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just figuring things out

Personal Development and Productivity

Just One Question

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Let me ask you a question:

What are you thinking about right now?

Are you thinking about what you have to do? What you should have done already but you haven’t done yet? Are you thinking about something you did that you wish you hadn’t done or perhaps done differently? Are you debating whether you should do A, B, or C or perhaps stay in bed and do none of them at all?

It takes some time to think these things through, I know. So please come back to this post once you’ve finished thinking. Come back when you’ve decided what you’re going to do (or have already done it). Come back when you’ve turned over an issue of your past, looked at every angle of it and are satisfied that you can let it go, so that you never have to think of it again. Come back when you’ve chosen A, B, or C or have decided to call in sick and stay in bed all day.

Come back when you’ve done any of the above. Don’t worry, this post will be here when you get back. It can wait.

Finished? Great. So let me ask you the same question again:

What are you thinking about right now?

Are you thinking about what you have to do? What you should have done already but you haven’t done yet? Are you thinking about something you did or didn’t do that you wish you hadn’t or perhaps done differently? Are you debating whether you should do A, B, or C or perhaps stay in bed and do none of them at all?

Sound familiar?

How To Find The Time And Energy To Work On Your Side Projects

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Ten Minutes Is All It Takes

When I had moved to Japan after graduation, it was my plan to make a little money and work on my novel. I’d teach English classes during the day and hammer out a few pages at night.  By the year’s end I’d have a finished draft, good to go.

Instead, by the time I got home from work most every day I basically said “Fuck it. I’m tired,” and cracked open a beer.

Sound familiar?

“It’s Hard to Find the Time”

When you have side projects, be they in writing, photography, or an entrepreneurial venture, it can be difficult to put in the time or muster the energy needed to make them cook.  The problem was that you used to have all the time in the world.  You went to classes, did your homework, and worked on your passion projects afterwards.  Sometimes your homework was your passion project, as it was for me as a creative writing major.

Then you graduate, and before you know it your get your first job and eight hours knocked out of your day. If you haven’t developed enough self-discipline, you’ll find yourself going to the bar instead of going home and working on that project of yours.

That was pretty much what I did when I lived in Tokyo.  It took me five years to write five chapters of my novel.  Most of that writing was done on the weekend when the guilt from not doing anything had pushed me so far that I forced myself to squeeze a few paragraphs out of my brain. My passion project, that thing that was supposed to be “fun,” turned into a form of torture.

But you gotta eat, right?  You can’t slack off at your job and be working on your passion project on the side, can you? You’ve already spent eight hours working. There’s no way that you’re going to spend another two or three hours working on your novel (or whatever it may be). You want to blow off steam.  Have a drink. Veg in front of the TV. You worked hard. You deserve it.  Besides, you’re tired now, how good is your writing (painting, coding, etc.) going to be when you’re as exhausted as you are? You’d best wait for the time for when you feel inspired.

If the above paragraph sounds anything like your internal monologue when you come home from work, I recommend that you read this blog post twice, maybe three times so that you can catch yourself rationalizing as it happens. Inspiration isn’t going to come if you just wait for it.  You must make the time for Inspiration to come forth.  If you don’t, you might as well resign yourself the fact that you’re never going to work on your project again–that way you’ll at least feel better about not doing it.

My (failed) Attempts to Make the Time

I’ve tried many methods to motivate myself to work on my side projects.  One of them was the “break the big goal into mini-goals” method that Stephen Covey often talks about.  I tried that, and placed deadlines for each chapter until, one year later, I’d have a finished novel.

That didn’t work. For some reason all the mini-goals just made me think more about all those chapters that I had to write. Also, the arbitrary deadlines that I imposed upon myself for how much I should have gotten done by what date had no power on me.  The moment I fell behind in my schedule I was too demotivated to continue.

I also tried the “one page a day” method. There was a problem here too. Some days I came home so tired that I collapsed on to the bed.  I couldn’t write a page to save my life. When two or three days passed with nothing written, I abandoned this resolution altogether.

When I started working full-time last September, I had another side project, goldhat.org, that I had spent the better part of 7 months putting together. I wasn’t writing a novel any more, but I was (and am) just as passionate about the web app as I was the the novel I was writing.

