The Art of Stress-Free Productivity | David Allen at TEDxClaremontColleges

Productivity guru and coach David Allen talks about "Stress Free Productivity" at TEDxClaremontColleges.
"How sustainable is your life and work style, right now, in terms of the long haul?"
"How available are you to creative things that are around you, right now, that you don't have the bandwidth to recognise, or take advantage of right now?  "
Victim: no control, no focus.  Driven by latest and loudest. Crazy-maker: high focus, no control.  Mad scientist.  Micro-manager: no focus, high control.  Captain and Commander: high focus, high control. Optimal place to be!
Capture your thoughts.  What outcome am I committed to finish? What's the very next action step that I need to take? Use a  map to capture it all.   Reassess regularly to recalibrate and refocus. Source 

Making Personal Development Fun | Vlad Dolezal

Think back to when you were a child, building a lego house. (Or using a similar building set.)

You would set off to build a house… then halfway through decide to make it a horse ranch instead… then get distracted by another idea and end up with a space ship with a pack of horses on one wing and a swimming pool on the other.

That’s how personal development feels when you approach it in a fun way. You have a certain intention, but then you get distracted by something interesting, experiment with a few different tidbits, and end up with something completely different than you intended. Yet the result is even more awesome than your original plan, and you had great fun along the way!

Still, some people insist on approaching personal development like building a lego house according to set-in-stone instructions. They stress about getting every brick in the right place, then get annoyed when they don’t progress fast enough, then start procrastinating because the process is boring and doesn’t challenge their mind and then they end up dropping the project and complaining that building lego houses doesn’t work.

Personal development can be just as fun as building a lego house, if you approach it the right way.

If you think personal development should be hard, it will be

There’s a funny thing called selective perception. Put simply, you only notice things you are looking for.

So if you’re looking for hard complicated ways to improve yourself, when you find an easy solution, you drop it because “that can’t possibly be right”. Then you come up with the most weird and convoluted ways to make your self-improvement difficult, because that’s what you’re looking for.

Here’s the thing. Personal development done right is easy. It’s effortless. It’s fun!

Building your own character is just like building a character in a computer game, or like building a lego spaceship:

• you tack on a bunch of random stuff because you feel like it
• you keep experimenting and see what you like the best
• the process is just as much fun as the result
• there isn’t a final outcome – it’s an endless fun process, where you keep changing and tweaking things because you feel like it. The fun of a building set comes from building things, and the same is true with personal development.

I have tried all sorts of habit changes myself, like waking up early, meditating, being vegetarian, keeping a daily to-do list, or consciously changing my body language (that one was especially fun).

Some of them have stuck and some haven’t. But every single one of them was fun to try! (Yes, even waking up early).

How to Make Personal Development Fun

Here are a few ways to make personal development fun:

1. Forget about the outcome
2. Think of it as a fun experiment to see what happens
3. When you read/hear about cool ideas, TRY THEM
4. Do it with a friend (either offline or online)
5. Tell other people about your experiments (that’s one reason starting a blog is great)

Aaaand… yeah. If I ended right here, you would most likely go off nodding, thinking you learned something interesting but leaving your behavior unchanged.

I’m not a big fan of list posts for exactly that reason. That’s why I let this list occupy such a small part of this post.

Instead, I will give you one thorough example, to help you drive the concept deep into your subconscious. This will stimulate your subconscious mind’s creativity and get it thinking of how to make other personal development ideas fun.

An example of making personal development fun

You can approach any part of personal development as a game. I’m going to take open-mindedness as an example here:

…

Think of lying on a grass meadow on a warm summer day, with a friend, watching the clouds above.

“That one looks like a car,” you say pointing at a cloud.

“It looks like a dog to me…” your friend replies.

What is your reply? Do you jump up angrily and shout “NO, it’s definitely a car! You’re completely wrong!” and storm off?

Or do you say “Wait… hang on… oh yea! I can see what you mean. I’d actually say it’s a bit more of a tiger, but I can definitely see where you’re coming from with the dog.”

And then you can have more fun guessing all the other interpretations for that cloud. Maybe it can also be a motorcycle, or a pretzel…

And considering other people’s point of view is just like that. For a moment, you suspend all judgment, and see the world as they see it. And then you think of all other interpretations of the same situation, just to see what fun things you can come up with.

You can even find a friend who’s also interested in practicing open-mindedness and challenge each other with issues and ideas to be open-minded about.

One more thing. Notice how I never once mentioned how will open-mindedness be useful to you? That’s because focusing on the outcome will make it seem like a chore. Consider the outcome when choosing what habits to try, but once you get started, forget the outcome, and enjoy it like a game.

