Blaz Kos

positive thinking

agile methodology business ideas cognitive distortions communication core values creativity & innovation detox diet ego emotional accounting emotional intelligence empathy environment you operate in fitness habits health tips homework interpersonal skills kaizen & growth mindset leadership lean life experiment ideas life skills life strategies life vision love mindfulness nutrition perfect match or fit personal talent management pivot positive thinking practical examples relationship advice retrospective & self-reflection self-discipline sharpen the saw start with why success the execution mode the search mode time management validated learning waste in life zombie life

  • Please don’t criticize people – instead understand, love or mentor them

    It’s so easy to criticize other people, and so hard to give a single honest compliment. It’s so easy to see yourself in a good light and at the same time focus on imperfections of other people.

    But criticizing people is a complete lose-lose situation that only creates distance, spreads negative energies and causes tensions. Criticism is one of the worst kinds of negative thinking, talking and acting.

    If positive thoughts are creative thoughts of connecting, including, sharing and loving, then negative thinking is composed of thoughts and words (and consequently actions) that disconnect, exclude and spread hate.

    Since it’s impossible to live a positive life with a negative mind, it’s obvious why criticizing others is so unproductive and irrational. So let’s put a stop to it.

    Why do you love to criticize people?

    On a logical level, we probably all know that criticizing people brings no good to anybody. And yet we still do it. If you do it, that means it must bring you some kind of value or benefit. Well, it does in the short term. The benefits are of emotional nature, and emotions are most often stronger than logic.

    That means you must understand criticizing other people on an emotional level, to deal with it once and for all. So let’s analyze the most frequent reasons why we all love to criticize other people so much and have a hard time resisting it.

    There is no rational benefits in criticizing other people. But emotional short-term benefits (that quickly backfire) are always present.

    Criticism is not good

    You criticize people to create emotional distance

    We are often more kind to strangers than we are to our loved ones. Many couples, parents or siblings are very critical towards each other. Most often the emotional reason for that is to create distance in a relationship. Criticism is a great way to emotionally distance yourself from another person.

    Now, why would you want to do that? Well, because on the subconscious level you are afraid to be hurt or disappointed. Kids leave their nests, siblings can be more successful than you, your spouse might break your heart, and so on.

    By criticizing others and focusing on their imperfections, you can emotionally protect yourself at least a little bit (they’re sour grapes – more about that later).

    Understanding that leads us to only one important conclusion. It’s ridiculous to create distance by criticizing others. By criticizing you are ironically forcing them to hurt you sooner or later.

    Nobody likes to be criticized; and obviously nobody can hurt you more than your negative untamed mind can. Thus, there is no need to create distance, only to improve your thoughts, feeling of self-worth and turn critiques into praise.

    On the other hand, sometimes we even use criticism to create connections and closeness with other people. That is in cases when we look for a common enemy to consequently find common ground with somebody we like or can benefit from.

    But starting a relationship based on hate is absolutely not a good start. We’re only showing off what we are prepared to do to other people, just to get a little bit of attention and love. Negative energies always somehow escalate and backfire.

    You probably love to criticize other people because you were criticized a lot as a young person.

    You criticize people to feel better about yourself

    The second most frequent reason why people criticize others is to feel better about themselves. If someone’s success or personality is too shiny, it’s easy to throw dirt at it, and the shininess instantly loses its brightness. At least a little bit; in our eyes. What a relief. Not.

    It’s been statistically proven that we are very indulgent towards ourselves and much harsher and judging towards others. We have double standards to protect our egos.

    If somebody is better in something important to us or owns something we want or outruns us in a competition, we must quickly find all the reasons why they aren’t as good as they appear; otherwise we feel humiliated.

    You criticize other people because you envy them

    Criticizing others to feel better about yourself and criticizing out of envy are closely connected motives. They are a slightly different tones of the same voice. Let me explain.

    It’s in our genes to hate unfairness. And when somebody gets something we want in a very unfair way, or when we feel life was unfair to us and kind to others, brutally strong feelings of envy arise.

    Examples of situations that usually make us envious, because life is unfair:

    • A friend gets lucky and earns much more money, much more easily than we do
    • A parent shows more attention to a sibling than to us
    • A coworker gets promoted, but we obviously deserve the promotion more
    • A colleague is talented and doesn’t have to work so hard to be good at a certain sport
    • We offer much better support to our kids than we had, but it seems they don’t appreciate it
    • We can find many similar situations

    All these situations are very unfair. Well, life can be extremely unfair sometimes and that hurts. We protect ourselves with many different rationalization mechanisms. We protect ourselves with self‑delusion.

    “Sour grapes” and “sweet lemons” are two very frequent rationalization mechanisms. With self-deception, you make things that you want but don’t have less desirable (sour grapes) and things that you do have but are not that important to you more desirable (sweet lemons).

    Criticizing others is absolutely a way to make grapes less sweet – to make other people’s accomplishments less worthy, to make relationships less important, and what other people have irrelevant.

    In a way, we could say that criticizing others is often an easy way to express frustrations and other negative emotions. But criticizing other people or complaining won’t help. Only a superior life strategy and going into action to improve your life will.

    Keep a positive attitude, make a lemonade out of lemons

    You don’t accept that people have different levels of capabilities

    Very capable and highly organized people usually have zero tolerance towards less capable people. They very strictly judge and criticize others when they do something wrong or don’t meet their standards. I used to be one of them (and still am a little bit).

    The reason behind that is that usually these people were severely judged in their upbringing. Consequently, they set extremely high demands for themselves and others. It’s an internalized judging voice of parents that haunts you (inner critic) and is also directed towards others (outer critic).

    In such a mental model, we don’t realize that people have different capabilities. We don’t take into account that people have different levels of experience, competence and that maybe not all were raised to high perfectionist standards.

    That doesn’t mean you must lower your standards, but criticizing others is rarely the way that leads to improved performance of other people. It sooner leads to hate than improvement.

    Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting. – Emmet Fox

    A complete lose-lose situation

    Nobody gains anything from criticizing. The other person feels devaluated. It creates distance and decreases capacity for love. With criticism, you easily spread the negative energy around and destroy other people’s days.

    People rarely listen to criticism, even if it’s justified, and they don’t try to improve themselves. Instead they take it personally and then avoid you, cut you out of their lives or criticize you back.

    With criticism, you might feel a little bit better about yourself and your ego might feel a bit safer, but at what price? You are doing damage to relationships, your mental health (negative thoughts) and you are trampling the other person’s potential and provoke their inner peace.

    You are pushing people away from your life. You are depriving yourself and others of love. That is a huge price to pay for feeling a little better about yourself in the short term.

    Sometimes you criticize people to help them, sometimes to hurt them. In both cases, you are doing damage to yourself and other people. There are better ways to help others or your ego and feeling of self-worth.

    Transforming criticism into more constructive thoughts, words and actions

    Now that you know the real problems and cause of criticism, let’s look at a few solutions for transforming criticism into more constructive thoughts, words and actions. There is the long-term, harder way to deal with the desire to criticize people, and a few short-term shortcuts and hacks.

    The long-term way is all about developing better self-esteem and self-worth, and a greater capacity for love. When you love yourself more, you can truly start loving others; and consequently you can stop criticizing them at every step they make. If you don’t feel threatened, there is no need to criticize.

    With higher self-esteem, there is no need to create so much distance in relationships or trample others. Because you know your high worth and you know you will survive and be fine (maybe even thrive), it doesn’t matter if somebody is better than you or that they might emotionally hurt you some day in the future.

    The best short-term way to deal with criticism is to use the “switch” approach. You switch from a bad habit (criticism) to a good one (praise).

    In practical terms, that means that every time you want to criticize a person, you bite your tongue (really hard) and do the following – mentor the person, find something to compliment, try to understand why the person is acting as they are, or make a conscious decision to mind your own business.Transform criticism

    Rather than criticize, show people how to do things

    Every time you want to criticize somebody because they didn’t meet your standards, show them how to do things better – mentor them. Just say, you did an excellent job (or parts of it); I have several additional ideas, let me show you …

    Or use the sandwich technique. Find something to compliment in their work, then show them what and how to do better, and end your talk by praising the person again. And if you roll your eyes while showing other people how to improve, you’re doing it wrong.

    Besides that, be careful when showing people how to do things. Make sure that your way really is more efficient, effective, profitable or better in a certain important standard. There are many ways how to achieve the same goal, and who says your way really is the best.

    If you don’t have data or metrics as a proof that your way is the right one or if you aren’t sharing small tricks of industry masters, maybe you are the one who can learn something from the other person.

    Rather than criticize, show respect or mind your own business

    Every time you want to criticize others with the goal of dirtying their shiny success or luck, bite your tongue and instead find a way to even deepen the relationship with that person. Find a way to develop a new dimension.

    If their success is based on hard work, just think of what you can learn from them. Ask them if they are prepared to mentor you or give you some tips to be more successful.

    If you envy them their (unjust) luck, well, it won’t help you with your luck in life in any way. Rather than drowning in envy and criticism, brainstorm how you can get luckier in life. Do it based on the quote: the harder and smarter I work, the luckier I get. As an alternative, you can also think of all the things that you have and are grateful for.

    Other people’s luck doesn’t mean your misfortune, if you have the abundance mindset. Life is not a zero sum game. Wealth and luck can always be created. With the abundance mindset, you know that sooner or later, you will also get lucky, as long as you stay proactive and positive enough.

