Picture this: There are two plateaus, separated by a deep, steep canyon with a turbulent river rushing far below.

The Canyon Between Worlds

On one side, you see a world of scarcity. People there get just enough to survive – and even that isn’t always guaranteed. They receive what they urgently need, but their situation never really improves. In fact, there’s a very slow decline happening, though most aren’t aware of it. People are gradually weakening over time. Fear dominates this place. People fear each other because they believe they can’t afford to be kind and caring to those around them.

On the other side lies a completely different world – one of abundance. Fewer people live there, but they move with confidence, trusting they’ll always receive what they need for their next step. This confidence allows them to share what they have and support each other. Here, everybody is gaining strength and growing. Happiness prevails.

Preventing Your Overdue Step

Now, this canyon isn’t very wide. At a few spots, someone could even try to jump across. And people do try. But most of them fall into the river below.

At these possible crossing points, there are guards and billboards with stern warnings: „DANGER! Crossing is far too dangerous! Every attempt leads to almost certain death!“

If someone lingers too long near these crossing spots, or talks too often about jumping, they’re declared mentally disturbed and suicidal. They get taken to psychiatric wards, treated with all kinds of drugs to bring them back to „normality.“

But still, some people dare to jump toward that other world. Most who try do make it to the other side… only to slide down into the canyon, tumbling toward the river below.

The Fallen Jumpers

From the scarcity side, people scream: „I told you so!“ „You deserve it!“ They fret about the jumper’s stupidity and irresponsible behavior.

People on the abundance side? They observe silently, often smiling. They know something the others don’t. Down by that river, there are hidden paths. Challenging and difficult, yes, but they lead up to their world. And they know there are guides down there – people looking for new arrivals, ready to offer help to those willing to take up the challenges and grow.

They appreciate these fallen jumpers because they understand: these souls made a conscious choice to reject that life of scarcity and continuous fighting. The guides lead them along hidden routes, making sure nobody can observe from above what’s happening deep in the canyon.

The Hidden Paths

Here’s the remarkable thing: those who dared to reject that life of scarcity couldn’t return to that old place even if a helicopter came to rescue them. They’ve changed too much. But their decision – that seemingly „catastrophic“ action – gave them the strength and wisdom to find the hidden path and follow it, slowly moving into the world of abundance, growing along the way to become one of those confident, kind, and caring people on the other side.

Edison’s 1,000 Experiments

Now let me ask you something. Do you know how many experiments Thomas Edison conducted before he created a functioning light bulb? Over 1,000. Some say as many as 3,000 attempts.

Yet Edison kept going. Not because he was stubborn or foolish, but because he understood something profound.

The Secret Sauce

Here’s the secret sauce: You must find your own path and have the courage to follow it – regardless of people’s laughter, thumbs down, and challenges. Never give up. Take every episode on your path as an invaluable lesson, not as an accident or catastrophe.

This mindset will bring you wherever you belong in this life.

Edison didn’t see 999 failures. He saw 999 ways that didn’t work, each one bringing him closer to the way that would. Every „failed“ experiment was actually a successful elimination of one more wrong path.

Your Soul Knows the Way

The people who jumped toward abundance and fell into the canyon? They didn’t fail either.

• They succeeded in breaking free from the prison of scarcity thinking.
• They succeeded in choosing growth over safety.
• They succeeded in listening to their souls over the crowd’s warnings.

Your soul knows your canyon. It knows your other side. It knows you don’t belong where fear tells you to stay.

The question isn’t whether you’ll face challenges, criticism, or seeming failures along the way. You will. The question is: Will you see them as Edison did? As the canyon jumpers did? As necessary steps on the path to where you truly belong?

The Call to Courage

Your transformation is calling. The path is there, even when it’s hidden. The guides are waiting, even when you can’t see them. What will you choose?

This is Eve Brownyz, reminding you that every expert was once a beginner, and every master was once a disaster. Your path is valid, your soul knows the way, and your next step is waiting for your courage.

Related post: How to Protect Your Energy. Podcast version at podcasts.chavavo.com

Don’t let your next step remain overdue!

The post Your Overdue Step Screams for Your Courage appeared first on Success and Inner Growth.

We often think of planning as something we do on paper or in our minds. But in reality, a successful planning system is a dynamic, living entity. It evolves as you act, learn, and grow. And at the heart of this system are two fundamental elements: information and action. Information is the air your system breathes, allowing you to make informed decisions and set clear objectives. But action is the heart – it pumps life into your plans, creating a rhythm that keeps everything in motion.

The Four Layers of a Plan

Before we explore how action drives your planning system, let’s revisit the four layers that form its foundation:

1. The Road Map: This is your big picture. It outlines the overall journey, the milestones you aim to reach, and the path you’ll take to get there. It’s your North Star, guiding your decisions.
2. Resource Planning: Often mistaken for budgeting, resource planning is all about identifying the tools and skills you need to invest in to make your goals achievable. It’s about planning for growth, not just managing costs.
3. The Budget: This layer is more straightforward—it allocates the financial resources required to execute your plan. A good budget ensures that you’re equipped to reach each milestone without running out of fuel.
4. The Action Plan: The most dynamic part of your system. It breaks down the big goals into actionable steps, outlining the „what,“ „when,“ and „how“ of executing your plan.

Action: The Driving Force of Any Planning System

Action is the most crucial element in any planning system. Without action, your plan is powerless. Instead of bringing fruits it collects dust in the world of dreams. What makes action so powerful is that it creates feedback. This feedback is more than just verbal responses from others – it’s the tangible results and reactions that happen in response to your actions.

For example, let’s say you’re building something as simple as a door or window in a wall. If you don’t know exactly how that wall was constructed—whether it’s made of concrete, bricks, or timber and mud – you wouldn’t just start cutting. You’d probe the wall first, gathering feedback from the material to understand how it will react to your actions. This is the same with business or personal projects: you take action, measure the results, and adjust based on what you learn. This steady stream of improvement, driven by a feedback loop of action and response, is the foundation of the aphorism „nothing is impossible“.

Feedback: Beyond Words

Feedback doesn’t always come in the form of spoken or written words from other people. Results are a form of feedback as well. Sometimes, those results are changes in how things operate after you take action. In business, when you launch a new product or service, the market’s response – whether it’s through sales numbers, customer reviews, or changes in web traffic – speaks volumes.

But feedback also includes more subtle responses: the actions other people take as a result of your actions. If you’re leading a team, for instance, the changes in how your team operates after you introduce a new process or tool provide important feedback about your leadership and decision-making. All of these insights, spoken or unspoken, give you critical data that helps you refine your approach.

Measuring the Results: The Role of KPIs in a Planning System

Now, here’s where many people fall short: they don’t measure the results of their actions. They trust their memory or gut feelings to tell them what’s working and what’s not. But our memories are often selective – they suppress facts that don’t fit into our existing belief systems, which can skew our perception of reality.

This is where measurement comes in. In a business context, we often condense our observations into Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). KPIs give us a clear, measurable way to track progress and understand how well our plans are working. They provide metrics for the overall performance of the business and serve as hints about where to dig deeper.

For example, let’s say one of your KPIs is customer retention. If this metric suddenly drops, it’s a signal to investigate deeper and figure out what causes the decline. Additionally, KPIs allow us to benchmark our performance against industry leaders, ensuring that we remain competitive and relevant.

But measuring KPIs isn’t limited to business. In our personal lives, we can create KPIs to track our well-being and productivity. For instance, you might track daily sleep time, weight, daily income and expenses, or even time spent with loved ones. Many health apps offer insights into steps walked, walking stability, and speed—data that can help you make informed decisions about your health and lifestyle.

Whether in business or personal life, KPIs provide an objective look at the outcomes of your actions, helping you fine-tune your strategy and adapt as needed.

Action Induces Feedback – Experience is Born

When you act, you generate feedback, and over time, this feedback accumulates into what we call experience. Experience is unique because it’s raw, personal, and specific to your life and business. It provides a deep comparative advantage. No one else has lived your experiences, and no amount of general knowledge can fully replicate the insights you gain from taking action yourself.

Experience teaches you the nuances of your industry, market, or personal life. It shapes your instincts and allows you to make better informed decisions in the future. But here’s the thing—experience is limited by the scope of your actions. It’s a product of what you’ve done so far. Therefore you need to continuously push the boundaries of your actions, if you want to grow.

Balancing Experience with External Knowledge

While experience is invaluable, it has its limits. It’s confined to the actions you’ve taken and the environments you’ve operated within. To expand your understanding and continue evolving, you need to seek out generally available, high-quality information from external sources. This information – whether found in research papers, books, articles, or conversations with mentors – gives you a broader context, allowing you to make even better informed decisions.

The difference between experience and external knowledge is that experience creates raw information. It’s the direct result of your actions and interactions. External knowledge, on the other hand, is preprocessed information—it’s already been analyzed and synthesized by others, making it easier for you to access and apply to your own situation.

Acquiring external knowledge also takes action – it requires research, evaluation, and validation. But it plays a different role in your planning system. While experience shapes your personalized insights, external information helps you stay ahead of the curve, adapt to new challenges early on, and avoid mistakes others have made before you.

Final Thoughts: A Living, Breathing Planning System

In summary, a well-functioning planning system is a living entity. It breathes in information and pulses with the rhythm of action. Action drives feedback, and feedback accumulates into experience. Experience, in turn, refines your actions, creating a continuous loop of learning and growth.

But remember: to keep growing, you need both experience and external knowledge. Rely on experience for the deep, personalized insights it offers, but don’t neglect the wealth of information that exists beyond your own actions. Together, these elements will help you operate a planning system that allows you not only to survive but lets you thrive. It opens for you the cycle of excellence.

If you want to invite that cycle of excellence into your own life, here is a great offer for you. I’ve condensed years of research and decades of personal life experience into a coaching program. I call it

The LOVE Plan for Success and Inner Growth

The program guides you through five steps to reinvent your life:
1.) Self observation. Free up the energy and time you need for change by going after the low hanging fruits.
2.) Reconnect to your soul and rediscover your personal purpose and mission in life.
3.) Find people who help you on your journey.
4.) Create a plan that guides you on your journey and measures your progress.
5.) Execute your plan and initiate your cycle of excellence

If you’d like to learn more about The LOVE Plan for Success and Inner Growth, I invite you to a free, one-on-one strategy session. During this session, we’ll find out whether we’re a good fit to take the next steps together.

If we are, that’s great! If not, that’s perfectly fine, too. Either way, we’ll spend an inspiring and interesting hour together.

PS: This is the text version of episode 33 of the Success and Inner Growth Podcast

The post A Planning System in Motion: Powered by Action and Breathing Information appeared first on Success and Inner Growth.

