I haven’t written in months. Here’s what’s been going on.

I changed my methodology on how I’m living my life. I’m focusing on being instead of doing. This doesn’t mean I’m not doing anything. I’m doing more now than ever. However, I’m not focused on the doing but focusing on who I’m being when I do. I’ll write a post on INFP blog later this week about this train of thought.

So since May, this is what I’ve done that’s improved my life:

1. Sold one of our rentals. Improvement because it increased monthly cash flow by +$150/month.
2. Refinance our current home. Improvement because it increased cash flow by +$200/month.
3. Volunteered for a new project at my day job and was sent to San Francisco for 2 weeks paid by the company. Improvement because I made myself move value at work. Also, 2 weeks in San Fran was nice.
4. Made a $1200 freelancing apart from my day job. Improvement because I used the money to pay off credit card debt.
5. Kept my weight at 150lbs. So I didn’t gain back any of the weight I lost in May. Improvement because I closer to my goal of 140lbs.
6. Read E-myth Revisited, Good To Great, Outliers, The Tipping Point and Blink via books on tape during my commute to work. Improvement because those books changed the way I’m approaching personal development.

There’s more small stuff. Basically, I’m in a constant process of simplification by just getting rid of stuff that I don’t really need or outgrown. I also updated my wardrobe and started dressing up again after 8 years. I bought 40 pieces of clothing at a thrift store for less than $150. I found a great pair of Italian dress shoes with heels and soles in perfect condition for $9. I spent 30 minutes with on them with shoe polish and they shine. I rearranged the living room. We’ve been in this house for 3 years and sometimes you have to change the environment up to get yourself to look at things in a different way.

Today’s Actions Towards My Goals

Got more info about buying an apartment building – My wife and I met with a friend to get more information on the apartment building he’s selling. It’s scary when I think how much debt that mortgage is going to be. But we’re not at that point yet. I’m still running numbers. We have to talk to various banks to see if we even qualify. We have to talk to our property manager to see if he’s interested in managing a multi-family property. It’s a bit daunting since all we’ve ever owned were single family homes.

Doing this improves my life because it’s gets my family moving closer to financial freedom.

Doing Small Things

I called Verizon and upgraded my wife from 250 texts/month to 500. It will cost us an extra $5/month. This improves my life because my wife kept going over 250 messages and it was costing us $6/month in overages.

Okay, I’m trying again with this blog. That’s what people do if they want to succeed. They try again.

Why This Blog

My INFP Blog is my thoughts on being INFP. This blog is about me. It’s my experiments to find a way to make things work for me. I’ve been reading self-help books for years. All of them have the same exercises and similar philosophies, but they mix and match to create self-help recipes that vary from author to author. Every time I read one of those, I think those would be great if I was an ESTJ, but some of it doesn’t fit my INFP preferences very well.

After 20 years, I know many of the ingredients. This blog is trying to figure out a recipe that works for me and my personality style.

This is My Self-Help Blog

This blog is about helping myself. I’m trying to help me first. You know how the airline tells you to put the oxygen mask on yourself first so you don’t pass out. This blog is me getting air first so I can be coherent enough to help others.

I’ve toyed with the idea of being a personal development coach but that’s still about 100 goals and 2 or 3 careers in the future. Here’s one of my deepest beliefs: you are as far as you currently go with your life with what you currently know.

This means that whatever I can teach another person can only get them as far as I’ve gotten. As of this time, I don’t know enough to get anyone further than where I am. Here’s the rub. I don’t want to be where I am. I want to be at that next level. Where I am doesn’t really inspire me. If I can’t inspire myself to be here, what does it say if I’m trying to inspire other people to get some place I don’t want to be anymore.

Where I Am

My life is good. I’ve had a good life for about 10 years now from ages 30-40. Ages 19-23 were the lonely struggling years. Ages 23-26 were the figure out how my life works years. Ages 26-30 were my getting my act together years. Ages 30-36 was the I-think-I-deserve-a-break years. Ages 37-39 have been years I’m realizing that I’ve gotten way too comfortable.

I have a good job that makes a good salary. My relationship with my wife of 14 years is pretty amazing and still growing better. My children have added a whole new dimension to my life and has made me grow as a person. We travel. We own real-estate and are moving, albeit slowly, to retiring comfortably.

Life is good, but it’s been always been my nature to ask, is this it? Is this all I can become? This is what I’ve been asking myself for 3 years.

What’s Next

See this is where the trouble comes in. I have a goals list. Here’s my problem with goals: so what? It’s just a to do list. Why bother?

