Like the Law of Attraction, what we get from our relationships with others is what we focus on. This is a lesson I have learned this week from Complaint Free Relationships: How to Positively Transform Your Personal, Work, and Love Relationships by Will Bowen.

What does that mean exactly?

Bowen explains ‘focus’ as the type of questions you ask yourself.

In our lives we are constantly asking questions in our head and then answering them; this is our judging process and is necessary for survival. For example, we need to be able to identify threats to our safety and protect ourselves accordingly, so asking “is now a safe time to cross the road?” might be a good idea if you are a pedestrian at a busy intersection. But the questions that we ask ourselves about people and experiences that do not pose a safety concern have the ability to colour the experiences that we have in our day-to-day lives.

If you were focusing on things that you like about other people, you would consciously or unconsciously ask and answer questions like “What am I enjoying about this relationship?”, “What do I like about this person?” or “What can I do to make this person happy?”

If you were focusing on things that you do not like about other people, you would consciously or unconsciously ask and answer questions like “What is bothering me about this relationship?”, “What is annoying me about this person?”, “What do I wish I could change about this person?” or “Why is this person not making me happy?”

If you are always asking the latter kinds of questions, then answers will come and those answers will bother you for as long as you continue to answer the same questions. Some people will move from partner to partner, never staying with anyone for very long, because they ask the same negative questions about every person they meet and keep receiving answers. Other people will stay in a relationship but won’t enjoy it very much because of the fact that they are always focusing on the negatives. The fact of the matter is, if you are asking questions like “What is annoying me about this person?” and the answers you get make you feel annoyed, then don’t expect that changing the other person will make any difference to your relationship. If you are focusing on what is annoying then you will find something to be annoyed about.

Bowen explains that one of the keys to enjoying happy relationships is to change what you focus on and start to ask yourself more positive questions. At first this may be very difficult if focusing on the negatives has formed a habit, but if you commit to changing this aspect of yourself it will show up in the positive relationships that you will attract to yourself. One question that he suggests asking yourself is “How are we able to exist and perform in a harmonious and agreeable way?”. Try asking yourself this question whenever you run into trouble, and see if it makes any improvement to the outcome.

The kinds of questions I have been asking myself this week include: “How can I be more friendly?”, “What can I do to be more helpful?”, “What do I really appreciate about him/her?”, “how does s/he make my life good?”. For someone I don’t get along with, I have started asking “What do her friends like about her?” I have been giving it some good thought and recognising that I can like those same traits too.

Related posts:

1. Complaint Free Relationships
2. Book Review: The Renaissance Soul: Life Design for People with Too Many Passions to Pick Just One
3. Goal achievement: recognising and breaking through obstacles that are standing in my way

This week I’ve been reading Complaint Free Relationships: How to Positively Transform Your Personal, Work, and Love Relationships by Will Bowen.

After a few years of marriage I have been wanting to make some improvements in communication and I have been finding it hard going without a good role model. The usual advice from other married couples and of course from counselors is to ‘get marital counseling’, but after trying that it seems to me that the counseling route is fraught with danger. If people feel safe to talk (complain) about their spouse to the counselor while said spouse is listening and feeling upset, then I am not sure whether it is really communicating or whether it is just going to cause more damage in the long-run. Going to the counselor abdicates responsibility for the marital communication to the counselor, and then when issues arise there is a sense of “well we already saw the counselor and it didn’t work, so that proves we’re never going to get along!”

To be honest there have been a few times recently when I thought that my marriage is never going to get better, but I’ve been trying anyway. I simply don’t believe that you can get better at anything without practice, and being good at marriage requires practice too. After a couple of recent disasters in communication I figured it was probably time to practice some better skills, and given that I was already looking into A Complaint Free World, I decided to add Complaint Free Relationships to the same Amazon order. I’m happy I did, it is a good book!

In the second chapter, ‘Relating in Relationships’,  Bowen describes a relationship he had with a coworker when he was working for a radio show. Bowen had been promoted to a managerial role, but was still relatively fresh to the industry, whereas his coworker Phil had been working at the radio station for his entire career. The two were always fighting about how things should be done and they could only see the worst in each other. Bowen just assumed that Phil was an argumentative and unfriendly person and that their relationship would never get better.

