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  • 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.

  • Free your mind with your own digital brain

    In order to innovate, create, improve yourself and enjoy life to the full, you need to be as free as possible. You need to be as free as possible on all four levels – physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual. Freedom simply means that you have the power to act, speak, or think as you want; and as you’ve probably figured out by now, we are more often slaves to ourselves than to anything or anyone else; at least as long as you don’t do anything that would be so stupid you end up in prison.

    On the physical level, flexibility, balance, strength and endurance bring more freedom and options. The better your take care of your body, the freer you are from being a slave to yourself. You can reach higher mountains, dive deeper into the oceans, have sex in more positions, do more sports, and so on.

    On the emotional level, cognitive distortions can be the ones keeping you in an emotional prison. Negative thinking very much correlates to negative feelings and negative emotional states. All four levels (body, mind, heart and soul) are connected, and more freedom on one level means more freedom on other levels.

    On the spiritual level, freedom means freeing yourself from expectations, attachments and fear. The greater your capacity for love is, the freer you are. You free your spirit when you realize that having a good trip is better than just arriving. You want to have a trip full of joy, happiness and bliss.

    On the intellectual level, you need to free your mind. One way of freeing your mind is taking control of it. There are only two options: either you control your mind, or your mind controls you. If it controls you, you’re on autopilot, which often leads to cognitive distortions and other mental errors. The best way to take control over your mind is to practice meditation.

    The second way of freeing your mind is getting to know yourself better with reflection. With regular reflection and by analytically thinking about yourself, your environment and your situations in life, you bring things that burden you from the unconscious to the conscious mind. The best way to do regular analytical reflection is to keep journal, and we’ll talk more about that later.

    The third way to free your mind is keeping your brain as unburdened as possible with unimportant things. There are several ways for doing that. One is to keep trivial decisions to the minimum. You have a limited daily cognitive ability, and every decision, thought or worry takes some of that ability away. Entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg and the deceased Steve Jobs even go so far that they wear pretty much the same thing every day, just to keep more cognitive power for decisions that are more important than choosing clothes. You should automate as many things as possible, from what to wear, what to eat and so on.

    Another very useful way is to have your own “digital brain”. With a digital brain organized in the right way, you can free your mind from irrelevant information, you can store things for reference, write down ideas and so on. Not only do you have more cognitive power to allocate for the things that really matter, you are also much more productive and creative; because you don’t lose your ideas, you can find your references really quickly and connect different pieces of information better.

    Don’t get me wrong: having a digital brain doesn’t mean that you become lazy; you just don’t burden your brain with information that isn’t important in a certain moment or with an information overload. There is no way you can create if you only consume. Nonetheless, it makes sense to work hard on your intellectual capabilities. Reading, doing mental exercises, making new yet unknown connections, thinking out of the box etc., are all things that increase your intellectual capacity.

    Your digital brain

    Your digital brain is nothing more than an electronic system for note-taking, brainstorming and archiving.

    The structure of your digital brain should be pretty simple. You should write down or save everything you don’t need in a certain moment but may need someday, save your ideas and, of course, keep everything that helps you to organize your daily life. Below are the things you should store in your digital brain at the least.

    Journal, thoughts and reflections

    The first and most important thing you should keep in your digital notebook (brain) is your journal, especially if you don’t want to keep any paper and want to have everything digitalized. Keeping a journal could mean two things. The first one is actually keeping a journal, meaning writing down what you’ve experienced throughout the day, where you’ve been, who you’ve met and so on. Maybe someday, you’ll want to show that kind of a journal to your kids.

    But an even more important journal type is a journal of your daily thoughts and reflections. It’s about analysing and getting to know yourself, reflecting on your decisions and what’s happening to you and so on. It’s about becoming more aware of your beliefs, values, perspectives, thoughts, mood triggers and so on. Regular reflection is the best way to free yourself from emotional and intellectual burdens as well as to get to smart work, because you become more strategic, proactive and less reactive.

