by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Celebration, Collaboration, Goals, Growth, Habits, Mindset, Planning, Tools, Wellbeing
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 59 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: The five pillars of ikigai
— From Awakening Your Ikigai: How the Japanese Wake Up to Joy and Purpose Every Day by Ken Mogi
Not too long ago we learned about the term kodawari. This is the Japanese word that refers to the combination of meticulous attention to detail in what we do plus the pride and joy that we feel towards what we do.
Kodawari is an integral part of ikigai (pronunciation), “a Japanese word for describing the pleasures and meanings of life. The word literally consists of iki (to live) and gai (reason).” Thus, it is loosely translated as your reason to live or the reason why you wake up every day.
Author and neuroscientist Ken Mogi, in his book Awakening Your Ikigai, says that ikigai “is used in various contexts, and can apply to small everyday things as well as to big goals and achievements. […] Most importantly, ikigai is possible without your necessarily being successful in your professional life… It is true that having ikigai can result in success, but success is not a requisite condition for having ikigai. It is open to every one of us.”
To this effect, Mogi introduces the five pillars of ikigai that he believes encompass this concept and help us make the best of every moment.
Pillar 1: Starting small → Focusing on the details.
Pillar 2: Releasing yourself → Accepting who you are.
Pillar 3: Harmony and sustainability → Relying on others.
Pillar 4: The joy of little things → Appreciating sensory pleasure.
Pillar 5: Being in the here and now → Finding your flow.
Mogi points out that the pillars reinforce each other and enable ikigai to flourish, yet they are not “mutually exclusive or exhaustive, nor do they have a particular order or hierarchy.”
Ikigai is closely related to our sense of happiness. And while Mogi says that there is no absolute formula for happiness, he mentions that accepting yourself is “a low-budget, maintenance-free formula for being happy. […] Accepting yourself is one of the easiest, simplest and most rewarding things you could do for yourself.”
However, Mogi recognizes that no man is an island and draws an analogy: “A man is like a forest, individual yet connected and dependent on others for growth.” And besides learning and getting support from others, one of the fastest ways to grow is by deriving lessons from failure. “After all, in the long process of life, you sometimes stumble and fall. Even at those times, you can have ikigai, even when you are on a losing streak.”
“Ikigai, in a nutshell, is literally from the cradle to the grave, no matter what happens in your life.”
Ikigai is about being mindful and present, enjoying the little things that make up the moment we are living in, and finding our flow as we get lost in the appreciation of the details. And when something goes wrong, “so long as you have ikigai, you can muddle through difficult periods of your life. You can always go back to your safe haven, from where you can start your life’s adventures all over again.”
ACTION
TODAY: Take a look at the five pillars of ikigai. How many do you apply to your life? How many would you benefit from applying? Create the intention of being mindful and aware of all 5 pillars and applying them at least once today.
FUTURE: Celebrate who you area and your ikigai! Also, make it a habit of practicing mindfulness and being aware of the five pillars of ikigai, so that you can apply them in as many instances of your life as possible.
Please share the concept of ikigai with someone today, you can do so via email, Facebook or Twitter, thank you!
by Helena Escalante | Goals, Growth, Habits, Mindset, Planning, Productivity, Time, Tools
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 44 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: 3 Considerations for deep work ritualizing
— From Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport
Cal Newport is a renowned focus guru and the author of the wonderful book Deep Work. He coined the term Deep Work and defines it as: “Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”
Newport says that creating a ritual is important to be able to work for long, uninterrupted—focused and very productive—stretches of time. He uses the examples of Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Robert Caro and naturalist Charles Darwin, both of whom “didn’t deploy rituals to be weird; they did so because success in their work depended on their ability to go deep, again and again—there’s no way to win a Pulitzer Prize or conceive a grand theory without pushing your brain to its limit.”
