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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

Feeling Overwhelmed – What, Why, And How To Fix It

Do you know what it means when you feeling overwhelmed? Do you know not what it is, but why it happens?

You know that dizzy feeling you get when you’re having trouble keeping your balance, or when you lean out over the edge of some place high up? It’s your subconscious mind’s way of telling your conscious mind that your body is out of balance.

Feeling overwhelmed is the same thing, but for “life balance”, instead of physical balance. It lets you know that things are not right, and you’re doing yourself harm.

Your conscious mind has a hard time multi-tasking. It’s sort of like the iPhone’s multi-tasking… it can keep things open to a limited extent in the background, but it basically only focuses on the thing that is currently in front of it. When you “multi-task”, what you really do is work on one thing, then push it into the background while you work on something else, then bring the first thing back to focus, etc.

This lack of ability to “de-focus” makes it very hard for you conscious mind to realize when your life gets out of balance. It has trouble even with the more obvious life balances, like work vs play, let alone with things like quiet vs noise.

The fact that your conscious mind doesn’t notice doesn’t mean that your balance being off doesn’t hurt you. To make another comparison with physical things, consider that a large portion of male back problems come from men carrying their wallet in their back pocket. This causes the bottom of their spine to curve, but in a small enough degree that it’s not noticeable while it’s happening. After ten, twenty, thirty or however many years, though, that little bit adds up to some serious back pain.

Poor life balance does the same thing, but it affects you mentally, spiritually, and emotionally, rather than physically (though enough suffering in any of those four areas will affect the other three over time). This distress of your non-physical self comes out as feeling overwhelmed.

Feeling overwhelmed is subjectively terrible, and can seem to come out of nowhere. It can do serious damage not just to you, but to your family and friends, as well, because of the way it causes you to act.

Feeling overwhelmed is like physical pain, though… there’s a purpose for it. Its purpose is to let you know that you are out of balance, that you need to change things in your life.

Once we understand that the feeling comes from something being out of balance, the next question is usually “But how do I know what is out of balance?” This may seem like a hard question, but the vast majority of the time, it really is not… it just feels that way.

The reason it feels that way is because of a balance that is one of the most likely to be off… action vs avoidance. There is an incredibly strong impulse in most people to avoid things that are uncomfortable (yes, that includes me… probably one of the reasons it has been so long since I’ve written here).

In evolutionary terms, this behavior often makes sense… it’s generally a good idea to avoid the type of places where you’re likely to find something that will eat you. In terms of life balance, however, it can be the equivalent of throwing a bowling ball on the wrong side of the scales. That’s because you avoid facing whatever it is that is out of balance, and if you don’t face it, if you can’t even acknowledge to yourself what it is, how in the world are you going to do something about it?

That means that your already out of balance life gets even more out of balance, because your balance of action vs avoidance leans more and more heavily toward avoidance… and the more heavily it gets skewed, the stronger the tendency to avoid that balance problem becomes, as well. It’s a really nasty vicious circle.

There’s another major balance point that is getting more and more skewed in our modern world, too, and it’s one that’s really hard to notice… quiet vs noise. This is both in the literal sense, but also in slightly more generic terms, meaning all of the “noise” of the constant bombardment of input… emails, phone calls, TV, music, coworkers, family, etc. More and more people these days forget to spend time away from these things.

These two balances, avoidance and noise, tend to negatively reinforce each other, as well… avoidance causes you to seek distraction (noise), and enough lack of quiet will cause you to start getting further and further into avoidance.

That covers the reason why we feel overwhelmed, and what the two worst causes of it are, but if you are feeling overwhelmed right now, what you really want to know is how to get over it. I have good news and bad news for you: I can tell you how to start getting over it, but you’re probably going to want to avoid it.

Here’s the secret to getting over being overwhelmed: Each day set aside (and I really mean set aside… treat it the same as if you were setting it aside for the person who is most important to you) two thirty minute periods.

One is for quiet… when I say quiet, I don’t mean watching TV, or even reading. I mean quiet… go somewhere away from all input, sit or lay down (laying down is better but not always available), and just be there. You may find that you can’t stop thinking about what else you need to do, or dwelling on this or that… and that’s fine. That comes when you don’t have quiet often enough. If you keep doing thirty minutes every day, you’ll see this start to go away… and feeling overwhelmed will go with it, too.

The second thirty minutes is for action. When I say action, I don’t mean exercise (though that’s good for you, and for feeling overwhelmed, too). I mean action doing something you truly enjoy, in a way that you enjoy it.

That last part probably needs further explanation… I enjoy writing, for example. I do not enjoy writing when I feel like I have to do it, like I am constrained. I write two blogs as part of my regular job, for instance. I don’t really enjoy writing them. I didn’t enjoy writing here for a while, either… It felt too much like something I had to do. Now that I’ve given that up, I can write on here, or on my other personal blog, and I enjoy it again.

You might feel the same way about watching TV, for instance, or reading the news. It’s enjoyable until it starts feeling like an obligation… “I can’t miss the new episode of my show” or “I have to keep up to date”. As long as you don’t feel like you have to do something, but instead are choosing to do it because you like it, that qualifies for your thirty minutes.