It was when Bowen saw Phil meet a friend for lunch and the friend clearly actually liked Phil that Bowen realised that there was more to relationships than meets the eye. In fact, for any person who you might have a bad relationship with, there is most likely people who have an excellent relationship with that same person. The difference between their relationship with that person and your relationship is you.

Bowen expliained, “Phil’s relationship with his friend was different from his relationship with me because Phil related (recounted or told) different things to himself about his friend than he did about me. Phil’s internal dialogue was about things he appreciated about his friend. Phil’s pal also told himself positive things about Phil. I, on the other hand, experienced a constant, negative, judgemental voice shouting in my mind whenever I thought of Phil. “Phil is an obnoxious, opinionated, condescending jerk,” I related to myself about him, and the result was that I had a relationship with a person who was all those things. Phil’s friend had a very different relationship with Phil because he related different things to himself about Phil.”

Here’s a quick and easy exercise that Bowen suggests so that you can see how you are affecting your own relationships, for better or worse:

• Think about a person you really like. What characteristics of the other person makes you like them so much? What do you tell yourself about this person that makes you like them?
• Next, think about a person that you do not like. What do you tell yourself about this person? Do you tell yourself that they are rude, mean, fat, selfish, lazy, conceited, all of the above? Feel free to list as many things as you think about the person.
• Now consider this: the person you really like is probably really disliked by someone else. And the person you detest is most likely someone else’s favourite friend or relative! If so, what might those other people think or say about them?
• If you believed what they believed, would you have a different relationship with these two selected people?

Using this realisation, Bowen realised that Phil acted differently depending on who he was with. Bowen was able to turn his relationship with Phil around by choosing to relate to Phil as a friend instead of as an enemy. He learned that you absolutely can change people using the power of your mind. “Having Complaint Free relationships is not about learning what to do; it is about learning how to be. When you become the kind of person for whom such relationships are common, others shift in your presence.”

Bowen offers some very good advice in the next few chapters as to how to change yourself to make your relationships better. I have taken his suggestions as a personal challenge, and I am pleased to say that so far his advice is very effective. I don’t think I have had even one fight with my spouse since I started last week! I will share some of his suggestions over the next few days.

Related posts:

1. What questions do you ask yourself about other people in your life?
2. Buying and eating organic and chemical-free food in order to improve health
3. Goal achievement: recognising and breaking through obstacles that are standing in my way

• Looking after my endocrine system
• Reducing my weight back to normal after gaining 3kg
• Completing four weeks of C25K
• Creating a balcony garden

This is the first time in a while where I’ve set goals to focus for a full 30 days. I have been allowing myself to be scattered and start a lot of things, and so for me this has been a test in discipline. Yesterday was Day 18 of 30 and I did find that in the past few days I had lost my focus a little and so I need to get back on track. Yesterday I decided that spending a day away from the computer would be a good idea as I tend to get sidetracked by reading so many different ideas and opinions. So the computer stayed off the whole day and I thought that was quite good. I did end up watching TV to get the election results in the evening, but I still felt that the computer-free day was worthwhile.

Today I’m going to the Eat Your Balcony event in St Kilda and I’ve been reading the book Chi Running, so today when I go for a run I’m going to practice some of the body focus techniques.

The area in which I feel I need to improve most is my diet, I have slipped back into a couple of bad habits in the last few days, out of convenience rather than out of desire. The other area in which I need to improve the most is to relax and not push too hard against what is. I think the reason I have been drawn to a little more convenience in my food is because Wednesday I felt burnt out and exhausted and ended up staying at home to sleep for much of the day. Then Friday at work I had a migraine and yesterday I suddenly got tired and fell asleep for 3-4 hours in the middle of the day. I’m not sure what’s up, but I suspect that some past tension has been catching up with me and it needs to be released.

Where did the tension come from?

I’ve been fighting against my career – I’m only six weeks into working for a new employer but my intuition is telling me that I need to work towards a different career because its not who I want to be anymore. At the same time, I like the fact that my current employment gives me the ability to afford good quality food, a nice home, stability in my life and a high calibre employer who provides many additional benefits to their staff that other employers do not offer. So instead of fighting with where I am now and feeling negative, I need to work with what I have in order to design the life I want and move forward to that destination. Part of that requires me to release any tension and go with the flow yet at the same time looking for opportunities that will propel me into the direction that I want to go.

