Back when I was a kid, my mum would always go into a cleaning frenzy around this time of year. And she would make us help her. It wasn’t exactly my favourite time of the year.

And yet about three weeks back, I caught myself doing big cleaning up – cleaning things I haven’t really touched all winter.

(What have I become!)

There’s something about the first days of spring that just makes me want to make my home nice and fresh. A new start, if you will.

And together with that, I thought it would be neat to do a bit of mental spring cleaning. To clean up the mental equivalent of a stinky pile of laundry, or a moldy potato salad in the back of your fridge.

That’s why I’ve decided to put a short series of posts together, to help you clear some old troubles from your mind that are probably weighing you down without you even realizing it.

We’ll cover:

• How to let go of a grudge
• Silencing your inner critic (that nagging voice inside your head that keeps berating you and bringing you down)

Let’s get started on the first point – how to let go of a grudge!

Why let go of a grudge

Holding a grudge is a bit like holding onto a bag of horseshoes while swimming. It brings you down.

Occasionally it can be useful to hold anger and use it to drive you to take action. But most of the time, a grudge just needlessly makes you feel worse. It feels bad, drains your energy, and makes you behave negatively towards the person you’re holding the grudge against, keeping your relationship to them stuck in a rut of negativity.

Letting go of a grudge is a freeing experience. It’s like finally letting go of that big bag of horseshoes you’ve been dragging over your shoulder wherever you go. You can still disapprove of a person’s actions and not want anything to do with them – but now you’ll do it with a calm, peaceful feeling, rather than always getting huffed up and upset around them.

Mind this – letting go of a grudge means forgiveness. True forgiveness.

If you say things like “yeah, I forgive him, but I still hate his guts for what he’s done and wish he’d die in a fire while being eaten alive by piranhas” – then you haven’t really forgiven. Once you forgive, the strong negative feelings are gone.

How to let go of a grudge

The technique I’m about to share with you works because your unconscious mind can’t tell the difference between reality and a vividly imagined event.

And it’s your unconscious mind we want to get through to. You might logically know how you want to behave towards a person towards whom you hold a grudge. But if you always get upset and uncomfortable whenever you think of them or meet them, no amount of logical thinking will help.

Instead, let’s tap into your subconscious mind directly, and let the magic happen.

The process is simple:

• Take a large sheet of paper, and compose a hand-written letter to the person towards whom you’re holding a grudge. Explain how their actions affected you and hurt you. Then explain that you forgive them, and no longer feel anger towards them. Pour your heart into this letter – don’t worry, nobody else will ever see it, only you.
• Next, write a letter from them to yourself. Make it explain that they’re sorry for their actions. Write down all the things you wish you would hear them say. Sign it with their name.
• After that, set a time every day to read the two letters. The one from you to them, then the response letter from them to you.
• Soon, after just a few days, you will start to feel that you truly do forgive them, and the burden will be lifted off your shoulders. Keep reading the two letters until you have completely let go of your grudge.

This technique works incredibly well, because those two hand-written letters give your unconscious mind a strong mental image to react to. (Writing them by hand makes them much more powerful than typing them out.) And by re-reading the two letters, you will reinforce this situation in your mind, and soon feel all the old negative feelings of a grudge dissolve, and be replaced by peace and forgiveness.

Give it a try if you don’t believe me! You’ll be surprised by the results.

And that’s all for today. In the next post, we’ll tackle how to tame your inner critic!

Comments are open.

(If you’re reading this via e-mail and can’t see the video above, click through to the blog.)

“They live in paradise, and yet they will never know it.”

- A buddhist monk upon getting off the airplane as he arrived in the US

We humans are brilliant at adapting to circumstances.

On the one hand, this is a great mechanism. It means we can keep going and struggling even when truly horrible things happen to us, instead of plunging into existential despair. Plus it’s quite handy in the world we live, since without these adaptation mechanisms, we’d spend our days staring at the world around us, gobsmacked.

On the other hand, it’s a bit of a shame how quickly we take things for granted. We lose our appreciation for all the wonderful things around us.

That’s why I’ve got a challenge for you, for this upcoming weekend.

The appreciation challenge

My challenge to you is simple – this upcoming weekend, take some time to appreciate everything around you.

From the moment you get up in the morning, you are bombarded with things that have the potential to leave you in awe, if only you take the time to appreciate them.

From seeing your alarm clock – and marveling at the idea of having standardized time all around the globe, with seven billion people.

To going to wash your face. And appreciating just how much effort goes into getting such a simple thing as potable water into your home. The effort that went into building the pipes, and filtering the water, and checking its quality, and providing the energy to pump it all the way into your home.

