Do you tell yourself that someday this part of your life will move to the front burner and become a priority? How will that actually happen?

Back burner items tend to remain on the back burner indefinitely. They rarely make it to the front burner on their own. The reason they’re on the back burner is because you put them there, probably because you deemed something else more important.

At one point you may have put your career first. Or your health. Or a particular relationship. But are those priorities still right for you today? Are your current priorities still correct?

If you ask this question in a cursory way, you’ll almost always answer yes. If you told yourself a year ago that your finances must be your #1 priority, they’ll have a tendency to stay there. Whether you’ve made measurable progress or not, you’ll have a tendency to stick to essentially the same priorities year after year.

A True Priority or a Distraction

If your current prioritization tends to be self-perpetuating, how do you know when it’s time for an adjustment? You probably won’t figure it out just by asking if anything needs to be adjusted.

Generally the way you’ll notice that an adjustment is needed is that you’ll notice a nagging feeling that something isn’t right with the way you’re currently living.

Another clue is that you won’t seem to be making much progress in your top priorities. If you look at your actual results in those areas, you’ll see evidence that you’re drifting or even declining.

Often this happens because we like to assume that we can improve some area of life by making it the #1 priority. For instance, if you feel that your finances are weak, you may decide to focus on making more money for a while. But then a few years pass, and your finances don’t seem to be that much better. Overall you feel more stressed too. The main reason you failed here is that making money wasn’t a true priority. It was actually a distraction from a deeper, more important part of your life.

Blocking

When false priorities are mistaken for true priorities, some blocking is bound to occur. You’ll feel resistance when you try to move forward on priorities that seem to make logical sense but which don’t connect with your true desires. No matter how hard you push against that resistance or what techniques you try to use to get past it, it will still be present. That’s because your mistake was further upstream. Your priorities weren’t aligned with your true desires.

When you realize you’re in a blocking situation, give yourself some time to pause and reflect. Even if you didn’t explicitly write down your priorities, what do your thoughts tell you about what’s most important to you?

If it’s convenient for you, jot down a quick list of your top mental priorities. Maybe you’ll come up with something like this:

1. Making more money
2. Improving my overall health and fitness
3. Spending time with my significant other
4. Being more focused and productive at work
5. Learning new skills

But if you were to actually look at your actions as an objective observer might do, you may see that you’ve been prioritizing your day very differently in practice:

1. Communication (email, texting, phone calls)
2. Social networking
3. Consuming information (blogs, news, videos, etc)
4. Doing urgent work
5. Being entertained

These aren’t complete lists, but I think you get the idea — your mental prioritization and your real world actions are not in sync.

If you discover something like this, don’t panic. It’s quite common for people to have two lists that are clearly not aligned. Fortunately this is a fixable problem.

The False Belief You Must Release

The reason for this dichotomy is a common false belief. It’s the belief that prioritizing is a logical affair, that it’s something you can achieve with your logical mind.

In fact, an equally mistaken approach is the belief that this is something you can discern intuitively. That approach will also fail.

Your logical mind is the part that comes up with solutions like: If my finances are the weakest part of my life, then I should make that my top priority for a while. Giving my finances more attention will surely improve them, and then when things are going really well in that area, I can make something else a priority.

This sounds very believable. So it comes as a real blow to the logical mind when this seemingly sensible solution doesn’t actually work. This throws the logical mind for a loop because after all, it should work, right?

Actually it shouldn’t work. There’s an error in the logic here. The assumption that turning a lagging area of your life into your top conscious priority will cause that area to improve is a false assumption. Much of the time, it turns out not to be true.

Many times when you take a lagging area of your life and make it your top priority, that area will continue to stagnate. Sometimes it will even get worse.

And sometimes you can ignore an area of your life, and it will improve all by itself.

We could go really deep into this, but for now I just want to plant the seed in your mind that turning a lagging area of your life into your top priority may in fact be a mistake. Sometimes it’s the worst thing you can do. You’ll see why this happens a little later in this article.

Why the Logical Mind Cannot Prioritize

If you try to set priorities in a logical manner, failure is guaranteed. This is because logic cannot provide a context for prioritizing.

There’s a special class of brain injuries whereby people cannot feel any emotions, or they’re unaware of their emotional states. Interestingly, these people cannot function well at all. They might spend a whole day deciding where to go for lunch, evaluating all sorts of irrelevant details such as the lighting conditions in each restaurant or which table they might get. Such people may brush their teeth 20 times a day, thinking it was a reasonable thing to do. They don’t have a context for separating the relevant from the irrelevant.

Some companies claim to make data-driven decisions, but that’s a misnomer since there must always be an emotional context behind the usage of data. There’s no logical reason for why a company must grow or why it must sell more products or have more impact. It could just as easily shut down, and the people could go do something else instead. Even the choice to make data-driven decisions is an emotional one. The emotional brain provides the context for feeling that it’s good to grow a company; then the data can be logically analyzed to determine what avenues may support that growth better than others. But ultimately the whole decision chain begins with an emotional context, and even data-driven decisions are normally littered with emotional checkpoints.

If you were to try to prioritize your life on a purely mental/logical level, you’d find the task impossible. You cannot logically evaluate and sort the infinite possibilities available to you. In fact, if you try to go that route, you’ll surely experience bouts of analysis paralysis, where you get so caught up in analysis that you hardly get anything done.

Let the Heart Lead

The solution to this trap is simple: Let the heart lead. Use your emotions to prioritize.

This may sound like a cop-out, but there’s a more empowering way to look at it.

First, you’re going to do this anyway. If you try to use the logical prioritization approach, some part of you won’t cooperate. Your mental priorities may look great on paper, but you won’t actually follow them. When have you ever prioritized your life logically and even come close to sticking to your priorities?

The closest you’ll get will be to use drugs like coffee to try to throw your hormones out of balance and overstimulate the logical mind, but your emotions will still reassert themselves from time to time, and the signals will only be more scrambled. In the end your emotions will make you feel worse when you try to graft a logical prioritization onto your life by force. This approach will take you further away from genuine happiness, and it’s ultimately counter-productive.

Maybe someday there will be a better substitute for your emotional brain, but for now you’re stuck with it. Fortunately that isn’t such a bad thing. Your emotional brain is much older than your logical mind, being subjected to many more cycles of evolutions. Your emotional subsystem is a finely honed instrument, far beyond the capabilities of even our most advanced supercomputers.

The logical mind is good at certain things, but prioritizing the big picture isn’t one of its strengths. This is, however, a major strength of the emotional mind. These two aspects of mind complement each other beautifully, but in the Western world we often have the relationship backwards. We need to learn to prioritize with the heart and the emotions, not with the logical mind.

Physically speaking, your emotional brain is mostly in your head, but it’s also partly in your chest. Your heart actually has its own tiny brain consisting of about 40,000 neurites. It’s primitive compared to the brain in your head, but it’s also loud. The communication channel that sends signals from heart to brain is like a firehose, whereas the channel going from brain to heart carries much less bandwidth — more like a thin straw. Essentially the heart functions as a state controller for the brain. The heart can easily tune out the brain, but the brain cannot easily tune out the heart. When you feel strong emotions, those emotions will take over your thinking, determine the types of thoughts you can or can’t have in those moments. But you may find it very difficult to think your way out of strong feelings.

Heart-Centered Prioritizing

When you prioritize with the heart, it’s important to get a clear signal. I recommend that you consume no drugs like caffeine or alcohol for at least a week just to be safe. Otherwise your nervous system is likely to be out of whack, and the heart-mind communication won’t work as well. If you really want to amp it up, eat all raw for a week, or try fasting, juice fasting, or mono meals for a few days first.

You’ll want to achieve a state known as coherence, where the heart and brain synchronize their communication patterns. This is the difference between listening to music and listening to noise.

To achieve coherence, you need to focus on creating a certain emotional state. Once you’re in that state, your brain will sync to your heart. This can be physically measured with the proper equipment. Perhaps the most significant change is in your HRV (heart rate variability). When you’re out of coherence, your HRV bounces around chaotically. When you’re in coherence, your HRV looks like a smooth sine wave if you were to graph it over time. Your heart actually speeds up and then slows down in a very flowing pattern, almost like music.

Emotionally this state of coherence can be described as: unconditional love, compassion, appreciation, and gratitude. If you’re feeling these emotions, you’re there. If you’re not feeling these emotions, you’re not there. Feeling neutral or okay or fine is not coherence.

Coherence has many benefits. It feels good emotionally, but it’s also good for your health, your mental performance, your social life, and beyond.

While the heart is the loudest voice in heart-brain communication, the brain can still influence the heart. So you can create this coherence state by holding thoughts in your mind that are congruent with these feelings. You can recall positive memories or use visualization. Another method is to listen to music that evokes these emotions. I like the song One by U2.

Play around to find a method that works for you. You can do it all in your mind if you want, such as by visualizing a positive scene, but you can just as easily induce coherence through external means, such as by cuddling someone you care about.

The reason to put yourself into a state of coherence first is simple: incredible clarity. Once you’re in this state of coherence, you can trust that your heart-brain communication will be at peak efficiency. You can still attempt to prioritize outside of this state, but the results won’t be as reliable.

Now while you’re enjoying this warm, glowing heart-centeredness, ask yourself what’s most important to you in life. Create your prioritization list by focusing on your feelings. I expect you’ll find this pretty easy to do.

You’ll probably notice that the way your heart prioritizes is very different from the way your logical brain works. For instance, when you’re in coherence, it’s pretty obvious that making lots of money isn’t that important, and it may not make it onto your priority list at all.

You may come up with a list that looks something like this:

1. Feeling connected
2. Helping people
3. Serving the greater good
4. Being kind
5. Sharing my gifts and talents with the world

Please do try this for yourself. Don’t just read this article and skip this exercise.

You’ll probably notice that heart-centered prioritizing is actually faster and easier than logical prioritizing.

The heart-centered approach is also more consistent. When you use the logical approach, you’ll get different answers each time. Every month you apply hard logic to set your priorities, your answers will keep shifting, sometimes radically. But with the heart-based approach, you’ll find that your answers remain remarkably consistent. You may use different words to describe your priorities and shift the ordering around a little, but you’ll be struck by a feeling of coming home to a delightful sense of clarity each time you do this. It may feel like remembering rather than prioritizing. The answers flow with little effort.

When you’re in coherence, your logical brain will function better too, and it will work harmoniously with your emotions to help you create what you desire.

We can also see why it doesn’t work to prioritize based on logic alone. Even prioritizing based on intuition doesn’t work. The reason is that these approaches ignore the importance of coherence. Each time you try to apply your logic or intuition to a problem, you’ll be in a slightly different emotional state. That emotional state will dictate what sorts of solutions you come up with. And if the emotional states don’t match from one month to the next, your solutions will be discordant, and you’ll find it hard to create plans that stick. It’s like listening to music where each track keeps drifting off key — it may still look like music on paper… but not when you listen to it.

We can also see why turning a lagging area of your life into your top priority will often backfire. If focusing more attention on that lagging area makes it harder to achieve coherence, your results will suffer. So if you feel a sense of financial lack and then try to push yourself to make more money, you’ll probably be more likely to induce feelings of stress and overwhelm instead of appreciation and gratitude. And so your emotional brain will lead you to procrastinate. It’s actually trying to get you away from those negative feelings and nudge you in the direction of coherence. This is why you may find yourself addicted to email or social media, which may help you feel better than stressing yourself out with work you don’t enjoy. A better solution is to enter the coherence state deliberately and then decide what to do from there.

Taking Action

When you’re ready to take action on your priorities, start by returning to coherence again. Use your favorite method to create feelings of unconditional love, compassion, appreciation, and gratitude. This way you’ll be syncing to the same state you used to create your priorities, so you won’t have the feeling of second-guessing yourself.

In this state, the right actions will tend to emerge fairly easily. For me it was the desire to write and publish a new article on this beautiful Saturday morning while sipping a banana-coconut smoothie. My desire is to help you gain more clarity and experience more flow and happiness in your life.

Returning to this state of coherence when you set priorities and when you act on them is better than trying to prioritize while you’re in one state and then taking actions in discordant states. Don’t expect good results if you prioritize from a state of desperation and then try to take action from a feeling of stress. Sync your emotions to the coherence state before you prioritize and before you take action. With practice you can do this in a matter of seconds. This is a high leverage practice that makes a world of difference.

A Global Perspective

Imagine how the planet would change if more people began each day by syncing to coherence first. Imagine if governments and corporate boardrooms took a couple minutes to sync to unconditional love before they made key decisions. How many problems could we avoid with this one simple practice?

Wouldn’t this be more impactful and consistent than having each person show up with discordant feelings such as fear, greed, overwhelm, etc?

You can try this with your family and friends as well. The next time you have a disagreement with someone close to you, pause for a moment and see if you can get yourself and the other person to sync to coherence first. Then see what becomes of your disagreement.

Syncing between multiple people is like playing in an orchestra. Each individual may have a different instrument and may play different notes at different times, but their output can flow together harmoniously. When multiple people sync with coherence, they create beautiful music. When they’re out of sync, they create some form of noise.

Consider a 30-Day Coherence Trial

If you want to make syncing to coherence a habit, consider kicking off a 30-day trial. It’s really not that difficult to do, and the potential benefits are huge.

To start the trial, take a few minutes to sync to coherence, and then jot down a list of your top priorities in life. It doesn’t have to be a long list, and the exact ordering isn’t that important. Just write down whatever comes to you.

When you’re ready to begin the action part of each day, pause again for a moment and sync to coherence. Then get started by taking the next action you feel inspired to take.

This synching step only takes a few minutes at most. It can be as simple as playing a song that makes you feel appreciative and loving. Then proceed from that state as you move forward. Try to hold onto it as long as you can.

