Personal Development

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Archives for July 2006

Don’t Be Afraid To Be The First

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It is incredible, how many things never get their chance to be done simply because we’re afraid to be the first ones to even try. We fear rejection and lack of acceptance, we fear a possible failure, and we generally would rather scrap a great idea than be courageous and adventurous enough to be the first. Well, it doesn’t have to be this way.

Why is being first so damn hard?

Why do we fear so much being first in doing something? Simply because it comes down to another very powerful fear of ours – the fear of the unknown.

We usually don’t like it when there’s something unknown about what we do or what we’re going to do. Facing the unknown means to us leaving the comfort zone, and we don’t generally like doing that, do we?! ;)

We also realise deep down inside, that being first in anything implies much more attention paid to you. And we usually don’t like this kind of attention, simply because we expect nothing positive out of it. What’s one of the first questions you ask yourself planning something really adventurous for the first time? That’s right! What’s the worst that could happen! No wonder you’re afraid to act! You’re asking the question before anything happens, and you’re already implying that something bad will happen.

Being first and feeling comfortable

People who make discoveries and set new records are just like everybody else – they’re not superhuman and they are not even necessarily talented The only unique feature about them is that they’re not afraid to be themselves! They are willing to do what it takes to reach their goals. And being the first ones is not only acceptable for them, but they welcome such an opportunity.

Why? Because they create positive and powerful beliefs related to their plans. They understand that everybody fails at some point, but they also realise that failures are nothing but an invaluable experience gained the fastest way possible. They have an ultimate vision of their goal, and if it’s going to take them a few failures to get there – it’s absolutely fine.

Setting the right beliefs is very important!

Making the impossible possible

Have you ever noticed the magic which happens every time someone achieves the unachievable? Making impossible things possible is one of the greatest joys you can have on this planet, because not only it gives you the victorious feeling, but it also empowers many others push a little bit harder and achieve the same!

Look at the modern technology, for example. The discoveries made today on a daily basis were believed to be impossible just a few years ago. Yet, as soon as a discovery is made, hundreds of other companies and research institutions immediately accept it and start using.

With sports, the magic of a breakthrough is even more obvious: it is widely believed that human body’s capabilities are well known and maxed out by modern athletes, yet old records are broken and new ones are set every Olympic game! Isn’t it amazing? Things nobody could do just a few years ago, are now possible and practiced by many athletes simply because now they know that it can be done!

Just think about it: virtually anything we do every day was believed or proclaimed to be impossible sometime in the past! Yet here we are, making progress every day and act on things without even questioning the possibility of so many things we make happen daily.

Don’t be afraid to be the first

You can’t overestimate the power of being able to set the right beliefs in order to be the first to do something. If you master the skill of setting positive beliefs and making powerful associations to the success of being the first, you’ll be unstoppable in anything you do.

Below I’d like to give you a list of common beliefs you can change to make any breakthrough possible. They have helped me, and they will help you. Spend few minutes a day working on setting positive beliefs and getting rid of the negative ones, and you’ll be thrilled with the immediate results!

  1. If something had never been done before, it’s not possible at all
    WRONG! All this means is that nobody cared enough or tried hard enough to make it happen. All the most influential breakthroughs and discoveries were made this way: everyone believed something was not possible, and then one courageous person questioned the whole world and proposed an alternative theory. All it takes to make something possible is to shift your beliefs and expectations. If everyone believes you to fail, it still doesn’t mean you will!
    Trust your feelings, and have the faith and courage to be the first!
  2. If I don’t make something happen, someone else will
    WRONG! You are a unique human being. This means that every minute your mind has many thoughts running through it such a way that it may never occur to anybody else on this planet. Hey, some thoughts may never occur again even to yourself! That’s why it’s important to take notes of your ideas, after all!Don’t wait for somebody else to make a breakthrough. You can’t afford to miss your chance!

    Be adventurous enough to question everything else around you, and only by doing that will you make a success of being the first one to achieve something!