Feel how connected you are to the rest of humanity like this.

Take the time to appreciate all the people around you – whether it’s your family, friends, or just random strangers you meet. Take the time to appreciate all the little things they do to make your life easier and more fulfilling.

As you walk around, take the time to appreciate the sights. How the sunshine glints off buildings (or the pretty shapes of the clouds). Trees and bushes you come across. The man-made structures. The people you see. Feel what each of those sights elicits in you, and take the time to appreciate it.

Appreciate the sounds and the smells. Appreciate the feel of light wind on your skin. Close your eyes and appreciate your sense of balance.

Appreciate.

…

In order to get the most out of this challenge, I suggest you make yourself some kind of reminder, so that you’ll take the time to appreciate everything around you, several times per day. Whenever your little reminder nudges you.

This can be a slip of paper that you put in a place that you will see several times per day. Or you can set yourself a reminder on your phone. Or you can write “Appreciate.” on your hand. (That’s what I will do.)

And when the weekend is over, and you have completed this challenge, come back here, and share your experience with others. What was one particular moment of appreciation that truly stuck with you?

Comments are open.

A few years back, I wrote a detailed guide on how to change your limiting beliefs.

It’s one of the most popular posts on this blog, and I’m very proud of it. But occasionally, I get e-mails from new readers who have trouble applying the approach. And about 80% of the time, the sticking point is reframing.

That clearly means I didn’t do a good enough job explaining reframing the first time around. So I thought I’d clear that up.

Read on if you want to find out how your mind loves to overgeneralize small situations, how this gets you stuck with crippling limiting beliefs that warp your view of the world, and how to change this.

How we form beliefs

Imagine you’re walking down the street, one warm summer day.

You’re not paying attention, and you stumble on a crack in the pavement. And as it just happens, you stumble into a kid, give them a good shove, and they drop their ice cream. The kid immediately bursts into tears.

“Oh no, I’m a horrible person!” you think.

Bam! That’s how beliefs form.

One little thing happens, or a series of little things, and your brain finds a pattern to match them into. Then it makes that pattern into a belief about the world.

This is a great mechanism that helps you survive and function. For example, early on in life you learn that “falling from high places hurts”. This helps you be careful around cliff edges and other dangerous places later in life.

And as soon as you form a belief, that to you becomes how the world is. You don’t think of apples falling down due to gravity as a belief. You simply think of it as things are.

Unfortunately, this trigger-happy pattern-matching mechanism in your mind sometimes produces laughably wrong results – if only you take the time to scrutinize them. But we almost never do that, because as soon as you form a belief, it becomes transparent to you. Like a piece of twisted glass – it warps everything you see through it, but you’re not consciously aware of the glass itself.

And that’s how it happens that you stumble on the street one day, accidentally push a kid to make them drop their ice cream and burst into tears, and somehow generalize that to mean “I’m a horrible person”.

Your mind matches the pattern of making a kid cry and decides that’s the best interpretation for the situation.

Granted, this example is a bit exaggerated. But most limiting beliefs are equally ridiculous. They’re a giant moon-to-Earth leap from the original situations that you use as evidence for those beliefs – you just don’t notice it, because those beliefs have become transparent to you, and you simply see them “as the world is”.

But once you become aware of those beliefs – once you realize that you’re looking at the world through a piece of warped glass – then you can begin to change them.

How reframing works

Reframing simply means taking a different view of a situation that happened. It’s not about lying to yourself – it’s not any more “right” or “wrong” than any other interpretation. It’s just a way of changing the meaning of a situation by putting a different “frame” around it.

Just like a skilled photographer can completely change the meaning of a picture by choosing what to include and what to leave out. For example, consider the famous “seal photobomb” photo below. With the use of clever framing, it turns from a pretty photo of a lying seal in front of a group of penguins to an internet classic.

(I’ve tried finding out who the original photographer is to give credit, but my google-fu turns up only sites upon sites reposting the photo without giving credit. So, unknown hero photographer – rock on!)

In the case of bumping into the kid with ice cream, one frame (way of looking at the situation) is “I’m a horrible person.”

Then again, you can choose a much less crippling way of looking at the situation – “I wasn’t paying attention and I stumbled.”

Isn’t that much better?

And even if you got into a similar situation several times, it would be really unhelpful to frame it as “I’m a horrible person”, or even as “I’m clumsy.” That way of looking at the world leave you feeling disempowered and stuck.

How about this instead – “I tend to get lost in my thoughts when I’m outside and trip often. I’d like to pay more attention when I’m walking near things or people I don’t want to bump into.”

