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  • What is assertiveness and why you are not assertive enough

    Looking from a psychological perspective at life, we can say that the point of existing is to satisfy your needs. In your lifetime, there’s a constant flow of new needs, and your mission is to make yourself happy by satisfying them. It’s that simple.

    Nevertheless, your needs must be met in a healthy and socially acceptable manner and in an absence of any internal conflicts, which can often be challenging. That’s where healthy assertiveness comes into play.

    Unfortunately, healthy assertiveness is not as common as one would think. It actually takes quite a strong and emotionally sharp character to be assertive in a healthy way. You must trust in yourself and in the highly probable positive response that the environment will have to your needs; and in case if that doesn’t happen you must not overreact to a rejection.

    You must also be bold enough to act and go after your goals and desires, but on the other hand you must respect relationship boundaries and social norms that limit your immediate need fulfillment. There are many different forces to be considered and brought in line.

    It takes especially vigorous upbringing with the healthiest possible home environment and strong parental role models to develop into an assertive person. If you weren’t raised as a healthy assertive person, your needs are still there, but the path to their fulfillment might be questionable in many situations.

    Two very common examples of unhealthy ways of need satisfaction are to either suppress the needs (passivity) or satisfy them in an intrusive, social unacceptable way (aggression). Both ways backfire sooner or later and lead to more frustrations rather than enjoyment of life.

    Needs

    Self-restrictions

    Healthy assertiveness

    Social restrictions

    Finding a healthy way to satisfy your needs without unnecessary self-restrictions and by respecting social boundaries.

    In this article, we’ll go through a few psychological theories, exercises and practical tips that will help you become more healthy assertive and proactive. It’s quite a long article, but after reading it, I promise you’ll have a really good understanding of what assertiveness really means, why you might lack it and how to develop it as quickly as possible.

    The main topics we’ll cover are:

    1. The universal human needs you can’t escape from
    2. The personality fundamentals for human assertiveness
    3. The potential conflicts when it comes to satisfying your needs
    4. Healthy and unhealthy ways of need satisfaction
    5. Practical tips for becoming more assertive (Part 2)

    What is assertiveness

    The list of universal human needs

    The first important lesson when it comes to human assertiveness is that we all have several universal human needs, impossible to escape from. These needs turn into desires, wishes and goals, and are somehow either fulfilled, sublimated or repressed with defense mechanisms. Thus, it makes sense to have a really good overview of all the universal human needs.

    We know several main theories of human needs. They talk more or less about the same needs, but differentiate more on complexity, the assumptions of how the needs are interconnected (hierarchy, system) and how they change with age or other factors.

    There are four main theories of human needs that are good to know in order to understand what kind of needs exist in the heart of every human being. The following are the four main theories (among them only the first two are from scientific literature):

    1. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
    2. Fundamental human needs theory
    3. Anthony Robbins’ Six Main Human needs
    4. Child’s developmental needs

    Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs

    The most known framework for human needs is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The biggest criticism of Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs is the hierarchy itself. Critics argue that there might not be such a hierarchy at all or that it can change under certain circumstances or even that it’s greatly influenced by age.

    But the point of this section of the article is to identify as many universal needs as possible, and Maslow’s pyramid gives us a great overview.

    Maslows Hierarchy of Needs

    BASIC NEEDS

    • Physiological needs: At the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy, there is the will to survive. For that you need shelter, food, water, and rest. Among the most basic needs, there is also the will to reproduce and spread your DNA – have sex, in other words.
    • Safety needs: This is then followed by the needs of basic security and acquiring resources. They enable you to make the step from surviving to thriving. Besides breathing and reproducing, you can also enjoy the material and social life.

    PSYCHOLOGICAL NEEDS

    • Belonging and love: We are social beings, so the next group of needs is about love, friendship and social connections that enrich your life.
    • Self-esteem needs: Besides belonging and love, we all need some form of recognition, respect from others, and a list of achievements. That’s the second category of psychological needs.

    SELF-FULFILLMENT NEEDS

    • Self-actualization: On the top of the pyramid is self-actualization, which accounts for achieving one’s full potential with creative and higher endeavors.

    In Maslow’s hierarchy, there are six different categories of universal human needs. These are all the needs you must and have every right to fulfill.

    Fundamental human needs theory

    Let’s move to the second theory. Manfred Max-Neef developed the theory of fundamental human needs and human-scale development. All the identified and presented needs are universal, which means they were present in all human cultures throughout history.

    The only thing that changed with time is how they manifest themselves through different kind of desires, and consequently strategies for how these needs are fulfilled vary between cultures.

    In Max-Neef’s theory there is no hierarchy of needs, yet they are put in an interrelated and interactive system with trade-offs and complementary fulfilments.

    Need Being (Qualities) Having (Things) Doing (Actions) Interacting (Settings)
    Subsistence Physical and mental health Food
    Shelter
    Work    		 Feed
    Clothe
    Rest
    Work    		 Living
    Environment
    Social setting
    Protection Care
    Adaptability
    Autonomy    		 Social security
    Health systems
    Work    		 Co-operate
    Plan
    Take care of
    Help    		 Social Environment
    Dwelling
    Affection Respect
    Sense of humor
    Generosity
    Sensuality    		 Friendships
    Family
    Relationships with nature    		 Share
    Take care of
    Make love
    Express emotions    		 Privacy
    Intimate spaces of togetherness
    Understanding Critical capacity
    Curiosity
    Intuition    		 Literature
    Teachers
    Policies
    Educational    		 Analyze
    Study
    Meditate
    Investigate    		 Schools
    Families
    Universities
    Communities
    Participation Receptiveness
    Dedication
    Sense of humor    		 Responsibilities
    Duties
    Work
    Rights    		 Cooperate
    Dissent
    Express opinions    		 Associations
    Parties
    Churches
    Neighborhoods
    Leisure Imagination
    Tranquility
    Spontaneity    		 Games
    Parties
    Peace of mind    		 Daydream
    Remember
    Relax
    Have fun    		 Landscapes
    Intimate spaces
    Places to be alone
    Creation Imagination
    Boldness
    Inventiveness
    Curiosity    		 Abilities
    Skills
    Work
    Techniques    		 Invent
    Build
    Design
    Work
    Compose
    Interpret    		 Spaces for expression
    Workshops
    Audiences
    Identity Sense of belonging
    Self-esteem
    Consistency    		 Language
    Religions
    Work
    Customs
    Values
    Norms    		 Get to know oneself
    Grow
    Commit oneself    		 Places one belongs to
    Everyday settings
    Freedom Autonomy
    Passion
    Self-esteem
    Open-mindedness    		 Equal rights Dissent
    Choose
    Run risks
    Develop Awareness    		 Anywhere

    In the table, the being column is about attributes – individual or collective. The having column describes institutions, norms, mechanisms, laws and tools. And the doing column represents actions. The last, interacting column is about the time and space in which needs can be met.

    Anthony Robbins’ Six Main Human needs

    Anthony Robbins simplified the list of all the needs into six core ones. This can help us focus human needs into nicely presented groups we all long to fulfill:

    1. Certainty: The need for safety, security, comfort, order, consistency, control
    2. Variety: The need for uncertainty, diversity, challenge, change, surprise, adventure
    3. Significance: The need for meaning, validation, feeling needed, honored, wanted, special
    4. Love and connection: The need for connection, communication, intimacy, and shared love with others
    5. Growth: The need for physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual development
    6. Contribution: The need to give, care, protect beyond ourselves, to serve others and do good

    Child’s developmental needs

    Pete Walker wrote the book Complex PTSD: From surviving to thriving in which he nicely describes the perfect environment for growing up. It’s not a scientifically confirmed theory, but a very nice overview of what kind of nurturance a healthy environment should provide for a child.

    As we will see later, proper nurturance plays a great role in developing healthy assertiveness. That’s why understanding needs from the child’s perspective is even more important. Here are the child’s main needs and what kind of nurturance is needed to fulfil them:

    • Physical needs and nurturance – Offering the child affection and protection, healthy diet and sleep schedule, teaching grooming, discipline and responsibility. Helping a child develop hobbies, interest and personal style. Teaching them how to balance rest, play and work.
    • Emotional needs and nurturance – Huge amount of love, warmth, compassion and tenderness. Paying attention to the child’s emotions and welcoming their full emotional expression. Teaching them how to express negative feelings in a healthy way. Offering emotional protection. Also humor.
    • Verbal needs and nurturance – Having intellectual conversations with a child, giving positive feedback, praise, mentoring and encouragement. Also providing teaching lessons, reading them stories and answering all their thousands of questions.
    • Spiritual needs and nurturance – Showing the child that life is a gift, frequent exposure to nature, nurturing the child’s creative self-expression, offering spiritual guidance to help the child deal with painful aspects of life, developing strong self-worth, and we can also add help in developing basic goodness and a loving nature to the list.
    Physical nurturance Emotional nurturance
    • Affection and protection
    • Healthy diet and sleep schedule
    • Grooming
    • Discipline and responsibility
    • Hobbies, interests and personal style
    • Balancing rest, play and work
    • Environmental stability
    • Being emotionally invested in a child
    • Paying attention to child’s needs
    • Offering emotional protection
    • Love, warmth, compassion, tenderness
    • Welcoming full emotional expression
    • Expressing negative emotions
    • Humor
    Verbal nurturance Spiritual nurturance
    • Intellectual conversations
    • Reading stories
    • Positive feedback and praise (5 : 1)
    • Mentoring and encouragement
    • Teaching life lessons
    • Answering questions
    • Life is a gift
    • Frequent exposure to nature
    • Nurturing child’s creative self-expression
    • Guidance to deal with painful life aspects
    • Developing strong self-worth
    • Basic goodness and loving nature

    In summary, a child must know that somebody is emotionally invested in him/her. There must be a stable and predictive environment that encourages the development of physical, emotional, verbal and spiritual aspects of a child’s personality.

    A healthy environment leads to several underlying personality characteristics that are a prerequisite for healthy assertiveness:

    1. Optimistic expectations that the environment will respond positively to your needs
    2. Being emotionally stable so that you don’t overreact in case of a rejection or a conflict
    3. Easily finding alternative ways to satisfy needs when you can’t satisfy them directly (with sublimation, finding a new “win-win” situation etc.)

    If we summarize all the theories, we can list 15 main needs that all us humans share:

    1. Personal autonomy, individual style and following your own goals and desires.
    2. Access to clean water, healthy food, nature and a stable home that serves as a shelter.
    3. Regular sex and producing offspring.
    4. Structured daily life that provides basic discipline, and getting enough sleep.
    5. Protecting yourself and living in a safe, secure and non-abusive environment, fair treatment.
    6. Warm and loving personal relationships, several close friends and social connections
    7. Being able to express negative emotions in a healthy way and providing self-nurturing when life gets tough or you fail. You have the need to not be too tough on yourself.
    8. Being part of social groups that you find important and valuable, and consequently being respected and respecting others. Especially important is the need for praise.
    9. Owning things and acquiring enough assets for a secure and comfortable life; being paid fairly.
    10. Doing work you’re good at, providing value and achieving things important to you.
    11. Finding balance between work and play, having fun and enjoying life.
    12. Regular intellectual stimulation, getting an education, expressing your thoughts and opinions, acquiring knowledge and sharing it, and developing new skills.
    13. Being curious, experiencing new things, growing personally and going on adventures.
    14. Freedom of belief, religion and spirituality.
    15. Undertaking creative endeavors, building things, contributing to the society and leaving a legacy.

    These are the needs we all have. Most of these needs can be only satisfied in interaction with other people. But many times these needs get suppressed or expressed in an unhealthy way.

    If you say money is not important to you, that’s a sign of an emotional knot. If you feel alienated from all social groups, there’s big repression. If you don’t want to have offspring, there is probably some kind of emotional pain.

    You get the point. But why?

    Greed

    Escalation of needs and seven deadly sins

    If your needs are not met for a longer period of time, especially when you’re a child, the phenomenon of need inflation happens. In practical terms, there’s nothing that can quench your thirst.

    Deep down, your inner child (emotional self) longs to be cared for, has a constant fear of abandonment and his needs not being met. And that’s when needs turn from something that can bring pleasure in life into a painful burden. That can happen in four major ways:

    1. Need inflation: You have an uncontrollable number of wishes and desires, and that leads to lashing out or even confusion, competing commitments and a lack of focus.
    2. Need escalation: You want too much of one single thing as a surrogate for what you lacked in your youth or later in life (money, good, knowledge etc.).
    3. Need perversion: Needs get expressed through weird wishes and desires (weird fetishes, abuse etc.).
    4. Need suppression: It’s too painful to even admit to yourself that you have certain needs and desires.

    There are several very standard ways of need inflation or escalation, interestingly all of them part of the seven deadly sins:

    • Lust – intense or unbridled sexual desire
    • Gluttony – overindulgence and overconsumption of anything to the point of waste
    • Greed – intense and selfish desire especially for wealth or power (or today even knowledge)
    • Pride – excessive view of one’s self with no regard for others (greed for status)
    • Envy – resentful covetousness towards someone else’s traits or possessions

    The first lesson was that we all have universal needs. The second lesson is that if you aren’t properly nurtured as a child or if your needs are not met for a longer period of time, they inflate or escalate or get perverted or suppressed. At least until you become aware of them, and then satisfy or sublime them.

    But the main point is, that in need escalation state it’s almost impossible to be assertive, because you’re driven by fierce emotions, not logic. You can be passive or aggressive, but certainly not assertive.

    Conflict

    Conflicts when it comes to satisfying your needs

    Together with needs comes one more thing all human beings have in common – conflicts. The reason for that is, because most of the human needs can only be satisfied in interaction with other people and with not having any redundant internal brakes.

    A conflict arises when the fulfillment of needs is blocked or threatened somehow – internally (only in your head), externally (in interaction with other people) or even both.

    That can happen in many different ways. You can go to war with yourself with self-sabotage, doubts, false guilt, rigid morals etc. Other people can block or obstruct your agency. It can be socially unacceptable for your need to be satisfied. And in the end, there are many other outside forces that can prevent you from going after your desires. Conflicts are simply part of everyday life.

    In general, we know eight different types of conflict and they all somehow interfere with satisfaction of human needs (with examples):

    1. Man against self – having competing needs that can’t be satisfied at the same time or, as we’ll see, unbalanced id and superego
    2. Man against man – competing with others for the same reward
    3. Man against society – the desire to fulfill a need in a way that’s not socially acceptable
    4. Man against nature – natural disasters that endanger safety, diseases and similar
    5. Man against god/faith – when god doesn’t grant your prayers or diminishes hope
    6. Man against supernatural – dealing with life dimensions that can’t be explained
    7. Man against markets – financial or career losses because of market crashes
    8. Man against robots (with the rise of AI) – potential threat to our existence

    Every conflict can be resolved in four different ways, and that gives us the first definition of what assertiveness is:

    Conflict
    I win – You win I lose – You lose
    Assertive Passive aggressive
    I win – You lose I lose – You win
    Aggressive Passive

    In a way, being assertive means finding a win-win situation in a conflict that enables you to fulfill your needs, while minding other people and their needs. But that’s not the whole picture.

