• Willpower: Let Go of Everything

    You have a strong will. People fear your willpower, you even celebrate it. Yet, against popular belief, you cannot change other people's will with your own will, no matter how strong or terrible it is.

    You may use seduction or force to get what you want, but you cannot put up willpower against willpower. Try to recall such a situation -- did it work? What were the consequences?

    Get rid of the belief that you can control everything, because you can't. In fact, you are not even able to control anything, what you can and do control is your perception of things and events. You control and set up your expectations and your evaluations of events and their particular circumstances -- this is the mechanism to influence reality itself. Your subjective perceptions do objectively change your realities. You change your point of view, you walk around the object of contempt or desire and start to see it from different perspectives.

    Putting up your will against an undesirable situation causes frustration and resent, your own frustration and the situations' resent. You may use or leverage some hierarchical power to change the situation but this is not your will. The moment you're trying to control your environment through your will, you do in fact force that very will upon your own mind. Your ability to create suffers as a consequence.

    Change the situation using your will for good, not going against any other person's will and you are going to employ willpower for the first time in an economical and successful manner. Use that powerful will of yours to enhance and enforce your discipline, for example.

    Let go. As an exercise, let go of everything. How does that feel? Let go of everything and consciously select the few things that you actually desire to productively take care of. Let go of everything else.

    Now you are free. Free to create and free to succeed.

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  • A Simple Technique to Experience Amazing Productivity Gains

    You plan your objectives in written form. You live Getting Things Done and the accompanying struggles.

    That is the easy stuff; mindsweeps, making lists of things, organizing and structuring the always up-to-date lists into contexts and working according to the circumstances, the environment, and the available energy. You will most likely end up with lists that grow longer and longer without even the slightest chance to ever satisfactorily complete any one sub-list.

    Enter the advanced stuff.

    Since you're working with and alongside intentions anyway, let's try to build a somewhat idealistic, but nevertheless fully functioning, productivity model based on only the best intentions.

    1. Start with the ubiquitous mindsweep.
    2. Recognize and accept the Must Do tasks.
    3. Collect your intentions for the desired outcomes of the Must Do and the Want-To-Do Really Badly stuff.
    4. Inject as much positive thinking as possible into your mental process. Sanitize every thought of potential auto-sabotage.
    5. Feel the synchronicities and the manifestations show up in waves depending on your faith in the actual reception of the intended goal or subject of desire.

    It is as simple as reaping what you sow, only more elegant.

    You act in accordance with your intentions, you set out your intentions and everything flows naturally, almost effortlessly, you take occasional glances at your plans and lists and you select instinctively, without much conscious thinking, the most appropriate and highest value-yielding task to subsequently accomplish in your sequence of events.

    Now that is productivity, where the world seems to run in slow-motion while you are, in high-speed mode and fully alert, observing the fulfillment of your laid out plans and the arrival of your results.

    The next -- and the last -- project you are going to tackle the old-school way will be the raising of your consciousness to the level where the magic becomes possible in the first place.

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  • 11 Ways to Improve Clarity and Start Getting Results

    Once you have found your purpose in life, you will have more than enough to do in never enough time. Here are some ways to make your experience even more joyous:

    1. List the top three objectives of your current endeavour. To do this, weigh the most important goals and assign them relative importances. You obviously have to decide which ones are not in the top three. Can you see where this is going? No two things are equally important.
    2. Be sure and confident about what you are doing and why and pursue exactly one project, single-mindedly to the end, until completion. This means you have to make decisions. Do not stand in your own way. Concentrate all your efforts and energy on one target at a time.
    3. Be able to present a written list, at any time, with your top priorities. Practice and pretend to be pitching your services and your goals every day.
    4. Define your #1 goal, its #1 project and its respective #1 task and start working on it, once you understand that this is the only thing there is, right now.
    5. Do not worry about the future. Stop worrying altogether. Apply your rage to the present moment. Transform rage into vigor. Do not fight the future and do not fight in the future. Be clear about the present, about this very moment.
    6. Your rewards are nothing to worry about either, they will come to you when their time has arrived -- worrying will only delay them and prevent you from receiving what you deserve.
    7. Realize that you do not have to suffer to achieve what you want. You decide whether suffering is part of your experience or not.
    8. Drop any goal that isn't worth pursuing anymore; do not let your countless started, semi-finished, and never followed-up upon projects divert your focus. They are worth nothing and only add to your sense of failure. Get rid of the clutter.
    9. Set up a hierachy of time and desire. You cannot have everything you dream of immediately. Even if you skip sleep and eating, you are not going to accelerate the pace with which your dreams are made real.
    10. Set yourself up for success by accepting what you have, as the ground in which to plant the seeds. Do not resist the situation you're in for you set up your future failure as long as you fail to accept the present.
    11. Do not break down and destroy your previous achievements in order to follow a new idea. Recognize the foundations that are laid out for you and your creation. Build on top of what you have -- whatever that may be.

    There is another way that runs parallel: see and set your goals as plans to improve your current experience of the present, whatever their outcome may be, regardless of the time it takes to successfully complete them, if they are ever going to be completed, that is.