I’ve also been fighting against significant relationships. I tend to hold a belief that my existing close relationships ‘should’ provide me with support for moving forward into becoming the new person that I am moving towards. But everyone moves towards their own goals and desires, and so if I am moving in one direction and someone else is moving in another direction I have no right to expect them to provide interest or support in what I want to do. The best thing would be to make new friends and new support groups for each interest, and then enjoy that interest with another person who is passionate in that area. That way there should be less tension in my relationships with family and friends where the relationship is based around the length of time rather than being interested in the same things. Its important to have a balance between having some relationships such as family and marriage and close friends where you have known each other for a very long time, and some relationships where you are interested in the same things. They don’t have to be the same!

It sounds as though these obstacles don’t have much to do with my four focus points for these 30 days, but when we’re holding onto negativity and tension in some area, it does spill over to other areas due to stealing focus. By being aware of these two areas in which I keep fighting against ‘what is’, I hope to stop fighting and instead, to relax and go with the flow, enabling me to achieve my goals with success.

I think that with any worthwhile goals in life we tend to follow a certain pattern which allows us to move forward:

1. Excitement about the new goal – doing everything we can to achieve the goal, everything is going wonderful!
2. We hit a stumbling block in the form of an external problem (the juicer breaking during a juice feast for example) or an internal tension coming to the surface (this is what I have been experiencing)
3. We consider giving up on the goal and look inward to decide if we have the strength and personal character (often we decide we don’t and we just give up here)
4. If we get past step 3, we formulate a new plan to get past the obstacle and push hard to get to the finish line
5. We achieve the goal and the memory of breaking past the obstacle is imprinted into our unconscious memory to build up our strength and personal character for next time

Related posts:

1. Goals are just a direction of focus – if we don’t succeed the first time, try again!
2. What questions do you ask yourself about other people in your life?
3. Balcony garden, lost 1.6kg of my extra 3kg so far, completed two weeks of C25K and had some self-discoveries about anxiety

• Looking after my endocrine system
• Reducing my weight back to normal after gaining 3kg
• Completing four weeks of C25K
• Creating a balcony garden

Well I haven’t been posting the last few days because I’ve had some other priorities come up, but now I can play catch up and share how I’m going with my 30 day goals. Its about half-way through my 30 days and I am starting to see some real progress. Lets start from the bottom:

Creating a balcony garden

Even though I have not put much into this in the last 30 days, the law of attraction kicked in and this weekend I am going to attend a workshop about growing food from a balcony garden. I just found out about it today – I can’t wait!

My bokashi bucket has finally filled up and I am ready to put in a second container in series with my wetpots system. I’m going to mix the bokashi with soil and put in an acid-loving plant like raspberry canes since it might take a couple of months for the bokashi to break down. Last year I had a couple of raspberry plants bear fruit all summer and it was wonderful because I normally baulk at the high prices you pay for fresh berries at the market.

The wetpots system is working – I can count about 30 little pea shoots popping up through the soil, including in the corner where it looked a little drier as it was further away from the ceramic pot. I hope the peas grow happily despite the windy weather we’ve been having lately.

Working on C25K

I completed week 2 of C25K, and additionally I have still been jogging to work and back which is 2.5 km each way. Some days when the weather is bad I just walk or catch the tram, but the majority of days I have been out jogging. In the C25K I have been doing intervals so I have been walking and running, whereas when I jog to work I try to keep up a slow jog for the entire 2.5km. Other than a few stiff muscles I feel great!

Reducing my body weight by 3kg

To be honest with my increased fitness body weight probably isn’t the best way to measure my body fat, but I don’t need to be too scientific. I am making progress with this goal finally after what felt like a slow start. I have been focusing on eating less calories than I expend, and I am using www.nutridiary.com to tell me how much difference in calories I should have each day in order to meet my goal. This is what it looks like so far:

calorie difference in the last couple of weeks

steady weight loss in the last couple of weeks

I haven’t been feeling hungry on the number of calories I eat because I eat so much of my calories from a large volume of nutrition rich, healthy greens, fruits and grains and almost no cooked or trans fat (although my overall fat consumption is about 12% of my daily calories – but it is healthy non-cholesterol producing raw plant-based fats). In fact, some days I have been feeling overfull with the amount of food I have been eating. With the addition of maca into my daily diet I have been consuming as much as 28.7mg of iron in a day (My RDI is 18mg per day) and as much as 63 grams of protein in a day (My RDI is 43 grams in a day) despite eating a 100% vegan diet. The difference between this and my ‘normal’ diet is only that I am watching my consumption of extra sweet and dried fruits such as dates and dried figs, as when I am not recording my calories I tend to overeat on these.

