Archive for the ‘Awareness’ Category

Bleeding A Few Drops At A Time

We all have different sets of rules for blaming different people… one set of rules for those we love, one for strangers, one for those we actively dislike, etc. There is another set of rules we all have, though, that is much harder to reconsider and change… the rules for blaming our selves.

When I say blame, I mean whether you truly believe something is the person’s fault or not. You might say, for instance, that little Suzie shouldn’t have pushed the other child in her class… but if you are truly thinking “He must have done something to deserve it.”, you don’t truly blame her.

The change in the rules for whether or not you blame someone are pretty easy to predict when it comes to other people. The closer you feel to them, the less likely you are to blame them for something. If someone you love does something bad, you will look for circumstances and related evidence that shows, at least to you, that it is not their fault. If someone you dislike does something good, you will look for circumstances and related evidence that shows, to you, that they had selfish motivations for doing so.

When it comes down to your own actions, the same sort of thing appears to apply, at least on the surface. If you love yourself, you will look for excuses to not blame yourself for your own actions. If you dislike yourself, you will find reasons to not even credit yourself for the good that you do.

In my experience far more people fall into the latter category. They blame themselves for things where they would not blame anyone else for the exact same actions.

Part of this comes from the fact that we know, for certain, our own thoughts and motivations. Few people truly have completely pure motivations when they do something, even something that seems completely selfless to others. When you look at your own actions, then, you have all of that to associate with the action and take away the goodness of the action. The same sort of thing holds true for bad deeds, as well… not only do you know what the action was, you also know all of the bad thoughts, feelings, etc., that went with it, making it even worse.

This is a vicious cycle, too… the more you blame yourself for everything you do, the less you like yourself, and the more you look for things you can blame on yourself. You often even start blaming yourself for things that are outside your control… for the happiness of those around you, for instance, or your lack of talent in one area or another (you can gain skill, but not talent… to others skill may appear as talent, but talent is innate ability, without training).

Mostly this happens at the subconscious level. You don’t even realize that you are blaming yourself for things that you would never even consider thinking was someone’s fault if the same thing happened to them.

This has a huge impact, but it comes slowly… it is an ongoing injury that only bleeds a few drops at a time. There is no noticeable impact for weeks, months, sometimes even years. It’s so gradual, in fact, that you often don’t notice it at all… you just get more tired, more easily overwhelmed, or angered, or other negative emotions and reactions.

Even if you only bleed a few drops at a time, you will eventually bleed dry. Infusions from positive things happening in your life (finding your soul mate, having a baby, getting your dream job) can help out, but if you don’t stop the bleeding, even the strongest man will fall.

How do you stop the bleeding? You can learn to focus on the positive things in your life, and that will generally slow and maybe even stop the bleeding. If you really want to heal, though, you have to learn to take a step back from your life, mentally, and look at your self the way you would look at another person.

Would you blame your best friend for the fact that they had not fulfilled all of their dreams? Would you blame your brother or sister if they occasionally fail? If you wouldn’t blame someone else in the same situation, then you need to let go of the blame you are laying at your own feet.

It is hard to do this, and it is easy to slip back into blaming your self for everything. It does become easier with time, though, and the peace that accompanies releasing the guilt and blame is nothing short of amazing when you first experience it.

Broken dreams, like broken toys, cannot be fixed while you cling to them. You have to let go first… then you may find that they can be restored, sometimes better than they ever were.

Author

April 13th

Awareness

Did You Choose Love Today?

Every day, with every relationship, you must choose… you can choose to actively move closer, passively let it sit, or actively push it away.

Two of those choices will lead to that relationship fading away, maybe slowly, maybe quickly, but it will eventually be a thing of the past. Only one choice keeps your relationship together, moving forward.

This is true in any relationship, whether it’s business, family, friends, and especially your significant other. The more you interact with someone in a positive, active way, the closer and stronger your relationship with that person will become… that’s why businesses with great customer service also tend to have highly loyal customers, but if that service drops off, so does the loyalty. The couples with the strongest relationships are also usually the ones who find things to do together that they both enjoy.

Here’s how each of the choices affect your relationships:

Love (Actively Moving Closer)

The very act of choosing to do something actively with the intention of strengthening your relationship opens you up more to the other person, forming new lines of connection that provide more ways to become closer, more of a foundation to build yet more lines upon.

There is an extremely important phrase in that last sentence that many people will pass right over… with the intention of strengthening your relationship. If you do something, even something that seems right, for any other reason, it will be at best passively letting it sit, and can even be actively pushing it away. Other reasons include everything from feeling obligated to pity to trying to do the specifics of a guide to “getting closer” without understanding the meaning behind the words and actions.