    Be happy when other people are struck by luck, and while you are happy, mind your own business and mind your own luck.

    Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain but it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving. – Dale Carnegie

    Praise or show empathy rather than criticize

    Last but not least, every time you want to criticize someone’s personality, instead find something to praise. If you manage to achieve 7 compliments for every critique, you will dramatically improve your relationships with others and with yourself.

    The same millisecond you think of a critique make sure you don’t say it and start searching for something to praise.

    • If a person’s extroversion bothers you, find something they’re wearing that you can compliment
    • If a person’s negativity bothers you, find something that they did well and tell them
    • If a person’s pimple in the middle of their face bothers you, find a body part you like on them and focus on that

    Physical traits, character, competences, there are so many different things you can compliment – if you just invest a little bit of effort. Remember, you are criticizing others to create distance, protect your ego, and because you are a hard judge towards yourself.

    Once you stop being hard on others and focus on their positive traits, you will also focus on positive things on yourself. Consequently, you will develop greater self-confidence and capacity for love. You will become more tolerant towards yourself and towards others. What a blessing.

    One more extremely powerful weapon against criticism is empathy. First, let’s define what empathy is. You mustn’t confuse it with sympathy or support. Sympathy means having the capacity to feel the same way as somebody else. Acting in a tender, understanding manner and standing by their side is a form of support. They are both useful, but not as powerful as empathy.

    Empathy means being able to precisely understand other people’s thoughts and actions, and where their actions and behaviors are coming from. When you deeply understand the context, you know the motives and what is really going on in a certain life situation. Then there is no need to criticize, only to forgive, understand or find a way to fix things.

    By developing empathy, you become more tolerant and respect the diversity that life has to offer. Maybe you would be or act the same if you had the exact same life circumstances. Understand, mentor, or develop new relationship dimensions and forget about criticizing.

    When you judge others, you do not define them, you define yourself. – Earl Nightingale

    Don't criticize people

    Concluding thoughts on criticism

    Openly criticizing anyone, or even doing it behind their back, is very destructive behavior that spreads misery in your life and the life of people who surround you. It’s impossible to live a happy and successful life with a negative mind and by spreading negative energies.

    There are better ways to operate in relationships than criticizing. There are ways to transform the desire for criticism into subtler energies and more constructive actions.

    You transform criticism into more positive energies, words and actions, by making sure that:

    • You understand there are many ways to achieve the same thing, and maybe yours is not the best.
    • If you know a better way, show people how to do it, don’t criticize them.
    • If something bothers you on a person, it’s usually something you don’t like about yourself; or you need to understand their context and life circumstances better.
    • With self-delusion of how you are better than others, you won’t get far in improving your life situation. Only with self-improvement, by minding your own business and working hard you can become luckier and happier.
    • You have to be little to belittle others. Thus criticizing others only shows you have to work on your feeling of self-worth and self-esteem.
    • Severely criticizing others means you are creating distance in relationships and that you have a low capacity for love. Ironically, you are forcing people into behavior that you’re afraid will happen to you. Stop it.

    The moment you start excluding others, creating distance and spreading negative energies, switch your thinking and acting to a more positive one. The same millisecond you want to criticize, switch to and ignite thoughts of connecting, sharing, love, praise, tolerance, compassion and empathy.

    That’s how you will deal with your inner and outer critics once and for all. Because when you develop tolerance towards others, you will develop tolerance towards yourself.

  • Emotional flashbacks – when your emotional response is out of proportion

    There are two psychology books that completely changed the quality of my life. The first one is Feeling Good by David Burns, where I learned about cognitive distortions and how you can manage them with emotional accounting and other similar exercises.

    Emotional accounting as a thought-correction process helped me tame my inner critic, focus on more positive aspects of life, be satisfied with good enough at work and in relationships, and avoid all-or-nothing thinking and acting.

    The second book that completely changed my life and helped me understand myself better is Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker. In the book, I learned about the outer critic (constant judgment of other people) that usually accompanies the inner critic and even more importantly, about the emotional flashback. I finally understood the missing puzzle that you can’t deal with solely through emotional accounting.

    In the past year or so, I practiced emotional accounting a lot. I learned to recognize cognitive distortions, categorize them and correct them with a rational response and self-defense. I learned to talk back to the inner critic and shrink his voice. He’s still there, he often still gets too loud, but now I know how to manage it and I’m getting better and better at it.

    But here comes the missing puzzle piece. From time to time, I get into a really intense emotional state, without identifying any severe negative thoughts. There is only a trigger, and I feel like somebody is trying to murder me or that the world is going to end.

    The intense experience happens more on the physical level than in the mind. When it happens, it definitely releases and enhances the power of the inner and outer critics, but the experience has a much wider force and effect. I can feel the happening in my bones.

    They are emotional flashbacks. In this blog post, I will focus on what they are and extremely honestly and openly talk about my own experience of how they’re messing with my everyday calmness and the quality of life (and how I am learning to manage them). If you identify that something similar is happening to you, reading this blog post might be a real epiphany.

    Emotional flashbacks

    What are emotional flashbacks?

    You experience an emotional flashback when a trigger in the environment reminds you of your childhood pain, suffering and traumatic situations. A subject, object, item, place, expression or any other kind of trigger reminds you of all the past events that caused you constant pain. There is a small similarity between the current and past event, and that triggers an emotional flashback.

    For example, somebody says an unjust critique directed at you and subconsciously in a second you experience all the pain of the thousands of times when one of your parents criticized you.

    An emotional flashback happens as a delayed response to childhood abuse. When you were a child, you didn’t have any power to defend and protect yourself. You could only suffer. In addition to that, you had to see your parents as perfect, because they were your protectors and providers, so you blamed yourself for all their toxic behaviors. That means a great deal of repressed pain and unfairness.

    The right thing to do would be to scream, to stand up for yourself, to protect yourself, to find love, but you were not in a position to do so. All you could do is witness (physical, verbal, emotional or spiritual) abuse, repress your feelings and go on with it. At the end of the day, a child can survive almost anything.

    No family is perfect, but there is a limit where it becomes toxic

    Don’t get confused at this point. These things don’t only happen in poor, alcoholic and broken families. It’s happening in 1/3 or more families that look normal at the first glance. By having complete power over children, it’s extremely easy for a parent to break a child; or to mock or criticize them; or to leave them on their own.

    I’ve seen dozens of “healthy and normal families” where parents labeled their children as stupid, clumsy etc., or they were constantly criticizing them or hugging family members was a strange thing to do. There is absolutely no perfect family, but there is a limit where an environment becomes a toxic one, and starts causing great psychological damage to a child.

    The problem is that it’s hard to admit to yourself (and others) that your family was toxic. You have to see your parents as perfect and that may also continue when you grow up. Next to that, it hurts like hell and it feels very shameful to admit that you don’t have a nice, healthy loving family. But living in a lie doesn’t pay off.

    Experiencing emotional flashbacks

    Experiencing an emotional flashback

    Now let’s get back to emotional flashbacks. They are direct messages of your painful past, alerting you how unfairly you were treated and how much pain you had to suffer. They are a cry for help from your inner child (your emotional self and damaged soul) to somehow address your traumatic emotional past.

    One situation in the present (a trigger) reminds you of everything you suffered in the past that’s yet unresolved.

    The emotional flashback isn’t happening only on a psychological level. Your body also gets into an adrenalized state, same as when you are facing danger. But when you’re experiencing an emotional flashback there is no real danger.

    Amygdala, the part of your brain responsible for fears and pleasures, hijacks the rational part of the brain with an intense reaction in the memory part of the brain, reliving and bringing forward all the painful past experiences.

    Even small seemingly unimportant events can trigger the amygdala to a severe emotional response, which completely blocks rational thinking, even when there is no real danger (someone is 5 minutes late, somebody interrupts you, you make an error in your email etc.). When they happen, emotional flashbacks get you into severe regression, stigmatized by:

    • 4F – flight, fight, freeze or fawn response
    • Strong mixture of experiencing fear, shame, alienation, rage, grief and depression, all at the same time, where one negative feeling dominates the experience
    • Overwhelming negative thoughts; the inner and outer critics awaken

    When you are in an emotional flashback, you panic – internally or even externally in your irrational words and actions. Emotional flashbacks often lead to you feeling like something is life-threatening, even if it’s not.

    You lose all of your self-confidence, feelings of helplessness arise, severe self-criticism and judgement of others start happening. We can also add social anxiety, depression, relationship problems, oversensitivity and even suicidal thoughts to the list. It can last from a few seconds to a few days or even weeks.

    The triggers and the 4Fs

    Every emotional flashback has a trigger. Something in the environment triggers all the memories. It’s a stimulus in the environment that reminds you of a childhood trauma and pushes you back into unbearable feelings of those times. Triggers can be external or internal.

    Triggers are most often places, people, events, things, facial expressions, specific styles of communication, specific words, and so on.

    Examples of triggers are visiting your parents or caretakers who acted toxic, family gatherings, a specific type of a shaming tone or words (cynicism, humiliation, criticism), authority figures, asking for help, making a mistake, not feeling perfect, physical pain, public appearance, a specific look, when you don’t meet your high standards, nightmares and bad dreams, and so on.

