lack of motivation to put in an 8-hour shift at the video game store? How come I could finish 100+ NES, SNES, Game Boy, and Sega Genesis games from start to finish, playing them for hours at a stretch? I had plenty of motivation in other parts of my life.

Maybe it was true that my problem stemmed from a lack of motivation, but that wasn’t because I was failing to step up to the challenge. The problem was that the challenge wasn’t designed well. The educational experience wasn’t engaging. The system did a poor job of executing. Playing a NES game was more appealing. One time a friend and I played Contra something like seven times in a row without either of us losing a life. That was a lot more fun than going to class.

In order to succeed in college, I had to gamify the experience, mostly by increasing the challenge. Once I compensated for the design problems and made the educational experience edgy enough to keep me on my toes, I was able to succeed. It wasn’t that difficult to do this. It was a challenge of course, but not in a painful way. It was much like playing through a dozen video games each semester. It takes a lot of effort, but if you like the games, then it’s a lot of fun.

Have you ever binged on a game for 8, 10, or 12 hours with few breaks? If you can do that, then you can do the same with other parts of your life too, such as school and work. You just need to modify the external experience to make it more gamelike. This usually requires changing the rules, including ignoring other people’s rules when they get in your way.
I love a good challenge, and I need to feel that even if I do my best at my highest level of motivation, there’s still the possibility of failure. That makes it fun. When I added that element to my educational experience, it changed everything.

My motivation wasn’t the problem. My mindset wasn’t the problem. I had to change some habits and adopt some good time management techniques to make this work, but I didn’t need to reprogram myself mentally or emotionally. I was still the same guy who got expelled earlier and who worked at the video game store. To succeed educationally, I needed more engagement, more risk, and more stimulation.

If I’d had fun, lively, witty, challenging teachers during my first attempt at college, I’d have gone to class every day just to bask in their presence. If I’d liked, respected, and admired my teachers, I’d have kicked ass in their classes. That was largely why I was a straight-A student in high school. I had some amazing teachers back then. They were challenging. Or brilliant. Or witty. Or sadistic. Or just odd. And that made me want to do well in their classes. My mistake was going to a college full of teachers who’d rather be doing research than teaching. If they didn’t want to be teaching, why should I want to attend their classes?

I know it’s considered uncool in personal development circles to blame someone else as the cause of your problems, but sometimes when you blame someone else, you can finally solve the problem for good. I don’t think this is a denial of responsibility because even when you define the problem externally, you can still assume responsibility for solving it. And in fact you may gain access to much more effective solutions.

When I placed the blame externally, I felt empowered to do something about it. I re-enrolled at a different school. I took a much higher course load. I got to know many of my teachers, and sometimes I chatted with them outside of class. If their classes weren’t engaging, I challenged myself to do other homework in class to see how productive I could be. I pushed myself to learn everything the first time it was taught, so I didn’t have to study outside of class. If there was something I’d have to memorize, I’d memorize it immediately, before it was even erased from the chalkboard. When I had lousy teachers, I stopped blaming myself for not being motivated, and I changed the way I played the game to compensate for their weaknesses. I had to make the experience more like a game of Contra, where I felt fully engaged. Then it was as easy as shooting aliens.

Could Your Problem Be Physical?

One particular area where people get stuck in endless “I’m not good enough” loops is when they define their problems in mental or emotional terms when the real cause is physical. You can’t easily solve a problem by treating it at the level of mind if the cause is in your body or brain.

A great example of this is toxicity. Our world is filled with chemicals that didn’t exist a few hundred years ago. Every day we drink polluted water, eat polluted food, and breathe polluted air. We can’t help it because these pollutants are everywhere now. They build up in our tissues year after year, causing a slow degradation over time. These toxins can fog up our minds, destroy our emotional well-being, and cause all sorts of behavioral problems.

Your liver, kidneys, lungs, intestines, and skin do an amazing job of neutralizing toxins, but these organs are struggling to keep up with today’s assignments. If we rely solely upon our internal detoxification systems to process toxic loads that are orders of magnitude beyond what was encountered during the entire evolutionary history of these systems, we’re going to fall behind and lose this battle little by little, year after year. It’s a recipe for slow decline. 
People are showing the symptoms of this decline on an unprecedented scale today. We’re having to invent scores of new terms just to label the mental and emotional disorders caused by toxicity.

How can we possibly solve all these mental and emotional problems that are caused by our physical reality? We’re not going to fix these problems at a software level when the root problem is in the hardware.

