Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) Demonstration

EFT Practitioner at Dr. Mercola's Center for Natural Health, Julie Schiffman shows a tool which can help in various aspects of life.  It's called Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) Technique, also known as Tapping.
Tune into a problem.  Tune into what your body is trying to tell you.  And then do the tapping!
Source 

Dynamic Planning | Steve Pavlina

One part of David Allen’s Getting Things Done system I’ve discarded is the idea of sorting next actions by physical context bins, such as phone calls, paper work, computer work, etc. Maybe that makes sense if you travel 200 days a year or work in a high-interruption environment where you can’t concentrate for more than 30 minutes at a time, but given that I work in a home office with virtually all of these contexts within easy reach, I find it worsens my productivity to sort actions by physical context. I get good mileage out of batching errands where I must physically go out, so I do maintain a separate errands list, but otherwise I’ve dumped this part of GTD.

The problem with sorting actions into context bins is that you scramble actions from different projects together. Perhaps you make 5 phone calls in a batch, each of which is associated with a different project. That’s fine if you’re out of the office, and you want to put your cell phone to good use, but what if you’re at your desk in your office? Does it still make sense to batch phone calls just because they all involve physically picking up a phone? If the calls are unrelated, then I’d say probably not.

My preference is to focus on a single project for as long as possible, doing a variety of actions in a row. Once I’ve loaded a project into my brain’s active RAM, I don’t like to unload it. Much efficiency is lost in the process of rebuilding awareness of a project. If I haven’t worked on a project for a while, it can take me anywhere from 15 minutes to several hours to fully reload the project into my brain — this is especially true for technical work or very large and complex projects. So I’d rather work on one project all day long instead of doing a smattering of different actions from ten different projects. I realize that not everyone has the luxury of doing that, but I do.

Taking on too many projects at once and switching between them often during the day will 
limit the complexity of the projects you can handle. This is fine for simple projects or if you do cog-like work, but it kills productivity on large projects where you need to keep a lot of information in your head at once. Some examples of the latter would be designing a new computer game or a web site, writing a book or screenplay, or doing strategic planning work for a business. In order to work productively on such projects, you can’t keep switching between projects, or the work will take forever. You need to load up a single mental context and stay with it for a long time, preferably days at a time but at least for several hours. Minor interruptions are OK, but you want to keep yourself from having to re-load a whole other mental context. Imagine writing 10 different books at once, working for 30 minutes a day on each one. It would be much more productive to knock off one book at a time.

Sometimes the mental context is a lot more important than the physical one. Sticking with a single project and moving all around your office building to perform the different physical actions may be better than staying at your desk and doing desk work from 5 different projects. Getting up to do something in another room may cost you a couple minutes, but switching projects will often cost you a lot more. When are you working most productively on a project? Definitely not during the first 15-30 minutes.

I think this is one of the hidden causes of procrastination. What happens when we procrastinate? We put a certain project off to the last minute, so we end up having to do the whole thing (or a large part of it) in a single marathon session. Say you put off doing a school paper until the day before it’s due. By procrastinating you ultimately force yourself to do the entire thing in one session. You load the mental context once, do all the next actions in sequence, and then you finish and release the context. This is very efficient in my opinion, a lot better than spreading the work out across several weeks and doing just a little bit each day (and forgetting must of the understanding you gained during the previous week). This is how I did assignments when I was in college, and I managed 31-39 units per semester. If I had a big project, I’d allocate a whole day to it and do it in one session — do the reading, research, writing, editing, etc. If I had to do a book report, I’d read the book and then write the report immediately afterwards. If a teacher allocated a month or two for a big assignment, I’d still try to do it in a single session.

I no longer maintain a separate next actions list, although I used to. Now I keep only a projects list, and I dynamically break it into next actions as needed. For some projects I make detailed plans of all the next actions, but for most projects I break down just enough actions to fill a day or two, and then I do them. Once I’ve completed those actions, I figure out more next actions and then set about doing those. I find this to be a highly productive balance that avoids underplanning on one side and analysis paralysis on the other.

Think of this as dynamic planning. I don’t tend to plan out the details of a project until it’s on my doorstep, and I aim to handle only 1-3 projects at a time. I barrel through, get them done, and then it’s off to the next project. This quote from Tryon Edwards basically sums up my approach:

Where duty is plain, delay is both foolish and hazardous; where it is not, delay may provide both wisdom and safety.

