Tag Archives: skills

Calmly Speak Your Desires

Most people wish they were more assertive.

In fact, most people misunderstand being assertive.

They often confuse it with being aggressive, or being belligerent.

And as I’m sure you know, all of us have shades of both passiveness and aggressiveness.

However, what really IS assertive behavior?

Well, it’s being able to “assert” something.

And what does THAT mean?

Simply stating what’s on your mind, or asking for what you want.

But it ALSO means allowing the OTHER PERSON to be assertive as well.

Say you see an interesting person. You’d like their phone number.

An example of assertive behavior would simply be to walk up, express that you think they are interesting, and ask for their phone number so you can get in touch with them later on. To know more about them. Because they are interesting.

Now, imagine doing that. Imagine walking up and saying that.

“Hi, I just noticed you standing there, and I thought you looked pretty interesting. I’m pretty busy right now, but how about if you give me your phone number, so I can call you later and we can meet up and hang out?”

Or something similar.

Of course, most people wouldn’t THINK of doing this. That is TERRIFYING!

But on another level, you probably realize that if you DID do this, and could say it with complete calmness and confidence, you’d get a lot of good results.

So how can you get to this level of calmness and confidence?

(And in case your wondering, you can substitute sales, or talking to your boss, or discussing difficult things with your partner, etc.)

The GOOD NEWS is that “assertiveness” is a transferable skill.

Like your chest muscles. If you work your chest muscles, ANYTHING physical you do, that involves your chest muscles will be easier.

Assertiveness works the same way.

To get better, all you’ve got to do is practice.

Any time you have an idea, an opinion, a desire, simply state it. Don’t force it on others. Don’t be belligerent with it, just state it as a FACT.

It’s raining out.

Today is cloudy.

I ate a cheeseburger last night.

I grew up in a one story house.

I’d like your phone number.

I didn’t like that movie.

I think that mustard and pizza go great together.

Don’t EXPECT agreement, but don’t EXPECT disagreement.

After all, you’re saying something that is ABSOLUTELY TRUE. For You.

Always look for opportunities to “strengthen” your assertiveness muscle.

Keep score. Write how many times you did it per day.

Try and keep a slightly increasing daily average.

And watch how easy it gets.

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How To Generate Momentum

When I was a kid me and a couple friends discovered the secret of making a snowman.

Growing up in an area without snow, we would go on these field trips in elementary school.

If you could find a gentle downward slope, and the right kind of sticky snow, you could get a pretty huge ball.

As soon as we “discovered” this “secret” we started coming up with wild imaginations.

Like making a ball as big as a city, that would roll down and wipe out civilization.

Of course, this metaphor is pretty common.

Not the wiping out the city part, the “snowball effect” part.

Where you put in a lot of effort at the beginning, and then the momentum of the system is enough to keep it going.

You can see it in a lot of places if you’re looking.

Crowd behavior, viral videos and social media posts.

They start slow, but they can multiply very quickly.

But it’s really cool when it happens to you, in a personal way.

Take exercise for example. Most people realize they should do more.

Long time ago, I started jogging. At first, it sucked.

Got tired quickly. Was sore. Shin splints.

I saw it purely as a means to an end. I wanted to shrink my gut. So I figured I’d have to put in work, to get the results.

But once I started getting into shape, something interesting happened.

Instead of seeing the jogging part as “work,” or a means to an end, it became an end in and of itself.

Because I was getting in pretty decent shape, my thoughts could actually wander while I was out jogging.

And for about twenty or thirty minutes every day, I was in a pretty cool state of mind.

That SAME activity turned from a means to an end, into a end to a greater end.

This is the crux of all snowball effects.

When the momentum of the “system” kicks in, and starts to become self-sustaining.

Because we are humans, and we always need to be moving, and eating, and sleeping, we can’t really switch ourselves into autopilot mode.

BUT when the tasks required to build a decent life for yourself (studying, practicing skills, journaling, talking to strangers, speaking in public, etc.) become ENDS instead of MEANS, that’s when the magic happens.

That’s when you start to feel alive. On purpose.

That’s when people will ask you, “man, what drives you?” And you won’t really know.

It will just FEEL right. Good. Natural.