See how each of these thirty minute periods starts balancing out one of the two life balances most likely to get severely skewed? They are complementary, as well, building positively on each other in the same way that noise and avoidance build negatively.

So… feeling overwhelmed? Turn of the computer, go somewhere that you can be alone and quiet, and tell your avoidance instinct to shut up when it tries to keep you from being quiet. Then, after you’ve done that for a while (it doesn’t have to be thirty minutes when you’re first starting, though it does help), go do something of your choosing. It doesn’t really matter what it is, as long as you don’t feel like you are required to do it.

You’ll start feeling better the first day you do both things, and the more days in a row you do it, the further from you that feeling of being overwhelmed will be.

Author

August 27th

Subconscious

A Simple Way To Easily Keep Your Focus All Day Long

We all have a natural tendency to start losing our focus as the day drags on, especially when we're working on something other than what we really want to be doing. It becomes harder and harder to pay attention to what you're doing… your mind starts to wander and pretty soon you're working at a fraction of your peak efficiency. Sometimes you may even become annoyed at yourself for it, but that doesn't really help, it just makes it even harder to focus.

There is, however, a fairly simple way to keep your focus all day long, and it doesn't even take much time. And, as a bonus, not only will it help you to keep your focus, but it will also help you to train your subconscious in what is important to you, and thus which choices and opportunities to bring to your attention.

And now onto the meat of article, how to keep your focus all day long:

Preparation

The first thing you'll need to do for this to be the most effective is a list of specific things in your life that you want to improve. The easiest way to get such a list is to sit down with pen and paper (or electronic equivalent) and write down whatever comes to mind as something you would like to improve. Anything that is really general, like "I want to be more successful", refine down to one or more specifics, such as "I want my income to increase".

Now take that list and narrow it down to something like 4-6 items that are the most important to you. Take those items you have left and put them into a positive and current sentence. As an example, if you chose from above the specific of "I want my income to increase", you could take that and turn it into "My cash flow is increasing." That's positive, as opposed to something like "I'm not going to smoke", and current, rather than future like "I will make more money".

So… that's the one time preparation, although you can, of course, revisit the list at any time if you find that one of the things on it is no longer of as much importance (or if you simply find something of more importance). There is also daily preparation, done each night just before bed. Each night, just before bed, make a short list of things you need to do the next day. This shouldn't be more than few of the most important things, not a comprehensive list of everything you have on your plate.

Now, onto the next phase…

Execution

First thing in the morning, soon after you wake up, take five minutes of quiet time for yourself. Start this quiet time with deep breathing, concentrating on feeling your breath slide in and out. After you feel your body relax and your mind achieve quiet (which should only be a couple minutes if you do this regularly) repeat to yourself the phrases from your list… "My cash flow is increasing.", etc. Focus on each one for just a moment, then move to the next. After you have finished that list, quickly review your to do list from the night before and decide the order in which you are going to do those things. Now you're ready to go start your day knowing what you need to do and where you want to go… and your focus should be sharp.

You should repeat this process every two or three hours throughout the day. It should only take a few minutes each time, and the time it takes is likely to go down as you get used to doing it. It gives your mind a chance to clear out all the debris that working builds up, refocuses you on what you want to improve in your life, and offers a chance to review what is left on your to do list, letting you see your progress and keeping you from straying off too far with distractions.

Each of those three things is important, but the thing that helps the most is clearing out the mental debris. This builds up constantly during the day and most people only clear it out at night when they go to sleep. If you keep it cleared throughout the day, however, it's not there impeding your ability to focus, and also lets you get to the good sleep faster, since there is little built-up debris to clear first.

And that brings us to the final phase…

Review

First thing in the morning is the most important part of the execution phase, because it sets the tone for the day. There's another very important part of the whole process, though, and that comes at the end of the day, just before bed. This is the time when, after doing your deep breathing and review of the areas where you want to improve, you review your to do list to see which things on the list were accomplished. This can be a good way to feel like you got something productive done that day.

After you review your list for the day, take the time to make a new one for the next day. You can include anything that wasn't completed from the day just past, as well as anything new. Take a moment to picture yourself the next night with your new list accomplished, and then put it away until the next morning.

It's also a good idea to mentally set a time that you intend to wake up in the morning, and use another phrase, something along the lines of "My sleep is restorative and refreshing. I awaken each morning focused and alert." This combination, setting a specific time and essentially telling yourself that you are going to sleep well, can help you to actually sleep well and awaken in the morning feeling refreshed and mentally clear.

Summary

This process generally takes no more than 30-40 minutes of your day, in 5 minute chunks, and will more than compensate for that time by keeping you focused and operating near to your peak efficiency. It also helps you to keep an eye on what areas of your life you want to improve, teaching your subconscious to bring situations and opportunities involving those areas to your conscious attention. If that isn't enough to talk you into trying it out, remember that it also helps you to focus on getting the most important things done each day, with reminders throughout the day of what you wanted to accomplish.