  3. Leaving your comfort zone is dangerous
    It sure feels like this, doesn’t it! But that’s not entirely true.Won’t you feel much proud of yourself if you do something different today, leave your comfort zone and do something outrageously unusual, and even make a success out of it?

    The danger of leaving your comfort zone is rarely a physical one. Mostly you just don’t want to change your behaviour patterns and sacrifice the comfort for the sake of a questionable success.

    But just think of this: only leaving your comfort zone makes you grow. Only by challenging yourself constantly you can progress and achieve better results. Only by thinking differently and looking at situations from a new angle you can make a breakthrough discovery.

    So go on and do this! Be adventurous, have the courage to challenge yourself and achieve the unachievable!

  4. What if I make a mistake? It’s going to be a disaster!
    While this is definitely an option, it’s up to you to make your project a success. Also, stop thinking it’s going to be a bigger problem simply because you’re the first one to try! Understand this: being the first to do something does not make the task harder to accomplish in any way but mentally. It is all about your approach, your expectations and your motivation, and nothing else.If it’s physically hard for you to do something no one had done before, please be assured that it’s going to be just as for to do the same for anyone who will follow you. The only advantage they’ll have is that they will know that it’s possible, because they will see you do it first.

    Stop expecting the worst. Concentrate and apply yourself, try your best and forget about how you will look if you fail. Focus on the goal, and think instead about how you will look and feel when you succeed. Be positive! Doing something for the first time ever doesn’t have to be negative.

Have all the motivation you need to be the first

Here are just a few of the highly motivational reasons for you to become first in doing something:

  1. Once you are number one in anything, you will remember this feeling forever.
    This is one of the most powerful motivators you can ever hope to find: become a winner and remember how good it feels. Plan a goal big enough, and you’ll get all the attention and admiration you ever dreamed of as soon as you achieve it!
  2. Once you have accomplished something impossible, everyone else will follow you.
    People will do this simply because now they know it can be done. And you are the one that made it happen! How cool is that?! ;)
    It’s incredible how many people still need reasons and proofs that some goals can be achieved, some things can be accomplished and some new records can be set.
    Don’t wait for them, be the first one and get the joy from making something possible and real for everybody else!
  3. Enjoy constant growth by leading others and challenging yourself on a constant basis. It’s a never-ending game, really. Once you realise how powerful the joy of setting an example for others is, you’ll want to set new records and reach new goals even more. You’ll want to do something even more adventurous, and get even more please by seeing others following you.Enjoy the feeling of growing stronger and better everyday, simply by leaving your comfort zone and gaining new skills and experiences.
  4. Being first is both challenging and fun!
    Whenever I see a possibility of being the first one to write/say/do something valuable, I always welcome such an opportunity and challenge myself to do my best and achieve the goal.I love challenge, and I hate people trying to discourage me without giving any reasons. I absolutely disagree with blindly following rules and limitations simply because others think I should. When I think of doing something adventurous and someone walks up to me and says: “Hey, forget it. I’ve tried it already and it doesn’t work”, I always ask for reasons and explanations. If something is “simply doesn’t work”, to me this sounds like “someone didn’t really try” ;)With technical problems, it could also mean that someone had used up all the immediate potential and it was easier for a person to give up than to continue the search for a solution. Again, I love such problems because it will make me feel much better when I solve them and help others by doing so. Challenge yourself to be the first one to do something! The joy of being the first (and for a short period of time – the only!) one to have coped with the challenge is definitely worth it.

I guess that’s it! I certainly enjoyed writing this one today, and I hope you’ll follow me in setting the right set of believes to achieve even better results in everything you do.

We live in exciting times! Every day there is a magic of something new and beautiful being created and brought into this world. Who makes all this magic happen, you wonder? YOU and me. Everybody.

Writing Productivity Tips

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As you could probably guess from my previous articles, I like plain things and simple approaches. I don’t think there is any benefit in making our lives even more complicated than they already are. And because of this, I’m always looking for new ways to make tasks even easier to accomplish, and things even simpler to deal with.

Today I’d like to talk about some of the incredibly simple tips I use daily for creative writing. Now that I think about it, these tip are good for any kind of writing, really.

