Fear is recorded at the cellular level. It is a memory of every seemingly life-threatening experience they ever had. It was born of a time of absolute dependency and helplessness. It originated in not having their needs met in a timely, judicious manner. It was fostered by fearful systems that discouraged risk and rewarded conservatism. It was heightened by the reality that life is messy and chaotic and any kind of change promises a journey into the unknown. I call this kind of fear, Memory Fear. Because of the memory fear created in childhood, Nice Guys still approach the world as if it is dangerous and overpowering. To cope with these realities, Nice Guys typically hunker down and play it safe. As a consequence of playing it safe, Nice Guys experience a lot of needless suffering. Suffering because they avoid new situations. Suffering because they stay with the familiar. Suffering because they procrastinate, avoid, and fail to finish what they start. Suffering because they make a bad situation worse by doing more of what has never worked in the past. Suffering because they expend so much energy trying to control the uncontrollable. No matter what happened, he would handle it. The following week, Nolan proudly announced that he had contacted an attorney. Even though he felt tremendous fear and anxiety, he found courage in repeating his new found mantra: "I can handle it." Facing present day fears is the only way to overcome memory fear. Every time the Nice Guy confronts a fear, he unconsciously creates a belief that he can handle whatever it is he is afraid of. This challenges his memory fear. Challenging this memory fear makes the things outside of him seem less threatening. As these things seem less frightening, he feels more confident in confronting them. The more this confidence grows, the less threatening life seems. List one fear that has been controlling your life. Once you decide to confront the fear, begin repeating to yourself, "I can handle it. No matter what happens, I will handle it." Keep repeating this mantra until you take action and stop feeling fear. No More Mr Nice Guy A paradigm is the road map we use to navigate life's journey. Everyone uses these road maps and everyone assumes the map they are using is up-to-date and accurate. Paradigms often operate at an unconscious level, yet they determine to a large degree our attitudes and behaviors. They serve as a filter through which we process life experiences. Data that does not fit our paradigm is screened out, never reaching our conscious mind. Information that does fit our paradigm is magnified by the process, and adds even greater support for that particular way of believing. Paradigms, like road maps, can be great tools for speeding us along on our journey. Unfortunately, if they are outdated or inaccurate, they can send us in the wrong direction or fruitlessly driving around the same old neighborhood. When this happens we often keep trying harder to find our desired destination while feeling more and more frustrated. Even though an individual following an inaccurate or outdated paradigm may think his behavior makes perfect sense, those around him may wonder what he could possibly be thinking to make him act the way he does. Most paradigms are developed when we are young, naïve, and relatively powerless. They are often based on the inaccurate interpretations of childhood experiences. Since they are often unconscious, they are rarely evaluated or updated. Perhaps most significantly, they are assumed to be 100 percent accurate — even when they are not. Now that you are older, you can create and edit your own paradigms to change yourself and your life. No More Mr Nice Guy “What recommendation can you give to a person who wants to make his or her life more exciting?”11/2/2014 “What recommendation can you give to a person who wants to make his or her life more exciting?” First, live your life as an adventure story. You are both a writer and a main character of the book describing the story of your life, and if the plot is interesting you will be excited to wake up every morning and take part in adventures. Secondly, live your life as a competition. Raise your standards and aim for continual progress in important areas of your life. No matter in which area of life you want to become better, today you compete with yesterday’s you and tomorrow you will compete with today’s you. Finally, live your life as an exploration. Explore the world by doing what you have never done before, by visiting places you have never been to before, by meeting people you haven’t known before. The biggest breakthroughs in life happen when you expand your comfort zone and explore the world beyond the border of what you are familiar with. Often people are afraid of going outside of their comfort zone, however in 99% of cases what they fear isn’t dangerous at all. Ask yourself: “What do I fear to do, but will bring me joy if I do it?” Live your life as an exploration, expand your comfort zone, experiment and you will have an exciting life. Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. – George Bernard Shaw The only thing you can control is your actions. No matter how bad the circumstances are it is always possible to get what you want; however, to get it you need to believe in the statement: “I am 100% responsible for everything that happens in my life. My actions, not the circumstances, create my future.” The biggest reason why people fail is not their lack of abilities but their lack of belief in their abilities. No matter what you believe in, your brain will look for confirmations that you are right and will eventually find them. As Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right.” The magical invocation that successful people use to achieve their goals is “I can.” On the way to your goal tell yourself “I can” every day, and if anybody ever says “You can’t” say “I can.” You can achieve literally whatever you want if you have a big enough desire and belief that you can. There is a significant difference between, “I wish to achieve my goal” and “I am committed to achieve my goal.” If you wish to achieve your goal it means, “I will accept it if it falls