All of that works out to help you easily keep your focus all day long. It also helps you to reduce your stress, frustration, and feelings of not getting anywhere, bringing more peace into your life. It can even help improve your relationships, as that can easily be on both your "areas to improve" list AND your "to do" list.

If you have any suggestions for ways to improve this process, or other things that you can add to it, please leave them in the comments.

8 Ways To Put Procrastination Off Until Tomorrow

Author

October 4th

Awareness, Body/Mind Relationship, Energy, Feed Your Mind, Internal Quiet, Planning, Priorities, Subconscious

The Secret Killer Of Relationships

Bleading Heart

Some people have a great relationship that lasts all their lives. Other people never seem to have a relationship that lasts more than a few months. Somewhere inbetween are the people that have a great relationship that slowly fades away. What is it that kills this last kind of relationship?

You may have heard of the seven year itch. It's a cultural reference to the fact that after a few years, and seven is NOT a magic number, a relationship is no longer as exciting as it once was. In fact, this can, and does, happen after a few months… but there is another drop in excitement, after this initial one, when you have been together for a few years. So why does this happen?

The initial drop in excitement, after a few months, is very nearly inevitable… that initial excitement is due, in large part, to the newness of the relationship. You are discovering all sorts of new things about this person who is so important in your life, thinking about them constantly. They are never far from your mind.

Once you learn the basics of who they are, which takes a few months usually, the excitement drops. You can then, if your relationship has decent foundations, maintain the new level of interest and excitement for a few years, at which point you know far more than the basics… in fact, you may feel like you know pretty much everything about your significant other (chances are pretty high that you don't, but that's a topic in itself). So, once you arrive at this point, the excitement level drops again. That's when the seven year itch kicks in to high gear.

Both of these drops in excitement have something in common. Both of them occur when you feel like there isn't as much left to learn about the person. This is NOT, however, the actual cause of the drop in excitement (or the drop in closeness that often accompanies the drop in excitement). It is only a more visible part of a deeper issue.

The real killer of good relationships, and one that often keeps them from cementing in the first place, is your partner dropping out of your conscious awareness. When you reach that first point, where you feel like you know the basics of who they are, you stop thinking about them quite as much. You stop thinking, or at least stop thinking it as often, "I wonder what she'd think about this?" or "I wonder what she's doing right now?". Then you hit that second drop when you feel like you know your significant other very well, and you feel like you can actually answer the questions in the previous sentence with a fair degree of certainty.

The killer of good relationships is familiarity. When something becomes familiar, our conscious mind tends to start handing it off to the subconscious to deal with. You can choose otherwise, but it has to be an active choice… the default is to pass it on and stop being aware of it. This includes people and our relationships with them. When you stop being aware of someone, you stop thinking about them, you stop giving them (and their happiness) your attention, and things deteriorate from there. And once this happens, you look at your relationship, when it comes to your awareness, and realize how far it is from what it once was. That makes you want to think about it even less, because it makes you feel bad (sadness, guilt, anger maybe… mental anguish). So it becomes a vicious cycle that takes a conscious effort to break.

You can recapture the excitement, though, and the depth and closeness of the relationship. All you have to do is start thinking about her more often (and getting her to think of you!). There are lots of ways to do this, but the biggest one is to do something different. Something you haven't done before, or haven't done for a long time. Or maybe even something that you have done, but you've never done together before. You can also come up with surprises (little ones… don't scare the snot out of her) to make her think of you… leaving her a note, making her something, going shopping with her specifically to buy her something (it doesn't always have to be about you!). The more unusual, the more new it is, the more she will think about it, and since it was from (or with) you, the more she will think about you. And you will obviously be thinking of her, because you'll be planning out what you can do next.

So… if your relationship isn't what it once was, don't give up on it. Instead, think of things that you can do for your significant other, or better yet, things you can do WITH your significant other. Go to a new restaurant together, go to the place where you first met, go have a picnic in the park (or on the beach… depending on where you live). Do something you don't normally do… and start doing it more often. But don't make a habit of it, do it consciously!

Oh, and you might want to read The Very Simple Secret To A Happy Marriage (it applies to any long term relationship, not just marriage).

Author

September 14th

Awareness, Learning, Relationships, Subconscious

The Subconscious Mind In Control (AKA Habits)

What Habits Are

"Habit" is a word for an area where your subconscious mind controls your actions in the absence of input from your conscious mind. Most of your every day life is controlled by habits… you have a habit of breathing, sleeping, waking, etc. When most people talk about habits, though, they are referring to ones where you are aware of the habit but still relinquish control to your subconscious. Smoking, drinking, gambling… these are things where the decision to do it is made by your subconscious, and your conscious mind, while aware of what you are doing, is nothing but an observer.

There are two things you should know when looking at habits from this viewpoint. The first is that if your conscious mind involves itself, becoming more than an observer, it can break (or change) that habit. The second is that even if you do decide to make a change, but don't give regular attention to maintaining the change, you will allow that area to slip back to your subconscious mind's control. If you have established enough of a different pattern, that won't matter, because the subconscious will continue along the new pattern, but if you slip before that new pattern is set, your subconscious will go back to its old ways, and your habit will return.

