But lately I’ve had a particularly hard time, as I make some major (positive) changes in my life.  I hit these moments where I’m in a foul mood, or I’m just feeling paralyzed, and I’m just stuck.  Sometimes I just stew in that and stay there, but sometimes I actually get intelligent and pull my way out of it.

I’m going to outline the framework that I’ve been using over the last 30 days to really get myself resourceful and motivated (and in a better mood) when I’m feeling stuck.  Hopefully it will help you, too, and if you do I truly hope you’ll share it with others.

First Up: Using A Framework to Escape From Paralyzing Emotions

When we feel bad, it’s hard to “feel good” again.  You can’t just wish yourself better, and when you’re in a stuck place, you don’t generally have the mental energy to pull out. Willpower doesn’t help, and “positive thinking” sure as hell doesn’t help.  But falling back on a framework of steps does help, because we humans function well when we have a set of steps to follow.

The reason for this is that steps take the emotion out of our situation and give us direction to simply act.  Duck and Cover.  Stop, Drop, and Roll.  When you know with certainty what to do next, you’re in a much stronger position to take action, even when you’re panicking.  (And it doesn’t have to be words, either – just think of Lamaze breathing, which expectant mothers practice well ahead of time so they can slip back into it during the stress of labor.)

You can call these verbal step-by-step tools anchors if you want, because they’re ways to anchor your emotional state to a time where you knew what to do and you felt prepared.  So I’m going to lay out a framework that you can use as your own anchor when you need to reset your mood, and while it’s seven steps long, it’s hella effective at getting the job done.

The seven steps form the acronym ACT FAST, and I picked that because I felt that it was a pretty empowering term as it forces you to presuppose you have a workable course of action.  So let’s dive in.

A: AGREE With Yourself That You Don’t Want To Be In This Mood Right Now.

This seems hokey, but it’s important for this reason: Once you agree with yourself that this is not the right mood for you, you’re revoking permission to stew in your own juices and keep the “pity party” going.  Think about it: When we’re mad, the thing we hate the most is when someone tries to cheer us up, because on some level we want to be mad and stay mad, or be depressed and stay depressed.

And that’s not always a bad thing. Maybe we want to stay sad because on some level we know we need to hang out in this mental state and really look at what’s making us sad, to really connect with it and deal with it instead of pretending it doesn’t exist.  Maybe we want to stay mad because we’re not finished processing our emotions and figuring out what our situation means and what we’re going to do about it.

So don’t take this as me saying “man up and stop crying.”  What I am saying is that at some point if you want to move forward in a functional way, and not feel paralyzed, you need to agree that this stage of emotion has to be finite, it has to come to an end so you can deal with the solution that the emotion demands of you.  When you’re ready to deal with it, you agree with yourself that you’re ready to shift gears.

Let’s say you’ve lost your job and you’re freaking out about what to do.  You could tell yourself something like, “Okay, I’m ready to stop being scared of this situation now.”  Then you move on to the second step.

C: CLARIFY The Mood or Emotion You Want To Move Towards

Now that you’re ready to change, you need to make sure that you know where you’re headed so you have something you can focus on.  It’s not enough to say “I just don’t want to feel this way anymore,” because then you’re still swimming in the Sea of What You Don’t Want.  You need to have a focus.

It could be as simple as defining the mood you want to be in with a single word or two. Resourceful.  Confident.  Infectiously Happy.  Stable.  Calm.  Controlled.  Helpful.  Pleasant.  Civil.  Generous.  Whatever it is, you need to give it a name.

Then you combine it with the last thought, so you can tell yourself something like “I’m ready to stop feeling scared and start feeling resourceful.”

There’s nothing magical about these words, and again, it’s not positive thinking.  This is all about creating something you can say to yourself to pull the emotion out of your mental state and focus on what you can do next and what you can influence.

When you start getting scattered and lose track of where you are, and you’re stressing, you can fall back on your statement: “I’m ready to stop feeling scared and start feeling resourceful.”  You’re putting yourself back in control and you’re ready for the next step.

T: TAKE Responsibility For Taking Immediate Action.

Now that you know what you want to move away from and what you want to move towards, it’s time to face reality: It ain’t gonna happen unless you make it happen.  You’re going to have to consciously accept responsibility for getting yourself in a better state.

This is a big deal, because it means that you‘re going to have to revoke permission to blame other people so you can do this.  Note that I’m not saying that you’re absolving other people of blame – if someone just screwed you over, then they’re still at fault, and you don’t pretend that didn’t happen.

But focusing on that isn’t going to help you get to your desired emotional state.  You have to take full responsibility for what thoughts you’re going to focus on and what attitudes you’re going to reinforce, because no one is going to do it.  No one is coming to your rescue.

You want out of this emotion? You’re going to have to do it yourself.  the good news is you totally can do it yourself, and we’re going to cover that in the next four steps so you can get there.

So now our statement to ourselves gets a little longer – it’s something like, “I’m ready to stop feeling scared and start feeling resourceful, and I’m going to make that happen right now.”

We’re going to move into four questions right now, and you’ll need to memorize them so you can get yourself back on track instantly when you’re backsliding into the emotional state you don’t want to be in.

F: “What Would I Need To FOCUS On To Feel this Way?”

This question is a really empowering one, because it forces you to stop thinking about the things that are draining you and gets you to acknowledge that there are things you can focus on that will give you more mental and emotional energy.

When you ask yourself this question, you’re putting yourself on the spot – you’re saying, “Hey, if I wanted to feel resourceful (for this job loss example), what would I need to focus on?”  You’re presupposing the answer is available to you rather than saying “How do I get out of this funk?”, which is an open ended question that invites an “I dunno …” response.

Think about it. If you were feeling resourceful in this job loss situation – imagine that you were for a second – what would you be focusing on in order to feel resourceful?  Would you be thinking of all your contacts and references, about renewing old work relationships?  Would you be taking stock of all the online job boards, or maybe sites like LinkedIn?  Or would you be revisiting your skills and experience and seeing if another career would be more fun?

Ask yourself this question, and write down the answers. You’ll need that written note to look back on when the painful emotion you’re moving away from resurfaces.  Have a written library of answers to this question and you can benefit from it when you’re feeling emotionally unable to conjure up answers later.

Sometimes the answer can be external as well.  The first part of my career was spent in software testing, and that’s some boring stuff.  It’s frustrating to test the same thing 100 times and not feel totally unmotivated.  But I’d focus on something external – like the road trip I was going to take with this week’s pay – and that would keep me going.

In one case I was testing training Army courseware for avoiding/disarming landmines, and after the 1,000th retest I was so bored out of my skull I wanted to scream. But I told myself that if I focused on testing it until it was 100% ready, then it would save people’s lives in the field.  Someone’s Dad would be coming home because they didn’t trip a landmine or trigger a roadside bomb.  That didn’t make the job less boring, but it gave me a sense of purpose and a better emotional state.

So think: What would you have to focus on to move towards the mood you want?  There’s always an answer.  Find it and write it down.

A: “What Would I Need To ACT On To Feel The Way I Want To?”

Now that you’ve established what you need to focus on, you need to address what kinds of actions you need to take to build up that feeling.  If you’re depressed and you want to feel happier, maybe you ask yourself, “How can I help 3 people today?” and you do something simple like send an encouraging email, or meet them for lunch, or just send $25 to a charity of your choice in someone else’s name.

Action is important because it’s extremely difficult to feel your way into a different way of behaving.  You know this, or you wouldn’t be stuck in the first place.  When you’re feeling scared or mad or depressed, you can’t just manufacture emotion to get yourself going.

But if you do something – if you take action – you can behave yourself into a different way of feeling.  And it doesn’t have to be directly related to your own issue if that’s causing you friction.  If you hate your life situation and you can’t figure out how to make it better, then focus on helping 5 other people feel better.  Be an encourager, and that will help you pull out of that sense of depression.   Trust me, it works, because it breaks your pattern of feeling helpless and connects you with other people.

But that’s just the start – it’s all well and good to take external actions to get your emotions jump-started, but you also need to get a sense of the actions you need to take relative to your own problems.  In the FOCUS step you will probably come up with things you need to not only focus on, but actually do, and you need to make a list of those actions and start running with them.

Sometimes that’s hard to do – the motivation wanes – and that’s when you fall back on the FOCUS step again.  It will help you get in a better frame of mind to take action.

Moving on, you’ll also need to ask yourself,

S: “What Would I Need To SURROUND Myself With To Feel The Way I Want To?”

This is an overlooked concept when it comes to mood change.  Your surrounding environment plays a huge factor in your mood, and if you don’t consciously take control over it, you’re leaving power “on the table.”  When you arrange your environment in ways that empower you, the chances of you keeping the mood you want to be in go through the roof.

Right now I’m writing this while listening to epic soundtrack music – I personally find that isolating my ears via headphones and keeping high-adventure music going keeps me focused and motivated.  It’s hard to feel complacent when listening to instrumental tracks like “A Storm Is Coming”  and “Rise of the Destroyers” are drowning your ears in epic symphonic goodness.

I know that this kind of music helps me kick ass, but you’ll have your own environmental triggers. Maybe it’s classical music or R&B, or maybe it’s just the silence of an empty room (or noise-cancelling headphones).  Maybe it’s a clean desk, or maybe it’s a desk littered with action figures and crazy stuff.  Maybe it’s wearing your favorite hat, brewing a certain kind of coffee or lighting some incense.

It doesn’t matter what it is - it just matters that you become aware of it, and you leverage it to help create the emotional state you want.  Whether it’s keeping the counters clean, making the bed, soaking in hot bath or cranking up Aerosmith, get a feel for what makes it easier to be in the moods you want to be in.  Then make it easy to build that environment when you need it.

T: “What Would I Need To TELL Myself To Feel The Way I Want To?”

This is where it all comes together – the part where the rubber hits the road and you have to fight against the emotions you want to move away from.  This is where the previous steps all kind of combine and you create this little script you can say to yourself, a litany of conscious choice, as it were, to recalibrate yourself when you’re struggling.

Maybe it’s something like this for the freaking-out-about-the-job-loss example:

“I’m ready to stop feeling scared and start feeling resourceful, and I’m going to make that happen right now.  I’m going to focus on the resources I have, like the 50 past co-workers who can get me leads, the job boards online and the in-demand skills I can show on my resume.  I have  everything I need to make this crazy time less crazy and I know what to do next.

