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  • Minimum Viable Experience

    In the lean start-up theory, there’s a very popular concept called Minimum Viable Product (MVP). The idea is that you don’t build the whole shiny expensive product and then launch it on the market and see the market response (because maybe nobody will buy it and the investment for doing that is big), instead you build the minimum set of features needed to start learning about what the market really wants. The MVP is the smallest thing you can build that tests the value you’ve promised to the market. You build an MVP to start learning about market needs and getting customer insights; or, if you want a fancier definition, a minimum viable product is the product with the highest return on investment versus risk.

    An important part of the MVP concept is that you stop thinking about the big picture and about your desired final outcome, and start thinking about immediately creating value and learning about your potential customers. You’ve probably heard Mike Tyson’s quote that everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. That’s why you have to test all the small parts of your plan, regularly getting feedback and constantly adjusting. In the lean startup philosophy, that’s also called testing your hypothesis with an MVP (validated learning).

    The important emphasis is also that the MVP is not only a crappy or minimal version of your final product, but a strategy and process aimed towards making and selling a product to customers. It’s a process of idea generation, prototyping, presentation, data collection, analysis and learning.

    In the startup world, you learn the most when you have direct contact with a market – with your potential clients or customers, everything else before are nothing but your personal assumptions and assumptions from your team; and as you know, wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups and you’re usually wrong before you’re right. When you have the MVP and are in contact with your market, you can engage in the build-measure-learn feedback loop. You can test and add or remove feature by feature of your product by building it, measuring results with carefully chosen metrics and learning about market response.

    MVPs in business can be landing pages (smoke test), explainer videos, e-mail tests, crowdfunding campaigns, concierge MVPs (manual service instead of a product) and so on. A popular method is also called a Wizard of Oz MVP (or Flinstoning), where you put up a front of the webpage that looks like a real working product, but you carry out product functions manually. There are many ideas for testing and comparing your assumptions (subjective reality) to actual market needs (objective realities); the point is that you don’t fully commit and put all eggs in one basket based just on your ego and what you believe is true. Because at the end, the market always wins in business, no matter what your beliefs are.

    To summarize, the purpose of an MVP is to accelerate learning about the customers and the market, to be able to test hypotheses (your assumptions) with minimal resources, to reduce waste such as engineering hours and financial resources, to get the product to early customers as soon as possible and to have really good customer insight into which features you should actually build. An MVP is also the basis for the final product.
    How to build a minimum viable product An MVP doesn’t only save you a lot of money and energy before getting a market response and prevents you from failing big, it can also help you avoid becoming a zombie company. A zombie company is a company that finds itself in a situation where there’s no death, no growth, no progress and no moving ahead. It’s consuming an enormous amount of resources and is a terrible drain on human energy. A zombie company is a company stuck in the land of the living dead.

    It’s no different in your personal life. You don’t want to fail big in any area of life after a big investment, and you want to become a zombie even less. The MVP concept from the lean startup philosophy can help you with that. Let’s see how.

    Using the MVP concept in your personal life

    One of the biggest mistakes you can make in life is committing to something that isn’t really you, investing your whole self into something that isn’t your perfect fit. One of the biggest wastes in life is doing something you don’t really want, something that you don’t really enjoy. And people do a lot of that shit. They commit to wrong jobs, wrong people, wrong diets and wrong investments.

    In order to not fail yourself and your needs, you must first know yourself and all the options you have in life really well. If you want to be successful in life, you have to know yourself and what you want out of life very clearly, and the best way to get to know yourself and your environment is by experimenting, reflecting and learning. The best way to do personal validated learning is introducing the so-called search mode into your life, testing what your best fits are by using the MVP concept.

    The core idea is that when you’re in the search mode, you shouldn’t have any expectations, you shouldn’t have any commitments and you shouldn’t do any hard work. Expectations lead to disappointments and before you understand something, you definitely have expectations that are completely wrong. Commitments lead to heavy energy investments, and you shouldn’t be investing before you know what you’re truly investing into and whether the investment really fits your character. Hard work should always also be smart work, but you can’t work smartly if you don’t have the right map and coordinates.

    In the search phase, using the MVP concept, you just try, experiment, observe, reflect and learn about yourself and the world. The most important thing is to have no fixed ideas and no expectations at all in this phase. Your only job is to test the assumptions you’ve written down, correct them, and try different things to find out what suits you best. Your only job is to learn about yourself and the world. No goals. No measurement of progress. Just learning and playing.

    To do that, you need MVPs. The idea of MVPs is to not only talk about things (what you should try, what you think you may like etc.), but to go and try them. You don’t assume, you go out and test. Testing and trying is the best way to gain firsthand knowledge about yourself and the world. For every new experience you get, you should decide whether to keep it in your life or not (pivot or presevere). Every new experience should also give you ideas and insights into what to try next. The difference between what you think is valuable to you and what really is valuable for your life creates waste.

    Don’t assume anything, try and test everything.

    The best thing ever is that today, it’s so easy to test and try everything. You have so many options, access to knowledge and many different disciplines in sports, arts, business and other areas in life you can try and test. You can really have a lot of fun testing and trying in today’s times. The world is basically an endless pool of possibilities.

    At the end of the day, you must find your best fits and have your dream life composed like a beautiful mosaic – perfect diet, best exercise, best-fitting career, investments best suited to your character, perfect partner etc. The problem, of course, is that you only have one life and every experiment takes quite a lot of time. That’s why you need to use the MVP philosophy. You need to invest the minimum amount of effort possible into learning if something is your fit or not.

    MVE Concept

    Minimum viable experience and emotional accounting

    Instead of calling it Minimum Viable Product, let’s call it Minimum Viable Experience. The idea is that you try as many things as possible in life (your vision list), and based on your physical, emotional and intellectual response, you decide whether you should keep something in your life or pivot to something else.

    To really use the MVP or MVE concept, you of course need to try something new in life, but you also need a system to measure feedback. The system for measuring feedback and your progress is called emotional accounting. The simple metric is that if you like something, if you enjoy a thing, activity or person, then keep it. If you like and enjoy something, then that thing probably fits you well. You can also set more complex metrics based on your goals, values and what matters to you.

    Here are two examples from the Agile and Lean Life Manifesto:

    There’s plenty of advice on fitness and diet. You can even find contradictory advice. But you can test what works and what doesn’t work for you as an individual. For someone, being vegetarian is the optimal diet. For others, far from it. There is no single formula for success. You can only try vegetarian, vegan, fruitarian, paleo and other verified diets until you find the one that suits you best. It doesn’t make sense to only read about it or argue about it, you have to try it for yourself and see. With no expectations and by keeping an open mind. After the search phase and finding what works for you best, you can execute (keep, set goals, measurements…) by optimizing details.

    In this case, an MVP would be the new diet plan that you stick to for a few weeks. In addition to that, you also need a measuring system. That can be your weight, fat percentage, energy level and so on. Smart scale can be a great help with that. You can record what you eat, how you feel after a certain food and the kind of results you’re getting. You must also take into account that every change brings new stress into your life, so the first few days shouldn’t count as relevant feedback; but after a few months, you should definitely have a clear picture of what works for you and what doesn’t, where to persevere and where to pivot.