Creating a plan that brings fruits is the overarching topics of a small series in this blog and the Success and Inner Growth podcast.

Today, we are not yet moving to the rhythm of a breathing, growing, swinging, and even dancing plan. But that is our goal over the next few blog posts and episodes of Success and Inner Growth. Instead, start out by studying the different components of a plan with four layers, their tasks, behaviors, and needs.

The Four Layers of Your Plan

I call the components of your plan the four layers. Let me introduce them:  the road map, the resource plan, the growth plan, and the action plan. If you want to reach your goal, they need each other for mutual support. Let me give you an example:

• If you want to breath the air and enjoy the scenery on the peak of the Kilimanjaro, you must know the steps to reach the foothills of the mountain and the different paths from there to the peak. This is the road map.
• But that is not enough. Your growth plan guides you through the acquisition and development of gear and skills you need to reach your goal.
• Your resource plan helps you building up the resources you need to reach the peak of the Kilimanjaro, and to return home afterwards. The resource plan guides you through acquiring the time, money, and energy you need to spend for the gear, guides, transportation, and accommodation necessary to reach your goal. It helps you to have the right amount of the right resource at hand at every step of your journey, and to spend it in the right order.
• Your action plan helps you to do the right thing, at the right place, at the right time. Acquiring the proper resources when you need them, collecting the necessary skills and gear in the right order: obviously, all this needs action. It needs finely choreographed action, taking one step after another, moving, jumping, retreating, coming back.

Today, we will have a deeper look at each of those layers of a living plan. This is the first step we have to take on our path to a powerful arrangement allowing us to fulfill our mission while enjoying the path of our life.

The Road Map

If we want to rule our own life and fulfil the mission our soul has set out for us, we must follow our personal path.

Starting Point and Destination

To move on our path, we must of course know where we want to go. In other words, we must know our destination. A clear purpose of our journey is a necessary condition for creating a road map, but it is not enough. If we do not know, where we stand, we cannot plot a path to our destination. Therefore, we need also the starting point.

There is no roadmap without starting point and destination. But a straight line from the starting point to the destination does not make a useful road map for humans. For birds, this might be a different story, but even they would have to know something about the wind and the weather on their journey.

Challenges and Milestones

On the path of our destiny, we meet always challenges and barriers. They serve as milestones, and they serve as catalysts and step stones, guiding, pushing, and pulling us to the next level of our personal development. Although some of the barriers will surprise us, it is worthwhile to identify the upcoming challenges as early as possible and to mark them on the road map. This helps us to prepare for them and to measure our progress.

Mostly, those obstacles and challenges demand, that we build more leverage. Therefore, we can overcome them by growing a bit further, adding knowledge, skills, wisdom, and resources to our life.

Stars and Role Models

Stars and role models help us to stay on the right direction. There is no reason to emulate a single one of them. Remember the saying: You have to live your own life, all others are already taken. But as we move, our distance and perspective on those role models change. This works like sailors in ancient worlds using the stars to navigate through the oceans, determining their position and their course.

It is up to us, whom to choose as stars and role models. They might be persons, whom we have experienced and observed in our personal life, like parents or grandparents. Famous contemporary figures out of our reach with remarkable success serve as orientation points. We can use Saints honored by the churches as our stars. Even figures like Odysseus or Hercules from the Greek mythology can support us as points of orientation.

Your stars should be visible and outstanding, like landmarks. Variety is here as important as it is in your personal network. Personal role models should represent and embody the different human archetypes. Their purpose is to reflect our own personal evolution and tell us at every moment, where we stand.

The Growth Plan

Growing means adding wisdom. knowledge, skills, and resources to our life. We accumulate them as investments if we care and dare to do so. Together, they allow us to make an impact in the world. Additionally, wisdom and knowledge cater to the needs of your soul for its own evolution and growth.

The more wisdom, knowledge, skills, and material resources we have already accumulated, the faster we can grow them further. Together, they help us to build leverage. Such leverage allows us to overcome even the steepest challenges and biggest obstacles popping up on the path to fulfill our mission. This is the place, where the magic happens. If we do it right, we can grab the opportunities passing our way all the time, and experience exponential growth.

The Resource Plan

Another name for the resource plan is the budget. But this budget is not only concerned with money. It plans, observes, and controls the flow of our time, energy, and money. The task of the resource plan is to ensure, that we have always the necessary resources available on our road map. If we run low on one of our three key resources, we must adapt our action plan and direct our activities to replenish the resource running low.

If such a problem persists, it is a sign that we are running against an obstacle or challenge. Chances are that we haven’t mapped out that little friend on our road map properly.

The Action Plan

Positive result without focused action do not happen. Your action bears fruits in the form of information, skills, better understanding of your environment. Action lets you move along your path of success. To focus your activities, you must plan them, day after day. What happens if you do not make conscious decisions about the activities? In the best case, nothing, but in most cases your leverage and resources start to decay.

Bringing your Plan with Four Layers to Life

In this edition we covered the components of our plan with four layers. In the next one, coming soon, we will explore how to turn this layered plan into a system.

Why is that important? Every army in the world, and every successful corporation, knows very well that they cannot execute any plan exactly as it was conceived. The plan must evolve.

But that does not mean stopping to plan. To the contrary, strong organizations spend vast resources on systems adapting and tweaking their plans continuously, and planning for scenarios. If you plan only for one way, and events take a sudden turn into another direction, you are at a loss. You would better have been prepared to grab the arising opportunity.

Free Strategy Session

If you want to find out more about me and Chavavo Publishing, I invite you to a free one to one strategy session. There we can find out, whether we are a good fit to take the next steps together.

If yes, it is fine. But, if not it is also good. In any case, we will spend an interesting and inspiring hour together.

Here is the link to register.

The post The Plan with Four Layers appeared first on Success and Inner Growth.

The Learning Curve

Today, I share methods and tools that allow me to keep moving through the learning curve until I reach my goal. If someone fails to understand the learning curve, giving up is almost inevitable.

But first, I must test your patience for a moment with math. Please forgive me and keep watching.

Compounded Effort

You learned at school how interest lets a small amount you save every month grow faster and faster. If you do things right, the same happens with the steady effort you invest into yourself and your business. You and your business will grow faster and faster.

You can see with this graph how steady effort leads at a certain point to an explosion of growth. The axis from left to right in this graph illustrates the sum of the effort you have invested into your project, the axis from bottom to top illustrates the results.

The formula is e powered by x. We call e the base and x the exponent. In statistics, we like to take e as the basis for the exponential function. The rounded decimal value of e is 2.72. But we could take any base bigger than one. This would flatten the curve, but the final effect would remain the same.

Imagine how much energy the engines of a plane mobilize before liftoff. But once the plane has reached the necessary speed, it rises steeply. And, when the plane flies high enough, the pilot can reduce the workload of the engines drastically.

Why do I bother you with this function? Here is the reason: If you don’t know the exponential function, you will most certainly give up before you are ready to lift off. You capitulate, and all your effort is wasted.

The Lift-Off Point

The exponential function consists of two components: The base e and the exponent x. As the exponent x illustrates the sum of resources you have spent, it grows step by step as you work on your project, investing time, energy, and money. Your project lifts off exactly at the point where the results start growing faster than the resources you invest.

Viability

The shape of the learning curve and the necessary investment depends on the viability of the project. We express the viability as a constant. In math, we call that constant the base of the exponential function. If the base is one, the curve will be flat forever. In that case, you will never lift off. If the basis is smaller than one, additional effort diminishes the result. Therefore, a project with an viability exponent below 1 sinks, and sooner or later it crashes.

Therefore, every project needs a solid base bigger than one and sufficient resources to propel it through the lift-off point. Whenever the base is too low, you must rethink the project and tweak it to add viability. If you want to evaluate the viability of a project, you need to determine the size of the base and assess the resources necessary to blast through the lift-off point. If the base is big enough and you have the resources to propel you through the lift-off point, you have won.

Is my Project Doable?

To determine if something is doable, ask first: Who, and how many, succeeded with it before? And who did similar things? If you find several people did successfully what you plan to achieve, success is possible. Start out following their path. If you find many people who tried and failed, but none who succeeded, you must find a different approach to solve the problem. In that case, focus on research and learning until you can define a promising path to success.

For Success You Need a Plan

For every successful project, you need a plan. You must know where you stand and determine the necessary steps for reaching the lift-off point. You must map out your success path, otherwise you lack stability and fail. Yes, this is the simple truth.

Example: Building a YouTube Audience

Imagine building a YouTube audience. To get there, you must go through several steps:

• Develop your message and your story: Who do you want to reach? What do you want to tell them?
• Build expertise and authority: Learn how to present your message in a way allowing your audience to listen, understand, and believe what you have to say.
• Develop a passion for public speaking: That passion provides self-confidence, joy, and fun while speaking. Your audience feels whether you believe listening to you is precious. Learn how to do this!
• Technical problems: Which camera to use? How to get good lighting? How to create a good audio experience? Which equipment? And where to get it?

Without a roadmap, you start buying a fancy camera and produce a few videos. After a short time, you give up because nobody listens. And even worse, you regret that you ever started.

The Success Path is all about Building Leverage

Why does the first grand you spend on a project bring fewer results than grand number 19?

Imagine you want to hang a screen on the wall. Here, you must perform a few things first: Check the place, where you want to hang the screen. Is the wall strong enough to hold a screen? Then you look for the right gear for fixing the screen. The holder must fit on one side to the shape of the screen, and on the other side, it must be sturdy enough to be fixed to the wall. Next, you need the right screws and drywall anchors, a drilling machine, and drilling needles.

But after buying those items, there is still no visible result, other than time and money spent and items littering the floor. There remain still some things to learn before you can drill the right holes in the right place of the wall, fix the holder, and hang the screen.

If you call a professional, they fix the screen for you in a few minutes. Why? Because they have the right tools and materials. And they know how to employ them. The expert has already built enough leverage to get satisfactory results quickly. Indeed, the success path is all about building leverage.

Delegation and Focus

The secret of delegation and focus helps you reach the lift-off point of the learning curve much faster. If you concentrate on a few activities, you really enjoy, excellence joins you quickly. Otherwise, you try to become an expert in everything. That leads straight to mediocrity. Delegating the tasks you do not enjoy allows you to focus on your strengths. How? Pay someone to hang the screen on the wall, or to edit a video, while you continue to refine and tweak your message.

If you can’t afford outsourcing, borrow or buy tools that make the task easier and provide reasonable results even for those who do not excel in the task. There is no need to be perfect in everything.