Isn’t that way more empowering?

How to apply reframing when dealing with limiting beliefs

When you’re dealing with limiting beliefs, that means you’ve taken situations that happened, generalized them, and then applied this generalized belief to other situations, slowly gathering up more and more evidence for an unhelpful way of viewing the world.

Once you recognize a limiting belief as such, changing it comes down to two main parts:

• dislodging the limiting belief itself
• finding support for a replacement empowering belief

Read the full post on changing your beliefs for details.

Dislodging the limiting belief means figuring out what supporting evidence you hold in your mind, then reframing that supporting evidence so that it no longer supports the belief.

Let’s go through a few examples.

Example 1

Limiting belief: “I’m a horrible person.”

Evidence: I bumped into a child, made them drop their ice cream and made them cry.

As we’ve already seen, a good way to reframe this is as “I didn’t pay attention to where I was walking.” That way, the event that happened no longer supports the old limiting belief. (Unless you believe that not paying attention to where you’re walking makes you a horrible person. In which case work on reframing that belief, too .)

Reframe: “I didn’t pay attention to where I was walking.”

Example 2

Limiting belief: “I’m unattractive.”

Evidence: My mum called me ugly when I was 9 years old.

This evidence could be reframed in several ways. Whichever one is best depends on the circumstances:

• My mum was feeling upset that day and said things she didn’t mean.
• My mum had horrible self-esteem issues, and projected them onto me.
• My mum found me unattractive back then, but I’ve grown and changed since then.
• Physical looks are just part of being attractive, certainly not the whole package.
• My mum found me unattractive, but it’s not like I want to date my mum. Different people have different preferences for looks.

In this situation, it can be particularly helpful to notice supporting evidence for a replacement empowering belief (along the lines of “I’m attractive to certain people.”)

Example 3:

Belief: “I’m bad at maths.”

Evidence: I failed a test.

Reframe: I didn’t study enough. I used the wrong studying methods.

…

And that’s all on reframing.

Hopefully this clears up the misunderstandings. If anything is still unclear, do leave a comment below. I’d love to update this to make it as clear as possible for future visitors.

If you find the idea of reframing really neat, check out my series on reframing strategies. (As you can see, for breaking down limiting beliefs, I’ve focused on framing down. It’s the most handy one in this situation.):

1. Pre-framing – or considering a situation not as an isolated event, but in terms of what happened to cause the situation
2. Post-framing – similar yet opposite to the reframing strategy above, considering a situation in terms of its intended effect
   
3. Framing up  – or picking a higher, overarching frame that will break down any incompatible smaller frames contained within it
   
4. Framing down - again, the opposite of the above – breaking down an overarching frame to think of a situation in more isolated terms, instead of in terms of sweeping generalisations

And finally, to read the full article for which I put together this clarification, check out how to change your limiting beliefs.

(image courtesy of neilt)

Comments are open.

If you’re not familiar with yoga, you probably imagine it’s all people chanting “Oooommmmmmm” and doing headstands in a secluded monastery.

You’re not far off. Except for the secluded monastery part.

The headstand is actually a pretty simple position. It’s just a bit scary at first.

You start by getting your arms and head on the floor, then slowly walking your feet towards your head to get your upper body vertical, then start lifting your legs off the ground, and try getting into the final position.

If you overbalance forwards, there’s no problem. You land back on your feet, and try again. It’s overbalancing backwards that’s scary.

But as it turns out, it’s completely harmless too. As long as you have enough space behind you, and a reasonably soft surface (a yoga mat, or a grassy lawn), you just tuck your chin in, and roll harmlessly onto your back. It doesn’t even hurt.

In fact, when you first practice the position, it’s pretty helpful to try that a few times, just to realize that there’s nothing to be afraid of. Even the worst that could happen – overbalancing backwards – is completely harmless and you can handle it easier than a hungry dog handles bacon.

So why am I telling you all this? (Aside from encouraging you to try yoga, because it’s pretty neat.)

The same applies to facing other scary situations. Fear of the unknown is usually much stronger than fear of specific situations.

Next time you face a scary situation, ask yourself – “What’s the worst that could happen?”

Take the time to face your fears, and figure out what you would do if the worst happens. Chances are, it’s nowhere near as tragic as it feels when you leave it as a vague fear.

Like doing the headstand – overbalancing backwards feels like a horrible tragedy, with all sorts of gory images crossing your mind. But once you face the reality of the situation and realize that it simply means you tuck your chin in and roll harmlessly onto your back – it’s suddenly about as scary as a piece of paper with “Rawr!” written on it.