I’m going to make a plan for getting (or creating) the job I want and set aside 3 hours a day to take serious action.  I’m going to neaten up my home office so I can think straight, and make it a relaxing place to work in the meantime.”

If you read this over and over again, what do you think would happen?  Would you keep freaking out about your job?  Or would you start feeling a little bit better?

Yeah, This Takes Some Work, But What The Hell Else Are You Doing?

Most people, if they’ve read this far, will say, “That’s too much work, Dave.”  But seriously, if you’re paralyzed and feeling terrible, you have time on your hands already. You’re just using that time to stew in the emotion instead of making it finite and taking action. I know how it feels, I fight it all the time.

But this is a way out – or at least the beginning of the way out for you.  And it’s easier than you think, because once you understand this process, 9 times out of 10 you won’t have to use all of it.  You’ll just be sitting there stewing and say to yourself, “What would I have to focus on right now if I wanted to get my ass up and exercising?” or “What would I need to change about my surroundings right now to feel a little bit happier?” and that will be enough to get moving.

The quality of your life revolves around the quality of the questions you ask yourself on a minute-by-minute basis.

If you ask yourself, “Why me?” or “What can I possibly do?” you‘re going to be paralyzed.

If you ask yourself “What can I do next, from where I am, with what I have,” you’re going to put yourself in a position of strength.

Ask better questions.  Train yourself to be the sculptor of your moods, rather than being tossed about by urgency and externalities you can’t control.

You can do it.  I hope this helps.

My best to you,

Dave

PS – I think this article can help a ton of people.  Please link to it and spread it on social media sites right now if you agree, even before you leave a comment.

Please re-tweet at the end if you liked it.

This Monday’s Kick: This Is Your Chance

When we’re focused on a goal – especially a big honkin’
one, the finish line can seem awfully far away. And that
distance can drain your desire to take action, because
all you can see is how you’re Not There Yet.

Want to lose 50 pounds, and you still have 49 to go?
… you’re Not There Yet, and your spirits sag.

Want to make $100,000, and you’ve got $99,990 to go?
… you’re Not There Yet, and your motivation slumps.

Want to stop being lazy, and … you still are?
… you’re Not There Yet. And “There” seems forever away.

When you’re in this state of mind, taking action can
be damned hard, because all you’re thinking of is the
problem you don’t want to have and the solution that’s
not yet in your hands. And it drains you.

But you don’t have to settle for that. There’s another way.
Just focus on this very moment as your chance to strengthen
your action-taking muscles.

No, you won’t lose weight by eating well or exercising
today. You’ll achieve that when you eat well almost
every day. So tell yourself “This is my chance to strengthen
this habit again.”

“This is my chance” should be your mantra, and you should
repeat it to yourself every single time you feel your spirits
flagging.

“This is my chance to strengthen this habit.”

“This is my chance to chip away at this fear.”

“This is my chance to build a relationship.”

Whatever you’re resisting (because the finish line is too
far away or too scary), stop resisting. You can’t turn the
tide in a day.

But you can take a few more strokes towards swimming
in the right direction. You can strengthen your action-taking
muscles, if only for the purpose of making it easier next time.

This is my chance.

This is MY chance.

Don’t settle for not taking it, again and again and again.

Changing your life? That’s hard. It’s a lot of work.

Changing what you do for the next 60 seconds? Hell,
you can do that.

This is my chance.

Take it. Now.

That is all,

Dave

(This is a post in the continuing 30 Hours a Day Project series.  To see all available articles, click the Table of Contents link above.)

Now that we’ve covered the introduction, it’s time for Step 1 – we’re going to start uncovering all of the deep-down fears, uncertainties and self-doubts that have been holding you back from making progress at mastering your time.  While that may sound like a tall order, it’s actually a pretty simple process (the hardest part is really just showing up and doing it, but we’ll address that in step four).

But despite the fact that it’s a simple process, I know from hard experience that we can easily create massive internal resistance to facing our problems and shortcomings head on because it’s a seriously uncomfortable task.  The pain of staying where we are is greater than the pain of unpacking our emotional baggage, so most of us stay where we are until the pain ratio changes due to a life crisis or a major “a-ha” moment.

I don’t want you to wait years to get there by chance, so I’m going to step you through a simple series of questions that will make the process as painless – and as quick – as possible.

These questions are really all about creating awareness about what’s going on in your head when you’re feeling fears, uncertainties and doubts about whether something is going to work out (or whether you have what it takes to make it work).  We spend too much of our lives playing victim to subconsciously rehearsed conversations in our head that make us believe we just can’t do it.

Awareness Can Be Curative

The good news is that sometimes awareness itself is enough to start breaking the power of these self-defeating beliefs.  Haven’t you had one of those experiences before where you had to explain to someone the reason why you did something, and even though it seemed like a good reason when it was in your head, when it came out it was, well, kind of stupid?  It may have seemed like a good idea at the time, but once it was out in the open you could see how it just didn’t make sense.

Well, we’re going to duplicate that experience, except instead of waiting for someone else to explain things to, we’re going to have you explain it to yourself so the limiting beliefs can be weakened right now.  As you look at the things that are causing you anxiety, and you get them down on paper, they are going to begin to lose their power almost immediately.

Remember, your brain is a powerful computer, and it loves solving problems.  It loves fixing things, improving them, making them better.  I mean, that’s what brought you to where you are now, reading this.  You’re paying attention because you believe that there are solutions to your problems, simply because I told you there are.  And that means that you’re viewing the situation as fixable, that it really does have a solution – and once your brain believes that, it’s ready to take action.

Belief Is The Tougher Part

But you see, the problem that’s attacking your motivation right now is that in a lot of areas, you don’t necessarily have that belief.  Whether you consciously decided to or not, on some level you feel like some of your problems are permanent, and that you can’t put a solution in place that is really going to work.  That’s what leads you to think or say things like:

• I wish I could do that, but I just don’t have the time …

• I wish I had the willpower to do this or that …

• I just haven’t been able to make that work in the past …

These are the kinds of conversations that we all have in our own heads, and the reason they have such a hold over you is that they tend to trail off like in the examples below rather than force you to really think about them.  They acknowledge the problem, and maybe they even acknowledge a possible solution, but these thoughts dismiss the idea that this solution is accessible to you.  These mental scripts, these limiting beliefs are what we’re about to start taking apart, one by one.

And we’re going to use three simple but powerful tools to defuse these conversations that are hijacking your productivity and we’re going to put the power to act back in your hands.

The first tool is a process called the Doubt Finder, which will step you through three questions that make you completely aware of the limiting beliefs which affect you most frequently.  When you finish this section you should set aside 10 minutes to work on this.  You’ll be answering three questions:

• When I imagine totally diving in and working hard to manage my time, what thoughts tend to pop up to make me feel like I’m not going to succeed?

• Where (and why) have my past efforts to manage my time failed?

• What doubts do those experiences leave me with?

Now, when you go through this process, if you finish before your 10 minutes are up, go back to steps 1 and 2 and ask yourself, “What’s at least one more thing I’ve missed?” or “What else could I come up with?”  Asking yourself leading questions like these tells your brain that you making the assumption that there really is another answer, so it’s more likely to find one.

So go ahead and take a break, just for 10 minutes and make your own Doubt Finder worksheet right now (or download the PDF worksheets for the 30 Hours A Day Project here).  It doesn’t take long at all and will give you instant insight into what’s going on in your head – and more importantly, it will give you targets to attack.  Go ahead and do it now – I’ll wait. 

Fade To Black, and … We’re Back.

All right, do I hope you’ve gone through the Doubt Finder exercise, and learned a little bit more about the conversations that are going on in your head.  If you haven’t done it, please go back now and do it. Really, the rest of this blog series can wait.  Remember, increasing your productivity is all about increasing your follow through, so if you haven’t done the Doubt Finder exercise, stop where you are and do it now.  Again, I’ll wait, just do it now.

Fade To Black, Once More (This Time, With Feeling)

All right, so you really have gone through that Doubt Finder exercise.  You’re walking the walk, and that’s great.

If you followed through on this quick exercise, you’ll be surprised at how many fears, uncertainties and doubts you are allowing to thrive in your brain.  The FUD may seem reasonable at first (such as “There isn’t enough time with all the things I have to do …”) but it’s really your brain being a little unreasonable, a little unrealistic.

It’s making the situation bigger than it really is, it’s ignoring a lot of your possible options, and it’s not taking a hard look at really solving the problem.  And that’s why you’re spinning your wheels when it comes to these situations.

Fortunately, in the next post, we’re going to go over the Doubt Killer exercise, where we’re going to take each and every one of those fears, and we’re going to come up with realistic counterarguments to show each of these issues is based in unreasonable thinking.  We’re going to defuse each of these trouble spots one by one, so get ready to start cutting the red wire (blue wire?  No, red.  No, blue!  No, red!).

But before we move on to the Doubt Killer exercise, for now I want to talk to you about the second important tool that you have at your disposal – the Doubt Capture process.  You’re going to use this process to capture issues as they come up in real-time.

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• Understand exactly what fears, uncertainties and doubts keep you from taking action

• Understand how to eliminate them, one by one

• Have a “doubt killer” tool you can use to kick-start your motivation whenever you need it

Introduction

Staying motivated to develop your time management muscles is crucial to increasing your productivity. It is the fundamental starting point for follow-through, and it has an instant impact on how much stuff you get done every day. But most people struggle with staying motivated to regularly invest time in developing the key skills that have an insanely high return on investment. Desire decreases. Self-doubt creeps in. Life just tends to “get in the way.”

But if you’re serious about moving towards a 30 hour day, you’ve got to stay motivated to increase your time management skills and sincerely believe that your efforts will pay off. It’s the only way you’ll make yourself take the steady, consistent action that puts you in command of your schedule. And if you don’t learn how to hold onto that motivation, you’ll just be spinning your wheels for another year, wondering where all the time went.

Now, we could spend some time talking about how to get motivated in the first place – but we’re not going to do that, because it’s not the highest and best use of our focus here. Instead, we’re going to discover the things that are currently destroying your motivation, and we’re going to work on those first.

