The more lifestyles you try out the more you can make a truly informed decision about how to live.
How could you ever say your way of living is best if you have never lived any other way?
My mum pointed out something interesting to me the other day. While living in America she was having a conversation with a friend of friend who happened to say to her "You've got to admit... America is the best place to live". To which she replied "why? where else have you lived?" after which she discovered that it was the only place he had lived.
It's really interesting to realise just how easy it is to get caught in the frame of "what I think is correct". Really take the time to try out some other things and find out if you really are correct.
In my opinion, open-mindedness is a skill and trait like any other that grows like a muscle. You can either grow it, maintain it or let it wither.
Here's one interesting reframe to try out.
Remember how you used to live 10 years ago. What would you do in a typical day. Plan it out in detail, it should probably take about five minutes.
Now for a day, go and live out that lifestyle.
See how much you have changed... or how much you haven't.
See how ridiculous some of the things you used to do were and think about how you would never do them nowadays.
Now realise that in 10 years time from now you may think the same about how you are living now.
How certain does that make you that how you are living now is definately the best way?
Tuesday, 8 May 2007
Thursday, 3 May 2007
When Should We Be Negative?
Looking at my last post, I realised that it was pretty negative.
Does negativity have a place in a truly fulfilled life?
I would say it depends on what type of negativity.
Negativity to me has its place when things really are bad and I have to make a change.
Absolute refusal to look at yourself in a negative light can SOMETIMES lead to denial and not seeing your life as it truly is.
So how can we apply negative motivation without becoming life haters?
If, for example you are in serious debt, you would probably be lieing to yourself if you said that your finances were in great shape and you loved your current situation.
Once you accept that you are in debt (negative) you can then begin to look at things positively and finding tools to overcome the problem. For example, being in debt is great because
-It provides a massive incentive to go out and earn more money.
-You have nothing more to lose
-There is no expectation to succeed
-Most of the world's self-made millionaires and billionaires came from very impoverished backgrounds and it is this situation that drove them to massive success
-Complete financial recovery has been done before.
So when in a fulfilled life does negativity have a place?
When you accept something in your life is not how you want it to be, and you accept that you want to change it. This is the initial driving force for change.
Negativity is not acceptable when it does not drive you to act and make a change. An example of negativity being used incorrectly would be asking yourself why you are bad at making money and beating yourself up over it.
If used correctly you would hopefully be asking yourself how you could improve your ability to make money.
To put the above into a formula I would say.
1. Look at your situation as TRUTHFULLY as possible, such as in my article on why the average life sucks
2. Use the honest and potentially painful truth as a motivational tool
3. Reframe your current potentially negative situation and view the potentially useful aspects of it (e.g. ask "how would I overcome this?" or "how can I use this?" questions)
4. Use these useful aspects of your present situation and your resourcefulness to propel yourself towards your goals
Does negativity have a place in a truly fulfilled life?
I would say it depends on what type of negativity.
Negativity to me has its place when things really are bad and I have to make a change.
Absolute refusal to look at yourself in a negative light can SOMETIMES lead to denial and not seeing your life as it truly is.
So how can we apply negative motivation without becoming life haters?
If, for example you are in serious debt, you would probably be lieing to yourself if you said that your finances were in great shape and you loved your current situation.
Once you accept that you are in debt (negative) you can then begin to look at things positively and finding tools to overcome the problem. For example, being in debt is great because
-It provides a massive incentive to go out and earn more money.
-You have nothing more to lose
-There is no expectation to succeed
-Most of the world's self-made millionaires and billionaires came from very impoverished backgrounds and it is this situation that drove them to massive success
-Complete financial recovery has been done before.
So when in a fulfilled life does negativity have a place?
When you accept something in your life is not how you want it to be, and you accept that you want to change it. This is the initial driving force for change.
Negativity is not acceptable when it does not drive you to act and make a change. An example of negativity being used incorrectly would be asking yourself why you are bad at making money and beating yourself up over it.
If used correctly you would hopefully be asking yourself how you could improve your ability to make money.
To put the above into a formula I would say.
1. Look at your situation as TRUTHFULLY as possible, such as in my article on why the average life sucks
2. Use the honest and potentially painful truth as a motivational tool
3. Reframe your current potentially negative situation and view the potentially useful aspects of it (e.g. ask "how would I overcome this?" or "how can I use this?" questions)
4. Use these useful aspects of your present situation and your resourcefulness to propel yourself towards your goals
Tuesday, 1 May 2007
Why the Average Life Sucks
What does the average life consist of?
You get up and you realise you have a day's work ahead of you. You don't like this work but you have to do it, because you gotta pay the bills.
You eat breakfast and go to work, probably listening to something random on the radio.
You're at work and you're under pressure to perform from the guy above. Any extra effort or hard work you do is not rewarded in equilevant proportions to what you do.
You're not enjoying yourself at work.
You get home and you're tired.
You eat some food and turn on the TV.
Maybe say hello to your wife and kids?
Surf the net.
Having been worrying about the bills for the last month you pay them.
Go to sleep.