Delegation and Focus

The secret of delegation and focus helps you reach the lift-off point of the learning curve much faster. If you concentrate on a few activities you really enjoy, excellence joins you quickly. Otherwise, you try to become an expert in everything. That leads straight to mediocrity. Delegating the tasks you do not enjoy allows you to focus on your strengths. How? Pay someone to hang the screen on the wall, or to edit a video, while you continue to refine and tweak your message. More about that in How to Build Relationships.

If you can’t afford outsourcing, borrow or buy tools that make the task easier and provide reasonable results even for those who do not excel in the task. There is no need to be perfect in everything.

This is the text version of the Success and Inner Growth Episode 30, The Success Path. Listen and subscribe at https://podcasts.chavavo.com or at any major podcasting app, created by Johannes Stockburger. If you wish to talk personally with me about your path to success, join me at the monthly Chavavo Publishing Office Hours. Find the link below in the show notes.

The post The Success Path appeared first on Success and Inner Growth.

Johannes:
Hi and welcome to episode twenty-nine of the podcast Success and Inner Growth. My name is Johannes Stockburger. And I am the owner and founder of Java Publishing. Our mission is to help those, who want to crash this glass ceiling on top of them, to find a way around it and climb on top of it.

Welcome, Evangelyne Brownyz

Johannes:
Today, first of all I want to introduce to Evangeline Brownyz. She is our new editor, and she is also producing this podcast from now on. Hi, Evangeline. Please tell us a little bit about yourself.

Evangelyne:
Thank you so much for the opportunity. My name is Evangelyne Brownyz, as you have said. And I’m from Kenya. I live in German now. I’m also editor and producer. And I’m in university in UK University, United Kingdom.

Johannes:
What are you doing in university?

Evangelyne:
I’m studying IT information technology.

Johannes:
OK, so let this be with it. Yeah, the topic of today’s artificial intelligence. I think first of all, it is worth to say a few things about it. You can ask me, and you can also contribute your thoughts. The first question is:

What at All Is Artificial Intelligence?

Johannes:
So, everybody is talking about it. It is the next step. They say it is the next big development after the Internet. And I mean, the Internet is not yet very old. It is maybe 30 years old. Let me say better say: It is 30 years that I had access to the Internet for the first time and I got that because I saw a small, classified ad, which was saying something like where is a new thing which used to be only for the CIA to have information around. And this is now going to be open to the public.

I thought this you must have.

And I had it. I had a computer, and when you had a phone and then you had to fix something like a cap on the phone so that the noise can be transferred to a microphone of a computer. And this was how this connection was built at the time. So, it was very, very different from now. But now it changed really the world. Yeah, because now you can exchange data, information all over the world in seconds, and you can send money to your Mama, and it is after 5 minutes there. It’s costing €2.00 to send it. Before, it would have taken 5 days, and you would have given that bank €50 to send it. This is a huge difference.

Yeah, and but now they say the next step is artificial intelligence.

Evangelyne:
And also, you can communicate easily with your loved ones with their like distance away.

What Can Artificial Intelligence do for Us?

Johannes:
And now the next step is artificial intelligence. And this means basically, that they built computers, which are able, almost, to act as a human, to talk as a human, to understand what you are saying. Not only to write it down, but to understand what you are saying, to search on it and to find answers.

So, nowadays you will not type into Google a few keywords carefully thought out, and when you look what it’s giving you back. But you say: “Hey Google, tell me what is going on tomorrow morning in Nairobi.”  And Google will understand what you are asking, and it will be able, maybe even to tell you not only what was going on yesterday, but what is going to go on tomorrow morning. This is artificial intelligence.

Evangelyne:
And is it like also because now in Google they can even count the steps like kilometers or know what you have been walking throughout the day. Yeah, you find your steps in the Google, in the phones, wherever.

Privacy

Johannes:
Yeah, but this is not exactly artificial intelligence. But this is something, which makes artificial intelligence possible. Because, all these phones we are walking around, from Apple, from Google, from Samsung, are always collecting information and sending lots of information to the computers [of the AI companies.]

And not only it is, what you it used to be, that everything what you are doing on the Internet is observed by somebody. But now even your phone is observing, if you are snoring in the night, and Google knows it and so.

They know really, really, really a lot and much more than would normally make sense for somebody to know, because … how your breath is sounding in the night, is not really interesting to anybody else, other than the person who is sleeping with you in the same bed.

But still, they are collecting these kinds of data or maybe, they say they won’t, but maybe they have a hidden thing where they ask you for permission and you agree to it, and they do it.

Or even if you are shopping and you are paying with a credit card, it is all going into the systems where you are walking.

Evangelyne:
For me, I think, there is no privacy in such things.

Anonymized Data

Johannes:
Yes and no. I think most for of this information, is the connection to a person removed. It is anonymized. So. OK, they collect it. Yeah, but when they remove the connection to you.

But they know there was one person snoring a little bit louder. And when they know in this area, there have been 100 persons snoring a little bit louder and when they know, OK, maybe there is a new virus there.

Evangelyne:
But you know my problem is: I don’t know who it’s getting or who is receiving all this data from me. Yeah, so I can’t. I don’t trust those people.

Artificial Intelligence Is a Fact of Life

Johannes:
But you cannot prevent it. And my thinking was, and I think still the same: You cannot prevent that they are collecting that data about you. Because for that, not only you would have to throw your phone away. You have to move into a forest, somewhere, almost without electricity. Look, here in town you have everywhere cameras. You have sensors. You could only use cash money.

So, this is just not possible. Yeah, my thinking is: let them collect it, but don’t give it only to one. Give it to your four or five of them. So, because this makes at least sure that they cannot cheat with it, saying that you did that, which you didn’t do it. Because then it’s in the next database, that it was not true. So, I don’t think you can prevent that. You have just to live with it. It is, even if you don’t like it, or if you like it: Who cares?

Dangerous, But Powerful

Evangelyne:
For me, I think, that is very dangerous thing, in the world. I prefer now even the analog.

Johannes:
Look, it is also very powerful. Look, it is like for example: Now this conversation, it will take us only two or three keystrokes, and then we have it in writing. Before, it would have taken a professional a day to put that in writing, you could have paid hundreds of dollars for it. Now you just press a button, connect it to Microsoft, and they give you a text.

The other thing is without that all research engines would not be possible. You get access to a huge, a huge amount of information. The problem is that it is like with everything. A knife is dangerous, it can kill somebody. But the knife is also good because it can really help you to produce your meal. And so it’s with that thing, also. It is dangerous, and it is also powerful and beneficial. And so, you have to know, where the dangers are, you have to learn how to handle it. Because there is another danger, it can also check what you are thinking and when it can try to influence you to change your thinking, especially if it is governments, yeah, who have really an interest to influence people, and they can use that also for that purpose. This is dangerous.

How AI influences Our Thinking

Johannes:
But on the other hand, for example: If I write a text, if I am thinking about artificial intelligence, for what is it good and what is it bad. And I write it down, and it is thoughtful, and inspiring for some people. But nowadays I write it, and then I copy it into one of these tools for artificial intelligence.

Why?

Because it will give me another take on a language, it will try to express the same things, but in other words. And this is helpful because these people, who are doing that, and especially Microsoft, they know how people are talking, and how people are thinking. And when they know that they know also how you can express something so that people are understanding it.

Microsoft is a big power in artificial intelligence, but this time not because of the phones. With the phones, they failed. They tried it.

But basically, they can watch, what you are doing on your computer. And there, they can not only watch what you are doing and what you are saying, they can watch how you are thinking. You write a text, you discard it. You write the next version, you discard it, you change it. Microsoft can see all that. You store it mostly on Microsoft nowadays, yeah, you put it on OneDrive, and you use with online versions of Microsoft Office. Or even if you have it on your own computer, it is half on online, so we know a lot of how people are thinking, and this is dangerous and it’s helpful. Yeah, it is helpful to communicate. But it’s dangerous in a way that they can also influence that thing.

Artificial Intelligence and Governments

Johannes:
And especially if that power comes to governments. Let me say if what happened in USA. Last time in the last election, when these people with artificial intelligence, they band together with the government to create reactions of people to hide information and to push other information in the foreground and you know they don’t do that like that, that everybody sees the same. They do it in a way where you see the thing, which is influencing you. This is possible, and they do that, they did that.

The danger is that this artificial intelligence is falling in the hands of the governments in my eyes. Because it’s so powerful and then, you know, with Google, Microsoft. OK, you have to deal with one of them or with two. But if you don’t want Google, you can go to Apple with your phone. If you don’t like Apple, maybe you buy a Google phone, or if you don’t really want it, you take just the phone, a normal phone, which has not this software. And same with the computer. Yeah, you have different vendors. But government, if you are at a certain place, this government is telling you: “I am your government, and you cannot choose whether you deal with me.”

The Power of Social Media

Evangelyne:
So yeah, that’s what I’ve been telling you, that these things are very dangerous, especially for the government. Because this is the way of influencing people to vote or to do these things, and this is how people steal elections.

Johannes:
Yes. Also, how people steal elections, but also, look in the beginning: You remember this time when there was this Arab Spring during Obama? And this was done a lot by Facebook.

This was not really yet artificial intelligence. It was just that Facebook knew who is thinking how, and they have been bringing these people together. Who went then to the street to oust the governments in Tunisia, in Egypt, in Libya. They tried it also and Syria. In Ukraine basically the same.

This was not yet really artificial intelligence. But this led also stronger governments like the one in Germany to try to prevent people from using Facebook. So, they were threatening businesses with a fine of € 50,000 if they put Facebook like buttons on their websites.

But they did it anyway, because Facebook was so powerful that they have been thinking, OK, we have to do it. And the government by themselves, they did it even also. This is the power of social media.

The Power of Artificial Intelligence

Johannes:
But with artificial intelligence, now, they use that power not only to bring people together, but to understand many things, which nobody has been understanding before.

The real beginning of the thing was the joke going on:  Amazon sending you advertisement for diapers before you even know yourself that you are pregnant. And truly you are pregnant, and you need them later. And this was the joke of it.

But the danger you can see in that: Police is still using that things. And then they say, OK, we think tomorrow morning in that area is going to happen that crime and they bring people police already there. And the probability is high that we are right, although we don’t know why and who is it. But they see signals and they follow them, and they see the results.

The problem is that they could see a result [signal], that you are going to kill somebody tomorrow, but it’s not true. They think now they have to prevent you from doing that and bring you into custody and in a prison without any real reason. This is not farfetched. You know, and this is, this is the danger of it.

But the question is now how are we handling that?