Newport continues by pointing out that, “there’s no one correct deep work ritual—the right fit depends on both the person and the type of project pursued.” And he offers the following three points to consider as you build the ritual that best works for you:
1. Where you’ll work and for how long. “Your ritual needs to specify a location for your deep work efforts.” This particular location can be as common as your office with the door shut or—even better and more effective—a specific place where you only go when you want to achieve depth, for example, a quiet library, or a conference room if you are running away from noisy colleagues on an open floor office. “Regardless of where you work, be sure to also give yourself a specific time frame to keep the session a discrete challenge and not an open-ended slog.”
2. How you’ll work once you start to work. “Your ritual needs rules and processes to keep your efforts structured.” For instance, you can set up a goal of the number of words produced per interval of time, and/or you can turn off distractions completely such as disconnecting from the Internet or putting your phone on do not disturb mode. This is important because, “without this structure, you’ll have to mentally litigate again and again what you should and should not be doing during these sessions and keep trying to assess whether you’re working sufficiently hard. These are unnecessary drains on your willpower reserves.”
3. How you’ll support your work. “Your ritual needs to ensure your brain gets the support it needs to keep operating at a high level of depth. For example, the ritual might specify that you start with a cup of good coffee, or make sure you have access to enough food of the right type to maintain energy, or integrate light exercise such as walking to help keep the mind clear.” Make sure you have all you need at your disposal, much as the chefs do with their mise-en-place way of working and overall philosophy. (If you have 7 minutes, read or listen to this NPR story about what we can learn from the way chefs organize.)
“To maximize your success, you need to support your efforts to go deep. At the same time, this support needs to be systematized so that you don’t waste mental energy figuring out what you need in the moment.” – Cal Newport
These three points to consider as you build your ritual are mere starting points. Newport says that crafting that ritual that will best serve you will take experimentation, so be willing to tweak and iterate until you find what works best for you. It’ll be worth it!
ACTION
TODAY: Carve out a slice of your day to do some deep work and, in the beginning, do some thinking and preparing, according to what you know you will need to succeed in your session. Make a list so that you can replicate it next time you need to go deep.
FUTURE: Tweak, tweak, and tweak again until you figure out a ritual that feels right for you. Keep on doing your ritual every time you intend to do deep work. In the words of Newport: “To work deeply is a big deal and should not be an activity undertaken lightly. Surrounding such efforts with a [ritual] accepts this reality—providing your mind with the structure and commitment it needs to slip into the state of focus where you can begin to create things that matter.”
Please share this post with someone who’s looking at doing deep work! Email, Facebook, Twitter.
by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Goals, Growth, Habits, Mindset, Planning, Tools
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 39 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: The AEIOU method
— From Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans.
Are you crystal clear on what you want? Often times, we are not. Sometimes we definitely know what we don’t want, but we have a hard time articulating what we do want.
How should we go about this?
Enter life designers Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, who have put together one of the most successful courses at Stanford University that teaches “how to use design to figure out what you want to do when you grow up.” Since they had lots of requests from people not enrolled at Stanford to take their course, they decided to write a book—Designing Your Life—to be able to bring this knowledge to everyone.
The book helps reframe some of our most common dysfunctional beliefs about life, and it’s full of exercises to give us the tools to design our life at whatever stage we may be. One of those exercises is called the AEIOU method. It helps us make detailed and accurate observations on when and where we are engaged and energized, and it helps us reflect upon that.
The method is quite simple, but it has profound results. In a particular situation, write down the answers to these questions:
A = Activities. “What were you actually doing? Was this a structured or an unstructured activity? Did you have a specific role to play [e.g.] (team leader) or were you just a participant [e.g.] (at the meeting)?”
E = Environments. “Our environment has a profound effect on our emotional state. You feel one way at a football stadium, another in a cathedral. Notice where you were when you were involved in the activity. What kind of a place was it, and how did it make you feel?”
I = Interactions. “What were you interacting with—people or machines? Was it a new kind of interaction or one you are familiar with? Was it formal or informal?”
