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  • 20 not so obvious indicators of emotional pain and psychological suffering

    Physical pain is how the body alerts you that something is wrong with you on the physical level and requires your immediate attention.

    No matter how small the injury is, you tend to care for it properly as soon as possible; otherwise the pain or the inconvenience usually get only stronger and stronger. In cases of any more serious injuries or health issues, you immediately rush to a doctor, specialist or the ER.

    The story is quite different when it comes to emotional pain, psychological issues and mental wellbeing. In cases of severe personality disorders or mental health problems (depression, anxiety, bipolar, schizophrenia etc.), there’s no other way but to get professional help as soon as possible.

    The same as it is with severe body injuries.

    On the other hand, many “soft indicators” of emotional pain and psychological issues get ignored. It’s like having a papercut that never gets healed. It’s not life-threatening, but it for sure is annoying.

    To be fair, people in such situations most often do try different self-help approaches (meditation, transformational vocabulary etc.), but they never get really serious about developing strong feelings of trust, personal power, proactivity, identity and self-worth, and finally heal that paper cut.

    In a way, it’s very understandable why. Getting serious about fixing even small emotional distortions requires substantial financial, emotional and time investment. Most often it can be done only with months of consistent work backed by professional help and one chosen type of scientific-based therapy (psychoanalysis, CBT, transactional analysis etc.).

    And an even stronger reason for not getting serious about developing extraordinary mental and emotional strength seems to be that people get used to living with high emotional velocity and a negative mind, believing that happiness and a warm, fulfilling life is only for fairytales. But it’s not.

    On top of that, emotional suffering is not seen from the outside very well – most people walking around seem okay. Sometimes it isn’t even seen on the inside, because the real reason for suffering can reside unnoticed on the unconscious level.

    Many people are not even aware that they are emotionally suffering.

    But the cost of any lasting emotional pain is enormous. Relationships suffer, life can’t be fully enjoyed, you rarely believe in yourself enough to follow your own dreams, even small irritations lead to emotional overreactions.

    Happiness with a smile on your face becomes something alien to you. It’s definitely worth to tackle even the smallest emotional issue and solve it once and for all.

    You only have one life and maximizing its quality is the wisest decision you can make. And the only way to get to a real quality life and personal happiness is to develop strong emotional foundations and a firm positive mind. But first we have to take a step back.

    First, you must become aware that there are some tight emotional knots smothering you. Thus, I prepared a list of soft indicators that often can be (but not always are) signs of emotional suffering and lighter types of psychological issues. They are worth tackling if you wish to maximize the emotional quality of life.

    Soft indicators are things that we all experience at some point in life. They are not solid proof of anything, only something that is worth exploring further; especially if they’re consistently present in your life or they somehow escalate to an extreme.

    In such cases, it’s definitely worth exploring what’s hidden behind – on your own with self-reflection and other similar exercises or with professional help.

    Indicators of emotional pain

    Below is the list of twenty soft indicators of a turbulent personality, emotional suffering or small psychological issues which point to a high probability that you can strengthen your mind and emotional stability for a better quality of life:

    1. Being drawn to the deceiving world of spirituality
    2. Superstitious beliefs
    3. Excessive altruism
    4. Gluttony, dieting extremes and pushing your body to the limits
    5. All types of greed
    6. Easy to anger and frequent mood swings
    7. Terrible nightmares
    8. Strong protection of intimate space and lack of physical touch
    9. Isolation
    10. Always being late
    11. Perfectionism
    12. Micro-management
    13. Constantly rushing and worrying
    14. Listening to “broken heart” music
    15. Bitching, whining and complaining
    16. Too rigid morals or a broken moral compass
    17. Forming abusive relationships
    18. Not wanting kids
    19. Physical pain
    20. Excessive fantasizing

    Again, these can be, but not always are signs of emotional suffering.

    1. Being drawn to the deceiving world of spirituality

    The spiritual dimension of existence is as important as the physical, emotional and intellectual one. A healthy human spirit is expressed in an unshakeable trust in yourself and life, in seeing life as a gift, having the wisdom to deal with negative aspects of life, developing basic goodness and a loving nature, and a firm decision to leave a positive legacy behind for your descendants.

    Spirituality can also include healthy religious beliefs without any fanaticism, having a connection with nature, and dealing with philosophical questions of existence at some point in life.

    But people who are emotionally hurting can be drawn to spirituality for other, less sensible reasons. It can feel so good to be part of a larger whole, a larger plan.

    If you felt alienated from your family and home, spirituality might seem like a shelter where you belong to something bigger than life; you might finally feel like there’s a greater plan for you. Spirituality can give you a poor consolation that you have a home.

    Consequently, instead of developing inner strength and trust in yourself, you start seeking explanations for human pain, the will to live and hope for fortune in doubtful spiritual guidance like tarot, astrology, numerology and other types of fortunetelling. Any fanatic religion might give the same false comfort.

    You give your personal power and proactive approach away to an external force, hoping to hear favorable outcomes for yourself. The less you trust in yourself, the more you need such external crutches.

    As mentioned in the beginning, a spiritual dimension of life is important. And there might be a greater plan for you and all of us. Having such faith in life is important and far from problematic.

    The problem occurs when you start using spirituality to compensate for inner insecurities, hoping that some greater force will take care of every problem in your life. The problem occurs when you start to only daydream and lose yourself in spiritual dimensions, instead of acting and improving yourself.

    Spirituality can also quickly become a poor consolation for suffering. Suffering is the pain of you wanting the world to be different than it is. Part of being an emotionally healthy person is finding a way to accept reality as it is and deal with the problems life serves you.

    Every human being also has the opportunity to co-create a fairer reality for generations to come. But running away from reality in spiritual dimensions can lead only to more pain.

    2. Superstitious beliefs

    Superstitious beliefs take second place right after spirituality. Believing that number 13, breaking a mirror or walking under a ladder will bring you bad luck, or that finding a horseshoe will bring you good luck has no connection with reality.

    There’s not even any scientific study that would support a significant extraordinary effect of the moon on human behavior.

    If your mind gets obsessed with waiting for what kind of bad luck will hit you after a black cat crosses the road, that definitely indicates emotional lability and a mind that isn’t strong enough. Bad things do happen, but not because of the number 13, horseshoes or black cats.

    Sometimes they happen because of your own stupid decisions and sometimes just because of how life is designed – we all get lucky or unlucky sometimes.

    The majority of generations in human history faced some kind of a hardship like wars, famine, natural disasters, and so on. And there is no human alive who would live decades without problems, obstacles and personal struggles.

    In the past few centuries, we have made life much more comfortable, but struggle is still a part of life. Without bad things, there would also be no good to experience. It’s how life is designed. You can’t have more fortune or misfortune by following some superficial beliefs.

    The best thing you can do is to develop inner strength and unshakable trust in yourself that you’ll face anything life serves you, no matter what it is. By adopting that positive outlook and expecting good things, you can focus your mind on the positive, which absolutely leads to a better quality of life.

    3. Excessive altruism

    A similar sign of emotional pain to questionable aspects of spirituality and religion is excessive altruism. Being a good person, helping others in need, and contributing to a better world is definitely the right thing to do.

    But there’s a thin line between altruism and fawning.

    An unhealthy form of altruism is when you completely forget about your own needs, and only serve other people or humanity in general, until you run out of (almost all) your resources, most of all your energy and life vitality.

    You never say no, you give yourself away at every opportunity and never put yourself first, no matter how much you neglect yourself.

    • The most probable psychological reason for doing that is usually the hope that other people will take care of you, if you take care of them. You give to others what you deep down crave to receive – love attention, affection and help. You hope that by being good, good things will happen to you.
    • It can also be that you are used to neglecting yourself, like your caretakers neglected you when you were a child. Thus, putting yourself first is unfamiliar to you, something strange and hard to practice.

    Mr. Nice Guy who has terrible love life, is a great example of excessive altruism.

    I’m not saying you must be a selfish narcissist, but excessive altruism usually leads to a lose-lose situation. You go (emotionally, energetically, financially etc.) bankrupt, and instead of teaching people how to fish, you give them fish until you run out of resources.

    People might even become too dependent on you. The simple rule when it comes to altruism is that you must first have in abundance the thing you give away, be it money, love, time or any other resource. Then you must set limits.

    That means you must first take good care of yourself and only then can you take care of others; or you must find a win-win situation, where you don’t forget about yourself and simultaneously help others.

    It might surprise you, but Mother Theresa was not a poor woman like she is pictured. Her order fundraised millions of dollars and their bank accounts were full of money. It’s a great example of how you must first have something before you give it away. That includes love and emotional stability.

    4. Gluttony, dieting extremes and pushing your body to the limits

    A very common way to cope with emotional pain are dieting extremes. Gluttony, emotional eating and following any extreme diet with the hope of finding redemption in food are most often an expression of inner suffering. There can be many subconscious reasons for that.

    Food can make you feel safe. It can give you a sense of emotional fulfillment. That’s why emotional eating is so common. Diet (besides sport) is one of the easiest ways to push yourself into extremes.

    The reason for hurting yourself with such behavior is simple – extremes are familiar to you because you were raised in an extreme environment. You might also look for pain release in food and dieting, or look for ways to resist “authority” or social pressure.

    Extreme vegetarianism or veganism and judging others for eating meat can be a similar sign. Fighting for animal rights as a vegetarian or vegan to save animals from suffering is a good way to show others that you want less pain in the world and that you experienced a hell of a lot of it already.

    Don’t get me wrong. A healthy diet is extremely important. Some people simply don’t like the taste of meat. And even more importantly, we must find ways to be more humane to the animal world. All these things are part of a wise and exemplary way of living.

    But they must not escalate to any extreme or to the point where you do more damage than good to yourself and others.

    Besides extreme diets, doing sports is another very frequent way of pushing your body to the limits. Of course, exercising is a must, and sometimes you have to test your limits. But there are limits to testing limits.

    Constantly pushing yourself in sports because of inner emotional tension leads to injuries, burnouts and sickness sooner or later. Nevertheless, sports, art, creating and humor are some of the best mature mechanisms of expressing pain and sublimating it.

    Physical pain can also be a type of distraction from emotional pain.

    5. All types of greed

    Greed is the most frequent way of coping with emotional pain of unsatisfied needs. The most obvious one is greed for money, but there are many other types.

    Intellectual greed. Emotional greed or neediness. Sexual greed or lechery. Greed for status or pride. Greed is absolutely not something good, no matter what Gordon Gekko says.

    Any type of greed is always a poor surrogate for love. It’s a sign of a low capacity for it. Deep down, all the upbringing negligence and emotional pain accumulated, desperately seeking other forms of safety, admiration, respect and attention.

    The biggest problem with greed is that since it is only a poor surrogate for love, your thirst can never be quenched. There is never enough of the thing your emotions are after.

    Thus, you want more and more of it, be it money, knowledge, status or sexual partners, but ironically it never fulfills you like you hope it will. Again, every human being has the right to material possession, property and decent financial status.

    Every one of us has sexual desires, the need for respect and accomplishments, and being educated is the cornerstone of a prosperous life. But there is a healthy limit, when fulfilling needs turns into a counterproductive obsession.

    6. Easy to anger and frequent mood swings

    Anger is a normal reaction when one is being mistreated. If you were mistreated as a child, with verbal or any other kind of abuse, the anger probably accumulated over the years and can easily be triggered by the smallest disagreements or obstacles in everyday life.

    Everything that doesn’t go according to your expectations triggers an emotional flashback. All the mistreatment from the past explodes in the present moment. And then road rage, emotional bursts and overreactions happen.

    Besides anger, there are other overwhelming emotions that can easily cripple you the same as anger, but triggered by small normal everyday irritations. Shame, doubt, fear, guilt, envy, sadness and so on.

    That’s usually seen in frequent daily mood swings. In one moment, you feel normal or even excited, and in the next moment you’re taken over by some type of a negative emotion. And then you go back to normal and soon again back to the negative.

    7. Terrible nightmares

    A big portion of pain and suffering immediately gets suppressed, before you even sense it. That is especially true for small daily irritations you aren’t attentive to or big painful events too hurtful for you to even admit they affected you. A

    n example of a small irritation would be someone constantly looking at their phone when spending time with you while you expected their full attention. And an example of a big irritation would be moving to a new home, where you’re excited but also afraid of change, unwilling to admit it.

    You might suppress the pain in order to protect yourself and go through the day more easily, but the pain is still there in the subconscious mind. One way how your subconscious mind tries to communicate with you, either pains or pleasures, are dreams.

    Painful dreams most often point to some type of suffering in real life. Thus, every time I have bad dreams, I immediately take a piece of paper when I wake up and do self-reflection.

    I try to find the connection between the dream’s story and what’s happening in my life. Most often I can quickly find the connection and identify the pain.