When I was self-employed with no fixed income (a term which I believe should replace the term “unemployed”), I could spend every waking hour of the day coding for the app. When working for TeachStreet, I found that, like before, I was spending no time at all on my side project.

I justified the 2-3 months not working on Goldhat based on the fact that I was getting used to the new job and I had a three hour commute to Seattle twice a week.  When I finally found an apartment and and was getting into a smooth workflow, however, I realized that I had no more excuses. I had to make time for Goldhat right away or it would fizzle and die.

The Ten Minute Rule

I reflected upon my failures to make time for my novel in the past and realized what I had lacked: momentum. I would whip myself up in a motivational frenzy and then sputter out a week later.  What I needed was a commitment, even a small one, that I would make every day for my project.

This was my resolution: No matter what happened or how exhausted I was, I would devote ten minutes a day to one of my side projects, be it this blog, goldhat, or both.  If I felt like continuing after the ten minutes that was fine, but I had to spend 10 minutes minimum.

This took away all my excuses because no matter how busy or tired I got, there was no way that I couldn’t spend at least ten minutes.  Most days I ended up spending much more then the minimum ten minutes and often worked for two hours or more.  There was one day where I had come back from the gym ready to collapse, but I forced myself to spend at least ten minutes staring at the code for Goldhat’s WordPress plugin.  I don’t think I wrote a single line of code in those ten minutes, but the next day I was bursting with ideas on how to make the plugin work.  Because I was anxious to try those ideas out, I went straight to coding that day and probably spent more than three hours on the project.  This was on a weekday, mind you!

In the two weeks or so since I’ve imposed this 10 minute rule I’ve completed a stable version of the Goldhat WordPress Plugin, wrote an announcement for it on the Goldhat Blog, and also wrote the blog post preceding this one about writing out of your niche.  I probably could have done more If I committed myself to these projects full-time, but I’m still very happy with my progress.

This blog post itself is a product of the 10 minute rule. At 6:00PM yesterday I felt mentally exhausted. All I wanted to do was have a slice a pizza and a nice big glass of wine.  I remembered, however, that I hadn’t yet put in my 10 minutes and got to typing. I started writing at 6:00, and found myself at the end of this 1300+ word blog post at 8:09PM.  All I needed was those first ten minutes to get over a bit of inertia, and then I was good to go.

The Power of Self-Forgiveness

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If I were to sum up 95% of what personal development gurus preach it would be this:

“You have the potential to do, have, and be anything you want.  All you have to do is adopt a positive mindset and take 100% responsibility for what happens in your life.”

I’m not saying that there isn’t any truth to the above statement, much of what I’ve written myself could be described as a deeper exploration of the ideas contained in the above two sentences. Recently, however, I felt that something vital was missing.

I realized that all of my motivation for bettering myself came from one chasing one great big carrot: “You can have anything you want” (You mean I can be rich and famous too?) and running away from one great big stick: “It’s all up to you” (Oh shit! I better start hustling!  Don’t want to end up in a van down by the river!)

When I looked deeper into these motivations all I could sense was a feeling of incompleteness, a feeling that I needed to be able to wake up at 5:00AM every morning, go to a dojo before sunrise and break slabs of concrete with my kung-fu.  That I needed every thought that ever passed through my mind to be a positive one, and that I needed every person I met to think that I was the most likeable person ever.  Until I had reached that level of excellence I was nothing but a work-in-progress, strung along by the idea that in the future I would be a better me.

With the incompleteness came the guilt and the fear. I felt guilty because I wasn’t able to tap into this “limitless potential” that all the gurus said I should be able to. I felt fearful and worried about what would happen to me should I not be able to do so. Whenever I didn’t accomplish what I had set out to do, I blamed myself for not trying hard enough or not thinking positively enough. If I only had the power to get rid of all my “negative thought patterns”, I would have been able to perform at my peak. Because I hadn’t. I had failed.

And I know that the self-help gurus also preach that we must, as the cliche goes, “treat every failure as a stepping stone to success.” Unfortunately, this is easier said than done.  When you’ve failed (or more rightly, labled your situation as a “failure”), it can be very difficult to see the big picture, to know that failure is not failure but simply the first step on a new path.  When I had found myself wallowing in the depths of what I had labled failure, I knew that I should be more positive and “see the bigger picture.” The fact that I couldn’t do so only made me blame myself more.

