Do you ever go to the gym, stare at all the dumbbells lining the wall, and exclaim, “Dammit! Why are there so many weights here? I can’t possibly lift all of them! Look at how heavy they are! Why can’t they just have a few easy weights and let that be enough?”

Of course that sounds silly, but this is precisely how many people react to the various problems that surface in their lives.

“Dammit! Why do I have to be overweight? Why can’t I just be thin and fit? Why are there so many delicious foods that make me gain weight? Why does exercise have to be so hard? I’m so sick of being fat!”

“Dammit! Why does it have to be so hard to make money? How am I supposed to get out of debt when I can barely pay my bills? Why does it seem like every time I start to pull ahead, my car breaks down again? I’m so sick of being broke!”

“Dammit! Why can’t I find a girlfriend (boyfriend)? I’m a nice person, aren’t I? I’m tired of lame dates with total idiots! Maybe I should just be celibate. Why does this have to be so hard? I’m so sick of being alone!”

“Dammit! Why can’t I find a job I like? Why do I have to do stupid work I hate just to make money? What kind of life is this? How am I supposed to do what I love when I don’t even know what that is? I’m so sick of my job!”

Any of this sound familiar?

Problems as Obstacles

The attitudes reflected above depict problems as obstacles. They are roadblocks, annoyances, and irritations. They get in the way of living. They interfere with your peaceful enjoyment of life.

Given this mindset, you should do your best to prevent problems from arising whenever possible. If a problem occurs, it means something went wrong. It should have been anticipated and avoided. An unavoidable problem represents bad luck or a cruel twist of fate. Or perhaps it suggests you held the wrong thoughts and somehow attracted it via the Law of Attraction.

If you currently have problems on your plate, then you should try to eliminate them if you can. Aim for the delicious nirvana of a problem-free existence — everything in its proper place and nothing to worry about.

This is a terrible mindset to hold. The longer you think this way, the weaker you’ll become. This mindset puts you on a path with two primary branches.

The first branch leads to overwhelm. Eventually your life gets filled with problems you can’t easily solve. You’ll probably resort to some form of escapism to cope (such as via TV, web surfing, video games, excessive reading, alcohol and drugs, etc). You’ll get that slow sinking feeling that your life is slipping away from you. When new problems arise, you’ll become stressed, worried, or anxious.

The second branch leads to withdrawal. You gradually check out from the world in order to reduce the problems you’ll face. You may justify this with words like simplification and minimalism. If some part of your life gives you too much trouble, you try to surgically remove it. You probably live alone and have few friends. You favor work that’s easy, unchallenging, and unrewarding. The thought of living in a cave somewhere or meditating for days on end starts to sound like a good idea. All you want is peace, peace, peace, but you never seem to be able to stay there for long. Some annoyance always comes up.

There are other branches as well as variations of the two above, but for the most part, you’re either headed toward stressful overtraining or long-term atrophy. Either way, the longer you run these patterns, the weaker you become. Eventually problems that didn’t seem so big five years ago now feel like terrible burdens. “Dammit! Why did that light bulb have to burn out? Oh crap, I’m outta bulbs too. Now I have to go to the store. Ehhh… I’ll do it later. I just don’t have the energy to deal with this now.”

Problems as Opportunities

Let me offer you a different way of thinking about problems that’s a lot more empowering and a lot less whiny.

Problems do not exist to beat you down. They exist to help you grow stronger. Problems are like the dumbbells at the gym. If you attempt to lift them, you may feel tired in the short run, but you’ll grow stronger in the long run.

When you think about the various problems and challenges you’re facing in life, you may be tempted to assume that the goal is to reach the solution state — to get past the problem. But that’s a very narrow and largely disempowering perspective. That’s like saying that the point of going to the gym is to reach the end of your workout.

A more productive perspective is to consider that the activity of solving problems is what really matters. It’s the activity, not the final solution state, that helps you grow.

Suppose that one of your problems is that you’re broke and in debt. If so, I imagine that’s a problem you’d very much like to solve. You may feel desperate to arrive at a solution as quickly as possible. But the greatest value is found in the activity of solving this problem, not in the end result.

One of the reasons I’m doing well financially today is that I solved the problem of being broke about 10 years ago. It was definitely not an easy problem to solve. I had to go through a lot of difficult intermediate steps to become strong enough to solve it. I made many adjustments to my attitude. By lifting those weights, I grew stronger mentally, and my finances soon followed.

Consequently, I know that if I ever found myself broke at some point in the future, I could solve that problem again, probably much more quickly than I did the first time. Even though I have more to lose these days from a financial perspective, I don’t fear losing it. I know I have the strength to bounce back. My real gain wasn’t money. My real gains were inner strength, knowledge, and skill.

What would my life be like if I jumped instantly to the solution state without actually solving the problem on my own? Suppose I won the lottery. At first it might appear that all my financial troubles were solved. But I’d actually be in a far worse position.

As I was going through that period of financial scarcity, I prayed that I didn’t experience a cash windfall. I knew I had to solve the problem on my own. I didn’t want to accidentally get a big inheritance and rob myself of crucial financial lessons and training. When someone gave me lottery tickets as a gift, I got nervous because I was worried I might win.

It was hard dealing with some of those challenges, but I could see that my problems served a greater purpose. They were helping to train me up.

Another benefit is that by solving these problems for myself, I’ve been able to write many articles to share what I’ve learned. I couldn’t have done that if I bypassed all those difficult lessons.

Physical problems build physical strength. Mental problems build mental strength. Social problems build social strength. And all problems will on some level build spiritual strength (or strength of character).

This mindset has a positive long-term outlook. The longer you hold it, the stronger you become.

Problem-Solving Attitude Adjustment

I’m pretty sure I learned the value of problem solving from my Mom. For pretty much my entire life, she was a college math professor (and still is). She would often buy me books filled with problems to solve — math problems, visual problems, word problems, logic problems, etc. You can find these books in any local bookstore. That was her way of keeping me busy during summer vacation.

I grew to like these books, so I was exposed to lots of different problems as a child. At first I was baffled by most of the problems in these books, and I could solve very few of them. But I gradually got better.

When I was in the the fifth grade, I started learning BASIC computer programming, so that exposed me to even more problems. I began to see problem-solving as something to do for fun and as a way to get smarter over time.

By the time I was in high school, I really enjoyed solving interesting problems. If a teacher assigned more problems for extra credit, I would always do them — just for fun. It was almost an addiction. If I saw a problem, I got really curious and felt compelled to solve it.

Other students would sometimes come to me in the morning before school to ask for help with their math or science homework. And I’d help them. Often we weren’t even in the same class, but I had a school-wide reputation as a good problem solver. With the encouragement of one of my teachers, I also did some tutoring in math. That was even better because I got paid to teach people problem-solving skills.

One morning my physics teacher walked up to me at my locker before school and asked me to step inside his classroom. He presented me with a physics problem that he couldn’t seem to solve. I solved it easily, not because I was better than him at physics but because I’d been exposed to such an enormous variety of problems that my mind just saw the solution. That physics problem fit the pattern of a class of problems I already knew how to solve. My solution was unusual for a physics problem, but it wasn’t that unusual for a math problem.

During Christmas break in my senior year, I was bored during the two weeks off from school… partly because I had no serious problems to deal with. So I opened my calculus textbook and started reading ahead and working through some problems. I did it simply because I enjoyed the challenge.

After the holiday break (at the start of my final semester of high school), I went up to my calculus teacher and handed him a big stack of papers. I told him that during the holiday break, I completed all the homework he would assign for the rest of the year.

He said, “But how did you know which problems I’d assign?” I said, “I didn’t, so I just did them all.”

Typically he’d assign 12-15 problems from each chapter for homework. I probably did about four times that amount.

