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  • The happiness index and the happiness chart

    If your body gets hurt, you feel physical pain. One of the roles of physical pain is to tell you what not to do, for example to not hit your head against the wall over and over again or play with fire. Besides having many other functions, emotions can also play a pretty similar role. They can tell you whether you’re on the right path, if you’re following your life vision and what your whys are (even if your emotions are repressed and you aren’t even aware of them) or if you’re going against yourself, marching in the wrong direction and being in the wrong environment with the wrong people.

    The compass is simple. A longer period of positive emotions shows that you’re going in the right direction, while negative emotions (anger, dissatisfaction, sadness…) warn you that you aren’t on the right path; negative feelings could be a signpost that you aren’t on the path that’s meant for you. If you are accompanied by constant negative emotions, it means that your soul is suffering.

    Just as a reminder, being on the wrong path is one of the options why you are experiencing negative feelings, but there may be many other potential reasons. You must carefully analyze yourself and find out what the real source of your negative feelings is. For example, besides being on the wrong path, cognitive distortions can also cause you to have constant negative feelings. You may be on the right path and just think too negative. But now let’s get back to being on the wrong path.

    The good news is that your emotions sense something is wrong and that you aren’t going in the right direction way before you can arrive at the same conclusion with your rational and analytical mind. It’s called instinct. Something either feels right or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t feel right and you still do it, you usually go against yourself and bring misery and unhappiness into your life. Therefore, your emotions are a great predictor of your future and your quality of life.

    • If you know you aren’t with the right person, but you still stay in a relationship just because you’re afraid to be alone, you’re going to be miserable.
    • If you sense that your bosses aren’t running the company professionally and that it’s just a matter of time before things go south, but still don’t do anything about it (search for a new job), you’re going to feel miserable.
    • If you’re driving in a car with a lunatic and you don’t have control, you won’t feel good because you feel that there’s a great probability that something dangerous will happen. But in real life, you have control in the most of situations if you only listen to your emotions, are aware of your personal power and you act.
    Happiness Index
    Happiness Index, Source: Agile trail

    Happiness and productivity

    If you’re happy, you’re more productive (some studies show you’re around 12 % more productive), you’re more optimistic and have higher level of motivation, you nurture relationships better at home and at work, and you have no problems with expressing gratitude, you are more innovative and creative. You can also enter the workflow without distractions more easily and are more committed to your goals. You also help to create better working or home environments. Nevertheless, there are several issues we have to address, because things aren’t that simple.

    First of all, we all love to ignore our emotions and what we really want. Maybe you’re afraid, maybe you’re clinging to safety, maybe you aren’t aware of your personal power, maybe something else. But if we take one step back, you most often aren’t even consciously aware of how you feel throughout the day, you don’t pay much attention to your emotions, you just get mad at your spouse or a coworker, or become grumpy in a traffic jam or whatever, but you don’t ask yourself why; in that case, you unfortunately don’t live, you only exist. You may even be a zombie. So the first important rule is to regularly and systematically monitor your emotions and become aware of them. Then ask yourself why.

    The second thing is that there are three areas for monitoring your emotions. One is your home environment. If you don’t have loving and caring personal relationships and don’t feel home at home, you can’t feel happy in life. Home should be like your temple of positive energy, emotional security and deep relationship bonds with people you love the most.

    Then we have the working environment. You spend one third of your life at work, so you must have good relationships there (do you have a best friend at work?), you must do meaningful work and fit into the company culture. You can’t be happy in life if you hate your job.

    Last but not least, you’re here to grow and enjoy life. You can’t be happy if you aren’t progressing from your real to your ideal self and if you aren’t enjoying life in the moment (while having realistic expectations). The bottom line is that you have to monitor your emotions in all three areas, and if one area is suffering, all areas are suffering.

    1. Your home environment
    2. Your work environment
    3. You

    And the third thing is that our emotions are complicated. They aren’t so easy to understand. If you decide to pay attention to your emotions, you’ll have to spend a lot of time dealing with self-analysis and how to live a life honest and true to yourself. It may seem that everything is in order in your life, but you may be totally unhappy and not even aware of it. When you decide to really pay attention to your emotions, you must start living life with courage and full of love towards yourself and others, and always be truthful to yourself. No dishonesty. It’s hard work but it pays off.

    Even if our emotions are complicated, there are two simple exercises you can do every day, as the first steps towards better understanding yourself and how you feel – they’re called the happiness index and the happiness chart.

    The happiness chart

    There’s a really simple method of monitoring your emotions and doing basic emotional accounting. It’s called the happiness chart. The main advantage/point of the happiness chart is to never forget about yourself or lose awareness of how you’re really feeling, even if you’re very busy. You put yourself first. Many times, if you aren’t super happy, angry, depressed or feeling some other extreme emotion, you just go through the day like you’re used to. Some people smile because they’re used to it, some people are grumpy all day because they’re used to it, and so on. You wear a social mask out of habit. But you never know what you’re really feeling and why. That’s existing, not living; that’s being a zombie.

