Tag Archives: Success

Beyond Awake

For the sake of simplicity, let’s define two degrees of awareness, asleep and awake. When you’re asleep, you aren’t aware of much. When you’re awake, you’re aware of your environment and yourself. What if there was a degree higher than the state of being awake?

That degree is called meta-consciousness or metacognition. When you reach the level of meta-consciousness, you become aware of your consciousness, your thought and emotional patterns.

There’s nothing esoteric about meta-consciousness, it’s a highly practical concept that you can use in your daily life.

Our Biases and Fallacies

Our biases and fallacies are reported extensively. Yet, most of us aren’t aware of them. In various cases, we can correct our cognitive and behavioral errors just by learning about them.

If you want to learn more about biases and fallacies, I recommend the book You Are Not So Smart by David McRaney. It’s comprehensive and easy to read.

One of our instincts is our urge to impact our environment. Yet, most of us aren’t aware of that urge and fall prey to it. That included me until I heard about it in the audiobook Outsmart Yourself by Peter M. Vishton.

We can improve our thinking and emotional patterns and our behavior just by learning about our biases, fallacies, and instincts. But there is a level beyond that. On that level, we become aware of our thinking and emotional patterns.

Becoming Aware of Our Thinking and Emotional Patterns

Suppose that you want to give up a bad habit. You can use sheer willpower to resist the cravings when they come up, but you have an alternative. You can observe your cognitive patterns and explore what causes the cravings in the first place. You can either eliminate the triggers in the first place or find more constructive ways of handling them.

Suppose that you want to eliminate drinking too much coffee. You realize that your coffee machine acts as a trigger. You can simply eliminate that trigger by getting rid of your coffee machine. However, you can’t do that at your job because other people drink coffee too.

In that case, you might want to observe your cognitive patterns. What is triggering you to drinking coffee? You might realize that every time you feel stressed, you feel the urge to drink another cup of coffee.

When you take one more step backward, you realize that you feel stressed when you have to deal with your colleagues. Through self-observation, you realize that the stress of dealing with your colleagues is triggering you to drink coffee.

Breaking Dysfunctional Patterns

Now, that you’re aware of your cognitive and behavioral patterns, you can expect when to feel stressed and when to feel the urge to drink a cup of coffee. You anticipate both conditions in advance and prepare for them.

You can find alternative ways of dealing with stress such as deep breathing and drinking a glass of water. You can use those relaxation methods when you’re dealing with your colleagues.

Becoming Aware of Subtle Patterns

Some of our cognitive and behavioral patterns aren’t as obvious as the example above. They might be obvious to others, but being aware of our own patterns is much more difficult. It’s like a fish becoming aware of water.

There are two behavioral patterns that I became aware of recently. The first one is apathy and giving up, and the second one is being reactional and making hostile comments. When I observed my cognitive patterns behind both behavioral patterns, I realized that they both stemmed from anger.

When I get angry, I either express it or suppress it. When I suppress it, I fall down to the level of apathy and give up. When I express it, I make hostile comments. Needless to say, neither method is pragmatic.

Moreover, acting upon them reinforces them in my psyche. Every time I act on them, I increase my tendency to use the same dysfunctional patterns next time. The behavior becomes even more automatic. It is ingrained deeper in my psyche.

Becoming Aware of Repressed Emotions

My patterns of expression and suppression were so deeply ingrained in my psyche that they happened almost in light speed. I wasn’t even aware of feeling angry before I react or give up. It required some study and self-observation until I could recognize these patterns in me.

Now, when I’m about the give up or make hostile comments, I stop myself and acknowledge the anger underneath those behaviors. I use the letting go method on the anger, while I look for a constructive behavior and do my best to act on it.

In letting go, you don’t push through with force. You tap into your power by releasing the breaks. When you release your breaks, your inner power drives you.

Conclusion

Studying psychology is definitely interesting, but there is something even more interesting, which is recognizing your own cognitive and behavioral patterns for the first time after 39 years of existence.

I highly recommend that you learn more about psychology, observe your psyche, and apply what you have learned to your own cognitive and behavioral patterns. Your results in life will justify the time and energy that you invest in it.