Now let's get something straight… not all habits are bad. Taking a shower every day is a good habit, as are brushing your teeth, chewing with your mouth closed, and exercising. Smoking can even be looked at as a good habit, if the benefits outweight the costs… it's just that the costs for smoking are cumulative, and quite high over the long term, where the benefits are NOT cumulative, and only valuable over a very short term. So one person may consider something a bad habit, where another might consider the same thing neutral or even good.

How Habits Form

You form habits by repeating the same response, or a very similar response, to the same, or very similar circumstances. You form your habit of breathing by exhaling when your lungs are empty of oxygen and inhaling when they are empty of air. You form your habit of smoking by picking up a cigarette in certain situations, which can then expand if you start doing so in more situations. Doing something one time is seldom enough to form a habit… it usually requires tens, hundreds, or even thousands of repetitions.

Performing the same action in response to non-similar circumstances can peripherally reinforce a habit that is forming, but the impact is small. That is, if you have a habit of smoking first thing in the morning, and you smoke one at lunch time, that isn't really enough to expand the habit to smoking at lunch, and if you have smoked a few in the morning, then smoke one at lunch, it is unlikely to cement the habit of smoking in the morning, either.

How Habits Change

There are two kinds of change that can happen with a habit… replacement and removal. Replacing a habit is FAR easier than removing it.

When you replace a habit, what you do is change which action is fired when certain circumstances trigger a habit response from your subconscious. Basically, you have trained your subconscious to fire off a habit when certain circumstances arise. Replacing a habit simply points that trigger at a different habit, such as chewing gum instead of smoking. That's relatively easy, because all you're doing is choosing a different habit to fire, rather than trying to change the whole subconscious pattern of responding to those circumstances with a a habit.

Removing a habit is the other side of that coin… it is conditioning the subconscious to STOP responding to a certain set of circumstances by firing a habit trigger. This is mostly done by altering the way you perceive the set of circumstances. If you want to remove a habit of swearing, for example, you could train your subconscious to look at the circumstances where you would normally swear through a filter of "What if my baby was here?". Even this doesn't actually remove the habit trigger, though… it simply keeps your subconscious from seeing the set of circumstances that trigger it.

That last is why people who form a habit of smoking, then quit, can one day pick it up right where they left off. They changed their perception of the circumstances for the time where they quit, but then their perception goes back to, or close enough to, the old set that fire off that trigger. Abra cadabra… your habit is back!

The ability for "removed" habits to return is one more reason why replacing habits is more effective… even if that set of circumstances arises, it fires off the replacement habit, not the original. I haven't really looked into replacement FOLLOWED by removal… that might be a relatively effective technique, so that even if you backslide it's only to the replacement habit, not the original.

Conclusion

The reality is that if you want to alter a habit, the first thing you must do it become consciously aware of it. After you become aware, you have to make a conscious decision to change, and you'd better have motivation for the change, too (and internal sources of motivation are by far the strongest, most persistent sort). Then you can work on replacing the habit or removing the habit trigger.

Don't expect instant results when trying to change habits. Chances are pretty good that you'll have a fight on your hands for at least two weeks… often much longer. Just keep your focus on now, on the progress you have already made, the changes that you already have, not on the permanent change that is your goal… it'll make it much easier to stick with it.

Why It’s Hard To Have Peace Without Quiet

If someone asked you what the first word that comes to mind when you hear the word “peace” is, would your response be “quiet”? If it is, and you were asked to come up with a mental “image” of that, what would you come up with? For me, the picture above almost perfectly captures the mental feeling that the phrase “peace and quiet” conjures up.

When you think of peace and quiet, the quiet you are thinking of is probably a low volume of sound around you. There’s a far more important kind of quiet if you are seeking peace, however: an internal quiet.

The clarity of your thoughts is determined by the signal to noise ratio. Signal, in this case, is thoughts related to whatever it is you are trying to focus upon. Noise is unrelated thoughts and distractions. When you have 100% signal, your thoughts are crystal clear and you can be extremely effective. When the noise goes up, and the ratio drops, your effectiveness declines. If you want to operate at peak efficiency, then, you must get rid of the noise.

“Internal quiet” is when when the signal to noise ratio is high, when you let go of all the noise, all of the mental distractions and conflicts. It is when the crazy whirl of thoughts that we live in slows down, making any one thought clearer and more focused.

Internal quiet is directly influenced by external quiet. We have instincts, passed down from our cave man ancestors, that cause our subconscious to interrupt whatever our conscious mind is doing to alert us to any new, different, or unusual sound. This comes from the fact that sound was one of the cave man’s primary means of detecting predators, and thereby avoid getting eaten.

We have similar instincts in regards to vision, the cave man’s other primary means of detecting predators, but those instincts are easy to shut off: close your eyes. If you close your eyes, you can’t actually SEE any new, different, or unusual things (other than mental images, which are part of the “distractions” mentioned above).