    With the happiness chart you will:

    • Always be aware of your emotions
    • Have early alerts for things are going in the wrong direction
    • Easily communicate your emotions with others (spouse, team etc.)
    • Have a basis for further analyzing your emotions further
    • Link your happiness level to your productivity level and see how happiness influences your day
    Happiness Index Calendar
    Happiness Index Calendar, Source: Agile Trail

    The idea is pretty simple. You have an uncomplicated chart with different indicators showing how happy you are. Every day, when you wake up, go to sleep or while working, you put an indicator on the chart, marking how you’re feeling.

    You have three charts on which you indicate the happiness level every day:

    • Me (that you share with yourself)
    • Intimate relationship (that you share with your spouse)
    • Work (that you share with your team)

    It makes sense to engage other people to use the happiness chart, of course. For example, you also ask your spouse to mark their level of happiness on the chart and when the mark from you or your spouse goes below a certain level, it’s time to talk and communicate more intensively about what’s going in the wrong direction and why.

    After marking your happiness level on the happiness chart, you should ask yourself four questions:

    • Mark how happy you are (at home, in a relationship, at work etc.) on a scale from 1 to 10. Why the x number? Watch out that you aren’t always in the average (5, 6, 7, 8). If you are, use only 1, 2, 3 and 9, 10 as a scale. Because you’re either happy or you aren’t. You can even simplify it with three smiley symbols: :) , :| and :(
    • What feels right at the moment?
    • What feels the worst or wrong right now?
    • What should I do to increase my happiness?

    When you have your answers to all four questions that should be enough material to do a retrospection (maybe at the end of the week or your sprint), where you answer three additional questions:

    • What should I start doing in my life?
    • What should I stop doing in my life?
    • What should I continue doing in my life?

    The most important thing while using the happiness index and the happiness chart is to be really honest and true to yourself. If you’re lying to yourself about your feelings, you repress them and ignore them. But they’re like an evil monster that starts growing if you ignore it. The evil monster keeps growing in you and will come back in times and places you least expect (you start destroying your relationships, become depressed etc.). Therefore kill the monster while it’s still small. The happiness chart will be the first to tell you when a small monster is born. Pay attention to your emotions, because they matter the most!

  • 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.

  • Positive orientation towards your past

    We know three time zones – the past, the present and the future; all three time zones very much define your life, from who you are to where you were, where you are and where you’re going. The renowned psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who was also responsible for the (in)famous Stanford Prison Experiment, found that the way you orient yourself towards your past, present and future defines your level of success and happiness. His suggestion is that you calibrate your outlook on time to improve the quality of your life.

    You have two options for your orientation for every time zone (past, present, future). You can focus on the positives or the negatives from your past. You can be a hedonist or a fatalist in the present. And for your future, you can be goal-oriented or oriented towards post-life rewards, like going to heaven.

    The best combination for improving your life is having a positive orientation towards the past, being a moderate hedonist in the present and being goal-oriented towards the future; but not so much goal-oriented towards the future that you also live in the future and forget to enjoy the present. That way, the past gives you strong roots and foundations, your present gives you feelings of personal power and proactive behavior, and your future gives you the wings to seize all the things you want in life.

    Past Present Future
    Positives

    Negatives

    		 Hedonist

    Fatalist

    		 Goal-oriented

    Post-life rewards

    Any other combination gives much worse results. If you’re focused on the negatives from your past, you hinder yourself with anger and depression and can’t act in the present, if you’re a fatalist in the present, you never act and you place all your freedom and personal power into the hands of others, and being oriented only towards post-life rewards doesn’t give you any ambition to fulfill your own desires and needs. You must also be careful to not be too big of a hedonist in the present, not thinking about the future at all, or be too goal-oriented, not enjoying the present at all. The latter only brings anxiety and a potential burnout into your life.

    If we focus more on the past now, the question is how to switch your orientation towards your past (from negative to positive), especially to see all the positive things that happened to you, not only the negatives.

    There are four things that can help you have a more positive orientation towards your past, if you have any struggles with that (I hope you had such a nice past that you don’t, but many people do have struggles). Here they are:

    1. Accepting your starting point and being honest with yourself about your limitations
    2. Having a list of personal strengths
    3. Having a list of your past accomplishments
    4. Having a list of things you’re grateful for

    Accepting your starting point

    If you had a good starting point in life, accepting your starting point is the easy thing to do. The shittier the starting situation you had in life, the harder it may be to accept it. The most important part of your starting point is how much sense of emotional security you have and how much love and affection you received, especially from your mother from when you were born to up to five years of age or so.

    Well, it all contributes to the feeling of emotional security – the relationship with your parents, the relationship between them and other primary family members, how stable your environment was at an early age, and so on. Let’s also not forget about the quality of the genes you got and the intelligence level you inherited (nonetheless, this can be developed to a certain extent later on with hard work).

    Then we have upbringing. There’s a strong correlation between how much energy your parents invested into your upbringing and your potential for success. The more they read to you, took you to museums, music festivals, art shows, sports games and the more they encouraged your hobbies and confidence, the more talents you could develop and the better picture you got of how the world works and all the possibilities.

    If they were too critical, they may have hindered your self-esteem forever; if they never let you overcome challenges completely by yourself, you may feel that you always need someone to push you to do something. Their behavioral patterns for money, running a household, diet and so on, their values and beliefs more or less became a part of your personality, also influencing your destiny.