    If you are experiencing emotional flashbacks, you have to observe yourself (with mindfulness) and find your own triggers. Not everything is an emotional flashback, but many things are:

    Practical examples
    • You can’t stand the face of your coworker. Seeing the person probably triggers an emotional flashback.
    • You worked the hardest, but your boss didn’t give you a raise, so you are outraged and depressed for days. You’re probably experiencing an emotional flashback.
    • Somebody takes away your right of way on the road and you get into the road rage mood. You are probably experiencing an emotional flashback.
    • The boss corrects you at work and you feel so humiliated and unworthy. It’s probably an emotional flashback.

    Emotional flashbacks push you into one of the four responses to danger. That is a very intense experience on the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual level. But when you are experiencing an emotional flashback there is no real danger, you’re only responding in an unhealthy way.

    You are acting out of proportion in a specific situation. You are acting reactively, self-destructively and irrationally. Here are unhealthy 4F responses you resort to when experiencing an emotional flashback:

    Fight Flight Freeze Fawn
    Narcissistic Obsessive-Compulsive Dissociative Codependent
    Explosive Panicky Contracting Obsequious
    Controlling / Enslaving Rushing on worrying Hiding Servitude
    Entitlement Drive-ness Isolation Loss of self
    Type-A Adrenaline junky Couch potato People-pleaser
    Bully Busyholic Space case Doormat
    Autocrat Micromanager Hermit Slave
    Demand perfection Perfectionist Achievement-phobic Social perfectionism
    Sociopath Mood disorder-Bipolar Schizophrenic D.V. Victim
    Conduct disorder ADHD ADD Parentified child

    Source: Complex PTSD, Page 107

    My own experience with emotional flashbacks

    Let’s start with two examples from my own life. When I go for a walk and suddenly somebody passes me on a bike, I experience an emotional flashback. My inner response is similar to somebody just putting a knife on my neck. It takes a few seconds for the rational part of my brain to start working again and then everything calms down. That’s a short but intense type of an emotional flashback.

    Another example is driving in a cab in a foreign country. When I sit in a cab, there is always a “background program” running in my brain monitoring and checking where the cab driver is taking me, if they look suspicious etc. It’s not that intense, it lasts for the whole ride, but I just can’t really relax. That’s a second example of an emotional flashback. There is no real danger, but I’m experiencing an event as such.

    Emotional flashbacks are a big part of my life, I’m used to them and you will rarely notice me experiencing them. It’s all happening internally and I’m quite a courageous person, so there is no way an emotional flashback would stop me from doing something I really want. But I never understood what was this shit (sorry about the language), until I read the book Complex PTSD (here is my summary). Since then, I categorized my emotional flashbacks pretty well.

    I categorized my internal flashbacks into three different types:

    • Short, but really intense ones
    • Obsessive ones that last until the trigger is out of my sight
    • Long ones, where I get completely lost in daydreaming, melancholy and fantasies

    Short but intense ones are when something unexpected appears in the environment; something I couldn’t anticipate and calculate how dangerous it is. My rational part gets hijacked for a second, I get into the 4F (fight, flight, freeze, fawn) response and as soon as I calculate the fact that I’m not really in danger, things calm down and I forget about it. A nice example is the one described with a bike passing by.

    Obsessive ones are when something is bothering me with a person, place or any other subject or object. I somehow feel unsafe and I just can’t stop thinking about it until I change my position and the trigger is out of my sight. I constantly pay attention to what’s happening to the trigger or stimulus. An example would be a ride with a cab or if I’m in a hotel where I don’t feel safe enough.

    Very long emotional flashbacks are the trickiest ones. Usually I feel like I don’t have enough control or that I am trapped in a certain situation (like I was when I was a child) and that leads me into melancholic fantasizing and severe angering states that last for days. That happens at least a few times per year, especially when things don’t go as planned. Yes, that’s why I’m learning and writing about how to be more flexible in life.

    I identified more than 30 different triggers of emotional flashbacks and the list is getting longer and longer with time. Identifying triggers helps me a lot with managing them.

    Short intense emotional flashbacks

    Here is the list of triggers of short intense emotional flashbacks that I am currently aware of:

    • When I’m alone at night and I hear any voices
    • When somebody passes me by unexpectedly from behind (walking, running, with a bike, a car etc.)
    • When I break the rules or a law (small things)
    • When I encounter a police officer or an army person
    • When I need to kill an insect
    • When I need to fight for money (fair payment)
    • If I don’t leave a tip
    • Often when I am eating (emotional eating)
    • If I do something clumsy or if I make a mistake
    • When I hear an ambulance
    • Any loud noises
    • Whenever I put money into my savings account
    • Seeing my father (photo etc.) – we have no contact
    • When something unfair happens (it can be in a movie or in real life)
    • A few specific insulting phrases
    • Any physical pain
    • Unexpected physical contact
    • When I have to wait for somebody
    • When I have to reject somebody or if I get rejected
    • When I need to stand up for myself and assert myself more aggressively
    • When I want to take enough space
    • When I have to ask a question in room full of people

    Medium-lasting obsessive emotional flashbacks

    Here is the list of triggers of medium intense emotional flashbacks that I am currently aware of (they end when the trigger is gone):

    • Two or more people arguing or fighting
    • If I feel like I’m not in a safe territory (district, hotel, etc.)
    • Passing by a group of people who don’t look very nice
    • Dealing with strangers in an unknown environment
    • People partying loudly or laughing out loud
    • When I encounter a person that’s physically stronger than me
    • When I spend time with somebody who makes (much) more money than me
    • Passing by some types of dogs
    • Dangerous animals – spiders, snakes etc.
    • Some types of non-dangerous animals – insects, red ants etc.
    • When I leave my possessions alone and somebody could steal them (bike etc.)
    • When the person I’m talking to is moody
    • Asking for help or somebody giving me something
    • Passing by a block where I was raised as a child
    • My birthday

    Long emotional flashbacks where I get completely lost

    Here is the list of triggers of short intense emotional flashbacks that I am currently aware of:

    • When things don’t go as I wanted or planned
    • Not doing all the work I had on to-do list (not finishing my sprint)
    • Interruptions of steady patterns in relationships (something unexpected happens in a relationship)
    • Cheating (and sometimes sexual history)
    • Ending things (a relationship, finishing a diploma, ending a project etc.)
    • Any big rejections or unfair happenings
    • A particularly melancholic music

    How come you aren’t going crazy?

    I know, this is a long list of triggers. But most of the listed situations trigger the emotional flashbacks very subtly. I needed years of reflection to identify so many of them. And most of them can be managed quickly. So it’s not like I’m going crazy every day, stuck only in emotional flashbacks. But many people are.

    If you spent years by my side, you would never notice that I’m experiencing emotional flashbacks, or you’d notice it extremely rarely. Many people who know me and read this post will be quite surprised. Not that I’m hiding the flashbacks, they’re just such an integral part of how I experience life that I just live with them and move on. I notice them, I manage them, and everything seems normal. But …

    No situation gets better with the passage of time; things only get better when they are addressed and the problem is confronted. Many times, emotional flashbacks do mess up the quality of my life.

    Many times, they do cause severe tension and get me stuck in the 4F response. They definitely contributed to a poor body posture, pinched nerves, stomach problems, periods of melancholy and anger, and sometimes an extreme loss of temper. Even if you try to ignore them, they are still there and they suck.

    They also mess a lot with having a healthy and smart life strategy. Your instinctively react based on the 4F response. If you react, you can’t be proactive. My first coping mechanism is flight, then fawn, then fight and the last one is freeze. I can be a pretty anxious, obsessive perfectionist who gets lost in work and improvements. I also know very well how to put the needs of others before mine like a martyr as well as how to lose temper and enjoy narcissistic tendencies. And sometimes I freeze.

    No situation gets better only with the passage of time.

    Dealing with emotional flashbacks

    Dealing and managing emotional flashbacks

    Emotional flashbacks aren’t healthy and they do cause a lot of damage. They can happen very subtly, it’s hard to admit that you’re experiencing them, but living in a lie only makes things worse. That’s why emotional flashbacks need to be addressed. I will share with you a few approaches that help me.

    Analyzing the triggers and reminders

    The first step that might help a lot is to understand better. You have to become mindful of your internal cognitive and emotional processes and become aware when you’re experiencing an emotional flashback. There are three things you want to figure out:

    1. Trigger – What exactly triggered the emotional flashback.
    2. Thoughts and emotions – What kind of thoughts are going through your head and what kind of emotions you’re experiencing (anger, fear, humiliation etc.).
    3. What is the crying about – Every trigger reminds you of some injustice, traumatic event, abuse or unfairness. Try to figure out what it’s all about. You can start asking yourself questions like who, when, where, why, what etc.

    I always have a piece of paper and a pen with me or a digital notebook, and when I notice that I’m experiencing an emotional flashback I use the D.E.A.R. concept – I drop everything and reflect. I start writing down everything that comes to my mind, ask myself “why” hundreds of times and then I connect the dots.

    As you can see, I’ve identified more than 30 triggers. I can connect all of them to different traumatic childhood experiences, abuse or neglect. Now I understand exactly why something is happening. Once you know about emotional flashbacks, you know when you’re experiencing one. At that moment, you have to sit down and do self-reflection.

    Employ the D.E.A.R. concept – Drop everything and reflect.

    Dealing with the inner critic

    The inner critic is constantly trying to prevent you from dealing with emotional flashbacks. Writing this article alone is one big emotional flashback for me and my inner critic is trying to stop me from publishing it in order to not experience public shame and humiliation. But I learned how to say “stop” to the inner critic.