Of course that left my calculus teacher wondering, “Now what the heck am I supposed to do with Steve for the next five months? He’ll be sitting in class twiddling his thumbs the whole time.” He actually found creative ways to push me, giving me special assignments and take-home exams to do on my own. During classes, I mostly tuned out from the lectures and wrote a blackjack game for my programmable calculator. More problem solving.

It was only later in life that I realized how helpful it is to generalize this attitude beyond math, science, and logic problems and into the realm of practical daily existence.

For example, it’s no secret that I despise accounting work. I find it to be the most boring part of running a business. I outsource most of it by using an accountant, but you can never totally disengage yourself from the numbers and financial obligations when running a business… unless you’re in a position to request a government bailout because you’re “too big to fail.”

Instead of resisting the accounting work, I decided to see it as a training exercise. The point isn’t to get to the end of the work and be done with it. The point is to use the work to grow stronger. Keeping the financial side of my business in good order helps me become more organized and efficient. I know that if I can get really good at managing the financial side of my business, that training will serve me well for many years to come.

I could outsource more of this work, but right now I don’t want to. It wouldn’t be a good idea to do that yet. This work is teaching me important lessons I need to personally integrate at this time in my business life. Otherwise I risk screwing things up when I have more money and more business complexity to manage. I can outsource more of it later, but right now I can tell that this training is still helping me get stronger. I have to master the 20-lb dumbbells before I can progress to 25 lbs.

Overcoming Overwhelm

If you’ve been slacking off due to escapism, when you pull your head out of the sand, you may find yourself surrounded by problems that seem too heavy to lift — deep in debt, a dead-end job, a sucky relationship situation, a big belly, no sense of purpose, etc. That’s okay. Just start with the lightest weights, and train up from there. As you clear some of those minor problems, you’ll begin feeling stronger and more hopeful. Eventually you’ll be ready to tackle some mid-sized problems… and then the really big ones.

Cleaning, organizing, and minor repairs are great places to begin. Straighten your desk. Clean the toilet. Organize one shelf. Clear your email inbox. Hang that picture. Remove the expired food from your fridge.

You can also use timeboxing for this. Set aside a fixed period of time, say 30-90 minutes, and just make a dent in some of your problems. When the time is up, you’re free to stop, regardless of how much progress you’ve made. I often use timeboxing for tedious tasks like cleaning up a hard drive that needs better structuring of its folders. I’ll chip away at it for 30 minutes every few days until it’s complete. That way the task never feels too overwhelming. The long-term benefit of dealing with little problems is that you get good at processing them quickly. My parents are masters at this. Every weekend they would tackle little problems in batches, so the house was clean, neat, and in good order at all times.

Think of a problem-solving session as a short workout for your mental discipline, much like going to the gym. If you conduct these problem-solving workouts regularly, you’ll gradually get stronger, and little problems will no longer seem so troublesome.

Getting Stronger

Solving problems increases your resourcefulness. The more problems you solve, the better you get at problem solving.

This attitude adjustment can be very effective. If you start seeing your problems as training exercises intended to make you stronger, you’ll be able to face your problems with a can-do attitude. You know it will be hard, and you accept that it’s supposed to be hard. The weight is supposed to be heavy, and the workout is supposed to be tiring. If it was too easy, it wouldn’t help you grow.

You may feel some stress and strain when you’re in the thick of a tough problem, but you’d feel the same way doing a tough workout at the gym.

Don’t bemoan your problems. Be grateful for them. They’re training you to become smarter and stronger. Learn to enjoy the training you’re receiving. Years from now you’ll be grateful you had to deal with these problems because of how much stronger you’ve grown.

Don’t resist resistance training.

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, people write to me all the time saying that they wish they could start a successful blog, but they just don’t know how. They act as if I was magically bestowed with some kind of insider blogger’s knowledge that isn’t equally accessible to them. The truth is that no one really knows how to do something new until they’ve done it. Imagine Wayne Gretzky saying, “I wish I could play hockey, but dammit — I just don’t know how.”

If you were to give those very same complainers a greater incentive to get moving, such as a million-dollar bribe for generating measurable results within 30 days, you’d find that their empty excuses and pointless whining are solidly blasted out of the water. Somehow the lack of knowledge is no longer a serious obstacle for them. (Yes, I’m being harsh on purpose. When such people are in front of me, I prefer to smack them, but in this case I’ll have to settle for a verbal smack.)

I’ve written about this topic before, but this time I’ll tackle it from a totally different angle. In the past I’ve pointed out that with sufficient motivation, you’ll simply go out and acquire whatever knowledge you need. All the raw how-to information you need is probably available online for free anyway. Either that or you can figure out what you need via trial and error if you just start taking action.

Instead of looking at the motivation side, let’s consider the excuse side. Claiming that you lack certain knowledge is an act of denying yourself permission to experience what you desire. It’s a way of blocking yourself from moving toward your goal.

The physical and mental act of acquiring knowledge is really a projection of a deeper event that occurs within your consciousness. That event is the act of giving yourself permission to progress to a new “vibration,” to shift away from your current experience of reality and to graduate to a new experiential level. When your consciousness experiences that internal shift, all the knowledge you need will practically show up at your doorstep. In many cases you don’t even require new knowledge, but if you think you need it, then you’ll experience a learning phase in your physical reality as you progress to the next level.

Why would you ever want to block yourself from going up a level? Why would you stay stuck for so long with feeble excuses like ”I don’t know how” or “I don’t know what to do”?

The answer is that you aren’t ready to progress yet. You haven’t soaked up all the lessons from your current reality. Energetically speaking, you still need to experience and accept some of the energy patterns swirling about you.

To use a video game analogy, imagine your current reality as a level from Pac-Man. You can’t progress to the next level until you gobble up all the pellets on the current map. It’s not a matter of putting in a certain amount of time. If you try to wait it out, you’re just waiting for death. It’s a matter of completion. You can run around the map for quite a while, but if you don’t pick up that last pellet, you’re going to be stuck on that level until you die.

People who complain about not progressing are like Pac-Man players who complain that they can’t pass the current level. Maybe you’re complaining that you can’t figure out how to get those last few pellets. That’s usually because those pellets are on the other side of the ghosts (i.e. your fears). It may take you a long time to pass the level if you always run from the ghosts. Perhaps you need to swallow a power pill (i.e. grow a pair) and run straight at the ghosts of fear to pass the current level. Pac-Man isn’t a game for fraidy cats; nor is real life.

For many years I was stuck at the financial level of being broke. I was constantly struggling against debt, but you can’t pass a level by resisting it and hoping that you somehow get a mercy pass. You have to accept and work with the game board as it is. My solution was to turn toward the ghosts (my fear) and realize that I could still be happy even if I was broke. I learned to stop trying to make money with a scarcity mindset and to start expressing my creativity with an abundance mindset. In truth I had to pick up a lot of pellets (lessons) on the financially broke level, but once I got them all, I was able to progress to a new financial level rather quickly. Of course that new level had plenty of other interesting pellets/lessons to gobble up.

When you’re stuck at a certain level in your health, relationships, finances, career, spiritual growth, or personal habits, and you can’t seem to make any progress, take a moment to stop and look around. The universe knows you want to reach the next level. It’s not blocking you to frustrate you. You’re blocking yourself because deep down, you know you aren’t ready for the next level yet. You still have more lessons to acquire right where you are.

Is the point of playing Pac-Man to get to the next level as quickly as you can? Not really. The point is to have fun.

Is the point of life to immediately jump to a state of infinite health, wealth, relationship nirvana, and spiritual bliss? Of course not. The point is to enjoy the progression through various lessons that help you develop and expand your consciousness. When you pass each level, your reward is a new level with… you guessed it… more lessons. If you don’t learn to enjoy the lessons and the process of growth itself, you’re surely going to stagnate.