Looking after my endocrine system

Anxiety

This is where I have still been placing the majority of my attention as it is such a complicated system. Saturday I experienced a day of severe anxiety and even though I have been working on reducing my anxiety overall, I do occasionally have these meltdown days where I feel highly stressed and worried about everything. I do believe my adrenals took a beating over the weekend, because I was very anxious over a 24 hour period, even through the night I was sweating and having nightmares and it took much of Sunday to recover.

Yesterday afternoon I suddenly felt really exhausted corresponding with premenstrual hormone changes and so I think my adrenals are a little overworked. It hasn’t been helping that I have been feeling a progressing desire to change my career to something where I focus more on educating and helping people in a field that I care about. Currently I am a Java software engineer which is a more task-based detail-oriented career, with minimal people contact but frequent high stress emergency incidents.

One thing I observed was that a certain sequence of events took place before I had my very bad day on Saturday. On Friday I was feeling increasingly tense at work and as a result I called my husband on the way home from work and started complaining about my day. When I got home the conversation escalated as I shared all of my frustrations about work which transpired into a negative spiral about life the universe and everything. I went to bed feeling tense and woke up at 3am with extreme anxiety which got worse and worse as the day continued.

I wondered to myself, could it be that if I had not complained the night before, I would not have set myself up for anxiety the next day? The level of anxiety I experienced would have certainly affected my hormones and left me feeling so exhausted. When I think back to other times when I have experienced high levels of emotional stress, those times have usually been preceded by a large complaining session which starts off OK, but as it continues the listener gets annoyed and my observation of the change in response from the listener often triggers an anxiety attack.

The solution?

I have been thinking for a little while about starting the Complaint-Free World challenge, which challenges you to 21 days of consecutive days where not a single complaint has been uttered. The idea of the challenge is to first observe our behaviours, then to recognise them and then finally to change them. By changing what we say we will slowly affect how we think.

In order to keep yourself honest doing the Complaint-Free challenge, you wear a purple wrist band and each time you complain you move the bracelet from one wrist to the other. If you complain you start again at Day 1, no matter which day you are up to. If you can keep the bracelet on the same wrist for 21 days consecutively then you have achieved the challenge and can then take off the band! It typically takes people about 8 months to complete the challenge and so I had been unsure as to whether I could take on such a large challenge at this time, but I am thinking it would make a big difference if I could become complaint free.

I have ordered the bracelets and book from http://www.acomplaintfreeworld.org and for now I have started with a ‘make poverty history’ wristband I picked up from Oxfam. I hope it works well

Related posts:

1. Supporting the adrenals with wise food choices, avoiding sugar and caffeine
2. The Ladycomp fertility monitor and BBT charting
3. General updates, maca recipes

Insights from Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently by Gregory Berns Ph.D.

I have been reading this week about how rare it is for people to make individual decisions and how this can strongly affect judgment when people form committees.

A psychologist named Asch performed an experiment which showed that humans have a tendency towards going along with other people’s opinions. The experiment involved individuals being asked to match the a line with one of three answers. The correct line should be obvious in every case. In each group there was only one subject and a number of actors, which was unknown to the subject. When the group unanimously picked the wrong answer, the majority of the time the person being studied also picked the wrong answer in order to go along with the group. When questioned about it later, they did not remember why they picked the wrong answers; just that they seemed obviously correct at the time.

A more recent study, which involved brain activity scanning, showed that when a person goes along with the group the person’s brain actually rearranges the incoming visual information to make the incorrect answer look correct. By rearranging the information mentally and then ‘seeing’ the wrong answer as the correct one, the person is able to avoid any mental conflict. These people would be telling the truth if they said that they picked the answer that looked correct to them. On the other hand, the few people who go against the group have strong activity in the part of the brain that would normally activate when bracing themselves for a fight or flight response. It appears that going against group opinion is highly stressful.