    The good thing about keeping a journal is that you can always go back, look at your epiphanies, cognitions and thoughts, and re-reflect on them. It’s how you grow and improve.

    Here are some types of documents you should keep in your digital brain:

    • Reflection journal – As mentioned, it’s a journal about you, making the unconscious conscious, understanding your motives, desires, frustrations and other psychological traits.
    • Emotional accounting – It’s about keeping a table to rationalize your cognitive distortions. 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 ten different types mentioned before, and the third one is your rational response (“Not true, I do a lot of things right”). Keeping everything in one place helps you see how you’re improving.
    • Your life strategy – Your thoughts about your life strategy, from your investment and money strategy to your traveling plans, developing competences and so on.
    • Your optimal environment – Keeping thoughts about the people in your life, the situations you face as well as an analysis of your environment, such as your country, macro-economic trends, your office and home.
    • Minimums and maximums – It’s about setting limits in your life, the minimums and maximums you should achieve to keep the balance and different areas in life in check (for example, the minimum amount of times you should exercise per week or the maximum amount of time you should work on average each day).
    • Desired outcomes – Whatever you do, you should start with an endgame in mind. That’s the list of outcomes you want in life, how you’ll achieve them, what could go wrong and how you’ll adapt and adjust your strategy.
    • Personas – It’s a technique that can help you clarify what kind of people you want in your life and the kind of organizations you want to function in.
    • Personal improvement strategy – It’s a list of where and how you want to improve yourself and when you’ll do it. It’s not only a list, but a document with an important life strategic value. This is probably the most important list in your life and has a deep reflection benefit.
    • Personal SWOT analysis – It’s a good tool for identifying your strengths and weaknesses, and can help you make your personal improvement strategy.
    • Traditional journal – It’s also good to keep a regular journal, into which you write about things like what happened to you on a specific day, where you’ve been, what you’ve seen and what you’ve learned. You can just write a few bullet points in your reflection journal.
    • “Thankful for” and “proud of” document – The two documents you should definitely have in life is a list of things that you’re really proud of in your life, like your achievements, strong personality traits, good deeds and so on, and a list of things that you’re grateful for.
    • Other thoughts and reflections – You can also keep all other types of personal documents and your thoughts, like quotes, positive affirmations, messaging archives, personal e-mail archives, dreams, associations and everything else that strongly impacts your life.

    Cloud computing

    Tasks and lists

    The second thing you should keep in your digital brain are various lists. You don’t want to try to remember everything, and you don’t want to torture your brain to recall everything you have to buy in the grocery store or be mad because you’ve forgotten something. If you help yourself with lists in your daily life, you’ll have much more cognitive power at your disposal.

    Lists also help with one more thing, if you write them correctly. They help you with not feeling overwhelmed. The right way to do it is to have all kinds of lists that free you from anxiety and a feeling that there’s too much to do. You only keep one list (or board), showing what’s in process (to-do list) for the following week. With an approach like that, you try to focus on one weekly or bi-weekly sprint, and you try to live in the moment more.

    Here are some lists you should keep:

    • Your vision list – It’s a big list of everything you want to experience in life. It feels good when you look at a list that shows what you’ve already experienced in life and what else you want to live to see. It empowers you and helps you focus on the positive.
    • Your “maybe someday” list – There are some things for which you aren’t sure whether you want to experience them in life or not. You can keep a “maybe someday” list to prevent burdening yourself too much with all the things that exist in the world. If one day you decide that you want to experience something from this list, you put it on your vision list, if not, you delete it.
    • “Not to do” list and distractions list – You should keep a list of things you know you won’t do or don’t want to do in life. It’ll help you stay focused and say no more easily.
    • Being a minimalist list – It’s a simple list of things you don’t need anymore and plan on giving away, selling or dumping. If you don’t do that as you go along, you can keep a list and then do a cleaning every three or six months.
    • Reading list and wish list – A good list to keep is a list of books you want to read in life. Make sure that you cross a book off the list every two weeks, or at least one per month. You should also keep a list of things you want to buy and have. But think twice before making purchasing decisions.
    • Your shopping lists – Simply a list of things you should buy the next time you visit the grocery store.
    • Daily/Weekly To-Do list – You can have a to-do list, but I recommend visualizing your tasks with a Kanban board. If you don’t want to have a physical board in your life, you can keep it electronically. One way to do it is with a software application like Kanbanery. The other ones are notebook applications that also have post-it notes integration.
    • Other lists – You should keep all other kinds of lists in your digital brain, for example a weekly home cleaning and maintenance schedule, gift ideas, things not to forget, things to do with your spouse etc.

