Man stands in his own shadow and wonders why it’s dark.
~Zen Proverb

Limitations that are set onto you by others, invoke rebellion. In me it does anyway. Who do they think they are to restrict my freedom? To restrict my ability to choose what to do and what not? If you want to see me getting all wound up, you should do just that.

Now I may react a lot stronger than most people, because freedom is right up there on top of my list of most important personal core values. Don’t touch my freedom! There’s only one person who really is able to limit me in my freedom, without invoking massive rebellious action.

Me.

That’s right. Only me.

Self-Imposed Restraints

It’s me who is my enemy
Me who beats me up
Me who makes the monsters
Me who strips my confidence.
~Paula Cole 

I’ve found that the strongest chains are the ones you use to restrain yourself. It’s unbelievable how creative I can get in restraining myself and limiting my freedom to express myself, to do what I want to do and to be who I want to be. Worst of all, I do it without my own consent and often even not conscious at all. Where’s that inner rebel when you need him?

But I know the answer to that question already: The inner rebel is hurting when I choose to rob myself from my freedom. He’s there inside of me standing by to support me and encourage me every time I need to defend my valued freedom. And then all of a sudden I, the one he tries to defend, turn around and stab him in the back by doing it to myself.

He shuts up, puzzled and hurting.

I know, I can feel his pain. It’s down there in my stomach.

I don’t always recognize it, but sure enough it’s a signal. And one I’m learning to recognize earlier than before, now I came to realize that I truly am my greatest enemy. About as much as I am my greatest asset.

Hidden Powers

I am convinced all of humanity is born with more gifts than we know. Most are born geniuses and just get de-geniused rapidly.
~Buckminster Fuller

Inside of me is a big set of hidden powers, a box of assets, waiting to be tapped into. This belief is relevant to dealing with my self-imposed restraints, because it’s telling me that there’s a hidden power in that behavior as well. I just need to learn to recognize it and to harness its power in a constructive way.

You see, the self-limiting behavior is not bad in itself. I realize it has a positive intention for me too, it’s trying to protect me. It does so by limiting the chance of me getting hurt or feeling bad, because it prevents me from entering into situation that might result in that. And I think that strategy sucks. It’s hardly empowering, and in the end it doesn’t get me anywhere.

Four Steps To New Behavior

The question is how to unleash the power of me, empowered by harnessing that limiting power in a positive way, while being encouraged by my inner rebel. That would result in super powers! (Don’t worry, I’m not going to levitate away right now).

1. First is to acknowledge that my habit of limiting myself is not bad. It’s just a not-so-smart-way of expressing a positive intention. It’s an asset when used in the right way.
2. Second is to understand the benefits you get from that behavior. In my case the intention was to ease my self doubts. By learning the lessons of others and applying them to myself, I got a feeling of certainty. It didn’t last though, but that’s usually the case with bad strategies in behavior.
3. Third is to find a solution that will satisfy both conflicting parts in me. The part that rebels on one hand and the part that restricts on the other hand. Look for alternative behavior or an alternative belief that might satisfy both of them.
4. Fourth is to apply that behavior. It’ll be easier than you think it will be, although it might feel awkward at first. But because both forces are aligned now, there’s less chance of falling back in “bad” behavior.

It’s a simple four step process, that might take a while to really get into my system. Finding new behavior that satisfies both parts however, is more powerful than the old behavior and gives more results. Of course things will happen that will throw me back into old behavior, it’s what I’m accustomed to do after all. But I’ll be quicker at recognizing it, and at adapting my behavior to the most empowering form again.

The way you treat yourself sets the standard for others.
~Sonya Friedman

Think about this. Others will notice it when you allow yourself to bully yourself around. And if you allow yourself to do that, what would keep others from doing the same? After all you just set the standard…

Photo by myself 

Man must cease attributing his problems to his environment, and learn again to exercise his will - his personal responsibility. - Albert Einstein

Everyday people from all layers of society are using a variety of techniques to avoid taking responsibility for their actions. These techniques can be classified as evasion, avoidance, denial or even obstruction of responsibility. They might seem to accomplish this, but they don’t help you forward in any way. And…c’mon, if you’re doing it, it doesn’t feel all that good, now does it?

In this post we’re going behind the scenes to take a look at the dynamics of why people shy away from responsibility. We’re also taking a look at what reality looks like as a result. And there’s also a sneak preview of what that reality would look like if you change the meaning of reponsibility.

Not all responsibilities are created equal

Everybody is responsible for something. A lot of the responsibilities are acquired, but the responsibility for your own life is definitely yours to take. Yet even though it’s the core responsibility, a lot of people shy away from that one too. To understand why people do this we need to understand the underlying thought processes.

Responsibility is a concept, it’s not tangible and as such we cannot see, hear or touch it. The meaning of these conceptual words (meta model words in NLP) is learned by experience, usually early in life during childhood. At one time a situation happened and you learned the meaning of that word “responsibility”. That very situation is now attached as a subconscious “video”, whenever you hear that word. New situations get added to that meaning as you progress through life, but you mainly build upon that first experience.

Unfortunately that first experience is usually a negative one. Something went wrong and someone was held responsible for it. Or maybe worse…you were held responsible for it. And you learned something: responsibility is no fun!

If you’re lucky, you learned the meaning of responsibility while you were receiving praise. Someone praised you for a good result and told you you were responsible for that wonderful result. It happens, but it’s rare. But it results in a totally different notion of responsibility and a very different attitude towards it.

The dynamics of avoiding responsibility

So it’s not a very pleasant word for most of us. It gets worse though, as we grow older we learn that being responsible for something also means that we are supposed to take control. And when we take control, we will be held accountable by someone else if it’s an acquired responsibility (e.g. your job). And we learn that being held accountable is no fun either. Painful at times even.

Chain of associations

1. Responsibility = being in control
2. Being in control = being held accountable
3. Being held accountable = painful
4. Pain = no good

The resulting chain of association gets stronger, and is reinforced by an instinctive mechanism: Pain avoidance. People are natural pain avoiders, it’s even genetically programmed into our system:

Pain is part of the body’s defense system, triggering a reflex reaction to retract from the painful stimuli, and helps adjust behaviour to increase avoidance of that particular harmful situation in the future.
- excerpt from Pain @ Wikipedia

So it’s not really the responsibility we’re avoiding, but the pain we have associated with it.

Changing the paradigm

Avoiding the pain might work on a short term. Yet at the same time we also know when we should’ve taken responsibility and didn’t, and that resulted in another not-so-nice feeling. And you’re not getting anywhere too.

It’s better to change the paradigm, to lose the association between responsibility and pain. We saw earlier on that it’s possible to have a positive meaning or association with the word responsibility. So we’re going to work on getting more of the positive associations and less of the negative. Easier said than done, right? It’s not really that hard, trust me. We’re just going to stop using the word ‘responsibility’.

The negative assocations we have with that word are too strong to ignore. We can’t just lose them, since we spent so many years training and reinforcing them. And ‘responsibility’ is a nasty word anyway, it’s so passive. It’s derived from ‘to respond’ and you can’t respond unless there’s an outside trigger. We need to find an active synonym.

Taking credit for results is an active formulation. “I take credit!” is something you can say proactively, you don’t have to respond, you can take the initiative. Good? Not yet, better but not good enough. Because ‘credit’ is a nasty word as well, with way too many unpleasant associations. Let’s replace it with ‘merit’, that’s a pleasant and positive word.

So along those lines, we will replace ‘responsible‘ with ‘meritable‘.

Now change your vocabulary!

Feels like playing with words? True, but we’re really going to replace it in our language. Whenever you hear responsible, replace it with meritable when you listen. Whenever you want to say responsibility, say meritability instead. It will feel awkward at first, but you’ll notice the impact instantly.

Suddenly things that you associated with pain, become areas where you can deserve praise for. It’s an opportunity to create, to do something good, to score. It’s fun again! And if you keep it up long enough, you will end up reinforcing positive associations that will even replace the negative associations of ‘responsible’. In time even that word will be safe to use again.

Image by minkymonkeymoo

This is not your regular ho-hum weekly review. It couldn’t be, because we’re well over three weeks into this month and I have yet to publish a new post. So much for weekly…

Why have I been silent for so long? To be short, for three reasons:

• Ski Trip in Switzerland
• Self awarded extended break from blogging
• Family outbreak of Norovirus

The Norovirus wasn’t a lot of fun… Patient zero was my son, followed after two days by my wife and another six hours later I fell victim too. Along the way we infected some other people as well, so we quarantined ourselves for the recovery period. Being sick with all of us at the same time was challenging, some things you don’t want to take turns in I can tell ya!

“By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try. The world is beyond the winning.” - Lao Tzu

Taking the extended break

Anyway, I liked being away from the blog when I was in Switzerland to such a  degree that while driving back to Holland I decided upon extending it for another week. Not that I’m contemplating to stop or anything, I just liked the mental distance from writing. Sometimes the best way to go forward is to stand still first. So that’s what I decided to do, stand still and just let the blog be the blog for a while. It was liberating and very refreshing.

I’m thinking about how to express what that period did to me, but I’m finding it hard to find the right words. It did not designate it as time to think about the blog, or as time in which I did not have to write, or in which I tweaked design or coding or something like that. It was purposeless, and that’s what was great about it. The blog just existed, it just was there, without my attention. Maybe it’s about letting go, maybe that’s the next step. I don’t know, but I think it might be. That week was about letting go, I did not have to blog, have to write, have to achieve goals, have to be accountable. I just was, and the blog just was.

The Norovirus was a blessing in disguise, because it forced me to extend that period even longer. And it deepened the experience as well. That virus hit me hard, to the point where I just felt like I couldn’t do anything. Not even read or watch television, just sleep or be awake (and care for my wife and son every now and then). My mind did something wonderful though, I started to process. Not think, just process. Without effort from my side, no conscious effort anyway, things fell into place, patterns emerged and creativity started to flow. My mind was doing spring cleaning it seemed (and my body was too). And the virus kind of forced me to undergo this.

Because doing wasn’t getting in the way of thinking, and thinking wasn’t getting in the way of feeling, there was room for just feeling. Don’t know if feeling is the right word, but because I wasn’t doing or thinking, a space opened up in me to see and connect to my path, my legend. There was room to realign. Not consciously realigning, it was an unconscious process. I realize this sounds vague, but that’s the best way I can describe it. It was refreshing.

Emerging patterns

One of the patterns that emerged was that I focused too much on the ‘getting’ part. So much that I lost connection with what I originally wanted. My goal of getting to 2500 subscribers is a great example. I was focusing so much on getting the subscribers, that I lost connection to what’s really important. Making a connection, being valuable, provide meaning, learning and sharing genuinely, growth! Those were are my motivations for this blog. On a tangent there are other motivations, like earning a buck, personal branding and so on, but they are secondary.

The thing with those motivations is that they are not directly quantifiable, and as such hard to measure. So you look for tangential metrics to measure progress, or give you a hint of your progress at the least. I found it’s important to keep connected to the original motivations, because if you fail to do that, the metrics and the goals are going to lead their own lives and take over.

This insight came to me last week. I have to focus on my original motivations that revolve around giving and growing, and be open to the getting part without focusing on it. I need to let go of the getting.

Trust

When the virus hit me last week, I was forced to let go too. I had to hand over my recovery process to my body and trust that it would do okay and that it would tell me when I needed to do things. My body was in control, and I had to trust it. That’s letting go, and it only feels good when there’s trust.

Letting go and keeping peace of mind at the same time, requires trust.

• I trust that when I let go of focusing on getting well, I will recover anyway.
• I trust that when I let go of focusing on the getting part, I will get it anyway.
• I trust that when I let go of being in control, I won’t be out of control.
• I trust that when I let go, it won’t be gone.

I feel I just made a big step.

The last two days something really interesting is unfolding on some blogs I follow (and some I didn’t follow yet). It’s something like a pub crawl between blogs, with online entrepreneurs and freelancers challenging eachother to put each other’s lessons in practice.

Christine O’Kelly (Self Made Chick) was put “On Notice” by Dave Navarro (Freelance Folder / Million Dollar Leverage), when he decided to start a 30 trial by putting the lessons of Christine’s e-book into practice. Christine in return shouted out to Dave to “Show her the money“, taking up a similar trial with the time management lessons of Dave.

Both of them are pushing themselves to improve, and openly challenging, praising, questioning and discussing what they experience. It’s a lot of fun to follow and read and discuss along. More great people are following and discussing, like James Chartrand (Men with Pens), Monika Mundell (The Writers Manifesto), Michael Martine (Remarkablogger) and Naomi Dunford (Ittybiz).

E-books

I somehow missed the fact that Christine published a 26-page e-book “How I Built A Profitable Freelance Business for Under $50 (And How You Can Too!)”. I got my copy, but have yet to read it (probably tonight).

I did download and read Dave Navarro’s e-book “How To Turn Your 24 Hour Day Into a 30 Hour Day”. Sign-up for his newsletter to get your copy. It’s a small e-book as well, but it really rung a bell with me. Dave touches on some points that I had discovered in recent months as well. He talks about not getting started, about keeping focus and eliminating distractions, about keeping yourself accountable for your goals and about having too many goals. So he got my attention!

Now where’s the cash?

Well the C.A.S.H. is a four-step program Dave discusses in his book:

• Clarity - identify your top priority using a checklist
• Accountability - review progress on a regular basis
• Strategy - adjust your strategy until your done!
• Honor - honor the process, by starting over

That’s in a nutshell where the cash is, and how you can find your 6 hours. If you want to know more about it, download the book.

My top priority? Plan my days!

Well, it’s been staring me in the face for a while now. When I used the simple checklists of Dave, they pointed out to me that I’m doing pretty good at my time results management already. My single top priority is to plan my days though. Planning my days is something that I have not been doing, but with a tendency to overcommit and a tendency to underestimate the time needed to complete a task, it’s quite essential.

So I created my own daily sheet to plan my day. Basically it’s a sheet of paper with a timetable divided into 30 minutes segments, with a column for my planning, a column for my actuals and a column for remarks. I’ll put it up for download soon. Update: download the daily planning sheet (pdf) here.

I’ve only been working with it for a day and a half now, so it’s hard to say that I have achieved results with it. I have noticed some thing already:

• It has made me more aware of how I spend my time and on what.
• It works as a focus tool, reminding me when I’m not working on the stuff I planned.
• It’s going to be a great reference to learn about how much time certain activities actually require.

And Dave’s convinced that most people who feel that they overcommit, are actually underplanning. So if I get this down, maybe I don’t feel overcommitted anymore.

I’ll keep you posted!

A lot of people are mind readers. Some people are even very proficient at it, reading minds of people every day, all day long. And most of the time, they get it so wrong. Mind reading is a dangerous trait.

The practice of mind reading

Of course I’m not talking about some supernatural phenomenon, a paranormal ability or extrasensory perception. I’m talking about a trait, or maybe a habit even. The habit of presuming to know what other people are thinking, without sufficient evidence of those thoughts. Some examples:

• “He must think I’m stupid for not knowing the answer to that question.”
• “When I ask for directions, she probably thinks I’m not man enough to take care of myself.”
• “If I’m not working full-time he thinks I’m not ambitious or that I’m taking advantage of his money.”
• “If I bring flowers, she probably thinks I have to make up for something.”
• “Oh my gosh he brought flowers…would that mean that…oh my gosh!”

Get the picture? “Reading” the mind of the other person, without knowing what’s really on their mind!

What makes matters worse is that people act upon those imagined thoughts, as if they were actual thoughts of the other! And that in turn might set off a whole series of events, leading to a great and possibly very damaging misunderstanding. I know, I’ve seen it again this week. Big time!

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