At some point, however, I realized that all the negativity, the worry, the apathy, the fear, and the anger that I might have felt was not really my fault. How could it be my fault? It was my genetics, my upbringing and my education up to this point that was largely responsible for my behavior, and not due to any conscious decision that I may have made. I then realized just how silly it was for me to feel ashamed at something that I had done or had failed to do. Why should I feel ashamed? The negative action or inaction that came from me was not “me” but rather the result of what some spiritual teachers would call my “conditioning.”

It became clear to me that what I had been doing was fighting my conditioning. I had been fighting the most futile fight of all: fighting what is.

I’m sure all of you have had this experience before. Let’s say you’re addicted to television. You know that watching too much TV is self-destructive, so you make a resolution to quit. One week later you find that you’ve downloaded every season of LOST and you’ve spent the whole weekend in bed watching one episode after the other, all the while shoveling pizza, ice cream, and doughnuts into your mouth.

Because you’ve resisted your conditioning, something that you have no control over, you are essentially pressing your body against a wall. Although you may be able to trick yourself into thinking that the wall is giving way, this is only temporary.  Eventually you’ll collapse due to wasted effort and surrender completely to your “negative” impulse. You fall into a state of apathy, a state where you’d like to resist what you are doing, but you no longer have the energy to do so.

Remember this: the wall is not “you.” You did not build it, and it’s not your fault that it’s there. It was built by the years of conditioning that you have grown to identify with as “You” or at least a part of “You.”

Even with the knowledge that your bad habits are not a part of who you really are, it can sometimes be difficult to dis-identify from them.  Don’t blame yourself for this either.  The tendency to blame ourselves for our negative thinking is also our conditioning.  If you get wrapped up in self-blame, you press yourself deeper into the wall.  There will be no way to see where the conditioning ends and You begin.

The only way to escape self-blame is, of course, self-forgiveness. Self-forgiveness is easier than you may think, even though some may perceive it as extremely difficult. After all, if your bad habits are not “you”, then you should have no difficulty forgiving yourself for them, right? When you forgive yourself for a negative emotion, impulse, or thought, you will have taken your first step away from the wall.  With this new perspective, you’ll notice that the wall you had been pressing yourself against all this time is only ten feet long.  Why throw your weight against it when you can walk around the sides?

When you forgive yourself, you’ll be able to observe negative emotions and thoughts from a distance.  If the impulse springs up to want to fight a negative emotion, forgive yourself for that impulse and observe that too.  As you observe you own thoughts, you’ll begin to see them in a much clearer light, to exercise “observation without evaluation” which J. Krishnamurti said was the “highest form of intelligence.” When you forgive and observe, most of the time you won’t have to actually “DO” anything for the negative feeling, thought or impulse to dissolve, it simply dissolves on its own, and all that is left, is you.

And what if you can’t forgive yourself? Then forgive yourself for the inability to forgive. Start from there.

Incredible Photo By: Laura Chifiriuc

Five Hard Truths You Need To Accept

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Denying the hard truth

Ignoring the hard truths of life is a dangerous thing to do. Unfortunately, because the truth is so damn scary, it’s something we all do from time to time. In order to ignore them we tell ourselves lies–lies that warp our view of reality to the point where we’re incapable of knowing the actions we can take in order to make real changes for the better.

Coming face to face with realities that we may have been denying for years is by no means an easy thing to do. We pretend we’re not overweight by wearing bulkier clothes so that we don’t have to do anything about it. We fantasize that things will go well for us in the future so that we can feel better about watching TV and playing video games. We blame our problems on other people so that we don’t have to take responsibility for them. By not accepting the truth, we take the easy way out.

But there comes a point when these lies are no longer satisfactory, when you take a look at your life and realize that reality is far removed from the delusions you’ve created for yourself. You get fed up, and finally you decide to stop telling yourself lies and face reality head-on.

I came to this point about a year and a half ago, and of all the hard truths in life that I’ve avoided, I have found the following five to be the hardest to accept. Upon accepting them, however, I’ve found them to be the most liberating. It’s important to understand these truths and the lies we use to avoid them so that we can get back to leading our lives the way we really want to.

Hard Truth #1: Your problems are your own, no one else’s

The lie we create to avoid this truth
“It’s (My parent’s/the economy’s/my disability’s/my colleague’s/the government’s) fault that I’m experiencing all the misfortune I’m having now.”