In other words, if you at least know what to do today, then go do it. Go back to planning when you hit the edge of the fog again. Dynamic planning: plan, do, repeat.

If a project is really, really big, then I’ll break it into subprojects, and the subprojects will be scheduled accordingly. Also, since there are always little things to do that don’t fall into any major project (like paying bills and such), I batch those little things up and then dispatch them in a marathon session too. For example, one Saturday I spent the whole day doing 20 unrelated home repairs. And often I’ll write a few days worth of blog posts in one session, scheduling each post to go live on a different day.

The downside to working like this is that once I’ve loaded up a particular mental context, it’s hard to let it go. I become semi-obsessed. My phone will ring, or my wife will walk into the room and talk to me, or my son will be crying in the next room, and I’ll automatically tune them out. It’s as if my brain has allocated all available RAM to the given project, and nothing else will fit. If anything else tries to squeeze in, I’ll chase it away with a growl. On the other hand, if I’m spending a day out with my family, I’m usually fully there with them, not thinking about other projects at all.

Source 

Overcoming Procrastination | Steve Pavlina

Procrastination, the habit of putting tasks off to the last possible minute, can be a major problem in both your career and your personal life. Side effects include missed opportunities, frenzied work hours, stress, overwhelm, resentment, and guilt. This article will explore the root causes of procrastination and give you several practical tools to overcome it.

The behavior pattern of procrastination can be triggered in many different ways, so you won’t always procrastinate for the same reason. Sometimes you’ll procrastinate because you’re overwhelmed with too much on your plate, and procrastination gives you an escape. Other times you’ll feel tired and lazy, and you just can’t get going.

Let’s now address these various causes of procrastination and consider intelligent ways to respond.

1. Stress

When you feel stressed, worried, or anxious, it’s hard to work productively. In certain situations procrastination works as a coping mechanism to keep your stress levels under control. A wise solution is to reduce the amount of stress in your life when possible, such that you can spend more time working because you want to, not because you have to. One of the simplest ways to reduce stress is to take more time for play.

In his book The Now Habit, Dr. Neil Fiore suggests that making time for guaranteed fun can be an effective way to overcome procrastination. Decide in advance what blocks of time you’ll allocate each week to family time, entertainment, exercise, social activities, and personal hobbies. Then schedule your work hours using whatever time is left. This can reduce the urge to procrastinate because you work will not encroach on your leisure time, so you don’t have to procrastinate on work in order to relax and enjoy life. I caution against overusing this strategy, however, as your work should normally be enjoyable enough that you’re motivated to do it. If you aren’t inspired by your daily work, admit that you made a mistake in choosing the wrong career path; then seek out a new direction that does inspire you.

Benjamin Franklin advised that the optimal strategy for high productivity is to split your days into one third work, one third play, and one third rest. Once again the suggestion is to guarantee your leisure time. Hold your work time and your play time as equally important, so one doesn’t encroach upon the other.

I’m most productive when I take abundant time for play. This helps me burn off excess stress and enjoy life more, and my work life is better when I’m happier. I also create a relaxed office environment that reduces stress levels. My office includes healthy plants, a fountain, and several scented candles. I often listen to relaxing music while I work. Despite all the tech equipment, my office has a very relaxed feel to it. Because I enjoy being there, I can work a full day without feeling overly stressed or anxious, even when I have a lot to do. 
For additional tips to make your work environment more peaceful and relaxing, read the article 10 Ways to Relaxify Your Workspace.

2. Overwhelm

Sometimes you may have more items on your to-do list than you can reasonably complete. This can quickly lead to overwhelm, and ironically you may be more likely to procrastinate when you can least afford it. Think of it as your brain refusing to cooperate with a schedule that you know is unreasonable. In this case the message is that you need to stop, reassess your true priorities, and simplify.

Options for reducing schedule overwhelm include elimination, delegation, and negotiation. First, review your to-dos and cut as much as you can. Cut everything that isn’t truly important. This should be a no-brainer, but it’s amazing how poorly people actually implement it. People cut things like exercise while leaving plenty of time for TV, even though exercise invigorates them and TV drains them. When you cut items, be honest about removing the most worthless ones first, and retain those that provide real value. Secondly, delegate tasks to others as much as possible. Ask for extra help if necessary. And thirdly, negotiate with others to free up more time for what’s really important. If you happen to have a job that overloads you with more work than you feel is reasonable, it’s up to you to decide if it’s worthwhile to continue in that situation. Personally I wouldn’t tolerate a job that pushed me to overwork myself to the point of feeling overwhelmed; that’s counterproductive for both the employer and the employee.