Turn a Loss into a Life-Time Win

The basic premise of economics is that we have unlimited desires but limited resources. That means we will experience the pain of failure, disappointment, or rejection sooner or later if we haven’t already done so.

How do you deal with the pain of failure, disappointment, or rejection when you experience it?

  • Do you deny it and act as if it never happened?
  • Do you give up, withdraw, and never try again?
  • Do you escape it by distracting yourself with something else?

When you experience failure, disappointment, or rejection, you have another option to turn this challenge into an opportunity. That option is to face it, accept it, and embrace it.

Sink into the Pain of Failure

The first step is to accept that you failed. Accept the defeat. Denial only makes things worse. Feel the pain of the defeat fully. Sink into it. Go toward the eye of the emotional storm instead of trying to escape it by distracting yourself with something else.

What happens when you allow yourself to feel the pain of failure fully? You’ll experience that it diminishes over time and eventually disappears.

There’s a caveat though. Embracing your pain doesn’t mean beating yourself up. The difference is simple. Focus on the emotions and not on the thoughts. This is the essence of the letting go method.

Don’t reinforce your feelings of pain by expressing them or dwelling in thoughts triggered by those emotions.

The Difference between Thoughts and Emotions

You can distinguish between emotions and thoughts with a simple heuristic. Focus your attention on your body to feel your emotions. Your thoughts reside in your head, and they are expressed with language.

If you feel a knot in your stomach, that’s your emotions. Stay with it and breathe into it without thinking. If you catch yourself thinking thoughts like “I’m useless. I failed again.” Let them go. Don’t pay any more attention or invest any more mental energy into them.

When you stay with the pain of failure, disappointment, and rejection long enough, something magical happens. That pain and associated fears subside and eventually disappear.

Lose Your Fear of Failure, Disappointment, and Rejection

When you lose your fear of failure, disappointment, and rejection, you approach life and other people with a lighter, playful, non-attached attitude. When you come from that place, life and other people respond to you more positively.

Even your relationship with yourself becomes more positive, which is the most important relationship that you have anyway.

You start taking calculated risks, making more offers, and getting things done effortlessly because you aren’t attached to the results anymore. As a result, you receive more yesses and accomplish more.

By going through the pain of failure, disappointment, and rejection, you come out the other side as a successful, happy, playful person.

Summary

We all have or will experience the pain of failure, disappointment, or rejection because we have unlimited desires and there are limited resources.

When you experience a defeat, you can turn that experience into an opportunity by embracing the pain it causes thoroughly.

Once you do that and process the pain of failure entirely, you become immune to it. When you reach that immunity, you lose your fear of failure, disappointment, and rejection.

You adopt an attitude of non-attachment. Other people resonate with you better and respond to your requests more positively.

Your relationship with life gets much better, and you adopt a playful attitude, which makes you happier and more successful.

From Despair, Lethargy, and Mental Fog to Bliss, High Energy, and Mental Clarity

When I observe myself, I recognize two states. The first state involves productivity, happiness, bliss, joy, peace of mind, and mental clarity. The second state involves negative thoughts and emotions, feeling down and depressed, lack of energy, lethargy, and mental fog.

As you see, both of those states involve physical, emotional, and mental symptoms. In my experience, those three components are tightly integrated. Of course, I’d like to be in the first state all the time and avoid the second state to the extent possible.

Sleep

When I observe my own experience, I realize that the quality of my sleep determines in which state I will be. I’ve read in multiple resources that sleep drains the toxins out of our brains, and I can testify that. When I had a quality sleep, I feel much better mentally, emotionally, and physically.

I aim for eight hours every day. Sometimes, I feel the need for extra napping on the weekends. When I do that, I enjoy peace of mind, mental clarity, and the absence of negative thoughts and emotions. The difference is significant.

Coffee

If sleep is so important, it only makes sense to let go of what interferes with it. In my experience, the biggest enemy of a long, quality, deep sleep is caffeine.

I’m addicted to delicious coffee, but I make an extra effort to keep my caffeine intake limited and early in the day. Green or white tea is a good replacement later in the day.

