Today, you can do this in ten minutes:

1. You’ll make an inventory of the skills you’re most proud of.

2. You’ll gain a touch of experience speaking in a stressful setting.

3. (Hidden bonus!) You’ll identify a job you really want: one that matches those skills you love.

____________

Today I was put in a tight spot. I was participating in a psychology study measuring the physical effects of stress on the body, and a critical part of the experiment, apparently, was putting me into a stressful situation.

What this meant to the researchers was that I, wired with electrodes and a blood-pressure cuff, was reading a wonderful cooking magazine when a man and a woman walked into the room. The man asked me to stand up and turn around, which I did with only a minor entanglement in the wiring. He promptly informed me that, in a few minutes, they would return to the room. Then, I would give a 5-minute “interview” for them, telling them exactly why I deserved the job.

“Any questions before we leave?” he asked.

“What job?” I said.

“Whatever job you like.”

So they left, and I set to thinking.

Here, however, is where you come in. If you were in this situation, right now, what would you do? Take a piece of paper to plot out your speech – take just five minutes. And don’t forget the first step – choosing the job you’re interviewing for.

Now give the speech. Without the notes. It’s best if you have someone in the room there with you, timing you – that way you can’t tell how much time you have left. It’s not that you’ll run out of time. It’s that you’ll have a lot left, and you may not know what to do with it right away. Twice today I stopped and asked “How much time is left?” only to hear “Please continue.”

If this sounds jarring, that’s because it is. After my experience, my heart rate had jumped and my blood pressure was way up. I was lucky to have some experience with public speaking so that I could at least keep my knees from shaking. But the best part was that it forced me to dig a bit deeper into the specifics of my skills, figuring out exactly how they tied into the job I’d just described and detailing those benefits exactly.

So take that “stress” and make your day and your life a little better. And in just ten minutes, too.

(Photo credit:  mrettig and Kolby Schnelli)

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Reward and punishment are two of the primary tools we use to change behavior.  Whether it be giving a friend the silent treatment or paying a child when he gets good greades, incentive techniques are widespread, and their efficacy is well-documented (read Chapter 2 of one of my favorite books for a fun look).  But rewards in particular are not all they’re cracked up to be: often, they actually deteriorate the experience they try to promote.

The main problem is the replacement of internal motivation with external ones.  If you try to get a child to raise his hand before speaking by giving him a cookie every time he does, the child quickly learns that the cookie is the main reward associated with raising his hand.  The core ideals that make raising a hand valuable – respect, for one – will not be part of the thought process.

“Giving students extrinsic rewards for engaging in learning tasks makes the implicit statement that the activity was not worth doing on its own merits.”        – Alfie Kohn

A reward system is like an evil carrot.

The worst part of this implicit message is that it retroactively affects a situation where a person has already developed an intrinsic motivation. So if, for example, a student loves reading and you create an incentive program for reading, you can destroy the internal love of reading. Once the switch is made from internal motivation to external motivation, the behavior can only be sustained by continuing to offer the reward. So once the reading incentives stop, the student stops reading.

Why?  It’s just the way we’re wired. If an activity has an external reward, we see the reward as a measure of the value of the activity.  This is a psychological reaction that makes biological sense.  If our ancestors were to go somewhere to find food, and one day the food were gone, would it make sense to keep traveling to that spot?  No.

Don’t let this confuse you, though, because punishments do permanently change behavior, even if they are taken away.  We develop permanent aversions to negative situations for the same underlying biological reasons.  If primitive man were to encounter a wolf, he wouldn’t be likely to return, would he?

So people can be conditioned by negative reinforcement, but not by positive reinforcement.  We all have encountered this in our personal lives when we promise ourselves some kind of reward for working out, or for waking up on time, but as the days pass we find that the reward is no longer enough to keep us exercising or pulling ourselves out of bed.

Think about a time when you earned a reward, whether or not someone else gave it to you.  Think first about the thing you did for the reward, then think about the reward itself.  Which is the positive memory?  Which thing feels like  “work?”  If you’re like most people, whatever you did to earn the reward has probably become a chore in your recollection.

That’s the reason that those self-rewards aren’t very effective.  Getting that treat over and over becomes less and less rewarding each time, while doing the task becomes more and more cumbersome.  At some point it’s just not worth it any more.  Then we fail.