When you notice that you’ve lost touch with the coherence state and you’re drifting into discordant feelings and losing clarity, take another time-out to re-sync to coherence. Again, this doesn’t take long at all. Recall a happy memory. Play some inspiring music. Or send a quick text message to someone you love: I’m really grateful you’re in my life. I deeply love and appreciate you. <3

Since I completed my 30-day music trial this week, I’m kicking off this new 30-day trial today. My commitment is to sync to coherence at least twice per day. I started this morning by syncing to that state and feeling inspired to write and share this article with you. I hope you find it helpful. Have a beautiful day!

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

That said, there can be tremendous value in planning. Thinking through a business in advance is hard work and requires deep concentration (if you want to do it well), but the payoff is a significant increase in clarity and a better shot at creating or expanding a successful enterprise.

I spent most of last week creating a new long-term plan for my business, which I just completed on Friday. I hadn’t done anything this thorough since 2005. It was incredibly tough mental work, and I put in many 12-16 hour days in a row, sometimes working so hard that I literally fell asleep at my desk. Then I’d wake up and work on it some more.

Since I’ve just been through this process, let me share some thoughts on creating a written plan for your own business.

Planning for Yourself vs. Planning for Investors

There’s a big difference between creating a business plan for your personal clarity vs. creating a plan to attract funding. Most of the business planning information I’ve seen in books or online is heavy on the latter side. If you don’t need outside funding, you can probably ignore 30-50% of the typical suggestions for what to include in a business plan.

There can be value in doing some of the work that it would take to impress an investor. Thinking through the financials is a good idea, but in practice a lot of what goes into an investor-based plan is actually persuasion as opposed to serious planning. Financial projections can be incredibly subjective, and you can’t predict with much accuracy what’s going to happen under real-world market conditions anyway. Overplanning is also a waste of time — you need to guard against filling your plan with irrelevant details that simply won’t matter one way or another.

I set financial goals for my business, but I don’t bother making predictions which are merely guesswork. Instead I spend more time planning how my business can adapt to whatever conditions may occur.

My business plan is created solely for me, and to a lesser extent, for those who work closely with me. I’ll never show it to an investor or banker because I’m confident I can continue to grow the business with a strategy that requires no outside financing.

Thinking Strategically

Business planning helps you think strategically about the road ahead. You only have so much time each day, month, and year to make decisions and take action. For many business owners those actions are chaotic and unfocused. They start projects they never finish. They miss opportunities by failing to act promptly. It’s very easy to hit a plateau and get stuck there for years.

A clear, committed strategy helps to cut through all of that. It sharpens your day to day choices. It provides an intelligent framework for action.

The problem, however, is that there are many valid strategies for growing a business. You will undoubtedly have more opportunities than you have time to pursue them. You can’t do everything well. If in the back of your mind, you’re oscillating between several different primary strategies, you’ll have a hard time growing your business if these strategies don’t mesh incredibly well.

I could grow my business in a variety of different ways. I could blog more often. I could write more books. I could expand into videos. I could expand my workshop offerings and begin doing them in different cities. I could invest in more marketing and PR. I could do guest blogging and accept more interview requests. I could get back into podcasting. I could start a membership site or paid subscription service. I could hire a few personal coaches and open a coaching program. I could turn my blog posts into products to sell. I could expand my social media presence. I could launch my own affiliate program (for workshops and future products). I could do more joint venture deals.

We could do any or all of these things, and many of them would be effective. But we can’t do all of them well. We might be able to do one or two of them well at any given time.

Thinking strategically requires deciding which fronts not to open. To create a practical and realistic business plan, I had to make some tough choices about which directions not to pursue. At first glance, almost everything looks golden. But with some deeper probing and a lot of analysis, I could discern which opportunities are truly the best relative to the others.

The Planning Process

Planning is an iterative process. In many areas you won’t know the best decision to make. At best you’ll be able to identify some options, but you won’t have much clarity about which possibilities make the most sense.

The way I resolve this is by taking a stab at each part. You can’t leave things in a wishy washy state, or you’ll end up with no workable plan at all. You have to keep pushing towards resolution and convergence. A good way to do this is to force a decision in a particular part of your plan. Then see how it fits. If it doesn’t feel right, yank it out, and try another possible solution. Repeat till you get it right.

Planning is an exploration of the potential solution space. To find the right combination of products, pricing, marketing strategies, staffing, and more, take some guesses and see what the big picture looks like. Then notice how those different elements mesh together.

It’s much like creating a song. Choose some notes and sequence them together. Then listen to the result. Does it sound harmonious? At first it probably won’t. But what’s creating the disharmony? Can you identify one misalignment? And can you fix that?

Then you keep tweaking and listening, tweaking and listening. Write out each new idea in great detail. Then read it back.

Sometimes you’ll get inspired ideas. Sometimes you’ll have to use a lot of perspiration, testing multiple ideas to find the right one.

My business plan is only 23 pages, but I probably wrote at least triple that to create it. For some parts of my business, intelligent solutions were fairly obvious. But in other areas, the right approach wasn’t obvious at all. My first stab produced a lot of text, but when I stepped back and read it within the context of the rest of the plan, it wasn’t harmonious. Perhaps my website would be delivering one message, but my products and pricing were likely to be incongruent with that message; the predicted consequence of that disharmony is that my business would end up attracting people who’d resist being customers — not a very sustainable approach.

This is a really important point to emphasize. To achieve convergence you can’t just sit and ponder until the right idea pops into your head. You have to take some guesses and run with them. Take a stab and fully document how it’s going to work, as if you’ve already made your final choice. Then look at it within the context of the rest of your plan. Does it seem harmonious? Does it support the other areas beautifully and elegantly?

My major rule here is that if it doesn’t feel elegant (or sound harmonious, or look beautiful — take your pick of modality analogies), it’s wrong. I know I have the right solution when a wave of awe washes over me, when I have to get up out of my chair and pace around so I can just be with that feeling for a while. Then I know I’ve figured out a key piece.

Deep Honesty

Deep honesty means being able to look at what you’ve planned and answer these questions:

• Is this an intelligent approach?
• Is this an honest approach?
• Is this a loving approach?
• Is this a strong plan, or am I caving to weakness and low standards?
• Is this a harmonious plan? Is it elegant and beautiful?
• Will this be a path of continued growth for me?
• Is this a courageous path, or am I playing it safe?

This is akin to asking a musician after many days of hard work, What do you think of your finished song? Will you get a fair and honest assessment, or will the answer be overly biased by the musician’s personal investment in the song?

There’s a temptation, especially when you’re tired after working so hard, to capitulate to a flawed plan. At some point you’ll want to say, This is good enough. You’ll want to label weak as okay, okay as good, and good as great. You’ll want to turn in B-quality work hoping to get an A.

But if the plan isn’t harmonious and elegant… if it doesn’t knock you back in your chair… if it doesn’t quicken your pulse like a beautiful song… you’re not done. You mustn’t say “it’s good enough.”

Hold out for the truly elegant solution — not by waiting, but by continuing to diligently explore until you find it.

How do you know when you’ve found a beautiful solution? If you have to ask, you haven’t found it yet. When you find it, you’ll know. If you don’t know that you’ve found it, you haven’t.

Listen to your very favorite song, one that you’d consider a masterpiece. When you listen to it, ask how you know it’s beautiful. You probably can’t articulate exactly why. You know that it’s good by how it makes you feel. If you have to seriously ask yourself whether the song is beautiful, you already know that it isn’t. Beauty is recognized, not analyzed.

When Martin Gore wrote the song “It’s No Good,” he knew he’d created something good (ironic given the title). He called Depeche Mode bandmate Andy Fletcher and told him, “I think I’ve written a number one.” And in many countries, it did hit #1. (source: DM biography Stripped).

This is how it is with a good business plan. When it’s finally done, you’re compelled to take a deep breath and say something akin to, “I think I’ve written a number one.”

When you’ve created a song you know is amazing, you can’t wait to share it with people. Similarly, when you have a business plan that you truly love, you can’t wait to implement it. But if your song (or your plan) is weak, then moving forward is more difficult. You’re more likely to procrastinate because you know you haven’t done your best work.

If you don’t love it, you’re not done. A plan you don’t love isn’t finished. How do you know you love it? Again, if you have to ask the question, you’re not there yet. A great plan will excite you.

What to Include

There are many guides to creating a business plan, but so many of them are filled with fluff, or they may be inappropriate for your particular business. Most of the ones I’ve seen are ridiculously archaic. In doing some research, I came across a business planning tutorial from Entrepreneur Magazine. Their template appears to be based on a manufacturing business. Seriously… what percentage of entrepreneurs are starting new manufacturing businesses these days? Perhaps they should note what century this is.

If you need to create a plan for investors, then you may want to follow conventions that they expect. But if, like me, you’re just creating a plan for yourself and your team members, then make sure the plan fits your business. Feel free to take advantage of online templates, but adapt them to your needs. If a section seems irrelevant, it probably is.

My plan has the following sections:

Overview – What’s the basic concept of the business? What is its purpose?

Business Description – What does the business actually do? Who are its customers? What are its products and services? What value does it provide? How does it earn income? What’s special or unique about it?

Market Strategies – What’s the target market for the business? How will you position it? How will you get the word out and reach potential customers? Why should anyone care about what you can provide? What’s your distribution strategy? What kind of PR will you do? Who’s your competition in the marketplace? What’s your strategy for dealing with competition? What’s your search engine strategy?

Pricing – What’s your pricing strategy? Do the numbers make sense? How will this affect your market positioning? This can be one of the most challenging sections to get right.

Social Media Strategy - How will you leverage social media? How does social media mesh with the rest of your business? Can you use it intelligently without seeing it become a distracting diversion? I haven’t seen any business plan templates that include a separate section for social media, but I include it because it’s a part of my business (blog, forums, Google+, etc), and it’s a growing segment that will likely be around for at least the rest of the decade. StevePavlina.com’s own discussion forums will soon pass 1 million messages posted.

Development Plan – How will you take the business from where it is now to where you want it to go? This is where you linearly plan out the steps to go from A to B. Document the key processes your business will need to execute. Identify the major risks, and decide how you’ll manage them. I prefer to spin off separate documents for this section, so it doesn’t become too bloated. For instance, I have other planning docs for my staffing plans, my process for creating and delivering workshops, my process for creating new products, etc. Those plans are 2-7 pages each, so if I included them in the main doc, it would probably be around 50 pages in length. Expect to spend a lot of time on this part of the plan.

Business Finances - In this part of the plan you can include things like balance sheets, income statements, and cash flow statements. You can analyze your costs as well. For a new business these will be projections (which are often just guesses). For an existing business you can use historical data and also include projections if you so desire. I don’t bother to include this section in my plans because my business has been profitable for years (October 1st, 2011 was its 7-year anniversary). I’m not trying to impress any investors, and I can use my accounting software to review my financials whenever I desire. I don’t bother to make future projections since I think it’s largely a waste of time. Another reason this section is largely irrelevant to me is because my business has a very low cost structure. My growth plans don’t require spending much cash, and the existing cash flow will cover it. I also have plenty of ways to quickly adapt to a cash crunch, so I simply don’t need to pay as much attention to this area. This would be an important area to fill out if you’re investing a lot of capital into the business, and you need to convince yourself and/or others that you have a sound plan for recouping that investment. But if your projections ultimately amount to guessing, why bother?

Closing – I like to include a half-page closing of just a few paragraphs to summarize the key strategic decisions. Since I already have a business, my main focus here is about what I need to start doing differently in order to implement the plan. What do I need to start doing? What do I need to stop doing? What do I need to change about the ways I’m doing things?

Thinking Holistically

Each part of a business plan is like a puzzle piece, and the entire plan is the puzzle. Your puzzle may have 100 pieces to it. But you may be able to identify 500 puzzle pieces. Many of those pieces will look like they fit the puzzle, but when you include them, it will feel like the puzzle isn’t quite coming together.

A holistic plan is one where all of the pieces support each other to create a singular picture. When you have this picture, your business will seem much simpler. Without this picture all you have is a jumble of pieces, each one demanding your attention. You don’t have the capacity to give all 500 or even all 100 puzzle pieces your full attention. But you can give your attention to the big picture, and if those 100 pieces all fit together beautifully, you’ll be giving them the right level of attention when you focus on the big picture.

As I created my business plan, I realized that the process requires a lot of deleting and letting go. There were some puzzle pieces I was very attached to, pieces I’d assumed should be important components of my business, but when I included them, I had to conclude they didn’t fit the big picture.

Letting go of the unneeded bits requires a lot of self-awareness. I had to pause many times and admit to myself that I didn’t feel good about a particular aspect of my plan. Occasionally I worked through the math behind an idea, or I tried to project the idea forward in time to think about the long-term consequences. In some cases I could see that 5-10 years down the road, I’d be left with a very undesirable situation, even though the first year looked great. Other times my intuition would be the dissenting voice. If any part of me disagreed with the idea, I knew I had to rework it or let it go. My commitment was to create a plan that made logical sense, that felt good, and that satisfied my intuition.

One thing that helped me tremendously was to do a 7-day all raw no-fat cleanse before I began this planning process. I started with a 24-hour water fast, and then for the next 6 days I ate nothing but fresh fruits and vegetables. No salt. No spices. No oils. No sweeteners. No overt fat sources like avocados, nuts, seeds, or coconuts. Just raw, water-rich fruits and veggies, water, and some occasional herbal tea (no caffeine). I lost 4.5 lbs during that week, but that was nothing compared to the mental clarity I experienced. After about 3 days, my mind became super sharp, as if I had more working memory available for conscious thought. I wasn’t even going to make a business plan at this time, but when I started working on other planning documents, I couldn’t help but notice how sharp my thinking was. I blazed through a day’s worth of work in a couple hours. When I tackled really hard problems that had challenged me for months or years, simple solutions were suddenly obvious. I felt a bit stupid for not seeing them earlier.

