Category Archives: Improvement

Who's Doing Your Thinking?

Whose Thoughts Are You Thinking?

Once I went to a bar with a friend.

As soon as I walked in, I noticed that the walls were covered with Corona flags.

We sat at our table, I ordered my drink, and he studied the menu.

After a little bit of thought, he ordered a Corona.

He acted like he’d decided on Corona ONLY after reading the menu.

I laughed, and he asked why.

I pointed out all the Corona signs and he looked stunned.

When I was a kid I saw this stage show at an amusement park.

The trick was that I was supposed to whisper something to a dog, and the dog would go and retrieve it.

I did, and the dog retrieved it.

Since I was a kid, I really thought the dog could understand me.

But my brother explained that the trainer had carefully slipped that idea into my mind, so I thought it was mine.

Every show, the dog would always get the same thing.

And every time, the kid thought it was HIS choice that he told the dog.

Just like my Corona ordering friend, the thought had been carefully implanted in there.

Had my brother not explained the trick to me, or had I not shown my friend all the Corona signs, we would have thought it really WAS our thought.

So here’s the uncomfortable question:

How do you know your thoughts are really yours?

Grocery stores are laid out to alter our buying choices.

TV ads are carefully designed to alter our thinking choices.

And since most people think the same thoughts every day, what does it mean if those same thoughts (that people think every day) are really put there by others?

Whose thoughts are we REALLY thinking all day long?

Our lives are built from our behaviors.

Our behaviors are a result of our thinking.

But if our thinking is secretly controlled by others, WHOSE lives are we living?

On a big scale, this sounds terrifying.

But on a much smaller scale, it’s not so bad.

If you’ve got a massive garden that is overrun by weeds, it’s not a very happy thought.

But if you just took out ONE weed per day, and replaced with a seed for a flower, pretty soon you’d transform your garden.

Your thoughts, and the behaviors that create, are the same way.

Even if ALL of your thoughts are really somebody else’s, you can start small.

And slowly replace them with YOUR thoughts that will build the life that YOU want.

Not anybody else.

Learn How:

Seven Disciplines

Life Is A Consistent Process

How To Build A Fantastic Future

I read an interesting article the other day about “happiness.”

Seems it’s a pretty interesting topic, since it’s obviously something everybody wants.

So it’s pretty easy to get grant money, funding, etc., to do studies.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to study, because it’s hard to measure.

In fact, just asking the question, “What makes you feel happy?” Will require you to THINK about those things that make you happy.

And as I’m sure you know, happiness can be pretty fleeting. It generally doesn’t last, if the situation stays the same.

If you’re sore at the end of the day, the first few minutes you slip into a hot bath may make you feel incredibly happy.

You think of all you’ve accomplished, you relax knowing you’ve put in a good day’s work. You can look forward to a decent dinner and maybe your favorite TV show, or book or whatever.

But how long will that “feeling” last? If you sit in that tub long enough, the hot water will turn cold.

Because humans are always in some kind of PROCESS, rather than some static blob of chemicals, happiness may well be a process also.

Not a destination, but a side effect of forward momentum.

Most people feel pretty good when they are on the path of achieving something worthwhile.

Think of the last time you were preparing for a party. A part you would enjoy hosting or attending.

While you were preparing whatever it was (be it shopping for clothes or baking a cake) you probably felt pretty good.

You were CREATING something that was important to you, and LOOKING FORWARD into the future when something good was going to happen.

On the other hand, think of a time when you were just sitting there, doing nothing, with NOTHING to look forward to.

Quite a different experience!

It seems an easy conclusion that so long as you are in the process of changing something towards a better future, one that is largely in your control, happiness is a natural by product.

The good news is that ANYTHING will work. So long as you are taking some kind of action every single day, that isn’t just a pastime in and of itself, but something toward a goal YOU have chosen, you’ll be much more likely to be happy.

One thing can do is some mental exercises.

Since your brain, and the quality of your thoughts, is a PRIME INGREDIENT in anything you’ll be building in this life, working on your noggin seems to be a good choice.