How are we handling that? You know, we cannot prevent the sun from shining. We cannot prevent artificial intelligence from being there or observing and putting things together.

Evangelyne:
OK

Johannes
We have to live with it, whether it is dangerous or not. The sun is also dangerous. But the sun is also giving us energy and food. And this artificial intelligence, it will give us information, it will extend our reach by far. But we have also to make sure that it’s not ruling us.

How does Artificial Intelligence Help Us?

Evangelyne:
So, my question is, how does the artificial intelligence help us?

Johannes:
It is giving us a lot of tools like text to speech like generating AI, where you can ask a few questions and you can write you a text. Or, better is to write your text by yourself and it helps you to improve it. Or you can take a photo here and tell it over Photoshop. I want here in this corner of our house and when it will put a house into that photo. It gives you a lot of help with creativity. It helps you even to be creative. Creativity, which is the one which you can do. But artificial intelligence normally not. But it can support your creativity also.

And it can help you understand. It can help also even to understand sicknesses. It can help in preventing diseases like these pandemics. Yeah, because it can allow people, at least early on, to ask the right questions. It can be very helpful in one way, but it can be also very dangerous in another way: it can also change our thinking and change our perception of truth.

Limited to Yes and No

Johannes:
You know, and this is the main point which I want to make: artificial intelligence can only use information which can go through a computer, which is digitalized. Which means, in the end it can handle only a lot of yes and no and yes and no and yes and no. But, you know, if you are sensing a feeling or an energy or emotions, they are not only yes and no. We have nowadays already systems there which are measuring the happiness of people. So, for example, they have cameras on the streets and they not only can do face recognition, yeah, but they can also know, when you are walking there, whether you are feeling happy or healthy or whether you are feeling depressed or angry.

This is in itself dangerous because you cannot control anymore where this information is going. If you are walking through a town like Frankfurt, you are passing a hundred cameras on your way to work. And all these cameras can see your face, can see who you are and can see how you are today.

But also, it is another danger which I see in it, that is, it is redefining the meaning of happiness. So, you will no longer ask yourself, or maybe you don’t even ask yourself, am I feeling happy today? Because you are just feeling happy.

Example: The Concept of Time

But with that one, yeah, I think there comes a time you will take your phone out. Yeah, take a short video of your face and ask the phone. Am I happy today? And the phone will tell you: yes, you are happy or no, you are not happy. And this will change the meaning of happiness. You know, and this I think is terrible. This is, with time that happened already. Time is now a row of seconds. Yeah, it used to be something completely else before that, digitalization and what it was coming before. It used to be the sun, the moon, the sun was standing up. Time used to be the years it used to be the months. It is a movement of the moon. It had many, many dimensions. But now it is only a number.

I think it can. if we’re not taking care, it can reduce our wealth and what we perceive of the world to numbers.

Evangelyne:
OK.

Where Humans Have an Edge

Johannes:
But this is also how we can prevail. Because, if we train our body and our mind to perceive also things, which are not numbers: Our feelings, the feelings around us, the people, the energy. And then we have, at least in our own world around us, a real edge over artificial intelligence, because we have sources of information, which cannot be sensed through a computer. Which are not either with a microphone to be digitalized, or with a camera to be digitalized, or maybe with a sensor for fingerprints. Which is the energy, which is the charisma, which is the feeling and if we are strengthening that dimension of ours, I think we can, at least in our near field, still control our life and not allow all this powerful people to control us, and I think this is what counts in the end.

Artificial Intelligence and the Subconscious Mind

Evangelyne:
OK. My next question is artificial intelligence and the subconscious mind. What do they have in common?

Johannes:
Yeah, this is an interesting thought. Let me first talk a little bit about the conscious mind and the subconscious mind.

The conscious mind is how we are really reasoning. It is especially working with causality. We are saying: if that is happening, then this is also true. If that is true, this is true and on that we conclude that is also true. We give a reason to things.

We are reasoning, but the subconscious mind is not reasoning. It is just connecting impressions and patterns and it is soaking everything up which you allow into your brain in from your eyes, from your ears, from the smell, from hands all information. Also with information, which is, I say from a sixth sense, the inner energy.

And, our subconscious mind is soaking all this energy up, all this information up, and then he is searching it for patterns and relates it to each other. So, it is saying: This is similar to that; this is similar to that. Or, maybe, they are connected. Maybe, this would be also connected like that. This gives you then a feeling: Oh my God, I think, I heard something like that before. And, you don’t know what, but you have an idea where to look. This is how your subconscious mind is helping you.

Focusing on Connections

Johannes:
Artificial intelligence is working somehow the same way. It is not looking for reasons, it is not looking for causal relationships. Artificial Intelligence is just looking what is happening together, what is coming together? It is looking for associations.

A butterfly flying in Europe through your window can cause a sack of rice falling down in China.

This is sounding very funny, but this is about hidden connection of things. And this is not a causal relationship, these are patterns, these are things which are occurring together.

And, if you master that, you know a lot in advance. Maybe, you don’t know that for sure it is happening, but it is a high probability of happening. This is even why artificial intelligence, it’s so important in the current wars, in the modern wars. Because, you cannot know for sure, nobody is telling you that your enemy is trying to do that: but you run it through a computer, and your computer is telling you: have here look. It might be like that. And often enough, it is true.

You know, and with that they target things. And the military is not waiting until they know really something for sure. If they think for 80%, here is the target which we want to hit, they shoot. If they hit then in half of the cases the right thing, it’s already a big success to them.

How to Keep Control over Your Own Life

Artificial intelligence is power, but I think also, to come to an end, we can master it in our life. First of all, by training our subconscious mind, which is working according to the same principles; and training our senses, so that we have a real wealth of information. Also important, to sleep enough, because in the sleep we are passing the information to our subconscious mind from where it is based in the brain from the day, we space it up, we keep it. And when it is crunched and sorted. The next day we have again space to safe information about what’s happening today. And in the night, we are crunching it again.

If we are not sleeping enough, and not taking care of the system and our subconscious mind, first of all, we will not get this information to the subconscious mind, but second of all, this place where we are normally saving the information, which we see every day, this will be full. And if it is full, we miss a lot of things. This is why, under stress you don’t see many things.

And so, for us it’s important to take care of ourselves: to sleep enough, to eat well, to train our senses, to avoid drugs and alcohol.

Evangelyne:
And drink a lot of water.

Johannes:
To give our body really what it needs.

Evangelyne:
And to stay always positive.

Johannes:
And this is our way I think to overcome the dangers of artificial intelligence and let it still work for us. Take care for yourself, care for your mind, care for your subconscious mind, care for your senses and keep your environment clean.

The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Our Culture

Evangelyne:
And I have here another question: How do unintended consequences affect our thinking?

Johannes:
This is about that it changes meaning of words there and when it is streamlining the concepts and removing everything from thinking, and with thinking also from reality, which is not fitting in this, let me say digital thinking of yes, no, yes, no, yes, no. Yes, no, yes, yes, yes. No, no, no. Yes, no, yes, no. Yes, no. You know if artificial intelligence, and it will, becomes in many instances the real arbiter of truth, it is no longer: You decide what is true. And you should keep for you the right to decide what is true for you. But especially the governments and societies, they think they have the right to decide what is true for that society. And It’s going to happen, but this decision, what is true in a society and what not It’s basically made by these artificial intelligence systems.

Limiting the Scope of Governments

Evangelyne:
But do you think this group which you have mentioned will do like that, especially government?

Johannes:
I think, this is a logical consequence, it is unavoidable. You know, this is like a neutral thing. We are discussing something, you, and me. And I say: “the grass is green.” But you say: “the grass is blue.”

And we are fighting, and we are shouting, until some third comes in and says what are you doing here? Why don’t you ask Google? So, we’re asking Google: “is grass green or blue?” And Google will tell us: “Grass is green, maybe sometimes yellow or brown, but certainly not blue.” And we are going to believe that. That way, it is a positive example, because it has been the end of a fight.

Controlling the Meaning of Words

But do we want computers and governments decide what is the meaning of happiness? Or do we want to decide it – everybody for himself? I want to decide for myself what is the meaning of the word “Happiness” for me. I want to decide for myself what is the meaning of a word “Love” for me. Me, I want to decide for myself even what is the meaning of the word “tiredness” for me, of “angriness,” of all these things.

And I don’t want from outside somebody to tell me: “You are angry.” I say: “I’m not feeling angry.” And they: “I know that you are angry!” and I will again say: “I am not feeling angry.” Next it is shouting to me: “But you are angry!” And I will become angry, because this shouting and not believing me and trying to force me into angriness. And this is dangerous.

This is only a simple example. I can say “I love this lady.” My computer is telling me: “No, it’s not true. You don’t love this lady.” And I say: “I love this lady.” But this computer is saying: “No, no, no, no, no.”

And, then these ladies there and asking: “Computer why do you think this guy is not loving me?” Again this computer is saying: “I know for sure that he’s not loving you. Don’t try. Don’t rely on him.” And this relationship is destroyed. You know because people believe in computers.

Now, this is an example still innocent.

Abusing Power

Johannes:
But if they have now somebody manipulating that, and I know in Eastern Germany the government has been destroying families if people don’t follow guidelines. So, they have been pitting husband against the wife, just to destroy your life.

And if you put that thing together, such a bad will of a government and the power of that computers, you come to a point, where you can become really fearful.

Me, I think, one consequence of this power of artificial intelligence is that we have really, really, really, really, and importantly to limit the power of governments.

So, to make sure that they cannot decide about everything. There are really spaces that are off limits for them. To concentrate on these few public things for what you need to them. But they don’t tell you what to do in the night in your bed.

If you allow both, artificial intelligence, and a government, which says it has to decide everything, then you are really running into trouble.

Artificial intelligence is supposed to stay there. We cannot change it. Which means we have really, really, really limits to the scope of governments so that the government is not able to abuse artificial intelligence.

Evangelyne:
Thank you so much.

Johannes:
I thank you.

PS: See also the transcript of Podcast Episode 10 – How to Take Care of Your Subconscious Mind

The post Artificial Intelligence and Human Thinking appeared first on Success and Inner Growth.

• the breakdown of credibility of governments and media
• the right to think on your own and to express that thoughts freely have been steamrolled almost everywhere in the world
• spending by governments and public debt has been exploding to the absurd
• election processes, the rule of law, and consequently the legitimacy of institutions are no longer beyond reasonable doubt

On top of that comes a big war in Europe, and another one looming in East Asia.

Such circumstances mark certainly an adverse environment. But a second thought tells us that a world like this was in human history not the exception, but the norm. And still, there were always people growing personally and living in abundance. Some people thrive, no matter how adverse the environment is for them.