So I can feel better about myself? What’s wrong with all the Power of Now stuff and just accepting my life as is and be happy with that?

So I can have more Peak Experiences? Yes there’s a bunch of travel and events I want to experience that are well beyond my price range right now. So is that my goal, making more money so I can buy Peak Experiences.

So I can have more choices? Tickets to Cirque de Soleil’s Allegria went on sale today. We don’t have that in our budget. We have enough money right now to make a down payment on our next property, but our “fun” budget is maxed. So are my goals to alleviate my need to choose between fun now and retirement later? There’s other ways to enjoy life besides purchasing experiences that I’m sure would make me just as happy.

Much of the self-help I’ve read and applied doesn’t fit me. It’s either about making a to-do list and showing you how to complete it or it’s about accepting the yourself as you are now.

For me as an INFP, I don’t care for to-do lists and who I am now was good enough for now, but not adequate for tomorrow.

Knowing what I want

Step One is knowing what you want. But I don’t equate knowing what you want as a list of goals.

I want to grow. I want it to be self-directed. I want it to feel organic and natural.

With a lot of self-help is that I feel like I’m adopting behavior which I know will make me “successful” but feels like I’m wearing really uncomfortable pants that will rip if I bend the wrong way.

I want to move from good to great. I don’t mind the hard work. I actually really need something to focus on right now in my life. However, I want to have a really good reason to have a great life beyond just the having of it.

All of these wants are just great, but their so general that if this is all I focus on then I might as well not have goals. General wants DO NOT work. I’ve never gotten something by wanting it in general terms. So how do I grow my life in general and still be specific enough that it doesn’t feel like my life is one to-do goal after the other? This blog is where I’m trying to discover that.

What’s Next

Another things that I believe with all my heart is this: you can do the same things and expect a different result.

The traditional self-help works, but it’s only gotten me this far. As I try to push farther, the more I accomplish, the unhappier I am. If getting more done and being more successful is making me unhappy, I’m missing something. I though it was a goals and values alignment issue but it isn’t.

Because of this I’ve been looking outside traditional personal self-help to find answers. Right now, I’m reading E-myth Revisited about business development. I’m trying to incorporate strategies of other fields into personal development.

I think I’m on the right track.

My First Breakthough

I’ve done the setting and accomplish goals method of “success”. It works. It definitely works, but some of the framework and methodology is too rigid for my liking.

In reading E-Myth Revisited, I can across the exercise of writing down all the positions of your business and the responsibilities of those positions before even starting the business. That way everyone knows what needs to be done and who should do it, even if you and your business partner have to fill all those positions at first. Later as your business grows, you’ve created systems for each of those positions and you hire people to run the system for that position. I was listening to that part on tape as I was commuting to work.

I had my breakthrough of how I could incorporate that into my growth and still have it feel natural.

I’m writing the down all the Roles that I need to step into when I have my dream life. So far my Roles are: father, son, husband, writer/blogger, entrepreneur, family provider, friend, personal coach and role model. Those are the roles that incorporate all my interests. For example, my interest in photography falls under role model. One of the behaviors of a role model is to be able to engage your own interests and make it a part of your life. For other people, photographer could be a primary Role which has a completely different set of behaviors to make that role a success.

This post is long enough. I’ll go into details in my next post about what future-orientation by defining Roles instead of goals entails. I’ll talk about defining success in those Roles and incorporating them with our Six Needs. I’m kind of making this stuff up as I go. I hope you come along for the ride.

I’m behind. It’s a constant condition. I’ve learned to let it go.

What I use to do was try to catch up until I realized that my goal isn’t really the goal. For example, one of my goals for this month is to get down to 150lbs. I’m at a 156. I’ve been floating in the 157-158 lb range since the beginning of the month. I’ve lost all my junk food weight. I stopped eating junk food and my weight is adjusting to not having all those extra dead calories which was up to 800 calories a day in junk food (soda, salty and sugary vending machine snacks, etc). What I haven’t been doing much of is exercising. I started well last month, but this month I’ve let my exercise slip in favor of working on professional goals. w

Not so long ago, I would have just transferred all my energy from my professional goals to my personal goals. That would mean going on a heavy exercise kick to lose the 6 lbs to complete my goal. The problem is that for an INFP like me, reaching a goal doesn’t really pay off in the long run because we tend to backtrack. I’d lose the 6 lbs, then stop what I was doing, gain 3 back, feel bad about it and then I’d let my physical/health goals slide. I’d start eating a little unhealthier because I’d think what’s the point or I’d do it as reward for all the effort of losing the 6 lbs.

