Is attraction something you have to create with another person? Or does it just happen automatically?

Have you ever made up a list of qualities your ideal mate should have, but when you finally met such a person, you realized there was no spark?

Opposites Attract

In many ways Erin and I are total opposites, but we find ourselves naturally attracted to each other. On a logical level, our relationship might seem like a mismatch, but in truth we are very close and very happy together.

Erin is very nurturing and motherly. In college she majored in psychology, partly so she could understand people better. She loves to encourage people and help them feel better about themselves. If our kids ever feel bad, she’s always there to cheer them up and help them solve their problems.

On the other hand, Erin has a much harder time with qualities like confidence and courage. Sometimes I’ve had to shove her out the door to try something new that would stretch her beyond her comfort zone. When people are mean to her, she is very hurt by it. She has a hard time dealing with unfairness and injustice because she can’t understand why anyone would choose to be cruel to anyone else.

Nurturing is not a quality I’d use to describe myself. Trying to be overly nurturing typically makes me nauseous. When other people get emotional around me, I’m more likely to roll my eyes until they get control of themselves. I’m all for abolishing the celebration of birthdays and holidays that include gift-giving because the whole practice seems so fluffy and lame to me.

My natural style involves pushing myself and others to grow. Confidence and courage are qualities that come easily to me, and I thrive on fresh challenges. I actually feel uncomfortable when I spend too much time in my comfort zone — it makes me itchy to try something new.

Erin is very right-brained and intuitive. She’s an extremely talented psychic medium and has been developing those skills since childhood. A lot of people are shocked by the stuff she’s able to pick up about them. She’s imaginative and creative and wrote her first novel in only 16 days. She can play piano by ear, a skill our daughter seems to have inherited.

Left-brained thinking is much harder for Erin. Helping our daughter with her third-grade math homework is sometimes a stretch for Erin. Erin does a lot of things I feel are borderline ADD like leaving lights on all over the house when there’s no one in those rooms or sometimes leaving cabinet doors and drawers open after she’s retrieved something from them. Often when I go to the kitchen after she’s been there, it looks like a small tornado swept through it. Sheldon Cooper would go kittywompus.

Right-brained thinking didn’t come naturally to me. It was something I really had to work hard to develop in my adult years. I thought that intuition was just woo-woo fluff. I found it much easier to understand computers than human beings. I considered most artist/musician types to be lazy, still-living-with-mommy-at-age-30 losers. I could only respect people who could think things through logically.

I am much more left-brained. In college I double-majored in computer science and math. I began learning computer programming at age 10 and was naturally good at it. I like to be very organized, and I have a low tolerance for disorder. If you’ve read my book, I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s highly structured and organized in a fluff-free manner. Left-brained people usually love it, while right-brained people are more likely to find it a little rigid for their tastes.

On some fundamental dimensions of personality, Erin and I are total opposites. She’s on one end of the spectrum, and I’m on the other end.

And yet despite these major differences, we both felt very attracted to each other. Our 15+ years together have been an incredible journey, and we’re really looking forward to what the next 15 will bring.

Stimulating Growth

I think the reason our relationship has worked so well is that Erin and I are really, really good for each other. She stimulates me to grow and change in ways no one else does, and I do the same for her.

When you enter a relationship with someone who’s very different than you, you’re likely to experience a lot of growth and change, assuming there’s a healthy underlying attraction. But when you’re in a relationship with someone who’s just like you, that relationship won’t stimulate nearly as much inner growth.

Erin opened me up to a world I didn’t even know existed. The first time we met, we spent two hours discussing lucid dreaming, mostly with me asking questions and her telling me about her experiences. Later she taught me about astral projection, something I was able to explore firsthand that same year.

Erin also helped me to get in touch with my heart, to learn to connect with human beings (not just machines), and to think about how I could help others instead of just myself.

Early in our relationship, I admitted to Erin that I really didn’t know how to love. Love was an alien concept to me. Her response was, “I will teach you.” There’s no way I’d have written hundreds of free articles to help people grow if not for Erin’s influence.

Similarly, when I first met Erin, she was working as a $9/hour secretary. The whole notion of deliberately setting and achieving goals was practically unknown to her. She was fun to be around, but it seemed doubtful that she’d really get anywhere in life on her own. Her biggest dreams were perpetually stuck in the fantasy stage. She lacked confidence and drive and became overly nervous if she was ever called on to perform in some fashion.

Just as Erin helped me open my heart and my intuition, I helped her get better at courage, confidence, and left-brained thinking. Looking back it’s pretty amazing how much she’s grown. Even her family has commented on how different she is now.

I encouraged Erin to write and to develop her various talents and skills. I pushed her to create an online business (which she later sold), to start a blog, to become a pro psychic medium, to join Toastmasters, to take Tae Kwon Do lessons, to go vegetarian and then vegan, to move to Las Vegas with me, to travel more, and to make lots of other positive changes.

Erin and I continue to be excited about our relationship because we can see how good we are for each other. We know that we couldn’t have achieved all these personal growth gains on our own. Every year we continue to enjoy positive changes that naturally arise from how we influence each other on a day-to-day basis. 

Attraction

In recent years a great deal of material has been created to explain how to attract a relationship partner. Some of it is technique-based, while much of it encourages you to develop the inner qualities a potential partner would find attractive.

I do think this material can be helpful for many people, especially since a great deal of it overlaps with general principles of personal development.

However, a huge amount of relationship material is rooted in a mindset that I don’t agree with — that you must first change something about yourself in order to become worthy of attracting a really great relationship partner. This mindset pre-supposes that for whatever reason, you aren’t yet capable of attracting that partner in this particular moment. This is a tricky mindset. I won’t say it’s exactly wrong, but I think it’s missing the big picture.

Let me offer you an alternative way of thinking about attraction.

A while back I wrote an article called Self-Acceptance vs. Personal Growth, which is about how to make positive changes while at the same time accepting yourself just as you are. Don’t begin with the erroneous assumption that you’re somehow defective.

This is a good way to think about attraction as well. Attraction occurs very naturally. Instead of learning techniques and “inner game” to become attractive, I think it’s more accurate to say that we need to learn how to stop blocking attraction when it naturally arises. You are already attractive. You just need to realize that and stop blocking yourself from expressing your natural attractiveness.

How many animal species hold seminars to teach their members how to attract a mate? They don’t need anything like that because they don’t have our level of social conditioning that tells them they’re ugly and unattractive and need to be repaired before they’re worthy. They just drop for it in the bushes and then go back to foraging.

Natural Attraction

Instead of trying to diagnose what you need to change or fix about yourself in order to attract a desirable partner, look at it from the opposite perspective. What sort of people do you find naturally attractive?

I’m going to suggest that the people you find naturally attractive are the same people that can help stimulate massive positive changes within you. Even if it doesn’t logically seem like a great match, such partners can potentially be very good for you — not always, but quite often.

When Erin and I first met, we naturally attracted each other. We didn’t need to use tricks and techniques, and we didn’t need to develop our inner qualities either. We certainly weren’t masters of social dynamics, but it didn’t matter. We allowed the attraction to unfold naturally. And 15 years later, we’re still great matches for each other.

Now don’t get me wrong. I think there’s a lot of value to be gained from improving your social skills as well as doing things that make you feel more attractive, especially on the inside. But I would also suggest that entering in a new relationship with someone is one of the best ways to grow and improve.

Instead of thinking about what you should change about yourself in order to gain a relationship, think in the opposite direction. How might a new relationship help you create all those changes? A relationship isn’t an end goal. It’s yet another pathway to long-term growth.

We’re all imbalanced beings to one degree or another. That’s perfectly okay. Don’t think of your personality quirks as defects you must repair. Ironically those quirks may be exactly what someone else finds most attractive about you.

The nice thing about improving through a relationship (as opposed to improving for a relationship) is that you get to enjoy life with your very best personal coach at your side. Instead of growing to get the relationship, you experience growth because of the relationship.

What Attracts You?

What qualities do you find naturally attractive in others? See if you can push past the social conditioning about what is supposed to attract you, and get in touch with what really does attract you.

For example, I’m not usually attracted to women who are too similar to me personality-wise. I have many confident, left-brained women as friends, but I don’t feel drawn to take those relationships to a deeper level. Those qualities just don’t attract me in that way.

On the other hand, I’m naturally attracted to women like Erin who are opposite from me in many ways.

If you’re familiar with the Myers-Briggs personality types, I’m an ENTJ. Isabel Briggs Myers describes ENTJs as follows: “Frank, decisive, assume leadership readily. Quickly see illogical and inefficient procedures and policies… Enjoy long-term planning and goal setting. Usually well informed, well read, enjoy expanding their knowledge and passing it on to others. Forceful in presenting their ideas.” That sounds like me.

My opposite on this spectrum would be an ISFP, which is described this way: “Quiet, friendly, sensitive, and kind. Enjoy the present moment, what’s going on around them. Like to have their own space and to work within their own time frame. Loyal and committed to their values and to people who are important to them. Dislike disagreements and conflicts, do not force their opinions or values on others.”

When I read the description of ISFP, I also note that it’s a good description of the types of women I feel most naturally attracted to. Erin isn’t an ISFP, but she does have many ISFP qualities, especially sensitivity and loyalty. (When I asked Erin what type she was, she couldn’t recall, but I remember it wasn’t my exact opposite.)

Now if I were to make a list of what I think I desire in a relationship partner, I probably wouldn’t list the qualities of an ISFP or anything close to it. Instead I’d probably write down many of the qualities I already possess, in an attempt to find someone I’d consider highly compatible. However, when I notice how I actually feel about women who possess the qualities I think I want, I typically feel little or no spark of attraction. On the other hand, when I meet women who are ISFPs or close to it, my left-brain might assume they wouldn’t be a good match for me, but meanwhile my own body is signaling very strongly that I’m feeling an instinctual attraction.

This played out when Erin and I first met. Initially I wasn’t even thinking about her as a romantic partner. In my mind she wasn’t really my type. I was also dating someone else at the time.

But as Erin and I began spending time together, I couldn’t help but feel more and more attracted to her, not logically but biologically. I wasn’t even trying to get into a relationship with her. It just unfolded in a very easy, natural way as a result of that undeniable attraction. To this day I still feel a very strong attraction to her, even though my logical mind can continue to churn out reasons why she really isn’t my type.

I’ve seen this in other successful relationships too. Sometimes I look at a couple and wonder how they could possibly stand each other. Their personalities are so different. But those differences somehow complement each other, and their relationship makes them both happy and helps them grow tremendously.

I’m suggesting that instead of trying to hunt down and connect with someone who has qualities you think you want in a partner, come at this from the opposite direction. Begin to notice those people you feel naturally attracted to, even if you can’t explain why. Then start listing their qualities. And finally, review your list and ask yourself how someone with those qualities might actually be an incredible partner for you if you got together. Perhaps the reason you feel such an attraction in the first place is that those people possess qualities that will help you grow.

I can offer good reasons why women who are quiet, sensitive, loyal, and conflict-avoiding would be poor matches for me as relationship partners. I could spell out the reasons why I’d very much prefer to connect with strong-willed, independent, thick-skinned women. But that doesn’t change what I’m naturally attracted to. As David DeAngelo says, “Attraction is not a choice.”

Perhaps this is an area where we simply need to upgrade our logic. Maybe our biological circuitry is working just fine, but we aren’t seeing the big picture. We get too stuck in the social programming of what we’re taught to be attracted to instead of paying attention to the real human beings that we’re naturally attracted to. So instead of choosing partners that we actually want, we get caught up in judgments that cause us to rule them out.

“My parents won’t like him.”

“He’s too short and too bald.”

“She doesn’t have the same hobbies I do.”

“My friends would make fun of me if I went out with him.”

But what if there’s a reason we seem to be attracted to those people who, on the surface, appear to be wrong for us? Perhaps by mating with our opposites, we create a stronger family unit (even if it doesn’t take the form of a nuclear family). Instead of doubling up on talents and skills you already possess, wouldn’t it be better to enter a relationship with someone who brings something new to the table? Then you collectively cover a lot more bases that way.

This is how my relationship with Erin has played out. Because we’re so different, we each bring a wide variety of skills to the table, and our family is better off as a result. Our children also gain two different role models to learn from.

Recognizing natural attraction

Now here’s where things get interesting.

It’s been my experience that when I connect with women I’m naturally attracted to, I can often see clear evidence that the attraction is mutual, even if neither of us are willing to acknowledge that attraction openly. It’s as if there’s a magnetic field pulling us closer to each other. But when our logical minds notice what’s happening, there’s a tendency to resist and try to block it because we’ll reason, “No, this person isn’t my type, so I can’t be feeling attraction right now.”

I remember talking about one particular guy with Erin. I said to her, “You two are so much alike. He has all the qualities you say you admire in men. You must find him very attractive. If you wanted to hook up at some point, I certainly wouldn’t be surprised. I think you two would be great together.” But Erin said, “I know, but I just don’t feel it. I’m not attracted to him in that way at all.” At first I thought that was strange because this guy has many qualities that Erin has said she wished I possessed… and yet she feels no special attraction to him. She’s telling the truth. When I see them together, I can tell there’s no spark.

On the other hand, when Erin tells me which people she’s naturally attracted to, I sometimes laugh. “That guy? Really? How is that even possible?” But it’s equally clear that she’s telling the truth.

This works both ways. When I tell Erin about certain women I’m attracted to, she’ll sometimes be surprised. “Really? You like her?” she’ll say. Sometimes she’ll point out why such a person would be a bad match for me, and on a logical level, we’re always in agreement about that. Nevertheless, the attraction remains.

When we sense an attraction to someone, it’s so easy to deny how we feel. Our logical minds break through and explain why we’re facing a bad match. She’s overweight — no way. He’s too aggressive – not for me. If I go out with him/her, my friends will think I’m nuts.

The problem is that when we turn our backs on those feelings, we’re also turning our backs on truth. The feelings are there, so we might as well accept them, make peace with them, and seek to understand them.

Perhaps we should stop denying these natural attractions and see where they lead instead. Maybe it’s better to let go of our judgments and trust our feelings for a change.

Do you think other animals rule out potential mates by talking themselves out of the attraction they feel? Does a male gorilla stop himself, “I dunno. She seems kinda hairy. And she doesn’t have the right waist-hip ratio.”

Does the female gorilla say, “All that chest pounding and ripping up the grass… Who does he think he is anyway? My parents will never accept him, especially since he isn’t Jewish.”

I’ve spent 15 years with a woman I feel naturally attracted to. I often call her by the nickname ”Mate” because that’s how I naturally feel about her. I don’t have to reason why we’re together. It just feels naturally right to me. And so far it’s turned out amazingly well in terms of happiness, mutual growth, and a loving connection.

I can’t even imagine what it would be like to be in a relationship with someone for logical reasons — where I convinced myself that it was a good match, but deep down I just didn’t feel that spark of attraction.

Creating attraction

I know it’s possible to create attraction. You can learn how to do things that will make another person feel attracted to you. There are lots of people teaching how to do that these days. But is this a wise idea?

In your gut don’t you sense there’s something not quite right about using tactics and techniques to cause someone to be attracted to you, someone who wouldn’t otherwise find you attractive?

I think the answer depends on the circumstances. Are you trying to hide the real you and to project a false image that people are attracted to? Or are you working to eliminate the blocks that prevent your real attractiveness from coming through?

I see wisdom in learning how to express ourselves more naturally and authentically. This can lead to relationships that are naturally good for us, that make us happy, and that help us grow. The attraction is genuine.

