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  • Reading challenge – The best way to fall and stay in love with reading

    There are three types of people in the world. (1) People who seldom read a book in their lifetime, especially after the end of their formal education. (2) People who have loved reading as long as they can remember. (3) And then there are people who slowly grow fond of reading with time.

    I belong to this third group. I always loved playing with technology and hated books. Until I stumbled upon an interesting thought: “A good book is definitely the best bargain you’ll ever get in your life”. I love good bargains and a book is definitely the best one.

    You pay somewhere between $3 and $30 for a book. The same price as a latte. But unlike sugared coffee, the book stays with you forever.

    After you buy a book, you have to invest around 7 – 10 hours to read it (this is the most important part when we talk about books), which is quite a big investment, but please mind all the benefits.

    First of all, the author had to spend months and months writing down their thoughts, life experiences or materializing their imagination. By reading the book, you get an opportunity to enter someone else’s mind, find out how they think and perceive the world.

    You get a chance to see the world through different eyes.

    By reading a book you automatically expand your mind, improve your vocabulary, train your creative potential and analytical skills, improve empathy and much more. You do a brain workout while disengaging from everyday worries.

    The benefits of reading a book are completely unfair compared to the investment.

    The gains of reading are a no-brainer. But how to grow fond of reading? Actually, you are only around 30 days away from being indifferent about books to falling in love with reading. And it’s the habit that can change your life forever.

    Reading Challenge

    The process that will help you fall in love with reading

    As I mentioned, I used to hate reading. Now I love reading. It’s the number one activity on my enjoyment list. But how did such a transformation happen?

    It’s not really that hard to become a bookworm. I followed a very simple strategy:

    1. Find the right topic. In the beginning, it’s essential to find a topic you’re really passionate about. The more passionate you are, the easier it will be to stay with a good book; or several of them. I started with books about ancient Roman Emperors, then startups, and today my passion is psychology. Just go to the library or browse book categories on Amazon until you find something that really fits your interest well. Alternatively, you can ask yourself: if you were a teacher what topic would you teach others?
    2. Carefully choose the book. There are more than 1 million new published (300,000) and self‑published books (700,000) each year only in the English language. That’s more than 2,500 new books every single day. You can choose from among more than 130 million books that have already been published. If you don’t put the effort into choosing a really interesting one, you’ll lose interest. Go for the best books on the chosen topic and take some time to do the research, read a free chapter, reviews, forum discussions, quotes and comments.
    3. The cat rule. When a cat bears her young ones, she carries them around wherever she goes. You should do the same with your book. Resting on a couch. Have a book with you. Doing the number two. Have a book with you. Enjoying lunch break at your job. Have a book with you. Wherever you go, make sure that the book is with you. Sooner or later, you’ll open it and start reading. And you will absolutely stand out in crowds, in a very positive way.
    4. Don’t go to sleep if you don’t read at least one page. Set a goal to read at least 30 minutes every day. Sometimes you’ll manage it, other times it will be too exhausting. You will be too tired, too busy or completely unmotivated. It doesn’t matter. The only rule to really follow is to never go to sleep if you haven’t read at least one page of the book. One page. It takes 2 – 5 minutes. Come on.
    5. Think with your own head. You can be a passive or an active reader. Being an active reader is so much more interesting and fun. So, while you read, force yourself to think a little bit; or rather think hard. Vividly imagine the scenes, the plot, the characters or whatever the content is about. Connect explanations in the book with your own life experience. Consider where you agree with the author and where you don’t. Look up new words and try to memorize them.

    If you follow these five rules, you will sooner or later read your first book, and then the second one and the third one and so on. Once you witness how your love for reading grows, you will face a new challenge – how to read as much as possible.

    There are many tricks to make more time to read, but one of the best way to push yourself into reading more is to join or create a reading challenge for yourself.

    Reading challenges can greatly accelerate your reading motivation

    Challenging yourself is always a good way to develop a new habit or to complete a very demanding task. That’s why 30-day challenges are a very popular concept in new habit development theory.

    In the past, I’ve completed several different 30-day challenges, among others the challenge to write and publish a blog post every day.

    A 30-day challenge to read every single day might be a good start at the very beginning, if you are really not fond of reading. But once you are a pretty regular reader, such a challenge is easy-peasy.

    Luckily there are many tougher reading challenges to undertake. Let’s look at the concept of real reading challenges.

    Popular reading challenges

    There are communities all over the world that organize all kinds of reading challenges. Joining such a challenge not only motivates you to read more frequently, but you also get a chance to meet new people, share opinions and perspectives on books, and engage in interesting discussions.

    Most reading challenges are based on one of the following frameworks or reading strategies:

    1. The “tutti frutti” challenge – Tutti frutti stands for “all fruits” in Italian. It’s usually associated with gelato (ice cream) that’s made of mixed fruits. I use the same term for reading challenges where you read all kinds of different books, from poetry to classic literature and non-fiction. Participating in such a challenge will greatly broaden your horizons in a very short time frame.
    2. Deep dive into one topic – If you read three to five books on a selected topic, you’ll know more about the topic than 90% of the people. Find one topic you are really or just a little bit interested in and start learning. Not only will you become a much more interesting person, soon you will find out that knowledge is real power.
    3. Genre or author specific – The third kind of challenges are genre‑specific. The selected genre can be anything from business to personal development or psychological thrillers. The books can also be related to a specific author, topic or even a fictional character such as Sherlock Holmes.
    4. Book Club challenges – Many book clubs organize different types of reading challenges. You can find online and real-life book clubs, supported by meetups, forums, real life chats or professionally organized events where you can ask authors anything you want.
    5. Summer reading challenges – Christmas is usually associated with deepening personal relationships. And summer always seems like a relaxing period of the year, perfect for reading a good book or several of them. Thus, you can find many different summer reading challenges together with book recommendations.

    Not to talk only about theory, here are some popular annual reading challenges:

    If you need a good idea for which book to read, Goodread’s Listopedia is a very good start. Then don’t forget to check Goodreads reviews and Amazon reviews for every book before you read it, and you can also find a good summary or read a few free pages on Amazon Preview to get a feeling about the author’s style.

    Research is really important before you buy and start reading a book. And if you are looking for a real-life book club, try to find one on the Meetup Platform or contact your local library.

    Reading challenge list - Example

    My summer reading challenge

    For years now, I’ve been reading on a daily basis. Besides regular exercise it’s probably one of the most beneficial habits I acquired. Since I always love challenging myself, not doing a reading challenge would almost be a sin.

    Rather than joining a formal reading challenge, I decided to build one for myself. I like to stay flexible and adjust my life settings and goals to situational circumstances; what and how I read is no exception in that.

    Here are the bottom lines of my current situation, when it comes to reading and writing:

    • I’m putting together a book (“blog to book” with a few extras). But that means it’s hard to simultaneously produce quality content for the blog and putting together a book.
    • I have been writing new blog posts for more than a year and a half now. I strive to make every blog post an outstanding piece of content. That takes hard work. A short break from putting together my own quality content would be nice.
    • I have a real desire to dramatically build up my knowledge about psychology. I feel like a vessel that needs to be filled with new knowledge. Thus, I currently strongly prefer reading than writing my own content. I want to take advantage of that feeling.

    These are the three facts, I decided to build my reading challenge on. What I decided to do in particular is to read 10 books on psychologyuntil the end of the summer (5 traditional authors like Freud, Ericson, Rogers and 5 contemporary authors) and, of course, write really extensive summaries of the books.

    I will try to publish a new summary every 7 to 10 days from end of June to end of September.

    That’s the reading challenge I will do this summer. The next summer, I will probably read 10 books from one single author. And the summer after that, I might do the “tutti frutti” reading challenge. And then who knows what I might come up with.

    If you like a good challenge, why not try the reading challenge. If you are not that fond of reading, it can be one of the toughest challenges you could undertake. But tough builds character.

    And if you already love reading, why not challenge yourself in some innovative ways, like reading books on subjects you never read before, or test your limits when it comes to reading; you know, just for fun.

  • Creative avoidance – when you get creative at blocking your own progress

    I firmly believe that everyone can be creative. If nowhere else, you can easily witness creative behavior in every single person when the time comes to make up a good excuse for not taking action or to face irrational fears.

    With no exception, we can all get so creative when it’s time to prevent ourselves from getting out of the comfort zone. There’s even an expression for such behavior. It’s called creative avoidance.

    You basically find every possible way to stop yourself from taking action. The subconscious goal of creative avoidance is to protect yourself from danger. But ironically, many times you are not protecting yourself, but rather stopping yourself from progress, growth and new wins.

    Creative avoidance can be the tough goalkeeper preventing you from entering a bigger league. It doesn’t make sense to invest your creative potential at avoiding your progress.

    Thus, let’s look at the origin of creative avoidance to understand it better and then present some hints on how to successfully deal with creative avoidance once.

    The origin of avoidant behavior

    In the jungle, the mighty jungle, avoiding danger was the ultimate survival goal. The better you were at avoiding beasts, predators and other killers, the greater were your chances of survival.

    If you managed to avoid danger, there was no need for an unnecessary fight or flight that might also end in death. The feeling that drives avoidant behavior is fear. Fear tells you that something is dangerous and tries to convince you to avoid it.

    With fear, you’re trying to protect yourself from danger, pain or harm. You’re afraid or even terrified when it’s a matter of life and death, when it’s time to protect yourself no matter the cost.

    Fear taking over in the face of danger is seen very well in your body language. Your whole body strives to avoid the threat.

    Slouching, hunching, avoiding eye contact, creating more space, backing off quietly, also shaking, rapid breathing, and speaking very little or very quietly are all signs that it seems good to avoid something or someone.