    The most interesting and complex type of conflict is the conflict within yourself. So let’s say a word or two about when and how you can turn into your own worst enemy when it comes to need satisfaction.

    Balancing id, superego and the outside world

    Freud, the most known name of psychoanalysis, defined three parts of a personality – id, ego and superego. The id is the source of your bodily needs, wants, desires, and primal impulses. It’s driven especially by your sexual and aggressive drive. You can imagine id as a child who wants to immediately satisfy all needs, no matter the consequences.

    The child (or id) is a hedonistic little fellow who wants to enjoy life, not minding other people and society. The id wants instant gratification and doesn’t have a moral compass. Id has zero issues with satisfying the primal urges in an uncivilized manner using aggression, force and violence. All that leads to hurting other people and the society as a whole.

    Safety is a very important need, and that’s why humankind strives to avoid war and violence. As we have seen throughout history, violence only creates more violence, and that brings a vicious circle of pain and destruction.

    That’s why several psychological and social mechanisms evolved or were invented over time with the goal of balancing these primal human urges. The goal of these mechanisms is to make the society more civilized and everyday life more human, far removed from the cruelty of the jungle.

    Id - Ego - Superego

    One psychological phenomenon that evolved in this matter is called superego. The superego reflects internalized cultural values and rules. It’s the moral compass that consists of ego ideals, spiritual goals and, more importantly, it has the power to prohibit the fulfillment of drives, feelings and actions.

    The main weapons of the superego are guilt, anxiety, inferiority and other forms of inner criticism. A too strong superego is a consequence of too rigorous upbringing.

    While the job of the id is to push us towards instant gratification of needs, the job of the super-ego is to make sure that it’s done in a socially acceptable way. The ego strives towards the self-ideal and social ideals without taking reality into account.

    The poor ego, which we so often like to blame, has to balance the id, the super-ego as a supervisor, and reality.

    To make things even more complex, the society has developed several other mechanisms to curb the aggressive impulses that are hurtful to the society. Examples of cultivation mechanisms are:

    1. Law, police and codes of ethics
    2. Trade – it’s cheaper to trade than to wage war
    3. Religion and spirituality
    4. Technology that provides surveillance, transparency etc.
    5. Culture, role models and similar

    Ego traps

    We love to blame the ego for many things. But the table above shows very nicely what a hard job the ego has. It must balance all one’s needs while being constantly supervised by the superego, mind a bunch of social restrictions, and face the limitations and hardships of reality (natural disasters, market crashes etc.). Not to mention that there’s competition out there for the same resources.

    The superego is involved in the experience of guilt, perfectionism, indecision, preoccupation with what is the right or wrong thing to do, and hence plays an important role in the aetiology of some forms of depression, obsessional disorders and sexual problems. (Source: Introduction to Psychoanalysis: Contemporary Theory and Practice)

    As we’ll see later, properly balancing all these forces is the foundation for healthy assertiveness. The solution is that the ego has to be strong enough to balance the id and superego. That’s how internal conflicts are avoided. But when the ego is not strong enough, the internal forces lean towards one direction or the other. That’s when problems with healthy assertiveness start.

    Too strong Id

    Too strong super-ego

    Turning against the society

    Turning against yourself

    Defense Mechanisms

    Too strong id or superego result in two potential unhealthy ways of need satisfaction. One is turning against yourself (with impossible standards and self-restrictions) and the other is turning against the society (with hurting others). And when the ego can’t find the right balance or a healthy way to satisfy a need, it turns to mechanisms of defense and toxic ways of need satisfaction.

    False guilt is always looking for people to please and rules to be kept.

    But balancing id and superego is only one part of the problem. The second part of the problem are psychological conflicts that naturally occur in different stages of development. If these conflicts are not successfully resolved, there is no healthy foundation for the assertive agency. To understand that, we have to turn to Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development Theory.

    The developmental crisis and fundamentals for human assertiveness

    There are eight stages of psychosocial development and a successful completion of each stage results in an emotionally healthy person who knows how to be assertive. Unfortunately, if you don’t successfully complete one stage, your ability to overcome the following stages is reduced and the emotional maturity you need for healthy assertiveness suffers even more.

    The good news is that you can later resolve the stages that you didn’t successfully complete while growing up, as long as you decide to put in the effort. The eight stages of psychosocial development are:

    Stage Age Conflict / Crisis Resolution / Virtue
    1 Infant – 18 months Basic trust vs. Mistrust Hope
    2 18 months – 3 years Autonomy vs. Shame Will
    3 3 – 5 years Initiative vs. Guilt and Doubt Purpose
    4 5 – 13 years Industry vs. Inferiority Competence
    5 13 – 21 years Identity vs. Confusion Fidelity
    6 21 – 39 years Intimacy vs. Isolation Love
    7 40 – 65 years Generativity vs. Stagnation Care
    8 65 and older Integrity vs. Despair Wisdom

    If you look at the table above, you can quickly see what kind of developmental conflicts need to be resolved for you to turn into a healthy assertive person. You need to trust people around you (your environment) that your needs will be considered and fulfilled, and that people will respond positively to your expressed desires.

    You must see yourself as an autonomous person who deserves to have their needs satisfied and to go after personal goals. Then you must take proper initiative and develop the competences to the point where they match personally set challenges. In the end, you must also develop a clear identity of who you are, what your higher self-actualization needs are and how you’ll satisfy them.

    On the other hand, if you don’t trust yourself and other people, if you’re burdened by shame, guilt and doubt, it’s very hard to go after your needs and goals. Either you find a way to not act, or you resort to unhealthy behavior in hopes of protecting your emotional self.

    A failure of parental empathy, leading to disruption of a coherent sense of self and the emergence of ‘disintegration products’ in later life such as aggression, or attempts at self-soothing through addiction, compulsive sexuality and even self-injury. Source: Introduction to Psychoanalysis: Contemporary Theory and Practice

    Based on that, we can draw a very simple conclusion:

    • Assertiveness: Is based on feelings of trust, autonomy, initiative, industry, clear identity and great capacity for love.
    • Non-assertiveness: Is based on mistrust, shame, guilt, doubt, inferiority, confusion, isolation
    • External conflicts: You must find a way to win-win situations
    • Internal conflicts: You must properly balance ego and superego

    Now we know all the developmental factors that are the core source of nonassertive agency:

    1. Need inflation, escalation, perversion or supression because of neglect of child’s needs
    2. Unbalanced ego, with too strong/weak id or superego – too rigorous or loose upbringing
    3. Unsuccessfully resolved developmental crisis

    Any of these situations leads to overly strong defense mechanisms (which are a too complicated subject for an already long article) and the four very nonassertive ways of need satisfaction.

    Agressive and Passive Behaviour

    The four toxic, nonassertive ways to need satisfaction in relationships

    There are four very general ways how you can act unassertively especially in interaction with others and consequently go against yourself, the society or most often both. The four ways are based on the 4F primal response mechanism.

    The fight/flight/freeze/fawn (4F) response is a normal human reaction to any danger (and conflict is danger). They are the tools you have at your disposal when you encounter a threat and need to protect yourself.

    Since you can easily get yourself into an (internal or external) conflict when it comes to satisfying your needs, you can just as easily resort to one of these unhealthy responses.

    We’re talking about an automatic response to a conflict, not something you consciously choose. The table below shows all the different toxic and nonassertive behaviors based on the 4F response.

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

    Source: Pete Walker (2013), Complex PTSD, page 107

    All the nonassertive acts originate either from mistrust, lack of autonomy, shame, guilt, doubt, inferiority, identity confusion, isolation (as we’ll see) or need inflation and escalation.

    The false underlying belief (or more exactly emotional hope) is that any such behavior, which you don’t even see as toxic, will provide you an emotional safety net. You assume that you can’t be hurt if you act in a nonassertive way.

    Examples of false underlying beliefs or bogus emotional hope:

    1. Control over people – and with control comes false emotional safety
    2. Perfectionism – in hopes that you will be more lovable
    3. Distraction – with the goal of running away from your real needs and feelings
    4. Create distance in a relationship – and thus avoid being hurt
    5. Codependency – to create a false feeling of safety by serving others

    In reality, you achieve the opposite effect from what you hope will happen. In false hope of protecting yourself, you simultaneously repress your real needs. With the fight response in any conflict, you push people far away from you, usually with anger and controlling demands.

    The flight response leads to distance in relationships, usually achieved by being busy. You try to become perfect, while running away from relationships and your own needs. The freeze response creates false safety with isolation and platonic online relationships. And the fawn response creates a fake feeling of security by over-focusing on other people’s needs, or even merging your own needs with those of other people.

    These are all nonassertive behaviors. The ego wants to protect you, and has to make a compromise in which your other universal and basic needs are not met.

    Defense mechanisms

    In the end, I also want to mention defense mechanisms, which play a huge role in needs satisfaction. The point of defense mechanisms is to minimize conflicts, reduce tension, regulate self-esteem and avoid danger, anxiety and displeasure.

    These defense mechanisms work on the unconscious level and play an important role in character formation. Psychoanalysis knows three types of defense mechanisms:

    • Primitive: Autistic fantasy, devaluation, idealization, passive-aggressive behavior, projection, projective identification and splitting.
    • Neurotic: Condensation, denial, displacement, dissociation, externalization, identification of the aggressor, intellectualization, isolation, rationalization, reaction formation, regression, repression, reversal, somatization and undoing.
    • Mature: Humor and sublimation.

    A summary – what is assertiveness?

    In summary, assertiveness means being self-assured in everyday life, without behaving aggressive or passive, with the goal to meet all of your needs in a healthy manner.

    That can be achieved only if the following conditions are met:

    1. You are consciously aware of the majority of needs you have. It’s quite a long list of needs that we all humans share.
    2. If you were not properly nurtured as a child, there is a great chance that your needs somehow inflated, escalated, get perverted or repressed. They most often inflate as greed, gluttony, or any other deadly sin. But they are only poor surrogates for love, affection and closeness. You can’t be healthy assertive in such a state.
    3. The needs are best met in interaction with other people. But many times, that’s not possible, which leads to a conflict. A healthy assertive person looks for a win-win situation in a conflict.
    4. There are four types of un-assertive behavior in interaction with other people, based on the 4F response mechanism to danger (or a conflict). You either become aggressive (fight), passive (freeze), you run away from a conflict (flight) or submit to other people (fawn).
    5. The needs are also best met in an absence of any internal conflicts. That’s not possible if id or superego are too strong. False guilt, based on too strong superego, is always looking for people to please and rules to be kept.
    6. Assertiveness is based on feelings of trust, autonomy, initiative, industry, clear identity and great capacity for love. Non-assertiveness is based on mistrust, shame, guilt, doubt, inferiority, confusion, isolation.

    Now I hope you understand very clearly what assertiveness really is. Thus, let’s move to the second part, how to become more assertive (the article will be published in a few days).

  • Tips for improving your English speaking skills and pronunciation

    I’ve been blogging in the English language for more than three years now (one year full time). I wrote more than 1,000 pages in English, which equals more than 5 books. I’m not writing this to brag, but to tell you about my tough beginnings as a writer, since English is not my mother tongue and I’m not particularly talented for languages.

    I vividly remember when I decided to write my first English blog post. After writing a single page, my head hurt like hell. My brain was obviously overclocking. It took me a few months to train my brain to write one or two pages without feeling overwhelmed, constantly looking in a dictionary and rewriting sentences over and over again.

    Only now, after several years, can I write for a few hours straight without any struggle. With time, I improved my writing skills and the brain capacity to the point where I can write a well‑structured and quality blog post quite quickly. All my blog posts are still copyedited, since grammar is not my forte, but my overall improvement is colossal.

    Currently a new challenge awaits. I’m preparing my first online courses. And guess what, courses are based more on audio and video materials than text. I already have my courses outlined and several scripts ready but when I decided to practice the scripts, a big realization occurred to me.

    Learn English

    Your writing, reading and speaking skills are not all the same

    If you want to improve your writing, you need to write a lot. If you want to improve your reading and comprehension skills, you have to read a lot. But reading and writing don’t automatically lead to an improvement of your speaking and pronunciation skills. That was quite a hurtful realization for me.

    Guess what, after practicing one page of the transcript for the online courses, my head soon starts hurting badly; even though I wrote thousands of pages in the past and can write for hours straight. My tongue constantly gets entangled and my pronunciation feels quite terrible. I’m in a very similar position as I was when I decided to create my first text in a foreign language. And it sucks big time.

    If I want to produce the courses, there is only one thing for me to do – improve my English speaking and pronunciation skills. I got a pronunciation coach and did big research on how to get better at speaking in particular.

    In this blog post, I want to share everything that I learned about improving speaking and pronunciation skills, and my personal improvement plan. I’m going to focus on a few key techniques that I’ve chosen in order to progress as quickly as possible.

    We already got to the first lesson. Writing and reading definitely help improve your overall English skills, but if you want to get better specifically at speaking and pronouncing, you must do a lot of deliberate practice exclusively for speaking and pronouncing. Writing, speaking and reading skills engage different parts of your brain.

    Improve your English pronunciation

    Tips for improving your English speaking skills

    Let’s start with tips for improving English speaking skills in general, without any focus on pronunciation and then continue with that. There are several sub-skills that you want to master when it comes to speaking:

    1. Switching from one language to another without getting confused or needing warm-up
    2. Learning how to speak clearly and fluently without any stopgaps
    3. Using contextual standard expressions in everyday situations
    4. Speaking for hours without losing focus
    5. And then of course perfecting your pronunciation

    Let’s go to some very useful tips and tricks for achieving that.

    Find language buddies and do international work

    The first rule of improving your speaking skills is to speak English as much as possible. You must practice language at every single opportunity. Finding language buddies in your professional and personal life is a great way to achieve that. Your goal should be to find people who speak much better than you are.

    You won’t believe it, but I convinced several of my friends that we text and speak only in English, even though we share a mother tongue. I wish I could convince more people, but not many are that motivated to improve their language skills. Nevertheless, if you find a few buddies you can talk with in English on a daily or at least weekly basis, that’s a very good start.

    Open your e-mail or messenger and immediately ask a few of your close friends if they’re prepared to communicate only in English with you to practice.

    In business, the best way to practice English is to engage in international projects. That is also one of the reasons I decided to start with (a very limited) amount of international coaching sessions. Not only am I extremely good at coaching and can help people, it’s also a great opportunity for me to practice speaking English as much as possible.

    I’m sure there are many possibilities how you can seize a similar opportunity at the work you do. Propose new international projects at your company, join international business clubs or enroll to seminars in English, you can make new international business partnerships, and so on.