Choosing love can be easy or hard, but it has to be your choice to truly work, long term. The choices that you make have to have meaning to you… you have to desire to build the relationship, not just follow a set of instructions.

Marriage counseling, for example, can fit into any of the three categories… if you are both choosing to do it as a way to strengthen your relationship, it is choosing love, and it will strengthen that relationship. If one of you is doing it out of obligation, or to avoid fights, it is passive, choosing apathy, and does nothing. If one of you thinks that it is a waste of time (or money), it will actively drive you apart.

Customer service is very similar… if your customer service person actively likes helping people, and identifies with the customer, it will strengthen that relationship. If they are following a script, like most first level call center employees, it is at best neutral, and does nothing to strengthen the relationship. If the person resents the job, even if they do the same thing as the first person who loves the job, they are likely to have a negative effect on the relationship between the business and that customer.

The choice of love, of actively strengthening the relationship, brings you closer.

Apathy (Passive)

As the Rush song says, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.” That’s as true in relationships as anything else.

The thing that most people don’t consciously consider, at least not very often, is that all relationships naturally grow apart over time. That’s because you get close as the people that you are at one point in your lives, but as your lives go on, you change. You become different people, and without actively forming new bonds, those people are less and less connected… you simply shed some of the pieces of you where the bonds between you are anchored.

This is true in personal relationships from marriage to friendship, and in business. How strong is your connection to someone you last saw five years ago, compared to someone you saw five days ago? Which one are you most likely to think of? Or for business, how much easier is it to sell something new to a customer you are actively involved with (in a positive way, of course) than someone you last spoke to three years ago?

The choice of apathy, or passively not doing anything, leads to weakening relationships over time.

Rejection (Actively Pushing Away)

Unfortunately, it’s very easy to actively push someone away without consciously deciding to do so.

You can do this when you are upset, hurting, or overwhelmed by things that have absolutely nothing to do with the other person in the relationship… you just act defensively, keeping them outside the “safety zone”. You push them just far enough away to keep them from hurting you, which happens to be far enough away to start the whole relationship moving down the path to being history.

It can be from things like being resentful of where you are or what you feel like you are being forced to do. It can come from things not going right at home (for business) or at work (for personal relationships). It can come from grief when someone close to you dies, or from simply feeling overwhelmed at all of the things that you feel you need to do (feeling like you are so far from where you “should” be, looking at the end point rather than the path to get there).

Rejection, in fact, is more often unconscious, or subconscious, than intentional. You are far more likely to “take it out” on someone than you are to choose to push that person away from you.

The choice of rejection leads to relationships weakening quickly… so quickly it’s hard to believe when you look back.

Every day, in every relationship, you make a choice… did you choose love today? What will you choose tomorrow?

Picture from Flickr

Author

December 28th

Awareness, Relationships, Subconscious

The “Skin” We’re In

Have you ever wondered how it is that you can love someone without liking them?

On the surface, it doesn’t make any sense at all… how could you possibly love someone without liking them?

The answer, though, is in the last sentence, right at the beginning… “On the surface”.

Personality “Layers”

We all have multiple personalities, and I don’t mean in the insane way (although that may just be a more severe form of the norm). We have one personality, our core, that is deep down inside of us. That personality is who we really are. Over the top of that we have various layers of “skin” that we show to different people.

The skin that’s on the outside is no more who we are than the clothes that we wear. When we love someone, we love them at a deeper level than the “skin” that they are currently showing the world. We hold on to that deeper layer that we have come to know, and we instinctively understand that the layer that we love is more truly who the person is that the skin that we dislike.

The Problem

People don’t all have the same number of layers… emotionally powerful events can either create or rip off layers. Powerfully negative events tend to build up additional layers, to insulate our core from harm. Powerfully positive events can melt away layers, essentially healing the remainders from past problems. Some events can do both at the same time… the death of someone close to you, for example, can rip away some of your layers of defense, while at the same time causing you to build new ones.

We present different layers to different people, too… we even have layers that we show ourselves most of the time. We then add other layers to the ones we’re showing ourselves as we move to people we identify with less… the closer to ourselves we regard someone, the closer to the core us they get, but if we seldom show ourselves our core, imagine how much less likely we are to show someone else. Many people may go all the way through their adult life without ever showing anyone else their core self.

It is impossible to let someone else deeper than we allow our selves to go. If you don’t look at your core, you can’t show it to anyone else, no matter how much you love them.

Everyone else starts at the layer where you place your self and moves outward from there.

The Solution

There is only one way to consciously move someone closer to you, deeper into your layers: spend more quality, quiet, slow time with them.

Want to be closer to your wife or husband? Spend more quality, quiet, slow time with them.

Children? Same answer.