    In many dangerous situations, fear is the greatest gift one can possess. It’s the survival instinct (and intuition) that helps you stay alive and in one piece. Thus, you shouldn’t see fear as something bad. Fear is your ally, an alarm notifying you as soon as possible that it’s time to avoid danger and protect yourself.

    But we don’t live in the jungle anymore, where avoiding things was necessary on a daily basis. In the developed world and fairly safe urban places, situations where you need to be really afraid are quite rare.

    You face such a situation maybe every decade or so. When you do face it (a snake in the house, a gang on the street, a hurricane in the air etc.) fear is a valuable sign to back off and call for help. In all other cases fear might be blocking you greatly.

    • Lesson 1: In very rare circumstances, fear is your greatest ally. So, always pay close attention when your intuition is trying to tell you that something creepy is happening. Don’t be naive.

    Make sure fear works in your favor when it comes to stupid decisions

    Before we go to situations where avoidant behavior is not protecting you, but stopping you from progress, there is one more colossal gift that fear carries and is worth mentioning.

    Fear can protect you from making stupid decisions. Fear can help you avoid all the situations where great risks are involved in combination with small potential rewards.

    Fear tries to prevent you from making many stupid decisions. Here are only a few examples:

    Driving drunk, not wearing a safety belt, driving dangerously, engaging in a physical fight, cheating, breaking the law, travelling in dangerous countries and war zones, quitting your job before knowing your next move, stealing, and so on.

    We’re all at least a little bit afraid of performing stupid behavior; at least in the beginning. With time, if you participate in malicious actions, you get used to them.

    The fear disappears and dishonesty, criminal or any other dangerous or stupid behavior can easily escalate. Your comfort zone stretches and you become more courageous, but unfortunately in a very negative way.

    The first time, most people are quite afraid to drive drunk. They are breaking the law, they don’t know how much of their ability is hindered, and so on. The second time, it gets much easier. The third time, it’s almost natural.

    Then it becomes who you are. You drive even if you’re drunk. But the benefits are really small in comparison with calling a cab, and the risks are huge – there are chances of losing your driving license or even killing somebody.

    It makes sense to have a personal ethic code to never make stupid decisions. Don’t lie, cheat, cross the law or perform any other type of illegal or immoral behavior at all. Measure yourself as a person based on your behavior when nobody is looking.

    With such an approach, you will never have a problem with the temptation to escalate bad behavior or do a stupid decision you will regret for the rest of your life.

    Listen to your fears very early when it comes to stupid decisions. Never drive drunk, always wear a seat belt, drive carefully and according to the rules, don’t engage in physical fights, don’t cheat, don’t break the law, don’t travel in dangerous countries and war zones, and so on. Make fear your ally in such situations, even if you could easily overcome it.

    • Lesson 2: Be the biggest pussy when it comes to stupid decisions. Avoid stupid decisions at all costs.

    Creative avoidance

    Irrational fear and fake emotional protection

    We might not live in the jungle anymore, but we live in a world where everybody wants to be competent, successful, beautiful, rich and happy. You and I are no exception in that.

    And we all like to imagine that these things are given traits. You either have it or you don’t. Luck either strikes you or it doesn’t. Some people were born lucky and others weren’t.

    The assumption that success is a given thing is based on the fixed mindset. You assume that really successful people don’t have to fight for what they’ve got. The majority of people suffer from that kind of a mindset. I see it on a daily basis.

    For example, people assume that since I was extremely successful as a startup ecosystem facilitator, I will automatically become successful in blogging. Without any effort.

    But that’s not how success works. At least not in 99% of the cases. In the majority of cases, success comes when people are willing to do the hard things. The things that all other average people are not willing to do; the things that average people are actually too afraid to do.

    No matter how good of a social status you enjoy, you always have to do the hard things if you want to get and stay on the top. Even Elon Musk was on a verge of collapse with Tesla, even though he was already known worldwide as a big visionary.

    Examples of hard things most successful people must do are:

    1. Brainstorming hundreds of ideas in a daily basis
    2. Putting creative ideas forward
    3. Selling yourself, your ideas or services
    4. Taking initiative and trying to get people on your side
    5. Negotiating hard
    6. Making tough decisions
    7. Public speaking
    8. Building an outstanding relationship with customers, boss or spouse
    9. Constantly learning new skills
    10. Mastering one industry exceptional well
    11. Well, the list goes on and on

    These things are hard because they carry the risk of rejection. They are hard because they carry the risk of failure. The risk of being humiliated or laughed at.

    Failing, being rejected or laughed at hurts like hell on the emotional level. Nobody wants that. That’s why fear is trying to protect you from it at all costs. But these are also the situations where fear is not really protecting you, but holding you back.

    People who are really successful in the long term know that success is not given. You must work hard for it. You can improve in almost everything you want, if only you are prepared to work hard. That kind of thinking is based on the growth mindset. And until you develop such a mindset, creative avoidance seems like a good escape. Because if you get rejected, it’s more than obvious that you were not born to be successful.

    Creative avoidance in the contemporary age

    Welcome to the contemporary jungle. In today’s jungle, trying to sell your ideas and competences is the new tiger. Testing business ideas by visiting potential customers is the new snake. Negotiating hard for your salary is the new bear.

    Fear of failure or rejection is the new Baba Yaga. And getting negative comments and thumbs down on social networks is the new Boogeyman.

    In all these cases, fear is not trying to protect you from physical, but emotional pain. It’s not a matter of life and death anymore, but of (more or less permanent) emotional scars. And emotional scars can often be even more painful than the physical ones.

    That’s why we get extremely creative when it comes to avoiding emotional pain. We can think of many different excuses when we get an opportunity to expose ourselves and open ourselves to potential rejection, humiliation or failure.

    Practical examples

    Here are a few most common avoidant behaviors:

    1. You avoid the action from miles away. I just don’t do public speaking.
    2. You find a good excuse. I really can’t make it this time, but next time for sure.
    3. You find a surrogate. I don’t need to do the presentation, I’ll just post an ad on a social network.
    4. You convince yourself that it doesn’t matter. I have more important things to do.
    5. You can even delegate the task to somebody else. My assistant can do it.
    6. You back off at the last minute. I wanted to do it so bad, but now I got sick.
    7. You can also indefinitely procrastinate with the task. I’ll do it some other time when I have more time to practice.

    Creative avoidance can go even so far that you perform self-sabotage. You lead yourself to illness, accidents and similar situations to avoid emotionally tough challenges.

    And there are so many other types of avoidant behavior – conflict avoidance, avoidant attachment in relationships and even information avoidance when we need to lie to ourselves. We can go very far in order to protect ourselves, even if the fears are completely irrational.

    The problem with creative avoidance is that it drives you to doing only low value-added activities. And that lowers your market value.

    If you are only performing tasks that almost everybody else can do, your market value will always be marginal. It’s much better to strategically put yourself in a position where the demand is high and the supply in shortage.

    Hard things are the ones that bring real value. Innovation, applicable research, generating ideas, performance marketing, sales, negotiation, execution, brutal focus, daily practice, competence acquisition, managing objections, persisting through rejections, constantly improving yourself, public speaking etc. are very hard things to do.

    But they also carry high value. Especially in comparison to doing emails, spending time on social networks, instant messaging, attending conferences, spending time on useless meetings, gossiping, feeling sorry for yourself, writing a business plan, seeking misplaced things, reacting to every interruption, ineffectively multi-tasking, surfing the web, taking coffee breaks, daydreaming, dozing, and so on.

    Read the best time management guide ever to learn how to deal with these things.

    It’s easy to get creative when it’s time to avoid performing hard things that lead to real value. Not to mention all the distractions out there that can easily seduce you into downgrading your market value and blocking your potential. So, when it comes to irrational fears, do the opposite instead.

    • Lesson 3: With avoiding hard stuff, you are not emotionally protecting yourself, but blocking your own progress. But that’s not the whole story.

    Make fear your growth compass

    The greatest advantage you can have in life is to quickly make smart decisions when you encounter new challenging situations. New situations are also the ones that wake up the fear in you.

    So, every time you sense the smallest sign of fear in your body, quickly run a short algorithm in your head that will help you make a smart decision – ask yourself the following five questions:

    1. Am I in real danger of injury, harm, physical pain or death? Don’t do it.
    2. Is it a stupid decision – is there a big risk involved and a small reward? Do you risk integrity, jail time, license termination etc.? Don’t do it.
    3. Is it something that you know is an irrational fear, and you plan to face it one day, but it’s currently completely beyond your focus? Don’t do it (you don’t want too many challenges at the same time). But the rule is that you must be already tackling one of your fears.
    4. Is the challenge that’s connected to your irrational fear that is holding you back way out of your comfort zone? Don’t do it.
    5. Is it an irrational fear holding you back from undertaking a challenge that’s just a little bit above your competence level? DO IT!

    When it comes to irrational fears, make fear your compass, showing you where you need to grow. When it comes to irrational fears, your mantra should be I will do it, because I fear it. Remember that it’s impossible to live out your full potential if you hide in a box.

    Don’t run away from hard things. See the hard things as the greatest gift that can accelerate your learning and growth. It’s that simple.

    • Lesson 4: Not every fear should be conquered. Carefully choose your battles.

    Practice mild exposure in the learning zone

    Overcoming your irrational fears is no rocket science. Science has proved, over and over again, that mild exposure in combination with progression works best. Exposure therapy is the best cure for irrational fears that are holding you back.

    But you have to do it the right way. You have to start small and escalate slowly.