    The second example would be looking for a new career. Your emotions mirror your complete dissatisfaction in your current career. Here’s how you would tackle this challenge in the first phase of an Agile and Lean Life. In your free time, you write down assumptions for careers you think you could blossom in. You start testing how much passion awakens in you when reading about specific industries, you join forums and attend online courses etc. You take some part-time projects, even for no payment, just to see how engaged you become. You continue experimenting until you find the new perfect fit for you. Then you go into the execution phase. At the end, you may find that design is your thing after trying to prepare an outstanding CV for a completely different industry.

    An MVP in this case would be to execute a small project in your free time or do some additional work as a sole proprietor or whatever, just to learn about the industry and the new career you want to undertake. First you have to learn and only then can you fully commit.

    Here are some other ideas and examples:

    • You can try dozens of sports before you commit to any of them.
    • You can do the same to discover your perfect investment profile, the competences you should develop, the things you enjoy in life, the technology you should use and maybe even a religion or life philosophy you should follow.

    Here, you can find many ideas for the areas you should test and experiment in: Your life strategy

    Minimum Viable Partner

    Minimum viable partner

    The same concept also applies to relationships. You can’t just commit forever when you meet someone for the first time. It should be a process of milestones and small commitments that get bigger with time, much like the definition of an MVP states that it’s not about the product, but about the process.

    There are around 7 billion people in the world. Most of them aren’t even close to being your fit, but a few are – in business and personal life. And you have to find them. Of course people who fit you best are people who have values and beliefs similar to yours, but are at the same time different enough that they can enable you to grow and learn. But how can you find them?

    The key idea is that you first know what you want in relationships. Making personas and then testing your assumptions can help you with that a lot. Soon after experiencing a few relationships, you should know very well what your minimum viable partner is like, what are the mandatory characteristics a person must have in order for you to have a deep relationship with them.

    When you know what you like and what you don’t, and what the deal breakers are, you can further explore what the purpose of every relationship in your life is, which relationships you should persevere in and which people you should remove from your life. You should date, meet and engage with as many people as possible. Again, you should have personal metrics to measure whether a relationship is giving you what you expect, be it emotionally, time-wise or however.

    Another key point is to commit to relationships gradually. You don’t get married after the first date and you don’t form a joint venture after the first meeting. You can perform little relationship tests to see if a relationship is something you want. Usually that happens spontaneously (talking, first kiss, sex, taking a trip together etc.), but people often commit themselves to relationships too soon; and even more often, people stay stuck in relationships they don’t like (forever).

    Since you don’t want to become a zombie, you have to constantly measure the quality of your relationships – what you give and what you get. Even after passing all the minimum viable experiences and fully committing to someone, you should somehow measure if you’re surrounded by people who empower you and make you happy. If not, you’re doing big damage to yourself and others.

    Interested versus committed

    Being interested in something definitely doesn’t mean being committed. Although interested isn’t being committed, you should only be interested at first. You should be curious, playful, and eager to discover. You should not think about commitment, but only learn and try new things.

    But at one point, when you find the right thing, the right person, when you find your fit, you should commit. Really commit; and it shouldn’t be hard. Because when you find your fit, you know that this is exactly what you want and if you really want something, you’ll find a way; if you don’t, you’ll find an excuse. Now go play with the MVEs in your life.

  • Immediate implementation

    I will sound a little bit harsh in this post because it’s a difficult truth, but most people are very judging towards others and very indulgent towards themselves (for the same things), at least in a few major areas of life that define the quality of living – health, wealth, relationships etc. and that are, in their essence, very hard to manage. It’s not easy to have a six-pack, even less so to get rich or have really close and deep relationships with family, friends and your spouse.

    As an exaggerated example: people think that if they use olive oil and take a walk once a month, they live a healthy lifestyle, even though they stuff their faces with hamburgers at the same time; or maybe they think they’re wealthy because they can lease an expensive car or whatever. At the same time, they’re very critical towards others who basically do the same, although maybe just in a slightly different way; for example, people who feel better about themselves because of olive oil are very critical towards their friends who think they live healthy because they use brown sugar and a sauna belt.

    Many studies have shown that people see themselves as much better than they are. One of the studies showed the same with individuals who rated the driving skills of themselves and others; almost everybody rated themselves to be a very good driver, much better than they really were. On the other hand, they’ve rated other drivers much worse compared to the objective reality. It’s called illusory superiority.

    I somehow understand that since life is hard, having a good opinion about yourself and your skills can help you go through life, even if the subjective standard / reality is far from the truth. It may be easier to live with being sparing towards yourself, but it can also lead towards you lowering standards and not achieving your maximum potential in different areas of life.

    There’s no doubt that I have the same cognitive bias from time to time, but overall I’m wired a little bit differently, with all the advantages and disadvantages that go with it. I’m actually the exact opposite type of person, very critical towards myself and often ascribing to other people much more than they deserve , at least in the beginning when I’m getting to know somebody new.

    A little bit of black humor about that: When I die, I want the people I did group projects with to lower me into my grave so they can let me down the last time.

    Back then, it was quite a shocking realization for me that most people are more or less talkers, and only a few are really doers. My rough estimate today would be that only one or two people out of ten are actually doers, and others only talk, discuss, dream, but never do shit for making their life better or meeting their commitments. Sometimes even when they do commit verbally, they don’t deliver their end of the bargain.

    That’s why I don’t pay that much attention to what people say anymore. Instead, I prefer to observe what people do.

    It’s a concept from the lean startup. Marketers have figured out that surveys don’t give you real answers for whether people would buy something or not, because they don’t even know themselves. That’s is why in the lean start-up methodology, you try to simulate a real-life buying scenario with a minimum viable product.

    Anyway, with time it became obvious to me that people who are doers perform much better in life. They really improve themselves, get promoted, start their own business, run marathons and progress in many different ways they desire in life. All the really successful people are definitely doers. On the other hand, not all doers are successful, but the ones who do smart work, instead of only hard work, definitely are.

    Next to getting their hands actually dirty and focusing on results, most doers have two outstanding abilities that make outliers and ultra-achievers out of them:

    • The first one is promptly testing new ideas, and implementing and keeping the ones that work in their lives.
    • The second one is observing and getting feedback from their environment and adjusting strategy accordingly.

    The first one is about the essence of constant improvement and self-growth. In practice, every improvement means nothing but doing things differently, in a different way from before. The second one is about staying agile and not acting only based on ego and assumptions, but also calculating outside forces into the strategy to achieve a certain goal.

    Get your hands dirty

    From an idea to testing and execution

    As I briefly mentioned before, talkers only discuss ideas, exchange their opinions, dream about things, but at the end of the day, they don’t do shit to really progress in life. When they see someone actually doing things and getting dirty, they criticize them.

    S/he definitely walks on water because s/he can’t swim.

    That’s the big majority of people. When they don’t have something (because it can’t be leased), they dream about it. Expensive home and car. Luxury travel. Hot body. Having their own business or whatever. On the other hand, what they do have, they put on a pedestal, without any high standards. And many times those are the things that were given to them or that they acquired by luck.