You can apply this to all sorts of situations. Asking a pretty girl out. Moving abroad. Trying to start your own business.

Once you know the worst (realistic) scenario, and make a plan for how you’ll handle it, you’ll realize it’s much less scary than you thought.

How about you? What scary situation are you currently about to face if you take action? What’s the worst that could happen, and how will you handle it?

Comments are open.

In 1928, Elton Mayo tried measuring the effect of lighting levels on the productivity of factory workers.

He formed three groups. One with increased lighting levels, one with decreased lighting, and a control group with unchanged lighting. As expected, the group with increased lighting experienced a measurable increase in productivity. But lo and behold… the increase in productivity was matched almost equally by the other two groups!

The single biggest factor influencing the workers’ productivity was that someone paid attention to their efforts.

This applies not only to working with others, but crazily enough, even working with yourself.

The effects of focused attention

If you’ve been reading Alive With Passion for a while, you know that I love to track things in my own life.

I’ve tracked what I eat, my sleeping habits, what I spend money on (the brilliant folks subscribed to the Alive With Passion newsletter will know all about my latest experiment regarding that), or even how my optimism relates to my current mood.

I like running experiments like that because:

• Keeping track lets you know what’s really happening (human memory loves to distort things more than a fuzzy cat looking through the event horizon of a black hole*)
• If you know what’s really happening, you know where to make changes.
• Even the simple fact of bringing attention to something is enough to start making positive changes.

And it’s this last point I want to talk about today. Simply shifting your attention is enough to start making changes.

Let’s try it right now.

Notice how you’re sitting. The position of your back and your shoulders. Any tension you might carry in your shoulders or your neck. How your lower back feels.

Simply notice all the parts of your body, particularly your back and shoulders, and “ask” them how they feel.

If that doesn’t make you shift around, relax tense muscles, or move in some other way, then you either just sat down, or you’re a yoga master with 24/7 perfect posture.

(As I was writing these last few paragraphs I did the exercise myself. It made me aware of my lower back being uncomfortable, so I stood up and stretched it for fifteen seconds. Much better!)

*I think the part of my brain in charge of making sure my analogies make sense is on vacation today.

Using your attention to make positive changes

The idea is simple. By bringing your attention to something for long enough, you will automatically start to correct anything that’s not quite right.

Here are a few specific ways to apply that:

• Make yourself some kind of reminder to become aware of your back and shoulders while you’re at the computer
• Make yourself a little note with a single word on it – “Breathe.” Put it somewhere where you see it a few times each day (say, your bathroom mirror) but not all the time, so that you don’t become accustomed to it. Every time you see it, become conscious of your breathing. (This will let you breathe deeper and more thoroughly.)
• Track every single thing you eat and drink for two weeks.
• Track the time of the starting and stopping point of everything you do for a week.

I will be attempting this last one sometime soon. (It’s called keeping a time log.)

Yes, it’s probably quite annoying to always carry around a notepad and a pen to keep track of every single thing you do. But I’m pretty sure it will bring great benefits by helping me understand exactly where all my time goes each day.

How about you? What area of your life would you like to be more conscious of?

How will you go about it?

Comments are open.

(If you’re reading this via e-mail and can’t see the video above, click through to the website.)

On my wall, I have a sheet of paper titled “Foods of Vladdyland”.

It tells me all the foods I like to cook regularly, and what ingredients they require.

This list can be a life saver when I’m feeling tired and don’t really know what I want to cook. I can simply glance at it, imagine each of the meals as I look over them, and when my body says “Yes! Let’s eat that!”, I know what to cook. No hard thinking required.

This might sound a bit silly, but it can be quite tricky for me to figure out what to cook when I’m tired.

That’s because decision-making is one of the most mentally intensive tasks you do all day. And when you get tired, you often simply don’t have the mental energy to recall all relevant facts and make a decision.

So I decided to frontload the hard thinking at a time when I wasn’t tired, and now I have a simple list to guide me when I am!

Similarly, I’ve got a list of “work-related tasks” pinned on the wall right above my laptop screen.

Some days, I know exactly what I’ll be working on, and flow smoothly from one task to the next. Other days, I don’t have much planned. And when I start getting tired, it can be tricky to recall what else I could be doing to advance my work forward. That’s where my list comes in!

I have the work-related tasks in four categories: high-energy, modeate-energy, low-energy and no energy. (The last one contains exactly one item – napping.). That way, especially when I’m tired, I can just assess my energy levels, then skim through the list and settle on a task to do.