But projecting a false image is the wrong way to go. This leads to relationships rooted in falsehood, denial, and deception. The people we attract won’t be good matches for us, and we won’t enjoy the optimal growth that comes from finding a true mate.

Attraction and Truth, Love, and Power

Even though your attraction circuitry may seem to operate on a subconscious, biological level, it isn’t there to frustrate you or to derail you. It actually serves a greater purpose by helping you become more aligned with truth, love, and power.

First, attraction helps to align you with truth. Attraction teaches you to let go of falsehood and denial and to practice acceptance. Can you talk about your attractions openly, even if it means others might reject your preferences? Are you ashamed of those you find attractive? Or can you accept this part of yourself completely and without judgment?

Second, attraction helps you align with love. By exploring your attractions and attractiveness, you’ll learn to connect with what naturally makes you happy. This happiness will inspire all other areas of your life. You also have the opportunity to enjoy one or more loving relationships. And you will have the joyful experience of connecting with a partner who finds you naturally attractive just the way you are.

Third, attraction helps you align with power. A relationship rooted in attraction can serve as a pillar of tremendous strength and growth. You’ll learn to stand up for your preferences and to stop apologizing for wanting what you want.

When you rail against what naturally attracts you and try to enter a relationship for reasons other than attraction, you throw yourself out of alignment with truth (by practicing non-acceptance), with love (by disconnecting from your feelings), and with power (by settling for a weaker bond).

Attraction isn’t the only important factor when it comes to relationships. By all means, consider the logical aspects too. Just take note that a relationship rooted in mutual attraction lays a very strong foundation.

Do your best to be true to your feelings instead of trying to reason your way into something that doesn’t feel right to you. Listen to your body more than your social conditioning. If you find yourself in a relationship with someone that your body doesn’t respond to as your natural mate, admit that you made a mistake, and take steps to move on. If you deny your true desires, you’ll be robbing yourself as well as your partner of tremendous opportunities for love, growth, happiness, and yumminess.

There is no one person in the world you must find to become your perfect mate. The world is filled with suitable partners for you. But it will be hard to find and attract them if you lead with your logical mind. Let your body and your feelings guide you instead. You can always engage your logical mind after the fact to figure out how you got so damned lucky.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

When I was in high school, I did volunteer work at two different places, helping out for about 50 hours at each place.

Working With Seniors

The first place was a convalescent home near LAX (Los Angeles Airport). I must have been 16 years old, since this was shortly after I learned to drive. I served as an assistant for the woman who was in charge of the place. Picture Gilda Radner after four cups of coffee.

I helped to facilitate various activities with the seniors at this place, including games and social events. Sometimes I talked one on one with people in their rooms. Other times I pushed people around in wheelchairs for their daily ”exercise.”

I remember talking to one guy who had a world map on the wall of his room. He said, “Point to anywhere, and I’ll tell you about it.” I’d point to different countries, and he’d tell me of his travels there, some of them during World War II. I rather enjoyed that. He reminded me a little of my grandfather, who was stationed in Germany at the end of WWII.

Overall, I learned a lot from this experience, but I honestly didn’t enjoy it. Most of the seniors at this place seemed lonely and depressed. Some were unfriendly, withdrawn, and bitter and clearly didn’t want to be there. A few seemed mentally unstable. I was cautioned to steer clear of at least one person there.

The staff seemed overworked and unmotivated. I didn’t get the sense they wanted to be there either. I imagine it was just a job to them. No sense of life purpose was present as far as I could tell.

Often the staff treated the seniors like children. That was sad to see, but at the time, I just assumed they knew what they were doing.

During the time I was there (Friday afternoons for a few months), I don’t recall seeing any family members visit, but I might not have noticed if they did because I usually wasn’t near the front desk. But it’s safe to say that the people in this convalescent home didn’t have much social interaction with anyone but the staff and each other. And some of them didn’t like each other or the staff.

Most of the seniors there were very passive. They just went along with the program and didn’t resist. For me personally that lack of independent will was the most difficult thing to see. I could better understand the people who showed bursts of emotion on occasion.

Perhaps the biggest lesson for me was that I didn’t want to end my life in this manner. It seemed so sad to me that human beings should spend their last remaining years this way. Virtually no one there was really doing anything with their lives. They spent a lot of time watching old movies on TV. I got the sense that everyone was basically waiting to die. The convalescent home was essentially a holding cell before you hit the afterlife. Once you checked in, you’d eventually be leaving as a corpse.

This was a formative experience for me because it gave me a greater sense of taking personal responsibility for my long-term health — all the way to the grave. Some things may be out of our control, but most of those seniors didn’t really need to end up there. If they’d assumed 100% responsibility for their own health care from a young age, most could have been physically and mentally independent for years to come. I’d rather end up Jack LaLanne (age 94) than have my body falling apart at age 70.

You could blame the families for abandoning their elders, but I wouldn’t do that. I agree that many Americans have a long way to go in terms of how we treat our elders compared to the respect shown by some cultures, but I also think that respect must be earned. If you allow your mind and body to atrophy so badly that your family would rather pay thousands of dollars to make you someone else’s problem, who’s responsible? Ultimate responsibility always rests with you. Just consider for a careful moment or two where your current health decisions are leading you. Where will your body be at age 70, 80, 90?

Incidentally, this convalescent home was later written up in the local newspaper for reported health code violations. I didn’t know anything about health codes at the time, but none of the details in the newspaper report were surprising to me.

Working With Disabled Children

When I was 17, I volunteered at the James McBride School in L.A. This was a special education center for children with various disabilities. I figured I’d already worked with seniors, so I might as well try the other end of the age spectrum. This time I was a classroom assistant for pre-school kids. The kids were probably 3-4 years old.

Most of these kids wore special helmets because they tripped and fell down a lot. One child had cerebral palsy and spent most of the school day in a special contraption to support his body and head. Without it he was unable to hold himself up. He looked a bit emaciated because his muscles were so underdeveloped. He also drooled a lot. I really loved his spirit — his smile would totally light up the room. Just looking at him forced me to open my heart.

I absolutely loved working with these kids. They were so alive and full of joy – the way people naturally act before social conditioning takes root. I enjoyed helping them learn shapes like circles, squares, and triangles. They already knew their colors better than I did.

After the pre-school kids went home, I ate lunch, and then I monitored afternoon recess activities with the grade-school kids. This mainly involved helping them shoot hoops and making sure they didn’t get into trouble. Some of the kids had difficulty managing their emotions, so it didn’t take much to set them off and initiate a fight. I remember that one kid with Down Syndrome sometimes had issues getting along with the other kids; we just had to make sure his tremendous energy was being channeled in a positive way.

I still recall some of the pre-school kid’s names — Steven, Candice, Joey, and Ricky.

Steven was a brown-haired kid who took an instant liking to me once he discovered we had the same first name. In his eyes that made us instant best friends. It was a Festivus miracle!

Candice was a short, sassy blend of Queen Latifa and Rosie Perez. The only problem was that while she was chewing you out, she’d often lose her balance and fall down. For an adult that might have been embarrassing. But Candice would simply get back up, straighten her helmet, and continue sassing you without missing a beat.

It’s funny to realize that those kids are now in their mid-20s. I wonder if any of them are reading my blog today.

Many years later, Erin did some substitute teaching at James McBride. It was a very challenging experience for her. She was working with older kids though, not the pre-schoolers.

Working with those kids made me more interested in having kids of my own. Before that I was definitely a no-kids person. This experience didn’t push me over the edge completely, but it definitely softened me up.

Watching kids learning shapes and colors reminded me of my experience at James McBride. At the preschool level, the way “normal” kids learn and play together isn’t much different than the behavior of children coping with various disabilities. Kids are kids, and self-acceptance comes naturally to us. For a young child, dealing with a disability is just life. It’s only later on that society teaches those same beautiful children that just because they’re different, they’re somehow broken.

Being normal is overrated anyway. If you live a “normal” life, your reward may be a stint at a convalescent home.

This year I read a book called The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal by Jonathan Mooney. The book is an insightful journey into the lives of people who are labeled disabled and the challenges they experience in dealing with society’s pre-conceived notions about them. This book gave me a new perspective on my experiences at the James McBride School. I can honestly say that I both loved and hated this book at the same time.

Community Service

Later in life when I got myself into a bit of legal trouble, I ended up doing some involuntary, court-ordered community service. That was a whole different beast because I didn’t really want to be there. Most of this time was spent picking up trash at the Emeryville Marina.

In January Erin and I spent a few days in Emeryville (just east from San Francisco across the Bay Bridge), and I took a morning walk around the marina. The park where I did my community service was still there, and I actually saw people in orange vests picking up trash just like I did… half my life ago. None of them looked like they wanted to be there either. I should have walked up to one of them and asked, “Surely you must have some interesting stories to tell. Have you ever thought about a career in blogging?”

When you perform service with a closed heart and mind, the experience is completely different compared to doing it because you really want to.

Benefits of Volunteering

I highly recommend doing some volunteer work, especially if you’ve never done it before. It’s a great way to open your heart and to feel more connected to people. If you’re feeling isolated, disconnected, misunderstood, or lonely, then volunteering can definitely help. Your biggest problems in life will all seem pretty minor when you’re face to face with the heart-melting smile of a child with cerebral palsy.

Many people have discovered new career opportunities from volunteering. If you want to work in a certain field, what better way to get started than to put in a few hours each week for free? And if you don’t have a clue what you’d like to do for your main career, volunteer at a few different places to see what you like best. You’ll learn a lot, build valuable experience, and make new friends and contacts.

Use volunteering to face some of your fears. Push yourself to grow. Are you uncomfortable around children or homeless people? How do you feel about domestic violence? Do you avoid people who are dying? You can use volunteering to face your fears head-on, gradually replacing them with greater truths.

The nice thing about most volunteer work is that you can quit whenever you want, so you don’t have to make a long-term commitment.

Volunteering is an activity, but it’s also an attitude. You’re there just to give. Obviously you’ll gain something from the experience, but it’s nice just to have the experience of helping people without needing or expecting anything in return.

Volunteering Through Your Career

Do your best to bring this same attitude to your main career. Work because you want to, not because you have to. Work like a free person who chooses to work, not like a slave who is forced to work. And when you’re at work, pour your whole heart into it. Never leave your soul at home when you go to the office.

I wrote this article because I had something I wanted to share with you, not because I need or expect something from you. My motivation to write stemmed from desire, not obligation. You’re free to read this article, think about it, and not pay me a dime for it. It is a gift.

I hate to think of what would become of my work if it was something I felt I had to do, like involuntary community service. If you work because you feel you must work to earn money, you’re poisoning your output. You don’t get great art by whipping a slave and saying, “Be more creative or else!”

Getting Started

If you’re curious to learn more about volunteering, a good place to get started is VolunteerMatch. You can use that site to search for volunteer opportunities near you. Another option is just to ask around, or stop by a place that looks interesting and ask if they could use some free help. If you’re currently in school, someone at your school may also be able to help out with volunteer placement. I got connected with the convalescent home and the James McBride School through my high school guidance counselor.

I recommend that you do something where you get to work with people face to face as opposed to sitting in a room alone doing filing. If you volunteer at a homeless shelter for example, ask to work with homeless people directly, even if you’re just serving them food. Throw your whole heart into the experience.

If your life is a struggle… if you keep getting bad breaks… if it appears that the world doesn’t much care for you, then it’s your move. The world is waiting on you to say “I love you” first.

A couple hours on a lazy afternoon is all it takes to send your life in a whole new direction.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

People afflicted with this personality disorder suffer from an uncontrollable urge to diagnose individuals as suffering from one or more psychological disorders, specifically individuals which the RDD sufferer has had little or no direct personal interaction with. RDD sufferers often diagnose specific mental illnesses and may go so far as to offer treatment suggestions.

Rather than conducting a formal psychological exam, including a structured face-to-face or verbal evaluation, RDD sufferers are inclined to make snap diagnoses based on data such as a very brief personal interaction, the opinions of third parties, asynchronous and/or indirect interaction (such as email), and the imaginary neuro-associations they’ve created for the people they diagnose.

Despite having little or no direct interaction with those they diagnose, RDD sufferers often remain strongly convinced their diagnoses are accurate. A side effect of this disorder is that RDD sufferers will typically avoid prolonged direct interaction with those they diagnose, as this could corrupt the benefits they obtain from RDD by proving their assumptions inaccurate.

RDD is essentially a form of projection. RDD sufferers remotely diagnose in others the mental disorders they experience in themselves but cannot yet bring themselves to accept.

RDD is often accompanied by one or more of the following symptoms: anger, depression, episodic dysphoria, anxiety, Internet addiction, substance abuse, instability in personal relationships, fear of abandonment, unstable self-image, severe dissociation, and eating disorders.

An effective treatment for RDD is to help RDD sufferers consider how their diagnoses of others are actually a projection of their own imbalances. By having the RDD sufferer make a list of his/her remote diagnosis of others, the therapist can begin treating these specific disorders in the RDD patient. Once the patient accepts these issues as his/her own and begins working through them directly, symptoms of RDD tend to fade. However, RDD symptoms may continue throughout therapy as new issues are brought to the surface through the mechanism of RDD.

Another practical treatment is to ask RDD patient to offer their own treatment suggestions for those they diagnose with various mental disorders. These suggested treatments can provide a starting point for treating the RDD disorder itself. In this manner the patient’s subconscious may offer effective treatment suggestions, bypassing any resistance from the conscious mind.

Some additional treatment resources for RDD include: Understanding Human Relationships and People and Subjective Reality.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

At the start of each new year, I like to pick a primary focus for the upcoming year. I prefer doing this instead of making a New Year’s resolution because it’s more effective for me. By primary focus I’m referring to a single area of my life where I want to make a major advance in my personal growth efforts.

I find that by picking just one area and by applying strategies like immersion and overwhelming force, I can take a quantum leap forward in that area and then lock in the gains. This has been much more effective for me than trying to make modest gains in multiple areas. Usually when I aim for several small changes, I only perpetuate the status quo. It’s like if someone throws you a ball, you can catch it, but if you’re thrown three balls at once, you get confused and fumble all of them.

In 2008 my primary focus was to improve my diet and health, which was probably obvious if you read my blog during the past year. In retrospect that turned out to be an awesome decision. I successfully converted to a raw vegan diet, after eating a cooked vegan diet since 1997. Although weight loss wasn’t my primary goal, I dropped 15 pounds from where I was at this time last year. I feel wonderful physically and emotionally, I have more energy and mental clarity than ever, and I love the food I’m eating. (As I write this, I’m enjoying a tasty shake made from bananas, brazil nuts, and water.) I’ve also made many great new friends in the raw food community.

It certainly took a lot of time and effort — and help from others — to make this transition. But I’m very happy with the results thus far.

After leveling-up my character in this area, it’s time to pick a different area of focus for 2009. I’ve decided that my core focus for 2009 will be intimate relationships.

This will take a bit of explaining…

Some Relationship Background

You may have noticed that I haven’t written a great deal about intimacy and relationships since I started blogging. There have been a handful of articles like Soulful Relationships, and I wrote a chapter about relationships in my book, but overall I haven’t written a ton about relationships relative to other topics. Also, I haven’t shared too many details about my marriage to Erin and how we manage our relationship. That might seem odd because Erin and I have been together almost 15 years now.

I get a ton of requests for articles about relationships, so it isn’t due to lack of interest.

The main reason I haven’t written much about this topic is that it was a part of my life where I had more confusion than clarity, and I didn’t want to give out phony advice that wouldn’t work. It’s also an area of my life where I’ve felt stuck for many years. It wasn’t until recently that I finally figured out how and why I was stuck and what I should do about it.

