Emotional resiliency means that you can bounce back quickly from a setback. It is a skill that can be trained, just like mental toughness. The process is simply stated but takes time and patience to develop:
Witness the negative emotional reaction, and then interdict it to observe the root emotion beneath it. Lean into the root emotion to experience it fully, ensuring that you are avoiding denial or transference. Transmute the negative emotion to its positive sister; for example, fear becomes courage, anger becomes commitment, jealousy becomes appreciation, shame becomes pride, and despair becomes surrender. Engage the new emotion with imagery and self-talk that supports it and blocks the old emotion. Then get moving again by taking action or taking your eyes off yourself and putting them on a teammate. The positive momentum will take you to a new, more positive, emotional place. It is much easier to be resilient when the Four Attitudes of Emotional Resiliency are burned into your character. The first attitude is to have self-esteem. Self-esteem is the emotional state of feeling worthy and respected by others. Low self-esteem can come from childhood abandonment, volatile environments where your voice is not heard, or outright abuse. If these attributes exist in your consciousness, then it is imperative that you get some therapeutic help and go deep into the silence practices to taste the underlying goodness inside of you. Second, resiliency is assured if you have the attitude of being oriented toward others versus just yourself, as our second discipline of service seeks to develop. In other words, if you are service oriented, then you tend to be more emotionally resilient. This character trait shows up at the fifth plateau of consciousness development (see the afterword), associated with a world-centric, service-oriented view. Victor Frankl describes this attitude in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, which chronicles his experiences in a Jewish concentration camp. Victor survived by finding meaning through tending to others’ needs over his own…and then teaching the power of this simple truth. The third attitude is holding a positive mind-set and optimistic outlook, which we have already discussed at length. It should be no surprise that a positive, optimistic attitude impacts one’s emotional resiliency. Finally, resiliency is ensured when you have an attitude of self-control informed by a deep certainty of your “why.” When climber Aaron Roth found himself alone in the desert, literally stuck between a rock and a hard place, he finally cut his own arm off to save his life. He did it because his “why” was to survive so he could be there for his unborn daughter, showing his orientation toward others. Unbeatable Mind: Forge Resiliency and Mental Toughness to Succeed at an Elite Level Eliminate barriers to practice.
There are many things that can get in the way of practice, which makes it much more difficult to acquire any skill. Relying on willpower to consistently overcome these barriers is a losing strategy. We only have so much willpower at our disposal each day, and it’s best to use that willpower wisely. The best way to invest willpower in support of skill acquisition is to use it to remove these soft barriers to practice. By rearranging your environment to make it as easy as possible to start practicing, you’ll acquire the skill in far less time. Make dedicated time for practice. The time you spend acquiring a new skill must come from somewhere. If you rely on finding time to do something, it will never be done. If you want to find time, you must make time. You have 24 hours to invest each day: 1,440 minutes, no more or less. You will never have more time. If you sleep approximately 8 hours a day, you have 16 hours at your disposal. Some of those hours will be used to take care of yourself and your loved ones. Others will be used for work. Whatever you have left over is the time you have for skill acquisition. If you want to improve your skills as quickly as possible, the larger the dedicated blocks of time you can set aside, the better. The best approach to making time for skill acquisition is to identify low-value uses of time, then choose to eliminate them. As an experiment, I recommend keeping a simple log of how you spend your time for a few days. All you need is a notebook. The results of this time log will surprise you: if you make a few tough choices to cut low-value uses of time, you’ll have much more time for skill acquisition. The more time you have to devote each day, the less total time it will take to acquire new skills. I recommend making time for at least ninety minutes of practice each day by cutting low-value activities as much as possible. I also recommend precommitting to completing at least twenty hours of practice. Once you start, you must keep practicing until you hit the twenty-hour mark. If you get stuck, keep pushing: you can’t stop until you reach your target performance level or invest twenty hours. If you’re not willing to invest at least twenty hours up front, choose another skill to acquire. Mastery by Robert Greene “It’s not about ideas, it’s about making ideas happen.”
