Tag Archives: Emotional Intelligence

Love the Pain

Our ancestors evolved in an era when food and other resources were rare, and challenges and threats were abundant. Needless to say, there wasn’t any entertainment, alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, and other recreational drugs.

As a result, we’re born with a psyche that is addicted to pleasure and avoids pain as much as possible. That made sense back in the day, but it’s a defect nowadays.

Thanks to civilization, we live in safe environments, we’re provided with basic necessities of life, and we have easy and abundant access to pleasures of life.

Under these circumstances, our addiction to pleasure and our avoidance of pain are our biggest enemies.

Types of Actions Available to Us

Most of the actions that we can take fall into one of the two categories below.

  1. Actions that feel good at the moment but harm us in the long-term.
  2. Actions that feel bad at the moment but benefit us in the long-term.

Our default personality prefers the type 1 actions and avoids the type 2 actions. We need to develop a new personality that is the reverse of our default personality.

When I say love the pain, I don’t mean to harm yourself. I mean to love the type 2 actions, which feel painful when you engage in them.

Reversing our default personality means not only loving the type 2 actions but also avoiding the type 1 actions like plague, even at the thought level. Don’t even fantasize about them.

Aim for Mental Toughness

Reversing our default personality requires mental toughness. Don’t give up if you think you aren’t tough. The fundamental principle of personal development states that you can cultivate it.

You can cultivate mental toughness by developing your courage, self-discipline, and compassion. Yes, you’ve read that right. Toughness doesn’t mean cruelty. Real compassion requires mental toughness.

You don’t have to do all of that overnight. You can build world-class mental toughness by making 1% improvements every day.

1% Daily Improvements Is All You Need

Ray Dalio suggests determining your top three habits to give up and top three habits to adopt in his book Principles. Before we continue, take a moment and answer the questions below. Make a list for both of them.

  1. Which habits do you need to let go of?
  2. Which habits do you need to adopt?

Let’s say you have ten habits in both lists. 1% improvement would be to take one habit from those lists and start working on it.

Suppose that you decided to meditate for 20 minutes a day. Instead of starting with 20 minutes, start with five minutes on the first day. Every day, add one minute until you reach 20 minutes. In 16 days, you’ll get to 20 minutes a day.

Now, pick another habit and apply the same 1% strategy on that one. This way, you’ll be gradually improving your mental toughness over time.

Look for and Welcome Challenges

Your default personality runs away from challenges, registers failure as pain, and looks for comfort. Now, reverse all of that. Look for challenges, register failure as pleasure, and run away from comfort.

Before we continue, do the following exercise.

  1. Make a list of challenges to face.
  2. Make a list of fears to overcome.
  3. Make a list of self-discipline goals to achieve.
  4. Make a list of indulgences to let go.

By indulgence, I mean inessential activities that you do just for pleasure. For example, drinking alcohol, going to parties, or drinking gourmet coffee.

Now, apply the 1% technique to the lists above. If you can’t give up an indulgence entirely, reduce it to a level that really hurts. Instead of drinking gourmet coffee several times a day, drink it once a week.

Don’t run away from challenges. Don’t resist them. Surrender to them. Melt into them.

If you run away from challenges, they’ll come after you and get you. If you face your challenges, you’ll have the choice to select the ones you want.

Get Over Your Fear of Failure

Choose projects that are outside of your comfort zone, which have a chance of failure. Don’t fail on purpose, do your best to succeed, but accept and embrace failure.

Reframe failures as growth opportunities. Examine your failures and derive lessons from them.

Embrace uncertainty. Go toward the eye of the storm. Let go of your fears.

Most of your fears are some bodily sensations. They don’t have any benefits and keep you from realizing your potential. They are a product of an archaic construct that your psyche is.

We can let our fears go by staying with them without avoiding them, without trying to change them, and without suppressing them.

Tap into Your Pain

Use your pain as fuel for progress. If you need the motivation to do what’s hard, make a list of your pains. I don’t mean physical pain, but psychological pain. What gives you psychological pain?

  • What are your past failures?
  • What are your missed opportunities?
  • What are the events that still hurt you?

Make a list of them, read that list whenever you need motivation, and get into the right feeling and do whatever is needed.

Tap into the tension between where you are and where you want to be. How does that make you feel? Determined? Strong? Powerful? How does pleasure make you feel? Weak?

Success rarely comes as a result of a walk in the park. It comes from being optimistic about the end result, but at the same time, facing the brutal reality of the situation that you’re in. This is called the Stockdale Paradox.

Enjoy the Process

When I first started jogging, I kept reminding myself of the remaining distance. Last 2 kilometers, last kilometer, last 800 meters, last 400 meters, and so on.

I thought that would make the process easier, but on the contrary, it made everything worse.

After a few trials, I realized that jogging is all about putting one foot in front of the other, without thinking about anything, enjoying the process, and doing that until I pass the finish line.

That’s true about all the challenges that you face in your professional and private life. You’ll give yourself a much harder time if you obsess about the finish line.

The whole process will be much easier if you make progress toward your goal day after day without obsessing about the finish line.

That involves loving your current conditions no matter how bad you may perceive them.

Just, stop resisting your current life situation and embrace it entirely. That doesn’t keep you from working to change it, but it’ll eliminate unnecessary suffering.

Conclusion

Our evolution made us go after pleasure and avoid pain. That made sense back in the day, but we reached a state of civilization where our default personality is harming us. We need to make conscious effort to reverse that.

To do that, we need to cultivate mental toughness by doing what feels bad at the moment but benefits us, by looking for and welcoming challenges, embracing our failures, tapping into our pain, and enjoying the process.

An Effective Method to Eliminate Bad Habits

 

Let me share with you three facts, and then explain how we can use them to eliminate bad habits.

  1. Our minds work with associations.
  2. Emotions have a higher impact on our behavior than thoughts.
  3. Negative emotions have a higher impact than positive emotions.

