Episode 5: Get a PhD. in Love
|
Chances are you haven’t had a single course in the most important subject in your life: love. Why not make it a study and realize the power of opening up? In part 2 of this discussion with Brian Johnson of PhilosophersNotes.com (summaries of personal development books “for the busy self-actualizer”) Duff and Brian chat about some of the surprising findings of the relationship gurus:
If you like this episode, please Digg it, give it a thumbs up on StumbleUpon, bookmark it on del.icio.us, and/or email it to someone who might benefit. Thanks for spreading the word about Precision Change! Resources: - Philosopher’s Notes |
 Duff McDuffee |
Succeeding Too Often is Failure (to Grow)
You ever play chess? I prefer to play chess against people who can whoop my butt, because I’ll have to play at my edge, and I’ll be sure to pick up some really good moves. Are you the kind of person who only plays chess against children because you want to think of yourself as a winner? Well, I’ve got news for you–if you are winning too often, you are truly a loser. You have play a game you could likely lose in order to really grow.
Photo credit: El Garza
Succeeding regularly is comfortable. I regularly succeed at making myself breakfast. But I’m 28 and of average to high intelligence, so I don’t put a check on my goal chart for cooking myself some eggs. I’m grateful for my ability to feed myself, but if I don’t have some goals I could and probably will fail at, then I’m not really living up to my potential.
I do not like to repeat successes. I like to go on to other things.
~ Walt Disney
Many people have no real goals, i.e. goals that matter deeply to them that they are actually working towards, goals that there is a good chance they could fail at–and that to succeed at them they’d need to seriously grow. It’s a shame, because unless you have goals like this, you are not really living or feeling the aliveness that comes from “living the dream.” And yes, the dream is like an always receding horizon, but the quest is still worth it.
A Brief History of My Successful Failures
I’ve been a part of several failed startups. How cool is that? I really went for it, tried to do something new and exciting and even world-changing, and it didn’t work. From these experiences I’ve learned a ton about…
- how to make ideals real
- when and how to get practical without losing vision
- how to work well with others
- why sometimes you do everything right and shit happens anyway, and all you can do is let it go and bounce back
- how to stay positive even after your ideals get shattered, your heroes sometimes act like assholes, and businesses you poured your heart into fall apart in 48 hours
(There’s the obligatory personal development blog bulleted list.)
But even having experienced the pain of business failure, I don’t understand how anyone could work a soul-sucking corporate job. Personally I think the 40 hour workweek is archaic, let alone the 50, 60, or 70 hour workweek. Of course, what do I want to do with my free time? Study, practice, create, dialogue with friends, write, and work on personal projects like this one.
Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
~ Winston Churchill
I’ve quit many jobs, risking failure and poverty, because I simply would not do the mind-numbing work that was being asked of me. Have I achieved success? Success by who’s criteria? I value my mind, my free-time, and the possibility for creating something unique and meaningful more than a steady and well-paid job, so by that criteria I am totally successful. For someone raising a family, or desiring to impress the neighbors by the size of their television, they will have a somewhat different criteria for achieving success. But no matter the criteria, if you are not failing often, you have become stale or your vision is too small.
On the personal front, I’ve had many failed relationships. My current relationship is overall quite beautiful and wonderful, but that in many ways is because I risked–and experienced–a great deal of failure. I grew up with intense social anxiety, so bad that until junior high I regularly peed myself in class because I was too shy to ask to use the bathroom. I had a crush on one girl from 3rd grade to 8th, and never once talked to her (although she was on my softball team for several years).
I never asked a girl out until college, where the first woman I kissed I ended up in a 2 1/2 year relationship with. I was a co-dependent, depressed pushover through most of the relationship, and when it ended, she took all my friends and I had to find new ones! Luckily I kept playing a bigger game, kept risking failure, and doing so with an open heart. I kept courageously going for what I wanted (failing even at that) and many years later, after many heartbreaks, I have a wonderful woman in my life. And at least every month there are challenges in our wonderful relationship! This is what happens when you are growing.