    8. Strong protection of intimate space and lack of physical touch

    We know three human interaction zones. The closest zone is intimate space (approximately 0.5 meters or 1.5ft from you), then we have social space (1.5 meters or 5ft from you) and finally public space (approximately 7.5 meters or 25ft from you).

    If you are extremely protective of your intimate space, don’t like to be touched by other people that aren’t really close to you and always try to keep as much distance as possible, you might be in emotional pain and have huge cravings for closeness and love.

    This can be seen in numerous different ways:

    • You never hug with your family or friends
    • You hate massages, physical therapy and similar
    • You twitch when somebody touches you unexpectedly
    • You overreact when you see kissing two people in public etc.

    Usually that’s a sign of a low capacity for love. Deep down you have a great desire for gentleness, cuddling and physical attention. But that’s too painful to admit, and consequently you create these rigid rules and a moral standing to keep people as distant as possible.

    9. Isolation

    We are all social beings. Love, belonging, and strong personal and professional connections are part of wellbeing and every quality life. While temporary isolation is definitely beneficial from time to time (for reflection, focused creation and self-improvement), longer periods of isolation always lead to sadness, loneliness or even depression.

    Isolation is a form of running away from potential emotional pain, because it’s easy to be the boss, the one and only when you’re at home, especially if alone. There’s nobody who can hurt you, tell you what to do or be better at something than you are.

    No people, no interrelationship dynamics, no benchmarks, no potential hurtful words or actions. It’s the perfect world. But not really.

    Human needs are best fulfilled in interaction with others. Thus, you must be strong enough to go out into the world and interact with people as much as possible. And being quiet, reserved and unsociable indicates some kind of emotional suffering.

    10. Always being late or being unreliable

    We all know some people that are always late. Well, I’m one of them or at least I used to be. One possible subconscious reason for being late is not in messiness and being unorganized, but in silently showing people that you’re not too dependent on their love or affection.

    You’re creating distance by showing independence in an ill way – by being late or through any other type of unreliability.

    It’s a very toxic way of showing autonomy and independence, and it indicates a huge mistrust in people and yourself. It’s not that you don’t respect others or don’t like to have them as friends, it’s more a silent expression of a power struggle because you’re afraid to let people get too close to you because then they might hurt you.

    But in the end, you achieve exactly what you don’t want to: superficial relationships and people abandoning you.

    11. Perfectionism

    Perfectionism is one of cognitive distortions that runs on the false belief that if you’re perfect, people will finally love you and show you some affection. You assume you only deserve love when you’re perfect.

    Consequently, your self-worth greatly depends on your current accomplishments. When you get some praise for good work done you feel good about yourself, when you get zero praise (for work that was maybe also done well) you feel like a piece of shit.

    Not only does your self-worth fluctuate on opinions of others, soon many additional issues arise from perfectionism. Being afraid to try new things that you haven’t mastered, overdoing things, worrying how people will react to your work done, and buying love from others by trying to be perfect.

    The irony is that people would probably love you much more if you just tried to be yourself, not fight to seem so perfect, and sometimes go for good enough.

    12. Micro-management at work or home

    Micro-management at home or at work is an indicator of mistrust in people. You know the mindset that the work probably won’t be done properly if it’s not at least supervised by your watchful eye.

    Consequently, you’re always telling people at home how thing should be done better, you nag and complain and want everything to be done your way. This shows zero tolerance and flexibility.

    When you have trust issues, you many times have a problem delegating work, and even when you do, you want to double-check everything. You are not loving or empowering people, you are controlling them.

    In any case, you’re letting people know that they’re incapable in your view, that you don’t trust them, and that you’re somehow superior to them. Nobody feels good in such a relationship.

    13. Constantly rushing and worrying

    Business, workaholism, rushing, impulsiveness and worry are signs of inner tensions and running away from pain. These behavioral patterns are usually run by mistrust in yourself, others and life, low feelings of self-worth and fear of failure, expecting only bad things to happen and similar.

    An emotionally strong person is always calm, moves slowly, controls the situation and has a positive influence on their surroundings. They keep a straight posture, breathe deeply and focus on finding a solution no matter the situation they found themselves in.

    On the other hand, people who panic and start worrying get hurt first, just like you see in the movies.

    If you can’t calm down, if you’re constantly worrying about something, jumping to negative conclusions and only wait for something to hit you behind the corner, it absolutely shows an excess of inner tension and emotional lability.

    14. Listening to the “broken heart” music

    One potential sign of emotional pain, is being drawn to melancholic or any other type of heavy or emotionally strong music. When you have a broken heart, all the lyrics starts to make sense.

    And music often resonates with our internal emotional states in general. Thus, why you like a certain type of music is worth analyzing.

    • Music is used as a way to balance your emotions and it biologically works. So when you’re sad, you can use sad music to embrace the sadness and thus get rid of it.
    • People who enjoy different types of music show different types of personality characteristics (this is especially a popular research field for music psychologists).

    I’m not saying that if you listen to Britney Spears you’re a special shiny snowflake, and if you listen to Metallica your soul is doomed. I’m talking about more subtle indicators.

    In what kind of lyrics do you find yourself and your life narrative? Do you often get lost in melancholic music and a certain kind of sadness? Does music help you express rage or any other type of severe negative feelings? Does it feel like you always have a broken heart?

    Sad music can be a form of addiction that feeds negative emotions, no matter the music genre. Losing yourself in melancholic music from time to time when life gets tough is very normal, but if you’re drawn to sad lyrics and melodies over and over again, it’s probably worth exploring why that is so.

    15. Bitching, whining and complaining

    Constantly bitching, whining and complaining is a loud call for help and an expression of a deep desire for emotional comfort. It’s a form of “forcing” other people to show you sympathy, empathy, understanding and love.

    But it’s a very unhealthy way of expressing your needs. Being a martyr is absolutely a sign of emotional pain.

    Constant complaining sooner or later turns you into an emotional vampire that nobody likes to spend time with. People start to avoid you, and that leads to even more bitching, whining, complaining and on top of that gossiping about how terrible others are.

    A pessimistic outlook is hardly part of an emotionally stable personality. We can add cynicism, skepticism and suspicion to the list.

    Many times, a form of toxic complaining is wishful fantasizing about the good old times. Debating over how people used to have better lives (without technology, simple times etc.), or how people in the West/East are more materialistic or spiritual and how their lives are a lot different in a positive way has nothing to do with reality.

    You’re fantasizing away your current pain.

    Every environment absolutely has a great influence on the quality of one’s life, but you have the power to change your environment at least to a certain extent. And an indication of emotional stability and a strong mind is improving your environment as much as possible.

    Only daydreaming about better times, on the other hand, most often indicates a lack of personal power, will or drive.

    16. Too rigid morals or a broken moral compass

    When it comes to your moral standing, there are two extremes that can indicate emotional pain. The first extreme is possessing unbearable moral standards.

    With a too strong superego comes false guilt, and false guilt is always looking for people to please and rules to keep. With too rigid morals you make yourself completely inflexible, many of your needs are unmet and life can be pretty boring because you’re putting heavy chains and restrictions onto yourself.

    The other extreme is having no morals. Money over everything. Cheating. Impulsive buying and similar. In the second case, the superego is too weak compared to the id.

    Both extremes indicate some kind of an inner struggle and emotional pain. It’s a sign you’re out of balance.

    A person with too strong or too loose morals always has a hard time creating healthy bonds and attachments with other people. Without healthy bonds, the needs for love, affection and belonging don’t get fulfilled and that leads to suffering.

    Developing a healthy balance between id (primal needs), superego (morals), ego and reality is thus mandatory for a happy, assertive and fulfilling life.

    17. Forming abusive relationships

    There are many forms of abusive relationships. But all abusive relationships have something in common – one person is the abuser and the other one is being abused; and they both have to play their role in the relationship to keep the abuse alive (there are exceptions, as always).

    No matter which side of an abusive relationship you are on, you are emotionally suffering; outside the scope of the relationship as well.

    Thus, people with internal struggles and emotional pain usually have a tendency to form the same toxic patterns in relationships over and over again. And that gives them an opportunity to live something familiar and express all the pain in a bad way.

    • Dominant types are drawn to jealousy, controlling behavior, verbal and physical abuse, extreme competitiveness, manipulation and always wanting to be in the center of attention.
    • The submissive type often resorts to passive-aggressiveness, shyness, stubbornness, indirect criticism, piggybacking, laziness and moralization.

    And both types are usually very sensitive, where every triviality leads to an emotional overreaction. Not a nice life to live.

    18. Not wanting kids

    In some rare cases, not having kids can be a rational decision, maybe because of financial, health or any similar reasons. But the reason for not wanting kids can also be because of huge emotional pain. A child can be a reminder of how tough your childhood was.

    Consequently, it’s natural to feel resistance to have a daily reminder of how painful your upbringing was for years to come.

    Similarly, you might be asserting that you don’t want to bring a new human being into this cruel world; even though you live in fairly good life conditions and circumstances.

    In such a case, you usually see reality much darker than it is, through the negative lenses of your negative mind. You’re suffering and you don’t want any new person to suffer like you have.

    There are two more indicators we can add to the list:

    19. Physical pain as a distraction from psychological pain (stomach ache, pinched nerves etc.)

    20. Excessive fantasizing – excessive fantasizing is usually a reaction to your insecurities, a way to distract yourself from burdens of reality. But your job is to accept reality as it is.

    Now you know the most frequent soft indicators of psychological and emotional suffering. We all experience most of these things from time to time and that’s completely normal.

    But if any of the indicators have a consistent presence in your life or if they escalate to irrational dimensions, it’s absolutely worth it to explore what is happening in you, start exploring your subconscious mind and maybe even find professional help if things get too heavy.

    Luckily, I found more than 13 soft indicators. :)

  • Everything you need to know about minimalism as the coolest lifestyle

    In the past 5 years or so, minimalistic living became something very close to my heart and an important part of my life design and superior personal organization. More and more people are joining this movement, since it’s really one of the coolest and most beneficial lifestyles to follow in today’s cluttered world.

    In this article, I will describe my experience of going from a messy person who kept every small useless thing to becoming an unhealthy ascetic person and then finally a healthy minimalist. All that hoping to convince you to also try and experiment with this awesome life design concept.

    Living a minimalistic lifestyle not only makes room for the important things in life, but it’s also a great weapon against being bombarded with products and sales offers all the time. Not to mention that minimalism makes your wallet full and happy.

    After making the first steps towards minimalism, you quickly realize that you don’t need thousands of useless items to be happy, unique and to feel safe.

    You do need a few key things that make life comfortable and you need to protect yourself on a material level and enjoy having possessions, but at the same you must know where to draw the line, so that things aren’t cluttering your life, giving you a false sense of identity and dragging your productivity down.

    So let’s start exploring the world of minimalistic living. Here are the topics covered in the article:

    The world is filled with cheap products and everybody wants you to buy something

    If you turn on the TV, you can quickly see one big downside of today’s world. The mantra that crowds all over the world are following, especially young people, is “shopping & f*cking”.

    Everybody wants to enjoy life through endless hours of shopping, enjoying material possessions, being famous and having fun. The demand on markets is the highest ever in history and people can’t wait to spend their hard‑earned money (or their parent’s money or even borrowed money) on new products.

    High demand leads to even higher supply. That means shopping centers are growing like mushrooms after a rainy day even in small mountain villages, you are exposed to hundreds of ads every day everywhere you go, and the social pressure to own the latest version of a phone, car and fashionable clothes has never been so huge. Everybody wants to get high just one more time by buying a few new possessions.

    At this point a quote from Fight Club serves us perfectly to illustrate the whole picture:

    People buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, to impress people they don’t like.

    The pressure that you are missing out on something if you don’t own everything in fashion, and if you aren’t beautiful, smart, rich, fit and powerful at the same time is very huge. That’s why people want more and more.

    Being exposed to all the shopping centers, products and ads, having easy access to money, yielding under all the social pressure and enjoying the dopamine rush when you buy something new is the perfect combination that makes people into unwise spenders.

    Now, don’t get me wrong, I think that we live in the best times ever. There are so many upsides to today’s world, like the lowest poverty, high mobility, access to information, endless opportunities and high safety levels. We can enjoy all that, at least in most parts of the world.

    But there are also a few downsides – market complexity, information overload, unrealistic expectations towards life and too many options for everything, including options for buying new things.

    Glorifying shopping and the “yolo” mentality are definitely not strong virtues and values of contemporary times. All great things in life were achieved with stoic virtues – frugality, smart and hard work, innovation, superior organization and flexibility. And empires crumbled under epicureanism.minimalism

    Finding the balance between the inner resources and the outer resources

    Minimalistic living is about finding the right balance between possessing inner and outer resources, and finding a balance between materialistic greed and ascetic martyrdom. If we start with the basic segmentation of resources, we know two types of resources – inner (internal) ones and outer (external) ones.