An Example: Quitting Smoking

I used to be a smoker. It was a severe addiction. A few cigarettes a day weren’t enough. When I smoked, I had to smoke around a pack a day.

On an intellectual level, I knew that this habit wasn’t sustainable. Understanding this on an intellectual level wasn’t enough to quit smoking.

Then, horrible pictures of mouth, throat, and lung cancer were put on cigarette packages, and that was the end of it.

Once, I made the association with the horrible pictures and smoking, I couldn’t smoke and feel good about it anymore.

Knowing Isn’t Enough

In the past, I knew that smoking was harmful, but the good feelings of the habit overrode that knowledge.

Remember the second fact above, “emotions have a higher impact on our behavior than thoughts.”

Then, I associated smoking with bad feelings as well. Now, two emotions and one piece of information competed to influence my behavior.

  • The bad feelings triggered by the images of mouth, throat, and lung cancers.
  • The good feelings triggered by smoking.
  • The information that smoking was harmful.

The good feelings easily overrode the information, but the bad feelings triggered by the images had a higher impact than the good feelings. That confirmed the third fact above, “negative emotions have a higher impact than positive emotions.”

A Habit Harder to Quit: Distraction

In my daily life, I don’t watch any TV. I don’t listen to distracting pop music. I don’t surf the Internet for hours. I used to do all of that in my life. I’m glad that I quit those habits.

There’s another habit that stuck with me though. I watch distracting clips on YouTube for half an hour a day.

You might say that half an hour isn’t worth bothering about, but half an hour each day makes 7.6 full days a year. If you count only the waking hours, it’s 11.4 days a year. That’s a lot of time to waste, isn’t it?

The Subtler Effects of Distraction

Distraction has other, subtler effects on our lives than losing time. It reduces our capacity to process the critical events of the day. Moreover, it keeps our minds busy even if we don’t engage with it.

If you distract yourself for 10 minutes, that’s 10 minutes less for your mind to relax and process the events of the day.

Depending on the intensity of the distraction, your mind has one more event to process. This fact holds even if your distraction was a funny clip.

Your mind has to play the same funny clip over and over in your imagination until it doesn’t produce intense emotions. That distracts you long after you stop watching YouTube and have to concentrate on your work.

The Competition of Thoughts and Emotions

On an intellectual level, I know that even 10 minutes a day is too much distraction. I want to quit it altogether.

Unfortunately, the good feelings of watching a funny clip overrule the knowledge that it’s a distraction. I need to associate that behavior with negative emotions.

I tried to do that by thinking about death as Stoics suggest. I even associated it with images of skulls and cemeteries. None of that helped me. Death is still an abstract concept for me. To me, cemeteries are beautiful, peaceful places, and skulls don’t scare me.

Finally, I found something that influenced me, pictures of old people. That reminds me of the possibility of getting old and having wasted an essential portion of my time. At this moment, that scares me.

Now, my goal is to associate distraction with the fear of regret in my old age. I try to create that association with images of old people. Let’s see if that fear will override the good feelings triggered by distraction.

Conclusion

If you’re trying to quit a habit, don’t waste your time to convince yourself with intellectual arguments. They don’t work.

Habits are associated with emotions. Those emotions make you maintain your habits.

To quit a habit, you need to associate other emotions with that habit. Those emotions need to be more intense than the ones that make you maintain that habit.

Negative emotions have a higher impact than positive emotions. For that reason, it’s easier to find a negative emotion to quit a habit than a positive emotion.

The easiest way to associate an emotion with a habit is through images that trigger that emotion. Find pictures that trigger your target emotion, look at them frequently until you memorize them. Fire that image in your mind every time you feel the urge for that habit.

How would your life look like if you eliminated all of your bad habits using this method?

What I Learned from an Airplane Flight That Took Six Hours Longer Than Planned

Last Saturday, I returned back from vacation. What started with a 40-minute delay ended up in a perfect storm, literally. My three-hour flight ended up as a nine-hour journey between three airports, which was a great lesson to practice what I preach in my blog posts.

Lately, I’m writing more and more about personality traits. One of the most critical success skills is to integrate opposite personality traits and to deploy them whenever needed.

There are more than 600 primary personality traits, but researchers focus on the big five in practice.

  • Openness to experience
  • Conscientiousness
  • Extraversion
  • Agreeableness
  • Neuroticism

Studies show that people with high conscientiousness and extraversion, and low agreeableness tend to succeed more in their careers.

I believe that we can increase our success even more by determining the most suitable personality traits for the situation at hand and adopting it.

My Default Personality

In my daily life, I’m more conscientious. When things go according to plan, I’m introverted and relaxed. When reality doesn’t match my expectations, I become tense and vocal.

“Neuroticism” is a bad word choice in my opinion. No one would like to be neurotic. Yet, there are times when we need to be nervous.

You want to be nervous when you face a challenge. Nervousness gets your body into a high energy state. That helps you attack the problem at hand with all of your power.

In my career, it helps me to become nervous when things don’t go according to plan. I become alerted and energized to take the necessary measures. However, that isn’t always the best approach.

When Your Default Personality Doesn’t Work, Shift Gears

Shifting gears by shifting between different personality traits is an analogy by Dennis Merzel from his book Big Mind Big Heart. Let me explain it with my experience last Saturday.

Last Saturday, I returned from vacation, from Turkey back to Belgium. Airport transfers and flights aren’t the best occasions to be conscientious unless you’re driving the car or flying the plane.

I was triggered a lot by the chaotic traffic during the airport transfer. When I get triggered in my daily life, I get nervous and vocal. Neither of that would help me during the airport transfer.

There was nothing I could do. I couldn’t communicate with each driver in the traffic and tell them to be careful. Doing that with the driver of our vehicle wouldn’t change anything, but distract and annoy him.