Family, friends, acquaintances? All the same answer.

Want to improve your relationships with all of those people at the same time? Spend more quality, quiet, slow time with your self.

Remember, everyone else starts with at least as many layers as you show yourself. If you remove a few of those layers, you move the starting point for every other person closer.

When is the last time that you actually sat down and looked within? I’m talking about time you didn’t worry about what you need to do tomorrow (or today), you didn’t try to solve problems, you didn’t worry about someone else… just sat there, by yourself, closed your eyes, and let that core self, the real you, rise closer to the surface?

It’s hard… life sometimes seems like it’s actively trying to keep you from doing it. You may have a wife and kids, friends, two or three jobs, etc., etc., etc. You know how I know it’s hard? I have those things, plus I actually know what I need to do and how to do it, and I still have a hard time taking that time for myself.

The most effective times to do this, at least for me, are first thing in the morning, before the day gets started, and right after work. The morning goes much deeper, but the time after work lets me get enough off of the surface that my time with my family is higher quality… which helps me to keep from building up yet more layers for both myself and them.

I think any time helps, though, as long as you can do it consistently enough to make it into a habit. Making something into a habit requires that you do something at the same time, every day (or nearly so), for somewhere around a month.

When I say “the same time”, by the way (and not just in this article), I mean in an event-driven sense, not in a clock-based sense. ”The same time” means first thing when you get up, or right after lunch, or something like that, not 7:15 AM (though that may be first thing when you get up).

It’s easy to let good habits slip over time… I’ve let many of my good habits slip, including the time mentioned above, and writing new articles regularly. It takes a lot of mental effort to establish, or re-establish, good habits (but very little mental effort for bad habits), but that effort pays off immensely… you’ll find that the amount of mental energy that you have to spend increases substantially once the good habits are in place (and often your physical energy level, as well).

Your Turn

Getting away from quantity time and toward quality time is hard to do, whether it’s time for your self or time with others. Have you found anything that works for you? Anything that makes it easier to turn quantity into quality?

Photo from Flickr

Author

December 7th

Awareness, Healing, Relationships

Forgotten Secrets: Have To Do vs Get To Do

There is a simple way to tell whether a day is going to be a good day, almost from the moment that you wake up.

It is so simple that anyone can do it, and it only takes a moment. All you have to do is think about the day that’s coming up, and what you’re going to do. If you come up with a list of things that you have to do, it’s going to be an unpleasant day. If you come up with a list of things you get to do, it’s going to be a good one.

There are obviously exceptions to this rule… if you win the lottery, it may turn out to be a good day regardless of how you started out looking at it, and if you get in a wreck, it may turn out to be a bad day. The vast majority of days, however, don’t have momentous events like that.

For all of those other, more ordinary days, it really isn’t what events happen in your day, it’s how you look at them. The same event can be a have to do for one person, and a get to do for another.

Take fishing, for example. Fishing definitely falls into the get to do category for me. My mom, on the other hand, would definitely consider fishing a have to do.

The question of have to do vs get to do is most interesting when it comes to the things you do in your every day life. Take the above example, fishing, and apply it to a professional fisherman. Does the fisherman consider fishing something he has to do, or something he gets to do?

If the things that you do in your every day life are things that you get to do, you are almost certain to have a happy life, and very likely to be successful, too. We do, after all, put far more of ourselves into things we get to do than things we have to do.

It doesn’t have to be your job that makes the difference in a happy life vs one full of frustration and negativity, though. It just matters what you focus on, and how you feel about those things. If you have to do your work, you might think that would hurt your happiness. It doesn’t, though, if what you think of when you think about the day is what you get to do afterwards… spend time with your family, go out with your friends, read, watch a movie, or yes, go fishing.

So… think about today. Think about what’s coming up… does what you have to do come first, or what you get to do?

P. S. – This is one of the reasons why taking action helps your emotional energy so much… all of those things that you avoid, or procrastinate, get added to the have to do list, tipping the balance away from get to do.

Picture From Flickr

Author

October 11th

Awareness, Forgotten Secrets

The Biggest Cause Of Unhappiness

Do you know the biggest cause of unhappiness, regardless of factors such as race, age, sex, or culture?

That’s right… it doesn’t matter who you are or where you are from, the biggest cause of unhappiness is always the same, though you likely don’t realize it. Most people never bring the root cause from the subconscious mind to the conscious mind, so the conscious mind seizes on all sorts of manifestations of the root cause and decides it’s the whole thing.

The root cause, though, is not money. It’s not relationships, or being stuck in a dead-end job, or any of those other things that pop into your mind.

The root cause of unhappiness, nearly all unhappiness, is mentally giving up your control of your life, your actions.

