Blaz Kos

empathy

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  • Mind the process phases

    Before getting to any event you want in life, you must first invest into the process. The process is what leads you to a certain event you want in life (getting rich, getting in shape, getting a dream job etc.) and it has specific phases. Most people are simply too impatient and disrespectful of the whole process (and the phases even more so) to ever come to the final event, the outcome they really desire.

    Because it’s not easy. A process means you have to get educated, have a strategy, it takes smart and hard work, you have to fail, you have to overcome setbacks and obstacles, you have to put in effort each day, but you only see results after years of hard work.

    It’s really not easy at all, but it also makes sense. Life owes you nothing, and if you really want something, you have to fight for it. If it were easy, everyone would do it. Life rewards those who master its game, and mastering the game of life means respecting the process.

    Not only do you have to respect the process, you also have to consider its different phases. You have to go step-by-step and patiently focus on different things in different phases. You cannot skip or jump over some of the phases.

    The point of every process phase is to be more focused on the right thing. The point is to not overwhelm yourself. The point of the phases is to not bite off more than you can chew. By considering the phases, you first set strong foundations and then build your thing step by step, strong and still. As I’ve already mentioned, it’s not smart to skip the phases of the process, but sometimes you definitely have to go back one or even more phases. Sometimes you have to take a step back to take two steps forward. It’s how the process work.

    There are five phases in the process:

    • Empathy or the search mode (in lean start-up, this is called customer discovery)
    • Stickiness or finding your fit (in lean start-up, this is called retention)
    • Virality or becoming an evangelist (in lean start-up, this is called referral)
    • Revenue or reaping the first rewards and making a plan (in lean start-up, this is called a business model)
    • Scale or the execution mode (in lean start-up, this is called explosive growth)

    Now let’s look at every phase of the process in more detail and with an example.

    Empathy or the search mode

    The first phase is the empathy phase or, as we know it in the Agile and Lean life, the search mode. The most important thing in this phase is to have an open mind as well as to be very gentle and tolerant towards yourself and others. Your most important skill in this phase is empathy.

    You’re starting something new, you don’t know the territory, you only have assumptions. The last thing you need are S.M.A.R.T. goals pushing you to do something, even though you don’t know if it’s right for you. What you need is to be excited over experiencing new things in life, you have to feel the adrenaline and energy because you’re trying something new; and you have to start experimenting and testing.

    You also have to be very tolerant toward yourself. You need to be aware that you’re going to fail. Some experiments are not going to work. But if you do it right, then you aren’t failing. You’re learning. It’s called validated learning. You try many different things, until you find the right one.

    In this phase, it’s also very important to get educated. You need to read as many books as possible. You have to talk to as many people who already did what you want to do. With analytical thinking, you have to decide what you’ll try and how you’ll measure it. Then as an adventurer, you start discovering new things in life.

    After performing an experiment, you have to make a data-based decision about what you will:

    • Stop doing
    • Start doing
    • Continue doing

    An experiment can usually take from 7 to 30 days and strongly depends on what you’re testing. But that should be enough time to get feedback from yourself (body, emotions, mind) and from your environment (if there’s any outside interaction in the experiment).

    Let’s look at an example.

    You want to get in shape. The bottom line of getting in shape is quite simple. You need to exercise and change your eating habits (what you eat, how much you eat). The most popular way of going on a diet is to read a book or an article about a “miracle diet”, doing it for a month or so, going for a run a couple of times and that’s it. At the end, you’re disappointed that the revolutionary diet doesn’t work.

    You certainly don’t want to force yourself into exercising and you definitely don’t want to go on a short-term miracle diet. You want to do a sport you’ll love, a sport you can’t wait to do, and instead of going on a diet, you want to introduce a new long-term eating lifestyle that won’t cause any cravings.

    So instead of finding a “miracle diet”, you do your research – about your body type, different proven diets that work in the long-term etc. You visit a few specialists (allergy tests etc.), read a few interviews, you start researching what could work for you. If necessary, you also consult a doctor or a nutritionist if you have any medical conditions. Then you start introducing new foods into your life, crossing out others, and measuring how you feel. On the other hand, you make a list of sports you want to try and a list of sports you assume you’ll enjoy the most. Going for a run is the easiest and most convenient way; but maybe you’ll enjoy biking or swimming or hiking more. You need to find a sport you really enjoy.