We know that most depression has a physical cause, and if you address the physical cause, it usually goes away. But if you always treat depression as a mental, emotional, or psychological problem, you can get stuck in an endless loop treating the symptoms with no cure. If the root cause is physical, then we ought to solve the problem physically. Don’t just treat it. Cure it.

When I went to a multi-day raw food conference with about 3000 people several years ago, the place was just overflowing with love, warmth, instant connection, happiness, and sexiness, regardless of age. It was a powerful example of what normal is supposed to look like when our underlying hardware is running properly. It’s much harder to get depressed when you eat raw because your toxic intake is much lower. It’s so much easier to get depressed when you consume a little poison each day. It’s tough to find a depressed raw foodist. I’m not saying it’s impossible… just very uncommon.

In fact, if you want a simple way to test your own mental hardware, eat 100% raw vegan for 30 days. That will give you a glimpse of what you’re missing out on due to toxicity. I often get emails from people who’ve done this challenge, and almost everyone reports marked improvements in their mood, motivation, energy, and mental clarity. Then it becomes undeniable that by eating more toxic foods, you really are slowing yourself down. Just be aware that if you try this, you’ll probably feel like crap for the first few days as the most accessible toxins start flooding out of your tissues. For most people it feels like having the cold or the flu.

When my mental performance was weak and I blamed my own thinking, mindset, or personal standards, I got nowhere. But when I felt sluggish or foggy and started blaming the people who were actively poisoning me, I finally made some progress and began to see meaningful improvements in my mental clarity, emotions, motivation, productivity, and confidence. That’s because when I blamed others, I saw that I could actually compensate for their attempts to poison me. I didn’t have to let them toxify my brain as much as they’d been doing in the past.

In terms of action steps, improving my diet certainly helped, but that wasn’t where I saw the greatest gains. It was a good starting point though. If you’re consuming poison every day, it makes sense to start doing less of that, but you also have to deal with the effects of the poison you’ve already consumed, especially toxins like heavy metals that can remain stuck in your tissues for life if you don’t address them. The people in Flint, Michigan have to deal with this in a big way due to massive lead poisoning, but all of us have been poisoned to one degree or another, and ignoring this just isn’t a good idea, especially if you want your brain to function well.

One reason I’ve been vegan for about 20 years is that eating otherwise is just way too risky. I’d rather not join the ranks of all the depressed and scatterbrained people out there who seem to be in deep denial about the long-term effects of a high toxicity diet. Even if you’re concerned about the effects of pesticides and herbicides, it’s still better to eat plants that have been sprayed directly as opposed to eating animals who’ve eaten such plants. Those 
toxins build up in animal tissues just like they do in our human tissues.

Eating animal products is like eating a used water filter. Being a human that eats animal products is like being a used water filter that eats used water filters – not a recipe for optimal functioning.

What if you’re into the paleo diet? Then you must be a hunter with a time machine. The animal products people consume today are nothing like they were a hundred years ago. No amount of labeling games will change that. Today’s paleo diet is just another name for the used water filter diet.

If you care about the health of your brain, the one thing you should avoid consuming at all costs is fish. Whether they come from the ocean, a lake, a stream, or a fish farm, all of the water areas where fish live are polluted, and fish soak up those pollutants like sponges. When fish eat other fish, the toxins become even more concentrated. You might as well sprinkle mercury on your meals if you think eating a dirty sponge is a good idea.

Despite all the marketing dollars the animal products industry invests in convincing you otherwise, being one of their customers is not an intelligent decision when it comes to the health of your brain. And if you’re already suffering from weak motivation, chronic self-doubt, procrastination, anxiety, fear, depression, and other issues, then please switch to a low toxicity diet for a while, if only to give your brain a chance to show you how it’s actually supposed to function.

But as important as it is to reduce your intake of toxins, I think it’s even more important to work on removing the toxins that are already in your body.

I actually got much bigger gains not from dietary or lifestyle changes but from exploring more intensive detoxification protocols. Over the years I’ve done many different cleanses – liver cleanses, kidney cleanses, salt water flushes, hydrocolonics, a green smoothie cleanse, and a bunch of cleanses I’ve forgotten. These cleansing rituals helped. I gained an especially nice boost in mental and emotional clarity after doing a 30-day juice feast several years ago.

I also tried dozens of different detoxifiers, starting about 10 years ago. That helped too. The boosts were relatively small, but there were noticeable differences. The downside was that it often took a lot of time and experimentation to reap the benefits.