Fixing The Holes In Your Boat

Now, focusing on the problems first may be a different approach than you’re used to (don’t people tell you to “think positive”?), but let me frame it for you this way. Imagine you’re cruising across the ocean on a sailboat that has two serious problems – first, there are holes in the sails, and second there are holes in the boat itself, all along the bottom.

Which holes do you take care of first? Well, if you patch up the sail, you’ll increase the power of the wind pushing you forward. But if you don’t take care of the holes in the boat, you’ll not only slow down on account of the water, you’ll start going in an entirely different direction as well – straight down.

Down means the journey is over. So it’s a no-brainer that you take care of the holes in the boat first. Sure, you can bail water while you fix the sail, alternatively, but that slows you down over the long run and it’s a huge waste of energy. You’ve done that enough already, trying to ‘keep up’ with everything n your life. To get to where you’re going, you want to seal the holes in the boat first to get the best speed over the long haul.

The Paradox Of The Obvious

Now, if you’re in a boat, that’s fairly obvious. But when you’re dealing with what’s going on inside your own head, it’s not so straightforward. You want to go faster, and you want that now. I mean, that’s why you’re reading these posts in the first place – you want “more, more, more” out of your schedule.

You want to get things done faster, and I’ll tell you, I’m all for that. I’m going to help you find out how to do that, when the time is right. But we’re in this for the long term, so right up front I want to make sure that you take care of the holes that are bogging down and sinking that ship that we call your personal productivity.

So let’s talk about where most of the holes in your boat – most of the things that sap your motivation – where they come from. They tend to all be rooted in something we call FUD (that’s short for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, if you haven’t heard this acronym before). For example,

• You may fear things like having to face uncomfortable personal issues or how difficult the work of changing habits might be.

• You’re may be uncertain about things like whether your strategies are going to work, or about how people around you will react when you start raising your standards, even when they don’t.

• You may doubt your abilities, or your resources, or how much time you have available to work on this kind of thing …

… and everybody has different fears, different uncertainties, and different doubts. So we’re going to start out by getting to the root of yours and work on changing them, one at a time, at the pace that works for you. Because you can do this. Because there is enough time. Sound good? Let’s look at the four steps you’ll need to take to consistently stay motivated to improve your time management skills.

The four steps are:

• Uncovering Your Biggest Self-Doubts

• Capturing Doubts As They Come Up

• Building Your Doubt Killer

• Finding The Time To Bulletproof Your Self-Confidence

Let’s jump right into Step 1: Uncovering Your Biggest Self-Doubts.

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It’s been too long since an interview, and the lovely and talented Pamela Slim has graciously given us some time during her book tour for Escape from Cubicle Nation.  If you don’t know her yet, now’s your chance, and if you do know her, give a shout out in the comments! – Dave

Dave: Pam, I want to thank you for taking the time to give us an interview here. I wanted to get some time with you because I’m impressed with your willingness to take chances and push hard to design the life you want. Can you give my readers a quick bit about who you are and what you do?

Pamela: I am a business coach and writer who helps corporate employees leave their jobs and start a new business. I am also the author of Escape from Cubicle Nation: From Corporate Prisoner to Thriving Entrepreneur. When not coaching, blogging or messing around on Twitter, I am chasing after my two toddlers Josh and Angela with my husband Darryl.

Dave: Why do you do what you do? What makes you passionate about your calling?

Pamela: I have always been fascinated by transformation and liberation. In college, I was an international service and development major, and did internships in Mexico and Colombia. I loved watching people use education as a tool to get out of poverty and improve their lives.

I then taught martial arts for years, and watched people overcome fears and transform their bodies. In my current work, nothing gets me more motivated then seeing someone realize that they have the capacity to free themselves from oppressive work situations and actually lead their life.

I have a core belief that we can overcome many deep-seated oppressive situations just by changing our thinking and taking action based on new beliefs. The power unleashed on the world by free-thinking people will improve everything.

Dave: How do you stay motivated to take risks, push your personal boundaries, and demand the best from yourself?

Pamela: I love what I do and feel a natural motivation to keep growing and learning. The more I learn about my field of expertise, the more I realize I don’t know. Finding out new ways to support my clients, blog and book readers challenges me to expand my thinking. And I like to test drive my own advice, to make sure that I am not just spouting off a bunch of crap, but rather sharing useful advice that will inspire people to action. I love to be surrounded by people who are at the top of their game, and they inspire me to be better myself.

Dave: At some point in life, we usually get a revelation that whacks us over the head and changes our course (for the better). What was one of the “A-ha!” moments that changed your life?

Pamela: When my son Josh was about two months old, I was holding him before starting a conference call for one of my big corporate clients. While I loved most of my consulting career, toward the end, I was tiring of the huge, complex projects. As I prepared to get on the phone, my body tensed up. All of a sudden, Josh’s body tensed up too, and I realized that he would completely mirror the energy I felt about my work.

It was a “lightening bolt to the forehead” moment, and at that instant I decided to jump into my new coaching direction full-time, which became Escape from Cubicle Nation. I thank him every day for giving me the courage to follow my true calling.

Dave: Keeping a balanced life is always a challenge. What do you do to help keep things sane?

Pamela: My life is very full, and I like it that way. I love to be doing work I enjoy, and try to focus only on the activities that both give me the most pleasure to do, and bring in the best income. My kids are my “out-of-whack-o-meters,” since they let me know very clearly if I am working too much.

I got a sobering wake-up call a few weeks after my book launched (which led to crazy hours due to radio promotions and extra writing) when my four-year old son Josh pointed a water gun at me and said “Mom – if you don’t stop working, I will shoot you.”

That stopped me in my tracks and made me stop constantly checking email and Twitter when my kids were around. I don’t have the expectation that I will be rested at all times, since sometimes there is just a lot to do — but because I love what I do, I feel peaceful most days.

Dave: If you could send a message to yourself 10 years ago, what advice would you give?

Pamela: You already have the capacity to follow your big dreams. You don’t need to spend any time on work you are not 100% passionate about.

Dave: What blog posts are you most proud of?

Pamela: One of my favorite posts, that also garnered a lot of attention in the blogosphere is An Open Letter to CXO’s Across the Corporate World. It opened a floodgate of new blog readers, and was the inspiration behind my book. It was very cathartic to write!

I also like Perfectionists are Losers and Are you acting like a celebrity sheep with your marketing plans? One that has been handy for my clients and blog readers is Overwhelmed with possibilities when plotting your career?

Dave: What bloggers inspire you to “play a bigger game” in life?

Pamela: I am inspired by Seth Godin, Havi Brooks, Kathy Sierra and Naomi Dunford. I love their humor, insight, authenticity and intelligence.

Dave: Thanks for taking the time for this interview, Pam, and I’ll be watching the rise of Escape from Cubicle Nation!

The trouble is, technology doesn’t solve your time management problems. Those problems aren’t solved by simply “getting organized” and harnessing “willpower” – they are solved by making some pretty significant shifts in your whole mental relationship with time and what you do with it.

All a technology-based solution does is try to force you into someone else’s mode of operation, abandoning the way you do things now (because your ways are wrong!, they say) and taking on someone else’s working style.  That rarely works (unless you’re already a fan of that working style to begin with).

Don’t get me wrong – the David Allens and Steven Coveys of the world are all valuable contributors (as long as you don’t take them as gospel).  But the idea that a better system will make everything okay is simply not in line with reality.  The truth is, you don’t need a better system.  You just need to start making incremental shifts in how you treat your time, your focus and your results, and you can track it any damned way that you please.

But when someone forces you into a system – their system – that can become painful.  On the other hand, just focusing on tweaking the way you already work?  And building new habits using your existing working styles?  Now that’s painless time management.

When you’re ready to stop thinking inside someone else’s box, and start building your own, there are 10 skills you can focus on that will make an immediate difference in your life – (regardless of the “system” you personally use to execute).  Incremental improvement in any (or all) of these skills will make it a whole lot easier to create lasting, permanent change by tackling easy problems first, and then working your way up to harder ones.  When you start making small wins right away, you’ll be more likely to stick with it and get the results you’ve really wanted.

Let me walk you through how you’re going to make these ten skills work for you.

Skill #1 – Staying Motivated / Defeating Self Doubt

The first skill of painless time management is mastering the art of consistent motivation.  Now, I know it’s easy to feel motivated after you go to a time management seminar or buy a new planner system, but what usually happens is that the initial excitement fades away and you fall back into the ruts of your old patterns.

Now, this may tend to happen for a couple of reasons.  Maybe the system you chose is a lot of work to implement.  Maybe you are just meeting up with resistance trying to change the old, comfortable habits that aren’t getting you the results you want.  Maybe keeping things the way they are seems kind of, well, ok to you – you know, not great, but acceptable.  Whatever the reason, you hit a wall where either the thrill is gone, or you doubt your ability to really take control over your time.

But that’s not how you roll, at least not anymore.  You’re going to come up with a way to keep yourself excited about becoming better and better about managing your time.  And you’re going to recognize that you also have to bulletproof your confidence, to get yourself to believe that the dabbling is over – you’re going to really do it this time.  You’re going to follow through.  You nail that, you get your confidence solid and the benefits clear in your mind, and you absolutely will take action on a daily basis to be in complete control of your time.

This is the starting point – you’ve absolutely got to get this part down or you really won’t take consistent action on mastering your time.  The bottom line is that if you allow yourself to doubt your abilities to manage your self and your life, you’re going to take a much lower quality of action, if you take action at all.  You’re simply not going to get serious about taking control, because on some level you’re going to be living in doubt as to whether you can really manage the insane busyness that is your life.  But to start you have to reinforce that belief that you can do it this time.

Think for a moment about all your doubts, all your emotional baggage that has to do with time management.  Think of all the times you have felt that you just couldn’t see how you were going to juggle all the things you have on your plate, and all the things you want to do.  Think of how it felt every time you had to look at how you’ve struggled with procrastination, or in keeping your focus.

Those are rough feelings, and they drain you, they paralyze you.  But in reality, that’s all in your mind.  Those feelings, there’s a systematic way to erase them and replace them with the kind of thinking that will not only make you sure that you can take total control of your time, but that will also keep you motivated to keep taking action, even if you have a lot of internal resistance.  And mastering that begins to make time management painless because it moves it from something you have to do to something you want to do.