into my lap.” You will do what is easy and convenient on the way to the goal, but once faced with difficulties you will find excuses and give up. However, if you decide to be committed, it means, “I will achieve my goal no matter what. Failure is not an option.” Commitment is when you have burned the ships and there is no room for a backup in your mind. Having a plan B is dangerous, because if you have it you won’t do 100% of what you can to implement your plan A. The secret of incredible commitment is simple: “Determine which dream could have the biggest positive impact on your happiness. Make a promise to yourself to fulfill this dream no matter how difficult it is.” 100 dreams exercise Write down all your dreams Your task is to write down a minimum of 100 desires that you would ask a genie to fulfill if you had a magic lamp. This could be literally anything: small desires, big desires, physical possessions, relationships, achievements or experiences. Imagine what your perfect life would look like and think about which desires would bring you from where you are to the life in your imagination. Spend at least 1 hour thinking about what you would want if there were no limitations and you could get and achieve anything. Don’t worry about making this list perfect, as you will be able to change or update it in the future. The most important thing in this exercise is the quantity of desires, which should be not less than 100. You will probably write the first 20 desires really quickly because they are at the top of your mind. Once you exhaust desires you have thought about before, your subconscious will begin really thinking. Desires that are between numbers 60 and 100 are usually the most original desires that you haven’t considered before. According to research done by Dominican University, people who just think about their goals achieve them with 43% probability. People who not only think about their goals but also write down their goals achieve them with 61% probability. Finally, people who write down their goals, create action plans and check progress weekly increase their chances for success to 76%. Isn’t that impressive that just by thinking about what you want you can achieve your goal with 43% probability and writing down your goal increases this probability by another 20%? The Achievement Factory: How to Fulfill Your Dreams and Make Life an Adventure You need to find the means to put a smile on your face during challenging training and events.9/27/2014
I recommend that you find the means to put a smile on your face during challenging training and events. Although this may be difficult at first, it will get easier with time and practice. By doing this you are not just pretending to be positive but are actually forcing yourself into a happy place. Studies have shown that a smile brings the same level of stimulation as eating a bunch of chocolate bars (so if you are using that tactic to brighten your day, then smiling instead will have the added benefit of weight loss!). Smiling releases endorphins, serotonin, and natural painkillers. In fact, people with serious depression have been completely cured with daily twenty-minute sessions during which the patient just sits and smiles. Intriguingly, recent research on happiness by David Lykken and Auke Tellegen, from the University of Washington, suggests that over half of what makes a person happy is within our sphere of influence to change. They cite faith, family, community and work as places to find that happiness. I don’t know for sure if being happy makes one smile more or if smiling more makes one happy, but it would be hard to dispute that the two are linked. Making a habit of smiling is a good idea because it can: Induce the physiology of happiness Lower blood pressure Boost immunity Reduce stress Cure depression Create a positive feedback loop as you are more appealing to others when you smile It is amazing how something as simple as smiling can have such a profound effect. Unbeatable Mind: Forge Resiliency and Mental Toughness to Succeed at an Elite Level Join our mailing list and we will send you one to two emails a week for 12 weeks teaching you the basic body weight exercises, nutrition guidelines, and mindset tools you need to be Indestructible. I recommend you get serious about team training. When I was in the SEALs, the units that took training more seriously than others far outperformed. Team training should not be seen as a random occurrence or a nuisance by the leadership. Here are ten guidelines for team training to set the stage for success:
Unbeatable Mind: Forge Resiliency and Mental Toughness to Succeed at an Elite Level Join our mailing list and we will send you one to two emails a week for 12 weeks teaching you the basic body weight exercises, nutrition guidelines, and mindset tools you need to be Indestructible. Montaigne’s library was not just a repository or a work space. It was a chamber of marvels.9/14/2014
Montaigne’s library was not just a repository or a work space. It was a chamber of marvels, and sounds like a sixteenth-century version of Sigmund Freud’s last home in London’s Hampstead: a treasure-house stuffed with books, papers, statuettes, pictures, vases, amulets, and ethnographic curiosities, designed to stimulate both imagination and intellect. The library also marked Montaigne out as a man of fashion. The trend for such retreats had been spreading slowly through France, having begun in Italy in the previous century. Well-off men filled chambers with books and reading-stands, then used them as a place to escape to on the pretext of having to work. Montaigne took the escape factor further by removing his library from the house altogether. It was both a vantage point and a cave, or, to use a phrase he himself liked, an arrière-boutique: a “room behind the shop.” “Sorry the man, to my mind, who has not in his own home a place to be all by himself, to pay his court privately to himself, to hide!” “How does one achieve peace of mind?” On the latter point, Plutarch’s advice was the same as Seneca’s: focus on what is present in front of you, and pay full attention to it. Montaigne used his essays to learn. Often, books need not be