My usual nervousness and extraversion in unexpected situations wouldn’t add any value at that moment. So, I decided to take deep breaths, calm down, and shut up. I consciously chose and adopted the most suitable personality traits for the situation at hand.

I Was Tested Whether I Learned My Lesson Well

I guess the universe wasn’t sure that I learned my lesson well and wanted to test me even further. My flight was postponed for 40 minutes. Again, something unexpected that would annoy me in normal conditions.

Since I couldn’t do anything about the delay, I chose to let go of the anger and disappointment about it.

On top of everything, the gate didn’t open until ten minutes before the delayed time. My typical reaction would be to get impatient, stand up, and look around. None of that would solve the problem at hand.

I was sitting in front of the gate. If the gate opened, I’d see it. And I expected the gate to open eventually. So, I calmed down, started to listen to an audiobook, and waited patiently.

It Was Just the Beginning

Finally, we got on the plane. When we approached our destination, the captain announced that we couldn’t land at the planned airport because of the storm there.

We landed at another airport, got some extra fuel, and waited for the weather conditions to improve.

In total, we waited for an hour or two on the airplane and spent another hour flying back to our destination. Many passengers became disappointed and started to express their discontent.

I kept letting go of my disappointment and stayed silent. Complaining to the staff wouldn’t change the weather conditions or magically move our airplane back to our destination. It would only make the whole situation worse for them and for me.

When You Can’t Do Anything about the Situation at Hand, Accept It

When we landed in our destination airport, we had to wait for an extra hour for our luggage. That was another problem no amount of neuroticism could solve.

Eventually, I expected our luggage to arrive. Honestly, it wasn’t that important to me if it got lost forever. It was just another hour of listening to an audiobook.

Finally, I got out of the airport six hours later than expected. Now, it was time to change the gears. I had to drive for one and a half hours from the airport to my home.

Now, I had to let go of the easy-going and careless personality and adopt the conscientious, focused, and even tense personality when I drove back home.

Conclusion

The moral of the story is that each polarity of the big five personality traits is useful in a different situation.

We need to know our default personality traits and be able to switch to the opposite polarity when the situation at hand demands it.

An Unexpected Shortcut to Mental Toughness

What would satisfy you the most?

  • Buy the luxury sports car that you want?
  • Move to the five-bedroom home of your dreams?
  • Start a relationship with the partner that you yearn for?

Maybe, your desires are subtler.

  • Being respected by others.
  • Being admired by them.
  • Being approved.
  • Turning heads around when you’re in public.

Or maybe, you’re frustrated with the challenges in your life, and you want to retire and do nothing the whole day.

The Problem with Your Desires

The problem is none of those achievements will satisfy you. They mean something to you at this moment, because you don’t have them. Once you have them, they’ll be an ordinary part of your daily life.

  • Once you have the luxury car, it won’t satisfy you anymore. You’ll be dreaming of a yacht.
  • Once you have the five-bedroom home, you’ll be dreaming of a castle or a home with an ocean view.
  • Once you’re in a relationship with your dream partner, you’ll start fantasizing about other people.

This is all human nature. Our wants are endless. Seemingly desirable things lose their meaning once you get them. Even the respect, admiration, and approval of others don’t mean much after you get used to that.

After a while, having an easy life becomes boring. You start looking for new challenges or risk falling into apathy and depression.

I don’t oppose buying luxury cars or homes or starting relationships. Just don’t obsess with them. Don’t end up in adversity to reach them. They won’t satisfy you at the end.

They’re like the chocolate at the end of a meal. It’s nice to have one once in a while. But they aren’t essential.

If realizing all of your desires won’t satisfy you, what would?

What satisfies us is to help someone in need and to make a real change in their life. Compassion is on a different level of consciousness than desire. Desire is a bottomless pit. Compassion increases our level of consciousness.

Most people, especially men, misunderstand compassion. They think that it has something to do with being soft. That’s the exact opposite of the truth.

Compassion starts with facing the pain and suffering of others. That isn’t soft. On the contrary, it requires serious mental toughness. It also involves toughness to do something about that pain and suffering.

It’s easy to turn a blind eye to the suffering of animals that are consumed as food every day by billions of people. It’s easy to fit in with the society and give in to your desire of consuming animal products. Doing the opposite is hard.

What Compassion Isn’t

Compassion isn’t about donating to charity and being done with it. Giving money doesn’t resonate with the primal part of our brains. We need to experience how our donations change the lives of others.

Compassion is also misunderstood for self-sacrifice. You don’t need to sacrifice your own success for compassion. On the contrary, you can use compassion to motivate yourself to succeed.

You can use compassion to let go of the inessentials and to focus on what matters in your life and work. You can use compassion to work harder.

The Hardest Part of Compassion

Compassion isn’t just about helping people in need. It’s also not reacting with hostility when we think we’re mistreated. That doesn’t mean not to defend ourselves or our rights. That means not reacting with unnecessary force or violence.

By violence, I don’t only mean physical violence. I also mean psychological violence. A joke can be a cynical remark, which is also an act of violence on a subtle level.

When somebody acts hostile against you, think about the pain and suffering in their past that motivates them to act that way. Reacting to them is easy. It’s hard to recognize their pain and feel compassion toward them.

What kind of a world would we live in if everybody practiced compassion?

Pain is inevitable. We all will face pain in our lives, whether physically or psychologically. What kind of a world would you like to live in when that happens to you? In a compassionate world? Or in an ignorant world? Knowing that, do you want to be a part of a compassionate world or an ignorant world?

Conclusion

We, humans, have endless desires. Realizing our desires won’t satisfy us. That only results in more desires. As long as we know that fact, it’s OK to fulfill our desires once in a while. Just remember that they’re an inessential part of your life.

Contrary to the common belief, compassion isn’t softness. It takes a lot of mental toughness to face the pain and suffering of others.

It also takes serious mental toughness to not react with hostility when someone acts hostile against you. You need to recognize the pain and suffering in their past that motivate their behavior.