Be aware that the peak performers in any field tend to take more vacation time and work shorter hours than the workaholics. Peak performers get more done in less time by keeping themselves fresh, relaxed, and creative. By treating your working time as a scarce resource rather than an uncontrollable monster that can gobble up every other area of your life, you’ll be more balanced, focused, and effective.

It’s been shown that the optimal work week for most people is 40-45 hours. Working longer hours than this actually has such an adverse effect on productivity and motivation that less real work gets done. This is especially true for creative, information age work.

Don’t just take my word for it though; test this concept for yourself. Many years ago I ran a simple experiment to determine how efficiently I was working. I measured my efficiency ratio as the number of hours I spent doing important work divided by the number of hours I spent in my office each week. The first time I did this I was shocked to find that I only got 15 hours of real work done while spending 60 hours in my office, an efficiency ratio of 25%. Can you believe that? Over the following weeks, I increased my productivity dramatically while spending far fewer hours in my office. By limiting my work hours, I actually got more done. You can read the details in the article Triple Your Personal Productivity. I now know that working long hours is huge mistake, and I challenge you to discover this truth for yourself.

3. Laziness

Often we procrastinate because we feel too physically and/or emotionally drained to work. Once we fall into this pattern, it’s easy to get stuck due to inertia because an object at rest tends to remain at rest. When you feel lazy, even simple tasks seem like too much work because your energy is too low compared to the energy required by the task. If you blame the task for being too difficult or tedious, you’ll procrastinate to conserve energy. But the longer you do this, the more your resolve will weaken, and your procrastination habit may begin spiraling toward depression. Feeling weak and unmotivated shouldn’t be your norm, so it’s important to disrupt this pattern as soon as you become aware of it.

The solution is straightforward: get off your butt and physically move your body. Exercise helps to raise your energy levels. When your energy is high, tasks will seem to get easier, and you’ll be less resistant to taking action. A fit person can handle more activity than an unfit person, even though the difficulty of the tasks remains the same.

Through trial and error, I discovered that diet and exercise are critical in keeping my energy consistently high. I went vegetarian in 1993 and vegan in 1997, and these dietary 
improvements gave me a significant ongoing energy boost. When I exercise regularly, my metabolism stays high throughout the day. I rarely procrastinate due to laziness because I have the energy and mental clarity to tackle whatever comes my way. Tasks seem easier to complete than they did when my diet and exercise habits were poor. The tasks are the same, but I’ve grown stronger. A wonderful side benefit of the diet/exercise habit is that I was able to get by with less sleep. I used to need at least 8-9 hours of sleep per night to feel rested, but now I function well on about 6.5 hours.

The most energizing foods are raw fruits and vegetables. Make your diet abundant in these foods, and you’ll likely see a marked improvement in your energy levels. The first week or two, however, you may temporarily feel worse as your body takes the opportunity to detox. Erin and I each lost seven pounds the first week we went vegan. Once the dairy clog finally got cleaned out, our intestines were better able to metabolize everything we ate from then on. We later learned that this is actually quite common. There’s a good reason baby cows need four stomachs to digest their mother’s milk. Human beings can’t metabolize dairy products properly, so the partially digested cow proteins float through the bloodstream and must be eliminated as toxins (i.e. poisons). This requires even more energy, which can leave you feeling more tired than you otherwise would.

You’ll have to decide for yourself how far you want to take this. I suggest you try different dietary changes for only 30 days at first to see how it affects you. That’s how I went vegetarian and later vegan. In each case I went into the challenge fully expecting to revert back at the end of the 30 days, but I liked the results so much that I couldn’t fathom going back. Don’t take my word for this. Experiment for yourself, and discover what health habits work best for you. For more tips see the article How to Find the Best Diet for You.

4. Lack of Motivation

We all experience temporary laziness at times, but if you suffer from chronically low motivation and just can’t seem to get anything going, then it’s time for you to let go of immature thought patterns, to embrace life as a mature adult, and to discover your true purpose in life. Until you identify an inspiring purpose, you’ll never come close to achieving your potential, and your motivation will always remain weak.