    On top of that, we also have your family’s wealth and their social network, the quality of formal education, the country you were born in, market and social trends, political and economic stability, the technological development level of your country, demographic trends, cultural inheritance and many other factors that define your starting point. Where you were born and to whom are two of the biggest advantages you can have in life.

    You starting point may be great, it may be average or it may suck. You can’t change your past, the only thing that you can do is accept it. The good news is that in your adult life, you have the power to change many things. Your starting point may somehow limit your potential, but only to a certain extent. If you take full responsibility for your thoughts, words, emotions, attitude and actions, you can achieve a lot in life, no matter how tough your starting point was. But how can you accept your starting point?

    If your past was really traumatic, one way to deal with it is cognitive psychology. With emotional accounting, you can identify cognitive distortions or negative thoughts that influence your dark perception of life and yourself, and correct them. Besides that, there are many other tools for building emotional stability that are more or less scientific, for example psychotherapy, meditation, transactional analysis, trauma release exercises, yoga and many other methods. You have to search and try different options and find the right tool, the right fit that can help you the most with managing your emotions.

    If you hadn’t had such a harsh and traumatic past that you need to deal with it with professional help, but still have a hard time making peace with it, let’s look at some less scientific and lighter tools and techniques that can help you see your past more positively.

    Seeing what you did get, not only what you didn’t

    The first step you can make is focus on the positives. You cannot change what happened, only how you view it. Your past cannot be changed and it may never be forgotten, but it can always be used. No matter how bad your starting point was, there must be positive things you got, be it on the physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual or material level. You should be focused on the thing you did get, not only on what you didn’t. There are, of course, big differences in starting points, but nobody gets everything and nobody gets nothing. Try to find the things that you got, the things you’re proud of, the lucky parts of your past that you’re grateful for. Add them to your gratitude list (more about that at the end of the article).

    Your job is to diminish the gap

    You have three missions in this life. One is to enjoy life, the second one to contribute (create value) and the third to personally grow, to become the best possible version of yourself. Personal growth is nothing but diminishing the gap between your starting point and who you want to become (your ideal self). Obviously the worse your starting point and the bigger your ambitions, the bigger the gap. But that’s the job you have to do, that’s your mission.

    The bigger the gap, the bigger the opportunity for you to grow. The bigger the gap, the more demanding the level you’re playing the game of life in. Consequently, you can become much more skillful and resourceful.

    At one point, you realize that you only have two choices in life – the blue or the red pill. You can either feel sorry for yourself for the rest of your life or you take full responsibility for your life and how things are. If you have emotional issues, you talk to a therapist, if you want to progress intellectually, you read, do math or whatever, if you have bad relationship patterns, you read everything about relationships and commit to becoming an authority on how to excel in relationships, if all of your ancestors were fat and you inherited genes that make you gain weight faster, interrupt the unhealthy pattern and become obsessed with being totally fit and living a healthy lifestyle. Whatever it is, you have to take responsibility and deal with it at some point. As I’ve already mentioned, that’s one of your missions in this life, something that life expects from you.

    You also have to know that accepting your past is not a one-time event, it’s a process. It’s a process of ups and downs; the harder the past, the longer the process with all its highs and lows. But it can be done. If we look at the bottom line, your past may shape your present, but it can’t control it.

    Having a realistic perspective of wealth

    Your family’s wealth is, of course, a very important part of your starting point. But you must have realistic perspective of where you stand. Usually people are in a much better position than they think. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have ambitions to earn more and acquire more wealth in the future, but when we’re talking about the inherited wealth and your family’s wealth, you should know where you stand.

    These figures may not be totally accurate, but just so that you get the general picture and a feeling of how poor the word really is. If you have around 2,200$ in the bank, you’re in the top 50% of the wealthiest people in this world. If you have 60,000$ of assets, you’re among the 10% of the richest adults in the world and if you earn 25,000$ or more annually, you’re in the top 10% of the world’s income-earners. If you have more than 50,000$ of income per year, you’re in the top 1% of the world’s income earners and if you have more than 500,000$ in assets, you’re part of the richest 1% of the world (source: MSN Money).

    GlobalRichList may help you see your more exact wealth position. The point is: it doesn’t matter if your parents helped you financially or not, you’re probably the lucky one from the macro perspective, and you should be thankful for that.

    List of your personal strengths

    Your past is the reason behind who you are, with all your strengths and weaknesses. You may not like certain parts of your character, but you should definitely be proud of your strengths. And let me repeat that again: your strengths are a consequence of your past.

    A smooth sea never made a skillful sailor. Good times are only producing soft people. So your strengths more or less developed from the tough times in your past. The stronger you are, the more difficult situations you probably had to encounter.

    Therefore you should definitely perform a personal SWOT analysis, in which you list all your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats; you should see all the strengths you acquired as the aftermath of the battles you fought in the past.

    Last but not least, you mustn’t forget. Strength aren’t only muscles and power and being better than others at something. The strengths also mean admitting all the limitations you have, being humble and knowing also how to be interdependent relationships, and being loving and caring towards others. Love and tenderness are the biggest strengths you can have in life. To act out of love is not the same as being soft and naïve.

    List of your past accomplishments

    Your brain has a function that can sometimes protect you from dying, but often also clouds your self-image and self-esteem. What am I talking about? Your brain functions in a way that you remember bad events that happened to you much better and vigorously than good events from your past. Delivered a good speech on a stage. Okay, whatever. Delivered a bad speech. Oh, let’s really remember it, especially before speaking the next time.