Compassion doesn’t mean sacrificing yourself. On the contrary, it gives you real, lasting satisfaction, peace, and joy. It eliminates hostility from your psyche, which makes you healthier. It motivates you to succeed and helps you build the character to do that.

Where would you rather live? In a compassionate world? Or in an ignorant one? Compassion increases the level of consciousness of the entire planet and makes it a better place to live for all of us.

Why You’re Running in Circles and How to Break Free

Imagine you’re on a ship with a bunch of people. Once in a while, one of those people get to the wheel. They change the direction of the ship to their liking. They use all the resources of the ship to sail in the direction they want. Once they’re satisfied, they sit down.

After a while, another person stands up, gets to the wheel, and does the same. Sometimes, two of them get to the wheel at the same time. They try to steer the ship toward the opposite directions.

This pattern repeats multiple times a day, every day. Sometimes, you like the direction the ship is sailing. Sometimes, you’re disappointed with it. Sometimes, you don’t get what the person at the wheel is doing.

The ship doesn’t have a clear direction. It burns a lot of fuel, but it doesn’t make any progress toward a specific direction. Time passes, and you know you have a powerful ship. Yet, you’re sailing in circles near the harbor you left. What’s going on here?

Your Mental Programs Steer Your Life in Random Directions

That ship is your psyche and the characters steering the wheel toward different directions are the programs in your mind.

Once in a while, anger takes over the ship and sails toward a specific direction. Then, fear kicks anger out of the wheel and turns the ship to the opposite direction.

After a while, fear gets tired, and greed takes over. Greed sails the ship toward a completely different direction.

Once in a while, everybody sits down and the ship sails with the current. As a result, the ship doesn’t get anywhere.

Determine Your Final Destination

If you don’t like sailing in circles, the first thing you need to do is to determine where you want to go. To do that, you can use the Four-Step Exercise to Come Up with a Congruent, Viable, and Compelling Vision.

Get to Know Your Staff and Tell Them Who’s the Boss

Once you have a clear vision, it’s time to get to know the people in your ship and tell them who the boss is. You’re not your anger, fear, greed, or dozens of other programs operating in your psyche. You’re the captain that commands them all.

As a captain, you can prevent them from hijacking the ship and steering it toward a direction you don’t want to go. Moreover, you can also appoint each of them whenever it is necessary and give them particular tasks.

For example, you might prevent anger from taking over your ship while you’re having a conversation with your partner. But you might appoint anger when you feel like giving up on a goal.

You might not be able to determine a specific emotion that’s driving a particular behavior. That’s completely fine. In those cases, just identify the behavior as the program that’s hijacking the ship. Those behaviors can be binge eating, distraction, or overreacting.

Identify with Your Consciousness, Not with the Programs Running on It

In the beginning, it’s not easy to prevent some programs from taking over the ship, because you identify yourself with those programs.

When you’re having a conversation with your partner, and you get triggered, you might get identified with anger. Anger fuels you. It makes you feel alive. Deep down, you might feel like your life depends on anger. That’s an illusion.

Just realize that you aren’t the anger. You’re the consciousness that perceives the anger. As the consciousness that perceives the anger, you can prevent the anger from taking over the ship. To do that, you have to identify with the underlying consciousness instead of the anger.

You need to do that with all the other programs. When you came across a challenge, and you feel like giving up, remember that you aren’t the fear, you’re the consciousness that perceives the fear.

Urges Are Like Fire. They’ll Burn Away.

It’s hard to identify with the underlying consciousness and not act on the programs in our psyche. It’s uncomfortable when those emotions are intense. They feel like fire burning in our belly. But just like fire, they will burn away.

With time and practice, your consciousness will get stronger and those programs, weaker. It’ll become easier to identify with your consciousness and not with the patterns running on it.

Once you identify with your consciousness, you can consciously choose the program you want to run in a particular moment. Again, this is not easy at the beginning, but it’s possible with time and effort.

If you want to learn more about this process, I recommend two books: Big Mind Big Heart by Dennis Genpo Merzel and The Dark Side of the Light Chasers by Debbie Ford.

Conclusion

Your psyche is like a powerful ship. The problem is that once in a while, it gets hijacked by some programs. Those programs steer the ship toward seemingly random directions. As a result, you sail in circles and stay near the harbor you left decades ago.

By identifying with your consciousness instead of the particular programs running on it, you prevent those programs from hijacking the ship.

You can also choose the program that you want to run at a given moment to make progress toward your goals. It’s not an easy process, but it’s possible.

Integrating Seemingly Opposite Personality Traits for High Performance and Success

Last Saturday, I published a post about “being” goals. These are the personality traits that you cultivate to achieve your “doing” and “having” goals.

In the same post, I shared the big five personality traits, the 13 virtues of Benjamin Franklin, and a list of 600+ primary personality traits. Those lists should help you come up with your own list of personality traits to cultivate.

Today, I’ll discuss two approaches to personality traits, duality and integration. Our default approach is duality. Learning and using integration will significantly enhance our success with our “being” goals.

Let’s discuss both approaches and see their impacts on our personality.

Duality

Our default thinking is based on duality. In this pattern, we see the world in opposites.

  • Black and white
  • Light and dark
  • Good and bad

If we look at the big five personality traits, we would see two opposites in each category.

  • Openness: curious vs. cautious
  • Conscientiousness: organized vs. careless
  • Extroversion: introvert vs. extrovert
  • Agreeableness: friendly vs. challenging
  • Neuroticism: nervous vs. confident

Studies show us that conscientious, extrovert, and non-agreeable people are more successful in their careers.

An average career consultant would tell you to be conscientious and extrovert, and stop being so agreeable.

They’d think that you can be either organized or careless, an introvert or an extrovert, and friendly or challenging.

The world is more nuanced than that.