    Comfort learning panic zonesWe know three different zones when it comes to the challenge level you can set for yourself:

    • Comfort zone: A challenge is something you’ve already mastered like a pro. No challenge, really.
    • Learning zone: A challenge is just tough enough for you to develop your skills in a safe way.
    • Panic zone: A challenge is way out of your comfort zone and above your competence level.

    The idea of exposure therapy is that you engage yourself in a situation that is in the learning zone, in a situation where you have things under control, so that nothing terrible can happen and even reinforce your fear in the end.

    If you are proactive enough, you can always find new situations to practice exposure in a safe way.

    Practical examples

    Let’s say you’re afraid of public speaking. Well, first speak in front of your dog, then in front of your friend. Find a public speaking coach and practice the talk with them several times. Then speak in front of three people behind a podium. Then in front of ten people without a podium. And then slowly escalate to bigger and bigger audiences.

    You can do the same with sales, negotiation, putting your ideas forward or anything else. Practice negotiation on a flea market. Test your ideas with an anonymous landing page. Start selling things by putting them on eBay.

    Don’t be creative by avoiding situations you are afraid of, instead get creative by finding new ways to mildly expose yourself to situations you’re afraid of. That’s how you build courage and self-confidence, acquire competences, and your chances of success skyrocket.

    • Lesson 5: When you are asked to do something that wakes up your irrational fear, but is still in the learning zone, train yourself to automatically say yes.

    Make avoidance a trigger for creativity

    As we have seen, creative avoidance can stand for finding new creative ways to avoid something that you are afraid of. But it can also mean getting creative (doing a relaxing activity) when you should do some other, harder task instead.

    What am I talking about? Sometimes you just don’t have the willpower to get yourself out of the comfort zone and into the learning zone. And that’s fine. But instead of procrastinating, feeling sorry for yourself or doing low-value activities, do a high-value creative task that also relaxes you.

    As a last resort that can help you turn irrational fears to your advantage, you can make avoidant behavior a trigger for a creative endeavor.

    Do you remember what you usually did when you procrastinated with studying? You cleaned your desk, made yourself a healthy meal, groomed your body and performed many other less important tasks.

    That’s the best way to beat procrastination. When you just can’t fight procrastination, do dozens of other small activities you have to do someday anyway. Sooner or later you will get back to the big task.

    On the other hand, do you know what’s one of the greatest drivers of creativity? Rejections, isolation and the feeling that you are somehow different. Feeling that you somehow don’t fit in can lead to great creative accomplishments.

    Creative endeavors can be a mature coping mechanism for needs not being met. These two behavioral phenomena can be nicely combined in “avoiding a hard task, but getting yourself into an ultra-creative mode”.

    Follow the rule that you always face your irrational fears. But in some cases, when you won’t gather the courage to do it, don’t beat yourself up. Turn the situation to your advantage. Just get creative. And that’s the sixth and final lesson of this article.

    Play an instrument, write a poem or a book, paint, draw, code or take pictures. Build something, cook a delicious meal or find any other way to express your emotions.

    It’s not rejection, it’s just redirection. It’s not failure, make it validated learning

    It’s time for some closing thoughts.

    If you put yourself out there, you will get rejected from time to time, you will occasionally say the wrong things and you will meet failure sooner or later. You might not get any likes, you will hear no, and on rare occasions you will make a fool out of yourself.

    But if you persist, you will also hear yes, you will deliver your best performance, reach things you were only dreaming about and, most importantly, you will show to the world all the potential and creative gifts that you possess.

    It’s not rejection, it’s just redirection. It’s not failure, it’s just one way how things don’t work with hidden hints for how they could work.

    You are not entitled to anything. It’s your job to beat your irrational fears. And irrational fears are the worst. They are the real enemy. So get up and get out into the real world.

    Train yourself to avoid creative avoidance. But don’t do anything stupid: instead practice mild exposure and keep yourself in the learning zone with the growth mindset.

  • The Milo of Croton story – Start small and never give up

    Italy - Calabria - Crotone
    Source: BBC

    Croton(e) is a small town in Southern Italy, which was also a Greek colony in the ancient times (6th century BC). The town was known for producing excellent athletes who dominated the Olympiad.

    The last big name of Croton was the best renowned wrestler in antiquity named Milo. Milo of Croton was an Olympic winner six times in a row.

    He also won many other prestigious athletic titles, including 32 wrestling competitions, and achieved an important military triumph for his hometown.

    Milo had an extraordinary approach to training that we can all learn a lot from. In summary, here are the main lessons from his training:

    • In the beginning, people will laugh at you, especially if you take innovative approaches
    • Always start small and be consistent
    • Slowly progress to bigger challenges and make sure you never give up
    • Facing the dips and setbacks are real character tests
    • When you reach a plateau, find a new way forward

    And two bonus lessons from Milo of Croton’s life:

    • Always have a mentor
    • Don’t make stupid decisions (the final lesson of how Milo died)

    So, what was his training all about?

    He decided to carry a newborn calf on his shoulders. Day by day, for more than four years, he carried an animal on his shoulders. While people were laughing at him, the small calf slowly grew into an adult ox and Milo got stronger and stronger along the way. What an awesome idea. Every day, when Milo woke up, he lifted the calf, put it on his shoulders and carried it around all day. After four years, Milo was lifting and carrying around an impressively big ox. By then, people stopped laughing a long time ago, when they saw Milo’s muscles and strength grow.

    Do you wonder what Milo did in the end, when the ox was fully grown and he couldn’t life it anymore? Well, he ate it. He didn’t bother why he can’t lift it anymore. He moved on and found new ways to improve himself.

    Now let’s look at the main lessons of his training and improvements.

    The Milo of Croton Story

    Acquiring any new skill starts with very small steps

    Milo didn’t start by lifting a big heavy ox. He started with a calf. That gave him the chance to master the fundamentals.

    He went with a smart approach to take on a manageable challenge and slowly develop strength and self-confidence; even though people were laughing at him. Deep down he had a long-term vision that was much bigger than the short-term pain of being laughed at.

    No matter what skill you want to learn or which area of life you want to improve, you have to start small. You have to start with the fundamentals. Because you can only build a majestic skyscraper of success on strong foundations.

    Think big, have a great vision, but start small. Don’t overestimate what you can achieve in a year, but don’t underestimate what you can achieve in five years.

    In five years, you can dramatically improve your health, wealth, relationships, competences, happiness or whatever your goal is. But start by saving a few dollars per day. Start with walks in nature, then progress to jogging, running and weightlifting. Read one page per day and then add an additional one every day. And choose maximum one or two areas to improve at once.

    While doing that, don’t compare yourself to other people who are already masters. Beginnings (after the initial motivation wears off) are always hard, but the hard road becomes easy with time. Thus, manage your expectations and keep the long-term view in mind.

    And remember, if your expectations are too high when you undertake a new challenge, you will be greatly disappointed and give up sooner or later.

    Long-term thinking means that you plan the great results to come in years, not months or weeks. Overnight success comes after years of hard work.

    Milo of Croton knew that consistency is key

    Hard work beats talent every time. But hard work is hard, since it demands almost bulletproof consistency and focus.

    Hard work requires putting effort into your goals on a daily basis. That means you have to cut the bullshit and focus on what really matters. Day by day.

    You have to persistently follow a carefully orchestrated process that leads you to your big vision. Consistency and never giving up, while staying flexible, are the key to everything. Milo knew that and thus wherever he went, he never left the growing calf behind.

    Practical examples

    Here is what consistency means in very practical terms:

    • It’s better to exercise five times per week for an hour than one time for five hours.
    • It’s better to learn a new skill every day for 30 minutes than for three hours on a Sunday night.
    • It’s better to put money in your savings account with every paycheck than to put in what you’re left with at the end of the year.

    Consistency is especially important when you face the first setbacks. In the beginning, enthusiasm drives you, but then the enthusiasm wears off and you find yourself in the dip. You realize that achieving your goals will be much harder than you assumed.

    You feel like you’re running out of time, money or passion. You fail again and again, and that damages your ego. Persisting in such a situation is hard as hell.

    Of course, you have to make sure you persist at the right thing (here is how), but following the process in hard times is what creates great people (and also following the process when you’re already super successful).

    What the Milo of Croton story teaches us is that the more adversity you face, the more determined you must become. That’s how you grow and progress in life.

    The more adversity you face, the more determined you must become.

    Make sure you combine consistency with progressive overload and interleaved practice

    Consistency is only one part of the equation. Lift. Carry. Put down. Rest. Pick up. Practice. Lay down. Rest. Day after day. Week after week. Year after year.

    The right kind of consistency helps you focus, lay strong foundations and master the basics. The second part of the equation is progressive overload in combination with interleaved practice.

    Practicing something with the same amount of effort and in pretty much the same way sooner or later becomes easy. Your comfort zone stretches, and when that happens it’s time to put more effort on your shoulders.

    The calf needs to get bigger and bigger. With that kind of an approach, things never get easier, but you always get better.

    Scientific research has shown that learning something in the same way over and over again is also not an efficient improvement strategy. It’s better to incorporate different concepts, approaches and techniques in the same learning session.

    You have to be on the edge of the learning zone (not entering the panic zone) by adding more load and new ways of practicing.

    Milo was definitely adding more load on his shoulders automatically. Let’s hope he also interleaved the practice by carrying the young calf in different ways and doing all different sorts of exercises while carrying the animal.

    The best effect of progressive overload and interleaved practice is that they lead to the domino effect and when the time comes to reap the efforts, the rewards can be really great. Improve yourself just a little bit every day, and the accumulated efforts will lead to success.