Why this lie is dangerous
When you blame external factors for your problems you effectively place them out of your scope of control. When you think your problems are other people’s fault and not your own it’s easy to believe you can’t do anything about them. This gives you an easy excuse to not do anything at all to improve your situation.

What we should tell ourselves instead
“There are some aspects to my life that I’m not happy with, but I’m not going to make excuses just to make myself feel better. My problems are my responsibility and no one else’s. It’s up to me to solve them.”

Hard Truth #2: No One Owes You Anything

The lie we create to avoid this truth
“People are naturally going to want to (help me/hire me/support me/choose me) because of how smart and special I am.”

Why this lie is dangerous
When you feel entitled to something that you want without really earning it, you set yourself up for a lot of disappointments. When you don’t get what you want you’ll probably tell yourself it’s someone else’s fault (see hard truth #1), and blaming other people is not a good way to win friends.

What we should tell ourselves instead
“People will only help me out when I prove my worth through my actions, not just talk.”

Hard Truth #3: There are No Shortcuts

The lie we create to avoid this truth
“There must be some way to (get rich/become famous/ be successful) that’s easy and won’t take much time. I just haven’t found my angle yet.”

Why this lie is dangerous
When you tell yourself that there must be an easy way to succeed, you’ll be chasing the quick buck instead of investing your time and efforts into honest, hard work. You’ll eat up the words of the hucksters who promise “surefire systems” that’ll get you rich in under six months. In most cases, all you’ll be left with is a $500 hole in your pocket and a set of 12 worthless DVDs.  Even worse, you could lose your life-savings on some “safe bet” stock that went *poof*. Looking for shortcuts is a surefire path to frustration.

What we should tell ourselves instead
“The only surefire path to success is hard work. There may be some shortcuts out there, but they are so few and far between that it’s much easier to do something simple, honest and valuable than to look for them.”

Hard Truth #4 Superman Won’t Swoop Down to Save You

The lie we create to avoid this truth
“Everything’s going to be okay when (The economy gets better/I get a big promotion/I win the lottery/I become a reality TV star)”

Why this lie is dangerous
Just as it’s easy to blame the bad economy for your misfortunes, it’s also easy to expect that the government will pass some magic law that will make them all go away. The solutions to your problems will come from you, not anyone or anything else. When you wait for someone or something else to solve them, they will most definitely persist.

What we should tell ourselves instead
“I must rely on myself first to solve my problems. No one’s going to do it for me. I make my own luck through persistence and hard work. I don’t need to wait to win the lottery. I can take steps today to make the money and do some good while I’m at it.”

Hard Truth #5: Dreams Don’t Come True Just by Thinking About Them

The lie we create to avoid this truth
“Someday I’ll be a successful(actor/writer/singer/CEO/President of the United States)”

Why this lie is dangerous
Oftentimes fantasies like this are but short lived escapes from reality. When you avoid reality, you limit yourself from seeing the necessary steps that you can take to change your it.

What we should tell ourselves instead
“What actions can I take today to accomplish my goals?”

Facing these truths can be frightening at first. But once you begin to accept them instead of avoiding them, you can be surprised how many paths open up for you. The more accurate your view of reality is, the more power you have to change it. Accepting these hard truths is the first step in claiming that power.

The Greatest Lesson I Chose Not To Learn

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Truth is on the other side. Do you have to courage to look?

The only way have principles but not live by them is to avoid the Truth, to fool yourself into feeling that you’ve honored your  principles when in reality you haven’t.  In order to do this you create  excuses to shelter yourself from the Truth,  and thus avoid the fear and uncertainty that comes with facing it.

The Truth is incredibly simple, so simple that proverbs like “When there’s a will there’s a way,” and “Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” sum them up as clearly as anyone possibly could. The problem with these proverbs, however, is that although they may represent the Truth, they fail to carry the force of the Truth because we’ve spent so much time learning to ignore them. Over time, our denial of the truth in these proverbs have reduced them to nothing more than  lifeless clichés.

We don’t just ignore proverbs, however. We ignore even the powerful messages of great works of art, literature and film. These works express profound truths so clearly that you would think they would be obvious to anyone. And yet,  all we do is nod our heads sanctimoniously and come up with new excuses of why the truth in this or that particular book or film does not apply to us.  In this way, we can have as many principles as we like, and not actually live by any of them. This is something that I have done more often than I’d like to admit.