If you stop resisting where you are, you’ll find that life becomes a beautiful thing, regardless of what level you’re currently experiencing. You can anticipate the next level while still having immense fun right where you are.

If you want to level up, you have to acknowledge the ghosts on your level. They may seem like bullies, obstacles, or dangers, but in truth their purpose is to make you a better player and to provide you with an interesting experience.

Imagine playing Pac-Man with no ghosts. Every level would be the same. It would be incredibly boring. Nobody would play it. Similarly, no one would want to come to earth and partake in this human experience if there were no ghosts to face here. The ghosts make it interesting.

Confronting ghosts develops your consciousness. Ghosts help you discover new truths about yourself. They motivate you to get moving and pursue your goals. They make you stronger. When you face ghosts, you discover what kind of player you really are. That’s a priceless gift.

To pinpoint the ghosts on your current level, ask yourself, “What parts of my reality am I currently resisting, and why? What parts of my reality do I refuse to fully accept?”

When you’re about to go up a level in a video game, what kind of emotions do you feel? I usually feel a sense of excitement, fun, and gratitude. Don’t you basically feel the same way when you level-up in real life?

When you aren’t close to that level-up feeling, it means you aren’t ready to level up.

Leveling up occurs when you’ve completed the current level. This doesn’t mean you tie up every loose end in your life. It simply means that you’ve integrated the key lessons you needed to learn.

If you’re broke and wanting to experience financial abundance, have you learned the key lessons of being broke? Are you feeling immensely grateful for everything that financial scarcity has taught you? Or are you still running away from your ghosts?

If you’re single and wanting to experience a relationship, have you learned the lessons of being single at this time in your life? Do you feel happy and grateful when you’re alone because of all the beautiful gifts you’ve gained from it? Or are you railing against it, thereby preventing yourself from moving on?

If you’re struggling to figure out your life purpose and/or to choose a career direction, have you learned the lessons of being directionless? Do you feel grateful for the freedom and limitlessness of options you have right now? Or do you still resist your current experience of reality?

You can’t move forward in life by hating where you are.

Whenever you resist your reality, you deny your own creative power. You make yourself powerless to progress. You’re like a Pac-Man player that swears “I hate this game” and slams the joystick in anger. That isn’t going to help you level up.

When you’re ready to be grateful for your current experience of reality, warts and all, you’re ready to level up. Now you’re reclaiming your creative power, which is the very power you need to manifest the new level you desire. When you rail against the reality you’re experiencing, you simultaneously deny your power to create something new.

Resistance is powerlessness. Acceptance is power.

Imagine an artist surrounded by her paintings. Suppose she dislikes them so much that she denies creating them. Is that going to put her in a place to go and paint something better? Of course not. She’ll probably just sit around sulking.

Now imagine that same artist, feeling grateful for all the paintings she created. She acknowledges that she created them. This doesn’t mean she feels they’re her best work, but she appreciates each piece for what it taught her. Her early work may not be much to look at, but it’s still precious. The true gift she experienced from creating all that art was her progressive refinement as an artist.

Similarly, when you look at any part of your life with disdain, you deny that you’re the artist who created it. Maybe it’s your early work, and it’s not much to look at, but you can’t progress by denying that it’s yours.

What would be the market price for Picasso’s first crappy pre-school drawing today? Don’t deny the value of your own ”suck period.”

When people do make progress — real progress — in some area of their lives, how do they look back on their past experiences? Usually they look back with gratitude, nostalgia, love, and appreciation. If they look back with resistance, they’re probably still repeating those same lessons in their lives today.

I don’t hate the years of my life when I was broke. I look back on those times with fondness. I smile when I remember how Erin and I squeezed three people and two businesses into a small apartment on a noisy street. It’s funny to remember that we once used a cardboard box as a piece of furniture. I was able to move on from that period of my life because I allowed myself to fully accept it. I now know how important it was for me to have those experiences. I’m very glad that I went through that period. It was a cool level to play through.

What about those times when I was arrested and stuck in jail? I feel grateful for those experiences too. I don’t look back and feel hatred towards anyone. But at the time, I resisted those experiences tremendously. That’s why I had to keep repeating them. I wasn’t ready for the next level. Eventually I learned to fully accept those experiences because of what they taught me. For starters, those experiences turned me on to the pursuit of personal growth.

Are there still parts of my life that I’m resisting today? Of course. We all have those blocks. When we’re ready to face them, we’ll do so.

Blocking yourself from reaching the next level isn’t the end of the world. It’s okay to be where you are and to stay there for a while — assuming that’s what you want to experience. For example, income-wise you may hold yourself at a certain level because you’re still soaking up the experience. Maybe you don’t want to boost your income because you’re quite happy with your current level. That’s absolutely fine.

When a block becomes a problem is when you feel stunted and trapped in your reality. You anxiously crave different experiences, and you’re bored or frustrated with the doldrums of your current level. That’s a signal that you need to turn toward those ghosts and face them head-on. It’s time to build your strength and move forward.

Long-term stuckness boils down to running from fear — fear of failure, fear of success, fear of rejection. We all run from these fears at times. We’re only human. Lots of stuff scares us. Even the best Pac-Man players spend a lot of time running from ghosts. Ghosts are scary.

But we’re also more than human. We’re creators. We have the power within us to dig deep and proclaim, “Enough of this. I’m summoning my power to create a new reality.” We can self-prescribe a power pill. But in order to summon this power, we MUST acknowledge and accept what we’ve already created.

Imagine the Biblical God visiting this planet and saying, “Adam and Eve? Heaven and Earth? Nope, wasn’t me!” That’s what we do when we resist some aspect of our current reality. A mountain of debt? A sucky relationship? No, wasn’t me! Yeah, right… as if the credit card charges just appeared out of thin air and the wedding ring was glued to your finger by a mischievous fairy.

Look around at your reality for a moment, take a deep breath, stick your chest out, and say, “Yup… that was ME!” Take credit for all that you’ve created, even if you don’t think you deserve it. When you claim credit for what you’ve already created, you simultaneously summon the power to create something new. Never deny what you’ve created. That would cause me to smack you. (I swear your cheek LoA’d my palm!)

Your best bet is to assume that you’ve created everything in your reality — and for good reason. With respect to everything in your reality that you currently resist, say to yourself, “Okay, let’s assume I did create this. Now why would I do something like that? What could this possibly do for me?”

Look for the hidden benefit, lesson, or message behind everything in your reality that bugs you.

In order to do this properly, you have to look beyond the physical. Look at how it affects your consciousness. What benefits might you be able to retain even after death?

Use the TLP framework from the book Personal Development for Smart People to help classify your experiences. How are these experiences bringing you into greater alignment with Truth, Love, and Power? What about Oneness, Authority, Courage, and Intelligence? The cool thing about these principles is that they’re rooted in consciousness, not in physical reality, so they can help you see the empowering lessons behind all of life’s challenges, regardless of the particulars. The nice thing about universal principles is that they can be applied to any situation.

Don’t think of yourself as a physical being. Think of yourself as a conscious being. You aren’t here to develop your physical life. You’re going to lose all of it when you die anyway. Everything you build here will eventually crumble. The human race itself will die off too. But consciousness is eternal.

Physical reality is a playground for the development of your consciousness. Your physical body, your bank account, your material possessions, your home and family – none of that stuff really matters in the long run. Eventually it will all be gone. If you get too attached to those things, I guarantee you a lot of frustration and emptiness down the road. You’ll get that slow sinking feeling that something isn’t right about your life. Instead, focus your primary attention in this life on the development of your consciousness. That’s why you’re here.