    Internal resources are the sum of all of your competences – knowledge, skills, willpower, creativity, innovative ideas, self-image, self-confidence, your life strategy and how you design your lifestyle, and everything else that is a part of your personality, your mindset and your agency. With inner resources, you have the ability to influence your environment and create wealth (money, healthy relationships, creative works, value added etc.).

    Your outer or external resources are all possessions and wealth you have that is not a part of who you are – money, connections, contracts, assets and all the items you possess. Now here’s why the inner/outer resources division is important for minimalistic living.

    An emotionally healthy person looks for a balance between the inner and the outer resources. Such a person knows that they have to develop their inner resources first, and then with the right inner resources they can always create more outer resources.

    For example, if you learn how to code, you can always undertake a new coding project to make more money. If you develop sales skills, you can always earn more money by selling something. The rarer the skills you possess that are in high demand, the better the position you are in. The right combination of inner resources brings the biggest safety ever; because you can always make more money.

    With the inner resources, you can directly create more external resources. But the formula doesn’t work the other way around. You can’t directly gain more inner resources by possessing more outer resources. That is exactly what people are trying to achieve by owning thousands of items and constantly buying new ones. Let me explain:

    • You hope to feel happier (inner resource) by buying yourself a new thing (outer resource).
    • You hope to be more self-confident (inner resource) by putting on new fancy clothes (external resource).
    • You hope to be seen as an interesting person (inner resource) by buying the latest version of a phone (external resource).
    • You hope that your spouse will love you more (inner resource) by buying him/her a new fancy gift or a bigger car (outer resource).

    You may quickly wrongly assume wrong that more outer resources bring more inner resources. You can quickly identify yourself with your possessions. Different brands may feel like parts of your personality.

    The dopamine rush might seem like you found the way to happiness by making one more purchase. A relationship might finally seem like a happy one when you buy someone an expensive gift, but what about in a few days? Things go back to normal, where they deserve to be.

    External resources absolutely play a great role in developing more inner resources, but not directly, only indirectly. You might definitely look more representative in a nice suit. But you still need personality substance. The suit is only an add-on. You definitely might be more productive with a faster and newer phone. But first you need to be organized as a person in your core lifestyle.

    A nice home can definitely bring you more comfort, but it will never make you permanently happy. The substance, like an interesting personality, resourcefulness, likability, status, they’re all developed by working on yourself, not buying things. They get developed by investing in yourself and continuous improvement.

    That leads us to the second part of the quote from Fight Club: “You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are the all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”

    In other words, you are unique and as unique as everybody else. You don’t need thousands of meaningless possessions to feel better about yourself. Feel good about yourself when you are completely naked. Develop your talents, become a healthy assertive person and know that you deserve love for who you are. No possession can bring you that.

    Minimalism is not the lack of something, it’s the perfect amount of something. N.B.

    Ascetic life

    Ascetic life, the other unhealthy extreme

    Hoping to find happiness, uniqueness and identity in owning hundreds of meaningless possessions (on borrowed money) is one extreme. The other extreme is denying the material world altogether and sliding into an illusion of divine unmaterialistic spirituality, ascetic living and giving up on owning anything that isn’t necessary to survive.

    If changing your lifestyle and following new dogmas is based on emotional issues, you can quickly go from one extreme to another.

    When you find that material things don’t bring happiness per se and that they can’t calm your hungry soul down, you can quickly decide to join the anti-capitalism march hating the materialistic world filled with advertisements and especially the financial system supporting all the corruption, unfairness and depravity. I’ve been on one side and the other.

    Denying the material world is as bad as glorifying it. I’m not saying that the social design is perfect, that the financial system is working well, and that there isn’t a worrying gap between the rich and the poor. I am trying to bring forward the painful truth that the reason why people decide to live the ascetic life and resist the materialistic world or even protest against it are rarely that straightforward.

    If you are constantly obsessed that you own too many things, your mind is still obsessed with stuff.

    For those people who decide for an aggressive ascetic lifestyle, it’s usually too painful to enjoy the material world, or too painful to fight for material things. The source of the pain might be that they don’t believe in themselves enough, inconsiderately acquire competences that are high in supply and low in demand, or have traumatic experiences in childhood that led to developing a false mindset about possessions.

    Being raised in poverty often leads to one extreme or the other – to a greedy soul that’s never satisfied or to a martyr for whom it’s too painful to own anything. I’ve been on both sides, so I know how these extremes feel. They are definitely not the solution and the formula for a happy life.

    Denying the material world is not the answer. If you are constantly bothered by what you own, your mind is still obsessed with stuff, and that isn’t healthy. You have to find the right balance between having enough inner and outer resources, so that you can normally grow, create and enjoy life and easily connect with other people. You don’t want to only survive in the material world, you want to thrive.

    So when it comes to minimalism, you have to avoid anyone claiming that you should own only an x number items to be a true minimalist or that if you own one expensive item you are a traitor to the minimalistic community.

    Minimalism is about possessing the perfect amount of something, be it an outer or an inner resource. Being a true minimalist means that you don’t run away from the material world, but on the other hand you also make sure that you don’t drown in it and waste your life.Declutter your life

    The problem of owning too much stuff and basic rules of minimalism

    Now that we know not to push into any extreme, the question is what to own and what not to own. Let’s analyze what makes sense. All material things have one big problem. They take up space, time and energy. They have a tendency to pile up.

    We all have that drawer full of clutter; and a basement or a garage. And a corner in a room. Things have extreme inertia and tend to stay where they are as dust holders. That’s why all material things need to be managed properly. There are a few rules about that.

    He who buys what he doesn’t need steals from himself. – Swedish proverb

    Don’t buy things too quickly

    By nature, we are all emotional buyers, impulsive buyers. Every purchase gives us a small dopamine rush. That’s why you have to trick yourself into becoming a wiser spender. There’s a simple trick you can do.

    Wait a few days before making minor purchases and a few weeks for bigger purchases. You’ll be surprised at how often you change your mind and foresee that at the end of the day, maybe you don’t need that thing that you wished for so much.

    Properly maintain what you own

    You can extend the longevity of things you own with regular maintenance. It’s better to own fewer things and maintain them properly, than to own thousands of items you forget about or don’t have time to maintain.

    Examples are regularly cleaning your computer from the outside and its operating system, taking good care of your car, protecting expensive items with cases etc.

    Do regular cleanings

    One of the most important things for living a minimalist lifestyle are regular cleanings. You should try to discard the things you don’t need on a daily basis as life goes by, but in spite of doing that, things still have a tendency to accumulate and take up space.

    That’s why it makes sense to do regular monthly cleanings and a major one every half year. Right before winter and summer begin, do a major cleaning. Here I wrote how I do regular major cleanings.

    Designing a space for decluttering

    There are only two types of home design. The one that encourages clutter accumulation and the one that discourages it. Many drawers, shelves, boxes, wardrobes and niches invite clutter and rubbish. You want to avoid that. Minimalistic designs, where there is no place to put a new souvenir, leave you with only one place where the memento can go – trash.

    You can always take a picture of the souvenir and save it on your computer for the memories. But you need to build yourself a motivational environment that encourages minimalistic life design and prevents you from throwing things in the corner where they pile up for months.

    Minimalistic home

    Everything you own either brings value into your life or drags you down

    Everything you do and have in life (material things, relationships etc.) either adds value to your life or drags you down. There is no third option. Things that add value to your life are things that make you happy, lead you to more creativity and greatness, make you healthier and more energetic, develop your talents, and so on.

    Things that take value from the quality of your life (aka waste) are the things that bring the negative into your life, to the environment or the society. This list contains clutter, overspending, throwing food away, owning things that only take up space, and so on.

    For every item you own, you have to ask yourself whether it brings value to your life or not really. If it doesn’t bring any real value into your life, you don’t need it. The result you’ll enjoy in the end by throwing away things you don’t need is more time, more money, more physical space and more room for the important things in life.

    • Do you love the item you own?
    • Is the item really useful?
    • Do you feel positive energies when you think about the item?

    Nevertheless, you must be very careful when answering the question of whether throwing something away or not makes sense, because your emotions might quickly mislead and mess with you. You can very quickly find a superficial argument why not to throw something away. Let’s look at how to deal with that.

    I make myself rich by making my wants few. H.D. Thoreau

    don't know what to do

    The mixed feelings you always have when throwing things away

    I did a long self-reflection every time I took a step deeper into the minimalistic lifestyle. I also observed many of my friends and family members doing major cleanings. There’s one interesting thing that I noticed. You can extremely easily find an excuse why not to sell, give or throw something away.

    • The item holds memories or you are somehow emotionally attached to it.
    • You assume that you might need that item someday, even if you haven’t used it for years.
    • You feel guilty at the first thought of getting rid of something, even if you don’t like the item, because it was a gift, you were taught not to throw things away, and so on.
    • Rooms filled with things don’t seem empty, and that means your life must also be more full.

    That’s what usually holds people back. These are the counterforces, battling all the advantages of throwing something away. It feels good to throw something away. It makes room in your life. You get more margin. But it’s emotionally hard.

    When you tidy up your environment, you always feel like you also tidied up part of your inner self – your mind, emotions and spirit. Not to mention the benefits of the workout you do when you carry all the clutter from the shelves into the trash.

    Having more time, more money, more physical space, less stress and more room for the important things in life always feels good and liberating.

    When you do major cleanings, when you have to decide whether to get rid of something or not, there are always doubts and second thoughts. That’s normal.

    And every time you have to convince yourself that the freedom of not owning unnecessary stuff is much greater and beneficial than any emotional arguments that look for superficial safety in owning things. With time, it gets easier to own as little as possible, but there is always a bit of internal struggle when you have to throw something away. It’s normal and we all have to deal with it.

    When you have problems deciding what to do with an item, ask yourself – which moments in your past were the deepest and most fulfilling experiences you had? Which past things made your life really valuable and worthwhile and bring tears to your eyes? It’s probably not an old rusty vacuum cleaner in your garage that you might need some day.

    minimalism - options you have

    All the options you have when doing major cleanings

    Many people assume that when you decide to live a more minimalistic lifestyle, you throw away 90 % of your stuff and that’s it. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Becoming a minimalist is a process. It takes time. You can’t become a minimalist in a single day.

    Becoming a minimalist is like peeling an onion. First you start by cleaning things out of your life that you really don’t need, and then you make the standards for what it makes sense to own and what not higher and higher. You just have to be careful not to go into any extremes, as we discussed.

    In the process of de-owning, throwing things away is not the only option you have. You have at least four options at your disposal for what to do with things:

    • Throw away – You can simply throw away an item for which you know that it has no value at all
    • Give away – Sometimes things that have no value for you have value for other people
    • Sell – If an item has solid monetary value and you don’t need it, liquidate it into cash
    • Rent out – If an item has value and you don’t need it, you can turn it into a cash machine by renting it or getting a co-owner or a co-user

    Other options you have that also lead to more minimalistic lifestyle:

    • Automate – social media marketing, tasks, production …
    • Cancel – subscription, event, appearance, travel, visit, meeting …
    • Delegate – tasks, commitments, chores …
    • Delete – task, functionality, files, online account …
    • Downsize – company, number of relationships, car, house …
    • Forget about it – issue, problem, person …
    • Let it go – emotional problem, emotional issue …
    • Minimize – workload, number of daily decisions, options …
    • Optimize – chores, processes, decision-making …
    • Opt out – newsletters, projects, commitments, meetings …
    • Refocus – reset priorities, define your True north …
    • Remove – people from your life, functionalities, options …
    • Set limits – for mental masturbation, TV watching, the number of things you do simultaneously …

    When I went from one extreme (searching for safety in material things) into the other (not owning anything) I made a big mistake. I threw away and gave away hundreds of possessions that had solid monetary value. A price tag. It was thousands of dollars given or thrown away. Just because I was so eager and enthusiastic to become a minimalist.

    It should have been more than obvious to me that a big emotional burden is behind the change and that I was acting irrationally. As I repeat over and over again, be rational on your way to the minimalistic path. A minimalistic lifestyle is no solution for emotional problems. It’s a lifestyle that can lead to a better quality of life, if you do steps into the minimalistic lifestyle in the right way.

    You don’t own stuff, stuff owns you.

    the first steps towards minimalism

    How to make the first steps towards minimalism

    I hope you’re at least a little bit convinced that living a minimalistic life design make sense. Thus the most important question is: what is the next step. Well, there are simple things you can do to begin a minimalistic lifestyle and then you can escalate from there to the point you still feel comfortable.

    • Give away clothes you don’t wear and need
    • Tidy up your home and make it much more minimalistic
    • Digitalize everything that can be digitalized
    • Downsize your car if you own a car you can’t afford
    • Minimize your reading list, tasks and commitments to the most important ones
    • Start acting more minimalistic towards food and relationships

    Let’s dig a bit deeper into every one of these steps.