    The bottom line is: you must practice speaking English at every opportunity possible, on a daily basis.

    Start recording videos or audio podcasts

    I have a friend who commutes to work and back for 30 minutes every day. While driving, he records an audio file in English for his wife, explaining many different topics and thoughts.

    When he told me about this practice of his, I was really impressed. What an awesome idea. In 6 months of daily practice, he dramatically improved his English speaking skills.

    I’m going to do a very similar thing. For most of my articles, I will:

    • Prepare a summary in a short audio or video file
    • Read complete articles out loud
    • or prepare a few bullet points from an article and speak freely

    You can do pretty the same with any material you like. It makes me puke (mom’s spaghetti) to just think about it. But I have a very strong why to do it (I have to publish those online courses), and nothing is going to stop me.

    The plan is to make quite long audio files to train my brain to speak in English for long hours without getting tired. Much like I did with writing. Just please don’t laugh when listening to my podcasts. If you’re bold enough, start a podcast or a YouTube channel of your own.

    Practicing speaking English

    A list of standard phrases and thinking in English

    I struggle quite a lot with switching from one language to another when speaking. It also takes me some time to warm up when changing the language. I hate that. As help, I’m preparing a list of very standard phrases I use in most of my conversations – interrogatives, conversation openers, responses and personal presentations.

    The phrases should also serve as anchors for immediately switching from one language to another. The main idea behind it is to not understand only what a certain English word means, but to add phrases to my vocabulary.

    One more thing I will do is to think exclusively in English. No matter where I am and who I’m talking with, and especially when I’m alone talking to myself, only English will be present in my mind.

    Tips for improving English pronunciation

    You can be a fluent English speaker, but your accent can still be very strong and wrong. To improve such a drawback, you have to additionally focus your efforts on improving pronunciation.

    There are several sub-skills when it comes to pronunciation:

    • Pronunciation is not only a brain, but also a physical skill, thus you have to learn how to correctly move your jaw, lips and tongue
    • Pronouncing difficult sounds of the English language
    • Giving proper syllable stress within words and sentences
    • Avoiding error patterns common for different non-native English speakers
    • Practicing sounds that you personally find difficult to pronounce

    Get a pronunciation coach

    The best thing you can do is to get a pronunciation coach, at least in the beginning. Or you can even get an English tutor to help you improve your English on all levels. You can find many good English tuition services – global or local ones (here’s an example of a specialized English tuition service in Singapore. You can find a similar service in your own country).

    I just started working with a pronunciation coach and the lessons are really valuable. You get immediate feedback on your speaking and that allows you to avoid any reinforcement of the wrong pronunciation.

    A good pronunciation coach can push you to the limits of your abilities, prepare a good learning plan for you, and most importantly, you can repeat phrases and sentences after the coach several times until you get it right. Human see, human do. If you have the financial resources to hire a good pronunciation coach, you will absolutely progress the fastest.

    Frank is my English pronunciation coach and I highly recommend him:

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    The shadowing technique: Model the speakers you like by recording yourself

    The second-best way to learn proper pronunciation is to model native speakers who have a speaking style very similar to yours (in your mother tongue). Their overall speaking style must be something you believe you can also achieve.

    I analyzed several speakers to find the ones I can model. For example, Tony Robbins is way too energetic for my style. Tim Urban speaks too fast and in a very comic way, which is completely not in my character. Tai Lopez is too spontaneous and entertainment-oriented. I deeply respect all these speakers, but there’s no way I can model them.

    But there are two authorities that I find very close to something that I could achieve – Ramit Sethi (I will teach you to be rich) and Chris Goward (Wider Funnel). These are the two speakers I decided to model.

    When you find an appropriate model, make sure you’re copying them the right way. What I’m going to do is to take short paragraphs of the transcript from their online courses and record myself pronouncing the same transcript.

    Then I’m going to compare my speaking and pronunciation to theirs. Besides that, I’m going to watch all their video and audio material that I can find. It will also be very educational.

    I know, the shadowing technique might sound like weird stalking, but you have to see it more as the ultimate form of praise and compliment. You’re struggling and putting in the effort to master a skill on the same level as one of your role models.

    Demosthenes, one of the great orators of ancient Greece, brushed up on his speaking skills by putting stones in his mouth while talking to the waves during a storm. That forced him to work very hard on getting the right sounds out. That was incomparably more odd than modeling successful people is. Well, you can also try speaking to the waves.

    Listen to English materials

    There’s a quote saying that before you learn how to speak, you have to learn how to listen. Practicing listening skills can actually help more with improving your speaking skills than reading can. Thus, it makes sense to practice English listening skills at every possible opportunity.

    Here are a few ideas how you can practice listening skills:

    • Listen to podcasts – while you drive, walk, cook and at every other possible opportunity
    • Watch movies, TV series and online courses without any subtitles, English or otherwise
    • Mind the lyrics when you’re listening to music. Singing along can also help.
    • Watch interviews, TED talks, sometimes maybe even reality shows with native speakers

    When you’re listening to English materials, make sure you pay attention to word and sentence stresses, intonation and how the words are linked together into phrases or sentences.

    English pronunciation - Mouth Alphabet

    Practice your physical tongue skills

    There are many situations in life where the tongue plays an important role. For example, when it comes to food tasting. What else did you have in mind? ;) Proper pronunciation is no exception.

    As we said, proper pronunciation is a physical skill to some extent. You must know where to put your tongue to make the right sound (or phoneme). The science behind that is called phonetics. Interestingly there are 26 letters in the English alphabet, but 44 different sounds.

    Let me give you a few examples:

    • To properly pronounce “th” (as in “think”), you really have to put your tongue out
    • To make the proper “v” sound, you have to put your upper teeth lightly against the bottom lip
    • To make the “l” sound, your tongue must touch the back of your front teeth
    • To make the “r” sound, you must pull your tongue back and not touch the top

    The best way to practice proper physical pronunciation form is to exaggerate a little bit at the beginning. And you have to practice it daily.

    Practicing minimal pairs is a good exercise to better understand the different movements you have to make with the tongue. Minimal pairs are all the words that are different only by one sound and have two distinct meanings (it and eat for example).

    Phonemic Chart - 44 sounds

    The best pronunciation resources

    Last but not least, it’s worth it to follow the best pronunciation podcasts, videos and courses. If you are extremely motivated, buying a book with audio files might also be a good option. But when it comes to online resources, here are a few suggestions:

    Summary of the tips for improving English speaking skills and pronunciation

    Soon after I started writing this English blog and wanted to improve my writing skills fast, I wrote an article on how to improve your English skills. In the article, my main suggestions are:

    • Surround yourself with English: Your computer operating system, mobile phone, applications, TV, choose the English language wherever possible.
    • Read exclusively English texts: Subscribe to blogs, newsletters, buy English books etc. Mix light reading with heavier English literature that’s at the limit of your comprehension abilities.
    • Get speaking buddies: Agree with friends who are better in English than you are to speak and text exclusively in English. They might resist, but I’m sure you’ll find at least one speaking buddy.
    • Get dead serious: Buy yourself a book of grammar, vocabulary, idioms or any other part of the English language and start studying. Take a whole week off and instead of going on vacation, dedicate your free time to improving English.
    • Other recommendations: Join (online) courses or English debate clubs, travel to English‑speaking countries as many times as possible, listen to English audiobooks and podcasts, etc.

    Now that I’m focusing exclusively on improving my speaking skills and pronunciation, there are some additional recommendations that I decided to follow. I’m sure you’ll find several ideas how you can also improve you English speaking and pronunciation skills. I will …

    1. Start with international coaching sessions to actively speak English at least one to two hours every day.
    2. Record audio or video materials for my blog posts – reading them out loud or preparing shorter summaries. I will torture myself by listening to them and paying attention to the errors I make. And I’ll have to record materials for the online courses, of course.
    3. Prepare a list of standard phrases that can help me switch between languages faster or that I can use in pretty common everyday conversations. It’s about adding expressions to my vocabulary.
    4. Think exclusively in English.
    5. Shadow two selected speakers by modeling their pronunciation and style – comparing my recordings to theirs for the same text.
    6. Continue to work with my pronunciation coach to get additional guidance and immediate feedback on my pronunciation.
    7. Stop watching any videos with English subtitles and practice listening skills at every opportunity I get (podcasts, music etc.).
    8. Do all the tongue exercises, get to know 44 different English sounds, and practice word and sentence stresses and speaking fluently.

    If you also have a plan to improve your speaking and pronunciation skills, I wish you the best of luck. Well, you don’t need luck, just a lot of smart practice.

  • Top 10 ways to learn or improve any skill fast

    If it’s knowledge, it can be acquired. If it’s a skill, it can be learned or improved. Period. Even if you don’t have the talent or IQ of a genius, you can get dramatically better at almost anything you want in life.

    It might take a lot of willpower, persistence and deliberate practice, but you can do it. There’s nothing that can stop you, if you’re determined enough.

    A tremendous help when it comes to knowledge and skills acquisition is to do it the right way. You want to shorten the learning curve as much as possible.

    When you’re going for new knowledge, it’s good to know the best learning practices; and when it comes to skills, you want to know the best tips and tricks for learning and improving any skill fast. In this article, you will learn exactly that.

    Let’s start with the initial and hardest requirement for acquiring any new skill.

    Learn or improve any skill

    1. Get emotionally, financially and timewise invested in the skill

    For every single thing you want to achieve in life, first ask yourself why. Always start with why.

    Because only when you have a strong why (the emotional drive to improve yourself) can you conquer all the obstacles on the way to your goal. Skills are no exception to that. Imagine your emotional drive like an elephant that can’t be stopped when properly directed.

    There are many different “whys” that can drive you when it comes to acquiring new skills. Here are a few most common ones:

    • With every new skill, you double your odds of success.
    • Most skills bring better earning potential.
    • You make sure your talents don’t go to waste.
    • To keep you mind, body and soul sharp.
    • To enter a new industry.
    • To be more respected.
    • New skills bring more ways to create.
    • Life is much more fulfilling and interesting.
    • It’s fun to master many things, and so on.
    • Find your why first!

    Sometimes you can have a strong why, but somehow still lie on the couch and feel sorry for yourself. In practical terms, that means you have to direct your why into concrete action, not towards self-pity. The best thing you can do is to schedule (or timebox) regular weekly practice session. If it’s not on your calendar, you probably won’t do it.

    For many people, putting money where their mouth is helps a lot. I’m not one of them. I can buy an online course and forget about it if I’m not strategically and emotionally engaged.

    But for many people, buying something leads to solid commitment. If you’re one of them, enroll in that class, buy that online course or book, get a coach or make any other type of serious financial commitment.

    Everything that gets in the way of focused, deliberate practice is an enemy that needs to be crushed completely and destroyed forever.

    Talent is overrated

    2. Make sure a lack of talent isn’t your excuse

    Talent absolutely helps. It can help a lot. But you can’t be talented for everything. Even more importantly, talent is not an “all-or-nothing” game.

    If you don’t have the talent, it doesn’t mean you can’t get better at something. So make sure a lack of talent isn’t your excuse for not getting better at something or acquiring a completely new skillset.

    Let me give you a few examples from my life.

    • I’m very talented for everything analytical. My analytical skills are really strong. I can structure an article, a presentation or a mind map at the drop of a hat. Self-reflection is instinctive. Through conversation, I can understand people really quickly, and so on. Improving my analytical skills is a breeze. When it comes to applying analytical skills to new domains, I can learn it lightning fast. Business planning, life strategizing, process optimization, market analysis, stock analysis, book summaries, it all comes naturally to me.
    • I’m very untalented for grammar. In high school when it came to language subjects, I was extremely good at writing essays, expressing my opinions or extracting the main points out of literature. But I really sucked at grammar. I barely passed grammar exams. That didn’t stop me from writing and publishing more than 2,000 pages of text in my life. I’ve been very slowly improving my grammar throughout the years. I’m still struggling to understand many grammatical concepts, but that doesn’t stop me. My improvements are slow, but I’m not standing still. That’s what matters.
    • There is one thing I’m even more untalented for than grammar. That’s sports. Again, in primary school and high school I was the one who couldn’t catch the ball. So instead I skipped gym classes. But for the last three years or so, I’ve been heavily investing into my motor and sports skills. It often sucks that most people can do some exercises by default, while I’m struggling. But that never stopped me. I’m getting better, I’m catching up. Comparing myself three years ago and today … what a difference in mastering athletic moves.

    Thus, having double standards when it comes to talent makes sense. If you don’t have the talent for a skill you want to learn, think of talent as being overrated. Hard work beats talent every time. With all the hard work, you’ll develop more stamina, willpower and persistence. Lucky you.

    There is one big value added if you don’t have a skill. You understand how life looks like when you’re not talented for something and you know what it takes to learn it the hard way. People who are talented for something usually don’t have that unique perspective. By possessing a unique perspective, you can always write a book or become a teacher or a coach.

    How to find a mentor

    3. The best advice ever is to get a mentor or a coach

    I experimented with dozens of different tips, tricks and recommendations when it comes to learning and acquiring a new skill. There is one pattern that stands out. It’s the most important recommendation when it comes to learning a new skill – get a mentor or a coach.

    But don’t get just anybody. Get somebody who is really good at coaching – the best you can afford. Make sure that the person you choose for coaching acquired their skills the hard way. Even more importantly, analyze their track record, make sure that in the past the coach successfully taught several people the same thing you’re trying to achieve.

    • My personal trainer is the most talented guy for sports and training other people. He sees every detail when it comes to performing exercises the correct way. He knows which weak points needs to be abolished, he can properly direct my practice and improvement etc.
    • Each of my published articles in English is copyedited. But it’s not just copyedited. My proofreader writes me comments, warning me about the common mistakes that I make, expressions that can be improved, and so on.
    • I recently just started working with a pronunciation coach. In a few lessons, I learned more than in weeks of doing research by myself. What also happened to me was that I practiced things the wrong way, reinforcing wrong pronunciation. What a waste.

    These are just three examples from my life. I had many mentors before that taught me many different skills – from sales to innovative thinking.

    If you hire a professional coach, it can be quite expensive, but most often definitely worth the investment. At least if you know why you’re doing it and if you find the right coach. The only investments I never regret are investments in myself.

    There are many benefits when it comes to coaching:

    • You usually progress based on a carefully prepared plan that already worked for others.
    • They immediately see poor or wrong execution. Practicing the wrong way is the worst thing you can do.
    • A good coach makes sure you’re always at the edge of your abilities.
    • They know how to interleave practice correctly.
    • You get immediate feedback on your performance and improvement.
    • They can always push you in the right direction.
    • You can model the coach.

    Last but not least, having a coach is a solid financial and time investment. You strictly set the dates when you’ll have practicing sessions. You have to pay for those sessions. All that gives you additional motivation. It’s hard to say to your coach: “I will give up now”.