And now you're on the next day and I bet you can't wait for the weekend to begin...
Weekend comes and you watch some TV, slowly getting fatter. Maybe go out and buy something that's interesting for a bit and watch the kids do cool stuff (although you probably don't think so).
Flash forward to your elderly years.
You're sitting in your rocking chair (if you can afford one) thinking about your life.
How have you lived?
How does thinking about this make you want to act to change your future and fulfil you?
You get up and you realise you have a day's work ahead of you. You don't like this work but you have to do it, because you gotta pay the bills.
You eat breakfast and go to work, probably listening to something random on the radio.
You're at work and you're under pressure to perform from the guy above. Any extra effort or hard work you do is not rewarded in equilevant proportions to what you do.
You're not enjoying yourself at work.
You get home and you're tired.
You eat some food and turn on the TV.
Maybe say hello to your wife and kids?
Surf the net.
Having been worrying about the bills for the last month you pay them.
Go to sleep.
And now you're on the next day and I bet you can't wait for the weekend to begin...
Weekend comes and you watch some TV, slowly getting fatter. Maybe go out and buy something that's interesting for a bit and watch the kids do cool stuff (although you probably don't think so).
Flash forward to your elderly years.
You're sitting in your rocking chair (if you can afford one) thinking about your life.
How have you lived?
How does thinking about this make you want to act to change your future and fulfil you?
How Are You Living the One Life You Get?
Take a look at your life.
Are you enjoying your life for at least 90% of your waking hours?
If not you are wasting your life.
You only get one life (at least that's all we can KNOW that there is).
If you are not enjoying your life as it is then it's time to make a change.
It doesn't matter if you have not enjoyed life in the past, what matters if you are enjoying life now. If you are not enjoying life now then you are WASTING your life. You only get one. And the time left to appreciate this wonderful thing is running out.
Does this mean you should feel extra happy all the time? No. Challenges and turbulances are part of life. Use them to propel you forward even further and motivate you more.
If you currently hate your job or your house or your relationships. Make that change NOW. Every second you do not make that change you are wasting your precious experience of life.
Use your current pain to leverage yourself towards action.
My point is this...
You have one life. Time is drifting away with every second.
How does accepting the above TRUISM motivate you to act?
How can you make the most of your life?
How can you feel most fulfilled and experience the greatest joy in life?
What will you have to change in your outside world to do this?
What attitudes about how to experience the present moment will you have to change?
What level of responsibility will you have to take to define the life and future you want?
Are you enjoying your life for at least 90% of your waking hours?
If not you are wasting your life.
You only get one life (at least that's all we can KNOW that there is).
If you are not enjoying your life as it is then it's time to make a change.
It doesn't matter if you have not enjoyed life in the past, what matters if you are enjoying life now. If you are not enjoying life now then you are WASTING your life. You only get one. And the time left to appreciate this wonderful thing is running out.
Does this mean you should feel extra happy all the time? No. Challenges and turbulances are part of life. Use them to propel you forward even further and motivate you more.
If you currently hate your job or your house or your relationships. Make that change NOW. Every second you do not make that change you are wasting your precious experience of life.
Use your current pain to leverage yourself towards action.
My point is this...
You have one life. Time is drifting away with every second.
How does accepting the above TRUISM motivate you to act?
How can you make the most of your life?
How can you feel most fulfilled and experience the greatest joy in life?
What will you have to change in your outside world to do this?
What attitudes about how to experience the present moment will you have to change?
What level of responsibility will you have to take to define the life and future you want?
Monday, 30 April 2007
Listen to More Than Double Your Learning Rate
The more time you spend improving yourself the more you begin to realise that there is no magic pill. There is no one magic technique or method that will transform your life.
Self-development is a road of continuous evolution.
But why not speed up how fast we move along that road?
So here's a very simple technique that everyone can use to help progress faster...
If you have a necessary daily habit but can't read or concentrate hard at the time, e.g. driving to work, getting dressed or eating food, then do the following.
LISTEN to motivational music, self-improvement technology or audio on anything you wish to learn more about.
It sounds so simple, but are there times when you could be listening to valuable audio when you are in fact just going on with your life in silence?
There are a number of great materials out there to listen to and by doing this you could more than double your rate of learning.
Try it TODAY. There's no excuse for this one, because you lose absolutely NOTHING in the process. But could potentially gain MASSIVE amounts.
Self-development is a road of continuous evolution.
But why not speed up how fast we move along that road?
So here's a very simple technique that everyone can use to help progress faster...
If you have a necessary daily habit but can't read or concentrate hard at the time, e.g. driving to work, getting dressed or eating food, then do the following.
LISTEN to motivational music, self-improvement technology or audio on anything you wish to learn more about.
It sounds so simple, but are there times when you could be listening to valuable audio when you are in fact just going on with your life in silence?
There are a number of great materials out there to listen to and by doing this you could more than double your rate of learning.
Try it TODAY. There's no excuse for this one, because you lose absolutely NOTHING in the process. But could potentially gain MASSIVE amounts.