Risk Failure, One Day at a Time
I love talking to people who are smarter than me, which is one of the joys of hosting the Precision Change podcast. Today I interviewed David Allen, author of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. It was wonderful talking to him, in part because I suck at doing things. Really! I hate todo lists. I’m basically lazy–passionate, but lazy. I’d much prefer to sit around and think about things, or read something interesting, or just relax outside in the beautiful Boulder sun than to get something done. My friend Theo joked recently that I should write a book called GTOYP: Getting Things Off Your Plate.
Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with all your might. Put your whole soul into it. Stamp it with your own personality. Be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and faithful, and you will accomplish your object. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
But yet I love David Allen’s GTD system, because it gives me the tools to manage a weakness (doing) utilizing a strength (thinking). And David Allen himself is a creative philosopher type, like me, who created this system in order to help himself to stay organized and get things done.
When I first thought of emailing his company to get him for the podcast, I felt anxious. What if he thinks we are small potatoes and laughs? Am I worthy of his time? But I felt the fear and did it anyway. What are you putting off because you are afraid you might fail? If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly at first.
The biggest lesson I’ve learned from all of my failures is that when you are really trying to do something important, when you are really trying to change the world, you are probably going to fail hard and often. If you try new and audacious things, at times you are regularly going to look like an idiot and a flake. If you take the creative and unique path you were born to live, your family may disown you. If you think outside the box, people will think you’re crazy, and try to stuff you back into their box. But for those who want to live fully, doing anything less than fully expressing your unique gifts just won’t cut it.
“I have learned this at least by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
~ Henry David Theoreau
Of course, failing too often, or purposely taking on extreme challenges can be dangerous and counter-productive. I have my fair share of personal experience here too. Don’t be stupid about the challenges you take on, but do regularly challenge yourself so that you continue to grow and express your unique gifts.
What can you risk failing at today?
The Transformation Try-Out
The Transformation Try-Out is inspired by the notion of the 30-day trial, which Steve Pavlina made so popular. The basic idea is to take a new action, or habit that you want to establish and commit to doing regularly for 30 days (much like a software trial). At the end of the 30 days you can choose to quit, continue, or modify your commitment. Knowing that you can change things after 30 days, the time you spend engaging in the new pattern becomes much easier. Also, you have a chance to get a feel for the results of changing the habit, to see if it’s something worth pursuing.
The transformation try-out however is a slightly different concept, that Duff McDuffee, Ryan Oelke, and myself came up with. It’s different in that we want to constantly evolve the try-out process itself, and because we’ve added these key distinctions and suggestions when performing the 30 day try-out:
- Keep in mind that changing a habit is often very hard work, and while the benefits are often enormous, doing so can often be massively destabilizing. Often times if you push the edge too far in transformational work, you can end up with a break down of multiple systems, instead of the breakthrough you are looking for. Because human beings are a system of many different tendencies, belief systems, habits, and so on, one major shift to an element of the system can have unforeseen impact on the system-at-large.
- Know which habit to try and change, at what time, and in what order. Perhaps in order to make other bigger changes you need to start with the simplest one’s of all. For example, say you want to start your own business, but you are in extremely poor health and barely have the energy to maintain your current lifestyle. The 1st thing you may want to change is your energy levels, and to do something related to your health, so that you can have the energy to commit to other larger changes and goals.
- Clear parameters and the appropriate tracking are invaluable. In order to follow through with a transformation try-out you first have to be very clear about the parameters of the change, and then need to have a reliable way to track your progress. It could be as easy as creating a small calendar on an index card and checking off each day that you perform the new action you are trying to do (or avoid a harmful action). Or it might be more elaborate, require more detailed metrics, happen over a digital medium, or have a collaborative component.
- While you are participating in a transformation try-out it is also a good idea to keep some sort of record of the process. Keeping a journal with observations about the process, or blogging if you’d like, can help with sticking to it and also learning from the process.
- Tell people what you are doing, and find others who can understand and support your decision. The more you talk about it, thinking about it, and reference it the easier the try-out will be.
Keep your eyes peeled for transformation try-outs from me and my friends, as we share our successes and failures, and hopefully the larger lessons that we learn along the way. We’ll be posting many of these in a blog format, and hopefully will continue to evolve the “transformation try-out” process itself.