    Role models can also be a great help

    Besides getting a coach, finding a few role models can help a lot. You can model the success of people who have already achieved what you want to achieve, at least to a certain extent. Finding role models is not only excellent way for speeding up the skill acquisition process, it’s also very motivating.

    Thus, find a few people you admire and respect who have mastered the skill that you want to master – read interviews with them, watch videos of how they perform, examine their road to success, read about their (humble) beginnings, and so on.

    Skill improvement chart

    4. Have realistic expectations when learning a new skill

    There’s nothing that will stop you from acquiring a new skill faster than big disappointments. If you have unrealistic expectations of how fast you can learn a new skill, you’ll start falling behind your expectations sooner or later, and then you’ll quit. I had such unrealistic expectations for learning how to code.

    If you don’t manage expectations properly, the excitement of skill acquisition can quickly turn into bitterness. But what are realistic expectations? There is no one right answer. Even performance psychology researchers have different opinions.

    But we can definitely set some soft limits and hard facts about the investment needed for new skill acquisition:

    • You can master the pure basics of any skill in around 25 – 30 hours of deliberate practice. That’s enough to orientate yourself and execute a few basic moves.
    • To reach the global mastery level, approximately 10,000 hours of practice is the big investment needed. But the hours invested account only for around 10-20 % difference in performance. Only practice isn’t a sufficient condition for mastery.
    • There are many other factors that determine how far you’ll get. Talent, quality of practice, stability of the curriculum structure, possible shortcuts (like participating in reality shows) and other similar leverages have a big influence on how quickly you can become good at something. But you don’t need to be a global master, all you need to do is become so good that they can’t ignore you.
    • The time it will take you to become good enough at something is somewhere between 25 and 10,000 hours. By respecting the best learning practices, you can get much closer to 25 than 10,000.
    • The beginnings are slow and very frustrating with every skill. After initial frustrations, steep learning acceleration takes place. Then at some point, you reach a plateau and it’s harder to get better and better. When it comes to skill acquisition, getting through conscious incompetence and plateaus is the hardest. That’s where your willpower, stamina, determination and “whys” come into play.


    These are the facts you must consider when managing your expectations. The beginnings are always hard and frustrating. The first few hours of deliberate practice suck when you realize how incompetent you really are at that particular initial moment.

    But then the next 25 – 50 hours are extremely important. If you have the right plan in place and if you practice the right way, you can progress extremely fast.

    Make sure that 25 – 50 hours is the minimum commitment you’re prepared to invest in acquiring a new skill. If you do the math, that’s not that little. You must practice between 45 and 90 minutes, 3 times per week for 3 months. That’s the investment needed for mastering the basics.

    If you don’t know where and how to start or how to organize yourself, do the following: Combine the 30-day challenge and Hour of power concepts. For the next 30 days, commit to practicing 1 hour per day. If you’re not prepared to make such a commitment, forget about acquiring any new skill.

    Practical examples

    My personal experience is in line with that. With any new skill, making the first step and orientating myself is always extremely frustrating. We live in the post-information age and the body of knowledge for any skill is huge, complex and comprehensive. You must push yourself to focus on the best information and it takes time to separate the wheat from the chaff. It took me 6 months to orientate myself when it came to internet marketing.

    Then in 30 hours of deliberate practice, you can understand the basics. Photoshop, blogging, SEO, HTML, CSS, cognitive behavioral therapy, psychoanalysis, the lean startup, proper exercise form etc., it took me around 30 – 50 hours to understand the basics of these skills (or knowledge). With an online course, books, personal coach or YouTube tutorials, that was an investment needed for understanding the skill and properly executing the basics.

    But when it comes to mastering something, we can definitely talk in years. It took me 5 years to become a master of lean startup methodologies. It took me 5 years in venture capital to really understand what makes a good startup investment, term sheets, and so on.

    It goes the same for my friends who excel at specific skills. The best programmers have been writing lines of code since they were 10. The best athletes have been doing sports from when they could walk. Any kind of mastery requires years of hard work. There are exceptions, but they prove the rule.

    5. Set very specific goals for what you want to master

    For every new skill you want to master, you can find hundreds of books, online courses, coaches and other resources. That can be very intimidating. In a tyranny of choices and options, we tend to do nothing in the end. That’s something you want to avoid.

    One good way to avoid the tyranny of choice is to define what kind of a skill you want to acquire very narrowly and in detail; and then find the best resources for that. Additionally, defining practical value is a big plus. Make sure there is always a problem you’re trying to solve by acquiring a new skill. Let me give you a few examples.

    Vague skill acquisition goal Smart skill acquisition goal
    I want to learn how to program I want to learn HTML/CSS and basic JavaScript so I can build landing pages for my products.
    I want to learn one of the backend languages that is in high demand so I can easily get a job.
    I want to learn how to sell I want to be able to confidently and clearly present our company’s products to the target market, manage main objectives and close sales.
    I want to be better at sports I want to learn the proper form of the main complex fitness exercises, like squats, pull-ups and deadlifts.

    Once you master one narrow definition of a skill, you can of course add a new one. The only point of this approach is to not get overwhelmed. Besides having no emotional drive and unrealistic expectations, being overwhelmed and lost in the information overflow is the biggest danger that can stop you on your way to acquiring a new skill.

    6. Preliminary research and a skill acquisition plan

    Once you have a specific goal for which skill exactly you want to learn, it’s time for preliminary research and a skill acquisition plan. Preliminary research is about finding the best resources.

    For every skill, if you invest several hours into research, you can find the best books, tutorials, online courses, coaches (and interviews with them) and other resources. You can drown in resources, so make sure you go to the best knowledge and find the resources that fit your character and the narrow definition of what you want to master.

    Then you want to make a skill acquisition plan. Every skill usually consists of several sub-skills, which are the core building blocks for performing that skill.

    Thus, the first step is to parse every skill into small manageable sub-skills. Again, the main point of deconstructing a skill is to make learning manageable and to not feel overwhelmed. Deconstructing a skill can also help you identify and focus on the most important sub-skills.

    At this point, you should have everything necessary for preparing a skill acquisition plan:

    • A very exact definition of what you want to learn and why
    • An overview of what mastering a certain skill really means (a semantic map with a list of sub‑skills)
    • The best resources for learning a new skill or, even better, a coach
    • Scheduled weekly practice for several months with enough space between practicing sessions for the new skills to sink in
    • A few role models for additional motivation and for modelling them

    An example of a skill acquisition plan

    To get more practical, here is how a simple skill acquisition plan would look like:

    Category Description
    What? I want to master HTML/CSS to build my own landing pages for infoproducts and consulting services.
    Why? To present my products exactly as I want them, experiment with new landing page building blocks quickly (A/B testing) and make money blogging.
    Time commitment One month, three hours per day.
    Sub-skills
    • Coding editor (Sublime Text 3)
    • Hosting, FTP and uploading files
    • Git & Github
    • HTML Syntax and elements
    • HTML Page structure and grouping content
    • HTML Formatting page content
    • HTML Links, images, tables, links, forms
    • CSS Syntax
    • CSS Selectors
    • CSS Box Model
    • CSS Cascade and inheritance
    • CSS Formatting
    • CSS Transforms, transitions and animations
    • CSS Page layout, grid system and flexbox
    • Sass & Post CSS
    • Bootstrap
    • WordPress & Plugins
    Resources
    • Lynda Photoshop/HTML/CSS/JS courses
    • Head First HTML/CSS book
    • The missing manual HTML, CSS
    • W3School
    • WordPress plugins for landing pages (as an alternative)
    Coach
    • A friend who mastered these languages and builds landing pages.
    • Front-end development meetup group.
    Practical application I will build two landing pages, one for my coaching sessions and one for an online course.
    Models Examples of the best landing pages for infoproducts.
    Financial investment $100

    Supportive environment for skill acquisition

    7. Build yourself a supportive environment

    You can’t succeed in anything alone. You always need strong support from your environment. Acquiring a new skill is no exception.

    You need to organize your environment in a way that supports your training, and you need to surround yourself with people who believe in you and know how to motivate you when thoughts of giving up pop up in your head.

    The best approach when organizing your environment is to assume the worst about your self‑discipline. Assume that at some point you’ll be lazy, unmotivated and ignorant.

    At that point, you’ll need a supportive system that pushes you back on the right track. Here are a few examples of what you can do:

    • Set up a series of reminders for a timeboxed practice session (on your desktop, phone etc.).
    • Put books and other resources at the reach of your hand (desktop table, your bed etc.).
    • Change your desktop wallpaper into one big motivational reminder.
    • Rearrange your software icons and bookmarks to support skill learning (bookmark the resources, if you’re using an app for skill acquisition make it easily accessible etc.).
    • Join meetups, make new friends, make sure you’re surrounded by people who want to achieve the same thing as you or who have already achieved it.
    • Reward yourself with something small every time you perform the practice.
    • Get a client or commit to a project at your job, so you will have a deadline to really master the skill. But make sure you have realistic expectations. Always under promise and over deliver.

    Don’t rely solely on self-discipline. Build yourself a supportive environment. That’s really important, it’s half of the success equation.

    Feedback system

    8. Immediate implementation and feedback system

    You can read 100 books about swimming and it can’t compare to jumping into water once.

    You absolutely want to do research, prepare a learning plan and understand the skillset from a logical perspective, but it’s even more important that you simultaneously put the skill into practice as soon as possible. That’s how you learn the most. A practical project will also help you not get stuck in the analysis-paralysis.

    The good news is that most skills are about solving practical problems. That also means that most skills are in high demand. Consequently, it’s really easy to join different projects and slowly brush up on your skills with practical work. The simple rule is to practice your skills wherever possible.

    If you want to improve your writing skills, open a blog and start writing, if you want to learn web design, design a blog, if you want to learn how to sell, open a lemonade stand.

    Working on practical projects has another additional benefit. You get immediate feedback on your work and new ideas on how to improve. You can always engage experts and peers to show you how to do things better and give you additional recommendations.

    As additional help, you can get valuable feedback in other ways:

    • Record yourself
    • Observe yourself in the mirror
    • Benchmark your performance to the performance of your models
    • Crowdsource improvement ideas, and so on

    When it comes to skill acquisition, make sure you have a really good feedback system.

    Best learning practices - skills

    9. Respect the best learning practices

    When it comes to acquiring a new skill, the same rules apply as they do for acquiring new knowledge. The problem is that the best learning practices are most often counterintuitive.

    We assume that crammed learning sessions where we repeat the same thing over and over again and practice in the same way work best. But that’s not true. That kind of an approach is the least effective.

    In summary, the best learning practices are:

    • Chunking strategy: Break down the learning material into manageable chunks (sub-skills in this case).
    • Focused attention: Have zero distractions when you’re learning something new and be completely focused. Your working memory must be focused on learning.
    • Take breaks: After a session of 45 – 60 minutes, take a small break to restore your attention.
    • Spaced repetition: It’s better to practice for 1 hour 5 times than for 5 hours 1 time.
    • Deliberate practice: Do focused drills and exercises until you get better at a particular chunk.
    • Interleaved practice: Use different concepts, approaches and techniques in the same learning session, mix your practice – speed up, slow down learning, take tests, practice different things, and so on.
    • Get out of your comfort zone: Don’t practice the thing you already mastered, practice things that are a little bit out of your comfort zone. Always be at the edge of your abilities.
    • The point where you master a chunk: You master something when practice turns to boredom. Practice a chunk until you get bored.
    • Rest: If you want to improve, you need to get enough sleep and you must rest between the practicing sessions. There is no improvement without rest. When acquiring knowledge or skills, you’re making changes to your brain. That requires time and rest.
    Four stages of learning a new skill
    Noel Burch – Four stages for learning any new skill, graphics GWS Media

    Four stages of the learning process and the dip

    Another very useful thing to know when it comes to learning are the four stages of the learning process. The first stage is unconscious competence, where you don’t even know what you’re doing wrong. That’s the calm before the storm, where you can have unrealistic expectations and self‑assessment.

    Then comes conscious incompetence and big frustrations with it. It’s the hardest stage that you have to persist through, as we’ve talked about. The next level is conscious competence. At this stage, you are aware of your mastery level, you know what you’re doing well but you also know how you can improve.

    The last stage is unconscious competence. You achieve this final stage when you can perform a skill without thinking. That’s where the mastery level resides.

    Seth Godin - The dip

    When you enter the conscious incompetence you have to face the dip. There are five main reasons why you might quit when you find yourself deep in the dip:

    1. You run out of time
    2. You run out of money
    3. You get scared
    4. You’re not serious about it
    5. You lose interest

    Make sure that doesn’t happen to you.

    10. List the skills you want to master and rank them properly

    Sit down, take a piece of paper, and list all the skills you would currently like to master. You can probably easily list 10 – 15 skills. Logically, you can’t master all of them at once. At best, you can learn 2 – 3 skills simultaneously, one or two at your job and one or two in your free time.Which skills to pursue first

    So, the final question is how to prioritize the skills you want to master. There are several criteria that can help you do that:

    • Point of the skill: Firstly, there are several categories that skills can fall into. The point of acquiring a new skill can be to increase your earning potential, have a hobby (something you like but won’t be paid for) or improve your overall quality of life (relationship skills, fitness etc.).
    • Supply and demand: When it comes to the skills’ market value, you want to develop skills that are in high demand and low supply. These are the skills that will dramatically increase your earning potential. Hobbies, on the other hand, usually have zero market value.
    • Talent: Your talents must not go to waste. That’s a lesson that was already written in the Bible. Categorize skills into those for which you’re talented, neutral and untalented.
    • Your goals and yearly focus: Your skills acquisition plan must be part of the long-term goals you’re trying to achieve. For example, changing a job or improving your health can be connected to specific skill acquisition.
    • Current opportunities: Assess the current opportunities you have in your environment. Can the company you work for pay for your skill acquisition? Do you have a friend or a spouse that mastered something and they are prepared to coach you? Can you easily join a paid project?
    • Resources you have: As we’ve seen, every skill acquisition requires emotional, financial and time commitment. Skills that are harder to acquire demand more resources. Realistically assess what kind of skill acquisition you can currently afford.
    • Life situation: Sometimes life forces you into a situation where you must acquire new skills. An injury, job loss, breakups, promotions, migrations, these are all situations that usually require and push you into developing new skills. When it happens, accept that, don’t resist, and improve yourself.

    Build an array of skills you want to acquire and all the mentioned criteria. Then rank the skills from the best ones to acquire at the moment to the least attractive ones. After that, it’s time to put everything you learned about skill acquisition into practice.