 

 

In any kind of activity, you have to find the state of mind where you’re not only committed, but also fully focused on your task. With writing, it’s very important to feel comfortable. Lots of factors will affect your level of comfort, and in this article I’d like to share the factors I found most important for myself. Hopefully, they will help you get more productive too.

  • Clean and tidy workplace
     As simple as this factor looks, it’s one of the most important ones for you. If you’re working in your home office, make sure your desk is as clean as possible. It should also be free from any unnecessary objects. Tidying your desk before you start any work is going to pay off, so never hesitate to spend a minute or two doing this before you start working. Put books on shelves and paper notes into paper trays (I’ve got 3 trays for GTD, so when in doubt I just put the miscellaneous paper notes into the “In” tray).
  • Quietness or comfortable music background
    It’s highly arguable whether you should leave any music playing at all, so you’ll have to find what works for you best yourself. I’m definitely seeing improvements when I switch from songs to instrumental compositions – when you stop hearing words you concentrate on your task much easier. Find what’s most comfortable for you. I find it best to switch working environment – one day I’ll try writing an article or two in our bedroom, with no music at all. On another day, I’ll listen to some instrumental music while working in my home office. On yet another day I could enjoy the softness of a leather sofa in our living room and listen to some music with my iPod. See what works for you.
  • 45 minutes of time
    This is something I’ve started doing only recently myself. Plan for your creativity time. Put it in your calendar and make arrangements with your family that you’re going to have at least 45 minutes of uninterrupted time to yourself and your thinking and writing.I can’t stress enough the dramatic difference this simple tip will make! When you have nothing else planned for the time and you’re not distracted with other tasks, your productivity level increases and you get into the creative state which makes writing a much easier task.

    Don’t forget to get rid of your mobile. I leave it in another room and ask my wife to answer all the call while I’m writing.

  • Go full-screen
    If you have gone as far as booking the time for your writing, you might as well take it just one step further: close all the programs running on your PC, so that you don’t get distracted by your instant messenger program or an incoming email. You can close practically everything, but pay special attention to those applications with built-in notifications – you don’t want any of their reminders popping up while you’re writing.Go full-screen in your favourite text editor, and get rid of all the toolbars. Try and make it all configured so that there’s only your text and nothing else on your screen.

    You can go full-screen in MS Word or Writer from OpenOffice, and few tweaks and settings will help you get a very comfortable full-screen mode. Make sure you go away from the classical “white background-black text” color scheme, as it’s not the most relaxing one possible. Find your combination, if your editor is flexible enough. If it is not, then simply go for ANYTHING different – like white text on blue background in MS Word – feels MUCH better for your eyes.

    Here are the things I’ve done in my MS Word to minimize distractions:

    1. changed the color scheme to “white text on blue background” (Tools–>Options menu, General tab)
    2. got rid of rulers (View->Ruler option)
    3. changed the scale to “page width”
    4. switched to a full screen (View->Full screen)

    After all these steps, there’s only a blue page for your wonderfully white text lines, plus a tiny yet terribly annoying “Full screen” toolbar. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a way to completely get rid of it; no matter what I did, it would try and get docked to one of the side panels. So if you know a workaround for this – I would really appreciate it if you told me!

Try applying these tips for a few days, and I’m sure you will see your writing productivity, concentration and even creativity levels go up! And as always, if there are any writing productivity tips you feel like sharing, please let me know!

Improving This Blog’s Feed

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Since I’ve enabled full-text feeds, I’ve seen that almost every subscriber of Personal Development Ideas feed now reads me through a news reader and rarely makes it to the actual website.

While this was the idea – make things easier for you, I’ve just noticed a few days ago that because of this all the feed readers miss out on the related articles section of posts. That’s why I’ve been working on bringing such functionality into feeds as well.

Let me know what you think.

Boost Your Productivity: Use Action Shelving!

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Believe it or not, action shelving is a technique you’re definitely familiar with. You may have used it only a few times and even then did it unconsciously, but you should recognize the concept once I explain it in more details.