The other things, that come to mind more easily, are nearly always a manifestation of that perceived loss of control, rather than the actual cause themselves. Stuck in a dead-end job? You have the ability to walk away from that job today. Any feeling that you do not is an illusion, it is you mentally giving up your control… “I can’t leave that job, I need the pay check.”

That is a false argument… you can leave the job any time. Convincing your conscious mind that you can’t is simply dodging the responsibility. If you “can’t” do something, then it’s not your fault when you don’t. You don’t have to deal with choosing whether or not to do it. There is no risk.

Without risk, though, there is also no opportunity. Imagine if you refused all risk, and stayed with your first job, maybe working in a fast food restaurant.

And with relationships, too… you can’t get the girl, so you don’t try. You can’t be an amazing artist, so you never pick up the brush. You can’t cook, so you only make macaroni and cheese in a box.

That doesn’t sound like a life anyone would choose, does it? It doesn’t sound happy in the least. In avoiding the possibility of pain, you have also closed out the possibility of joy.

At the same time, you feel constantly resentful at what the world has done to you. You see other people succeeding and ask why they got so lucky, while you’re stuck where you are, and have no way to get out.

You still don’t admit the choice, though, and without that choice, you cannot improve. As long as you consciously deny that you have a choice, you can’t move on to somewhere happier.

And what’s worse… your subconscious knows that you do have that choice. It knows who is causing all of the unhappiness and frustration, and it holds you responsible. After long enough, you tend to start hating your life, often without even being able to give objective specifics as to why you hate it.

You don’t, of course, have control over everything in your life. You can’t choose not to be blind, or choose to be smart… but you do have a life filled with choices every day, and as Rush says “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”

Choosing not to decide means that you cannot succeed. You live a passive life, always being pushed along by outside influences, unable to reach any goal, because you will not choose to take action toward it.

It’s simple, but painful (which makes it not easy), to change. The only way to change, and start erasing the unhappiness, is to admit that you do have control, that you have a choice. That means, though, that you have to face up to the fact that you always have had a choice… and that your current circumstances, that you “couldn’t” change, were something that you chose.

It’s okay to start small. You can actively choose something small… you can choose to go to the gym to start getting in shape. You can choose to take a class in something you always wanted to learn (I’ve recently done this myself, with martial arts). You can choose to start a project of one sort or another at home… something that lies in the direction of your dreams (dreams never truly die… and you’d be amazed at how powerfully they can come back once you take action toward them).

You don’t have to start small, though. It’s perfectly acceptable to wake up all at once, throw off the shackles that you have chosen by choosing not to decide, and make sweeping changes through all of your life. Sometimes a drastic change is the only way to keep from going back to where you were.

It doesn’t really matter what it is that you choose to do, it simply matters that you consciously accept that you have a choice, and that you made it. The fact that something happened as a result of something that you actively chose makes it, in some odd way, easier to accept failure… especially if you continue to make choices and keep moving ahead.

Ask anyone you ever meet that seems at peace with themselves, truly happy or content, how much control other people have over them. Everyone of them will tell you little or none. They live by their own choices, and their own actions, and because of that, they live a life that is in keeping with who they truly are… after all, why would you do anything else knowing that everything you do is by your own choice?

Author

September 28th

Awareness

7 Signs You Are A Creative Destruction Kind Of Person And How To Excel If You Are

Chaos is in my nature. I thrive when creating, and suffer when maintaining. I feel passion when building something and “stuck” when forced to focus on the details.

Does that sound familiar, or overwhelming? Does it sound exciting to throw caution to the wind and dive right into something, or does it sound scary?

In my last article, I gave a very broad overview of the two basic natures of people, chaotic and orderly. I mentioned, briefly, that I am of a chaotic nature (more so, in fact than virtually anyone I’ve ever met). Ironically, I am also very good at spotting the order in what seems chaos to others (something sometimes referred to as pattern recognition).

Below I’ll list seven of the major attributes of someone for whom creative destruction is the spice of life, and then a few things that don’t come easily, but pay back the extra effort they require many times over.

You feel alive when creating something new.

Crafting something builds your energy, leaving you satisfied and stronger, while assembling things leaves you empty and drained.
You see the whole more than the parts.

In the kitchen, you make a meal, not a recipe… in writing, you see the world, not its mechanics… in business you see how the whole is different than the sum of its parts.
You love creating plans, but have trouble following them.

Creating plans is fun, just like creating nearly anything usually is for you… when you are creating, you easily open up and pour your energy into things. When it comes to following the plan you have created, you start having to pay attention to details, and the fun goes away… and with it goes the energy.
You generally have little attachment to things.