    Why can I easily override the inner critic? Because I know what it’s like before you get familiar about what emotional flashbacks are and after that. It’s a huge epiphany and relief. You know what you’re dealing with. And if one single person gets an idea of what’s happening to them and how they can deal with it, it’s worth it.

    Well, the inner critic is constantly at work, minimizing the damage done in your upbringing (“it wasn’t so bad”), explaining to you that you’re only a pussy (“it wasn’t that hard, you’re just weak”), and constantly explaining how nothing is good enough, how everybody is flawed and how emotional flashbacks are a stupid concept.

    Emotional accounting is how to deal with the inner critic. First you have to tame your critic a little bit, then you can start dealing with emotional flashbacks. You can do this part while analyzing the triggers and reminders, but if you don’t shut down the inner critic, you have zero chance of managing emotional flashbacks properly.

    Developing a healthy relationship with yourself

    Listen to yourself. Explore your inner world. Be kind to yourself like you are to other people (well, most of them). Never go to war with yourself. Take good care of your body, emotions, mind and soul. Build yourself motivational environment. These are all my mantras that help me deal with emotional flashbacks.

    I direct emotional flashbacks into exploring my past, grieving the lost childhood, undertaking creative endeavors and developing empathy. In other words, I listen to what my emotions have to tell me. I listen to what the scream is all about. And I’m trying to calm the scream down by being nice to myself.

    In the book Complex PTSD, there are 13 steps for managing emotional flashbacks. It’s definitely a process I recommend you to follow. For me, the process is a bit complicated, so I simplified it.

    I first say to myself that I’m experiencing an emotional flashback and identify what the trigger was. That enables me to get my brain back from being hijacked by the amygdala. Then I remind myself that I am not a helpless child anymore and thus I try to express my feelings in a healthy manner. In the last step, I listen to what the scream is all about, let myself grieve and I try to relax (jogging, stretching, deep breathing).

    Many times I succeed at managing the emotional flashback, and many times I fail. Sometimes I know that there is no other option but to wait for it to pass – when a strong one happens. There’s nothing wrong with it, because life is not a bed of roses. All these happenings make my personality a lot richer.

    Having realistic expectations about the emotional flashbacks

    marbles in a jarIn the end, I have realistic expectations. Scientific research shows that you can never completely get rid of emotional flashbacks. Imagine a glass with one red marble in a glass bowl. Then you start throwing green marbles into the bowl. Soon you cannot see the red marble anymore, but it’s still there. The red marble is a painful experience, and the green ones are new positive experiences in your adult life.

    By experiencing more and more positive situations – like safe relationships, deep positive emotional experiences, enjoying life and growing personally, you are slowly gaining a more accurate picture of reality. These are the new green marbles in the bowl. The world isn’t that dark. It takes a lot of work on yourself with all the described exercises to make emotional flashbacks and cognitive distortions exceptions, not a rule.

    But even when you achieve that, the red marble is still there under all those green marbles. Sometimes it still washes ashore. Especially in new situations, which you don’t know how to manage yet. But that mustn’t stop you. Dealing with emotional flashbacks is a never-ending process. You have to accept that.

    You have to welcome the idea that you are stronger than any emotional flashback, because you have many tools to deal with them and in the end, you don’t have to be perfect. You just need a strong vision for yourself that’s bigger than any obstacle on your way; including these flashbacks. And if you find your emotional flashbacks too strong, many times a professional therapy is the best way to go. Good luck.

  • Regular daily reflections will change the quality of your life forever

    In the AgileLeanLife Productivity Framework, you don’t just do things because you always did them in a specific way. You don’t just work and execute tasks like a robot.

    Instead, you regularly reflect on why you do certain things, analyze how efficiently you are doing them and, most importantly, you constantly evaluate where your actions are leading you and if you are following your True North.

    If you want to avoid being on reactive autopilot, you have to do regular reflections. The main goal of regular reflections is to ask yourself thought-provoking questions so that you can develop a deeper level of understanding:

    With regular reflections, you want to gain as many important insights as possible that can help you shape a superior life strategy, progress towards your goals faster and, in the end, live a better life. The good life.

    But that’s not all. One of the biggest values of reflection is that you can change how you see yourself, how you feel about certain situations and, in the end, how you act. New thoughts lead to new emotions and consequently to new actions. That way, regular reflections really help you stay lean, agile, flexible, happy and wise.

    There are several points in your life when performing a reflection is extremely valuable:

    1. After every sprint (bi-weekly planning session) and 100-day plan (quarterly plan)
    2. After every experiment you perform in the search mode as part of validated learning
    3. When big or unexpected changes happen in your environment or relationships
    4. When negative emotions pile up or you sense big negative mood swings
    5. At the end of the day, just before you go to sleep to examine your daily life

    Reflections after sprints, 100-day plans and experiments are called introspections in the AgileLeanLife Productivity Framework.

    Reflections before you go to sleep or when an emotional or situational trigger fires a need for analysis we call short self-reflection. We will discuss both types of reflections in this article.

    But first, let’s answer the basic questions of why, how and when to do reflections.

    Regular daily reflections

    A short daily reflection is nothing but a healthy habit

    Regular daily reflections are a positive habit, like any other healthy and beneficial habit, from exercising to reading and being grateful. Every habit has three key elements.

    There must be a trigger, a behavior you perform and, in the end, a reward you enjoy. If the triggers are strong enough and rewards are big, you have a greater chance of sticking to a habit. That’s what you also need if you want to stick to regular reflections – strong triggers and big rewards.

    Reward – why do short daily reflections

    There are so many big rewards of regular reflections. Everybody doubts it, but then after doing it a few times, they become in love with it. Many times, I had to push people a little bit to do it the first time, but then after performing it a whole new world opens to them.

    They are like “wow, I didn’t know my mind works like that and that I can get so many insights by writing a few of my thoughts down. With reflections, you can finally meet the deep and rich internal world you possess. And now the benefits.

    • You better understand yourself and your actions,
    • You pay more attention to your thoughts and emotions
    • You become aware of your rich inner world
    • You become connected to yourself much better
    • You can more easily see all the ways of how you can properly adjust
    • You can plan how to do things in a better way

    With all that, you gain more control over yourself and you become much more proactive.

    With regular reflections, you explore your needs and wants and become very much aware of them. You explore the fears that are blocking you on your way towards your goal. You can finally understand what kind of conflicts are preventing you from being more assertive in life.

    You can more easily identify all the different toxic thoughts and how they’re hurting you. You can identify competing commitments, internal frustrations and other things that are blocking you in life. Therefore, combining reflections with mindset upgrades is the perfect combination.

    All this removes different inner blocks and releases emotional tensions. Not to mention that these are all the inputs for a superior life strategy.

    Regular reflections help you better understand your environment and its paradigms, including people’s diverse behaviors and changes in their behaviors. You can see and understand your position in your environment exceptionally well and you can analyze how different actions can lead you towards different outcomes.

    Regular reflections enable you to go from reactive behavior to proactive behavior. Regular reflections enable you to go from being miserable to being happy.

    Behavior – how to do short daily reflections

    Doing a short daily reflection is an extremely easy exercise. All you have to do is take a notebook and a pen and start writing down your thoughts. You provoke yourself with a few tough questions, you encourage yourself to look at things from different angles and you ask yourself why dozens of times. Then you dig deep. As deeply as possible.

    Here are examples of questions you ask yourself during reflection:

    • How am I feeling? Why am I feeling like that? Why am I so anxious, angry etc.?
    • What does this situation remind me of? When did I feel the same way as I do now?
    • What am I trying to achieve with my behavior?
    • Why are others behaving towards me as they do?
    • What is the best way to improve my situation? Why am I blocking myself?
    • What am I scared of? Why am I persisting at this thing that doesn’t work?
    • Why does this bother me so much? Why do I really dislike that person?
    • What will happen if I do the complete opposite? How would my life look like if I believed the opposite from what I believe now?
    • After every question you ask yourself why, why, why and dig deep.

    The solemn end of every reflection should always be new insights about you, about your position in the world and how your life relates to different relationships, marketing trends and other environmental elements. After you do a reflection, you should finally understand. There should be many “aha” moments.

    When you do retrospections (after execution), you consciously decide how you will change your behavior and actions. You discipline yourself to follow a new behavioral pattern. On the other hand, in very well performed self-reflections it should all come naturally to you without any force. You should feel it in your bones how you can do things differently and how it makes sense to change.

    Trigger – when to do short daily reflections

    There are many potential triggers that can lead you to do a reflection. Some of them can be planned (after a sprint, before sleep) and some of them can be spontaneous. I suggest you combine both types.

    The strongest and most useful triggers are usually emotional ones. Examples include interesting thoughts or ideas you become aware of, big negative changes in your moods, getting hurt by other people, and so on. In such situations, you go straight to the most painful things a lot more easily.

    The second most common triggers are time- and location-based. You do a daily reflection before you go to sleep. You do a reflection as part of a planning meeting with your team, and so on. You should always have a few strong location and time triggers that naturally lead you towards performing a reflection.

    Napkin sketch

    Introspections – reflections after executions

    Now let’s go a little bit deeper into the concept of introspections.

    Introspections are reflections you do after different periods of execution and after performing life experiments. They are an integral part of bi-weekly sprints and quarterly planning sessions, and their main purpose is to improve your strategy, tactics and actions.