As I alluded to a couple days ago in the Overcoming Indecision article, we create growth forks of indecision when deep down, we know which path to take, but we don’t feel ready to accept it yet. My big challenge wasn’t really about deciding what to do. For me the really hard part was accepting the next step on my path. For reasons I’ll soon explain, I had a very difficult time coming to terms with a path that felt a little too overwhelming for me.

If you hold very traditional, mainstream views about relationships and especially marriage, then you probably won’t like what I’m about to say. My guess is that you’ll be inclined to frame this in a rather non-accepting, resistant way. And that’s okay if you feel that’s a reaction you need to have. That being said, please understand that I’ve already moved through this phase myself, so there’s no need to bother sending me a critical email to share your discontent and/or concern. I don’t want you to waste your time crafting a lengthy response that won’t actually be read, so if you feel inclined to do that sort of thing, please don’t.

Marriage

Erin and I have been together since 1994, married since 1998. We got married on the four-year anniversary of the day we met. In all that time, our marriage has been monogamous with no cheating or affairs or anything like that.

Erin and I are very much in love. I love her, and I know she loves me. Throughout our relationship, I’ve never doubted that she loved me.

Erin is my best friend. I feel I can talk to her about anything. We often talk for hours — about our lives, our careers, and how we can help the planet. I never get bored spending time with her. She’s one of the most conscious and interesting people I’ve ever known. I find her totally fascinating, and I feel grateful to have her in my life every day.

I love being married to Erin. I love that we get to spend so much time together. Our journey together has been magical.

Indecision

This may sound surprising given what I just wrote above, but a huge area of indecision in my life for years has been this question: Should I stay married to Erin, or should I get divorced and experience other relationships?

You really don’t want to know how much time I spent pondering this.

Since we have two kids, ages 5 and 8, and since we run a business together, the consequences of divorce can get pretty complicated.

The problem was that neither path intuitively felt right to me. I felt like I was stuck in a no-win situation.

Being married to Erin has been wonderful. However, we’ve grown so close over the years — to the point where we’re telepathically picking thoughts out of each other’s minds — that it’s hard to imagine growing much closer as a couple. I can’t even define what being closer to Erin would mean without us practically becoming the same person. I feel that Erin and I are closer than any other couple I’ve met.

As wonderful as our relationship has been, for a long time it has felt like something important is missing. The thought that I would never enjoy a deep, intimate relationship with any other woman really started to bother me. I felt like if I stayed married to Erin, I’d be missing out on a huge area of potential growth for the rest of my life. But more importantly, I felt that I had more love to give that was getting bottled up inside me with no good outlet for expressing it. If I stayed married to Erin, I’d have to accept that so many wonderful opportunities for love and connection with other people would never happen. I wasn’t willing to accept that.

I’m referring to both physical and emotional intimacy. For me the two are hard to separate. I can’t imagine being physically intimate with a woman without feeling deeply emotionally connected to her as well. Having sex just for the sake of orgasm feels hollow. For me the emotional bonding and the feeling of connection is an essential part of physical intimacy. There’s something magical about two souls opening themselves to each other’s presence. Consequently, a model like swinging (i.e. having sex with other couples) or just getting some extra sex on the side would be a total turnoff for me.

There have been times when I had to stop my emotional bonding with another women from leading too far into physical intimacy. In my heart I felt that’s where things were meant to go, but I always kept that door closed.

My feelings aren’t caused by any sort of deficiency in my marriage. Erin is an absolutely awesome wife. I think I would feel the same way no matter who my wife was. Erin and I are compatible on so many levels, so compatibility isn’t the issue. In the most important ways our marriage can work, it works wonderfully. The issue is that my desire to connect with women is more expansive than what can be provided by any one relationship. I want to express and share more love than I’m currently able to.

For a time I thought the only viable solution was to move into a serial monogamy situation, so I could experience multiple relationships. That felt totally wrong to me though. That would merely convert the current problem into a recurring problem.

When I thought about getting a divorce from Erin, it felt absolutely wrong to me. I have no interest in breaking up with her. We’re still totally in love with each other. I love spending my life with her. Why would I want to give that up?

For a long time, I got stuck in the trap of either-or thinking. I thought there were only two realistic options. Either I had to stay monogamous with Erin, or we had to break up so I could experience other relationships. But there was no way I could fully commit to either choice because they both felt wrong to me.

I guess another option would be to have an affair, but I could never do that in secret because that would mean turning my back on truth. So I can’t give that serious consideration. I even read an excellent book about people who have affairs in order to understand why so many people choose that path, but it didn’t change how I felt. Having an affair would be an unconscious path that would force a decision later, but I’m looking for a conscious choice I can feel good about. In general, people don’t consciously choose to have affairs; affairs almost invariably arise unconsciously.

Being in this state of indecision for so long had a negative effect on my marriage. Because I wasn’t sure what to do, I felt uncommitted to Erin. As a result I held back a lot of love I might otherwise have given her. When I was feeling very stuck, I often disconnected from her. I didn’t want to keep feeding a relationship that I thought would have to end in a break-up. I’m sure that created a lot of stress for Erin too. She’s very intuitive of course, so she knows when I’m not fully present in our marriage.

Due to the close nature of our relationship, I often discussed my feelings openly with Erin. I brought up the possibility of divorce many times. I thought that by discussing this with her, it would give me more clarity and lead to a decision that felt good. Unfortunately, it didn’t. I wasn’t trying to threaten the relationship, but I didn’t think it was a good idea to keep all of these thoughts to myself. I couldn’t just pretend everything was okay.

I read many acclaimed books on relationships, but nothing proved helpful. My relationship with Erin had already advanced beyond the stages those books addressed. Our level of closeness and connection wasn’t the problem, so trying to get closer wasn’t going to yield a solution.

This indecision also had a negative effect on me as a father. I felt disconnected from my children. Every day I’d look at Emily and Kyle, not knowing if we’d be living in the same household much longer. That was very hard for me. I know I held back a lot as a parent, and of course that made things harder for Erin as well. Just thinking about this makes me pretty sad.

I used every decision-making technique I knew, but none of them gave me an answer that felt right. I know that when my head and heart don’t agree, something is wrong. But I just didn’t know how to resolve this.

An Alternative Answer

Eventually the answer came to me. What’s really amazing is that I have to credit the answer to the gains I experienced after going 100% raw and especially after completing my juice feast about a month ago. If I didn’t take those steps, I’d probably still be feeling stuck right now.

The mental clarity gains were only part of the solution process. Actually the more important part was that I finally felt like I had the physical and emotional energy to implement the solution. Prior to making these dietary changes, whenever I caught a glimpse of the solution, I always had to reject it as insanely impractical. I just didn’t have the power needed to face that kind of truth.

My problem wasn’t really due to a lack of clarity. So it’s no wonder that trying to gain more clarity was a perpetual dead-end. The problem was that I was unwilling to accept the answer that was presenting itself. Every time it came up, I’d shove it aside with a loud, “No way!”

So what is the solution? To put it simply, I needed to replace either-or with and.

This is where we have to say goodbye to mainstream paths. This is also the point where my Puritanical readers will begin looking for a good throwing stone or an appropriate Bible verse.

I very much want to stay married to Erin, but I also want to experience intimate relationships with other women. Is it possible to do both at the same time?

As it turns out, the answer appears to be yes.

The specific nature of the answer is still foggy because I haven’t implemented anything yet, but the general solution could be labeled polyamory.

Polyamory

Polyamory simply means having multiple intimate relationships at the same time. I’m not going to dive too deep into explaining the details at this time. If you want to learn more about it, you can Google polyamory and find some good sites devoted to the topic.

In practice, polyamorous relationships can get complicated because you’re dealing with multiple partners. I believe I have a good shot of making this work. I’m a pretty conscious guy, and since I don’t have a job, I have a lot more free time than most people. Plus I love challenges.

I guess the main challenge would be finding other partners who are open to this sort of thing. Obviously it’s not very mainstream. But neither is raw food, juice feasting, being happily jobless, experimenting with polyphasic sleep, or many of other things I’ve done.

What appeals to me about polyamory is that it’s a way for people to learn to share love and connection without trying to possess each other. It feels a lot more free and open to me than a closed marriage situation.

Is this just about having sex with other people? No, if that was all I wanted, I could just go pick up some tourist women on the Strip.

The truth is that I love connecting with Erin physically and emotionally, and I want to enjoy that kind of connection with other women too. I can use self-discipline to try to deny those feelings, but that would require turning my back on the principle of Love, which is a big no-no. In this case I have to follow my heart.

Erin’s Reaction

What’s Erin’s reaction to all of this? Due to the nature of our relationship, of course I’ve talked to her about this in depth. At the present moment, she’s actually okay with it. Like I said, she’s a very conscious woman.

I expect this will deepen my relationship with Erin in the long run. Her acceptance of this already makes me feel more committed to our marriage. By taking divorce off the table, I feel like we can continue to invest in what we’ve built together.

I feel our relationship has already improved in the past few weeks. We spent a lot of time talking and snuggling today. I feel much happier about our future direction, and I think Erin does too.

In fact, to kick off the New Year, Erin and I have decided to commit to a 30-day trial of 30-60 minutes per day of physical intimacy (sex, massage, cuddling, smooching, etc). We’re normally very affectionate with each other, so we want to see what happens if we turn this into a daily practice for a month. I doubt we’ll blog about it as we go along, but I’m certainly looking forward to this trial. It seems a lot more fun than the ones I did last year.

If I don’t go this route, what’s the alternative? The alternative is that we’re back to the original either-or decision. I could stay monogamous with Erin without feeling good about it, or we could get a divorce. Regardless of how a polyamorous relationship model works out, we’re really no worse off than before. Sure there might be some added consequences, but to me the biggest deal right now is the status of our marriage. I’d like to stay married and keep our family together in one household, and I know Erin wants that too.

Being in this state of indecision for so long has held me back in a lot of ways. For example, I didn’t want to grow the business too much because it would complicate things even more if we eventually got a divorce. It sucks to have to think like that, but indecision can’t be so easily compartmentalized. It feels good to move beyond that level of thinking though.

Linear Growth

Looking back I can see that the growth fork (i.e. that prolonged state of indecision) was something I created to keep myself from moving forward because I didn’t feel ready to take the next step.

The next step in my relationship with Erin was to expand beyond sharing an intimate connection with just one person and to learn to create and share that kind of connection with other people too. Deep down I knew that was the truth, but it was a truth I felt unready to face.

Obviously I’ll have to deal with some flak from people who have issues with this new direction. But the more important issue is what will happen to my relationships with Erin and my kids.

Intuitively I sense that it’s time for me to explore other models for intimate relationships and to share what I learn along the way. The comfortable path would be to stay monogamously married and pretend everything is fine as-is. The courageous path is to reach out and attempt to share love and intimacy with more people. The courageous path is the only one with a heart.

Erin and I have basically taken our personal connection about as far as we can on our own. If we keep doing what we’ve been doing, we may enjoy some small incremental gains, but it’s doubtful that we’ll experience any major leaps. Without those kinds of growth opportunities, it’s hard for me to get excited about our relationship, and it’s hard for me to feel committed to it.

But the thought of taking the kind of deep connection that Erin and I have built with each other and creating new relationships with other women — now that’s exciting to me. But I wouldn’t just want to talk about it or write about it in a theoretical way. I have to do it. My growth style is experiential.

My heart is excited by all of this. My head needs some time to catch up, but eventually he’ll be on board. I don’t know exactly what I’ll do about this yet, but intuitively I know this is the right direction to go.

Writing about this publicly feels like a good first step. I’m sure the next step will reveal itself soon enough.

Sharing Love

Sharing love and connection is my main motivation for wanting to experience other intimate relationships. It’s not about trying to get something from other people. I don’t feel I’m coming at this from a place of neediness, at least not in the sense that I need something from other people.

What I’m feeling is that I have this massive energy source of love inside me, but I lack the channels to fully express it. I want to let it flow, but all I’m doing is keeping it bottled up. Some of it flows into my relationship with Erin of course, but there’s still more to give.

Sharing emotional intimacy is great, but I’ve felt stunted by my inability to cross the physical intimacy border and take the sharing of love and connection to a much greater level. I think some amazing things will happen by dropping that limitation from my life.

Obviously I can share love through writing, speaking, and talking with people. However, my most natural manner of expressing love is through physical intimacy, especially touch. I give Erin massages all the time. If I see her sitting on the couch, it’s hard for me not to start squeezing her. When we go to bed at night, I usually massage and cuddle her first. Sometimes I play a game to see how much massaging she can handle before she’s so sleepy that she asks me to stop. We also have sex pretty often, especially since I know how to put her into a receptive state. A foot massage always sends her to la-la land.

But I still have the capacity to share more attention and affection than Erin can receive. If I give out as much as I feel inclined to give, she eventually starts rejecting it. Consequently, I always have to hold back. Some of this desire for expressing affection gets channeled into my writing, which is a way for me to reach out and connect with lots of people, but since that medium is a mismatch for physical intimacy, I often feel stunted trying to express love through the written word.

Why can’t I just become a massage therapist on the side and touch people all day long? That wouldn’t be appropriate because in my case, sensual touch leads very naturally to sex. I’d have a hard time holding back. Touching, kissing, massage, and sex are all part of the same bundle in my mind.

Physical and emotional intimacy go hand-in-hand with me. I’m not exactly sure why, but it’s hard for me to separate the two. A physically intimate relationship with a woman would make me feel very connected with her, and I’d automatically want to connect with her emotionally as well.

I’ve no idea how easy it will be to follow this path, but at least I know that others have already done it, so hopefully I can learn something from them.

I’d never want to do anything deceptive, so I wouldn’t start a relationship on false premises, like by pretending I’m a single guy. I’d need to find women who could understand my situation without going kittywompus. I have to imagine that somewhere on this planet, there must be other women who are open to exploring physical and emotional intimacy without major hang-ups and possessiveness issues… hopefully ones who like being massaged a lot.

2009

So my main focus for 2009 will be to explore intimate relationships in more depth. I mean that experientially of course. This includes my relationship with Erin as well as creating intimate relationships with other women. I can’t say in advance what the exact nature of those relationships will be because I’ve never done anything like this before. That remains to be seen.

There may be a limit as to how much I can write about this because I’m not going to reveal info about others who might be involved w/o their permission. I may not be a very private person myself, but I respect other people’s desire for privacy. What happens in Vegas…

However, I can certainly open up and write more about relationships in 2009. I’ve learned a lot from my very conscious relationship with Erin. The things we did that brought us so close happened more than a decade ago though, so for the most part these would be pretty old lessons. But I’m sure they’d still benefit a lot of people.

If I had it to do all over again, knowing what I know now, would I still get married? No, I doubt it. The monogamous marriage model doesn’t feel right to me. I love the idea of long-term committed relationships though, but you don’t need marriage for that. I don’t see a compelling reason to get a formal divorce just on principle, but it’s fair to say that my commitment to being in a single monogamous relationship has ended.

I can’t really say where this path will lead, but I’m sure this will be another amazing year of growth and change. I could easily write 10x more about this topic, and I know there are a lot of loose ends I didn’t wrap up, but that will have to be shared later. Most of those loose ends are still loose right now, so at this point I can’t tie everything into a nice neat bundle for you.

Happy New Year! May your 2009 be filled with the discovery of new truths, an expansion of your love, and a strengthening of your power.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

A Personal Example

During my first few years of blogging, I’d typically do one or two interviews per month. Sometimes a couple months would go by with no interviews at all. With this level of frequency, I reached a certain level of comfort and competence and pretty much stayed there.