For more than a decade I ran a computer game publishing company. That was a dream of mine in my early 20s, and it was wonderful to be able to fulfill that dream. However, as I entered my 30s, I began feeling much less passionate about it. I was competent at what I did, the business was doing well financially, and I enjoyed plenty of free time. But I just didn’t care that much about entertainment software anymore. As my passion faded, I started asking, “What’s the point of continuing with this line of work?” Consequently, I procrastinated on some projects that could have moved the business forward. I tried to boost my motivation using a variety of techniques but to no avail. Finally I recognized what I really needed was a total career change. I needed to find a more inspiring career path.

After much soul searching, I retired from the gaming industry and launched StevePavlina.com. What an amazing change that was! I found renewed passion in helping people grow, so I didn’t have to use motivation-boosting techniques to get going. I was naturally inspired to work. I still feel totally inspired. Best of all I procrastinated less on non-work tasks too — my passion spread across all areas of my life.

Center your work around an inspiring purpose, and you’ll greatly reduce your tendency to procrastinate. If you haven’t already done so, listen to Podcast #15 – What Is Your Purpose?. Finding your purpose is a powerful way to defeat procrastination problems because you won’t procrastinate on what you love to do. Chronic procrastination is actually a big warning sign that tells us, “You’re going the wrong way. Take a different path!”

Once you’ve centered your life around an inspiring purpose, then you can take advantage of certain motivational techniques to boost your motivation even higher. For some specific motivational tips, read Cultivating Burning Desire.

5. Lack of Discipline

Even when motivation is high, you may still encounter tasks you don’t want to do. In these situations self-discipline works like a motivational backup system. When you feel motivated, you don’t need much discipline, but it sure comes in handy when you need to get something done but really don’t want to do the work. If your self-discipline is weak, however, procrastinating will be too tempting to resist.

I’ve written a six-part series on how to develop your self-discipline, so I’ll simply refer you there: Self-Discipline Series. If you really want to overcome procrastination, you must release any attachment to the fantasy of a quick fix, and commit to making real progress. Hopefully you have the maturity to recognize that reading a single article won’t cure your procrastination problems overnight, just as a single visit to the gym won’t make you an athlete.

6. Poor Time Management Habits

Do you ever find yourself falling behind because you overslept, because you were too disorganized, or because certain tasks just fell through the cracks? Bad habits like these often lead to procrastination, often unintentionally.

The solution in this case is to diagnose the bad habit that’s hurting you and devise a new 
habit to replace it. For example, if you have a problem oversleeping, take up the challenge of becoming an early riser. To de-condition the old habit and install the new one, I recommend the 30-day trial method. Many readers have found this method extremely effective because it makes permanent change much easier.

For tasks you’ve been putting off for a while, I recommend using the timeboxing method to get started. Here’s how it works: First, select a small piece of the task you can work on for just 30 minutes. Then choose a reward you will give yourself immediately afterwards. The reward is guaranteed if you simply put in the time; it doesn’t depend on any meaningful accomplishment. Examples include watching your favorite TV show, seeing a movie, enjoying a meal or snack, going out with friends, going for a walk, or doing anything you find pleasurable. Because the amount of time you’ll be working on the task is so short, your focus will shift to the impending pleasure of the reward instead of the difficulty of the task. No matter how unpleasant the task, there’s virtually nothing you can’t endure for just 30 minutes if you have a big enough reward waiting for you.

When you timebox your tasks, you may discover that something very interesting happens. You will probably find that you continue working much longer than 30 minutes. You will often get so involved in a task, even a difficult one, that you actually want to keep working on it. Before you know it, you’ve put in an hour or even several hours. The certainty of your reward is still there, so you know you can enjoy it whenever you’re ready to stop. Once you begin taking action, your focus shifts away from worrying about the difficulty of the task and toward finishing the current piece of the task which now has your full attention.

When you do decide to stop working, claim and enjoy your reward. Then schedule another 30-minute period to work on the task with another reward. This will help you associate more and more pleasure to the task, knowing that you will always be immediately rewarded for your efforts. Working toward distant and uncertain long-term rewards is not nearly as motivating as immediate short-term rewards. By rewarding yourself for simply putting in the time, instead of for any specific achievements, you’ll be eager to return to work on your task again and again, and you’ll ultimately finish it. You may also want to read my article on Timeboxing.