Alcohol

I’m lucky that I don’t enjoy alcohol at all. I become sluggish when I drink, and I don’t enjoy that zombie-like mental state. I enjoy staying aware and awake as much as possible, hence the inclination to drink excess coffee.

If you consume alcohol or other recreational drugs regularly and you feel lethargic, depressed, and foggy in your head, you might want to remove them from your life for thirty days and see what the effects are on your body, mind, and emotions.

Distraction

Exposure to distractions like noise, TV, radio, pop music, and social media moves me from the first state to the second state. So, I try to avoid them to the extent possible.

Cardio

A good cardio session in the open air changes my mental and emotional state entirely. I return home in a state of bliss after a cardio session even if I left home in a grumpy mood after a working day.

I used to enjoy weight training in the gym, but I’m in the process of giving up on that due to the lack of fresh air, fluorescent lighting, and constant, loud pop music in the background.

Letting Go

A spiritual practice can also help you move from the second state to the first state. I prefer the letting go method. It helps me with letting go of addictions, distractions, and other negative thoughts and emotions.

The idea is to stay with those cravings, urges, or other negative emotions without acting on them or trying to change them with other distractions. After a while, they subside. If you go through this cycle enough times, they stop bothering you.

Our modern lives test us with new challenges constantly. So, I won’t argue that you can let go of all of your negative thoughts and emotions, but it definitely helps you in reducing them to a pleasant level.

1% Improvements

When reading this post, you might have recognized some improvement points in your daily routine to move from the second state to the first state.

You might be tempted to make all the changes in a single day. In my case, that doesn’t work.

What works for me is the 1% improvements method. That is defining where I am now, where I want to be in an ideal case, and then making baby steps toward the ideal every day.

Summary

When I observe my body, mind, and emotions, I recognize two states. The first state is energetic, peaceful, and has mental clarity. The second state is lethargic, depressed, and has mental fog.

The difference between both states is the quality of sleep, caffeine and alcohol consumption, distractions, physical exercise, and a spiritual practice like the letting go method.

I pay attention to those variables because I want to stay in the first state to the extent possible. Sometimes, I realize that I’m far from the ideal. In such, cases I’m using the 1% improvements method to make baby steps toward ideal every day.

Game Theory, Relationships, Entrepreneurship

Let’s divide games into two categories for the sake of this discussion, games with perfect information and games with imperfect information.

Chess is an example of games with perfect information. You can see all the squares and pieces, all the time.

Texas Hold’em Poker is an example of games with imperfect information. Each hand involves two hidden cards held by each player.

Most real world transactions resemble closer to the games with imperfect information than to the games with perfect information.

Relationships

Consider the following question about relationships on Quora.

“If a girl appears to dislike me while texting, but shows with her body language she does like me, then what do I conclude?”

This is a typical example of an imperfect information game. This person tries to reach perfect information, hence the question “what do I conclude.” The answer is you can’t reach perfect information in this situation.

Perfect Information Doesn’t Exist in a Chaotic World

We all have various subpersonalities in our psyche, and once in a while, those subpersonalities conflict with each other.

The woman mentioned in this question might be attracted to him on an emotional level, hence the affirming body language. However, she seems to dislike the idea of romantic involvement with him on a mental level, hence the negative texting.

Looking at the clues and analysis above, one can’t have a conclusion. Most probably, she doesn’t have a conclusion either. At one moment, she’d say that she isn’t interested and rationalize it with some convincing reasons. At another moment, she’d feel rapport with him.

When she can’t come to a conclusion, how can he? It’s impossible. Therefore, he has to move forward without perfect information.

This is not only relevant to him and to this situation but to all of us in most critical situations in our lives. We won’t have perfect information most of the time.

Proceed without Perfect Information

What he can do here is to make a step forward toward his goal even in the face of imperfect information. Make an offer to the woman and see if she accepts it or not. This can be asking her for a date.

If she accepts the offer, keep taking steps toward the goal, which can be a stable relationship, like marriage. If she refuses, then he has to deal with the pain of rejection.