Now, out of all 10 of the skills I’m going to go over, I suggest that you focus on this skill first, since it helps guarantee you’ll follow through on everything else.  That said, let’s jump over to the second skill of painless time management.

Skill #2 – Facing Reality

The second skill you’ll want to master is keeping up with is what I call a reality check. This is all about really seeing where your time is going on a daily basis.  You see, we all like to rationalize how we’re spending our time.  We really don’t want to face up to all the moments of the day when we’re living in reaction and distraction, where we’re getting off track or just plain wasting an opportunity to do something really useful with our time.  Left to ourselves, we all do it – and unless you have an easy way to see where all your time is really going, you’ll never be able to reclaim the productivity you’re losing.

You already know how life works.  During your day, from moment to moment, you have to face a harsh reality:  either you’re working on the exact things that you intended to that day, or you’re not. You’re either on track for the things that you tell yourself really matter, or you’re off track.  And the scary thing is that the average person spends over 50% of their time off track, doing something other than the things they intended to do to make their real goals come to life.

How do I know this?  Because of a little tool I call a reality check.  It’s a simple tracking sheet that I’ve used with clients in the past to show them how much time they are really spending off course – whether it’s because of their own day to day choices or whether it’s the result of unexpected things popping up that they have to react to.  Ultimately it doesn’t matter though, because it’s all stuff that slows you down, that takes you off of the course you were meaning to travel on.

And unless you have a tool to track that kind of thing, you’re going to be wasting a lot of time that could be making you money faster or giving you the free time you’ve been looking for.  That’s why you want to get your hands on that reality check, so you can see exactly where you need to make changes to guarantee you stay on track.  In fact, just keeping track of where you’re spending your time during the day gives you an automatic productivity boost, I’d say, of at least an hour a day on average.  (Don’t believe me?  Try it for a day and see the difference.)

You can accomplish this with a pencil and paper, an Excel spreadsheet, or whatever.  Your system, your preference.  Anything that lets you easily track what you’re doing throughout the day.

Circles of Activity

Now, everything you can do during the day falls into one of several categories, which I call circles of activity. Just imagine a bulls eye target made up of four circles in it to get an idea about what I’m talking about.

The bulls-eye in the center, that’s what we’re going to call the circle of intent. This is where you are when you’re spending time doing exactly what you set out to do for the day – in other words – when you’re following through on the things you intended to do.  Naturally, this is the bulls-eye, because you want to spend as much time as possible on target, doing the things you planned on doing every day.  This is where you get into that state of flow where you’re really getting tons of incredible stuff done, time seems to lose its meaning and your productivity goes through the roof.

Now, you know and I know that life doesn’t just let you hang out if the circle of intent. If it did, your to-do list would be very short and you wouldn’t be listening to me right now.  No, most of the time you’ve got to fight for your right to be there, because you get dragged outside of that circle all the time dealing with things that pop up as well as your own bad habits.

When this happens, this puts you in the second circle, the one surrounding the bullseye.  This circle is called the circle of reaction, because it’s where you are when you’re reacting to some urgency that’s sprung up around you.  Sometimes breaking away from intent and dealing with the reaction makes sense.  For example, if you’re working on finding new business and someone is calling you up to close a deal and write a check, then answer the phone, that’s a good thing to react to.  Or maybe a true emergency pops up and you have to rush someone you care about to the hospital.  Life will throw things like that at you.  You gotta do what you gotta do.  In fact, I’d call this less of reaction and more like an intelligent response.

But on the other hand, there are plenty of things that you shouldn’t be breaking away from the circle of intent to react to.  You don’t have to do them – or maybe at least you don’t have to do them now.  You already know what these things are – they’re the things that seemed urgent, that seemed like a good idea to work on at the time … but they weren’t the best use of your time right then.  They could have waited.  They should have been scheduled for a different time.  But instead, you jumped, either because you reacted to the urgency or you just wanted to get away from the task you should have been focusing on.  This is what you want to avoid, by resisting the temptation to trade the good for the best.

Now, that covers the circle of intent – where you want to spend most of your time – and the circle of reaction – where you’ll undoubtedly spend some of your time.  That leaves the next circle to deal with, and it’s an ugly one.  It’s called the circle of regret. I don’t even need to give you examples of what this is.  You already know.  It’s full of the things you look back on and say to yourself, Man, I wish to God I hadn’t wasted my time doing that.

Sometimes you spend time in the circle of regret because you’re trying to distract yourself, or trying to escape from dealing with something in your life.  Sometimes you get there simply because you’re being sloppy with your time and you don’t know what to do, or you lose track of time doing something pointless.  But it almost always keeps happening because you aren’t tracking where you’re spending your time. If you did, you’d be so fed up with yourself that you’d fight to stay out of that circle as hard as you could.

The way start fighting against this is to simply track your time, and track what circle you’re spending it in.  Just like tracking your money in detail keeps you from wasting it – tracking your time will raise your awareness so you don’t waste as much time as well.  And as you get accustomed to noticing you’re drifting away from the circle of intent, you’ll begin to find that you snap yourself back into line a lot more often than you would have if you weren’t tracking things.

Wait a minute …

Ok, at this point, you’re probably thinking that tracking your time doesn’t sound very painless – it seems like a pain to have to do that.  Well, that’s just an excuse to get out of doing the work, because the payoff on this activity in the beginning is so damned high, and it’s honestly so little effort.  It’s not like you’d have to stop what you’re doing every 10 minutes to write on a piece of paper – it’s more like you only write when you stop what you’re doing, so that you become more conscious of the fact you just stopped doing something (and maybe because you’re getting distracted or off track).

The truth is, it becomes more painless every day because when you start doing this, you’re going to realize that by day three that you’ve freed up at least an hour or two a day of productivity because you’re more centered and focused, all because you took 5 minutes total throughout the day to scribble on a sheet of paper or update a spreadsheet.  And tapping into all that additional time takes the sting out of keeping yourself accountable.

Skill #3 – Funneling

The third skill to master is the art of funneling.  You master this skill, and you will knock out 50% of your feelings of overwhelm and stress and nothing will ever fall through the cracks, ever again.  Ever.

Funneling is a simple concept, you’ve probably heard of it before but you just haven’t seriously put it into practice.  It’s all about managing the flow of incoming activities in your life, those things you put on your to-do lists.  You’ve got a million things you have to do – a million little commitments you’ve decided you want make happen.

Now, I call them commitments instead of to dos because face it – to-dos just pile up, while commitments get done, don’t they?  You tend to be more likely to make yourself follow through on commitments, so let’s start reframing all your actions that way.

So you’ve got all these commitments coming at you every day from a lot of different sources.  You get emails that generate new commitments for you.  You get phone calls, you get new commitments.  Mail comes in, bringing more commitments with it.  Conversations with other people generate more commitments.  You scribble stuff on post it notes, on the back of envelopes.  You think of stuff you need to do in the car, at work, in the shower, and everywhere in your life you’re adding more and more of these items to whatever to-do list manager you’re using right now – if you write it down at all.

The problem with all of this is for most people, they have no consistent way to manage all of these commitments. Post it notes get lost.  Emails get buried under other emails.  Mail gets stacked and stacked some more.  Scraps of paper with to-dos on them get lost.  Conversations get forgotten.  Stuff falls through the cracks, and you end up living in the circle of reaction, jumping to whatever seems most urgent at the moment.  Its how most people live, and it kills your productivity.  You already know from experience how much time you’ve lost in the past because of this.

It’s Funnel Time

This is where funnels come in – you create these funnels, which are really just specific ways to capture new commitments.  Maybe it’s a notebook when you’re on the go, or a special folder in your email, or a little voice recorder – whatever works for the spot you’re in.  You’re already doing this to some extent, but the key to taking it to a level where it really works 100% of the time is when you decide on a specific system to handle incoming stuff ahead of time.  You set up multiple funnels so you’re not just noting it some reactionary way like on an envelope or in your head.

When you do funneling right, you set up an elegant, effective way to capture all your incoming commitments and then you set aside a few minutes on a regular basis to dump all of these funnels into one place, like a special notebook or a spreadsheet, and you manage all your commitments from that one spot.

Once it gets into there you clean your funnels – you cross it out of your notebook, you delete it from your email, you erase the voice recording, because you don’t need it anymore … you can manage it all in one place, in the style that works best for you.

It may sound less than painless to get organized about how you capture incoming commitments but let me tell you it pays off like crazy.  You get this great peace of mind seeing everything in one place and it makes it so much easier to prioritize what you want to do.  Instead of having everything swimming in your head you’ll have it in one place, ready to take action on.

And you’ll never have to look for a misplaced piece of paper again.  Things won’t fall through the cracks and your productivity will shoot way up.  And it’s painless in the long run because it eliminates the pain of stress, the pain of worry and the pain of overload.  So if you don’t have a funnel system set up yet, start figuring out how you’re going to create one.

Skill #4 – Keeping Accountable

It’s one thing to set goals, but it’s quite another thing to actually hold yourself accountable for following through on them.  Accountability is key to getting things done, and getting them done quickly and with as little wasted time as possible.  Let’s talk about that for a moment.

Any serious goal that actually gets accomplished goes through a number of stages.  First, you set the goal – let’s say, you want to start a business and make $50,000 over the next 12 months.  That’s great, but making that decision is just the first step.  What you’ve got to do after that is the second step, which is flesh it all out into a series of steps, you know, a project plan.  So many people don’t do this, they figure they’ll just wing it, and then they wonder why they never get the goal accomplished.  Or maybe they eventually get it accomplished, but it took years longer than they expected it to.  So getting the project planned out is the second step.

The third step is to start breaking the project down into milestones – you know, saying, ok, in 3 months I’ll be this far along, in 6 months I’ll have these other things done, and so on and so on.  Basically, you’re creating a roadmap that tells you how far you should be from quarter to quarter, or month to month, or week to week, whatever makes sense for your project.  But here’s where it gets sticky for most people.  Once you do this, then you actually have a bunch of deadlines to meet.  You have specific measurable things to accomplish.  You can’t hide behind the “I’d like to get this done, sometime …” no, you’ve milestoned it, so now it’s something you have to deliver on.

A lot of people freeze up at that idea, because it means they have to be accountable. They can’t be sloppy with their time anymore.  They have to get focused and organized, so they don’t do it.  But remember, this is not how you roll – just by reading this far, you’re confirming to yourself that you want to raise your standards.  You nail this and you’ll see how freeing it can be to know exactly what you have to accomplish from week to week to stay on track, and you’ll start making more of your goals a reality.