    Here’s a good video that explains how people ignore lucky circumstances and falsely contribute the winning to their competences more than the circumstances (good genes, inheritance, country etc.). Many of them even become cocky in the process.

    [ted id=1897]

    It’s not always like that, I don’t want to be too critical and negative, but many times that is the case; to be honest, I’m exaggerating a little bit to make a point. But even the very famous quote explaining that “small minds discuss people, average minds discuss things and events, and great minds talk about ideas” is misleading about success from the point I’m trying to make. Talking about ideas is definitely better than talking about events and things, but only talking about ideas and having a great mind won’t get you anywhere. You need to take a step further, you have to be a doer, not only a talker or thinker.

    Doers are usually quite different from talkers. Many doers don’t talk much and prefer to let their work speak for itself. No real king has to tell people that he’s the king. Doers like to talk about ideas, to get new insights and clues for new potential life experiments, but what they like even more is real progress and concrete results. They prefer to swim rather than only discuss different swimming styles.

    Doers are the ones who test and quickly implement ideas into their lives. They hear, read or see a new thing they like, and they test it immediately. If they like it, if it gives them a result they want, they put in all the effort necessary to keep it in their lives.

    When doers hear a new idea they like, they’re aware they have to test it out for themselves first. Because what works for one person may not work for someone else. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. What’s important is that the best doers test everything in small steps and in a very smart way. So as to not get burnt or too invested in something that’s not proven on their own skin yet.

    When best doers test something new, they observe what’s happening inside (body, mind, heart, spirit) and outside them (environment), and if the idea leads to personal improvement and faster progress towards their goals, they put in the effort to form a new habit; all the way until they find a new, even better idea. If it doesn’t work, they discard it.

    Immediate testing and (if it works) implementation is the key to execution, it’s the secret sauce of doers and their progress.

    • Talkers discuss how good it would be to save money, doers hear about the automation of saving and try it with the next few payments they receive. If it works, they keep the system going.
    • Talkers tell other people how great their partner is and how they’d spend more time with them if they could, but they’re so busy, doers make room to take their spouse on a date at least once per week, without any distractions.
    • Talkers brainstorm how good it would be to have a business, doers write down their business ideas, analyze and prioritize them, build MVPs, test what works and what doesn’t, and improve their idea until they find the right product/market fit.
    • Talkers complain how hard and without value college is, doers finish a college and while doing so, build an awesome business network, acquire extensive work experiences and do other stuff that makes their CV look ten times better compared to all other schoolmates.

    The only downside to testing all different ideas is not sticking to anything. There’s one group of people, who are neither talkers neither real doers. They try and test all different things, but never stick to anything. Usually there’s some kind of fear behind that, most frequently a fear of failure or a fear of success. You definitely want to stick to the best behavioral pattern you currently know for a specific thing you want to achieve in life. Only searching, thinking and overanalyzing without any discipline and implementation is a big waste in life.

    What you need is to have a system in place that works for you, but in addition to that, you should always be testing and trying new things in order to improve the system (and your behavioral patterns). Most of the time, you do small linear changes, but from time to time, you get disruptive ideas that can help you make a rapid change and get to a totally different level of operation (for example going from being an employee to being an investor etc.).

    From observation to action

    The second important part of immediate implementation is constantly adjusting strategy based on the feedback from an environment. The fact is that you’re part of a larger system and every single action of yours triggers a reaction from the environment. The environmental reaction can either (more or less) accelerate your motion or block it.

    There are always forces that work to your advantage and to your disadvantage, but at the end of the day, what matters a lot are the final direction and the magnitude as a sum of all forces. The difference of progress when an environment supports your actions or blocks them can be enormous. Something doers always count into their strategy.

    In business, there’s a saying that markets always win; markets as an example of one of the very important outside forces, besides legislation, politics, influencers, social trends, technological paradigms, and so on.

    Ego is the only thing that really stands in your way of observing something happening in the environment and consequently adjusting your strategy and action. It’s hard not to be right, but the gap between the objective and subjective reality always exists. If you don’t accept that and you let your ego prevail, you build your actions only on untested assumptions and you should remember that wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups. The bigger the gap, the bigger the potential fuckup.

    At the end of the day, it’s an easy choice. (1) You can act based on your assumptions and ego (“I can’t be wrong”), hoping that the gap between the objective and subjective reality isn’t too colossal or not even admitting to yourself that the gap could exist. Nevertheless, experience very clearly shows that it’s only a matter of time before you fuck something up in a big way because you rely on your personal interpretation too much.

    It may feel good to be sure that you’re right and to stroke your ego with mantras like “my way or the highway”, but the pain after being wrong is then so much greater. The more you build your life strategy or business strategy or any other strategy based on your ego and untested assumptions, the bigger your ego gets (because you put all faith in it) and the more it hurts when the bubble bursts; and sooner or later it will burst, because nobody is right 100 % of time.

    The second path you can take makes much more sense. (2) You know that your interpretation of the world is wrong and that there are big errors present. You know that your brain has very limited information and an even more limited capacity for processing captured information and that on top of that you are biased from many different angles. Even the collective brains’ processing power of outstanding teams is quite limited. You know there’s a big gap between the subjective (how you think things are) and the objective reality (how things really are).

    Because you know all that, you consciously decide that you’re wrong (before you’re right). You list your assumptions but make baby steps to test them one by one. You regularly gather feedback from the environment and adjust your motion based on the feedback. You keep your vision or goal in mind, but stay totally agile on how you’ll achieve your goal.

    That’s what “from observation to action” means. You have a system of gathering information from your environment based on every smaller or bigger action of yours, and you also decide on your next step based on the feedback you get from the environment. It may hurt your ego that some of your assumptions were wrong, but your awareness that you’re always wrong before you’re right has to be stronger and give you the courage to stay adaptable and continue with testing all the way until you have enough data to understand the objective reality as closely as possible and thus achieve your goal more easily. Sometimes better understanding the environment with testing (superior insights) enables you to achieve something you want.

    Just do it

    Besides ego problems, the challenge to stay adaptable is also that much greater because of the following two factors:

    • None of us like rapid changes and none of us like to change themselves rapidly because it hinders our sense of security and identity. But you can learn to like change. Being agile and adaptable means constantly changing yourself. Your mind has to be like air or plasma.
    • In addition to that, we believe that bad things only happen to people on TV or far away from us. It’s not easy to admit that the world is a harder place to live in than it may seem at a first glance. That’s why we build naïve ideals we believe in, that’s why a change in an environment must be really colossal before we act (adjust) and consequently, we usually act too late.

    Here are some classic examples:

    • An industry you work in goes down, people start losing jobs, the future market outlook is very pessimistic, but you somehow hope everything will be alright without acting in any way. After a short period of time, you’re fired and mad as hell at the economy, politics etc.
    • You see big behavioral changes in your partner (hiding their phone, staying late at work etc.), but you assume that your partner really couldn’t cheat on you because s/he is so special. After a few months, you’re shocked when your spouse tells you that s/he is leaving you.
    • Your crush gives you signals that s/he likes you, but you don’t do anything, because you assume that if s/he would really like you, s/he would make the first step. Consequently, nothing happens but maybe you’ve just wasted the best potential relationship of your life.
    • The same goes for your money, business relationships, health or any other area of life that’s interdependent and related to the outside environment.