That means he has to take action in the face of two possible results, the achievement of a goal or the pain of failure. That takes some courage. The alternative is to stay in limbo forever.

Even though staying in limbo seems to be less painful than the pain of failure, failing once and dealing with it is much less painful than the constant low-intensity pain of limbo. It’s always better to take calculated risks and fail than to do nothing and get stale.

What Does All of That Have to Do with Entrepreneurship?

Entrepreneurship by definition involves imperfect information. No matter how many market surveys you make or big data analysis you do, there’s always a risk of failing. You can never reach perfect information.

That means you need to boil down your possible outcomes into two options, a success scenario and a failure scenario. The chance to fail is always there. Therefore, you need to accept it and embrace it.

One way to mitigate the risk of failure is to ask yourself what the secondary benefits are even if you failed. Lewis Schiff calls these the cherry on top in his book Business Brilliant. Your cherry on top can be more experience, extended network, and even a new idea for another business venture.

Summary

Unlike chess, most real-world games, like relationships and entrepreneurship, involve imperfect information. Therefore, a game like Texas Hold’em Poker with hidden cards provide a better analogy for real-world games.

When faced with a challenge due to imperfect information, the knee-jerk reaction is to try to get more information. This is reasonable to some extent, but in a chaotic world, perfect information is impossible.

What it all comes down to is to boil down the possible outcomes into two scenarios, a success scenario and a failure scenario.

You need to embrace the failure scenario fully and then move on and act anyway. That’s the only way to get out of limbo and to create an opportunity to succeed.

Self-Coaching on Multiple Levels

Once in a while, you might come across a challenge that has solutions on different levels. Moreover, this challenge might point to a bigger problem on a deeper level.

Today, I’m going to work on a challenge that I had recently to give you an idea of how to process issues on multiple levels.

Last week, I started to answer self-help questions on Quora. My motivation was twofold. First, I wanted to learn what type of challenges people had so that I can produce relevant content for them. Second, I wanted to promote my blog there.

As a part of my second purpose, I included a link to my blog in my credentials. After a week, Quora warned me that my credentials weren’t displayed and I had to edit them. This didn’t land well with me.

The Mental Level

On the mental level, Quora removing my credentials was a minor issue. Maybe, not even that. Sure, not having a link to my blog in my credentials could impact the traffic to my blog, but how much? One person a week? Was that really such a big problem?

Quora had all the rights to impose whatever rules they wanted on their service. If I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t use it. It was as simple as that.

I believe that their service provided value to me even if I didn’t promote my blog there or answered a single question. It was a goldmine to understand the challenges of people and to produce content to address those challenges.

Can an obstacle actually be an advantage? I believe it can. In this case, I can use my creativity and embed persuasive links to my blog posts in my Quora answers. That practice might result in greater subscriber acquisition than a dry link in my credentials.

Long story short, there’s no need to be upset about Quora removing my credentials. On the contrary, I can use my creativity and turn this constraint into an advantage. That’s my conclusion on the mental level, but there’s a deeper level that I have to work on.

The Emotional Level

If I didn’t work on this issue on an emotional level and left my reflection on the mental level, I’d miss an opportunity. Every challenge is an opportunity for growth, and I believe I have a room for growth here.

How do I feel about this event? I feel upset because I feel like I’ve been punished. That means I made a mistake.

I don’t like to be punished, and I don’t want to make any mistakes.

That’s a deep belief I carry with me that regulates my behavior. You might say that no one likes to be punished or make any mistakes. But if you take that to an extreme, it might result in passivity, not taking any risks, and dwelling in your comfort zone.

How do I process this problem on the emotional level? The first step is to use the letting go method. Stay with the intense emotions that are triggered until they subside. Embrace the fact that I made a mistake and got punished.

The second step is to allow myself to make mistakes. I don’t need to be perfect. As a matter of fact, I can’t be perfect. It’s human to make mistakes and get punished by reality.

I can see how I adopted my limiting belief of perfection. When I was a child, I was expected to behave perfectly, and I was punished harshly when I didn’t. It’s time to let go of this irrational belief.