    While doing your research, you’ll also discover that there are some general things you should stop doing, continue doing and start doing. For example, if you want your diet to succeed, you must definitely limit the amount of junk food and refined carbohydrates (sugar) you eat. On the other hand, you should start eating more vegetables and some fruit. In the middle, there is room for testing and experimenting – you have to see whether the high protein, the high fat (healthy fats) or maybe the vegetarian diet is best for you.

    Your output in this phase should be research, like reading 10 of the best books from the field, talking to at least 10 people and making a list of different things you’re going to try. In the search mode, you should also find your why. It should be a very strong why. In fact, you should start by asking yourself why!

    For example, in our case, the “whys” could be to:

    • Have more energy
    • Look better in a mirror (if that is the strongest why, you should buy yourself a big mirror :) )
    • Get more attention from the opposite sex
    • Live longer

    Stickiness or finding your fit

    The second phase is stickiness. You find something you like. You see the first results and you get early wins. You’re getting the first positive feedback from your body, emotions, mind or even external environment. You’ve found something you want to stick to. It’s called a fit. Nice.

    Now your focus should be on making a system that will help you stick to your new habits. Because as you know, motivation lasts only while you’re on your way to the fridge. You have to systematically think and try to reinforce your positive behaviour, build an adequate positive environment and a bulletproof system.

    You have to take the time to think how you’re going to stick to your new thing. Your enthusiasm will help you, but it’s usually not enough. You need internal and external aids – new habit reinforcers.

    Here is a good visualisation of habit formation that you can help yourself with:

    Habit 3R
    Source: The Power of Habit, James Clear

    Here are some ideas for what you can do to increase the probability of stickiness:

    • Connecting your new habits with old habits (doing something right after you wake up or before you go to sleep; these are the so-called morning and evening habits)
    • Exchanging your old habits for new ones (every time you want to eat a cookie, you eat a carrot or every time someone turns on the TV, you go read a book)
    • Introducing reminders and visual aids into your life (sticky notes, screensavers, goal board etc.)
    • Leveraging technology (applications, gadgets etc.)
    • Joining a new community (coaches, groups, friends with the same values etc.)
    • Getting rid of some things/people and introducing new things/people into your life
    • Rewarding yourself for positive behaviour and getting punished (not like in 50 Shades of Grey) for bad behaviour (for example giving your spouse $20 every time you lose your temper)
    • Surrounding yourself with research materials (books, bookmarks, magazines etc.)

    Now let’s get back to our example. You found foods that make your body happy. You educated yourself on which foods are the worst for you. You found a sport you like. Now you have to build a system that’ll help you stick to new habits. You simply stop buying foods with empty calories. You put fruit and vegetables in visible places in your home. You always have a bottle of water with you. You set a hot athlete as your wallpaper background. You put a picture of a hot athlete on your fridge. You get a personal coach who will help you get through the stickiness phase of the first two months. You spend at least 30 minutes a day reading about healthy living. You join and participate in online and offline groups, and so on.

    The biggest mistake you can make in this phase is sticking to something that doesn’t work for you. I was on a fruitarian diet for one year and I did a lot of damage to my body. So again: you have to be careful, you have to be smart and you have to listen to your body; except when you crave empty calories. The Agile and Lean Life is about having a smart strategy with constant and fast feedback you take into account.

    The second biggest mistake you can make in this phase is giving up. Improvement and change aren’t a linear line, they’re full of ups and downs. Sometimes you’ll slip up, sometimes your discipline muscle will just stop working. Nothing unusual. In a situation like that, you have to give yourself a break for a few days and then start over. Every day is a new beginning, you can always start over.

    The output of this phase should be a new reward system for yourself and visual changes in your environment. While the aim in the phase before the goal was to find the best fit for you, the goal of this phase is to reinforce your new desired behaviour and stick to it. No goals yet, just thinking about what you should do to reinforce your new habit.

    Virality or becoming an evangelist

    Now you know your endgame. You’ve found the perfect fit after testing and experimenting with several things in the search mode. You have inner and outer elements that help you stick to your new habits, like a new personal reward system, habit triggers, regular reminders, and so on. Okay, but that’s still not enough to really get to the result you want.