It’s much harder to close your ears, however. There are noise-cancelling headphones, but these are usually quite expensive, and the feeling of having them on can be quite distracting itself. That means that if you want external quiet, in order to facilitate internal quiet, you are probably going to have to find some place where you can be alone.

Once you are alone, and all is quiet, you can start working on internal quiet. Actually, to be more accurate, you can STOP working in order to achieve internal quiet. Internal quiet can only be attained through letting go of working, seeking, or any other active pursuit. It is ironic, but internal peace cannot be achieved by seeking it… it can only be achieved by ceasing to seek.

Once you reach internal quiet, you begin to release physical and mental tension. You let go of emotions that you had been clinging to, and let your muscles relax. Both of these actions promote healing… you can’t heal a wound that you won’t stop digging at. Letting go also releases the energy that you had been pouring into your grip, so that it can be devoted to healing instead.

Sometimes, when you achieve internal quiet, you may find yourself overwhelmed by emotion. This is normal… you can’t let go of emotions until you stop suppressing them and feel them. Once you go through the emotion and come out on the other side, however, you’ll feel like a weight has been lifted.

Letting go brings peace. That peace leads to healing. Healing one injury leads to less resources (or energy) being used on that wound, enabling you to let go of more. That, in turn leads to more peace. It’s the opposite of a vicious cycle… it’s a virtuous cycle.

When you have too much noise, it is hard to let go, let alone start to heal. That is why peace needs quiet… it doesn’t necessarily have to be external quiet, though that helps too, but without internal quiet, peace is simply out of reach.

Author

August 29th

Healing, Internal Quiet, Subconscious

The Most Essential Ingredient Of Success

Peaceful Scene

There are an incredible number of books, articles, videos, and any other kind of media you can imagine selling you "the secret of success". Most of these methods are questionable… after all, if it were easy, then everyone would be successful, and that's clearly not the case. There is one thing, however, that IS critical to success… success in ANY field.

That one thing is awareness. There are many kinds of awareness, but there is one kind that has greater impact on your path to success in anything you attempt. That kind is awareness of self… awareness of how you make choices, how you change your subconscious tendencies, and how that determines how you see the world.

We all face an uncountable number of choices each day. With each choice that comes, you have two levels at which it can be made: subconscious or conscious. The default is subconscious, as you can plainly see if you think about it. You don't consciously choose when (or whether) to breathe, at least not normally. You don't, generally speaking, choose which letters to read in which order. Your subconscious handles all of these types of decisions…. EXCEPT when you become consciously aware of it.

When you read the paragraph above, you may have suddenly become aware of your breathing, and made a choice to hold your breath, or breathe more deeply. If you did decide to do one of those things, then your conscious mind made the decision to take over that choice temporarily from your subconscious. It will shortly pass the choices back to the subconscious as your awareness of your breathing fades.

When you become aware of a choice your conscious mind has the chance to pick the option that best aligns with your conscious goals, rather than your subconscious goals. That means that you have a much better chance of achieving success in the area where you are aware. Your conscious mind has the ability to prioritize goals much better than your subconscious… for instance, your subconscious will seldom, if ever, decide that something is more important than taking care of hunger. Your conscious mind, on the other hand, can see that going to an interview during your lunch break, and thus missing lunch, will satisfy higher priorities, like getting a better job.

Your subconscious mind makes choices based on the history of how your conscious mind has chosen in situations similar to current circumstances. Any time it doesn't have enough related decisions, it passes the choice on to your conscious mind by bringing it to your awareness. It also brings things to your awareness that your conscious mind has taught it are important.

You teach your subconscious about what is important to you by giving it your conscious attention. Whenever you think about something, you are giving it importance "points" in your subconscious. That is, if you think about something in passing one time, it will barely register as important, and your subconscious will only bring things to your awareness concerning it if they are huge, and if it's shortly after the thought. If you are constantly thinking about something, however, your subconscious will interpret that as you telling it that that something is very important, and it will pop even minor things relating to it into your awareness.

Your subconscious is not terribly smart… it's more like a computer. It does what you tell it to do, but can't make intelligent decisions on its own. What that ends up meaning is that it takes not only the content of your thoughts when determining what's important to you, but also the "polarity". That is, if you think about something in a negative way, it will bring things that relate to that thing in a negative way to your attention. If you think about it in a positive way, it will bring things that relate to that thing in a positive way to your attention.

One example of this is finances. When you think about how little money you have, what things you don't have, and how you don't seem to be getting anywhere, that's what you're telling your subconscious is important. That means that it will make you aware of things that relate to (and reflect) how little money you have, what things you don't have, etc. If, on the other hand, what you think about when it comes to your finances is how you can invest time or money to bring added benefit, that is what your subconscious mind will bring into your awareness.

For instance, let's take a situation and look at it from each perspective. Let's say a coworker tells you about his new fishing boat. Someone who looks at what they don't have feels bad, or jealous/envious, that the other guy can afford to buy a boat when they can't. Someone who looks for opportunities, on the other hand, might see it as a chance to make a friend and go fishing with them, or from a more financial side, might offer to buy the fish the coworker catches for a set rate, knowing that he can sell them for more than that.