    In sports, there are many ways to add load to your workouts. Here are seven most common ones:

    1. Improving your form (it’s always harder to lift when you do it correctly)
    2. Increasing the load you are lifting
    3. Doing additional sets or reps
    4. Performing the same workout in a shorter time
    5. Adding additional workouts to your weekly training plan
    6. Doing new, more complex workouts or remixing the workout routine
    7. Doing more work on the same muscle group

    No progression means no muscle growth or performance improvement.

    There are also several ways how to interleave practice in sports. For example, in badminton, there are three types of strokes you can do. Blocked practice would mean practicing one stroke throughout the training period. Interleaved practice would mean mixing the practice of all three strokes in one session.

    The same rules apply for improving other areas of life. Be consistent. Constantly add load. Interleave practice.

    Be prepared to take a step back in order to make two steps forward. That’s how you’ll progress the fastest, no matter at what you want to improve. That’s how you can become the best version of yourself in the fastest way.

    Progress is always slow

    As good as the story might sound, progress is never linear

    There is one thing that the Milo’s story doesn’t tell. Progress is rarely linear. Usually it happens with “one step back, two steps forward” or even in “a few steps back, one quantum leap forward” way. That means progress is full of ups and downs.

    You practice, you work hard, but the progress is really slow. Or maybe you get sick, or a little bit fed up with everything and you simply must take a break. Those kinds of situations can make you extremely frustrated.

    But if you keep persisting (maybe by adding one more pause or two), one day you wake up, go to your practice, and suddenly see a big improvement. The reward always follows the effort, if you practice right, it just takes time for things to settle in and for you to reap the rewards.

    That’s why following a plan with linear progress rarely works. You have to keep your plan lean and agile. You have to adapt to the feedback you get from your body and your environment.

    You have to innovate your way out of setbacks, look for ways that work best for you, and stay flexible without any fixed ideas. With that kind of a mindset, you can always find new ways to improve when you reach a plateau or face a setback.

    Non-linear progress is seen in sports very well. Here are a few examples of what kind of setbacks you can encounter, and how you can find a way to go forward:

    • You might get sick, and need rest. But that can also be a good time to work on your flexibility and stretch regularly.
    • Maybe you get injured and must rest completely. But that can also be a good period to study your competitors, gain new knowledge as well as get some proper rest.
    • Sometimes you get fed up with a certain type of workout, and you can try a new sport, just to relax and keep the diversity high.
    • From time to time it might seem like you work out like an animal, and there’s no improvement. But then you change your exercises a little bit, and when you try the old exercises after a while, you see great improvement.

    There’s always a way to push forward, you just have to keep your mind open. Winning is always based on a superior mindset. In the winner’s mindset, the most important thing is that you don’t give up if you don’t see the results immediately after the first few practices.

    The new neurons need some time to grow, and they can’t grow if you don’t plan the proper combination of pushes and breaks. The same approach is needed when the time to break a plateau comes.

    In the end, make sure you never give up

    If consistency, progression and interleaved practice are the key to success, that means the most important thing is to never give up.

    You should never be afraid of slow progress, the only thing you should be afraid of is to stop trying. There’s a simple secret how to make sure you never give up.

    The secret is to start with why. You need a strong emotional reason why you want to achieve something. You must empower your doing with a mission, which is greater than any setback on the road. When you find your why, you don’t have a problem with motivation anymore.

    Nobody gets motivated by savings or an exercise plan. People get motivated by life visions, missions and meanings.

    Emotions are the fuel that drives people forward. You absolutely need a good plan, but even more importantly, you need to feel something deep in your bones. You need to feel that you were born to do something.

    Knowing something won’t ignite a change, feeling something will. That’s how change happens.

    Always have a mentor and don’t make any stupid decisions

    Suvee Joseph Benoit - Milo of Croton
    Source: Wikipedia

    Milo was supposedly good friends with the philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras. Pythagoras was the first man to call himself a philosopher or lover of wisdom.

    They became friends after Milo saved Pythagoras’ life when a roof was about to fall on him. There’s also a possibility that Milo married Pythagoras’ daughter. I’m pretty sure that Milo had the chance to learn a lot of life wisdom from Pythagoras.

    That’s another lesson from Milo’s story – always have extraordinary mentors.

    But I guess he didn’t learn enough life wisdom to not make a very stupid decision at the end, and so he died a foolish death.

    Milo, already an old man, wanted to test his vigor. He found a cleft tree trunk and wanted to split it in half with his fist. But he got his hand caught in the tree trunk and trapped himself. Soon he was devoured and eaten by wolves.

    So the final lesson is: absolutely test your boundaries, but never make stupid decisions.

  • How to become the best version of yourself

    You are here on this world for three main reasons. The first one is to experience as many different things as possible and enjoy life to the full. The second one is to create, contribute, share, and leave a positive legacy behind.

    And the third reason why you’re here on this planet is to improve, evolve, grow and become the best version of yourself. So the question is: what can you do to make sure you become the best version of yourself?

    The initial step towards becoming the best version of yourself is knowing your ideal self very well. The best way to do that is to make a persona of your ideal self (mind-map, notebook with pictures, etc.).

    In general, personas are used in marketing for fictional characters representing the ideal customer or a typical representative of a user segment, but they can easily be used to clarify who you want to become.

    The more exactly, accurately and sooner you know your ideal self, the easier you’ll get there. When you are clarifying and brainstorming your ideal self (the best version of yourself), there are 7 areas of life where you have to determine your realistic potential and your goals, including metrics of your progress and the strategy of how you will get there.

    The 7 areas of life where you have to constantly improve to become the best version of yourself and should be part of your ideal self are:

    • Body
    • Mind
    • Emotions
    • Spirit
    • Relationships
    • Assets
    • Career & Legacy

    Before we continue to examine each of the life areas in detail, there is one more important fact to note. When you’re setting your goals, it’s extremely important that you consider your starting point.

    And when you’re measuring your progress, you should compare yourself only to yourself. Well, to your previous self to be more exact. Other people can be your reference point, but what’s important is that you compete with your status in the past first and foremost.

    The best version of yourself

    Now, let’s go into detail of the 7 areas you have to pay attention to if you want to become the best version of yourself.

    1. Take outstanding care of your body

    Your body is the most amazing thing you will ever own, and without a healthy and firm body, it’s hard to become the best version of yourself. So the first thing you should do in order to achieve your maximum potential and peak performance is to take outstanding care of your body.

    For outstanding care of your body, you have to pay attention to three fundamental areas of health:

    The good news is that there are very actionable metrics you can use to follow progress regarding your health and how well you’re taking care of your body. So you can have a very clear picture of whether you’re improving your body capabilities and becoming the best version of yourself.

    Here are a few core metrics you can measure:

    • Calorie intake (macros, type of food etc.)
    • Body composition (fat %, muscle size etc.)
    • Aerobic endurance (VO2max, how fast you can run a mile)
    • Muscular endurance (push-up test, plank test)
    • Muscular endurance (one-rep max)
    • Flexibility, mobility, stability (yoga poses you can do)

    2. Take outstanding care of your mind

    The next thing you have to take good care of is your mind. We live in the knowledge society and taking care of your mind is extremely important.

    Your mind is the greatest asset to create, deliver and capture as much value as possible on the markets; and you should also take care of your mind to make good life decisions.

    To become the best version of yourself, there are a few aspects to taking proper care of your mind. Here are the main ones:

    If you want to achieve your peak potential, you have to take control of your mind; otherwise your mind will hinder your potential instead of supporting you in achieving your peak performance.

    If you don’t take over the control of your mind, the mind will instead focus on negative thinking, cognitive distortions and mental masturbation (entertainment).

    The best way to take control of your mind is to practice meditation, focus on gratitude and what you already have in life, develop the abundance mindset, become aware of your dominant cognitive distortions and eliminate them with emotional accounting, and take regular updates of your brain’s “software”.

    Yes, even if the brain is a remarkably powerful organ, the software it runs among neurons is quite buggy. Extremely buggy, actually. By reading, listening to lectures, talking to people, observing different situations, reflecting and other similar situations, you can update your software to be less buggy.

    You also want to regularly improve your creative potential. We can all be creative; you just have to practice. There are two easy ways of developing your creative potential, without becoming an artist or something. Write down new ideas every day and constantly try new things in life.

    To sum up, here are some very actionable things you can do to develop your mind to the maximum and become the best version of yourself in this aspect:

    • Meditate
    • Eliminate cognitive distortions one by one with emotional accounting
    • Write down one thing you are grateful for every day
    • Be a lifelong learner – constantly develop your competences, read and read a lot, go to lectures and seminars, take online courses, respect knowledge and make sure you acquire a lot of it.
    • Did I mention that you should read every day and that you should read a lot?
    • Limit mental masturbation activities like watching TV, reading the daily news, spending time on social networks, participating in useless meetings etc. Make sure you become the master of the time management.
    • Every day, write down at least 50 ideas. Just open a notebook and brainstorm.
    • Always try new things in life – take a new route home, try a new sport or a hobby, brush your teeth with your non-dominant hand, do the opposite of what you usually do, travel, learn a new language, play mind-development games etc. There are so many things you can do and try.

    3. Take outstanding care of your emotions

    Taking care of your mind already has a very positive influence on your emotions. By focusing on the positive and extensively dealing with your cognitive distortions, your emotions will also become much more positive. But that isn’t enough for you to achieve your peak performance.

    Your ideal self is kind of a vision of who you want to become. But vision without emotional backup and strong will to act is just an illusion.

    That’s why you also need a strong why; strong emotional reason or life mission, why do you want to become the best version of yourself. You have to act out of a sense of mission and inspiration if you want to constantly improve yourself.

    You want to have a mission that is bigger than any life problems and obstacles you will meet on your way to becoming the best version of yourself. Only if you have a strong emotional why, a strong sense of personal mission, can you enjoy the benefits listed below.