Personal development is fun. All you have to do is approach it in the right way.

…

Now stay with me, this is important. You might be tempted to skip the last few paragraphs.

Maybe you’re thinking of commenting, or retweeting this post.

Don’t. Not yet. Before you do anything else, I want you to use the information here.

Because while comments and retweets are nice, they’re not the real thing. The real thing is helping you improve your life.

So in a moment, when I say the word “now”, I want you to stop reading and start thinking. Think about your personal development, and how you could make it more fun. Then think of some specific actions you can take in the next 24 hours to make it more fun.

When you’re done, then you can go do something else. And if you come up with an interesting way of making personal development fun, please share it in the comments! 

Okay, ready? Three, two, one…

This blog post ends now.

Source 

How to Make Personal Growth More Fun (and Easier) | Henrik Edberg

“People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.”

Dale Carnegie

When you read this blog, other blogs and books on personal development it’s easy to get drawn into an atmosphere of this being really serious business.

And for someone who needs help it can be. If you are really out of shape or have a huge debt or haven’t had date in ages or just don’t know what to do with your life then it’s no fun.

However, as usual, I want emphasize what works here. And through my own experience these last few years I have discovered that taking this as deadly serious business makes things harder than they need to be.

So today I’d like to suggest a bunch of ways to make personal growth and achieving what you want more fun.

Think of it more as light and breezy fun rather than going to war.

No, you are not going to war. Thinking that you are can help you to ramp up enthusiasm and aggressiveness in the beginning. It seems to help you.

So you make any personal development goal – or just anything you want out of life – in to this epic struggle. Perhaps just in your mind or also by reading more and more about a topic.

The more you think and read about a topic the more complicated it seems in your mind and is also becomes “heavier”. What may have been pretty straightforward in real life becomes this huge struggle, where you are Rocky Balboa taking slow painstaking steps uphill against horrific odds. Yep, it’s a real inspiring thing as you struggle as the heroic underdog.

It’s also a great way to make things so much harder for yourself. It’s you putting up imaginary obstacles in your own mind that aren’t even there in reality. The Rocky way of thinking about these things is very seductive. But life becomes so much lighter and easier when you just let that stuff go.

It’s a bit counter-intuitive and it took me quite some time to understand this. You think that an overly serious attitude may seem like the right attitude to help you achieve your goal.

But a more relaxed and fun attitude where you tell yourself that what you are doing isn’t really that complicated, epic – millions of people have probably done what you want to do in last 1000 years or so – or super serious is often more effective to get the result you desire.

Of course, sometimes things will suck but I think that if you can approach things this way you’ll get more enjoyment on your path to your goal and you won’t put up extra obstacles on that path.

You can bring awareness to what you are thinking while on the daily walk on that path by asking yourself questions like “Honestly, am I overcomplicating this?” or ”Am I taking this a bit too seriously?”.

Find out what you have fun doing.

If you don’t like jogging don’t do it. Not everyone has be a runner to get exercise. Be curious and explore different options, perhaps soccer or table tennis is a better option for you? 
Finding what works and feels good for you makes it a lot easier to stick to the plan and be consistent each week rather than feeling like you have drag yourself to the gym again.

Detach from the outcome.

This is one of my favorite tips for making it easier to take action and to do so consistently. It makes the doing more enjoyable and there is less inner resistance or projections into the future that can screw things up.

I first got this tip from the ancient Sanskrit Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita. It says:
“To action alone hast thou a right and never at all to its fruits; let not the fruits of action be thy motive; neither let there be in thee any attachment to inaction”

This tells me to understand that I cannot control the results of my action. I can’t control how someone reacts to what I say or what I do. And that I should do what I do just because it is something I want to do rather than because of some outcome I’d like. But at the same time I should not let these two ideas lead me to become passive and get stuck in sitting on my hands and not taking action at all.

Basically, I do what I think is right and that is my responsibility. And then the rest (the possible results), well, that is not up for me to decide about or try to control. I let it go.

Now, I apply this when I do something. I can get motivated by future results before the doing the activity. But when I start doing any those activities I detach and change how I think. I just focus on showing up and doing. This may sound a bit weird or hard but after a while it gets easier and easier to do that shift in your mind and to not start projecting into the future while you are doing.

You can apply this to:

• Working out. By focusing on just showing up and doing the workout you won’t get discouraged when you haven’t lost x pounds after a week. You become more patient and more emotionally stable when you don’t think about losing that weight all the time. If you just show up and work out – and control what you eat – the pounds will come off.

• Blogging. If you don’t have to worry about what people may think about your next post then it becomes a lot easier to calmly write what you want instead of getting stuck in some kind of writer’s block.