Before I had this list, I would sometimes deflect to procrastination, because I couldn’t remember what else to work on. But now, it’s so much easier to pick things from a list than to conjure them up from memory!

So, over to you. What decisions do you find tricky to make when you’re getting tired?

How could you pre-make them when you’re full of energy, so that when you’re tired, you can just glance at some notes you made for yourself, and then know what to do?

(The style of the video at the top of this post is inspired by Niall Doherty.)

Comments are open.

As you might know, I’m currently running Alive Through Action – a 6-week interactive course on taking massive action.

For the first lesson, I gave the participants a simple task – to think of two actions that they’ve been meaning to do for a while, but have always been putting off because something more urgent came up.

One of the participants enjoyed the feeling she got from completing those two tasks so much, she went on an action-taking frenzy. She probably completed that assignment ten times over, and that was great fun to listen to!

It got me inspired, and I decided to try a similar thing. I would set aside half a day each week to get all this little stuff done – these things that I might be putting off for ages, because they would be nice to get done, but they aren’t urgent.

So far, it’s been working absolutely brilliantly! (Except for that one day when there was heavy sleet, and I did not feel like biking 20 minutes into the city to run some errands.)

So I wanted to share this with you, because I think it would be fun for you to try, too!

The basic idea

The idea is simple. Think of things that you’ve meant to get done for a while, but have always been putting off.

Then set aside a specific time to get those things done. This can be one afternoon per week (my choice), or one full from sunrise to sunset per month, or anything else that works for you.

Heck, don’t commit to doing it regularly. Just try it once, and see how you feel afterwards!

Make a list ahead of time, with all the things you want to get done. Then, during the time you set aside, simply start working through the list.

It can be little organizational stuff (setting up a dentist’s appointment, cleaning out a closet), or other long-term non-urgent stuff (donating blood, doing some big-picture thinking).

The benefits

Firstly, you get a happy, productive feeling. This can be great to kick-start your mood on a day when you’re feeling a bit lackluster.

Secondly, with some actions you feel like a weight has been lifted off your chest.

You might not even realize it, but if there are things that you’ve been meaning to get done for a while, but haven’t yet, they’re probably sitting at the back of your mind, nagging you to get them done. This produces a bit of background stress that you don’t even notice until you get rid of it.

When you finally get those actions done, it feels like throwing off a stone tied to your feet.

On top of these immediate benefits, this is a great chance  to do things that are important but not urgent.

The trouble with being human is that we value immediate benefits more than delayed benefits. Would you rather have $5 now, or $10 in a year?

This skews our actions towards things that are urgent – things that need to be done soon.

But often, the urgent things are not that important, and can take away your time from more important things.

For example, let’s say that it’s getting late afternoon, and you’re doing well with your work. But you need to stop in a few minutes in order to leave in time to return a book to the library. (As this is the day it’s due.)

Would you go return the book? Or would you decide to ignore that, continue working while you’re in a good flow, and then simply return the book the next day and pay a small late fine?

Setting aside some regular time to do things you’ve been delaying for a while helps you do exactly this sort of important things. The things that have a long-term benefit to your life, while not being particularly urgent.

Over to you

Let’s get back to you.

What actions have you been delaying for a while, because something more urgent keeps coming up?

Set aside one specific chunk of time to get all these things done, and notice how you feel afterwards.

Or if this is still too much commitment for you, try the lite version first.

Simply pick two actions you’ve been delaying for a while. Then figure out exactly when you will get them done, within the next 7 days. Then do them.

Once you’ve done that, I bet you’ll be motivated to experiment with setting aside a whole chunk of time to get this kind of stuff done!

Oh, and once you’ve done this – come back and share your experience in the comments below!

Comments are open.

For the past three weeks, I’ve been running a little personal development experiment.

I’d noticed that I always need to do laundry because I run out of clean t-shirts.

I followed this trail, and realized that my armpits are the first thing that starts to smell if I do some sports. (I bike everywhere around here, and that’s usually enough to get me sweaty.)

Being lazy and hoping to get more mileage out of my t-shirts before I have to wash them, I decided to experiment with reducing how quickly my armpits start to smell.

So, in the name of science, I shaved one of my armpits!

I experimented with all sorts of combinations, including not using any deodorant, using my usual deodorant, and even using a new anti-perspirant on my shaved armpit, which wouldn’t really work on an unshaved armpit. (Obviously I wash my armpits thoroughly.)

In the end, it turns out that the best combination is unshaved armpits and using my old deodorant. Go figure, I was already doing the best thing!

But I’m not writing this to ramble about my armpits (okay, I do take a bit of persverse pleasure in making you read about that ). It’s about the general idea.