    From unqualified to qualified

    In summary – the best tips, tricks and recommendations to learn or improve any skill fast

    In summary, the best tips, tricks and recommendations for learning any new skill are:

    1. Find a strong emotional reason why you want to learn a new skill.
    2. Timebox regular practice sessions in your calendar and don’t miss them no matter what. Start with a 30-day challenge where you practice a skill one hour every day for a month.
    3. Have double standards when it comes to skill acquisition. When you’re not really talented for something, see talent as overrated.
    4. Have realistic expectations. Beginnings always suck big time and the hardest thing to do is to pass the conscious incompetence stage. But you can master the basics of every skill if you invest around 20 – 50 hours. Then things get a lot easier, until you reach a plateau.
    5. If possible get a mentor or a coach or at least find a few role models you can model and look up to.
    6. Very narrowly define what you want to master, parse the skill into small manageable chunks (sub-skills), prepare a learning plan for yourself, and go straight to the best resources.
    7. Practice at the edge of your abilities. Do spaced repetition. Focus your working memory (or attention) with deliberate practice with zero distractions. Interleave practice. Rest.
    8. Build yourself a strong supportive environment (people, habit triggers), apply for practical projects and have many feedback loops. With feedback loops, you will make sure you’re not reinforcing wrong execution.
    9. Develop highly valuable skills that are in high demand but short supply. Make sure none of your talents go to waste.
    10. Finally, enjoy the learning process!

  • Learn how to model successful people to accelerate your own success

    I was a fashion model for Calvin Klein for more than 10 years. In those 10 years, the most important things about modeling that I learned was … Stop there, I’m just kidding.

    I don’t have the looks to be a model and I certainly have zero advice or experience on how to become a successful fashion model. Today, we’re going to talk about a different kind of modeling.

    Modeling is one of neuro-linguistic programming techniques designed to recreate excellence that only the best people reach. With modeling, you want to duplicate extraordinary results of high achievers by mirroring their conscious and unconscious behavior.

    The main principle and idea behind modeling is that if you overtake the behaviors, strategies, beliefs, language (words, phrases, questions), emotional states and other traits of successful people, you will also become more successful.

    By having access to someone who achieved exactly what you want to achieve, you could simply ask him or her: “Teach me how to do that!”.

    The second best thing you can do, if somebody isn’t prepared to coach you in person, is to study them through all the public materials available. The latter is not as effective as full in-person access to the exemplar (the person you want to model), but indirect modeling can still prove to be valuable.

    If we take a step back and go to the definition, a model is a simplified description of a complex entity or process – in our case, a model is a simplified version of the whole system and process that lead the person (exemplar) to the desired outcome.

    A psychological model carefully describes a method, form, ways of doing, customs and styles. It kind of gives you a step-by-step formula to replicate the success as much as possible.

    Nevertheless, every psychological model is still a very simplified version of a real-life success scenario, with many limitations. In modeling, we tend to focus only on the main variables that lead to success. We try to slice the success into small chunks, identify the biggest contributors to the success, and build them into a replicable model.

    In the end, modeling is successful when you manage to achieve more or less the same behavioral outcome as the person you are modeling. You achieve that by mirroring the main “psychological personality chunks” or contributors to the success.

    How to model successful people

    In this article, you will learn all these things, like:

    • The mindset you need to successfully apply modeling
    • The detailed process of how to use modeling in everyday life
    • The limitations of modeling
    • The questions that can help you build a successful psychological model
    • The most practical approach to modeling
    • Practical examples of how to use modeling in your personal life

    By the way, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) modeling is a very complex and detailed subject, way beyond the scope of this article. If you are interested in NLP modeling in particular, I suggest you read the book Modeling with NLP written by Robert Dilts.

    I will rather describe a simplified version of modeling that you can quickly and practically use in everyday life. I will also give many examples on how I use modeling to achieve my goals faster.

    I own me, and therefore, I can engineer me. – Virginia Satir

    Modeling others comes naturally to human beings

    A child doesn’t pay as much attention to what their parents say or command as s/he does to what they do. A very big part of a child’s personality development is modeling their role models – they want to be like them; in the early age, that means especially their parents and other caretakers.

    That’s why we say that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

    A little bit out of the context, but an extremely useful exercise when it comes to choosing a spouse to start a family with is the following: ask yourself if you want your child to be the same as your spouse (especially the child of the same gender)?

    If the answer is yes, you clearly respect the personality traits your spouse possesses. If the answer is no or you don’t have a clear opinion, you should probably reconsider if you are with the right person.

    You might tell a child to clean their room a thousand times, but if your room is messy, there’s a high probability that the child’s room will also be messy.

    Now let’s get back to modeling. With age, the interest to model other successful people and have role models declines in most people, as does the interest to learn new things.

    There are many reasons for that, from ego defense to a lack of curiosity, fixed mindset, intellectual sublimity, general laziness, and so on. Much like people stop reading books, exploring the world and acquiring new competences, so they stop mirroring their role models.

    But here’s the trick. Even if you stop looking up to your role models, you’re still influenced by the people who surround you. That’s why you can hear over and over again that you are the average of the 5 people you spend most time with.

    Whether you want to or not, you are overtaking the mindset, behavior, values, beliefs and actions of people you spend the most time with. You are unconsciously modeling them, because no matter age you never stop modeling others. Slowly, you overtake other’s people attitudes and behaviors.

    You maybe didn’t have a choice about who to model when you were a child. But you can absolutely choose who your role models and people who surround you will be in your adult age.

    People who surround you are the people that you will sooner or later consciously or subconsciously model. Thus, make sure you use your modeling capabilities to your advantage. Carefully choose with whom you spend time with.

    Try to be positive among 10 grumblers. It’s impossible, and sooner or later you also start to whine, bitch and complain.

    Modeling success

    Practical use of modeling in everyday life

    If you’re going to model anyway, make sure you are modeling the right kind of people. Below are a few very practical ideas for how to use modeling to your advantage, from the simplest forms of modeling to the most complex ones:

    1. Read biographies of successful people to get inspired when you feel down.
    2. Never put your ego in front of learning something new, there is always something to learn or model from other people. Find that one thing in which the person is better than you are.
    3. Spend time with people who have personality traits and skills you want to develop. Make sure you are never the smartest person in the room. You will slowly assimilate their characteristics. And you will learn the most when you spend time with smart people.
    4. Study people you admire. Read their biographies, interviews and other articles. Read and watch everything that exists about them. Ask yourself: what would [an extremely successful person] do in the same situation as you are facing?
    5. Find a person who has achieved exactly the same thing as you want to achieve. Ask them to coach you and based on regular interactions, build yourself a model of how you can apply their behavior in your life to become more successful. That is real modeling.
    6. Model your previous successful self. There are times when you’re feeling up and there are times when you’re feeling desperate. Just thinking about your thoughts, beliefs, actions and decisions when you were feeling assertive and ambitious can motivate you to take action.

    I use all six ways of modeling in my personal life. Besides reading books and regularly experimenting with new things in my life, modeling is one of the fastest ways how I learn about life and develop new skills. Let me give you a few examples:

    Practical examples
    1. I regularly read biographies and watch documentaries about successful people I admire. From Siddhartha Gautama, Alexander the Great, Marcus Aurelius to Sigmund Freud, Richard Branson, Elon Musk and others. It always greatly motivates and inspires me.
    2. Whoever I meet, I usually ask them many different questions to understand them and learn from them. I really get interested in a person’s life – how they think, experience reality, where they blossom and what are their struggles. And people love to talk about these things.
    3. I always surrounded myself with people who are more successful than I am. With investors, scholars, entrepreneurs, scientists, and so on. There are so many clubs, meetups, communities, associations and co-working places you can join and meet people smarter than you.
    4. At the moment, I am studying the most successful personal development bloggers that I like the most – Tim Urban, Tim Ferris, Tai Lopez, Ramit Sethi, Mark Manson, James Clear, James Altucher, Steve Pavlina, Barrie Davenport, Derek Sivers, Cal Newport and Steve Scott. I read their blogs and books, watch or listen to interviews with them, and want to learn everything about their strategy, mindset, skills and daily habits. I already see some patterns in their success (every one of them innovated a distribution channel, they all have a few simple ideas that they repeat over and over again, and so on).
    5. I always learned the most with a personal coach, either a hired one or people who were willing to be my mentor because we worked together. I learned the most and the fastest when I spent several hours over the course of a year with people who mastered the skills or possessed the knowledge that I wanted to learn. From selling skills to athletic moves, in-person coaching or real modeling is how I learned the most.
    6. Last but not least, when I’m feeling down or my spirits are dampened for whatever reason, I vividly visualize a particular situation in my past when I was highly motivated, determined, had a clear goal that I assertively pursued and felt mentally strong. I transfer the past positive feelings and thoughts into the moment when I’m feeling down and it always helps motivate my spirit.

    No matter how smart we are, on the basic level we are still monkeys. Monkey see, monkey do. Thus, make sure you choose your role models and people you spend time with very carefully.

    You are modeling people around you, whether you want to or not, even in your adult years. Make sure modeling is working to your advantage and accelerates your personal growth.

    Your role models play a huge role in how you pick your vocation and make other important decisions in life. If someone looks like you, has had a similar upbringing, belongs to the same religion order, has attended a similar school, and is making a good living, it naturally has a huge impact when you’re trying to decide your calling in life. [Thus, ask yourself:] Where will your life lead you if you follow the path laid out by your parents, peers and other role models? – Mohnish Pabrai, Dhnadho Investor

    Limitations of modeling and why modeling is not copy-pasting

    You can absolutely progress faster in life with the use of modeling, but there are still big limitations. First of all, the less frequently you personally interact with an exemplar, the harder it is to build a model that you can replicate in your own life.

    You would get the best modeling results if you were able to do a “shadow experience” with an exemplar. That means you would spend hours observing them in action every day.

    In-person modeling is most effective because it gives you the opportunity to model the same way you did as a child. By observing, you get a chance to mirror and match the behavior of the other person – their conscious and unconscious parts.

    You don’t try to merely understand and rationalize what the exemplar is doing, you employ your unconscious resources to exactly mimic the behavioral patterns.

    Here is the hierarchy of the information quality you can gather when it comes to modeling:

    • Consistent live observation or shadow experience
    • Watching video or audio material
    • Interviews in person
    • Role-playing
    • Questionnaires
    • Reading biographies, articles and written interviews

    Secondly, no success can be completely replicated. You have your own set of talents, your environment is different and there are always “blind spots” – things that contributed to the success that neither the exemplar nor the modeler know about.

    If success were that easily replicated, everybody would be successful. That means you have to always account for an individual’s specifics in every model and must keep realistic expectations about the extent to which the success can be modeled. Real modeling takes a lot of hard work.

    Last but not least, modeling does not equal copy-pasting other people’s personalities. You don’t want to lose yourself by trying to be someone else.

    That might not be a problem when you try to model skills and habits, but it can present a huge challenge when it comes to beliefs, values and personality traits. You can’t just change your personality like underwear.

    But there are two core things you can do that will protect your true self:

    1. You can find a healthy intersection between you and the exemplar you’re modeling. If there are parts of the exemplar’s character that don’t fit your ideal self, there is no point in modeling them.
    2. You can only temporarily take over different beliefs, values and personality traits to find a balance that works better for you. For example, if you are always giving yourself away to other people and consequently they take advantage of you, you might temporarily model someone who gives nothing, and then in the following step find the right balance between giving and taking.
    Your current self Your ideal self
    Modeling >>

    You must use common sense when it comes to modeling. It’s not a miraculous solution, it has many limitations, but it can absolutely help you progress faster in life towards your ideal-self. Now let’s move to a more practical level of how to use modeling in everyday life.

    Different stages of modeling successful people

    These are four very simple and logical steps when it comes to modeling:

    1. Choosing a person to model – In the first step, you must find a person worth modeling. It must be someone you respect, who already possesses a skill or personality trait that you want to acquire. The best scenario is if you have access to spend a lot of time with the person. You can also choose several people to model (that’s often an even better approach).
    2. Observing and mirroring – When you have your model chosen, the analytical part comes into play. It is a combination of mirroring exactly what a person does (unconscious mirroring) and employing questions that can accelerate learning (logical modeling). You want to understand in detail what the person regularly does, how they do it and why they do it.
    3. Finding similarities and differences – By mirroring, spending time with people and asking questions, you want to find which behavioral differences are present. You want to list all the small personality chunks (traits, behaviors etc.) and understand how they contribute to success.
    4. Designing a model – In the last step, you try to build a model that can be replicated. The model is like a manual that can be presented to other people so they can improve their skills. It describes all the important pieces together with the sequence, system and process.

    Modeling personality traits

    Things you must pay attention to when modeling other people

    In a way, we could call modeling reverse-engineering psychology. The idea is to find as many factors as possible that lead to a specific successful outcome in someone’s life, and rank their influence. From the macro perspective, you are interested in three different types of information when you are modeling:

    1. External behavior – habits, responses, words, phrases, skills, competence etc.
    2. Internal states and processes – values, beliefs, emotions etc.
    3. Environment – social circles, trends, support etc.

    Here’s the big catch. When you are listing elements, you must pay attention to those that the person you’re modeling is aware of as well as those they aren’t aware of. Many times, people have no clue why they are really successful. They just are.

    It’s because they possess a competence or a personality trait they aren’t even aware of. It’s called an unconscious skill and competence.

    Very similarly, we know universal success principles and situation-specific success contributors. Many people are successful merely because they were lucky. There was no skill involved. You probably wouldn’t try modeling a lottery winner.

    Thus, you must make sure you’re not fooled by random success factors, like being born in the right family, being in the right industry by accident, or being one of the first employees in a high-growth company.

    These factors don’t mean that there is nothing to model per se, you just have to make sure there are really strong personality traits or skills present that contributed to the success and outcome that you’re trying to model.

    If we go back to the three macro factors – external behavior, internal states and processes, and environment – you are interested in questions that help identify cause (activity) and effect (outcome):

    • What exactly do they do? – A precise description of an activity that leads to the desired result.
    • How do they do it? – Detailed description of how they perform an activity.
    • When and where do they do it? – What triggers the behavior and how often.
    • Why do they do it? – What is the motivation behind their actions.
    • What kind of support do they have? – How the environment influences their actions and outcomes.