Integration

In the integration approach, we define qualities independent of each other. We don’t describe them as opposites of each other.

The best analogy to explain integration is music. You can define tones as bass or treble. You might think that they are the opposites of each other. In reality, they are tones with different frequencies.

Would you call a song bass or treble? You wouldn’t. A decent song includes sounds from a wide range of frequencies. The volume of the sounds from each frequency range varies throughout the song. A song is a composition of a variety of volume and frequency over time.

Now, let’s use the same analogy in personality traits.

Agreeableness

Agreeableness is a great example to explain integration.

Let’s say you’re friendly and compassionate and not challenging and detached. In this case, your approach would be like a song that includes only treble sounds and no bass sounds. Would you like to listen to such a song? I wouldn’t.

If you go to your average executive coach, they’d tell you to stop being friendly and compassionate and become challenging and detached. What kind of a song would that be? All bass sounds, but no treble? Who would like that?

The art is to add the traits of being challenging and detached to the mix as needed. If you’re a manager, you need to be detached once in a while and make the decision of firing someone. That doesn’t mean you can’t be friendly and compassionate when you share this decision with the related person.

Being friendly doesn’t mean not challenging someone when they’re making a mistake.

Extroversion

A challenging example to grasp is extroversion.

When I was in the college, I’d like to have a team of introverts and extroverts in our project team. The introverts would develop the project and the extroverts would do the necessary presentations.

The same approach is used in companies. On the one hand, you have the introverted engineers and on the other hand, the extroverted salespeople. You need both groups to succeed as a company.

If you could integrate both traits and use them whenever they’re necessary, you’d be unstoppable in your career.

Neuroticism

Integrating neuroticism is a hard example to grasp.

  • Who would like to be nervous?
  • What kind of a value would nervousness would add?
  • Isn’t nervousness the exact opposite of confidence?

To understand this, think about your typical college class. You have a professor who isn’t a bit nervous, because they know the topic inside out and gave the same lesson a dozen times before.

How would you feel at the end of such a class? Back in the day, I’d be bored and sleepy, because there wouldn’t be a bit of tension in the class.

In contrast, think about a student giving a presentation about their term project. They’d fail or pass as a result of this presentation. How would you feel during such a performance? It would be intense, wouldn’t it?

We need nervousness at some points in our lives.

Being nervous 24/7 would be an overkill, but at critical moments like giving a presentation or a meeting, being nervous increases the amount of energy our body produces. It’s up to us to channel that energy constructively.

Nervousness isn’t the opposite of confidence. It’s a physical state when your body gets into overdrive and produces high amounts of energy. You can be confident and nervous at the same time.

You need to be confident and nervous at the same time at critical moments.

You need to believe that you can succeed at the challenge at hand and at the same time, you need all the energy that your body can produce.

The next time you feel nervous, stop trying to calm down. Instead, focus on increasing your confidence and focus the energy that your body produces on the task at hand.

Conclusion

We tend to see the world in opposites. This perception of reality doesn’t serve us when we cultivate our desired personality traits.

Integration is a better approach than duality. In this approach, we cultivate the desired traits without trying to suppress our existing traits.

We see our personality as the composition of a variety of traits. We use each trait whenever it is necessary without trying to suppress others.

As a result, we develop a strong personality that performs well in variety of situations and success becomes inevitable.

Effortless Success

One of the 12 life-changing books I shared last week is The Surrender Experiment by Michael A. Singer.

Michael A. Singer was a college student who started practicing mindfulness and yoga to deal with the chatter in his mind and ended up as the founder and CEO of a billion-dollar software company.

It’s a fantastic, real-life story worth a read. At the same time, it’s an intriguing story.

Popular success stories depict heroes that overcome a lot of obstacles and involve a lot of plot twists. That’s not the case with the Surrender Experiment.

An Intriguing Life Story

As a college student, Singer is disturbed by the chatter in his mind and starts practicing meditation and yoga to quite that voice. At the same time, he follows his intuition to buy a personal computer when they first came to market. He starts programming as a hobby.

He acts upon the opportunities that are presented to him such as accepting a teaching position in college and buying a construction contractor license when they were offered for a low price.

Along the way, he keeps practicing meditation and yoga, and he keeps letting go of his limiting beliefs and emotions such as fear and worries.

His life is almost magical. All he has to do is to act upon the next opportunity that is presented to him. It is almost too good to be true. Singer’s life looks as if he succeeded without any effort.

Life is simple. We make it complicated. We keep creating problems if we don’t have any.

What is the secret of the effortless success of Michael A. Singer?

Imagine you stretch your budget to buy a powerful computer. After a few days, your new computer slows down. It freezes frequently, and some operations take significantly longer than you expect.

What’s going on? Why does this new, expensive, powerful computer perform so poorly?

When you inspect the issue, you realize that you’ve installed a lot of programs that you didn’t actually need. You start uninstalling them one by one. The performance improves with every program that you uninstall.

Once you have uninstalled the unnecessary programs that you have installed, you realize that your computer also came with a lot of bloatware. You uninstall those programs as well.

Finally, you end up with a system with only the software you need. Your computer starts to perform as you expected. It boots fast, and it processes complex processes without any delays.

Your Mind Is Like a PC Filled with Bloatware

It’s a familiar scenario, isn’t it? It’s easy for us to understand that the performance of a computer decreases when it’s bloated with unnecessary programs. Yet, the same is true for our own minds.

We fill our own minds with a lot of useless programs. Moreover, our minds come with a lot of programs that aren’t that useful in this day and age. All of those useless programs, emotions, and chatter are slowing down our minds. They blur our vision.

We don’t see the opportunities in front of us. We can’t make the simplest decisions. We have a difficult time concentrating on the easiest tasks. Sitting in front of a computer and working for a few hours becomes a torture. All of that because of the bloatware in our minds.

Our minds are powerful machines that are slowed down by unnecessary programs that consume its processing power. Imagine how powerful your mind would be if you only ran a few required programs.