This is just one of many things I’ve tried tweaking in my life. I’m constantly experimenting.

This might not sound like it’s worth it for you, but these little experiments add up.

If you’re always experimenting with little things, you will keep discovering little ways to make your life better and better. And over time, these add up to make a huge difference.

This reminds me of a story about car manufacturing companies in the 80′s.

In America, Toyota had been steadily overtaking the local companies in sales. So the engineers at Ford decide to buy a Toyota, in order to take it apart and see how the Japanese were building their cars.

Everyone still remembered when Japanese manufacturing was a laugh, back in the 50′s, and they wondered how Toyota managed to go from that to being one of the biggest threats for the domestic market.

So they bought one and started taking it apart… and they were shocked at how easily they could move all the pieces around.

While their own manufacturing process had stayed more or less the same in the past decade, Toyota had embarked on a mission to make constant little improvements in how the pieces of their cars fit together. Different placement of parts, different ways of screwing them together, constant little tweaks.

Over the years, these constant little improvements added up. While the Ford cars had all sorts of pieces that needed to be forced into place, and screwed in at awkward angles, the engineers noticed that putting the Toyota back together was almost like playing with legos. The pieces fit together perfectly, and snapping them together was quick and easy.

It was this philosophy of constant little improvements that made the Japanese cars overtake the US market.

So, how about you? What little tweaks will you try making in your life?

If you’re short on ideas, you could try:

• taking 20-minute power naps to recharge your energy
• tweaking your body language to change your mental state
• not using soap or shampoo
• spending a few minutes on self-reflection each evening
• keeping a gratitude journal

Or have you tried other little personal development experiments that improved your life? If so, please share them in the comments below!

I’m always looking for fun new things to try.

Comments are open.

At the end of last week’s post about snowballing positive changes, I asked if you would like to hear about interrupting unwanted behaviours that snowball upon themselves.

I got a couple of requests to cover that, so here we come!

Interrupting unwanted snowballs

If you’ve ever slammed your finger in a door, you might have noticed a very interesting phenomenon.

As you’re shutting the door, and you see your finger there, and you feel the door closing on it…

…there’s this teeny tiny sliver of time where you think “Oh, crap!”, and you know exactly what just happened, but the pain hasn’t started yet. And the tiny moment passes and the pain starts and you curse and life goes on.

But for that one tiny moment, time almost stands still.

A similar moment happens with pretty much every automatic behaviour you do, whether you realize it or not. You’re probably usually just not aware of it.

And while you can’t do much about the pain from slamming your finger in a door (though you might change how you react to the pain), with other behaviours, you can actively change them, or even interrupt them completely before they happen.

This is by far the best way to interrupt unwanted snowballs – at the moment when they’re just getting started.

It’s almost like seeing a little rock start slowly edging towards the slope of a mountain, about to start a landslide. And you come in there and put your foot on the rock, and nothing happens. You’ve stopped the landslide at its weakest point.

Interrupting unwanted snowballs as they form

Last year, I worked with a life coaching client who had trouble with procrastinating at his computer. So I asked him to describe exactly how his typical procrastinating behaviour goes.

He answered that he usually got an urge to check facebook, so he would open a new browser window and automatically go to facebook. Then he would get stuck procrastinating there.

Looking at that, there’s one clear moment at the beginning where he could interrupt that behaviour – opening a new browser window.

What we needed was a way to interrupt his automatic behaviour, and get him to become consciously aware of what he’s doing. That’s often enough to diffuse a unwanted snowball as it’s about to form.

He came up with the idea of changing his homepage to a big, red stop sign. That way, when his habit of procrastination kicked in, he would open a new window… and bam! The big red stop sign would interrupt his thought patterns, and make him conscious of what he’s doing.

It worked perfectly.

Then, after a week or two, he got rid of that change, because he found it a bit inconvenient (he was using his browser homepage for shortcuts to a lot of useful sites). But by now, his procrastination habit was broken. Whenever he opened a new browser window, he would pause and consciously assess what he was doing.

As another example, I had a friend who would regularly get upset at getting stuck in traffic.

But he came to the realization that it doesn’t help anything to get angry at something that he can’t change. And one day, as he was in a hurry to get to an airport (because he left late), he got stuck in traffic. He felt himself take a sharp breath in starting on his usual pattern of anger… and then he paused.

He realized that this won’t change anything. So he exhaled slowly, and took a couple more deep breaths.

Then he relaxed his tense muscles, and decided to put on some music. He might as well make the most of waiting.