    Burying your head in the sand and hoping that something bad will go away or that luck will strike you somehow is naïve. Problems and changes are like monsters. You have to kill them when they’re small, because they only grow bigger and are harder to solve with time.

    Therefore, to be more agile and adaptable, you must have shorter intervals of gathering and analyzing feedback from your environment and be regularly adjusting your strategy and action. Monthly adjusting intervals are probably okay, but weekly ones are even better, depending on which area of life we’re considering. You’re the captain of your life and you always have to observe what’s happening in your environment.

    • You see your body fat percentage go up on a smart scale. That’s an observation that needs action in terms of diet and exercise.
    • You noticed that your spouse is getting more and more moody. That’s an observation that needs action in terms of better communication, spending more loving time together, more lovemaking or whatever.
    • You observe that your wealth manager is charging you bigger and bigger provisions while your returns are getting worse and worse. It’s an observation that needs immediate action, maybe by negotiating a better deal or changing your wealth manager or even starting to manage your money on your own.
    • Have you read a book and got an idea for getting more productive? That’s a realization that needs to be tested and, if it works, immediately implemented into your life.
    • You’ve noticed that you envy someone something? Good, that means you have a compass for what you want in life. Now study how that person got the thing you want and implement the insights into your life strategy.
    • You have a friend that’s really good at making money, getting good grades, flirting or whatever. Observe how s/he does it, learn, and in the next second, test the same ideas and behavior yourself, adjusting them to your personal situation.

    The key is that when you get an idea, when you experience an epiphany, when you acquire new knowledge or when you observe changes in your environment, you act as quickly as possible. You change how you behave, act, and where and how you invest your resources. Remember that you grow by doing things differently and you can’t grow if you only think and observe without acting.

    Just do it is probably the best slogan ever, but you have to do it in a smart scientific way, regularly measuring your progress. Be inspired. Test and experiment and test. Implement and keep what works. Observe and adjust your actions based on observation and feedback. Be a doer, not a talker.

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  • Tools to help you with self-reflection

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

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

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

    Your ideal and ought self

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

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

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

    Empathy map

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

    Emapthy map
    Source: Copyblogger

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Whys

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

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

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

    Happiness index and happiness chart

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

    Happiness Index
    Happiness Index, Source: Agile trail

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

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

    Life satisfaction chart

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

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

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

    De Bono thinking hats

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

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

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

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

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

    Force field analysis

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

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

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

    Describe your situation in life and then analyse the following:

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

    Gut test

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

    Meditation

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

    Free associations

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

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

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

    Transference and people you like or hate

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

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

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

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

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

    Obsessions

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

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

  • Do not judge – observe, notice and learn

    We would all like the world to be more similar to us. Because that would make it much easier to live in. The more your personal values are aligned with your environment, the better you fit in somewhere. The more your values are aligned with the values the world is currently respecting, the better off you should be, assuming you don’t face any other tough situations, like strong cognitive distortions.

    Let me give you an example. If you strongly believe in nationality and borders, it probably irritates you that both are becoming less and less important due to globalization. There’s a difference between your values and the values of your environment, and that causes friction. On the other hand, you may be a technology enthusiast and love the general priority given to technological advancement. Your personal values are aligned with what the markets respect. It’s the same with political and economic systems, global trends and other environmental factors. Since the world is becoming flat, all people can feel the global influence of values changing.

    But another important trend is also occurring. The world is becoming more and more diverse and interconnected. That’s a big benefit you should take advantage of. As the world becomes more tolerant and one big global market place, you can easily find communities with the same values as you. You aren’t alone or in a minority anymore. All you have to do is connect yourself online.

    Being able to connect with people sharing the same values as you without immigrating is a big advantage you should deeply respect. Even more: you should encourage diversity and let other people be who they are and connect with people and societies they most fit into. Variety is the spice of life, diversity makes life interesting. If you don’t see it that way, shifting your thinking in that kind of way will strongly enrich your life.

    From judging to observing, noticing and learning

    People are very forgiving towards themselves and judge others so quickly. It helps us feel our own importance as well as protects our values. Quickly judging others is how we try to shape the world to be more in line with our values.

    You can do a simple test. If you stand firmly for something, you can easily find people who will brutally criticize you publicly and even more cowards who will do it anonymously on the internet. Just look at the comments on anything published online.

    There’s nothing wrong with discussion, arguments and debates. There’s nothing wrong with showing data and describing the objective reality as closely as possible. But the fastest progress comes out of constructive debates, merging different views and out-of-the box experiences. Variety also allows people to live in different communities the way they want to, the way they want to experience the world.

    You can benefit from that in many ways. As Scott Fitzgerald nicely said: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” It’s the best way to learn, improve, innovate and expand your thinking horizon. Remember that in 1000 years, science will probably prove that almost everything we believe now is wrong, even though it’s currently scientifically proven.

    If you don’t agree with someone and start judging, you put your ego before learning something new. When you judge someone else, you judge yourself and thus you limit your thinking horizon. You see the world as black and white. Someone is wrong and you’re right. It’s called “all or nothing” thinking and it’s one of the most frequent cognitive distortions.

    Perceiving personality types embrace that kind of thinking more easily than judging types. But even if you’re a judging type of person, which you probably are if you’re extremely organized, you benefit a lot from going from only a judging personality to also observing and learning from different perspectives.

    Here are some ideas for developing observing and learning abilities alongside the judging mindset.

    • Let go of your ego. Never put your ego before learning something new, trying new things, understanding different views and expanding your horizons. It’s how you become a wiser, more aware and enlightened human being. Understanding different views and values makes you a richer person internally. You’ll be able to connect with more people and have more loving connections. Stop judging and start observing how people think, what they believe in and value, and why. Rather than feeling defensive or offensive, ask yourself why, five times if necessary.
    • Practice empathy. Judging most often means deciding what’s right and what’s wrong according to your own opinion, following a subconscious autopilot. But your opinion is a subjective reality and probably far removed from the objective one. In fact, no one understands objective reality, but the more angles we understand, the closer we are. Instead of quickly judging, walk a mile in the shoes of a person with a different view. Ask yourself why, try to think, feel and understand the different angles; and stay respectful.
    • Tolerance. Tolerance is one of the most important values of progress. If you want to improve in life, you have to be tolerant, you have to be open-minded, try new things, experiment, and accept failure. You can’t be tolerant towards trying and implementing new things if you’ve already firmly decided on everything. To build tolerance, you have to trust yourself more and you have to see that your values and beliefs are not threatened if someone else sees things differently. Disagreement isn’t being intolerant; but not respecting other people with different views is.
    • Positive energies. Brutally judging is what divides people and spreads hate. If we subjectively see something as entirely good and something else as entirely bad, there must be a fight between good and bad. But in reality, nothing is entirely good and bad, except pure evil. There are no black and whites, only different shades of gray. Don’t curse the dark, light a candle. Spread positive energies and be a role model for empathy, tolerance, love and integration. We judge because we’re afraid. If we’re loved, we don’t have to be afraid of anything. Love is the first thing that bridges differences.
    • Staying flexible. Being agile means being flexible and adaptable. The more fixed you are in your thinking and the bigger your fixed expectations towards life, the bigger the potential for your disappointments is. The world is definitely different from what you wish it would be. So you have to see it as a playground, a place with endless possibilities where you can put your life together as you want. You have to stay flexible to find your best fits, try new things and adapt, especially if the world is going in different directions than your current values. You only have one life, you don’t want to spend it bitter and angry and grumpy, just because you aren’t flexible in your thinking.
    • Data before rhetoric. Despite different opinions, there are things (systems, ideas etc.) that work better than others in a specific situation and in a specific environment. Every social circle needs an optimal structure for progress. But again, it’s not about judging, it’s not about arguing and fighting, but about scientifically proven facts. Always put data before rhetoric.
    Open Parachute
    Your mind is like a parachute; it only works when it is open.