    The third phase is called virality or becoming an evangelist. That simply means shifting your identity. You have to fall in love with what you do. You have to see yourself as a new person. An athlete. An investor. The perfect husband. An entrepreneur. Father of the year. A good man. Whatever.

    There are two main signs that indicate that your identity shift is happening. The first one is that you aren’t shy and reserved about your new habit or identity. For example, if someone asks you if you exercise, you don’t say “I try to, from time to time”, but you proudly answer that yes, you are an athlete.

    The second sign is that you start encouraging other people to do the same. You become an evangelist of something.

    In our example, that simply means that you proudly tell all the people in your life that you have a new diet that makes you feel great, that you regularly do sports, that you can see the first results and that it feels great. You’re like a talking billboard for the new thing in your life.

    The output of this phase is an identity shift. There’s no way of going back anymore, unless something goes really wrong. You’ve reached the tipping point. Bravo.

    Identity shift
    Source: The Power of Habit, James Clear

     

    Revenue or reaping real rewards

    After a very long and demanding process, you start reaping real rewards. The hard work paid off. You found your fit, you have a new system and habits in place, and you’ve shifted your identity. The world sees you differently now and you see yourself differently as well.

    You’re not at your endgame yet, but now you can set S.M.A.R.T. goals. You have enough knowledge, you have enough feedback, you have a new identity and you know the territory well enough to set measurable goals with a time frame. You have a good picture of how long it’ll take to achieve your endgame.

    In our case, you’re becoming more and more satisfied with yourself. You see your body fat melting off. Your fitness performance is getting better and better. Your “whys” are getting fulfilled – you have a better self-image, you get more attention on the streets from the opposite sex, you have more energy, the sex is better and so on. Now you can clearly see how long and how much it will take to get a six-pack and to achieve your maximum performance. You start feeling good about yourself. You prepare a system for measuring your progress by writing down how many repetitions you can do or you start using different apps that measure different aspects of your performance.

    One dangerous thing that can happen in this phase is scaling too fast. You can become too impatient and go into the execution mode too fast. You have to be sure that your foundations are strong, you have to curb your greed and follow the plan to improve step by step. If you try to scale too soon, you can hurt yourself, experience a setback and you’ll have to go back into the search mode to find a way around your new weaknesses.

    Let me give you an example. You see the first real results of your diet and exercise. But now you want the results faster. You start to overdo everything. You go to extremes with your diet and you push your body too hard. Sooner or later, your body will force you to slow down. You will fall ill, you will injure yourself etc. That’s why you need to make a solid diet and exercising plan in this phase, even with an expert if necessary. You have to push yourself, but you also have to know where the limit is.

    In this phase, the output is a solid and smart plan for how you’ll improve step by step and increase your yield on the investment you’ve made. You should stick to your plan and not overdo things or speed up too fast. If your discipline weakens, you shouldn’t try to catch up, but rather return to your plan the next day.

    Scaling or the execution mode

    We are at the last stop of the process, namely scaling and execution. You want to achieve your peak potential. Your best shape possible, your optimal portfolio. You want to become as unique and valuable person as possible in a relationship, outstanding in your occupation and so on.

    You’ve found your fit, you’ve built a system to stick to new habits, you’ve made an identity shift and you’ve written down a plan. Now you have to stick to the plan with regular intervals, and still listen to your mind, body, emotions and environment. You never stop listening to feedback.

    Sooner or later, you will change (get older for example), your environment will change and you may have to go back into the search mode. Next time, the process will be much easier, because you already have strong foundations, you already have knowledge, and you don’t have to go to the very beginning. But you should always stay agile and lean.

    In our example, the final step is sticking to the execution plan. You have a new diet that works for you and you exercise regularly on a weekly basis. You have goals for improving your performance and you stick to the plan. On your Kanban board, you move your sticky notes from “to do” and “in process” to “done” every week. But you also regularly test and try new things, new superfoods, new exercises and so on. You constantly do linear improvements, but you also search for rapid ones. The process of improvement never ends and neither does the execution mode. The new diet and exercise are now a part of who you are and what you do in life, consistently and in regular intervals. It’s the new you after very long, hard work.