It takes a while to get there, but when you do, there will be NO stopping you.

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Claim The World As Yours

I used to have this weird freezer.

It was at the perfect temperature for a cool effect.

If I put an opened bottle of water in there, it wouldn’t freeze.

But as soon as I took it out, and twisted off the cop, it would freeze in about a second.

It was right at the “phase transition” temperature of liquid to solid.

All it needed was a little air, and movement, and instant ice.

Phase transitions happen a lot. Not just in matter (gas to liquid, liquid to solid, etc.) but in different levels of complexity.

For example, when you move from the stage of “conscious competence” to “unconscious competence.”

When something you’ve been studying or practicing for a long time drops down into your subconscious.

On a conscious level, it feels like magic.

This was the secret of both “Karate Kid” movies.

He trained a boringly repetitive skill until it became automatic.

If you’ve ever learned an instrument, it’s a pretty good feeling.

You’ve been practicing, with a LOT of frustration, and then you finally “get it.”

You can play the piece “by heart” without needing to think.

The trouble with most things we would like to accomplish in life is they require a certain degree of skill.

And those skills take practice.

They aren’t instant.

Only in our world of “instant gratification” things are often taught AS IF we really CAN learn them instantly.

Especially in the world of “self development.” There are TONS of books that give you certain “ideas” or different “frames” or “models.” But unless you PRACTICE those ideas or frames or models, it’s really not that different than reading a book on how to play the piano, without ever really practicing.

This is good news. Because all it takes is a few minutes of daily practice.

You won’t become a super-genius overnight, (at whatever skill you’d like) but it WILL happen, so long as you are persistent.

Unfortunately, most people are NOT persistent. They try once, maybe twice, and then give up.

World class athletes and musicians KNOW that the TRUE SECRET of mastering ANYTHING is daily practice.

Not when it’s convenient, or when you feel like it.

But every single day.

Whatever skills you’d like, to create WHATEVER you’d like ARE within your grasp.

So long as you are willing to do what it takes.

Ten, twenty minutes a day, and the world is yours.

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Blast Away Your Inner Demons

When I was a kid I was very interested in science.

I was insanely curious about how stuff worked.

When I was in junior HS I had a subscription to Science magazine.

Total geek.

I always liked learning about things like atoms, molecules, and what I understood about quantum physics.

I was even on this book of the month club, and I read a bunch of science books.

I remember learning why the sky was blue.

Because the molecules in the upper atmosphere radiate at the same frequency as blue light.

So of all the light that comes through, blue light comes through the easiest.

Later on, I started studying hypnosis, metaphors and story telling.

Joseph Campbell explained the reasons that most of the myths have the same structure.

Of all the stories that were told over the eons of human history, that particular structure resonated the most effectively with humans.

Kind of like how blue light passed through the upper atmosphere the easiest.

One thing that surprises most people is that we have a lot of common fears and insecurities.

But since we never talk about them, we think we are the only ones that have them.

This is one major reason why there are so many different kinds of group therapies.

Just knowing that there are other people out there, just like you, who are having pretty much the SAME problems, is very comforting.

At our core, we all fear the same things.

Rejection, being kicked out of our social group, making mistakes in front of others.

This is why most people are terrified of public speaking or walking up to an attractive person.

Even the people that “seem” to do it naturally are feeling the same fears.

It’s not that they don’t have those same fears and insecurities, they’ve learned to act in spite of them.

To simply accept them as normal.

What you resist, they say, persists.

When you simply accept it, it is not so bad.

One of the common “themes” of myths is to “face” some demon.

This “demon,” of course, is a metaphor for those SAME fears we all share.

However, there are many ways to face them.

Raw courage and will power is one way.

Using mental practice, on a daily basis, is another.

Or both at the same time.

A little of one on a daily basis, out in the real world, and some daily practice on the inside, in your inner world.

And just like anything else, the more you practice, the easier it gets.

Pretty soon those common “fears” won’t be such a big deal anymore.

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Are You Trapped By Social Pressure?

When I was in Junior High School I played a lot of golf.

No, I wasn’t rich, but next to my school was a public course, and it only cost $5 to play nine holes.