    Personality chunks and dimensions

    We can parse the question further into different personality dimensions. Only understanding all these dimensions (“personality chunks”) really well gives you all the necessity input to build yourselves a viable model:

    1. Purpose and intention – That’s the big question why, consisting of motives, desires and wants.
    2. Identity – How the person sees themselves.
    3. Outcomes – What are their ideas about goals, what exactly do they tend to achieve.
    4. Strategies – What does the person do to achieve a particular outcome, what procedure and methods do they follow.
    5. Beliefs – The main ideas about life that they agree with and validate. Beliefs are philosophies and attitudes that lead to a specific heuristic and cognitive strategy.
    6. Values – All the ideas that are important to the person, things they like or tend to avoid; values expose how they decide to invest their resources, and they’re tied to emotional aspects of life.
    7. Representations, submodalities and meta-programs – How the elements of the environment are identified, interpreted and reacted to.
    8. Understandings – All the mental support of the inner world (subjective interpretations of reality). Personal interpretations of how the world works, supporting individual beliefs, values and representations. Understandings are realizations about what kind of actions will lead to a specific outcome.
    9. Heuristic – How evaluations and judgements are made in problem solving.
    10. Attention – What the person focuses their limited mental resources on and what do they think most of the time.
    11. Cognitive strategy – Proactive response to the environment based on representations; mental syntax and sequence involved in performing a specific action or behavior.
    12. Behaviors and habits – Behaviors that are repeatedly performed, usually based on triggers.
    13. Emotional states – What is the dominant emotional state when the person performs specific activity or behavior.
    14. Conscious and unconscious knowledge and skills – What kind of competences are present that enable successful execution of an activity. They can be simple or complex behavioral, cognitive or linguistic skills.
    15. Physical (somatic) skills and physiology – Particularly body (or motor) skills and what kind of a connection between the mind and the body (posture, muscle tones, balance etc.) is present when the activity is executed.
    16. Language, communication style and non-linguistic symbols – What are the dominant words, phrases and questions used and other non-verbal cues.
    17. Peer group and environment – What kind of people surround the exemplar most frequently, what kind of support do they have, what are the industry trends and other environmental variables.
    18. How exactly everything ties together – Prioritizing elements that contribute to the success.

    Perspectives and questions that can help you accelerate the modeling process

    Before we go to specific questions, there is one more useful trick that can help you build the model you want to replicate. In the process of modeling, you can play with four different perspectives:

    • 1st person perspective – Analyzing how you’re currently performing an action, how it’s different from the exemplar and experimenting on your own with the exemplar’s behavior.
    • 2nd person perspective – Empathically putting yourself in the exemplar’s shoes and trying to understand completely why they do things as they do, together with mimicking their thoughts, feelings, actions and other personality characteristics.
    • 3rd person perspective – Observing at a distance as an uninvolved witness how the modeled person is behaving and what are their actions. Acting like a scientist that tries to analyze a specific person and situation.
    • 4th person perspective – Trying to understand a situation from the perspective of the whole system, from the environment to the individuals involved.

    It’s extremely important that you first mirror the person’s behavior and only then try to logically parse and understand it. That will give you the greatest insight and benchmark with your current situation. Then you can start logically building the model while playing with different perspectives.

    Questions to ask successful people worth modeling

    You can accelerate your learning and model building with the right questions. Below are examples of the questions to use when you’re modeling successful people – some questions are meant for asking the exemplar directly, others you can answer by yourself with observation:

    Purpose, identity, beliefs and values

    • How do you see yourself? What do you believe about yourself when you perform a specific action?
    • What is driving you to do this, what is your mission, vision or why do you do it?
    • What do you believe about yourself, the world and your life circumstances?
    • What are your beliefs that support your doing when it comes to that particular goal you’re trying to achieve?
    • How do you express your beliefs on a daily level – through thoughts, words, actions etc.?
    • What kind of expectations do you have towards yourself and others?
    • What kind of standards do you follow? Which standards must be met no matter what?
    • What rules do you tend to live by and why are these rules important to you?
    • How would you describe the hierarchy of your values? How do you satisfy these values?
    • How do you make decisions when you have to choose between two things in your schedule?
    • How do you respond when things don’t go as you planned?
    • What kind of gains you tend to enjoy with achieving the goal and what kind of pain are you trying to avoid?
    • What do you focus on for most of your day?
    • How do you make decisions and what criteria do you use when making decisions?

    Habits and patterns

    • What patterns do you easily recognize and why are these patterns important to you?
    • What are the dominant thoughts you repeatedly have? What do you think about most of the time?
    • What kind of emotions do you experience on a daily basis? Why are these emotions important to you?
    • What do you do when things go wrong or when you experience severe negative emotions?
    • Which are your dominant personality traits and what strengths do you have?
    • What kind of habits do you follow on a daily basis? What kind of activities do you not do at all?

    Competences – skills and knowledge

    • What kind of skills have you mastered and how are these skills helping you in life?
    • What skill helped you the most in achieving that particular outcome?
    • How and when did you acquire this skill or knowledge?
    • How often do you practice this particular skill? What is your learning style?
    • If you were going to teach me to do it, how should I approach it? What would you ask me to do?
    • What do you pay most attention to when you’re performing that specific skill?
    • How do you know you’re really good at these things?
    • How do you feel when you perform that specific action? What kind of an emotional and physical state are you in?
    • What kind of a situation happened in your life that led to you being good at this particular skill?

    Environment

    • In which places do you spend the most of your time? With which people?
    • Can you describe the main characteristics of your environment – industry, market trends, target markets, people that surround you etc.? Did you consciously choose them?
    • What kind of an infostructure do you have – what do you read, watch, which apps do you use?
    • How do you acquire the knowledge and information that you need in order to be successful?
    • Which are the main social groups in your opinion, where and how do you network?
    • Do you have any role models that you tend to model?

    Language and non-verbal behavior

    • What were the main words used in the conversation with the exemplar?
    • What is their dominant body language, what part of their physiology stands out?
    • How do they use body language when interacting with other people?
    • How do they tend to speak to themselves and others? Which words do they mainly use?

    Trust me, if you have answers to these 40+ questions, you understand the person extremely well and you have all the input needed to build a model to replicate their success. These questions are also very useful when it comes to practicing empathy or developing new perspectives. Last but not least, these questions can also help you better understand yourself.

    Flexibility comes from having multiple choices; wisdom comes from having multiple perspectives. – Robert Dilts

    NLP Modeling

    The final stage of modeling – implementation of the model in your own life

    We have come to the final stage of modeling. Implementing everything that you’ve learned about the chosen model in your own life.

    The very good news is that you have the ability to think about your thinking. You can perform self-reflection and find the differences between your strategies, behaviors and thoughts and those of the people who are more successful, those you want to model.

    Before implementing anything, you must first analyze all the gathered data:

    1. How exactly did you feel when you mirrored the model – what felt right and what felt wrong?
    2. Which things did you notice when you spent time with your exemplar?
    3. List of all “personality chunks” you gathered through observations and asking questions
    4. List of all other insights you have gathered by analyzing interviews, videos etc.
    5. Analysis of all other data that you managed to gather (interviewing other people etc.)

    Based on the data, you should build a model – a prioritized “personality chunk” list that explains all the main external behaviors, internal processes and environmental variables that led to a specific outcome.

    In the next step, you can analyze how the model differentiates from your particular situation as well as which differences are aligned with your ideal self and which aren’t. That should help you make a solid decision about which behavior you will continue to mirror, and which “personality chunks” are not part of your authentic self.

    NLP offers many tools that can help you permanently implement the “personality chunks” that you intend to keep in your life and that represent a way of personal improvement – from anchoring and mental rehearsal to game playing and visualization.

    But more about that in one of the next articles. Until then, find a person worth modeling and parse their personality down to the smallest chunk. Play with mirroring their activity and ask them thousands of questions that will help you better understand their motives, behaviors, languages and other personality traits. It’s a very fun exercise to do.

  • Different types of intelligence and why your IQ is not fixed

    One of the greatest assets you can have in today’s post-information society is being smart.

    Intelligence is an important resource that can bring you status, respect, academic and career advancements, better earning potential, new ways to create and contribute to the world and let’s not forget the capacity to forge better strategies and make smarter decisions.

    Being intelligent doesn’t guarantee these things and it’s sometimes not even a mandatory factor, but it absolutely does help.

    In general, intelligence refers to the ability to learn new things quickly, solve logical problems, think abstractly, comprehend new ideas, learn from experience, and even to the overall mental adaptability to new situations.

    Components of intelligence are at least the following:

    • Curiosity – the desire to know various phenomena
    • Depth of mind – the ability to separate the important from the secondary
    • Flexibility and mobility of mind – the ability to use experience widely in different situations
    • Logicality of thinking – the ability to follow a strict sequence of reasoning
    • Conclusiveness of thinking – the ability to use facts, regularities and correct judgment
    • Criticality of thinking – the ability to discard incorrect judgements
    • Breadth of thinking – the ability to comprehend the whole coverage of intellectual activity

    Since intelligence is an extremely important asset, there is always one question in the forefront – is intelligence inherited and fixed, or can it somehow be improved with the right resources and environment, even when you’re older? As we will see, there is no simple answer to that, and the truth probably lies somewhere in between.

    The most popular test of intelligence is the IQ test, which measures the ability to solve problems, reason logically and use the vocabulary. IQ tests are strongly connected to the g factor, which measures general intelligence. And the g factor is hard to improve, especially when tests are focused on fluid intelligence. But that’s only one part of the story.

    Your genes and early development did have a huge influence on your general intelligence development that’s hard to improve in the adult age. At most it can be fine-tuned. But that doesn’t mean you are completely limited at becoming smarter. There are many ways you can maximize your intellectual potential.

    Your IQ is not fixed

    Is IQ really fixed or can you become smarter somehow?

    Let’s go straight to the main question – is IQ fixed or not? The answer is unfortunately not very straightforward, but more like yes and no. Studies show that people who are at the top of intelligence tests when young, stay at the top in their adult and senior age. But … (you see, there is a but).

    Overall, people show a higher IQ with age. That means, your IQ improves (linearly) with age when you learn new things and improve your skills. It can also start to decline fast in the old age. Thus, your IQ is a relative measure that represents your standing among your peers at a certain age.

    You absolutely have some influence on how big your improvement will be. If you take good care of your brain, deliberately practice and learn a lot, you might progress faster than average. And if you don’t take care of your smarts at all, you might decline much faster than average.

    The test showed that there are outliers when it comes to IQ tests. Much like some people lost their cognitive abilities (due to a mental illness, for example), so did a few people show greater improvement than average.

    Changes in intelligence can be very big, especially at a young age and in adolescence when brain’s plasticity is not yet reduced. That’s why babies can learn languages faster than adults.

    On the other hand, regular learning and brain training can prevent cognitive decline in the old age. And you can at least fine-tune biological intelligence that is limited by the neural efficiency of your brains.

    What we do know for sure when it comes to intelligence is the following:

    1. At a young age (up to the age of 16) the environment has a great influence on the development of intelligence. IQ can be increased or decreased during childhood. What happens during pregnancy and afterwards (diet, stress) also has a great influence on child’s intellectual development.
    2. If you practice a particular intellectual skill you get better at that skill, even if your overall intelligence doesn’t improve. In the same way, you can develop crystalized intelligence (knowledge) faster than your peers at any point in your life if you devote yourself to regular learning.
    3. Most people don’t reach their intellectual potential. That means they don’t use all the intellectual capacity they possess. Curiosity, good learning skills, applying knowledge in new situations, developing new competences, seeking complex intellectual environments, all that leads to reaching intellectual potential.
    4. The fluid intelligence and working memory can be improved at least in the short term with different brain games, exercises and learning. Even in the adult age you can develop new brain synapses, but it’s much harder than at a young age. In the old age, intellectual effort and different brain games can prevent cognitive decline.
    5. People with the growth mindset don’t limit themselves with a fixed IQ, but rather accept the fact that they can grow and improve in any skill. With that attitude, they often overcome the limits of average general intelligence and become more successful and even smarter.
    6. Children without an extremely high IQ that are exposed to certain knowledge domains (and practice that domain regularly from a young age on, for about “10,000 hours”) in combination with encouraged creativity can become geniuses.

    Here is the most important fact – we do know for sure that most people don’t reach their intellectual potential.

    What an individual can achieve with a combination of practice, hard work, assets and savviness, is completely different from what most people do achieve. Most people prefer to settle in a certain intellectual standing backed by the fixed mindset and stay in that intellectual comfort zone for the rest of their lives.

    That kind of thinking absolutely leads to cognitive decline and loss of IQ points (they don’t catch up with their peers), and especially slow development of crystalized intelligence. Thus, a much better question rather than if the IQ is fixed or not is: how can you make sure that you employ all of your brain potential and maximize your smarts?

    If you are mentally active, your cognitive abilities improve, and if you neglect your smarts, you are in cognitive decline. You lose what you don’t use.

    How improving your intelligence might work

    Taking care of your health and body is a very good analogy for becoming smarter. How you look is very much determined by your genes and early development. Like with intelligence, the inheritance and early environmental factor is very strong.

    Nevertheless, there is a big difference between maximizing your looks with a good diet, regular exercise and taking good care of yourself (grooming, outfit etc.) and being careless about your body and appearance and becoming slovenly. I’m sure you saw many before and after photos, where people decided to take better care of their body and health. It’s like looking at a completely different person.

    No fat and full face with double chin, better skin, more charming energies and better self-confidence, a whole new person. The beauty of an individual is still somehow fixed, but taking good care of yourself does make a huge difference.

    It’s the same with intelligence. There are definitely biological limits you can’t cross. But the difference between maximizing your intelligence and neglecting your potential can be colossal; like on those before and after photos.

    The problem in both cases (becoming fit or maximizing intellectual potential) is that it takes a lot of hard work and dedication. There must be a growth mindset present backed by persistence and regular deliberate practice.

    Brain power

    If you want to improve your smarts, here are the things you can do:

    • The brain manual: The first thing you can do is to know how your brains work and treat them according to what works best proved by science. From improving your learning style to regularly developing creative and analytical skills, maintaining your brain cells with proper brain diet and regular physical exercise.
    • Optimizing working memory: A very important part of the brain’s operational manual is understanding how the working memory works. Smarter people usually have a greater working memory capacity or know how to use it better. There are several things you can do to improve your working memory – from learning to manage negative thoughts to training your attention span and practicing a dual n-back game.
    • Crystalized intelligence: If you practice a particular skill (or knowledge domain), your overall intelligence might not improve, but you definitely become better at that particular skill. But that’s the only thing that really matters. You can improve the intellectual skills that you can use in everyday life. In the end, nobody will ask you what your IQ score is, but what kind of skills do you possess.
    • A smart attitude: You can always develop the right attitude to maximize your intellectual potential. Curiosity, growth mindset, seeking complex environments, practicing knowledge transference, applying knowledge in new situations, learning new languages, these are all the things that help you achieve your intellectual potential and prevent cognitive decline.

    As you can see, there absolutely are ways to improve your smarts. If you practice certain types of intellectual tasks, you become better at those tasks. Similarly, when you learn something new, it takes up less of your working memory when recalled, so you can manipulate more information at the same time. And if you know how to learn properly, you can learn more things in a shorter time.

    Good genes and general intelligence might be given. But that shouldn’t be your excuse. Richard Feynman, theoretical physicist most known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics (whatever that means) wore his low IQ test result of 125 as a badge of honor. He wanted everyone to know about it as a sign that showed how absurd the notion of an IQ test is.

    How improving your IQ absolutely doesn’t work and what hinders your intelligence

    Feynman quoteBefore we go to different types of intelligence, a word of caution. Knowing different types of intelligence might quickly give you an excuse to be intellectually lazy. You know, you find a type of intelligence that you know you’re good at and then you say to yourself that you are obviously smart enough and life goes on.