I realized I had to take full advantage of this heightened clarity for as long as it lasted, so I dove into this business planning project and worked each day till I was ready to drop. I’m so glad I did because I think I was able to do a better job in a week than I probably would have been able to do in a month if I didn’t have this extra clarity. If you’ve seen the movie Limitless, the experience was almost like taking one of those pills — not quite that good, but enough to notice a difference.

I’m still feeling this heightened clarity now, but I can tell it’s not quite as high as it was near the end of the cleanse week (which ended last Sunday). I’m probably still enjoying 60-70% of that boost though. I’ve never done a cleanse like this before (I’ve done low fat but never no fat), so this was a new experience for me. I’ll very likely do more cleanses like this when I want to regain that mental boost. The productivity I’ve been enjoying these past couple weeks has been amazing. I’d love to learn how to create this level of mental performance permanently, but I’ve had problems with eating very low-fat in the past for more than 2-3 weeks (like having my skin become so dry that my knuckles were cracked and bleeding).

I’m not saying you have to do a similar cleanse to create a decent business plan, but I am suggeting that it makes sense to be at your mental and physiological best when you do it. The sharper your mind is, the better your plan will be. This is incredibly challenging work that will stretch your brain to its limits. Give yourself every advantage you can.

Competitive Advantage

One of the most important parts of a good business plan is identifying your business’ competitive advantages. Many planning templates have you start by doing market research and looking for market gaps. Then you deliberately target those gaps to position your business competitively relative to existing businesses. You look at what the other players are doing, and you target where they’re weak.

I prefer to approach this from a different angle, especially for small Internet businesses. Start by looking at your personal strengths. How are you different from others? What can you do better than most people? Or what could you eventually learn to do better than most if you worked at it?

If you start with a strengths-based approach, then you need to massage your strengths into a competitive advantage that people will care about. A strength is probably something that matters only to you. It may take some work to transform it into a benefit for your customers.

One of my strengths is that I can develop quality content on many topics much faster than most of my competitors can. I can create in an hour what takes many of them half a day to a day to do.

Being a prolific content creator isn’t necessarily a competitive advantage, but it can be turned into one. For instance, by using this strength to write lots of quality free content, I was able to build very high web traffic in just a couple years. This was largely under my direct control too. I didn’t need Oprah to host me on her show. I didn’t need outside investors to give me money. Now I’m able to leverage this traffic to do things that most of my competitors can’t, such as delivering workshops without spending any money on marketing or promotion. I can also develop workshops faster, which allows me to launch several new workshops simultaneously instead of doing the same one or two over and over.

While you may not like the idea of thinking competitively, it’s wise to view your business through this lens and give it some careful thought. People have an incredible array of choices today. Why on earth should they buy from you instead of from someone else? If you can’t come up with a good reason, don’t expect your customers to figure it out for you. They will indeed buy from someone else.

If you can’t think of any major strengths, then what makes you different? What sets you apart from other people? If you embrace your differences, you may see that you can turn them into strengths. For instance, I live in Las Vegas, which is different than where most people live but not necessarily better. However, I’m able to turn this into a strength by doing workshops on the Las Vegas Strip, which is a fun and lively place. I take full advantage of the location by inviting people to do special exercises in the casinos and on the Strip and by encouraging people to hang out socially after hours, see shows, etc. This provides them with fun, memorable experiences that they won’t have at other people’s workshops. Living in Las Vegas is merely different, but with a little creativity it can be made into a strength.

What’s different about you or your business but not necessarily better? Can you massage one or more of those differences into a strength for your customers? Is anyone else already using similar differences to create a competitive advantage?

Thinking Long-term

Business planning will challenge you to think long-term, years and decades ahead.

I use a time frame of 10-20 years for most aspects of my plan. If I think only 6-12 months ahead, I fail to see how particular paths can magnify into problems down the road, and I overlook major opportunities. If I try to think more than 10-20 years ahead, my plan becomes too speculative, although I can think further out for some aspects that are likely to remain stable.

A lot can change in 20 years. If you had a PC 20 years ago, you probably had a 386 or 486 running MS-DOS 5.0 and possibly Windows 3.0. Windows 3.1 didn’t ship till 1992, and Intel didn’t ship the Pentium processor till 1993. No smart phones. No iPods or iTunes. No web browsers. No Google or Yahoo. No YouTube. No social media unless you liked BBSing. You may have had email, but you probably checked it using a slow dial-up modem. If you did use the Internet, you may have accessed it via CompuServe, Prodigy, or AOL. If you owned a video game system, it was probably a NES, Super NES, Sega Genesis, Turbo Grafx, or Neo-Geo… or Game Boy or Game Gear for a handheld. If you went to the movies, you’d have be wowed by the 3D special effects in Terminator 2.

So if so much is going to change, how can you possibly create a long-term plan that makes sense? Isn’t planning pointless in light of such uncertainty?

The purpose of planning isn’t to predict the future. The purpose of planning is to sharpen your present day decisions and to give your business an intelligent basis for growth.

It’s true that you can’t know what’s going to happen even a few years from now. Surprises will occur. Some of those surprises will help your business. Others will throw you for a loop. No matter what, you’re going to have to adapt as you go along.

But some aspects of the future may be fairly predictable. I feel good in predicting that personal growth will still be important in 20 years. It’s been around for thousands of years. It will probably survive a few more decades. Actually I predict it will be even more important in 20 years than it is today. For at least the last few decades, this field has been trending towards expansion, growing by many billions of dollars in annual revenue within the past five years alone. People are spending more on personal growth than ever before. And as far as I can tell, this increase is expected to continue for many more years.

One of the reasons personal growth will become increasingly important is that change is accelerating, especially technological change. The job market will continue to shift. To be competitive workers, people will need to adapt more quickly than ever to changing circumstances. They won’t be able to trust that they can just get a job and keep it for decades.

I predict that traditional educational systems like universities will become increasingly less relevant, failing to adapt quickly enough to marketplace changes. By the time a student graduates from a 4-year degree program, so much of what they learned will already be obsolete. This is already a major issue today, but it will continue to get worse. College grads will enter the workforce wholly under-prepared for the competitive realities of the workforce. This creates tremendous opportunities for the personal growth field (which overlaps traditional education) to fill in the gaps. There will be increasing demand for faster, more intelligent, more practical sources of education — forms that can adapt their curriculums more quickly to changing circumstances. Archaic elements like tenure only make it harder for old systems to adapt, so if those structures aren’t replaced with more flexible systems, those institutions will be out-competed by smart entrepreneurs who are willing to embrace change. To some degree this is already happening, and I expect this sort of change to continue.

The business opportunities in education alone are staggering. I’ve lost track of how many millionaires I’ve met who built successful businesses teaching people important skills that aren’t normally taught at traditional universities. By leveraging the Internet, they can do it at much less cost for their students, they can do it faster, and they can keep their programs modern and practical under today’s conditions.

All this growth and expansion will create more confusion and stress. Self-discipline and focus will become increasingly important qualities for people to develop since distractions will surely keep expanding. The demand for better management of one’s life will increase significantly.

You don’t need to be a technologist to make some reasonable predictions about the future. Just look at some of the general trends that have been building for years, and project them forward. Smart phones will get smarter and will become even more common. Tablet computers will become more powerful and more common. Data transfer rates will increase. The Internet will become much bigger. New major players will emerge. There will be more interests competing for your attention than ever before.

Some major breakthroughs will occur, and human beings may begin integrating tech-based enhancements onto or into their bodies, but the concept of growth won’t go out of style. Very likely it will become even more important. The fastest growing, fastest adapting people will have a major competitive advantage over those who are slow to adapt. This remains true whether the world of the future becomes more abundant or more scarce.

By making some reasonable predictions about the needs of future humans (or cyborgs, or whatever we become down the road), you can make decisions today that set yourself and your business on a path to long-term success. You can avoid getting bogged down in short-term thinking that leads you astray. You can build a business to grow in alignment with the direction that the world is heading, not where it’s been.

I can see pretty clearly that people are going to need a lot more help with focus, self-discipline, and self-control over the next several years. I can see that many traditional educational institutions are going to get worse in terms of their ability to teach students skills they’ll need in today’s workplaces, especially as they have their budgets slashed. I can predict that more people are likely to access my work on devices that aren’t a desktop computer or a laptop. This helps me make intelligent choices about how my business can serve those needs while remaining flexible and adaptable.

It’s important to get clear on the difference between your medium and your message. Your message can remain fixed, even under changing circumstances, but your medium must remain flexible if you want to have a competitive business across decades in time. My message is conscious growth, and that message can adapt to many different media. I don’t need to worry that blogging may someday go out of style. Ten years from now, most of our interactions may occur through a medium other than blogging. Growth is my business, not blogging, and growth can be communicated in many forms. With a plan based on your message, you don’t need to fear change; rather, you can be excited by all the new opportunities change can bring. (For more on this notion, read The Medium vs. the Message.)

Clarifying the Core

When you finally complete your business plan and clarify the big picture, you may feel a newfound sense of excitement about it. Ultimately the core of your business will probably be something very simple, perhaps something so simple that you were inclined to overlook it.

In my case when I saw the big picture, I realized that it ultimately came down to one simple principle. In order to have a business that really works, I have to focus first and foremost on pursuing my own path of growth. Making money doesn’t work as the main focus. Creating products or doing workshops can’t be the main focus either. In order to succeed, I have to make sure the business is tough on me. I can’t allow it to become so easy that I no longer feel challenged.

When I feel challenged, I’m much more motivated, so I work harder, and my business thrives. When it gets too easy or repetitive, I lose interest. If I don’t feel I’m growing by running the business, that’s a problem. So I have to run it in a way that keeps me in that sweet spot of challenge. That sweet spot, however, is a moving target. It’s not a static spot. And so I came to realize that the only way I can make my business viable and successful in the long term is that I have to relate to it as a vehicle for my own growth and development.

If I stop growing, my business loses its value to me. I begin to check out from it. I’ll turn my attention elsewhere to keep growing. And the business will ultimately suffer for that.

Intuitively I’ve known this all along, but it was difficult to see it till I worked through all the details and finally understood it logically too. It may seem like an emotional or even an irrational choice to define the primary purpose of my business as serving as a vehicle for my own growth. But when I worked through the consequences of that focus, I understood that if I make this my primary focus, then many other intelligent choices flow smoothly from there. I have to help other people grow in order to grow faster for myself — I can’t grow much in a vacuum. I have to innovate. I have to make the business financially sustainable since going broke isn’t going to help me as much as creating more abundance will. I already did the going broke thing more than a decade ago and don’t see much point in repeating it.

This simple understanding helped me remove many puzzle pieces I might otherwise have kept. I now see with much greater clarity that it’s unwise to try to expand my business in directions that won’t help me grow.

I don’t think this is particularly unique though. I think the appeal of entrepreneurship for many people is the long-term personal growth that’s gained from this path. That’s what keeps a business fresh and exciting for the founder. That’s what got me out of bed at 5am this morning. When that growth is no longer present, it’s a good time to sell or leave, so you can move on to new growth experiences.

What’s really interesting about this is that even though I mainly used the objective perspective to develop this business plan, the end result is nicely congruent with the subjective perspective as well. What does a business matter in a dream world? The subjective value is how the business affects you, the business owner. It doesn’t matter how much dream money you accumulate or how many dream characters you can count as customers. What matters is the story you’re creating and how it affects your character’s development. This is of course perfectly in line with what we should expect from the Equivalency Principle, which I’ll be covering in more detail at the Subjective Reality Workshop in less than two weeks.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Arbeit Macht Frei is a slogan on a sign above the entrance to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland (among other concentration camps used by the Nazis). It roughly translates as, “Work sets you free.” What the Nazis expressed with cruel irony, I say seriously. Embracing work is a path to freedom. Resisting work is a path to enslavement.

Much struggle is the result of hard work resisted, but hard work is more than just putting in the time. To ensure that hard work pays off, an intelligent effort is required.

Justifying Laziness

Laziness is an emotional impulse — a common desire to enjoy the pleasures of life before we’ve earned them — but it’s not a very effective or sustainable approach.

Do you need to earn the pleasures of life? That depends on what you want. If you want something that’s free or freely offered — by nature or by people — you can simply claim it. If you’re walking through a field and want to eat some of the wild plants, go ahead and enjoy nature’s bounty.

If, however, you desire something that was created by human hands (especially hands that expect to be fairly compensated for their efforts) such as a nice home or a speedy piece of technology, then laziness is largely a path to scarcity. Get used to being denied many of life’s benefits if your attitude is entrenched in laziness.

If you resist the emotion of laziness when you experience it, then the emotional feeling of laziness combined with your beliefs about what it means to be lazy will signal your brain to come up with plenty of logical-sounding justifications for your laziness-induced episodes, such as:

• Everything should be free without requiring effort.
• It’s okay to mooch off of others, just this one time.
• I can manifest whatever I want, even if I’m not willing to work for it.
• Laziness is more spiritual than hard work.

The problem with these justifications is that they don’t mesh well with reality. Laziness is an emotional impulse, not a logical choice. Justifying laziness with logic is like breaking your dishes in anger and then claiming that you did it because you needed new dishes. You broke your dishes because you were pissed and lost control. You slacked off because you felt lazy and unmotivated. Don’t overcomplicate this.

Regardless of your personal “shoulds,” there are lots of items and experiences in life that aren’t free but which can easily be attained by earning and spending money. A full wallet can do a lot of manifesting with grace and ease.

You can try manifesting your desires without lifting a finger. This can work for small things, and sometimes you’ll get lucky, but if you resist working towards your desires directly, it’s delusional to claim that you’re a vibrational match for receiving them.