The results for the experiments were reversed when just one other person picked the correct answer to the problem rather than going along with the group. When there was another person going against the group the subjects’ fear was much less and so in almost every case they selected the correct answer.

This effect where people will follow the group rather than dissent means that meetings where people have to vote with a public show of hands will very rarely be a true representation of the group’s opinion. In this kind of environment, the most original ideas do not even get mentioned. Instead everyone will go along with the loudest people in the group. The best way to vote in a group is both anonymously, and with the ability to give weightings to different ideas.

The moral of this story then, is that if you want to do things that are original and creative then you have to work very hard to not face groups alone. Avoiding people altogether is not a good idea if you want to sell your ideas, but if you have a good idea that you want to get across you are better off pulling people aside one at a time to share it before facing a whole group at once. Otherwise there is a good chance that you will either feel pressure to go along with the group, or that you will feel fear when facing the group which then comes out as defensiveness. If just one person is willing to agree with you publicly then you will find it much easier to move forward.

Also, be aware that a controlling person can use groupthink to their advantage. Powerful people often form a group of strongly agreeing followers through means of fear of punishment and promise of reward (you see this all the time in sci-fi movies where evil overlords have large numbers of slave minions at their beck and call). If the powerful person then recruits their own followers to any decision-making meetings, the remaining people who do have different ideas eventually become zombified and not only agree with the group but will adopt a different perception in order to justify going along with the group’s ideas. Stay away from this kind of group! These are the kinds of conditions that are used by leaders of racism groups and cults.

Related posts:

1. Iconoclast Personality Profile
2. Increase your creativity!
3. My ideas file

Insights from Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently by Gregory Berns Ph.D.

Breakthrough creative ideas, insights and groundbreaking solutions to troublesome problems come from sparks of imagination rather than from logical persistence. Iconoclastic people, those who do what ‘cannot be done’, find that their best ideas come when they are doing something completely different or talking to someone new. I know from experience as a computer programmer that this is true – the solution to a programming problem always pops up if you do something completely different like go for a walk or have a shower.

All of us, not just iconoclasts, can use creativity and imagination to solve the problems with which we are faced. Gregory Berns explains that its all about getting around your brain’s lazy mode of thinking.

Imagination and imagery fall into the realm of visual perception and so the same parts of the brain process both visual imagery (through the eyes) and mental imagery (imagination). The brain acts like a pattern-matching super computer – when seeing through the eyes, the brain starts off with a pattern of contrast and colour and then through the firing of many millions of neurons the pattern is filtered through to a categorisation of what is being seen, with a high level of specificity. So for example which you do not have a specific ‘grandma’ neuron (a single neuron that recognises your grandma), you would have a cluster of neurons at brain location ‘V1′ that recognises a visual image. These neurons trigger other neurons that recognise a human form which then fire in ways that trigger the recognition of a female, specifically an older female form, and the level of detail matching the shape of body and face will eventually filter through to a cluster of neurons that allow you recognise your grandma. All of this occurs with a running energy barely enough to run an electric lightbulb.

The trouble is that while this form of processing information is both fast and energy efficient, it allows very little scope for different ideas. Essentially as soon as you see or imagine an image, your brain has already fired its neurons in such a way as to categorise it as something specific that you have already experienced. The older we are, the less creative we become because we have a greater number of experiences and our brains take the route of least resistance because the same neurons will fire in response to any specific thought or visual image.

Parents of young children however will notice that because the children have so little experience they will not fall into these traps of thinking – at a very young age children have only a limited number of categories and so when faced with something new a child’s behaviour will be much less predictable. With unpredictability emerges interesting new ideas, whereas predictability results in cliche. On the other hand, fast and specific categorisation allows someone to learn from the past so that they don’t make mistakes in the future.

More spontaneous and free thinking lets you move forward with new technologies instead of being stuck in the past. If you want to be fearless and come up with a creative new idea which could be the next big thing (earning you recognition and some decent money!) you will need to break away from your past experiences and start releasing some creativity.