But after my book came out, I started doing 30-60 minute interviews a few times a week, sometimes as often as three times a day. I noticed improvements every week, and my skills picked up fast.

I’ve gotten so comfortable doing radio and podcast interviews that I feel like it would be easy to progress to TV. If Oprah called, it wouldn’t seem like such a big deal at this point. It would just feel like more of the same.

It should be obvious that by doing more interviews, I’m improving my calibration in this skill set. There are lots of subtle adjustments to make, such as being able to feel the difference in flow between a 30-minute interview and a 60-minute one, knowing how podcasters differ from experienced radio DJs, determining when it’s best to deliver quick sound bites vs. longer replies, adapting answers and examples for the target audience (students, teens, spiritual seekers, etc), and so on.

Now what if I did the exact same interviews, but I spread them out over a few years instead of doing them all in several weeks? Would I reach the same level of performance and comfort, just over a long time period? No, certainly not.

Another expectation is that if I were to take a year off from doing interviews, I could probably get back up to speed very quickly because I’d retain most of the gains from my current calibration.

Full-Assed Is Better Than Half-Assed

If you want to learn a new skill, it can take you much longer to get good if you learn the skill too slowly and gradually.

You may also reach a greater level of skill overall if you condense your learning into a shorter period of time, even if you end up investing the same amount of total time you’d have invested by spreading it out more.

Obviously you can still err on the side of going too dense, but for most people the lack of frequency is the more common problem.

One of my friends wanted to improve his speaking skills. He joined six Toastmasters clubs — that’s a lot! — and attended meetings almost daily. He had the opportunity to do lots and lots of speaking. Toastmasters obviously became a huge part of his life — he even joked that it is his life. Let me tell you… he got really good at public speaking in a fairly short period of time, racing beyond people who’ve been in Toastmasters for decades but who stuck with one or two clubs and didn’t push themselves as hard.

By making a short-term sacrifice, this guy took his speaking skills to a whole new level. This calibration will benefit him for the rest of his life. Even if he takes time off from speaking, he’ll be able to pick it up again rather quickly. He’ll only need to refresh the old patterns he’s internalized.

When I was going through college in three semesters, I learned how much more efficient it is to go full-assed vs. half-assed. Most students spread their studies out over four years or more. This may be common, but it’s also very inefficient. Common and inefficient are practically synonyms.

By condensing my college experience into only three semesters, I not only graduated quickly, but I also spent significantly less time on my studies compared to other students. Within the first few weeks of school, I calibrated to a high level of performance and learning, and I was able to maintain that level thereafter. Most students never calibrated themselves for high performance, so it took them a lot longer to learn the material and complete assignments.

The funny thing is that this wasn’t my first college experience. The first time I tried going to college, I mostly partied, messed around, got drunk, did tons of shoplifting, and ditched my classes. I was eventually expelled.

Earlier this week I was doing an interview for a college radio station. When I shared these stories, the interviewer noted that I separated the typical college experience in two equal halves. First, I got all the partying and socializing done. Then I did the academic portion. I laughed because I’d never heard anyone describe it like that. That’s a pretty accurate insight though.

Despite my unusual college experiences, it was actually an awesome trade-off. I made major gains in my social skills and courage during the party and shoplifting time. And I made huge improvements in my self-discipline and time management skills during the academic portion. I think the overall results would have been much worse if I tried to achieve balance between academics and a social life.

Balance

Balance is a good thing to have over the span of a lifetime. But within a shorter time span, even during a period of a year or two, over-balancing your life will only decrease your effectiveness because it will dilute your focus.

I like to think of life in an episodic manner. I don’t try to pile everything into each day. I can’t even deal with everything that interests me during a single month.

If you were to look at a typical week from my life, it would appear to be totally unbalanced. For example, you might see me working like crazy on an interesting project or hobby and ignoring virtually everything else. My kids would barely see me. I’m in office hermit mode.

But another week I could totally switch gears. Now maybe I don’t want to work at all. Perhaps we go on a family trip, and I spend day after day with Erin and the kids doing fun stuff.

This week I’ve been doing several months’ worth of accounting work for my business. I prefer to do my accounting in a few sessions per year instead of doing a little each week or month. If I do it a little at a time, it just steals my attention from other things. I do a better job with the marathon sessions. Some people would say this is procrastination. To me it’s intelligent batching.

In the short term, I largely ignore balance. It’s meaningless.

But in the long term, I consider how to balance my focus between a variety of different interests. A month here. A year here.

This way I still enjoy a sense of balance at the big picture level. I pay attention to all the important parts of my life. Everything gets handled.

But within the span of any given week, my focus is usually pretty tight. Most weeks I have a theme or major focus for what I want to get done. Everything else gets blown off until later… or never.

Even during the span of a year, I tend to pick just one or two areas of my life in which to focus the bulk of my growth efforts.

This year my major focus was on improving my diet and health. I knew that if I could become a raw foodist this year, even if it took a lot of effort to push through the learning curve and initial resistance, it would be worth it. This was the most important goal I accomplished this year… even more important to me than the release of my book. I’m so glad I did it. I doubt I would have achieved this goal if I didn’t focus so much attention on it in a relatively short period of time.

I’ll have a different primary focus for 2009. Most likely it will have to do with social dynamics and relationships. This is an area that’s been fascinating me lately. Other parts of my life, such as my diet, will simply go into maintenance mode next year.

Focus

It’s a mistake to try to balance your day with a small slice of everything that matters to you. It spreads your focus too thin. It dilutes your learning process. It promotes stagnation.

It’s better to pick a strong focus for a certain period of time, set a breakthrough goal in that area, and then push hard until you lock in to a higher-level calibration.

Stephen Covey wrote that it’s better to focus on the rhythm of the week instead of the rhythm of the day. In other words, attend to your various roles and goals over the course of a week, but don’t worry about packing everything into every day.

That’s a step in the right direction, but it’s still too unfocused. Well… it’s okay for baby-sized goals, but it’s no good for going after the big stuff. It will slow you down with unnecessary baggage.

If you want to make faster progress, you need to lighten your load by letting some things slide for a while. Not every aspect of your life needs your attention every week.

For working on significant goals, the rhythm of a month, quarter, or even a year is better for making meaningful progress.

When I want to learn something new, I try to immerse myself in it as much as possible. I’ll buy 5-10 books on the subject and read them back to back. I’ll contact several experts and learn from them. I’ll dive in with action and do some kind of 30-day trial.

This is a great way to learn. It keeps your enthusiasm up because you can enjoy rapid progress through the beginner phase. You get to the intermediate level quickly, where you can finally start applying what you’ve learned.

Big goals often require tons of learning. A good example would be starting a new business. If you try to pick away at that goal a few hours a week, you may never get it done. It’s better to put the rest of your life on hold and just go at it like a madman for a while.

You don’t have to push through from beginning to end on the first try. You can push ahead in focused phases. For example, if you want to start an online business, your first phase might be to educate yourself. Then you can take a few weeks off to focus on a different part of your life — or just relax. Your next phase might be to build your website and get it launched.

Managing Your Attention

Know your primary focus at any given time. Give that part of your life the bulk of your attention. Let the other areas slide a bit… not so much that they crumble, but enough that you can free up extra time to devote to your primary pursuit.

If you divide your attention between too many things at once, your productivity and enjoyment suffer across the board. But if you can focus your attention on just one thing at a time and go all-out with it, just temporarily, you can make major strides. You’ll achieve great long-term balance, even though things may look incredibly unbalanced on a day-to-day basis.

Not having a job obviously makes this approach easier to fully implement. I love the freedom of working 60 hours on a business project one week, and the next week I might devote that many hours to studying a new subject of interest, such as when I was learning to play chess earlier this year. A job with regular hours would kill my efficiency. It would seem like a constant interruption in whatever I wanted to be doing.

If you do have a job, have you ever felt like you could get two weeks worth of work done in a single week if you made an all-out effort? Could you be twice as productive as you normally are, just for one week? What if you could work every other week and earn the same amount of income? One week you would work flat out — no distractions, no socializing, no idleness, long hours, minimal family life. And the next week you could attend to your personal life. Do fun stuff, socialize, be with your family — but give your personal life your full attention.

What if you love playing computer games? Instead of having them be a constant distraction in your days, set aside a period of a few days or weeks to all-out indulge in this hobby. Afterwards you can drop all game-playing and move on to something else.

I’ve done this a number of times (not recently), and it’s a lot of fun. One summer (1991 I think), I took two months to play Ultimas I-VI back to back. It was a lot of fun. By going through the games back-to-back, it was faster, less boring, and not as frustrating as it might have been if I played them over a longer period of time. I didn’t feel guilty playing games so much because I knew it was a temporary experience, like a vacation. Eventually my focus would shift to getting real work done, and of course it did.

If you want to work, then work. If you want to play, then play. But whatever you decide to do, commit yourself to it without holding back. Be aware that your commitment is temporary. It will eventually end. You’ll have the opportunity to shift your focus to something else.

Do you think this approach would make your life more or less balanced?

The only way to know whether this works for you is to try it for a while and find out. If you’ve been living such that every day is virtually the same, you don’t know what you’re missing. Try working flat out for 12 or more hours one day. Then take the next day off completely to do something you love — guilt-free. It’s a fun (and productive) way to live.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

Erin just joined Facebook this afternoon. If you have a Facebook account, please send her a friend request. She has 121 Facebook friends so far (after we posted about it to our Twitter accounts), and she’s looking to add more. Her Facebook page is at:

Erin Pavlina – Facebook

My Facebook Experience

My Facebook page is here:

Steve Pavlina – Facebook

I’ve been using Facebook for a few months now. I currently have 1,907 Facebook friends. I’ve been a fairly active user ever since I joined. I get new friend requests, comments, and emails there every day.

Overall I’m glad I joined Facebook. It takes extra time to keep up with it, and it can easily become a time sink if you aren’t judicious in how you use it. However, I’ve found it a good way to meet people with compatible interests.

I set things up so that whenever I update my Twitter status, it updates my Facebook status automatically. Also, if I make a new blog post, the link is automatically posted to my Twitter and Facebook accounts too. Facebook has an app that anyone can add to their account to do this. To set this up with Twitter, I used Twitterfeed. You only have to set these up once, and after that it’s all completely automated. Nice!

There are four primary ways I use Facebook now:

1. Broadcast medium. I use Facebook as a broadcast medium via the auto-updates that appear when I post anything to my blog or my Twitter account. This is fully automated. This brings more readers to my blog posts. It gives people an extra outlet to keep up with my work.
2. Gathering feedback. Facebook is another place where I receive general feedback (via comments posted on my Wall and Facebook email) as well as specific feedback about my Twitter updates and blog updates. Most of this feedback is pretty general (”great post”), but some of it has been helpful. The Facebook feedback is usually short and snappy, so it gives me a quick vibe on people’s reactions to a post. The feedback I get via email and the forums is usually much longer.
3. Making new connections. I’ve met some pretty cool people on Facebook. This includes new friends (people I now keep in touch with regularly) as well as new business contacts. I’ve received a few interview requests and speaking invites via Facebook too. Facebook has been more beneficial as a business tool than Linkedin. My Linkedin account generates mostly spam and inappropriate requests and has been largely useless. Between the two, Facebook wins hands down for business networking.
4. Maintaining existing connections. Some people prefer keeping in touch with me via Facebook instead of using regular email or phones. Some of my existing connections have strengthened with people who happen to be on Facebook. I think this is because my Facebook friends see my updates more frequently (vs. if they just subscribe to my blog feed or newsletter), so they think about me more often as a result.

The downside is that I can’t respond to all the feedback I get on Facebook, including the emails people send and the comments they post on my Wall. It’s just too much to keep up with it all. A few times people got upset when I didn’t reply to their questions, but I have to triage. However, I think most people understand that when you have nearly 2K Facebook friends, you can’t be equally responsive to everyone. If people think I can do that, their expectations are totally unrealistic.

Another thing I don’t have time for is getting involved with all the Facebook apps. Most of them are way too cutesy for me. I really don’t need people sending me virtual candies and such. Don’t get me wrong — I appreciate the sentiment behind it — but I just don’t have time for that sort of thing. I almost always decline requests that require me to add new apps to my account. If you want to send me extra love, just hold the intention in your thoughts, and I’ll receive it. No need to send me virtual snacks via Facebook.

I also decline all Facebook cause invites. People send me new ones every day. Again, it’s not that I don’t care about the fate of whales or polar bears. It’s just that I don’t have time to get involved in five new causes every day. I have to be more focused than that.

Spam hasn’t been a big problem for me on Facebook. When people start spamming me with too much junk (some Internet marketers have done this), I just unfriend them. Problem solved. If you spam me, I can guarantee you won’t be my friend for long. If you send me a message that says, “I know this looks like spam, but…” you’ll be unfriended before I read the rest of your message. I have zero tolerance for anything that looks like spam.

I normally accept all initial friend requests. The limit is currently 5,000 friends, so my account still has room for about 3K more friends. I thought about creating a separate fan page, but for now that seems unnecessary, and I don’t see what it would accomplish. Maybe if I hit the friend limit, I can consider it.

There is a lot of stuff in Facebook that is awfully cutesy and which seems totally pointless to me, so I simply ignore that stuff. When I stick with my core reason for using Facebook, which is to cultivate new compatible connections, it does fulfill that purpose quite well. Many people find me on Facebook because they see I’m friends with one of their friends. This has a rippling effect of expanding my Facebook network in interesting directions. For example, I frequently get new friend requests from other raw foodists because I’m friends with lots of other raw foodists there.

Twitter

I’ve been using Twitter a bit longer than Facebook. I currently have 2,409 followers there, and I’ve posted 479 updates. On average I gain roughly one new Twitter follower per hour.

One thing that helped boost my follower join rate was adding my Twitter page to my signature in our discussion forums. If you regularly participate in any online forums, I highly recommend you do the same. Your signature links will appear on every post you’ve ever made (assuming the forum software is decent). People who find your old forum posts (such as via search engines) may start following you on Twitter if they like what you posted. This way your old posts are working for you. Be sure to also link your forum signature to your Facebook page if you want more Facebook friends.

Overall I like Twitter. I wish I adopted it earlier, since I’d have a lot more followers by now. Many bloggers who started using Twitter earlier have way more followers than I do.

Using Twitter doesn’t require much time at all if you’re disciplined, especially since my blog posts are automatically announced there. I have it set to announce Erin’s blog posts to my Twitter account as well. If I get a quick thought I want to share, it takes 30-60 seconds to post it on Twitter.

I use Twitter mainly as a broadcast medium. I don’t reply to all the questions and comments people send me there — that wouldn’t be a good use of my time. As with Facebook, a few people get upset when I don’t reply to them. I do reply to some people there, but replying to everyone who contacts me there is totally unrealistic.

People often send me cool links via Twitter, and I’ll occasionally re-tweet them or share them in our forums. Earlier today I shared a link to a heart-warming Youtube video (16:23) that someone sent me via Twitter this morning. If I get too busy, I don’t even look at the links people send me. I can’t keep up with all the links people email me either. If you send me a link, the odds are less than 50-50 that I’ll even look at it.

Even on Twitter I get a lot of people asking me to help them with certain causes. I appreciate the seriousness of some of these requests, but it’s just too much for me to get involved with this sort of thing. I do what I can now and then, but I can’t get behind every cause that crosses my plate.