    Back when humans were still living in a jungle, your brain had to make sure you really remembered everything dangerous – from meeting a tiger to touching fire. The more the world we live in develops, the fewer times you encounter life-threatening situations. Despite that, the same biological mechanism still applies, but instead of meeting a tiger you really remember all the times when you’re in a really stressful situation (like public speaking or whatever) or you failed at something that caused you a lot of emotional stress. Your brain, together with all the strong negative emotions, remembers those moments very well and tries to protect you from doing the same thing again. That is also why comfort zone is so cozy.

    On the other hand, all your achievements, moments of success and victories are not that special because they aren’t life-threatening. So there’s no need for remembering them. You tend to quickly forget about all your past victories, especially in the long run. In the short term, victories encourage you to achieve even more and boost your self-esteem, but when the first failure comes, you can quickly forget about all the past victories you achieved and see only your past failures.

    A good solution for focusing your brain on the right things is to have a list of your past accomplishments. When your self-esteem goes down or you feel bad after a failure, you should look at the list, just to remind yourself that you’re a winner and that you have many past accomplishments. Every single person on the planet has bigger or smaller accomplishments in their lives that they can list and that can definitely help them see the past in a more positive way.

    Gratitude list

    Gratitude list

    The last technique that can help you to see your past more positively is a gratitude list. Many times, you simply forget how much you already have and all the things that you can be grateful for.

    Gratitude shifts your focus from what your life lacks to the abundance that’s already present. Research in psychology has shown that being thankful makes you happier and healthier, it reduces stress and makes you stronger and more resilient. If you remind yourself what you are grateful for every morning, it will definitely increase your level of alertness, enthusiasm, determination, optimism and energy in everyday life.

    If you don’t know what to be grateful for, here are some ideas. You can be grateful that you woke up this morning, breathing and with a heartbeat. Life itself is a precious gift. You can be grateful for your health, spouse, family, friends, the employment or business you have, the value you’re able to create, your genes, looks, the outdoors, the technology you can use, the things you own, food and shelter, free time, things you enjoy and so on. If you need additional ideas, you can find many good ideas online, simply search for things to be thankful for in life, although it’s much better if you write them down straight from your heart.

    By practicing everyday gratitude, you’ll put your life into a more positive perspective, you’ll realize how much you already really have and you’ll definitely accept your past more easily. With your personal gratitude list, you’ll constantly be aware of the wonderful things in your life.

    It may be hard to begin, but you should see gratitude as an emotional muscle that will grow and strengthen with use. There’s always something to be grateful for, so make your list. Last but not least, the more gratitude you have in your life, the more you open yourself up for abundance, meaning getting even more excited about your future.

    If you think successful people don’t do that kind of stuff, you’re wrong. Extraordinary results demand an extraordinary way of thinking and actions, that’s a fact. Average people only read about it, successful people really do it. Let me give you an example.

    Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, sets himself annual challenges. In 2010, he committed to learning Mandarin, in 2011 to eating only animals he slaughtered himself, and in 2013 to meeting someone new each day. And guess what, in 2014 he wrote at least one well-considered thank you note every day (Source: Bloomberg).

  • Tools to help you with self-reflection

    Self-reflection is about asking yourself thought-provoking questions so that you can develop a deeper level of understanding yourself. The biggest value added of self-reflection is that you can change how you see yourself and how you feel about certain situations and, in the end, how you act. New thoughts lead to new emotions and consequently to new actions.

    Nevertheless, performing self-reflection regularly isn’t easy, especially in the beginning. We are so busy that we often lose touch with ourselves, and all the different distractions and responsibilities prevent us from really listening to our true self. We most often only hear our inner voice when it comes out as a critique of ourselves or others. All that leads to negative thinking and emotional repression.

    Starting with self-reflection activities is similar to starting with meditation. It feels uncomfortable in the beginning and you aren’t even sure what to do. Much like it’s hard to quiet down your thoughts and focus, so it is hard to listen to your thoughts and analyse them. Below are some techniques that can help you perform self-reflection. These techniques will help you the most when you first start thinking about yourself and start getting to know yourself. Different techniques simply mean looking at yourself from different directions and observing what works best for you.

    Your ideal and ought self

    There are three basic versions of yourself. The first is your actual self, which is your representation of the attributes you believe you actually possess. It’s also about the attributes you think other people believe you possess. The second is your ideal self. Your ideal self is all about the attributes you would like to possess or other people want you possess. Your ideal self is what motivates you to change, improve and achieve goals. The third is your ought self and it’s not about who you’d like to be, but about who you and others believe you should be.

    Your first step should be to make a persona (clear character representation) about your actual self, ideal self and ought self. In the second step, you should thoroughly analyse who you are, who you want to become and what the social expectations connected to your feelings and behaviours are like in different situations. Ask yourself questions like:

    • Why do I want to become [enter your characteristic]? Who in my life was/is like that?
    • Who would I make proud if I were [enter your characteristic]? Why?
    • How are my feelings in certain situations connected with my actual, ideal and ought self?
    • Am I pushing myself to be something I’m actually not?
    • Am I doing something I’m not just because others are expecting me to?