    Benefits that are a must if you want to achieve your peak performance:

    • You feel more alive and valuable
    • You have no problem with prioritizing tasks
    • You can connect more easily and communicate with people much more passionately
    • You enjoy the work you do
    • You can innovate and be creative much more easily
    • You can really have impact on the world and change it
    • You can inspire other people to work with you
    • You are a more charismatic and energetic person and probably happier as well

    Personally, I call acting out of a powerful why transcendence. If you want to achieve that kind of a transcendent state, you have to take outstanding care of your emotions.

    Your emotions are the ones fulling your motivation and willpower, not logic. So you must employ your emotions as fuel that drives your improvements.

    But how do you do that? Here are a few things you can do:

    • Become aware of your emotions with practicing mindfulness
    • Employ visual representations (Kanban philosophy)
    • The “True North” test

    The first step you have to make is to pay close attention to your emotions. You can easily do that by introducing the Happiness index into your life.

    Every day (or, even better, twice a day) you mark how you feel on a scale from 1 to 10 (1 – negative emotions, 10 – positive emotions), and then analyze exactly what kind of negative or positive feelings you’re experiencing and why you are feeling that way. Try to ask yourself “why” at least 5 times to get to the core of the problem (the 5-whys technique).

    By doing such an exercise, you’ll gain much better understanding of your feelings, what motivates you and what takes motivation right out of your heart. Right after taking a note on the Happiness index chart, you can do the true north test.

    Simply ask yourself: are you doing all the things you were born to do? Are you fighting for what you want in life or are you just going where life kicks you (usually those aren’t very nice places called average life or even zombie life).

    If you want to achieve the best version of yourself, you have to follow your heart and listen to your gut instinct. You have to gather the courage to start following your true north. You have to start doing things you were born to do (work, love, creating, hobbies etc.).

    One more thing that helps with emotional empowerment are visual representations. You’ll react a lot differently if I describe a snake to you or if I show you one on a picture or if you actually encounter one in nature.

    Visual elements can motivate you extensively. So visualize, have a vision board, have a Kanban board, go for a “test drive” of what you want out of life. That will help you achieve your peak performance.

    It also helps a lot to be emotionally motivated if you:

    4. Take outstanding care of your spirit

    Taking care of your spirit means that you have strong faith in life. There are many different ways of taking care of your spirit and all of them are okay, if they help you become the best version of yourself and if you aren’t hurting others with any radical beliefs.

    Here are a few ways of how you can take care of your spirit:

    • Having extraordinary faith in yourself
    • Religion
    • Spirituality

    If you aren’t a religious or spiritual person, taking care of your spirit can come only from extraordinary belief in yourself.

    If you want to do extraordinary things in life, if you want to become the best version of yourself, you must have extraordinary faith in yourself and life.

    There are a few signs that show very well that you have extraordinary faith in yourself:

    • Putting yourself first (but not in an egocentric way)
    • Developing high levels of self-confidence and self-worth
    • Having rituals in your life (for example a morning kick-off routine)
    • Rewarding yourself even for the small wins
    • Forgiving yourself for the mistakes you make
    • Regularly celebrating life and being grateful for every day
    • Having integrity and making sure you are a good person
    • Building your success based on prestige, not dominance

    The other two ways to take care for your spirit are religion and spirituality. Praying, doing good, having faith in God, being thankful, helping people and the society, these are all things that bring peace, karma points and general good into your life.

    This is how you take care of your spirit and it’s a very important part of your personality and becoming the best version of yourself. You can only become the best version of yourself if you also make this place just a little better to live for generations to come.

    Remember, legacy is always greater than currency.

    5. Take outstanding care of your relationships

    It’s impossible to live a quality and happy life without many healthy and deep relationships; and it’s impossible to become the best version of yourself without having outstanding relationships in life and taking good care of them.

    People can make you or break you. People can bring out the worst in you, or people can bring out the best in you. In addition to that, nobody can succeed alone. You need a dream team of people in your personal life and you need a dream team of people in your professional life.

    You need a dream team of people in your personal life and you need a dream team of people in your professional life.

    Therefore, if you want to achieve your peak performance, you have to strategically build relationships. You have to meet many different people and keep the ones that give you the most in your life. Once you’re an adult, the choice of who you’ll spend time with is completely yours, and you must choose wisely.

    In your personal relationships, you have three pillars of love, support and empowerment:

    • Spouse
    • Family (primary, secondary)
    • Friends

    Who you choose for your spouse is, in many ways, the most important choice in your life. It’s extremely hard to be happy, successful and achieve your peak performance and ideal self if you fight at home all the time and if there is no love, understanding and tolerance.

    Besides your spouse, having a happy family also gives strong emotional foundations and feelings of belonging. And strong foundations give you wings to fly high to your peak potential.

    If you don’t have a good connection with your primary family (you haven’t chosen it), make sure you build a loving and caring secondary family.

    To feel emotionally secure, take risks and be happy in life, you also need friends and the feeling that the people closest to you will help you if and when things go wrong. Without strong emotional support, you can never take risks to really become the best version of yourself.

    In your professional life, you also have three important pillars:

    • Boss / Stakeholders
    • Coworkers / Cofounders
    • Mentors / Mastermind group

    You spent almost 1/3 of your time at work. Thus professional relationships can either make your life miserable or encourage you to become the best version of yourself in work-, career- and money-related things.

    The first rule is to never work for a boss that you don’t respect and can’t learn from. Then you need many coworkers or cofounders if you have your own business and they should always push you towards new challenges and professional personal improvement.

    You need to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you, who you can learn from and with whom you can do real team work. Last but not least, having mentors or building a mastermind group can help you a lot in becoming the best version of yourself.

    6. Take outstanding care of your assets

    The last thing you have to take care of if you want to become the best version of yourself are your assets. Assets are what can leverage and accelerate your success and help you to achieve your peak performance on all levels of life more quickly and efficiently.

    Assets are divided into two general categories:

    • Inner assets
    • Outer assets

    Inner assets are all the assets that are a part of your personality, who you are and what you’re capable of doing. Examples of inner assets are knowledge, skills, experiences, creativity, self-discipline, values, beliefs, intelligence, passion, your life strategy etc.

    The good news is that with inner assets, you can always create, better manipulate or acquire more of the outer assets.

    You can easily measure progress and acquirement of your inner assets on the road to becoming the best version of yourself. Here are a few core metrics:

    • Domain knowledge you master (number of areas)
    • Number of skills you have
    • Number of tech skills you have
    • How long you can do focused work etc.

    Outer assets are all the things that aren’t a part of your personality, but that you can possess and that bring advantages and material comfort into your life. Examples of outer assets are wealth, power, fame, social network, status, contracts, land, goods, technology etc.

    The good news is that unlike inner assets, which are limited with biological bounds, outer assets can grow much faster. You can’t read 100x faster in one year, but you can have 100x more money.

    It’s even easier to measure progress and acquirement of your outer assets:

    • Personal income statement (Income – Expenses)
    • Net worth (Assets – Liabilities)
    • Your position in the company
    • Number of professional connections
    • Public and social media influence etc.

    Knowing how to properly deal with the inner and outer assets is actually the main secret how people achieve massive success in life.

    Now, in order to achieve your peak performance you have to constantly be acquiring new inner assets with everything mentioned previously in this post – taking good care of your mind, body, emotions and spirit. The more you take care of these things, the more inner assets you have.

    But it’s not only about acquiring inner assets, it’s also about managing them properly. A ton of theory can’t compare with a gram of practice and real life experience.

    To manage your inner assets properly, you have to be aware of them (listing your competences, past accomplishments, performing a personal SWOT analysis etc.), and then put them to good use by creating (innovating), delivering (marketing) and capturing value (getting paid).

    You have to strategically offer your inner assets on the markets, be it as an employee, self-employed individual or business owner.

    The last step to becoming the best version of yourself is to strategically start acquiring and managing outer assets. In other words, you have to start thinking and acting as an investor.

    If you want to be really successful in life, get to your peak performance and achieve massive success, you have to employ outer resources as your leverage, because they can grow much faster than your inner assets.

    The main problem is, of course, that acquiring inner assets is already damn hard. But acquiring and managing outer assets is even harder. You need to better understand markets, media, people, money management, and you need to know how to create things that people want. And the competition is crazy.

    But that’s what you have to do to become the best version of yourself.

    Because only by having enough outer resources, you can invest so much more back into yourself and the people around you. And you actually have enough power to change the world and make it a better place and thus leave a visible legacy behind.

    It’s not easy to become the best version of yourself, but it’s definitely worth it. And if everything sounds like too much, here’s where you can start easily – start by taking care of your body and the rest will follow.

  • Short-term past is the best predictor of short-term future

    You can go to the best fortuneteller in the world, and it’s still impossible to predict the long-term future. Nobody knows what will happen in 10 years’ time, even less what life has prepared for you or for anyone else for that matter.

    There are just too many variables. Your values change over time, you have no idea where the global flows will turn and what kind of life opportunities or tragedies will test your character.

    That’s why long-term planning is very ineffective. Any detailed planning for more than a year ahead is useless in most cases. You can’t predict where you’ll be in 5 years, 10 years and even less so in 30 years.

    The more fixed your mindset is about how your life should unfold, the more disappointed you will probably be. And big disappointments lead to big pain. That’s why the best approach to the future is to trust yourself that you’ll adjust accordingly to whatever happens.

    Consequently, the more reasonable approach to long-term planning is to have a life vision – you have a list of things you want to experience in life, but at the same time stay very flexible about when and how you will experience those things.

    And if you manage to bring more than half of the things on your vision list to life, that’s more than enough. In the end, there are so many different experiences that life offers.