While I don’t do a lot of out-linking from my blog posts — I feel it would add way too much clutter to the archives if I did — I often share cool links via Twitter. Those links may not be seen by as many people, but I think it’s a good compromise. I prefer to use my blog for sharing original content. If I want to pass on a link or share something timely, Twitter works well for that.

One of my favorite things to do on Twitter is to share interesting, inspiring, and/or challenging quotes. Sometimes I’ll tweet a famous quote I come across. Other times I’ll post a sentence or two from my book or my blog that I think people will find stimulating. I get some cool feedback on these quotes, so I think people like them. Again, all of these tweets are automatically posted to my Facebook account too.

Online Socializing

The downside of adding Facebook and Twitter to my life is that it increased the flow of new connections coming into my life. At first this was great, but soon I started feeling over-socialized. I was forming more new connections than I could sustainably manage. Adding these new contacts is easy. Maintaining ongoing relationships with all of them is impossible.

In lieu of spending even more time answering emails and such, my most practical option was to raise my standards for the type of online socializing I would do. Otherwise I could spend all day on this stuff and never get any real work done.

Consequently, I’ve become much pickier about which connections and conversations I’ll get involved with personally vs. keeping my distance. This applies to my regular email as well as to forum discussions, Facebook feedback and emails, and Twitter responses.

This wasn’t easy to do. There were many people I felt deserved a response, so I constantly have to remind myself not to follow up on anything that doesn’t pass my pre-qual tests. I don’t always succeed, but I’m gradually getting better.

I admit I feel a bit guilty about all the stuff I have to let slide. But I can’t justify spending all day answering one-on-one feedback when I have more impactful things to do.

Even though I’ve added Twitter and Facebook to my life, I’m actually doing less online socializing than I used to. The reason is that the extra incoming communication made me more aware that it isn’t a good use of my time to over-socialize online. I quickly realized that in order to stay productive, I had to be more selective than ever.

Consequently, I’ve been letting some online-only friendships fall by the wayside if the compatibility connection just isn’t there. I’m letting a lot of emails go unanswered these days. In fact, many of them are now going unread. I used to read every email I received, but no longer. If people send me lengthy emails about their life stories and how my work has helped them, I used to love reading that stuff, but I can’t justify spending time on that anymore. It steals too much attention from other things. It’s unfortunate that some people will spend hours writing these long messages that will go unread. I’m grateful for the intent behind them, but I must be more careful in how I use my time. If I take the time to read those emails, I have to do less of something else.

Incidentally, if you’re considering sending me a long email in the near future, please don’t. I probably won’t have time to read it. I do appreciate the intent, however.

A big problem with online socializing is that it can become a crutch that crowds out face-to-face connections. I’d rather meet new people face-to-face as opposed to sitting in front of my computer typing emails. So I’m intentionally withdrawing from a lot of online socializing in order to free up more time for face-to-face interaction. I’m dropping the quantity, so I can raise the quality.

Ironically, the net benefit of adding Facebook and Twitter to my life is that they caused me to back off from online socializing and to become much more selective with socializing in general. The upside is that these services help me cast a wide net, so I have new potential connections coming into my life every day. Then I sift through the contents of that net with a pair of tweezers. I look for strong compatibilities, and when I find them, I follow up to see if there’s the potential for a deeper connection to be made. Sometimes this results in new friendships or business contacts, and other times it just fizzles.

Dealing with Rejection — When You’re the Rejecter

What I dislike most is that this approach requires me to “reject” more people than ever, usually by ignoring them or blowing them off. I still feel a bit guilty about this. But obviously this isn’t going away if I’m going to keep doing what I do. It will very likely continue to get worse.

Still, there’s an ongoing incongruity between my feelings and my reality that I haven’t yet resolved, and I dislike that very much. For years now I’ve been receiving more feedback than I can possibly respond to. And now I’ve ramped that up to an even greater level. Now I can’t even read it all. Logically I know that it’s unrealistic for me or anyone else to expect I can personally follow up with everyone who contacts me. So why do I still feel like everyone deserves a personal response? Why do I feel like I should do my best to maintain every online relationship I have, even though that’s totally impractical these days?

It feels rude to ignore people who take the time to keep in touch with me, especially those who genuinely want to connect or who offer encouragement and support. I think it’s very nice that such people take the time to email me. So how can I respond by ignoring them?

Something is messed up with my beliefs here. I’m looking at this situation from a disempowering perspective. I can see the truth logically, but I’m not feeling it emotionally. My heart just isn’t onboard with my brain’s solution. Some part of me is resisting the idea that possibly for the rest of my life, I’m always going to have to blow off people who reach out to connect with me. This includes saying no most of the time to people who ask for help (and need it).

When I switched to a 100% raw vegan diet this year, something strange happened to me energetically. There are lots of ways to describe it, but one way to explain it is that I used to have an imbalance where my power chakra was a lot more energetic than my heart and third-eye chakras. This year that imbalance has totally flip-flopped. In plain English, this means that my emotions and intuition keep bringing problems to my attention that at present, I lack the ability to solve in a way I feel good about. So I have a lot of motivation and drive to do certain things that I’m simply not able to do to my satisfaction. My solutions often make me feel worse than the problems they’re intended to solve.

This new imbalance has been causing me problems for several months now. On multiple occasions, I’ve acted on some of these heart-centered impulses, but the results weren’t so good. I’ve gone out of my way to help people in a few situations, but the results left me feeling empty and disappointed. This relates to some offline problems I’ve been tackling lately, i.e. stuff I’d never blog about due to the importance of protecting people’s privacy.

This Facebook/Twitter expansion seems like it might be another manifestation of this imbalance. Originally I felt motivated to join these services as a way to reach out and connect with more people. It certainly had that effect. But the side effect is that I now must reject more people than ever, which is the opposite of what I wanted. So yeah, you could say it’s a solution of a sort, but it’s not a solution that makes me feel totally good.

Ultimately in order to resolve these issues, I need to correct the energetic imbalances I’m experiencing. That may take some time though. It’s like whenever I take some kind of action now, I can feel the rippling consequences of it so deeply that I end up focusing too much on the negative side and not enough on the positive. It’s like my emotions and intuitive abilities have become over-energized and don’t know when to shut up.

On the many occasions when I have to blow people off, I wish they wouldn’t think their disappointment so loudly… cuz I can hear it, you know. It’s like constantly having one of those Obi Wan moments after Alderaan got Death Starred.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

This is a majorly long article. At about 8,600 words, I’m pretty sure this is the longest article I’ve ever written. It’s more like a free book chapter. The length is because my goal is to share one of the most comprehensive articles ever written on this topic. If you actually read the whole thing, you should gain many helpful insights from it. There are many subtle ideas here. If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to print it out for later. It goes good with peppermint tea.

Calibration for Long-term Success

When you begin any new activity or endeavor, initially you won’t be calibrated for success, so you’ll experience mostly failure. However, if you keep moving forward with a clear goal in mind, and if you progressively adjust your thinking and actions along the way, you’ll eventually calibrate yourself to get the results you want. This calibration only occurs from directly applying a skill under real-world conditions, not by reading about it.

When you’re in the pre-calibration period, achieving even a small degree of success in a new field requires a massive, all-out effort. Post-calibration, success is practically on auto-pilot; you can consistently achieve the results you want with minimal effort.

Calibration Examples

It’s easiest to understand calibration by way of example, so here are some detailed examples to consider:

Social Dynamics, Making Friends, and Dating

In the field of social dynamics, calibration is the process of learning how to meet new people, initiate conversations, keep conversations going, make new friends, get dates (second meetings), and basically achieve positive social interactions.

How you calibrate your social skills will depend on your personal goals for this area. A salesperson may focus on learning how to build rapport, generate interest, close sales, and construct a database of quality contacts. A professional speaker may learn how to get attention, arouse emotion, generate laughter, and inspire people to action. A pick-up artist may study how to initiate conversations, demonstrate value, build attraction, and achieve successful closes (a close could be getting a phone number, a date, or a sexual encounter).

In high school I was comfortable within certain social circles, but I was still more introverted than I wanted to be. So when I started at college, I decided to remake myself into a more extroverted person. I didn’t really know what I was doing, so I just dove in and attempted to be as social as possible. I accepted any and all opportunities for social interaction. If anyone invited me to go out, I always said yes. I made a huge commitment to elevate this part of my life, and I stuck with it for my entire freshman year.

This strategy actually worked. I hadn’t read any books on social skills at the time, but I quickly calibrated my social skills via trial and error.

Within a few weeks, I’d made dozens of new friends, and I was going to parties every week. If I ever wanted to hang out and do something fun, I could always find someone willing. Not including sleep time, I’m sure I spent more time in other people’s dorm rooms than my own. I was always going out — for parties, poker games, volleyball, ping pong, or just for pizza. I created an absolutely amazing social life and packed more fun into each month than I used to enjoy in a year. I practically became like a different person.

What I found interesting was that in the beginning, it seemed like I was always the one to initiate new connections, but once I felt comfortable doing that, additional connections began flowing into my life almost effortlessly. During my first week at college, I noticed a party across the hall and asked if I could join in the fun (and got a quick yes). After that I was always getting invitations to parties and virtually never had to ask. During the first few months, I initiated a lot of social experiences (Wanna join me for dinner at the dining commons? Wanna grab a slice? Wanna get a poker game together?). But eventually I had so many invites coming to me passively that I didn’t have to initiate as much.

Looking back, I probably went way overboard. The good news was that I really took control of this area of my life. By throwing myself into it with a passion, I quickly became comfortable meeting new people, and I learned to make friends easily. The bad news was that I totally blew off my studies and was flunking out of school. In retrospect it wasn’t such a bad trade off though. I got expelled after my third semester, but the social calibration I gained during that time has served me well ever since. I went to a different school later and still earned my college degrees, but I think the social calibration has proven more valuable in the long run. I don’t feel intimidated in new social situations, and it’s normally easy for me to make new friends and connect with people. Somewhere along the way, I picked up a wife without even trying.

When Erin and I moved to Las Vegas in 2004, we didn’t know anyone in the city. We went from having a lot of friends in L.A. to having zero local friends in Vegas. It was just the two of us and our kids in a big city of strangers. But part of the reason I was happy to move to a new city was that I knew I could make new friends easily. Sure enough, it wasn’t long before I had plenty of great local friends. The bigger challenge for me has been feeling over-socialized at times. There have been some weeks where I’d have preferred more alone time.

This social calibration has benefited me tremendously in business. I can go to a mixer or conference where I don’t know anyone, and I have an easy time making new friends and contacts. I remember when I first started attending the Game Developer’s Conference many years ago, most of the attendees seemed shy and socially awkward. They’d mostly keep to themselves or cling to their co-workers, especially at meal times. Meanwhile, I was going around making new friends, which just felt natural to me. Some of those chance encounters led to new opportunities and deals that helped grow my business. It was also nice to have more friends with similar interests.

One year at that conference, I hung out so late that the shuttles had stopped running. It was pouring rain outside, but a new friend offered me a ride back to my hotel. In fact, something similar happened at a different conference this year. It’s nice to know that my social calibration can keep me out of the rain when necessary.

To some people this may not sound like a big deal. Many people develop such skills in high school or younger. But for a shy kid like me who went to an all boys Catholic high school, it was indeed a big deal.

Although I use my social skills mainly to make friends and business contacts, you can use a similar process to develop dating and relationship skills. For example, if you want to go on more dates, you can calibrate your skills to get good at opening conversations with strangers, develop fun and interesting conversations, build attraction, and at least close with a phone number. There are lots of people teaching this stuff online now, with varying degrees of credibility (and sanity), but the most important thing is to just dive in and start experimenting. You’ll experience some rejection at first, but if you just keep learning and adapting, your skills will calibrate to the point where you’re able to get consistently good results.

If you happen to be suffering from loneliness, most likely it’s because you never took the time to adequately calibrate your social skills. Consequently, you may avoid making new friends because you don’t understand the social nuances of how to do it. You probably feel socially awkward and suffer from an amplified fear of rejection. The solution is to focus on a different goal first. You need to calibrate your social skills before you can apply them. Go out and socialize for the sake of learning how to socialize. Don’t worry about whether or not you make any new friends. Once your social skills are calibrated, which may take a few months, then you can focus on building the kinds of friendships you desire, and it will be much easier for you. Aim to get good first. Then aim to get results.

Martial Arts

If you study martial arts and begin learning to spar, you’re going to be pretty bad at it initially. You’ll have no sense of timing, and you won’t grasp the rhythm of a sparring match. You’ll probably bang knees with your opponent a lot. All the newbies do that.

For the most part, you can expect to look and feel like a total dork. The first time I sparred, which was more than 10 years ago, I was laughing during the match, mostly at how awkward I felt. I’m sure I looked like a total dork.

This is to be expected. You can try to play it cool, but the truth is that the first few times you attempt any new sport, you’re virtually guaranteed to look and feel like a dork. This is because your mind and body aren’t calibrated to that sport.

Within a few months of regular training, your sparring should be fairly well-calibrated for an intermediate level of skill. At the very least, you won’t embarrass yourself. You’ll have sparred many different opponents, and you’ll have a good sense of what to expect. You’ll be able to use different moves successfully, land punches and kicks, and pull off the occasional surprise. I remember how cool it was when I stripped an opponent’s helmet off with an axe kick during a sparring match.

While sparring at the beginner level feels awkward and intimidating, once you gain a little competence, it becomes a fun challenge. At this point the subtleties of the skill begin to reveal themselves. Once your basic sparring moves and tactics are calibrated, you can begin to calibrate your strategic decisions, and this is where the richness of sparring really opens up. The game becomes less physical and more mental. Some would even say it becomes spiritual at a certain point.

Calibrating to a particular sport is a lot like learning to ride a bicycle. Even if you don’t train for a while, the mental calibration remains, and you can easily pick it up again later.

I trained for about three years in Tae Kwon Do in the late 90s with a mix of group classes and private lessons. Over time I got pretty good at sparring and really enjoyed it. I moved away from the studio and stopped training, but several years later, I started training in a different martial art, Kempo, starting as a white belt. Kempo is geared toward self-defense, while TKD is more sporty. Fortunately, all the moves that are legal in TKD are also legal in Kempo, and Kempo allows you to do some things that aren’t legal in TKD, such as punching to the face. (Protective gear is worn during sparring, but there’s still some risk. I suffered a bruised rib and a split lip on different occasions.)

Even though I’d lost most of my flexibility, the first time I sparred in Kempo, I did amazingly well, certainly far beyond the white belt level. From my first Kempo sparring class, I was able to hold my own against one of the black belts in the studio. I was sparring TKD-style, not Kempo-style, but that actually gave me an advantage because the other students weren’t calibrated to that style. TKD is mostly kicking, but Kempo uses more hand techniques. My preference for kicks surprised the other students because they would hover just outside of punching range, but they were still within my TKD-calibrated kicking range, so I hammered them with kicking combos until they figured out they needed to back up. This threw them off mentally, and it took months for many of them to adapt to my style. Of course, it also took me a while to get used to having punches thrown at my head.

After a year of training in Kempo, I was fairly well-calibrated to that style, but I had to unlearn some of my TKD habits that were ineffective in Kempo. I had to work on my speed, defensive maneuvers, and incorporating punches, strikes, and backfists into my sparring.

The point is that once you gain calibration at a particular skill set, you may very well lock in that skill for life. I feel as if basic competence in sparring is so ingrained in me that even if I didn’t spar again for 20 years, I’d be able to quickly pick it up again. I can actually feel that calibration in my body.