Things are a part of the details, and therefore not something to which you become attached… the same often holds true for the majority of people that you meet.
You are easily frustrated when details keep you from advancing the big picture.

This one really rears up and bites me every now and again… when you get stuck on what seems like a minor (but necessary) detail, and it keeps you from making any major progress on the big picture, the frustration can build up to an extreme level very quickly.
You excel when given a free hand, but perform average at best when forced into a box.

When you have something to do, and the freedom to do it your way, you tend to excel, because it draws forth your energy as you create a solution. When you have something to do and have a prescribed way that you must do it, especially if you see a way that seems better, you resent it, and do not give it your energy.
You are frustrated by working with people who must follow step by step plans.

Sometimes life works better when you follow Nike’s advice and Just Do It. Some people, however, can’t operate that way… they need step by step guidance for everything. Of course, sometimes their way works out best, too.

There are, of course, degrees of alignment with either nature. Some people are extremely chaotic, while some are just mildly chaotic, and the same goes, of course, for those of a more orderly persuasion. The degree to which the points listed above apply reflects that level of alignment.

If you don’t recognize yourself in the points above, you almost certainly can name someone who does fit them right off the top of your head. While everyone leans one way or the other in their nature, the ones who lean the farthest tend to be more memorable.

That’s the first half… knowing that you are chaotic. The second half is knowing how to use your strengths to cover your weaknesses. Here comes your second list:

Find something you can do with passion to keep you going after the initial investment.

As mentioned above, when you create something, it’s easy for you to invest a lot of energy into it. When it changes from creation to maintenance, though, it becomes much harder to invest your energy. The counter to this is finding something that you are passionate about, so that your passion can keep you going between your bouts of creation.
Create smaller, short-term plans so that you can accomplish them before you run out of energy.

One of the best ways to keep going when you have a chaotic nature is to keep things in the creation mode as much as you can by creating short-term plans more than long-range ones. Create a plan for what to do today, rather than what to do for the month.
If you must create long-term goals, then break them down as soon as you can and forget about the long-term goal except for when you accomplish the shorter goals and need to see what the next short-term goal is.
Learn to shift exactly how big the big picture is.

Because we tend to see things in terms of the big picture, little details can become frustrating all out of proportion. One solution for this is to shift how big the big picture is… if you’re building a house, and the detail is an electrical problem, shift the big picture down to the electrical system of the house. This will make the detail not seem like it’s so disproportionately small, and can also make it feel like it’s the last detail, which can relieve a lot of the stress.
Create systems to help you with things where you know your nature is hurting you.

This is one area where I can definitely do better… the most obvious example for me is networking (and not in the computer sense). It is not natural to me to build and maintain network connections, but it’s clear that they make it far easier to succeed in whatever it is that you do. It is natural, however, for me to take a problem and build a system to solve it. I just need to apply that here. The same goes for other things where your nature works against you, like if you are absent-minded and forget what needs to get done, or what was highest priority… create a system to solve the problems your nature causes.
Find partners (whether in business or personal) who are more orderly than you, but understand your nature.

This is a big one, but has a catch, too… you need someone more orderly than you, but if you are at the extreme of chaos, you don’t want someone from the extreme of order. You’ll end up having so much trouble seeing things from each other’s view that you’ll have serious problems communicating properly and working together.
Someone who is a little more orderly than you, though, can be a great complement, with their strengths supporting you where you are weak, and vice versa. This is how it is with my wife and I, and it works out amazingly well for us.

Understanding who you are, what your nature is, and how to use that is an almost overwhelming advantage, as the vast majority of people never learn. If you can understand the nature of others and therefore how to best let them use their own nature, you’ll can, and almost certainly will, find success in both business and personal life.

Next article… signs and tips for the more orderly among us.

Author

December 29th

Awareness, Energy

Knowing Your Nature Is The Key To Happiness

Everyone in life has a nature that tends toward either chaos or order… knowing which one is your nature is essential to happiness and success.

What do the terms chaos and order mean in regards to your life? They are opposite ends of the same spectrum, just as they are in other things.

Order is a force of preservation, of structuring… order is all about maintaining what already exists, about keeping the status quo. Its impact is easily recognized in things like planning and scheduling.

Chaos is a force of both creation and destruction. Often the creation actually comes from the destruction… something gets taken apart, and the pieces get put back together in a new way to create something that didn’t exist before. Its impact is usually most easily detected in things associated with creativity… art, design, writing, etc.

Both of these forces are present in everyone’s life, and both are important in everyone’s life, as well. The key is to finding the balance between them in your life.

If you are like most people, your first thought about balancing order and chaos in your life is wrong.