    You need to have realistic expectations about how long the process takes. It’s usually at least a few years. But you have enough time. If you really want it badly enough, you will find a way, if not, you will find an excuse. The key is to really want it badly enough. That’s why you need a strong why.

    So start with the why.

  • 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

  • Personas – Know what you want

    One thing in life is sure. The more exactly, accurately and the sooner you know what you want from life, the easier your will get it. Usually the most successful people in the world are the ones who know what they want to do in life from a very young age, and have the talent to really do it.

    The best programmers, athletes, businessmen and so on, they all know that they were born to excel at exactly one thing. Knowing what you want in life allows you to focus on that thing only. If you are lucky and the environment supports you to the point where you can invest 10,000 hours into your talent development, then you can become a real Outlier.

    I very well remember one sentence from the movie Limitless, where Bradly Cooper gets the special brain enhancement pills, becomes super smart and goes from rags to riches. When he takes the pill, only one magical thing happens – quoting him: “I wasn’t high, I wasn’t wired. Just clear. I knew what I needed to do and how to do it.”

    Well, that is the secret to a much better quality of life – be clear about what you want and make the strategy for how you will get it. You must know what you want as clearly as possible. You have to see the final outcome you want. Just saying to yourself “I want to be rich” or “I want to have a cute girl/boyfriend” is not enough. You have to be more specific. That is the rule for every aspect in your life. Even for relationships.

    And you don’t need any pills for that. Let’s look at a better technique for being more proactive at choosing your personal and professional relationships – personas.

    Personas in business

    In internet user-experience and marketing expertise, personas are used to represent different user types that might use the product in a similar way. Personas are fictional characters representing the ideal customer or a typical character for a user segment. They are hypothetical users. It is also a very popular method used in lean start-up marketing to help you focus your efforts. You try to imagine everyone who could potentially use your product (customer segments) and then you create fictional characters for either every segment or for the priority ones.

    In user experience, the purpose of defining personas is to more easily make decisions about product features, interaction, architecture and design of the website. A persona is nothing but a substitute for a target user. You create as realistic and reliable representation of the user segment as possible.

    When you are defining a typical persona for a selected customer segment, you are defining their goals, desires, behavioral patterns, buying triggers, limitations and other elements, such as demographics, biographics, geographic and psychographic attributes, and so on.

    Hubspot Personas
    Personas Example. Source: Hubspot

    The most frequently used parameters for defining personas are especially based on what they want to do, how they behave, what motivates them, how they think and what they want to accomplish.

    To be more exact: for every persona, you should define the elements listed below, if you have enough data to back them up. The list is meant to help you with ideas for defining personas in your personal life later on.

    • Fictional name, photo, representative quotes for a better notion of the potential user
    • Demographic and geographic features
    • Professional background, responsibilities and skills
    • Context or a narrative story
    • Behavioral patterns and key characteristics
    • Values, attitudes and beliefs
    • Environment
    • User goals, desires and expectations
      • Life goals
      • Product experience goals
      • End goal of using the product
    • User tasks, activities and workflow
    • Limitations and accessibility issues
    • Buying triggers
    • Needs and pain points
    • Use cases or specific usage pattern
    • Interaction, information, sensory, emotional aspects
    • Typical day in a life
    • Potential customer journey
    • Empathy map

    The biggest benefit of creating personas is personalizing abstract data and therefore better understanding different customer segments and their goals. You “materialize” your assumptions and much more clearly define who your potential customer could be.

    Creating personas helps the product development team to:

    1. focus on creating value,
    2. user experience experts to prevent common (design) pitfalls, thus avoiding “self-referential design” creation which means subconsciously projecting your own mental models on the product.
    3. With personas, you can more easily (3) evaluate product feature ideas, develop wireframes and site architecture, design the overall look,
    4. and of course copywriters can write a better (4) targeted copy.

    Here is a good presentation about personas:

    Before defining the persona, you should also do user research and gather as much data as possible about the selected segment. Data can be gathered by interviews, surveys, different testing methods (A/B), user observations, field studies, and so on. In reality, personas are only as good as the research behind them. The best research is usually based on ethnographic data – ethnography being the systematic study of people and culture. The purpose of research is to find what people do, what frustrates them and what gives them satisfaction. After conducting adequate research, you should be able to identify their behavioral patterns. One technique to do that is user mapping by behavioral variables.