The benefits of letting go of my limiting belief are to be more relaxed going through life, taking more risks, and not being tormented when I make a mistake. It’s a liberating process that would contribute to my success and satisfaction in life.

Summary

Once in a while, you might come across a challenge that you can solve easily on the mental level, but the issue might still impact you on an emotional level.

If that’s the case, you need to go deeper into your psyche and ask yourself why you’re triggered by such a simple problem.

When you explore your psyche, you might come across a limiting belief that you picked up when you were a child.

Now is the time to let go of that limiting belief and replace it with a rational one to function better in the world and to improve your success and satisfaction in life.

A Racing Mind, a Blessing or a Curse?

Do you have a racing mind that jumps from thought to thought and comes up with new ideas all the time? That sounds like a blessing because you have a constant stream of new ideas. What can be wrong with that?

On the other hand, a racing mind can be a serious liability, keeping you from focusing on a task until you complete it. How would you deal with such a problem, if you’re distracted by your racing thoughts?

I had a similar problem. On any given day, my mind would bombard me with dozens of ideas, nudging me to act upon them immediately. At a certain moment, I realized that my to-do list had thousands of tasks. It was impossible for me to complete all of those tasks.

Overestimating Ideas

When a new idea came up, I used to think that it was the Holy Grail. After a while, I realized that it wasn’t. However, I wasn’t ready to let go of all the ideas that my mind came up with. My solution was simple, write them down and move on.

Whenever I come up with a new idea, I write it down in my Evernote and move on. When I have time, I go over those ideas and pick the ones that are worth considering.

Throughout the time, I made a few conclusions about my ideas. They are usually repetitive. My mind comes up with similar ideas over and over. That’s why it’s important to expose our minds to new ideas. The best way to do that is to read books, but there’s some valuable online content as well.

The second conclusion I made about my ideas is that I will never have the time to implement all of them, even the majority of them. In a way, that discouraged my mind from coming up with new ideas all the time.

Do Your Ideas Serve Your Goals?

Moreover, I realized that the majority of my ideas were about irrelevant topics that didn’t serve my goals. That realization helped me to focus on my goals, on my tasks, and on what mattered to me. Nowadays, I don’t come up with new ideas about topics that don’t matter to me.

If you have racing thoughts, you’re probably feeding your mind with lots of stimulation, social media, TV, caffeine, and so on. Reducing social media and caffeine helped me with mental clarity.

Mental clarity is the absence of irrelevant racing thoughts in your mind. That way you can focus a greater portion of your mental capacity on what matters.

Summary

Having a racing mind that produces new thoughts and ideas all the time sounds like a blessing, but it has its disadvantages.

Our minds usually produce the same thoughts over and over. We also don’t have the time to implement all the ideas that our minds come up with. Majority of those ideas are on topics that don’t serve our goals anyway.

What’s the best way to deal with a racing mind? Just write down those ideas and carry on with your day. You can go over your notes over the weekend. You’ll realize that majority of your thoughts are repetitive and irrelevant to your goals.

When you let go of your racing thoughts, you’ll be left with mental clarity, which leaves you with greater mental capacity to focus on the tasks that serve your goals.

Pain, Pleasure, Satisfaction, Mental Toughness, Success

We, humans, are hardwired to avoid pain and seek pleasure. This simple principle was a wise rule of thumb before the civilization. Our environment provided us with sufficient challenges to deal with. This is not the case anymore.

Civilization brought us abundance and removed pain from our daily lives. This is good news on the surface, but there’s a flip side. We don’t know how to deal with abundance and the lack of pain.

If we follow our instincts, we can sink deep into pleasure and have no pain at all in the short-term. Such behavior is guaranteed to bring pain in the long term, either the pain of sickness, or the psychological pain of emptiness, or both.

Pleasure vs. Satisfaction

Satisfaction is a different feeling than pleasure. It requires our effort. That effort can be mental, emotional, physical, or a combination of them. When we reach a goal after an extended period of hard work, the emotion that we feel isn’t pleasure. It’s satisfaction.

Pleasure is a bad heuristic for success. Following pleasure rarely leads to success. Following satisfaction does.