    Clothes

    I’m currently looking for a new home, and so I visited a few flats and houses to rent/buy. There was one pattern in all the properties I visited. People had piles of clothes everywhere. On chairs, floor, wardrobes, everywhere. They didn’t even bother cleaning them up and putting them where they belong.

    Clothes are cheap, easy to buy and there is always a new fashionable piece you should own. But then you spend 80 % of the time wearing the 20 % of your clothes that you bought years ago.

    The best way to start a minimalistic lifestyle is to give away clothes you haven’t worn at all in the past few months. And then be very careful when you buy new ones.

    Your home

    You want to have a home filled with laughter, happy family members, good friends and positive energy. You want to have a bright, spacy and clean home, where there is plenty of room for warm relationships. That means your home needs one big cleaning.

    Consider getting rid of all the things you haven’t used in months or even years (that you might need some day) – all the souvenirs, broken items, old books, worn out towels. Who needs all that? Decide to do one big cleaning of your home, and then do it regularly.

    It might be hard to throw the first few things away, but after the fifth item everything will be easier and right after you’re done with the cleaning process, you will feel wonderful. You can even have a garage sale, for example.

    Everything that can be digitalized

    A big enabler of the minimalistic lifestyle is the so­-called asset-light living. Asset-light living means you can digitalize many things you had to physically own a decade ago. CDs, videotapes, audiotapes, photo albums, books, notes etc.; it can all be digitalized or bought in a digital version.

    If you aren’t a professional collector of any of those things, you can free up a lot of your space by organizing a huge part of your life in the cloud. While you do that, you can also clean your files and folders on your computer, you can delete e-mail accounts and social networks you rarely use, and remove all other waste from your life.

    Asset light living
    Everything you need in a small device and your cloud.

    Car

    Car is most often the second biggest expense in a household, right behind a home. You don’t want to be slave to your home, and you especially don’t want to be slave to your car. Buy a car you can afford, regularly maintain it and make sure it’s clean and tidy.

    The best minimalistic move you can probably do right away is to downgrade your car. There are so many hidden expenses in a car, like insurance, gas and amortization. When you want to sell your car it’s worth nothing, and every new car costs a fortune.

    Car is nothing but one big cash consuming machine. Like TV is one big time consuming machine. I don’t even own a car anymore and it feels great.

    Projects and tasks

    The next very important aspect of life where you can do a big cleanup is the number of projects and tasks you have on your to-do list. The majority of people are overwhelmed with work and they are doing it to themselves by committing to way too many things; sometimes to run away from life in doing instead of also being. Don’t be one of them.

    Commit to a few projects where you really bring value and then say no to all the other things.

    Go through your tasks, delete all of those that aren’t really that important, and send a few e-mails out that you won’t manage to deliver what is expected of you so you will rather exit the projects. It takes some guts, but you will feel wonderful afterwards. You will do a big favor to yourself and others, who impatiently waited for you to deliver.

    Things to read

    I really like to read, so it can quickly happen to me to have thousands of unread articles in the RSS reader, ten not­-yet-finished books on my Kindle, and a Pocket app full of to-read articles. Then from time to time when I started to feel overwhelmed, I used to just delete everything.

    I stopped doing that and decided to go for a smarter strategy. Now I only go for the best content with limited to-read in progress. I don’t queue new things or buy new books when the reading queue limit is reached. You should be absolutely minimalistic in organizing your infostructure; otherwise you can drown in information.

    Food

    As much as we look for emotional safety in items, we can also look for it in food. It’s called gluttony and it leads to being overweight, low levels of energy and several diseases. Being a minimalist when it comes to food can greatly improve your quality of life.

    Don’t buy too much food and don’t stockpile tons of food that you then throw away because you couldn’t eat it before the expiration date. Have a standard weekly shopping list, eat standardized dishes and eat less of more quality food.

    Relationships

    Much like you want to be minimalistic with items you possess and food you eat, so you want to be minimalistic with relationships in your life. You want to have fewer relationships, and for those be really quality ones. Key relationships are one of the most important aspects of your life.

    People can make your life on Earth heaven or hell. Make sure you take enough quality time with the few people you really love, and offer each other mutual support and encouragement. Be minimalistic in your relationships.

    A minimalistic lifestyle is always very kind to your wallet, your stomach and your heart.

    Practical examples

    My steps towards becoming a minimalist

    When I earned my first real money as a teenager, I decided to renovate my room. I wanted my architect to put as many shelves, drawers and wardrobes as possible into my room. Then throughout the years, I piled things up. Technology was my biggest weakness.

    I had a PC, laptop, netbook, three monitors, tablet, a few mobile phones, you name it. Books were my second weakness. I had thousands of books lying everywhere. One of my shelves collapsed because of it. Not that I’m against owning books, but I had hundreds of unread books and I was buying new ones and new ones. It’s called intellectual greed.

    I had wardrobes full of clothes I never wore, old magazines were lying around everywhere, I had souvenirs from all over the world on my shelves and desk, and I had hundreds of items I never used. I felt like the room was full of memories and I felt rich in a way. But in reality the room was as cluttered and unorganized as my internal world.

    As mentioned, I then went from one extreme into another. One day I read about the minimalistic lifestyle and I just decided to be a minimalist. It made sense to me, it could be a solution for my turbulent inner world. I gave away thousands of books to friends, libraries and secondhand bookshops. I threw away all the souvenirs. I decided to go for one laptop with two external monitors. I minimized the clothes I had.

    I tried hard to really own as many things as possible. Everything I still owned bothered me. A computer cable that I rarely used, a few coins in the drawer, everything bothered me. I searched for peace and salvation in owning as few things as possible.

    Then at some point, I realized the same thing that Buddha taught and was enlightened about. Many times, the middle path is the answer. I figured out that going from one extreme into the other won’t bring me any peace and happiness. So I decided to be a healthy minimalist. Here are the rules I follow now:

    • I prefer warm and healthy relationships over owning money and brutally fighting for more possessions and fancy things. But I don’t deny the importance of money and the benefits of enjoying the material world.
    • I want to experience life more than to own things; but I have no problem enjoying the few material possessions that I do own.
    • I try to own as few things as possible, but I don’t torture myself with how many items I own.
    • If owning something brings a lot of stress into my life, I downsize it or sell it.
    • From time to time I buy myself an expensive thing I really want and I have no problem with it.
    • I give special attention to not enslaving myself with debt.
    • I try to simplify my life as much as possible and make the majority of my life about growth, creating things, connecting with people and doing things I really enjoy, which rarely costs a lot of money.
    • I know that the real path to inner happiness and peace is not through material things. I strive for a balanced amount of inner and outer resources.
    • I try to keep my environment as simplistic and minimalistic as possible.
    • I try to digitalize everything that can be digitalized by following asset-light living and having my own digital brain. I also regularly go on technology detoxes.
    • I am very mindful about the quality of the food I eat, the quality of the relationships I have and the projects I join and really commit to.
    • I very carefully maintain all the items I own. I clean them, protect them, take them to the maintenance shop when needed, and so on. The phone I own looks like new after a few years.
    • I do regular cleanings at least two times per year – of my physical and digital environment.

    You can read more here about one of my minimalistic cleanings that I did not that long ago. I’m always surprised at how I can still manage to find a few bags of clutter even if I’m very careful about what I keep in my life. Without regular cleanings, there is no minimalistic life.

    As I mentioned, today I am a much healthier minimalist, even if I currently don’t own a car or a mobile phone. But I will have no problem buying any of these two items the moment I need them. I always ask myself if something brings value into my life or drags me down. After that, I have a very clear picture of what to do with the item – own it or discard it.

    Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

    do the first cleaning now

    Homework

    Do you have the guts to try the minimalistic lifestyle?

    Now it’s up to you. It might seem scary to get rid of 80 % of the things you currently have, but you can make it less scary by following a carefully orchestrated process that we discussed. The first step is to get rid of one single thing.

    Sell something that has solid monetary value and that you don’t need on eBay. Liquidate it into cash. Then donate a few pieces of clothing you really don’t wear. Play a little bit with different ideas for how you can simplify your life and how you can own less. Experiment a little bit, it’s fun.

    The only thing you have to be careful about is not to go into any extreme. Don’t drown in stuff. Don’t drown in debt. Be more a producer than a consumer. But don’t be only a producer who doesn’t enjoy life and only works, and don’t try to live the extreme ascetic life; you won’t find happiness there.

    The material world is a very important part of the life experience. You are here on this world to grow, create, connect with people as well as to enjoy material things and possessions. Enjoy them, but don’t not look for happiness in them.

    Make sure you know where to draw the line and how to find the right balance – between possessing, being and doing. Now it’s time for you to make your first step towards a more minimalistic lifestyle. Get rid of one of the items you don’t need. It will feel good, believe me.

    If you aren’t sure, you can try minimalism as a 30 Day Challenge. Rent a completely empty flat, select no more than 100 items and try to live for a month. I know it sounds crazy, but it will definitely be an awesome life experience. Something you can tell your kids about.

    Additional resources

    If that sounds too crazy, you can find here a solid 30 Day Challenge plan for how to do one thing every day to get one step closer to a minimalistic lifestyle. It’s a smart plan and an exciting challenge you can absolutely go after.

    And if you are interested in reading more about the minimalistic lifestyle and personal experience that other people had with minimalism The Minimalists, BecomingMinimalist, mnmlist, TheMinimalistMom and Minimalism Subreddit are some of the most popular resources.

  • The only solution on the table if you are feeling stuck

    Many times, we feel stuck in life. You may feel like you are stuck in a relationship, in a job or in life in general. It happens to all of us. It’s a shitty mixture of feeling paralyzed, depressed, overwhelmed, hopeless, being in doubt about the future and many other similar negative feelings.

    You may not have suicidal thoughts, but feeling stuck can often go even so far that you may just want things to be over (with your life). It’s definitely not a pleasant feeling.

    You usually get stuck after making a series of bad decisions. It can be a few major bad decisions like getting into business with the wrong person, making a big bad investment etc. or several small bad decisions like not taking care of your body daily, drinking too much alcohol, not following your True North, ignoring your feelings etc.

    No wonder that people most often feel stuck in their:

    The most important question is: what should you do when you are feeling stuck?

    Feeling stuck

    You are not really stuck, there is something else

    Here’s the good news. If you are feeling stuck, you aren’t really stuck. You are only spending your time, energy and other resources wrong. There is nothing else. It’s more than obvious that doing the same things and expecting a different result is crazy. It’s actually the official definition of craziness.

    You aren’t stuck, you’re only spending your precious time, energy and other resources wrong. You aren’t following your True North.

    In reality, you can’t be really stuck, because life always goes on. Your seconds of being alive are passing by. Everything is moving and going forward, and so are you. You can’t stop time, so you can’t be stuck. You can only be making wrong decisions about spending your resources. You can only be committed to the ill life strategy.

    If you are asking yourself why you’re doing that, there is a very simple answer. Because in comparison, the pain of being stuck is smaller than the pain of freeing yourself and doing something about it. There are certain benefits to being stuck you are enjoying. They can be enjoying the comfort zone, emotional security, financial security, being used to people and things, and so on. Deep down, you know very well what it is.

    You feel stuck because things are too bad to stay and too good to leave.

    Most people wait until the pain of being stuck becomes much bigger than doing something, just anything. And by then it’s usually far too late to constructively solve a problem without severe damage. People wait until they get a serious disease, go bankrupt, the relationship becomes extremely abusive, they burn out or experience a psychological collapse because of work pressure.

    Yes, at some point the pain of not acting becomes too strong. But there’s a rule. Kill the monster when it’s still small. Well, don’t kill anything, but you get the point.

    The more you ignore the monster, the bigger and stronger it becomes, and it’s going to eat you sooner or later. If you don’t act as soon as possible, a collapse is inevitable, and waiting until the collapse is a sure way to completely destroy your life.

    Stuck Quote

    Homework

    So the first exercise you should do is to list all the benefits you are enjoying while being stuck. They are usually deep psychological and emotional reasons that drive you to cling to a certain situation. What’s so good about it? What are you really afraid of?

    You may feel like you don’t deserve to be happy, that you aren’t good enough, you may be afraid of financial insecurities, that you won’t meet a new person who can treat you better etc. There is always a deep psychological reason why you cling to where you are and you must become aware why you’re doing that. Usually you also lack self-confidence in that area big time.

    Stuck in life

    When you are feeling stuck, solution is in craziness

    The solution for freeing yourself when you feel stuck lies in craziness. What do I mean by that? If being crazy means doing the same things and expecting a different result, then starting to do different things will bring you a new result. Yes, it’s that simple – you aren’t stuck, you’re just spending your resources wrong. That means you have to start directing your resources (time, energy, money, creativity etc.) into a new direction.

    You must start doing different things and you must start doing things differently. That’s all.