used at all. One learns dancing by dancing; one learns to play the lute by playing the lute. The same is true of thinking, and indeed of living. Every experience can be a learning opportunity: “a page’s prank, a servant’s blunder, a remark at table.” The child should learn to question everything: to “pass everything through a sieve and lodge nothing in his head on mere authority and trust.” Traveling is useful; so is socializing, which teaches the child to be open to others and to adapt to anyone he finds around him. Eccentricities should be ironed out early, because they make it difficult to get on with others. “I have seen men flee from the smell of apples more than from harquebus fire, others take fright at a mouse, others throw up at the sight of cream, and others at the plumping of a feather bed.” All this stands in the way of good relationships and of good living. It can be avoided, for young human beings are malleable. How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer Join our mailing list and we will send you one to two emails a week for 12 weeks teaching you the basic body weight exercises, nutrition guidelines, and mindset tools you need to be Indestructible. Researchers have found that memory follows a decay curve: new concepts need to be reinforced regularly, but the longer you’ve known a concept, the less regularly you need to review it to maintain accurate recall. Spaced repetition and reinforcement is a memorization technique that helps you systematically review important concepts and information on a regular basis. Ideas that are difficult to remember are reviewed often, while easier and older concepts are reviewed less often. Flash card software programs like Anki,1 SuperMemo,2 and Smartr3 make spaced repetition and reinforcement very simple. Spaced repetition systems rely on a “flash card” model of review, and you have to create the flash cards yourself. By creating flash cards as you’re deconstructing the skill, you’re killing two birds with one stone. Once you’ve created your flash cards, it only takes a few minutes each day to review them. By systematizing the review process and tracking recall, these systems can help you learn new ideas, techniques, and processes in record time. If you review the decks consistently, you’ll memorize necessary concepts and ideas extremely quickly. Create scaffolds and checklists. Many skills involve some sort of routine: setting up, preparing, maintaining, putting away, et cetera. Creating a simple system is the best way to ensure these important elements happen with as little additional effort as possible. Checklists are handy for remembering things that must be done every time you practice. They’re a way to systematize the process, which frees your attention to focus on more important matters. Scaffolds are structures that ensure you approach the skill the same way every time. Think of the basketball player who establishes a pre–free throw routine. Wipe hands on pants, loosen the shoulders, catch the ball from the ref, bounce three times, pause for three seconds, and shoot. That’s a scaffold. The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything . . . Fast! Join our mailing list and we will send you one to two emails a week for 12 weeks teaching you the basic body weight exercises, nutrition guidelines, and mindset tools you need to be Indestructible. Your Four Dominant Emotions Today’s first assignment: Grab your journal, sit quietly, and reflect upon which four dominant emotions drive your behavior. Do you operate out of fear? Anger? Jealousy? Love? Joy? Courage? Be brutally honest with yourself. No one’s watching. Write your four down. It’s very important. The Kokoro quitter operated out of anger and fear of failure. They defeated him. Got your four down? Good. Now, answer the following questions: 1. What do these emotions keep me from creating in my life? 2. What beliefs create these four emotions? 3. What would I be like, and what would my life be like, if I could control these emotions? Now we’re getting somewhere. Next I want you to close your eyes, and envision four new ideal emotions that you strongly desire. Replace fear with courage, anger with joy, jealousy with acceptance, pessimism with trust. Whatever four emotions you originally chose to describe yourself, choose more positive emotions now. When you’ve written down your four, answer these questions: 1. What benefit would it bring me and others if I acted with these ideal emotions? 2. What beliefs do I need to change, and what new beliefs do I need to develop, to own these ideal emotions? 3. What would I be like and what would my life be like, if I replaced my original four dominant emotions with these four ideal emotions? Reflect on your answers daily for the next 3 weeks. After 21 days your new beliefs and emotions will begin to form habits, which will define your new character. 8 Weeks to SEALFIT: A Navy SEAL's Guide to Unconventional Training for Physical and Mental Toughness Join our mailing list and we will send you one to two emails a week for 12 weeks teaching you the basic body weight exercises, nutrition guidelines, and mindset tools you need to be Indestructible. We do not like what is unfamiliar or unknown. To compensate for this, we assert ourselves with opinions and ideas that make us seem strong and certain. Many of these opinions do not come from our own deep reflection, but are instead based on what other people think. Furthermore, once we hold these ideas, to admit they are wrong is to wound our ego and vanity. Truly creative people in all fields can temporarily suspend their ego and simply experience what they are seeing, without the need to assert a judgment, for as long as possible. This ability to endure and even embrace mysteries and uncertainties is what Keats called negative capability. All Masters possess this Negative Capability, and it is the source of their creative power. This quality allows them to entertain a broader range of ideas and experiment with them, which in turn makes their work richer and more inventive. Negative Capability will be the single most important factor in your success as a creative thinker. In the sciences, you will tend