Episode 4: “The Secret” Looks Good in Overalls
|
Are you dreaming big enough? And are you backing up your dreams with consistent, daily action? How do we cut through our limiting beliefs to free our vision while also recognizing and accepting our real limitations? On this episode, Duff talks with Brian Johnson of PhilosophersNotes.com, a service that provides useful summaries of personal development books “for the busy self-actualizer.” In this high-energy conversation with two personal development geeks, you will learn…
If you like this episode, please Digg it, give it a thumbs up on StumbleUpon, bookmark it on del.icio.us, and email it to someone who might benefit. Thanks for spreading the word about Precision Change! Listen in next week for part 2 of this dialogue with Brian Johnson. Resources: - Gaia Community |
Duff McDuffee |
Episode 3: The Foundations of Money Mastery
|
Are you a personal finance n00b? Never fear. There are some simple steps you can take towards getting out of debt that worked for J.D. Roth, personal finance blogger at Get Rich Slowly, and that will work for you too. On this episode you will learn…
If you like this episode, please Digg it, give it a thumbs up on StumbleUpon, bookmark it on del.icio.us, and email it to someone who might benefit. Thanks for spreading the word! Resources: |
Duff McDuffee |
Episode 2: J.D. Roth: How to Get Rich Slowly
|
Do you feel like you are never going to pay off all your debts? Are your finances a constant source of stress in your life? Learn more about how to pay off your debts and have more control in your life as J.D. Roth, personal finance blogger at Get Rich Slowly, tells us about:
If you like this episode, please Digg it, give it a thumbs up on StumbleUpon, bookmark it on del.icio.us, and email it to someone who might benefit. Thanks for spreading the word! Resources: |
Duff McDuffee |
Episode 1: Master Information Overload Now and Forever with Bit Literacy
|
Are you overwhelmed by information? Do you have 1000’s of emails sitting in your inbox right now, many unread, all nagging at you to do something about them? Have you declared email bankruptcy, hoping that “if it’s important, they’ll write back?” You are just minutes away from a permanent and responsible solution…and it has nothing to do with getting a Blackberry or the latest upgrade of Microsoft Outlook. According to Mark Hurst, author of Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload, the digital age has created both new opportunities and new problems with these things he calls “bits.” In this interview, listen to Mark teach you…
Take responsibility for your relationship to the digital world by listening to this interview now. After you do, go achieve inbox emptiness and then come back and comment about it below! We’d love to hear how it works for you. If you like this episode, please Digg it, give it a thumbs up on StumbleUpon, bookmark it on del.icio.us, and email it to someone who might benefit. Thanks for spreading the word! Additional Resources: - Mark’s online to-do program GooToDo |
Duff McDuffee |
Overcome Obstacles by Listening to the Voices in Your Head
photo credit: Via Flickr
You’re not crazy. Trust me.
We all have voices inside of us speaking their minds about our life - our projects, hopes, dreams, problems, and challenges. The good news is that having voices is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s through giving them a microphone front-and-center, one at a time, and hearing them fully that we succeed in life. Unfortunately, we often spend our time rushing through our days, ignoring them, and worse yet, letting one voice overshadow all other voices, giving us a very narrow perspective on life.
Ok, so you might have some doubts about all this, wondering just what a voice is. Think of a voice in the same way that you say things like, “A part of me feels/thinks this____, and a part of me feels/thinks that.” As an example, a part of you might want to get your financial debt under control, another part says it’s way to hard, and another part say to hell with it, live for today! Now, we haven’t quite got to the voices yet, only things the voices are saying.
Who or what is behind these statements?
Using the example again, a voice behind the first statement could be your Planner voice - the part of you that is always focused on long-term success and well-being, and with any issue in life, this Planner will take that side and present its case. Sometimes, you’ll value its perspective and other times you won’t, but if you don’t acknowledge it, there’s a good chance it will eat at you consciously or unconsciously. The important point here is to understand that we all have voices that take certain positions relative to any issue we’re dealing with.
So, what happens when you don’t listen to your voices?