If you want to improve your manifesting, at least meet the universe halfway. It’s hard to say you’re committed to experiencing a result if you aren’t actively moving towards it. Rest in the space of allowing when you get stuck and need inspiration, but when the next action is staring you in the face, taunting you to get moving, then release the parking brake and go, go, go!

Laziness isn’t spiritual — unless your intent is to cultivate an unrefined and slothful spirit. If that’s the case though, you should have incarnated as a rock… perhaps below the tree in my backyard where the birds like to poop.

Justifying laziness with seemingly logical explanations after the fact is pointless — pure nonsense used to explain a resisted emotion. The emotion of laziness requires no justification, however. Next time you’re feeling lazy, just admit that you’re feeling lazy, and leave it at that. Don’t try to justify it. If you decide to act on that emotion, make it clear to yourself that you’re acting emotionally. Be congruent with your emotional truth in that moment, and don’t try to layer it with nonsensical explanations to make your actions seem logical. Occasional laziness has its place — we all need a break sometimes — but if you resist it, you’re only going to expand it.

Recognize pervasive laziness for what it is — a block that stands between you and your desires. Don’t feed laziness with pointless justification. Feed your desires with action instead. If you’re going to indulge in laziness, then indulge in it fully and consciously till it runs its course.

Cultivating High Standards for Work

Hard work can be very enjoyable if you’re working towards desires of your choosing.

Let your desires motivate you towards action. Know that you can achieve them and that you will achieve them — if you’re willing to make a serious, committed effort. Don’t expect much progress though if you’re only willing to take a half-assed approach. Achieving meaningful goals requires that you commit your entire ass, not just one cheek.

It’s possible to work hard and not get much done if your standards for work are too low. These standards include:

• what kinds of work you’re willing to do
• how well you maintain focus and avoid distractions
• how well you’re leveraging your skills and talents
• what levels of quality you consider to be acceptable output
• favoring work you enjoy

If your standards for the kinds of work you do are low, you’ll get caught up doing a lot of pointless busywork that you don’t need to be doing and which doesn’t provide much social value. Doing work that’s beneath you can be a mild diversion for a while, but if you do too much of it, it’s just another time waster.

If you work with poor focus and succumb to distractions, you’re not working hard, and your results will suffer for it. Working for 3 hours with good purpose and focus is often much more productive than putting in 8 hours of distraction-laden half-work.

If you do too much work you’re not very good at, and you aren’t improving much, shift your work around to align more closely with your skills and talents. You’ll get more done in less time, and you’ll be able to take on bigger challenges as well. Regardless of whether you believe you work for yourself or for someone else, you ultimately choose the work that lands on your plate, either by direct consent or through silent approval.

Maintain high standards for the quality of your output. When you’re working on something important to you, do your best work. If you aren’t willing to do your best, then switch to work that demands the best of you.

Keep shifting your work in the direction of what you love to do. This week do more of what you love than you did last week. The more you enjoy your work, the easier it is to feel motivated. This kind of hard work feels good.

Think improvement, not perfection. Keep raising your standards over time. Strive to become more dedicated to your work this year than you were last year.

High standards require commitment. You cannot maintain high standards while simultaneously tolerating low standards. Start noticing where your standards are out of alignment with your best efforts, and make some real changes. Disconnect from those who are constantly dragging you down. Dump the uninspired work that makes you feel like procrastinating instead of contributing. Brainstorm a list of 20 things you can do to increase the quality of your work output; then implement one of those items immediately.

Hard Work and Growth

Holding public workshops is very challenging for me. I know my material well enough that I could surely wing it through a whole workshop, especially if it’s one I’ve done many times before, but I’m not willing to do that. Even if other people didn’t notice, I’d notice, and I wouldn’t feel good about it.

And so I work very hard at each workshop, from preparation to delivery to completion. I show up well prepared and well rested. I prepare myself mentally and emotionally for a demanding weekend. I arrive early, and I hang out during breaks and at the end of each day of the workshop to answer people’s questions. This work is very challenging, and I do the best I can each time, always trying to top what I did last time. After each workshop I do a postmortem to look for ways I can improve the experience for next time. I embrace the principle of kaizen — continuous improvement.

This is hard work, but it’s intelligent hard work. Small improvements in the workshop format and delivery can increase the value that people receive from it.

I could simply lock down the workshop format and coast for a while if I wanted to, but I wouldn’t respect myself as much if I did. If I’m going to teach others about personal growth, then I must embody that value. I want to keep growing and improving, both personally and professionally, and so my workshops must keep improving as well.

Perfection is an unattainable ideal. No human work product will be perfect. But growth and improvement are grounded and practical values. They’re achievable under real-world conditions. You can work smarter and harder today than you did yesterday. You can eliminate one distraction today that you succumbed to yesterday. You can do more work today that you enjoy and that matches your skills and talents. And this is all that’s required.

Make your best effort not to be perfect but to improve upon yesterday or last week. Take on one little change at a time. Find one small improvement you can make today, and do that day after day. After months and years of iteration, you’ll find your work much more productive, enjoyable, and rewarding.

Fulfillment

If you maintain high standards for your work, the work provides its own intrinsic rewards. Nevertheless, it’s well and good to be fairly compensated for your work.

A tremendous amount of neurological and psychological experimentation has shown that, barring abnormal conditions such as being a sociopath, our brains are hard-wired with a sense of social fairness. We typically reject approaches to life that are either too selfish or too selfless. People will even reject certain forms of personal gain if they perceive that those gains are unfair. Somewhere between thievery and sacrifice, we seek to find the right balance that keeps us feeling good about our exchanges with others.

These behaviors are normally subconscious. We don’t even think about them most of the time, but we often notice when such standards are violated, either by ourselves or by others.

I ask you to look within for a moment. Are you living up to your own standards of social fairness? How much value are you receiving from others, and what are you contributing in return? Are you too much of a moocher, taking more than you’re giving? Are you too much of a martyr, draining yourself to keeping giving even as you decline the best that life is willing to provide you?

I found that when I was mired in scarcity, I wasn’t contributing my best. I was usually working hard, but I wasn’t doing the kind of work that I felt close to my best potential contribution. And so my compensation was commensurate with that mismatch — weak.

When I shifted to work that I felt more congruent with, I didn’t have to put in as many hours, but I could still feel at the end of the day that I’d done my best. Writing one good article, even though it isn’t difficult work for me these days in terms of the skill required, is still an area where I invest a lot of hard work, and I seek ongoing improvement. I enjoy expressing inspired ideas through writing, and I share them through an efficient medium that allows people to receive them immediately after publication. I push myself to publish fresh content that can help people grow. I put a lot of myself into my work. I take risks. The payoff is that I respect myself, and I value what I’m contributing. I wouldn’t feel this way, however, if I constantly succumbed to laziness and then tried to justify it as “spiritual allowing” or some such nonsense.

When you respect your work and your contribution, it’s easier to allow yourself to receive the rewards of hard work. Abundance can flow through your life with less resistance. You’ll be able to receive more rewards if you make a bigger contribution because you’ll feel you deserve it; it won’t violate your biologically pre-programmed standards of fairness. But if you know deep down that you aren’t doing your best, some part of you will block that abundance. You’ll know you didn’t really earn it.

Earn It!

Fulfillment is earned, not bestowed. I know many people would like to convince themselves that this isn’t true, and I wish them the best of luck, but I still consider it a lazy and slothful mindset to expect the universe to open the floodgates of abundance in such cases. I’m privy to the results such people consistently achieve. Year after year they struggle to pay their bills. They deny themselves wonderful experiences due to lack of funds — funds that they could be earning if they’d finally devote themselves to intelligent hard work. I share from direct experience as well. I can look to my own past and see how weak my results were when I subscribed to this mindset.

It’s a serious character weakness to think you can get something of value for little or nothing, to believe that life will flood you with abundance when you won’t commit yourself to delivering your best contribution in exchange. In fact, it’s a safe bet that you’ll subconsciously sabotage yourself from being in such a place for long. You won’t allow yourself to receive what you don’t feel you’ve earned. To receive life’s bounty, you must know without a doubt that you deserve it.

I do believe it’s well and good to adopt an abundance mindset. But this mindset isn’t to be found behind Door #1: Laziness, Hope, and Wishful Thinking. It’s only behind Door #2: Intelligent Hard Work, Doing Your Best, and Making a Meaningful Social Contribution.

Do Your Best

Are you doing your BEST? Not just working hard… Not just putting in the time… Not just showing up…

Are you doing your personal best to grow and improve today? Are you besting what you did last week? Are you working on the best project you can be working on to make a meaningful social contribution?

If you aren’t doing your best, how can you shamelessly expect the best in return? If you output mediocrity, expect to receive that. That’s only fair, isn’t it?

If you truly do your best, then you have good cause to expect the best in return. Time and again you’ll see that when you really do your best, the universe will back you up. Social support will come to you. Resources will arrive. Obstacles will be overcome. Encouraging signs will appear. Life will flow with grace and ease.

Arbeit Macht Frei contains another level of irony. On the surface it may appear that hard work is in conflict with freedom. But the truth is that in order to extract real value from your freedom, you must make a serious effort. Freedom is a blank canvas. Hard work makes it a masterpiece.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

If you haven’t read the previous post yet, I suggest you read it first, so you can better understand the context of this one. I know it’s a lot of reading, but it will be worth your while.

Stretch Goals

For the sake of convenience, let’s use the term “stretch goals” to refer to the types of goals for which you aren’t already a good match.

Such goals are of course relative to the person setting them. Buying a new car wouldn’t be a stretch goal for someone who can easily afford it, but it could be a stretch goal for someone who’s broke and struggling with unemployment. The first person can simply walk into a dealership, pick a car, pay cash for it, and drive away with it. The second person may be looking at tougher challenges to overcome.

Jack Canfield likes to refer to these as breakthrough goals, perhaps because when you achieve such a goal, you’re breaking through to a whole new level of being.

Vibrational Alignment

People don’t experience the same level of difficulty in achieving similar goals because each person has a different degree of vibrational alignment (or lack of alignment) relative to the goal.

A goal is only easy or hard relative to your vibe. Some vibes are weak matches for certain goals. Other vibes are strong matches. The more strongly your vibe matches a goal, the more easily and effortlessly you can achieve that goal.

For example, if I wanted to earn an extra $10K this month, that would be a fairly easy goal for me to achieve. I could probably do something this weekend that would generate an extra $10K by the end of the month. My vibe is already a good match for receiving such sums. It feels normal to me. But since the goal wouldn’t cause me to stretch, it isn’t very inspiring either. As far as goals go, it’s a bit dull.

For someone else, earning an extra $10K this month might be a seemingly impossible fantasy. Their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors create a different vibe. Whereas I see ease and simplicity, they might see struggle, obstacles, or lack of opportunity. They might also become overly excited about the idea of earning an extra $10K (which suggests it isn’t normal for them), thereby positioning the goal in the realm of fantasy instead of possible reality.

To yet another person, the goal of earning an extra $10K this month might be right in the middle — enough of a challenge to be interesting and motivating, but not so challenging as to appear impossible. For this person it’s a stretch goal. They see it’s possible, but they aren’t sure how to make it a reality yet.

Your vibe largely determines which goals you’re even willing to set. If your vibe is too far out of alignment with a particular goal, you’ll never bring yourself to set such a goal. That would be self-delusion at best, like a scarcity-minded person setting the goal to become a billionaire. The mind won’t believe the goal, so the person won’t take the actions needed to get there.

When your vibe is a very close match for a goal, you probably won’t even think of it as a goal. It will simply be a task to do, like making dinner or taking your dog for a walk. For me, writing a new article is a basic task which I often do for the sheer enjoyment of writing. So we could say that my personal vibe is a very close match for the goal of writing an article.

When your vibe is somewhere in the middle, you have a stretch goal. Your vibe is enough of a match for the goal to enable you to set the goal and take it seriously, but not yet enough of a match to experience the achievement of the goal.

One of the best reasons to set goals and work to achieve them is the vibrational shift you must undergo in order to achieve new goals, especially stretch goals.

Matching vs. Mismatching Vibes

There are two types of vibes to think about with respect to any goal:

1) Vibes that match the goal

2) Vibes that don’t match the goal

When your vibe is in the first category, then achieving your goal is relatively easy. You will still take action, but your actions will flow easily, and they won’t feel terribly effortful. Taking action will often feel like play. The actions you choose will be the right actions that will move you closer to your goal. You’ll probably experience many synchronicities too. Great opportunities will come to you. You’ll see good evidence that real progress is happening. Other people will notice that you’ve shifted.

When your vibe is in the second category, the path to your goal will seem difficult and littered with obstacles. You’ll notice the obstacles and will probably feel a strong desire to procrastinate, and you’ll often indulge in distractions. You will identify actions to take, but they won’t be the right actions. When you take action, you’ll often feel resistance, either from inside yourself or from the external world. Getting to your goal will feel like work more than play. You may invest a lot of time and effort into your goal, but you probably won’t get there. Months or years may pass, and you’ll have little to show for it.

These are the extremes. Depending on the degree of alignment between your vibe and your goal, you’ll probably fall somewhere in the middle. Some aspects will look like the first example, while other aspects will resemble the second situation. This means that your vibe is a partial match for your goal. Some parts of your vibe are very well aligned with your goal, while other parts are opposing your goal.

Stop Using Force

Now here’s the tricky part to understand, so please read this next bit carefully.

When your vibe is a good match for your goal, you’ll naturally have a sense of the right actions to take, and synchronicities will show up to guide you as needed. You won’t have to struggle to figure out what to do next. Most of the time, the next action to take will be fairly obvious, and it will feel good to you. It will be an action you want to take. You won’t have to force it.