    You mustn’t be too egotistic and stubborn about your future, but instead constantly adjust bit by bit to the external forces and find a way to surrender to the river of life, while still following your true north.

    Surrendering is not about being indifferent or passive, far from it. It’s about maximizing your current life quality and happiness. There’s always a way to find an intersection between your goals and what life has to offer. That’s always a move forward you can make.

    The long-term future is a complete mystery. But with short-term planning and predicting, we can definitely be more confident and optimistic.

    You can play a fortuneteller at least to some extent when it comes to the near future. Are you wondering how? The best way to predict the short-term future is to look at your (or anyone else’s) short-term history.

    How people thought future will look like
    How people thought future will look like

    Analyze your short-term past and you’ll know more than any fortuneteller

    Take a pen and a piece of paper, choose a few core life areas (health, wealth, relationships etc.) along with a few life metrics (net worth, savings, body fat percentage, number of close friends etc.) and analyze them for the past 2 – 3 months.

    What kind of decisions did you make, big or small, and what kind of behavioral patterns did you follow?

    That’s the closest prediction you’ll get for your next 2 – 3 months. Here are a few examples of questions you can use for the exercise:

    • Did you save any money in the past 2 – 3 months?
    • Did your fat percentage go up or down?
    • How many times per week did you exercise on average in the past few months?
    • How much time did you spend with the people you love?
    • How many books have you read in the past 3 months?
    • How many times did you smile?
    • What kind of posture did you have most of the time?
    • How many hours per week did you watch TV?

    Now you probably know where this is going. If you made zero trips to the gym in the past 3 months, you’re probably not going to go to the gym in the next three months. If you’re getting fat, you’ll probably continue to get fatter in the time to come. If you haven’t saved any money in the past few months, there is only a small probability you’ll save it in the near future.

    Short-term behavioral patterns and near-past decisions are the best predictors for the short-term future. And it’s quite simple.

    Stupid decisions and bad habits lead to a poor future. Smart decisions and healthy habits lead to a bright future.

    There are always trends present for all areas of your life, and you must fight to make sure the trends are going in the right direction most of the time.

    Short-term past is the best predictor of short-term future

    Old habits die hard, that’s why short-term can predict short-term future

    As we said, the only way you can predict anything with a relatively high accuracy is if you have a long and stable history. But there is one more very important element.

    The longer and the more stable the history, the more accurately can you forecast the short-term future; and you can also have a better general sense of how the long-term future could look like, unless some disruptive changes happen.

    That’s why big established companies have a much easier job preparing short-term and long‑term plans than startups do. But don’t be fooled, even big companies are not immune to wrong long-term predictions.

    Like Nokia, most established companies sooner or later experience big setbacks, crashes and with them unexpected market trends and new enemies. That happens especially when big corporations don’t know how to adjust. And trust me, it’s hard to be big and flexible at the same time.

    It’s very similar in personal life. The longer and more stable the history, the easier it is to predict the short-term future.

    If somebody never ever exercised in their life, there’s a big probability they won’t start tomorrow. If a person never saved a penny in their lifetime, you can have great doubts that they will in the future. And if somebody cheated on all their previous partners, why would you be the exception?

    In the same way, you can play with seasonal predictions.

    For example, I exercise outdoors much more in the summer than in the winter. I tend to gain some fat during the winter. There is a minimum amount of income I have to earn to save money. And with age, human needs tend to change.

    But in general, things stay the same in a short time period. You probably know the saying that old habits die hard or that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. These proverbs do hold great life wisdom.

    Look at someone’s past and the more obvious and stable it is, the more confident you can be about their future; and the same goes for your future.

    Nevertheless, you have to make sure you don’t get too confident in your predictions. Because people can change or, even more often, life kicks them in the butt and they are forced to adopt new behavioral patterns (people usually out of inspiration or desperation) .

    History repeats itself, unless you do something

    Behavioral patterns have the tendency to repeat themselves, and consequently they have a great influence on one’s destiny. But luckily you have the power to change your behavioral patterns at any time.

    You can start making smarter decisions with your next one. And you can do it out of inspiration, desperation or purely by growing tired of a life strategy that doesn’t bring you any results.

    That’s the greatest personal power you have, now and forever. At any time, you can stop with negative habits or reinforce the healthy ones. At any time, you can start making better decisions. That’s the personal power you possess to make history.

    From tomorrow on you can:

    • Start saving 10 % of your income every month
    • Keep your food intake in a moderate caloric deficit
    • Take enough time for yourself and exercise two or three times per week
    • Spend an hour or two with people you love every day, without any distractions
    • Read at least one page of a book before you go to sleep
    • Smile at every person you meet

    If you’re not doing these things yet, that’s how you’ll turn your life around. You have the power to make sure your short-term future doesn’t look like your short-term past, if it’s a negative one.

    Remember that the hard road gets easy with time, and the easy road gets hard. That’s the surest long-term prediction that can ever be made.

    Nokia CEO quote

    Unpredictable external forces

    You have the power to change your habits and thus reshape your destiny. But at the same time, you’re also greatly influenced by all the external forces – your environment.

    The environment is a very important part of your destiny’s equation. And you (or anyone else for that matter) have a somewhat limited influence on the environment. That’s why it’s so hard to predict the long-term future.

    • You might meet an old buddy who will convince you to start going to the gym tomorrow
    • You might get ill, and then take extraordinary care of your health
    • Someone in your life might die and the experience might completely reshape your values
    • There might be a raise waiting for you at your job, and then you decide to save the surplus, even though you might never have done that before
    • Or you might lose a job and start your own business

    There are so many forces beyond your control, it’s impossible to know what will happen in the long-term future. You know the saying: if you want to make God laugh, make a (long-term) plan.

    Life has so many tools for changing your life path. You can get inspired, experience a life collapse, find yourself in a completely new environment, get an unexpected offer, experience unexpected loss or even meet the love of your life on the other side of the planet.

    You aren’t completely powerless in these kind of situations, but your power is limited. With hard and smart work, you can increase the number of good things that can happen to you.

    You always have the power to let unexpected positive influences into your life and to reject all the bad forces. And in the end, you can always adjust and find your next best move.

    Resistance means being inflexible by default. So, don’t resist, but rather adjust. And when life gives you a hard time, you can always reframe it in a more positive way or find a more redemptive narrative.

    Your greatest power is to always look at things from the bright side, to find the positive in the negative. That’s how you can deal with unexpected external forces. Don’t try to predict them, adjust to them.

    Where is your personal history leading you?

    As we said, short-term history is a very good predictor of short-term future. Do a very extensive analysis of how your past decisions and behavioral patterns led you to the point in your life where you are at this particular moment.

    Then ask yourself where your current behavioral patterns and decisions are going to lead you in a month, a few months’ time, one year’s time or even further ahead.

    The choices you make today have an impact on your life for years. Thus, make sure you make the right choices, make sure your short-term history is leading you into a bright short-term future.

    And in the long term you’ll do just fine if you live by a smart life strategy, follow healthy habits, make smart decisions and last, but not least, if you properly adjust to all the experiences that life has prepared for you.

  • How to become more assertive with a few simple exercises

    People who are naturally assertive had their needs properly met when they were young. Thus, they developed a sense of trust, autonomy, initiative, industry, clear identity and great capacity for love. All that gives them the inner strength to go after their goals.

    Without a healthy upbringing environment that’s responsive to one’s needs, without strong role models and loving relationships in youth, it’s almost impossible to develop into a healthy assertive person.

    Unassertiveness is based on feelings of mistrust, shame, guilt, doubt, inferiority and identity confusion, or because your id (aggressiveness) or superego (passiveness) are too strong, as we have learned in the first part of the article.

    But even if you aren’t naturally assertive, you have the power to change that. And now, in the second part of the article, we’ll look at exactly how to do that.

    How to become more assertive

    The general overview of how to become more assertive

    If you want to be healthy assertive, you need a new mental and emotional framework that leads to rational behavior and assertive agency. To achieve that, you ought to:

    • Have optimistic expectations that the environment will respond positively to your needs, under three conditions:
      1. There is no need escalation (greed, gluttony etc.), inflation (neediness, lack of focus etc.) or perversion (weird fetishes etc.). Environment usually reacts negatively to these things.
      2. You clearly communicate your needs, since other people can’t read your mind.
      3. You know there will always be some some haters and blockers who will work against you. It’s part of the reality and how life is designed.
    • Not emotionally overreact in case of rejection or conflict. Rejection is unpleasant for everyone, but it shouldn’t catch you in a mental cage with emotional flashbacks. Many times people react positively to our desires and wishes, but rejections are also a normal part of life.
    • Easily find alternative ways of satisfying your needs when you can’t directly satisfy them – either by adjusting your strategy or through sublimation of needs. That’s something we’ll learn in this article.

    If you want to achieve such a psychological state, you must practice the courage to take initiative, develop a strong sense of trust in yourself and the environment, acquire a set of competences to match your desires and goals, and possess an abundance mindset to stay flexible about how you’ll satisfy your needs.

    Let’s look at a few steps (assertiveness exercises) for achieving all that.

    Wish list

    Step 1: Develop awareness of your emotions and desires

    First of all, if you want to be assertive, you must be as aware as possible of your needs and have a clear picture of your desires. If you weren’t raised in an environment where your major needs were met in a healthy and respectful manner, you probably have a tendency to repress your needs.

    Repression ensures that wishes incompatible with reality, your superego or any other impulses, remain unconscious or disguised. For example, you start believing you don’t need to be close to other people, that family members can’t hurt you if they’re mean to you, that serious relationships or kids are not something for you or that material life is unimportant. We all have the same needs and they can either be fulfilled or repressed.