The only way to overcome that challenge is to build an intrinsic motivation for whatever it is you want to do.  Don’t let an external reward become a source of motivation – don’t even tempt yourself to let that happen by creating one, because it invariably will.  By creating that reward, you send yourself the same message that a child would get: that the thing isn’t worth doing in its own right.

The key to creating a positive habit in you or in someone else is to tie the positive response directly to the achievement, rather than to the reward.  You should be happy because you went to the gym.  You should relish the good burn, the sweat on your forehead, and the pride of making it through a tough workout.  You shouldn’t be happy just because you let yourself eat a piece of key lime pie afterwards.

The same principle goes for others.  Direct praise for a good behavior is much more effective than a prize if you want to train a child.  At first, it may not seem that way – the allure of a reward system is that it is always immediately and perfectly effective – but over time the results will be more noticeable and dramatic.  Enjoyment and motivation can come from within rather than from without, and those personal motivators are the only ones that will always endure.

(photo credit: Brettf)

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Tip #428: Reset Your Rhythm

Write down your top five to ten priorities in life, whether they include learning to play the guitar ortrying to have a baby. What things on this list have you been attempting to attempt for a long time? Is it taking you a long time to do them because you are scared of the potential havoc failing at them may wreak on your life? If you answer, “Yes,” say this next sentence aloud:

I have control over how I experience failure.

Think about how empowering this is: you have the ability to control how you experience FAILURE. No “failure” ever has to be an actual failure.You can choose to label failure as something completely awful, or you can choose to label it as something negative but useful. We are all fragile beings, and it is important to surround ourselves with love and positivity – but if you are hiding behind a façade of happiness and denying what could have been, then all the positivity in the world won’t rub off on you. Enjoy your journey from monotonous security to risk-taking passion. If you stay focused on your priorities, even if they are changing every second, you have nothing to fear. (This does not mean that you won’t feel scared along the way!)

If dead ends keep mounting, you can be your own cheerleader! At each obstacle you face, regardless of whether you overcome it or not, adapt yourself and your strategies to continue on ahead. By turning these difficult experiences into your edge, you can transform from a cubicle slug and release the radiant individual you are.

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Inventory Yourself in Ten Minutes

It’s incredible how bright we can be while still being so foolish.  I know,consciously, that I ought to exercise at least 5 times a week and that I ought to eat enough (for me, some 2500 to 3000 calories/day).  But despite that fact here I am, preparing to run a blog based around health, I hadn’t been doing it.  “Why not?” I think to myself.  And then the answer is delivered…

The excellent new book Nudge thinks about the problems in terms of two brain systems.  One, the reflective system, is what you know you know.  It’s the part that thinks about all the things you should be doing.  It’s the part that tells you to go to the gym, or to not eat potato chips, or to grab a piece of fruit in the morning.  But the other, the automatic system, is the one that finds you sleeping in, munching away, and driving to work in the morning.  More on both ahead.

The Lizard Brain

Why does our automatic system put things off and snack even when we know we shouldn’t?  Because it’s concerned about you.  This part of your brain is keen on staying alive and making sure that your conscious functions don’t have to work too hard to get you through the day.  Think about the last time you took a long drive.  How much of it do you remember?  If it was uneventful, probably not too much.  If it was eventful, you probably only remember swerving to avoid the deer, or pulling over so a kid could vomit – but not much else.  This is because your automatic brain learns to do all sorts of things for you.  Remember how harrowing it was when you first learned to drive?  It would be like that every time if your brain couldn’t repeat these functions automatically.

Naturally, our most important functions came naturally coded into our automatic brains.  Sleeping and eating are key among those functions, since if we didn’t take care of those, we wouldn’t get far in life.  But in the modern age of plenty, eating at least now needs to be kept under control.  Whereas our ancestors were endlessly grateful that they could hold intelligent cocktail parties while their automatic systems kept munching on grapes or whatever was handy, we are less pleased with the ability to mindlessly consume cheese and crackers (high in calories, fats, and much more) during those same parties.

What else is this brain not so great at?  Financial planning, for one; health planning, for another.  Actually, almost any sort of long-term planning is out of the question – our evolutionary predecessors simply didn’t live long enough to need to develop such an ability!  This is why planning, budgeting, and the like come so difficult to so many of us.  The automatic brain is motivated by real, immediate rewards, like a full stomach.  Hypothetical, potential, and on-paper rewards like money and health just don’t do a great job of making us do the right thing by nature.