Blogging

Since blogging is still a fairly new medium, it usually takes new bloggers a while to properly calibrate. The failure rate is pretty high for newbies because most of them give up before they calibrate for success. I’d say you need to write at least 200-300 posts before you get a decent calibration going, and that assumes you’re making a solid commitment to getting better. For some people it will require more than 500 posts to achieve reasonable calibration, especially if they aren’t very good writers. There’s just a lot to learn.

In particular, there’s a huge gap between writing posts that people read and forget vs. writing posts that people will remember well enough that they’re still referring their friends, family members, and co-workers to read a year later. One of the key calibrations for long-term blogging success is to learn how to write the latter type of post; that’s how you get your archives working for you, and your traffic can still grow even when you aren’t posting anything.

For example, of the top 10 articles on my website that generate the most referrals, only one was written this year. Articles I wrote years ago continue to attract new readers today. However, it took me a long time to learn to write the kinds of articles that would produce such results. I’ve publicly shared how I do this, and that’s been helpful for some people, but it still takes time for new bloggers to “get it” to the point where they can apply it.

Not long ago I was at a party, chatting with a woman who got started blogging after attending a blogging workshop I did a couple years ago. She was telling me some of the mistakes she made with her blog during that time, all of which were mistakes I explicitly said to avoid during the workshop. For example, she wrote lots of timely content instead of timeless content, so she felt like she was on an endless treadmill, and her archives were largely worthless. She remembered that I said to avoid those mistakes too, but that wasn’t enough to stop her from making them. Despite having the opportunity to learn from my experience and avoid the pitfalls I described, she still had to go out and make those mistakes in order to refine her own calibration. I’ve seen countless bloggers make the same mistakes. They seek my advice, I tell them what to do and what not to do and why, and they do exactly what I tell them not to do and then wonder why it isn’t working. Oy vey! This is okay though, as long as they keep plugging ahead and learn from those mistakes. We human beings aren’t known to be the best listeners in the galaxy. We learn much better by doing something than by reading about it.

Different bloggers will naturally calibrate themselves toward different goals. For example, I wanted to calibrate my blogging skills to the goal of having a deep, long-term impact on my readers. I want to change people’s lives for the better. This is partly why I do things differently than most bloggers. I blow off many practices that other pro bloggers defend as sacred. My articles tend to be very long and detailed. I typically avoid posting shallow short info-crack pieces. I post less frequently, sometimes going a week or more with no fresh content. I largely ignore current events. I don’t often link to other blogs. This is all because I’m calibrating my skills toward a certain type of result. Those popular strategies just aren’t very helpful at achieving the results I desire, so I don’t use them. If you want this to become yet another info-crack blog, get used to disappointment. I want to change your life, not provide you with a five-minute distraction.

So be careful when taking advice from others. If you’re calibrating toward a different goal than they are, their advice may hurt you more than help you. It’s best to learn from people who’ve already achieved a similar calibration to what you want to achieve. For example, if you just want to make as much money as possible and don’t care how you get it, then you probably wouldn’t want to model my blogging methods because I’ve calibrated myself toward a different goal. But you might want to follow those bloggers who proudly proclaim they’re in it for the money — there are plenty to select from. On the other hand, if you believe you’re here for a reason and that blogging could potentially become a sustainable expression of your life purpose, then you’d probably benefit greatly by studying my style, since I’ve been getting positive results in this area for years. The point is that if you decide to model someone, be sure you’re modeling someone with compatible goals (and thus a compatible calibration).

One thing I’ve learned from 4+ years of blogging is that it really isn’t that hard in principle to become a successful blogger; however, it’s very hard in practice. Newbies’ minds are typically filled with many false notions. In some ways they need to unload more useless ideas than they need to absorb useful ideas. I’ve raped quite a few pro blogging sacred cows, yet my blog is still going strong.

There are a lot of blogging success factors that are somewhat counter-intuitive. You won’t realize this if you just read sites about blogging because they’ll rarely write about these factors. For the most part, it’s not that anyone is intentionally withholding information. The ideas are simply too subtle for most bloggers to be consciously aware of them. Many calibration issues are like this — they’re just too subtle to appear on any “top 10″ or “how to” lists. Sometimes people who succeed can’t document all the specific reasons they’ve succeeded. They can’t consciously unearth every detail of their unconscious calibration. There are some things I do as a successful blogger that I’ve never seen anyone write or speak about publicly, myself included. Some of the concepts are so subtle or intricate that even if I explained them in detail, nobody but other successful pro bloggers would even understand what I’m talking about, and some people would accuse me of lying.

Yesterday another blogger emailed me a link to a post he wrote, explaining why he personally dislikes my writing style. This is a blogger who says he gets significantly less traffic than I do. His main criticism is that I state my opinions too directly, as if they’re facts. This is a perfectly valid criticism of course; I confess to doing this liberally. The attitude of that blogger was that this is a personal defect I should correct. However, what he probably doesn’t realize is that this is a trait I developed over time as part of my calibration process for blogging success. I’m sure his advice is well-meaning, but I know that if I take his advice, my results will actually decline. I can say he’s wrong and that I’m right because I’ve learned which approach works best for me via trial and error. As a generalization, I know that making strong statements works better than making weak statements.

This is one of many subtle calibration refinements I learned from years of blogging. I discovered that prefacing every opinion with phrases like “I think…” or “I feel…” or “In my opinion…” leads to the creation of wimpy content. So this was actually a personal defect I learned to correct, and I intentionally make strong statements. My readers aren’t stupid. They know that since this is my website, such statements represent my thoughts, opinions, and beliefs. When I offer up my thoughts directly, as opposed to watering them down with qualifiers, people are challenged to agree or disagree with me. This helps people question their beliefs, strengthening some while weakening others. This is what I like to see.

Another benefit to making strong statements is that other bloggers, including the one critical of my posting style, will take the time to write posts just to disagree with me, thereby sending traffic to my website and actively helping me achieve my goals. Yet because their content is usually wimpier, they don’t benefit equally from this same mechanism. There are a lot of subtle interactions going on here, and I’m only offering a cursory overview here, but the net effect is that by posting strong statements, I enjoy more blogging success, but I also attract more criticism. However, the criticism actually benefits me. This is pretty counterintuitive, isn’t it?

Part of the reason I’ve been so successful as a blogger is that people remember what I’ve written, especially if they disagree with it. If you look at the comments written about my work throughout the blogosphere, you’ll find that most people have very polarized opinions about my work. Some people love my work. Some absolutely despise it. Very few are neutral. However, love it or hate it, these same people keep discussing my work, constantly spreading the word to those who don’t know about me. Such controversy makes people curious and brings new readers to my website every day. Isn’t this just insidious? The more people dislike me, the more they actively go out and market my work to others, and the more they help me achieve my goal of helping people grow. This is so effective that I can even tell such people how they’re helping me, and they’ll keep right on doing it.

I could certainly write more agreeable posts that few people would find objectionable. I could apologize for every opinion of mine that isn’t mainstream. But that’s totally the wrong calibration for my goals, not to mention for my personality. It’s way too cowardly. I don’t want to calibrate as a wimpy blogger that nobody can find fault with. It’s more effective to calibrate as a blogger who challenges people and makes a difference, even if it sends some people running the other way (to go out and promote my work instead of reading it themselves).

Uncalibrated newbie bloggers often blog scared. They try to please everyone and avoid taking risks. Consequently, they write posts that are easily forgotten and which will generate few referrals. Then some new upstart blogger comes along with a better calibration, breaks all the newbie rules, and surges ahead in traffic. And the other newbies think it’s luck. It’s not luck though. A good example is the blog Stuff White People Like. I first happened upon it shortly after it launched, and I knew it would become successful. I could see it had a great calibration for building traffic quickly — it was only a matter of time before it took off. The posts were politically incorrect to the max, but they were witty and memorable. Sure enough, that blog became a hit and even led to a book deal. If this sort of success surprises you as a blogger, it means your calibration is off. If your calibration is solid, you should be able to browse through the early posts on that blog and NOT be surprised by its success. Overall, if you’re often surprised by the success of others in your field, it means your calibration isn’t very good yet. As your own calibration matures, you’ll get better at being able to predict successes.

One of the keys to success in any field, especially blogging, is to accept that there are good reasons the successful people are succeeding, and it has nothing to do with luck. If you see someone who’s getting better results than you, even if it’s someone with less experience who started after you, chances are they have a more accurate calibration than you. You can rail against that, feel jealous, and call them names, but it’s better to take a step back, eat your humble pie, and learn from such people if you can. I’ve learned some pretty cool things from bloggers who started long after I did. Although my current calibration is obviously working, I know I can always improve, and I never want to think of myself as such as expert that I can’t keep learning and growing.

One of the worst things you can do in blogging is to write in such a manner that will offend no one. If you don’t offend or challenge anyone, you’re probably writing content that isn’t very memorable or meaningful. If you write what people expect, their minds won’t store it. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any highly successful bloggers that don’t have multiple negative rants written about them somewhere. All of them piss people off. Most of them aren’t intentionally trying to upset people. It’s just that upsetting people seems to be a natural consequence of the calibration required for blogging success.

This isn’t unique to blogging either. Think of any successful media personality, and I’m sure you can find some rants about them with a quick online search. In fact, the biggest stars will have tons of rants. Consider Tom Cruise for instance.

Some people might assume this sort of controversy is a side-effect of success, like perhaps that celebrity got a big head after enjoying some success (causing people to turn against him/her), or maybe the rants appeared as a side effect of the celebrity’s popularity (like it’s just a numbers game). I’d say that’s the wrong way to look at this. It’s more likely that generating controversy was part of the celebrity’s early calibration process. If anything, the ability to handle controversy probably helped them become a celebrity in the first place.

Some of the first articles I ever wrote, even before I launched StevePavlina.com, generated controversy that helped turn them into fast hits. An example was the article Do It Now, which I wrote in 2000. Lots of people love that article, but some people find it disturbing and feel compelled to rant about it (even eight years after it was first posted online), perhaps because it makes them realize just how unproductive they are compared to what they could be achieving if they really made an all-out effort. Unfortunately, it took me years to figure out why that article became a hit and to learn how to reproduce the kind of impact it had. It also took me a long time to realize that the negative backlash generated by that article was actually helping me grow my readership… and that I should accept and embrace such critical feedback rather than worry about it. What I initially interpreted as negative feedback (i.e. I did something wrong) was actually positive feedback (I did something right). Interpreting emails from people saying “you are wrong” as evidence that you did something right is again pretty counterintuitive, isn’t it?

This is a key point of calibration. When you’re building a new skill, you have to look at the big picture in terms of the results you’re getting. You might do something that seems to generate immediate negative feedback from people, but when you step back and look at the big picture, you may see that the overall feedback is overwhelmingly positive. This happens a lot in blogging, where a reader may chew you out for something you wrote, and then six months later, they’re singing your praises for helping them achieve a breakthrough they never thought possible. And even if they aren’t singing your praises, they’re out there telling people why they hate you, thereby making people curious and sending you more traffic.

A similar effect also happens in social dynamics, where the “bad guys” can actually attract more success because they have so many detractors unwittingly doing their marketing for them.

Newbie Fear

Perhaps the toughest part of calibration is dealing with newbie fear. This is the fear of failure or rejection we experience when learning a new skill. Initially we suck, we know full well that we suck, and we really don’t want to deal with the embarrassment and humiliation of other people witnessing just how badly we suck. This is most distressing with skills that must be calibrated in public, such as dating skills and public speaking.

There are some ways to mitigate newbie fear. One of the best ways is to connect with other newbies and go through the initial training together. When you look up to experts who are already well-calibrated, it’s easy to become intimidated and psyche yourself out. You’ll tend to hold yourself to an unreasonable standard of performance. But if you befriend and hang out with other newbies, the learning process can be a lot more fun. It’s comforting to have buddies that suck just as badly as you do. You can blow off steam together, share your latest insights, and poke fun at each other as you learn. “Misery loves company” isn’t such a bad idea in this case.

The key is to associate with newbies who are committed to learning and growing. If you hang out with flakes, it probably won’t help you much. Try to identify other newbies that you predict are likely to stick with it and succeed, and hang out with them if you can. This will help increase your commitment without making you feel too intimidated.

When I first started learning about blogging, I enjoyed connecting with other newbie bloggers. In the old days (old as in four years ago), we swapped links with each other, shared advice, and found ways to help each other gain traffic. Many of those people gave up and quit of course, but a few are doing very well today. It’s cool to watch your newbie friends improve their calibration right along with you, even though everyone improves at different rates.

Ultimately, you’ll only get so much mileage out of trying to reduce newbie fear. The fastest way to overcome it is to simply charge straight at it. Just accept that you’ll suck, that some embarrassment will happen, and that the only way out is through. This is especially important for building good social skills.

You’ll only get so far by sitting at home reading, listening to audio programs, and watching videos. Such educational aids can help, but they can never substitute for real-world experience. Use them as supplemental materials to refine your in-field experimentation. If you want to become a successful blogger, start blogging immediately. If you want to build an online business, get some kind of website online right away. If you want to improve your social skills, go outside and meet people tonight. Yes, you’re going to suck at first. But if you push through the newbie fear and do it anyway, the fear will subside, and you’ll begin to calibrate your skills very quickly.

Even if you read all the books in your field, you will still suck on your first in-field experience. You won’t even be able to apply what’s in those books. So get out in the field and start calibrating.

Get that first crappy “Hello, World” blog post under your belt. Let out that inane “Hey, baby. What’s your sign?” pick-up line. Bang shins with your sparring partner as you scream, “Ouch!”

Newbie Pride

If you’re a newbie at something, and you’re feeling hesitant to go after some live in-field experience, realize that this is very normal. Many newbies resist being newbies, but this resistance only makes them more nervous. So realize that a big part of the problem is your own resistance to being a newbie. You’ll get into the field sooner if you can accept this phase of your learning curve.

My advice for turning this around is to fully embrace your newbieness. Don the badge of Newbie Pride. Instead of fearing that you’ll look like a total dork, take this the other way. Embrace and even exaggerate your dorkiness. Don’t try to resist it. Blow it up even larger.

In martial arts classes, there’s no hiding your newbie status. You wear a white belt, so everyone knows you’re a beginner. This actually makes it easier because you know people don’t expect much of you. The lower belts may be nervous about sparring, but since they know that nobody expects much of them, most are able to get out on the mat and spar without undue hesitation.

However, in other fields, people don’t wear white belts. This has positive and negative side-effects.

In online business, for example, many newbies try to hide their newbieness. I made this mistake when I started my first business. I pretended to be an experienced business person when I just started. I talked about my staff even when I was the only person in the business. That was totally unnecessary, not to mention really dumb. When I started blogging, however, I didn’t try to hide my newbieness. I embraced that dorky beginner phase and had fun with it. And because of that, more experienced bloggers reached out to help me. Back then, “more experienced” meant they started blogging a month before I did.

I still maintain this attitude today. If I’m new at something, I’ll openly share my newbie dorkiness and hesitation. It doesn’t embarrass me to share my weaknesses. On the contrary, it actually invites a lot of help and advice from non-newbies who want to help me calibrate.

The Master Newbie Pick-up Artist

Suppose you’re a guy who wants to learn how to pick up women at night clubs, but you’re terrified of going out, and you can’t imagine walking up to a woman and delivering an opener. Realize that so much of your resistance is because you’re trying to appear cooler and more experienced than you really are. Do you realize this is totally unnecessary? It’s better to embrace your newbieness and use it to your advantage.