Work on your physical body because such a pursuit develops your consciousness. Build your discipline by challenging yourself to eat foods you know are healthy for you. Build your compassion by refusing to kill and torture animals for the sake of your taste buds. Build your courage and authority by eating the way you feel is right, regardless of what others think.

Work on your finances because such a pursuit develops your consciousness. Expand your creativity by creating value for others. Cultivate an abundance mindset by learning to let go of scarcity thinking. Build your focus and discipline by working hard. Experience freedom by creating passive income instead of living paycheck to paycheck.

Work on your relationships because such a pursuit develops your consciousness. Build your courage by learning to be open and honest about your feelings. Increase your alignment with oneness by getting to know lots of people and realizing that we’re all part of the same whole. Deal with difficult people to learn unconditional love.

Get the idea?

Learn to embrace the Truth. Learn to connect with what you Love. Learn to channel your creative Power fully. Your problems are there to help you progressively train up your alignment with these principles. The purpose of your physical life is to help you improve the TLP-alignment of your consciousness. That’s something you can take all the way to the grave and beyond.

You are here to shine, not to whine.

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.

Linear Growth

Linear growth is when you can see the next steps ahead of you fairly clearly. Figuring out where you should go next isn’t that hard. Implementation is the biggest challenge here. This doesn’t necessarily mean you can see ten steps ahead, but the next step in front of you is at least visible. Once you complete that step, the next step will soon present itself.

An example of linear growth is my long-term path of improving my diet. I started on a variation of the SAD diet, and gradually progressed to vegetarianism, veganism, and raw foodism. There was some exploration along the way of course, but most of the time I had a pretty clear idea of the “next level” I wanted to reach.

There were two independent lines of development here, but they basically pointed in the same direction. The first line was shifting from animal-based foods to plant-based foods. First I eliminated all animal flesh, and later I dropped eggs and dairy products. I’ve been eating a 100% plant-based diet for about 12 years now.

The second line of development was to graduate from processed to unprocessed foods. I progressively dropped manufactured and cooked foods and began eating closer to nature (i.e. fresh, raw whole foods). Cooking does increase the bioavailability of a few nutrients, but that can’t compensate for the hundreds of other nutrients it simultaneously destroys; on the whole cooking is nutritionally devastating to food.

Linear growth is wonderful. When you can clearly see the next steps ahead of you, you can focus on making changes instead of second-guessing your decisions. This doesn’t mean that it’s easy, but at least you can see where you’re headed.

It’s important to recognize when you’re on a linear growth track in some area of your life. Often when we’re on a linear path that’s very challenging, we’ll have a tendency to second-guess our decisions. “There must be an easier way,” we proclaim. But when we rehash the decision, we keep coming up with the same answer. We’re on the right path; it’s just a very challenging path. This is good for us though because these are the paths that push us to build focus, self-discipline, and a strong work ethic.

If you think that if a path is too hard, it must automatically be the wrong path, you’re buying into weak-mindedness and turning your back on truth. Training yourself to lift heavier weights makes you stronger. Avoiding heavy weights only makes you weaker.

Growth Forks

A growth fork is when you see two or more mutually exclusive paths ahead of you, and it’s tricky to decide which path to take. Your challenge here lies in choosing the “correct” path. Implementing your decision may still be hard, but the up-front decision is the major limiting step.

Should you attend college or start your own business? Should you marry your current relationship partner or break up and go your separate ways? Should you move to Los Angeles or New York City?

Should you choose Option A or Option B? What’s the right choice? How do you decide?

Growth forks can be very frustrating. The problem with a tricky growth fork is that it can cause your growth to stall, sometimes for years.

I’ve faced some very difficult growth forks in my life. Some of them absorbed hundreds of hours trying to figure out the correct decision, and I still felt unsure about what to do.

You can seriously wrack your brain trying to figure out the best choice. You can use different diagnostic and analytical tools to help you decide. You can ask other people for advice. You can consult with your intuition. Sometimes this helps, but in many cases the more you try to analyze the situation, the more you feed your ambivalence.

One way to visualize a growth fork is to imagine two or more alternate timelines stretching into the future, one timeline for each possible branch leading away from your decision point. Once you make the decision, you lock yourself in to a certain branch. From that moment onward, you’ll never have the freedom to experience the other branches, at least not in the same way you can now.

Indecision at Growth Forks

One reason it’s so easy to get stuck at a growth fork is that the pre-fork position offers the illusion of greater freedom than any of the post-fork decisions. This freedom often feels better than making a commitment to any one path.

For example, suppose you’re married, and you’re also having an affair on the side. Your spouse and your lover find out about each other, and now you’re pressed from both sides to choose one or the other. Many people in this situation will delay making a choice, stringing along both spouse and lover as long as possible. Why? Because the freedom of keeping both possibilities open feels better than the instant loss of either partner. Neither path seems like a clear improvement over the state of perpetual indecision.

Unfortunately, when you stay stuck at a growth fork for too long, you often lose the freedom to make a choice at all. For example, your spouse and lover both get fed up with you and dump you at the same time, so you get nothing. Your freedom to decide has been taken away. The choice has been made for you. Letting fate decide isn’t a good idea because fate often makes crappy choices.

Growth forks needn’t be huge. You may get stuck at a growth fork when faced with the question, “What should I do today?” If you remain stuck in a state of indecision for too long, pretty soon you’ll lose the freedom to decide at all. Perhaps your TV or the Internet will make the decision for you. Such indecision can cause you to waste a large portion of your life, often by letting it slip away one day at a time.

Overcoming Indecision

So how do you overcome the trap of indecision at a growth fork?

Suppose you’re playing a computer role-playing game where you control an avatar in the game world. In this game you have a lot of decisions to make. What character class will you choose? Will you explore Arendia or Algaria? Which quests will you undertake? What guild will you join?

There are a lot of decisions to be made, but few people would consider such decisions paralyzing. Can you imagine someone complaining, “I bought this game three years ago, but I haven’t started playing yet because I just can’t decide what character class I should play. I don’t know what to do!”

Instead most people will just dive in and start playing. They’ll give a little consideration to such decisions, but they’ll decide fairly quickly, perhaps even impulsively. And for the most part, the consequence is that they’ll have fun.

Sure there may be some regrets along the way. “Dammit! I never should have picked up that cursed item!” But most people will just take any setbacks in stride and keep pressing on. As a result their character goes up in levels, and they get to tackle bigger and bigger challenges. When the game gets boring, it can be retired, and the player can move on to something else.

So why do we face situations in real life that can cause us to remain terribly stuck in indecision, but when we’re just playing a game, major in-game decisions are regarded as no big deal?

Consequences

Perhaps the main factor is that in an artificial game world, the consequences of your actions are considered minimal. Regardless of what you decide, you’re not really going to be hurt. No one else is likely to be hurt either. A bad choice affects only your character, but it doesn’t affect your real self. The whole thing is just pretend. No matter what happens to your character, the real you will still be okay.

But in the real world, things are different. Your actions have bigger consequences. People can get hurt. If you screw up, you could be socially ostracized, and that can create serious consequences for you.

It’s understandable to fear such consequences because at one time in human history, if you were socially ostracized by your peers, that could be a major threat to your survival. Getting kicked out of your community for incompetent decision-making might even be a death sentence.

Today, however, the consequences of being socially ostracized aren’t nearly as severe. For example, in the USA most marriages end in divorce. And interestingly, marital satisfaction has been on the rise for decades, keeping in step with the relative ease of getting a divorce. At one time getting a divorce was considered socially unacceptable (and of course still is in some cultures), but now it’s not such a big deal. Even if your divorce messes up the lives of many people, society is robust enough to absorb the impact, and you can still press on and achieve post-divorce happiness.

Of course there are other consequences aside from being socially ostracized. You could really mess up your finances, for instance. That could put a big crimp in your lifestyle plans.