Uninstalling Bloatware from Our Minds

Michael A. Singer uninstalled all of those bloatware from his mind with this mindfulness, meditation, and yoga practice.

This doesn’t happen overnight, but every time you let go of a program, your mental clarity increases a little. Those changes add up over time, and we end up with a robust system.

Your hardware is already powerful. Most of the time, the problem isn’t the hardware. It’s the software. And the problem isn’t the lack of software. It’s the excess of software.

Mental Clarity and Intuition

As Michael A. Singer improved his mental clarity, his intuition improved as well. He was able to see and take advantage of the opportunities in front of him.

As he let go of his worries and desires, he was able to make the correct decisions. He was able to focus on the work at hand and let go of his distractions. As a result, success was inevitable.

It’s a Process

Make no mistake, I don’t claim that you can let go of all of your programs easily. It takes time, and it’s a process.

When it comes to self-improvement, I believe in 1% improvements. Those 1% improvements add up over time and produce excellent results.

Letting go is a simple process. Yet, it’s significantly hard for most of us. I could tell you “just let go,” but I also refer you to my favorite book on the topic: Letting Go by David Hawkins. For a definition of the letting go process by Hawkins, please read this post.

Conclusion

Our minds are capable of amazing feats. We fail to accomplish those feats because we fail to use the full capacity of our minds.

We can’t use the full capacity of our minds because most of its capacity is wasted on useless programs. We can boost our mind power by removing those useless programs.

It doesn’t happen overnight like uninstalling software from a computer, but we can make significant progress over time by practicing consistently.

The Critical Principle You’re Violating

There’s a simple principle that gets violated often nowadays. This principle is a critical one in our personal and professional lives. It’s one of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I’d call it empathy, but I’ll use Stephen R. Covey’s definition.

Seek first to understand, then to be understood.

Covey divides the 7 habits into three groups, independence, interdependence, and continual improvement.

The Illusion of Absolute Independence

With the advances in the technology, we grew more and more independent. We think we don’t need people around us anymore.

The Internet provides us with more than enough entertainment. We don’t need to go to a store, everything is delivered to our homes.

As a result, we have the illusion that everything happens by itself and all we have to do is to pay the price. We forget the people who run this system because most of the system is automated.

With the advances in technology and automation, we became more and more independent. And that’s a good thing.

The High Tech Culture

The companies that provide us with the latest technology have a unique culture that emphasizes independence.

Engineers are encouraged to deliver a product that works. They aren’t encouraged to talk to their customers, build relationships with them, and make sure that they keep their customers satisfied.

As we excel in independence, we forget interdependence.

Communicating with others and building relationships with them are seen as a waste of time. This will be an even greater problem for the new generation.

The Generation of Loners

When I was a kid, I had at most one hour of TV time per day. I wasn’t limited by my parents. That was all there is for children on TV where I grew up.

In hindsight, I was lucky. I had to communicate with other children and grownups for entertainment. Otherwise, I’d be bored out of mind.

That’s not the case with the new generation. All they have to do is to get their hands on a gadget connected to the Internet, and they have an endless stream of entertainment. What a fantastic babysitter, isn’t it?

You’ll Need Others

If you think you’re completely independent, I have bad news for you. At a certain moment in your life, you or one of your loved ones will need medical attention. Then, you’ll understand that there are other humans, and you actually need them.

I really like how Stephen R. Covey calls this principle, seek first to understand, then to be understood. This definition is simple yet covers everything I wanted to explain in today’s post.

If I had to explain this principle in other words, I’d call it being sensitive to other people’s conditions and needs.

Real Life Examples

Let me go over a few examples that I come across frequently, and that explain how critical this skill is in your personal success.

Imagine a team of brilliant software developers. They spent all of their lives with computers and programming. They know the software technology inside out. However, the software developed by these geniuses is impossible to be used by the average person.

Their average customer uses a computer at most one hour a day. They don’t have that much experience with computers and software.

The software is developed for geniuses. These developers didn’t think that their software would be used by anyone less knowledgeable than them.

They didn’t seek to understand their typical customer. Neither did they try to be understood. Now, they have to deal with all the support calls they receive.

Business and Marketing

When we develop a product or offer a service, what we are doing is obvious to us. This isn’t the case for our prospects. Yet, most of us ignore that fact.

I came across so many online businesses where I had to search their website to find a blog post that explains what they are actually doing.

You can create the best online business out there, but if you can’t explain what you’re doing in three sentences, you won’t have any chance of surviving.

Communication in Private and Professional Life

Once in a while, I receive a collaboration request. I can understand that it’s an honest request, but I don’t get what is expected from me, and what I should expect from the counterparty.

The answers to these questions are obvious to the counterparty, but they aren’t included in the request.

Did you ever have a friend who told you “let’s meet sometime?” When you came back with a specific idea, they didn’t return your message. You know how annoying that is.

On the other hand, some people tell you the exact location where to meet, with as much detail as possible, like the date and time.

“Let’s go for a coffee in the coffee shop across the post office near our office at 4pm on Tuesday.” It’s impossible to misunderstand and waste time.

My Own Sins

Even though I’m writing a post about this principle, I won’t claim that I’m perfect at it. No one is, and no one can be, but we can improve ourselves by paying more attention.

One of my sins when it comes to this principle is that I provided way too many ideas and feedback to my colleagues.

As a result, they got overwhelmed and started to ignore my ideas and feedback over the years. Nowadays, I pay attention to keep my lips sealed and only speak up on issues that truly matter.

A Skill You Can Develop

The fifth habit is a skill you need to pay attention and practice to develop. Always ask yourself some questions about the counterparty.

  • What do they know about what I’m offering to them?
  • What is their background?
  • What is their experience?
  • Which skills do they have?
  • Who are they?

That list is not even close to complete, but I hope you get the point.