    For every product, more personas are usually created, specific to every customer segment. But even the same customer segment can be represented with more than one persona, for example if there are gender specific roles and use cases. When you create a persona, you also try to imagine a typical day in the life of that persona and, of course, how and when they would use or buy your product.

    All information about the persona should lead to some decisions. In the next step, you can also make scenarios describing a persona trying to do a specific task in a specific environment or context. This is the so called scenario-based design.

    If you don’t have enough research information to create real personas, you can create provisional personas. They are not that detailed and are based on a few best guesses of their needs and characteristics. That is still better than having no personas.

    When creating your personas you can mark different assumptions as:

    • Validated hypothesis (what you already know, is confirmed)
    • To be tested hypothesis (what still needs to be tested)

    Without doing personas, you have the so called “elastic user”. An elastic user can be anyone and therefore no one. The consequence of an undefined user is usually unfocused design with too many features.

    Bad userinterface
    When having an elastic user and not knowing what a customer wants

    Personas tell stories, spark ideas and ignite action. They are the in-put information for marketing and selling activities (sales funnel, customer segmentation…).

    Using Personas in your personal life

    Let’s build a use case based on those two understandings – (1) the first one, that the clearer picture you have of what you want in life, the easier you will get it, and the second that (2) the user experience experts use personas as a tool for visualizing probable users of the product in order to make the best possible user experience.

    The idea behind using personas in personal life is very simple. Based on knowing yourself and your assumptions about yourself, you can make personas for people and organizations you want to interact with in your personal or professional life. Starting with the most important person in your life, your spouse. After making a persona for your spouse, you can also make a persona for your perfect boss, the company you would like to work for (there should be different name for that, since a company is not a person, but that is okay), friends and business partners.

    Benefits of creating personas
    Benefits of creating personas

    Having this kind of personas will help you attract or select only quality relationships and improve the current relationships you have.

    Well, at this point I know exactly what you’re thinking and I totally agree with you. How can this make sense, especially for your personal relationships, if …?

    Attraction isn’t a choice. You are simply attracted to someone before really knowing them. It’s true nonetheless… Maybe you cannot choose who you fall in love with, but you can definitely choose who you will stay in a relationship with and devote your life to. Choosing the right partner is probably the most important decision of your life. You don’t want to make the choice based only on your animal instinct.

    It goes the same for the company you (will) work for, as the second most important decision of your life. You are going to spend approximately one third of your life at the workplace. You don’t want to spend your life working only for those companies that first replied to your received CV or that give you the biggest paycheck. You want to work for the companies that make you feel good, with which you share the same values and where you can blossom.

    Personas can help you with that. Personas can help you move from lottery to strategy.

    With personas, you are more proactive and growth-oriented

    You have two options for how to interact with life. The first one is the reactive way and the second one is the proactive way. Being reactive means that you simply react to things that happen to you in your environment based on your (subconscious) behavioral patterns. You assume that your personal power is quite limited. You are how you were born to be and you live life that was given to you. That is also called a fixed mindset.

    In personal relationships, that means falling in love because of the “greater power”, usually physical attraction. You try to stay together with someone without thinking of how good you two fit together. But if there is no other fit except physical attraction (emotional, spiritual, intellectual, social attractions, sharing the same values…), relationships often become sour and there are many disappointments for both partners.

    In business life, being reactive means sending your CV to hundreds of companies and hoping that one of them will invite you to an interview. In the second step, you hope that at the interview, someone will recognize you as a fit for the company and hire you. In this kind of thinking, people usually don’t even know much about the company. They are only focused (reacting) on being invited to the interview.

    In both cases of reactive thinking, what usually happens is that business and personal relationships can very quickly become relationsh*ts. You expected more, you had the wrong assumptions, you find out that maybe there is no real fit after a big struggle. And remember:

    The hottest hell on Earth is when you are forced to work or live with people who have totally different values than you, with no common ground to build on.

    The solution is pretty simple. You have to know yourself better, you must know better what you want in life and you must be much more proactive. Steven Covey, author of the book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People defines proactivity as the act of taking charge of your life. Proactivity means being responsible for your life and taking actions to master it.

    One of the most fun and quick solutions for being more proactive is making a persona – of your perfect spouse, the company you would like to work for, and so on.