You won’t have to stress out about all the things that are yet to be accomplished – you’ll know exactly what you have to do, so you can focus like crazy on getting it done fast.

As you work at keeping accountable, you’ll learn to to quickly and easily break your major goals down into sub-projects and get them milestoned.  Then once they’re milestoned, you can simply make a tracking template to make it painless to chart the progress you’re making as you go through the week.

This is the critical part, where you go through the week asking yourself, “what have I done so far to support my most important priorities?”  The tracking template you use (whick , honestly, can be a 3×5 index card if that works for you)  will keep everything visible in one place, so you can see how all your projects are getting worked on in a balanced way.  It’s gonna be nice, it’s going to help you get focused and take a lot of stress off of you.  And making it easier is what we’re all about, right?

So let’s turn our eyes to the fifth critical skill of painless time management – wiping out weaknesses.

Skill #5 – Wiping Out Weaknesses

So far we’ve talked about strategic things – how to set yourself up to win in the larger, big picture sense.  But now we’re going to move into the down and dirty, day to day challenges you have that are sucking your time away.  This is a critical thing to nail down because it’s what takes you out of treading water or standing still and gets you steadily moving in a direction that makes you stronger, that gets you better results.

Most of us know we have weaknesses, but we don’t sit down and figure out a systematic way to eliminate them.  We take it for granted that we can get by with them, or maybe we just think that there’s no way we’ll ever overcome them.  But that’s not how you roll, because you’re raising yourself to a higher standard.  If you’ve done your reality check for any length of time, you’ll be getting a really good idea about what your time management weaknesses are.

So you’re going to want to create a battle plan – a specific guide to how you are going to knock them out, one at a time, so instead of wishing you had more time in the day you’ll be living a life where you have the time you need.

Later in this series I’ll guide you through how to make your battle plan and how to carry it out in a way that’s as easy and painless as possible.  Some of these weaknesses relate to the final five skills we’re about to go over.  Just keep in mind that if you don’t nail this, if you don’t have a battle plan, it’s like looking at the bad habits that steal your time and continue to keep key goals that you want to achieve out of your reach and saying “No problem guys, you just stick around.  You’re safe here.”

You’ve got to make a plan so you have something to take action on.  And the time you spend on developing and working your battle plan will pay you back over and over.  So don’t skip investing the time to get started on this critical skill of painless time management.

Skill #6 – Overcoming Procrastination

Just like there’s good cholesterol and bad cholesterol, good stress and bad stress, there’s a good kind of procrastination to go along with the bad.  Think about it – procrastination is simply putting something off until later.  That can be really valuable if you’re leveraging the good kind of procrastination – putting off anything but the best actions until later.  You’re going to learn to leverage good procrastination as you move through this series of articles.

Procrastination is a monster-sized killer of your time, and it directly affects how much time you spend in the circles of reaction and regret – time that you could have been spending getting important things done that made you money and enriched your life.  But procrastination flushes all that down the toilet.  It slows your productivity down considerably – and in a lot of cases, destroys your productivity completely.  You do NOT want to be here.

So let’s talk about how to overcome procrastination.  It’s simpler than you think.  People tend to think of getting past procrastination as an exercise in willpower, a kind of mental toughness that lets you push through it all, but it doesn’t have to be that way.  All procrastination is really just based around how we represent a task to ourselves – what it means, how hard it is, how uncomfortable it is to deal with it.

All these are just feelings in our heads, and the only thing that gets us past it and into taking action is learning how to defuse these feelings and reframe things in a way that makes us want to get them done – and to get them done fast, with energy and motivation, instead of dragging them out forever.

To really master the art of overcoming procrastination, and to make it as easy and painless as possible, you need to understand the specific causes of procrastination.  As you begin to recognize the different mental frames that allow procrastination to flourish, you will be able to match those symptoms to specific, key tactics that will defuse procrastination’s hold on you.  We’ll discuss those later in the series (or you can download them now if you don’t want to wait).

You see, when procrastination takes root, it’s sort of like a combination lock. You can spin that dial all over the place and get nowhere – or, you can learn the specific numbers that are part of that combination and unlock it. Once you learn to recognize those combinations, and you practice using them, you’ll be able to break through the things that are causing you to procrastinate.

And look at it this way – how many times have you procrastinated on something because you built it up to be this great big thing in your mind, and had all this stress about it and when you finally dealt with it it was over with quickly, and it wasn’t really that bad at all?  As you  developing this critical skill of painless time management, you’ll consistently be able to get to that “done and over with” point a whole lot more quickly.

Skill #7 -Bulletproofing Focus

Now we come to the seventh critical skill of painless time management – Bulletproofing Focus.  Without focus, you cut your productivity in half at the very least, so bulletproofing your focus is something you definitely need to take seriously.  When you have a bulletproof focus, an amazing thing happens.  You start tackling your work with a force multiplier – doubling your productivity, tripling it, or even more.  It’s another way to tap into that flow state where time loses meaning and you are so totally immersed in what you are doing that it brings out the best work that you are capable of.

And the funny thing about focus is that it’s not so much about keeping your mind on what it is that you’re supposed to be doing, but about keeping your mind off of everything – and I mean everything else.  For an achiever personality, this is a tall order, because we’ve always got our goals bouncing around in our heads.  We’ve always got tons of stuff swimming around in our heads.  But if you want to unleash the raw power that comes with an unbreakable focus, you’ve got to get all the kids out of the pool.  No more swimming around in that head of yours.

The good news is that focus is definitely a learnable skill.  It’s not something that only a select few people get to master.  It’s yours for the taking.  But you have to develop a system to keep your mind off of everything else so it has no other option than to be right where it needs to be, fully present, fully engaged, fully ready to give everything to the task at hand.

In other words, if you want more focus, it’s not about trying hard, it’s about knowing the right things to do ahead of time to safeguard your focus and the right things to do real-time, when something threatens to take your focus away.  Developing focus is like lifting weights – you’ll quickly see results and you’ll be stronger to the degree you practice it.  And that’s a nice situation to be in.

Skill #8 – Managing Interruptions

So let’s bump on over to the eighth critical skill of painless time management – managing interruptions.  This is a big one, because interruptions kill your productivity in two destructive ways.

First off, any time someone interrupts you, you have automatically shifted away from the circle of intent – where you were working on the things that were important to you – and drifted to the circle of reaction. Your progress on the things that matter most stops dead in the water.  With the number of distractions that typically come most people’s way, it’s no wonder that the days, weeks and months creep by with us not making the progress we want on our major goals.

So when interruptions come, you’ve got to know how to push back on them – either by deferring the work until later or just choosing a small part of the task to tackle now.  Many interruptions can get the 80/20 treatment, where you do the most important 20% of the task and get 80% of your results.

You want to leverage this any way you can, and later in this blog series I’ll teach you simple tactics for making the process as painless as possible – for you and the person who’s interrupting your flow of action.  This way you can pop right back into the circle of intent and do stuff that matters instead of just doing stuff.

Now, the second way interruptions kill your productivity and steal time from your day is they take you back to a cold start.  You know how when you get started on something, it takes a little bit of warm up time to get focused and get totally engaged in giving your all to knock out whatever it is you’re working on.  Well, whenever you get interrupted, guess what – you’ve got to do that all over again.  And when you’re interrupted a lot during the day, that can literally eat up hours of your time.

And remember, it’s not how much time you spend working on something that gets you results – it’s how much high quality, focused time you spend on it.  Every time you permit an interruption to get in your way, you drop straight down into low productivity time for generally five to fifteen minutes at a time.  Now, if you’re interrupted a dozen times a day by things like phone calls, emails or other people, you can see how that can add up to an hour or more.

But that’s not how you roll, at least not anymore.  You’re going to learn how to prevent most of your interruptions from happening in the first place with a few simple tactics as you go through the managing interruptions coaching session.  And you’re going to take those hours back, so that you can get important stuff done with them.

Skill #9 – Giving 200%

Now let’s get to know a little about the ninth critical skill of painless time management – and that’s Giving 200%.  A lot of people talk about giving your all, giving 100%, but that’s not going to get you the massive results that you want – it will just get you the same results you’re capable of with the skill levels you have.

And giving 110% isn’t much of a help either, because that’s basically just taking the same wall you’ve been banging your head against and banging harder.  It may get you a little farther than you’ve gotten in the past, but it’s not going to take you to the next level.

No, giving 200% is all about aggressively pushing past your productivity limits, of taking steps that significantly change the way you’re doing things now – but in a good way, and in an easy way to implement. It’s not about swinging the ax harder – or even sharpening it -  it’s about heading out to the store and getting a chainsaw.

It’s about stepping back and looking at the way you do things and finding out what small changes you can make and manage right now, right where you are, that will keep you totally immersed in what you’re doing, totally on fire even you don’t particularly care for the task you have to do.

It sounds like I’m talking about motivation, but it’s more than that.  It’s a simple procss for getting yourself into a state where you’ll push past your limits and actually enjoy the experience.  It’s about learning how to summon up all these personal resources that you’re currently not taking advantage of and using them to take your performance and productivity through the roof.  It’s about making the pain of hard work – a lot more painless.  We’re going to have fun with this one, you and I.  This is one of my favorite topics, and I think you’ll really enjoy it as well.

So wow, that brings us to the final critical skill of painless time management.  You’ve read this far and I’m impressed, because that means that you’re one of the select few who stick it out, who finish what they start, who win the race.  I like the way you roll.  So let’s roll into this tenth skill and finish this up so you can get cracking.

Skill #10 -Maintaining Energy

This tenth and final skill is the art of Maintaining Energy.  Most people find their energy comes and goes in spikes and valleys.  They feel tired at times, wiped out, and it’s hard to get motivated or to give 200%, or even focus for that matter at times like those.  I’ve been there and I know you have, too.  But if you really want to get more of what really matters packed into your day you’ve got to master the art of summoning up and holding onto a consistent supply of physical or mental energy.

Now, I’m not talking about getting all hyped up and bouncing off the walls, or keeping some dreamy-eyed positive thinking grin on your face all day.  I’m not talking about adopting a crazy diet or popping pills.  I’m simply talking about taking command of simple strategies that help give you the energy to act, to do what you have to do with intensity and purpose, without being held back by feelings of being tired out.