    Business and other ideas

    Your digital notebook should also be your brainstorming tool. You can get your business and other ideas (like ideas for blog posts, for example) randomly throughout the day and when you do, you should write them down immediately. We can quickly forget ideas, even if they’re really good. So make sure you write down every idea you get, bad or good. Noticing and identifying your ideas throughout the day will also improve the quality of your ideas in the long run.

    The second way is to take time and brainstorm. You should do that regularly, at least on a monthly basis. It’s how you keep your creative muscle strong. Having good ideas is an important part of success in life. The good news is that everyone is creative, you just have to practice enough.

    Here are two additional resources:

    Mind maps and summaries

    As you reflect on yourself, you should also reflect on the things you read, listen or see. For example, after reading a really good book, you should go through your highlights again, making a summary or a mind map of things that fascinated you the most. You’ll get much more out of it and you can go back and refresh your knowledge anytime. I do mind maps in the Mindjet MindManager and then save them in my digital notebook.

    Notes

    You should also keep notes in your digital brain, all kinds of notes. Notes from team and client meetings, classes, phone calls, sales visits, all other types of meetings, the conferences you attend and so on. The good thing is that you can send a note to all other parties involved to confirm everything you’ve agreed on. It’s part of good communication and it helps keep clarity.

    What you can also use are templates for different kinds of meetings or activities. For example, you can have a business meeting template. The purpose of a template is to first maximize the value of the meeting, making sure that the subject is clear etc. as well as to prepare and share the minutes faster.

    References

    You should also keep all different references and resources in your digital brain. The webpages you like, infographics, blogposts, articles etc. Things you’ve read and want to keep, things that you may need again someday and so on. I call my reference notebook Intelbox and I keep all kinds of useful information and good ideas in it.

    Documents and archive

    Last but not least, your digital brain should also be your document archive. You want to keep everything in one place, systematically organized and easy to find. It’s good if you can digitalize everything and keep a no-paper policy. I know it’s not always possible, especially when it comes to the government, but you should keep things on paper to the minimum. You should digitalize as much as possible.

    Since your archive will become bigger and bigger as you go through life, it’s really important to have things organized from the very beginning; you should also do regular cleaning and organizational updates. Your archive can be the place for storing your personal documents, business documents, bills, medication and medical records, etc.

    It’s also good to have different information you only need sometimes in one place, for example the tax ID number, clothing size, different home measurements (window size, quadrature…), manuals, and so on. You can also keep important phone numbers, insurance policy, a “what to pack” list for traveling and so on in your notebook. There are numerous ways of using your digital brain.

    Advanced uses of your digital brain

    Thanks to technology, applications are becoming more and more powerful. With multiple users, sharing abilities, extensions and synchronization across applications, there are many advanced ways of using your digital brain, either all in one application or with different applications synchronized.

    Here are some examples of using your digital brain in an advanced way:

    • Tracking your time
    • Tracking your finances and investments
    • Keeping a digital rolodex (scanning business cards and keeping contacts in one place)
    • Your weekly menu and different recipes
    • Tracking your calories
    • Your fitness and sports journal with a plan and tracking progress
    • Writing blog posts or your own book etc.