But the biggest leaps forward happened more recently, starting in August 2015 when a guy named Alexander Bloom told me about his detoxification experiences and invited me to check out his detox site. Please do yourself a favor and read his story because it will blow your mind if you’ve never looked into this sort of thing before. I saw a lot of alignment between what Alex shared and what I’d been exploring over a period of years, except that Alex was miles ahead of me in terms of how far he’d taken this exploration, and he had a lot of specific advice about it.

Alex and I emailed back and forth a few times, and I decided to try a detox protocol similar to what he recommended, beginning with a 30-day trial in August 2015. I was pretty foggy during those 30 days, but after I stopped, I felt like the guy from the movie Limitless. I enjoyed amazing mental clarity and a massive boost in motivation, and I plowed through mountains of work like it was nothing. I could work a 14-hour day with ease and still feel alert afterwards. There were some nice physical changes too, like my hair growing in thicker.

That 30-day detox was the reason I was finally able to tackle my website redesign project. I’d been wanting to do it for years, and it was such a delight to direct all that extra clarity, motivation, and energy into that project and drive it all the way to completion. Then after that was over, I did four three-day workshops in four months, more than I’d even done in such a short period of time.

I’ve done many more rounds of detoxification since then, mostly still based around Alex’s protocol. This year I also did another round of hydrocolonics, a two-week raw liquified diet cleanse, and a 17-day water fast. That seems to have helped even more.

Additionally, last year I bought a top of the line infrared sauna with ceramic emitters (not the cheaper carbon fiber ones). Cedar, hemlock, and cheaper woods can release toxic gases when heated, so I paid extra to get a sauna made from aspen wood. I normally use it 2-3x per week, and my skin is super soft now. An infrared sauna heats you up from within, encouraging more of your cells to release their toxins, some of which gets released through your sweat, but most of these toxins are actually processed by your liver. This is very different than a traditional Swedish sauna (like the kind with hot rocks), which heats you up from the outside in.

I continue to invest in detoxification, spending thousands of dollars on this in 2015 and 2016 because this investment has been paying off so well. I’m still seeing gains from it, although now the progress is more gradual than it was last year.

My motivation has been sky high for more than a year now, and I enjoy working more than ever. I feel like I was starting from a decent level of motivation and mental clarity to begin with, but now it’s just ridiculously wonderful. I can only imagine how this type of exploration would affect someone suffering from major mental and emotional challenges. Actually I don’t have to wonder because I’ve heard some amazing stories about that too.
If you want to read a really long and powerful story about how important it is to correctly define your problem, read Josh Macin’s story about coming back from the brink of being suicidal. I met Josh earlier this year at a conference in London where he gave a moving talk about how detoxification saved his life.

The funny thing is that all of this progress stemmed from defining the problem externally. Have you ever stopped to ask yourself, What if I’m having problems motivating myself and staying focused on my goals because people are poisoning my brain with toxic chemicals?
I know… it seems like a big leap, especially if you’re new to detox and have yet to personally experience how powerful it can be. And if you accept that the problem is external, it puts a huge ton of work on your plate. And it sucks to acknowledge that people are poisoning the planet. But what if this is the key to unlocking a huge amount of progress that you could never access when you framed this as an internal mental or emotional problem?

If you’ve been working on your personal growth for years like I have, isn’t it possible that your brain already grasps the importance of mindset, motivation, focus, and being in the flow? What if it totally gets this already, and it’s simply not able to run the positive programming you’ve internalized because the hardware of your brain is constantly misfiring due to a long-term buildup of toxins like heavy metals?

Blaming vs. Shaming

I know that blame sounds like a dirty word, especially in personal growth circles. But note that this is primarily about an internal shift in perspective that actually helps you assume more responsibility for solving your problem, not less. And generally speaking, solving your problem is better than letting it fester.

Blaming others doesn’t require you to inform them of your new perspective. In most cases I wouldn’t recommend doing that because it’s a waste of energy. People will just feel attacked, they’ll respond defensively, and you’ll get sucked into pointlessly debating instead of taking action to solve your problem. On the other hand, if you do meet someone who’s actively poisoning us, maybe you should try to get them to stop.

Blaming doesn’t necessitate shaming other people publicly or privately, which is also counterproductive. If you feel so inclined, you can certainly discuss your problem with others, including those you may feel are causing it, but make sure you assume responsibility for actually solving it. If the other person can’t or won’t help you solve it, then solve it without their help. Sometimes that will require you to change the nature of your relationship. It can be an especially unnerving personal growth challenge when you have to weigh your loyalty to someone you like vs. your ongoing path of growth if that person is creating social drag for you. I’ve received many emails over the years with questions of this nature; usually the answer is already clear to the person, and accepting that answer is the hard part.