If you find that clutter and disorganization are hurting you, I suggest you read the article Getting Organized. For a compelling overview of effective time management principles, read Time Management. And for a giant list of specific time management tips you can apply right away, read Do It Now.

7. Lack of Skill

If you lack sufficient skill to complete a task at a reasonable level of quality, you may procrastinate to avoid a failure experience. You then have three viable options to overcome this type of pattern: educate, delegate, or eliminate.

First, you can acquire the skill level you need by training up. Just because you can’t do something today doesn’t mean you’ll never be able to do it. Someday you may even master that skill. For example, when I wanted to create my first website in 1995, I didn’t know how to do it because I’d never done it before. But I knew I could learn to do it. I took the time to learn HTML, and I experimented. It didn’t take long before I launched a functional web site. 
In the years since then, I continued to apply and upgrade that skill. If you can’t do something, don’t whine about it. Educate yourself to gain skill until you become proficient.

A second option is to delegate tasks you lack the skill to do. There are far too many interesting skills for you to master, so you must rely on others for help. You may not realize it, but you’re already a master at delegation. Do you grow all your own food? Did you sew your own clothes? Did you build your own house? Chances are that you depend on others for your very survival. If you want a certain result but don’t want to acquire the skills to get that result, you can recruit others to help you. For example, I don’t want to spend my days trying to understand the details of the U.S. tax code, so I delegate that task to my accountant. This frees me to spend more time working from my strengths.

Thirdly, you may conclude that a result isn’t needed badly enough to justify the effort of either education or delegation. In that case the smart choice is to eliminate the task. Sometimes procrastination is a sign that a task needn’t be done at all.

When I was in college, I felt that certain assignments were pointless busywork, and I couldn’t justify the effort required to do them. If the impact on my grade wasn’t too great, I’d decline to do those assignments. Nobody cares that I received an A- instead of an A in a class because I declined to write an essay on gestural languages. If an employer or graduate school screener ever did care, I’d have turned the experience to my advantage by using it to demonstrate that I could set priorities.

8. Perfectionism

A common form of erroneous thinking that leads to procrastination is perfectionism. Believing that you must do something perfectly is a recipe for stress, and you’ll associate that stress with the task and thus condition yourself to avoid it. So you put the task off to the last possible minute until you finally have a way out of this trap. Now there isn’t enough time to do the job perfectly, so you’re off the hook because you can tell yourself that you could have been perfect if you only had more time. But if you have no specific deadline for a task, perfectionism can cause you to delay indefinitely.

The solution to perfectionism is to give yourself permission to be human. Have you ever used a piece of software that you consider to be perfect in every way? I doubt it. Realize that an imperfect job completed today is always superior to the perfect job delayed indefinitely.

Perfectionism also arises when you think of a project as one gigantic whole. Replace that one big “must be perfect” project in your mind with one small imperfect first step. Your first draft can be very, very rough. You’re always free to revise it later. For example, if you want to write a 5000-word article, allow your first draft be only 100 words if it helps you get started.

Some of these cures are challenging to implement, but they’re effective. If you really want to tame the procrastination beast, you’ll need something stronger than quick-fix motivational rah-rah. This problem isn’t going away on its own. You must take the initiative. The upside is that tackling this problem yields tremendous personal growth. You’ll become stronger, braver, more disciplined, more driven, and more focused. These benefits will become hugely significant over your lifetime, so recognize that the challenge of overcoming procrastination is truly a blessing in disguise. The whole point is to grow stronger.

Let me know what you think below.

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 

Attitude Makes All The Difference | Zig Ziglar

This is a very thought provoking 9.5 minutes that will change your attitude to life!

Zig Ziglar teaches people all over the world the fundamentals of sales and success. Here he tells a story of a woman with a negative attitude who hated her job, shifted her attitude and changed her life.

Source:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRMogDrHnMQ

Let me know what you think!

The Mindset Behind Success - Motivational Video

To bring anything into your life, imagine that it's already there.

Contributions from: Connor McGregor, Idris Elba, Denzel Washington, Jon Jones, Jim Carrey, Steve Harvey, Wayne Dyer, Stewart Hughes.

Source: https://youtu.be/oG-kWW4um0s

Have you tried it? What was your experience? Let me know below.