He made it to the airport on time. Since that day, he started leaving earlier to get to important places if there was heavy traffic, and he stopped getting angry at traffic.

Again, it comes down to noticing the snowball of unwanted behaviour as it starts to form, and interrupting it.

Here’s how you apply this yourself:

• Figure out what your unwanted behaviour is, and what your usual pattern is
• Notice the tiny moment right at the beginning, as it’s about to get started. This is your key to interrupting the snowball.
• Make a change to your behaviour in the tiny moment, until you’re no longer behaving on autopilot, and can consciously decide if this is what you really want to be doing.

The third point sometimes takes a bit of practice. Luckily, you can usually find a way to practice your new behaviour in this situation, before you have to do it “live, so to speak.

Let me make that clearer with one more example.

Let’s say you have trouble getting up. You keep hitting the snooze button for over half an hour every morning, and want to stop this behaviour.

Analyzing the pattern, you notice that you’re normally sleeping, then the alarm clock rings, you hit the snooze button and roll over back to sleep.

The moment the alarm clock rings is a good point to interrupt that automatic behaviour.

One way would be to simply move the alarm clock out of reach, so that you have to get up to actually turn it off. Nice and simple.

But to illustrate the habit-changing example, you could go about it another way. You could decide to practice getting up as soon as the alarm clock rings.

To do this, make the situation as authentic as possible. Dress the way you do for sleep, close the blinds to darken the room, then lie down and set the alarm clock for five minutes later, so that you have a bit of time to lie around. Then, as soon as the alarm clock rings, turn it off, get up, open the blinds, and go to the bathroom to wash your face, or something.

Then do it again. Close the blinds, lie down, set your alarm clock, etc.

It might take a few repetitions, but by the end of it, you’ve interrupted your old pattern of behaviour, and started establishing a new habit – getting up as soon as the alarm clock rings!

You can apply this yourself with whatever unwanted snowballs you experience.

Emergency snowball interrupt technique

The best way to stop unwanted snowballs is to nip them in the bud, just as they’re about to form. See above for how to do that.

But occasionally, you only become conscious once you’re smack bang in the middle of a snowball. That’s where the emergency interrupt comes in.

The following might sound crazy to someone who hasn’t experienced this, but you probably know what I’m talking about. Even if you know that you’re procrastinating, it’s really hard to stop. You become aware of it… but you carry on, because you just don’t have the willpower to get up from your computer and do something else.

That’s the thing. Such snowballs are surprisingly strong in perpetuating themselves, and it’s really tricky to make such a big mental change at once. Getting up from your computer might as well be running a mile.

But if you don’t have that much control, you probably still have a bit less.

Can you close your eyes? (If not, you’re screwed.)

Excellent. Well, the emergency snowball interrupt goes like this:

• Close your eyes (obviously don’t do this if you’re driving or operating heavy machinery.)
• Focus on keeping your eyes closed for a few seconds. Resist the urge to open them again.
• Notice your breath. Then, after a breath or two, make your breaths fuller and deeper. Breathe slowly all the way in, and then allllll the way out.
• After focusing on your breath for some 5-10 breaths, notice how you feel. What is your body telling you?
• By this point, your previous behaviour snowball should be interrupted, and you can now consciously decide what you want to do next. If you’re not sure, just get up, walk to a window, and gaze outside until you make up your mind.

This works because you first take as small an action as possible – just closing your eyes.

But this already starts shifting your awareness from whatever you were doing (procrastinating) to yourself. Focusing on your breath further deepens that, and so does noticing how your body feels.

By this point, you’ve managed to tear your thoughts away from what you were doing, and can now consciously decide what you really want to be doing.

And you know what? Sometimes you will want to go back to whatever you were doing. That’s okay.

Because now you’re in conscious control of what you’re doing, rather than acting on autopilot.

And now over to you. Do you have a habitual snowball of unwanted behaviour? Then go off and figure out how you will interrupt it the next time it’s about to form!

Comments are open.

If you’ve ever tried building a snowman, you know that you don’t just pick up snow handful by handful until you have a snowman. That takes way too long.

Instead, you first get together a couple of handfuls of snow, and make them into a ball. Then you roll the ball around on the ground, getting it to pick up more snow through its own weight. As the ball grows, it picks up more and more snow, and before you know it, you’re rolling around a huge 20-kilo snow boulder (snowlder!).

Personal development often works like that, too. Making a bit of a change makes it easier to continue making changes in the same direction. I call this the snowball effect.

And today I’ll show you how to harness the snowball effect to make big changes easy.

How the snowball effects works

Some things have a natural way of attracting more of the same.