• Social interactions. If you detach from an outcome such as someone liking you at a party or on a date then you’ll be less nervous. You won’t try to impress people. You will be more like how you are with your closest friends, relaxed and easy going. Just being yourself is an often cited and sometimes criticized piece of advice. By detaching from outcomes – while still of course using your common sense – it will be a lot easier to just be the best version of yourself.

Focus on the positive things from the past.

It’s easy to fall back into the common habit of focusing on your past failures. Doing so can make you feel like giving up. Or like this is a war. Or like getting out of your comfort zone is just one big hassle.

So I suggest changing your focus. Remember when things went well.

Awash your mind with positive memories.

Realise it can be fun to get out of your comfort zone despite what your mind and feelings might be telling you before you get started. Think back to the previous times when you have broken out of your rut. Focus on the positive memories, when you got out there, when you took a chance. And you’ll recall that it wasn’t so bad, it was actually fun and exciting and something new to you.

A lot of the time we automatically play back our negative experiences – or negative interpretations of events – in our minds before we are about to do something. And we forget about the positive memories and our previous, positive achievements. Avoid that trap. Let the fun and good memories flow through your mind instead and let things become easier.

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Focus on process, not outcome | Tom Murcko

It seems like the best way to reach a desired result would be to focus on that result, try to move toward it, and judge each attempt by how closely you approximate it. But actually that approach is far from optimal. If you focus your attention and effort less on the results you’re hoping for and more on the processes and techniques you use, you will learn faster, become more successful, and be happier with the outcome.

By default we tend to be forward-looking, goal-pursuing, results-focused. Why? Because we’re wired for a discontentment with the present and a striving for a better future. Because results are easier to measure and evaluate than processes. Because we know others judge us based on results and we tend to care too much what others think.

But focusing on process rather than outcome is a much better strategy. Why?

• It eliminates the noise of external factors. Success can follow a flawed effort and failure can follow a flawless effort. In those cases, judging performance by outcome will reinforce the wrong techniques. You’ll achieve mastery of a new skill more quickly if you can learn to detect those cases and reinforce the correct processes whether or not they happened to lead to the desired outcome in that instance.
• It encourages experimentation. When you’re wholly focused on a specific desired result, you’re less willing to try long shots, less inclined to experiment, less open to serendipity, and less likely to stumble on an even better outcome than the one you were aiming for
• It lets you enjoy the process more. Life is lived in the present, not the future, and happiness is a process, not a place. Focusing on process will let you engage more deeply with the present and experience it more fully, which will help you learn faster and experience life more completely.
• It puts you in control. You have only partial control over whether you reach a specific external goal. But you have complete control over the process you use. Whether you give your best effort is entirely within your power. An internal locus of control leads to empowerment, higher self-esteem, and success, all of which contribute meaningfully to life satisfaction.
• It lets you enjoy and benefit more from whatever outcome does occur. In the long run things rarely turn out the way we expect them to. If your happiness is predicated on your success, and if your success is predicated on a specific outcome, you are setting yourself up for a high likelihood of frustration and disappointment. If you instead let go of the need for any particular outcome, you increase your chances for success and contentment. It’s fine to desire a certain outcome; just don’t make your happiness contigent on it. Instead, derive happiness from knowing that you gave every attempt your best effort.
• It will give you confidence. Not confidence that you’ll succeed in the current attempt, but confidence that you’re on the right path to mastery. You’ll worry less about the future because you’ll know that you’ll be happy regardless of the outcome of any given situation or event. You’ll be more free to get out of your comfort zone, to be spontaneous and take risks. And being unattached to a specific outcome means you won’t be needy, or get upset when things don’t go as you had hoped. The more you focus on process over outcome, the more confident you’ll become, and there’s nothing more attractive than confidence.

So how can you focus on process over outcome?

•  Don’t pursue the rewards directly, trust that they will come. Focus on the process with diligence and effortful study, and let the outcome take care of itself.
• Stop worrying about what others will think of your performance.
• View each attempt as merely practice for the next attempt.
• Choose for yourself how to rate your performance. Rate yourself based on the effort, not the outcome. Don’t try to win today, try to become a winner. Be happier when your best effort results in defeat than when a weak effort results in victory. Determine what your best effort would look like, and then make it happen.
• Bring awareness to your performance, either during or immediately after it, so you can learn to identify when bad results follow good processes, and vice-versa. With practice you will build the confidence needed to avoid second-guessing yourself when the results are bad but your technique is good.

Source: http://www.howtolive.com/focus-on-process-not-outcome/#.WEdiV_mLS00

Inspiring or what?  Love it!  Let me know what you think below!