Someone suggested this to me recently about a problem I was wrestling with, “It’s like you have a board room filled with people yelling at each other, and no one’s getting heard.” I thought this was a perfect metaphor for the experience of having lots of voices (parts of ourselves) speaking, but not hearing them out individually. Hard to run a company that way, and equally hard to be the CEO of our lives. As a result, one of two things (usually) happen when we don’t listen to our voices:
1. You remain frozen, indecisive, and unable to take action.
2. You take action, but are not fully committed, doubting yourself.
You can only make strong decisions in your life when you have fully heard yourself out, when you’re not fighting yourself, when you have expressed everything on your mind and have come to terms with it all. This doesn’t mean that, after listening to your voices, they just go away, only that you are not held back by them. You might still worry about your debt, but if you have gone through this process, and feel that you’ve thought it through, you feel much more at ease about it all.
In the end, the only way you’ll know what I’m talking about is to actually give it a try, so let’s go over the process.
Let the Voices be Heard!
The first step to listening to your voices and integrating their perspectives is to give them the time to speak. The first time you try this, set aside at least an hour. Make sure you won’t be disturbed. If quietness helps you to reflect, make sure you have it. If music gets your juices flowing, kick on some tunes that help you relax. Now, the actual process can be done in a more extroverted or introverted way, depending on your personal preference. One way involves, speaking out loud and using a couple of chairs that you’ll move back and forth from. The other method, my personal choice, simply involves paper and pen - in other words, bust out a journal. Either way, the essential process is the same, so go with what feels most comfortable.
The second step is to bring up a problem or challenge you’ve recently been struggling with. It could be an opportunity you’re considering taking, like a new job, or dealing with a thorny problem, like debt. It’s important that you have the issue clearly in your mind before you start. Once you have it, begin speaking or writing whatever comes to mind. After a few minutes, take a step back and ask yourself, what voices are speaking here? Often, it might be only one voice, having spoke it’s mind fully. Sometimes, it’ll be a whole bunch, but try to differentiate the different perspectives your voices are bringing to the table.
Next, once you have a few voices identified, you’ll want to have them “speak” alternately, one at a time. If you’re using the chair method, you should get up and move chairs for each voice, speaking from a distinct and different voice when you move to a new chair. Two chairs is fine, even if you have five voices, just make sure you clearly distinguish them, but the more chairs the better. If you’re journaling, write as though you’re composing a play, writing each character and their lines.
An important thing to remember is to fully embody each voice as a distinct and separate voice. It’s easy to start combining voices and get confused. Keep in mind that there is no “set list” of voices, so be creative and name as many voices as you have and feel the need to distinctively identify. Of course, there are certainly some common voices that everyone seems to have - the protector, the parent, the child… - but we also all have our own unique voices that emerge in our lives.
Each time you do this, it will start very naturally and organically. There is no rigid, predictable method. Over time you will be aware of all of your most common voices that could have something to say about the issue at hand, but you won’t be able to necessarily predict any or all of them.
Each time you do this process will be like picking up a bread crumb trail, or like a bloodhound catching a scent - at first you have to find the trail (identify the issue), then follow each crumb (listen to all your voices) and more bread crumbs you follow, the closer you get to a realization/understanding, much like a bloodhound hones in on its target. There is also no predictable time it takes for this. Sometimes the process might take five minutes, other times it might take a handful of hour long sessions. The goal with this is to arrive at a point when you feel that you have expressed all the sides of an issue you’re internally taking, and can take action with confidence and a clear conscience.
Episode 0: What is Precision Change?