    Recommended applications

    I use the following applications to keep my digital brain:

    • Evernote – Evernote is an extremely powerful and popular notebook tool. It gives you everything you need to organize your digital brain. You can encrypt sensitive data, it’s synchronized across all devices and keeps a copy in the cloud, you have an extensive app market with a post-it extension, for example, and so on. There are also many templates available.

    You can easily enter data, for example capture websites, e-mail documents, synchronize applications, and so on. You can directly scan documents into Evernote, you can make audio notes, save pictures, easily share notes you write down and so on. There really is basically everything you need to keep your digital brain structured and organized. I strongly recommend it.

    • Dropbox – I keep almost everything in Evernote, except files. For my files, I use Dropbox, where I have a directory Intelbox and in it, all the different files I may need as a resource or reference one day. From free eBooks to presentations, papers and other materials. By using Dropbox, you can easily access and view files from all the devices you have. Sharing is also very easy.
    • Google Inbox – Another important part of my digital brain is my e-mail client. I keep an archive of my e-mails in my Gmail account. I try to keep it as clean as possible and I try to write a minimum amount of e-mail. I use the Inbox application, which really keeps things with e-mail productive and simple.
    • Other applications – I also use some other applications as part of my digital brain, for example Pocket, Mindjet Mindmanager, WordPress and Twitter. And I must not forget IFTTT, for keeping things as automated as possible. There are many other specialized apps on the market, but I recommend you to keep things as centralized as possible. Evernote is a good place to start.

    If you’re interested in organizing your digital brain with Evernote, here are some recommendations for further reading: How to organize Evernote for maximum efficiency.

     

  • A short morning meeting with yourself

    The most popular agile development framework is called Scrum. An important part of the Scrum process is the so-called Daily Scrum. The Daily Scrum is a very short meeting with a team before the work begins, especially meant to coordinate team effort and overcome eventual roadblocks.

    The meeting shouldn’t last longer than 15 minutes and it not only coordinates, it also contributes a lot to keeping a strong working momentum, motivation and communication. The meeting agenda is very simple and straightforward. Every team member answers the following three questions:

    • What have you done since the last meeting?
    • What are you planning to do today?
    • Is there anything preventing you from achieving your goals?

    The purpose of the meeting is not to resolve issues, but just to detect them and bring them to the awareness of all team members. Another very important part is that the meeting should always be held at the same location and at the same time every day, and should start on time.

    The meeting should also be a stand-up meeting. Meetings can be big time wasters, especially if people aren’t on time, there’s a lot of small talk, there’s no clear agenda and purpose to the meeting and so on. But if you stay standing up, the meeting members are definitely not tempted to exceed the time limit.

    Your short morning meeting

    In agile development, the Daily Scrum has many planning and clarifying benefits. It doesn’t take long, the investment is small (if it’s done right), and the rewards are big. That’s why you should also have a short morning meeting with yourself, because you want to:

    • Be constantly connected to yourself and listen to your mind, body and emotions
    • Align your daily tasks and effort with your sprint and endgame
    • Keep momentum and motivation
    • Detect and consider roadblocks in the process you follow and keep a flexible mentality
    • Focus yourself for the rest of your day

    The best thing to do is to make your short morning meeting a part of your morning kick-off routine. Because you should hold this meeting at the same time every day. Before you start working, you take 5 to 15 minutes, open a notebook or word processor, and answer three very simple questions:

    • What did I do yesterday?
    • What do I plan to do today? (Limited to three to five important things you can do in the flow…)
    • Is there anything preventing me from achieving my goals?

    By answering these three simple questions, you’ll refresh what you were doing in the past to keep the momentum, you’ll focus your activities for the upcoming day and you’ll think about the potential roadblocks that you can encounter through your day. Being aware of the roadblocks makes it easier to handle them later.

    While having your short morning meeting, make sure that you don’t listen only to your mind, but also to your body, spirit and health. Consider your level of energy as well as your emotions, intuition, mission and other feedback you get from yourself and your environment.