Taking Charge of the Lizard Within

Since you can’t change the habits that are written into your DNA, you have to do your best to change the ones that aren’t.  Our automatic systems are capable of learning (we ride bikes, drive cars, learn new languages and type), but it takes time and repitition.  For simple, common tasks like excercise, all we can do is go every day until it becomes as natural as sitting down to dinner.  Working out at the same time every day can go a long way here, because our brains are very capable of tying activities to time.

But what about the activities that we only get a few chances at?  What about long-term activities where we will not see the rewards until it’s too late to change our behaviors?

Breaking out the Carrot and Stick

You have to provide the automatic brain with enough incentive to get off its lazy tail and stop trying to take care of you – at least in those areas where you really do know better.  If you don’t want to put on extra weight (that is, to protect yourself from starvation in scarce times), you have to let the lizard brain know thatkeeping fit is more important to you.  Money is usually a good way to do this.  Countless stories circulate of the workplace bets to keep the pounds off, oftentimes including a hefty sum (several thousand dollars makes a good incentive to stay slim) and at-will weigh-ins.  Hire a friend to let your mother know every time you skip breakfast.  Make morning dates and meetings with people whose friendship or business you can’t afford to lose.  Get a Clocky.

Conquering your automatic impulses – the short version:

Decide what you want, then give yourself an incentive – one that you can’t “change your mind” about.

(photo credit: csr02083 and Daisy.Sue)

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Crimes of Passion

Picture tomorrow in your mind.  What are you going to do?  Who are you going to see?  Now that you’ve thought about tomorrow, it’s real.  Whether or not you meant it to be, the day after today is now a real thing, given substance and possibility by nothing more than the thoughts in your own head.

Of course it would have come anyway. But by making tomorrow part of your life before it even gets here, you have the opportunity to make critical changes to the way that tomorrow will actually take shape.  Think about yourself getting up early.  If you hadn’t thought of it, hadn’t planned for it, there would be absolutely zero possibility that it would happen.  Something as simple as the start of your day – perhaps the most critical part – in fact has to be planned ahead of time or you lose all control over it.  What would happen if you put no thought at all into waking up, and merely let yourself rise whenever your body naturally did?  Chances are you would sleep much later than you meant to, later even than is healthy for you.  So idealizing and planning tomorrow, actually, creating it with your actions today, is extremely important.

What else can you picture for tomorrow?  What else can you plan to do?  I know that the most helpful thing for me is to create a written list of all the things I want to do tomorrow, today.  It’s easy to put things off: all we have to do is say “I’ll get to it tomorrow,” meaning, of course, on a day that has not yet been idealized in the mind.  It’s safe; it means that tomorrow, just like Annie says, “is always a day away.”  But a list – not just a to-do list, but one with a concrete date on it – will force you to confront it tomorrow as a list of things to do today.  Not to be put off.  To be done.  You don’t even have to get all gung-ho about this and plan your days and weeks so far in advance it feels like you’re living out a script.  All I’m asking that you do is make a list of the things you want to do tomorrow.

Because chances are, tomorrow you won’t want to do them.  They’ll remind you of that saying about classic books – “everyone wants to have read them but nobody wants to read them” – in a way that’s a bit too frighteningly parallel to warrant any more explanation.  And if you don’t write these things down, if you don’t make real the idea that you really will accomplish these things tomorrow, you won’t.  You’ll wake up, and contrary to all expectations, tomorrow will be just like today.  It will look a lot like today.  It will feel a lot like today.  And chances are, anything you wanted your future self to be responsible for doing, he or she is also going to want to pass that buck onto his or her future self.  Don’t let him.

What if you had woken up with a list of things to do today, prepared by a spouse or an important family member? You’d do them, right?  It’s the same idea.  In fact, if you really want to bring tomorrow to life right here, right now, and decide what you are going to do, you should tell someone else.  Because just thinking something to yourself isn’t enough; sometimes even writing can be ignored by a particularly stubborn future-you.  But if you make sure another real person knows what you are going to do, they can hold you to it.  You can hold you to it too, so that when the other person asks, “how did this-or-that go?” you won’t have to lie.

So make your future self the person that you wish your present self was.  There’s nothing wrong with doing it tomorrow, so long as tomorrow is really only a day away.

Photo credit: Zsaj

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1. Your friends backbite. 