The Formula of Mental Toughness

Success requires effort. After a certain threshold, effort feels painful. If we used our instincts, we would avoid the pain of extensive effort. That means we need to go against our instincts to succeed in life.

In other words, we need to invert the pain, pleasure principle. We need to avoid pleasure and go toward the pain to the extent possible. This is the formula of mental toughness that leads to success and satisfaction in life.

The Pain that Stimulates Growth

The pain I’m talking about here isn’t harming yourself physically. It’s the psychological pain of making the effort necessary and facing your fears. In other words, it’s the pain of self-discipline and courage.

You don’t need to become the toughest person overnight. It’s a process. All you have to do is to put one step in front of the other in the right direction. This is the principle of 1% improvements. By making 1% daily improvements, you make significant changes in your life over time.

When you go toward the eye of the storm, you’ll inevitably fail. That’s good. Every failure is an opportunity for personal growth and progress. Ray Dalio, an American billionaire investor, defines progress as pain + reflection in his book Principles.

Summary

Our default behavior is to avoid pain and seek pleasure. That instinct worked back in the day for our ancestors because their environment provided them with sufficient challenges. That’s rarely the case for us now.

To reach success and satisfaction in life, we need to invert our default instinct. We need to seek pain and avoid pleasure. That new heuristic improves our mental toughness and results in success and satisfaction in life.

Eliminating Self-Sabotage from Your Life

Yesterday, I shared the dynamics of self-sabotage. Self-sabotage occurs when our deep-seated beliefs are challenged by the reality.

Unconsciously, we’d rather experience loss, failure, and pain than to see our beliefs invalidated. If you think that you don’t deserve a promotion, you’ll set yourself up for failure when you receive one.

Self-sabotage is an unconscious process. Sometimes, we realize we are undermining ourselves and ask ourselves why we are doing that.

Sometimes, we aren’t even aware that it is us that is causing the same losses, failures, and pain over and over. We wonder what’s wrong with us and why we are attracting the same unpleasant experiences over and over.

When you come across a persistent problem, you can go over the following steps to find and change the underlying, negative, limiting beliefs.

  1. Determine your contribution to the problem.
  2. Discover your motivation to your contribution to the problem.
  3. Find out how you acquired the limiting belief that motivated you to sabotage yourself.
  4. Come up with an alternative, empowering belief.
  5. Repeat the new empowering belief until you internalize it.

Determine Your Contribution to the Problem

Some random events cause loss and pain. If you’re driving safely within legal speed limits and a truck hits you, I won’t go as far as to say that you have attracted this reality to your life.

However, if you’re experiencing the same difficulties over and over in a particular area of your life, you might want to look at your own contribution to the problem.

If you’re getting fired within the first year of every job you start, or if your relationships always end up prematurely in a breakup, you might be contributing to this problem as well.

The first step to solve such persistent problems is to acknowledge your part in it and find out exactly what you have or haven’t done to cause the failure or loss.

Maybe, you don’t give 100% at your job, or you make unrealistic demands from your partners. Whatever it is, find your contribution to the problem first.

Discover Your Motivation to Contribute to the Problem

This is the hardest and most critical part. We’re looking for the underlying negative belief here. Sometimes, this belief can be conscious, but most of the time, it is unconscious.

If you don’t give 100% at your job, ask yourself why you don’t do that? If you make unrealistic demands from your partners, ask yourself why you do that?

You might think that you’ve failed so many times before and probably fail in this job as well. So, why give 100%? If this is your approach to your job, your limiting belief will turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy, and you’ll lose your job.

You might feel like your partners aren’t loving you enough, and you might be making unrealistic demands to make them show you that they genuinely love you. The underlying limiting belief there could be that you’re unlovable.

Apply the Letting Go Method to the Unpleasant Emotions that Come Up

When you discover your limiting belief, you’ll feel a surge of unpleasant emotions. That’s good because those emotions have been trapped in your body. They have been fueling your limiting belief and your self-sabotaging behavior that create your persistent problems over and over.

Apply the letting go technique to the unpleasant emotions. Stay with them without trying to change them, suppressing them, expressing them, or escaping them. If you do that long enough, those emotions will subside.