O = Objects. “Were you interacting with any objects or devices—iPads or smartphones, hockey sticks or sailboats? What were the objects that created or supported your feeling engaged?”
U = Users. “Who else was there, and what role did they play in making it either a positive or a negative experience?”
The authors recommend using AEIOU to “zoom in effectively and discover specifically what it is that is or isn’t working for you.” Here’s an example from the book to further clarify how this method works:
Lydia is a contract writer. She works to help experts document their procedures in manuals. And she’d come to conclude that she hated working with people—mostly because of how awful she felt after going to meetings, and how great she felt when she got to write all day. She was wondering how she could make a living without ever going to a meeting again… When she zoomed in, she observed that she actually liked people fine—when she got to meet with only one or two of them and either work hard on the writing or do rapid brainstorming on new project ideas (activity). She hated meetings about planning, schedules, and business strategy and any meeting with more than six people in it; she just couldn’t track all the different points of view (environment). She realized that she was just an intense and focused worker, and that her intensity could be either nurtured or frustrated by other people (users), depending on the form of collaboration (interactions).
As you can see, this exercise brings much clarity. The important thing, the authors say, is to “record whatever comes up and not to judge yourself—there are no right or wrong feelings about your experience.” This info will be very helpful in figuring out what you do want!
ACTION
TODAY: Is there any area of your life (health, work, play, love) where a bit of clarity as to what you want could come in handy? Set aside some time to start this exercise today.
FUTURE: Continue with this exercise for as long as you think it’s necessary to zoom in and get the clarity you need. Remember not to judge yourself, simply observe and you will start seeing some patterns emerge. These patterns will help you figure out what you want. Do this exercise every time you feel you need to discover what is working and what is not.
Know someone who could get some clarity? Please share this post with that person via email, Facebook or Twitter, thank you!
by Helena Escalante | Creativity, Goals, Growth, Mindset, Opportunity, Planning, Tools
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 20 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: The Law of Creativity
— From The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success by Brian Tracy.
The Law of Creativity states that “Every advance in human life begins with an idea in the mind of a single person.”
“Ideas are the key to the future,” says author Brian Tracy in The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success. “It is the ideas you generate, more than anything else, that will enable you to solve your problems, overcome your obstacles, and achieve your goals.”
Take a look around you: your clothing, the furniture, the appliances, the products and services that you use… every single one of those things was an idea in somebody’s mind before becoming a reality. And the beauty of this law is that it doesn’t stop there. Tracy adds four corollaries to this Law that make it so much better, stronger, and much more powerful:
1st corollary: Your ability to generate constructive ideas is, to all intents and purposes, unlimited. Therefore your potential is unlimited as well. Tracy explains this beautifully: “Ideas are a mode of transportation, a vehicle that you can use to take yourself from wherever you are to wherever you want to go. Your job is to generate as many ideas as possible, evaluate them carefully against your current goals, and then take action on them.” Two things to remember here: (1) there is no such thing as a shortage of ideas and, (2) as Seth Godin says, “you can’t have good ideas unless you’re willing to generate a lot of bad ones.”
2nd corollary: Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve. –Napoleon Hill. “Your mind is designed in such a way that you cannot have an idea on the one hand without also having the ability to bring that idea into reality on the other. […] The only question you have to answer is, how badly do you want it?”
3rd corollary: Imagination rules the world. – Napoleon Bonaparte. “Our entire man-made world is the result of thought brought into reality.” As Bill Burnett and Dave Evans so aptly put it in their book Designing Your Life, “Everything that surrounds us was designed by someone. And every design started with a problem.” And before there was design, there was the idea of that design in the person’s mind; it was the idea of how to solve a problem or how to make something better. A lot of things come to fruition because someone wants to scratch his/her own itch and the solution is successful enough to be shared.