When you apply some sort of analytical process to decision-making, you’re trying to assess and compare the consequences of different possible paths. The path with the best consequence is deemed the correct choice.

Unfortunately, assessing and comparing consequences requires predicting the future. To some degree we can pull this off, but it’s tough to be accurate. Real life will seldom fit our predictions.

So we really have two problems that lead to the state of indecision. First, we consider the consequences of certain real-life decisions to be serious and important. Second, we try to predict which consequences are best. This is how we try to make a decision.

The problem is that this decision-making process often fails. The more you magnify the importance of a decision, the more you’ll paralyze yourself. Eventually external factors will force you down a certain path, and you’ll lose your freedom to decide altogether. By refusing to decide, you get assigned the character class of Peon by default.

An Alternative Decision-Making Process

How can you make a decision if not by comparing future consequences?

This might sound like a subtle distinction, but a different way to make decisions is by comparing immediate present-moment consequences.

What does this mean?

Instead of trying to predict the future to determine the long-term implications of each possible path, drop the whole branching timeline model. Instead of regarding time as a line, consider time as a single fixed point. In other words, assume that only the present moment is real, and nothing beyond that exists.

Your decision point no longer involves the selection of a long-term path. Now it’s merely a state change to your present moment.

As you consider the alternative choices you might make, ask yourself this question: If I were to commit to this choice, how would it affect me right now? What immediate changes would I experience?

Imagine each possible choice as real, as if you’ve already made it. Pay attention to how the choice makes you feel. Does it feel good, or does it feel wrong somehow?

From Growth Forks to Linear Growth

When I use this process, I often find that my growth forks transform into linear growth. The indecision fades away, and I begin to see that the fork itself was merely an illusion. It was a mental construct — a distraction — that my mind created because on some level I didn’t feel ready to face the next logical step on my linear path. Because I thought the step was too big for me to handle, I created the growth fork as a way of putting my progress on pause.

For example, for many years while I was running my game development business, I was stuck at a growth fork. I debated whether I should keep growing my games business or quit that field and build a career in the field of personal development.

I kept trying to decide by predicting the future consequences of each path, but that led to analysis paralysis because I was comparing apples to oranges. It was tough to decide on that basis. Because of the difficulty of changing careers, my mind had a tendency to keep me stuck. Remaining in a state of indecision was actually easier and gave me the illusion of more freedom.

However, when I compacted each alternative to a present-moment decision, considering how each option made me feel in the present moment, the right choice was clear. When I thought about continuing to build my games business, I felt trapped. When I thought about working in the field of personal development, I felt excited. I didn’t need to predict the future. The present-moment difference was clear enough.

This helped me see that deep down, I already knew the right decision. But I was having trouble coming to terms with it, so I created the decision fork to keep myself stuck. Once I saw that the decision fork was a self-created illusion, I realized that I was dealing with a linear growth challenge all along.

Although it might not seem like a linear progression to shift from game development to personal development, it was for me. While running my games business, I began writing articles on the side to help out other game developers. Eventually my articles became more popular than my games. Switching from creating games to creating articles was therefore a semi-logical “graduation” for me. It became clear that I could provide more value through writing articles than I could through producing games.

Since that time, whenever I’ve faced a tricky growth fork, it has eventually revealed itself as a false dichotomy. It was an illusion I created to avoid dealing with a major growth challenge. Sometimes I created growth forks as a way of giving myself permission to pause and gather my strength.

Making the right decision wasn’t the real issue. Deep down I knew the correct decision. I could see the correct path just by focusing on the present-moment effects of each alternative. The challenge was being able to accept the correct path and to stop resisting it.

Is it possible that your own growth forks are merely illusions? Could they simply be delay tactics? Might you already know the correct choice, but you’re having a hard time accepting it?

Can you recognize the pattern that whenever you get stuck at a growth fork, you use the state of indecision as a way of putting your forward progress on pause? Do you see that this is a way you avoid what you know is coming up because you don’t feel ready to deal with the consequences yet? Can you see that making the correct decision isn’t the real issue? Can you see that the real issue is being able to fully accept the path you’re already on?

Even when you’re on a fairly linear path, you may have a tendency to create growth forks as a way of putting your progress on pause. If you don’t feel strong enough to take on the challenges ahead of you, a growth fork is a tempting option. By placing yourself in a state of indecision, you get “credit” for trying, even though your forward progress is halted.

When you face a tricky growth fork and you feel stuck in a state of indecision, pull back for a moment, and reconsider your challenge from a different perspective. Instead of trying to choose the correct path, consider that your task is to fully accept the path that deep down, you’ve already chosen.

Accepting Your Path

Accepting your path can give rise to some interesting emotions. I’d call it a combination of relief, excitement, and surrender. It feels good to leave the state of indecision behind, but it can also feel uncomfortable because now you have to get to work. You can no longer hide behind the excuse of indecision.

The feeling that “Crap… this is gonna be hard! I’m not even sure I can do this…” is perfectly normal. I experience that feeling every time I get past a growth fork. On the one hand, I know the decision is correct. But on the other hand, I don’t feel quite ready for the path ahead. I glance at the level 30 monster down the road, and I’m concerned because my character is only at level 20.

But once you stop asking, “Am I really supposed to tackle that level 30 monster?” and you fully accept that yes, you’re the hero assigned to it, this helps to shift your focus. The indecision evaporates, and you surrender to the path ahead. You realize you’re going to have to build your character beyond level 20, so you can prove a match for that monster.

“I don’t know what to do” is an excuse that really means, “I don’t feel strong enough to take the next step.” In other words, “I don’t know what to do” is pure nonsense. Of course you know what to do. You’re just scared that you won’t be able to handle it.

The funny thing is that if you poured all the energy being wasted on worry and indecision into building your character, the monster ahead would soon be no match for you.

Which path of your growth fork makes you think, “Gosh… I dunno if I can do that. That looks pretty tough. That’s a pretty scary monster”? Is it the entrepreneurial path? The path of improving your diet? The path of marriage? Which path will push your character to progress from level 20 to level 30?

Take heart that other heroes have already defeated that same monster you must face. Others have already reached the level you’re trying to reach. You can train up to their level if you work at it. Your level 30 challenge looks difficult because you’re looking at it through the eyes of a level 20 character, but you don’t have to remain a level 20 character forever.

Drop the excuse of indecision, and start working on level 21 today.

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.

First off, I don’t own any corporate stock — haven’t for years — so I’m not as deeply invested in the financial markets as some. There aren’t many public companies that are strongly aligned with my values. I don’t even buy mutual funds or index funds because that means putting my cash in too many companies whose business models depend on keeping people’s awareness levels low. As people become more conscious, they tend to gradually withdraw their financial support from certain corporations. This happens as we accept more responsibility for our personal impact on the world and seek to reduce the amount of harm we’re doing.

Investing

I do consider myself an investor, but I don’t have the same priorities as most other investors. In a general way, I want to maximize the return on my investment, but I don’t define the return in monetary terms. For me the return on my investment is what kind of impact I can have on the collective consciousness of humanity. If an investment seems to help people live more consciously, it’s a good one (a net gain). If an investment lowers people’s consciousness, it’s a bad one (a net loss).

For example, I believe that building StevePavlina.com was a very good investment. Writing my book was another one. Doing public speaking is another. These investments required virtually no money, but they required a significant amount of time. Time is a more precious resource to me than money, so my ultimate goal as an investor is to have a significant consciousness-raising impact on the world during my lifetime.

When I think about investing money in exchange for more money, it honestly bores me to tears. It seems like a complete waste of life. Why would I want to devote my precious time to such a hollow pursuit?

I’m sure some people think that if they have lots of money, it will make them happier and give them more of what they want. I found that it’s easier to get what I want by going for it directly instead of using money as an intermediary. I found a way to be free, to do what I love, and to help people. This happened before I had much money. I would not sacrifice those things for billions of dollars.