    There are several things you can do to become clearly aware of your wishes and desires:

    • Go through all the needs listed in theories of human needs. As we said, universal needs are those we all have, you can’t escape from them, even if you’re in monk mode. Specifically list all the goals and desires you have based on different categories of needs. Make yourself a wish list and constantly add new things as you identify them.
    • Pay special attention to those universal needs that you think are not important to you. Examples are: I don’t care about money, it’s not important to me if people forget about my birthday, I didn’t want that promotion anyway etc. Many times, you use self-deception to make things that you want but don’t have less desirable (called “sour grapes” in psychology) and things that you do have but are not that important to you more desirable (“sweet lemons”). Start exploring why denial is present.
    • Prepare a vision list of everything you want to experience in life. Try to list every detail that you would like to have, do or create. Dream of having no financial boundaries. Pay special attention to the needs where there is inflation, escalation or perversion present.
    • Connect your severe negative emotions (anger, anxiety, depression, envy etc.) to the fear of your specific needs not being met. Try to take the analysis a step further and figure out which of your needs weren’t meet when you were a child and are now causing you emotional knots.

    Without knowing your needs, you have zero chances of living a fulfilling, joyful, happy and satisfactory life. So first identify your needs.

    Assetivness transfer

    Step 2: Identify areas where you are healthy assertive and where you are not

    Being healthy assertive is not an all-or-nothing personality characteristic. Usually there are some life situations where you are very assertive, and others where you’re not. For example, you might be very assertive intellectually, but a complete coward when it comes to talking to the opposite sex.

    In other words, take a list of the universal human needs and categorize them:

    • Needs that you have no problem meeting in a healthy and respectful manner
    • Needs with which you are under-assertive or over-assertive
      • You get aggressive in case of a conflict
      • You distract yourself with something else
      • You run away and isolate yourself
      • You automatically submit to others
    • Needs that you’re confused about, you have no clear emotional or behavioral pattern
    • Needs that you most probably repress (you can’t know that, but make a few assumptions about what kind of needs are being repressed based the universal human needs lists)

    There are also a few very common life situations where people lack assertiveness. As we said, that originates from shame, guilt, mistrust and feelings of low self-worth. Below is the table detailing where people usually have problems with healthy assertiveness.

    Under-assertiveness

    Over-assertiveness
    Physical space
    • Not taking up physical space with your body
    • Always withdrawing from other people
    • Letting people ahead of you in lines
    • Being afraid of protecting yourself
    • Bumping into other people
    • Cutting other people in lines and on the road
    • Physically threatening to other people
    Establishing new personal or business relationships
    • Being afraid of introducing yourself to new people
    • Being afraid of joining new social groups and meetups
    • Never making a cold call
    • Never writing cold e-mails for a new partnership
    • Weak handshake
    • Introducing yourself to everyone
    • Being at all social events
    • Bragging when you meet somebody new
    • Too strong handshake
    Intimate and sexual activities
    • Having no physical contact with people (except handshakes)
    • Staying in a friendzone forever
    • Never escalating to the first hug, first kiss and first sex
    • Not expressing what you like in bed
    • Hugging and kissing everyone
    • Having only sexual relationships with the opposite sex
    • Minding only your own sexual desires and needs
    Setting boundaries
    • Never saying no
    • Not telling your partner what you like or don’t like in relationships
    • Letting people talk bad about you
    • Creating distance with constant criticizing
    • Threatening with no
    • Controlling other people
    Public appearance
    • Being afraid of public speaking
    • Never asking a question in groups
    • Being ashamed of dancing
    • Hating your birthday party
    • Wanting to be in the center of attention all the time
    • Being loud and noisy just to get attention
    Authorities (formal and informal)
    • Never having a different opinion than the boss
    • Being afraid of public authorities
    • Always having a different opinion than the boss, no matter what s/he does
    • Working against the boss, as a matter of principle
    Money matters, sales and negotiations
    • Never asking for a raise
    • Invoicing less than you deserve
    • Never taking back the change
    • Being afraid of selling and marketing yourself
    • Never negotiating
    • Buying attention with money
    • Wanting to earn more than others no matter what
    • Always selling and marketing your skills
    • Always negotiating
    Creativity
    • Never sharing your ideas
    • Not doing anything creative
    • Never trying anything new
    • Seeing your ideas as the best
    • Doing everything for that “like” on social networks
    • Always going for new things

    You, you, you

    Me, me, me

    Find one or two situations where you are healthy assertive (not passive or aggressive) and all the situations where you’re not healthy assertive.

    In the next step, what you can do is to practice transferring your healthy assertiveness from one area to other areas where you have problems being assertive. You can model your assertiveness best in order to use it in all the life situations that require assertiveness. The best way to achieve that is with practice.

    Self-Exposure
    Source: GollyGforce – Living My Worst Nightmare

    Step 3: Face your fears and practice being assertive with moderate self-exposure

    The best way to become more assertive is to practice assertiveness. In situations where you are a wussy, it’s time to stand up, and in situations where you’re an asshole, it’s time to cool down.

    In a way, you must start performing experiments and see how your environment reacts when you’re being healthy assertive – considering your own needs and the needs of other people.

    As you will see, a few things are very likely to happen:

    • With new people, you will get a positive response more often than you think. If you don’t leave a big tip or if you ask a question or state your opinion, people won’t immediately dislike you. Your questions will be nicely answered and your food will still be served in a restaurant. Nothing terrible happens if you communicate your needs in a healthy way (as it might have in your upbringing environment).
    • From time to time you will get the cold shoulder or a negative response. But you will quickly see that rejections are not as painful as you imagine them to be in your head. With a fast “no”, you can move on and find people who better resonate with your true self. Rejection is also a form of an emotional flashback. You must become aware that you are not a helpless little child anymore, and that you are not in the same situation as you were when young. You have options now. With every emotional flashback you can also easier explore your past.
    • By practicing assertiveness, you’ll feel better in your skin. You’ll start to feel your personal power, you won’t feel guilt or shame when going after your needs, and your negative feelings will start to fade away.
    • In your existing relationships, some people will respect you much more if you become more assertive and consequently healthy relationships will become even stronger. People you have toxic relationship with might get confused and angry. But you don’t want to have toxic relationships in your life anyway.

    When you’re practicing assertiveness, start small. As an experiment, do a small assertive action that’s currently not something you would naturally do. A great example is advice for guys to become more assertive in dating. The most common advice is to start small with self-exposure.

    Practical examples

    Example of practicing assertiveness in case of dating for men:

    • Ask a girl you like what time it is
    • Ask ten girls what time it is
    • Ask a girl for directions and her opinion on what to do in town
    • Ask ten girls the same thing
    • Ask one girl for an e-mail, and then ten girls

    Exposure therapy is a very popular cognitive-behavioral treatment for anxiety disorders. As part of the therapy, you’re slowly confronting the things that get you anxious. As you begin to face your fears, your anxiety naturally decreases during exposure.

    Below are a few ideas how you can practice exposure to develop assertiveness:

    • Join a meetup and introduce yourself to a few people
    • Say your first no; do it by e-mail if it’s easier the first time
    • Ask for a raise when you complete a demanding project
    • Don’t run away from conflict, but try to manage it
    • Find one thing you like about your boss and compliment it (if you dislike your boss)
    • Smile the next time somebody cuts you off

    A very important part of this step is to work on your communication skills. How you communicate your needs does matter a lot.

    If you don’t communicate them, people won’t know. Many times, we assume that other people know our needs, that they can read our minds. Well, people don’t. You can often be misunderstood as well. Good communication skills come with healthy assertiveness and vice versa.

    Assertivness killers

    Step 4: Pay attention to guilt and shame

    As we said, under-assertiveness is often based on guilt and shame, and over-assertiveness is based on need inflation and escalation. Guilt and shame are especially sneaky emotions. The purpose of guilt is to meet your moral standard. You feel guilty when you assume you’ve done something wrong.

    But false guilt, with an overly strong superego, is always looking for people to please and rules to keep. Shame is even worse. Feelings of shame are based on the belief that you’re bad, flawed and not lovable.

    With strong feelings of shame, it often even comes to emotional substitution, and you prefer to feel anger with other people rather than shame with yourself. If you are a very angry person, you probably have strong issues with shame.

    When practicing self-exposure before doing an assertive act, you will probably feel fear and doubt. But fears are the compass for where you need to grow in life, and doubt kills more dreams than failure or rejection ever will.

    Comfort learning panic zonesWith fear and doubt, you are constantly caught in an emotional cage. That’s not life but slavery. So expose yourself to the point where fear and doubt are still manageable. You must get yourself out of the comfort zone into the learning zone, not the panic zone.

    And after doing an assertive act, you will probably feel shame or guilt. You will feel like that because you assume it’s not okay to have your needs fulfilled. Deep down you think you don’t deserve it. That will happen, especially if you’re rejected.

    There are two things you can do. First, with every small exposure, you will feel less fear, doubt, shame or guilt. You will realize that it feels good to meet your needs and that it’s perfectly okay to do so. Thus, be patient and persistent and give yourself a tap on your back every time you expose yourself and show your vulnerability.

    Even more importantly, feeling shame or guilt is an excellent opportunity for self-reflection and healthy self-talk. It’s an opportunity to untie some of your emotional knots from the past. If you find that the feelings of shame, guilt or fear are too strong, you might even decide to enter a professional therapy.