to entertain ideas that fit your own preconceptions and that you want to believe in. This unconsciously colors your choices of how to verify these ideas, and is known as confirmation bias. With this type of bias, you will find the experiments and data that confirm what you have already come to believe in. The uncertainty of not knowing the answers beforehand is too much for most scientists. In the arts and letters, your thoughts will congeal around political dogma or predigested ways of looking at the world, and what you will often end up expressing is an opinion rather than a truthful observation about reality. To put Negative Capability into practice, you must develop the habit of suspending the need to judge everything that crosses your path. You consider and even momentarily entertain viewpoints opposite to your own, seeing how they feel. You observe a person or event for a length of time, deliberately holding yourself back from forming an opinion. You seek out what is unfamiliar—for instance, reading books from unfamiliar writers in unrelated fields or from different schools of thought. You do anything to break up your normal train of thinking and your sense that you already know the truth. In order to produce work of any sort we must create limits on what we’ll consider; we must organize our thoughts into relatively cohesive patterns, and eventually, come up with conclusions. In the end, we must make certain judgments. Negative Capability is a tool we use in the process to open the mind up temporarily to more possibilities. Once this way of thinking leads to a creative avenue of thought, we can give our ideas a clearer shape and gently let it go, returning to this attitude whenever we feel stale or blocked. The brain is constantly searching for similarities, differences, and relationships between what it processes. Your task is to feed this natural inclination, to create the optimal conditions for it to make new and original associations between ideas and experiences. And one of the best ways to accomplish this is by letting go of conscious control and allowing chance to enter into the process. Mastery Join our mailing list and we will send you one to two emails a week for 12 weeks teaching you the basic body weight exercises, nutrition guidelines, and mindset tools you need to be Indestructible. Depending on where and how we are raised, we learn different ideas about what we need to be happy. These ideas often show up as either our fantasies or our beliefs about what we should be doing with our life. The most common beliefs are that marriage, love, having children, success, wealth, major achievements, fulfilling potential, making history, fame, power, respect, or travelling the world will make us happy. As soon as we believe that something is the key to our happiness, and we don’t have it, we have no choice but to think, “My circumstances aren’t good enough right now to be happy”, or “I need my circumstances to change for me to be happy”. These thoughts make us feel as if something is missing from our lives, and as though we are somehow lacking or incomplete. We then innocently blame our unhappiness on our seemingly insufficient circumstances instead of recognizing that it’s only our thoughts about our circumstances that have created these feelings. We first need to understand what our identity is. Our identity, or self-image, is our answer to the questions, “Who am I?”, or “How would I describe myself?” Part of our answers to these questions includes the facts of our age, gender, physical measurements, job title, education, living situation, marital status, and so on. However, the facts themselves aren’t what create our identity, emotions, or self-confidence. The basis for our self-image, and our ensuing happiness or unhappiness, is our opinion of ourselves (our thoughts about ourselves). For example, even if two people are the same age and have the same weight, education, and jobs, one person could be proud of himself, while the other person could be ashamed to have these very same characteristics. Basically, our self-image is predominantly made up of our opinions of all the facts, as well as our opinions of completely subjective topics such as our personality and whether we are attractive. Put simply, our identity is made up of thoughts (opinions). Psychological thoughts are the ones that decide whether something is “good” or “bad”, and these are the thoughts that create our suffering. For simplicity, our psychological thoughts are nearly all of our thoughts that have opposites. This is because if a thought has an opposite, then we will almost certainly consider one side to be “good” and its opposite to be “bad”. For example, if we think it is “good” to be rich, funny, skinny, and intelligent, then we would consider it “bad” to be poor, boring, overweight, and unintelligent. Our minds tend to be filled with the same psychological thoughts repeating themselves over and over again. Functional thoughts are mostly answers to the question “How do I do that?” Functional thoughts determine how to build something, how to get somewhere, or how to solve a particular problem at work. Purely functional thoughts don’t create suffering, only psychological thoughts do. However, most of the time, our functional thoughts are tainted by psychological thoughts. In any moment when we have no psychological thoughts, or we don’t believe our psychological thoughts, what remains is the experience of the present moment. When we don’t have or believe the thoughts that create our unwanted emotions, none of these emotions are experienced, and we get to experience the present moment. The ability to experience the awe of something simple arises in the moments when we have silence or space between our thoughts. It is like seeing something for the first time. This feeling is similar to the sense of wonder and innocent curiosity that young children have. A Guide to The Present Moment Join our mailing list and we will send you one to two emails a week for 12 weeks teaching you the basic body weight exercises, nutrition guidelines, and mindset tools you need to be Indestructible. |
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