Sorry for the Delay

I am almost three months late with this podcast episode. And the reason is not, that I did not have a computer, an office, a home, or food. In fact, I had those months everything I needed.

The true reason is, that thinking about the current situation is really painful. But, if I want to master the current environment, I have no choice other than collecting information, listening to many – even insulting – reports, stories and half-truths.

That’s painful and sucks my energy. But, if I want to come out on top of this, I have to understand what’s going on.

Universal Truths

In the late 19th century and throughout the 20th century there was the notion that everyone lives in the same reality, defined by universal truths.

As we all know, this era of universal truths did not exactly lead to peace and mutual understanding. Instead, people ganged up around this or that set of universal truths, also known as ideologies, and tried to subdue, enslave, or kill anyone daring to question the wisdom of the locally dominant gang.

Their kingpins were people like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot… Others are Ruhollah Khomeini, Mobutu Sese Seko, Idi Amin. More examples include Osama Bin Laden and Abu Muza Zarqawi. All of them believed that

• they are fighting for the truth,
• have the moral high ground
• their enemies are evil
• they must save the world from the evil

The easiest way to get a decent living in such a place means joining he locally dominant gang and exchange loyalty against alimentation. Follow their orders without asking questions, and they will take care of you. It is obvious, that such an arrangement leads to personal decay instead of personal growth.

But so what, people get what the stomach demands. They turn an adverse environment into a stomach friendly environment and thrive in a limited way.

Conflicting Layers of Truths in an Adverse Environment

I want to discuss this concept of conflicting layers of truths at the example of the war in Ukraine. The competing layers of truth and the corresponding framings lead to unimaginable suffering and dying in Ukraine. The result will be a completely redrawn geopolitical landscape in Europe. How it will look afterwards is not yet fully decided. This is fought out on the battlefield.

But if you want to avoid ending up as victim of that enormous transformation, you must understand it. It does not suffice to repeat the mantra of the first, the second, or third party.

I do here a partial analysis of the upcoming tectonic shift as an exercise, and as an example showing how to identify some underlying currents in a fast shifting and unpredictable environment.

After isolating the powers pushing into different directions, you can identify some possible scenarios and prepare for them. I left this part for you, because I am today not concerned about predicting the results. My topic is to find a way for staying on top of this upheaval.

The Ukrainian Layer

Ukraine as a country was created after the first world war. Territories belonging up to then to Russia or the Austrian-Hungarian Empire were cobbled together. The relationships between the different ethnic groups were not really friendly over the centuries, there have been ongoing fights and wars.

But this new country Ukraine was established in a centralized fashion, one central government dominated almost everything. This implicated the probability that one or the other ethnic group would dominate the whole country.

A few years later Ukraine was absorbed into the Soviet Union, and this gave the Russian cultural heritage in Ukraine naturally the upper hand. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, Ukraine was a main target. Many Ukrainians with the cultural heritage connected the Austrian Empire and thus to the German culture sided in the ensuing battle with the Germans.

After the German defeat in 1945, Ukraine was again one of the most important parts of the Soviet Union. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine became again an independent country. It did not take long until the old cultural tensions resurfaced. In 2014, in the context of a possible association treaty with the EU, this tension erupted into violence and war.

The Russian Layer

Eastern Ukraine was the staging area for the most dangerous offensive of the German army in 1941 against the Russian industrial heartland, leading to the siege of Stalingrad. At the time, it was far from clear that the Soviet Union or Russia would survive this.

Therefore, Russia was certainly alarmed, when after 2014 armed formations, bearing the symbols of some of the worst units of German armed forces in the 1940s, resurfaced just at that point of geostrategic vulnerability.

The European Layer

The Prussians and later the Germans, the Austro-Hungarians and the Russians competed for several centuries over control of Eastern Europe. At times, those powers fought wars and at other times, they divided the lands up between themselves. Especially Poland was divided up between Russia, Germany and the Austro-Hungarian empire several times, until it ceased to exist.

After the end of the cold war an new strategic partnership between Germany and Russia emerged, symbolized by the natural gas pipelines under the Baltic Sea. It looked like German industry backed by Russian natural resources could steamroll the complete EU. If you think that is not true, ask people from Greece, Cyprus, Italy, or even Bulgaria. Ask the governments of Poland and Hungary, they have also a story to share.

The Global Layer

A Europe dominated by a German-Russian strategic partnership would severely weaken the power and influence of the United States.

There remains until today a very fruitful transatlantic relationship regarding technology and innovation. But, if the European scientific and technological potential would be separated from the US or even turned against the US, a world ruled by Chinese information technology and artificial intelligence would be even closer than it is today.

Due to the strong anti-American currents in Germany and Russia, a hegemony of that couple over the rest of Europe would certainly destroy the transatlantic relationship.

Control of Information Flows

Now, those layers, and probably a few more, are present for everyone involved. Each side of the war emphasizes and promotes a convenient assortment of that information and tries to conceal other aspects. They do this to influence people, to channel their energy and behavior into a direction favorable to their agenda.

All those narratives have one thing in common: They contain true components, but they distort reality. They have in fact no intention to mirror reality. Spin doctors design those narratives as tools to influence you, to manage your emotions and influence your actions. Although a good spin doctor does not lie, he guides your attention to the things he wants you to see and hides those aspects that might prevent you from behaving along his intentions. Sometimes, a seasoned spin doctor will draw your attention to a remarkably beautiful or frightening image with little or no relevance to the essence of the situation to hide something else. But he knows that outright lies hurt his credibility and limit his influence.

Obviously, competing narratives do not belong exclusively to the current war. To the contrary, controlling the narrative is a decisive element in every power struggle. Power comes from bundling the energy of crowds. Therefore, no power exists without controlling mind and behavior of the masses.

Government Weakness Increases Repression

But there is a new aspect today: Governments lost a big junk of their ability to control the flow of information around the world. Therefore, they feel vulnerable. They lost the ability to control the narratives in their own population. Such feelings of weakness and vulnerability lead to a gross erosion of freedom all around the world.

Instead of growing freedom, we observe repression growing everywhere. Governments shelve freedom, while giving as reason they would defend freedom. They squeeze and pressure us because „we must overcome imminent dangers“. Sometimes, they cite even a combination of both reasons for their repressive behavior. But, whatever they say, they try to limit our control over our own life. Obviously, this makes for an adverse environment. But adverse environment or not, we are determined to thrive.

Necessary Skills to Thrive in an Adverse Environment

Whenever you are caught in a prefabricated narrative construed to nudge, push, and corral you into a certain direction, you are lost. If you want to thrive, come what may, you need to anticipate and prepare. Those, who want to use your energy, your mind, and your life for their own goal even up to the point of sacrificing your very existence must blind you. The best method for that blinding is spreading fear.

On the other hand, anticipating different scenarios and preparing for them demands a clear mind and the use of all your senses. In the mode of fear, this is impossible. So, we have already a few answers to our question. To thrive in an adverse environment, you must

• know how to manage and switch off fear
• control your energy and emotions
• keep your mind and senses even under stress open
• anticipate possible scenarios and plan for them
• prepare yourself for opportunities and dangers

That allows you to act in the right moment boldly. But you need a few specific techniques, and methods to acquire and master those skills.

Techniques and Methods

Keep Your Distance

During turbulent times, much energy is flowing around. To understand, what is going on, you must certainly feel samples of that energy. But do not allow this energy to overtake you. Therefore, keep your distance.

After receiving a dose of ardor, withdraw to a protected place and take your time to inspect the energy you received. Slice it, dice it, get the information out of it. But limit the amount of energy you take in from the street.

Don’t allow energy pouring in from the street to overtake your mind and your life. Let your soul be the master of your life. Therefore, let those spin doctors keep swirling around you. But take them as spin doctors, not as the authorities they pretend to be.

Manage Your Visibility

If you are different from the crowds around you, you make a perfect target, whenever someone needs to direct mass anger away from the own doorsteps. On the other hand, you must be visible to attract the right people into your network.

Therefore, be aware of your visibility. Decide, where to show up, and where to stay away. That does not mean to be wishy washy, but silence is at times the better solution. When you speak up, speak with clarity. But do not shout nor scream. And choose your audience wisely.

Clarity: A Necessity for Thriving in an Adverse Environment

Clarity. The more fluid and obscure an environment is, the more you need clarity. But how to create that clarity?

Observe carefully

Careful observation is one key to clarity. And observation does not merely mean watching. It means also asking, testing, probing. If you observe an aspect you don’t quite understand, research it.

But you need an additional key to create clarity: You must organize your observations, connect them, relate them to things you know already. Helpful is here a simple tool: a note book. If you see something remarkable, take a note. After taking a note, you can move on.

The very fact of writing it into your note book directs your subconscious mind to chew it, to find similar occurrences, to connect the dots. And, of course, you can come back, read the note, check what you have seen, amend it with additional aspects..

I created already three years ago a blog post and podcast episode discussing how to care for your subconscious mind and harness its potential. Read it and use it.

Build a Trusted Network

If you want to thrive in an adverse environment, nothing is more important that a trusted network. You need a few people, with whom you can talk openly. There is a thin line to follow between paranoia and negligence. Your network can lend you a hand and provide the stability you need.

Equally important is a good network as an invaluable source of timely and trustworthy information. To thrive in an adverse environment, where reality seems to shift within a few hours, access to timely and actionable information is a must have.

Intuition

Intuition does not mean to predict the future out of thin air. But a well-trained intuition will help you to decide what to observe and to make sense of your observations. Intuition can guide your subconscious mind, and it can issue urgent warnings you should heed.

You can train your intuition. Start with unimportant things, where you can afford to be wrong. Write down, what you think your intuition wants to tell you. Check it out and see the results. After some time, you will learn to listen to your intuition and to understand the signals it sends to you. Don’t dismiss intuition. It can save your life, if you know how to listen to your intuition and understand what you hear.

Upcoming Episodes

This was the manuscript of episode 28 of the podcast Success and Inner Growth. The next Episode, number 29, will discuss the impact of artificial intelligence on our personal life. In the meantime, subscribe here, so that you don’t miss out on further episodes.

The post How to Thrive in an Adverse Environment appeared first on Success and Inner Growth.

I published already in September 2020 the episode Stability and Resilience in Success and Inner Growth. But now the time has come to expand on that concept and add the concept of focus into the picture

The Relationship between Focus and Stability

Stability allows for processes in a business environment and habits in your personal life. In a stable environment, many events come up repeatedly. Therefore, you can reuse your decisions and responses in a stable environment many times. No agonizing over the same problem again and again.