If I were trying to develop this particular skill, here’s what I’d do. I’d go up to women and tell them the plain and simple truth. I’ve never actually done this, so take my advice with a grain of salt because this isn’t a calibration I’ve bothered to develop, but I’ll bet you it would work well at initiating fun conversations.

I’d walk up to a group of women with a big smile on my face. I’d get their attention and say to them, “Hey guys, I’m currently learning how to meet women at night clubs, but I’m a total newbie at this. Would you mind if I practice on you just for fun for a couple minutes? And would you give me some honest feedback afterwards?”

I suspect you’ll probably get a laugh if you do this, and if you don’t, then the women aren’t likely worth talking to anyway, so you can quickly disqualify them as boring or humorless. You’ve taken the pressure off by initiating a “practice session,” so it doesn’t even matter what you say next. Your next line could even be, “Okay what do you think of this? [Switch to deep voice] Hey, baby. What’s your sign?” That would probably get another laugh, but even a groan isn’t bad. You can keep saying other funny lines. You could also kick off a meta conversation about meeting women at night clubs, such as by asking a question like, “Okay, after I do the opener, what should I talk about next? Would this be a good time to tell you a quick story to demonstrate that I’m a cool guy? Should I tell you about the time I …?” The context is that you’re just practicing, but in truth you’ve already opened the group.

This is an untested suggestion of course, so you’ll have to try it yourself to see if it works for you. The general idea is not to hide your newbieness. It’s perfectly okay to be a newbie and even to admit it to people. When you’re a newbie, your initial goal is to calibrate your skills, not to achieve a particular result. So take the pressure off as to whether or not you succeed or fail. You can go for results after you’ve calibrated your skills.

If you pretend to be an expert when you’re not, you’ll just stress yourself out. Wear the badge of Newbie Pride.

Incidentally, if you actually try this, please let me know how it goes. I’d love to hear how people react to it. I think this could work for men and women alike.

In fact, if a woman came up and used this opener on me, I’d probably laugh and say, “Sure, let’s practice.” I’d be pretty impressed by a woman who used such a line because it demonstrates a high level of awareness with a certain playfulness. I’d probably fall in love on the spot.

Great… now I’ve gotten myself all riled up to the point where I totally want to go to a night club and try this for real just to see what happens.

The Skill of Calibration

Being able to calibrate yourself to a new skill set is a skill in itself. The more skills you learn, the faster you’ll be able to achieve competence in each new skill you attempt.

One thing that happens as you calibrate to many different skills is that you become more comfortable being a newbie in general. Once you’ve gone through the newbie phase enough times, it ceases to bother you so much. You can start from rock bottom in a new field and be mostly okay with how badly you suck. You get used to it, and you know you’ll eventually get better. This makes it easier to put in the time as a newbie, so you can quickly progress to intermediate. For me the newbie phase is often the most fun and exciting because I learn the fastest during this time.

Another benefit of having lots of calibration experience is that you’ll be less intimidated by the experts. You’ll accept that they fine-tuned their calibration over many years. This will help you develop the patience necessary to keep hacking away in order to build long-term competence.

When I became a raw foodist earlier this year, I spent a lot of time communicating with successful long-term raw foodists. Initially, the information I gained was just overwhelming. I was offered thousands of pages of text to read (books, e-books, articles), plus audio, video, and live lectures to attend. There were some weeks where learning this skill practically became my full-time job. I had to unlearn many bad habits that were holding me back, not to mention breaking a lifelong addiction to cooked food. This was a total lifestyle overhaul, not just a minor diet change.

After months of study and practice, I eventually calibrated myself to being a successful raw foodist, well enough that I felt I could maintain it on autopilot. I’d probably label myself an advanced intermediate at this point. I have a solid grasp of the fundamentals, cooked foods are no longer appealing to me, I feel fantastic, and I love the foods I eat. As part of this re-calibration to raw foods, my taste buds have shifted a lot. I actually crave fresh greens now. I feel mildly deprived if I don’t eat at least a pound of greens each day. Now that I’ve achieved a decent calibration, maintaining this lifestyle is pretty much a no-brainer for me. But during the first few months, I had to invest a lot of thought and effort into it.

Immersion and Experimentation

When learning new skills, my preference is to get through the newbie phase as quickly as possible, so I can start enjoying some good results. In order to accomplish this, I’ll often put other areas of my life on hold, so I can devote the bulk of my time to building competence in the new skill. I don’t always do this, but if the skill is important to me, I prefer the strategy of total immersion instead of working on it a little bit each week.

The danger of being stuck in beginner mode for too long is that your early motivation may fade, and more self-discipline will be required to keep going. Many new bloggers give up within the first few months, well before they’re getting any results. It takes them too long to calibrate their skills to what is required for success in blogging, so they never make it past the beginner phase. After a few months, they still haven’t calibrated, so they continue to make the sorts of mistakes that a well-calibrated blogger could spot within seconds. For example, they write boring posts that nobody cares to read, or they write time-bound posts that will be worthless a year later. It takes too much discipline for them to keep going with no results to show for it, so they give up. Then they repeat the same process again in a different field. Hopefully by now you can clearly see that this is a loser strategy.

On the other hand, I’ve seen bloggers who’ve built a lot of traffic very quickly, earning $1000+ per month within a few months after they started. They threw themselves wholeheartedly into learning everything they could about blogging, and they were willing to be open-minded and flexible. They learned what worked for them and did more of it. They learned what didn’t work and stopped doing it. They understood that if they wrote a blog post, and it generated no increase in traffic whatsoever, then perhaps they should write something totally different instead of sticking with more of the same.

Proper calibration requires a lot of experimentation. If you don’t get a good result, you can interpret that as a negative result, and change something — change anything. But don’t keep doing what didn’t work, expecting that it’s just a matter of time before things pick up. It’s not really a matter of time. It’s a matter of skill.

When you immerse yourself in learning a new skill, don’t focus on trying to get results with the skill — at least not right away. Instead, focus on getting good at the skill.

For example, if you’re learning to blog, focus on writing posts in a variety of styles. You want to calibrate yourself to get good at writing blog posts that generate referrals. Don’t worry about trying to make money with your blog. Don’t even worry about trying to build a certain level of traffic. You can focus on those goals later. But initially, aim to figure out how to semi-consistently write awesome posts that generate referrals. If you can’t figure out how to do that, your blog will surely fail. But if you can calibrate yourself to this skill, then you can shift from building your skill to applying your skill. That’s where you can start really building your traffic and generating income from your work.

A New Equilibrium – Post-Calibration

The funny thing about calibration is that once you reach a certain point, you’ll tend to let go of all the tricks, tactics, and techniques you learned along the way. Now you’re able to maintain a certain level of success just by being yourself.

This happens because the skills you learned have been internalized. You no longer have to think about the details because your subconscious mind takes care of them for you. Applying your skill becomes much easier when you reach this point.

Blogging is largely effortless for me these days. I can crank out a detailed new article with fairly little effort. I got the idea for this particular article while I was at the gym this morning. I outlined it in my head while I took a shower. Later I sat down to write, and the words just flowed. It took me a while to write an article of this length of course, but the process was easy and effortless. The reason it was easy is that I’ve already calibrated myself to the skill of writing articles. There are lots of details that go into writing an article of this length, but I don’t have to consciously think about the process of how to write. It’s all internalized. I can just sit down at my desk, the ideas start flowing, and my fingers automatically start typing. I can chunk the task of writing an article as a single to-do item, even an article of this length, and it isn’t a big deal to me.

When I write a new blog post, I don’t consciously think about all the details that other pro bloggers would tell you are important. I just blog. It feels like a very simple thing to do, not nearly as complicated as it might seem. However, the reason I can keep it simple and still do well in this field is because I went through that complicated newbie phase years ago. I internalized the techniques that proved effective for me, so today I don’t even think about them anymore.

Putting a skill on automatic pilot is the long-term benefit of good calibration. Once you gain this calibration, you can’t really lose it. You may need to re-calibrate your skills from time to time to adapt to changing conditions, but that usually isn’t as hard as acquiring the initial calibration.

If you took away my blog and all my articles, and I had to start over from scratch as an anonymous blogger today, do you think I could repeat my success? I’m sure I could do so very quickly because I’ve already calibrated my blogging skills. I typically experience quick success when I can rely on a previous calibration, such as learning to spar in a new martial art or building a social network of friends in a new city. One of the reasons I achieved quick success as a blogger was that I benefited from my previous calibration of running a profitable online business for years, so I was able to adapt much of that skill to the medium of blogging. I was also able to adapt my blogging calibration to writing a book.

When you calibrate, you lock in a new skill. Then you can use that skill to generate consistently good results. This is a wonderful place to be. Post-calibration, you’ll typically feel very confident within the realm of that skill. You have every reason to feel confident because you’re genuinely competent. I’d feel comfortable starting a new online business. I’d feel comfortable moving to a new city where I didn’t know anyone. I’d feel confident studying a new style of martial arts. I’d feel confident giving a new speech. However, the first time I did these things, I hadn’t yet calibrated myself for success. The only kind of confidence I was able to muster back then was the “fake it till you make it kind,” which is more false bravado than genuine confidence.

Calibrate Is a Verb

Don’t let the newbie phase get you down. Everyone has to go through it. Get a newbie training partner if you must, but turn toward that newbie fear, and run straight at it. The fear will soon go away. It’s not a big deal to fail or to get rejected. That’s part of being a newbie. Accept it. You will get better.

In order to calibrate your skills, you have to take action. You can’t just sit at home reading or studying training materials. You must go into the field and do field work under real-world conditions.

As Mike Tyson said, “Everybody’s got plans… until they get hit.”

I know so many people who’ve spent months reading about and talking about starting an online business. They still don’t have an online business. But they just keep talking about it and planning it, as if that’s some form of phantom progress. Their calibration is still at zero. They think they’re getting closer to their goal. From my perspective, they haven’t even started yet. They’re just procrastinating.

Such people would do much better if they stopped reading and planning and started doing. Nobody earned a black belt from reading about martial arts.

Which approach do you think will generate the best results? Reading about a diet for 30 days? Or doing a 30-day trial of that diet?

Which will improve your social skills the most? Watching social skills videos for 30 days? Or going out every night for 30 days and starting up conversations with strangers?

Which will generate the best blogging results? Reading blogs on blogging for 30 days? Or starting your own blog and posting your own blog entries for 30 days?

Which will generate the best physical results? Read about weight training for 30 days? Or hit the gym and do 30 days of weight training?

Reading and studying will give you knowledge and information that sits in your mind. That seems like a good thing, but you’ll still have zero results to show for your efforts. You’re actually no closer to your goals. You’re still at the starting line. But if you go out and do the best you can to apply what you know right now, even if your understanding is full of holes, you’ll quickly learn what works under real-world conditions, and you’ll adapt. You’ll make a huge leap forward in your calibration. You’ll also generate some real-world results that may benefit you.

Get your nose out of the books and onto the field. Take your licks as they come, and learn from them. Build your skills under real-world conditions, so you can actually apply them to get results. Don’t just read about life. Live it.

Reading and learning are awesome, but make sure you’re using these as supplements for in-field experience, not substitutes. If you’re reading about any skill you want to develop, but you aren’t regularly performing in the field yet, you’re just procrastinating. Deep down you already knew that, didn’t you? I’m here to remind you of this, so you can hate me for it and help spread the word about how awful I am.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

It’s no secret that Andrew’s message creates resistance in people, partly because the way he delivers his message is so passionate, direct, and unforgiving. He pulls no punches and lambastes the “New Age Movement” for being yet another form of mental masturbation. Andrew is aware of the resistance to his message, and he acknowledged it when he spoke, but he certainly didn’t let it stop him.

Personally I agree with Andrew’s message (at least what I’ve heard so far — he’s written quite a number of books), although I view his ideas from within a different framework. What Andrew calls passionate compassion, I regard as a combination of Oneness and Courage (two of the seven principles in Personal Development for Smart People).

Andrew talked a lot about the Dark Night of the Soul, which is something everyone on this path of service experiences. Personally I think we go through multiple dark nights as we shed more and more of our false identities and learn to align ourselves with Oneness.

Andrew spoke with conviction as he told a story about praying at a temple in India. As he left the temple, he encountered a helpless man with no arms and no legs in need of assistance. Instead of ignoring him, Andrew opened his heart and chose to help this man. He contrasts that experience with the dissociated attitude many people display in such a situation. Instead of embracing our heartbreak and allowing it to guide our actions, too often we shield and distract ourselves from those feelings. When we do this, however, we become something less than human.

Bliss vs. Heartbreak

There was one line Andrew said during his workshop that gave me an instant emotional hit. He said, “Don’t follow your bliss. Follow your heartbreak.” That’s a powerful way to reframe your life purpose.

I realized that my bliss and my heartbreak both point in the same direction. I follow my joy and my heartbreak simultaneously because they’re two sides of the same coin.

Andrew’s statement reminded me of this quote from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet:

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.

Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?

And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see in truth that you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

In fact, I’m pretty sure I mentioned this quote during our initial radio panel together.

My greatest joy is seeing people live consciously, courageously, and compassionately; it’s to watch people bring their lives into greater alignment with truth, love, and power. My heartbreak is seeing people live unconsciously and inflict all sorts of unnecessary suffering on themselves, on each other, on animals, and on the planet as a whole. It breaks my heart to see people living in denial, disconnected from others, and disempowered. It’s rare that more than a few days go by where the nature of my work doesn’t bring me to tears. However, usually those are tears of joy. I feel very grateful for being able to make a difference in people’s lives, and often that can be emotionally overwhelming.

In my messages I tend to focus on the lute’s music, while Andrew seems to stress the “hollowed out with knives” part. When he spoke, he often repeated the phrase, “The world is burning!” But really joy and sorrow are two sides of the same coin. Your greatest joy is also your greatest sorrow.

I remember debating with Andrew during our radio interview about the joy/sorrow issue. I think he may derive most of his drive and passion from the sorrow side, while I get mine from the joy side. I consider both approaches to be equally valid; however, gratitude is a stronger motivator for me than sadness, so I focus on the those feelings because they’re more effective for me. When I’m sad I usually do nothing. But when I feel grateful for the opportunity to make a difference, I reach out and connect with people.

Making a Difference

Experience has shown me that following my most action-inducing emotions does make a real difference in the world. As just a small example, over the years I’ve helped inspire hundreds of people switch to vegetarian and vegan diets. Let’s say I’ve helped 100 people go vegan, which would be a pretty conservative estimate. That seemingly small shift will actually conserve about 142 million gallons of water per year, not to mention loads of other resources and a massive reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. (That’s 3,900 gallons per day of excess water required to feed a typical animal eater vs. a vegan x 100 people x 365 days per year.) That’s a lot of water! This is far more water than I could possibly conserve as an individual during my lifetime.

Just by continuing the work I’m already doing, I’ll eventually help us conserve many billions of gallons of water (and conserve fossil fuels and reduce greenhouse gas emissions), which means my presence here is actually creating a massive net positive environmental impact. And that doesn’t even count the rippling effect that will spring forth from those I’ve influenced. I consider this a very tangible result of following my bliss, and it motivates and inspires me to do even more. All I really did was follow my heart and share my experiences with other people. It wasn’t particularly complicated.

From a certain perspective, I could say that it’s heartbreaking to see so many resources unnecessarily wasted in the process of turning plant-eating animals into human consumables, but again, I prefer to focus on the gratitude side because that’s what motivates me to take action. I’m grateful for the opportunity to have a positive environmental impact by doing my best to be a good example to others and by encouraging people to make their own conscious choices.