Here are some suggestions that Gregory Berns has for breaking out of stale thinking:

1. Use the element of surprise. While I don’t recommend you try this at home, the sudden loss of one eye has been known to result in a surge of creativity while the brain struggles to readjust. Perhaps you could find a safer way to become surprised, but obviously this is not easily planned!
2. Go to unfamiliar surroundings; especially when struggling to solve a difficult problem. The new visual imagery should give your thinking a fresh jolt. Try going to new restaurants, travelling to different cities or countries, spending time outdoors instead of in an office etc.
3. Talk to different people. People all come from different backgrounds and have different experiences. These experiences might just make you realise something you hadn’t thought of. And don’t forget children either – a six year old might have just the answer you were looking for due to their unclouded judgment.
4. Switch between looking at the whole big picture and looking at specific details. Switching from one view to the other might trigger a change in perception that you hadn’t considered.
5. Seek out activities in which you have no experience. The activity may have nothing whatsoever to do with your area of expertise or the subject matter in which you are trying to become more creative.

Related posts:

1. Iconoclast Personality Profile
2. What you can do about groupthink
3. My ideas file

I just started reading Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently by Gregory Berns Ph.D. The first chapter describes what an iconoclast is and a basic overview of how someone becomes one and why successful iconoclasts are real life paradoxes. It is quite interesting, because I can understand why the personality is so rare, but at the same time a successful iconoclast could become really famous in their field, initiating a paradigm shift.

So, what or who is an iconoclast?

Wikipedia describes iconoclasm (with an iconoclast being someone who performs iconoclasm) as “the deliberate destruction within a culture of the culture’s own religious icons and other symbols or monuments, usually for religious or political motives.” While this religious context is the etymology of the term, Dr Gregory describes an iconoclast as “a person who does something that others say can’t be done”. Basically, an iconoclast is someone who is prepared to tear down social expectations, rules and dogma in order to plot their own course.

Iconoclasts come up with business ideas that are radical or new (like for example Steve Jobs), they come up with political ideas which might confront or anger people (many political prisoners fall into this boat) and they come up with scientific breakthroughs that disprove what is commonly believed (like for example Galileo), or they create art which is dramatically different from the social conventions at the time (like Andy Warhol).

What does it take to become an iconoclast?

Dr Gregory points out two key areas of mental functioning in which an iconoclast is different from other people. Those key areas are:

• Perception, and
• Response to fear

Perception is the way in which your mind processes all the inputs in order to come to a conclusion about what is being seen, what something means, how the world behaves, how a problem can be solved. Basically anything that you see or experience has first been processed through your brain. The imagery that you see through your eyes has been passed into your brain, and it is the post-brain version that you actually ‘see’. This is how we can be tricked by optical illusions. Perception is very much based upon experience and repetition of inputs – the more you experience things being a particular way, the more that input biases the perception.

I remember when I was studying psychology, I heard about a scientific study that was performed on kittens (I do not condone this experiment, but remember it as an example). Basically the kittens were brought up inside a spherical enclosed cage that had no straight lines or corners anywhere, nor could the kittens see out to form any images of straight lines. The kittens were eventually released as cats and could not function in a normal environment as they were blind to straight lines. They could only see curves! This is an example of repeated experience fusing the neural pathways that make up the brain.

When it comes to iconoclasts, they have experienced so many different things that they are not blinded by social norms. Iconoclasts actually think and perceive the world differently from everyone else. Their brains have not formed in a way that other people’s have, perhaps due to a different range of experiences as they grew up. Iconoclasts tend to seek out novelty, and end up as free-thinking agents.

Iconoclasts do not respond to fear – specifically fear of uncertainty and social rejection – in the same way that everyone else does. While they may still experience some fear, it doesn’t stop them. They simply move through the fear and keep going.

What makes an iconoclast successful?

The problem with being an iconoclast is that it is extremely difficult to be a successful one. Many iconoclasts do not succeed because being a successful iconoclast is a great paradox. The reason being, there is a third aspect of mental functioning which makes an iconoclast a successful iconoclast, and that is Social Intelligence.

Having social intelligence requires the ability to experience empathy, fairness and social identity. It involves being able to fit in with other people, make friends and influence people. These abilities are in direct conflict with the iconoclast’s major point of difference – their different perception. A person who does have empathy and good social skills is more likely to have experiences in which their perception is adjusted towards the norm, and therefore away from iconoclasm. The very things that make a person an iconoclast tend to make them also social outliers, with little influence and with a steep uphill battle to sell their ideas. Remember, Galileo died while serving life inprisonment for writing blasphemy.