    When we talk about starting to do different things, there are two ways you can go. You can start making even worse decisions like start drinking alcohol, blaming other people, start gambling etc. or you can start making better decisions. The latter is what we are looking for, but I hope that is obvious.

    What’s really important is that there is a simple solution for feeling stuck that I have seen over and over again. When somebody feels stuck, the moment they start doing a small new task they haven’t been doing before to change their situation, a big burden lifts off their shoulders.

    The first step is the hardest but when you do it, a whole new world opens up to you. You can start feeling the energy flowing again. It usually takes only a small kick and the soul boat starts drifting again on the river of life.

    Kick yourself a little bit in the butt and life will start flowing again.

    If you want to live the life you want, you have to put yourself first, be a little bit rebellious and stand up for yourself. You’re feeling stuck because you are putting yourself in a position of a victim. It’s the worst kind of mindset you can operate from. So push yourself out of the victim mindset.

    Nobody gets the quality life they want handed to them on a silver platter; we must all fight for it. Life owes you nothing, it was here first. The important fact is that life rewards those who master its rules. And one of the important rules of life is acting or, according to the Nike slogan, “Just do it”.

    But when you act, you have to observe the feedback you are getting from the environment and from your inner self, and if it’s not working, you have to act differently. It’s that simple.

    Answer three simple questions and do one small thing

    Homework

    So if you’re feeling stuck, gather all the energy, motivation, will and determination that’s left in you and make three simple choices, answer three very simple questions:

    • What are you willing to stop doing?
    • What are you willing to start doing?
    • What is the smallest single step you can take into a new direction?

    This one single step is really important. It can be getting a massage as a signal to life that you are putting yourself first, it may be updating your CV and then sending it to a few companies, it may be showing with your behavior that you have enough of being abused, or it might simply be reading a book.

    It may be getting up a little bit earlier and meditating, it can be deciding to let it go or anything else that will serve as a signal that you aren’t stuck anymore.

    One small act is usually the tipping point that gets you going again. You have to do one single thing you haven’t ever done since feeling stuck, and then piggy-back further positive changes on that one epiphany moment.

    One single act is often the only thing you need to start feeling unstuck. So do it now!

    Why does it work? Because it’s a simple reminder that you possess all the power necessary to change your life situation. At any time and in any place. Nobody can take that away from you. You are the one who chooses who to spend time with, where to focus your energy and what you will do with your life.

    You are the one who can take action, innovate your way out of shit and take a step towards a better life. You already possess all the power needed.

    If you are deep in shit, stop digging.

    Understanding global and local maximum when feeling stuck

    Local maximum
    Achieving local maximum. But is there a higher hill to climb?

    In mathematics, there is a concept known as local and global maximum. It’s an important concept that can also be applied to a personal life.

    A global maximum is the point where you would enjoy life the most, achieve your true peak performance and maximize all the potentials you have.

    Honestly, it’s pretty hard to achieve that point and it takes a special kind of character. It takes an enormous amount of experimentation through the search mode, and you often have to change many diets, partners, careers and behavioral patterns.

    Then there is the local maximum. The local maximum means maximizing your quality of life and success levels in different areas with your current life settings. You search for a position and behavior for yourself that gives you the most out of your current life situation.

    • Global maximum: Completely changing your life settings – you make one or several new big decisions (like changing a job, getting a divorce, saving all the money possible etc.)
    • Local maximum: Maximizing your quality of life in current life settings – you start making small better decisions (like letting go, getting a new hobby, changing your behavior towards a person, slowly paying off your loan according to a plan etc.).

    Now, why are those two concepts important? Many times, it’s obvious what the best thing to do is when people are feeling stuck. You don’t like your job, change it. Your partner is abusive, leave them.

    But the problem is that things rarely get so bad that the pain of staying would be greater than the pain of doing something and leaving. The benefits of staying (either emotional, material or whichever security) are bigger than the effort necessary to act in a big way.

    It’s kind of a “too good to leave, too bad to stay” situation, but most people decide to stay. Because things aren’t painful enough, even though they are getting worse. So acting is absolutely better than doing nothing.

    If you know that going after a new maximum is just too much for you (changing a job, getting a divorce etc.), do something small that will maximize your current situation. There is always something you can do to be in a better position.

    • You can change yourself
    • You can negotiate
    • You can communicate differently
    • You can start treating yourself better
    • You can set strict boundaries
    • You can strategically protect yourself

    It’s a no-brainer that you are feeling stuck if you see your only option as leaving or giving up on something that is dear to you, but at the same time you know you can’t do that, it’s just too hard. Well, admit that to yourself and do something to maximize your quality of life in current life settings.

    If you can go after completely new life settings and draw the line in the sand, do it. But if you know you can’t undertake a different road to get unstuck, do something new and small that will get you to feel unstuck in current life settings.

    To find out whether you should go (if you are ready to go) for a new maximum or stay at the local maximum, simply employ optimal thinking. Ask yourself: What is the best thing I can do in my current situation to get back on track? Your intuition will tell you what to do.

    “Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.” Will Rogers

    Nevertheless, if you decide to stay at your current life settings, make sure you protect yourself. Things will probably get worse and you must be ready for it. Make sure you’re building options for yourself in current life settings. If things get much worse at some point, the transition will be smoother. If not, learn to enjoy life under current settings, but be prepared. Play your cards smart.

    Free yourself

    Homework

    If you’re feeling stuck, start playing and free yourself

    To get unstuck, you have to be more assertive, there is no other way. An important truth of life is that if you want to function well, you have to be a healthy assertive person.

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

    There is no stuck in the definition of an assertive person.

    So you have to start treating and listening to yourself better. You have to stop abusing yourself or letting yourself be abused. When feeling stuck, there is nothing but a lot of abuse.

    Instead start loving yourself, build up your self-confidence, become assertive and start playing again, like a kid. A kid who plays, can’t be stuck. If you are really so stuck that you have zero ideas on what to do, here’s a few of them:

    1. Challenge your fears, just a little bit
    2. Break your routine with something new
    3. Change the way you think and look at things
    4. Start communicating with a new behavior
    5. Do something extremely fun or take a trip
    6. Start exercising
    7. Volunteer for charity
    8. Get a pet
    9. Get yourself a small garden
    10. Write a novel about your being stuck situation
    11. Draw a picture about your being stuck situation
    12. Make new friends
    13. Analyze yourself and get to know yourself better
    14. Figure out if you are maybe a chronic procrastinator
    15. Try doing the opposite just to see what happens
    16. List all the possibilities you have, and keep an abundance mindset while doing it
    17. Take an online course or read a book about your life problem
    18. Do one thing that you really enjoyed as a child
    19. Write down 50 ideas on how you can help your company to perform better
    20. Find a mentor
    21. Increase your margins and disinvest yourself
    22. Do all the mind exercises to think better

    Now go out and play, do something new. You only have one life. And remember, you aren’t stuck, you’re just spending your time, energy and other resources wrong. So shape a better life strategy. You only live once.

  • How to simplify your life to make room for the important things

    You should be super happy and grateful; you live in the best times ever. Violence levels are the lowest in history, poverty is declining fast, you’re free to design your life completely tailored to your needs, and the average person today owns more cool stuff than a king or a queen did a few hundred years ago.

    But there are also a few big downsides in today’s world. Information overload. Uncertainty. Market complexity. Unrealistic expectations towards life and the tyranny of choice, to name but a few.

    There are so many things to choose from, there are so many things to do, own and experience, that you can quickly get carried away by wanting too much at the same time. You know, much like if you eat too much chocolate at once and then your stomach suffers.

    As I teach in my blog posts, you always have to be one step ahead of life. You always need to have a superior life strategy in place. The solution for the tyranny of choice in today’s times is to simplify your life. It’s one of the most freeing things you can do. Subtracting instead of adding things into your life.

    The best cure for the tyranny of choice in today’s times is to simplify your life.

    By simplifying life, you make more room for the really important things (health, relationships, wealth, a smile …), you increase your margin (the space between your work capacity and workload) to not drown in work, and life in general becomes so much easier. Even more importantly, by simplifying your life you can finally make room for happiness.

    By being exposed to all the ads, technology, numerous distractions, possibilities, options, products and changes, you can quickly start feeling overwhelmed. We all do. And it’s time for you to get ahead of this downside.

    In this blog post, you will learn how to simplify your life, so that you can get back the freedom, time, energy and other resources you need to live a happy and really productive life by being focused on the things that really matter.

    So let’s start exploring the options you have for simplifying your life.

    Less is more

    How you can simplify your life

    There are several ways of how you can simplify your life. They aren’t rocket science and they aren’t hard to do – rationally. You see, simplifying your life is an emotional challenge, not a rational one. The two strongest emotional challenges you have to face are the fear of missing out and the fear of losing something valuable to you.

    Simplifying your life is an emotional challenge, not a rational one.

    Because it’s an emotional challenge, you have to start with small steps and see that you can survive with one project less or by throwing away that thing you haven’t used for months. Things will get much easier when you simplify your life and doing it will make room for the important things.

    I was scared like a little puppy when I sold my car and when I ditched my mobile phone. But after experiencing all the benefits a few days later, all the fear was gone, and the benefits were so huge I was just asking myself why I hadn’t tried it earlier.

    Knowing that to simplify your life, you will have to deal primarily with your negative emotions and fears, here are a few options you have to start simplifying:

    • Automate – social media marketing, tasks, production …
    • Cancel – subscription, event, appearance, travel, visit, meeting …
    • Delegate – tasks, commitments, chores …
    • Delete – task, functionality, files, online account …
    • Donate – clothes, money, things you don’t need anymore …
    • Downsize – company, number of relationships, car, house …
    • Forget about it – issue, problem, person …
    • Let it go – emotional problem, emotional issue …
    • Minimize – workload, number of daily decisions, options …
    • Optimize – chores, processes, decision-making …
    • Opt out – newsletters, projects, commitments, meetings …
    • Refocus – reset priorities, define your True north …
    • Remove – people from your life, functionalities, options …
    • Set limits – for mental masturbation, TV watching, the number of things you do simultaneously …
    • Throw away – clutter, things you don’t use…

    Above are listed 15 ways of how you can simplify your life, and I definitely haven’t listed all of them. It’s up to you to decide which option is the best for the different situations you have in life. The important fact is that if you don’t systematically and strategically simplify your life with all the options you have, you’re going to stay right where you are.

    Now let’s dive deeper into a few best options of how you can simplify your life fast by using above mentioned tools.

    1. Simplify your schedule
    2. Simplify your meals
    3. Simplify your style
    4. Simplify your relationships
    5. Commit to the minimalistic lifestyle
    6. Cancel projects you aren’t really committed to
    7. Use fewer apps
    8. Simplify your goals
    9. Simplify your soul
    10. Other ideas for simplifying your life

    Simplify your schedule

    You probably know very well that meetings, excessive socializing and spending too much time on email are the biggest time wasters for most people. Email can be real work, but only for rare occupations. For the majority, email and meetings are great ways to kill time and feel productive, even if you aren’t.

    Meetings, emails and urgent tasks are also a great way to make your calendar and working day super complex and super unproductive. Having hundreds of items in your calendar every week can make you feel like you’re a super busy person, but the feeling is often fake.

    It’s shocking how many people are lying to themselves with a fake feeling of progress, doing tasks that are urgent, but not important.

    To avoid a fake feeling of progress, you need to set clear outputs and metrics for your work and then make sure you’re really getting the important things done. In more than 90 % of cases, that means you have to simplify your working day and make room to work in the flow on the things that really matter.

    Simplifying your calendar can be really life-changing for your productivity and happiness levels at work. The tools for simplifying your calendar are timeboxing and setting strict limits.

    Timeboxing is a way to proactively set what you’ll spend your working time on in advance, while limits help you set strict boundaries to make sure that distractions and “urgent” tasks don’t make you stray from your plan.

    For example, you can simplify your calendar with a framework where you timebox two working flows per day, you plan to check email only once a day and you have a maximum of two 30-minutes meetings. An exception is Friday, when you may have more and longer meetings as well as spend more time on email.

    You may also have a no-interruptions Tuesday, when you do 4 working flows with zero distractions, no email and no meetings. In that way, you finish 10 working flows and focus on what’s really important. A strict schedule framework helps you more easily make decisions on when and how to spend your time. You can take everything even further by having no schedule at all.

    Here is one more alternative suggestion how to organize your calendar with timeboxing:

    Example of Highly Productive Calendar
    Here is an example how your calendar should be organized for maximum performance.
    Life experiment ideas

    Simplify your calendar by:

    Simplify your meals

    Food is an important part of life. You probably eat 3 to 5 times per day and it takes you between 20 – 60 minutes on average to prepare the meal and eat it (or even more). That sums up to 2 – 3 hours of eating every day.

    There’s nothing wrong with that. As I mentioned, food is an important part of life. Who doesn’t love food and eating. Not only do you need it for survival, it also gives you a feeling of safety, pleasure, and sharing a dish can be a great social experience.