    Empathy map

    The second tool that can help you with self-reflection and engaging all your main senses is an empathy map. The main value added of this tool is that it helps you identify your needs and the disconnections between what you say and what you do. Identifying such a disconnection should present an insight about yourself.

    Emapthy map
    Source: Copyblogger

    It’s called an empathy map, because the tool helps you practice intellectual identification of feelings, thoughts or attitudes, in our case of yourself, and helps you try to analyse those feelings, thoughts or attitudes. In business, you use an empathy map to put yourself in the shoes of your customer. In self-reflection, we can use an empathy map to empathically analyse ourselves from a third-person perspective.

    You simply draw four quadrants. Every quadrant represents a different angle. You think about a situation that awakens specific emotions in you (for example, a fight with your spouse) and analyse yourself from four different angles:

    • SAY: What are some of the quotes and defining words you said in the situation?
    • DO: What actions did you do and which behaviours did you notice in yourself? What is the behavioural pattern you can identify?
    • THINK: What were you thinking in that situation? What does this tell you about your beliefs?
    • FEEL: What emotions were you feeling? Why? Which past situation do they most remind you of?

    You should also have a fifth quadrant, where you put all your insights and ideas. Here are some additional questions that will help you with self-reflection when you’re drawing up an empathy map:

    • How is the situation connected to your fears and hopes? What are your fears? What are your hopes? Which of your needs are met or not met in that situation?
    • What was the environment in which you encountered the situation? What do you remember from the environment? How did you find yourself in that environment and why? What was your sight focused on?
    • What hurts you most in the situation or makes you feel good about the situation?
    • Is this a typical or atypical situation for you? Do you often find yourself in similar situations where you say, do, think and feel the same things?
    • What was the feedback you gathered from your environment – other people?
    • What are all the positives about the situation? What can you learn about yourself, others and the world by experiencing that kind of a situation?

    When answering these questions, be very careful to avoid cognitive distortions and to not reinforce negative feelings. Try to go deep and identify why you feel like you do and pull yourself out of being a victim. Just observe, don’t judge.

    Whys

    Asking yourself “why” encourages analytical flow and helps you get to the root of the problem. First describe the situation (I was fired/hired etc.) or a certain feeling (I’m in a bad/good mood etc.). After describing your situation, start asking yourself why. Do it at least five times, ten times if necessary. It will lead you to new insights about yourself.

    The second thing you can do is not to go after the cause of the situation analytically by asking yourself why, but asking yourself why to look at the situation from many different angles. You simply brainstorm every why question you can think of and you find your answer. Then you continue by asking yourself “why” five times before brainstorming a new question. You can start with the following questions:

    • Why do I feel the way I feel? … Why? … Why? … Why? … Why? … Why?
    • Why do I feel so small or so important?
    • Why did I find myself in this situation? Why do I see the situation as so positive/negative?
    • Why are my beliefs and actions so different from other people’s?
    • Why don’t I look for positive elements of the situation? Why do I see the situation as black or white?
    • Why am I labelling myself or others? Why do other people see me like they do?
    • Why don’t I do the opposite? … Why? … Why? … Why? … Why? … Why?

    Happiness index and happiness chart

    The funny thing is that in your daily life, you are often so busy that you aren’t even aware of how you’re really feeling. If you aren’t supper happy, angry, depressed or feeling some other extreme emotion, you just go through the day like you’re used to. Some people smile because they’re used to it, some people are grumpy all day because they’re used to it, and so on. You wear a social mask out of habit.

    Happiness Index
    Happiness Index, Source: Agile trail

    One way to identify your feelings better is to keep track of them. This is called emotional accounting. You have a simple chart with different indicators showing how happy you are. Every day, when you wake up, go to sleep or while working, you put an indicator on the chart, indicating how you’re feeling. Then you can continue with “why”. You also have many apps for entering your daily emotional states.

    You can use the happiness chart for many other things. For your personal relationships, for example. Every partner simply marks how satisfied he or she is with the relationship every day. When the mark of one partner goes below a certain level, it’s time to talk and communicate more intensively.

    Life satisfaction chart

    One good way to start with self-reflection is to make a life satisfaction chart. You draw a scale from 1 to 10 horizontally and list all ten areas of life vertically:

    • You
    • Health
    • Relationships
    • Money
    • Career
    • Emotions
    • Competences
    • Fun
    • Spirituality
    • Technology

    You assess every area of life from 1 to 10. In the second step, you take another look at all areas you assessed with 4, 5, 6 or 7. These are the areas where you’re averagely satisfied. It’s much easier to start reflecting if you have a more shaped and clearer view of whether you’re satisfied with a specific area of life or not. So assess life areas again, but now by using only the numbers 1, 2, 3, 8, 9 and 10. Highlight every 1, 2 and 3 with red, and every 8, 9 and 10 with green. Now start asking yourself “why” for all ten areas of life.

    De Bono thinking hats

    Edward de Bono is a worldwide known physician, author, inventor and consultant. He invented the term “lateral thinking” and wrote the book The Six Thinking Hats. The Six thinking hats method is often used in schools as a learning tool, as well as in creative teams, because it’s a simple, effective parallel thinking process that helps people be more productive, focused, and mindfully involved. The main idea is that by mentally wearing and switching “hats”, you can easily focus or redirect thoughts, a conversation, or a meeting.