    Don’t tolerate evil, be a hero

    Being tolerant doesn’t mean simply agreeing with everything. It’s about respecting people and having a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward opinions, beliefs, and practices that differ from your own. It’s about an opportunity to expand your thinking horizon and let diversity of life exist, and enjoy it to the full.

    But no matter how tolerant and respectful and loving you are, there is evil in all of us. And that’s one thing you shouldn’t tolerate. You should understand it, you should be aware of it, you should study it, but you should never tolerate evil behavior. It can especially come out in three types of situations.

    • The first one is in all the people who were raised or born in hostile environments, like war, abusive families etc. A lack of love and healthy environment in the first few years of upbringing leaves a lot of psychological damage. People like this need professional help.
    • The second one is finding yourself in a system or a situation that brings out the evil in you. Once again this means situations like war, gangs, poverty etc. Situations that put people in fear for their own existence and fear of their needs not being met, wake up evil fighting spirits. They bring out the desire for dominance in order to gain safety and resources.
    • The third type are systems that aren’t transparent and where people think they’ll easily get away with hurting others. In situations like that, people’s desire to overpower others prevails. Evil prevails. Look at what anonymity on the internet does. That’s why we need more transparent environments, with an adequate reward and reintegration system.

    The more evil is tolerated, the more it grows and the stronger it becomes. So you shouldn’t tolerate hostile and harmful behavior in any community. Starting in your home, the company you work for and other societies you belong to.

    And secondly, we should all strive to build a better global system that will have zero tolerance towards evil and harmful behavior. Never get so tolerant that you tolerate intolerance.

    As Philip Zimbardo suggests in his study of evil: “You must refocus away from evil to understand heroes. Heroism is when ordinary people do extraordinary deeds in certain situations. The very same situation that can inflame the hostile imagination, in those who become perpetrators, can also inspire the heroic imagination in others. Heroes are ordinary people whose social actions are extraordinary. The key to heroism is two things. You’ve got to act when other people are passive and you have to act socio-centrically, not egocentrically.”

    Five things you can do to spread tolerance:

    • Act out of desire for prestige, not dominance.
    • Be tolerant, loving and respectful of people and diversity. Go home and love your family, love yourself and others.
    • Fight for a cause that matters to you, but fight as a peaceful warrior.
    • Don’t approve of evil acts and behavior. Report, inform, and don’t only mind your own business.
    • Contribute to transparency and integrity of the society. We’re going in the right direction, we’re living in the most peaceful times in history, we just have to keep up the trend, but be faster in rooting out poverty, domestic violence and other similar situations.

    Do not judge. Observe, notice and learn.

  • Mind the process phases

    Before getting to any event you want in life, you must first invest into the process. The process is what leads you to a certain event you want in life (getting rich, getting in shape, getting a dream job etc.) and it has specific phases. Most people are simply too impatient and disrespectful of the whole process (and the phases even more so) to ever come to the final event, the outcome they really desire.

    Because it’s not easy. A process means you have to get educated, have a strategy, it takes smart and hard work, you have to fail, you have to overcome setbacks and obstacles, you have to put in effort each day, but you only see results after years of hard work.

    It’s really not easy at all, but it also makes sense. Life owes you nothing, and if you really want something, you have to fight for it. If it were easy, everyone would do it. Life rewards those who master its game, and mastering the game of life means respecting the process.

    Not only do you have to respect the process, you also have to consider its different phases. You have to go step-by-step and patiently focus on different things in different phases. You cannot skip or jump over some of the phases.

    The point of every process phase is to be more focused on the right thing. The point is to not overwhelm yourself. The point of the phases is to not bite off more than you can chew. By considering the phases, you first set strong foundations and then build your thing step by step, strong and still. As I’ve already mentioned, it’s not smart to skip the phases of the process, but sometimes you definitely have to go back one or even more phases. Sometimes you have to take a step back to take two steps forward. It’s how the process work.

    There are five phases in the process:

    • Empathy or the search mode (in lean start-up, this is called customer discovery)
    • Stickiness or finding your fit (in lean start-up, this is called retention)
    • Virality or becoming an evangelist (in lean start-up, this is called referral)
    • Revenue or reaping the first rewards and making a plan (in lean start-up, this is called a business model)
    • Scale or the execution mode (in lean start-up, this is called explosive growth)

    Now let’s look at every phase of the process in more detail and with an example.

    Empathy or the search mode

    The first phase is the empathy phase or, as we know it in the Agile and Lean life, the search mode. The most important thing in this phase is to have an open mind as well as to be very gentle and tolerant towards yourself and others. Your most important skill in this phase is empathy.

    You’re starting something new, you don’t know the territory, you only have assumptions. The last thing you need are S.M.A.R.T. goals pushing you to do something, even though you don’t know if it’s right for you. What you need is to be excited over experiencing new things in life, you have to feel the adrenaline and energy because you’re trying something new; and you have to start experimenting and testing.

    You also have to be very tolerant toward yourself. You need to be aware that you’re going to fail. Some experiments are not going to work. But if you do it right, then you aren’t failing. You’re learning. It’s called validated learning. You try many different things, until you find the right one.

    In this phase, it’s also very important to get educated. You need to read as many books as possible. You have to talk to as many people who already did what you want to do. With analytical thinking, you have to decide what you’ll try and how you’ll measure it. Then as an adventurer, you start discovering new things in life.

    After performing an experiment, you have to make a data-based decision about what you will:

    • Stop doing
    • Start doing
    • Continue doing

    An experiment can usually take from 7 to 30 days and strongly depends on what you’re testing. But that should be enough time to get feedback from yourself (body, emotions, mind) and from your environment (if there’s any outside interaction in the experiment).

    Let’s look at an example.

    You want to get in shape. The bottom line of getting in shape is quite simple. You need to exercise and change your eating habits (what you eat, how much you eat). The most popular way of going on a diet is to read a book or an article about a “miracle diet”, doing it for a month or so, going for a run a couple of times and that’s it. At the end, you’re disappointed that the revolutionary diet doesn’t work.

    You certainly don’t want to force yourself into exercising and you definitely don’t want to go on a short-term miracle diet. You want to do a sport you’ll love, a sport you can’t wait to do, and instead of going on a diet, you want to introduce a new long-term eating lifestyle that won’t cause any cravings.