    But it doesn’t have to get more complicated than that. In fact, there are many ways of simplifying your eating habits and still fulfilling all your nutritional and foodie needs. You can prepare a standard weekly shopping list. You can simplify the meals you cook. You can optimize how many dishes you use. You can standardize the types of meals you eat at different times of day.

    I have a few standard options for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. I try to keep my meals standardized, simple and within the caloric limits that fit my macro-nutrition plan. At first, I put some effort into experimenting with different options and finding the optimal meals for me (taste, preparation time, nutritional values etc.).

    Now, I update and add new options every quarter or so, just to make sure that my diet is constantly improving and things don’t get too boring. But I try not to spend hours and hours thinking about what should I eat for my next meal.

    Well, simplifying your meals doesn’t mean that you don’t try new dishes from time to time. It doesn’t mean that you don’t go to a restaurant and order something different and non-standard from time to time. You don’t want to deprive yourself of pleasures in life.

    Simplifying your meals only means that you decide to have the best of both worlds. On the one hand, you try to simply, standardize and optimize your life and on the other hand, you’re constantly experimenting with new things. Keeping the balance between the one and the other is usually more art than science, but with time and by listening to yourself, you start making the right choices.

    Life experiment ideas

    When it comes to food, here are some suggestions for how to simplify your life:

    • Standardize your weekly shopping list and have groceries delivered to your home.
    • Plan a standard weekly eating schedule and update it from time to time.
    • Eat meals more or less at the same time every day.
    • Have 5 – 10 favorite types of breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks that fit your macro-nutritional needs.
    • In each of your favorite restaurants, have a dish or two you always order.
    • Simplify your meals with fewer different types of food. You will consume less calories and food will digest more easily.
    • Optimize food preparation and how many dishes you use.
    • Constantly improve your diet and try new things from time to time.
    • Have healthy snack options when emotional hunger hits you.
    • Absolutely enjoy food, but try not to complicate your life too much with meal choices.

    Simplify your style

    Personal style is very important, it’s one of the power signs and the handiest option to express your taste, values and uniqueness. Nevertheless, having and managing good style takes time, effort and mental bandwidth. That’s why Steve Jobs wore the same clothes most of the time and why Mark Zuckerberg does it nowadays.

    On the one hand, expressing personal style is important, but on the other, it doesn’t make sense to spend hours and hours in front of the mirror and an open closet, choosing what to wear. Obviously it’s a lot harder for women and many professions (like modeling) to not invest heavily into a unique and impressive personal style, but there are definitely some limits you can set.

    What to wear

    Life experiment ideas

    Here are a few ideas for how you can simplify your style:

    • Find a few clothing brands that fit you well and shop only there.
    • Regularly take one day per month to update your wardrobe or do it only twice a year (like I do), but then make more purchases.
    • Get a stylist if necessary, to unburden your mind over whether you fit the new fashion trends.
    • Donate clothes you don’t wear. It’s probably half of your wardrobe.
    • Buy seven pairs of the same jeans, t-shirts and hoodies, and forget about your style.

    Simplify your relationships

    I’m a strong believer that you must have complex, multidimensional, deep and diversified relationships in order to grow and experience the richest life possible. At the end of the day, close relationships matter most.

    Simple relationships are definitely helpful when you want to relax and enjoy life, but they rarely bring out the best in you and push you to new levels of awareness.

    But there are definitely many ways of simplifying relationships in your life. First of all, if you follow the “no assholes, no bozos, no crappy people and no haters” rule, you’ll clean up your life in terms of relationships to a great extent. You can simply decide not to deal with that kind of people at all.

    You don’t think about them, you don’t talk about them, you don’t gossip about them, they just don’t exist for you. What a simple and effective solution.

    The second thing you can do is to choose your battles very carefully. Even by ignoring all the shitty people, relationships are often battles, because of a lack of outstanding communication, clashes of interest or many other things.

    Never go to war, not with others, but especially not with yourself.

    But there are battles that are important in your life, and others you often engage in only because of your ego. So simplify your life by choosing your battles very carefully. There are many battles you don’t have to engage in; you can simply smile or move on.

    In the same way, you can simplify your most precious relationships by initiating honest communication as soon as a problem appears. As soon as there is bad energy present, you can take a step towards transforming it into a positive one.

    A hug, a compliment, a nice word, sitting down and starting to communicate is always a good first step towards switching from the negative to the positive. By being proactive in relationships, you can simplify your life to a great extent.

    Life experiment ideas

    To sum up, here are the ideas for how to simplify your relationships:

    • Have fewer relationships and those ones really deep. There are six extremely important relationships to nurture in your life – spouse, family, friends, boss, coworkers, mentors. Put quality over quantity in these relationships.
    • Follow the “no assholes, no bozos, no crappy people and no haters” rule.
    • Don’t engage in battle with every person who doesn’t agree with you, has a different opinion or doesn’t know how to drive. Instead observe, listen and learn. Choose your battles very carefully.
    • Don’t have unrealistic expectations about relationships. Relationships are like glass, but the glass is already broken.
    • Be proactive in relationships. When a problem appears, solve it immediately, especially with honest communication. When engaging with people, always respond active-constructively.
    • Always be yourself and don’t lie at all.

    Simplify your life

    Commit to the minimalistic lifestyle

    The more stuff you own; the more stuff owns you. Every item in your life takes up place, time and energy. Having less of quality stuff is some of the best advice for simplifying life. A lot has been written about minimalism, so I won’t go deep into it, but there are a few key important points I have to emphasize when writing about simplifying life.

    You don’t want to go into the extreme of living an ascetic life, owning almost nothing. That’s often a sign that it’s too painful for you to deal with the material world. Don’t try to escape from reality. You need to be constantly fulfilling your needs to be happy and that also includes fulfilling materialistic needs.

    But that doesn’t mean you need to have a cellar full of junk, hundreds of clothes you don’t ever wear, dozens of clutter drawers, three cars, two TVs, five tablets and hundreds of souvenirs catching dust on your shelves. Be an emotionally healthy minimalist.

    The second important point is that the best way to live a minimalistic lifestyle is not to buy stuff in the first place. Wait a few days before making minor purchases and a few weeks for bigger purchases. You’ll be surprised at how often you change your mind and foresee that at the end of the day, maybe you don’t need that thing that you wished for so much.

    To simplify your life with a minimalistic lifestyle, it’s also very important to do regular cleanings, at least twice per year. Sell stuff, donate stuff, throw stuff away. For every item that you haven’t used for a month or so, ask yourself if you really need it. If you don’t, get rid of it.

    Life experiment ideas

    The main ideas for how to simplify your life with the minimalistic lifestyle:

    • Do regular cleanings every 6 months or so. Know that being a minimalist and throwing stuff away is more an emotional challenge than a rational one.
    • Avoid emotional buying. Wait a few days for minor purchases and a few weeks for the bigger ones, and observe if the emotional pressure to buy that things fades away.
    • Everything you want to buy, multiply the price 7 – 10x. That’s the real price, considering the opportunity-cost in 10 years if you had invested the money in an EFT with average market return.
    • By owning less, there are fewer items to use, fewer items to move, take care of, clean, do software updates or whatever. Remember, you don’t own stuff, stuff owns you.

    Always have the key objects in the same place

    Key holderThere’s a part of your brain called the hippocampus and it’s dedicated to remembering the location of things, if they are consistently in the same place. That leads to a simple tip for productivity and simplifying your life.

    Always have the things you own in the same place. Your keys, glasses, perfumes, whatever. This life hack will save you a lot of time and brainpower.

    Cancel the projects you aren’t really committed to

    Every year, there are probably a few projects in your professional or even personal life (redecorating the bathroom etc.) that you said yes to, but only because you somehow didn’t have the courage to say no. And now you aren’t meeting your commitments and you probably never will or you’ll just deliver a half-finished output.

    Gather the courage and be honest with yourself and others, and cancel all the commitments that you know you won’t deliver or will perform poorly; or that aren’t projects with the highest impact in your life or projects where your contribution is irreplaceable.

    Life experiment ideas
    • Simplify your life by not having too many projects, too many activities and too many commitments.
    • Work only on projects where your value added is high and you personally grow and learn.
    • Free yourself of the emotional burden, where you committed to something you will never deliver.
    • Simplifying life is always about saying no. Learn how to say no.

    Use fewer apps

    One of the best ways to really simplify your life is to use fewer applications – on your computer, tablet and mobile phone. There are so many applications to install and it’s so easy to do it, all you need is one click or touch of a screen. It takes a few clicks and you can have hundreds of apps on your devices.

    From 10+ chatting apps to 10+ news apps and then you have all the productivity apps, entertainment apps, the list is endless. Every app takes up space, time, energy and adds complexity to your life. And new popular apps are being released every single day, just begging you to install them.

    Instead of installing one more app, go into the opposite direction instead.

    Life experiment ideas
    • Limit yourself strictly to 30 or something apps. If you want to install a new app, you have to delete one that you’re currently using. It’s a tricky rule, you’ll see.
    • Have one app for chatting, zero apps for news, maybe one or two productivity apps and one to relax you.
    • Delete all the apps you haven’t used for more than a few weeks.
    • But digitalize as many things as possible. You can simplify your life to a great extent by organizing a digital brain for yourself.

    Simplify your goals

    If you’re trying to achieve too many goals at the same time or trying to implement too many changes at once, you usually implement none. Thus you can greatly simplify your life by reducing the number of goals and improvements you want to achieve in a specific time period.

    You absolutely need to have a life vision, you absolutely need a list of what you want to experience in life, what you will create and what an awesome person you will become – the best version of yourself.

    But not everything can be achieved at once. You have to strictly limit your work in progress (WIP) if you don’t want to overwhelm yourself.

    Limiting work in progress is one of the best ways to simplify your life.

    One big improvement and one big goal, together with a few small goals and improvements is probably the upper limit. Or here’s an even better idea – one of the best ways to focus yourself is to choose one life area you want to dramatically improve in one year and then work every day hard to really improve that area. Only one area, nothing more.

    In five to seven years, you can completely change your life with that kind of an approach. One year, one area. Just don’t try to follow too many goals at once. You have enough time, all you have to do is to be patient and work steadily on your priorities every day. Very limited priorities.

    Life experiment ideas

    Here are a few ideas for how to simplify your life regarding goals:

    • Have only one big goal and one big improvement you want to achieve at once.
    • Even better: make it a New Year’s resolution to take one life area to a whole new level and then focus on that area 100 %.
    • Don’t overestimate what you can achieve in a month and underestimate what you can achieve in a few years.
    • Limit the number of goals, work in progress, and don’t forget to enjoy life.

    Simplify your soul

    The last thing you can do is to simplify your character. I call it simplifying your soul, but that includes everything around you as a person. You can simplify your emotions by smiling most of the time; by enjoying the present moment and flowing through life like a river, calmly facing every obstacle on the way.

    To stop resisting and being flexible means greatly simplifying life.

    It’s easier said than done, but it’s definitely the most rewarding simplification.

    You can simplify your character if you stop being a perfectionist and start accepting a good enough state. You can simplify your soul if you stop being greedy, needy or stuck in any other negative emotion or excessive need. You can greatly simplify your life by focusing on what you have and not on what you lack.

    You can simplify your life if you stop torturing your soul, stop doing things that aren’t your true north, things that you don’t enjoy and got somehow stuck in. You can simplify your life by facing your irrational fears and making more room for love. You can simplify your life by accepting the truth no matter how hurtful it is and having realistic expectations towards life.

    Here is how you can simplify your life by simplifying your character:

    • It doesn’t have to be perfect, good enough is just good enough.
    • Keep the (inner) smile as your default emotion 80 % of the time.
    • Don’t overanalyze and overthink things, learn to live in the present moment.
    • Deal with negative thoughts and cognitive distortions with emotional accounting and cognitive reframing.
    • Stay lean and agile on how you will achieve your goals, stop resisting life.
    • Focus yourself on what you have in life, not on what you lack.
    • Accept the truth and stop asking yourself why life is as it is, instead learn to master it.
    • Face your fears and make room for love instead. There are many types of fears, but there is only one love.

    Keep it simple

    Other ideas for simplifying your life

    I think you got many ideas for simplifying your life. You know it’s better to implement one thing than to only read about 50 recommendations. So choose a few of your favorite life simplifications and make sure you really implement them.

    Life experiment ideas

    But if you’re really enthusiastic about simplifying your life to the full, you can find additional ideas below.