    With retrospections, you want to make sure you’re progressing towards your goal in the best possible way. With regular retrospections, you want to have the smartest strategy and be one step ahead of your instincts, life itself and other people.

    Introspections are otherwise also an integral part of agile software development (SCRUM), where a team reflects on how they work and where they can improve. As I mentioned, introspection is done after every sprint. The things you want to achieve with introspections (you can do it by yourself or with your team if you have one) after sprints and 100-day plans are:

    • Reviewing the tasks done in the previous interval
    • Carefully planning your next sprint
    • Thinking of all the ways you can adjust to achieve your goals faster
    • Thinking of all the ways you can adjust to achieve your goalswith fewer resources
    • Making sure you are going into the right direction (following your True North)
    • Brainstorming how you can do things better and how you can improve and adjust
    • Analyzing all the new ideas you have
    • Better connecting with yourself or with team members if you have a team
    • Updating your life vision or vision of the team
    • Measuring your real progress based on the metrics framework you set for yourself
    • Adjusting the strategy and plan and reflecting on new things that you learned

    Sprint planning and short morning meeting with yourself (and/or your team) are great starting points for execution, and reflection is the perfect activity to end every execution interval.

    The best practice is to combine planning a new execution phase with reflection on the previous one. That way you can really improve yourself on the way from one sprint to another. The simple rule is to never even leave out execution retrospection when planning your next sprint, quarterly plan or an experiment in the search mode. Never. Because that’s what successful people do.

    The bottom lines of introspection are the most important part of the process. If you don’t have the bottom lines, you have a very poorly performed introspection. The mandatory thing is that after every introspection, you have answers to a few very basic, but extremely hard questions:

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

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

    • What should I start doing?
    • What should I stop doing?
    • What should I continue doing?

    After every introspection, you have to change your behavior and your actions. You have to do things differently. You have to improve and grow. If you don’t, introspection was useless. Changes and adjustments are the whole point of it.

    Before we go to short daily reflections, let me once again emphasize the important difference between introspections and self-reflections. The changes and improvements after introspection can be a little bit pushed, you can discipline yourself to do things differently.

    Meanwhile changes after self-reflection must come completely from within, they must feel completely natural. You can train yourself to perform a new behavior, but you become wiser after an epiphany that changes how you see the world in every one of your cells.

    Performing reflection

    Short daily reflections – do them at the end of the day or whenever you feel like doing it

    Now let’s move from introspections to short daily reflections.

    Explained very simply, performing self-reflection means that you take from a couple of minutes to an hour or more to reflect on your goals, beliefs, behavioral patterns, negative and positive emotions, emotional knots and everything else that’s happening in your life.

    The best way is to do it daily by writing a journal. Once you try it, you will see what kind of amazing breakthroughs self-reflection can lead you to. It’s better than any thriller movie once you discover your rich inner world.

    There are two perfect moments for doing a short daily reflection. One is at the end of the day. At the end of the day, you can analyze and compare your plans to what actually happened in reality.

    You can write down what you’ve learned, people’s unexpected reactions and interesting changes in your relationships, how productive you were and how well you completed the three most important tasks that you had given to yourself for that day, and so on.

    The second trigger is when you sense an interesting thought, observation or insight or when negative emotions pile up. When you get extremely moody, when something upsets you, when things don’t go as planned, sit down and start analyzing.

    Use the D.E.A.R. concept in those cases. Drop Everything And Reflect. Or sometimes Drop Everything And Read, you know, to get wiser and more educated.

    A short daily reflection is slightly different from introspection. If you have to force yourself to make a certain decision after self-analysis, you hadn’t done it right. Self-analysis is about understanding yourself and noticing, not judging and forcing yourself into anything.

    There are 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 want through analytical thinking.

    Here are a few additional ideas for what you want to achieve with short daily reflections:

    Analyze your day

    Think about how your day went compared to – (1) your daily plan and (2) your ideal day. Analyze if you executed all the planned tasks, especially the three most important tasks for the day. Analyze what went wrong and what went right, what you’ve learned throughout the day, and write down the insights you gained.

    You can also write down all the cool things that happened to you, so you never forget them. In the end, you can also add all the new things you’re grateful for.

    Look for errors in your subjective reality map

    You see the world through your subjective lenses. I call it the subjective reality map or the frame. You operate based on this mental frame, a set of schemas defined by your beliefs, values, way of thinking and many other factors. Subjective lenses are like unique code that runs in your brain. You’re only aware of a small part of it, most of it is subconscious.

    This frame or the subjective reality map is not the truth, even if it most often feels like it. But it’s not the objective reality, it’s only how you interpret the reality with your limiting senses.

    That’s important, because there are many errors in your subjective reality map. From wrong assumptions and cognitive biases to all the things you don’t even know you don’t know. With reflections, you should identify as many errors in your subjective reality map as possible.

    Through analysis, you should notice that you were wrong about something (but first you have to put your ego aside) and then say to yourself: “Oh gosh, I was really wrong about that” or “I can’t believe I was lying to myself so hard” or “I really operated based on toxic behavioral patterns and beliefs, now I see it”.

    With regular reflections, you should come closer to the objective truth and identify all the ways you’re lying to yourself or deceiving yourself.
    Examining-your-mind

    Make subconscious conscious

    By asking yourself tough questions and digging deep, you can find many emotional knots in yourself of which you weren’t aware before. These knots are tied by all the mistakes your parents made in your upbringing. The more toxic the family environment where you were raised was, the more tension there is. Not all family environments are toxic, but many of them are.

    When you identify these emotional knots, they lose some of their power and some tension gets released. On top of that, you can become aware of why you are performing some self-sabotaging behaviors.

    With regular reflections, I identified all kinds of different things, like why I was always late, why I was afraid to start my own business, why knowledge is so important to me, and much more.

    Brainstorm ideas

    The only way to keep your creative muscle strong is to regularly brainstorm ideas. If you do it every day, the creative part of your brain will be fit and strong.

    It’s hard to brainstorm ideas every day, but you can still make it a part of your shutdown routine before you go to sleep, just after making a short reflection. In such a case you will never forget to train and stretch your creative muscles.

    An idea that isn’t written down is an idea quickly forgotten.

    Of course you won’t have only brilliant ideas with regular brainstorming, but writing down as many ideas as possible is the only way to get to brilliant ideas. If you write down 100 ideas every day, most of them will be absolutely crappy; but every now and then, a new brilliant idea will be born among all the crap. An idea that might lead you to a new course of life.

    An idea to start a business, to help your company to grow, how to improve your relationships or how to experience life more fully, and so on. One such powerful idea can change your life forever.

    Giving instructions to your subconscious

    Your brain works 24/7. No rest, no holidays, just work. Even when you sleep and enjoy your dreams, that’s your brain at work. One good way to use your brain better is to keep the dreaming function alive during the day as well. It helps you be more creative, stay curious and an optimist.

    Very similarly, but the other way around, it also makes sense to give instructions to your brain what to work on when you are asleep. There are many different types of instructions you can give to your brain. Revealing a part of your subconscious self to you in your dreams, finding a new solution for various problems, experiencing lucid dreaming, and so on.

    As the last step of your daily reflection, just after your brainstorming session and before you go to sleep, give instructions to your brain what to work on while you’re sleeping. Just say to yourself (or to your brain) what you want your cognitive power to be used for during sleep. It will absolutely raise your productivity levels and lead you to many cool new insights.

    Mind Body Spirit Soul

    Homework

    Drop everything and go buy yourself a notebook

    Richard Branson, one of the most successful entrepreneurs ever, always carries a simple inexpensive notebook and a pen with him. He writes down all cool ideas, meeting minutes, observations, and so on. You can do the same just for personal purposes.

    A simple notebook that you always carry with you is the best way to do regular introspections and self-reflections. Because when an interesting thought appears, you can simply sit down and start writing. Whenever and wherever you are.

    You can do it digitally, of course, but there is a special connection between paper, pen, your hand and your brain. So I suggest you go to a stationery shop and buy yourself a notebook you like, a pen that feels comfortable to write with, and start with regular daily reflections.

    The mantra here is to just do it. As mentioned several times, it’s hard the first few times. I have people in my life I care deeply about and it took me years to convince them to try self-reflections. It took me three years to convince somebody I love to do their first self-reflection. Three years.

    The first few times, you always feel blocked somehow. There’s nothing to write down. It feels weird. But you have to be patient with yourself.

    Sooner or later your heart opens and your thoughts start to flow.

    After performing one really deep self-reflection I guarantee you that it will become one of your favorite parts of the day and one of your favorite personal development tools; especially because you will forge a better connection with yourself and you will be able to easily enter your rich inner world that’s hidden deeply inside you. Have courage and start exploring your inner self.

  • Life is just a dream – not really, but the idea can be useful

    Life is nothing but a dream. I’m just kidding. Life is not just a dream. It feels pretty real to me. Nature, sun, rain, pain, food, sex, keyboard, kissing, blood, it all feels very real to me.

    Not only my body, also my mind, my consciousness, relationships with people that I love, they all feel very real, even though I can’t touch my mind and I can’t see the relationship bonds.

    Don’t get bored, this blog post is not about arguing why life isn’t just a dream or why that could be true. You can find many philosophical debates about that online, from solipsism to discussions over whether Matrix could be real, and responses to Elon Musk saying that life is only a simulation and that we live in a video game.