This happens in all areas when I try to “catch up” to one my goals. The real goal is consistency of action because that consistency lasts longer. So this week, my goal is to ease back into regular exercise again. It’s not about going full out. It’s about figuring a way to work that time into my life.

As an INFP, I accomplish in spurts which is great because I get a lot done in a short amount of time. Unfortunately, that effort draws too much energy away from other areas and those other areas suffer. What I’m trying to do now is find some way to do personal development interval training. In cycling, interval training involves maintaining 20mph (or whatever your ideal pace is) and every 30 minutes you sprint for a minute or two and then ease back down to 20mph.

In daily life, I’m trying to find my ideal pace of my life where I can get everything done which means spending less time in each area so no areas get neglected even though I won’t be progressing in some areas as fast as I like. After that, I want to do intervals where I’ll work really hard on something for a day, then go back to normal pace for the next two days. Then I’ll pick another area to focus on.

I’ll let you know if that works because for my personality type, I think it’s really my best shot at not being obsessive about one thing while everything else falls apart. At the same time, it fits my need to short gain accomplishments.

Daily Actions Towards My Goals

Prompt replies – Answered two emails promptly since they were blog related. Doing this helps me because it keeps me focused on the fact that my INFP blog is not about me. It helps me build my community of INFPs which is the my real goal for the site.

Doing Small Things

Apologize to my daughter for yelling at her – I needed her to clean her room yesterday and she was balking. I was frustrated because I had housecleaning to get done and I felt I was wasting my time telling her to clean her room instead of getting my cleaning done. I lost my temper. Doing this helps me because I need to teach her that being right isn’t as good being effective. The real object wasn’t to get her to clean her room. The real goal was to make her want to clean her room. I got a clean room and damaged a relationship in the process. Being right isn’t always the right thing.

I’ve always know that you can’t do the same thing and get a different result. So once again, I’m trying something new with this blog to see if I get a different result.

Here’s what I’ve tried before:

1. Not writing everyday and do just twice weekly updates. Bad result: I wasn’t getting stuff done.
2. Changing my personal site as to host my self-development blog. Bad result: Erratic traffic. I think the site needs to be branded as self-development.

The problem with my INFP Blog is that it’s solely INFP focused. My goal with this one is to make it more general self-development focused and build traffic. Maybe this move to a new domain was just a huge waste of 6 hours. I don’t mind failures because then I know what doesn’t work which is better than not knowing.

To succeed more, I have to fail more.

Moving this blog is my attempt at failing more. Who knows? I might succeed.

Daily Actions Towards My Goals

Move Site to a New Domain – I came up with a long term plan which required that this site be re-branded with a new domain. So I set up everything in an hour including new domain registration, setting up hosting, configuring and moving my old posts over to this one. Doing this will improve my networking capability and monetize my sites.

Doing Small Things

Nothing today.

Well, last week was a major fail. I’m going to try again with this blog.

People do things for two reason: a good reason and the real reason.

A good reason is what we tell people when they ask us why were doing it. The real reason is what’s actually motivating us to do something. I’ve always taken pride that I was really honest with myself about the real reason why I kept this blog.

My Good Reason was to prove that an INFP can make great changes in their life.
My Real Reason was that I was filling my need for Critical Importance.

I wrote an article on my INFP blog called Fulfilling Your Needs about the need for Critical Importance. Basically, I write this blog. People read it. I feel I’m important. If I’m honest with myself and and admit my real reason, it saves a lot of time trying to fool myself that I’m doing stuff for some ideal purpose.

So I’ve been doing various experiments to get new readers. The last one being to not post every day, because who wants to read a daily blog. It’s too much.

Here’s the drawback. I wasn’t getting as much done as last month. When I posted last month, this blog kept me accountable. This blog was helping me with my Growth need even though it wasn’t doing much for my Critical Importance need. This month is total slack for me.

When it comes down to it. I don’t feel as good as I did last month because I’m not getting as much done. And doing stuff because it makes you feel good, no matter how difficult is a Real Reason to do something.

Daily Actions Towards My Goals

Answered client query – I had a query from one of my graphic designer clients about helping her with a client that needed help with private video embedding. I did one thing that I did differently. I would have done some quick research and made a few suggestions. Instead I told her that I’d do the research, but she would have to pay for it. Basically, knowledge is free. She can Google it. Work requires time and effort. That is not free. Doing this helps me because it’s stopping me from doing free work even if that work won’t take that long.