Ikiru

Ever since I can remember, I believed it was much more important to pursue one’s passions than it was to pursue comfort, riches or security.  I had read many books and had seen many films that reinforced this belief. None of them, however, was more powerful for me than Akira Kurosawa’s film Ikiru (Ikiru is the Japanese word for “to live”). This film had conveyed the message of the importance of a living a meaningful life more than anything I had read or seen before. And yet, despite the power of the film, and despite the fact that it was probably my favorite film of all time, I failed to live by its message.

The Original Preview of Ikiru:


The first time I watched the film was just before I went to Japan to teach English. It told the story of bureaucrat by the name of Watanabe who had spent his whole life stamping papers in a dusty office. For 35 years he kept the same routine. He clocked in, stamped papers, clocked out, went home, went to sleep and clocked in the next day. There were no divisions between the days, and  all of it blended together into a single lifeless moment that passed by in an instant.

The film takes a turn when Watanabe finds out that he has stomach cancer, and finally makes the realization that he hasn’t done anything meaningful in his life. At first he tries to distract himself with drinking and the Tokyo nightlife. Soon, however, the weight of his immnanent death is far too heavy for him to ignore. He eventually makes the decision to spend his last six months doing something meaningful. Although Watanabe is on the verge of death, he becomes absolutely committed to leaving a legacy in the short time that he has left.

The message of the film was clear: do something meaningful now, or your life will end before you know it. Although I had heard similar messages before, never had it been as powerfully conveyed to me as it had been in that film. I walked out of the theater with tears streaming, and I vowed to live my life on purpose from that moment on.

How I Managed to Ignore The Lesson

That vow, as soon as it was made, was not fulfilled. I acknowledged the truth of the film but failed to live by it. In order to help me avoid the truth of the film, I came up with excuses:

Excuse #1: “I Don’t Need to Change”

Because I believed in living a meaningful life, I had the conceit that I was more enlightened than Watanabe was. After all, I had graduated with a creative writing degree. My life goal at the time was to inspire people with my stories. I wasn’t about to sacrifice my life to get some boring yet secure government job like Watanabe had. Soon after graduation, however, that’s exactly what I did. I latched on to the first easy opportunity that fell in my lap: a teaching job in Japan. All the time that I taught English I never thought of myself as a teacher, but as a novelist. And although I only fiddled with my unfinished novel about once a month, that was enough for me to sustain the illusion that I had chosen the road less traveled by, even though I hadn’t.

Excuse #2: “My Situation Is Different”
Although I sympathized with the plight of the main character, never did I think that I would end up stamping papers in a dusty office, living a life devoid of meaning. This was the easiest excuse for me to make. I wasn’t, after all, a bureaucrat wasting his life away  stamping papers. I was an English teacher wasting his life away repeating the most mind-numbingly simple phrases to students over and over (and over) again. When I wasn’t teaching Japanese salarymen how to ask directions to the post office, I partied with friends, watched television and played video games.

Although the context of my situation was different from Watanabe’s in Ikiru, the essence was the same.  Watanabe passed his life away in a government office while I did it in a corporate classroom. I clocked in, passed a few hours of my life, went home (maybe after a few drinks), went to sleep and clocked in the next day. Because of these superficial differences it was very easy for me to buy into the illusion that my situation was different.

Excuse #3: “I’ll Change Later, But Not Now”
Eventually I came to terms with the fact that my work was not meaningful for me. I left the teaching world, and fell into a job as a corporate headhunter. Because my job was 100% commission based, I became obsessed with work. I made an average of 80 to 100 phone calls a day and worked about 70 hours a week, sometimes more. The job was much more meaningful for me than teaching English, but I knew still that the job wasn’t ideal for me. I didn’t want to be a headhunter forever, but I thought that I could make a million dollars first and then go off to do  something more meaningful later. It took a very long time to admit to myself that by the time I made a million dollars I would probably become trapped by the lifestyle and comfort that my income provided me, making it that much more difficult to leave and start something new.

The Epiphany

It took me five years to finally accept the truth of the movie Ikiru. I had created walls of excuses, rationalizations and delusions to shut the Truth out, but when confronted with the daily realities of my life, my excuses could not pass muster. One by one, they began to fall down. When there were no more excuses left, I had an epiphany: live a meaningful life now, or you never will. This was something I had believed in for a long time, but because I had no excuses left, it seemed infinitely more clear and powerful to me.