    In this blog post, I’ll talk about how perceiving life as a dream can be a good mental trick you can use to stay more (1) flexible and (2) creative. We will start with the creativity, but first what kind of a problem are we even trying to solve with this mental exercise.

    The main problem is that because life feels very real, you take yourself and the world around you very seriously, including your limiting beliefs, assumptions, convictions and values that you’re emotionally heavily invested in.

    To free yourself from the emotional pains, to open your mind and to play with different ideas, versions of yourself and potential future realities, it sometimes helps to see life as nothing but a dream.

    Your brain works 24/7 and dreams only for several hours every night. Why not keep the dream function working also when you’re awake?

    Life is just a dream

    If life is just a dream you can more easily create

    Everything that surrounds you and wasn’t created by Mother Nature was created by man. You have the power to do the same, to contribute, to create, to innovate and to solve problems. But before anything was created by any human, it was first born as an idea or a thought in someone’s head.

    Someone imagined a solution in their head and then made it come true. Someone had a dream of a completely new thing, of a completely new reality. Every idea is born twice, first in your or someone else’s head, with help of dreaming and visualization, and then it materializes through hard work.

    Dreaming of things that you can create and then creating them is one of the reasons why you’re on this planet. You’re here to create, grow, enjoy life and connect. You’re here to create a better future and leave a better place behind. You’re here to dream, not only when you sleep, but also when you’re awake.

    Everything was made up by people that were no smarter than you. Steve Jobs

    You have the ability to dream and imagine how the future will look like. Then through actions, you also have the power to make it come true (at least to some extent). Dreaming is of course not enough. Only when you break your big dreams down into small action steps, how they can become reality, you create a vision that has a potential to materialize.

    Visions are dreams combined with action plans. Only individuals with an incredibly strong vision and determination to make the vision reality changed the world. The vision has to be so strong that it’s above all the problems you encounter on your way. All problems must become irrelevant when you think of your big vision.

    Say to yourself: life is just a dream, a dream where I can create almost everything I want. First imagine life as a dream, distance yourself from the hard limits of reality and then imagine things like:

    • How your future could look likein all the different alterative scenarios
    • What kind of products you can create and all the cool ideas you have
    • What kind of domestic and international relationships you can forge
    • What are the potential scenarios for how the future will look like in 20, 50 and 100 years and how you can contribute to it
    • What the different versions of you being at your best are
    • Dream of different life settings you would like to experience

    Imagine all these things, daydream without any limitations. Then slowly make your dreams and ideas meet the limitations of physical reality. Still keep your mind completely open, but try to extract practical innovations from your dream in the shape of products, your actual future, art masterpieces or anything cool that could be created in reality.

    And then make an action plan how you will bring your dreams to life.

    Perceiving life as nothing but a dream gives you a tremendous ability to brainstorm new ideas and be creative. You can play much better with products not yet created, alternative versions of your future, new types of art, and so on.

    If life is just a dream you can easily change yourself and the way you think

    You see the world through your subjective lenses. You have a mental frame, a set of schemas, defined by your beliefs, values, way of thinking and many other factors, by which you interpret what’s happening around you, you make decisions based on it, and so on.

    Subjective lenses or the frame are the unique code that runs in your brain. You’re only aware of a small part of it, most of it is subconscious.

    This frame is an integral part of you. It’s not the truth, it’s not objective reality, it’s how you interpret reality in combination with limiting senses. The frame is how you think, how you see the world, what you value, what is important to you.

    Changing your beliefs and values together with frames means changing yourself. The more heavily invested you are in your current frame, the harder it is to change it. It’s not easy to operate for years or even decades on a certain set of beliefs and values, and then just change them.

    Nevertheless, sooner or later you encounter a situation when you see that your frame is not giving you the results you want. You’re following one thing because you perceive it as thinking, saying and doing the right thing, but the feedback you’re getting from the environment is not as shiny.

    You might quietly realize that you are operating based on false beliefs, that you were misguided, that you inherited a corrupt piece of mental code. Your way of thinking needs to be reprogramed.

    When you find yourself in such a situation, you have a few options:

    • You can immediately change your frame when you realize that you’re wrong, like Steve Jobs had no problem doing. He didn’t mind being wrong and changed his view of the world in a matter of seconds. I guess he had an extremely flexible mind. The same way Elon has no problem imagining and believing a drastic thing like the one that we are nothing but a video game simulation.
    • You can persist in your frame, lying to yourself that you’re doing the right thing, that you won’t betray yourself and you have to insist on not changing yourself, even if your life is getting more and more shitty. Next to that, you have to live with constant internal conflict and emotional pain.
    • You might have a desire to change, but the pain is just too huge to do that. You can’t just let go all the emotional investment in your (false) beliefs and values, it’s who you are, it’s a big part of your past, what you always defended, how you were raised. In such a case, you have a big internal conflict, two competing commitments, you want to stay true to yourself and change yourself.

    If you find yourself in the scenario with big internal conflict and resistance to changing your frame, but you want to do something about it anyway, seeing life as a dream might help you a lot. It’s nothing but a mental trick to have a more flexible mind and to more easily reframe your reality and consequently change your beliefs and values.

    Virtual reality

    It’s impossible to change reality but it’s easy to change the context

    Let’s say that life is just like a dream, limited by material laws. It’s impossible to change reality and the basic laws of physics, but it’s easy to change the context, the emphasis, the focus, the frame of what you see and what you don’t.

    It’s much easier to reframe anything, if you’re thinking of life as a dream, especially when you are emotionally heavily invested in your current frame. It helps you be more flexible in your thinking and mindset. It helps you distance yourself from yourself a little bit. Because you are only dreaming, nothing is real.

    First of all, it wasn’t your choice to be programmed as you are. It’s a matter of genes you inherited, how you were raised and influenced by secondary socialization, and so on. You didn’t choose what will be your reality, life chose it for you.

    The mental code you got – you didn’t choose it, you just got it – that also includes many cognitive distortions, things you’re afraid of, self-doubt and other crap that prevents you from being happy and making intelligent decisions.

    The question is – why to be faithful to the reality you were put in, if you’re suffering?But if life is just a dream where you can do whatever you want, why not simply decide to live by different rules, why not to go after a better dreams.

    Why not just change what you value, what’s important to you, what you focus on in your dreams, and what kind of a life you create for yourself. It’s nothing but a dream, so you can easily do it. It’s no big deal.

    How and what you think is limited only by you. You can decide to live by different rules and value in seconds.

    Practical examples

    If life is just a dream, imagine a world where you don’t judge yourself but only love yourself. Imagine a world where you don’t judge others but care only about deeply connecting with people.

    Imagine a world where you have many creative (business) ideas you put to use. Imagine a world where you can’t get heartbroken. Dream that it’s impossible for you to get heartbroken, because you love yourself so much.

    Dream of a world where rejection doesn’t affect you at all. Dream of a world where all of your talents are fully developed. Imagine a world where you do what you love, are good at it and make enough money. Dream of being super motivated. Imagine a person who is the complete opposite when you think of your weaknesses.

    What is stopping you from going after these things? You are most often the only one stopping yourself. What if in some cases, the only thing preventing you from living a dream life is being faithful to something that doesn’t work? And you even haven’t chosen that for yourself.

    All you need is the courage to disinvest yourself from your beliefs and start being committed to a new frame. If life is just a dream, you can do that immediately.

    The mental exercise of distancing yourself from yourself and your environment by seeing life as a dream enables you to change yourself and how you perceive things much easier and faster. With perceiving life as a dream, your frame becomes more fuild.

    But when you start sliding back into reality, it again feels so hard to change the frame. So when the old frame starts stifling you, zoom out from the reality into your dreams, imagine a new reality of how you perceive things and who you are and then zoom back into reality. Doing that a few times might help you weaken the negative emotional charge. That’s it.

    But then comes the time to wake up

    Seeing life as a dream is just a tool, nothing else. And as with any tool, you can use it the right way or you can use it the wrong way and even hurt yourself. You can hit a nail with a hammer or you can hit your finger if you miss the nail. Thus there are several ways of how seeing life as a dream can be misused.

    The tool should be used when you need to be creative, open you mind, stay more flexible, reframe things, change yourself to the better version or deal with your limiting beliefs that cause you emotional pain. On the other hand, examples of misusing this tool would be the following:

    • Using daydreaming to escape from reality or as a way to lie to yourself.
    • Brainstorming awesome ideas and products and then doing nothing.
    • Dreaming of violent, negative or evil scenarios. Don’t feed your mind with such things.

    Life is just a dream, nothing else, so make sure you’re dreaming nice, beautiful, diverse dreams that are also turning into reality. If you don’t like the concept of dreams, imagine life as a simulation where you can freely focus on the things that you wish without any emotional garbage.

    And if even that isn’t enough, imagine you’ve just woken up from the Matrix where it’s time for you to take full responsibility for your life and the code you’re running in your brain. If the code is not working and giving you the results you want, it’s your job to update it once you are an adult.

    Imagining life as a dream is only one way to update the code more easily, because it enables you to distance yourself from the reality and yourself. You stop taking everything so serious. For Elon Musk it’s just a computer simulation, so no wonder he can focus on creating rockets. It’s no big deal.

    And if you find the idea useless, you can luckily choose among many other tools that are at your disposal to play with your mindset. Happy and successful dreaming.