It’s time to stop blaming our surroundings and start taking responsibility. While no workplace is perfect, it turns out that our gravest challenges are a lot more primal and personal. Our individual practices ultimately determine what we do and how well we do it. Specifically, it’s our routine (or lack thereof), our capacity to work proactively rather than reactively, and our ability to systematically optimize our work habits over time that determine our ability to make ideas happen. Through our constant connectivity to each other, we have become increasingly reactive to what comes to us rather than being proactive about what matters most to us. Truly great creative achievements require hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of work, and we have to make time every single day to put in those hours. Routines help us do this by setting expectations about availability, aligning our workflow with our energy levels, and getting our minds into a regular rhythm of creating. At the end of the day—or, really, from the beginning—building a routine is all about persistence and consistency. Don’t wait for inspiration; create a framework for it. CREATIVE WORK FIRST, REACTIVE WORK SECOND The single most important change you can make in your working habits is to switch to creative work first, reactive work second. This means blocking off a large chunk of time every day for creative work on your own priorities, with the phone and e-mail off. I used to be a frustrated writer. Making this switch turned me into a productive writer. Now, I start the working day with several hours of writing. I never schedule meetings in the morning, if I can avoid it. So whatever else happens, I always get my most important work done—and looking back, all of my biggest successes have been the result of making this simple change. But it’s better to disappoint a few people over small things, than to surrender your dreams for an empty inbox. Otherwise you’re sacrificing your potential for the illusion of professionalism. Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind (The 99U Book Series) by Jocelyn K. Glei Trollope managed to produce forty-seven novels and sixteen other books by dint of an unvarying early-morning writing session. In his Autobiography, Trollope described his composition methods at Waltham Cross, England, where he lived for twelve years. For most of that time he was also employed as a civil servant at the General Post Office, a career he began in 1834 and did not resign until thirty-three years later, when he had already published more than two dozen books.
Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey Trollope's daily ritual was; It was my practice to be at my table every morning at 5.30 A.M.; and it was also my practice to allow myself no mercy. An old groom, whose business it was to call me, and to whom I paid £5 a year extra for the duty, allowed himself no mercy. During all those years at Waltham Cross he never was once late with the coffee which it was his duty to bring me. I do not know that I ought not to feel that I owe more to him than to any one else for the success I have had. By beginning at that hour I could complete my literary work before I dressed for breakfast. All those I think who have lived as literary men,—working daily as literary labourers,—will agree with me that three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write. But then, he should so have trained himself that he shall be able to work continuously during those three hours,—so have tutored his mind that it shall not be necessary for him to sit nibbling his pen, and gazing at the wall before him, till he shall have found the words with which he wants to express his ideas. It had at this time become my custom,—and is still my custom, though of late I have become a little lenient of myself,—to write with my watch before me, and to require of myself 250 words every quarter of an hour. I have found that the 250 words have been forthcoming as regularly as my watch went. But my three hours were not devoted entirely to writing. I always began my task by reading the work of the day before, an operation which would take me half an hour, and which consisted chiefly in weighing with my ear the sound of the words and phrases.… This division of time allowed me to produce over ten pages of an ordinary novel volume a day, and if kept up through ten months, would have given as its results three novels of three volumes each in the year;—the precise amount which so greatly acerbated the publisher in Paternoster Row, and which must at any rate be felt to be quite as much as the novel-readers of the world can want from the hands of one man. If he completed a novel before his three hours were up, Trollope would take out a fresh sheet of paper and immediately begin the next one. Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey Fights are like car wrecks,” he said. “It could be anything, anytime, and it will be unexpected. "4/13/2013
“Fights are like car wrecks,” he said. “It could be anything, anytime, and it will be unexpected. Car wrecks are what they are—you don’t leave in the morning and think, Okay, I’m gonna get hit by a station wagon at the stop sign on that little street. It’ll be a fucking car wreck and you just don’t know how or when it’s gonna happen.” This is a huge concern of mine, because all the confrontations I’ve been in have been planned, fights in cages or rings, with months of preparation. The car wreck fight scares me, because you have to react quickly and surely; hesitation can be doom. I’m sure I can be plenty effective if given enough time to prepare, but wake me up from a nap and how would I act? “When you get in your car, you put your seat belt on, not because you expect the wreck, but because the possibility exists,”
“Think about it like this,” he said. “Every time you perform a repetition of the action, every time you practice it, you put that repetition in your mental storage box. Now, in a crisis, you have to perform that same skill, and you blindly reach into your mental box and pull out a repetition at random. Hopefully, it’s a good repetition, done with the proper form, or you will be in trouble.” The Disaster Diaries: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Apocalypse by Sam Sheridan . . . just as a matter of interest, tell me something: how long do you sleep each night?