If those emotions come up again, their energy will be lower. If you keep applying the letting go method, they’ll eventually vanish from your system.

Find Out How You Acquired the Limiting Belief

Most of the time, we acquire our limiting beliefs early in our lives. Look at your past and try to find the incident that caused the limiting belief.

Maybe, your dad was distant to you when you were a child, and you interpreted that as you being unlovable. That was one of the explanations of your dad’s distant behavior. Which other explanations are there?

Maybe, your dad thought he had to be strict with this children to raise them as disciplined individuals. Maybe, his parents were distant to their children as well, and he didn’t think about it. Maybe, he was a busy professional. Maybe, he had his own problems he had to deal with.

One or more of those explanations are probably more valid than your explanation of being unlovable. That explanation made sense to the young child that you were, but isn’t it time you drop it?

Yes, it’s hard, and it stirs up some heavy emotions, but isn’t it time to process those emotions now, release them from your body, and start a new joyful, happy, fulfilling life now?

Come Up with an Alternative, Empowering Belief

At this step, you have found your limiting belief, figured out how you acquired it, and let go of it and associated emotions. Wouldn’t it be cool to come up with an alternative, empowering belief?

If your limiting belief is that you’re unlovable, the alternative is that you’re lovable. If your limiting belief is that you’re incapable, the alternative is that you’re capable.

If you’re limiting belief is more complicated than that, use your creativity to come up with an alternative, empowering belief.

Internalize Your New Empowering Belief

Repeat your new belief as much as possible. Post it on different places where you can see it often. Record it on your phone and listen to it on auto-repeat. Find proofs of it. Act it out in your life.

Give your 100% at your job even if you’re guaranteed to fail. In the worst case scenario, you’ll get fired, but you’ll have learned a brand new skill set. That’ll be the cherry on top. Or your boss might recognize your efforts and move you to a more appropriate position.

Summary

If you’re experiencing the same problems over and over, you might be contributing to the problem with your self-sabotaging behavior. The first step to resolve the dynamic of self-sabotage is to acknowledge and recognize your contribution to the problem.

In the second step, ask yourself what your motivation was to act in a self-defeating manner. Your answer will be a deep-seated limiting belief. When you discover that belief, intense, unpleasant emotions might come up. Letting those emotions go is a part of the healing process.

Find out how you acquired that limiting belief and find an alternative explanation to the event or events that caused it.

Come with a new, alternative, empowering belief. Internalize your new belief by repeating it often, looking for proofs of it, and by acting it out.

Once you go through these five steps, you’ll be free from that particular self-sabotaging behavior, and end up with an empowering belief for the rest of your life.

The Dynamics of Self-Sabotage

We’d rather experience failure, loss, and pain than seeing our beliefs invalidated. As a result, our lives are a manifestation of our beliefs. That’s good news and bad news at the same time.

Let’s start with the bad news. Most of our beliefs are unconscious. So, we aren’t aware of the beliefs that shape our lives. Moreover, our beliefs are subject to the negativity bias.

Our ancestors had to take into account the worst case scenarios all the time to survive in the wilderness. Obviously, our living conditions have improved over the years. However, we inherited the negativity bias from our ancestors and pass it on to the next generation.

There are unconscious, negative beliefs in our psyche and they are shaping our lives.

The good news is that we can become aware of our unconscious, negative, limiting beliefs and replace them with positive ones.

Self-Sabotage at Work

Nathaniel Branden explains the dynamics of self-sabotage brilliantly in his book The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem.

A man receives a promotion in his job. He believes that he doesn’t deserve the new position. He believes that he can’t succeed at it. As a result, he doesn’t give 100% at his new job. Deep down, he thinks he’s going to fail anyway, so why make an effort?

His negative belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. His lack of effort results in failure in his new position. As a result, he loses his job. Facing a career bump is less painful than facing his belief invalidated.

Moreover, what if he gave 100% and still failed? That would be even more painful and meant that he was truly incapable.

Self-Sabotage in Relationships

Deep down, a woman has the unconscious belief that she isn’t lovable. She might have formed this belief because she didn’t receive any love from her father who believed that fathers had to be strict with their children.