We call such reusable decisions and responses in business life processes based on policies. In our personal life, they are habits based on values and beliefs. If you get your values and habits, your policies, and processes right, a huge amount of attention and energy becomes available for better use.

This extra energy and attention help of course to tackle and overcome the next barrier holding you back, otherwise preventing your next step on your journey to success. But excellent results become only possible, if you focus your free energy and attention like a laser beam.

Your detailed and carefully employed attention helps to find opportunities to tackle your problems, while organizing your energy allows you to act and break the barriers at their weakest points.

Creating Stability

The first source of your stability is your own strength. I am talking here mainly about your physical and mental health. Knowledge and wisdom will of course help protecting and growing your personal strength. Learning adds reach and impact.

The second source of strength is your network. The right people around you help whenever you make a mistake. On top of that, you can employ your resources together in a way, that the whole is more than the sum of the parts.

Therefore, let’s explore both, how to build personal strength, and how to build strong and fruitful relationships with the right people.

Self-Care

Another term for building personal strength is “self-care.” If you don’t care about yourself, stability will be a stranger in your life, while focus will be a rare visitor. So, let me break down the main dimensions of self-care.

Good Food

It is so obvious, that healthy food providing for all nutrition needs of our body is essential. Still, we don’t take the time to cook, buying instead readymade food. Therefore, we don’t even know exactly what we eat.

But there is more to good nutrition. Buying the best food, without dangerous ingredients and full of nutrients is not enough. That’s because everyone has slightly unique needs for a slightly different body. And you, with you unique body have also varying nutrition needs depending on your activities, mood, and overall health. Therefore, eating the right food demands not only attention to the things we eat. The second requirement is listening to your body. Pay attention to signals like appetite, energy levels, and also pain signals.

Enough Sleep

The next dimension of self-care is sleep. Your body needs sleep, and so does your mind. For your body, sleeping means cleaning up the mess left by the day. On top comes testing body functions, repairing damage inflicted during the day and strengthening any weak spots.

But your mind needs also sleep. A whole lot of information ended up during the day in your short-term memory. Your mind needs sleep time to sift through that pile, structure it. A lot will be dismissed as noise, marked as already known, and filed in the appropriate folder. But then, some information stands out. It does not neatly fit into our world view. It is strange in our known world. Your mind need sleep to get hold of those ones, search in its huge database for related information and make sense of it.

But those strange and challenging bits are often the most valuable ones. They can help you to reframe the most challenging problems and guide you towards creative solutions. Lack of sleep is the equivalent of throwing those nuggets into the waste bin.

Learning

Paying attention to the world, your body, and to yourself allows you to learn. Those strange and otherwise disturbing nuggets help you to build new and unique skills. Knowing your needs and desires allows you to decide what to learn.

The Second Pillar of Stability

Your own strength is one pillar. But that is not enough. Stability needs a second pillar: good relationships. If you want success, you need focus.  And because focus is impossible without stability, and success without stability is not even a pipe dream. Therefore, let’s move to the second pillar of stability: Relationships.

Building a Network

A network is a bunch of people helping each other’s to reach their respective goals. The best networks connect different people with different interests and aspirations. Networking is not always easy, and many people are reluctant to join or build a network. I admit that I belonged to this group. But such reluctance and fear made me run many times against the same wall.

The life blood of networks is giving and taking, while living the own life and allowing others to live theirs.

Giving and Taking

Giving and taking is the lifeblood of all economic activity. To participate, you need something to give and the willingness to accept what others have on offer. In other words, you must on one hand develop your own talents and skills, but on the other hand you must also appreciate the talents, skills, and talents of others.

If you lack skills, there is little you can give. But you will receive little for your work, even with the best and most unique skills without the ability and willingness to appreciate others, accept their contribution, and to leave them room to grow and improve.

Yes, it is so important that I repeat it a third time. The main ingredient of networking is the willingness to develop yourself, use your talents, hone your skills. But openness to others, appreciating their contribution with awe, and accepting their gifts with joy is equally important.

People, who must compete in everything, will obviously struggle to build a great network. They have a challenging time to accept the gifts and contributions of others, because accepting that implies that those others can perform the task better than they themselves. Therefore, without appreciation of others balance of giving and taking is impossible. If you cannot appreciate the skills, talents, and contributions of others, you will give and give and give without taking enough. That is, until you break down.

But balanced giving and taking, together with the opportunity to focus on your strengths and talents, is not the only precondition for a great network. The network also needs reliability.

Why Reliability?

If you try to build a relationship, you start with small give and takes. You offer a small favor and wait how it will be returned. If you get a return favor, you might offer more, expecting the other person to match it again.

After a few rounds you have a pretty good idea what to expect. Reliability means now, that you and the people in your network live up to the expectations they create.

Obviously, the best way to disconnect from people and lose access to that network and to poison your relationships features unclear expectations and broken promises.

Therefore, it is imperative to create realistic expectations and to live up to explicit and implicit promises. The big question is here: How to get there?

Taking Yourself Seriously

Reliability is not just a matter of words. Reliability is about thoughts and behavior, and about your relationship with yourself. If you know your own priorities and the resources you have at hand, then you are in the position to make a promise and keep it. But, if you are clear with yourself, you know also when to decline a request because it would destroy your focus, overstretch your resources, or for any other reason you might have to say “no.”

The art to say no is one the foundation of reliability. If and when you take yourself seriously, knowing your goals, your skills, and your resources, then you know when to decline a request. And obviously, if you know why to say no, you can let your opposite know about the reason and avoid hurting him or her personally.

On the other and, if you conclude that you

• want to say yes to a request
• have the means to live up to your words
• and this additional task chimes nicely with your goals

then it is easy to make a promise and keep it. Reliability is not a matter of pressure and fear. Instead, it is a matter of self-consciousness and the skill of saying no.

Build a Habit of a Daily Review

The daily routine of an unbiased look at

• your progress towards your goals and aspirations
• your resources as they grow or shrink
• the people around you with their needs and the opportunities they offer

almost guarantees to you the ability to maintain a stable environment. Dedicate ten or 15 minutes per day to such a ritual. The big reward is the ability to manage your focus and direct it to the things that do indeed matter most for you.

Use Stability to Focus on Your Mission

Living in a stable environment, surrounded, and protected by a network characterized by clarity, mutual trust, reliability, and open mindedness you can now scan your path for upcoming challenges. If you see a challenge early on, you can assess the resources and skills you need to tackle it successfully. Then you focus your attention to acquire what you need, prepare, and execute your response.

Upcoming Episodes

This is the manuscript of episode twenty-seven of the podcast Success and Inner Growth. The next Episode will be ready by the end of the year. The topic will be: How to Thrive in a Hostile Environment. In the meantime, subscribe here, so that you don’t miss out on further episodes.

The post Stability and Focus appeared first on Success and Inner Growth.

It took me a bit of time to continue my Success and Inner Growth series. I needed that time to think and rebalance my life. But here we go again.

I do not know, if you are familiar with Napoleon Hill’s sentence: “What you can conceive and believe, you can achieve.” The way from conceiving to achieving is part of that way, but by far not the whole story.

Today, I want to share my two cents.

Step by Step from Inspiration to Manifestation

Step by step sounds nice. But you will ask: What steps? Here is a list:

1. Inspiration
2. Imagination
3. Expression
4. Commitment
5. Focus and Power
6. Transformation
7. Manifestation

If I may return to the sentence from Napoleon Hill: To conceive something starts in the border area between imagination and expression. Imagination and visions can be fluid and do not always include clarity. To conceive means creating concepts, thus adding clarity and structure. Transforming our vision into concepts entails looking at the details and then establishing relationships between the different and aspects parts of the picture.

After doing so, we can turn our vision into a project and develop a plan. But the best plan does not help, if we do not execute it. Therefore, we need to commit ourselves to that plan. We must merge with that plan, so that the plan becomes part of us, and we become part of the plan.

After commitment comes action. You move towards the goal you have set, until you reach a point of resistance. You use all your skills and do whatever it takes to understand and overcome the resistance. This allows you to enter the world of your desires. But the journey from inspiration to manifestation is not yet complete, because you feel here like a stranger. Your transformation continues, you grow into your new life. In the process, you become different person.

Now, you are at home, again. Your new life becomes the undisputed reality, and if you turn your eyes back to your earlier life, it looks strange and impossible, quite the same way as your new life looked, when you started to image it.

Allow Your Soul to Inspire Your Mind

Inspiration is a matter of energy. Therefore, receiving inspiration requires opening up to the energy around you. To do so, you need a calm, peaceful, safe place that is easy to reach.

And importantly: ban all sources of poisonous energy from your environment. Any environment with poisonous energy forces you to cut your energy flows off, and in the process, inspiration cannot access you, either.

Further, you must set time aside for communicating with your soul and other sources of energy. Block in your calendar at least 30 minutes per day as time for yourself and make yourself unavailable during this time. Withdraw to your safe, peaceful, and calm refugium, open up and allow things to happen. Have a notebook handy and jot down your ideas or thoughts for further review.

Imagine the World Outlined by Your Inspiration

This is the domain of your creativity. Listening to the impulses coming from your soul provides you with a wealth of ideas. But, while arriving as inspirations, those ideas belong still to the sphere of energy, and they are not completely connected to your world.

The task of imagination is connecting those inspirations to your daily life. You imagine following the inspiration and observe, what you experience in the process. According to the result, your imagination has shown you, you refine the idea, tweak it here a little bit, dismiss there a small aspect, ad here another ankle. This process goes back and forth between your body and your soul, until you have a 5-dimensional image, where every dimension represents one of your senses:

• seeing
• hearing
• touching
• smelling
• tasting

You keep tweaking the picture, until is is attractive to your soul and brings joy into your life as a human.

After creating that attractive image, you have a goal. Create now a vison board representing that goal with its most important aspects and place it on a point where you see it all the time. This goal will turn out to be the magnet, pulling you into the direction of your choice. Obviously, you will fine tune it on your journey, because the closer you get, the more you can see the details.

Express Your Vision in Words

The next milestone on the journey from inspiration to manifestation asks you to structure the image you created as your goal.

Why is that important? Structure allows you to act, while a lack of structure will result in a situation, where all kind of circumstances have the power to push you around, like an autumn leaf is blown around by the wind.

The ability to structure their own world is the one thing differentiating humans from animals. And the outstanding tool of humans for structuring experiences and impressions is the language. You must connect your goals and aspirations with the power provided to us humans by language. If you fail to put them in words, they will wither away turning a fairy tale.

Structuring your vision and expressing it in words means work. This is in fact good news, because a work process can be replicated, and everybody can learn it. So, no excuses, here!