    1. Limit different communication channels you use (IM, paper mail etc.)
    2. Don’t read news at all
    3. Don’t go to conferences
    4. Rent instead of own
    5. Simplify the furniture in your rooms
    6. Have one day when you spend time all alone
    7. Don’t own a car
    8. Downsize a car or a home
    9. Create a system (for mail, paperwork, chores)
    10. Have fewer drawers
    11. Clean your desk
    12. Don’t multitask
    13. Don’t use your phone when you’re talking to other people
    14. Create a not-to-do list
    15. Every day, have three tasks you must do, forget the rest
    16. Enjoy doing nothing
    17. Simplify your RSS feed
    18. Move closer to your office
    19. Never be late
    20. Use email templates
    21. Use fewer words
    22. Take time away from technology
    23. Prepare yourself for a new day a day before
    24. Always go to sleep early
    25. Create more white space
    26. Slow down
    27. Don’t bitch, whine and complain at all
    28. Consolidate bank accounts
    29. Shop only once per week
    30. Work from home when possible
    31. Automate administration (bill paying, savings, etc.)
    32. Rearrange your browser’s bookmark bar (delete bookmarks)
    33. Mind your own business
    34. Don’t be overly sensitive
    35. Forgive
    36. Drink only water, tea and the green drink
    37. Ask for help when you need it
    38. Eat only healthy food
    39. Don’t act out of ego, search and mind the environment’s feedback
    40. Always tell the truth

    As you will see, by simplifying your life you’ll finally make room for the important things. And your stress levels will drop dramatically. You’ll finally get the opportunity to really live life.

    Simple living, high thinking.

  • Anti-Kaizen

    You can find a lot of information about Kaizen, the basic Kaizen rules as well as more specialized Kaizen rules for teams on this blog. Now let’s look at the same topic from a slightly different perspective. Let’s talk about the so-called Anti-Kaizen. It’s a toxic mindset and includes all the limited beliefs that prevent any kind of improvement and progress.

    Before we go to Anti-Kaizen, make sure you remember all the Kaizen rules. The best thing you can do is to download and print the rules and stick them to a visible place in your home or your office. When stuck, look at the list, read the rules, and you will refocus your brain on the path towards the solution, and hopefully stop feeling sorry for yourself. It’s the best way to avoid any kind of Anti-Kaizen behaviour.

    You can download the documents here:

    [sociallocker]

    [/sociallocker]

    Now let’s go to the most frequent Anti-Kaizen beliefs.

    Negative beliefs that prevent any improvements

    There are 13 quite frequent beliefs and toxic behaviors that prevent any kind of progress and improvement. You’ll find that kind of behavior in many toxic and unproductive environments, where the status quo is the only constant; and most people in an organization like that are nothing but zombies. Well, even the status quo is only a mirage, because if you aren’t going forwards, you’re going backwards. There is no status quo in the long run.

    Here they are, Anti-Kaizen beliefs and situations:

    1. Lying to yourself
    2. Victim mindset and being stuck in an emotional cage
    3. “There’s no need for improvement” mindset
    4. Lack of time
    5. Firefighting and enjoying adrenalin rushes and dramas
    6. Lack of confidence in self and others and lack of courage
    7. You want to change others, not yourself
    8. Getting in trouble for failing or pointing out the problems
    9. Not following up on ideas
    10. Giving up too quickly
    11. Solving problems with additional administration
    12. Hoping that others will do it for you and waiting for better times
    13. Jumping to solutions too quickly

    Lying to yourself

    If you lie to yourself about where you are, there is no need for improvement. Many times, we like to picture ourselves or even the world as a whole in a much more beautiful scenario than it actually is (or, in some cases, much worse than it is, if the necessary improvement is to relax, for example). But in general, people are very indulgent towards themselves, lying where they really stand, and great critics towards others.

    • You can lie to yourself that you live healthy just because you regularly use olive oil
    • You can easily lie to yourself by only looking rich and not really being rich
    • You can lie to yourself about how productive you are every day, but in reality only work a few hours on the things that matter most
    • You can lie to yourself that your job is pretty okay, but in reality you suffer a lot and so on

    If you want to make any improvements in your life or in any organization, you first have to know where you are. And be extremely honest about it. Today, that’s quite simple with all the data available. Never lie to yourself. Always be honest and seek the truth. Know where you are and where you want to go. Then start improving yourself or an organization step by step. For example, don’t only look rich, actually be rich.

    Don't Lie To Yourself

    Victim mindset and being stuck in an emotional cage

    The victim mindset is one of the most common reasons why people get stuck and never start improving themselves, their life situation and the environment around them. It’s very easy to blame others, from your parents to the government, market trends, life in general, and so on. And many times, you have every right to do so.

    But it doesn’t help anyone. Whining, bitching, complaining and feeling sorry for yourself never bring results, improvements or more happiness, only more sorrow. You only live once and if being stuck in an emotional cage is preventing you from improving and growing, start dealing with your past, your emotions and all the cognitive distortions. It’s the best option you have, no matter how difficult your past was.

    There is always a move you can make in your life towards a better position. After you stop being a victim and take full responsibility for your future, you will easily find a move you can make. Don’t be a victim, take control over your life once and for all, and start improving. If you focus on problems, you’ll only get more problems in life, and if you focus on solutions, positive things will start happening to you.

    “There is no need for improvement” mindset

    You can have a growth mindset or a fixed mindset. If you have a fixed mindset, you assume things are as they are and there’s nothing you can do about it. If you believe that there’s no need or no room for improvement, you won’t improve. Why would you?

    Nevertheless, studies show that a growth mindset is one of the top personality traits of successful people. The most successful people constantly improve, even when they’re on top; because there is no top. In addition to that, the organizations that constantly learn and improve are the ones that are winning in business.

    The conclusion is therefore pretty simple. If you want to be successful in life, you need to grow, you need to evolve and you need to constantly improve. It’s one of the reasons why you’re here on this planet.

    “I/We have always done it like that” is the most evil sentence ever.

    Lack of time

    Many times, people work so hard that they don’t even take the time to look around and analyze if they’re digging the right hole. Until it’s too late. A lack of time should never be an excuse for not brainstorming and implementing improvements. You always have to work smart as well.

    Therefore, the AgileLeanLife Productivity Framework has three levels of planning – the strategic, tactical and operational level. You have to see the woods and you have to see all the trees. You must always take enough time to plan and make improvements in where you go and how you do things on all three levels.

    There is a very simple test that shows your speed of improvement. How many things are you doing differently now than you did six months ago? If the answer is none and you’re only working hard the same way you did half a year ago, because you don’t have the time to improve your working methods, it’s time to change something.

    If necessary, make sure that your first improvement is that you start dealing with improvements at all.

    Firefighting and enjoying adrenalin rushes and dramas

    People who are prone to deadline adrenaline rushes and dramas in relationships rarely take the time to stop and analyze how to improve. The frequent reason for that is the existence of an internal conflict. Improvements take away the drama, unproductive adrenaline rushes and other toxic behaviors. And you simply can’t focus on improvements if you need to feed your emotional monsters.

    An important part of improving yourself is to become happier and more satisfied, productive, relaxed etc. Firefighting and playing a drama queen means going in the opposite direction. The solution is simple. If there is any kind of drama, anxiety and constantly chasing deadlines in your personal or company culture, it’s time to start improving fast.

    Not to be too extreme, everyone finds themselves in such a situation from time to time, but if it’s a part of the culture or how a person operates and it happens more often than not, then that is big Anti-Kaizen behavior.

    Lack of confidence in self and others and lack of courage

    As I mentioned many times, it’s not easy to implement new changes, even if they are positive ones. We are all afraid of change on the biological level. Nevertheless, you simply need the courage to face your fears and start improving. The first step is to have more confidence in self and others.

    Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will. In the same way, doubt kills more improvements than failure ever will. Skepticism, cynicism, excessive sarcasm, drama, negativity, indecisiveness etc., they all kill creativity and potential for improvements. Believe in yourself and believe in people around you. There is nothing to doubt about, to be honest. Your growth and personal improvements (or the improvements of family or company culture) are the best possible investments.

    Improve Or Not To Improve
    To improve or not to improve?

    You want to change others, not yourself

    As cliché as it sounds, change always begins with you. First you have to understand (system, process, environment, relationships, history etc.), then you have to ignite the spark in yourself with a great vision and a powerful mission and only then change and adjust yourself to the right vibration in coherence with the system to start influencing other people and implementing change.

    Implementing change is always a carefully and surgically orchestrated process that starts with changing yourself and adjusting your actions to face the least resistance from environmental forces.

    Why do you have to change yourself first? Well, it’s easy to blame others. It’s easy to see flaws. It’s much harder to come up with good solutions. It’s even harder to analyze the system and pull the right moves to implement a change step by step in a very non-invasive way. Everyone wants to change the environment, shape it more to their liking, but nobody wants to change themselves first. But that’s the only place where the change really begins.

    Before you can start implementing change, you have to find common ground with the environment and then build on it. To find the common ground, you have to first change yourself.

    Getting in trouble for failing or pointing out the problems

    If you judge others when they fail or make a mistake, you’re doing a very Anti-Kaizen thing. But there’s a catch. Usually people never openly criticize failure, of course. They do it with gossip, silence, sarcasm, mockery or some other type of intolerant emotional behavior. That kind of behavior means people get in trouble for failing and making mistakes.

    A whole different thing is if you show curiosity for why something didn’t work, if you’re interested in what has been learnt and in the new ideas for how improvements could be made. Because Kaizen people have to feel emotionally secure and not be afraid to fail and make mistakes. You show people that it’s okay to fail with words and emotions.

    Make sure people don’t get in trouble if they show you the problems or if they fail when trying something new. It means they care and that they have the willpower and probably many good additional ideas for what to try.

    If you get in trouble for failing or showing the problems, explain to your boss what the Kaizen philosophy is and how it can help the organization. Try to find a way for moving the system towards the philosophy of constant improvement. But if it’s not worth your energy, if you don’t care enough, find a different system that will appreciate your ideas and suggestions, and vice-versa, a system where you will really care and have the power to test and implement new ideas.

    Not following up on ideas

    Ideas are a dime a dozen. Testing ideas and executing the best ones is pure gold. For implementing change, you simply have to be a doer, not only a talker. You must have a culture of immediate implementation and execution. Not following up on ideas is one of the most Anti-Kaizen things you can do besides having a victim mindset.

    There are several reasons why there’s usually no follow up on ideas. Either the ideas are too complex or completely unreachable, or there are strong emotional issues that block the implementation. Going back to basic Kaizen rules and having an honest conversation is the best cure for a situation like that.

    Giving up too quickly

    Implementing change is no easy task. It not only takes motivation and creativity, but also a lot of patience and a long-term view. Changing the culture of an organization can take years, for example. In reality, implementing change is not very different from going on a diet. You have to work hard and make sacrifices now, for benefits that are far far away; while eating sweets gives you instant gratification and the punishment in excessive fat and bad health seems far away. That’s why it’s so hard to go on a diet.

    The reason why it’s so hard to implement any change is the same. Because you have to put in the effort now for results and benefits you will enjoy sometime in the future. But if you stay in the status quo, you don’t have to put in any effort and the punishment comes sometime in the far-away future.

    With time, the hard road becomes easy and the easy road becomes hard. So you must have a long-term view for every change you plan to implement. Never give up too quickly. Even when you lose motivation, remember that tomorrow is a new day to start over. And don’t overestimate what you can achieve in a few months and don’t underestimate what you can achieve in a few years.

    Solving problems with additional administration

    Many times, when we identify the root problem, additional administration in the process seems like the right solution; but in reality, it rarely is. If you take that kind of an approach, you can soon find yourself drowning in paperwork and everything becomes counterproductive. Never let additional administration be your best solution, you can always find better solutions than additional paperwork.

    Let’s get back to a practical example of the 5 Whys technique and how it can help you focus on the process that was presented in the Kaizen rules for teams. It’s very simple: you describe the problem and start asking yourself “why”.

    • 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)

    After the last “why” and discovering core problem, one of your first solution may be, let’s add a checklist or some other form of paper to the process. Or an engineer should sign dozens of forms on what s(he) has done, and so on. Many times, our initial ideas include additional bureaucracy, who knows why. But that’s rarely the right solution.

    Hoping that others will do it for you or waiting for better times

    An interesting thing can happen. When markets go up, they can solve many problems so you don’t have to improve at all. Or sometimes you get a rock star in your team who solves many of your problems and, again, you don’t have to improve. Sometimes a few problems die on their own. It can happen, problems can be magically solved without you making any improvements.

    But hoping that others will implement changes and improvements instead of you, or waiting for better times that will take care of everything makes no sense at all. Because sooner or later, new challenges will come and afterwards, you may be in an even worse position. The main idea of improvements is that you become better and more competent and capable. You want to develop abilities to tackle problems better, provide more value, and so on. Inner assets or competence, if you want, are one of the most powerful securities you can have in life.

    It’s also one of the reasons why you’re here on this planet. You don’t want to be deprived of the feeling of satisfaction when you win a battle with yourself and change to a better version of you. The feeling is awesome.