Unless you’re a very unusual person, you can’t balance chaos and order by having equal amounts of both. That’s because your fulcrum, your center of balance, is highly unlikely to be in the center. Instead, you will, by your very nature, have more affinity for one side than the other.

If you are the kind of person who gets nervous at the first sign that something unexpected is happening, your nature is pretty far to the side of order. That means that you need considerably more order than chaos in your life to find balance.

If you are the kind of person who never plans unless they have to, who does nearly everything on a wing and a prayer, then your quite chaotic. Balance for you requires keeping the order to a quiet murmur.

It really isn’t hard to figure out which side you lean toward. If, when looking at a task, you see all of the pieces and then assemble them into the whole (like following a recipe when cooking), your nature is orderly. If, when looking at the same task, you naturally look at the whole and see where the pieces fit, your nature is chaotic.

Where you, personally, fall can be anywhere from nearly at one of the poles (pure chaos or pure order), to somewhere very near the center. As with most things that involve people, though, it tends to be somewhat of a bell curve, meaning that the farther toward the edges you get, the fewer people you find, though in my experience, the center of that curve, where you find the most people, tends to be more on the side of order than chaos.

Anyone who actually knows me can tell you which source my energy tends to come from… I am definitely chaotic. I love to dig in, tear things apart, and build new things… but I don’t like doing the detail work.

My writing and my programming both reflect this… I jump in, build the structure, the skeleton, and make it work, and I generally do this very rapidly. Then I have to go back and fix or add all of the little details I missed. I love the first part… it definitely is my passion. I can do the detailed part, but I mostly do it without the passion, meaning that someone who is passionate about the details could likely do it better than I.

There is nothing better or worse about either way, any more than there is between brown and blue eyes. You may very well have a preference for one or the other, but neither is actually objectively better.

That being said, the there are things in life that align better with one side or the other, one of the most important being your work. Artists, for example, tend to see the things they are creating first, then shape the pieces to fit, whether those pieces be brush strokes, stone, or words. Managers and money people, on the other hand, tend to see the pieces and try to assemble them into a whole. Nearly every type of work, however, has some sort of role for those of the opposite nature… technical writers, for instance, are usually very orderly, while sales managers may tend to be chaotic (at least, if promoted from within the sales department).

True happiness is nearly impossible to find when you try to force yourself into roles and paths that originate, or mostly stay, on the other side. It is like the mental equivalent of wearing clothes that are too small for you… you can do it, but it is uncomfortable short term and can cause serious damage long term.

Take me, for example… In my last job, I was moved from a role that consisted mostly of creation to a role that was mostly organizing. I went from enjoying my job, and being very good at it, to intense dislike of my job and overwhelming stress, and doing average at best. In the beginning I was following my nature, and after the change I was fighting it. The move, even though it came with a higher title and more money, was a poor one on my part.

Happiness, and success, in life nearly always comes from following your heart, your passions… and your passions will always reflect your nature, be it chaos or order. When you follow your passion, you do things with your whole heart, your whole mind, and that is how great things come to be.

Your passion doesn’t have to be something the world admires, it just has to be yours.

Find your nature, find your passion, and find a way to follow it.

Follow-up article: 7 Signs You Are A Creative Destruction Kind Of Person And How To Excel If You Are

Author

December 28th

Awareness, Energy

Don’t Let Your Body Blind Your Soul

How does your body blind your soul? What does it even mean to “blind your soul”?

Being soul-blind means being so wrapped up in the things going on immediately around you that you cannot see anything else. It is when you become so overwhelmed with the stress and build-up of life that you start losing sight of what really matters to you.

How can your body overwhelm the part of you that is supposed to be in charge? The same way the old saying says you boil a frog… slowly. If you drop a frog into boiling water, it will jump back out, but if you put it in water which you slowly heat, it will sit there while it cooks.

The same thing happens with your soul… if you are dropped in a situation where everything is completely skewed and wrong, you will rebel. If that situation comes about slowly, though, you can be talked into (or talk yourself into) just sitting there while you let it happen.

I’ll offer an example from my personal life, and it has to do with why I have been gone so long, as well: My previous job was causing me to work so many hours and stress out so much that it was tearing me apart. What little time I had at home was not quality time with my family, as it should have been, but instead was still focused on work and the stress from it… I couldn’t let go.

It didn’t start out that way, though… if it had, I would have jumped out, just like the frog in the pot of boiling water. Instead, things got that way over time, and even when they moved further that way, there was usually something positive, too… a raise, a promotion, etc. These made it even harder to see that the overall impact was the slow heating of the water, the slow blinding of my soul.

I was even aware of it, sometimes, to some extent, but I couldn’t see my way beyond it… I was blind in my soul, even if my eyes could still see. I knew that it was hard on my whole family, yet even that could not open my sight to what needed to be done. I kept making excuses, like the economy being so bad that I might not be secure in a new job, if I could even find one… and so I didn’t really look.