4th corollary: Imagination is more important than facts. – Albert Einstein. “An idea or an insight at a critical moment can be the turning point in your life. All great changes in human life and destiny begin with an idea that enables you to see things differently and to take an action that you would not have taken in the absence of that idea.”
ACTION
TODAY: Tracy suggests practicing the “Mindstorming” method of idea generation for any and all problems. Here’s how it works:
- At the top of a sheet of paper, write down any goal or problem you have in the form of a question. Then, write 20 answers to the question. Your answers must be in the present tense as if you are doing them already.
- Pick at least one idea or answer from your list of 20, and take action on it immediately. This will ensure the creativity and ideas keep flowing all day long and, the more ideas have, the greater the opportunity to find the one(s) that work best to solve your problem or attain your goal.
FUTURE: “Do this mindstorming exercise every day for a week, first thing in the morning, for whatever question or goal is most important to you at the moment,” says Tracy. “You will be amazed at the quantity and quality of ideas that spring from your imagination when you ask yourself the right questions and then write down the answers.”
Know someone who needs to let his/her ideas lose? Please share this post via email, Facebook or Twitter, thanks!
by Helena Escalante | Goals, Growth, Mindset, Opportunity, Resources, Tools, Wellbeing
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 59 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: How to get rid of unfounded fears
— From The Success Principles™: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be by Jack Canfield
For our human ancestors millions of years ago, fear was a helpful sign that alerted them to possible danger. A saber-tooth tiger was indeed a life or death situation back then. Nowadays, thankfully, our situations are rarely life-threatening.
While fear is a valid and helpful response when it’s real, “[We’ve] evolved to the stage where almost all our fears are now self-created,” says Jack Canfield in The Success Principles. Thus, as it pertains to unfounded fears, Canfield points out that, “We frighten ourselves by fantasizing negative outcomes to any activity we might pursue. Luckily, because we are the ones doing the fantasizing, we are also the ones that can stop the fear by facing the actual facts, rather than giving into our imaginations. We can choose to be sensible.”
This is welcome news, especially once we learn the acronym for fear that psychologists like to use:
F = Fantasized
E = Experiences
A = Appearing
R = Real
Canfield offers a simple—yet very effective—method to get rid of our unfounded fears. It starts with better understanding how we bring those fears into our lives.
Step 1 is to make a list of the things you are afraid to do. “This is not a list of things you are afraid of, such as being afraid of spiders, but things you’re afraid to do, such as being afraid to pick up a spider.” Canfield gives some examples so that you can see what this looks like in different areas:
I am afraid to:
- Ask my boss for a raise
- Ask Sally for a date
- Go skydiving
- Leave my kids home alone with a sitter
- Leave this job that I hate
- Ask my friends to look at my new business opportunity
- Delegate any part of my job to others
Step 2 is to restate each fear using the following sentence:
I want to ________________, and I scare myself by imagining ________________.
Canfield points out that the key words are I scare myself by imagining. And he offers the following examples, based on the previous list, so that we can see how it is, indeed, that we are the ones that create our fears.
- I want to ask my boss for a raise, and I scare myself by imagining he would say no and be angry with me for asking.
- I want to ask Sally for a date, and I scare myself by imagining that she would say no and I would feel embarrassed.
- I want to leave this job I hate in order to pursue my dream, and I scare myself by imagining I would go bankrupt and lose my house.
- I want to and ask my friends to look at my new network marketing business opportunity, I scare myself by imagining they will think I am only interested in making money off them.
- I want to delegate parts of my work to others, and I scare myself by imagining that they won’t do it as well as I would.