    Creating your own personas will help you:

    • Have better focus for who to meet and spend time with, in business as well as in private life
    • Know immediately which relationships you have to discard
    • Decrease the number of pitfalls in relationships (wrong expectations…)
    • Do a quick benchmark of how big the potential of the relationship is when you meet and interact with someone new
    • Be more honest in relationships and avoid many disappointments, like hoping that people will change
    • Quickly identify what you can learn from the other person and where the relationship needs to grow
    • “Market” yourself better, know what to look for and where
    Know what you want
    Be proactive. Go for what you want. Have a strategy , don’t play a lottery.

    In order to use personas in your personal life, for business and pleasure relationships, you should especially define (the brackets contain an example from business as well as personal life):

    • Basic demographics (age of potential partner, size of the company)
    • Must-have values and traits (intelligence, technological company)
    • Key characteristics (company culture, hobbies)
    • Deal breakers (smoking, industries not to work for)
    • Goals (building a family, becoming number one in the industry)
    • Other

    It may sound extremely dull, so let’s look at all the benefits of going from reactive to proactive behavior when creating personas in both cases.

    If you do a persona for your perfect spouse, you can:

    • Know yourself much better, and be more aware of what you want out of the personal relationship
    • Get new ideas for where and how to meet a potential spouse (hobbies, online dating…)
    • Make a better personal “sales pitch”
    • Evaluate the potential of the relationship really quickly (common goals…)
    • Know what the deal breakers for you are
    • Be honest about the potential, avoid hurting yourself and others (we can just be friends…)
    • Talk about what you like or dislike in other people and what the deal breakers are
    • See what you can work on in your personal relationship to make it even better
    • Identify common hobbies and start doing things together
    • Based on all the facts above, you can more easily “attract” someone that fits you better

    If you do a persona for the perfect company to work for, you can:

    • Know better where you would like to work (size of the company, culture…)
    • Prepare a list of companies you would like to work for
    • Do detailed research for your targeted companies (company goals, board members…)
    • Better customize your CV and personal presentations
    • Think of ideas for selling yourself to the companies, bypassing traditional approaches such as sending a CV and hoping they will invite you for an interview
    • Write down numerous ideas for how you can add value to the company
    • Develop new skills you know the companies you are targeting are looking for
    • Monitor all new information about the targeted companies via Google Alerts and so on

    As mentioned before, you can do the same for other relationships in your life (friends, boss, business partners…).

    The more experience you have in life and the more often you reflect on your past choices the more clear picture you should have what you want in your life. Thus more persona assumptions should be marked as validated, not to be tested.

    There is no perfect match in life

    Of course even if you do make your perfect personas, you will never find a perfect match. If there were a perfect match for you, then there would be no room for growth and learning. And life would be very boring without any challenges. But you can definitely find a close fit to your likings.

    There is no straight lines in nature or life.
    There is no straight lines in nature or life.

    On the other hand, you also shouldn’t fear that there is no close fit for you. There are more than 3 billion people of the opposite sex living in this world, and we have more than 100 million companies. Statistically, it is very probable that you can find your fit, a place or a person where you feel extremely good and you can blossom.

    The only thing holding you back is not knowing what you want, a lack of strategy, and fear. Life is too short and too precious for that kind of nonsense.

    And last but not least: personas should be dynamic. Your preferences and values do change throughout life and therefore your personas can become outdated. The expiration date of your personas usually depends on how fast you grow in life and how fast people in your life grow with you.

    Thus you should regularly update your personas. A good compass for when to do it is when you feel that it’s time for a change in life, when you want something new or you are very frustrated with current relationships. Extremely good times or extremely bad times usually accelerate even more relationship transitions and are real relationships tests.

    The more you want to experience in life, the more you change and grow, the faster your environment is changing, including people you are spending your time with. Thus you will have to update your personas more often. But it doesn’t take long. It’s just a short exercise to clear your mind, define what you want and focus yourself.

    Your ideal self-persona

    There are some relationships in your life that you cannot choose by yourself – especially your kids, your mother and your father. Making a persona for them should be done from a different perspective. You should move from what kind of relationships you want in life to how you can help them and empower them to become what they really want.