That's the same situation, the coworker with the new boat, and two completely different ways of seeing it. The same thing happens in other areas, too, like relationships. If you think more about what's wrong with your relationship (or what's wrong with the other person), your subconscious is going to bring more of that to your attention. If, on the other hand, you think about the positive aspects of the relationship, or positive attributes of the other person, your subconscious will make you aware of things related to that. It's pretty obvious what a difference that can make in a relationship.

The good news is that you can intentionally choose to think (or not think) about a specific thing, or in a specific way. That is, you can consciously choose to look at your relationship from a positive perspective, and start teaching your subconscious that THAT is what you want brought to your attention. You can turn your thoughts away from what you lack any time they head that direction, and that will make that of less importance, thus bringing less of your lack to your attention.

By doing this, you are choosing what to be aware of. That means that you make choices in that area consciously, thus also setting "the history of how your conscious mind has chosen in situations similar to current circumstances", and changing how your subconscious handles similar situations in the future when your conscious mind is too busy to deal with it.

You can set the patterns of success consciously, and then your subconscious will automatically reinforce those patterns. You can also set the patterns of failure, and your subconscious will automatically reinforce THOSE patterns. The difference between the two is awareness… when you become aware, you can set the pattern of your choice. That just leaves choosing what success means to you… and focusing your thoughts and awareness on that meaning.

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August 27th

Awareness, Energy, Goals, Patterns, Polarity, Relationships, Subconscious

9 Methods To Start Your Morning Alert And Focused

Notepad - List

Some people wake up instantly alert, focused, and ready to get to work on a new day. Others set their alarm an hour or more before they actually have to get up because they drag it out so much, and even once they are up, it takes them another half-hour or more to really be with it. If you fall into the first category, you probably don't need this list (although you may find a few helpful techniques to start off even better). If you're in the second category, and want to move closer to the first, this list is for you!

Welcome to a new feature of A Miracle A Day, Tips Tuesday. Once a week (at least), I will take a break from the normal in-depth coverage of one piece of one topic, and provide an article filled with easy to read, easy to use tips, methods, techniques, or something like that. Today's topic is, as you may have guessed, "How To Start Your Morning Alert And Focused".

Start The Night Before

The things you do before you go to bed the night before can make a huge difference to how you feel in the morning. You've probably read a list of things to avoid late at night, like caffeine and exercise (and no, that doesn't mean avoid exercise altogether). There are also positive things to do, rather than avoid… here's a way to sleep better and avoid bad dreams.
Give Your Subconscious A Wake-Up Time

Just before you go to sleep, choose the time you want to wake up. Form a clear mental image of your clock showing that time. Repeat it, mentally at least: "I am going to wake up at 5:00 AM". Picture yourself seeing your clock showing that time, and yourself getting up. This primes your subconscious to send you an alert when it hits that time, and your subconscious has a very good time sense, even if your conscious mind has no access to it.
Get Up When You Wake Up

One of the biggest mistakes you can make if you want to get up easily and be alert without needing to wait is to hit the snooze button. Your body has an instant response to waking up of being completely awake and alert. That response generally lasts less than a minute. If you get up during this time, however, you will remain awake and alert. You even get the same benefit, to a lesser extent, if you just start thinking about a complex topic… it's much more effective if you actually at least sit up, though.
Don't Snuggle Your Wife/Girlfriend

This is sort of an extension of the last one, but taken farther (and the one I have the most trouble with). If my wife wakes up with me (I wake up at 5:00 AM, so it doesn't happen all the time), and rolls over to snuggle me… it just kills pretty much any chance of my getting up before my body settles back down to being drowsy.
Get Moving Early

Physical movement gets the blood pumping stronger, and that includes to your brain. If you have a chance, an early morning walk or work out can work wonders for your alertness and focus. Physical activity also helps clear mental fog, and any stress left over from the day before or any bad dreams (though you don't need to have bad dreams).
Take A Shower

This one is especially important if you implement number 5, above. A nice cool shower after working up a sweat is very refreshing, and gives your mind a little down time to deal with whatever issues have been clouding your mind lately. A shower is usually "safe" time, meaning you're unlikely to be interrupted or required to do anything, so your mind can let go of the barriers it holds up the rest of the time, at least a little bit.
Visualize Your Goals Being Accomplished

This one really can't be beaten for being alert and focused. What better motivation is there than vividly imagining your goals already accomplished? It gives you a reason to dig in and get moving on whatever project it is that you're working on.
Posture

It's amazing how much impact your physical posture has on your mental state. If you become aware of your posture, and which aspects of it reflect which moods, you can actually choose your mood by adopting the posture that reflects that mood. It's not instant, but it is rapid. Try it some time… put yourself in a confident posture, and remain mentally aware of it so that you don't slip out of that posture. Stay that way for a few minutes and you'll see the change in your mood.
Visualize Explaining Your Favorite Topic

This is another great way to get the mental juices flowing. Just picture yourself explaining all about your favorite topic to someone new to it, someone who is fascinated by it. This is like taking motivation and alertness, distilling them to a serum, and injecting that straight into your brain.