Create a Mind Map Reflecting Your Vision

You start structuring your vision by creating a mind map. Create shapes representing the big ideas behind your vision and name them. Move them around and connect them to each other. Create additional shapes with more detailed aspects of each big idea and name them. Assemble them step by step in a meaningful way. Look also for relationships between the details. This makes more relationships and dependencies visible, refining the structure.

Write It Down

Now, that you have created your mind map, it is time to describe it with words. Write a text into your notebook, describing this beautiful image with all the concepts, sub-concepts, the web relationships, and the dependencies between them. Writing your ideas down in words carries three big benefits:

• Every word represents a concept. Although the meaning of words varies slightly between one person or another, there is certainly a shared understanding of a word’s meaning within a distinct cultural context. Therefore words, and especially written words, challenge you to think carefully and with great diligence.
• Writing your vision down into words protects you also from self-delusion. You have written it into your notebook. It will be there, whenever you open it again and look. at it. Writing should not prevent you from refining your vision and clarifying your mission, but your words are there. It is now impossible to maintain: “I never thought that” and it is difficult to protest: “I never meant it”: Therefore, writing it down also offers a handy tool for self-control.
• At the end of this process of verbal expression emerges something like an outline of the path you are going to take in pursuit of your effort to turn your vision into reality.

But most importantly: expressing your thoughts in words allows you to share your vision with other people and makes your mission visible to people around you.

Talk about Your Plan

Sharing your vision with people and making it visible will open some doors for you, although it will also hurt some old relationships with people, who do not like the way you have changed.

These changes of relationships, and the need to let some people go, leads you to the next step on your journey from inspiration to manifestation.

Transforming Your Vision into Your Mission

After coming out with your new vision, your goals and intentions, your life will start to change automatically. There will be some changes you anticipated, and others which take you by surprise. Anyway, old habits and beliefs, which do not resonate well with the new path you took, will ask you: “Are you serious, dropping an old friend and servant like me?” Commitment means answering those habits and beliefs: “You have to change, or I will drop you, indeed.”

Some steps you have to take on your path will lead you clearly out of your comfort zone. Your old persona might yell: “Are you serious? I will never do this, and I cannot?” Commitment means here to answer: “Yes, you will, and You can – even if I do not know yet exactly, how!”

A lot of doubt and internal resistance will pop up, and you must engage them. There is no benefit in saying: “I know that I will succeed,” while silently thinking that you will not succeed.

You must step out of your comfort zone, entering unknown terrain, get used to it and learn to feel secure and safe in that setting. Commitment means here learning, trying, failing, standing up again.

Remember the determination, despair, and pride you felt as a toddler, after deciding that crawling on the floor is not your way of life. You decided that you must walk on your legs, and you will! And it did not take too long, until your Mama was running behind you and stopped you before you could run on the street.

Merge Yourself with Your Mission

Going through all this doubt, disbelief and even ridicule, tackling each of them one by one creates in you the confidence, determination, and ruthlessness you need to follow through with your plan and progress on the path you have sketched out so diligently. You and you plan merge into the same thing, fulfilling your vision turns into your mission.

At this point, you are ready to encounter the next milestone on the journey from inspiration to manifestation.

Overcome any Resistance with the Help of clearly Targeted and Focused Action

In the last step you dealt with the hurdles inside your mind. You tackled and overcame your doubts and amended your beliefs. You are determined to succeed.

That means you have the mindset you need to overcome resistance coming from your environment.

But before taking that outside resistance straight on, you must first understand two things:

• From where does this outside resistance come?
• Which benefits does it bring into our lives?

Only after understanding the essence of outside resistance, we can move on to tackle and overcome it. Therefore, I want to share first a few thoughts about the sources and merits of outside resistance.

If we understand that we have been building those barriers by ourselves, we know that we will be able to overcome them in order to fulfil our mission.

The Sources of Outside Resistance

All outside resistance reflects our past life. Our actions, decisions and even feelings take on their own life. Moreover, when we repeat our behavior many times, it materializes in our living environment.

This sounds a bit theoretical. But think about it:

• Your social habits determine to a large degree with whom you can connect.
• Eating habits determine the shape and strength of your body.
• Sleeping habits have an enormous influence on your ability to take in information through your senses.
• Altogether, those ever-repeating behavior heavily influences our access to information, income, social status, and the resources we can mobilize to get things done.

Therefore, we can say our past decisions and habits materialize and act as barriers whenever we try to accomplish a fundamental change of our life. Whenever we try to change tack, they turn into barriers blocking our path from inspiration to manifestation, trying to hold us back in our current state of affairs.

Barriers Stabilize and Protect Our Lives

Although we perceive those walls around our current world as obstacles and barriers, they exist for a reason. Like the structure of a house, they provide stability to our life. Imagine, how life would be, if each and every one of our thoughts and wishes would materialize immediately. It would be a big mess.

Therefore, we must appreciate the existing structure in our life. We must examine that structure, test the barriers and probe them. That leads us to a deeper understanding of our current situation, the one we want to leave. We can now define with accuracy, what exactly we must, want and will change in our life.

Understanding the current structure of our life with its different components, and how they depend on each other, allows us to find the right place to pierce one of those barriers and open a window or door for us.

Appreciating, examining, and understanding the structures in our life helps us to move on to the next milestone on our journey from inspiration to manifestation. It opens a door to a new world, while helping to avoid those catastrophic events, where the sky seems to fall on our heads.

Settle into That New World

After defeating those barriers, that used to look so powerful and insurmountable, we arrive now at a strange place. It is impossible for us to return to that cage of our past, but we don’t quite fit yet into that new world.

We need to explore it, sometimes with fear, sometimes with awe. We observe, how people who are already there, behave and act. Learning, evolving, and growing is now the order of the day.

We left fear and self-depreciation behind us. Therefore, it will not take long, and we have adapted, morphing into a natural part of this life beyond the barriers and fences.

The Journey from Inspiration to Manifestation of Our Dreams Transformed Us

After some time, we learned a new way to make decisions, changed our behaviors and adapted our habits. We morphed into a new person, and nobody, not even we ourselves, imagined from the beginning how we would be.

Now, that we reached a new balance for our life, things will stabilize again. A new structure will emerge in our life, a structure that fits our new personality, supports our new habits of thinking and behavior. This structure provides new stability, and with that renewed space to dream, attracting fresh inspiration.

Upcoming Episodes

This is the manuscript of episode 26 of the podcast Success and Inner Growth. If I find it possible and useful, I continue to post here transcripts, but at times, there will be unscripted live episodes, without transcripts. In the meantime, subscribe here, so that you don’t miss out on further episodes.

The post 7 Steps From Inspiration to Manifestation appeared first on Success and Inner Growth.

Although the word “process” does not sound so exciting, and even boring, having that process and improving it continuously makes the difference between success and failure.

Therefore, we need an outline for such a systematic approach to tackle those challenges, to create a process for managing the unexpected and overwhelming twists and turns in our life.

If we want to grow ourselves into a person looking forward to challenges with joy and confidence, we must first understand those roadblocks.

• Why are they present in our life?
• Which benefits do they offer?
• Why do we fear them?

Definition of Challenge

What is a challenge? For the purpose of this podcast episode, I want to define challenge as a powerful barrier on our path, without an obvious way to overcome it.

Challenges show often unexpectedly up and without invitation. But sometimes we know very well that a certain problem will pop up somewhere on our way, and that we do not yet have a solution.

How do I know it is a Challenge?

So, we are walking along the path of our life, trying to reach our next goal or landmark, and wow: an obstacle springs up and forces us to stop immediately. It forces us even to turn one or two steps back and look for cover. This is the handshake of a challenge, the way it says “hello.”

It could come in the guise of a huge mountain, a fast-moving river blocking our way, or an angry crowd of people demanding we should not dare to be and behave differently than they do.

A challenge is powerful and interrupts us, wrecks our beloved routine. We do not understand challenges always in full, but they bring certainly fresh color and energy into our life.

Why do we have challenges in our life?

Challenges are our opportunities to gain experience and to grow. When we are ready for them, and only when we are ready for them, the spiritual sphere – be it in form of our soul or God himself – throw those obstacles into our way.

Therefore, challenges are both: they are a sign that we have grown to the next level, and they are a request and invitation to move on, stretch again and grow further.

The First Steps to Tackle a Challenge at Hand

Now, we arrived at this fresh and overwhelming roadblock. How to respond? We might tend to become angry, because our plan does obviously not work out as expected. But that would be very wrong. Keep your cool and take a deep breath. Then, say hello to this new opportunity for growing.

Welcome the Challenge

Welcoming the challenge seems counterintuitive. But appreciating it means telling the new task something like: “Hi, nice to see you. Let us have fun together. How can I help you, and how do you want to help me?”

Every problem coming along our way contains an opportunity for us to grow and to learn. Even if we do not yet know the contents of the opportunity and lesson we are going to receive, we should be curious and open-minded.

Hiding or trying to run away from the challenge will not help. Both, our soul, and God are persistent, when they offer us a lesson and ask us to stretch. If we reject challenges, they will return under a new guise.

So, the best attitude is loving those challenges.

Love your challenges, because…

• they signal, that you have grown to the next level
• they help you to move on and continue growing
• the very fact, that a certain challenge pops up in front of you tells you that you can master it

Be Curious!

Welcoming someone does not mean just saying “hi,” then turning around and moving on. Be curious. Ask: “Where are you coming from? What made you show up, here and now? What is your purpose, your intention? Then, take a bit time and open up for the awe, for the new energy you can feel around you.

Collect Information

Notwithstanding all the fascination with that new facet of your life, do not allow yourself to be carried away. Start moving around with a respectful distance, circle it. Try to look at it from all sides, from the left and from the right, from the top and from the bottom. At times, you might retreat one or two steps, so that you do not miss the big picture over all those fresh details. Invite the challenge even for a small dance, and do not be too much in a hurry.

After interacting with the challenge enough, it will finally reveal its mission to you, hand over its precious gift. And then it will wave its magic ward and transform you into a slightly stronger person, blessed with additional germs of wisdom.

To Tackle a Challenge Opens up its Gift

Whenever you encounter a challenge but refuse to tackle it and try instead to run, you reject the gift it has on offer. This is wasteful.

The gift is threefold:

Improving your understanding of yourself

Your environment does mirror you, and so does your new challenge. As it is now part of your environment, the challenge carries certainly a story about you. Listening to such stories pays, even if their messages look sometimes in the beginning not so lovely. Embrace that message, because it will help you enhance your ability to see, feel. understand, and upgrade yourself and your relationship with your world.