    Changing hats and looking at a situation and ourselves from different perspectives can also help us when we’re doing self-reflection. A new angle on yourself or the situation can give you a new perspective and a new insight. Moreover, using different hats is quite fun.

    You have six different hats and every hat represents a very narrow, focused and specific angle:

    • Blue hat: Describing and identifying the situation and managing the process
    • White hat: Facts and information
    • Yellow hat: Positives, benefits, advantages
    • Black hat: Difficulties, dangers, what is wrong (don’t overuse)
    • Red hat: Feeling, hunches, intuitions
    • Green hat: Possibilities, alternatives and new ideas

    A very important part is that after you write down your perspectives of all five different angles, you start asking yourself “why” and discovering your deeper thoughts, beliefs and subconscious reactions and behaviours.

    Force field analysis

    Force field analysis is a framework for looking at factors – different outside forces that influence your situation. You analyse forces that are either helping you towards your goal or need, or blocking your desired movement. On the one hand, you have driving forces that are positive forces for change, and on the other, you have restraining forces that are obstacles to change.

    Much like you have outside forces that are blocking your way towards your goals and needs, and that are causing frustrations, so you also have internal blockers that are causing internal conflicts. You have internal drivers and blockers as well as outside factors that are helping you or blocking you. If opposite drivers (pluses and minuses) are too strong and equalize, you may be trapped in the same place, feeling frustrated and in internal conflict, instead of moving forward. It’s like having one leg on the gas pedal and the other on the brake.

    Don’t forget that your external environment is often connected to your inner state. Optimal thinking always includes staying flexible, agile, lean and positive. It’s about finding an innovative way out. If you can’t do that, you’re attached to a certain situation and to your inner state, and your job is to find out why.

    Describe your situation in life and then analyse the following:

    • Identify outer drivers. How are they connected to your thoughts and beliefs?
    • Identify outer blockers. How are they connected to your thoughts and beliefs?
    • Identify internal drivers. Where do they come from? What is driving you? Why?
    • Identify internal blockers. Where do they come from? Why are you blocking yourself?

    Gut test

    It’s a very simple exercise to help you start self-reflecting. Describe your situation, quiet your mind for a moment, and listen to your gut feeling, intuition and hunches about what you should do and how you should decide. After that, start asking yourself why.

    Meditation

    One way to have a better connection with yourself is meditation. It’s a great tool for disciplining your mind. It also helps you observe your thoughts, especially in the beginning when you probably have trouble focusing and letting go. You should always carefully analyse things that come up during meditation. After finishing your meditation, you should start asking yourself questions, like why you were thinking specific thoughts, why they came up and how they made you feel, and so on.

    Free associations

    Free associations is a technique used in psychoanalysis. In the free association process, you’re expected to put all your thoughts into words without any filters, even if those thoughts are incoherent, inappropriate, rude, or seemingly irrelevant. Psychoanalysts encourage you to say anything that comes to mind.

    It’s an advanced technique you can use for self-reflection. You simply go to a quiet place, take a pen and a piece of paper (or your journal), and start writing down whatever comes to your mind. No filters at all. After that, you try to analyse your thoughts. In the process, never forget that the series of free associations you produced is somehow related to your present circumstances. You try to find out how and why.

    You can do the same with your dreams. They can be a good starting point. You can ask yourself how you felt in your dreams, what they remind you of the most and then start with free association. You just let out whatever comes into your mind.

    Transference and people you like or hate

    Transference is simply a process by which the feelings that you had for someone important in your life, such as a parent or a sibling when you were a child, get directed at someone else, with whom you have or are building a close relationship.

    Transference even happens in our everyday lives very often. For example, your boss at work reminds you of your father, so you act accordingly to your inner prototype of a relationship. The problem, of course, is that rather than connecting with the person for who their really are, you’re relating to a template from your childhood. Transference reactions most often point to some deeper issue or unfinished business from your past.

    Now think of your behaviour in your closest relationships. Try to analyse how you’re transferring your internal prototype, together with feelings and reactions, onto a close person in your life, using them as a “reincarnation” of some important figure of your childhood or past. Ask yourself questions like:

    • Who do you want others to be?
    • How are you interacting with people accordingly?

    It’s quite hard to identify transference, so there’s also an easier version of this exercise. Start by listing people you like and dislike in your life, and people you hate and love. Start asking yourself why that is, what causes positive and negative feelings and how people’s behaviour reminds you of your past figures, situations and encounters.

    Obsessions

    One way to start reflecting and analysing yourself is with your obsessions. There are many causes that lead to obsessions and you can start figuring them out. For example, scarcity usually leads to an obsession. If you were exposed to constant injustice in life, you may become obsessed with justice. You can start analysing all the injustices that happened in your life, how contemporary situations are reminding you of that and how your obsession is holding you back.

    And remember, you should be excited and enjoy analysing yourself.

  • Be more of a producer than a consumer

    Today, we live in an extremely materialistic world, where we are programed to be a subconsciously obedient consumer from a young age onwards. You’re exposed to a few hundred marketing messages on average each day, and most advertisers try to convince you to buy things you don’t need to impress people you don’t like with hard-earned money from a job you may even not like.