It was then that I realized that an epiphany is not a sudden insight into the Truth, but rather it is the moment when when you run out of excuses for yourself and nothing is left but the Truth.

Let me say that again:
AN EPIPHANY IS THE MOMENT WHEN YOU RUN OUT OF EXCUSES FOR YOURSELF, AND NOTHING IS LEFT BUT THE TRUTH.

I distinctly remember the moment when the last excuse came crumbling down. It was the “Not now, but later” excuse. I was sitting in the Tokyo Shinagawa Immigration office waiting to renew my visa when I was suddenly confronted with the fact that I had lived in Tokyo for five years, and had never intended to.

I had originally  resolved to stay in the country for just one year, but because I told myself the “Not now, but later,” excuse every day, one year quickly became five. Renewing my visa, and seeing the stamp permitting me to stay in Japan for three more years brought this fact into focus. Although I had known the Truth all along, this was the first time I confronted it without excuses. The moment I saw that stamp on my passport I knew that if I didn’t resolve to leave and start my new life today I would still be telling myself the same “Not now, but later” story in 20 years. The only difference between now and the future was that there would be more stamps. Eventually, there would come a point where I would wake up and realize that, just like Watanabe, I had wasted my entire life.

Two months after I had this realization I quit my job, cleaned out my apartment, and bought a one-way ticket to Seattle. My folks picked me up at the airport and I went back to my old room at my old house. I had no friends, no connections, and no career history in the new areas that I wanted to explore. Was I scared as hell? You better believe I was. The Truth, however, was so obvious to me at that point that I could no longer rationalize against it. I had no choice but to take action.

One year later, I find that I am far from what I can consider an ideal career. I work full-time for little or no income and on top of that I’m still living with my parents, but I have no regrets. In this one year I’ve learned more about myself than any other. I understand my strengths, my weaknesses, my passions and my purpose more than I ever had before. Although I admit that I have few material achievements to my name as of yet, I feel like I’m on the verge of something big. In the near future, I plan to launch a web application which could change the way people do business on the internet. The application itself is complete, and all that’s left is to deal with legal and tax details. Even if this venture fails, I’ll have proof that says to potential employers and business partners that I’m a self-starter and that I follow through with my goals. That right there is worth more than any MBA.

What Are Your Excuses?

Hopefully it won’t take you as long as it did me to accept the Truth. The only way that I can think of to do this is to take a good look at your principles and ask yourself: “Am I really living in accordance with these principles?” If you aren’t, think  of the excuses you tell yourself in order to avoid them. The first step in shooting down your excuses is to know exactly what they are.  The moment you know your excuses and confront them  is the moment you accept the Truth, and will finally start living by the principles you’ve had all along.

Fun With Affirmations! *OR* Why You Can’t Become a Space Vampire.

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In his audio series, The Psychology of Selling, Brian Tracy tells the story of a top salesman who attributed his success to just one thing: affirmations. Just before the salesman went to meet with a client he would repeat to himself: “I am the best! I am the best! I am the greatest salesperson in this industry and in this country! I am the very very best!”

As a headhunter in Tokyo, I took this story at face value. Every time before meeting a candidate or client, I would repeat the same affirmations again and again until I felt sufficiently pumped up for the meeting.

These affirmations seemed to have helped when I was in a good mood, but  when I wasn’t, the words seemed hollow, and often made me feel worse off than I had before. There was always a voice in the back of my head that said:  how can I keep fooling myself?

Apparently, I wasn’t alone in my feeling that affirmations didn’t work. According to some recent research, affirmations only work for people who believe in them in the first place. If your fundamental beliefs run contrary to what you’re affirming,  the affirmations will have no effect at all.

But don’t take my word for it, why not try it yourself? Go ahead and try this affirmation below. Don’t worry…nobody’s watching except ceiling cat.

I am a space vampire! I am an ancient undead being from the void who can swim in the vacuum of space. I thrive off the blood of unwitting space adventurers!

After saying these words a couple times, do you feel particularly bloodthirsty? Do you feel confident that you can breathe in the vacuum of space? Does your reflection seem a little less clear when you look in the mirror?