In essence, you need to step into the shoes of someone and look at the world from their perspective.

That’s not easy, because you don’t know a lot about that person, but at least pay attention and ask questions instead of making assumptions.

One of the advantages of this habit is that you perceive clues from your environment faster. You use them as feedback, which is a growth opportunity.

Resources

Empathy is a huge topic, and this post is just a reminder for you to pay more attention to it.

If you want to dive deeper into it, I recommend the books The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and How to Talk to Anyone by Leil Lowndes. Both are included in my list of 12 life-changing personal development books.

Conclusion

With the advances in technology, we get more and more independent, and that’s a good thing. However, absolute independence doesn’t seem to be possible in the near future.

We will always need other people one way or another. Therefore, we need to pay attention to interdependence and improve our skills in this area as well.

Identifying and Changing Thought and Behavior Patterns

In my recent posts, my focus was on using emotional intelligence for personal success.

Most of the personal development ideas and practices don’t work, because they are based on intellectual concepts.

Our behavior isn’t motivated by thoughts. It’s driven by our emotions.

We fail miserably when we try to regulate our behavior with our thoughts.

We remind ourselves how beneficial it is to focus on our job and how harmful it is to distract ourselves with our gadgets.

In the end, we still don’t focus on our job and distract ourselves with our gadgets because we receive emotional rewards from distraction and emotional pain from concentrating on the task at hand.

When emotions and thoughts battle, emotions win any day of the week. It’s not even close.

Thinking your way to success is an impossible mission. There’s a way to use our thoughts to modify our behavior though.

Even though we can’t modify our behavior with thoughts, we can change our emotions with our thoughts.

If we manage to modify our emotions to trigger the desired behavior, then we are on our way to success. Let’s go over an example of how to do that.

A Real-Life Example

This example is from my own life. The first step is to identify the thought and behavior patterns that end up in an unwanted situation.

Here’s my default pattern.

  • After a working week, I’m tired on Saturday mornings.
  • I want to publish a post on Saturday morning as well.
  • I get overwhelmed.
  • I feel triggered to distract myself with the Internet to escape the discomfort.
  • Once, I enter the cycle of distraction, I spend the whole morning on the Internet.
  • I feel disappointed in the afternoon.
  • Now, my mind is even more exhausted, and I still have to write a blog post.
  • I regret how I spent my time.

The Analysis

At the beginning of this pattern, my psyche associates distractions with pleasure and work with pain. As a result, I escape work and enter into distraction. After a few hours, my psyche associates the time spend on distraction with pain.

That’s a contradiction in my mental programming. You can even call this a bug in my mind. Luckily, I can fix this bug. I can replace the dysfunctional pattern with a functional pattern. Let’s come up with a functional pattern.

First, I’ll make a list of all the things in my life that make me feel discontent. Whenever I feel the urge to distract myself, I’ll remember two feelings.

  1. The feeling of disappointment and regret after a few hours of distraction.
  2. The feeling of discontent to be triggered with the list I prepared before.

When I get into the feeling of disappointment, regret, and discontent, I feel motivated to do something about them.

At that moment, all I have to do is to focus that motivation on the work in front of me.

Now, my work is an escape mechanism from the pain of disappointment, regret, and discontent.

I effectively associated distraction with pain and punishment, and work with pleasure and rewards.

Doing It Once Won’t Solve the Problem

Coming up with this idea and thinking about it once won’t make any change in your psyche and behavior in the long term.

Unlike a computer, our minds don’t save a program upon the click of a button.

We need to use the spaced repetition method until we reach the level of unconscious competence in triggering the desired pattern.

In other words, we need to remind ourselves the same program over and over until the new pattern fires on autopilot in our minds. There are many ways of doing that.

Here’s an example. You can write a summary of your new pattern on an index card and place it on your desk. That way, you’ll remind yourself every time you feel the urge to fall back to your default patterns.

Conclusion

We’re all motivated by our emotions. Most of the time, our feelings are programmed in contradiction to our thoughts. Our desires on emotional and intellectual levels don’t match each other.

In those cases, our emotions win over our thoughts. There’s a way to overcome that uphill battle. That is programming our emotions in alignment with our thoughts.

The first step is to identify our default patterns. The second step is to come up with a beneficial pattern that associates harmful behavior with pain and useful behavior with pleasure. And the last step is to remind ourselves the new pattern until it becomes second nature.

Emotional Intelligence for High Performance

Yesterday’s post was about using emotional intelligence (EQ) to overcome dysfunctional patterns. Today, we’ll learn how to use EQ to maximize our performance.

In yesterday’s post, I introduced the 2×2 model of EQ. That model involves the awareness and regulation of emotions of yourself and others.

We’re interested in becoming aware and regulating our own emotions when working on our dysfunctional patterns and maximizing our performance.

Emotions Drive Us

We are mostly driven by our emotions. Even the most rational people are guided more by their feelings than their reasoning.

There are two entities in our psyche. The first one is intelligent but weak. The second one is strong but dumb.

These two entities are mentioned in multiple resources. Nobel Laureate psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls these entities System 1 and 2 in his book Thinking Fast and Slow.

Ray Dalio mentions two levels of self in his book Principles. Sigmund Freud has a three-piece model, id, ego, and superego.

I like to call these entities David and Goliath. Our executive center is like David, intelligent but weak. Our emotional center is like Goliath, strong but dumb.

The Battle between the Two Systems in Our Psyches

There’s a battle going on between David and Goliath all the time.

David is pulling us toward our long-term goals, while Goliath is pulling us toward short-term rewards.

The quality of our lives is determined by the result of this battle, day after day, moment after moment.

The good news is that we can use our executive center to regulate our own emotions. That way we can break our dysfunctional patterns and maximize our performance.

The Secret of Success

We can’t succeed if our emotional center isn’t in alignment with our executive center, because the emotional center is stronger than the executive center.