    If you visualize your progress, don’t forget to move sticky notes on your Kanban board.

  • Morning and evening habits and rituals

    You make hundreds upon hundreds of smaller and bigger decisions about your life and your future every day. A lot of those decisions are more or less the same every day. They’re called habits and we are creatures of habits. Our habits are what defines us most, especially in the long term; because they accumulate.

    There are actually two ways of succeeding in your life or messing it up:

    • You make one big right or wrong decision (for example what you study, who you marry, the friends you choose, the markets you operate in, etc.)
    • You make right or wrong small decisions each day (for example you go for healthy or junk food, how much money you spend, do you watch TV or prefer to read etc.). Let’s now focus on these small decisions you make every day, called habits.

    Positive habits, like brushing our teeth regularly, exercising, reading, trying new things, analysing ourselves, etc. lead to our constant improvement and evolution, and thus increase our capacity for productivity, creativity, longevity, income and so on. On the other hand, a lack of positive habits or negative habits like smoking, drinking, clinging to anger or depression, watching TV and so on, decrease our capacity to create, truly enjoy life and contribute.

    Don’t get me wrong, we all need to relax and release some tension from time to time, just let it go. That isn’t a habit, that’s perfectly normal and it leads to better long-term performance. For example, resting and doing “nothing” one day per week makes other six days of the week much more productive, especially in the long run. We all need to give ourselves a break from time to time.

    The problem is a lack of daily positive habits, since for some people they don’t even exist at all. Not doing things that improve your body, mind, emotions and spirit on a daily basis means going back, not forward. It means throwing away your potentials. It means lagging behind and making your position worse. When you take a very passive approach to living in that kind of way, life kicks your butt from time to time – you know, you lose a job, you break up etc. – but it’s usually not enough to really change. It’s just a reminder that you constantly have to struggle, fight and push yourself.

    As already mentioned, positive daily habits accumulate through time. You become a little bit better every day and in the long run, it makes a huge difference. With a new positive habit, you can become a completely new person in a few years. With a new positive habit, you can upgrade your body, mind, emotions and spirit in the long run, and that’s what really leads to a better performance and happiness.

    Of course the big challenge is developing a new positive habit. It’s usually true that motivation gets you started and habit keeps you going. That’s why you first need a strong why and then follow the process through which you also develop new habits.

    Nevertheless, developing habits really is very hard, so let’s look at a few tricks for developing a new habit. Before we even begin with the tricks, remember that you can’t implement too many changes in your life at once; and habit is change. Thus you should implement one new healthy habit at a time. One positive change usually represents an early win and that will motivate you to implement even more new habits. For example, when exercising gives you the first results, you will automatically also be more motivated to eat a healthier diet.

    But now, let’s look at the tricks. Every habit starts with a reminder, a trigger. After the trigger, the routine starts, your subconscious autopilot. At the end, there is the reward. The reward brings you pleasure; but the key question is what kind of a pleasure you’re focusing on. There’s usually a conflict between short-term gratification (immediate pleasure) and achieving long-term goals (true pleasure). If you change focus from the former to the latter, your life will change dramatically.

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

    Here are three tricks you should do:

    The first one is having a “why” that’s so strong it puts instant gratification to shame. Your long-term pleasures must dominate your short-term appetites. You have to see instant gratification as pain, and following your true goals as pleasure. Let me give you an example.

    Let’s say that you want to eat a really unhealthy meal and it’s right in front of you. You can get instant gratification from eating it. It smells so good, it tastes excellent and your cravings are strong. The short-term reward you get from eating a fast-food meal is immediate. The pain of getting fat and getting a medical condition is somewhere in the future. And when we’re hungry, our brain couldn’t care less about our long-term goals and our future.

    Now let’s turn things around a little bit.

    Let’s say your goal is to train your body and become really fit. You’ve found the sports you like and the diet your body best responds to in the search mode, you’ve decided to follow and trust the process; and the process doesn’t include eating fast food.