Sometimes you get in this state of total energy, that place where you were just able to keep hammering at the things you had to, and you didn’t get tired – or maybe you did get tired, exhausted even – but you summoned up the energy and commitment to push past any tired feelings and keep going. It’s like those people who can run a marathon – they may get to the end sweating and exhausted, but they followed through on every step and never missed a beat.

And managing your energy has everything in the world to do with time management because face it, in reality you’re not actually managing your time after all.  You’re managing your results, the things you get done that really matter, that really move you forward rather than simply filling your days.  And you’ll only get things done to the degree that you have the energy to do it, just like a car is only going to go as far as its gas tank will take it.

When I go into this topic during this blog series, I’m going to help you isolate the exact causes, the exact things that are sucking your energy away, and it’s going to show you how to start turning the tide – even if you only have two minutes a day to devote to it.  It’s one of the most powerful parts of this series, because it gives you the power you need to consistently take action on the things you say are most important to you.

Whew.  You did it.

Well, you finally did it – you got to the end of this non-stop, 6500-word article and now you’ve got the ten critical skills of painless time management fresh in your mind.  You can jump back to the table of contents to see how far the series has developed.

(If you’re new to this site, what’s going on here is I’m taking my 11-CD time management program and turning into free blog articles.  So be patient with me – this is a lot of material to translate into article format.  If you don’t want to wait on my schedule, you can download all the MP3s and PDFs right now, right here).

Until we meet again, this is Dave Navarro saying, It’s your life – so take total control of it!

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But what you may not realize is just how many people influence your life, feeding you ideas about what is “right,” “wrong,” “good,” “bad,” and practically every other subjective decision making criteria that guides your life.  Some of these ideas are good for you , while others are bad.  (See what I did there?  Hopefully you’re not taking my word for that! )

Whether someone’s influence on you is bad or good isn’t up to me to decide – you’ve got to make the call for yourself.  But chances are you’re not aware of how much external programming you’re soaking in. In fact, there are more people than you’d like to admit secretly controlling your life by influencing how you make your most important, life-guiding choices.  I say “secretly” because we generally don’t even acknowledge that it’s going on.

Let’s look at seven types of people who contribute ingredients to your daily decision making processes, and let awareness do its work in you.

#1 – Your Heroes

The Good: I’m all for having heroes – those powerful people (real or fictional) who you want to emulate so you can become the person  you want to be (if indeed, that’s who you have consciously chosen to become).  Focusing on how a hero would handle your situation can help you detach from unnecessary emotional baggage and focus on doing what needs to be done (despite how small you feel sometimes).

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been able to cut through the emotional clutter and make a good decision simply by asking myself, “How would (name) handle this?” or “What would (name) think was most important?”  Taking on some of your heroes’ attitudes and views can be a powerful way to overcome emotional resistance.

The Bad: Heroes are often one-dimensional – whether they’re real or fictional.  We tend to put people on a pedestal and think because they are amazing in one sense that all their other capacities are flawless.  But they’re people just like we are, and they have their own failings.  When you emulate heroes, you have to be very careful not to absorb the bad with the good.

Case in point: When I was a teenager I found a very strong role model who was a shining example of hard work, being positive, doing things that supported others in the community and expressing gratitude for life and family.  I made sure to emulate a great deal from him.

But on the flip side, I was acutely aware that as a result of his upbringing, his attitudes towards other races were not as they should have been.  I winced at racially tinged comments and made a mental note not to absorb this part of his personality.  I took the good, and resisted the bad.

Bottom line: You have heroes.  They influence you.  Make sure that you are consciously selective in how they influence you.

#2 – Your Nemesis

Chances are you may have a nemesis, even if you’re not a superhero with a secret identity.  Your nemesis can be someone who you want to be like (but whom you’re jealous toward) or someone you’re feeling directly pitted against (such as a neighbor or relative who constantly one-ups you).

We all like to feel like we’re above such things, but we’re not.  There’s always someone you’re just a little bit jealous of or whom you’re consistently badgered by in regards to your progress or status.  This influences your focus and choices, whether you want it to or not.

The Good: Sometimes a nemesis is good for you – constantly keeping you on your toes and staying one step ahead of you, making you hungry to be, do, and have the things they are having.  Maybe they’re closer to the weight/income/whatever you want to be and you’re jealous – so you commit to taking focused action in order to catch up.  You may be accessing a petty emotion (jealousy), but it’s driving you to do something constructive.

One positive “nemesis” to have is someone on the same side as you are – such as a teammate or co-worker, where the healthy competition creates a positive net result for your side.  Each success of theirs triggers your own sense of drive to equal or surpass them.  You may both be battling for first place, but there’s no real shame in coming in second because your side wins.

The Bad: It’s easy to play the sucker to a nemesis.  Often, you’ll generate huge amounts of stress trying to have what they have, and you can make same pretty stupid decisions in the name of keeping up with them.  You can become extremely petty, burn bridges and actually have a negative impact on the people around you in your quest to never let your nemesis get the best of you.  You become reactive (to their decisions) instead of proactive (making your own choices).

Worse yet, it’s all too common to let a fierce competitive drive push you to expend a huge amount of personal energy and focus into winning, without ever asking yourself if the prize itself is worth it. You may devote years of your life trying to climb one rung higher on a ladder that’s leaning against the wrong wall.

Bottom line: Be very careful when it comes to being jealous – or feeling a personal sense of threat – when it comes to the success of someone else.  It’s a slippery slope that can leave you chasing after a set of standards that aren’t truly your own, simply because you want to be “like them.”

#3 – Your Parents

There’s no denying that your parents are a major source of your attitudes and beliefs, even if that idea makes your skin crawl.  From a very early age, you were spoon-fed the foundations of what you were to consider right and wrong, and you either accepted it or rebelled against it (or in rare cases, actually reasoned out your own beliefs).

There’s nothing accusatory in that statement – it just is.  Our parents’ job is to mold us into people who can function independently, and we take a lot of that conditioning without questioning it.

The Good: Hopefully your parents established positive, uplifting standards in your life.  If they were absent for whatever reason, hopefully you found a positive role model.  Parents can be a powerful force in helping you mature, guiding you around some of the foolish pitfalls you might otherwise have to experience on your own.

You should definitely look at your parents (or parent figures) as guides who can teach you the wisdom they learned through painful trial and error.  Most of the time they (hopefully) will genuinely look out for you and keep your best interests at heart, and that’s worth modeling.

The Bad: Since our parents are the first authority figures we come to know, we tend to put them on a pedestal early in life, thinking they know absolutely everything about life.  That means some of our basic beliefs, opinions and life direction are stamped from their mold.  But their mold may not even be remotely right for our lives, because it carries the baggage of their individual lives (and that of their parents).

Sometimes this means you’re conditioned to believe in scarcity. Sometimes it’s cynicism, or racism, or sexism, or whatever kind of -ism dominated their formative years.  It’s hard to stomach, but in some cases we may have had parents who just plain indifferent to creating a fulfilling life or sadder yet, wanted to be better role models but just didn’t know how.  Their limiting beliefs may – when transferred to you – be what’s holding you back.

Bottom line: A lot of who you are is shaped by who your parents were, so it’s critically important that you ask yourself if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.  If it’s good and lends you strength, keep it.  If it’s bad and transmits weakness to you, break the habit.

#4 – Your Partner

Your partner is someone you spend an extraordinary amount of time with, and from an emotional standpoint is likely one of the strongest influences on your life.  And because our fear of being rejected by (or disappointing) our partners is such a powerful force, it can easily make us adjust our personal standards in ways we would never have done on our own.

The Good: In many cases, opposites attract (because hell, wouldn’t being around someone just like us make us bored – or crazy?).  This means that your partner likely has many strengths you don’t, which can be a catalyst in making us want to raise our standards to match them – especially if they are particularly demanding of them.

For example, I’ve always been a very logically-oriented, “rugged individual” kind of person, which has served me extraordinarily well in personal development, engineering and business.  On the other hand, that means I’ve spent the bulk of my life around other “rugged individuals,” so I’ve have a much harder time relating with people who operate from a more empathetic, feelings/relationship standpoint.

But that’s exactly how my wife Alison operates – she’s highly tuned to “get” what other people are feeling and thinking, and what’s on their mind emotionally.  What this means is her standards – which involve understanding what people need rather than just what they are doing – influence me to do the same.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been struggling with some parenting issue, trying for an hour to make my 5 year old “do” something he’s supposed to, and she’s swept in and taken care of the issue within 60 seconds.  I watch her connect empathetically with our kid, and it teaches me a new (and better) way of handling the situation in the future. I could give a hundred examples of how she does this, but this blog is called Rock Your Day, not My Wife Rocks, so I’ll leave it at this one.

A good partner complements you, opening your eyes to new ways of thinking, behaving and just being.  Witnessing their standards can positively mold your own.

The Bad: Because we spend so much time around our partners, and we want to be on good terms with them, we can begin to experience entrainment - we are likely fall into the same patterns they have.  If their standards are not as strong as ours, that can bring us down to their level.  (And it works both ways – you might be the negative force on them!)

This can create a strong negative pattern that’s hard to break, because once the two of you have relaxed your standards, it’s more difficult to generate the desire to snap out of it and break free.  Your new, lowered standards become “normal.”  The two of you may not even realize that you’re drifting downward.

And it may not even be intentional.  Your partner (or you, if you’re a negative influence on them) may not even be consciously choosing to lower their standards.  They may have simply become sidetracked by life, as we all are, and let one standard slide so that they could focus on what’s more important in the moment.  God knows we’ve all done the same thing.

The challenge there is once the standard is relaxed, it often doesn’t ever get strengthened again.  So you need to be vigilant and proactive in keeping the standards you want in place (or raising them back to where they were if you’ve let them slide).  It’s not easy, but it’s tragic when it doesn’t get done.

A quick note on this: I’ve heard a lot of people talk about having to distance themselves from “negative people,” and they take that to mean they ditch their partners and family members.  There’s a fine line there.  While I’m 100% behind separating yourself from someone who is dead-set on being consciously abusive to you or who is invincibly poisonous to your well-being, I think that some people use this as a crutch to justify giving up on people who are simply difficult to deal with.

