by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Creativity, Growth, Mindset, Opportunity, Tools
Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 27 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: A ticket to anywhere
— From A Year Without Fear: 365 Days of Magnificence: 5-Minute Mind-Set Shifts by Tama Kieves
Today’s idea expands on yesterday’s AEIOU method (to bring clarity and figure out what you want when you don’t know). However, instead of sharing a methodology, this time my intention is to share a mind-shift.
When we don’t know what we want, we focus on the lack. We beat ourselves up because we think we are supposed to know what we want, or because we should have figured it out by now, or because _______ (fill in the blank with what you tell yourself).
In A Year Without Fear, Tama Kieves says, “When you don’t have a definition or plan, this isn’t a lack. It’s an opening. You don’t have a label, but you do have a ticket. You have a ticket to go anywhere you want to go. You have a blank canvas. You can say yes to any desire, sunbeam, divine invitation that comes your way. Something will come. You are in the exact right place where magic can find you.”
So there you have it. Don’t focus on the lack. Focus on your ticket to anywhere: a wonderful opportunity ahead that you can turn into whatever you want. Give yourself permission to explore various paths to determine which one you fully want to go through.
Happy exploring!
ACTION
TODAY: Is there any area in your life where you’d like to give yourself a ticket to anywhere? Do so! Start exploring and enjoy the ride.
FUTURE: Whenever you are stuck not knowing what you want, remember that there is an opening right there for you. Give yourself a ticket and go explore.
Give someone a ticket to anywhere by sharing this post! 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 | Celebration, Collaboration, Creativity, Mindset, Time, Tools, Wellbeing
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 3 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Adopt an afternoon lift
— From: The Best Team Wins: The New Science of High Performance by Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton
Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton, in their book The Best Team Wins, provide a toolkit of 101 ideas to inspire teams. The ideas are short and sweet, some are powerful, some are practical, and some others are plain fun!
I will showcase in here, every so often, those ideas that I like the most. I’ll do this one at a time to keep up with the promise of every post readable in less than 5 minutes. (Here’s a previous post from this book too.)
The idea that I want to highlight today is the one Gostick and Elton call, “Adopt an afternoon lift.” It’s an example of teambuilding they saw at Microsoft. I like it because it doesn’t matter whether you work at a Fortune 500 or as a solopreneur, you can definitely apply it.
“Each day, one person signed up to blast a song across the work area at three o’clock. Everyone was dragging by that point and needed a lift. Some people got up and danced, and everyone clapped when the song was done. Classics Mustang Sally, Born to Be Wild, and Living on a Prayer were a few popular choices.”
The authors mention that a strong sense of camaraderie within the team needs to be present before this can happen. “It was clear to us that solid relationships were in place before this kind of fun could be accepted an authentic.” And I would add that doing this exercise on a daily basis likely continued to foster the strength of those existing bonds throughout the team.
This idea, however, is not exclusive to large corporations. I’ve started to do it on a daily basis when I need an afternoon pickup, and it works out well. Whether you have a team and blast the song out loud, or you just get up and walk briskly (dance?) with your headphones on while the song lasts, it’s a perfect energy and mood lift for the afternoon slump.
ACTION
TODAY: Gostick and Elton suggest “Figure out a daily ritual that [you or] your team can adopt to restore energy levels later in the day.”
FUTURE: Adopt that afternoon pick-me-up ritual for a while to see how it goes. Don’t be afraid to modify it to suit your needs. It’s a much welcome break and it’s a fun way to restore your energy when you most need it.
Know someone who needs an afternoon lift? 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!