    So instead of finding a “miracle diet”, you do your research – about your body type, different proven diets that work in the long-term etc. You visit a few specialists (allergy tests etc.), read a few interviews, you start researching what could work for you. If necessary, you also consult a doctor or a nutritionist if you have any medical conditions. Then you start introducing new foods into your life, crossing out others, and measuring how you feel. On the other hand, you make a list of sports you want to try and a list of sports you assume you’ll enjoy the most. Going for a run is the easiest and most convenient way; but maybe you’ll enjoy biking or swimming or hiking more. You need to find a sport you really enjoy.

    While doing your research, you’ll also discover that there are some general things you should stop doing, continue doing and start doing. For example, if you want your diet to succeed, you must definitely limit the amount of junk food and refined carbohydrates (sugar) you eat. On the other hand, you should start eating more vegetables and some fruit. In the middle, there is room for testing and experimenting – you have to see whether the high protein, the high fat (healthy fats) or maybe the vegetarian diet is best for you.

    Your output in this phase should be research, like reading 10 of the best books from the field, talking to at least 10 people and making a list of different things you’re going to try. In the search mode, you should also find your why. It should be a very strong why. In fact, you should start by asking yourself why!

    For example, in our case, the “whys” could be to:

    • Have more energy
    • Look better in a mirror (if that is the strongest why, you should buy yourself a big mirror :) )
    • Get more attention from the opposite sex
    • Live longer

    Stickiness or finding your fit

    The second phase is stickiness. You find something you like. You see the first results and you get early wins. You’re getting the first positive feedback from your body, emotions, mind or even external environment. You’ve found something you want to stick to. It’s called a fit. Nice.

    Now your focus should be on making a system that will help you stick to your new habits. Because as you know, motivation lasts only while you’re on your way to the fridge. You have to systematically think and try to reinforce your positive behaviour, build an adequate positive environment and a bulletproof system.

    You have to take the time to think how you’re going to stick to your new thing. Your enthusiasm will help you, but it’s usually not enough. You need internal and external aids – new habit reinforcers.

    Here is a good visualisation of habit formation that you can help yourself with:

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

    Here are some ideas for what you can do to increase the probability of stickiness:

    • Connecting your new habits with old habits (doing something right after you wake up or before you go to sleep; these are the so-called morning and evening habits)
    • Exchanging your old habits for new ones (every time you want to eat a cookie, you eat a carrot or every time someone turns on the TV, you go read a book)
    • Introducing reminders and visual aids into your life (sticky notes, screensavers, goal board etc.)
    • Leveraging technology (applications, gadgets etc.)
    • Joining a new community (coaches, groups, friends with the same values etc.)
    • Getting rid of some things/people and introducing new things/people into your life
    • Rewarding yourself for positive behaviour and getting punished (not like in 50 Shades of Grey) for bad behaviour (for example giving your spouse $20 every time you lose your temper)
    • Surrounding yourself with research materials (books, bookmarks, magazines etc.)

    Now let’s get back to our example. You found foods that make your body happy. You educated yourself on which foods are the worst for you. You found a sport you like. Now you have to build a system that’ll help you stick to new habits. You simply stop buying foods with empty calories. You put fruit and vegetables in visible places in your home. You always have a bottle of water with you. You set a hot athlete as your wallpaper background. You put a picture of a hot athlete on your fridge. You get a personal coach who will help you get through the stickiness phase of the first two months. You spend at least 30 minutes a day reading about healthy living. You join and participate in online and offline groups, and so on.

    The biggest mistake you can make in this phase is sticking to something that doesn’t work for you. I was on a fruitarian diet for one year and I did a lot of damage to my body. So again: you have to be careful, you have to be smart and you have to listen to your body; except when you crave empty calories. The Agile and Lean Life is about having a smart strategy with constant and fast feedback you take into account.

    The second biggest mistake you can make in this phase is giving up. Improvement and change aren’t a linear line, they’re full of ups and downs. Sometimes you’ll slip up, sometimes your discipline muscle will just stop working. Nothing unusual. In a situation like that, you have to give yourself a break for a few days and then start over. Every day is a new beginning, you can always start over.

    The output of this phase should be a new reward system for yourself and visual changes in your environment. While the aim in the phase before the goal was to find the best fit for you, the goal of this phase is to reinforce your new desired behaviour and stick to it. No goals yet, just thinking about what you should do to reinforce your new habit.

    Virality or becoming an evangelist

    Now you know your endgame. You’ve found the perfect fit after testing and experimenting with several things in the search mode. You have inner and outer elements that help you stick to your new habits, like a new personal reward system, habit triggers, regular reminders, and so on. Okay, but that’s still not enough to really get to the result you want.

    The third phase is called virality or becoming an evangelist. That simply means shifting your identity. You have to fall in love with what you do. You have to see yourself as a new person. An athlete. An investor. The perfect husband. An entrepreneur. Father of the year. A good man. Whatever.

    There are two main signs that indicate that your identity shift is happening. The first one is that you aren’t shy and reserved about your new habit or identity. For example, if someone asks you if you exercise, you don’t say “I try to, from time to time”, but you proudly answer that yes, you are an athlete.

    The second sign is that you start encouraging other people to do the same. You become an evangelist of something.

    In our example, that simply means that you proudly tell all the people in your life that you have a new diet that makes you feel great, that you regularly do sports, that you can see the first results and that it feels great. You’re like a talking billboard for the new thing in your life.

    The output of this phase is an identity shift. There’s no way of going back anymore, unless something goes really wrong. You’ve reached the tipping point. Bravo.

    Identity shift
    Source: The Power of Habit, James Clear

     

    Revenue or reaping real rewards

    After a very long and demanding process, you start reaping real rewards. The hard work paid off. You found your fit, you have a new system and habits in place, and you’ve shifted your identity. The world sees you differently now and you see yourself differently as well.

    You’re not at your endgame yet, but now you can set S.M.A.R.T. goals. You have enough knowledge, you have enough feedback, you have a new identity and you know the territory well enough to set measurable goals with a time frame. You have a good picture of how long it’ll take to achieve your endgame.

    In our case, you’re becoming more and more satisfied with yourself. You see your body fat melting off. Your fitness performance is getting better and better. Your “whys” are getting fulfilled – you have a better self-image, you get more attention on the streets from the opposite sex, you have more energy, the sex is better and so on. Now you can clearly see how long and how much it will take to get a six-pack and to achieve your maximum performance. You start feeling good about yourself. You prepare a system for measuring your progress by writing down how many repetitions you can do or you start using different apps that measure different aspects of your performance.

    One dangerous thing that can happen in this phase is scaling too fast. You can become too impatient and go into the execution mode too fast. You have to be sure that your foundations are strong, you have to curb your greed and follow the plan to improve step by step. If you try to scale too soon, you can hurt yourself, experience a setback and you’ll have to go back into the search mode to find a way around your new weaknesses.

    Let me give you an example. You see the first real results of your diet and exercise. But now you want the results faster. You start to overdo everything. You go to extremes with your diet and you push your body too hard. Sooner or later, your body will force you to slow down. You will fall ill, you will injure yourself etc. That’s why you need to make a solid diet and exercising plan in this phase, even with an expert if necessary. You have to push yourself, but you also have to know where the limit is.