Financial Bailout

The proposed financial bailout (which hasn’t been passed at the time of this writing) is in my opinion a patently stupid idea. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see that so many people are expressing opposition to it. I’m not sure it will be enough to help though because presently the U.S. government seems to have quite a strong capacity for putting short-term thinking ahead of long-term thinking. Unfortunately, it seems that the reason the bailout failed to pass the first time is largely because members of Congress were thinking even more short-term than usual.

In my opinion it’s best to let some companies crash and burn, even if it creates negative consequences for all of us. It’s better to deal with it now than to put it off to be dealt with another day. A company that bases its operations on something that doesn’t create sustainable value for people might as well crash and burn. It will be best for their employees and stakeholders to find more conscious, fulfilling work anyway. It’s too bad our leaders are such short-term thinkers. Pouring more money into operations that don’t create much value to begin with is a short-term fix that will only lead to a bigger crash later.

Even though the financial markets may be doing poorly right now, overall I think it’s a good thing. This sort of situation helps to wake people up, to give them a kick in their complacency. Not everyone — but more people than usual.

The Role of Money

The role of money is to serve as a medium for trading value. Of course many people have tried to turn money into something else. They adopt a moocher mindset, playing the money game to win at someone else’s expense. Many large corporations operate from this mindset. They either produce nothing of real value (and wouldn’t be missed if they vanished entirely), or their products and promotions actually serve to lower consciousness instead of raise it.

Money has its place, and it’s not a bad thing to become wealthy, as long as you become so by creating and sharing an abundance of value with others. This will bring more money into your life if you so desire, but you’ll likely find that under such conditions, money isn’t the most important reward.

There are many “returns” on my investments that I believe are much more important than money, including the impact I have, the goodwill my work generates, and the relationships I build. If the financial markets crash, those things can still hold their value, while my cash could end up being worthless. So my relationships are a much more useful and flexible currency than cash. I engage in many exchanges with people where no money changes hands, but value is certainly shared, and goodwill is generated. I don’t need money to continue making such exchanges.

If given a choice between losing all my money and financial assets vs. losing all my relationships and connections with people, I’d rather lose the former.

Does it bother me that my financial assets (such as my home) may go down in value because of the broader financial meltdown? Not really. The numbers in my life may get smaller, but money isn’t the primary way I store the value I’ve created. I prefer to hold excess value in goodwill and relationships, not a number in a bank account. I’d rather have a million friends than a million dollars.

The stuff that’s most important to me in life can’t be bought — it can only be earned. I can still fulfill my heart’s desire even as my assets decline in value. Since I don’t play the game of life for money, I’m just not that attached to the particular numbers that swirl through my life. They’re largely irrelevant.

I don’t even set specific financial goals anymore. I found that when I did that, I was giving too much power to money instead of wielding that power myself. Then I could use the lack of money to justify not fully committing myself (and risking failure and rejection). So instead of setting financial goals now, I just aim for what I want straightaway. I can’t think of anything I’d really like to do that requires being rich first. Pursuing money is just a delay tactic, an excuse not to live consciously.

What about retirement? I don’t expect I’ll ever retire. But if I spend the rest of my life helping people grow and cultivating lots of goodwill, I think I could enjoy a fantastic retirement even if I end up penniless. Think of all the people I’ll be able to spend time with. I could probably even do that now. Lots of people have offered to put me up in their homes if/when I travel to other countries, for instance.

This isn’t a special situation. Anyone can do it. Do you really think you’ll need to worry about retirement if you dedicate the rest of your life to helping people with an open heart? Do you really think that money is the most powerful currency? You can have all the money in the world and suffer a very unhappy retirement. Money may allow you to meet your physical needs, but it won’t make people care about you. However, if you learn to open your heart and connect with people, you need never be alone. You can be quite happy without a dime. And when you reach this state, you just won’t care about money so much. You’ll realize that love is truly the most powerful currency. A heart filled with love will do more for you than a wallet filled with cash.

Market Manipulation

I’m fully aware that we don’t live in a Utopian society. I know the U.S. government is largely controlled by corporations at this time. I know the Fed essentially operates as a private corporation and that it would be inaccurate to call it a part of the U.S. government. I know that certain entities gain by manipulating the money supply, allowing them to buy up other companies for pennies on the dollar. I know that our government’s budget is largely a joke.

I’ve been exposed to many theories about how the markets really work. There’s way too much complexity and duplicity for me to discern the whole truth, but I don’t need to know all those details to see that the whole financial system operates at a fairly low level of awareness.

None of this really matters to me though. It’s not a game I pay much attention to. My focus is elsewhere, not because I don’t care but because I know that focusing on such problems can’t possibly help.

Who I’m Voting For

Who am I voting for in the next election? No one. I’m not even registered to vote — never have been. Does this make me a bad U.S. citizen? Perhaps. I see myself more as a citizen of the world. My loyalties are with humanity at large, not some political entity.

Voting as an individual in the USA seems rather pointless to me at this time, especially given our current political climate. Instead of voting as an individual, I could vote with my blog by endorsing a particular candidate. But I honestly don’t resonate with either Obama or McCain. If forced to choose between them, I’d say that Obama is the more conscious of the two. However, personally I’d much prefer Dennis Kucinich because he seems much more conscious and aware. He’s also a fellow vegan who believes that all life is sacred, so of course that’s a big plus in my book. He’s done some gutsy but unpopular things, and I really respect that about him. Unfortunately people like him are still a minority in Congress.

I don’t expect any political leader to be perfect, but I’d like to see something much more conscious than our current levels. I actually feel that’s an achievable goal.

I do have a vote to cast, but not in the upcoming political election. My vote is for a more conscious humanity. I have to vote with my conscience, and that requires that I cast my vote through my work, not at the ballot box.

As I see it, the main problem is the soup of low awareness that permeates American society. The fact that we Americans will select a guy like George Bush as our leader doesn’t speak well of us. (Well, okay technically we picked Al Gore.) I’d sincerely like to apologize to the rest of the world for that. It’s pretty embarrassing when you think about it.

Our political leadership is a sign of the times. The “soup” that encourages people to spend the bulk of their time working at a meaningless corporate job for money is the same soup that puts people like George Bush in power. I don’t blame George Bush for that. I’m sure he’s doing the best he can. But the very notion that my fellow Americans would pick someone like that to lead us makes me very cognizant of the fact that as a whole, this country is pretty low on the awareness totem pole. But the bright side is that there’s plenty of worthwhile work to be done in this country. You don’t have to look very far to find important needs that require filling.

The Solution

So what can we do about this? As I see it, the solution is to fix the soup. And the only way to do that is to raise your own awareness as an individual.

I like to take personal responsibility for everything in my reality, especially what I don’t like. Since I’m not a big fan of the current economic and political climate in the USA, I assume that I’m responsible for fixing it.

Some people might see this as a hopeless cause or an overwhelming task. I don’t see it like that. I see it as a worthy challenge.

We Americans have so much potential. We just need to cultivate an environment that allows us to let go of our Cro-Magnon nationalism and start living like citizens of earth. We have the potential to create massive value for this great planet instead of being a corporate-owned bully.

Obviously there are many people working against the vision of a conscious America. Some people are polarized to benefit from an environment of fear and control. On a daily basis our mainstream media gives us reason to be afraid. Our politicians tell us to be scared, and they say they’ll protect us. It’s all nonsense though. In every moment we still have a choice. We can tune out the fear mongers and decline to participate in their silly games. We can stop subscribing to fear and start being brave and strong as individuals.