    But there’s more than that. Productivity has risen dramatically in the past two decades. An average worker creates more value than ever. Nevertheless, wages aren’t going up, they are remaining steady or even decreasing. All of the benefit (or extra profit, if you want) goes to employers or business owners. That’s why rich people are getting richer, and poor people are getting poorer.

    Productivity and wages

    It’s true that an average inhabitant of the world can afford more and more material things. The material abundance has never been as high as it is today. But the profoundly sad truth is that the material status isn’t improving because wages and productivity are higher, but because it’s much easier to access debt. People enslave themselves to debt more and more, just to afford another thing they probably don’t even need.

    Household debt vs savings

    Being an obedient consumer

    There are many reasons and motivators why you should buy something new. Because you get the instant good feeling of gratification, because you deserve it since you work hard, because you’ll feel a little bit better about yourself or other people will notice you more, because a new thing will bring short-lived excitement into your life, and so on.

    It’s so easy to spend money. Your hard earned money is just an electronic figure. Your fastest connection to that figure is a piece of plastic; doesn’t even feel like a real money. Just some numbers. You see something you like. You just swipe your plastic and you feel a little better for whatever reason.

    You don’t have enough of your own money? No problem. You have a few more decades to live and you’re going to work hard, for sure, and earn some money. Lenders know that, and they want a piece of your future earnings. That’s why it’s so easy to borrow money and just buy something you want. With a single signature.

    A big screen TV you can’t actually afford. A fancy nice car. A big modern home. Dozens of shoes and coats and other clothes. Vacations you haven’t taken for so long and you definitely deserve. A big expensive latte. Restaurants and drinks and parties. There are so many options to spend money, and it doesn’t matter whether you actually have it or not.

    You can swipe credit cards and take more and more debt until reality kicks in. The easier road sooner becomes hard. The good short-lived feeling of owning something new becomes a long-term catastrophe; because debt means slavery. Possessions you cannot afford destroy your freedom and your potential, and sooner or later your health and relationships as well, because of all the stress. The more things you buy that you cannot really afford, the longer your jail sentence is, the more enslaved you are.

    One of the problems is that things are rarely as they seem. Maybe your neighbor has a bigger house than you, drives an expensive car, wears expensive clothes, has a nice motorbike and I don’t know what else, but in reality, he may be an enslaved person working a job he hates just to pay the debt he owes. The material things are just his short escape from reality.

    We buy things we don't need

    Having material things in life doesn’t really mean neither wealth nor happiness. Almost anyone can go to a bank for a consumer loan to buy a few fancy things and enslave their own future. But sooner or later, you don’t own things anymore. They own you. Your freedom goes away, your happiness goes away, and all you do is work hard to pay off the debt. Everybody earned money except you. Remember: if you don’t know who the fool in the room is, you’re probably that fool.

    The easiest way people see for getting out of a financial hole is by earning more money. But sooner or later, they realize that more money is rarely a solution for poor financial management. You just can’t buy more financial discipline. That’s why most lottery winners go broke soon after winning the money. You must financially discipline yourself, no matter how much you earn. Because money follows management.

    Don’t try to only look rich, work hard and be disciplined to really become rich. Buying stuff on credit means slavery. Living a modest and frugal life and not spending money like crazy, especially not by taking debt, means freedom. You have more choices and more choices mean more freedom. You have more options to pursue your dreams and the things you really want in life.

    The opposite is also true. The hard road becomes much easier with time. If you save money, you’ll become a winner sooner or later. Because a free cash flow will allow you to become an investor, a business owner or lender. Cash in your bank account will give you more options and possibilities.

    Shopping and getting poor

    Being an innovative producer

    The large majority of people are consumers. Most of them afford their lifestyle by taking debt. They enslave themselves and limit their options. But logically, this planet has another type of people – the ones who are selling the products to this majority. These are the people with a completely different mindset. They’re called producers. They’re driven by the force to innovate, to produce to solve problems and to create beautiful shiny products and services that provide value.

    Every one of us has the capacity to innovate, create something new, provide value and produce different products and services. Every one of us has a much greater potential than to just go to work, take debt and spend money as the easiest way to escape reality and its challenges. Not everyone is made to become an entrepreneur, but you can also become an investor, sole proprietor, freelancer, you can produce and sell stuff in your free time, partner up etc. There are numerous ways of becoming a producer.

    You can break free from being only a consumer by becoming a producer as well. The sooner you switch sides, the sooner life becomes easier. You get more ideas, you see more opportunities, you’re more immune to all the advertising messages, and even more importantly: the will to create and contribute awakens in you. Switching from a consumer to a producer mindset can be one of the greatest things you do in life. First you produce and provide value, which makes you rich, and then you consume. Producers get rich and consumers go poor. That’s a fact.

    Think about providing value to the world. See yourself as an innovator, entrepreneur, businessperson, visionary, creator and producer of added value. See yourself as an investor and business owner. Instead of spending money, invest money, save money and produce.

    You can even take being a producer to a totally new level. If you have a consumer mindset, you only think about what you’ll buy for your spouse on Valentine’s Day. Producers prefer to think about what they can sell on Valentine’s Day. They see millions of spenders who just want to buy stuff as proof of their love.

    Consumers buy things in shopping centers, producers sell them. Consumers buy products on TV, producers sell them. Consumers borrow money to buy stuff, producers lend money. Consumers buy things for every holiday and special occasion, producers see special occasions as opportunities to sell things to needy people.