    In this phase, the output is a solid and smart plan for how you’ll improve step by step and increase your yield on the investment you’ve made. You should stick to your plan and not overdo things or speed up too fast. If your discipline weakens, you shouldn’t try to catch up, but rather return to your plan the next day.

    Scaling or the execution mode

    We are at the last stop of the process, namely scaling and execution. You want to achieve your peak potential. Your best shape possible, your optimal portfolio. You want to become as unique and valuable person as possible in a relationship, outstanding in your occupation and so on.

    You’ve found your fit, you’ve built a system to stick to new habits, you’ve made an identity shift and you’ve written down a plan. Now you have to stick to the plan with regular intervals, and still listen to your mind, body, emotions and environment. You never stop listening to feedback.

    Sooner or later, you will change (get older for example), your environment will change and you may have to go back into the search mode. Next time, the process will be much easier, because you already have strong foundations, you already have knowledge, and you don’t have to go to the very beginning. But you should always stay agile and lean.

    In our example, the final step is sticking to the execution plan. You have a new diet that works for you and you exercise regularly on a weekly basis. You have goals for improving your performance and you stick to the plan. On your Kanban board, you move your sticky notes from “to do” and “in process” to “done” every week. But you also regularly test and try new things, new superfoods, new exercises and so on. You constantly do linear improvements, but you also search for rapid ones. The process of improvement never ends and neither does the execution mode. The new diet and exercise are now a part of who you are and what you do in life, consistently and in regular intervals. It’s the new you after very long, hard work.

    You need to have realistic expectations about how long the process takes. It’s usually at least a few years. But you have enough time. If you really want it badly enough, you will find a way, if not, you will find an excuse. The key is to really want it badly enough. That’s why you need a strong why.

    So start with the why.

  • Self-reflection, retrospective and journaling

    Imagine an iceberg floating in the ocean. Only one tenth of the iceberg is visible, while the rest of it lies deep beneath the surface – mighty, intimidating and alluring. It’s the same with your mind. Your conscious mind makes up less than 10 % of your brain function. The mighty rest is your subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind is composed of unintentional and habitual thoughts, behaviours, and actions.

    That’s why no human is the master in his own house. The subconscious mind is like an autopilot that triggers certain behaviours in certain situations. The triggered behaviour doesn’t necessarily lead to the desired outcome. Even more: you often don’t have a clue about why you’re doing a certain thing and why you feel the way you feel. In some situations, you can even become self-destructive or completely misinterpret the feedback from your environment, which leads to an entirely wrong decision.

    Self-reflection can help you with that. Through self-reflection, you can change how you see yourself and how you feel about certain situations and, at the end, how you act. Consequently, you can also change how other people see you.

    We could define self-reflection as careful thought about your own behaviour and beliefs. If we develop the definition further, self-reflection is really asking yourself thought-provoking questions so that you can develop a deeper level of understanding yourself.

    The most important direct or indirect benefits of self-reflection are:

    • Understanding and knowing yourself better, for example why you were feeling a certain way and why you did something or made a certain decision
    • Becoming more aware and thus more proactive than reactive, meaning you have more personal power and control
    • Having a clearer picture about your true desires and who you really are
    • Analysing feedback from your environment based on your actions and taking it into account for the desired final outcome of your actions (every action in life brings a reaction)
    • Removing inner roadblocks and releasing emotional tension

    There are also many side benefits of self-reflection, like developing better communication skills, critical thinking, self-learning, self-awareness, social awareness, empathy, analytical capabilities and sensitivity to cultural differences, meaning you become more tolerant. Long-term benefits of self-reflection are also increased professional value and value for personal relationships, resulting in you having a greater capacity for work, creativity, love and, at the bottom line, being happier.

    There are two levels of self-reflection you should be doing regularly:

    • Action retrospective for regular improvements and adjustments to the environment after every sprint
    • Self-analysis for knowing yourself better and being happier in life in the long-term

    Sprint retrospective

    No matter how productive or successful you are in life, there’s always an opportunity to improve. There’s always a way to do things better. The more you become aware of yourself, your actions and your environment, and the more you are open to experiment and try new things (frequently out of the box), the better your potential for improvement is. In different words: becoming wiser unlocks the opportunity for improvement.

    As Confucius said, we may learn wisdom by three methods: “First, by reflection, which is the noblest; second, by imitation, which is the easiest; and third, by experience, which is the most bitter.”

    Since we don’t want to be bitter in life and we don’t want to only imitate other people, much less the wrong ones, let’s focus on improving ourselves by reflection. In agile development, we know the so-called sprint retrospective. The purpose of the sprint retrospective is to learn what works for the team and what doesn’t, and to make adjustments for the next sprint. A sprint retrospective usually takes two to four hours and the team tries to answer a few basic but hard questions:

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

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

    • What to start doing
    • What to stop doing
    • What to continue doing

    There is no reason why you couldn’t do the same in your personal life. When living the Agile and Lean Life, you don’t just do work and execute tasks. You have to think regularly about why you’re doing something and how you’re doing it, and whether you’re making real progress –progress that brings value to your life. Being strong and passionate about the reason why is the best motivator you can have in life, and as mentioned before, there’s always a way to do things better. That’s why personal sprint reflections are so important.

    In the Agile and Lean Life productivity framework, you have regularly scheduled intervals (seven or fourteen days) for planning the next sprint and reflecting on the previous sprint. While planning the sprint and doing the retrospective in your personal life, you should do the following:

    • Review the tasks done in the previous interval
    • Connect with yourself and straighten out your life vision (why)
    • Measure your real progress
    • Adjust the strategy and plan
    • Reflect on new things you learned
    • Gather new ideas
    • Identify potential improvements
    • Set new tasks for the upcoming interval

    Thinking about the elements listed above during your interval planning and reflection, you should ask yourself the following questions: what went well during the last sprint, what you were doing right, what didn’t go that well, why that is so and what you could do differently and how. Based on that, you should make three decisions:

    • What will you start doing in your life?
    • What will you stop doing in your life?
    • What will you continue doing in your life?

    To really implement the change in your life, you have to consider your own behaviour, the desired result, people involved in the process, relationships, the process itself and the tools that can help you improve your work.

    There are two options for when to take time for reflection:

    • Every week or every two weeks when you make time for planning the sprint and doing reflection
    • You plan the sprint in the beginning of the week and do reflection at the end of the week or in two-week intervals. Whatever works better for you. Some people like to combine planning and reflection, others don’t.

    The process is simple: you sit down and go through all the planning and reflection elements and questions listed above.

    If there is no change in your behaviour – the decisions you make, the strategy you follow, the actions you do etc. after your reflection, your reflection simply had no real value. The purpose of the sprint retrospective isn’t just to feel a little bit better about yourself for planning and strategizing. Avoid the fake feeling of progress at all costs. If you don’t know what you’ll do differently after the reflection, if you don’t know how you’ll change your behaviour, you’re doing it wrong. Applying wisdom in practice is the key to progress, not only being aware of something.

    Self-analysis and journaling

    Self-analysis is kind of a different story and takes reflection even a step further. Don’t get me wrong, you need both processes for the best results, but you do have to know the difference between both tools.