Once we align our emotional center with our executive center, we operate on autopilot and maximize our chances of success.

The Map of Consciousness

Before proceeding, let’s take a look at the map of consciousness by David Hawkins. This map is useful to determine and regulate our emotions.

  • Enlightenment
  • Peace
  • Joy
  • Love
  • Reason
  • Acceptance
  • Willingness
  • Neutrality
  • Courage
  • Pride
  • Anger
  • Desire
  • Fear
  • Grief (Sadness)
  • Apathy
  • Guilt
  • Shame

For more information about the levels of consciousness, I recommend the book Power vs. Force by David Hawkins.

Emotions Are Neutral

We tend to label some emotions as positive and others as negative. In essence, emotions are neutral. It’s how you use them that makes them positive or negative.

Anger can be a positive emotion if you use it constructively. Anger is a sign of optimism. It means that you feel like you can change the situation that makes you angry.

Sadness is a sign of pessimism. That doesn’t necessarily make it a negative emotion. Sometimes, we need to let go of trying to change some situations and accept them. Sadness helps us doing that shift.

Use Your Executive Center to Steer Your Emotions

We’ll use our executive center to determine and change our emotional state. Let’s go over an example.

Suppose that you feel an urge to distract yourself with social media. What’s the underlying emotional state that’s causing this urge?

In some cases, it might be apathy. You might be bored and think that it won’t make any difference to waste a few minutes on social media.

Default Behavior Is Determined by Emotions

Your executive center thinks that the right thing to do is to not waste time on social media and to work on your project.

Your emotions don’t agree with your executive center. Your Goliath thinks it’s completely OK to kill some time on social media.

Since your Goliath is stronger than your David, your Goliath will win this battle. The only way to win this battle for your David is to switch the emotional state of your Goliath.

You Can Regulate Your Emotions

Your target behavior is to work on your project. Which emotional state would cause your Goliath to work on your project? You can use guilt, fear, anger, and even love and joy.

  • You can trigger guilt by thinking about your responsibility to your colleagues, boss, family, accountability partner, or your mastermind group.
  • You can trigger fear by thinking about the consequences of not working on your project.
  • You can trigger anger by thinking about not getting what you want from life.
  • You can trigger love by thinking about the people who will benefit from your project.
  • You can trigger joy by thinking about how other people’s lives will be changed as a result of your project.

Which Emotional State Works the Best for You for a Certain Task?

You need to know which level works best for each type of task. Let me go over four activities and which level works the best for me for each kind of task.

You might have different activities in your life. Different emotional states might work the best for you for each type of task.

Planning

When I’m in the planning mode, a peaceful state of mind works the best for me. In this state, I don’t feel any intense emotions.

In the absence of intense emotions, I have mental clarity. I can reflect on the challenges in front of me. I analyze, prioritize, and schedule my tasks.

To get into this state of mind, I use the letting go technique that I mentioned in yesterday’s post.

Execution

When the planning phase is over, and I’m in the execution phase, the level of anger works the best for me. When programming or writing a post, anger helps me focus on the task at hand and give my 100% to it.

Getting into the level of anger isn’t that hard for me. I just focus on the end result that I want to get and try to accomplish it as fast as possible.

Lifting Weights

By lifting weights, I mean working out in the gym, exercising with weights, doing 4 sets of 12 reps. These exercises require a similar emotional state as the execution phase.

A set of lifting weights takes around 45 seconds of intense effort. That requires full focus. The anger energy provides that kind of concentration.

Jogging

Recently, I started jogging three times a week. Last week, I realized that jogging required a different emotional state than lifting weights.

In my case, jogging takes around 25 minutes of moderate effort. The moderate effort leaves room for random thoughts to rise.

When random thoughts rise and keep my mind busy, my performance drops. It becomes harder to complete my target distance.

When I let go of all the thoughts and aim for peace of mind and mental clarity, completing my target distance becomes easier.

Anger doesn’t work in jogging. Peace of mind works better. Therefore, I practice letting go during jogging.

What Works for One Task Doesn’t Work for Another

If I use the same level of consciousness as in lifting weights, and try to complete my laps as fast as possible, I won’t be able to finish my target number of laps.

For me, jogging is all about feeling good, enjoying the process, and letting go of intense emotions and the thoughts they bring with themselves. I focus on putting one foot in front of the other until I pass the finish line.

The Influences on Your Emotional State

Your thoughts, the state of your body, and your environment impact your emotional state. Your emotional state affects your thoughts and your body in turn.

You might have different thoughts about the same subject according to your emotional state.

At a particular moment, you might feel love, and your thoughts about a person would be positive. At another moment, you might feel anger, and your thoughts about the same person would be negative.

Thoughts vs. Your Emotional State

You can also influence your emotional state with thoughts. In yesterday’s post, I mentioned an if-then list to catalog your patterns and the thoughts to use to change your emotional state in each situation.

Environment vs. Your Emotional State

Your environment impacts your emotional state as well. I realize that I’m more reflective and peaceful on rainy days. I become more driven on sunny days. Different types of music trigger different emotions.

The State of Your Body vs. Your Emotional State

The state of your body affects your emotions as well. Think about the emotions you feel when you’re hungry and when you just ate. Or think about the effects of coffee and tea on your feelings.

You can use all of the variables above to regulate your emotions to maximize your performance.

Summary

Your performance depends on your emotional state, more than what you think on an intellectual level. If you want to maximize your performance, you need to regulate your emotions to produce the best results.

In summary, using EQ to maximize your performance is a four-step process.

  1. Which emotional state am I in now?
  2. What is the ideal emotional state for the task at hand?
  3. How do I get out of my current emotional state?
  4. How do I get into the target emotional state?

The answers to these questions are different for everybody. To get the most out of this process, you need to find your own answers to these questions.

In essence, align your emotional state with your goals, and you will succeed. If your emotional state and your goals contradict each other, your emotional state will always win.