However, when your vibe is a poor match for your goal, you’ll come up with some actions to take, but they’ll be the wrong actions. You won’t have a strong inner feeling of clarity about them. You’ll have a lot of doubts. It will be hard to choose a path, and even when you do choose, you won’t feel certain that it’s the right path for you. When you do take action, you’ll be acting under a cloud of doubt and uncertainty. You’ll also have a strong tendency to procrastinate and delay.

A common prescription for people in the second situation is to use force. Take more action. Fight procrastination. Push yourself harder. Eliminate distractions. Focus! Do it now! Get to work!

This doesn’t work well. It’s like trying to push two opposing magnets together. Even if you do achieve a goal this way, it will be difficult to sustain it, and a fall is inevitable. Your vibe and the goal are constantly resisting each other. As soon as you let down your guard, they repel each other.

Imagine trying to get up at 5am when your vibe isn’t a match for being an early riser. Instead of popping out of bed feeling alert and refreshed, you feel tired and sleepy and hit the snooze button. When you are a match for such a goal, however, you can arise early with ease. The goal requires no struggle at all. It’s just your normal wake-up time. No big deal.

It’s safe to say that if a goal seems like a big deal to you, this indicates that your vibe isn’t yet a match for that goal.

When you notice that you’re trying to force a goal, stop for a moment and think about it. Why is this such a struggle for you? Why are you fighting what you claim to desire? Why are you sabotaging yourself? Why do you keep procrastinating?

Ask yourself, Do I really want this goal? Is this a good goal for me at this time? It’s okay if it’s a stretch goal. Just be sure it’s something you really want. It’s perfectly okay to desire a goal that may seem like it’s beyond you right now.

If you realize that you don’t really care enough about this goal to take it seriously, then let it go. If you don’t desire to do what it takes to become a match for the goal, there’s no point in fussing over it. Drop it, and accept the consequences of that decision.

I often see this pattern with people who go to college because their parents expect them to. They pick a major that others will approve of. But they don’t enjoy the coursework, and they don’t even want to work in that field. That’s a no-brainer recipe for vibrational resistance. Then these students wonder why they procrastinate on their studies and don’t feel motivated. Sure it takes courage to choose your own path, but you aren’t here to live up to other people’s expectations.

Now if you still feel good about the goal and you still want the outcome, that’s perfectly fine too. Just because you aren’t a match for the goal doesn’t mean you should drop it. Some of the best goals will require you to shift your vibe in order to achieve them. It could be said that the vibrational shift is an even greater accomplishment than the external goal. For example, aligning your vibe with abundance can be a greater accomplishment than earning some specific sum of money. Once you’ve integrated the vibe of abundance, your whole life is transformed, not just your finances.

Orbiting vs. Achieving Your Goal

Let’s assume for now that you have a goal that you like, but you aren’t yet a vibrational match for it. What’s the next step?

Well, many people would say that the next steps are to make plans and start taking action, but for a goal of this nature, that approach doesn’t work well. It will usually cause you to run in circles.

It’s like trying to push two opposing magnets together. You can push with great force, but that isn’t a wise idea. If you want the magnets to stick, then it’s easier if you flip one of the magnets around. If you do that first, then you can pretty much let go, and the magnets will attract each other. You may give them a nudge, but forcing them together isn’t necessary.

Now this is a very simple analogy, so let’s expand it a bit. Your vibe is much more complex than a single magnet. Your vibe with respect to any single goal is like 100 pairs of magnets. Some magnets have their poles aligned to attract each other, but some are repelling each other. So when you try to achieve your goal by taking direct action, sometimes you’re in the flow, and sometimes you’re out of flow. Some parts of your vibe are pulling the goal towards you. Other parts of your vibe are pushing the goal away.

You don’t have to be in perfect 100% alignment to achieve your goal. You just have to make enough shifts such that the overwhelming force is attractive rather than repulsive. But it has to be strong enough to overcome inertia and any repelling forces.

If there’s too much repelling force or inertia and not enough attracting force, then you’ll fall into the trap of running in circles when you try to take action.

The Earth and the Moon attract each other gravitationally. But they don’t crash into each other. The Moon just runs in circles around the Earth. But what if we could somehow slow down or stop the Moon’s motion relative to the Earth? Then the Earth and the Moon would attract each other till they collided. This would be bad for people on Earth, but the Earth and Moon would become one. Similarly, if you wish to become one with your goals, you’ll need to work with the various forces and motions that are present until a collision course with your goals becomes inevitable. This is essentially what it means to become a vibrational match for your goal. If you’re not a match, you’ll end up orbiting your goal instead of reaching it, despite having a lot of gravity on your side.

Understanding the New Vibe

Now here’s another tricky part, so read this carefully and ponder it a bit.

The #1 reason people struggle to achieve their stretch goals is that they don’t have a solid understanding of the matching vibe.

Because they don’t understand what the new vibe looks like and feels like, they don’t understand the right actions to take. So they take the wrong actions, they struggle, and they get results they don’t want.

The most important thing you can do to achieve a stretch goal is to deepen and clarify your understanding of the matching vibe. What will your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors be like when you’ve already achieved the goal? What kind of person will you be when you’re already there?

Someone who earns $1 million per year doesn’t have the same vibe as someone who earns $50K per year. The thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of each person are very different. If you’re earning $50K per year, and you set a stretch goal to earn $1 million per year, the first thing you must do is study and understand the vibe you’d be emitting if you were already at the $1 million per year level. It will be very different than your current $50K vibe. Energetically speaking, you won’t be the same person.

Your greatest risk of failure stems from the problem of projecting your $50K vibe onto the $1 million goal. You can’t use a $50K vibe to create the action list to achieve this goal. You have to use the $1M vibe to create the action list, and you can’t do that until and unless you understand the $1M vibe well enough.

Most people don’t do what it takes to understand the new vibe. They project their old vibes forward in time, but that doesn’t work. It only keeps them orbiting the same goal, running in circles for years.

You must figure out which of your 100 internal magnets are aligned with the new goal’s magnets, and which aren’t aligned. When you dive into action without this understanding, the odds of success are very low. The opposing magnets will simply repel each other, and you’ll be kept in orbit indefinitely. The closer you get to your goal, the stronger the opposing force will be. This may look like you’re sabotaging yourself each time you get close to your goal. Forcing it won’t work. It will only frustate you. Then you’ll say to yourself things like, “Why is this taking so long? I should be much further along by now.” or “Why do I keep procrastinating?”

How to Learn the New Vibe

There are many ways to deepen your understanding of the new vibe that pairs with your goal. Here are some suggestions.

First, be humble as you enter this process. Admit that you don’t yet understand the new vibe. If you did understand it, you’d already be coasting effortlessly to your goal. Accept that if you’re struggling, it’s because you don’t understand the new vibe well enough. You might also be clinging to some false assumptions about it.

Try to set aside any preconceived notions about the new vibe. Start with a blank slate. Open your mind to new possibilities. Don’t pretend to know something you haven’t yet experienced. If you aren’t already living it, it’s safe to say that you don’t know it yet.

It may help to think about a goal you’ve already achieved. Remember your vibe before and after the goal was achieved. Think about the goal of learning to drive a car. Notice how different your vibe was before you learned. It probably seemed like a big deal. You may have put the goal on a pedestal. You may have felt a bit stressed about it. But as you got closer to achieving this goal, your vibe shifted to the point where driving seemed like no big deal. If your vibe didn’t shift, you still wouldn’t be able to drive yet. We could say that practice is what helped to shift your vibe, but we could also say that you shifted your vibe by spending time with people who already had the right vibe (i.e. experienced drivers), and you picked up the right vibe (not just the know-how) from them. Once you matched the vibe of a confident driver, you could drive confidently too.

This leads us into the next step. If possible, identify people who’ve already achieved the goal you want to achieve (or something similar). Buy their books, and read them for starters. Join clubs where these people are members. Do whatever it takes to get face time with such people. Don’t admire such people from a distance. You need to connect with them in person, and preferably one on one. This means not over the phone and not over the Internet. In person means in person. This is easier than it sounds if you make it a priority. When you hang out with such people in person, you’ll learn so much about the new vibe you wish to create. Some inner shifts will happen automatically. This is very important. Don’t blow it off unless you prefer to orbit your goals instead of experience them.

So if you want to be a millionaire, go to places where millionaires hang out, and spend time getting to know them. Talk to them about money. Don’t worry about getting how-to tips. You won’t be able to apply them yet anyway. Instead, get a sense of the other person’s thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about money. Contrast their vibe with yours. What’s different about their vibe? Why is it that they’re a match for having lots of money, and you aren’t? The vibrational differences tell the story.

If you’re shy or socially dorky, go to a park or coffee shop in a wealthy neighborhood. Sit down, shut up, and observe. Listen to people’s conversations. Do this again and again until you start getting a clear sense of the vibe of such people. Contrast their vibe with yours. What’s different about them? Are you willing to embrace this vibe?

Notice that such people don’t usually say, “Holy frak! I can’t believe I have all this money! It’s so unreal!” Having lots of money is just normal and routine for them. It’s no big deal. That’s the vibe you want to understand. If you think having a lot of money is a big deal, that’s why you don’t have it. That’s the vibe of wanting money and not having it. The vibe of having money is totally different.

Next, spend time visualizing yourself as already having the vibe needed to achieve your goal. You’ll learn about this vibe partly from being around people who’ve already achieved your goal. Visualization can help you personalize the vibe. Other people will give you clues with respect to where you need to make shifts, but your vibe is uniquely your own. Your wealth vibe, for instance, won’t be quite the same as someone else’s. However, you’ll still have a lot in common with other wealthy people when you make the shifts that work for you.

I recommend spending about 10 minutes per day visualizing how your life will be different once you’ve achieved your goal. How will you really think, feel, and behave on the other side of that goal? Try to make as few adjustments as possible to your current vibe, just enough to realistically see yourself in that situation and having it feel normal to you. This is important. Realize that if you’re going to achieve this goal in reality, then it’s still you on the other side, with all your dorkiness coming along for the ride. It’s not your higher self or your ideal self. It’s just a slightly adjusted version of your normal, everyday self.

Try doing it like this. Imagine a scene that represents your goal. Now put your current self into that scene. This is the person you are right now, your normal self. Imagine yourself going through that scene as if it were completely real and happening right now. You just quantum leaped right into it. Do your best to imagine this not as a dream or fantasy, but as solid reality, like a real event that’s happening today, perhaps a few hours from now.

Now let your character interact with the scene. How would you realistically react to what’s happening? What you want to understand is your character’s vibrational interaction with the vibe of the scene. This will tell you where some of your magnets are pointing in the wrong directions. The more realistic you can make this scene, the more you’ll learn from it.

Daydreaming isn’t the same thing as visualizing. You can visualize yourself being in a sex scene for the purpose of taking care of yourself, but that isn’t the same thing as visualizing a sex scene that you actually want to experience in reality. Your mind can tell the difference between a fantasy visualization and a serious goal. Otherwise you’d manifest lots of sex just by imagining it. You can imagine anything you want, but it won’t become real until you match the vibe of that experience too, and that part takes a bit more work.

For example, suppose one of your goals is to live in a mansion and have a staff of servants. In most of your visualizations, you imagine how great it will be, but that doesn’t get you any closer to your goal. However, when you take the time to imagine it as 100% real, and you plop your current self into that new reality, you notice some issues coming up.

Maybe you feel nervous and anxious living in such a big place. Perhaps you feel uncomfortable telling your servants what to do — maybe you feel bad about the idea of other people cleaning your toilets and making your meals. Maybe you also feel some excitement about having such a cool place to live, but that also suggests a mismatch because if you actually lived there, it would probably feel normal to you. You might appreciate your home, but you probably wouldn’t feel excited about living there every day.

Take notes about these experiences. Write down things like: I don’t feel good about paying 20x bigger tax bills. I don’t like telling other people what to do. I’d feel stressed if I had to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars per year minimum just to cover my expenses. What are the thoughts, beliefs, and feelings you have that indicate you’re still a mismatch for your goal?

Sometimes it’s the extended consequences of the goal, rather than the goal itself, that reveal a lack of alignment. For example, if you want to be a famous actor, what do you think about being in the public eye? Can you handle public criticism from people who don’t know you? Can you accept that as being a normal part of your life, or does that seem like something you’d want to avoid? If you want to achieve a goal, you must accept the logical consequences of that goal. If you resist the consequences, you resist the goal.

Now ask your mind to show you what vibrational adjustments you need to make to be congruent with your goal. Imagine that your character is downloading a new personality subroutine. Let your adjusted self interact with the scene anew. Allow your mind to keep making tweaks until your character seems to be a comfortable, natural fit for the scene. Get a sense of your character’s new vibe. What’s different about it? What had to be changed?

Again, take some notes that you can refer to later. You may notice things like: My new character is more confident. My new character jokes with the staff; s/he appreciates them but also retains an air of authority. My new character feels that it’s easy to earn enough to cover all the expenses; this isn’t a big deal.

A very helpful final step is to broadcast your desires. Share your goal openly with the people in your life, and talk about it seriously as if you intend to make it real ASAP. Notice how the people in your life react to your announcement. This will quickly reveal which relationships in your life are helping you become a match for your goal and which are holding you back. You’ll need to drop or transform the relationships that will otherwise hold you back. Don’t get clingy since that just holds everyone back and builds resentment. Accept that you’re here to grow. You’ll have the opportunity to connect with much more compatible partners anyway, so no worries about being alone.

Turning Repulsion Into Attraction

This process will help you create a vibrational to-do list. This is even more important than your action list. Once you take steps to adjust your vibe to be in harmony with your goal, the action steps will begin to flow rather easily.

What’s a vibrational to-do list? It’s a list of the personal development work you need to do in order to become a match for your goal.