I had a set of hand-me-down clubs, as did many of my friends.

One thing I always did was slice. That’s when the ball starts to fade to the right after you hit it.

For a while, I tried to correct my changing my grip.

Because it caused more problems, and I wasn’t patient being a JHS goof, I just compensated.

Meaning I would just aim left. My friends thought I was nuts, until they saw how consistent my error was.

I suppose that if I’d taken the time to build in the muscle memory of the new grip, I wouldn’t have fixed it.

But since I was never really concerned with my score, only that had I had fun, it didn’t seem to be worth it.

They say that learning from your mistakes is one of the most important skills you can have.

Sure, we all do it naturally when we’re really young. Things like walking and eating and riding a bicycle.

It’s kind of hard to just “compensate.” If you just decided to wear a lot of padding instead of trying to ride a bike without falling over, that would be pretty silly.

But a lot of us do that without really knowing.

We try something once, we can’t do it, or we do it with difficulty and frustration, and just decide that “I guess I can’t do that.”

Instead of just getting and trying again, and again and again until we get it right.

This is easy when everybody around us is walking or riding bikes or playing catch. We feel left out if we don’t suck it up and learn how.

But other things, where most people suck, it’s EASY to try ONCE and give up.

Public speaking, starting a business, walking up and talking to attractive strangers.

But the SAME strategy works. Try, fail, try again, fail, keep trying, WIN!

It’s the learning strategy that is built in your brain.

Only sometimes we’re “forced” by social pressure to keep trying (we want to walk since everybody else is walking).

But other times we’re “forced” by social pressure to try ONCE and give up.

But you don’t HAVE to ALWAYS obey social pressure.

You can actually CHOOSE to ignore it.

Sure, it’s not easy. It takes consistent mental effort.

You may say this is one of the META SKILLS that support a lot of other skills.

Like learning how to talk to strangers, learn to be covertly persuasive, get rid of emotional issues, etc.

The good news is there are a lot mental exercises that make it easy.

So you can pretty much learn to learn anything.

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Practice Your Superpower

The other night I watched the movie “Jumper” on Netflix.

About this kid that learned he could teleport himself everywhere.

Didn’t take him long to start showing up inside bank vaults, taking stacks of cash, and then going back home.

There’s another TV show about these ambulance drivers. One episode they were talking about the coolest superpower to have.

They all ended up choosing the superpower they thought would help them get laid.

There’s this interesting primate called the Bonobo.

One thing they do is have a lot of sex.

Everybody is pretty much nailing everybody else all the time.

They find a new grove of trees, they have an orgy to celebrate.

I recently read a book that suggested the main reason for our human intelligence was a tool to get laid.

It’s our own version of the Peacock’s tail.

If you could choose a super power, which super power would you choose?

The very first book every written about NLP was called “The Structure of Magic.”

It related Noam Chomsky’s theory of transformational grammar to the idea of “surface structure” vs. “deep structure.”

What we say and pay attention to is the surface structure.

But what we respond to is the deep structure.

When you learn how to “speak” NLP, you can speak and understand both.

Which means you’ll no longer be limited to seeing ONLY the surface structure of people’s communication.

You’ll know what they mean, know what they want, and what they are afraid of.

And when you can communicate at that level as well, that’s about as close to a super power as you’re going to get.

Funny thing about NLP is it’s usually taught as some kind of “once and done” type of deal.

Go to a seminar, have a bunch of stuff “installed” and then suddenly you’re “trained” in NLP.

Suppose you went to a basketball camp and thought you were “trained” in basketball?

What would happen if you went down the playground and tried some pickup ball?

Do you think it would help if you brought your “basketball practitioner” certificate?

If you want to get better at a skill, there’s two essential ingredients.

You’ve got to know how to do the skill in the first place.

AND you’ve got to practice.

How much?

How much practice would it take before you could stroll onto a basketball court anywhere in the country and hold your own?

How much practice would it take to become a black belt in your preferred martial art?

How much practice would it take to become fluent in a foreign language?

That much!

But here’s the good news.

Since so few people take time to practice ANYTHING related to NLP, most people couldn’t NLP their way out of a paper bag.

So when YOU start putting in the practice, your language will be YOUR superpower.