Step 3 is to “actually disappear your fear [by asking] yourself what you’re imagining that is scary to you and then [replacing] that image with its positive opposite.” So, taking an example from the above list:
I want to ask my boss for a raise, and I scare myself by imagining he would say no and be angry with me for asking, would be replaced with the image of you talking to your boss, who is receptive to your idea, and then seeing yourself in that new position creating value for your company. This doesn’t mean that you will indeed get the raise, but you will lose the fear of asking for it. And by asking for it, you then have a chance of getting your raise, vs. not getting it by not even asking for it. Remember the quote from Wayne Gretzky:
“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
As you can see, the minute we realize that we are the ones creating our fears, they become much smaller and even disappear by knowing that we are the ones that generate those scary thoughts. Once we replace those thoughts with a positive opposite, we strengthen our desire to do what once scared us and we can move forward with our goals.
ACTION
TODAY: Make the list of things you’re afraid to do and then restate it with I scare myself by imagining. Visualize the positive opposite and say goodbye to your unfounded fears as you open up the opportunity to move closer to your goals.
FUTURE: Make it a habit of getting rid of your unfounded fears this way. Every time you realize you are afraid of something and it doesn’t make sense, use this method. It works very well!
Know someone who could benefit from getting rid of unfounded fears? Please share this post via email, Facebook or Twitter, thanks!
by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Goals, Growth, Habits, Planning, Tools
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 45 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: 25 ways to complete your incompletes
— From The Success Principles™: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be by Jack Canfield
“Are there areas in your life where you’ve left uncompleted projects or failed to get closure with people? When you don’t complete the past, you can’t be free to fully embrace the future,” says Jack Canfield in The Success Principles. By devoting attention to these incompletes and unfinished tasks or projects, you are taking energy and focus away from the things you should be doing—or the things you want to do. Canfield says that we only have so many “attention units” and we should focus those units “to completing present tasks and bringing new opportunities and abundance into [our] life.”
Canfield suggests continually asking, “What does it take to actually get this task completed?” At that point you can move forward with the next steps that will lead you to completion: filing the completed paperwork, mailing in the forms, etc. “The truth is that 20 things completed have more power than 50 things half completed. One finished book, for instance, that can go out and influence the world is better than 13 books you’re in the process of writing.”
So, what to do about this?
In addition to the 4 Ds—Do it, Delegate it, Delay it or Dump it—Canfield suggests scheduling a completion weekend and devoting 2 full days to completing as many things as possible. He provides the following list of 25 categories as a starting point and suggests you add your particular items. He also recommends selecting just four items and completing them, then moving on to another four, and so on. “At a minimum,” says Canfield, “I encourage you to clean up one major incomplete every 3 months.”
Here’s the initial list for you, it contains both personal and professional suggestions. Happy completing!
1. Former business activities that need completion.
2. Promises not kept, not acknowledged, or not renegotiated.
3. Unpaid debts or financial commitments (money owed to others or to you).
4. Closets overflowing with clothing never worn.
5. A disorganized garage crowded with old discards.
6. Haphazard or disorganized tax records.
7. Checkbook not balanced or accounts that should be closed.
8. “Junk drawers” full of unusable items.
9. Missing or broken tools.
10. An attic filled with unused items.
11. A car trunk or backseat full of trash.
12. Incomplete car maintenance.
13. A disorganized basement filled with discarded items.
14. Credenza packed with unfiled or incomplete projects.
15. Filing left undone.
16. Computer files not backed up or data needing to be converted for storage.
17. Desk surface cluttered or disorganized.
18. Family pictures never put into an album.
19. Mending, ironing or other piles of items to repair or discard.
20. Deferred household maintenance.
21. Professional relationships with unstated requests, resentments, or appreciations.
22. People you need to forgive.
23. Time not spent with people you’ve been meaning to spend time with.
24. Incomplete projects or projects delivered without closure or feedback.
25. Acknowledgments that need to be given or asked for.
ACTION
TODAY: Check the list and add your own incompletes that come to mind. Determine if there is any task that you can complete today. If so, get it done — woohoo!
FUTURE: Pick a date in your calendar and schedule your first completion weekend. Make it a habit to schedule them at least once a quarter.
Know someone who could benefit from completing some incompletes? Please share this post via email, Facebook or Twitter, thanks!