  • The proven ways to stop taking things personally

    You were just badly insulted. You’re raging inside. You need to talk to somebody immediately. You call your best friend, explain the crappy thing that happened to you, and their wise words to calm you down are: “Just don’t take it personally”.

    Right after that, you can hear solid statements and arguments like: it’s not about you, it’s about them, you can’t control what other people think or say, you need to have thick skin in life, and even that what others think of you is none of your business. That’s all well and good, but it still hurts.

    Why is that? Because when you take things personally, you’re emotionally hurt and offended. A wise rational statement may help you a little bit, but it’s far from enough. Taking things personally is about emotions, not logic.

    What you have to do is to dig a little bit deeper into your emotions and personality to uncover the source of why you’re really taking that specific situation personally. Only then can you detach yourself from the negative situation.

    In this article, you will learn how to really stop taking things personally. So let’s start digging deep into the emotional reasons of why sometimes cheeky words hurt much more than usual. Here they are:

    • Deep down, you agree with the critique
    • You experience an emotional flashback
    • You perceive being treated unfairly in the situation
    • You may feel excluded
    • You have unrealistic expectations

    Feeling offended

    Deep down, you agree with the critique

    The first and most frequent reason why you take something personally is because deep down, you silently agree with the person who is criticizing you. If you have no doubt in yourself and in what you’re doing, and if you know that the hater is only delusional, you have no problem to just move on.

    But if deep inside you, there is just a small sliver of doubt, a single thought that they might be right, it will hurt you and you’ll go straight into a defensive and crying mode.

    Losing your temper is always an indicator of a core that isn’t solid enough. Losing your temper shows that there are doubts present.

    Actually, there are three scenarios when you can silently agree with a critic:

    • What they’re saying is true and there’s nothing you can do about it.
    • What they’re saying is true and you know it, because you follow the “fake it until you make it” philosophy or you are work in progress.
    • What they’re saying is not true but you just aren’t self-confident enough.

    The critic is right and you can’t or won’t do anything about it

    The first situation is the hardest somehow. Let’s say that somebody insults you that you’re fat and it’s true. You only have two options. Change it, which leads us to the second bullet point. Or accept it. If you are bald or short on the other hand you can only accept it.

    When you learn to accept reality as it is, you can’t take it personally anymore. So in such cases the only thing you can do to stop taking things personally is to accept reality, move on and focus on the positive.

    But it’s easier to say that than to do it. Sometimes the mantra “to forget is the next best thing to forgiveness” might help. And more about accepting reality in one of the following blog posts.

    • Solution: It’s time to accept the harsh reality; or if there is something you can do about it, start improving.

    When you are work in progress

    If you find yourself in the second situation (when you are work in progress), you need to have a vision and a mission greater than any life problems or any hurtful words a hater can say.

    You have to trust in the process of hard and smart work, see how you’re constantly improving, and be aware that you’re a work in progress. You can ease the pain by looking at the list of your past accomplishments, things that you’re grateful for or at life metrics that clearly show your progress. Ease the pain, but don’t engage in a fight. If you engage in a fight with a hater, only more pain waits for you.

    Never wrestle with pigs. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it. George B. Shaw

    If the critique is justified from a boss or somebody you respect and it hurts, you can ask for a clarification and make an action plan of how you will do better in the future. Having the growth mindset and a desire to improve yourself is the way to go in such a situation. If you have the growth mindset you can’t take things personally, because you know you can easily improve and that effort is the road to mastery.

    • Solution: Compare a critique to your improvements and have a vision stronger than any problem.

    When you only lack self-confidence

    In the last case, if what they’re saying is entirely false but you have doubts, there is an easy exercise you can do that will wash away the pain immediately.

    Make a list why you don’t agree with their statement. It will help you see the objective truth, trust more in yourself and distance yourself from the comment. Such a list will also help you build up your self-confidence.

    • Solution: Make a list why you don’t agree with the statement that you’ve taken personally.

    You experience an emotional flashback

    The next most frequent reason for taking things personally is that you experience an emotional flashback when somebody criticizes you, doesn’t agree with you or shows you no support.

    An emotional flashback is when a current life situation reminds you of past traumatic life experiences, especially from your early childhood. Maybe your parents constantly criticized you or they abandoned you, and now in the adult age a single small critique reminds you of all the past emotional pain.

    All the past pain combined together can erupt like a volcano in such situations. Then you may ask yourself how could such a small thing upset you so much.

    Emotional flashbacks aren’t an easy thing to deal with. The first thing you have to do is to become aware of them. You can do that with the following exercise:

    • Ask yourself: is your emotional response proportional to the critique? I guess if somebody pokes you a little bit, it doesn’t make sense to completely lose your temper and destroy an otherwise nice day.
    • Ask yourself: of whom or of what thing from your youth does the situation remind you? Don’t censor your thoughts, note the first thing that comes to your mind. It should be something like “My mother always criticized me, and now this.”

    Becoming aware of emotional flashbacks will somewhat disarm the tendency to take things personally. But to completely wipe out such emotional flashbacks, it’s necessary for you to do hard work on your mindset.

    You can do many different mind upgrades on your own, but sometimes professional therapy is the way to go. Analyzing emotional flashbacks will also help you understand what easily pushes your buttons.

    What are you saying?

    You perceive being treated unfairly in the situation

    There is one thing we hate the most. We hate it in our bones, every internal organ and in every situation possible. We hate being treated unfairly. We hate unfairness.

    If you weren’t treated properly as a child and in your youth, the judgment towards unfairness is even stronger – because it’s combined with an emotional flashback.

    If somebody criticizes you, you can very quickly see it as unfair. You fight for something, you put in all the hard work, long hours and all the effort, and then some unimportant hater dares to throw mud at you and diminish your efforts. That is so unfair. Injustice – what we hate the most.

    Well, in reality it’s not. You must become aware that you aren’t being treated unfairly. Haters are a fact of life. They’re a byproduct of success. They always existed and they always will. You have to start dealing with them the moment you go above the average. No exceptions. Everybody has to and there are many reasons for that:

    • There may be a clash of interests
    • People have different values
    • People have many personal issues or act based on stereotypes
    • Many people might envy you
    • Bad communication is a frequent reason for haters
    • Some people are just assholes

    Just go to a few blogs, YouTube or Facebook pages of public figures and you’ll immediately see a ton of hateful comments. No matter the industry, no matter how good the cause it is, there are always haters present. You aren’t alone in this game, so don’t see it as unfairness towards you.

    There is a saying haters gonna hate. There are many reasons why somebody might not agree with you or wants to engage in a fight with you. Everyone has their own opinions based on their belief system and there’s nothing wrong with that.

    It’s impossible for everybody to have a belief system where they like you and adore you.

    If you encounter people who are against you, that doesn’t mean that life is treating you unfairly. That only means you stood up for something important and that people with different belief systems who have poor communication skills exist and can’t express their opinion in any other way than insulting you. Nothing else. So don’t take it personally.

    You’re probably doing the same to other people, just in a subtler and more civilized way. If you’re trying to change other people, that means you don’t really like them as they are.

    Your belief system is different from theirs, and you have different values and preferences. That’s why you’re trying to change them. Luckily, there is a level above not agreeing with people in a respectful manner and trying to change them – accepting people as they are. I practice that a lot.

    You may feel excluded

    We are social beings. As such we need to belong. We can’t survive alone. We can’t succeed alone. So if somebody tries to exclude you from a social group, there is no other way but to take it personally. Again, it can be mixed with an emotional flashback, if you didn’t feel accepted at home. A few decades ago that might have been a big problem, but today it’s not.

    All you need is the abundance mindset. You have to see that there are so many different social groups, clubs, associations, meet-ups, hobby gatherings etc., that you should have no problem finding a few social groups where you completely fit in.

    Usually the only obstacle preventing you from finding the right fit for yourself in different social groups is laziness, fear and a desire to stay in the comfort zone. Don’t hope for others to change. Don’t hope that the world will change to be more to your liking just because of your ego. Find people where mutual respect is present and where you can shine.

    Your environment matters a lot. And being who you are matters a lot. Don’t take it personally if you don’t fit somewhere, instead find a group of people who will accept you with wide open hands and hearts. Don’t be a nerd trying hard to fit in with the cheerleaders. And don’t be Penny trying to become a nerd.

    Much like it goes for social groups, so it goes for individual relationships. You’re the one choosing your key relationships in life. So choose them wisely. Don’t spend time with people who don’t support you, believe you and encourage you to become the best version of yourself.

    You have unrealistic expectations

    One more source of taking things personally are unrealistic expectations, especially regarding relationships. In life, you must never go against markets or human nature.

    There is a saying that relationships are like glass, but the glass is already broken. There is no perfect individual and there is no perfect relationship. People lie, people cheat, they try to control you and manipulate you. Usually they hurt you because they themselves are hurt or afraid.

    But it doesn’t matter, these are all the things that happen in a relationship. They aren’t an exception; they’re more of a rule. And strangers aren’t the ones doing them. People you like, people you love and work with will do that to you.

    Many times, you act the same way towards others. That’s the reality of life that you have to accept if you don’t want to take things personally. Like you have to accept your flaws and learn to love yourself the way you are, where you have no power to change things or to improve.

    Stop taking things personally

    Homework

    Simple exercises to stop taking things personally

    There will come a time when people won’t agree with you, they will play against you or even throw shit at you. To happily and calmly continue with your day and not drown in misery, you have to learn how to not take things personally.