Just as a warning, though, this one loses its power if you use it TOO much… though ACTUALLY doing it, not just visualizing it, takes a lot to get to that point.

There you have it. Follow these techniques, especially number 3, and you'll be alert, aware, and focused every morning. You may even be so alert that you annoy other people who aren't. If so, direct them to this page to annoy them even more!

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August 21st

Awareness, Body/Mind Relationship, Subconscious, Tips Tuesday

4 Steps To Truly Forgiving

Forgiveness… it is espoused by very nearly any program for personal growth or healing, whether scientific, religious, or new age. The reason behind the effectiveness of forgiveness is not mystical, however. The reason that forgiveness is so essential is simple: True forgiveness involves releasing your hold on grudges that are constantly draining your mental energy.

When you hold on to grudges, you are devoting mental energy to maintaining them and the emotions that you associate with them. Since we're talking about grudges here, this also means that emotions you are devoting your energy to holding on to are negative . Think about it… you are intentionally causing yourself to feel bad feelings. That doesn't make sense, but if you allow your subconscious mind control, things don't have to make sense.

Understand What Forgiveness Is

True forgiveness begins with acknowledging and accepting responsibility for any emotions that you attach to an act. "They" didn't make you angry. "They" did something, and you became angry. The difference between the two is critical. The first one assigns blame for the feeling, and responsibility to change that feeling, to the person who committed the act. The second one brings it back to where it belongs: you.

Forgiveness always comes from within, never from outside. That is because outsiders have no control over the emotions, the feelings, inside of you. The best they can do is inspire you to decide to change yourself.
Understand What Forgiveness Is Not

Forgiveness is not justifying or forgetting. It is not pretending like nothing happened, or letting actions go without consequence merely for the sake of "forgiveness".

Many people confuse forgiving an act with justifying the act. When you justify an act, you search for reasons to show that the act was never bad, right from the beginning. But that doesn't fool your subconscious… it knows what you really feel, what you really believe, and so it will continue to hold negative emotions, though your consciousness may disguise them as feeling guilty either for having provoked the action, or for not having truly "forgiven" it. Your consciousness is not fooled by false justification… and if you REALLY believe the act was completely, 100% justified, then you'll have no forgiveness to grant.

Forgetting and pretending nothing happened are actually the same thing… because you're highly unlikely to ever truly forget. Once you feel like an act has harmed you, your subconscious stores it away in patterns having to do with getting hurt, so that it can recognize similar situations in the future and act to avoid that hurt. Thus, both of these things are false fronts, and do not contribute in positive ways to either you or the person who you want to forgive.

Letting actions go without consequence is VERY commonly mistaken for forgiveness. In reality, it's one of the worst choices you can make. If actions have no consequences attached, then the person committing those actions doesn't learn anything from them. If someone does something that hurts you, and there are NO bad consequences, they will do so again in the future in the same situation. Now keep in mind, knowing that they hurt you may be a bad consequence for some people, but even then, that still requires that you let them know that they hurt you. That means that without consequences for the action, not only did you get hurt, but the person who did it won't even learn that they did something wrong.
Understand Why Forgiveness Is Important

Negative emotions have a natural tendency to become entangled. That means that when you attach negative emotions to an act, those emotions become entangled with any OTHER negative emotions you have tied to another act. They become one interconnected mass, the total size of which grows with each new act to which you attach negative emotions. The fact that they are entangled also means that as you add more to this mass, already existing emotions become harder to release, and new ones are more likely to stick.

This entangled mass is what causes situations where one annoying but inconsequential act snowballs into massive amounts of negative emotions. Basically, it catches onto the existing entanglement of negatives and rips the whole thing into your conscious awareness, but WITHOUT THE REASONS BEHIND THE WHOLE THING. That is, all of your negative emotions that you have piled up get focused on this one, inconsequential thing, and so you completely overreact, out of all proportion to the "cause". Often, you won't know, even later, WHY you did that… so you'll come up with some sort of reason that half fits.

All that energy that you are dumping into holding onto this entanglement of negatives is energy that could be spent to improve your current life, work for the future, deepen relationships, or any number of other things. Because of inertia, though, you continue to spend that energy on anger, frustration, pain, and other bad things from past events. If you were to consciously choose which thing to spend your energy on, what would you choose: positive things in the present and future, or negative things from the past?
Take Action

Letting the negative emotions attached to an act go is an intentional action. You choose to stop devoting the energy to continue feeling the hurt. You choose to untangle the negative emotions from the act you are forgiving from whatever other emotions onto which you are holding. You acknowledge that the act hurt you, but that it is in the past, and that you're only slowing yourself down by holding onto those emotions.