2. Girls communicate exclusively through gossip.

3. The manly man – the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker – is the one you want.

4. The girly man – the accountant, the lawyer, the politician – is not.

5. There is a more interesting life out there, where people don’t spend their time watching TV (have you ever watched someone watch TV on TV?).

6. The best way to access this more interesting life is through television. (Thanks to David Foster Wallace for this.)

7. You are not beautiful enough.

8. In fact, you are not even close to beautiful enough.

9. There is someone out there who is perfect for you and only you.

10. You are perfect for them, too.

11. You are constantly being evaluated and judged.

12. Nobody else has any sort of self-identity confusion. They are near-static, self-assured characters.

13. Your qualms and confusions are weaknesses.

14. Political speeches are important.

15. You have to be doing something with your hands at all times, or you seem stiff and awkward.

16. Gaffes, especially of the speaking variety, are unacceptable.

17. Everyone is all about sex, all the time.

18. Celebrities’ lives are somehow inherently more interesting than yours.

19. Spoken communication is, by and large, passe.

20. Plastic surgery – not time – heals all wounds.

21. The preparation of food is a heartwarming, fun, unique experience despite the fact that a million other families are eating the same food out of the same can/box.

22. Every response out of your mouth must be quick, witty, and incisive.

23. Things are always more than they seem.

24. Nobody can be happy with what they already have.

25. Men have a right to spend a fortune when they have a mid-life crisis, but menopause confers no such entitlement.

26. If you try hard enough, you will succeed.

27. There is no arduous mediocrity in learning. There is only a scene where you pick up an instrument, and then, later, one in which you impress your friends with a masterful rendition.

28. Only a diamond will do for an engagement ring.

29. See a lover before a therapist when a marriage or relationship hits a rough patch.

30. “Falling out of love” is reason enough for divorce.

31. You will always have the same friends.

32. Men, unassisted, will notice when a woman is upset.

33. Men know what to do when a woman is upset.

34. Elderly people are boring and nosy.

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Breakin’ All the Rules

List your negative emotional experiences over any time frame – from a month to fifteen years.

Group these experiences into two categories: “Caused by Me” and “Caused by Others.” If a majority of them go one way or the other, go back through and re-think your answers; you’re either being too hard on yourself or not hard enough.

Think about the causes of the events on the “Caused by Me” list. These are the things you can avoid, the things you can control. What triggered each event? Was it something as broad as fear or was it as specific as empty-nest syndrome?

Do you notice anything? Do you see a pattern? For example, are your relationships ending terrbily? Did you lose your past few jobs? Are you having the same kind of fight with lots of different people?

Isolate a cause. If many of your actions have the same basic cause, you’ve successfully identified an area where you can do some serious self-improvement. Congratulations!

Don’t justify your actions! An easy thing to do while making this list is to justify the mistakes you made. Wanting to justify your behavior usually sounds like “Wouldn’t you have said the same thing if you had been in my position?” or “I don’t think you understand, let me tell you the story again, then you’ll see.” 

Instead, when you feel the need to justify your actions:

Don’t ask others, ask yourself. You know how to manipulate your kids, parents, or significant other, but it is much more difficult to truly manipulate yourself. You know the truth. This is why it is so important to quickly get in the habit of asking yourself what emotional patterns you might be recycling. Sometimes it does have something to do with you and you need to step-up to yourself when it does. Best of luck.

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Single-Tasking (Video!)

Inspiration is the single most important factor in making the most of your day.  If you don’t know what you want to do or where you want to go, how do you stand any chance of actually getting there? This post will help you find a single source of inspiration that you can keep going back to, over and over, whenever you need it.

What An Inspiration Does for You

Inspiration, well, inspires you. It sets your mind moving in new directions, branching out from the mainline of thought you spend most of your day in. It helps you do something unique and amazing.

Inspiration sets your thoughts in an out-of-control spiral you can barely keep track of. It floods your mind with tangents you’d love to follow if only you had the time. It makes you want to grab a sheet of paper and write and write or draw and draw until you’ve got nothing left, which can be a long time if your inspiration is a good one.

Inspiration, in short, sets your passion free into a world full of ideas you’ve never had before. What you need is a source of this awesome energy that you can go back to and draw on whenever you need it. Since the best things we can do in life spring from our passions, getting those energies in motion is crucial to moving your potential into realization.

Where can I find it?