Cherish your concentration

In anything you do, your success heavily depends on how  focused and concentrated you are.  It takes a lot of effort on your part to maintain the focus while processing pages and tables of information, and you probably know yourself the frustration you experience when suddenly distracted or interrupted in the middle of such a task. You grow frustrated because you know it will take you some time to get back into the focused state.

It is important to realise though, that concentration isn’t simply a state of mind and a result of your interest in the subject, but it is also your ability to isolate the task you’re working on from all the rest. Concentration is getting into a state where you pay attention only to things important for accomplishing a given task.

Just think about it: when you’re trying to concentrate on something, what do you experience? Usually you keep thinking about the subject and focusing on the task until all the other things and subjects around you and in your mind start slowly fading away.  And when the right balance is reached and your brain finally finds the level of background thinking noise acceptably low, you see and feel yourself fit for the process – you feel focused and concentrated on just the task you need to be working on, you feel organized and motivated.

Get rid of distractions

The more productive you become in any aspect of your life, the more you will notice that there is a direct correlation between your levels of commitment and focus on a task and how successfull your accomplishments are. And ultimately this brings you to realising once again how vital it is to get rid of distractions before approaching any given task.

For example, do you find it much easier to work when your workplace is nice and tidy? When you have only the essential tools on your desk, and none of your post-it notes or books or pencils scattered all over it?

This is because by tidying your desk you’re effectively getting rid of distractions. You’re physically removing all the things which can distract you even by accident, and by doing this you’re limiting your concentration options to only subjects you’ll be working on.

I have worked out a habit of tidying my workplace every week. It happens so naturally and quickly, that I really don’t mind doing it. Instead, every time I do it, I just feel how much easier it makes any task I will be working on, how much clearer my vision of the positive outcome will be, and all this motivates me a lot.

Action shelving: remove the complexity

Do you ever think about why we like using shelves for storing things? We have many reasons for doing so, but among the most obvious and important ones are:

  • organizing books
  • making sure everything is within your reach
  • making information easy and quick to find

The same principles work in many other areas, including the one I’m talking about right now.

Action shelving is how I call an organizing approach which makes sure you split any activity or complex task of yours into flat levels of simple and easy to follow steps. Action shelving ensures that no action on your list has any unknown implementation steps.

The idea is really simple: it is in human nature to be afraid of anything unknown. Although it is possible to train yourself overcome such fears and even work out a positive approach to everything unknown, it requires a lot of effort on your part and there is no way to guarantee the positive outcome in such a training.

With complex projects, the fear of unknown implementation steps slows you down. You may not necessarily notice it, but unknown things in your plan affect the way you think about the project and the way you plan tackling it. As long as there is at least one absolutely unknown step in your plan, any task will seem much bigger than it really is.

Just remember now, how often did you have tasks which seemed scarily complicated  at the beginning, and then somehow turned out to be ridiculously trivial to accomplish? This is simply because some elements of these tasks were unknown to you at the beginning of the project, and slowed you down. Once you had progressed enough with other steps of the task to learn more details about the unknown part, you realised how simple this part is, and quickly got it sorted.

Action shelving is thus a proactive approach of asking necessary questions about various parts of any complex task to ensure the simplicity of every step you put down on your implementation plan.

You should apply action shelving few times during any project: right at the very beginning, to ensure a quick and powerful start; somewhere in the middle of the project, to ensure you’re still moving in the right direction and to also get a clear vision of what your next actions should be; and at the very end of implementing a project – to effectively build a flat and easy-to-follow structure of the outcomes and goals of the project. Not only will this help you concentrate better on each of the goals, but it will also make it easier to see when you reach a particular goal.

Don’t Be Afraid To Speak Up At Meetings

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Have you ever had one of the really long meetings when you're either bored to death or tired so much that you stop following the speaker and sometimes even try falling asleep? Well, here's a little trick to stay focused and alert: speak up! It may and probably will require some confidence to express your opinion or ask a question – and that's exactly what I'll be concentrating on in this post.