    We already mentioned a few core weapons that will help you with that:

    1. Make a list of arguments for why you don’t agree with the statement.
    2. If a critique is justified and it hurts you, ask for clarification and make a battle plan for how you will improve yourself. Keep the growth mindset no matter how harsh the critique is. You can and will improve.
    3. Ask yourself about the proportion of your response to the critique and what the critique reminds you of. Analyze whether there may be an emotional flashback involved.
    4. Analyze how many critiques other public figures receive and realize that there is no unfairness happening to you, it’s just life. Not all people can agree with you and love you
    5. Find a group where you really fit in and where you can blossom. Don’t try to fit in and work with people who simply don’t resonate with you.
    6. Have realistic expectations towards people. We may be civilized animals, but deep down we are still nothing but animals. Sooner or later, the people you love will hurt you and you will hurt others.

    In addition to that, there are several other things you can do that will help you not take things personally:

    1. Make sure you don’t give people any solid reason to trash talk about you. Then you always have the greatest power in your hands – transparent evidence that they’re wrong. Make sure you are always transparent and that you always act out of good intentions.
    2. In most cases, completely ignore the evil people. Don’t think about the evil people, don’t talk to them or write to them. Never gossip about them or God forbid that you try to give them advice. Maybe from time to time, you can turn their critique into a joke or defend yourself in a professional way with arguments and transparency when your reputation or ego is at stake.
    3. Make sure you aren’t a hater. Respect other people. Only give constructive criticism and share your positive ideas with others. State facts with solid proof and don’t only share your vague opinions or insults. Practice empathy and put yourself in other people’s shoes. Treat other people like you want to be treated.

    If you 100 % don’t agree with the statement, if you don’t experience an emotional flashback, if you always keep realistic expectations and if you know that it has nothing do with unfairness, you have nothing to take personally no matter how tough the words that are pointed towards you.

    When you learn to not take things personally on the emotional level, your life will be much calmer and you’ll be able to go more smoothly towards your goals even through the days when somebody is throwing shit at you. Now you know how to not take things personally. Use it, apply it, enjoy it.

  • Your mind is like a garden that needs a good daily care

    Your body is a vessel that carries your soul, so you must take good care of it. That’s a concept easy to grasp. Everybody knows how important it is to take good care of the body with regular exercise, a healthy diet and moderate lifestyle; and it makes complete sense to go to the doctor when you get sick.

    Everybody knows and agrees with the importance of the healthy living, but sticking to it is completely another story.

    On the other hand, taking good care of your mind is not perceived as common sense as taking care of your body; even though it’s sometimes even more important.

    Psychological pain is often much harder on you than physical pain. At the very least, a poor mindset leads to being constantly trapped in negative emotions, making bad life decisions, self-sabotage, several severe diseases (mind has a great influence on the body), an unhappy life in general and many other negative behaviors and outcomes.

    Scars on a body are well seen, but wounds of a soul are sometimes permanently hidden.

    Thus you must regularly take care of your mind.

    Much like you can do many things for your physical health to avoid any serious illness or injury that needs to be cured by a doctor, so you can take many precautions to take good care of your mind, in order to not find yourself in depression, social anxiety, severe stress, eating disorder, procrastination, cognitive distortions or any personality disorder.

    We don’t even need to go that far.

    Being unhappy or unsatisfied in life or living a zombie life wasting your potentials is certainly a big enough reason to start taking better care of your life by upgrading the way you think. It may help if you imagine your mind like a garden that you have to take care of regularly.

    Your mind is like a garden

    Your mind is like a garden and you are the gardener general

    Even though nothing lasts forever, you can extend the longevity of things with positive actions, regular maintenance, and constant growth and improvement. Your body and mind are no exceptions to that. With regular maintenance, they both last longer and function better. That’s exactly what you want.

    If you want to have a beautiful garden, you have to take care of it regularly; on a daily basis. And if you want to have a beautiful mind, you have to take care of it regularly; also on a daily basis.

    There are several ways how you can take good care of your mind garden:

    1. Plant the right seeds and regularly wipe out the weeds
    2. Make sure that other people aren’t throwing rotten seeds on your soil
    3. Take good care of the soil

    Plant the right seeds

    The seeds in the garden of mind are constantly being planted. The seeds in the garden of mind are your thoughts, opinions and concepts.

    The right seeds, the beautiful seeds from which a nice flower will grow, are all the thoughts that bring the positive into your life. The right seeds are tender thoughts of sharing, connecting and loving – yourself, people, things and ideas.

    Examples of the right seeds to plant in your garden of mind are:

    On the other hand, harmful seeds or weeds are all the thoughts that bring the negative into your life. Negative thoughts or seeds are rough mental energies of excluding, disconnecting and hating – yourself, people, things and ideas.

    Examples of negative seeds being planted in your mind:

    • Minimizing your accomplishments
    • Comparing yourself to others and being jealous
    • Fantasizing about revenge or misfortune happening to other people
    • Labeling yourself and others in a negative way
    • Drowning in self-pity and a victim mindset
    • Being a perfectionist and always wanting more and more
    • Other cognitive distortions

    When we talk about rotten seeds, the most important fact is that by thinking the same negative thought over and over again, you give rotten seeds the power to grow and spoil your garden.

    They can completely overtake it. They can completely destroy your mind and your life. So you want to pull out the weeds while they’re still small and manageable. Stop feeding the monster. Starve it.

    By thinking the same negative thought over and over again, you give rotten seeds the power to grow.

    On a more positive note, by thinking the same positive thought over and over again, you give healthy seeds the power to grow. So think positive thoughts repeatedly. Enjoy them.

    With your actions, you give additional power to your rotten or healthy seeds to grow. That means you have to be careful how you think, what you say and especially how you act.

    Poor seeds of mind

    Wipe out the weeds

    In the garden of mind, it’s impossible to plant only the good seeds. Weeds grow in every single garden of mind. There’s no way to avoid it.

    But there are two things you can do regularly to properly maintain your mind:

    • You can observe what’s happening with your mind and learn to recognize a bad seed from a good one. You do that with meditation, by counting negative thoughts, writing and categorizing them, and many other mind exercises. Here are all potential toxic thoughts that you need to learn to identify and categorize.
    • You can pull out the weeds while they’re still small and manageable. Not only do you have to throw away the bad seeds, you also have to cut down the ones that start to grow. You can do that with emotional accounting, cognitive reframing, positive affirmations and many other mind tools.

    You either control your mind or your mind controls you.

    Controlling your mind doesn’t mean that a negative thought never appears in your mind. It only means that you learn to recognize what’s happening in your garden of mind and bring attention to the positive things.

    Watch what other people are throwing on your soil

    Other people are constantly throwing seeds on your mind soil. When you watch the news, what you read, when you talk to other people, it all represents seeds being thrown on your garden of mind. You want to make sure that as few rotten seeds as possible are thrown at you.

    Making sure that the healthy seeds of other people land on your mind soul isn’t rocket science:

    • Don’t spend time with bozos, zombies, and ignore the haters
    • Read useful and positive material, and read a lot
    • Don’t watch TV at all
    • Don’t read the news and trashy magazines
    • Don’t let social networks be the main source of information for you
    • Browse educational not mental masturbation internet sites
    • Listen to positive music and different audio books
    • Go to seminars, lectures, subscribe to MOOCS and never stop learning
    • Get yourself a mentor

    All these things are part of your personal infostructure. Your personal infostructure is like a sieve that separates healthy seeds from the rotten ones so that they don’t even have a chance to reach you. Build yourself an outstanding infostructure and your garden of mind will start to blossom.

    But even if you build yourself an outstanding infostructure, a few rotten seeds will still land in your mind. Luckily, you can only be infected with a negative idea if your mind is fertile ground for such negative words and ideas. Make sure you’re simply not sensible to anything negative, because you know very well that you can’t live a positive life with a negative mind.

    You can only be infected with a negative idea if your mind is fertile ground for such negative words and ideas.

    Take good care of the soil

    Last but not least, make sure you take good care of the soil. That brings us back to the body. A healthy mind can only reside in a healthy body. So make sure you’re taking good care of your body, especially your brain. It’s actually not that hard to do that.

    There are only five major things you must do to take good care of the soil:

    • A healthy diet means a healthier brain. Eat a lot of green veggies and fruit in moderation, a high amount of healthy fats, low amounts of sugar, and consume low amounts of alcohol.
    • Exercise at least three times a week. Go for a 30-minute walk if nothing else. Exercising in nature is much better than being a gym rat.
    • Get enough sleep every night. It’s the number one thing for keeping your brain healthy and making sound decisions. If you’re sleepy, you don’t act as rationally as you should.
    • Reduce the amount of stress in your life. Stress slowly kills you and it also kills your brain and the ability to take good care of your garden. Increase your margins, simplify your life and learn to manage stress properly.
    • Constantly try new things, challenge yourself, travel, talk to new people, never get bored. Do a creative task every day – do art, brainstorm ideas, write etc. You can do brain teasers, games and different puzzles. You can play challenging video games. Constantly try new things.

    Your mind is like a garden. Make sure it’s a unique and beautiful garden. You will be rewarded with a happy and high-quality life, and people will love to spend time with you.

    There is no wiser life advice than: take good care of your body and take good care of your mind.