Inspiration is a natural complement –  a beautiful synergy – with your passion. Only you know where that it – and I can’t tell you. What do you love doing? Where do you love going?

The surest way to find inspiration is to look in the same places. What are the things that most excite you? That let your thoughts and dreams wander?

Those are your inspirations. Personally, I love to let my mind wander through reading. It barely matters what, but every time I read something extraordinarily well-written, I find myself imagining not only the events as they occur, but of myself writing something that reaches somebody else in the very same way.

What causes you to want to create? What fills your mind with fantasies involving futures you wish you had? Those are your inspirations. They are the things that propel your towards what you wish you were, towards the stuff that your dreams are made of.

What’s so special about recurring inspiration?

Recurring inspiration is different from regular inspiration in a fundamental way. “Regular” inspirations give you a burst of passion and energy just once, but if you go back to it they can only take you down the same roads in your mind, to places you’ve already been. They no longer inspire you to new, grander things. They fade into reminders. They fade into memories.

A recurring inspiration is something that you can revisit whenever you need a burst of passion and be sure to find it. That’s a priceless asset you’ll never allow to fade into memory. It’s something that will always keep you looking forward, creating bigger and better for yourself.

How do I recognize recurring inspiration?

Recurring inspiration can be hard to recognize because it can border on obsession. You can easily get lost fantasizing in the very thing you ought to be harnessing.  In fact, that’s possibly the best sign that you’ve found something that will always inspire you.

Where’s a place you can be lost in thought for hours? What’s something you can do for seeming eternities, over and over, exploring every minutia with joy and wonder and scrutiny? If you come out of it feeling renewed, but in that dream-state as if you had just woken up, there’s a thing that’s ripe to become a life inspiration.

Instead of getting lost in it endlessly, stop yourself. Once that vacuum thought-process starts, pull yourself out of it and examine exactly what you were thinking of. Like waking in the middle of a dream and being able to remember it, this will open entire new worlds of thought, contemplation, and experience for you.

If you can go back to it and have another explosion of passion, then this is a sure stop for you.

(photo credit: Quotentials)

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Day Two

Qualify Yourself

We’re always fighting about something. When we stop and think about it, though, we usually find that the energy we spent fighting could have solved the problem completely. One of the most common annoyances we both face is one neither of us can avoid – the other person.

We all make mistakes. And other people seem to make even more than we do. But the worst mistakes – and the most annoying – are those everyday oopsies made by the people closest to us, the people we’re stuck with. So when one of us (”What do I do, honey?” … “What don’t you do?”) playfully grabs the other and causes a family heirloom to go skittering under the couch, the other wants to flip shit.

But as we all know, shit flipped into the air tends to hit the fan, and the next thing we know the heirloom is buried under piles of throw pillows living up to their names. At this point, it’s difficult to cool down. Someone huffs their way out of the room, the thrown pillows are dug through, and the heirloom is found in less time than it took to have the tiff. What did this accomplish? You’ve wasted your time, energy, and  now both of you are upset.

Instead of getting angry right off the bat, sit down, take a couple deep breaths, and think before you speak. Put things into perspective. This isn’t to say, “don’t be angry,” but trust that the other person understands what happened. Maybe they don’t understand fully, but it’s okay. Remind yourself that they didn’t do it on purpose. They’ll probably even try and help fix whatever went wrong.

Often in our relationship, it helps to collect ourselves for just five minutes. And often, the person who screwed up will fix things in those five minutes without a single cross word. It’s not easy, but a touch of self-control goes a long way for us. For the hurt person, it really helps to remember that the mistake  really was just a mistake – that the other person didn’t want to hurt you.

For the mistake-maker, it helps to take the perspective that the anger isn’t directed at you. The anger is directed at what happened, and that can probably be fixed within those five minutes.

These strategies can help avoid mistakes before they even happen, too. Think about the last time you were in traffic and the driver was getting a bit too close to the car in front of you. Shouting at them didn’t help. It just startled them or made them more tense. Instead, you can just let go and trust in the other person. No matter the situation, you’re not the only person who has a stake, whether it’s emotional or material. The other person wants to avoid an accident just as much as you do.

It’s important to take those five minutes before spending a lot of energy making everyone feel worse. In those five minutes, the problems you thought you needed to fix will often fix themselves. By all means, speak up if you really need to, but when you’re coming from a place of anger, frustration, or annoyance, stop and think. “Is what I’m about to say going to make things better or make things worse?”

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