If you  said “yes” to any of these, let’s just say that I’m happy I’m typing this miles away from you with a garlic wreath around my neck.

I’m assuming that most of you didn’t feel a single bit more vampirish after saying this affirmation. The thought that you’re a space vampire is so ridiculous that saying it might make you snicker a little, but not much more than that. It’s so removed from your current perception of reality that you could never take it seriously, even if you say it a million times.

The same thing goes for positive affirmations. If you say a positive affirmation but your beliefs run contrary to it, it’ll most likely have the same effect as saying the affirmation above. If you hold the limiting belief that nobody likes you and you continue to repeat the affirmation that everyone likes you, you’ll get depressed telling yourself something that you don’t believe in.

Most of us don’t want to admit to ourselves that we have limiting beliefs. We don’t want to admit that we believe we are unimportant, that we believe we’re not good enough, that we believe that nobody likes us.  We don’t want to admit to ourselves that we have these beliefs because we know that on an intellectual level they aren’t true. We may have limiting beliefs, but we tend to deny they exist because we know they’re illogical, negative, and just plain wrong.

If we continue to deny that our limiting beliefs exist, however, they will persist. It’s important that we recognize and accept that we have these beliefs in order to get rid of them.

How can we admit to ourselves that we have limiting beliefs?  The Lefkoe Method, which is a system for eliminating limiting beliefs (say that ten times fast!), suggests using a negative affirmation.  Negative affirmations work in very much the same way that positive affirmations do; if you don’t believe in them, they have no power over you, and will feel just as empty as the space vampire affirmation.  If you feel confident that you have no limiting beliefs, then you should feel no sense of discomfort when saying any of the following affirmations aloud:

Nobody Likes Me
I’m an idiot
I’m not important
I’m not strong enough
Nothing’s worth the effort
I’ll never win a hot dog eating contest

If you felt  a sense of unease saying any of the above affirmations, that’s a sign that you’ve been harboring that particular limiting belief. You may not want to have that belief, and you may know it’s wrong on an intellectual level, but you still have it.

Although it might not feel great to know that you have the belief that nobody likes you or that nothing’s worth the effort, the good news is is that you’ve already taken the first step in overcoming the belief: admitting you have it.

It is important to remember that you created this belief, and since you had the power to create it, you most certainly have the power to let it go. Every time you have a negative thought all you have to do is remember the limiting belief that is the source of that negative thought. When you do, the thought will lose its substance.

My Personal Experience With the Lefkoe Method

When I tried out the Lefkoe Method, the limiting belief that I worked on was :  I’m not important. On an intellectual level I believed that I was important, that I could do anything, and could change the world, but after I said “I’m not important” and felt the discomfort that came from saying it, I realized that I still, at a subconscious level, believed that I wasn’t important.

I then began to see how this limiting belief had affected me in the past. Every time I wasn’t invited to a party or a client didn’t return an email I would instantly have a negative thought that sprung from this belief. Every time people celebrated my achievements I dismissed them as flattery, thinking that these people probably wanted something out of me.

I didn’t want to have these negative thoughts. I knew they were irrational, but they just kept coming to me like a reflex.

After using the method, it feels as though this belief has gone completely. When people ignore me, my explanation for why they do so is much more positive than before. Instead of thinking “That person must think I’m not important.” I now think “Maybe he/she was busy that day” or, “Maybe that’s how he/she treats everyone.” Conversely, when I receive a complement, I find that I can accept it much more easily because I know, at a deep level, that I’m important enough to receive complements. As far as my sense of self-importance is concerned, I no longer have  to force myself to try to see things in a positive light. I just do.

Now, when I say the words “I’m not important,” they seem as hollow and empty to me as “I’m Space Vampire.”  Conversely, when I say the words “I am important,” I get a little boost of positive energy because I actually believe the words. No longer do the words feel hollow.

If you have 30 minutes to spare, I highly encourage you to try out the Lefkoe Method yourself . The web page this links to turned me off at first because it asked me for my email address without giving any indication of the value I’d receive for doing so, but after reading other testimonials across the web I decided to try it out.

I must say that I was pleasantly surprised how much value they’re giving away for free. In fact, just by knowing how the method works for one limiting belief you can work to eliminate many others without buying their full program. It makes me wonder how these guys stay in business.