Having conducted a small research on such meetings, I've found out the following positive outcomes of speaking up:


Regain your interest in the subject

Some speakers have a real talent of giving such a monotonous speech that it makes even the most exciting subject sound unbearably boring. What usually happens then is that the audience falls into a pattern of gradual boredom. What this really means is that the more of monotonous speaking we hear, the more distant we become from the subject. The audience may genuinely try to stay focused, but will eventually fail to do so unless this pattern is somehow interrupted.

Skilled speakers know this and try their best to make their speeches interesting and dynamic. Even if they're facing a long paragraph which they know will sound boring, they interleave the theory with some examples or diagrams – just about any different kind of interaction helps.

Now, if you weren't particularly lucky with the skill of your speaker, you have to break the boredom pattern yourself. And you do this – you guessed right! – by speaking up. Ask a question or state your opinion, this will make a natural pause in the speaker's monologue, and thus will break the pattern audience is getting caught up in.

Just to motivate yourself more, think of yourself as of hero. Simply imagine there for a second, that you could be the last and only hope the whole audience might have! If you don't break the pattern, nobody else will. By asking an intelligent question, you will regain your interest in the subject and relieve everyone by helping them focus on the topic and get some useful answers from the speaker.


Stay alert by interacting

When you realise you can't follow the topic anymore, it becomes personal. No matter how the rest of the audience feels, you have to act. This means that you should be even more interested and motivated to speak up and become alert by doing so. Not only will you break the boredom pattern, but you will also express your opinion or ask a valuable question. After all, if you lost track of the discussion anyway, any question will be good because it will bring you back to the topic. And yes, if the meeting isn't boring at all, it is still okay to ask questions – so go on and ask one just for the fun of it. Learn something new and score some points with the speaker by expressing your interest in the subject.

Please be conscious about the fact that negative talks alert more than positive ones! Once you realise this, you can actually use it to your advantage.

Generally, people take negative opinions or news much more seriously than positive ones. So if you're starting a verbal attack on the speaker, you will become alert very quickly (think twice though, is it worth starting a fight with this person).

What's even more effective, is that if someone else (not necessarily the speaker) starts an attack on you. Now, that will make sure you become more alert that ever!

This negativity rule stretches further than just some negative talks. For instance, if you discuss a topic which worries you – be it one of your responsibilities, something you've forgotten to act on, or simply a very complex task coming up, this will alert you just as good. Trust me, talking about such things will never make you sleepy!


The best approach for speaking up

I believe it is best for you to do your homework and prepare a couple of questions before the meeting. This way, you know you'll have them to ask no matter how bored you get during the speech or how tired you feel to think about anything. Try and come up with general but useful questions, such ones that can be asked at almost any time during the meeting, sound reasonable and provide real value to yourself and others, when and if the answers are given. Write these questions down. If someone sees you with a list of questions, it will only add more to your positive look – you will be demonstrating not only your readiness, but also a certain commitment to the upcoming meeting, which is always a good thing.

If you don't have any questions prepared for the meeting, it's okay. But you have to make sure you use the first few minutes (maybe hours, depending on your ability to listen and the skill of the speaker) of your genuine interest in the subject to jot down few key notes and make up related questions. Again, people seeing you do this will only be impressed by how determined and organized you really are.

What I find most useful is making my point with 3-5 sentences, and then finishing off with asking one of the prepared questions. The overall impact of this is that you're providing audience with enough background to switch from the possible boredom pattern, and to make things even better, you also challenge their minds by asking an intelligent, thoughtful question. This approach is also likely to please the speaker too, as it will demonstrate your interest on the topic, and not a simple act of questioning the authority of the speaker.

What are your experiences with dull and long meetings? Feel free to share the knowledge, and I'll be happy to update this entry right away.

Finally – a decent archives page

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In a spirit of constant improvement, I’ve finally created a decent archives page for this blog, listing every single post in the short history of Personal Development Blog, sorted by month for your convenience.

Check it out: Personal Development Blog – Archives

If there’s anything else I can do to improve this blog, please don’t be shy and let me know, either by leaving a comment or by submitting a message using the Contact page.