    Jumping to solutions too quickly

    Jumping to conclusions without any real proof is one of the cognitive distortions that happens to people very often. Jumping to solutions too quickly, without any testing, experimenting and measuring, is what often prevents real change to the better. It’s not that hard to come up with a solution or ideas for what to do. But it’s usually quite hard to come up with a solution that works and can be realistically implemented with sustainable effects.

    You need a systematic and scientific approach to implementing improvements. You need to measure your progress. You need to use real data, not just your hunches and intuition. Just coming up quickly with a solution and thinking that you’ve done your job is definitely an Anti-Kaizen approach; after all, you’re breaking rule number one of not lying to yourself.

    You must not wait for the perfect timing or the perfect solution when implementing improvements, but on the other hand, acting without thinking is damaging as well.

    The key takeaway

    The roots of Anti-Kaizen behavior lie in either the wrong mindset or toxic emotional behavior. Therefore, you have to deal with both of them – mindset and emotions. Rationally, you have to see constant improvement as the common sense you simply have to follow in order to achieve your peak performance. That’s usually the easy part of the equation.

    The emotional part is much harder. But there is no other way than to work on more self-confidence, facing your fears with courage and dealing with laziness and procrastination or whatever holds you back from becoming the best version of yourself. Sometimes playing it safe is no different from being locked in a safe. Upgrade your mindset, face your fears and start improving yourself.

    Kaizen rules!

  • Positive orientation towards your past

    We know three time zones – the past, the present and the future; all three time zones very much define your life, from who you are to where you were, where you are and where you’re going. The renowned psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who was also responsible for the (in)famous Stanford Prison Experiment, found that the way you orient yourself towards your past, present and future defines your level of success and happiness. His suggestion is that you calibrate your outlook on time to improve the quality of your life.

    You have two options for your orientation for every time zone (past, present, future). You can focus on the positives or the negatives from your past. You can be a hedonist or a fatalist in the present. And for your future, you can be goal-oriented or oriented towards post-life rewards, like going to heaven.

    The best combination for improving your life is having a positive orientation towards the past, being a moderate hedonist in the present and being goal-oriented towards the future; but not so much goal-oriented towards the future that you also live in the future and forget to enjoy the present. That way, the past gives you strong roots and foundations, your present gives you feelings of personal power and proactive behavior, and your future gives you the wings to seize all the things you want in life.

    Past Present Future
    Positives

    Negatives

    		 Hedonist

    Fatalist

    		 Goal-oriented

    Post-life rewards

    Any other combination gives much worse results. If you’re focused on the negatives from your past, you hinder yourself with anger and depression and can’t act in the present, if you’re a fatalist in the present, you never act and you place all your freedom and personal power into the hands of others, and being oriented only towards post-life rewards doesn’t give you any ambition to fulfill your own desires and needs. You must also be careful to not be too big of a hedonist in the present, not thinking about the future at all, or be too goal-oriented, not enjoying the present at all. The latter only brings anxiety and a potential burnout into your life.

    If we focus more on the past now, the question is how to switch your orientation towards your past (from negative to positive), especially to see all the positive things that happened to you, not only the negatives.

    There are four things that can help you have a more positive orientation towards your past, if you have any struggles with that (I hope you had such a nice past that you don’t, but many people do have struggles). Here they are:

    1. Accepting your starting point and being honest with yourself about your limitations
    2. Having a list of personal strengths
    3. Having a list of your past accomplishments
    4. Having a list of things you’re grateful for

    Accepting your starting point

    If you had a good starting point in life, accepting your starting point is the easy thing to do. The shittier the starting situation you had in life, the harder it may be to accept it. The most important part of your starting point is how much sense of emotional security you have and how much love and affection you received, especially from your mother from when you were born to up to five years of age or so.

    Well, it all contributes to the feeling of emotional security – the relationship with your parents, the relationship between them and other primary family members, how stable your environment was at an early age, and so on. Let’s also not forget about the quality of the genes you got and the intelligence level you inherited (nonetheless, this can be developed to a certain extent later on with hard work).

    Then we have upbringing. There’s a strong correlation between how much energy your parents invested into your upbringing and your potential for success. The more they read to you, took you to museums, music festivals, art shows, sports games and the more they encouraged your hobbies and confidence, the more talents you could develop and the better picture you got of how the world works and all the possibilities.

    If they were too critical, they may have hindered your self-esteem forever; if they never let you overcome challenges completely by yourself, you may feel that you always need someone to push you to do something. Their behavioral patterns for money, running a household, diet and so on, their values and beliefs more or less became a part of your personality, also influencing your destiny.

    On top of that, we also have your family’s wealth and their social network, the quality of formal education, the country you were born in, market and social trends, political and economic stability, the technological development level of your country, demographic trends, cultural inheritance and many other factors that define your starting point. Where you were born and to whom are two of the biggest advantages you can have in life.

    You starting point may be great, it may be average or it may suck. You can’t change your past, the only thing that you can do is accept it. The good news is that in your adult life, you have the power to change many things. Your starting point may somehow limit your potential, but only to a certain extent. If you take full responsibility for your thoughts, words, emotions, attitude and actions, you can achieve a lot in life, no matter how tough your starting point was. But how can you accept your starting point?

    If your past was really traumatic, one way to deal with it is cognitive psychology. With emotional accounting, you can identify cognitive distortions or negative thoughts that influence your dark perception of life and yourself, and correct them. Besides that, there are many other tools for building emotional stability that are more or less scientific, for example psychotherapy, meditation, transactional analysis, trauma release exercises, yoga and many other methods. You have to search and try different options and find the right tool, the right fit that can help you the most with managing your emotions.

    If you hadn’t had such a harsh and traumatic past that you need to deal with it with professional help, but still have a hard time making peace with it, let’s look at some less scientific and lighter tools and techniques that can help you see your past more positively.

    Seeing what you did get, not only what you didn’t

    The first step you can make is focus on the positives. You cannot change what happened, only how you view it. Your past cannot be changed and it may never be forgotten, but it can always be used. No matter how bad your starting point was, there must be positive things you got, be it on the physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual or material level. You should be focused on the thing you did get, not only on what you didn’t. There are, of course, big differences in starting points, but nobody gets everything and nobody gets nothing. Try to find the things that you got, the things you’re proud of, the lucky parts of your past that you’re grateful for. Add them to your gratitude list (more about that at the end of the article).

    Your job is to diminish the gap

    You have three missions in this life. One is to enjoy life, the second one to contribute (create value) and the third to personally grow, to become the best possible version of yourself. Personal growth is nothing but diminishing the gap between your starting point and who you want to become (your ideal self). Obviously the worse your starting point and the bigger your ambitions, the bigger the gap. But that’s the job you have to do, that’s your mission.

    The bigger the gap, the bigger the opportunity for you to grow. The bigger the gap, the more demanding the level you’re playing the game of life in. Consequently, you can become much more skillful and resourceful.

    At one point, you realize that you only have two choices in life – the blue or the red pill. You can either feel sorry for yourself for the rest of your life or you take full responsibility for your life and how things are. If you have emotional issues, you talk to a therapist, if you want to progress intellectually, you read, do math or whatever, if you have bad relationship patterns, you read everything about relationships and commit to becoming an authority on how to excel in relationships, if all of your ancestors were fat and you inherited genes that make you gain weight faster, interrupt the unhealthy pattern and become obsessed with being totally fit and living a healthy lifestyle. Whatever it is, you have to take responsibility and deal with it at some point. As I’ve already mentioned, that’s one of your missions in this life, something that life expects from you.

    You also have to know that accepting your past is not a one-time event, it’s a process. It’s a process of ups and downs; the harder the past, the longer the process with all its highs and lows. But it can be done. If we look at the bottom line, your past may shape your present, but it can’t control it.

    Having a realistic perspective of wealth

    Your family’s wealth is, of course, a very important part of your starting point. But you must have realistic perspective of where you stand. Usually people are in a much better position than they think. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have ambitions to earn more and acquire more wealth in the future, but when we’re talking about the inherited wealth and your family’s wealth, you should know where you stand.

    These figures may not be totally accurate, but just so that you get the general picture and a feeling of how poor the word really is. If you have around 2,200$ in the bank, you’re in the top 50% of the wealthiest people in this world. If you have 60,000$ of assets, you’re among the 10% of the richest adults in the world and if you earn 25,000$ or more annually, you’re in the top 10% of the world’s income-earners. If you have more than 50,000$ of income per year, you’re in the top 1% of the world’s income earners and if you have more than 500,000$ in assets, you’re part of the richest 1% of the world (source: MSN Money).

    GlobalRichList may help you see your more exact wealth position. The point is: it doesn’t matter if your parents helped you financially or not, you’re probably the lucky one from the macro perspective, and you should be thankful for that.

    List of your personal strengths

    Your past is the reason behind who you are, with all your strengths and weaknesses. You may not like certain parts of your character, but you should definitely be proud of your strengths. And let me repeat that again: your strengths are a consequence of your past.

    A smooth sea never made a skillful sailor. Good times are only producing soft people. So your strengths more or less developed from the tough times in your past. The stronger you are, the more difficult situations you probably had to encounter.

    Therefore you should definitely perform a personal SWOT analysis, in which you list all your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats; you should see all the strengths you acquired as the aftermath of the battles you fought in the past.

    Last but not least, you mustn’t forget. Strength aren’t only muscles and power and being better than others at something. The strengths also mean admitting all the limitations you have, being humble and knowing also how to be interdependent relationships, and being loving and caring towards others. Love and tenderness are the biggest strengths you can have in life. To act out of love is not the same as being soft and naïve.

    List of your past accomplishments

    Your brain has a function that can sometimes protect you from dying, but often also clouds your self-image and self-esteem. What am I talking about? Your brain functions in a way that you remember bad events that happened to you much better and vigorously than good events from your past. Delivered a good speech on a stage. Okay, whatever. Delivered a bad speech. Oh, let’s really remember it, especially before speaking the next time.

    Back when humans were still living in a jungle, your brain had to make sure you really remembered everything dangerous – from meeting a tiger to touching fire. The more the world we live in develops, the fewer times you encounter life-threatening situations. Despite that, the same biological mechanism still applies, but instead of meeting a tiger you really remember all the times when you’re in a really stressful situation (like public speaking or whatever) or you failed at something that caused you a lot of emotional stress. Your brain, together with all the strong negative emotions, remembers those moments very well and tries to protect you from doing the same thing again. That is also why comfort zone is so cozy.

    On the other hand, all your achievements, moments of success and victories are not that special because they aren’t life-threatening. So there’s no need for remembering them. You tend to quickly forget about all your past victories, especially in the long run. In the short term, victories encourage you to achieve even more and boost your self-esteem, but when the first failure comes, you can quickly forget about all the past victories you achieved and see only your past failures.

    A good solution for focusing your brain on the right things is to have a list of your past accomplishments. When your self-esteem goes down or you feel bad after a failure, you should look at the list, just to remind yourself that you’re a winner and that you have many past accomplishments. Every single person on the planet has bigger or smaller accomplishments in their lives that they can list and that can definitely help them see the past in a more positive way.

    Gratitude list

    Gratitude list

    The last technique that can help you to see your past more positively is a gratitude list. Many times, you simply forget how much you already have and all the things that you can be grateful for.

    Gratitude shifts your focus from what your life lacks to the abundance that’s already present. Research in psychology has shown that being thankful makes you happier and healthier, it reduces stress and makes you stronger and more resilient. If you remind yourself what you are grateful for every morning, it will definitely increase your level of alertness, enthusiasm, determination, optimism and energy in everyday life.

    If you don’t know what to be grateful for, here are some ideas. You can be grateful that you woke up this morning, breathing and with a heartbeat. Life itself is a precious gift. You can be grateful for your health, spouse, family, friends, the employment or business you have, the value you’re able to create, your genes, looks, the outdoors, the technology you can use, the things you own, food and shelter, free time, things you enjoy and so on. If you need additional ideas, you can find many good ideas online, simply search for things to be thankful for in life, although it’s much better if you write them down straight from your heart.

    By practicing everyday gratitude, you’ll put your life into a more positive perspective, you’ll realize how much you already really have and you’ll definitely accept your past more easily. With your personal gratitude list, you’ll constantly be aware of the wonderful things in your life.

    It may be hard to begin, but you should see gratitude as an emotional muscle that will grow and strengthen with use. There’s always something to be grateful for, so make your list. Last but not least, the more gratitude you have in your life, the more you open yourself up for abundance, meaning getting even more excited about your future.

    If you think successful people don’t do that kind of stuff, you’re wrong. Extraordinary results demand an extraordinary way of thinking and actions, that’s a fact. Average people only read about it, successful people really do it. Let me give you an example.

    Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, sets himself annual challenges. In 2010, he committed to learning Mandarin, in 2011 to eating only animals he slaughtered himself, and in 2013 to meeting someone new each day. And guess what, in 2014 he wrote at least one well-considered thank you note every day (Source: Bloomberg).