And it will get you all the things superpowers do.

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Are You Letting Others Choose Your Life?

I used to do a lot of backpacking.

Once me and a buddy decided to take the back route to Mt. Whitney.

Most people go in through the front, so it’s really crowded.

But the back way in is a lot less crowed, and therefore has a lot more wide open meadows and streams and lakes with a lot of fish.

The back way to the top is a five day hike. The front way is two, one if you start at dawn.

The first day was the worst. Fifteen miles. We wanted to push over the first pass, which was very difficult.

One stretch of about two or three miles was particularly grueling.

A long, uphill walk on very loose gravel.

It was so loose that simply walking forward, by pushing off with your feet you lost a little ground.

But once we got over that first pass, it was magnificent.

A HUGE valley with several small lakes. Plenty of fish. No other people.

On the other hand, I’ve been car camping quite a bit. Where you drive right up and park.

Sometimes people even sleep in the car. You can bring huge coolers filled with food straight from the grocery store.

It’s only sort of camping if you sleep outside. But nothing comes close to sleeping on the ground, under the stars, knowing there’s no other people around for fifty miles.

Everybody wants more out of life. But few people are willing to put in the work to get there.

Some people spent a great deal of time, money and effort looking for “shortcuts” that will circumvent the necessary work.

If they’d spend that SAME amount of time, money and effort on ONE GOAL, for at least a year, they would make amazing progress.

Most any goal you want (at least that’s worthwhile) WILL take time. It will take effort.

And you will have those long uphill climbs that seem like you’re putting in TONS of work and not making any progress.

That is when it’s easiest to quit. To question your motivations. That’s when the self doubt starts to creep in.

You may even find that the biggest obstacles between where you are and where you want to be are your own doubts and fears.

Does this mean if you remove your doubts and fears your goals will magically appear?

Nope.

But the required ACTION to get there will be much more fulfilling.

So much so that you’ll enjoy doing it. Even if others think you’re crazy.

If you don’t take efforts to create your life, somebody else will do it for you.

Most people are content to do that. It’s safer. Less scary. You won’t get in trouble.

But you won’t get much else, either.

What do YOU want?

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Model The Millionaire Mind

I love the book “Freakonomics.”

I always like different ways of looking at things.

One very flexible mindset to have is “models of the world.”

Too often we get caught up in our own way of thinking, which is necessarily limited.

We all have unique experiences, beliefs, biases, etc.

One way to “think outside the box” either for fun, or to shake things loose in your life is to try on different “models of the world.”

If you’re a fan of the old TV show, “The X-Files,” they did this all the time.

Two FBI agents investigating paranormal stuff. One guy believed in aliens, the other believed science always had an explanation.

One of the reasons the show was so successful, and developed a HUGE cult following, was that BOTH angles (science and paranormal) were plausible. Either could be used to describe what had happened in that particular episode.

One of the presuppositions of NLP is that “all else equal, the person with the most flexibility will prevail.”

Meaning if you are looking at a problem, and you only have ONE way to solve it, once you get stuck, you’re done.

But if you can switch out different “models of the world” until you find a solution, even if it isn’t one that fits your favorite “model,” you’ll generally do better than the one-model-wonders of the world.

As I’m sure you know, life is nothing but problems to be solved along the way to your goals that will be achieved.

The more successfully you can overcome those INEVITABLE obstacles, the easier of a time you’ll have.

One of the things they looked at in “Freakonomics” was that people that made a lot of money tended to have a lot of books.

Even in the book, “The Millionaire Next Door,” one of the things that found out about your average run of the mill millionaire is that they got their money very SLOWLY.

Not by mumbling some magic words from the Law of Attraction. By getting into the world, every day, and getting it done.

And their preferred form of entertainment as not TV or movies, but books. And not just fiction, but non-fiction.

You can learn a lot of “models of the world” by reading Biographies of famous people. Or classic stories from literature.

People from different times, different political and economic systems, different religions and different ethnicity’s.

The more you learn how OTHER PEOPLE throughout time have successfully solved their problems, the more flexible you’ll be when you come up upon your own.

You can even be like Napoleon Hill, who created an IMAGINARY GROUP of people from history that he talked to on a regular basis.