    You can do the same for yourself. If you don’t like spreadsheets and the personal Kaizen table (a list of personal improvements you have to make), you can make a persona of your ideal self. In psychology, the self-discrepancy theory talks about how everyone has an ideal self and that is what usually motivates you to change, improve and achieve more. Having a clear picture of your ideal self will definitely help you focus, set the right priorities and grow faster.

    For your Ideal self-persona you can make a mind map, a list, a Pinterest board or a notebook with pictures, quotes and attributes for the direction you wish to grow in. You can expand the context of what kind of person you would like to become, what kind of skills you would like to develop, what you would like to have, in what environment you would wish to create and so on.

    Homework

    The first three steps you can make for creating Personas as a technique to help you know better what you want in life is concretizing and visualizing:

    1. the ideal spouse you would like to have in life and,
    2. the ideal company you would like to work for (or what kind of business would you like to have) and of course,
    3. you should make a Persona for your ideal self (if you don’t already have your Kaizen list).
    Practical examples

    My example

    Here are two examples from my life as guidance to help you with the whole process. I have used the mind-mapping technique in order to create Personas.

    Company Persona Me Example

    Below you can download two files, one for my ideal spouse and one for my ideal company.

    [sociallocker]

    Persona of my ideal spouse

    Persona of my ideal company

    In user experience, personas should often tell stories, which means you can make a life or relationship story instead of a mind map or list. Be creative and use the tools in a way that inspires you the most.

    [/sociallocker]

    Enjoy playing and creating your personas!

  • When asking people for advice

    Advice as past decision justification

    There is one really important thing you should know when asking people for advice. In most cases, people will give you advice that justifies their past decisions or reflects their personal experience.

    Practical example

    Let me give you an example. A few years ago, I’ve started taking better care of my health. Since I had not done any exercise for 30 years, I had had very weak core muscles. Consequently, I have damaged my hand ulnar nerve. Bad posture contributed to nerve entrapment in my spine.

    Now if anyone asks me whether they should exercise more, I start explaining how good it is, but that you must be careful that you have strong core and don’t overdo it. There’s nothing wrong with the advice. But it was my own individual experience that justifies my current decisions – working more on my core. Not all people start exercising with such a weak core.

    Luckily the damage has been more or less manageable, but I could have had such a bad experience that I would stop recommending exercise to people at all. Yes, we shape our opinions and therefore also advice according to what happens to us as a consequence of our decisions.

    Therefore don’t ask an employee if you should become an entrepreneur. And don’t ask an entrepreneur for career advice if you want to be a successful scientist. Maybe you can ask an entrepreneur for advice if you want to be more business oriented in your scientific work, but then also expect some suggestion why you should be more an entrepreneur than scientist.

    Don’t ask a person feeding themselves with fried chicken what they think about healthy lifestyle. And don’t ask people who never needed their university degree if you should get one. Except if you share the same viewpoint and are only looking for adherents.

    Find people who have already achieved exactly what you want to achieve, and listen to their advice. But only if they are happy and successful doing it, otherwise they will merely explain how hard it is and why not to do it.

    When you are receiving advice, always ask yourself about the context of the advice that the person is giving to you, and if the same applies to your life.

    And at the end, remember: even when you find the right person and get some really good advice, you still have to find your own path. Nothing can be achieved in the same way twice.

    Don’t look for safety when asking for advice

    The second important thing regarding advice-giving is that people usually ask for advice just to get outside confirmation, not because they really want a piece of advice. Thus people often take an advice that agrees with what they have already decided to do.They don’t believe in themselves enough, and just want to hear that they are doing the right thing from someone else.

    I have seen this so many times with people asking for business advice and hoping to hear, “yes, you are doing the right thing and here are some additional ideas”. After that, they immediately forget all about the additional ideas and go back to doing the same thing as before, feeling a bit better.

    It’s the same in personal life. When someone asks you for advice, they are often looking for someone to listen to them and understand them, hug them and share sorrow with them. Not many people are actually looking for advice. Even if you give it, they will ignore it.

    Therefore when someone asks you for advice, make a quick judgment if they really want advice or just comfort. Give them what they are really looking for. And when they really want advice, remember that you will give them a piece of advice that justifies your past decisions. If possible, try to distance yourself from your past, and put yourself in their shoes and their context.