Doing Small Things

Back-filling Giving Ground entries – Doing this helps me chart my progress to show that I didn’t really totally slack.

This is a back-fill entry done on 5/13. Read the 5/13 entry to see the my reasons why.

Daily Actions Towards My Goals

Posted on infpverse – The object is to build traffic for my INFP Blog. I’m starting to post on lesser traffic INFP forums. Doing this helps me because when those forums do get traffic however infrequent, at least my post will up top with a link to my blog. So far I’ve gotten two visits in the last 8 hours replying to two posts.

Doing Small Things

Fail because I didn’t do anything.

This is a back-fill entry written on 5/13. Read the 5/13 entry to see the my reasons why.

Daily Actions Towards My Goals

New post for my INFP Blog – I’m going back to my once a week posts like I should be doing.

Posted on Typology Central – More traffic building. In all posts and replies, my website is in the signature. Doing this helps me because it drives targeted traffic from the forums to my site. As of 5/13, I’m seeing traffic from Typology Central.

Doing Small Things

Fail because I didn’t do anything that moved me forward.

This is a back-fill entry written on 5/13. Read the 5/13 entry to see the my reasons why.

Daily Actions Towards My Goals

Fail because I didn’t do anything that moved me forward.

Doing Small Things

Went to Open House – There’s a house across from where we live that’s on sale. I know it’s currently out of our price range. I wanted to see it anyway just to get an idea of the layout. The layout wasn’t really great with two young kids, but the kitchen was great. Doing this helped me because it keeps me from wondering if I missed out on anything.

Last month, I decided to post my progress every day. However, it isn’t working. Here’s what isn’t working:

1. I’m not getting sustained traffic, ie people come and go but no regular readers
2. Posting every day is taking to much focus away from my INFP Blog

Here’s what is working:

1. This blog keeps me accountable.
2. I get to see the progress I’m making.

So this month, I’m going to post twice a week instead. I’ll list my Daily Actions Towards my goal. I’ll list my Doing Small Things. My objective is still to show how anyone can go from here to there by taking small actions each day towards a goal.

Daily Actions Towards My Goals

Sat 1
Dinner with friends – I’m counting this because I had worked a full day and honestly, I just wanted to hole up. However, I went and my wife and I reconnected with good friends that we haven’t seen in months. Doing this helped me because I overcame my need for introversion in order to achieve my goals of connecting with the 20% of people that make an difference in my life.

Sun 2
Loss day. I maintained but didn’t do anything new that moved me towards my goal.

Mon 3
Published new post on INFP Blog – My new posts are less INFP specific and more general self-help. I’m hoping this will expand my opportunity to network and drive traffic to the site.

Tue 4
Signed Up with 3 different affiliate programs – My object this year is to monetize my blog in some small way. Doing this helps me because I’m teaching myself a much needed skill for my next career.

Doing Small Things

Mon 3
Got info on house for sale – House across the street is for sale. I looked into it for investment reasons and found out it was out of our price range. Doing this helped me by eliminating something that was taking focus in my head.

At one time, I wanted to quit my job and do design full time. I didn’t because I told myself that my problem was that I wasn’t good at selling at getting clients. But then I never did anything about it.

I’ve been watching a television show called House MD lately. I’ve never seen it before but there’s a pattern to the show that parallels real life. Patient is sick with something unknown. The doctors make a wrong diagnosis with the information they have at hand. They prescribe treatment that makes the patient worse. They make a new diagnosis which still isn’t the real problem. They prescribe treatment that makes the patient worse. It’s not until the end of the show when they have that “a-ha” moment when the realize what’s really making the patient sick that they are able to resolve the patient’s health issue.

I see this in life a lot where people try to fix symptoms and not the real problem. Many INFPs are lonely so they try to find new friends but they can’t. If you look deeper, you realize that many INFPs have unrealistic expectations of friendship that other people can’t meet and don’t even want to. That’s the real problem, but that’s not the one their trying to solve.

Here are symptoms:

• I can’t find clients.
• I can’t sell that’s why I can’t find clients.
• I can’t sell because I’m naturally introverted.

The real problem is that I like having stability of income. I don’t want to risk that so that’s the real reason why I never went out on my own.

People have two reasons for doing (or not doing) anything: a good reason and the real reason.

Today’s Actions Towards My Goals

Will update later.

Doing Small Things

Nothing yet.