The proverbial eight hours. Ask anyone and they say automatically ‘eight hours’. As a matter of fact you sleep about ten and a half hours, like the majority of people. I’ve timed you on a number of occasions. I myself sleep eleven. Yet thirty years ago people did indeed sleep eight hours, and a century before that they slept six or seven. In Vasari’s Lives one reads of Michelangelo sleeping for only four or five hours, painting all day at the age of eighty and then working through the night over his anatomy table with a candle strapped to his forehead. Now he’s regarded as a prodigy, but it was unremarkable then. How do you think the ancients, from Plato to Shakespeare, Aristotle to Aquinas, were able to cram so much work into their lives? Simply because they had an extra six or seven hours every day. The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard by J. G. Ballard I just asked him to do one simple thing consistently without fail.
At least three times per day at scheduled times, he had to ask himself the following question: Am I being productive or just active? Charney captured the essence of this with less-abstract wording: Am I inventing things to do to avoid the important? Learn to ask, “If this is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied with my day?” Compile your to-do list for tomorrow no later than this evening. I don’t recommend using Outlook or computerized to-do lists, because it is possible to add an infinite number of items. I use a standard piece of paper folded in half three times, which fits perfectly in the pocket and limits you to noting only a few items. There should never be more than two mission-critical items to complete each day. Never. It just isn’t necessary if they’re actually high-impact. If you are stuck trying to decide between multiple items that all seem crucial, as happens to all of us, look at each in turn and ask yourself, If this is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied with my day? The 4-Hour Workweek, Expanded and Updated: Expanded and Updated, With Over 100 New Pages of Cutting-Edge Content. by Timothy Ferriss The one thing that is utterly and completely under your control is your own physical condition—you can get in shape.
And there is another reason to stay fit: The physical is inextricably linked to the mental. The greater the fitness level, the higher the cognitive resilience to stress. In-shape athletes handle stress hormones better than out-of-shape people. The adrenaline dumps don’t affect their minds as badly. If you’re in shape, you get to hang on to those fine motor skills a little longer. The Disaster Diaries: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Apocalypse by Sam Sheridan Want to know more? Check out Indestructible Muscle here When you can take a profit, take it.
The Mental Aspect In the penny world you have to be prepared for anything. You cannot get upset about your losses or let your gains make you seem unstoppable. If you take a big loss, count your losses and walk away with no regrets. If your loss was due to a mistake, take that as a gain on experience. Do not go out and try to make your money back by picking a stock you have only heard will go up. Carry on your trading normally and always do your own due diligence. If you manage to lock in a huge gain, congratulations, but make sure you put some of that money away in your bank account, and of course keep some of it for investing more. Again, always carry out your normal routine. Do not let big gains or losses change it. The biggest aspect you have to have in trading penny stocks is DISCIPLINE. From this book I have made a set of rules that you should follow and always have in your head. I have my rules as my background over the top of the next big item I would like to purchase. 1. Always have discipline, keep to your rules and routine 2. No Pump and Dumps 3. Always do your own due diligence 4. Take losses with no regrets 5. Always sell half your shares at around a 100% gain 6. Only invest what you are willing to lose 7. Make money! The Penny Book by Jordan D. Shaw I am running around Las Vegas this week and saw these statues, and had to take a picture.
2012 was a good year, and I have a lot going on, so I really think I need to stay focused and continue to improve. The year being good made me think of this quote, which basically says it all, that it is just when all is good and everything is going the right way that you need to double up on the discipline and focus. If things keep going well, you will continue to improve and if they suddenly go differently than planned, you are already in motion and not just coasting. "After victory, tighten the straps on your helmet." -- Tokugawa Ieyasu The Third and Final "Great Unifier" of Japan, Founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate That Ruled Japan For 250 Years |
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