Ultimately it will include three types of growth experiences:

1. You’ll shed limiting beliefs and perspectives that align with the old vibe, replacing them with new truths that align with the new vibe.
2. You’ll shed negative relationships that are bad match for your new vibe, and you’ll add positive new relationships that are well aligned with it.
3. You’ll stop feeding your power to excuses and obstacles, and you’ll begin emitting a more powerful vibe that draws your goal increasingly near.

These personal growth experiences are the inner magnets that you must re-align. Let’s consider each category in turn.

New Truths

Suppose your goal is to earn $1M per year. That’s about $80K per month. If you currently earn $50K per year, then this may seem like a very large sum. But if you were a match for this goal, then $80K per month must look and feel like a normal sum to you. It’s just your regular paycheck. There’s nothing special about it. If you’re going to turn it into a big deal, then you’re pushing this goal away.

So your new truth might be, “Earning $80K per month is normal. It’s easy and natural for me.”

To help you align with this goal, you might go to your bank, withdraw $1000 cash, and carry it around in your wallet every day. That may feel uncomfortable at first, but keep doing it till it feels normal and natural to you. How does it feel to carry two hours’ worth of pay in your wallet? It’s no big deal. Embrace your new truth, and it will help you create a more abundant vibe. If you want to earn 20x more money, then you need to change your relationships to money by a factor of 20. A $1000 sum in your new vibe is equivalent to a $50 bill in your old vibe.

If you can’t make little adjustments like this to get started, then you aren’t yet serious about your goal, are you? Are you going to make it real or not? If you’re going to make it real, then you’d better get used to dealing with larger sums of money as if it’s a totally normal experience for you. So start building that comfort now. Otherwise you’ll repel those larger sums because you’ll freak yourself out when they start to show up.

New Connections

Suppose your goal (once again) is to go from earning $50K to $1M per year. When you imagine yourself as already there, it becomes clear that some of your current friends won’t be able to handle it. So part of your inner work will be to either (1) drop these people from your life, so they stop blocking you, or (2) have some deep conversations to transform these relationships, so these people can get behind your goal.

Build new relationships too. What kinds of people would you have in your life if you already achieved your goal? Start building those relationships now. They’ll actually help you get there. Don’t do the “I’m not worthy” thing. If you’re going to make this goal a reality, then you’re going to have to overcome those feelings of unworthiness. You might as well start now.

The same goes for family members. In my early 20s when I decided to start my own business, I distanced myself from my parents and siblings because they were so immersed in the employee mindset. I had to be around other entrepreneurs to understand the vibe of success on this path.

Don’t cling to relationships that aren’t a good match for your goal. This is an area where you may really have to do some house-cleaning. Yes, you’ll see a lot of relationships come and go. That’s part of life. You’ll get used to it. If you want to be a match for having lots of growth experiences, then you’d better embrace the idea of seeing your personal relationships shift around a lot. Otherwise, you’ll be a match for stagnation and foot-dragging. This sort of shifting is nothing to fear. It can be quite exhilarating to connect with a variety of cool people in your lifetime. Clinginess isn’t a vibrational match for growth.

Embracing Your Power

The third area for personal development work is to notice where you’re giving your power away, and begin to reclaim your power. It’s time to stop making excuses, stop blaming others, and accept the full consequences of what it will take to achieve your goal.

Suppose you want to have a threesome (sexually). Obviously there are plenty of people on the planet who are willing to engage in this, so it’s certainly possible for you to have such an experience if you’re willing to do what it takes to make it a reality. It’s certainly not that difficult action-wise. Ask enough people, and you’ll get some yeses. Arrange a time to get together, and have fun.

And yet despite the simplicity of this goal, you can massively overcomplicate it if you give your power away.

Suppose you ask your current partner, and she says no. You can blame her for being a stick in the mud, or you can try to convince her (a form of force), but you’ll probably end up with a bad experience if you go that route.

You can also accept your partner’s no and learn to live without the threesome. But if this is a strong desire for you, then this will only build resentment. Settling for less than you desire certainly won’t lead to greater happiness and fulfillment. It may appear to be a more socially acceptable choice in some circumstances, but that’s just another instance of your feeding your power to something that blocks you (the delusion of being socially accepted by others in this case).

The deeper inner work is to ask, Why am I with a partner who doesn’t naturally want the same things I do? Why am I settling for less than I desire? Why am I being so clingy with someone who wants different experiences than I do?

To make the threesome real (not merely a fantasy), this inner work has to be done. These apparent conflicts need to be resolved. You have to learn to use your power to feed your desires, not obstacles.

If you were already a strong match for having threesomes, you could make one happen this week, perhaps even today. I know someone who claims to have had 500+ threesomes. For him it’s a fun but also an easy thing to experience. He can go out and make it happen with two women he just met, and he certainly doesn’t look like a swimsuit model. While most people block such an experience from happening, he directs his power to creating the experiences he wants to have.

I hope you can see that logistically, this really isn’t that difficult of a goal. The action steps are pretty basic, mostly involving some communication. But if your vibe isn’t a good match for such an experience, then it may appear to be virtually impossible for you. It will seem like the external world is opposing you, but that isn’t the case at all. Your own vibe is what’s creating the mismatch. If you adjust your vibe enough, the goal becomes easy and straightforward. It may even happen on its own without your having to ask.

Achieving stretch goals requires fixing the magnets that aren’t turned the right way. This includes dropping limiting beliefs and false assumptions, dumping disempowering relationships, and letting go of excuses and blame. If you avoid this inner growth work and try to jump ahead to cause-and-effect action steps, you’ll simply orbit your goal.

Do the Personal Growth Work

Once you’ve identified the personal growth work you must go through in order to become a match for your goal, then get busy working on it. If you’re conscious about it, you can compress lessons that would otherwise take years into a few months or weeks, creating big shifts in a short period of time.

There are tons of methods you can use to do this personal growth work. This website is filled with them. Here are some examples:

1. Journal to gain new insights (contrast the old vibe with the new one).
2. Have deep conversations with people who are intelligent and aware.
3. Meditate on feelings of gratitude and appreciation.
4. Keep visualizing yourself as already there; feel it as real.
5. Disconnect from people who aren’t a match for your goal.
6. Join a club that will help you align your vibe with your goal.
7. Move to a new city that’s a better match for your goal.
8. Replace the books on your bookshelf with books that match the new vibe.
9. Donate possessions that aren’t a good match for the new vibe.
10. Catch yourself giving your power away, and reclaim it by directing it back towards your desires.
11. When someone says no to your desires, say no to that aspect of your relationship with them (or to the whole relationship, if necessary).
12. Create new empowering belief statements to replace old limiting beliefs.
13. Hang out regularly with people who can naturally help you align with your goal (i.e. people who inspire you in that direction).
14. Intend and expect to reach your goal.
15. Use the word “when” instead of “if” when talking about your goal.
16. Blog about your goal or talk about it publicly (this will reveal mismatching relationships and help attract compatible connections too).
17. Conduct experiments like 30-day trials to immerse yourself in the experience of a new vibe.
18. Change your diet, clothes, etc. to eat, dress, and live as if you’re already there.
19. Put up pictures or other inspirational messages that represent the new vibe.
20. Read books written by others who emit a vibe that’s compatible with your goal.
21. Go to lectures, workshops, seminars, and retreats that will help immerse you in the new vibe.
22. Forgive people who’ve wronged you, and release the hurt and resentment.

I think you get the idea. The exact processes you use here aren’t that important. Last year I went to a talk where Joe Vitale asked everyone in the room (a room full of professional speakers and authors) to shout out their favorite personal growth processes. He had two people writing them down on a large white board. Within 10 minutes the board was completely filled, and they still kept going by writing over the previous items. This drove home the point that there are countless ways to do inner work.

Use your favorite three-letter acronym process. Get therapy. Poke yourself with your finger a few times. Go to Sedona and consult with the vortex aliens. Whatever. The specific process doesn’t matter. What works best for me may not work at all for you, and vice versa. The important thing is that the processes you use are helping you become a match for your goal. Don’t stick with a process that isn’t giving you results.

Results in this area may involve a lot of inner processing, but they should still create tangible effects. For many years I’ve wanted to travel a lot more. But I didn’t have the right vibe for a travel-rich lifestyle. I had limiting beliefs about how difficult it would be to make travel a regular part of my life. I had home-centric relationships that didn’t support a travel-rich lifestyle. I gave my power away to reasons (i.e. excuses) for why I couldn’t travel as much as I wanted to. I did some serious inner work to resolve those blocks, and as I did this, travel began showing up in my life very easily. Now it seems normal and natural to travel often. Two weeks ago I was in Canada. This week I spent a couple days in Sedona (consulting with the vortex aliens, no less). And next week I’ll be in New Orleans. Travel has become an easy and natural part of my life. It took some inner work to integrate the frequent traveler vibe, but I’d say it’s pretty well integrated now. I like being a travel slut.

When you’ve integrated the new vibe well enough (perfection isn’t necessary), you’ll find that the right actions begin to flow with ease. It feels natural and casual. There’s little or no resistance. When you want to experience something that’s aligned with your vibe, you just create it. It’s no more difficult than making a meal.

Now here’s the rub. The personal growth work will not be easy. It may be very challenging. But this is the area where you’ll make the fastest progress when working towards goals that you aren’t already a good match for experiencing. Once you resolve the alignment issues, the goal almost takes care of itself. You won’t have to worry so much about problems like procrastination and self-sabotage.

If you want to get through this part faster, read my book Personal Development for Smart People. It covers the 7 fundamentals of personal growth and how to speed up the process, regardless of what type of goal you’re trying to achieve. I’ve alluded to 3 of those 7 principles in this article. For the others I have to refer you to the book because it would take way too long to explain them properly in an article (and this one is already pushing 8000 words). A full book was necessary to do this topic justice.

Avoid Delusional Role Models

I feel very fortunate because I have a privileged perspective that isn’t available to most people. I get to observe lots of people going after different goals, and I get to see who succeeds and who flounders. And because I’m exposed to all this raw data, I’m able to learn patterns that most people don’t have the opportunity to learn within their lifetimes.

One thing that’s become very clear is that when people succeed, they tend to get there by taking actions that are easy and natural for them. Force doesn’t work well. Force can sometimes get you to a goal, but the form of the goal will be a bit off from what you wanted, and it will be hard to hold onto it. When you achieve a stretch goal using this vibrational alignment process, however, it’s easier to hang onto it afterwards — and to further build upon it. And you’ll enjoy the process of getting there so much more.

This is a very personal process, however. You have to keep coming back to what works for you. You have to stop projecting false imaginings onto other people, especially people you’ve never met. That’s delusional thinking that will only push your goal further away.

For example, if you set a goal to become a millionaire, search your thoughts for the kinds of images that come up. What associations do you already have in your memory? Where did you learn them? Are they accurate? Do they apply to you? Did you pick up fictional characters from TV or film for your role models in this area? When you think of millionaires, do you imagine Ebeneezer Scrooge or Gordon Gecko? Do you imagine millionaires that you’ve only seen on TV but which you’ve never met face to face? Such mental clutter will screw up your vibe in this area.

Go back to basics and re-learn the right vibe from scratch. Admit that you don’t really understand the true vibe of what it’s like to be an actual millionaire in the real world. I have many millionaire friends, and none are anything like the way I’ve seen wealthy people portrayed in fictional books, TV shows, or movies. Their real vibes are totally different than the fictional versions. Their vibes are also quite different than what I’d have expected based on interviews I’ve seen with other millionaires, or from what I’ve read in books written by millionaires.

When you only experience certain people through indirect media, don’t pretend that you know the person being represented. It’s too easy to project false assumptions and beliefs onto someone else when you only connect from a distance. If you later interact with such people one-on-one and face-to-face, those interactions will often throw you for a loop. The other person’s vibe won’t be what you expected.

Obviously I’ve shared many details about my life via my blog, but it’s safe to say that someone who spends 30 minutes chatting with me one-on-one in person will know me significantly better than someone who’s read all of my articles but has never met me in person. The second person will have a lot more information about me, but the first person will have a much better understanding of my actual vibe. I feel the same about others. If I haven’t met you in person, then I don’t claim to know you at all.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve met someone in person who’s clearly shy and introverted, but from their blog postings, you’d think they were a social butterfly. In most cases, they didn’t intentionally create a false image to deceive people. It’s just that their real vibe doesn’t get transmitted over the Internet. This leads people to project all sorts of false assumptions onto them, making it hard to use such people as good role models.

One of the reasons it’s so important to favor in-person communication (especially when you want to understand a new vibe) is that your skin cells are covered with tiny antennae that pick up electro-magnetic fields emitted by other people (such as their heart waves and brain waves). Every human being is like a walking transmitter and receiver. This aspect of our biology, however, is essentially a local phenomenon. It drops off massively if you’re more than a meter or two away from someone. Even watching someone from a stage is too far. You really want to be no farther than the distance of sharing a meal together. That’s when you’ll learn the most about someone else’s vibe. Of course you’ll learn even more about someone’s vibe if you sleep with them, but you don’t have to take things that far.

Consequently, if you’ve never spent any real time with me in person, then it’s not such a good idea to use me as a role model for any goals I might have achieved that you also want to achieve. If you only know me from my blog posts or podcasts or from watching me give a speech, you don’t really know what my normal daily vibe is like. You’re better off finding someone local who can serve as a role model, someone you can hang out with in person, if only for a short time. If you use primarily Internet-based role models, you’re probably going to spend a lot of time running in circles instead of achieving your goals because it will be very hard for you to lock onto the right vibe. You’ll merely be creating a false projection that doesn’t much resemble the real vibe that matches the goal.