Some people say that their partners are “always negative” or “a pain” or even “unwilling to change.” If you’re thinking along the same lines, I challenge you get brutally honest and ask yourself if the real problem is that they’re simply mirroring your standards?  I know that in my life, I tend to get most frustrated with people who  – wait for it – demonstrate my own weaknesses.  It’s crazy.  It’s also human nature, because I see it in others all the time.

If you have a partner who you feel has lower standards than yours, may I suggest that you entertain the possibility that you’re in the position to be a positive influence?  It’s not the easy way out, I know, but it may just be the challenge they’re secretly waiting for you to take up, but are too shy to ask.

Bottom line: Your partner and you control each other’s lives more than you probably acknowledge.  Use that power over their standards for good, and not evil (or worse yet, indifference).  And if your partner’s standards are dragging you down, don’t make ditching them your first option – instead, lock in a core group of friends who have higher standards so you can keep yours up, and raise your partner up in the process.

#5 – The Man (Or Woman) In The Mirror

This may be the hardest person to fight back against you’ll ever meet – the person who you imagine is looking at you from the other side of the mirror.  We are our own worst critics – constantly sizing ourselves up in ways that we’d never judge other people while at the same time resisting the acceptance of positive messages as “not a big deal.”  Many of us can’t stand to face the person staring at us in the bathroom mirror (and some people even remove mirrors from their house entirely because their self-loathing is so strong).

This is a tough one.  This is all about looking at our self image, our identity, the mish-mash of opinions, feelings, and baggage we carry and really asking ourselves how it all comes together.  The truly frightening thing is that for so many of us our self-image is a prison, yet it’s the single thing we have total control of in our life.

The Good: That morning mirror check can be a mini-accountability session that you experience every day, if you focus on who you want that person in the mirror to be. When you consciously decide to raise your standards – or simply stick to the ones you have – you get to look yourself straight in the eye and ask if you’re holding up your end of the bargain.

If you’re focusing on your successes – the things you’ve done right in your life, the good decisions you’ve made and the lives you’ve impacted (even if it is only one life) – then looking into the mirror will strengthen you.  It will become an exercise in celebrating your victories and steeling yourself for even greater challenges in the future.

And if you’re shuddering at that notion because you view congratulating yourself as narcissistic, or egotistical, or self-centered, get over it.  Your playing small does not serve the world.  If you build yourself up on a daily basis, you will be in a better position to be a positive influence on others.  I give this example a lot, but it’s like the safety cards on airplanes show – when you take the oxygen mask and put it over your face first, then you can help take care of other people.

This isn’t about saying, “I’m the greatest, people should be impressed by me” – it’s about saying “I have a lot going for me and I should feel really uplifted by it.”

The Bad: The mirror can be the scariest thing in the world if you’ve been conditioned to look down on yourself (whether by parental criticism, bad experience, or those damned beauty magazines).  You look in the mirror and you judge yourself – you’re not pretty/thin/attractive enough, you’re a loser/fraud/sham, you’re not anywhere close to where you wanted to be at this point in your life.  Every failure you’ve experienced (or imagined!), every harsh word or insult you’ve received, it all comes back to you in a rush of depression as you see that tired face in the mirror.

Now it may be just me, but that sounds like the height of self-centeredness.  To hold on to every negative impression about ourselves as tightly as possible and refuse to let go, because we are so convinced that we are terrible people … it’s borderline insanity, and yet it’s what every single one of us does on a daily basis, to one degree or another.

And if you think “successful” people are above that sort of thing, think again.  If anything, it’s more acute, because they’re generally exposed to even more people who judge them (sometimes fairly, sometimes just out of spite, and sometimes very publicly).  No matter what your position in life, you’re going to have ample “reasons” to beat yourself up.

But holding on to these “reasons” is not in your best self interest (or in the interest of those who you can influence positively).  It locks you into a downward spiral of resentment that some people never pull their way out of.

If that describes you, then you need to start pulling yourself out of that spiral, because no one can do it for you.  And while that may seem like an impossible task, it starts with a simple act of self-defense:

The next time you pass a mirror, look straight into it and no matter how you feel about yourself in the moment, say these words: “I refuse to give up on you.  That’s my standard.”

You probably won’t feel anything different the first time you do this – or the second, or even the tenth.  But if you stick with it, you’ll begin conditioning yourself to pull out of the emotional hole you’ve dug, and start making the changes in standards and behavior that will improve your self-image.  When you tell yourself you’re worth fighting for, eventually you will fight – and you’ll ultimately win.  Just don’t give up.  You are worth it.

Bottom line: Nobody is going to fight your inner battles for you, so you have to do it yourself.  You have the power to set a new standard where you actively build yourself up on a daily basis and stop beating yourself up – but only if you choose to.

The Choice Is Yours – Program Yourself Or Be Programmed By Others

Other people wield an enormous influence on your standards on a daily basis.  If you’re not consciously deciding to filter that influence, you’re setting yourself up to become a puppet pulled by strings you can’t even see.

Increase your awareness, and increase your personal power over your life – and when you look in the mirror, you’ll like what you see more, day after day.

If you found this post helpful, please pass it along via email or Twitter. If you’d like to make a donation to support more articles like this, do so and I’ll throw in my 11-session time management program as my way of saying thanks.

There’s something more important than that – something so important it determines whether taking action is a pleasure or a chore:  It’s the set of personal standards you hold yourself to on a daily basis.

Not willpower.  Standards.

Standards determine what you’ll settle for.

Standards drive your behavior because they’re linked to what you will and will not tolerate in life.  They actually generate that discomfort threshold - that “oh, $#!t!” emotion that finally gets you moving on something.  Look at what you tolerate in life and you’ll see where your standards are.

• How messy does your car/house/office have to get before you can’t tolerate it anymore?  That’s your standard of cleanliness.

• How out-of-shape can you get before you draw the line and start doing something about it?  That’s your standard of fitness.

• How deep in debt do you have to get before you cut up your cards and take action to get out?  That’s your standard of financial solvency.

We operate like little human thermostats – we have this mental standard of “okay” that we can tolerate, and when we dip below it, we suddenly get motivated to get our ass in gear.  We feel like less of a person until we get ourselves back into that “okay” zone.

In one sense, standards are part of how we want to identify ourselves.  If we’re not living up to our own standards, we don’t feel like ourselves – and we suddenly get motivated to correct the issue.

But standards can also lock you into a personal hell.

The other side of the coin is that our standards are often based around how we want other people to identify us. And since our human desire to be accepted is so strong, we commonly set our thermostat a lot higher when other people are looking than we ever do for our own personal sense of fulfillment.

Because we’re afraid of being excluded, ridiculed, or simply thought poorly of, we jump through hoops to look good for others.  In effect, we let the fear and worry about other people’s opinions become a stronger driving force then the desire to live a life we’re happy with.

Don’t believe me?

• How many times have you let your place stay messy for long periods of time, and finally get it clean only because people were coming over?

• How many times have you let your physical fitness go for a long time … only to start taking care of yourself because of an upcoming reunion, or special event?

• How many times have you altered the appearance of your home, your wardrobe, or your accumulation of “stuff,” only because your friends, neighbors, or co-workers have done it first?

The desire to not be labeled as “different” (which most people are afraid means “deficient”) is so strong that we will move heaven and earth not to be called out by someone else.

But we won’t move heaven and earth to get our lives where we want them.  You know it’s true in your life, the same way I know it’s true in mine.  Deep down, we are more likely to let other people’s opinions - real or imagined – direct our lives than we are to take the reins for ourselves.

That, my friends, is screwed up.  And it should scare you.

There’s an old saying about the definition of debt:

“Debt is spending money you don’t have to buy things you don’t need to impress people you don’t even like in the first place.”

So it is with your standards.  You freak out about getting the place clean for company without asking yourself, “Why don’t I keep the place this clean for myself?” or “Why the hell do I even have all of this stuff, anyway?”  You diet and work out to look good at that wedding or reunion and let yourself go to pot for the rest of the year.  You avoid taking risks, being yourself and being vulnerable because you are afraid that showing your “real” side will get you looked down on.

Again, you know it’s true in your life, the same way I know it’s true in mine. Even if you’re the most independent person on Earth, somewhere in your life you’re likely letting someone else set your standard.

It’s not fun to acknowledge this.  In fact, a big part of you will be resisting thinking about this as strongly as possible (isn’t there a link I can click to get away from this as quickly as I can?).

It’s uncomfortable because it’s true.  And as a truth, you can either pretend it’s not an issue, or you can face it and admit that as a society, we’re carefully conditioned to fear being ourselves and to take the “safe” path at all costs.

But the safe path isn’t safe at all.  Since your peace of mind – if you ever have any – is tied up in impressing others, it’s on the shakiest ground possible.  What happens when the wind changes and your best isn’t good enough in society’s eyes?  How high will you jump to get back into their good graces?  Is that how you want to live your life?

What to do when you’re ready to face the facts

If a life of slavery to society’s fickle standards isn’t very appealing to you right now, congratulations – you’re setting your own standard right now and deciding that you don’t want other people’s opinions to force you into a box any longer.

Now it’s time to re-evaluate some of the other standards in your life.  Why do you work the job you do?  Why do you wear the clothes you do?  What criteria do you use to select your friends?  Why do you look at yourself in the mirror and say _______ (insert good or bad word here)?

is it because you’ve bought into society’s definition of how you should work, look, live and operate?

Or is it because you consciously looked at your life and said “this is what I truly find fulfilling?”

For everything in your life, it’s either one or the other. Either you’re letting the world tell you what you need to be/do/have to be happy and worthwhile, or you’re setting your own standards.

Wouldn’t you rather be free to chart your own course?

The high non-existent cost of high standards

For a lot of people, all this standards-setting talk will be scary, and rightfully so.  After all, if you do what’s best for you, even if it doesn’t fit someone’s cookie-cutter idea of what life should be like, won’t you lose some friends and make some relatives mad?

Absolutely.  Because other people are just as afraid of being looked down on as you are, they’re going to panic and tell you that you should fall in line, like they are, and take the safe route.

• When you decide to take care of your body, eat right and work out, they’ll push you to pig out like they do – and then resent you when you start trimming down as they fatten up.

• When you decide to brown-bag lunch and save your money instead of joining them at the food court, they’ll label you as a financial loser.