In an ironic twist, the poor economy was actually the cause of my eyes opening… my position was eliminated, and suddenly I was forced out of that environment. I couldn’t seem to do it on my own… I had been there for over seven years, and with the economy in the state it was, I couldn’t risk not being able to take care of my family… even though I was already not taking care of them in a way that matters far more than the money.

It took nearly a week for the shock and the remains of the stress and feelings of being overwhelmed to fade enough for me to begin looking for a new job. In the meantime, there were new stresses… what were we going to do with no more money coming?

I went online and looked for a new job, sent my resume to a few places, and was astonished to receive a call within an hour, asking me if I could interview that day. I did, and a few days later I was offered the job. I took it.

Luckily for me, it turns out that not only was this job available when I needed it, but it is a great place to work, too. I’m also closer to home, and I have no overtime. My job is no longer overwhelming the rest of my life… and the blindness of the soul is leaving me.

There are three lessons that learned from this experience, that I want to share with you:

The big positive things from a piece of your life, things like raises and promotions in a job, or wealth and beauty in a relationship, don’t matter as much as the ongoing small things… if your energy is always being drained, and you take that one piece of your life into every other piece of your life, it’s not good for you.
You can find reasons to not do something, and convince yourself that they are good reasons, even when you should (and if you were completely honest with yourself, actually DO) know better.
You can let a piece of your life that is less important, like a job, hurt the pieces of your life that are more important, like family

So what to you do if you look at your life and see that there is one piece of it that is taking over the rest, that is blinding your soul? To quote from the Bible, “If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.”

I am not, of course, recommending that you blind yourself physically… but if one piece of your life, whether it’s a job, a relationship, or something else, is taking over your life, draining your energy, to the point that you forget to, or can’t, take care of the other parts of your life, then take that leap and do what you have to do in order to clear your soul’s sight of what is truly important.

If you think that your soul is already blinded, if you spend your days drained of energy and feeling overwhelmed, or if you may be headed that way, find a way to take at least a day completely to yourself, with no one else around, and no interruptions. Take that day to take a look at your life and find out what it is that is sending you down that path… and look at what you can do about it.

You may be able to fix the thing that is causing you the harm, especially if you are only headed down that path, rather than already at the end… relationships especially can start heading down that path, but be repairable (there are quite a few articles even on this site for help with that). Jobs are less likely to be able to be fixed, but that doesn’t mean they cannot be… you may be able to invest less of yourself into your job and still get it done, and that may keep it from taking over the rest of your life.

If you can’t fix it, though, the only answer may be removal.

Trust me, I know that it is a lot harder to do than to say, yet I have also just been through a really strong reminder of just how important it is. My life felt like it was falling apart, and I was hurting physically and emotionally, as well as being blinded. I now feel like I’m not just healing, but moving past where I was before I started heading downhill, and that’s with it having been only about a month.

Please feel free to share your story, either in the comments or by emailing me, and if you want any advice, I will be happy to help if I can… even if all you really want or need is someone to listen.

PS – This is my first real article since I’ve gotten the site back up and running. If you like it, please help me get the word back out and share it with your friends or on a social site. That goes for any “old favorites” you might have, as well… I really need a helping hand back up. Also, please feel free to become a “Fan” on Facebook(99 as of last time I checked), or follow me on Twitter (less than 1 last time I checked… I haven’t really started using Twitter much, but I will if I can find conversation… I don’t want to just send out “Hey, I have a new article”).

Most Read AMAD Articles Of All Time, In Order:

(Not the same as at the top left, due to new system)

Author

December 21st

Awareness, Body/Mind Relationship

How To Deal With Controlling People

How To Deal With Controlling People The first thing to do when you need to deal with a controlling person is understand that the need to control comes from a place of fear, of weakness, not of strength. A person operating from a place of strength has no need to control others.

The fear that causes someone to be controlling is generally one of two kinds: fear of failure (if I'm not running everything, then it will all go to pieces) or fear of showing their weakness (if I don't control this person, they will find my weaknesses and control me). The way to treat those fears differs, although both involve letting go, but this isn't about how to fix someone being controlling, it's about how to deal with them.

Controlling people have a sliding scale along which they place each person they encounter, a scale that runs from vastly inferior to vastly superior, with the very center being those that are unknown. People on the low end of the scale are safe to manipulate, while those at the high end are to be obeyed (and maybe even feared).

People are placed on this scale (and moved on it) based on their behavior… if your behavior shows strength and confidence, you move up the scale, but if your behavior shows weakness and uncertainty, you will move down it. Much of this behavior is subconscious, and is even shared with many types of animals.