The Process in Review

Here’s what our overall process looks like step by step:

1. Define your outcome.
2. Develop a deeper understanding of the new vibe that matches the goal (get face time with people who’ve achieved it, visualize yourself as already there).
3. Contrast your current vibe with the new vibe to see where you’re out of alignment (use contrasting visualizations, broadcast your desires).
4. Identify the personal growth work necessary to adjust your vibe (new truths, new connections, smarter application of your power).
5. Use your favorite processes to do the personal growth work until you achieve enough alignment to experience the flow of inspired action.
6. Allow the flow of inspired action (not force) to guide you to your goal.
7. Enjoy the harmonious manifestation of your goal.

It’s a simple process in essence, and it works amazingly well.

No goal is out of reach with this process. But what if you can’t find any role models for a particular goal?

Then you’ll have to rely more heavily on visualization. This may require more experimentation to find the right vibe. It’s one reason that new goals that have never been accomplished before by anyone usually take longer to achieve. It takes a while to figure out the right vibe that aligns with the goal. For example, human beings are always building faster computers than the ones that exist today because the vibe of “building a slightly faster computer” is already known and understood by enough people to make that possible. However, the vibe of “building a sentient android” is not yet understood and integrated, so we don’t have a Mr. Data yet.

Some fun areas for vibrational “play” involve exploring spaces with stretch goals that no one has ever achieved before. Can you figure out the vibe that aligns with the goal? Can you do the personal growth work to become a match for that vibe? Or will you stick to the vibes that represent a “been there, done that” experience for someone else?

What about the action steps? When your vibe becomes a strong match for your goal, you don’t even have to think about the action steps. That would be like telling you how to make dinner. There are countless resources to inform you about the action steps to take. When your vibe is a match for your goal, those action-step resources will tend to effortlessly flow to you. If it seems like the action steps are unknown or a struggle, then you need to do more work on aligning your vibe with your goal.

Now if I could only figure out the vibe of writing a typo-free article on the first try.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Actually it’s neither.

Ironically I found that having such values on my list didn’t help me much when making decisions. They seem like good values to have, and I agree that they’re important, but in practice they served to obfuscate a deeper truth.

Does It Help to Focus on Focus?

Focus on what? Discipline yourself to do what?

What if you apply these values to the wrong pursuits?

When I was 19, I was very focused on shoplifting. I thought about it every day, kept improving my game, and disciplined myself to take action. And I got pretty good at it. Was that a wise choice?

Later I focused on running a computer games business. That focus gave me good results in some areas of life, but it also slowed me down in other areas. When I’d write an article to help people on the side, sometimes I’d chastise myself for it because writing articles would dilute my focus, drawing me away from publishing games. But I still felt motivated to write. I didn’t know I’d someday become a blogger, author, and speaker and end up writing more than 1,000 articles, having a book published in a dozen languages, and doing live workshops. Blogging didn’t even exist back then, at least not like it exists today. So even though it seems like a good value to have, if I’d clung to the value of focus more tightly than I did, I might still be writing computer games, ceasing all article writing as an unjustifiable distraction.

Look at your own life and ask yourself if focusing on becoming more focused has produced positive results for you. Is it paying off? Might it also be holding you back in some areas? Are you certain that your focal point is the best one for you?

In my case I would say there were some benefits to trying to become more focused and discipline as ends in themselves, but those results weren’t as strong as I’d hoped. I intuitively sensed that something was off. I’d do things that seemed more focused and disciplined, but often that made me feel more stressed and overwhelmed, which ironically make it harder to focus. Some part of me was resisting, and it wasn’t due to laziness.

I eventually realized that my resistance had to do with feeling disconnected. Often I would focus on actions that left me feeling unfulfilled, even though I initially expected to feel really good about the results. The deepest levels of drive and motivation weren’t coming through.

What’s Your Best Focal Point?

This got me thinking. Is there a better place to focus my attention, such that I’ll experience less resistance, feel more motivated, and be more fulfilled?

Eventually I figured out the focal point that works best for me. That focal point is caring.

That value has been present in my life for many years, but it wasn’t till recently that I became consciously aware of just how important it is to me.

The main reason I started this personal development website is that I care about helping people. You don’t succumb to writer’s block when you care. The words always flow. I’d find it harder to discipline myself not to write. I don’t have to discipline myself to write because I care about the topics I write about, and I care about the people who read my work. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t write anything.

Caring is why I’m a vegan. I have a deep sense of compassion for animals, and it breaks my heart to see them suffer needlessly. So I strive to keep reducing the amount of suffering I contribute to, and I keep holding the intention for us to co-create a more compassionate world. Perfection may not be realistic in such an inter-connected world. Nevertheless, I do the best I can. I’m not going to close my heart, even if it stings now and then. I know that joy and sorrow are a package deal.

Something that non-vegans are rarely aware of, but which many vegans know quite well, is that your relationships tend to improve significantly when you go vegan, partly because you feel much more connected to your fellow human beings. Even if you go vegan mainly for health reasons, as I initially did, a side effect is that your heart becomes less clogged (both physically and metaphorically). This allows you to feel and express love more strongly. After several years on this path, you look back to your past self and shudder to realize how cold and dark you once were. It generally takes years for this effect to play out, but a lot of vegans experience it. You can’t close your heart to animal suffering without also closing part of it to human suffering. When you open your heart more, and you behave more compassionately, initially it may seem more difficult to attract a decent relationship because your standards will be higher, but when you do connect with someone who cares as much as you do, the connection can be more intense than anything you’ve previously experienced.

Caring is the primary value I use in my relationships. I love to care for someone deeply and to express that caring — through affection, attention, playfulness, etc. I like making people feel good. This is why I resonate more with polyamory than monogamy. It doesn’t feel right to me to label caring for more than one person as cheating. Making love physically is one way among many to express caring, but for some it’s a powerful channel for giving and receiving love. If I’m going to discipline myself, then I might remind myself to give Rachelle a nice massage or to tell her how grateful I am for our connection. Or I might post some encouraging words on a friend’s Facebook page, or come up with a Twitter update that might help inspire people.

On the other hand, caring made it very difficult for me to separate from Erin. The last thing I wanted to do was to hurt her. Our connection couldn’t be transformed until I realized that it wasn’t enough that we cared about each other; we also needed to feel cared for. Since Erin and I give and receive love in very different ways, it was a struggle for us to express caring in ways that the other would receive it. So we had to let go and allow each other to seek out more compatible partners. We continue to care about each other, but now we express it differently.

When I see other people who haven’t opened their hearts, and they struggle to find something to care about, I see that they suffer for it. I’ve seen how much happier people are when they finally open their hearts and begin to care. Often that begins with giving themselves permission to turn and face what breaks their hearts — and to stop holding back the tears. What is it that makes you cry? What would happen if you allowed yourself to care about it every day?

A New Level of Clarity

My new list of values does a better job of clarifying what I want to focus on.

Focusing on making more money or on achieving more success doesn’t motivate me to do my best work. Often it just makes me feel more stressed. But when I focus on caring about people and when I enter into that place of knowing that we’re all part of the greater body of humanity, everything flows beautifully. I feel stimulated even if I might otherwise be a bit tired or drowsy. There’s just enough tension to drive action but not so much to make me feel stressed or overwhelmed. My mind feels sharp and alert, and my thoughts become clear and focused, like I’m flowing down a river with the current. I’m able to concentrate well. And I have this warm and powerful feeling in the center of my chest. When I write from that place, people seem to resonate with it, and my words are often coincidentally synchronous with events in their lives. A greater level of harmony is achieved.

When I focus on values like caring and oneness, I feel more fulfilled. I become stronger and more disciplined because caring is intensely motivating. If you don’t care about what you’re doing, it’s very hard to discipline yourself. But when you really care, it’s actually harder not to take action. You’d practically have to be restrained.

Interestingly enough, isn’t that what society does to us sometimes? When certain activists go out and express how deeply they care about certain issues, you’ll sometimes see them being physically restrained by those who’ve been conditioned to keep their hearts closed.

What kind of world would you rather live in? Would you be happiest living in a very focused and disciplined world? What kind of imagery that does bring up? The Nazis perhaps?

Or would you rather live in a very caring world? What would it be like to live in a world where everyone cared about each other and about the planet as a whole? Wouldn’t this make us more focused, disciplined, and efficient too — and in the ways that matter?

I choose the latter. I understand the importance of becoming the change we wish to see in the world. I think that what our planet needs most at this time is for more of us to wake up and care, not just through feeling but through action. At this time in our history, it’s more important that we learn to care about each other than it is that we produce a new iThing.

When I listen carefully (= care fully) to what tugs at my heart strings, those strings begin to play music. That music is very beautiful.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Now it’s time for the advanced version: The 30-Day Supertrial.

[cue trumpets]

A Quick Review

When conducting a 30-day trial, you pick one habit or behavior you’d like to change, and you commit yourself to sticking with it for 30 days straight. If you miss even one day, you start back at Day 1.

It can be very difficult to change a habit for life, but if you use the psychological trick of telling yourself that it’s only for 30 days, your odds of success increase substantially. And of course once you reach Day 30, the new habit is already installed, and it’s much easier to continue it on Day 31 and beyond.

Some examples: Get up at 5am every morning. Eat a vegan or vegetarian diet. Avoid watching TV. Say “You are loved” to someone each day.

A 30-day trial is partly an experiment and partly an exercise in self-discipline. It’s an experiment in that you see for yourself how your life would be different if you made a certain change and stuck with it. A good 30-day trial will also push you to build your self-discipline, helping you grow stronger mentally and emotionally. It’s a workout for your willpower.

The more 30-day trials you successfully complete, the stronger your self-discipline muscle becomes. This will benefit you tremendously in all areas of life. On top of that, you get the benefits of the new habits you’ve installed, such as the educational value of reading lots of new books, the metabolic boost that comes from regular exercise, or the financial benefits of working on your Internet business every day.

When most of us reach adulthood, we have lots of crappy habits that don’t serve us, and our self-discipline tends to be very weak. For example, about 50 million Americans smoke, yet most of them would prefer not to. That’s a behavioral conditioning nightmare. What habitual actions are you succumbing to that you’d prefer not to?

Your level of self-discipline will have a strong impact on your self-esteem. The more disciplined you are, the more you can adopt positive habits and shed negative ones. Positive habits yield positive results, and positive results feel good. Feeling good gives you more energy, and that feeds into more positive actions, which in turn become positive habits.

30-day trials can be very challenging, but they’re also very effective. This is my #1 favorite tool for habit change.

Now in the past, I’ve cautioned people not to overdo it. Many people who are new to the concept of 30-day trials go kittywompus and try to install 5-10 new habits simultaneously. And almost without exception, they crash and burn. Usually they don’t even make it past Day 3.

It’s like trying to juggle too many balls at once. You end up dropping all of them. Zero results.

So I’ve advised people to stick with one 30-day trial at a time. One trial will be plenty challenging. And you can do 12 of these per year if you’d like. Even if you only succeed at half of them, that’s still a tremendous amount of improvement within a year.

Now I’m going to explain how to actually do the opposite.

Yes, Dr. Venkman, under certain conditions we can cross the streams. There’s definitely a very slim chance you’ll survive.

I love this plan! I’m excited to be a part of it! Let’s do it!

What Is a 30-Day Supertrial?

A 30-day Supertrial is when you attempt to make several significant behavioral changes in one 30-day period.

For example, you might attempt to install the following habits all at the same time:

1. Check email only once per day, and completely empty your inbox each time
2. Exercise every morning for 30 minutes minimum, alternating weight training and yoga workouts
3. Read positive, inspirational material for an hour before bed
4. Go to bed by 10pm every night
5. Spend 10-20 minutes per day visualizing your goals/intentions as already accomplished
6. Avoid consuming dairy products
7. Work on your screenplay for 2 hours per day

For 30 days you commit yourself to doing all of these things without exception.

If you’re like most people, then you’re going to fail. You probably won’t even make it through the first day, and the odds of making it through the first week successfully are more than 100-1 against you.

So if you want to have a chance in Sto’Vo’Kor of succeeding at this, you can’t be like most people.

You probably won’t heed my advice, but let me succumb to the delusion anyway and share some practical tips on how to increase your odds of success.

It’s Possible But Almost Not

First of all, it is possible to succeed at a Supertrial. It’s just extremely difficult. But like the Siren’s song, many of us can’t resist the seductive lure of instant behavioral nirvana.

Yes, it’s possible. It’s possible to flop a boat with 7-2 offsuit too, but the odds are against you.

Knowing how difficult this is, however, gives you a slight advantage. If you maintain a healthy respect for the challenge, you’re less likely to underestimate how tough it is, so you’ll be better prepared when you begin.

A Supertrial does make some sense because our behaviors are intricately linked. One behavior triggers another, which links to another, and so on.

Oversleeping in the morning leads to skipping exercise, which leads to a crappy breakfast and a late start on your day, which leads to feeling unproductive and lazy, which leads to low performance at work and a feeling of being drained at the end of the day.

On the flip side, getting up early gives you extra time to exercise, which boosts your metabolism and energizes you. You’ll also be more attracted to healthier foods after exercise, and this positive start can kick you into a productive workday, which leaves you with a delicious feeling of accomplishment in the evening, where you’ll still have plenty of energy to work on your personal goals.

Habits reinforce each other. They overlap. So the main idea behind a Supertrial is to collapse a whole chain of negative habits and replace them with a new chain of positive ones. In some ways this can actually be easier than trying to change habits one at a time since a Supertrial gives you the opportunity to cut out an entire chain of unhelpful behaviors.

Prepare Well

Read the article Habit Change Is Like Chess to understand the 3 phases of habit change. A 30-day trial occurs in the third and last phase. Make sure you devote sufficient effort to putting the right scaffolding in place and preparing for the trial as best you can.

For example, if you’re doing a dietary change, stock your kitchen with healthy foods and make sure the off-limit foods are out of the house before you even begin your trial.