Truth Alignment

Ultimately this is about truth alignment. Pay attention to the information and feedback you’re receiving from your external reality. If you believe the external reality is a dream world of sorts, then pay attention to what’s arising within that dream. You may resist seemingly unpleasant information at first, but if you accept it as a call to greater truth alignment, and if you understand that truth is one of the core universal growth accelerators, you’ll soon warm up to this type of invitation if you want to graduate from stubborn problems sooner.

It’s usually easier to recognize truth alignment issues in other people than it is in ourselves. For example, suppose you received an email like this one:

I recently caught my boyfriend cheating on me again, and when I confronted him about it outside of his apartment, he started hitting me really hard and told me he doesn’t want to see me anymore and that we’re through. That was three days ago. I still love him so much though, and I know he’s my soulmate. What can I do to get back together with him?

I just made this up, but I actually get emails similar to the above pretty much every month, although usually with a lot more detail.

As glaring as the lack of truth alignment may be in a situation like this, it’s almost guaranteed that you have a similar misalignment in yourself, and you’re just as blind to it as the people writing these emails. If you have the willingness to look for it though, you’ll usually find it in the areas of health, career, finances, or relationships. And you may find more than one.

I’ve had major misalignments in all of these areas at one time or another. In my first business, I kept working with game publishers despite seeing major integrity problems in how they worked, and when I finally gave up on them and went indie, my business thrived. I put off going bankrupt for many years, but when I finally did, I felt tremendous relief afterwards, and it helped me turn my finances around. I didn’t want to accept that the long-term incompatibilities in my marriage couldn’t be resolved through negotiation or personal growth work, and a separation and divorce finally made it possible to move beyond that stuckness. In all of these cases, blaming my own shortcomings slowed me down for years, and I could have made much faster progress if I’d just been willing to blame others sooner.

If you don’t enjoy your work, is your mindset really the problem? Are you just an unmotivated, procrastinating, lazy sloth? Or could it be that your company, your boss, or your coworkers do a poor job of engaging and stimulating you? Could it be that your company was poorly designed? Might it be that your company doesn’t have a meaningful purpose in the world? Could it be that your manager sucks? Could you imagine a different company with different leadership, a different team, different values, or a different style where you’d actually look forward to going to work each day?

If your productivity is low and you succumb to distraction often, does it really help to define the problem as your own lack of self-discipline or focus? Or could it be that you live in a world where other people are constantly competing for your attention? Do the people running the social media services you use truly care about helping you manage your social life, or are they really just trying to addict you, so they can make money from your addiction? Weren’t the devices you use at least partly designed to distract or addict you? If all of these services and companies weren’t actively trying to suck you in, would you be so easily distracted, or is it possible you’d find it pretty easy to concentrate on your own goals without their meddling?

Do you really have social anxiety? Do you find it hard to experience deep and meaningful relationships? Are you just socially defective, inexperienced, or untrained? Or is it possible that you’re relatively okay on the inside, and your friends and family are just socially inept when it comes to connecting with you? Or is it possible that some marketers have been trying to convince you that you aren’t good enough, so you’ll buy their products instead of meeting your needs more easily through abundant social connections? Did these people teach you that your body isn’t good enough, your hair isn’t good enough, your skills aren’t good enough, or that you’re not attractive enough? Haven’t you been exposed to this kind of conditioning your entire life? What would happen if you blamed these sources for a weak social life instead of yourself? Can you imagine a social group in which you don’t experience social anxiety because everyone recognizes the destructive societal conditioning they’ve all endured, and they’re consciously teaching themselves to connect like real human beings in spite of that conditioning? How would you compensate for the efforts of some people to condition you to become a lonely and isolated consumer? How would you push back against that?

Noting that the world is beating you down in many ways doesn’t have to be disempowering. 
Try to see it as a weight to lift, and by lifting it you can grow stronger.

Ironically, perhaps your mindset really is the problem, but not in the way you originally thought. Maybe you’ve been overplaying the idea that you need to improve your internal software, causing your mind to get stuck in endless self-analytical loops. And maybe the solution is to notice that your external input has included way too much garbage, so you’ve been caught in a GIGO pattern – garbage in, garbage out. If that’s the case, maybe your mental software is running just fine, and you simply need to provide it with different input, such as a new school, a new work environment, smarter people, cleaner food and water, and so on.

Perhaps you’re awesome just as you are, and with a few adjustments to your external world, you’ll be able to fully express your awesomeness. The next time the world seems to disagree with you, don’t buy into its assumptions so quickly. Be sure to consider the possibility that maybe the world itself needs fixin’.

Source