This is why I find the idea of a successful iconoclast to be so interesting. This is a person who has thought differently, done things differently, faced criticism and still managed to move forward and make a contribution that changed the world!

Related posts:

1. What you can do about groupthink
2. Increase your creativity!
3. The Scanner Personality

I have been working on adding all the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for my online book Fast Track Your Success and Happiness which I originally wrote when I was 22. Its funny reading back on it to be honest, because some of what I wrote makes me laugh now that I’m a little older, but there are some real pearls of wisdom in there too.

I like this technique I called Teach what you want to learn. It really is so true that when you teach a topic you will behave in a way that is in-line with your teaching.

When the book first came out in 2005 I was teaching the contents of the book to everyone I could talk to. I was having radio interviews, I was having newspaper interviews, I had a publicist organising media interviews with me and I was even finding myself being quoted in glossy magazines. I was feeling on top of the world, very happy and very confident!

Then I had a bit of a crisis. Essentially my plans for publishing and printing and marketing the books had been a little on the naive side and so I was losing money trying to sell them. I went back to work, started a new career and stopped teaching self improvement techniques to anyone because I felt embarrassed.

Well after I stopped sharing the knowledge, little niggling things started to creep into my thinking. A few doubts about my abilities perhaps, or a negative way of looking at things, perhaps feeling less grateful or not using the techniques for feeling happier when getting bounced around in life’s little hurdles and setbacks. Perhaps I started acting a little more reactively instead of proactively. Well only four years after I had published the book I was feeling depressed again.

Does that mean the book was a failure, that the techniques didn’t work? No, not at all. It was because I stopped living that way, essentially because I stopped teaching and therefore had no external stimulus to keep applying the material for myself.

Now after a period of depression and anxiety in the last year, which started when baby Sebastian arrived three months too early, I am ready and determined to move forward again and regain all the confidence and happiness that I temporarily lost during that period of time. This time I plan to teach what I learn – as I learn new things I will write about them in this blog. It will keep me honest and push me to new levels in my thoughts and in the improvement of my character.

Do you feel the same about teaching? Have you ever taught a subject that you were really passionate about, and then found that you were making new breakthroughs in your personal abilities as a result?

Related posts:

1. Read my book online
2. Donald Trump Attempts to Teach You How to Think Like a Billionaire
3. My points of strength and weakness – the direction of this blog

Trump: Think like a Billionaire – Everything You Need to Know About Success, Real Estate, and Life
Donald J. Trump with Merideth Melver
ISBN 0-345-48140-2

I was thinking that being able to think like a billionaire might be an interesting skill to have, and so when I passed by a local bookshop last week and saw this book sitting in the sales rack for only $8 I figured, why not? Well I think this is probably the worst book I have read in some time, so I will not recommend it, but I did learn a couple of things from it all the same.

1. If you want to be a Trump-style billionaire you need to have an ego that surpasses your wealth so that if anyone ever tells you your idea is bad or that you’re an idiot you won’t believe it. This enables you to go for all your ideas without fear of being hurt or made to look bad. For example, here is a quote from the very first page: “Consider this new book the second part of an ongoing conversation between you and The Donald – the billionaire’s equivalent of those bestselling works of inspiration Conversations with God and Conversations with God, Book 2“. Basically it seems that this billionaire’s mindset is one that knows no embarrassment.
2. If you want to become rich and famous based on your own reputation or personal brand you will want to have your own trademark saying and/or habits and make sure that you repeat them over and over so that everyone remembers you. After reading this book I will forever know that Trump’s trademark is ‘You’re Fired!’, because it was repeated so many times.
3. If you want to be grossly successful at one area of your life, you have to really enjoy it above all else. This because to make it to the top you have to work non-stop in that area and not deviate. Trump says he doesn’t take weekends or holidays because he’s so busy working, but that’s fine because he really loves his work. While ‘The Donald’ never mentions any drawbacks, he does claim to love McDonalds hamburgers, pizzas and diet coke, so being so intensely focused in one area will mean that you will be less educated in other areas. You can’t be the best at everything.
4. When you’re rich and famous a lot of people will want to be seen as your friend when in actual fact they may be jealous of your success and they will be disloyal when you need them. Trump suggests that the best time to go looking for friends is during your worst times when you need some support. If someone is your friend during the good times and then is rude to you when you’re down then they can never be counted on again. Trump advises that if those people attempt to be your friend again in the future they should be told “f___ you!”
5. If you want to be like Donald Trump you’d better like taking short resort-style holidays instead of any kind of trekking or adventure. According to him “One day in the south of France will be far more restive and rewarding than a whole summer spent in a hellhole.”
6. If you care about making a good impression to people, never criticize them. Just be silent and let people embarrass themselves if they’re wrong.