Some daily practice will give you that feeling of forward momentum, enough so that when you look a year or two into your future, you’ll have a deep and real feeling that it WILL be awesome.

Get Started:

Intelligence Accelerator

Are You Stuck In A Rut?

Maximize Your Greatest Gift

It’s easy to get stuck in a rut.

Sure, it’s pretty safe, which is why they happen.

In fact, the “rut” itself is a metaphor for the grooves that build up in a road where carts go over the same path over and over.

If you are a big civilization, these are very, very helpful.

If you tried to take your cart through a bunch of bushes every day, you wouldn’t get very far.

Societies in general are built on the idea of trade and exchange.

Everybody builds, makes or grows whatever they can, meet in a central place to trade.

Around these central areas cities grow.

And two and from these cities are roads, many of which are made solely by many people going back and forth over them again and again.

Building those “ruts” which make pulling your cart easy.

But it also keeps you from going other places.

Off the “beaten path.”

Now, just doing things differently for the sake of doings different is pretty silly.

But if you have an inkling that maybe there’s something BETTER out there, then you HAVE to try something different.

If life were exactly the same, every single day, it would be REALLY boring.

Imagine if you watched the very same episodes of the very same TV shows every day.

Which brings up another point.

Most of us “outsource” our “doing things differently.”

We go to the same job, come home to the same house, eat the same food. Talk about the same things. The only thing different (for a LOT of people) is what’s on TV that night.

Since TV entertainment is meant to dull your senses, it’s not the best brain food.

What IS the best brain food?

Actually DOING things differently.

Go to the same restaurant, but order something different.

Take a different route to work. Cook something completely different for dinner.

Take up a new hobby.

ANYTHING.

If you make a habit of actually DOING something different a few times a week, you’ll develop incredible flexibility of mind.

You’ll think more outside the box, look at things differently (and much more resourcefully) and feel a lot less “stuck” in many situations.

There are plenty of EASY exercises you can do on a daily basis, without ever leaving your house, that will get the same effect.

When you start to go exploring inside your brain, you’ll discover the VASTNESS that most people take for granted, and therefore NEVER use.

What about you?

Are you willing to put in a few minutes a day to MAXIMIZE your greatest gift?

Get Started:

Intelligence Accelerator

How To Get Better Each Time

Secrets Of Continuous Improvement

Leverage Every Experience

One of the worst feelings is getting taken advantage of.

That’s why people really don’t like salespeople.

Even if you negotiate for something, there’s always a suspicion in the back of your mind that you could have gotten a better deal.

Even in a job interview, you may get the job, accept whatever they were offering, but in the back of your mind you’re thinking that maybe if you would have held out, you could have gotten more money.

Some people are good at sniffing out people that are easy to take advantage of.

I recently read a book about these people, written by a psychologists who worked in the prison system.

They had some kind of “sixth sense” for needy and desperate people. Then they’d swoop in, manipulate the crap out of them, take what they wanted, and then leave.

Even if you’ve never been outright manipulated, it can still feel pretty terrible if you think you could have done better had you only asked, but you were afraid to or not assertive enough.

However, consider how powerful that feeling is.

That feeling of, “I could have done better.”

What happens when you think of that as a resource, rather than a burden, or a shortcoming.

Then simply “reframe” that feeling to “I will use this experience to do better next time.”

Sure, it helps to learn from the past, but if you ONLY dwell in the past,  you can’t see what’s coming.

Think of each job interview as practice for the next one.

Think of each job as practice for the next one.

Each project, each goal, each success.

After all, no matter who you are or what you’ve accomplished, unless you’ve only got a couple minutes to live, there’s still plenty more you can do.

You can either use the past to “prove” that you’re a failure, or use it to “prove” that you’re always getting better.

It’s completely up to you.

Now, for some people, admitting failure, and then blaming the world, is a lot easier and safer than actually getting out there and trying to better each time.

Because let’s be honest, not a lot of people accomplish much in their lives, other than becoming incredibly creative in justifying their limitations.

What about you?

If you look back into your past, up to now, and then way up into your future, where does it lead?

Get Going: