Blaz Kos

emotional intelligence

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  • Extremely good or bad times are real relationships test

    In normal, or even slightly good or bad times, anyone can be a good friend, a good business partner or a good spouse. Normal times never show the darkest part of a person’s character, unless the person is an asshole by default. Extremes do. Extremes show whose personality really is larger than life and whose character is lower than a snake’s belly. Well, everyone makes a mistake or breaks from time to time, but if you see consistently atypical behavior in extreme times when interacting with someone, you can see deep down their soul. You don’t even have to look them in their eyes.

    When things go really badly, people very clearly show how strong their rational part is compared to their instincts as well as how stable their emotional self is. They show their true nature and how mature they really are to other people. Surprisingly, when things go extremely well, the darker human nature often comes into play even more. You probably heard the quote that nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test man’s character, give him power.

    Thus we have two real life relationships test – both extremes, when things go either really well or really badly, put relationships to a tough test, especially the closest ones.

    When things go extremely badly

    Bad times are usually a very tough testing period for relationships. Any kind of adversity, losses and other tragic situations, big or small, have a huge impact on your life and your relationship with other people. Job loss, money issues, accidents, death of the people you love, you name it.

    From what I’ve seen, there are only two possible outcomes when things go extremely badly. Either people turn on each other and start fighting, or the extremely bad situation gives them an opportunity to connect even more and deepen the relationship. The fact is that relationships that endure extremely tough times usually become even more substantial.

    In bad times you have only two options in a relationship in your life:

    1. You can turn to each other and start fighting
    2. You can connect even more and deepen the relationship

    I guess the second options is a good thing in a bad thing. But unfortunately people prefer to turn on each other than find a deeper mutual connection. But why? Many times, extremely bad times make you feel bad about yourself, they hinder your self-confidence, and they make you feel more insecure and intolerant. Consequently, your capacity for love decreases.

    The more your self-confidence is damaged by an external event, the more your capacity for love decreases. If your perception of value was, for example, strongly grounded in your fancy job and you lost the job, you feel unworthy and thus your perception of your value in a relationship changes as well. By fighting, you usually want to make people love you more and chain them onto yourself in a very aggressive way. It’s a kind of unhealthy compensation for the feeling of lost value.

    The second thing that often happens is that it’s much easier to blame others for many types of different failures and bad things happening to you. It’s much easier to blame the partner that s/he didn’t support you enough etc. than it is to admit to yourself that you f*cked up. You protect yourself and your feeling of value by blaming others. Ironically, the easiest way to start a fight is with the people you love and care about the most. That’s the point when relationships start to go south in tough times. You get insecure, aggressive and start accusing your loved ones instead of facing the truth and building even stronger relationships based on more effective communication, mutual care, empathy and understanding. It can be done, but it takes a lot more effort.

    Sad couple

    When things go extremely well

    Much less obvious is why people fight when things go extremely well; well, usually they go extremely well for one person in a relationship or even both parties. Examples of extremely good times are when someone gets a big promotion, enters a new well-known social circle, gets to know new people who rank higher than them on the sexual market value and is exposed to their affection, when business goes really well, when someone acquires larger sums of money etc.

    Two things very often happen in that kind of a situation. First of all, outer stimuli (good happening) stroke the ego too much. When the ego gets too much stroking, people often start getting full of themselves, they become cocky and arrogant, and suddenly they feel like they don’t need some people around them anymore so much. They enjoy their extremely good (many times unexpected) situation so much that suddenly they don’t give a f*ck about the people around them anymore or they feel superior to them.

    The second thing that often surfaces is the natural human tendency of trying to progress and strive for better things in life. When something extremely good happens to you, you get a new reference point. You feel much better than you used to. So everything around you must be much better than it used to be, from items to people; and so you start looking for things and social circles in the same new league. Because your perception of value increased, you also look for people who have higher value in your eyes.

    It’s some kind of The Diderot Effect: The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new (fancy) possession often creates a spiral of consumption which leads you to acquire more new (fancy) things. As a result, you end up buying things that your previous self never needed to feel happy or fulfilled. It happens pretty the same in the relationships.

    Both things, the illusion of ego and the new view of higher self-worth, lead to a big relationship test with all the people with whom you had normal and totally good relationships before that extremely good thing happened. But there’s a big trick in this game. You still have some kind of an attachment to the people in your life, which leads to internal conflict. You still care for them but you want to move on at the same time.

    Secondly, your new perception of self-worth makes you feel good when you’re with them because you feel superior to them. But they start feeling shitty when they’re around you. Last but not least, there is always also a question of what will happen when good times go away and your luck strikes out, who will you go to then? In movies, you can often see the moment when someone realizes that a good thing is not as shiny as s/he thought, and they come back to old friends.

    If that happens once, it’s kind of understandable, but if it happens many times, it’s an ugly form of hypocrisy. There’s nothing wrong with being self-confident, maybe even a little bit cocky sometimes. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to become better and better and be surrounded by better and better people, items and stuff. There’s nothing wrong in deciding to end a relationship if you feel that its expiration date has come because you’ve progressed faster than the other person. It may not be nice, some people would already see that kind of behavior as proof of a lousy friendship, but at least it’s honest.

    What definitely isn’t right is (1) having a relationship with someone only when things go bad, constantly leaving them at good times and coming back at bad times, (2) being around someone just to feel superior to them or seeing them as plan B, and what definitely isn’t right is (3) going against someone you love (seeing them as less valuable) just because something good is happening to you.

    When things go really well, your instincts should be to share your happiness and success with the people you love, not feeling superior to them and seeing them as less valuable. Even if your emotional self does feel a little better for a second, your rational part should correct your emotions immediately. If your emotions march off, you have to put them back into the right frame with your intellect. Just remind yourself why a relationship with someone is really important to you and what they contribute to your life.

    In bad times you have only two options in a relationship in your life:

    1. You can share your happiness and success with people you love
    2. You can start feeling superior and full of yourself and become a hypocrite (in this case is better to end a relationship)

    I have seen it a hundred times in personal and professional lives. Suddenly a business takes off. One partner would like to cash out, the other to reinvest. They don’t communicate enough. Both of them see each other as an unnecessary part of the business and a burden to their own goals and interests. They start fighting. Business goes down. Before, they were best friends. After the first real success, they become the worst enemies. A similar situation often happens in the personal life.

    Ask yourself the questions below. They do sound a little bit silly, but if you know how to be honest with yourself, they’ll tell you a lot about you and your relationships:

    • If Jenifer Lawrence/Channing Tatum or whichever famous person is your favorite actor fell in love with you and tried to seduce you, what would you do? It doesn’t even have to be a famous Hollywood star, make it your national or local TV star, or your last crush or whoever you maybe feel attracted to and is out of your league.
    • If you won a big amount of money in the lottery, let’s say 10 million EUR/USD, or if your business started generating 30,000 EUR/USD profit per month, what would you do?

    Would you stay with your spouse and friends and family or in any other relationship? Would you spend more or less time with them? Would you start fooling around and find new friends or would you share your success with old friends? Ask yourself sincerely and you’ll see very well what would be the relationship test outcome of extremely good times.

    If the answer is that you’d keep a specific relationship, or invest even more into it and share all of your success without feeling superior, there’s a very good chance that a relationship would pass that kind of a life test. If you’re tentative and undecided or if questions like that piss you off, you should probably rethink your relationships. We’re talking about only one context here, and that’s what would happen to your relationships if your position were to drastically improve. There are many other elements and angles that influence the quality and duration of relationships, but this kind of a test can still tell you a lot.

    When things go extremely badly and extremely well

    There’s also a third situation, when things go both extremely badly and extremely well at the same time. In those kind of times, relationships and people’s characters are put to an even harder test.

    An example would be when parents die and inheritance has to be split among siblings. The extremely bad situation (and a shocking one) is the parents’ death. Kind of a good situation for many people is the inheritance, and usually there’s a bigger sum of wealth in play because of the real estate. There are so many families where people really had strong bonds with each other, until something like that happened. It’s heartbreaking how many families fall apart because of the inheritance fight.

    The same situation often happens in business, when things go well in some ways (generating money, usually), but there are also many challenges present. People are afraid of losing something valuable and they often prefer to blame others than themselves for all the problems. Relationships become relationshits.

    Everyone breaks sometimes

    We all sometimes make mistakes in relationships. We hurt people and people hurt us. We’re all human and we all make mistakes. That’s fine. What’s not okay is if you start behaving toxically and you cripple your relationships every time something extremely good or extremely bad happens to you.

    Those are the times when you should put in extra effort to strengthen the most valuable relationships in your life. If they’re really valuable to you, and not only plan B or a compromise you think you had to make because of your temporary situation, you’ll make sure that extremely good or extremely bad times bring out the best in you and the people you love.

    The key takeaways are the following:

    • Extremely good and extremely bad times will have a big influence on your ego, self-worth and your perception of yourself and your relationships.
    • If a relationship is really sincere, based on love, mutual respect and is valuable to you, you’ll look for ways to enhance, strengthen and deepen the relationship in both extremes. You’ll open yourself up more, you’ll invest yourself more, you’ll communicate more, and you’ll show more loving and tender energies. You should see extremely good and extremely bad situations as an opportunity to build even more quality relationships. Both extremes should bring out the best version of yourself and you should bring out the best in other people.
    • Many relationships won’t pass the test. Maybe because of you, maybe because of others. That’s okay, you just have to be fair and sincere, to yourself and to others. Even if it’s time to end a relationship, you can do it the right way. There’s nothing wrong with moving on, but you shouldn’t keep things open. Give a close to a relationship that you think has to end.
    • But what you definitely shouldn’t do is start fighting with the closest people in your life only because things go bad for you and it’s the easiest thing to do. Don’t blame or abuse others because of your own sorrows. And what you also definitely shouldn’t do is keep relationships in your life only as plan B or only to make you feel good about yourself, feel all superior, because currently things are going really well for you. That’s an ugly form of hypocrisy.
    • The good news is that real life relationships test will help you to keep the relationships that really matter in your life and clean all the others. It may hurt, but in the long run such a relationship cleaning will help you make a room for the new people – people who fit you better in your new period of life.

  • Multidimensional relationships – how to build the deepest bonds possible

    A very important realization in life is that there’s no absolute good or bad. Everything has a good side and a bad side. Everything has its own advantages and disadvantages. One side may be more dominant (good or bad), but it contains at least a drop of the opposite nevertheless. Even more than that: one side cannot exist without the other. Good cannot exist without bad. Life cannot exist without death. Happiness cannot exist without sadness. These dynamics of life are best represented by the yin and yang symbols, from the very well-known Taoist philosophy.

    Yin anf Yang

    Understanding the duality of life without any absolutes can help you with at least two things. The first one is keeping your mind open. As Scott Fitzgerald said, the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. Money is good and bad. Each of your personal characteristics is a strength and a weakness at the same time. A clock can go clockwise or counterclockwise at the same time, depending on your perspective. You cannot be both at the same time, but if you change perspective, you can change the interpretation. Changing perspective can lead to either manipulation of truth or better understanding, and you should strive for the latter.

    The second thing you can take from this philosophy is understanding the bad sides of three main cognitive distortions. Understanding duality and non-absolutism can help you deal with perfectionism, all-or-nothing thinking and disqualifying the positive. No perfect thing exists in life, never has and never will. If you can only be satisfied with perfect, you’ll never be satisfied. Because of emotional dissatisfaction, you will waste your life. Maybe good enough is already a level that should bring you a feeling of satisfaction.

    You can also better understand that there’s always “all in nothing” and “nothing in everything.” Life flows somewhere in the middle, not in having it all or having nothing. Life is colorful, not black and white. And last but not least, the duality of life helps you understand that there’s always something positive in the negative. Sometimes you can see the brightest stars in the darkest night.

    Being aware of duality and absolutes can help us a lot in understanding the dynamics of life. But there’s a step further we can take, above duality. It’s the concept that brings life from a mere gray mixture of black and white to a colorful rainbow, full of different experiences and levels of connectedness. I call it multidimensional relationships, be it relationships with people, animals, nature, things and even ideas. The concept best applies to personal relationships, but there are many other situations where understanding the concept of several dimensions can help us enrich our lives.

    Stronger together

    Multidimensional relationships

    Relationships are always multidimensional and the more dimensions present, the richer and the more varied they are. You often experience or build relationships only on a few of the easiest and most obvious dimensions. But why stop at a certain point, if life is offering so much more. Only a greater awareness and a bigger investment into relationships can help you build newer and newer dimensions and thus an even stronger bond with someone over time.

    What am I talking about? If you have a one-night stand with someone, the relationship only has only one dimension – physical, and even that in a sort of a limited way. If you have a friend with benefits, there may be two dimensions – physical contact and friendship. If you also share a flat with someone like that, there’s yet another dimension, sharing resources.

    It’s obvious that we usually have the most dimensions with our chosen spouse, but even so, many people experience far from all the dimensions that they could in their closest relationships.

    Here are only some of the dimensions you can experience in an intimate relationship:

    • Tenderness and other soft physical contact
    • Erotic touch and sexual intercourse
    • Tantric and other spiritual kinds of erotic experience
    • Intellectual stimulation and information exchange
    • Emotional experience with a different palette and depth of feelings (negative and positive – see the picture below)
    • Co-development and personal growth based on common hobbies and goals
    • Sharing economic resources
    • Friendship
    • Teamwork and mutual support in life and in career development
    • Running a household or a side business
    • Joint spiritual or religious experience
    • Experiencing the world together – traveling, mountain climbing etc.
    • Having fun together – playing games, cooking etc.
    • Raising a plant, an animal or a child etc.
    • Socializing in larger groups and helping other people together etc.

    With other people, outside your intimate relationships, there may be fewer possible dimensions, but many people still neglect numerous dimensions, consciously and unconsciously, consequently hindering the relationship potential and growth potential of both people involved.

    List of emotions
    Source: Plutchik

    For example, many people focus only on a few dimensions when raising a child. Be it education or play or something else. But there are so many dimensions you can build in a relationship with your kid. A physical dimension, like doing sports, cooking healthy food etc., a strong emotional bond and security, an intellectual connection, passing on all your experience and knowledge, letting the kid have their own opinion and go their own path, and so on. There are so many relationship dimensions you can experience, if you only open your mind and let love be the center of it.

    The good thing about multidimensional relationships is that in most cases, you don’t lose anything if you give more. If a relationship is built on the right foundations (respect/boundaries and love/positive energies), the more you give, the more you receive. For example, if you’re happy and you put someone in a good mood, so they’re also happy, there’s a high probability that you’ll simply stay happy afterwards, assuming the relationship is not of an abusive nature.

    The key thing is that when you’re spending time with someone, you should try to activate as many dimensions as possible. For example, if you’re playing with your kid, don’t let it be only play. It can also be an opportunity to enrich your emotional bond and the child’s inner sense of security, provide intellectual stimulation, and so on. You should try to activate as many dimensions as viable, possible and sensible in a specific relationship.

    If you go mountain climbing with your spouse, there can again be many dimensions you can experience. It’s a physical experience of taking care of your body, it can also be a healthy competition, intellectual bonding, emotional bonding (if there are any thrills on the path), maybe you can even have sex at the top of the mountain. The idea is that you don’t climb a mountain just to kill time with someone, but to engage as many dimensions of a relationship as possible in everything you do.

    In order to do that you have to, of course, turn off your phone, let all your worries go, and completely focus on the present and on a specific person or group. In a relationship, you have to be present with your body, heart, mind and soul. Fully present. Otherwise you’re blocking some of the dimensions and thus killing the relationship potential.

    While doing that, don’t forget that relationships are a two-way street. The more you invest, the more the other person should invest. The more dimensions you try to activate, the more dimensions the other person should try to activate. There are many people out there who will only try to take advantage of your surplus investment. Thus you also need to know how to set boundaries and you need to have as realistic expectations as possible. Some people don’t have the capacity to go really deep, others just won’t. That’s why you need to find your perfect fit and work hard from there.

    Relationship and trust - Multidimensional relationships

    Other multidimensional perceptions

    Not as important as personal relationships, but still a powerful concept, is having a multidimensional perception of other things in life. The more usage you can see in something, the more valuable that thing becomes to you or, even more than that, you understand it better. Let’s look at a few examples.

    For example, money can have many functions alongside the standard four, namely being a medium of exchange, a measurement of value, a standard of deferred payment and a store of value. Based on these standard four functions, you can see it as only something you work for in order to buy goods after earning it. But to understand it better, you can also see money as an idea – a piece of paper with numbers. Money can also be an employee that works for you (investing) – for example to make more money or to realize your ideas. Money can also be a way to contribute to the society (donating). You can also see money as the measurement of your value added to markets. You can see money as energy or an interpreter of your mindset. You can see money as a generator of social clusters, and so on.

    You can see your home as only a place where you come after work or whatever. But there are so many dimensions you can add. You can see it as a meditation temple, an art project, a place where you hang out with your loved ones, a place of security, the biggest financial investment of your life, an opportunity to meet new people in a neighborhood, a joint project with your spouse, and so on. Home can have many different dimensions and can thus hold different meanings to you.

    As for the third example, you can start your own business only to get rich or make extra money. But you can also start a business to bring your ideas to life, to employ people and develop yourself as a boss; you can start a business to have better control over your time, you can see it as a tax shield/shelter or a vehicle for leveraging other people’s money. There can be many dimensions how you see your business and it can serve you with many different purposes.

    The more dimensions you see, the clearer the picture you can have about something, what it means to you and how you can extract value from it. Even more importantly, you usually enjoy it more, it enriches you and makes you into who you really are. That’s why understanding the multidimensional side of life is so important.

    There are four options regarding your perception of dimensions:

    • You are aware of an important dimension in a relationship (good, continue building on it)
    • You are not aware of a dimension that already exists (become aware of it)
    • A dimension could exist and you know about it, but it doesn’t (build it)
    • A dimension could exist, but you are not yet aware of it (observe, read, learn)

    Since we started with duality and absolutes, we should also finish on the same note. Nothing is only good and bad, and so there’s also no pure gold in multidimensional relationships. The more dimensions that exist, the more we’re usually invested into a relationship and the more value it has for us; thus it also holds a bigger potential to hurt us once the expiration date comes. As Taoism teaches us: nothing lasts forever. But that shouldn’t stop us from living life with courage and engage with as many dimensions as possible. Nothing lasts forever, but what we’ve experienced stays, and we should be thankful for that.

  • When your ego blocks your progress

    One day, I had to make a withdrawal on an ATM. I entered my PIN and the wrong PIN message appeared on the screen. I entered the same PIN, same message. I got a little pissed off and entered the same PIN the third time. The ATM took my card and I had to go to the bank the next day to get it back. Immediately after entering the wrong number for the last time, I remembered that my card had been renewed a few days ago and my PIN had also been changed.

    Here’s another story. I got a creative idea for acquiring traffic by using paid channels for this blog. It should have attracted a lot of visitors for a good price. I executed the idea, but it didn’t drive even nearly as much traffic as expected. So I threw in even more money. “It has to work, it’s such a good idea,” I thought to myself. It still didn’t work, so I threw in even more money. After the third investment with no return, I admitted to myself that the idea was, at the end of the day, not that good.

    “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” as the famous quote goes. But it’s really easy to say that. In both cases, I was so sure of myself, I was 100 % confident that I knew what I’m doing. There was no other option. Even after getting the first feedback showing me that something is not working, my ego overshadowed the facts. I was repeating the same thing and expecting different results.

    It’s good to feel alive, but it can also be painful

    First of all, wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups. That’s why the idea of the Agile and Lean life is not to make big risky bets based only on your assumptions, but to start with small experiments that show you the right way through validated learning. You minimize the risk as much as possible by making small steps and gathering feedback from your environment as soon as possible.

    Starting to follow the agile and lean strategy is quite a big mental leap. You don’t fall in love with your idea, person or anything else, and blindly follow it hoping that you’ll get lucky. You see everything you do in life as an experiment that will lead you to the outcome you want. You start small, you test everything and you stay as agile and flexible as possible. You know what you want to experience but you have no assumptions on how it will manifest. You let tests and experiments lead the way.

    The problem with staying lean and agile is that it’s extremely boring and difficult. Taking risks, having an idea, falling in love, being right, having a strong opinion… All this brings excitement into your life, makes you feel good about yourself and feel worthy. It’s fuel for your ego. But if you’re wrong and blindly follow your ego, disappointments may come sooner or later; and usually they do. All the highs become deep lows.

    Thus a much better strategy is to wait for an opportunity where the risk is low, but there are a great possibilities for a big gain. To do that, you need a different approach. You need knowledge, patience, stamina, insights, to be surrounded with the right people etc. To gain all that, you need to scientifically test, experiment, learn, understand and be committed to real progress while staying flexible. You have to do all the boring and hard stuff day by day. You have to admit to yourself that you were wrong almost after every experiment.

    Egocentric person

    Never let your ego block your progress

    The first big challenge for your ego is changing how you act in life. You should switch from acting out of your ego, meaning your assumptions, beliefs and convictions, to acting out of feedback that you regularly gather from your environment by performing experiments. It’s the best way to stay flexible.

    The second challenge is facing the results when data disprove your ego assumptions. The feedback you get from your environment is different from what you expected. It hurts. It seems impossible. It lowers your feeling of self-worth. You don’t feel so smart anymore.

    You entered the wrong PIN. Period. The campaign is not delivering any results. Period. She does not share your feelings. Period.

    It’s hard to face the fact that you’re wrong. It’s so hard to admit that the objective reality is different from your subjective reality, just because your subjective reality feels so real. That’s why you build illusions in your head. You also have a tendency to finish things that you begin. For example, you usually watch a movie until the end, even if it’s bad. Those are all reasons why you want to persist at things that don’t work. It’s hard to stop doing something that you’re so sure of and on top of that you want to finish what you have started. That’s why you need the search mode in your life – to start small, to gather feedback from day one, to fail fast and stop doing things that are not working.

    Here are some additional tips on how to deal with your ego:

    • Make sure you see validated learning as progress. Make sure learning feeds your ego, simply because you’re following a superior life strategy, you are gathering insights how to live a better life, more suitable for you, independent of your interpretation of the world.
    • Don’t get stuck in analysis-paralysis. Just write down experiments you’ll make and start gathering feedback from your environment.
    • Always question everything. Follow your curiosity more than your ego. Don’t ever let your ego prevent you from learning something new.
    • Have a system for when to persist at something and when to stop and try new things. Make sure you follow your system, and that your ego and your emotions don’t distract you.

    Tough decision

    When to persist

    The tough question is when to persist and when to admit to yourself that something isn’t working and you should leave it behind. It’s more art than science, but there are some indicators that can help you identify what the optimal thing to do is.

    In lean start-up, there is a rule that you don’t fall in love with your business idea, but you become passionate about finding the right solution for the problem your business idea is solving. By experimenting and gaining customer insight, you may find out that your idea was not that good, but you may also find a much better solution to the problem. You have a vision, you’re passionate about the problem to fix, but you stay totally flexible about how to fix it. It’s the same in your personal life.

    • Don’t fall in love with the idea that you’ll meet one person who will stay with you forever, be loyal to you no matter what, and everything will be perfect all the time; like in Hollywood movies. Fall in love with the idea that you’ll have honest and loving relationships with superior communication and extra contribution. The right people will come into your life.
    • Don’t fall in love with the idea of having a magazine cover body in three months. Fall in love with the idea that your body is a temple you must take care of. A temple that needs healthy food to function, regular stretching and exercising, and so on. Fall in love with the idea that you’ll take care of your body, and stay flexible about what it needs and when.
    • Don’t fall in love with the idea of an ideally paid job. Fall in love with an industry you really know you can contribute to, fall in love with the idea of developing your competences to the full and providing as much value as possible to the market. Stay flexible about how things will manifest. Maybe you can contribute much more value by being an entrepreneur or a freelancer.

    It goes the same for all other areas of life.

    Another rule in lean startup is to make a pivot when each additional experiment leads to less progress. In such a case, you hit a local maximum. Pivot refers to a fundamental change in your business strategy. You change direction but you stay grounded in your vision and learned facts.

    After knowing that and applying it to your personal life, there really is no more dilemma of when to persist at something and when not. It’s not about letting something go, but about redefining your strategy based on what you’ve you learned along the way. You still follow your heart, your vision, the things you want to experience in life, you just take different steps, manifesting it in a different way. You should fall in love with what you want to experience in life, not how it should manifest. Then there is no question of whether you should persist or not, just what your next step is.

    Here are some examples of that kind of thinking and their healthier alternatives:

    • The relationship didn’t work out, I’m never going to find the right partner. And I was so in love. I don’t want to fall in love anymore.
    • I had a great experience with a person, but we aren’t the right fit. I tried many things to improve the relationship, but everything led to the same result – fighting. Still, I’m grateful for the experience and I’ve learned that it’s not acceptable for me if my intimate partner smokes. It just bothers me too much and I become passive aggressive. I am keeping my heart open and my love capacity full for the next person I’ll spend a part of my life with. After my sadness of breaking up passes, I’m going to start making new acquaintances.
    • I’ll never find a job I really love. I sent so many applications, but I didn’t get any interviews. I guess I have to send out another fifty.
    • Sending out CVs doesn’t work. But I know I’m really good at marketing. I’m going to read one book about marketing each week, I’m going to go to all marketing meetups. I’m going to start a blog about marketing, I will send personalized creative presentations of myself and my skills to a few companies I really want to work for.

    But if you don’t stay flexible and you let your ego ground you in your subjective reality, you have a great chance of becoming a zombie and living a zombie life – where being a zombie means you invest a lot of energy into something with no or little progress. You get more and more depressed after each CV you send out. You hope that your partner will magically change, just because you’re in love. On the one hand, there is no growth and progress, and on the other, you’re consuming your resources and draining your energy. But that is a big waste of your precious life.

  • Self-reflection, retrospective and journaling

    Imagine an iceberg floating in the ocean. Only one tenth of the iceberg is visible, while the rest of it lies deep beneath the surface – mighty, intimidating and alluring. It’s the same with your mind. Your conscious mind makes up less than 10 % of your brain function. The mighty rest is your subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind is composed of unintentional and habitual thoughts, behaviours, and actions.

    That’s why no human is the master in his own house. The subconscious mind is like an autopilot that triggers certain behaviours in certain situations. The triggered behaviour doesn’t necessarily lead to the desired outcome. Even more: you often don’t have a clue about why you’re doing a certain thing and why you feel the way you feel. In some situations, you can even become self-destructive or completely misinterpret the feedback from your environment, which leads to an entirely wrong decision.

    Self-reflection can help you with that. Through self-reflection, you can change how you see yourself and how you feel about certain situations and, at the end, how you act. Consequently, you can also change how other people see you.

    We could define self-reflection as careful thought about your own behaviour and beliefs. If we develop the definition further, self-reflection is really asking yourself thought-provoking questions so that you can develop a deeper level of understanding yourself.

    The most important direct or indirect benefits of self-reflection are:

    • Understanding and knowing yourself better, for example why you were feeling a certain way and why you did something or made a certain decision
    • Becoming more aware and thus more proactive than reactive, meaning you have more personal power and control
    • Having a clearer picture about your true desires and who you really are
    • Analysing feedback from your environment based on your actions and taking it into account for the desired final outcome of your actions (every action in life brings a reaction)
    • Removing inner roadblocks and releasing emotional tension

    There are also many side benefits of self-reflection, like developing better communication skills, critical thinking, self-learning, self-awareness, social awareness, empathy, analytical capabilities and sensitivity to cultural differences, meaning you become more tolerant. Long-term benefits of self-reflection are also increased professional value and value for personal relationships, resulting in you having a greater capacity for work, creativity, love and, at the bottom line, being happier.

    There are two levels of self-reflection you should be doing regularly:

    • Action retrospective for regular improvements and adjustments to the environment after every sprint
    • Self-analysis for knowing yourself better and being happier in life in the long-term

    Sprint retrospective

    No matter how productive or successful you are in life, there’s always an opportunity to improve. There’s always a way to do things better. The more you become aware of yourself, your actions and your environment, and the more you are open to experiment and try new things (frequently out of the box), the better your potential for improvement is. In different words: becoming wiser unlocks the opportunity for improvement.

    As Confucius said, we may learn wisdom by three methods: “First, by reflection, which is the noblest; second, by imitation, which is the easiest; and third, by experience, which is the most bitter.”

    Since we don’t want to be bitter in life and we don’t want to only imitate other people, much less the wrong ones, let’s focus on improving ourselves by reflection. In agile development, we know the so-called sprint retrospective. The purpose of the sprint retrospective is to learn what works for the team and what doesn’t, and to make adjustments for the next sprint. A sprint retrospective usually takes two to four hours and the team tries to answer a few basic but hard questions:

    • What went well during the last sprint that the team will continue doing?
    • What could the team do differently?
    • How can the team implement the change?

    Based on that, the team should make three decisions and stick to them:

    • What to start doing
    • What to stop doing
    • What to continue doing

    There is no reason why you couldn’t do the same in your personal life. When living the Agile and Lean Life, you don’t just do work and execute tasks. You have to think regularly about why you’re doing something and how you’re doing it, and whether you’re making real progress –progress that brings value to your life. Being strong and passionate about the reason why is the best motivator you can have in life, and as mentioned before, there’s always a way to do things better. That’s why personal sprint reflections are so important.

    In the Agile and Lean Life productivity framework, you have regularly scheduled intervals (seven or fourteen days) for planning the next sprint and reflecting on the previous sprint. While planning the sprint and doing the retrospective in your personal life, you should do the following:

    • Review the tasks done in the previous interval
    • Connect with yourself and straighten out your life vision (why)
    • Measure your real progress
    • Adjust the strategy and plan
    • Reflect on new things you learned
    • Gather new ideas
    • Identify potential improvements
    • Set new tasks for the upcoming interval

    Thinking about the elements listed above during your interval planning and reflection, you should ask yourself the following questions: what went well during the last sprint, what you were doing right, what didn’t go that well, why that is so and what you could do differently and how. Based on that, you should make three decisions:

    • What will you start doing in your life?
    • What will you stop doing in your life?
    • What will you continue doing in your life?

    To really implement the change in your life, you have to consider your own behaviour, the desired result, people involved in the process, relationships, the process itself and the tools that can help you improve your work.

    There are two options for when to take time for reflection:

    • Every week or every two weeks when you make time for planning the sprint and doing reflection
    • You plan the sprint in the beginning of the week and do reflection at the end of the week or in two-week intervals. Whatever works better for you. Some people like to combine planning and reflection, others don’t.

    The process is simple: you sit down and go through all the planning and reflection elements and questions listed above.

    If there is no change in your behaviour – the decisions you make, the strategy you follow, the actions you do etc. after your reflection, your reflection simply had no real value. The purpose of the sprint retrospective isn’t just to feel a little bit better about yourself for planning and strategizing. Avoid the fake feeling of progress at all costs. If you don’t know what you’ll do differently after the reflection, if you don’t know how you’ll change your behaviour, you’re doing it wrong. Applying wisdom in practice is the key to progress, not only being aware of something.

    Self-analysis and journaling

    Self-analysis is kind of a different story and takes reflection even a step further. Don’t get me wrong, you need both processes for the best results, but you do have to know the difference between both tools.

    To start with the biggest difference: if you have to force yourself to make a certain decision after self-analysis, you haven’t done it right. Self-analysis is about understanding yourself and noticing, not judging and forcing yourself into anything.

    There is no “stop doings”, “start doings” and “continue doings”. It’s about changing the course of your life without any force, by better understanding who you are and what you are through analytical thinking.

    With self-analysis, you’re going way deeper. It’s not only about your plan, actions and environment anymore, but about you, your whys, about who you truly are and what you want in life. It’s more about getting rid of emotional shit and intruded behaviour you’ve accumulated in the past, which consequently increases your capacity for love, self-worth and self-respect.

    Of course in the long term, self-analysis is also strongly connected to your performance level, productivity and success, much as sprint planning is in the short term. If you look at Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle, the sprint retrospective is more about what and how, while self-analysis is more about why; and you should always start with why.

    There are two main ways of doing self-analysis:

    Psychoanalysis – Frankly, we aren’t talking about self-analysis anymore, but more about the professional process of gaining insights about yourself with a therapist. As you probably know, psychoanalysis was founded by Sigmund Freud and its aim is to release repressed emotions and experiences by making the unconscious thoughts conscious. It’s also about rebuilding your inner blueprint for healthy relationships.

    It’s a very valuable process, but the downside is that psychoanalysis is time-consuming and there are no quick answers. It usually takes a few years of regular weekly meetings with a psychoanalyst. You have to be very motivated to go through the process, but you know how it is: you only get out as much as you put in, and this process can be pure gold for you, especially if you have many cognitive distortions.

    Journaling – The second option, less professional, intense and scientific but still with great value, is to lead the self-analysing process yourself. You won’t internalize a new healthier blueprint for relationships, but you can get many insights about yourself. The best way to keep the needed discipline and to trigger analytical thinking in your brain is journaling.

    Journaling and your self-reflective journal

    Instead of having a psychoanalyst, a journal can be your tool for self-reflection and analytical work. When I talk about journaling, I’m not talking about writing down everything that happened to you on a specific day. I’m talking about why it happened, how you felt, why did you feel that way, how is that connected to your values and beliefs and so on.

    Keeping a self-reflective journal is not about your day and what happened, but about your thoughts, your perspective, your feelings, your words, your actions and about the feedback from your environment. It’s about becoming aware of why you acted like you did and what the result of your behaviour was. It’s about becoming aware of who you are, what your true desires are, identifying your cognitive distortions and so on. All that should lead to insights, understanding and better knowing yourself.

    Regularly reflecting by writing a journal will enable you to:

    • Get to know yourself step by step throughout different life situations
    • Be better connected to your true self, your values, emotions and desires
    • You will become more aware and come to more insights as well as understand your environment better, especially the people who are the closest to you
    • Develop deeper relationships by developing a greater capacity for love and by better understanding yourself. Being more tolerant towards yourself means being more tolerant towards others.
    • Have outstanding clarity and focus
    • Track your personal development and personal evolution. It will also accelerate your personal growth and development. You’ll be able to track your linear and rapid improvements.

    Other benefits of journaling:

    • You get things out of your head and clear your mind, which can relax you and give you more creative and analytical potential.
    • You gain insights you would otherwise miss, especially since you’re keeping track of your thoughts and thinking. You quickly forget what you don’t write down, even the best business ideas.
    • Journaling is also a very powerful problem-solving tool, especially for complex problems.

    There are three main ways of how to keep your journal (it’s not rocket science, but still):

    Notebook – By far the best way to do self-reflection by journaling is writing things down. Your hand is connected directly to your brain and it’s a good feeling to have full control, while nothing is buzzing or blinking or distracting you. All you have to do is buy a notebook, schedule some time and start writing.

    Applications – You have many applications you can use for journaling, such as text processors, editors, notepads and journaling software. If you decide for an app, you should test a few of them and select the one that works best for you. Maybe you can start with Evernote.

    Private blog – The third option, also electronic, is having a private blog. Here are the instructions for how to open a blog (a public one, but all you have to do is keep it private). It’s probably not the best option and it’s also not the safest, but if it works for you, why not use it.

    Some additional directions for keeping your journal as a self-reflective tool:

    Be constant

    The easiest way to start journaling is when you’re pissed off or have had a very vivid day. That’s okay, a journal is a great tool for situations like that, but to get the most out of journaling, you should do it consistently, daily. For example, for 30 minutes every day before you go to sleep.

    It will become a habit for you, your mind will get into the state for self-reflection faster and you’ll have consistent history. The most powerful thoughts you can work with usually come when you have an empty head.

    Be alone and without distractions

    Keeping a self-reflective journal is about association. Associations always lead you to the core of the problem. An important part of it is that nobody should distract your flow of associations. That’s why it’s good to be alone and without distractions such as a phone or anything else.

    Whys

    Encourage your association flow by asking yourself why. Do it five times if necessary. Even ten if it leads you to more insight. As already mentioned, associations will slowly lead you to the core of everything, you’ll become aware sooner or later. You will get an insight into why you feel like you do and why you’ve found yourself in the situation you’re currently in.

    5-Whys is also a great problem-solving method. Write down a problem you have and ask yourself “why” five times. After every answer, you ask yourself “why?” again and that will lead you to the core of the problem. Here is an example (source: Wikipedia):

    • The vehicle will not start. (the problem)
    • Why? – The battery is dead. (first why)
    • Why? – The alternator is not functioning. (second why)
    • Why? – The alternator belt has broken. (third why)
    • Why? – The alternator belt was well beyond its useful service life and not replaced. (fourth why)
    • Why? – The vehicle was not maintained according to the recommended service schedule. (fifth why, the root cause)

    Intellectual and emotional body

    You need to distinguish between your mind and your emotions. It’s true that our thoughts and emotions are strongly connected, but you’re often in situations where something seems totally logical (how you should feel or do), but your emotions tell you a completely different story. Your emotions are the compass that leads you to the real insights.

    For example, it may be logical that you take a new job that has a higher pay-check and more opportunities. But your emotions may not completely agree with the rational decision. You can feel your emotional body resisting. It’s part of your analytical job to ask yourself why. Five or even more times, if necessary.

    You can help yourself with the following questions and guidelines:

    • Clearly describe a situation that happened to you
    • How does it make you feel and why? Continue with whys.
    • The situation you’re in and your feelings, what do they remind you of the most?

    No judging, just noticing

    The purpose of self-reflection by journaling is not to judge and criticize yourself or analyse what you should do and what you shouldn’t. It’s about being understanding, tolerant and noticing things about yourself.

    It’s not about strengthening your inner critique, but vice versa. It’s about increasing your capacity for love towards yourself and others by becoming more aware and knowing yourself and your past. No matter what, be gentle with yourself when self-reflecting.

    For increasing your short-term performance, productivity and improvement, regularly plan sprints and do reflections. And for increasing your long-term performance and happiness, do regular reflections and self-analysis by keeping a journal. It may seem like a huge investment, but it’s an investment that will enable you to really go for your true desires and goals. It doesn’t matter how hard you work if you aren’t doing the right thing. Dare to be yourself!

  • Cognitive distortions and negative thinking

    By far the biggest waste in life are cognitive distortions. Cognitive distortions are all extreme negative thoughts that bring bad feelings as well as longer periods of depression or severe negative moods sooner or later. You simply can’t live a positive life with a negative mind. By having too many cognitive distortions, you’re trapped in living a zombie life, seeing the world as very dark and full of terror. What a waste.

    There’s good news and bad news regarding cognitive distortions. The good news is that you can get rid of cognitive distortions and live a fuller and happier life. Without cognitive distortions, you can be much more positive, lean, agile and with a greater capacity to love yourself and the world around you. You develop inner strength that allows you to go after your goals with positive feelings.

    The bad news is that the way of getting rid of cognitive distortions is counterintuitive to us. For most people, assumptions about how to deal with cognitive distortions go something like this: I need [x]. Having [x] will make me happy in life. By having [x] and being happier, my negative thoughts will go away, I will free myself and be more motivated and become successful. As you’ve probably guessed [x] is usually a good car, a well-paid job, a dream spouse or anything similar from the materialistic world.

    There are several problems with that kind of thinking. The first wrong assumption is that happiness comes from the outer world. Well, it can come, but only for a very short period of time. Buying something you want makes you happy for a few days, after that you’re back in the same situation of negativity.

    The second very big problem with that kind of thinking is passivity. You put yourself in a passive role, waiting for life to reward you just because you deserve it, just because you’re something special. It doesn’t work that way. Life rewards those who master its rules and put all their creativity, cleverness and hard work into achieving their goals. Life wants you to be proactive, not passive and reactive. A passive role has never brought real happiness. You can find a lot of passive people who fake happiness, but you don’t want that.

    The next false assumption is that it’s going to be easy to get rid of negative thoughts. One new item, thing or person in your life, and your mind will get updated with a new, more positive “software”. You’ve probably been thinking negatively for years, it’s part of how you were raised, maybe your parents were too critical of you or you grew up in an abusive family. It’s been there for years; and it’s going to take a lot of effort and hard work to get rid of it. It’s not fair, but you have to face it. Nothing worthwhile comes easily and getting rid of your negative thoughts is definitely worth it. No matter how hard it is.

    The process of getting rid of cognitive distortions works the other way around. First you have to work on your mind, first you have to improve your mental state and change your inner world. Working on your mind will improve your thoughts, better thoughts will bring more positive actions, more positive actions will bring more positive outcomes. That’s a proactive position. You tackle the software in your brain to get rid of bugs and function optimally. You level up your game. You first have to work on your mind to become more focused, more decisive, clearer about what you want out of life, and more positive.

    It’s really important that you distinguish between the process and the event. Getting rich is an event. Meeting your perfect spouse is an event. Getting a raise is an event. Having a positive mind is an event. But before any kind of event like that, the process always comes first. Getting rich is a carefully orchestrated process that usually takes years if not decades to finally reach the final event. It’s the same with your mind. There are no shortcuts. There is no easy way out of negative thinking, there is no event without a process. But it can be done.

    You can’t just think positively

    You can find many self-help books that praise positive thinking. Well, it’s true that positive thinking is an important part of a happy and successful life, but you can’t just decide to think positively. If it were that simple, everyone would be happy and optimistic and super positive in life. You can’t force yourself into positive thinking, it will only make you miserable. Every time a negative thought crosses your mind, you will get mad and angry and disappointed, and that only means even more negative thoughts.

    In order to get superior results, you always need a superior strategy. You need to tackle the problem more smartly and systematically. There are two ways how to do it, the first one is the hardest, but gives the best results, the second one is a simpler version, but probably suitable for most people.

    If you have really big problems with depression, negative thinking and heavy moods, they probably won’t go away without professional help. In this case, I suggest that you enter the search mode, and do research on different types of psychological therapy, read a few professional psychology books, not self-help ones, visit a few specialists, try to get to know yourself as well as you can on your own and find the therapy that suits you best or you think could help you the most. It may take a lot of time, money and energy, but you don’t want to waste your life and live like a zombie. Your life is the most precious thing you have.

    The second, simpler version is to systematically tackle the problem by yourself. You can still do research on your own, but the best resource I’ve ever found by far is a book called Feeling Good, written by David D. Burns. If you want to get rid of your thoughts, you first have to understand what they are, where they are coming from, the different types of negative thinking that exist and how to deal with them. You can find all the answers in the mentioned book.

    Methods and techniques in the book are part of cognitive psychology. The foundation of cognitive psychology is the hypothesis that all your moods are created by your cognitions – thoughts, where cognitions refer to the way you look at things, from your perceptions and mental attitudes to beliefs.

    Based on that fact, you simply feel depressed when your thoughts are dominated by pervasive negativity. Your negativity is therefore probably not based on accurate perceptions of reality, but is instead often the product of mental slippage. The extent of negative thinking is enormous. Your mood slumps, your self-image crumbles, your body doesn’t function properly, your willpower becomes paralysed and your own actions defeat you.

    Feeling trapped
    You can feel trapped inside your own mind.

    Ten types of negative thinking

    I suggest you buy and read the book, as it can really be a life-changer. Nevertheless, here’s the summary of ten different kinds of cognitive distortions that are really eye-opening and the first step to understanding your negative thoughts. Before we look at ten types of negative thinking, let’s look at the scientifically proven hypothesis of the extent that negative thinking really has.

    “Every bad feeling you have is the result of negative thinking. Self-defeating emotions are caused by negative thoughts, illogical pessimism and strong inner critique. Your emotions result entirely from the way you look at things, by your internal dialogue on a series of events that happen to you. If your understanding of what’s happening is accurate, your emotions will be normal. If your perception is twisted and distorted in some way, your emotional response will be abnormal.”

    Here are ten types of negative thinking, described in detail in the book Feeling good:

    All-or-nothing thinking

    “You evaluate yourself and events that happen in your life in extremes, it’s either totally black or totally white. That kind of thinking is the basis for perfectionism. It causes you to fear doing any mistakes, it causes you to fear doing something imperfectly. If you don’t do it perfectly, if you make a mistake, you see yourself as a complete looser. You have the same interpretation if something doesn’t happen as you wanted or expected. It can go from all to nothing really quickly. You can see yourself as zero with one single small change in the outside environment. That kind of perception has nothing to do with reality. Absolutes do not exist in the universe.”

    For example, your spouse must behave exactly to your expectations, or they are not the right one.

    Overgeneralization

    “With overgeneralization, you arbitrarily conclude that a thing that happened to you once will occur over and over again. For example, the pain of rejection is generated almost entirely from overgeneralization. Without cognitive distortion, a rejection can be temporarily disappointing, but cannot be seriously disturbing.”

    You know how it goes: I will never get a girlfriend… (Based on one rejection).

    Mental filter

    “Mental filtering simply means that you pick out a negative detail in any situation and dwell on it exclusively, thus perceiving the whole situation as negative. Because you aren’t aware of this mental filtering, you conclude that everything is negative. All that you allow to enter your conscious mind are the negative things.”

    For example you have your dream job, it’s just your pay check that could be a little bit higher, but all you can see is that the pay check is not adequate.

    Disqualifying the positive

    “It’s about the unwanted ability of your mind to transform neutral and maybe even positive events into negative ones. You don’t just ignore positive experiences, you cleverly and swiftly turn them into their nightmarish opposite. “

    For example, if you get a compliment and your mind starts questioning the compliment and maybe even seeing it as manipulation that could definitely be this kind of cognitive distortion. It doesn’t make sense to constantly throw cold water on the good things that happen in your life.

    Jumping to conclusions

    “Jumping to conclusions means that you jump to a negative conclusion that is not justified by the facts of the situation. It’s as if you had a crystal ball that foretold only misery to you.”

    For example, you make assumptions that other people are looking down on you, and you’re so sure about this that you don’t even bother to check it out and talk with other people. You would rather have a negative belief about what other people think of you.

    Magnification and minimization

    “With magnificational or minimizational thinking, you either blow things out of proportion or shrink them. Magnification commonly occurs when you look at your own errors, fears or imperfections, and exaggerate their importance. When you think about your strengths, you may do the opposite – you look at your strengths in a way that makes them look small and unimportant. Of course if you magnify your imperfections and minimize your good points, you’re guaranteed to feel inferior.”

    Emotional reasoning

    “Emotional reasoning means that you take your emotions as evidence for the truth. Because things feel so negative to you, you assume they are true. But in reality if your thinking is distorted, your emotions have no validity of reality. Just because you feel overwhelmed and helpless, for example, it doesn’t mean that your problems are impossible to solve.”

    Should statements

    “You try to motivate yourself with statements like “I should do this”, “I must do that” etc. These statements cause you to feel pressured and resentful. With that kind of statements, you achieve the opposite result, feeling even more unmotivated and apathetic. When the reality of your own behaviours falls short of your standards, your “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” create self-loathing, shame and guilt.”

    It’s the same when you direct “should” statements towards other people. In most cases, you feel frustrated, because you want someone to behave according to your expectations. When the all-too-human performance of other people falls short of your expectations, which definitely happens from time to time, you feel bitter and self-righteous. You either have to change your expectations to approximate reality or always feel let down by human behaviour.

    Labeling and mislabelling

    “Labeling means creating a completely negative self-image based on your errors. It’s an extreme form of overgeneralization. Labeling yourself is self-defeating and irrational. Because we label ourselves or others, for example with the label “I’m a born loser”, we resent ourselves or others, and jump at every chance to criticize. But it doesn’t make any sense to focus on every weakness or imperfection of yourself or others as proof for being worthiness.”

    You must consider that a human life is an ongoing process that involves constantly changing the physical body as well as having an enormous number of rapidly changing thoughts, feelings and behaviours. Your life is therefore an evolving experience, a continual flow. You are not a thing. That is why any label is constricting, highly inaccurate, and global. Labelling means that you have a fixed mindset, but in life you can always grow, improve and change. Nothing is permanent and there is always a move you can make towards a better life. You have to innovate your way towards a better life.

    Personalization

    “The last cognitive distortion is personalization and it is the mother of guilt. You assume responsibility for a negative event or thing, even where there is no basis for doing so. You arbitrarily conclude that what happened was your fault or reflects your inadequacy, even when you are not responsible for it. Personalization causes you to feel crippling guilt.”

    In the case of personalization, you usually confuse influence with control over others. What the other person does is ultimately his or her responsibility, not yours.

    These are ten cognitive distortions identified by David D. Burns. You can read more about them in his book Feeling good. I really recommend it. Here is a good summary of why dealing with your negative thoughts is so important:

    “Your thoughts create emotions; therefore your emotions cannot prove that your thoughts are accurate. Unpleasant feelings merely indicate that you are thinking something negative and believing it. Every time you feel depressed about something, try to identify the corresponding negative thought you had just prior to negative feelings and during the depressed mood.

    Because these thoughts have actually created your bad mood, by learning to restructure them, you can change your mood. Your emotions come entirely form the way you look at things. If your understanding of what is happening is accurate, your emotions will be normal. If your perception is twisted and distorted in some way, your emotional response will be abnormal. Feelings aren’t facts.”

    Smile more
    Free yourself!

    Dealing with cognitive distortions

    The first step in dealing with cognitive distortions is building up your sense of self-worth and self-esteem. When you are in a negative emotional state or, even worse, depressed, you usually believe that you’re worthless. The stronger the negative feelings, the more you feel like no one.

    Thus the first step is to closely examine what you say about yourself when you have negative feelings. Negative events grow in importance until they dominate your entire reality. All the distorted thoughts feel real to you. The illusion you have about yourself is very convincing.

    An important fact in the whole picture is that achievements and other external rewards can’t really help you with your feeling of self-worth. They can bring you satisfaction, but not happiness. Moreover, love, approval and friendship also can’t help you much. As stated in the book, a great majority of negative and depressed people are loved very much, they just can’t see it, because their focus is completely elsewhere.

    The only way to do it is to tackle your inner dialogue and your inner critique.

    The method that David S. Burns recommends for tackling your self-esteem is:

    • Talk back to your inner critique
    • Train yourself to recognize and write down self-critical thoughts as they go through your mind
    • Learn why these thoughts are distorted
    • Practice talking back to them so as to develop a more realistic self-evaluation system

    You simply draw a three-column table, where the first column is the automatic negative thought (“I never do things right”), the second one is the type of cognitive distortion (overgeneralization) out of the mentioned ten different types, and the third one is your rational response (“Not true, I do a lot of things right”).

    Genius people always test and implement new things in their life as quickly as possible. If you aren’t willing to use the tool and take time to deal with your thoughts, you simply won’t be able to do the job. The table tool will help you locate the mental errors that depress you and fix them.

    Even if this article is eye-opening for you and you do nothing afterwards, all the reading was a big waste of time; and waste is your biggest enemy to a happy and successful life.

    Emotional accounting

    The most important thing in cognitive therapy is to observe your thoughts and your feelings. Thus you can add two more columns to the above-mentioned table and do some emotional accounting. You can specify the type of feeling and its intensity (0 – 100) from before the rational response to cognitive distortion and afterwards. It’s a good way of determining how much your feeling will actually improve.

    Thus columns in your table would be:

    • Automatic negative thought (“I never do things right”)
    • Type of negative feeling and intensity (Anger, 90%)
    • Type of cognitive distortion (Overgeneralization)
    • Rational response (“Not true, I do a lot of things right”, for example…)
    • Intensity of negative feeling (Anger, 30%)

    An important part of emotional accounting is also the mental biofeedback. It simply means clicking a button each time a negative thought about you crosses your mind. With this technique, you will always be alert for negative thoughts about yourself. You should probably do this exercise first, before any others, just to become aware of your negative thoughts and how many of them you have.

    That’s basically it. It sounds simple, but it’s not. Nevertheless it’s definitely worth it. You don’t have to do anything especially worthy to create or deserve self-esteem. All you have to do is turn off that critical, inner voice. Your inner self-abuse springs from illogical, distorted thinking. Your sense of worthiness is not based on truth, it’s just the abscess that lies at the core of your negative thinking. Deal with your inner critique and your thoughts will improve.

    Negative thinking can really paralyze you, your willpower and your desire to do things. Mindsets like hopelessness, helplessness, overwhelming yourself, jumping to conclusions, self-labelling, undervaluing the reward, perfectionism, fear of failure, fear of success, fear of disapproval and criticism, coercion and resentment, low frustration tolerance, guilt and self-blame are usually most commonly associated with procrastination. And you deserve better.

    You should identify your negative thoughts, your cognitive distortions and your paralyzing mindsets. Keeping a schedule of negative thoughts, fixing your cognitive distortions, keeping a daily activity schedule as well as rewarding yourself and giving yourself credit is a way towards a whole new, more positive life. Focusing on your progress, what you’ve done and fixing your negative interpretations and beliefs will help you with your feeling of self-worth and thus you will be able to enjoy life more. At the end of the day, the most important thing is that you respect and love yourself.

    Here is a good checklist you can download to refresh your memory about cognitive distortions when needed.

    Start small. It is first action and then motivation, not vice versa. A little action leads to motivation and motivation leads to more action. Don’t just wait for motivation to come out of nowhere. It won’t happen. Just do it. Take a piece of paper and start writing down negative thoughts you have about yourself. Take a piece of paper and write down three small things you will do tomorrow. Then do them all.

    Source: David D. Burns, Feeling good: the new mood therapy

  • Your life strategy

    The key to a more successful life is having a superior strategy for living it. Hoping that everything turns out okay is not a strategy.

    Your life strategy is especially shaped by your beliefs, values, personal management system, and thus by your decisions about spending your time, energy, money, skills and other resources. After setting your life vision, you should think carefully over your life strategy and the direction it’s taking you in. This blog post will help you with that.

    For extraordinary results, you need an extraordinary approach. For extraordinary life, you need an extraordinary strategy.

    Even if you don’t have a specific strategy, you do have at least some sort of a strategy. It’s usually a combination of what you’ve learned through primary and secondary socialization, especially from your parents, grandparents, other people who raised you and the schooling system, and later in your life of what is expected from you by social norms in your country, dominating religion etc.

    If not any of that, your default strategy is usually what happens to you by chance. For example you end up in an industry where you’ve landed your first job after having sent CVs to numerous companies in different industries.

    Having no strategy as a child is a fact, but later on it’s your personal decision. As a child, you can’t take any decisions for yourself. All you can do is observe, learn and try to function in completely dependent relationships. The healthier the environment that you’re raised in, the better off you usually are regarding your life strategy and the better your starting point is when taking complete control over your life.

    But even if you were raised in a perfect environment, no one is completely the same as their parents and nor they should be. There’s also the additional fact that times change (your environment), thus sooner or later you have to shape your own life strategy if you want to be happy and successful. Modeling as a life strategy works only to a certain extent.

    Your personal power is the key in consciously shaping your life strategy

    The more personal power you develop over the years (mastering yourself), the greater the influence you have on how your life will turn out. Somewhere in adolescence, you start to take over the power in different areas of life and soon it’s totally up to you how you will live it.

    At the end of the day, you only have two choices – either you follow your own goals or the goals of other people; either you are the pilot of your life or other people are, from your past and your present.

    The most important thing you have to be aware of is that you always have a choice. If you don’t like something, there is always a move you can make towards a better life. You don’t betray anyone if you change your beliefs or your values over time.

    There’s nothing wrong with choosing to look at the world through different lenses, lenses that suit you better. It’s your life and you should live it completely true to yourself. You have to be yourself since everyone else is taken; you have to be yourself if you want to be happy.

    But just being yourself isn’t enough, not even close. You also have to be smart. You want to be happy and successful as well. You want to be different and better. You want to shape a life strategy that will take you to your goals and enable you to experience as much of your life vision as possible.

    “I am who I am” should not be an excuse for not playing the game of life smartly, dedicatedly and masterfully. You don’t get a second chance so it’s really important that you regularly think through how you will play the game of life.

    Saying that you always have a choice may sound easy, but it’s not. Every change means that you want to achieve a state that’s different from the default; and changing things takes courage, effort, investments etc. The greater the change you want to make in life, the more effort it will take.

    The worse your starting position is and the more ambitious goals you have, the more effort it will take to change the course of your life. Your strategy will have to be more superior, you will have to play smarter and work harder.

    The world is designed to reward those who master its rules.

    The elements of your life strategy

    Of course you constantly change your life strategy over the course of your life, especially when you experience new things and epiphanies. Thus you should regularly update your life strategy by having your end goals and your life vision in mind.

    Nevertheless your life strategy mainly consists of the following decisions you have to make sooner or later:

    • Your mindset and your personality
    • Taking care of your physical body and physical appearance
    • Formal education
    • Informal education and developing competences and skills
    • Information intake and communicating strategy
    • Your past and relationships with your primary family
    • Intimate relationships and your secondary family
    • Your sex life
    • Relationship with your kids
    • Money and investment strategy
    • Career strategy
    • Your social strategy
    • Hobbies and having fun strategy
    • Travel and transportation strategy
    • Home and your surroundings strategy
    • Strategy toward animals and nature
    • Art and culture
    • Using technology and your digital trail strategy
    • Your nation, country and political system
    • Spirituality, religion and asking for help
    • Taking care of your emotional body
    • Dealing with enemies, bad and evil in the world
    • Your legacy and social engagement strategy
    • When do you want to give up?

    Now let’s break down one by one.

    Your mindset and your personality

    The first and most important part of your life strategy is you. You have to make a choice of how much you will bother with yourself and your goals and how much you will just go with the flow. It’s your choice whether you will live your life with the growth mindset or the fixed mindset and that’s probably the key decision you have to make in your life.

    I am of course biased towards the growth mindset, but there are definitely many people who live a good life with a fixed mindset as well. The question is what works best for you.

    After choosing the growth or fixed mindset, you have to decide how much and when you will compete, and when and where you will cooperate. Cooperating is usually a part of the prestige mindset and competing a part of the dominating mindset. We all have and live both mindsets, the only question is when do we chose one over the other. It’s an important part of your life strategy. For example in sports, you may brutally compete, while at your job you help all your coworkers.

    The next decision you’ll have to make is where your mind focus will be, in your past, present or future, and what kind of an outlook you will have to each time frame. For your past, you can focus on negative or positive events. For your present, you can be more hedonistic or more fatalistic. And for your future, you can be goal oriented or surrender yourself to a greater power and posthumous life.

    Let’s continue with your personal level of ethics and morality. It doesn’t matter whether your actions lean on the prestige or the dominating mindset, you always have to choose where to draw a morality and ethics line. You may, for example, brutally compete but never take illegal performance enhancing drugs. On the other hand, you may help people in your class to study, but cheat on your test nonetheless.

    We have laws that forbid harmful behavior, especially on the physical and material level, meaning they provide security to your body and personal property. But there are still many gray areas and harmful things that are allowed, especially on the emotional level, and different ways of unethically gaining new material things.

    You have to decide for yourself what’s right and what’s wrong after the law stops working.

    Another important decision is whether you will be more flexible or stubborn in your life. Will you push things to go your way no matter what or will you adapt to different circumstances? It’s a totally different life if you choose one or the other.

    There are several other things you have to decide about yourself, like how organized you will be, whether you will be more unique or follow trends, the level of your privacy, how you will deal with obstacles and so on.

    Take care of your body

    Taking care of your physical body and physical appearance

    Your body is like your digital avatar, a vessel carrying your soul so you can experience the material world. An important part of your life strategy is how well you will take care of your vessel/avatar (or body, if you want).

    The formula is very simple. The more you take care of your body, the better you look, the more energy you have, the longer you will probably live and so on. Taking care of your body is probably one of the best investments in your life strategy. And we all know that.

    Why don’t we all do it then? Because it’s not easy. Our body is a very complex mechanism and our mind even more so. Not taking care of your body gives you immediate gratification and consequences are seen only over the years.

    Eating that hamburger in front of the TV relaxes you immediately, but you only gain weight over time. Regularly taking care of your body has the opposite mental effect and take real effort. You have to invest and work hard and make sacrifices now at this moment, only to get results somewhere in the future.

    Therefore it’s not easy to take care of your body. Anyway, you do have to make a decision of how well and how regularly you will maintain your body. What will be your healthy living strategy? That includes everything from your diet, exercise and hygiene to choosing your personal style and appearance. To be even more specific, as part of your life strategy regarding your body, you have to at least make decisions about:

    • Your sleep schedule (how much you sleep, when do you go to sleep)
    • Your hygiene level
    • Your personal style
    • Your posture and body language
    • Your exercising strategy
    • Your relationship with food (diet)
    • Dealing with daily anxiety
    • Taking breaks and holidays (rest)
    • How often and regularly will you go to a doctor
    • Taking medicine and vaccination
    • Smoking / drinking / drugs
    • Detoxing yourself (fasting, technology detox)

    One more thing to mention here is your personal clothing style. Clothes are an important part of communicating who you are. Again it’s your choice how much you will emphasize your uniqueness. It’s on you to decide whether fashion and style will be a part of your life or not.

    Formal education

    At first, your formal education is strongly determined by your parents and the place where you live. The material status of your family also has a great influence on the quality of the formal schooling that you can get (private schools etc.). But sometime after high school, the level of formal education you will receive is, in most cases, completely up to you. Probably an even more important decision is which field you will choose.

    The more traditional that the career you want is, the more important is a high level of education. If you want to be a doctor, lawyer, scientist etc. formal education is very important. On the other side of the coin, many contemporary jobs don’t even demand high levels of formal education if you are good at a specific skill, like digital design or programming.

    Decisions about formal education are tough and many factors are involved. You should consider them all and then make the best decision that’s available to you. When making decisions about the level of your formal education, you should consider at least the following:

    • Market trends for different jobs
    • Importance of formal education in your chosen career
    • The field of study and subjects you will take and why
    • The college you will choose and in which state/country
    • Grades you will aim at
    • Scholarships, taking debt and total financial costs of schooling
    • Opportunity-cost of schooling (you could work, earn money and gain experience…)
    • Your payoff for investing into a higher level of formal education
    • How you will spend your free time outside the formal education process (partying, working, traveling, doing pro bono work…)

    You know that the costs of good formal education are getting higher and higher, while on the other hand, formal education is not a guarantee for getting a job anymore. You can find many different opinions and views on importance of formal education, especially if you should get yourself in debt to get a good formal education or not, but at the end of the day, it’s totally up to you.

    It depends on your life situation, your goals, the career you aim at, your strategy etc. You should systematically analyze it, think different scenarios over and then make a sound decision.

    Informal education and developing competences and skills

    We all know now that formal education is not enough to develop your competences and skills and thus achieve your maximum potential. You have to achieve your peak performance on your own. An important part of your life strategy is how much you will invest in acquiring knowledge and developing skills in addition to formal education.

    This one’s not about reading books and having meaningful conversations and so on, but about developing hard core knowledge and skills that can help you provide value to the market. It’s about knowledge, skills and talents you can sell on the market. It’s about certified or systematic courses you take that take a longer time to develop.

    • To what extent you will develop your competence level
    • Talents you have and will exploit
    • Knowledge you’ll acquire
    • Skills you’ll develop (programming, accounting, cooking…)
    • Soft skills you’ll develop (teamwork, leadership, sales, organization, EQ, SQ…)
    • Levels of creativity you will employ
    • Languages you’ll learn etc.

    Information intake

    Information intake and communicating strategy

    Besides formal and informal education, you constantly intake information and communicate. As the saying goes: you should watch what goes in and comes out of your mouth.

    In addition to that, there is another important fact and that is garbage in, garbage out. Therefore your information intake strategy is a very important part of your life. Things that you focus on grow, so you must be very careful on which information you will focus.

    The second thing is that as much as you have your personal fashion style, so you have your personal communication style. You should be aware of it and decide where you should make improvements and how to develop it to the full.

    Communication is a very important part of life and the better you are at communicating, the more you can achieve and the better you can resolve conflicts. Thus you should carefully consider how much you will invest in your own effective communication style.

    There is one more important thing you have to consider when it comes to your communication style. You may be shy and it probably has to do something with your past. Nevertheless when you are an adult and aware of it, shyness becomes your choice and can burden your life progress. Deal with it if necessary.

    • Level of listening to others
    • Books you read and how much you read
    • Personal infostructure: Media you consume – what and how much (TV, news, blogs, movies…)
    • Your communication style
    • The level to which you will develop your communication skills
    • Level of shyness / openness and how it goes together you being introvert or extrovert
    • Complimenting and criticizing others
    • Swearing and gossiping – yes or no and how much

    Your past and relationships with your primary family

    As mentioned before, you have to deal with your past to some extent and dealing with your primary family (meaning your mother, father, brother and sisters and even your grandparents) is also a part of this. If you had a loving home and you have the same values as your parents, then this may not be a big deal. It’s good if family really feels like family, the safest and the most loving environment.

    But that’s often not the case. In some cases the worst things that can happen to people are their parents. Families can be dysfunctional, love can be replaced with abuse and the values you have can be a complete opposite to those of your parents and siblings, from politics and religion to discipline and all other areas of life.

    In those cases, it’s very difficult to make a decision of how much and in what kind of a relationship you will be with your parents. Still, you have to decide.

    Another important part of your life strategy is how much you will lean on your long-time past, family history and bloodline. Well, if you are of royal blood, that’s definitely an important part of your life.

    If your ancestors came from another, completely different country or even continent, it can also be an important part of your life. Many people decide to explore their history and roots and look for strong history traits to lean on. How important your family history is to you is your choice.

    Every one of us has also experienced more or less shocking events in the past that can become a burden in our lives. Mistakes your parents made, accidents that happen, unfortunate events etc. We all have such shocking events in life and have to deal with them somehow. How we will deal with the negative situations of our past is a part of our life strategy.

    • How much you will keep in touch with your parents
    • How close you will be to your parents
    • How much you will keep in touch with your siblings / grandparents / relatives
    • How close you will be to your siblings / grandparents / relatives
    • The level of leaning on your family history, ancestors and bloodline
    • Dealing with unfortunate events from your childhood and youth
    • Which family patterns you will strengthen and which demolish
    • Making a decision about when you will move out of your primary home

    Intimate relationships and your secondary family

    The spouse you will choose to spend the rest of your life with will have the biggest influence on your life. You are very much shaped by people who surround you and your intimate partner is number one in this regard.

    There are also many things you have to decide before and after committing to one person. Before that you have to decide how serious you will be about relationships, to what extent does finding the right partner lie in your hands and to what extent is this the domain of a “higher power” and so on. What qualities will you look for in your partner, how much emphasis will you give to physical looks, what are the deal breakers, how long will you stay in dysfunctional relationships and so on.

    The clearer the picture that you have about what you want, the easier it will be to make decisions. But of course if you believe that a greater power must take care of your love life, you will be much less proactive. Tough decisions never end.

    Even after getting into a relationship, you again have certain behavioral patterns and decisions you have to make and be aware of. How you see traditional gender roles, how much you will invest into a partnership, what you want to get out of it, is marriage important to you and so on.

    Your attitude towards cheating and missteps is also an important part of intimate relationships. It’s not easy to spend decades with the same person and you have to decide if it’s worth it and what kind of mistakes you’re willing to tolerate.

    Together with your partner you will have to decide what kind of a family you want to create. You have to decide how organized, loving, safe, caring etc. your family will be. You have to choose what kind of a home you will create, how you will decorate it, which rituals you will celebrate, who will do which chores and so on. If you didn’t have a choice with how your primary home looked, now you have it.

    • Is love in your hands or in the hands of a greater power?
    • Your dating strategy
    • Qualities you look for in your partner (personality traits, common hobbies…)
    • Is a partnership fixed or can it grow?
    • The extent of traditional gender roles and gender equality at home
    • Home chores
    • The importance of a formal marriage
    • Breaking-up attitude in partnership and ending marriage if necessary
    • Morality in partnership
    • Your personal life and privacy in relationships (will you share everything to your partner…)
    • The financial aspect of a household
    • Sex life

    Intimate relationships

    Your sex life

    Right after your intimate relationships, it makes sense to mention your sex life as well. I know sex is a very primary force and we act on instinct, but we can still control a big part of our sex life with the decisions we make.

    If we listen only to our instinct, we are on autopilot that’s maybe not even leading us to our true goals. As mentioned, even if we don’t have a strategy, we have some sort of a strategy. In this case having no strategy means yielding to our urges. But to have the best sex of your life, you have to do much more than that.

    Regarding your sex life, you will have to make the following decisions:

    • Satisfaction with your own body and your attitude towards nudity
    • Openness about your sexual orientation
    • Approximate number of sex partners you want to have
    • How regularly you want to have sex in your life
    • How well you have to know a person to have sex with them
    • How much effort you will put into pleasing your partner and how much you want to receive
    • How much is sex a part of love and how much it can be only fun
    • Kinks you have and want to make happen
    • All the things you want to experience and try in your sex life
    • Tools and techniques you will use to spice up your sex life (toys, poses…)
    • Dealing with negative emotions regarding your sex life (guilt, shame…)
    • Your attitude towards pornography
    • Your attitude towards prostitution

    Relationship with your kids

    The relationship you have with your kids is probably the most sensitive and responsible part of your life strategy. You create a new life and you have the power to break or make an innocent person. Nobody lives an easy life, but you can make a decision of how much love and support you will offer to your kids and how you will make their life more beautiful and fulfilling; or not.

    Thus an important part of your life strategy is choosing why you will have kids, how many of them you will have and how you will raise them. Some people have kids for the economic benefit (poorer countries), some to fill their emotional gaps, others to create a loving family and pass on what they’ve learned in life and prepare kids for their own challenges. There are many reasons why to have kids and you will have to find your own. Both having kids and not having them can be the most selfish thing you do in life, depending on your why’s and how’s.

    • The number of kids you want to have in life
    • Reasons to have kids in life
    • How will you raise your kids (and how you will not raise them)
    • The amount of time you spent with your kids
    • Financial and other support you will offer to your kids
    • How well will you prepare your kids for life challenges
    • What will you do if for some reason you can’t have kids (adoption etc.)
    • Helping and empowering misfortune children

    Money and investment strategy

    I probably don’t have to emphasize that being able to acquire and keep assets is one of key skills in life and everybody has to deal with it, whether you want to or not. Some people love it, others hate it. It’s pretty much the same with money as it is with diet and health. Instant gratification messes up our rationality and plans.

    The wealth of your primary family and the money blueprint you’ve inherited have an important influence on how you will shape your strategy for dealing with money. But at the end of the day, it’s once again a question of mastering yourself and making choices.

    First you have to decide how you will make your income by providing value. You can either be employed, self-employed, a business owner or an investor.

    You have to decide how much money you will spend and how much money you will invest in order to gain passive and portfolio income. To do that, you need a savings and investment strategy. You have to deal with debt, curb your buying decisions and much more. If you are born poor, it’s not your fault, but if you die poor, it probably is your fault. If you decide for the latter, be aware that you’ve chosen it yourself.

    • How will you make money (employed, self-employed, business owner, investor)
    • Types of earnings (active income, passive income, portfolio income)
    • Will your income come from wealth creation or welath extortion or both
    • The balance between monetary and social value created
    • Insurance strategy
    • Saving strategy
    • Investment strategy
    • Debt strategy
    • Donating
    • Buying / Renting home
    • Luxuries you will afford
    • How long you will keep things (living minimalist life or not)
    • Inheritance strategy (receiving from your parents and giving to your kids)
    • Joint assets with your partner (to what extent)
    • Attitude towards government and taxes (optimizing taxes etc.)

    Career strategy

    Your money and earning potential are very much connected to your career, achievements and social status. First of all, your career strategy depends on your ambitions. The more ambitious you are, the more sound and superior a strategy you need in terms of career and in all other areas of life.

    You have to decide whether you will be a leader or a follower. You have to decide about the industries you want to contribute to and work in, the type of organizations you want to function in, whether you want to start your own business, whether you’d like to have business partners and so on.

    Your career also strongly depends on your execution and political skills. The bigger the organization you work for and the closer to the government you are, the more political skills you need. And you can either use political skills to do good or to manipulate for personal gain only. Again, it’s a part of your strategy and choice. Your advancement in career is also very much connected to your personal marketing and sales strategy.

    • Level of your ambitions
    • Leader or follower
    • Industries you want to work in
    • Type of organizations you want to work for (size, type, profit/non-profit…)
    • Starting your own business – yes or no
    • Business partner strategy
    • Relationships with authorities
    • Political skills
    • Execution skills
    • Personal marketing strategy – how aggressive you will be with personal marketing

    Your social strategy

    We are social animals. We cannot survive without other people. Relationships fulfill us and make us happy. Nevertheless some people are introverts, others are extroverts. Some people prefer business relationships, others personal. Some people like to do sports with friends, others like to only have fun.

    You need to know what social relationships mean to you, how much you are prepared to invest into relationships and what do you want to get out of them.

    It’s also no secret that you can benefit from having good social skills and developing strong social connections. It’s called acquiring social capital and it’s a part of your social strategy. The people you want to get to know, how you will make sure that people hear about you, who will you spend time with, who are you going to call when you’re in trouble and need something, all these are important questions you should find an answer to for yourself.

    • Introvert / Extrovert
    • Business / Personal Relationships
    • When and why to socialize
    • People you will spend most of your time with (who, their character, deal breakers…)
    • How often you will change your friends and social circles
    • Social intelligence and social skills
    • Social capital and networking strategy
    • Your social life online
    • Who will you call in times of trouble
    • Who can help you in different areas of life
    • How much you will invest into helping your friends

    Hobbies and having fun strategy

    According to my beliefs, we are here on this planet to (1) create, (2) learn and (3) have fun. Therefore hobbies, relaxation and having fun are also a part of your life strategy. Decisions on this area of life should be easy since we all love to have fun, but they are not always.

    You have to make important decision, how much time will you spend on your hobbies and having fun and how much on developing your career and being responsible adult dealing with all important obligations.

    The line between how much you should invest into your future and how much fun you want to have is conflicting, especially in your youth. In my opinion it should be “and” not “or” and while doing that, keeping the balance. But again, you have to find the right answer for yourself.

    • What relaxes you and how often you will relax
    • How much free time will you have in life? (work – life balance)
    • How do you spend your free time?
    • Hobbies you are going to try and do in life
    • Alcohol, drugs and other substances use / abuse
    • Games and gambling affinity
    • How much you smile

    Travel

    Travel and transportation strategy

    First of all, you need all kinds of transport in your life, moving from home to work and vice versa, traveling to different destinations and so on. You have to decide whether you will own a car or not, how safe your driving style will be, how much you will spend on your car, whether you will have one or two cars in your household and so on.

    Car is usually the second biggest expense besides your home. If you decide not to own a car, you need to have a transportation strategy, especially how to use public transport and how much money to spend on it.

    The desire to travel around the world is also a part of human nature. You have to decide where you want to travel, which countries you want to see and why. Whether it’s because of the culture, the nature or everything. Maybe you have a limited budget but if the desire is strong enough, you will find a way. In my youth, I never had a budget to travel personally, so I combined travelling for business with pleasure.

    • Car decisions (number of cars in household, how much to spend on car etc.)
    • Is car a status symbol for you or not
    • Your driving style
    • Use of public transportation
    • Countries you want to travel to
    • How much to travel, travel budget, with whom to travel
    • Why you want to travel
    • How you will finance your travels
    • Business / personal travels

    Home and your surroundings strategy

    One of the biggest costs in your life will be buying/renting and arranging your home. Thus it’s not only a tough decision to make, but also a very expensive one. Nevertheless you have to choose where you want to live sooner or later in your life, from which country and which city to choosing between a house and a flat or maybe even a boat if you prefer living on the sea.

    After choosing your home, you also have to decide how you will decorate it. It’s part of a creative process, where you of course want to make your surroundings to your liking. You should feel as good as possible in your home.

    You also have some influence on how your office will look. Thus you have to make a decision of how will you decorate it and maybe even install some elements to support you at your goals, like a Kanban board or something.

    • Where do you want to live (county, state, countryside, city…)?
    • House / Flat and size of your home
    • City / Countryside
    • Your home and its interior design
    • Your office design
    • Tidiness and cleanliness of your surroundings (order, creative chaos,…)

    Strategy toward animals and nature

    We are a part of nature, the planet Earth is basically a symbolical mother of us all. And we share this world with animals. Therefore you have to decide on your standpoint towards nature and animals.

    There are some very tough decisions to make and there are no easy answers, especially when it comes to global warming, waste and other damage we do to our planet. To balance that, you have to make more pleasant decisions in life as well, like whether you want to own pets, how nature relaxes you the most and so on.

    • Owning pets
    • Eating animals and animal products – yes or no
    • Keeping animals in captivity (circus, zoo etc.)
    • Supporting animals in shelters and issues regarding animals close to extinction
    • Dealing with dangerous or annoying animals (beasts, insects…)
    • Global warming and other related issues
    • Using or overusing natural resources (electricity, water…)
    • Personal waste management and level of tidiness
    • Relaxing in nature (where, how, do you prefer mountains, forests…)

    Art and culture

    Culture and art have a great influence on our lives, even if it’s not that obvious anymore, especially due to all the instant pop culture. Nevertheless, art and culture fulfill our lives, make us more human, creative, understanding and civilized.

    If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint (or do any other kind of art). E. Hopper

    Art is a way of reaching our hearts and expressing ourselves in both ways, be it as creators of art or consumers. Still we have to make a decision about the extent to which we will let culture and art influence our lives.

    • Subcultures you decide to belong to
    • Cultural rituals you decide to follow
    • Values you take from your culture (religious, national…)
    • Using symbols in your personal and professional life
    • Music you listen to
    • Expressing yourself in artistic ways (drawing, painting, sculpting, dancing…)
    • Traditions you will strengthen and traditions you will demolish
    • Your personal style

    Technology

    Using technology and your digital trail strategy

    In the last century, technology has become an important part of our lives and it will have an even bigger influence in the future. Technology is a tool like fire: you can cook a meal with it or you can burn yourself.

    In much the same way some people see technology as the biggest enemy of humanity and others see it as the biggest savior. The fact is that technology is here and you will have to decide how big of an affinity you will have for it and how you will benefit from using it.

    The second fact is that the more you use technology, the more of a digital trail you leave. It seems like you are living two lives, the real one and the digital one. Most people can be googled and “facebooked”. Digital life will stay online even after you die. Therefore you’ll have to decide what kind of a digital trail you’ll leave behind you.

    • Your attitude towards technology
    • Technology skills you will develop and invest into
    • Applications you will use in your everyday life
    • How often you will unplug yourself from the online world (digital detox)
    • Your digital life strategy and management
    • Your attitude towards artificial intelligence
    • Convergence of human tissue and technology
    • Using robots to do work

    Your nation, country and political system

    Virtual lines drawn on the map were an important part of life for the past three millennia. Now the world is becoming more and more flat and connected. You will have to decide how loyal you want to be to your country and which political system you see as the best option.

    You have to decide how much of government intervention you think is adequate, whether you are pro military or against it, what your opinion about taxes is and how much you will optimize your government contributions (your taxes).

    • Belonging to your country
    • Political issues (capitalism, socialism…)
    • Racial issues
    • Military issues
    • Taxes and government intervention
    • Economic inequality
    • Conspiracy theories

    Spirituality, religion and asking for help

    Religion is maybe even one of taboo topics, especially because you could feel guilty if you have different religious beliefs than your parents or the majority of people in your country/area do.

    But again, at the end of the day, it’s about your life and you will have to decide if you believe in god and how strict you will be at following your god’s word and religious rules.

    You can be a good person and atheist and you can be very religious and do harm to others for personal gain (think Italian mafia). What you believe is actually a part of your reality and your right. In my view the only important thing is that you aren’t doing any harm to other people and breaking any laws, no matter what your religious beliefs are.

    While people more or less do respect religious beliefs, it’s a little bit different with spirituality. Maybe yoga and meditation have quite a good reputation, but you have many practices that are considered strange and fake. At the end of the day, it’s again up to you what you believe and if it helps you to live a better life, why not.

    You have to decide about your attitude towards spiritual things, from astrology and bioenergy to fortune telling and even ghosts. As mentioned before, if you believe in it, it’s probably a part of your reality and you have a complete right to it.

    Here is one more important thing I have to mention and you have to decide on. An important part of your strategy is whether you will ask for help, who you will ask for help and when and how comfortable do you feel that other people do work instead of you.

    Never forget that if you don’t create value, someone else has to create it for you; how acceptable is that to you? How much do you think you have to care for yourself and how much you think your parents, government or even God should help you? Are you prepared to go begging if necessary? How difficult does your situation have to be in order for you to ask other people for help and is your honour in conflict with asking for help?

    • Believing in god
    • Your religious beliefs (belonging to a religion, changing family religion…)
    • Are we alone in the universe?
    • Believing in supernatural forces
    • Engaging in spiritual activities (meditation, fortunetelling, astrology, ghost calling…)
    • When will you ask other people for help?
    • How much will you depend on others and how much will you rely on yourself?
    • How do you feel about other people doing work instead of you or to serve you?

    Taking care of your emotional body

    There is a special reason why I’ve dedicated an entire headline to an emotional body. It’s because emotions color our lives. Emotions drive and fuel our passions. Emotions take us to life’s highs and lows. Emotions are the main reason why we can inspire and lead other people. Still we usually understand our physical body and our mind much better than our emotional body, especially men.

    A part of your life strategy is how good your connection with emotions will be and whether you’ll use emotions as positive guidelines in life or you will see them as a burden. How much you will show your emotions and how well you will engage the emotions of other people is a part of your life strategy.

    • Being connected to your emotions
    • Expressing your emotions
    • Emotional intelligence
    • Confronting with your fears (being courageous or living a life in an emotional cage)

    Evil

    Dealing with enemies, bad and evil in the world

    Evil is the saddest but very realistic part of our world. There is evil in all of us, but since times are becoming more and more transparent and survivable, we also tend to curb the evil in us. Nevertheless, there are still horror stories that are happening daily, terrible things like war, rape, abuse, murder, terrorism and so on.

    It’s a part of life we cannot deny, no matter how much we want to. Maybe (I hope not) you’ll even have to deal with some of these horror stories at some point in your life. And it’s not only about you. Will you, for example, stand up for people who are going through hell at this very moment?

    There are also lighter negative aspects of this world you have to face more often. People you love will die, you may have an accident or face other types of burden and sorrow. Besides that, everyone has enemies, you have people in your life who are prepared to argue with you and if not that, negotiate with you or sue you.

    A part of your life strategy is how you will protect yourself and how much you will fight, run or let things go. Which battles do you plan to choose? It’s not easy but it’s also worth to consider how you will deal with tougher situations that can or will happen in your life (loss, failures…). Think about how you will handle them.

    • Dealing with your inner evil
    • Dealing with personal tragedies
    • Dealing with evil in the world
    • Strategy for owning arms
    • Negative attitudes and opinions from others
    • Your negotiation strategy
    • Your arguing level strategy (how far will you go, how much will you quarrel etc.)
    • Your personal legal protection

    Your legacy and giving back strategy

    We’ve talked about asking for help, but you should also consider giving help. You have to decide how altruistic you will be and how much of your resources you will invest into making the world a better place to live for all of us.

    You have to decide what causes you will fight for and how you want to influence the world in a positive way. A part of your life strategy is to choose whether you will donate money or not and whether you will spend your free time volunteering or not.

    Politics is also a part of your social engagement and legacy. Maybe going into politics is actually even the best way, besides donating money, to influence the quality of life on this planet in the future.

    When we talk about politics, it all starts with voting and continues with supporting different political parties or even joining them or running for different functions. In this case, it’s not so much about career advancement as it is about sincere interest to do good and leave the generations to come a better place to live.

    The third thing you have to consider is your life legacy. One legacy that you’ll leave behind is your digital footprint, but is that enough? Do you want to make any bigger contributions to art, science, sports or any other area or life?

    Do you want to change the course of your family or maybe fight passionately for a specific cause that will make the world a better place? There are many problems in this world you can fight against, from poverty, famine, child abuse to deadly diseases etc.

    Do you want to be an example of a successful person in business? What do you want to be remembered for the most? Answering this question is also a very important part of your life strategy.

    • Your contribution to art, science, sports, business and other areas
    • Social and service organizations
    • Donating money and time to charity
    • Involvement in politics (voting, running)
    • Attitude toward world problems
    • Things you want to leave behind and how you want to be remembered the most
    • Thing you will create and fight for

    When do you want to give up?

    The final thing you have to decide on in the course of your life is when you want to give up. Some people never want to stop working, others dream about retiring from day one at the job. Again, it’s about you, your values and your decisions.

    In addition to that, the older you are, the more health issues and risks you have to face. At the end you have to decide how long you will try to prolong your life and what your attitude towards death will be.

    How afraid are you and what are your beliefs concerning what happens after death? Is it all over, do you reincarnate, do you go to heaven or hell or something else? Maybe it’s part of your religion, maybe what you feel happens after death is completely your personal decision, but you have to believe something, there is no other way.

    Your attitude towards death and the afterlife is a very important belief and a part of your life strategy, since it can influence all other decisions you make in different areas of life. Nevertheless it’s quite obvious that all religious belief systems as well as non-religious systems try to influence you to be as good of a person as possible, despite the fact that life is neither easy nor fair.

    • Retiring from work
    • Trying to prolong your life
    • Your attitude toward death
    • Beliefs about afterlife
    • How good a person you will be in life

    We’ve looked at 24 different elements of your life strategy. I am sure there are still some minor things I’ve forgotten about. Still, if you analyze your beliefs and build a strong and superior life strategy for all the mentioned areas of life, I’m sure you’ll be very well off.

    Knowing who you are and clearly knowing what you want out of life is an integral part and the first step towards a superior life strategy.

    But it’s not an easy task. If it were easy, everyone would live a happy and successful life. Knowing who you are and clearly knowing what you want out of life is an integral part and the first step towards a superior life strategy.

    The main purpose of this 24-areas framework is to help you shape your own superior life strategy that will lead you towards experiencing as much as possible in your written life vision.

    Homework
    Template

    Do the exercise

    Below you can find a spreadsheet with all the bullet point from this article. It will help you systematically analyze your beliefs, your life strategy, show you where you are missing information and which areas you are strong in. You should write down your thoughts, goals and intentions at the end of every row.

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    AgileLeanLife – Life Strategy Template (xls)

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    In the second step ask yourself the following for every single thing that you have written down: why?

    • Why do I believe that?
    • Why do I want to live my life like that?
    • Where does that come from?
    • Is that truly me?
    • Do I know enough about it or should I read more before I make my final decision?
    • Does it lead me towards my goals?
    • Am I doing something good for myself, the people I love and humanity in general as well as for nature and maybe even other living beings?
    • How would my life look like with a different kind of belief and strategy?
    • Where could I make improvements?

    Happy thinking and analyzing.