    You have a greasy, unhealthy meal in front of you. With your goals and process in mind, that meal should represent pure pain for you, not pleasure. You should see how not eating that meal is a reward for you and eating it is a big misery. By having a strong enough “why” (why you want to become fit, in this case), that should be easy. But you’re still hungry… and that’s how we come to the second trick.

    The best way to develop a new positive habit is by exchanging a bad habit for a new, positive one. Every time a trigger comes into play, decide for a new routine, have a new personal reward system in mind. That’s the best way to develop a new healthy habit.

    Every time a hamburger is put in front of you, just nod your head, and order a super healthy meal; eat a carrot or a banana or whatever. Every time someone turns on the TV, go read a book. Every time someone orders an alcoholic drink, order yourself a smoothie or a lemonade. Every time you want to buy an expensive latte, put the money in your piggybank instead. Every time you want to buy yourself a new fancy car you don’t need, go study investments you’re going to make.

    The third trick are the cues, triggers. There are two points every day in your life that work great as triggers for your healthy habits. It’s when you wake up and before you go to sleep. Throughout the day, we’re all usually extremely busy, running from one activity to a meeting to another task and so on. Your phone keeps ringing, your inbox is filling up and you face many unexpected events. Daily challenges slowly take away your capacity for discipline and cognitive abilities. It’s quite hard to follow any new serious habit during the day (well, it can be done, for example if you have a no-interruptions day, but it’s harder to do something new).

    But before 9am and after 9pm, everything is quiet and peaceful. They are the two time blocks of a few hours that you can really dedicate to yourself and your long-term goals. It’s even better if you connect the trigger of your routine for waking up and going to sleep with a healthy habit. Then you’ll definitely be a winner in the long run.

    Your own personal rituals

    Your morning and evening habits should be more than just habits. They should be your personal rituals, something, you never miss, no matter what. Your personal rituals for keeping inner peace, focus, personal development, life planning, health and happiness.

    The best thing you can do in life is to first take care of yourself, and your personal rituals are the best way to do it. Because rituals are something divine and nothing should come in the way you of performing your rituals. You should put yourself first. Because if you’re happy, people around you will also be happy.

    • You can call your morning rituals the kick-off routine and
    • You can call your evening rituals your shut-down routine

    Make sure you have visual aids that remind you and help you stick to your morning and evening rituals. Have a Kanban board, a checklist or whatever works best for you. Another very important thing is to have zero distractions when taking time to carry out your morning and evening routine.

    Last but not least, your willpower is the strongest in the morning. That’s why your morning routine can be a little bit more demanding, and your evening routine should be more about relaxation and reflection and calming down.

    Since your willpower is the strongest in the morning, you should also plan to do your most complex and difficult tasks right after your morning routine.

    Ideas for morning rituals or kick-off routine

    Here are some ideas for the best morning rituals you can introduce into your life:

    • Be grateful for a new day and reinforce positive emotions, read a positive quote or two
    • Brush your teeth
    • Drink a glass of water first (with some lemon if that works for you)
    • Meditate for 10 minutes or more
    • Exercise or stretch if you don’t have time to exercise
    • Eat a healthy breakfast
    • Take a shower or a bath (end of the kick-off routine)
    • Daily stand-up meeting for planning

    Ideas for evening rituals or shut-down routine

    And here are some ideas for the best evening rituals you can introduce into your life:

    • Have an alarm on your phone to trigger your shut-down routine (9pm for example)
    • Meditate or do yoga
    • Read, read and, one more time, read (but not on electronic devices, exception being an e-reader); if you read right before going to sleep, read something lighter and not too intellectually demanding
    • Reflect on your day
    • Visualize your goals
    • Take a shower or a bath (end of the shut-down routine)
    • Be grateful for the day you had