Heartbreak and Life Purpose

You can actually follow your heartbreak to discover your life purpose. If you’ve tried the life purpose exercise and had trouble going deep enough, try repeating the same exercise with this starting question instead:

What is my greatest heartbreak?

This strategy of following your heartbreak is another way to get out of your head and to start listening to the voice of your heart.

If you’ve already done the life purpose exercise and got an answer that inspired you, I encourage you to try it again with the heartbreak question. This may help you develop a deeper understanding of your purpose.

Effectiveness

You have to determine what works best for you. Are you more motivated when you focus on your bliss or your heartbreak? I suppose this is the classic difference between towards motivation and away-from motivation. I’ve always been a towards guy, but I think that’s the less common of the two.

The important thing isn’t how we choose to motivate ourselves. What’s important is that we find a strategy that’s effective for us. Are we actually taking action? Are we serving as good examples for others? Or are we comforting and distracting ourselves?

Which emotions are arising within you? Do you feel more connected to your pain or your sorrow? What feelings will drive you to action if you crank up the volume? Are you listening to those feelings… or are you numbing yourself to them?

***

Incidentally, Erin wrote up a review of our Transformational Weekend at the I Can Do It! conference in Tampa, so I encourage you to read it if you haven’t already done so. I’m not planning to post a separate review of my own this time.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

The original release date was October 15th, but the book has already shipped and is available now.

You can get it at Amazon.com and in many major bookstores, including Borders, Barnes & Noble, Books a Million, and Hastings.

The major book distributors also have it too, including Baker & Taylor, Ingram, Partners, Bookazine, and New Leaf. So if your local bookstore doesn’t carry it yet, it should be easy for them to order it if you request it.

Why an Early Launch?

The early launch was actually a mistake. I learned of it last week when people started telling me that they’d just received their pre-ordered copies from Amazon. That was news to me!

I checked the Amazon sales page for the book and saw that it was no longer in pre-order status — it was already selling. Once that happened, the book’s Amazon sales rank quickly climbed into the top 1,000. And I hadn’t even announced the release yet.

I promptly contacted Hay House to find out what happened. Apparently the book was supposed to be shipped from the printer to their warehouse, and then it would be shipped to their distributors shortly before the launch. But instead, thousands of books were shipped from the printer directly to the distributors and retail chains, who promptly began selling them.

Obviously this throws off the timing of my launch plans, but all we can do is roll with it. I’m not even bothered by this because I’m so thrilled that the book has finally shipped.

Blogger Review Copies – Update

If you’re a blogger who took advantage of my review copy offer, there’s no need to wait until October to post your review. Please feel free to review the book as soon as you get a chance to read it. If you email me a link to your review via my contact form any time between now and October 31st, I’ll be happy to add a link to your review. I’m going to do this in batches. About 420 bloggers have already been approved for review copies, so that’s a lot of reviews.

The review copies began shipping last week, so please be patient if you haven’t received your copy yet. Most reviewers will receive a print copy in the mail. But there were a lot of requests from international bloggers, and it was a challenge to find a fair way to qualify them. Hay House wanted to disqualify almost all of these requests because many of the international blogs were in languages or countries where the book isn’t even available yet, and Hay House wants to focus on the U.S. launch. Many of these requests also came from countries where the mail system is unreliable, such as parts of Eastern Europe. And on top of that, many international bloggers said they preferred an electronic version of the book, so they could get it sooner.

I still wanted everyone to get a print copy, but Hay House has to pay for this, and shipping hundreds of books internationally isn’t cheap.

After some discussion we ultimately decided to send the international bloggers a PDF version of the book, but if their traffic was high enough (we had to set the bar fairly high), Hay House would still mail them a print copy. Maybe this wasn’t a perfect solution, but I think it was a fair way to handle it. The alternative would have been to disqualify most of the international review copy requests. But this way, nearly everyone who requested a review copy will receive something — either a print copy or a PDF. If you received the PDF but don’t like reading on your computer screen, you can always print it and read it on paper. I don’t know too many people that read long e-books on their screens.

If you didn’t participate in the free review copy offer but would still like to review the book on your website or blog, I’ll link to your review if you send me a link to it… as long as it has some decent substance to it and doesn’t just rehash the back cover text.

I’m not possessive about the ideas in the book — I really want them to spread. I’d love to see people writing about other ways to apply the book’s 7 principles to specific challenges and situations. Put your own creative spin on it.

Several bloggers have already posted reviews and have sent me the links. I’ll be sure to link to these reviews soon. I’m just waiting for a few more to come in so I can do this in batches.

Interview Requests

I still have about two dozen interview requests to process, so if you requested an interview, please be patient. I’ll endeavor to reply to all of the requests I’ve received so far by the end of the week. As you can imagine, this is a pretty busy time for me.

***

So I turn my back for one minute… and my book sneaks out the door without me. Must be an Aries.

I see that there are already a couple of Amazon reviews posted. I’m delighted to read some of the first pieces of feedback about the book. Wow!

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

For example, when I was going through my 30-day raw food diet trial earlier this year, I had a lot more energy — physical, mental, and emotional. This wasn’t a surprise to me because I’d experienced similar energy boosts during other raw food trials over the past several years.

At first it felt great to enjoy that extra energy — especially the feeling of euphoria — but after a while it began to feel uncomfortable. I was trying to contain all this extra energy, but I wasn’t used to it. I felt like an overcharged battery. Sometimes I felt so overloaded with energy, I thought I was going to explode. It was like feeling super-aroused but with no sexual outlet available.

After doing several 30-day raw food diet trials, I always returned to cooked food again. That always lowered my energy, and I lost all of the gains from eating raw, but the old feeling was more comfortable and familiar, so I felt a magnetic pull to return there.

What to do with the extra energy?

Eventually I asked myself, “Why are you intentionally lowering your energy? What is it about that higher state of being that makes it so hard for you to contain it?”

I soon realized what the problem was. That extra energy had nowhere to go. You see… my whole life was structured to handle a certain level of energy output that had been relatively stable for years. My exercise routine, daily activities, social life, and so on were all balanced to support a certain energy output. When I changed my diet and experienced a major energy boost, my life just wasn’t designed to handle it. It was like sticking a 12-volt battery into a 1.5-volt device.

Since I was increasing my supply of energy, perhaps I needed to increase the demand as well.

If my theory was correct, then in order to maintain my new diet, I’d have to change the rest of my life to support a higher energy output. I couldn’t just change my diet and leave everything else the same.

As it turned out, this was precisely the key I needed to return to the raw food diet and stay there without wanting to flee back to my old comfort zone.

The most important change was that I set some new goals as well as some bigger goals to create new outlets for the extra energy flow. These were goals that would have seemed like too much of a stretch on my old diet, but with a greater energy output, they seemed achievable.

Instead of trying to contain all this extra energy, I found new ways to let it flow through me. Some of the specific changes I made include the following:

1. Increased physical output. Before this dietary change, my gym workouts would usually burn 300-400 calories. Now I’m doing 500+ calories per workout. To be honest I don’t consider this change critical. Re-channeling the extra mental and emotional energy was more important than burning more calories. But I do think this extra physical output helped. Raw foodist Dr. Doug Graham recommends burning a minimum of 20% of your daily caloric intake as physical exercise. I’m not there yet, but I’m getting close.
2. Increased creative output. This is by far the biggest change. I feel more creatively inspired than ever, so I’ve been doing more creative work than I used to, shifting between blogging, speaking, journaling, business planning, concocting raw food dishes, and other outlets. I was especially pleased with four of the articles I wrote this month; those particular pieces felt very inspired to me. On Thursday I wrote a 4,400-word journal entry because I had so many ideas coming through that I wanted to record. I’m also developing a new audio program which I plan to release later this year. I now feel very uncomfortable if I go more than a couple days without creating new material. It’s like I’m overly aroused with creative energy and feel compelled to express it. Normally I don’t write on weekends, but this morning I just had to write an article to release some of this extra energy. Otherwise I’ll go through the day feeling like I’m about to explode.
3. Increased intentional output. I feel best when I spend at least 20-30 minutes each day imagining new ideas and visualizing my goals. It’s like I’m releasing some of the extra energy in the form of positive intentions. I often go to bed 30 minutes early and just lie there visualizing new goals and possibilities until I fall asleep. If I don’t do this regularly, I feel a strange build-up of pressure to let some of this energy flow through my imagination and release itself as new dreams and goals.
4. Increased spiritual/intuitive output. I feel more spiritually tuned in than ever. I’ve never enjoyed such a clear channel for intuitive guidance. I no longer have to meditate to put myself in the right state for “downloading” inspiration. I can simply close my eyes and access it within seconds. It’s like the switch is always on. Whenever I get stuck on a problem, I just tune in and request a solution, and it starts coming to me almost immediately. Consequently, I’m now relying on my intuition more often than my logical/analytical mind because it’s faster, more accurate, and more holistic. Yesterday Erin told me to “stop giving her readings” because she hadn’t had time to fully process the previous breakthroughs I helped her experience. I can’t help it though. When I pick up intuitive information about her, I have to relay it, or it feels like the energy is backing up.
5. Increased social/emotional output. Since I’ve been feeling so good lately, I needed new ways to channel those good feelings. Mostly I’ve been channeling those feelings toward my family. I’ve been having a lot of very connected conversations with them and pushing for more family outings. Last weekend I took the kids on the rides at Circus Circus, and next month we’ll be taking a family trip to L.A. and San Diego. I’ve also been teaching my 8-year old daughter about how to hold positive intentions and avoid complaining; this seems to be having a positive impact on her already. I’m sure some of these good feelings are coming out through my writing as well. A few people mentioned I seem more excited than usual. I can’t help it because that’s how I naturally feel now. I wake up feeling excited.
6. Increased standards. Lately I’ve been feeling a strong desire to fix a lot of the little problems in my life — problems that are too easy to ignore. Yesterday I replaced a broken paper towel holder in our kitchen — it broke nearly a year ago and was still usable but slightly annoying. I’ve also been much more consistent at teaching the kids to maintain certain standards of order in the house, and they’re taking pride in cleaning up after themselves. I finally feel like I’m getting a handle on the little problems that have been backing up. Individually they’re no big deal, but collectively they can be draining if ignored for too long. Until now I just didn’t feel have the energy to deal with all of them. Now I’m finally making a dent.
7. More sexy time. During my January raw trial, I experienced a temporary drop in libido while I was adjusting to the diet, and then it returned to normal. Now it’s definitely higher than it used to be. But at the same time, the desire to have sex feels more subtle and less distracting, so it’s easier to hold onto it for a while without feeling an overwhelming urge to release it. It also feels much more heart-centered… not so stuck in the lower chakras. Maybe it’s the maca.

The most significant change was definitely #2 (creative output). Sometimes I actually have to hold myself back from sitting at my desk and writing so much; otherwise I’ll never see my family.

Improved diet = increased creative output

When I remember other dietary changes I’ve made, I see similar patterns. Each successful dietary improvement was accompanied by a significant increase in creative output.

I went vegetarian in the summer of 1993, before my final semester of college. A few weeks after making this change, I started working as a contract game programmer, eventually creating a pack of Windows arcade games that hit the shelves several months later. This was a very busy and creative time for me. I even designed one of the games myself. I also earned a lot of money during this time, especially for a student.

I went vegan in January 1997, just before I started designing a new computer game. It was my most ambitious project. Due to financing problems, it was never released commercially, but I was very proud of the design. This was an extremely creative time for me. A couple years later I released an award-winning game with a very original design. I have no doubt that my improved diet helped me a lot here. I also got into martial arts training and distance running during this time.

During my raw trial in January of this year, I was working on my book. I made a lot of important edits to the book during those 30 days. I also booked a speaking engagement at the I Can Do It! conference. This was a very expansive time for me.

It’s hard to say which came first — the dietary change or the demand for greater creative output. Upon reflection I think it was the latter. When I was ready to take my creative output to a new level, I also felt ready to improve my diet. It seems like the intention to be more creative and to contribute more value triggered the dietary changes, perhaps to put my body in a state where it could handle more energy flow.

Have you ever experienced anything like this? Have you noticed any connection between your dietary changes (the kind that made you feel much more energetic) and increased creative output?

If you do creative work like me, there’s a good chance your income is strongly linked to your creative output. The more you can create and the more inspired your creations are, the more value you create for others and the more income you can generate from your work. So there can also be a financial benefit to improving your diet and channeling more energy. There’s also a productivity benefit because more energy means you can get more done in less time — without feeling burned out afterwards.

Are you resisting a more energetic state of being?

Perhaps the most important lesson I learned is the role of resistance. When I initially resisted my transition to a 100% raw diet, the real reason was that I was resisting the consequences of the increased energy flow. I’d been enjoying a nice comfort zone, but I’d have to leave it behind if I wanted to successfully navigate this change. That meant accepting more responsibility and putting more on my plate than ever before. It took me a long time before I was ready to do that.

Of the various major dietary shifts I went through (omnivore -> vegetarian, vegetarian -> vegan, vegan -> raw), this latest shift was by far the biggest and the most difficult. The first change was definitely the easiest and the mildest. It’s too early to say for sure because I only made the shift this year, but I strongly suspect that going raw will also be the most beneficial change in the long run.

If you want to permanently improve your diet, you have to reach the point where you can say yes to all the consequences. Otherwise you may fall into a fear of success trap. If you resist the consequences, you’ll stop yourself from making the changes that would give rise to them.

If you improve your diet and then feel much more energetic (physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually), how will you channel all that extra energy? Where will you direct it? How will you use it to fuel greater creative output? I think those questions need to be addressed before you’re ready to make the shift. Otherwise it’s too easy to fall back into your old comfort zone (both diet-wise and energy-wise).

Imagine what would happen to your life if you permanently felt a lot happier, stronger, more motivated, and more energetic. What would you stop tolerating if you suddenly had tons more energy flowing through you? Would you direct all that energy into your current career, relationships, and exercise routine, or would you feel compelled to make some major changes? What if your job was incapable of channeling all that extra energy? Would that compel you to quit and do something more creative, so you could contribute more? Do you resist any of these potential consequences on some level? What would happen if you could accept and even invite all of these consequences?

Quantum leaps

Some of these consequences can be very challenging to accept… and even more difficult to intentionally invite. It takes courage to willingly push beyond your familiar comfort zone. You have to be willing to bust up old patterns, so you can create new patterns that will effectively harness the extra energy.

In my case the changes I experienced weren’t terribly disruptive because my career outlets are very flexible, so they can handle more energy without being torn apart. From the outside looking in, it may appear that little has changed, even though this was a huge shift for me internally. But if I had a job and/or relationship with less flexibility, I might have had to endure much more significant external shifts.

It really is like taking a quantum leap. In these situations you don’t gracefully improve along a continuum. You reach a point where you must abandon your old orbit in order to shift to a new orbit. There may be a lot of energetic build-up before this shift occurs, but eventually you hit a tipping point. You have to choose one side of the chasm or the other because there is no middle to speak of.

You can certainly have a quantum leap that doesn’t involve dietary changes, but you may find as I do that your dietary leaps induce major shifts in the other areas of your life too. So in order to make the dietary improvement, you have to accept the whole package of consequences. If you resist any part of the package, you resist the dietary change as well.

Is there some part of your life where you’ve been pushing for a quantum leap but always falling back to your comfort zone? If you made this important leap, what other related leaps would have to come along for the ride? What part of this package deal have you been refusing to accept? What are the physical, mental, social, emotional, and spiritual consequences? What will it take for you accept the complete bundle of those consequences?

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.