    To start with the biggest difference: if you have to force yourself to make a certain decision after self-analysis, you haven’t done it right. Self-analysis is about understanding yourself and noticing, not judging and forcing yourself into anything.

    There is no “stop doings”, “start doings” and “continue doings”. It’s about changing the course of your life without any force, by better understanding who you are and what you are through analytical thinking.

    With self-analysis, you’re going way deeper. It’s not only about your plan, actions and environment anymore, but about you, your whys, about who you truly are and what you want in life. It’s more about getting rid of emotional shit and intruded behaviour you’ve accumulated in the past, which consequently increases your capacity for love, self-worth and self-respect.

    Of course in the long term, self-analysis is also strongly connected to your performance level, productivity and success, much as sprint planning is in the short term. If you look at Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle, the sprint retrospective is more about what and how, while self-analysis is more about why; and you should always start with why.

    There are two main ways of doing self-analysis:

    Psychoanalysis – Frankly, we aren’t talking about self-analysis anymore, but more about the professional process of gaining insights about yourself with a therapist. As you probably know, psychoanalysis was founded by Sigmund Freud and its aim is to release repressed emotions and experiences by making the unconscious thoughts conscious. It’s also about rebuilding your inner blueprint for healthy relationships.

    It’s a very valuable process, but the downside is that psychoanalysis is time-consuming and there are no quick answers. It usually takes a few years of regular weekly meetings with a psychoanalyst. You have to be very motivated to go through the process, but you know how it is: you only get out as much as you put in, and this process can be pure gold for you, especially if you have many cognitive distortions.

    Journaling – The second option, less professional, intense and scientific but still with great value, is to lead the self-analysing process yourself. You won’t internalize a new healthier blueprint for relationships, but you can get many insights about yourself. The best way to keep the needed discipline and to trigger analytical thinking in your brain is journaling.

    Journaling and your self-reflective journal

    Instead of having a psychoanalyst, a journal can be your tool for self-reflection and analytical work. When I talk about journaling, I’m not talking about writing down everything that happened to you on a specific day. I’m talking about why it happened, how you felt, why did you feel that way, how is that connected to your values and beliefs and so on.

    Keeping a self-reflective journal is not about your day and what happened, but about your thoughts, your perspective, your feelings, your words, your actions and about the feedback from your environment. It’s about becoming aware of why you acted like you did and what the result of your behaviour was. It’s about becoming aware of who you are, what your true desires are, identifying your cognitive distortions and so on. All that should lead to insights, understanding and better knowing yourself.

    Regularly reflecting by writing a journal will enable you to:

    • Get to know yourself step by step throughout different life situations
    • Be better connected to your true self, your values, emotions and desires
    • You will become more aware and come to more insights as well as understand your environment better, especially the people who are the closest to you
    • Develop deeper relationships by developing a greater capacity for love and by better understanding yourself. Being more tolerant towards yourself means being more tolerant towards others.
    • Have outstanding clarity and focus
    • Track your personal development and personal evolution. It will also accelerate your personal growth and development. You’ll be able to track your linear and rapid improvements.

    Other benefits of journaling:

    • You get things out of your head and clear your mind, which can relax you and give you more creative and analytical potential.
    • You gain insights you would otherwise miss, especially since you’re keeping track of your thoughts and thinking. You quickly forget what you don’t write down, even the best business ideas.
    • Journaling is also a very powerful problem-solving tool, especially for complex problems.

    There are three main ways of how to keep your journal (it’s not rocket science, but still):

    Notebook – By far the best way to do self-reflection by journaling is writing things down. Your hand is connected directly to your brain and it’s a good feeling to have full control, while nothing is buzzing or blinking or distracting you. All you have to do is buy a notebook, schedule some time and start writing.

    Applications – You have many applications you can use for journaling, such as text processors, editors, notepads and journaling software. If you decide for an app, you should test a few of them and select the one that works best for you. Maybe you can start with Evernote.

    Private blog – The third option, also electronic, is having a private blog. Here are the instructions for how to open a blog (a public one, but all you have to do is keep it private). It’s probably not the best option and it’s also not the safest, but if it works for you, why not use it.

    Some additional directions for keeping your journal as a self-reflective tool:

    Be constant

    The easiest way to start journaling is when you’re pissed off or have had a very vivid day. That’s okay, a journal is a great tool for situations like that, but to get the most out of journaling, you should do it consistently, daily. For example, for 30 minutes every day before you go to sleep.

    It will become a habit for you, your mind will get into the state for self-reflection faster and you’ll have consistent history. The most powerful thoughts you can work with usually come when you have an empty head.

    Be alone and without distractions

    Keeping a self-reflective journal is about association. Associations always lead you to the core of the problem. An important part of it is that nobody should distract your flow of associations. That’s why it’s good to be alone and without distractions such as a phone or anything else.

    Whys

    Encourage your association flow by asking yourself why. Do it five times if necessary. Even ten if it leads you to more insight. As already mentioned, associations will slowly lead you to the core of everything, you’ll become aware sooner or later. You will get an insight into why you feel like you do and why you’ve found yourself in the situation you’re currently in.

    5-Whys is also a great problem-solving method. Write down a problem you have and ask yourself “why” five times. After every answer, you ask yourself “why?” again and that will lead you to the core of the problem. Here is an example (source: Wikipedia):

    • The vehicle will not start. (the problem)
    • Why? – The battery is dead. (first why)
    • Why? – The alternator is not functioning. (second why)
    • Why? – The alternator belt has broken. (third why)
    • Why? – The alternator belt was well beyond its useful service life and not replaced. (fourth why)
    • Why? – The vehicle was not maintained according to the recommended service schedule. (fifth why, the root cause)

    Intellectual and emotional body

    You need to distinguish between your mind and your emotions. It’s true that our thoughts and emotions are strongly connected, but you’re often in situations where something seems totally logical (how you should feel or do), but your emotions tell you a completely different story. Your emotions are the compass that leads you to the real insights.

    For example, it may be logical that you take a new job that has a higher pay-check and more opportunities. But your emotions may not completely agree with the rational decision. You can feel your emotional body resisting. It’s part of your analytical job to ask yourself why. Five or even more times, if necessary.

    You can help yourself with the following questions and guidelines:

    • Clearly describe a situation that happened to you
    • How does it make you feel and why? Continue with whys.
    • The situation you’re in and your feelings, what do they remind you of the most?

    No judging, just noticing

    The purpose of self-reflection by journaling is not to judge and criticize yourself or analyse what you should do and what you shouldn’t. It’s about being understanding, tolerant and noticing things about yourself.

    It’s not about strengthening your inner critique, but vice versa. It’s about increasing your capacity for love towards yourself and others by becoming more aware and knowing yourself and your past. No matter what, be gentle with yourself when self-reflecting.

    For increasing your short-term performance, productivity and improvement, regularly plan sprints and do reflections. And for increasing your long-term performance and happiness, do regular reflections and self-analysis by keeping a journal. It may seem like a huge investment, but it’s an investment that will enable you to really go for your true desires and goals. It doesn’t matter how hard you work if you aren’t doing the right thing. Dare to be yourself!