    It’s appealing to think that everybody is smart in a certain way. While we all do have different abilities, being strong in one ability shouldn’t give you an excuse to not work hard on all different types of intelligence, maximize your intellectual potential or accept some of your intellectual limitations (overall intelligence or some domains where you have to work harder) and make the most from your individual situation.

    A unique personal style always comes out of limitations, thus you have to use them to your advantage.

    We also know many factors that hinder your intelligence. Stress is one of them. Stress kills your working and long-term memory. Stress can wipe out your brain cells, wither the connection between neurons, and by changing the blood flow in your brain the emphasis is more on animal instincts (4F response) than on being a reasonable empathic human being. A lack of sleep has the same negative effect on your smarts.

    • Head injuries
    • Traumatic situations
    • PTSD
    • Regular drug use
    • Bad diet
    • Dehydration
    • Too much alcohol
    • Having a stroke
    • Avoiding exercise
    • Chronical negative thinking
    • Smoking
    • Taking steroids
    • Extreme anxiety and panic
    • Exposure to toxic elements and pesticides
    • Air pollution
    • Too high sugar consumption
    • Isolation
    • Depression
    • Multitasking
    • Obesity
    • Burnouts

    They all have a very negative effect on your brain performance.

    9 different types of intelligence - infographic

    Nine independent and different types of intelligence

    The idea of one general intelligence that is inherited and fixed was always challenged. One of the first people to challenge it was Robert J. Sternberg who developed the triarchic theory of intelligence.

    He argued that there are three important parts of intelligence – analytical or componential, creative or experimental, and contextual or practical.

    Howard Gardner took a step further and developed the theory of multiple intelligences. In the theory, he presented the idea that there are nine independent types of intelligence and argued that people who fall short in some of the types might excel at others.

    He also argued that schools focus on logical and linguistic abilities and neglect other types of intelligence. The nine types of intelligence are:

    • Naturalist Intelligence (“Nature Smart”) – understanding how nature works, together with materials, plants and animals.
    • Musical Intelligence (“Musical Smart”) – recognizing, creating, reproducing and reflecting on everything connected to tones and music.
    • Logical-Mathematical Intelligence (“Number/Reasoning Smart”) – it’s the ability to do mathematical operations, perform experiments, think in abstract and symbolic dimensions, identify patterns, categories and relationships.
    • Existential Intelligence (“Spiritual Smart”) – the capacity to tackle questions about the human existence, the meaning of life, why we die and what happens after life.
    • Interpersonal Intelligence (“People Smart”) – all the skills related to understanding and interacting with other people, from verbal and non-verbal communication, showing sympathy and empathy, to motivating and leading others.
    • Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence (“Body Smart”) –physical and sports capabilities together with the ability to manipulate objects and to apply a variety of physical skills. It also includes the sense of timing and strength of the connection between mind and body.
    • Linguistic Intelligence (“Word Smart”) – the ability to express complex meaning with words and applying meta-linguistic skills to reflect on the use of language.
    • Intrapersonal Intelligence (“Self Smart”) – the capacity to understand yourself, together with all the thoughts and feelings, and use of that knowledge to plan your life’s direction.
    • Spatial Intelligence (“Picture Smart”) – the ability to think in three dimensions, together with spatial recognition, image manipulation, artistic skills and active imagination.

    The idea that everybody is smart in some way is very attractive. But research shows that supposedly independent domains are highly correlated. As we said, there might be a type of intelligence where you really excel, but we must not neglect the empirical evidence on general and fluid intelligence.

    CHC - Intelligence - Model
    Source: Wikipedia

    The g factor and ten different intelligence domains

    We know a term for general intelligence – the controversial g factor, which is supposed to be more or less fixed (scientists are not uniform on that). You can’t influence it with education, brain games, diet or by any other means.

    The g factor is your biological limit in intelligence, especially fixed in the adult age. It’s the general intelligence on top of all the cognitive abilities. Full scale IQ scores show the general intelligence.

    The g factor was developed by Charles Spearman in the early years of the 20th century. His observation was that children’s performance across different unrelated subjects was positively correlated.

    The underlying mental ability, or the g factor, has an influence on how you do on most intellectual tests. In other words, individuals who tend to do well at one type of tests, tend to excel at other types of tests as well. The influence of the general intelligence on performing a cognitive task is around 50 %.

    Interestingly, genes contribute 20-40 % of the variance in intelligence in childhood and about 80 % in the old age. The older you are, the more difficult it is to improve your g factor. A complex intellectual environment that encourages brain activity has a great influence on brain development and intelligence until the age of 16 and then declines fast.

    CHC model of intelligence

    The Cattell–Horn–Carroll theory is today the most widely accepted theory of cognitive abilities that is also supported by empirical evidence. It supports and integrates everything we’ve talked about intelligence until now. It’s a very complex theory that incorporates the g factor and different types of intelligence.

    The g factor consists of 10 broad intelligences that are further divided into narrow intellectual abilities. Here are all the broad and narrow intellectual abilities that are measured in the CHC model:

    • Fluid intelligence – broad ability to reason, form concepts, and solve unique problems using new information and novel procedures
      • Deductive reasoning – solving a problem by going from general knowledge to specifics
      • Induction – reasoning from specific cases to general knowledge
      • Piagetian reasoning – seriation, conservation and classification
      • Speed of reasoning – speed or fluency in performing reasoning tasks in a limited time
    • Crystalized intelligence – Acquired knowledge with the ability to communicate that knowledge and the ability to reason using previous abilities and knowledge
      • Language development – general understanding and application of words and sentences
      • Lexical knowledge – extent of vocabulary
      • Listening ability – the ability to receive and understand spoken information
      • General information – general stored knowledge
      • Information about culture – general stored cultural knowledge (music, art etc.)
      • Communication ability – the ability to speak in everyday life situations
      • Oral production and fluency – specific and narrow oral communication skills
      • Grammatical sensitivity – proper construction of words and sentences
      • Foreign language proficiency – language development for foreign languages
      • Foreign language aptitude – rate and ease of learning a new language
    • Quantitative reasoning – the ability to comprehend quantitative concepts and relationships and the ability to manipulate numeric symbols
      • Mathematical knowledge – range of general knowledge about mathematics
      • Mathematical achievement – tested mathematical achievement
    • Reading and writing ability – basic reading and writing skills
      • Reading decoding – the ability to recognize and decode words or pseudowords in reading
      • Reading comprehension – the ability to attain meaning during reading
      • Verbal language comprehension – general development or the understanding of words, sentences, and paragraphs measured by reading vocabulary and comprehension
      • Cloze ability – the ability to read and supply missing words from prose passages
      • Spelling ability – the ability to form words with the correct letters in accepted order
      • Writing ability – the ability to communicate information and ideas in written form
      • Language usage knowledge – knowledge of language mechanics such as capitalization, punctuation, usage, and spelling
      • Reading speed – the ability to silently read and comprehend connected text
      • Writing speed – the ability to copy words or sentences repeatedly, or writing words, sentences, or paragraphs, as quickly as possible
    • Short-term memory – the ability to hold information in immediate awareness, and then use it within a few seconds
      • Memory span – the ability to attend to, register, and immediately recall temporally ordered elements and then reproduce the series of elements in correct order
      • Working memory – the ability to temporarily store and perform a set of cognitive operations on information that requires divided attention
    • Long-term storage and retrieval – the ability to store information and retrieve it later in the process of thinking
      • Associative memory – the ability to recall one part of a previously learned but unrelated pair of items when the other part is presented
      • Meaning memory – the ability to note, retain, and recall information where there is a meaningful relation between bits of information
      • Free recall memory – the ability to recall as many unrelated items as possible
      • Ideational fluency – the ability to rapidly produce a series of ideas, words, or phrases related to a specific condition or object
      • Associational fluency – a specific ability to rapidly produce a series of words or phrases associated in meaning when given a word or concept with a restricted area of meaning
      • Expressional fluency – the ability to rapidly think of and organize words or phrases into meaningful complex ideas under general or more specific cued conditions
      • Naming facility – the ability to rapidly produce accepted names for concepts or things when presented with the thing itself or a picture of it
      • Word fluency – the ability to rapidly produce isolated words that have specific phonemic, structural, or orthographic characteristics
      • Figural fluency – the ability to rapidly draw or sketch as many things as possible when presented with a non-meaningful visual stimulus
      • Figural flexibility – the ability to rapidly change set and try out a variety of approaches to solutions for figural problems that have several stated criteria
      • Sensitivity to problems – the ability to rapidly think of a number of alternative solutions to practical problems
      • Originality and creativity – the ability to rapidly produce unusual, original, clever, divergent, or uncommon responses to a given topic, situation, or task
      • Learning abilities – general learning ability rate
    • Visual processing – the ability to perceive, analyze, synthesize and think with visual patterns
      • Visualization – the ability to mentally imagine, manipulate or transform objects
      • Spatial relations – the ability to perceive and manipulate patterns and maintain orientation
      • Closure speed – the ability to identify a familiar visual object from an incomplete representation
      • Flexibility of closure – the ability to identify a visual figure or pattern embedded in a complex distracting array
      • Visual memory – the ability to form and store a mental representation or image of a visual shape
      • Spatial scanning – the ability to quickly and accurately survey a wide or complicated spatial field or pattern and identify a particular configuration through the visual field
      • Serial perpetual integration – the ability to identify a pictorial or visual pattern when parts of the pattern are presented rapidly in serial order
      • Length estimation – the ability to accurately estimate or compare visual lengths or distances
      • Perceptual illusions – the ability to resist being affected by the illusory perceptual aspects of geometric figures
      • Perceptual alternations – consistency in the rate of alternating between different visual perceptions
      • Imagery – the ability to mentally encode and manipulate an object, idea, event or impression in the form of an abstract spatial form
    • Auditory processing – the ability to perceive, analyze, synthesize and discriminate auditory stimuli
      • Phonetic coding – the ability to code, process, and be sensitive to nuances in phonemic information in short-term memory
      • Speech sound discrimination – the ability to detect and discriminate differences in phonemes or speech sounds under conditions of little or no distraction or distortion
      • Resistance to auditory stimulus distortion – the ability to overcome the effects of distortion or distraction when listening to and understanding speech and language
      • Memory for sound patterns – the ability to retain auditory events such as tones, tonal patterns, and voices
      • General sound discrimination – the ability to discriminate tones, tone patterns, or musical materials regarding their fundamental attributes
      • Temporal tracking – the ability to mentally track auditory sequential events to be able to count, anticipate or rearrange them
      • Musical discrimination and judgment – the ability to discriminate and judge tonal patterns in music
      • Maintaining and judging rhythm – the ability to recognize and maintain a musical beat in the short-term time period
      • Sound-Intensity and duration discrimination – the ability to discriminate sound intensities and to be sensitive to the rhythmic aspects of tonal patterns
      • Sound-Frequency discrimination – the ability to discriminate frequency attributes of tones
      • Hearing and speech threshold factor – the ability to hear pitch and varying sound frequencies
      • Absolute pitch – the ability to perfectly identify the pitch of tones
      • Sound localization – the ability to localize heard sounds in space
    • Processing speed – the ability to perform automatic cognitive tasks, especially under pressure
      • Perceptual speed – the ability to rapidly and accurately search, compare and identify visual elements presented side-by- side or separated in a visual field
      • Rate of test taking – the ability to rapidly perform tests which are relatively easy or over‑learned
      • Number facility – the ability to rapidly perform basic arithmetic and accurately manipulate numbers quickly
      • Speed of reasoning – speed or fluency in performing reasoning tasks in a limited time
      • Reading speed – the ability to silently read and comprehend connected text rapidly and automatically
      • Writing speed – the ability to correctly copy words or sentences repeatedly, or writing words, sentences, or paragraphs, as quickly as possible
    • Decision speed and reaction time – how fast can an individual react to stimuli or task
      • Simple reaction time – reaction time to the onset of a single stimulus that is presented at a particular point of time
      • Choice reaction time – reaction time to the onset of one of two or more alternative stimuli, depending on which alternative is signaled
      • Semantic processing speed – reaction time when a decision requires some encoding and mental manipulation of the stimulus content
      • Mental comparison speed – reaction time where stimuli must be compared for a characteristic or attribute
      • Inspection time – the ability to quickly detect change or discriminate between alternatives in a very briefly displayed stimulus

    Besides mental intelligence, we also know body intelligence (independent or connected to cognitive abilities) that includes:

    • Psychomotor speed – the ability to rapidly and fluently perform physical body motor movements largely independent of cognitive control
      • Speed of limb movement – the ability to make rapid specific or discrete motor movements of the arms or legs
      • Writing speed – the ability to correctly copy words or sentences repeatedly, or writing words, sentences, or paragraphs, as quickly as possible

    Speed of articulation – the ability to rapidly perform successive articulations with the speech musculature

    • Movement time – the time taken to physically move a body part to make the required response
    • Psychomotor abilities – the ability to perform physical body motor movements with precision, coordination or strength
      • Static strength – the ability to exert muscular force to move (push, lift, pull) a relatively heavy or immobile object
      • Multi-limb coordination – the ability to make quick specific or discrete motor movements of the arms or legs
      • Finger dexterity – the ability to make precisely coordinated movements of the fingers
      • Manual dexterity – the ability to make precisely coordinated movements of a hand, or a hand and the attached arm
      • Arm-hand steadiness – the ability to precisely and skillfully coordinate arm-hand positioning in space
      • Control precision – the ability to exert precise control over muscle movements, typically in response to environmental feedback
      • Aiming – the ability to precisely and fluently execute a sequence of eye-hand coordination movements for positioning purposes
      • Gross body equilibrium – the ability to maintain the body in an upright position in space or regain balance after balance has been disturbed
    • Olfactory abilities – the abilities that depend on sensory receptors of the olfactory system
      • Olfactory memory – memory for smells
      • Olfactory sensitivity – sensitivity to different smells
    • Tactile abilities – the abilities involved in the perception and judging of sensations that are received through touch sensory receptors
      • Tactile sensitivity – the ability to detect and make fine discriminations of pressure on the surface of the skim
    • Kinesthetic abilities – the abilities that depend on sensory receptors that detect bodily position, weight, or movement of the muscles, tendons, and joints
      • Kinesthetic sensitivity – the ability to detect, or be aware, of movements of the body or body parts

    Source: Wikipedia and CHC – Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) Broad and Narrow Cognitive Ability Definitions

    As you can see, there are many different types of intelligence. There are absolutely certain areas where you excel. But even though the g factor on top is more or less fixed, there are several ways how you can transcend this limitation at least to a certain extent (probably enough to be successful in any field in life):

    1. Building up crystalized intelligence
    2. Leveraging the power of a motivational environment
    3. Possessing the growth mindset

    Crystallized and fluid intelligence

    Fluid and crystallized intelligence – that’s what really matters

    As we have seen, many researchers reject the idea of a single measurement of intelligence such as the g factor. They argue that there are at least there two independent domains of cognitive performance of an individual – crystalized and fluid intelligence. And crystalized intelligence has its own important place in the CHC model.