Once you have let the emotions associated with an act go, you can make practical choices about how to respond to the action. You can decide, in fact, if it's worthy of a response other than to note it in passing. Some acts may not be. Others may require you to respond drastically. With your sight cleared of all the negative filters from anger, pain, or whatever else, you can actually make these choices consciously and in an educated manner. You will no longer feel the desire to simply strike out, to make someone else pay for your hurt. That means that you can choose appropriate consequences, and actually let go of the attention you were giving to the act (this includes subconscious attention, which is actually the most dangerous kind, since it's difficult to recognize as even being present, let alone the cause of stress and bad feelings).

Forgiveness can be a cascading event. Forgiving one action removes some of the negative emotions from the entangled mass present in most of us. As anyone who has untied a nasty knot can tell you, each thread you remove makes the rest easier to detangle. You also learn the process, and become adjusted to it, making it even easier to do. You may find that with a few conscious efforts at forgiving specific acts, it starts to become natural… though you will still find instances that require your conscious attention from time to time.

True forgiveness requires conscious acknowledgement of an event that hurt you and the negative emotions that you attach to it. It requires that you acknowledge these feelings, and then let them go. It requires you to take responsibility for the feelings that you associate with the act, because as long as you blame someone else for making you feel that way, you won't be ABLE to let them go (how can you let feelings someone else controls go?).

But most importantly, true forgiveness opens up a huge amount of your life and energy that were closed off by those negative emotions. It makes it FAR easier to be happy and at peace. Those things you aren't fogiving are anchors holding you back from the happiness, the joy, the life that you could be experiencing.

Get rid of your anchors. Forgive someone today!

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August 20th

Awareness, Communication, Energy, Free Will, Relationships, Subconscious

The Power Of The Spoken Word – Spoken Words Multiply

Spoken Words Multiply

The power of words is multiplied as the spoken word multiplies… often having consequences far beyond what the speaker intended.

You've heard stories about, and maybe even been affected by, the power of gossip and rumors. You probably have experience with someone letting something slip to someone they shouldn't have, where it came back to bite you. You've even heard of the power of "word of mouth" when it comes to advertising or gaining customers. These are all some of the more obvious signs of the power of the spoken word.

The spoken word is of immense power. Something you mention off-hand can completely alter the course of the life of someone who hears it… even someone who overhears it. You might mention to your friend as you're walking that you're tired of having to deal with one of your vendors, and someone you're passing by right at that moment may hear you and start a company to compete with that vendor, eventually becoming the biggest company in that industry… all because of your off-hand comment.

That is the power of the word with an individual. But the REAL power of the spoken word is that it multiplies. You tell one person something, and they pass on what they heard… which is NOT necessarily the same thing that you said. This often happens whether you want it to or not.

What that means is that you really need to watch what you say. People around you will remember what you say even after you've forgotten that you ever said it. Not only that, but they will pass it on, either through actual words, or through the way their behavior is modified because your words altered their perceptions of whatever you were talking about.

Tying this back to a recent article of mine, 8 Ways To Show Your Husband You Love Him, one of the very common, very nasty examples of this is when one spouse goes into detail about the faults of the other with friends and family. Many times, they even seem to enjoy getting as low as they can, reporting even things that are temporary or very private (ie "He's insecure about his competency when it comes to his job"… that sort of thing is told with the expectation of privacy, and should not be passed along). You can easily predict what this is going to do to the way the people hearing it view the object of the conversation. This effect is, of course, even stronger when the words are repeated, first of all by the original speaker, and then afterward by those who hear it among themselves and others.

Every spoken word affects every person who hears it. The amount it affects them is, to be honest, completely unpredictable to the speaker. It might be something they dismiss immediately, which never even gets committed to long-term memory. On the other hand, the smallest thing can trigger massive surges of thoughts and feelings in someone, for reasons the speaker may know nothing about.

It even affects the person doing the speaking. Saying something makes you think about it, and makes you give a concept the extra attention necessary to break it into things that can be communicated in words. That extra attention gives it more importance to your subconscious, as well as making you think about each of the individual components, not just the overall concept. That can be either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on what it is, and what your perception of that is. In other words, if you are communicating your idea for a new business, and speaking about it causes you to break it down into components, which you then think about, that is probably a good thing… it clarifies your idea and makes it more concrete. On the other hand, if what you are communicating is how your wife never does this or that, and you then break that down into details (even if it's only in your mind, not communicated), then you are adding negative thoughts and emotions not only to your life in general at that point, but also to your overall perception of your wife, so that those thoughts and emotions weigh, however slightly, every time you think about your wife.

The moral of this story is to be very careful what you say. Communication is a great thing, especially when it is both useful and effective. Communicating negative things, however, unless it is a needed warning, usually has more of a net harm than benefit. That is, warning someone of something negative that affects them is good. Reporting something negative to someone who it doesn't affect, however, generally causes more harm than good, as it makes you think more about those negative things yourself, thus emphasizing them in your perceptions, and possibly altering the listener's perception of the object of your conversation in a negative, unnecessary, and quite possibly unjustified way.

As I said in the beginning, the power of words is multiplied as the spoken word multiplies… often having consequences far beyond what the speaker intended.

I have created a new contest! One lucky subscriber will win a free copy of The Secret.

Click the link below to enter:
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