Beliefs, for example. If you believe you’re ugly, you’re going to notice evidence that supports this, and ignore evidence to the contrary, because it doesn’t fit with your model of the world.

If you see a random stranger sneer as they look at you, you’re going to remember that and replay it over and over in your head, further feeding your insecurity. If a friend compliments you, you’re going to dismiss it – surely they just want something from you.

This sounds a bit disheartening, but it works in the other direction, too. If you go through the process of busting your limiting beliefs, you will build up a snowball of evidence for a positive belief, to the point where it displaces your previous negative belief. This new positive belief then takes hold and builds on itself, without conscious effort on your part.

In this case, the snowball effect happens because beliefs have a way of directing your focus and thoughts to reinforce themselves.

In other cases, the snowball effects occurs because of a positive feedback in internal mind states, or in external circumstances (making friends, for example).

Among other thing, you can harness the snowball effect for:

• changing your limiting beliefs
• building your confidence
• making friends
• networking at work
• getting fit
• establishing positive habits
• and more…

Let’s first have a look at some examples, and then tackle a general plan of action.

Examples of harnessing the snowball effect

Building your confidence

I have covered this before in my article on gradually building your confidence. (Click the link for more detail and “pretty” pictures.) The idea is extremely simple and extremely effective.

You pick an action that you would like to be able to do, but that is currently way outside your comfort zone. And I don’t mean that it feels a bit uncomfortable. I mean so way out of your comfort zone that you freeze up like a deer encased in ice if you even think about doing it.

But you can harness the snowball effect to make that kind of action possible for yourself surprisingly soon.

Just think of an action that is similar, but not quite as scary. And then another action that is still similar, but even less scary. And so on and so forth, until you get to something that is within your discomfort zone – still a bit scary, but you can do it.

For example, your eventual goal might be to give an inspiring, informative speech in front of several hundred people.

The intermediate goal right next to it might be speaking in front of a few dozen people. If that’s still too scary, your next intermediate goal could be joining a local Toastmasters club, where you will find people who are excited and happy to listen to you and give you feedback, no matter what level of public speaking you’re at. Or even further, you could just ask a few of your friends to get together sometime so you can stand up in front of them and give a short speech on a topic you find interesting.

Then, once you find an action that’s still scary but doesn’t make you freeze up faster than sticking your hand in liquid nitrogen, you can go ahead and take it! After a few times, you will become comfortable with this action – you will have built up some confidence and expanded your comfort zone.

Then you move on to the next similar-but-slightly-scarier action. And before you know it, you will have snowballed all the way to your original goal.

Making friends

It can be a bit tricky to make friends when you move to a new place. But again, the snowball effect comes to your aid.

As soon as you make even one friend, or even acquaintance, your options will open up.

• Firstly, you might get invited to events where you meet other people.
• Secondly, you can now ask about people you might like to meet.

I’ve bolded the important part that a lot of people miss out on.

It’s okay to ask for help. And being new in a place without many friends is a great time to ask.

Just mention that you’re looking to make friends, mention some of your interests, and ask your existing acquaintances if they know anyone you might want to meet.

You can also look at what’s happening in the vicinity. Whether it’s a pottery class or a guided visit of some caves. Whatever interests you. Any such event is a chance to meet people, and as soon as you make even one acquaintance, it again opens up a lot more possibilities.

As long as you’re reasonably adept at talking to people, once you get past the initial sticking point of actually meeting them, you will be able to make acquaintances and meet again. (If you’re not sure how to be interesting to talk to in the first place, leave a comment or shoot me an e-mail. If there’s enough demand, I’ll write a post on the topic.)

And the more friends you make, the easier it will be to get invited to events or organize little get-togethers, and before you know it, you will have a steady social circle of friends to hang out with.

Snowball effect.

Using the snowball effect in your own life

To harness the snowball effect, pick a change you would like to make in your life. Then think about how making a little bit of that change can help you make more of it.

Sometimes you’ll need a bit of extra thinking to make it work. Like with the friends-making example – it’s not immediately obvious to most people that you can just ask to be introduced to more people you might find interesting.

But no matter what your desired outcome is, I’m confident you can harness the snowball effect.

So this is my challenge for you - pick an area of your life where you would like to make changes. Figure out how to harness the snowball effect there. Then take action towards that goal sometime within the next week (ideally today).

By the way, there’s one thing I haven’t covered today, because it’s a huge topic of its own. Interrupting negative snowballs. If there’s enough interest, I’ll write a follow-up post covering that. So if you would like to know how to stop negative actions (like procrastination) from snowballing on themselves, leave a comment below this post!

Comments are open.