The girl in the picture, for instance, is clearly showing her submission… leaning away, head tilted downward, eyes raised and barely able to look at the man. The man, on the other hand, is showing aggressive, dominant behavior… leaning forward to look down on her, teeth bared, finger in her face, etc.

There is also a place between these two extremes… your behavior can show your dominance without being aggressive. If you stand with your back straight, confidently meeting the eyes of whomever you encounter, speaking strongly and clearly, then you will come across as being high on the scale, without having to be a jerk (though being a jerk to someone who is controlling can often place you above them on their scale, it is a temporary placement… they will not respect you, and without respect, they are simply looking for a way to maneuver around you to a superior position).

If you want to stop someone from controlling you, then, you need to adopt behavior which shows them that you are higher on the scale than they consider themselves (or so strong that you actually are off the scale, but that's much harder both to learn and to do). You can easily figure out what that behavior is by mentally picturing someone of strength and confidence… picture them standing, moving, and reacting. The behaviors you picture are the ones that you should aim to adopt.

When you first change your behavior in this manner, the controlling person's first reaction is often to try to drag (usually through guilt) or push (often through angry reactions) you back down the scale to where you were. Don't back down, though… even if you don't feel the confidence you're projecting, their very reaction shows that you are having an effect, and when you understand that, and that they are indeed seeing what you are projecting, that itself can cause you to grow into that very confidence. In people behavior and attitude are interdependent: as your attitude changes, so does your behavior, but the reverse is true as well… as your behavior changes, your attitude slowly follows.

The new strength and confidence that you find as you change your behavior can help you across all aspects of your life, too… it may give you the confidence to ask for a raise, or the strength to do something about the state of your relationship.

So, in parting, I'll leave you with a small list of things that can help you project that image of the strong, confident person that you want to be:

Stand Up Straight
Meet People's Eyes Directly
Speak Clearly And Strongly
Don't Back Up When People Invade Your Personal Space
Don't Fidget

And a mental one:
Every Time You Think Of Failure, Think Of Success

More detail on that list may be forthcoming in another article in the near future.

Author

March 25th

Awareness

Perception – What’s In A Name?

Perception - What's In A Name? No two people see reality in exactly the same way. The same event, viewed by ten different people, will be perceived in ten different, sometimes wildly different ways.

That point has been made many, many times, by many, many people, including me. The problem is that we use different language to refer to the same thing… the beliefs, opinions, prior knowledge, and other internal factors that color our perception of reality. I generally vary between two words to describe this: filters or lenses. For me, the difference is that filters refer to individual beliefs, opinions, etc., where when I use lens, I'm generally speaking of the entire collection of such things that belongs to one person.

Other people use other labels, such as mental maps, "centers", etc. But it's all referring to that set of internal factors that are what makes your perception of reality unique. Unfortunately, the profusion and variety of lables may cause some people to think that they all refer to different things, and therefore scatter their efforts amongst all the labels and techniques to become aware of them, or just give up the whole concept as something too difficult for them.

Perhaps if there were one agreed upon term, that would make it easier for more people to begin (or extend) the process of becoming aware of the things that color their perceptions of reality. Standardizing terms makes it easier, in fact possible, to communicate… if you don't have certain words and their definitions in common, it is impossible to communicate a concept. If, for instance, what I call black is what you call white, then when I refer to "a black car", you'll never get the message that I was trying to send.

The same goes for terms in regards to perception… if you don't understand what I mean when I say the lens through which you perceive reality, then any further discussion on the topic is futile. If I don't know what you mean when you say "centers", in regards to perception, then I won't understand anything else that you say that depends upon that concept.

The problem here is the same as with perception, though… we all perceive the things which affect our perception differently, and with different previous experience, so the term that suits the concept best is not the same from person to person. So even if you understand what I mean when I say lens, it may not help YOU that much, though it might be perfect for your best friend. And in matters of perception, what works for you is more important than an agreed upon standard. Whatever concept allows you to start finding, acknowledging, and altering your own personal collection of beliefs, opinions, and other internal factors in influencing your perception is the right concept (or term) for you.

So… what's in a name when it comes to perception? Everything and nothing… it can "make it click" for you, so that you understand, but once you understand the idea, the name no longer matters… you translate it automatically. If my "filters" and "lenses" don't work for you, you could try Jenny's mental maps or Stephen Covey's centers from 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People (Amazon aff). If those don't work, either, I'm quite certain there are many, many other terms and concepts out there for you to try… or you can always do what I did, and come up with your own.

If you do have other terms you use, or terms from other people, please feel free to share them and link to them in the comments… provided the sites linked to are clean.