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  • Understand Pain to Train More Efficiently

    It doesn't have to hurt in order to work, especially not on an everyday basis, but an always and infinitely comfortable workout is no guarantee for success either. There is no reason to run away from the slightest air of pain, as much as you don't need to run away from hunger. Enjoy your pain as long as it lasts.

    Have you ever trained to accomplish full splits? This hurts and it has to.

    You can choose from three different kinds of pain.

    First, there is the pain of muscles that are brought to their maximum in a controlled training situation. Your workout is breaking up the muscle fibers which subsequently heal and grow bigger and stronger as a result. You want that pain.

    Then there is the pain of injury: it hurts and at the same moment you know that you should stop your workout immediately. You certainly don't want it but you need that pain in order to prevent further serious damage to muscles, joints, or ligaments.

    Another form of pain, the most stressful and the most desirable one, while at the same time the hardest, is the pain of endurance, where the mind offers to shut down the muscles long before they are technically due. Your body would thankfully give in. It is an art in itself to signal the mind that you understand that there is still a long way to go -- sometimes literally, think marathon -- and that the body is physically capable of working the load. You convince the mind that its efforts in telling you to stop will be ignored.

    The pain stays the same, whether you run the double or the quadruple distance, the trick is to surrender to the continuous pain and to proceed anyway. The reward is a solemn state, which is achieved when this royal pain is conquered with marathons for example, with wall chairs, with willpower plus discipline. Nothing more.

    It is this pain that you don't really want nor need, in fact it is -- to a certain extent -- a game that your mind is playing with you. The more you resist and endure, the more your mind will respect you and finally cooperate with you in your effort to excel.

    You need willpower to successfully finish heavy, painful workouts, you are even able to overcome the pain of injury with sheer willpower -- take care though -- but in order to conquer the pain of endurance you have to combine willpower and discipline. This is where real training with massive results begins.

    Pain is weakness leaving the body. Mental weakness, that is.

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  • Succeed through Synchronizing Your Behavior

    Behave, when you are alone, exactly the same way you behave on the big stage. Avoid splitting your personality.

    Will it be harder to adapt your stage personality to everyday life or to try and maintain the everyday personality and translate it to the big screen?

    Imagine preparing your food the way you present yourself in public... you do that already? Now imagine a public appearance reflecting the way you relax inside the safety of your home...

    Synchronize your public and private sets of behavior and you'll notice a more peaceful life, a life that is more centered and with less opportunities for inner conflict expressing itself as anger, accident-proneness, or simply self-propelling, ever perpetuating stress.

    You split your behavioral routines, forced to act very disciplined throughout your public day with rules and guidelines for even the simplest of actions. Acting out the opposite side of behavior when finally being alone is a very comfortable form of compensation.

    You may find some peculiar manners within your repertoire of expression that are apparently not suitable for the world. You may also find that your public appearance is somewhat inhibited and for certain reasons you feel that some traits of your inner personality are not congruent with your public image.

    There are great opportunities in matching public and private expressions. Opportunities for growth, for overcoming inhibitions, and for building higher self-esteem. Do you ever wonder why success in certain areas of your life seems to be so hard to achieve? Release that fear of being recognized, uncovered, and discovered the way you really are, because everybody is able to see the real you right now, regardless of how you behave.

    Do you still dance in solitude? Come out of the closet already. The streets are waiting for you, dancing...

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  • How to Motivate Yourself with One Word

    Your own word: give your word. If you are a person of honor and integrity, you know what it means to give your word.

    One method is emotional motivation, pumped up at seminars or at group meetings where the participants leave with that smile on their face, only to have their motivation literally fade away over time, another method is Steve Pavlina's "sans chest-pounding motivation for smart people," intellectual motivation with the main idea to always set unreasonably big and thus intellectually challenging goals.

    There are ends to achieve that are important and may be emotionally lit brightly and furthermore intellectually founded and held up by logical reasons and even some scientific evidence... Some goals, the really big ones, can't get enough motivational support to be pursued and focused on, no matter what.

    Give your word to someone in order to complete and deliver on the promise whatever it takes. There are not many events that would make an acceptable excuse for yourself showing up with empty hands.

    This goes beyond intellectual or emotional motivation. If it is promised, it has to be done. Motivation through honor.

    Now, if you develop a similar sense of integrity in dealing with yourself, you may give your word to yourself in order to accomplish any given task even after emotional or logical motivational means are not available for some reason. The emotional momentum may be long gone and logic is hard to employ under certain circumstances.

    It doesn't matter why exactly you have to do it, you gave your word and that is more than sufficient to change the world around the issue at hand.

    Develop that sense of integrity and give your word to guarantee that things get done. Just make sure to be absolutely convinced that you are not going to give up before the defined and promised goal is achieved. Do not give your word if you are not willing or able to invest whatever you have in order to succeed.

    The beauty of this approach is that you do not have to continuously invoke the whole array of "whys" and "what ifs" and "what if nots" in order to stay focused. Your word is a shortcut that let's you switch to autopilot and enables you to work without any doubts or any further questions on the current obsession.

    The phrase because I said so now takes on a completely new meaning.

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