When she gets into a relationship and the relationship works out well, her belief of being not lovable is challenged. This disturbs her, and she starts to act in a way that causes trouble in the relationship. Eventually, her partner breaks up with her.

She’s sad, and she doesn’t get what happened. She doesn’t understand why her relationships follow the same pattern and end the same way. Deep down, her belief that she isn’t lovable is reinforced once more.

Growth Mindset vs. Fixed Mindset

People with a fixed mindset believe that they can’t develop new skills in areas where they aren’t naturally gifted. As a result, they don’t make an effort to adopt new skills. That limits their options in their lives. They end up living lives that are less than their potential.

People with a growth mindset believe that they can develop a new skill if they put in the effort necessary. Encouraged by their mindset, they work on developing new skills that are necessary to realize their potentials. As a result, they end up living happy, fulfilling lives.

Summary

We carry a large set of unconscious, negative beliefs in our psyche. When our beliefs are challenged, we get disturbed. We act in a way to change the course of events that challenge our beliefs. This process is mostly unconscious.

Our behavior is mostly irrational, and we might have a hard time understanding why we act in a certain way. This is how self-sabotage works.

The way to fix self-sabotaging behavior is to find the underlying belief and replace it with a more positive one. How to do that will be the topic of tomorrow’s post.

Tap into Your Genius by Optimizing Your Mental and Emotional States

If there was a mental and emotional state that improved your creativity, your ability to think rationally, analytically, and critically, and as a result improved your cognitive performance, would you be interested in getting to know it and doing your best to get into it?

In my experience, there’s such a state. It is equanimity and mental clarity. To me, both of those states are the two sides of the same coin. Equanimity results in mental clarity, and mental clarity causes equanimity.

My mind works best in the absence of intense emotions and distracting thoughts. To me, this is what equanimity and mental clarity are all about.

How to Reach Equanimity and Mental Clarity

Equanimity and mental clarity require silence and relaxation. Noise and stimulation interfere with them. We need to sacrifice the external and internal obstacles to reach those states.

External obstacles to equanimity and mental clarity are obvious. These are the distractions in our lives. Here’s a short list of them.

  • Noise,
  • TV, radio, and distracting music in the background,
  • Substances like caffeine, alcohol, and so on,
  • Unhealthy food choices, overeating, heavy or stimulating foods,
  • Distraction through unnecessary Internet usage,
  • Newspapers, magazines, and so on,
  • Inessential communication and relationships with others,
  • Unnecessary objects in your environment, a messy environment.

The list goes on, but we can summarize it as everything inessential.

Internal Obstacles

Internal obstacles to equanimity and mental clarity are subtler than the external ones. These are the intense emotions, including the so-called positive ones, and irrelevant thoughts.

Handling the external distractions are straightforward. You switch off the radio and TV, stop indulging in coffee and social media, and donate all the useless belongings at your home.

Some of your addictions are harder to give up, but there are techniques to eliminate bad habits as well. The real challenge is the internal distractions.

Dealing with Internal Distractions

The best way to deal with internal distractions is to let them go. When an intense emotion or a distracting thought comes up, stop paying more attention or feeding more mental energy to it.

The ideal way to deal with an intense emotion is to stay with it without trying to change it, suppress it, escape it, or feeding it with more mental energy. If you stay with it long enough, it will subside by itself.

In some cases, the emotion might be too strong to bear. In such cases, let go as much as you can and use your escape strategies consciously.

In some cases, you might not have the time to stay with a distracting emotion until it subsides. In such cases, you can use the dark side of motivation.

For example, you can switch from the desire to distract yourself to the fear of the consequences of your distractions. You haven’t reached equanimity or mental clarity, but in your case, the fear might be a more productive emotion than desire.

Summary

I wholeheartedly believe that we are all geniuses. We need equanimity and mental clarity to tap into our genius. What keeps us from getting into those mental and emotional states is our internal and external distractions.

All we need to do to tap into our genius is to eliminate our distractions. It’s a long, hard journey, but a happy, satisfactory life is waiting for us at the end.