I think that was pretty much all I got from the book. One third of it was frequently conflicting advice about things that have not much to do with being a billionaire, the next third was name dropping all the famous people Donald Trump likes to catch up with during his workday, and the last section described the contestants in the next ‘The Apprentice’ show. In between were pictures of himself. Basically it was self promotion and had very little useful advice. I wasn’t expecting to take the book seriously, but I was still surprised!

Hrmmm… apparently you can buy the book for only 1c on Amazon…

Related posts:

1. Teach what you want to learn

Refuse to Choose! A revolutionary program for doing everything that you love
Barbara Sher, 2006
ISBN: 1-59486-303-2

After recently reading Margaret Lobenstine’s The Renaissance Soul: Life Design for People with Too Many Passions to Pick Just One, I was expecting Refuse to Choose! A revolutionary program for doing everything that you love to be much of the same. But in actual fact, it was quite different. I would consider these two books to be an excellent complementary set for anyone who wants to explore this part of their personality.

Barbara splits her books into two parts:

Part One, titled ‘What is a Scanner, and are you one?’ provides an overview and some specific techniques for overcoming the general problems that face all Scanners. These include fear that time is running out, fear of commitment, inability to get started on projects and inability to finish projects.

Part Two, titled ‘What kind of Scanner are you?’ showcases Barbara’s many years of experience working with people who are divided in their interests. She has managed to identify a whopping nine different types of recurring Scanner behaviour, within two broad categories, giving each an individual name and their own dedicated chapter. The Scanner types have been split up into Cyclical Scanners and Serial or Sequential Scanners.

In addition to these two main parts of the book, Barbara has added some useful appendices which help Scanners find good careers that fit their personality style. These include jobs for people who love travel, jobs for those who love to learn, jobs for those who love to share ideas, jobs for people who love to read, and even jobs for those who don’t want jobs!

The techniques described in Part One of Refuse to Choose were different from Margaret Lobenstine’s techniques, so I think it is possible to pick and choose between both books. Barbara focuses more on how to express every part of who you are right now, rather than trying to limit your energy to a smaller subset so that you can make progress. Either approach may suit different people and so its probably best to get both books and try them out on yourself.

Personally I really liked this book, because the more I read about Scanner Personality / Renaissance Soul Personality the more I realise that this is who I am. It is a real relief to find a book where the author understands how it feels to be so torn between different interests all the time.

Through this book I have identified myself as a Cyclical Scanner (as I tend to move like a bumblebee between different topics within self development, health, finance, IT and business, and sometimes return to the same topics or same interests years later) and I related most to the scanner types of Sybil and Plate Spinner. My Plate Spinner personality keeps me working in my IT job as computer programmer just because I recognise that I love solving lots of different problems very quickly in a high pressure environment. I also love to work in project management for the same reason. The Sybil in me keeps me moving all the time, always wanting to pick up something different, and unable to commit to any one project.

I would recommend this book wholeheartedly to anyone who recognises that their division of interests is starting to make themselves feel like they are not accomplishing anything. Take heed, when you read this book you will realise that not only are you able, but in some careers like journalism, parenting, teaching, entrepreneurship, management, software development and others you may actually be better equipped than some of your specialist peers.

Reading both Refuse to Choose! A revolutionary program for doing everything that you love and The Renaissance Soul: Life Design for People with Too Many Passions to Pick Just One one after the other has reignited some of my passions after personally going through some difficult times, and so I recommend that you read both of them.

Related posts:

1. Book Review: The Renaissance Soul: Life Design for People with Too Many Passions to Pick Just One
2. The Scanner Personality
3. Too busy to do what you love?