    You first make your habits and then your habits make you

    Never forget that you first make your habits and then your habits make you. Your personal culture (values, beliefs, habits…) eats your strategy and goals for breakfast. An important part of your personal culture are also rituals. The more positive rituals you have in your life (in quantity and quality) the better; because you only have two options:

    • You either take good care of yourself or you neglect yourself
    • You either burn more calories than you consume in a day or not
    • You either spend less than you earn or you’re probably accumulating debt
    • You either improve and evolve, or you lag behind and waste your potentials
    • You either go up or out

    Make sure you have daily positive rituals in your life, as they will accumulate through time and lead to the things you want to experience in life. Having strong rituals is an important part of trusting and following the process that will lead you to your goal, your endgame. Strong rituals in your daily life are what prayers are to every religion; they are a must so you can stick to the process more easily.

  • 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!

  • Do the opposite

    Sometimes the best approach to start improving your life is doing the exact opposite from what other people are doing or what have you been doing in the past. Especially when the expectations of the society and the behavioral patterns are so extreme that nearly everyone is doing the same thing. Like every December. Sometimes the best cure is to take a totally different step from expected when the social pressure is the strongest.

    DoTheOpposite

    Here are some ideas how.

    Life experiment ideas
    Practical examples

    Instead of stuffing yourself, gaining weight and feeling fatigued throughout all December and half of January, do the opposite – exercise every day and eat super healthy. Bring your own carrots and bananas to parties. No, I’m just kidding, don’t do the latter, but you get the point.

    Instead of buying yourself expensive gifts, because you deserve them for having worked so hard all year, do the opposite – save some money, pay off some debt or invest into your future. Trust me, there will be moments when you will need your money much more than you want to spend it on luxuries now.

    Instead of spending hundreds of dollars on expensive gifts, write a personal thank you note to all the people that really matter to you and donate some money or buy gifts for poor kids. Don’t let Santa be a scumbag who buys rich kids more gifts than the poor ones.

    Instead of writing down goals for next year, plan two agile sprints that you will do in December, and actually come closer to your goals. While everybody eats, parties, drinks alcohol and forgets their daily life for a second, you should fight hard for what you really want in life.

    Instead of decorating a Christmas tree, get rid of all the filth, dirt and clutter as well as all other things you don’t use, and make room in your life. Sell some of the things, give away others, throw away the rest of them. Make your surroundings and consequently your mind super clean. You don’t need a nicely decorated tree for good family spirit; just tell your spouse and your kids that you love them more than anything in the world and spend twice as much quality time with them, without the TV and other distractions. Well, some minimalistic Christmas decorations are acceptable for the spirit. :)

    Instead of partying and socializing too much, decide that you will find a connection with your true self. Decide to reconnect with your inner voice and your true desires. Instead of torturing your body and living a “YOLO” life, decide to be gentle to yourself and to feel good in your skin. Without any alcohol and being a party animal.

    Do The Opposite Be Different
    What would be the outcome if you did the opposite?

    Don’t get me wrong. Rituals are very important in life. They remind us of what’s really important and they have a critical role in making us feel connected to other people. That’s perfectly okay. But you can do this in a healthy, economical, environment-friendly and really loving way. Not at all like it’s promoted in the ads. You should increase your margin on holidays, not decreasing it.

    It’s also the way to opening a creativity door

    Asking yourself what end result you would achieve and what would happen if you did things the opposite way from what you were doing in the past or from what other people are doing is a great way to open the doors to creativity.

    It’s not like the opposite way is always better. But merely asking yourself this question makes you challenge yourself, your beliefs and your actions. You open your mind to new possibilities. It’s your new starting point from which you can brainstorm alternative options.

    Sometimes asking yourself about the opposite way releases you of mental limitations. It puts you into the realm of out-of-the-box thinking. Improving yourself means nothing but finding new and better ways to do things. Thus you always have to challenge yourself and question everything, from why you are doing something in a specific kind of way to whether there are any other, better ways to do it.

    Maybe the opposite way is a much better way, or there is another better way that’s very close to the opposite. Try it.