Refining your understanding of the world

Refining our understanding of the world is closely related to understanding ourselves, because our environment mirrors our energy.

But on the other hand, they are not the same. We decide, which space we are living in and with whom we share our time. But that does not mean, that we are our bedroom, and the people around us are certainly distinct from ourselves.

Nevertheless, people experience vastly different worlds, even if they live in the same condominium or use the same train on their way to work. In this sense, understanding your own world, and knowing how and why it is so different from the worlds of the people around you will tell you much about yourself.

If you would rather live in your neighbor’s world, it makes good sense to look, what he is doing differently, where he thinks, feels, and behaves differently.

Often, a challenge comes up because people around you reject the way you think or behave. This is a message to you. Ask in such cases yourself if you would rather be like them. In this case, heed their message. But often, challenges arise from people, who want to hold you back from your journey and have you stay in their restricted world. In that second case, the message contained in your challenge asks you to let those people go. In the end, it is up to you to decide, which one is your world.

Seeing Yourself Grow

In most cases, a new challenge is also a sign, that you have been growing recently. That neighbor, whose world you would rather share, would not have you allowed a glimpse inside his world if you would not have qualified for that.

And your old friend, who wants to hold you back and tells you to remain as you have been, would not have to take that trouble if you were not about to grow out of your old world.

Understanding the Message

A barrier in your life does not necessarily mean, that you have to conquer it. You might encounter a message from your soul, that you should reconsider your direction. Therefore, do not run blindly against every resistance showing up on your way. If you find resistance, examine, and explore it. Weight it. Look for the message it has to tell you. Then decide how to heed that message, because such messages are the fundamental rewards we receive if we tackle that challenge.

Help is Available to Tackle the Challenge

After understanding, that every challenge contains a message sent to us, we need to learn how to parse that message.

The best thing: helpers are available. Here is a list of such helpers. Allow them to do their job!

Internal Helpers

• Your Conscious Mind. Your conscious mind will help you to pick up the obvious. It will know, what you did, and what results you got. Your conscious mind will help you to avoid the most obvious errors, and it will check the plausibility of the suggestions and hints coming from a huge variety of sources.
• The Subconscious Mind. This is arguably the most important tool at your disposal when a need to tackle a challenge arises. The subconscious mind connects all experiences and information coming from your senses together, looking for patterns and meaning between them. While the subconscious mind serves up hidden truths and subtle patterns, it is up to your conscious mind to validate them and make them actionable. Allowing this pair working together instead of playing them against each other provides a huge comparative advantage.
• Your Soul. This is the master of your life, the one providing purpose, mission, and energy. Your soul decided to build a body, and she devises a life for you providing the experiences she needs to grow. It is quite possible, that some of your challenges are messages and interventions from your soul, guiding you on the way she intended for you. If you are looking for a happy life, full of vibrant positive energy, you better listen to your soul.

External helpers

• Peers. Those are people moving along the same path with you, and often they try to tackle a similar challenge. Some peers are a bit more advanced while others walk a bid behind you. But they all are on a comparable way. By sharing your path with them, you can observe your own progress. They allow you also to get an early idea, what to expect next and where to take care.
• Leaders. They are people, who have gone through similar experiences. They managed to understand similar challenges on their own way and converted them from a barrier into a launch pad. If you find leaders, observe them, and ask them how they did it, they can be a major help in turning challenges into assets.
• God. One of the best kept secrets of life is this: Whenever you ask God for help, he will respond. Although God does not take orders from humans and helps sometimes in surprising and unexpected ways, he will not let you down. On the other hand, if you remain silent, God will remain silent, too. He will never force himself into your life.

The Process to Tackle a Challenge

We can conclude that the main function of challenges in our life is conveying messages to us. Those messages might come from our soul, our environment, or sometimes even from God. We can turn challenges into assets by exploring their messages, then understanding and heeding what we hear. Such messages may relate to topics like…

• understanding our environment
• understanding ourselves
• skills we need to build
• goals we need to refine
• adapting our path to those goals

This list is obviously not exclusive. Add, whatever may apply to your own life.

Access as much information as possible

After encountering a challenge, collect in a first step all information available. For this purpose, you need an open mind, curiosity. Just collect all information available and send it to your subconscious mind.

Allow your subconscious mind to work

The next step is calming down and allowing your subconscious mind connecting everything you passed to it with related information and experiences you encountered already in your life. Remain confident and fearless, but also calm and cautious.

Retrieve the response from your subconscious mind

After giving your subconscious mind enough time to crunch the information, retrieve its results. This works best in kind of brainstorming sessions. It often involves journaling, at least write down on paper, what your subconscious mind serves up. Try to get it all, and do not filter it.

Validate the input from subconscious mind and outside sources

Step number four validates the responses and hints coming from your subconscious mind. Look also for people who faced similar challenges before, or for professionals who saw and supported others going through similar experiences. Combine the outside input with the input from your subconscious mind.

Plan

If that brings clarity, plan to act. If not, send the whole bundle back to your subconscious mind.

Execute your plan

Next, execute your plan. Do it carefully, diligently, and step by step. Here, you need to combine focus with openness, because you need to know, what you are doing and then you need to listen carefully to the response provided by the challenge.

Review the results

Observe the results of your action and send this feedback back to your subconscious mind. Retrieve additional input from the subconscious mind. Validate everything again and combine it with additional outside sources of skills, knowledge, and wisdom.

If you use this process to tackle challenges, it will take only few rounds and you will be well on top of them, ready to move on to your next milestone.

Upcoming Episodes

This is the manuscript of episode twenty-four of the podcast Success and Inner Growth. After this episode, I will change the format of the podcast to include interviews with interesting guests. Those interviews will not be scripted, and therefore, I will not publish further manuscripts. If I find it possible and useful, I continue to post here transcripts. In the meantime, subscribe here, so that you don’t miss out on further episodes.

But this blog remains a place for me to do loud thinking, and let you look over my shoulder when developing my concepts.

The post How to Tackle a Challenge appeared first on Success and Inner Growth.

Life is like riding a bicycle: We must move to keep balance. Nevertheless, if we move into a wrong direction, we will never reach.

But the world is full of opportunities for moving aimlessly, while powering the treadmills set up by other people solely for their own benefit. Therefore, it is essential to understand the difference between movement and action if we want to reach our goals.

Action is more than Movement

If we think about it, movement describes the mere process of change. This change or movement can run in any direction and can have different forms. It can have the shape of a circle or spiral. It can involve distinct steps. But common to all the different shades of movement it the fact, that movement needs energy.

Obviously, not all change is positive for us. To get positive results, we must direct the change. This means, we must direct our movement. We must decide, which outcome we want to achieve. And then, we must find targeted moves, that will allow these desired changes to materialize. Acting as opposed to moving randomly means now performing those well-defined acts we identified as helpful to induce the change we intend to see.

You Need a Plan

Your plan is a map, showing the terrain between your current state of affairs, and the reality you want to create for yourself. If you don’t have a plan, you must draw one up. Although you can include into your plan information and suggestions from others, you should not allow anybody to draw up a plan for you. There is a high probability, that any plan drawn up by a third person for you will neither fit your purpose nor lead you to your perfect world.

How to Build a Plan

A good plan has four different elements:

• The starting point
• The goal, the end point of the plan.
• Milestones
• Step stones leading from one milestone to the next

Overall, the plan is our tool to focus our energy and transform movement into action.

Let me now talk a bit more about the different elements of an action plan.an.

The Starting Point

If you want to change your life in a meaningful way, you need to asses your current situation as a first step. Your plan needs clear answers on the following questions:

• Where do I happen to be right now?
• How did I reach this point in my life?
• Where do I want to move from here?

The answers on those questions define the starting point of your quest for change. You know, where you are and the general direction you want to take.

The Goal

The next element of the plan is the goal. Here you get specific about the intended outcome of the plan. Imagine in detail and with all your senses, how life will look like after you reached your goal! Dream your success and explore, what you would enjoy most in your new upcoming life. Check in your dreams also for unintended consequences of reaching your goal and adjust it step by step to strengthen the positives and eliminate negative aspects of your goal.

This process gives you clarity, connects your energy to the future state of your life as expressed in your goal and protects you from adopting goals, which shine in the first moment but turn out to have in the end a negative impact on your life.

Barriers and Hurdles as Milestones

Milestones mark the progress you make on your journey towards your goal. They come along as major hurdles and barriers, seemingly cutting off your way.

When you map out your path from your current reality towards a major goal, you will probably foresee at least some of those barriers. Try to order them in a useful sequence and appoint conquering them as your milestones or interim goals.

Such milestones are natural landmarks, making your the progress on your chosen path visible to you and to the world.

The Steps

If we want to master a challenge, we must show up. The steps in our plan mark the path, leading us from one challenge to the next. Those steps are entirely doable, and often repetitive. But performing those simple steps is also a necessary condition for reaching our goal. Therefore, we need enough discipline and patience.

Let me give you an example to clarify this abstract concept. Imagine, that you decide you need to look for a new professional challenge, because you want to be able to pay for a decent school for your child. After clarifying your goal and interim goal, you need to take a sequence of steps:

You start by updating your resume. Then, you look for openings coming close to your intention. The obvious way is studying advertisements, but also contacting people you know to get a clear idea about the skillset you need for your new job. Next, you match your current skills with the skillset you need for the new job. Now comes the time to upgrade your skills, if needed.

After bringing yourself into perfect shape for the task at hand, you start to apply for your dream job. Activate to that end your personal network and apply for publicly advertised job openings. You will get invitations for job interviews.

Present yourself well, but don’t forget to listen carefully and observe the reactions of all people participating in the meetings. This will help you to refine your message, until you found the people who are willing to provide you the chance and the necessary support for tackling the new challenge you have been looking for.

The Plan is Essential for Transforming Movement into Action

The plan is our tool of choice to transform random movement in to deliberate movement and action. The time of wasting our energy and dancing to tune of other people’s pipes now is over, because we can observe and measure our progress. Whenever we see that our path deviates from the way mapped out in our plan, we have the chance to take a look and correct the situation.

At times, we must adapt our plan. But more often, we need to sharpen our focus, cut out the noise and shield ourselves from hostile influences and energy.

If we stay determined and focused, retaining at the same time the open mind to adapt and improve our plan, it will lead us without fail to our chosen goal.

Episode 24

This was the manuscript of episode 23 of the podcast Success and Inner Growth. Episode 24 will follow in the first days of 2022. The rough topic will be: “How to tackle a challenge.” You can find all episodes of the podcast here, and all manuscripts here.

The post Movement and Action appeared first on Success and Inner Growth.