Whatever works!

They say you should spend ten percent of your income, and ten percent of your time, on self-improvement.

Learning skills. Improving skills.

After all, this strategy made a lot of people a lot of money.

Why not you?

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Achieve Mastery In Anything

A have a friend who is an engineer for a company that makes industrial equipment.

Recently he took a trip to South Korea, as a big company there was one of his clients.

Before they let him in the facility, they made him surrender all his pens, phones, and papers.

They were extremely worried about trade secrets, and didn’t want him copying anything.

One of the unknown drivers of the industrial revolution was copyright infringement.

Everybody was copying the crap out of everybody else.

Even entire books were pirated and sold for a nickel.

All kinds of industrial espionage was taking place.

Ever since the first caveman decided it might be easier to throw a rock at a zebra instead of wrestle it to the ground and beat it to death, humans have been copying each other.

This is the heart of progress. Somebody gets an idea and turns it into a business.

Somebody else improves on it. And on and on.

Pretty soon we go from running to riding bicycles to riding on trains to flying in planes.

The process of modeling is the heart of NLP.

The whole set of language patterns was modeled from the some of the greatest therapists.

And then later the modeling process itself became part of the process.

When you were a kid, and you wanted to learn how to walk, you didn’t invent the process on your own.

You copied everybody around you until you could reproduce what they did.

Unconsciously, this is natural. Automatic.

When we get older, and we want to consciously learn things, it’s a bit more involved.

If you wanted to copy somebody playing the piano, you’d have to do more than sit and move your fingers around.

You’d have to copy their understanding of music. What all the notes mean.

One thing that is very helpful in any learning endeavor is to measure your progress.

Try something, see what happens, then step back and take a look.

A great way to do this is journaling. Write down the things you did, what you learned, and what you can do next to do even better next time.

It helps if you have some kind of reference material to help.

A set of ideas of principles to go by. You study them, then go out into the world and apply them.

Then later at home, write down what happened. Then study them some more, think of a different way to apply them based on your experience, and go out and try them again.

And keep repeating the process.

Do this every day, and pretty soon you’ll be an expert.

Of whatever it is you want to do.

Making money. Persuasion. Sales. Relationships. Anything.

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Build Your Castle

Occasionally, I’ll re-read a novel I’ve read a long time ago.

I can’t do this with every book, only a few.

The ones I really get into, the characters I identify with or would like to identify with.

It’s interesting to read an epic in different points in your life.

Your response to it, and how you imagine yourself within it is much different from a Junior High School perspective than as an adult.

That’s one of the reasons classics are classics. They appeal across all times, ages, and levels of life experience.

Especially super old stories like mythology or Aesop’s fables.

They touch on the common truths of human existence. What it’s like to struggle. To fail. To succeed.

Many times two people are playing eye contact games across a crowded room.

And they are each thinking the same thing.

“I like that person. I’d like to talk to them. But I’m nervous to make the first move. If they walked over here and started talking with me, that would certainly be cool.”

Most of the time, though, nobody makes a move, and both people go home wondering “what if.”

Most people spend their entire lives like that. Waiting for some external “spark” to get them going.

Even in common stories, there’s always some external “event” that FORCES the hero onto his or her journey.

Rarely does some normal person wake up, and decide that they are going to create a brand new life.

But if you WANT a brand new life, that’s what you’ve got to do.

Remember, stories are the way we WISH life was, not the way it really is.

If they made books and movies about the way our lives REALLY were, they’d be pretty boring.

Even those “reality” shows are highly scripted. Sure, the stuff people are saying and doing are “in the moment.”

But those people are carefully selected in hopes they’ll be MAXIMUM fireworks. And they film a whole week and only edit together the best hour.

Sure, it’s great to get “discovered.” To get “picked,” but it’s not always the best strategy.

Generally speaking, in the real world, people who succeed the most are the people that get out there and make things happen.

Not those who wait for things to happen.

But you don’t have to kill dragons every day. Not even close. All you need is a huge goal, WAY OUT in your future.

And every day, simply take small steps in that direction.

Because you build a massive life the same way you build a massive castle.

One brick at a time.

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