    Think about all the needs people have. Think about how you can provide value to the world. Think about how you can solve problems for people. Think about all the business ideas you have; and if you don’t have them, brainstorm. Think about your dreams and talents, and how you can monetize them. Think like a producer and a creator of value.

    “You look at the world, when you buy a sandwich or a beer; you are a consumer where you trade money for a certain type of good. I think money is fundamentally an exchange of value. So, how can you be the guy that produces the value so that people can use that to give you the money? When you see that way, then you kinda see the matrix. That’s the biggest switch you probably have to make.” Terry Lin, Baller Leather, Your Own Way Out Interview

    Changing from a consumer to a producer mindset

    Changing your mindset from being a consumer to being a producer is not an easy job, but it can be done. Here are some tricks that are going to help you change perspective.

    Whenever you want to be an obedient consumer, do the following:

    • Whatever you buy, multiply the price by ten. That’s the actual cost of your purchase. If you were to invest that money, that is approximately how much money you’d make in twenty-five years with an average return on your investment.
    • Everything you buy doesn’t only cost money. It also costs you your freedom, your space in life, your future and the number of your choices. See how you’re enslaving yourself with every purchase, especially if you’re buying things on debt.
    • Whenever you get a paycheck, Pay yourself first. Have a savings account and put some money aside for your future. See it as part of your expenditures and consumption. Feel instant gratification when you save money. Whenever you see your neighbor’s fancy car and feel bad, look at your savings account and it’ll make you feel better instantly.
    • For bigger purchases, wait two to three months, don’t make impulsive decisions, especially not for big purchases. If you still need the new thing, maybe you should buy it, but rather not. Time will curb your consumption desires.
    • Rather than buying things you won’t use in a few weeks’ time and that only start collecting dust, live a minimalistic life. Remove all waste from your life.
    • If you really have problems controlling your expenditures, find a spouse with better money management habits than you. It will be a good influence on you and you’ll be able to save much more money.

    Tricks to acquiring a producer mindset:

    • Become a smarter consumer, educate yourself, compare prices, understand taxes and the monetary system, read financial statements, become financially educated. Try to see everything you buy as a business deal with room to negotiate.
    • Read investing and business books, as this will motivate you to save more and to produce more value for the world; besides learning new things.
    • Spend more time with investors and producers. Join business or investor clubs, make new friends, and go to conferences.
    • Invest in yourself, unless you don’t think you’re a good investment. But you are. Leveling up your skills, upgrading you mindset and having a better life strategy is the best investment you can make.
    • Have a long-term approach. It takes years to change your mindset, to learn new skills and to really become a producer and then produce something of real value. The good news is that you only have to be right once with the right product (to get rich), but you can’t just switch sides, it’s not that easy. You must learn about the markets, you must develop new skills, expand your social network, and so on. The learning curve is long and takes a lot of effort, years of hard work, but it’s worth it. Not only because of a better earning potential, but also because of the feeling that you created something and contributed to the world.
    • Start creating something small and try to sell it. Maybe you can start with selling things you don’t need at home. Try to identify small opportunities for making some money. Make your first dollar, then ten dollars and continue like that.
    • Go to the Arab part of the world and practice bargaining and negotiating. Most people feel uncomfortable negotiating and getting the best possible price. If you can’t do it, partner up with someone who can.
    • Make sure your spouse understands your goals and supports them. If you try to save, invest and produce, and your spouse only wants to spend and consume, things will not work out very well. Besides investing into yourself (you), your spouse is the most important choice you make in your life.
    • Think about what else you consume that’s unnecessary, like news, TV, unhealthy food etc. Try to see your time and energy as precious resources you can either waste or invest wisely.
    • Try to think about how to create products with real value. If you want long-term success, you need to create value that people really need and respect. Try to build products you’d proudly put your name on. Don’t try to just to make a quick buck or scam people.

    My friend Robert Rolih wrote two reports that are great if you are new to investing:

    Specialreports1

    That’s also what I do. I’m not rich (yet) but my material status is improving every year. I drive an average car (which I even downgraded a few years ago) and I live in a small but cute flat I can afford. I spend as little as possible on clothes. I don’t buy any unnecessary stuff. I try to live as minimalistic of a life as possible.

    I have a spouse who knows how to save money and she motivates me to spend even less. She is a really good influence when it comes to money. My major expenditures are investments into myself (books, seminars, MOOCs…), healthy food, technology and sports. All that I see more as investments than costs.

    Seven years ago, I wasn’t even close to being careful with my money, because of my false mindset. That’s changing for the better every year; especially by reading books and socializing with the right people, and it feels so much better. Still, I’m not obsessed with money and I value relationships and doing good much more than financial benefit.

    I see myself much more as a producer than a consumer. I produce things I’m good at, things like writing articles, doing workshops, managing complex projects and delivering consulting work. I’m just in the process of switching from producing value for the local to the global market, while my plan is to also create some products so I can progress from only trading my time for money to also having some passive and portfolio income.

    It may take me the next decade to really do it, but I have no problem investing into the process and trusting it. Despite all that, I really enjoy what I’m doing. It’s not only about the final event, the path alone pretty much has the same value and importance.

  • 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!