This is a case where if you aren’t part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. If you aren’t living consciously, if you’re playing follow the follower, if you’re just going through the motions of life, then you’re one of the “bad guys.” You just don’t realize it yet. And by your example, you’re encouraging others around you to do the same. You’re adding to the low-awareness soup. If you live unconsciously, if you settle for less than your potential, if you devote your days to being a corporate cog in an unconscious profit-seeking machine, if you use food and idle entertainment to numb your senses, then you’re part of the problem.

At this point in history, all that’s required for the USA to become one of the greatest blunders of all time is for you to keep on going through the motions just like everyone else. The only true enemy you must face is your own complacency.

The Blame Game

We can never hope to improve the soup of our country by playing the blame game. To blame others is to deny your own responsibility. If you don’t like what our political and corporate leaders are doing, it’s pointless to blame them. That cannot possibly help. If you think that someone should do something about it, that someone is you. If you blame others but take no direct action to fix the problems you perceive, I guarantee you’re part of the problem. You have only yourself to blame. You’ve been swallowing the soup of unconscious living, and it’s time to spit it out.

If you don’t like what’s happening, it’s up to you to fix it. That may seem like an overwhelming task if you’re living unconsciously, and it surely is. But once you really embrace conscious living and dump all the low-awareness garbage you’ve been clinging to, you won’t feel so weak and disempowered. You’ll realize you’re much stronger than you ever thought possible. You’ll begin to see that living consciously is all the solution you really need. When you live consciously, you inspire others to do the same. You help to change the soup. You make it safe for more people to wake up. You become a beacon for positive growth. Once you’ve begun to experience life at this level, it’s really hard to go back. You just can’t fit in the old box anymore.

While unconscious people consent to the current climate through silent approval, conscious people say, “No, this situation needs to change, and I must be the one to change it.” Then they get busy. They don’t waste time whining and complaining. They work on themselves, and then they share themselves with the world. They work to become stronger, more loving, and more aware. They build their capacity for service. They help teach us how to connect with each others instead of feeling disconnected and alone, they help bring purpose and passion to our lives, they empower us, and they offer honest and authentic leadership.

Are you worried about the current financial and political climate? If you’re worried, then turn and face those fears. Accept responsibility for what’s happening. Is there some part of you that wants to get something for nothing? Do you value money ahead of personal relationships? Is greed more important to you than service? What will you need to change in order to live more consciously? What must you learn to let go of? Are you living your life as part of the solution, or are you part of the problem? You choose.

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.

I’ve always turned down formal consulting requests because I didn’t like the idea of charging money for helping people one-on-one. I also figured it was more effective to focus on one-to-many communication outlets like blogging, speaking, or writing a book, since I’d be able to reach more people that way. But after seeing the kind of impact Erin’s readings have had on some of her clients, and coupled with my goal of making StevePavlina.com ad-free by the end of the year, I’m giving this idea serious consideration now.

Informal coaching

I’ve been helping people on a one-on-one basis for nearly a decade, dating back to my computer gaming industry days. I’ve always done it for free and very informally, usually via email or the forums, but sometimes by phone or in-person. Since this isn’t a core part of my business and doesn’t generate any income, I never bothered to formalize or structure it. However, because of the volume of requests I receive each day, this means that I help people in a very haphazard and random way. On any given day, I might answer a few requests personally and then refer everyone else to the forums.

My contact form includes the line, “I respectfully request that you please DO NOT use this form to request personal advice or feedback because I don’t have the capacity to provide that.” But still many requests come through each day. Before I added that line, the volume of requests was just insane. With that line it’s still unrealistic for me to give personal guidance to everyone who asks, but at least it’s more manageable than it was before. I love to help people when I can, but it seems lame to have to put up roadblocks like that just to cut down on the volume of requests.

On the bright side, I’ve seen that even this random assistance-on-the-side has been very helpful for many people. I like that I can save people a lot of unnecessary struggle as they work toward their next breakthrough. Because I’ve had the opportunity to connect with so many different people from a variety of backgrounds and cultures, I can quickly discern patterns that most people simply can’t see. This makes it easier to come up with practical solutions.

I recognize that my informal approach isn’t a good system. It’s too chaotic. I don’t think it’s wise to help people one week and then have to turn them away the next because I’m too busy. I know that some people have found this frustrating. I need a better system.

Professional coaching / consulting

If I’m going to keep helping people one-on-one, I should formalize and structure it into a proper coaching/consulting setup. To me that would be more fair than telling people in bold red letters: “Do NOT email me!” I wouldn’t want to drop this part of my life completely, since helping people one-on-one has served as tremendous fuel for my own growth. But I need some way of priotizing the requests, and the most sensible way to do that is to assign it a price tag. That also fits with my goal of shifting away from ad-based income.

Since my blog and the forums generate such incredible feedback, I’ve gained a tremendous amount of experience and insight into solving personal growth problems. This has enabled me to help people overcome all manner of challenges. It seems reasonable that I should formalize this process instead of just applying it randomly to people that happen to catch me at a good time.

Also, since I’ve been doing business online since 1995 and blogging since 2004 (very successfully), I could consult with people about online business and blogging, shaving a lot of time off their learning curve. I’ve certainly gotten a lot of requests for this over the years.

Additionally, while writing Personal Development for Smart People, I devised a system that has made it much easier for me to diagnose and solve problems, both for myself and others. This could easily be applied to coaching and consultations, both with individuals and businesses.

Since my book will hit the shelves on October 15th, I can anticipate even more requests for advice hitting my inbox. That’s another incentive to get this handled sooner rather than later.

Consulting Topics

Because of the wide variety of articles I’ve written, I’ve consulted with people on many different challenges. I’ve been doing this informally since 1999, when I began sharing ideas with fellow software developers to increase their personal productivity and their sales.

Here are some of the most common areas where I’ve helped people in the past:

• Breaking bad habits, adopting new habits, and overcoming addictions (especially becoming an early riser)
• Time management and personal productivity improvements
• Building self-discipline
• Building courage
• Polyphasic sleep
• Discovering your life purpose
• Navigating career transitions (”I hate my job” -> “I feel so free and alive”)
• Starting a new business (mostly online)
• Generating passive income
• Increasing your income (without violating your values)
• Dietary improvements (going vegetarian, vegan, or raw)
• Diagnosing and solving relationship problems (Should I stay or go?)
• Achieving more clarity and focus (creating a sense of direction)
• Setting inspired goals (separating your true goals from socially conditioned ones)
• Polarity decisions (lightworking vs. darkworking)
• Blogging and online business (especially building traffic and generating income)

This list of topics is way too broad to be considered a niche, but I’ve never been a niche person. I have a lot of different interests, but they all enhance and support each other remarkably well. The underlying pattern is that I want to help people live more consciously and courageously.

Some situations where I do NOT enjoy coaching people are:

• People who are too passive and powerless - These people either try to give me all their power, or they fail to summon the will to act on the simplest of ideas. Either way it’s a bad match. In order to help such people, I usually have to piss them off first (to get them to rise from apathy to anger). When I succeed, they typically run away or turn against me because they don’t interpret anger as progress, even though it’s a huge step in the right direction because they’re finally moving away from denial and falsehood. This only works well when there’s a high-trust relationship to begin with, and that often takes more time than most people are willing to invest, so there isn’t enough leverage.
• Depression - Dealing with people who are depressed or suicidal is tedious because most of them aren’t at the stage of accepting full responsibility for their lives. Therapy might be a good choice for such people, but not the kind of coaching/consulting I could provide. I prefer to deal with generally positive and responsible people who are looking to go from okay to good or from good to great… not from miserable to tolerable.
• People who don’t believe in personal growth - A reasonable degree of self-awareness, a sense of curiosity about life, and a commitment to personal growth are very important. Otherwise the person is still in the unconscious growth phase and simply isn’t ready for conscious growth yet.