Saturday, 28 April 2007
Is One Self-Improvement Book the Answer?
Take a second and think about all the self-help gurus you know about.
Look at these guys. The kind of guys who have transformed their lives to better things.
How many of these guys do you know who have read a single book or website on "self-improvement" and suddenly their life was transformed.
It is not the case.
Deep fundamental life change happens over time. If you want to achieve mastery in life or an area of life you cannot do it with just one book or one coach. You need to start DEVOURING this information. Complete immersion in self-improvement.
Look at the people you want to model. People like Tony Robbins or Paul McKenna didn't just read one book or talk to one guy who told them everything. Self-improvement and change became their life. It changed their life for the better. And it's changing me too.
If you want some fundamental, long-term change for the better...
Immerse yourself.
Look at these guys. The kind of guys who have transformed their lives to better things.
How many of these guys do you know who have read a single book or website on "self-improvement" and suddenly their life was transformed.
It is not the case.
Deep fundamental life change happens over time. If you want to achieve mastery in life or an area of life you cannot do it with just one book or one coach. You need to start DEVOURING this information. Complete immersion in self-improvement.
Look at the people you want to model. People like Tony Robbins or Paul McKenna didn't just read one book or talk to one guy who told them everything. Self-improvement and change became their life. It changed their life for the better. And it's changing me too.
If you want some fundamental, long-term change for the better...
Immerse yourself.
Friday, 27 April 2007
Implement Change by Changing Who You Are
Two key concepts I have come across recently about generating change include the pleasure and pain theory (which I discovered on Tony Robbins' Personal Power II) and the identity theory.
These two theories are very comprehensive and can be understood on many levels, but to summarise in a few sentences...
The pleasure and pain theory says that our decisions on how to act are based on our perceptions of how much doing something will hurt or feel good. If doing something, e.g. smoking a cigarette, feels better than it feel hurtful to us, then we do it.
The identity theory is that all the result in our life that we produce are in line with what at our core we feel we deserve. E.g. if you at your core believe you are financially poor then you are probably also poor in real life. This phenomena explains how people who are poor and win the lottery often fall right back to being poor within a few years, if that.
So how is this useful for implementing change?
Say you want to become a millionaire. If you want to happily remain a millionaire once you get there you will have to have the identity of a millionaire. Having the correct identity means you will act 100% congruent with being a millionaire.
But how does this tie in with the pleasure and pain theory?
If you at your core believe you are a millionaire and you look at your bank account and realise that you have only a thousand dollars then this will cause incredible pain to you. This will cause so much pain because it is so not real to you that any pain involved in earning that money back will not compare to the pain of not being your true self of being a millionaire.
Many real life examples of this are when millionaires lose all their money, but then get it back again really quickly.
So how can we use this knowledge to achieve our goals?
1. We need to change our identities so that they are in line with our goals
2. We do this by changing our pleasure and pain associations to those of someone with your ideal identity would experience if they were in your situation.
3. We do this through various methods including NLP, journaling, asking focussed questions, e.g. how painful will not acting make me feel in 10 years time?
4. Discover what the side effects are of having that identity would be and start acting them out, like Steve Pavlina suggests on one of his podcasts.
Changing your identity is essential for rapid and long lasting change. My advice would be to take every action possible in making this change, because if at your core you believe you really DESERVE your goal, then it will take very little struggle to get there.
These two theories are very comprehensive and can be understood on many levels, but to summarise in a few sentences...
The pleasure and pain theory says that our decisions on how to act are based on our perceptions of how much doing something will hurt or feel good. If doing something, e.g. smoking a cigarette, feels better than it feel hurtful to us, then we do it.
The identity theory is that all the result in our life that we produce are in line with what at our core we feel we deserve. E.g. if you at your core believe you are financially poor then you are probably also poor in real life. This phenomena explains how people who are poor and win the lottery often fall right back to being poor within a few years, if that.
So how is this useful for implementing change?
Say you want to become a millionaire. If you want to happily remain a millionaire once you get there you will have to have the identity of a millionaire. Having the correct identity means you will act 100% congruent with being a millionaire.
But how does this tie in with the pleasure and pain theory?
If you at your core believe you are a millionaire and you look at your bank account and realise that you have only a thousand dollars then this will cause incredible pain to you. This will cause so much pain because it is so not real to you that any pain involved in earning that money back will not compare to the pain of not being your true self of being a millionaire.
Many real life examples of this are when millionaires lose all their money, but then get it back again really quickly.
So how can we use this knowledge to achieve our goals?
1. We need to change our identities so that they are in line with our goals
2. We do this by changing our pleasure and pain associations to those of someone with your ideal identity would experience if they were in your situation.
3. We do this through various methods including NLP, journaling, asking focussed questions, e.g. how painful will not acting make me feel in 10 years time?
4. Discover what the side effects are of having that identity would be and start acting them out, like Steve Pavlina suggests on one of his podcasts.
Changing your identity is essential for rapid and long lasting change. My advice would be to take every action possible in making this change, because if at your core you believe you really DESERVE your goal, then it will take very little struggle to get there.
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