|
This is the pilot episode of Precision Change, a weekly podcast about technologies of transformation—from personal productivity to personal power, lifehacks to life mastery, GTD to NLP, and other acronyms you’ve never heard of. Next week will be the first real episode, so subscribe now so you won’t miss anything. Why “precision change”? Well, a lot of self-help books and audio are pretty cheesy. We’re wanting to give you the strategies and information that work, now with 1000% less hype! On this show we’ll be talking with prominent personal development authors, speakers, and bloggers about how to thrive in the digital age, live your life with purpose, improve the quality of your relationships, get and stay healthy, optimize your personal finances, and other ways to obsess about your personal development. Every week we’ll bring you with free tips and tricks for inspiring your personal development in playful, courageous, and integrated ways…with a geeky edge, because frankly, we’re geeks, and the geeks shall inherit the earth, right? I mean, look at Bill Gates. Subscribe to our iTunes feed for this show on the left side of this page to get the latest episodes automatically. Give us your feedback by adding your comments to the episode pages by clicking on the title of the show. We’d love to hear from you! Enjoy the show! |
Duff McDuffee |
The Many Levels of Responsibility: Part 2
photo credit: http://flickr.com/photos/pingnews/
In Part 1 I described the difference between victimhood and full responsibility, and how one can move toward full responsibility. In this post I wanted to push the envelope a little, and describe territory that I believe most self-development literature is unaware of (or even worse confuses with victimhood). This is the living understanding of integrated responsibility or what one could call cosmic responsibility.
The Synthesis of Opposites: Living in Complete Accord with the Universe
Integrated responsibility is the bringing together of the key insights from the previous two stages of responsibility. From victimhood we see the key insight that the world is a complex and sometimes uncontrollable force. From full responsibility we see that we (or the other) have a much larger part to play then we once thought, and that intention and surrender are deeply powerful forces with regards to causality.
The difference in integrated responsibility is that we don’t conceive of our “personhood” in the same way as we did prior (where the sense of a solid separate self was maintained as part of the equation). We also begin to see the deeply systemic nature of causality, and the limits of full responsibility.
Going Beyond the Self
For either victimhood or full responsibility to be maintained we have to think that there is a “self” that is at the receiving end of causality. That self is often experienced and understood as radically separate from the rest of causality (though becoming less so in full responsibility). When one begins to see through this sense of self, as ultimately existing, then the focus on self, and indeed on our always getting what we want starts to diminish radically. At this point one switches away from self-actualization, which characterizes most of the self-development literature, and moves toward self-transcendence, which tends to involve contemplation and introspection.
Systemic Thinking is Key
Another thing that can bring about the awareness of integrated responsibility is a kind of systemic thinking, in which one begins to see how systems operate, where their leverage points are and what the limitations in systemic change are. A great example of this type of thinking can be seen in “systems theory” with such thinkers as Gregory Bateson, Fritjof Capra, Ken Wilber, and Peter Senge. Our personal influence on changing things is seen in the light of larger systemic dynamics that are at play.
To get a better sense of how this might play out, think about the weather system. You may want it to rain, may do a rain dance, etc. but how much does your personal intention play in the larger confluence of wind, air pressure, humidity and competing weather patterns. Probably not that much!
Another thing I’ll mention about integrated responsibility is that one begins to have the flexibility to notice how and why their personal intentions have the results (or lack of results) that they do. One begins to appreciate the strong power of habits and forces in the universe, and develops a certain level of surrender to them. They also become more able to leverage these systems in amazing ways and can become phenomenal masters at shifting whole systems. In many ways these are the alchemists, magicians, and agents of change!
Here are some tips for how, if you are already operating from a perspective of full-responsibility, to move toward integrated responsibility:
Tips for Becoming an Agent of Change:
- Have a regular contemplative practice – Contemplative practices, from any of the wisdom traditions, provide insight into a deeper, wider perspective that is broader then your “self”. This naturally leads to integrated responsibility.
- Study thinkers who think systemically – Studying the great philosophers, thinkers, and theorists who have put forth material in a systemic way is a sure way to be challenged to think this way, and start moving into a sense of integrated responsibility. I mentioned a few earlier in the post, but there are many.
- Think about things from multiple angles – Challenge yourself to see the things that happen in your life from multiple viewpoints. For example, I recently heard that my wife and I were receiving (along with many other people in the U.S.) a rebate check for $1,200. I can view that as simply chance, can see that because we have been on top of our taxes we are receiving it, can view it as a the universe doing me a favor, can see it as a larger governmental response to the current recession, etc. There are so many ways to consider the things that happen in our lives, and by doing so we become disillusioned with any simple answers or perspectives.
When we open fully to the larger context in which life is happening, that isn’t solely reducible to my experience or my desires, then a greater level of surrender & happiness can result. The happiness isn’t one borne from getting what we want, but rather from seeing how things really are.