I’m happy to consult with individuals as well as businesses. My preference is to come up with holistic, long-term solutions. I shun quick fixes that will only break later or that will create new problems in other areas. I like to solve problems, not manage their symptoms.

Pricing

How much would I charge for coaching/consulting services? That’s a good question.

It’s clear that I can’t offer lowball pricing. Due to the traffic my website generates, I’d simply get overwhelmed with too many requests. I’ve seen what happened with Erin’s readings during the past two years. She currently charges $295 for 30 minutes by phone, $395 for an hour, and $495 for an hour in-person. Her website gets 1/20th as much traffic as mine.

I intend to start at $500 per hour with a one hour minimum. In the long run, the rates will largely be determined by supply and demand. In this case the supply is rather limited compared to the demand, so that dictates a certain price level. I think $500/hour will be the low end. I doubt I’ll go lower than this.

Obviously at these rates, I probably won’t be coaching too many starving students. This service would be more appropriate for professionals, business owners, online entrepreneurs, etc. — people who are already in a strong position to leverage a personal or professional breakthrough. If these rates make you cringe or if $500 seems like an enormous sum to you, it simply means you wouldn’t be a good candidate for this. I’m sorry if that’s the case. It’s unrealistic for me to offer a lower price though. Even this rate makes me a bit nervous – I think it’s probably going to be too low.

Since I can’t accept every request for advice that comes my way, I need some way of filtering them. I think a price tag is a better solution than my current method of using a virtual scarecrow plus random luck.

Interest list

In order to assess the demand for coaching/consulting services, I’m building an interest list. I’ll probably launch something official within the next couple months, but before I do that, I want to get an idea of the initial demand.

If you think you’d be interested in a consultation or coaching arrangement, please let me know as soon as possible, and I’ll add you to the interest list. You don’t have to commit to anything — just let me know if you think there’s a good chance you’d avail yourself of this service (at a minimum rate of $500 per hour) within the next few months. Also, please let me know what you’d seek to gain from it — i.e. short-term help with personal challenges, long-term coaching, business or blogging consultations, etc. This will help me tailor the service offerings to fit your needs.

Even if this service is out of your price range, the upside is that formalizing this process will help me improve the free articles I write. Helping people one-on-one has been fueling my articles since 1999. As I learn what works for people individually, I can generalize the solutions and turn them into new articles for everyone. I’m sure a more structured approach on the coaching side will enable me to provide more value compared to the random way I’ve been doing this for the past several years.

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.

In chess there’s an early game, a middle game, and an endgame. The same is true for habit change.

Many people try to change their habits by skipping straight to the endgame. They dive in and commit themselves to making the change happen right away. This is what people do when they make a New Year’s Resolution. It hardly ever works.

Scholar’s mate

Trying to change a habit overnight is like trying to execute scholar’s mate in chess. Scholar’s mate is a strategy of achieving checkmate in only four moves. It only works against total beginners. Against a chess player with an ounce of experience, scholar’s mate will fail. A botched scholar’s mate puts you in a disadvantaged position, so attempting it is usually a bad idea unless you’re playing against a complete novice.

Are you applying the scholar’s mate strategy when trying to change old habits or adopt new habits? Do you go straight for the kill, only to find your attempt shot down?

When you try to change a habit without devoting sufficient time to the early game and middle game, you’ll almost always fail to make the change stick. Only the very easy habits will succumb to this kind of brute force strategy.

The early game of habit change is education and setup. In the middle game, you execute some changes to support your habit change. Only in the endgame do you go directly for the kill.

Early game

In the early game of chess, your goal is to set up your pieces for success. Move your pieces out. Develop a solid pawn structure. Get control of the center of the board. Put some pressure on your opponent’s pieces. Defend your king. The goal of the early game is to get off to a strong start where you’ll hopefully be able to gain an advantage. The endgame is still a long way off.

In the early game of habit change, you’re also setting yourself up for future success. Read some books to educate yourself. Talk to people who’ve already made the change you seek. Write up a one-page plan for how you’re going to pull it off. These opening moves needn’t be complicated, but they shouldn’t be ignored.

Middle game

In the middle game of chess, you’ll normally become more aggressive, but you still aren’t going for checkmate yet. You’re mainly looking for opportunities to gain an advantage in material, position, or momentum. Use solid tactics to weaken your opponent until you have a shot at checkmate.

In the middle game of habit change, your goal is to attack the scaffolding around the habit, not to go after the habit directly. What tactics can you use to give you an advantage? For example, if you want to change your diet, purge all the problem foods from your house, pick 5 restaurants where you can order healthy meals, learn 10 new healthy recipes, and recruit a buddy to go through the same change. Tell other people about the change you’re attempting, and request their support. For any habit you want to change, you should be able to come up with at least a dozen tactical moves that will increase your advantage.

Endgame

In the endgame of chess, your goal is to checkmate your opponent’s king. If you do a good job in the early game and middle game, you’ll be in a strong position to achieve checkmate. If you race through the first two stages, your own king will probably be mated instead. The endgame is often fairly straightforward. Usually it’s clear that you’ve either won or lost by this point.

In the endgame of habit change, you finally initiate the change with the goal of making it stick. This is the point where you would begin a 30-day trial. Only in the endgame do you actually try to change your habit. Up until this point you’re simply jockeying for an advantage that will make the endgame successful.

Fortunately, unlike chess, in the game of habit change, you can spend as long as you want in the early game and middle game. You don’t have to worry about a timer counting down or an opponent trying to outthink you.

If you fail in the endgame (meaning that your new habit doesn’t stick), your mistake was most likely not in the endgame. You probably screwed up in the early game or middle game. You didn’t take enough time to educate and prepare yourself, and/or you didn’t do enough work to give yourself a decisive advantage before you started.

The role of self-discipline

If you feel you must call forth a seemingly inhuman level of self-discipline while trying to change one of your habits, it usually means you botched or neglected the early game and/or middle game. Sweating through a habit change isn’t self-discipline; sweating is the consequence of executing an ineffective strategy. More sweat won’t help much.

Picture a chess player sweating every move in the endgame. Is this a good player? Often this is a sign of a weak player. For a skilled, disciplined player, the endgame frequently plays itself, with the outcome being a foregone conclusion. Since there are fewer pieces on the board, there are fewer options to consider.

If you can’t even make it through the first week of a new habit without feeling an overwhelming urge to quit because you have to push yourself unreasonably hard to keep going, your mistakes were made long before you even began day one. You’re trying to pull off the equivalent of scholar’s mate, and your imaginary “opponent” isn’t stupid enough to fall for it.

Sometimes a little self-discipline will be required in the endgame, especially if you’re tackling a really tough habit, but if you built a solid foundation in the earlier stages, the endgame will often be smooth sailing.

The proper role of self-discipline is to make the best moves you can in the early game and middle game, such that by the time you reach the endgame, achieving checkmate is easy and straightforward. Self-discipline also plays a major role even before the early game. Did you give proper attention to study, practice, and training before you challenged your opponent to a match? Do you know your strengths and how to leverage them? Do you know your opponent’s weaknesses and how to take advantage of them? Are you prepared to win?

If you take a disciplined approach to habit change, you won’t be sweating the endgame. By the time you’re starting on day one of your new habit, you’ll have already knocked the legs out from under your old habit and build the necessary scaffolding to support your new habit. When you finally begin day one, you’ll already have the upper hand.

What can you do to put yourself in a more advantageous position with respect to changing one of your habits? How can you eliminate obstacles, cut off escape routes, derail threats, gain more leverage, take control of the center, etc? What early and middle game strategy and tactics will virtually guarantee success before you even begin day one?

Incidentally, applying chess concepts to personal development is an example of how cultivating many different interests enables us to transplant basic concepts from one field to another to solve problems creatively.

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© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.