• When you decide to stop joining in on the regular gossip sessions because you know that’s not the kind of BS you want in your life, they’ll think you’re “too good for them.”

• When you decide to push back on late work hours because you want more time with your family, they’ll say you’re not a “team player.”

• When you decide to pour your time into improving your life rather than heading out for drinks on Fridays or spending the weekend at the big game, you’ll become one of “those people.”

So, yeah, some people will shun you. That seems like a pretty high cost – and I won’t argue that it won’t be.  But think about it this way – if these people are going to reject you because you’re taking care of yourself physically, mentally and emotionally … then do you really want them to be major players in your life anyway? Are they really caring about what’s best for you, or are they selfishly trying to hold you down so they don’t have to face the same uncomfortable choices for themselves?

Yeah, you’ll lose some people along the way to raising your standards.  But you never really had them anyway.

The light at the end of the tunnel

Now, don’t think I’m saying you should abandon people. If friends and family put pressure on you because you’re not falling into line with their standards, don’t cut them off.  But do let them know firmly – and in no uncertain terms - that you’re a big kid now, and you can make your own decisions.  And that you can live with the consequences.

If they can’t deal with being around someone who is trying to improve their quality of life, than it’s not your problem. Yes, it will hurt.  Yes, it will open some wounds.  But reaching the end of your life with the realization that you let yourself spend your time on Earth as a puppet will hurt even more.

But it’s not all bad.  In fact, two very fulfilling things will happen as you move forward in your quest to raise your standards:

• First, you will attract people who will accept you for who you are and be genuinely supportive of your decisions to raise the bar in your own life.  You will create your own circle of people who will actually let you be yourself (which is a rare thing in this world).

• Second, you might pull some of your friends and family along in your wake, and inspire them to set their own standards as well.  When they see you becoming happier and more fulfilled in your own life, they may gain the courage to do the same.

Raising your standards is not easy.  It’s frightening.  It’s challenging.  It’s not something you may want to do alone.  But it is something you need to be aware of, because if you’re not consciously determining where you want your standards to be – in all things – you’re letting the world reach in and muck around with your thermostat as often as it wants.

And when it’s all said and done, that’s not where you want to be.

Every day, ask yourself this:

Am I living this way because it’s what I want, or because society is telling me it’s what I should want?

And be prepared to act on the answer.

That is all.

Dave

Steven Covey also talks about the dangers of the “rescue fantasy” in one of his books, saying how too many people think that some magical solution will solve their problems in the future.  We’ll get that raise, and then we’ll be able to get out of debt.  Someone new will date us, and finally, things will go smoothly.  Someone will offer us a better job, and then everything will be okay.

Except life doesn’t work that way.  Nothing is going to make your problems go away.

No one is coming to your rescue.  And that’s good news.

We buy into all these little “someday” ideas in our life – “Someday, when I have this, I’ll be happy.”  Or “Someday, when this circumstance changes, everything will be better.”  We’re unhappy about something now, and we fall for the scam of external happiness – the idea that something outside of us has to change before we can actually feel happy and fulfilled.

But here’s the cruel thing – even when that circumstance changes, or when you get that thing you’ve been angling for, you won’t be happy. Things won’t be okay, because there will be a new circumstance you want changed or a new thing you want.

There will always be another external factor for you to be unhappy about, because if you’re miserable, it’s because you’re not cultivating the practice of gratitude and happiness in your own life.

The good news is that when you accept that no one is coming to your rescue, you can finally work on rescuing yourself from the stress and unhappiness you’re generating inside you.

I speak from experience.

The last two weeks have been absolutely miserable for me, because I’m trying to make a major change in my circumstances right now, and it’s extremely difficult and it’s not happening fast enough. (If only X or Y or Z would happen, then everything would be okay!)

I’ve spent two weeks living in almost paralyzing frustration looking for a quick-fix solution to my situation.  And then I get blindsided with this, from Mahala Mazerov:

At the most basic level, the definition of suffering is wanting things to be different than the way they are.   I live with a brain injury that significantly influences my life energy. In addition, I’m dealing with new health challenges that have left me extremely limited since January.  In Buddhist practice, we are reminded again and again we can take adversity as the path. In other words, we can face adversity, bow to it,  and use it as a means of cultivation. My daily challenge has been to embrace the shifting experiences as best I can, take the hardship as fuel for love, compassion and patience.

You really need to step away from this blog and read this post of hers, right now.

Mahala goes on to say that a lot of our suffering comes from getting stuck on our desire to have things be different right this instant and that taking adversity as the path is far easier than creating suffering in the name of desire.

And I have to say, I agree.

When we cling to our rescue fantasy, we make life more difficult.

One major change I made this weekend was to stop wishing that my circumstances were different right now and to start focusing on the question how can I grow as a person through the process? Maybe the reason I’ve been so damn unhappy isn’t because I’m not at the finish line right now, but that the waiting is revealing weaknesses in my attitudes, my self-discipline, and my willingness to push myself harder in the areas that matter.

We all want “things to change and be better” when perhaps we should be focusing on becoming better in the process of moving towards that change.

Otherwise, when things do get better, we’ll still be carrying all our current baggage into the next job, the next relationship, the next whatever … and we’ll be just as unhappy.

I’m not feeling the frustration of last week right now because I’ve abandoned my rescue fantasy. I can see some personal shortcomings I need to address between now and that near-future tipping point, and I can also see how the waiting period can give me the much-needed time and incentive to become a more balanced, relaxed person.

The “pain” of waiting is actually a pretty damn good gift, if I just choose to unwrap that sucker and use what’s in the box.

A change in circumstances does not equal a rescue (it’s more of a bailout, and we see how well those work).

You need to rescue yourself from your frustration, right where you are, right now.  People with far worse circumstances than you are refusing to play the victim every day – step up and join the ranks.

Hope this helps -

Dave

Of course, we know better (now), and we’re calling bullshit on this.  Running at maximum capacity does NOT equal a better life any more than redlining your car’s engine makes it last longer.  “Zoom zoom,” indeed.

So let’s talk about one of the many tools the Cult of Productivity – The Default “Yes.”

Just Say No (Where Have We Heard This Before)?

Somewhere along the line we’ve made the false connection between being busy and being cool.  It became a little high-schoolesque game to see who had the most gadgets, the most projects, the most emails on a daily basis.  Productivity became, in a sense, a pissing contest.

The more stressed for time you were, the more you had “arrived.”  The more you could impress people with being everywhere at once.  The more things you could jam on your personal and professional resume.

The problem with this is, when you spread yourself out like that, you’re spreading yourself thin.  Your circle of influence may have stretched to miles wide, but eventually it’s only a quarter-inch deep.  Not a good place to be.

But – gasp – you can’t slow down … that would be admitting weakness. That would betray a lack of “real” priorities.  And so when a new project, a new idea, a new commitment of time and energy comes by … how can you say no?

After all, it’s a really cool project.  And it’ll be a great networking opportunity. And I’m sure I could squeeze it in.

And then you end up like those trains in Japan, where they literally have to have a “spotter” to help push people into the train because they are packed so tightly.

Because saying “no” to a new commitment becomes equivalent to failure.

And we all know how unacceptable failure is in our society.  It’s like a non-airbrushed photo of a supermodel – it’s something to be shunned and attacked (eek!  It’s reality – run!!!).

And so time and again, we get tricked into saying “yes,” because we’re afraid of the fallout of “no.”

But if you don’t say no – relentlessly – the Cult captures you.

You know, having certain people view you as a failure isn’t so bad.  After all, if someone is going to be so shallow as to shun you because you aren’t willing to settle for burning your soul out prematurely, then that’s a really cool situation – you can weed out the posers and false friends from your life.

Who knows, you might actually end up left all alone … except for the handful of real people who accept you for who you are and are also willing to be transparent and honest about their own limits.

The horror.

But the Cult is relentless – so you’ve got to be relentless back at them.  You can’t just say “no” every once in a while – you’ve got to make it a default answer in your mind, because the pressures of society will try and force you into taking more an more on until you every last drop of you is squeezed out.

That’s a scary thing for a lot of people – the idea of not taking on and endless array of goals – but it’s a damned important one for your life.  Here’s why.

Saying “No” Means Saying “Yes” To Only The Right, Best Things

When you say “yes” to everything, you’re not making any judgement calls or assessing the value of things.  You’re just taking things on because they’re there, or because you don’t want to disappoint someone.

But this is madness.  It’s like deciding you’ll date anyone who is interested in you rather than looking for someone you like, respect and trust.

And just like sex sells in advertising, the Cult of Productivity wants you to be really easy when it comes to accepting goals.  It’s already loosened you up with the “contact high” of other people’s super-productivity, and it’s hoping you’ll be a sure thing.

But you want to respect yourself in the morning …

… so you’re going to want to be more discerning.  When you decide your default answer is going to be “no,” you’re forcing yourself to really evaluate whether this new commitment of time and energy really lines up with what you want for your life.

You’re going to have to ask yourself if it’s worth trading part of your life for it.  As @CharlieGilkey says: “If it’s not worth doing, doing it will be at the cost of something worth doing.”

So repeat after me: Saying “no” is not a sign of weakness.  It is proof you are not insane.

But it’s easier said than done.

How to push past resistance to “no”

There’s no doubt you’ll encounter a lot of resistance when you first start saying “no” – not only from the Cult of Productivity (who, let it be said, aren’t evil – they just believe you can always do something more) – but also from yourself.

It’s going to be difficult and uncomfortable to turn commitments down, but it will make you a happier person.  It will also have the side effect of making you (dare I say it?) more productive, because you’ll be freeing up more focus to handle the things that are currently on your plate.

And as your plate gets clearer, your mind will get clearer, too.  You’ll start rejecting commitments that add “shallow value” to your life and take on different commitments that feed your sense of self and value and contribution.  You’ll become someone who builds a fullfilling life rather than just a life filled with “one more thing.”

It won’t be easy.  But saying “yes” all the time is even harder, and you know it.  Start the practice of resisting new commitments and only saying “yes” when they truly align with what you want.

But how do you start saying “no” when you’re not good at it?

Next post will talk about how to do this – but in the meantime, if you’ve got a strategy for keeping the number of commitments you juggle sane, feeel free to add it in the comments.

Good luck – and start saying “no” more often -

Dave