    Fluid intelligence is the capacity to figure out novel problems, and it’s more or less fixed. It’s limited by the brain’s biological traits. Crystallized intelligence is, on the other hand, defined by how much you know, by your knowledge and experience. It’s influenced by education and acculturation. Crystalized intelligence is the knowledge and skills that you possess. It’s what matters at the end of the day.

    While crystalized and fluid intelligence are correlated, they change at different levels when you age. Fluid intelligence tends to peak at 20 and then slowly decline after. On the other hand, crystalized intelligence is stable and increases over your lifetime; and you have a huge influence on how your crystalized intelligence will advance.

    The more you study, learn and expose yourself to new things, the smarter you become by increasing your crystalized intelligence.

    There is also a possibility that acquiring additional knowledge can fine-tune your fluid intelligence by using your working memory better.

    When you bring something from the long-term memory into the working memory (by bringing something to mind), it occupies fewer working memory slots than it did initially when you were trying to memorize it. It gets kind of compact (like zipping a file), and that enables you to play with more ideas at once and connect knowledge in new ways.

    Smooth physical repetition creates muscle memory, and smooth mental repetition creates knowledge chunks that take up less working memory; you don’t have to relearn or re-explain pieces of information to yourself. You just know it and can intuitively do it; you know it from memory. And that’s how you become smarter by knowing more.

    Environmental influences

    Your development, actions and intelligence are always a product of your genes and your environment. Your genes activate or react differently in various environments. In other words, every inherited trait, even intelligence, can be enhanced, decreased, woken up or eliminated by repeating life experiences or functioning in a specific environment.

    When it comes to intelligence development, the environment is especially important in the pre-natal period and in youth all the way up to the end of adolescence. But it can have a positive influence on your smarts even later.

    When it comes to intelligence, the following elemental variables are important:

    • Family – home resources, parents’ use of language, birth order, amount of praise etc.
    • Peer group – stereotypes, complex intellectual environments etc.
    • Education – in general, IQ decreases during summer breaks, children with delayed schooling and dropouts have lower IQ, less schooling usually equals lower IQ.
    • Training – fluid intelligence can be increased through training, at least in the short-term, by improving the working memory. The growth mindset also has a great influence on intellectual abilities.
    • Environmental enrichment – more stimulating environments can increase the number of synapses in the brain, especially at a young age, but also later.
    • Nutrition – nutrition has an effect on intelligence even before birth, as well as afterwards, where sufficient protein intake is especially important.
    • Stress – maternal stress, traumatic life situations and constant pressure have a negative influence on intelligence.
    • Exposure to toxic chemicals – exposure to some toxic chemicals can reduce mental abilities of a child during pregnancy and at a young age. Similarly, alcohol, drugs and tobacco can have a negative influence on the child’s intellectual development.
    • Perinatal factors – complications at birth or low birth weight can have serious implications on the child’s intellectual development.
    • Environmental exposure – if a child is exposed to a specific knowledge domain and creativity is encouraged at the same time, the child can develop exceptional understanding of that field. That’s how geniuses are born, even if they don’t have a really high IQ.

    With age, the potential positive influence of the environment declines, but an influence still exists. It’s been proven that your brain synapses can grow in the older age as well.

    Thus, seeking complex intellectual environments, lifelong learning, regular reading and developing competences, proper nutrition, building yourself a motivational environment and avoiding severe stress does have a positive influence on your cognitive abilities.

    Growth vs. Fixed Mindset
    Graph content: Carol Dweck, Image: Nigel Holmes

    If you can influence your intelligence, that means only one thing – grow

    I’m pretty sure you don’t like the idea that the IQ is completely fixed. Neither do I. A fixed IQ would be a very unfair thing. While biology and primary socialization absolutely impose limits on us, as we’ve seen, you can fine-tune your overall intelligence, and even more dramatically improve your crystalized intelligence.

    Actually, only being able to improve your crystalized intelligence and optimizing your working memory is not enough. You must constantly improve both, otherwise you are falling behind. If you’re not going forward, you’re going backwards. And you’re wasting your potential and resources. That’s where the right attitude and the growth mindset come into play.

    Stanford professor Dr. Carol Dweck has found out that the biggest difference between successful and unsuccessful people lies in their mindset. The right mindset is more important than IQ.

    You can either have a fixed mindset or a growth one. If you have a fixed mindset, you believe that your character and potential are unchangeable, have been “written in stone” since birth. You assume that they cannot be modified or improved in a meaningful way.

    The second option is a growth mindset. It means that you believe that you can improve your character by working on yourself. If you have a growth mindset, you see yourself as being at a specific starting point with the option to improve yourself through hard work – your skills, beliefs, competences and intelligence.

    The fixed mindset leads to hiding your flaws, doing only things that you are naturally good at, feeling defined by failures, being unwilling to improve your relationships, and feeling bad if everything doesn’t go as planned, even if you’ve learned something new.

    On the other hand, with a growth mindset, flaws and problems are only opportunities to improve. The new and the unknown bring learning opportunities, mastery leads to passion and purpose, and every failure is only a temporary setback. Nothing is given and everything can be improved.

    When it comes to intelligence, you can at least fine-tune your fluid intelligence, dramatically develop your crystalized intelligence over the years, excel at specific cognitive tasks (that other people will pay you for), make sure you reach your intellectual maximum, apply your skills in various life situations, and prevent your cognitive decline.

    You can achieve all that with the right attitude powered by the growth mindset, curiosity, deliberate practice and hard work.

  • A year in review – 50+ questions for annual reflection

    I’m a big fan of performing regular self-reflections. Self-reflections are about systematically asking yourself thought-provoking questions to develop a deeper level of understanding yourself (thoughts, feelings, visions, goals etc.) and your environment (relationships, trends, opportunities etc.).

    Not to sound too abstract, performing self-reflection means that you take some alone time, grab a pen and a piece of paper, and reflect on your goals, beliefs, behavioral patterns, emotional knots, changes in your environment, and everything else that’s happening in your life.

    The biggest benefit of self-reflection is that you gain a better overview of your life – you better understand yourself and your life situations (and other people), and thus you can directly impact how you think and feel about certain events in your life; and most importantly, in the end you can act more wisely.

    New understandings lead to new thoughts, new thoughts lead to new emotions and consequently to new actions. But there’s even more. With regular self-reflections, you can act smarter, you can make sure that your goals and environmental forces are aligned.

    One big part of self-reflection is to analyze as much information as possible that can help you shape a superior life strategy, progress towards your goals faster and, in the end, live a better life. The good life.

    Self-reflections are about becoming a wiser person and acting smarter.

    To really enjoy all the benefits of self-reflection, you have to perform it on a weekly, if not daily basis. My daily reflections don’t take me more than 20 minutes, and sometimes I do longer ones that take up to an hour; especially when I’m stressed out or severe negative feelings concentrate.

    These are usually the best spent minutes in a day, because I gain so many insights about myself, life and others.

    But at the end of the year comes the time for a special type of reflection – annual reflection. I call it a year in review. The end of the year is always a great opportunity to do extensive analysis of where you are, how satisfied you are with your life, and where to go next.

    A year in review

    Christmas holidays are ideal for a big annual reflection

    I’m always surprised how full gyms are in January. I guess entering a new year does motivate us all to go after new goals. And it makes sense.

    Life slows down in Christmas time, relationships and celebrations come before hard work, and usually we are all surprised at how quickly another year has passed us by and start wondering what we’ve really achieved in the past 12 months.

    Well, if Christmas holidays are ideal for a bigger self-reflection and setting new goals, it makes sense to do it in a very structured and systematic way.

    That’s why I prepared a framework with a bunch of questions that will help you perform the year-in-review in a very professional way. You know, according to the mantra that whatever you do, give it 110 %.

    Before we go to specific questions and exercises, the goals you want to achieve by performing the annual reflection or the year in review are:

    • Assess where you have been in the beginning of the year and where you are now
    • Update your life vision and set new priorities
    • Make sure you are going in the right direction (following your True North)
    • Carefully plan the next year together with specific goals (prepare new Goal Journey Maps)
    • Think of all the ways you can adjust to achieve your goals faster or with fewer resources
    • Analyze all the changes in your environment to make sure you properly adjust
    • Brainstorm new ideas you have about your life and what you would like to experience
    • Update your life strategy if necessary
    • Systematically go through all the new things that you learned
    • Reestablish the connection with yourself

    AgileLeanLife - a Year In Review - CoverAs I mentioned, the best way to perform annual self-reflection is by doing a set of analytical exercises and answering several questions about your past, present and future. I have prepared the framework and questions for you. You can either download the free PDF below or read the rest of the blog post.

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    • A Year in Review – Annual reflection – PDF Template (with input fields)

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    Life satisfaction chart and one priority area for the next year

    The best way to start the year in review is with a life satisfaction chart. The life satisfaction chart shows how satisfied you are with different core life areas. If you are doing such self-assessment for the first time, you need to make two charts:

    • Life satisfaction in the beginning of the year
    • Life satisfaction at the end of the year

    Building a life satisfaction chart is really easy. You draw a scale from 1 to 10 horizontally and list all ten areas of life vertically:

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

    You assess every area of life from 1 to 10. In the second step, you take another look at all the areas you assessed with 4, 5, 6 or 7. These are the areas where you’re averagely satisfied.

    It’s much easier to reflect and draw conclusions if you have a more shaped and clearer view of whether you’re satisfied with a specific area of life or not. So, assess life areas again, but now by using only the numbers 1, 2, 3, 8, 9 and 10. Highlight every 1, 2 and 3 with red, and every 8, 9 and 10 with green.

    1 2 3 8 9 10
    Health X
    Relationships X
    Money X
    Career X
    Emotions X
    Competences X
    Fun X
    Spirituality X
    Technology skills X

    An example of the life satisfaction (assessment) chart

    After completing the assessment for both points in time (beginning and end of the year), you should make several conclusions:

    • In which life areas have you progressed or declined the most? Why?
    • Which life areas are currently in the red and which ones in the green? Why?
    • What is the one life area you want to improve the most in the next year?

    The core bottom-line of this exercise is to get a general overview of what happened with your life in the past year and even more, to select one life area on which you will primarily focus all of your improvement efforts in the upcoming year.

    A Year in Review: Analysis of the past year with proper closure

    Once you have a general overview, it’s time to dive deep into the past year. You want to gain as many insights as possible from the past 12 months. These insights must then be an important input when planning the next year. Here are the questions to answer:

    Learning from success

    • What were your 3 – 5 biggest accomplishments in the past year?
    • What contributed the most to these accomplishments (new knowledge, a coach, focused effort etc.)?
    • Which other goals have you achieved in the past year and which new things are you proud of?
    • Which healthy habits have you followed the past year?
    • What were the smartest decisions you took?
    • Which new competences (knowledge, skills) and strengths have you developed?
    • What were 2 – 3 greatest lessons that you learned?
    • Which risks did you take and how did they pay off?

    Learning from failure

    • What were your biggest failures in the past year?
    • How did you grow as a person and what have you really learned from failure?
    • What contributed the most to the desired results not happening?
    • What other goals did you not meet in the past 12 months?
    • Which unhealthy habits did you follow in the past year?
    • What were your worst decisions of the year? Why did you make them?
    • What is the biggest “unfinished business” of the year and what can you do about that?
    • What do you wish you had done differently in the past year? How could you have done things better?
    • What risks did you take that didn’t pay off? What were your wrong assumptions?

    Relationships

    • Did you make any new relationships that enriched your life? Who and why?
    • Which relationships improved the most in your life and why?
    • Which relationships took a downturn and why?
    • Who had the biggest impact on your life in the past year? Positive or negative?

    Other

    • Select 3 – 5 keywords for the past year (use free associations)
    • Which new things did you discover about yourself?
    • What were the biggest resource wasters (time, money, energy) in the past year?
    • What were the best resource investments (time, money, energy) in the past year?

    Answer all of the questions and then carefully review them. Try to gain as many insights and draw as many bottom-lines from the previous year as possible.

    Firm decisions for the upcoming year

    At this point, you should have a good picture of where you currently are in life and about the core events that had an influence on your life in the past year.

    The next step is about making firm decisions on how you will improve yourself in the future and what goals you will follow. Here are the questions to answer:

    Behavioral patterns

    • What are 3 – 4 things that you will stop doing in the next 12 months?
    • What are 3 – 4 things that you will start doing in the next 12 months?
    • What are 3 – 4 things that you will continue doing in the next 12 months?
    • What other new healthy habits will you start following and which bad habits will you ditch? How?
    • Name one personality trait you want to get rid of to become a better person next year

    Personal growth and competences

    • Which new competences do you plan to develop in the next year?
    • What is the one skill you already possess and haven’t been using that you will put to hard work?
    • What is the biggest step out of your comfort zone that you will take or which fears will you face?
    • Which completely new things will you try in the coming year?
    • How do you intend to be different at the end of next year?

    Relationships

    • Which existing relationship in your life deserves more attention?
    • Which new relationships do you plan to forge in the upcoming year?
    • What kind of help will you seek from current and new people in your life?
    • Who will you help to progress in life in the next year? Who will you mentor?

    Environment and trends

    • What are currently the greatest opportunities in your environment?
    • Which environmental trends and forces are supporting your goals and which ones are blocking you?
    • Which people are supporting your efforts and which people are playing against you?
    • What obstacles are you facing and how will you overcome them to accomplish your goals?
    • How can you improve your environment so that it’s more encouraging and motivating?

    Goals

    • On which life area will you focus your efforts the most (from the life assessment table)?
    • What are 3 – 5 things you must accomplish in the next year, no matter what? Why?
    • List all the goals from your life vision you want to achieve for different life areas (approximately 10 goals).
    • What is the next planning step? For which goals will you build Goal Journey Maps?

    Annual-reflection

    I hope you answered all the questions. It’s not that hard, right? The main point of such an introspection is to change your behavior and your actions. You have to do things differently.

    You have to improve and grow. You have to start doing certain things and stop doing others. You have to start making wiser decisions. If you don’t, the introspection was useless. Changes and adjustments are the whole point of it.

    Reflection also doesn’t equal goal setting. It just gives you a general overview of your past journey, where you currently are, and where you want to go. It’s only the first step in goal setting. It’s about understanding how you can do things better, setting priorities, and defining the next execution steps.

    The wisest next step is making Goal Journey Maps or any other kind of a detailed flexible plan for the area you want to improve the most and for a few goals that are your priorities.

    Just writing down your goals is never enough. You have to live your goals every single day with proper execution. I hope you had a great year and that the next one is even more successful. Happy New Year!