    Anyway, there are several things you want to achieve with self-reflection:

    1. Reinforce the healthy belief that you have needs like everyone else and that it’s your basic right to meet them in a healthy and respectful manner.
    2. Dig deep why you really feel guilt or shame; what kind of errors were made in your upbringing that put a tough emotional burden on your assertiveness.
    3. It’s a great chance to talk back to your inner critic and practice self-mothering; in other words, you consciously decide to take good care of yourself and your needs.
    4. Acknowledge guilt or shame, make room for it, write down why it’s so tough, talk to other people and then let it go.

    But if feelings of shame, guilt (or even greed) are too strong, absolutely get professional help. There’s nothing wrong with that, all you want to do is to free yourself of the emotional cage.

    Exercise for assertivness

    Step 5: Work on your body language and do sports

    Your assertiveness is expressed not only with words, but even more so with your body language. That means that by improving your body language, you can also improve your assertiveness.

    As you probably know, your inner state and body language are closely connected. Next to that, your body language carries more than half of the influence of how you’ll be perceived (50 % what you say, 50 % your body language and tone of voice).

    Here is what healthy assertive body language looks like – you:

    • Feel comfortable taking space with your body
    • Keep a nice posture in a confident pose
    • Speak slowly with a relaxed and clear voice
    • Go for direct eye contact and smile
    • Listen and seek other opinions
    • Express your thoughts and emotions
    • Have physical contact with other people (when appropriate)
    • And when things get tough, breathe and calm yourself, other people and the atmosphere down

    You can always practice body language in the mirror or with your close friends. Rehearse and do role‑playing. Model people you admire. Read articles on body language. Improving your body language will have a great positive impact on your assertiveness.

    Besides paying attention to my body language, exercising has really helped me to become more assertive. I would say sport is the number one thing that helped me with assertiveness and finding the right balance between passivity and aggression.

    In sports, if you’re too aggressive towards your body, you get injured. And performing any sport, gets you out of a passive mode by default. So if you want to become more assertive, put on your trainers and get your ass to the gym.

    Exercising has also many other benefits. It’s the best way to stay healthy and prevent cognitive decline. Besides exercising, don’t also forget about a healthy diet and food supplements such as ActivatedYou, to achieve maximum overall wellness.

    Relationships with friends

    Step 6: Develop your social skills

    There is a basic, primal trust in yourself and life on the emotional level that you can only develop in your youth or over time with hard work on yourself in the adult age; and then we also have the trust that comes from mastering a specific skill.

    When it comes to assertiveness, social skills are the ones you need. The basic rule is that any skill can be developed. Logically, you can become more assertive by developing your social skills. It’s that simple.

    • Read 10 different dating books, if you’re afraid of speaking to the opposite sex
    • Join a public speaking course, if you’re terrified of public appearances
    • Practice negotiating with a friend, if you’re afraid of heated discussions
    • Study how to manage difficult people, if you have a difficult boss that makes you scared

    Leveling up your social game will greatly help you in becoming more assertive. Just because you’re not a born people person, it doesn’t mean you can’t become one.

    World of abundance

    Step 7: The abundance mindset

    The abundance mindset can also help you a lot with healthy assertiveness. Today we live in the best times ever, where your needs can be met in thousands of different ways.

    You can connect with so many people, choose so many different hobbies, there are so many ways of making money, and so on. Thus, most of the time there is no need for you to be in a huge conflict after all.

    The abundance mindset is defined by:

    1. Seeing all the possibilities the world has to offer in order to create, connect, grow and enjoy,
    2. knowing that you deserve love and prosperity, and
    3. realizing that if you’d experience only plentitude in life, it would be boring as hell and you wouldn’t appreciate anything you have at all.

    With such a mindset, you can always find a way to satisfy your needs, as long as you’re flexible enough. The opposite of the abundance mindset are the scarcity mindset and oneitis. The scarcity mindset means being focused only on what you can’t have, and not considering all the things you can have.

    Very similarly, oneitis means having an obsessive attraction towards only one person or thing, while completely excluding any other potential alternatives. That most often leads towards a big conflict, even though there might be no need for it.

    Here are the proofs of abundance:

    • There are around 7,000,000,000 people in the world, all of them your potential lovers, spouses, friends, social groups to join etc.
    • There is more than 4,000,000,000,000 USD in circulation (M0). Let’s not even mention all the virtual money and other material assets (land, gold etc.).
    • There are around 1,000,000,000 webpages and more than 130,000,000 books you can learn from – and more than a million books and new webpages are published every day.
    • Only in the UK, they throw away 7 million tons of food and drink every year. That was the first data I found online, I’m not singling out the UK for any specific reason.
    • There are more than 190 million registered companies you can work for in the world, 45,000 of them listed on the stock exchange.
    • There are more than 190 countries you can travel to and around 2,000,000 cities worldwide.
    • There are more than 200 different types of hobbies, more than 1000 different sports, more than 70 religions and belief systems, more than 30 different types of art, and so on.

    I think you can absolutely find a way to satisfy your needs in a healthy and respectful manner, but only if you decide to practice assertiveness and stay a little bit flexible. The other option that we’ll talk about is the sublimation of your needs. They’re both healthy possibilities when you can’t directly satisfy your needs.

    Successful conflict resolution

    Step 8: Make the 4F response work in your favor

    By becoming healthy assertive, you want to achieve that the 4F response to danger and conflict is working in your favor, not against you. When you manage to achieve that, the flight response ensures that you set boundaries and self-protection. The freeze response enables you to give up and quit struggling when there is no progress or when resistance is futile.

    Flight instincts lead to you disengaging and safely retreating when confronting life-threatening danger. And the fawn response enables you to actively listen, help others in trouble and make healthy compromises, while still minding your own rights, needs and beliefs.

    Here is the table showing how a healthy person uses the 4F response (and the list of unhealthy responses):

    Fight Flight Freeze Fawn
    Assertiveness Disengagement Acute awareness Love & Service
    Boundaries Healthy retreat Mindfulness Compromise
    Courage Industriousness Poised Readiness Listening
    Moxie Know-how Peace Fairness
    Leadership Perseverance Presence Peacemaking

    Source: Complex PTSD, page 106

    One of the best things you can do is to print out all these healthy behaviors and practice them. Make them your virtues. When you come into conflict, use one of the healthy responses from the table. Pay attention to your emotions and learn to express them in a healthy way.

    Sense of humor

    Step 9: Practice mature defense mechanisms

    In the end, there is no way that all of your needs can be met. There will always be some (primal) needs that can’t be satisfied due to reasonable superego restrictions or limitations of the real world. In such cases, there are several mature defense mechanisms at your disposal.

    The two most common ones are:

    • Sublimation of needs: With sublimation, unacceptable impulses or idealizations are unconsciously transformed into socially acceptable actions or behavior. Your wishes are challenged rather than dammed or diverted. For example, you express your aggressiveness in sports and games, and your feelings are acknowledged, modified and directed towards goals. Sports, art, learning, there are many ways how needs can be sublimed.
    • Humor: Humor enables you to share emotion without discomfort, to regress without embarrassment, to play games with freedom, to laugh with impunity and to relax in total pleasure. Humor is a great way to deal with needs that can’t be satisfied.

    Other mature defense mechanisms that you can resort to are:

    • Acceptance
    • Altruism
    • Anticipation
    • Courage
    • Emotional self-regulation
    • Emotional self-sufficiency
    • Forgiveness
    • Gratitude
    • Humility
    • Modeling
    • Mercy
    • Mindfulness
    • Moderation
    • Patience
    • Respect
    • Tolerance

    Explore how to use them.

    The final thought on healthy assertiveness

    A healthy assertive person is a person who likes themselves as they are, has a strong sense of self and their autonomy, has no problems with their needs being met, knows how to express feelings, knows where they’re going in life and what they want, is not afraid of conflict, knows how to set boundaries, takes initiative and contributes creative ideas.

    That’s the sort of person you want to be; otherwise life will slip through your hands. Don’t keep yourself locked in a cage.

    • If you don’t raise your hand and ask a question, you’ll never know
    • If you don’t ask her (him) out, the answer is already no
    • If you don’t ask for a raise or promotion, you most probably won’t get it
    • If you buy love with money, people will never really love you
    • If you never say no, people will have zero respect for you

    There’s a little vulgar, but very illustrative quote (for men) that shows why you must be assertive in life: He who hesitates, masturbates. If you don’t act, nothing will happen. That’s for sure.

    You just have to realize that in the long run, the pain of doing nothing is much greater than the pain of being rejected from time to time. You want to have zero regrets on your deathbed.

    Here is a short summary how to become more assertive:

    1. Pay constant attention to your needs, wishes and desires. Be gentle and attentive towards yourself.
    2. Identify areas where you are healthy assertive and where you are not, and practice skill and mindset transfer.
    3. Face your fears and practice being assertive with moderate self-exposure. At every opportunity practice assertiveness by being in the learning zone.
    4. Lean to manage your fear, doubt, shame and guilt. Acknowledge them, make room for them, use them as a trigger for self-reflection and even more to reinforce healthy, assertive beliefs.
    5. Work on your body language.
    6. Start doing any type of exercise or sport immediately.
    7. Develop your social and communication skills.
    8. Walk proudly around the World with the abundance mindset and stay flexible how your needs can be met.
    9. When you come into conflict, use one of the 4F healthy responses.
    10. Sublime your needs – use humor or employ other mature defense mechanisms.

    By developing healthy assertiveness, you’ll feel more confident, your relationships will improve, negative feelings will go away and you’ll feel much better and happier in general. You know that it’s better to live a single day as a lion than years as a sheep.

    Most people die when they’re around 20 years old but are buried 50 years later; because they get caught in an emotional cage possessing no healthy assertiveness. Don’t be one of them, find the right balance between passivity and aggression. Now you have enough knowledge to become assertive in a healthy way. Apply it!