Whatever you can set up, take down, or prepare in advance to make your life easier during the Supertrial, do that first. Give yourself a few days to get everything in place before you begin. You may be itching to start Day 1 as soon as you can, but that inspiration is only going to fizzle into disappointment if you don’t take enough prep time.

The more prepared you are when you kick off your Supertrial, the better your odds of success.

Train Up First

Supertrials are like triathlons. You don’t just show up for one with no advance training. You won’t even make it through the swimming portion if you do that.

This is a level you must build up to. Once you have at least 5-10 successful 30-day trials under your belt, then you might consider a Supertrial. Otherwise you’re wasting your time.

Supertrials are the advanced version of 30-day trials. Even a regular 30-day trial is well beyond the beginner level. The beginner version is a 5-day or 10-day trial.

You must learn to walk before you can run. Training up your self-discipline is a lifelong process. Start with what you can achieve, and keep upping the challenge level as you grow stronger. But don’t keep attempting to lift weights that you’re always dropping. Go lighter until you see what your capabilities are.

There’s no shame in being a beginner who accepts that s/he is a beginner. For the unwilling and impatient, there are humility lessons.

Eliminate Social Drag

If there are people in your life who will resist the changes you’re making, distance yourself from them as much as possible. Otherwise the social drag they create can decrease your motivation and hold you back.

For example, if part of your Supertrial includes working on your new Internet business for 2 hours per day, and you have a friend who thinks that the only people who make money online are scammers, that isn’t a good person to be connecting with during your trial.

Make yourself scarce to anyone who would drag you down. You’re going to have enough of a challenge without the unnecessary social resistance.

Don’t Announce It

With a normal 30-day trial, telling people about your commitment in advance can increase your chance of success because they’ll help hold you accountable.

But with a Supertrial, I’d advise you to do the opposite and keep it to yourself.

One reason is that you’re going to be attempting so much change at once, that most people won’t believe you can do it. So when you tell others about it, you’ll probably add more negative social drag. People will be watching for you to fail. That isn’t going to help you succeed.

The exception is that it’s okay to share this with people you genuinely expect will be encouraging and supportive. If you can secure more social support, then go for it. It can definitely help.

By the time you’ve built your self-discipline to the level where a Supertrial becomes potentially achievable, you’ll be so far beyond the average level of performance in society that most people will be turned off if you talk about it. You’ll just upset them, and they may secretly wish to see you fail. So my feeling is that you’re better off keeping them in the dark.

Many years ago I set a goal of going through a 4-year university in only 3 semesters by taking about triple the normal course load (as explained in Do It Now). I shared this goal with several people in advance. Most of them laughed or said I was deluded. Not a single person was encouraging. So I learned to keep a low profile, and I kept other people out of the loop. Further into this experience, one of my professors became curious about what I was doing, so I shared the details with him. He was able to relate because he had a very high-performance daughter. It was nice to gain that little bit of social support.

It takes more than discipline to get through a Supertrial. There may be unforeseen interactions between your habits that you didn’t account for. You may realize you didn’t set it up right after the first day or two, and you need to go back and revise your plan. So much can go wrong. With a Supertrial you really don’t need the added social pressure of accountability to others.

A Supertrial is more of an inner journey anyway. It’s about digging deep within yourself and giving birth to a whole new you. You need the space to focus on doing what needs to be done without worrying about other people’s reactions.

By the time you’re ready to attempt a Supertrial, you’ll have already trained your self-discipline to a high degree. And you’ll have a clearer understanding of what kinds of weights you can lift and which are too heavy for you. At this point you’re going to rely more on your inner resolve; social accountability won’t be as important. If you can’t hold yourself accountable, you aren’t ready to attempt a Supertrial anyway.

Don’t Wear Yourself Out

One of the most common mistakes people make when stacking multiple 30-day trials is that they include something in there that’s going to wear them out during the first week.

The craziest example is when people attempt polyphasic sleep, which is insanely difficult by itself, and then they stack a bunch of other trials on top of that. I’ve never seen anyone succeed this way. It’s like going to the gym for the first time ever and trying to bench press 300 pounds. Nice try, grasshopper… but no.

Only slightly less deluded is including something in your trial that’s going to make your energy levels wonky during the first several days. For example, if you currently drag yourself out of bed at 8am each morning, and getting up at 5am is part of your Supertrial, you can expect to be a bit sleep deprived during that first week until your body adapts to the new rhythm. Being tired will make it VERY difficult to succeed at the other parts of your trial.

Another example would be trying to switch from the Standard American Diet (SAD) to an all raw vegan diet. You’re probably going to deal with some intense detox (cold-like symptoms) during that first week or two. To stack even more on top of this is going to be too tough.

Any yet another example would be diving into a new weight training regimen, one that leaves you very sore during that first week.

If you’re going to attempt a Supertrial, do your best to avoid including a new habit that may wear you out during that first week. Do a separate 30-day trial for that item first, get it locked in, and then conduct a Supertrial afterwards. So go raw first, or become an early riser first, or start weight training first. Get the sleepiness, detox, and soreness out of the way. Then you can stack more on top with a Supertrial later. This will make your Supertrial much less stressful and a lot more achievable.

Guard your sleep during your Supertrial. Don’t push yourself to stay up later and later trying to squeeze everything in. If you can’t complete all your actions by your desired bedtime, then cut out some actions. Don’t deprive yourself of sleep. Sleep deprivation will increase your stress levels and your risk of illness. You don’t want to be fighting your own fatigue while you’re trying to complete a Supertrial. Supertrials are tough even when you maintain stellar energy levels.

Stagger Your Starting Days

Instead of launching every new habit on Day 1, you can stagger your starting days a bit. This gives you the opportunity to focus on adding one new habit every day or two, so Day 1 isn’t so overwhelming.

It’s a judgment call if you want to do this. It isn’t necessary, but it may help if your intended Day 1 looks a bit daunting.

Count Day 1 of your 30 days as the day you add on the final habit, so you’re still doing the full 30 days with every habit.

Have a Fallback Position

Prioritize the habits in your Supertrial, so if the going gets too tough, you can drop one or more of them and fall back to a smaller number that you’re committed to installing.

I suggest splitting your Supertrial habits into 3 lists:

1. A-list = definitely want these installed, would make a huge difference if I succeed
2. B-list = great to have, would certainly enhance my life, but not worth sacrificing my A-list items for them
3. C-list = nice to have but it’s the icing on the cake, but not worth sacrificing A-list or B-list items for them

If you feel too overwhelmed or stressed, and you’re at serious risk of failing your Supertrial, first cut out the C-list items. If you’re still overwhelmed, then cut out the B-list too. And worst case, fall back to your single most important A-list item.

Knowing in advance which items to cut in an emergency will at least allow you to fall back to a regular 30-day trial and still get something installed. That’s a lot better than dropping every single ball and achieving nothing.

Do the best you can, but don’t beat yourself up if you can’t get everything installed at once.

Design for Balance

Perhaps the best use of a Supertrial is to conduct a holistic rebalancing of your life across all key areas.

A well-balanced Supertrial will increase your chances of success. An imbalanced trial will generate inner resistance and make you want to quit.

Pay particular attention to the following:

Body – Include something to boost your energy and sense of well-being. Exercising in the morning is great because it will boost your metabolism, making you feel more alert and energetic during the day. It’s much easier to conduct a Supertrial when your energy is high.

Mind – Develop your mind during your Supertrial. Daily nonfiction reading is a nice practice. Then you’ll gain some educational value during your trial. Reading in the area of your career can be especially beneficial.

Career – Add a habit to benefit your career or your general work productivity, such as checking email only once a day, or saying something encouraging to each of your coworkers each day.

Finances – Add habits to improve your finances, such as updating your accounting records each day or working on a new Internet business for 2 hours per day.

Relationships – Add a habit to improve your social courage or relationship skills. Attempt to initiate a conversation with one new person per day. Or share lunchtime with a different coworker each day to improve your networking.

Emotions – Include habits that help you maintain a positive, action-oriented attitude. I listened to inspirational and educational audio programs for about 2 hours per day in college, mostly while walking to and from classes, and it kept my motivation levels very high.

Order – Add a habit to reduce chaos and increase the order and organization of your life, such as devoting 30 minutes per day to sorting and purging clutter in your home or office.

Spiritual Development – Include a habit like daily meditation or journaling, so you can enrich your inner life to keep pace with your outer enrichment.

Fun – Including at least one fun daily activity in your trial, such as playing a game with your family. This gives you a daily reward and something to look forward to. It also helps condition your mind to believe that self-discipline is fun. The more disciplined you are, the more time you’ll have to enjoy your life, and the less stressful your life will be.

This may sound like a tall order, but such a blend of habits will help to mutually reinforce each other, thereby increasing your chances of success. For example, improving your finances means you can afford to buy healthier foods, pay for yoga classes, etc. A holistic approach will help you make advances across the board, so no area of your life drags down the other areas.

Use Crisp Parameters

Define your habits crisply by spelling them out with nouns, verbs, and prepositions. Avoid the use of adjectives like more and better, since that’s a sign of wishful thinking (and it’s also dumb).

These are delusional goals: Exercise more. Eat healthier. Read faster. Complain less. Be nicer. Work harder.

You can’t succeed if you set delusional goals. Plus your cheek will be hurting after I smack you upside the head.

This is a crisp goal: Exercise on the treadmill at 60-80% max heart rate for 30 minutes per day.

With crisp goals you can’t delude yourself. It’s obvious if you’ve done it or not. An objective observer would give you the same thumbs up or thumbs down that you give yourself. There’s no room for debate.

To the maximum extent possible, define each habit in binary terms. Either you did it or you didn’t. Eliminate the middle gray area, unless you just want to do a make-believe trial with make-believe results.

Focus on Actions

The point of doing a Supertrial is to lock in some serious gains that will put you on a path for a major long-term boost in your results. However, during the Supertrial itself, it’s usually counter-productive to be too outcome-focused. Keep the end results in mind, but put your attention on the daily actions you need to take, and do them one at a time as they come up.

For example, “Write for 2 hours per day” is a better choice for a habit goal than “Write every day so as to complete the first draft of a book in 30 days.” The first one is more directly under your control, and it’s clear whether you’ve done it or not.

Supertrials are all about action. What are the daily actions you want to condition into habits, such that if you passively maintain beyond the initial trial, they’re likely to serve you well for many years to come?

How would your life be different if every day you… Did yoga for 45 minutes? Limited web surfing to 30 minutes max? Initiated a conversation with someone new? Read nonfiction for 30 minutes? Worked on an Internet business for 1-2 hours? Cuddled and caressed your significant other for 20 minutes? Took a shower? Organized your home for 20 minutes? Planned your next day for 10 minutes? Made travel plans for 30 minutes?

Schedule It

If you’re going to perform some action each day, decide in advance what time you’re going to do it.

If you have a lot of items to schedule, write out a schedule for a typical day, so you can see how everything fits together.

Give yourself some breathing room between activities. Don’t assume you can stop exercising and start showering in the very same minute, for instance.

If you don’t set aside a time for it, you haven’t yet committed to doing it.

Compensate for What’s Missing

Bad habits are sticky for a reason. They provide you with some benefits.

Before you drop a bad habit, consider what the benefit is. Then be sure to add something to your Supertrial to compensate for the benefits you may be losing when you cut out those bad habits.

Suppose you’re spending way too much time checking Facebook and other online forums during your workday. This kills your productivity, which in turn drags down your self-esteem and energy levels, preventing you from feeling the motivational boost that only a truly productive day can provide. Deep down you know this bad habit has to go.

But each time you attempt to drop it, you feel isolated and disconnected. You miss those frequent social connections, and pretty soon you’re back at it again.

Recognize that even though this habit is destroying your productivity, it’s actually helping you in a different way. It helps you periodically renew the feeling of being connected to others. That isn’t a bad thing at all.

What else can give you this feeling of connection without destroying your workday? There are many possible solutions.

One solution would be to timebox your online socializing by assigning it a time slot in the evening, so it doesn’t interfere with your workday. You can give yourself a liberal amount of time to socialize all you want, but not when you’re supposed to be working. If you want more frequent socializing, you can chop it up and schedule it during the natural breaks in your day, such as during lunchtime or with your afternoon snack.

Another solution is to reduce or eliminate the online socializing, and add a stronger habit that gives you even more of these benefits. Spend 30-60 minutes talking with friends on the phone each day. Arrange a social event at your house every day for 30 days, like a 2-3 hour game night. Or invite a different friend or coworker over for dinner each night. Communicating online can be fun, but nothing beats face-to-face connecting, especially when it comes to sharing laughs.

Still another option, which may be outside the scope of a Supertrial, would be to switch to a career that has you interacting with people a lot more, so you don’t feel disconnected during your workday.

Replace smoking with meditation and massage. Replace junk food with cuddle time. Replace masturbation with sex (or vice versa, depending on your priorities).

Notice the hidden benefit behind your bad habits. Instead of dropping those habits completely, look to replace them with new habits that provide even stronger benefits but without the drawbacks. This may take some trial and error experimenting to discover what works best for you, but it can certainly be done.

Include Downtime

Supertrials can be energizing, but they can also be physically and emotionally taxing, especially in the beginning when it takes a lot of conscious thought.

I recommend that you include at least 2 hours per day of downtime for rest and relaxation. Give your body and mind a complete break from the potential stress of your Supertrial.

You can use this time to lie down, take a nap, connect with friends and family, enjoy a relaxing bath, play video games, cuddle a loved one, or anything else that helps refresh you. Unplug and relax.

Putting this near the end of the day, such as right after dinner time, gives you something to look forward to. You may not always need it, but some days you’ll be glad to know it’s there.

Stick With Daily Habits

For a Supertrial it’s best to stick with habits you’ll do every day, including weekends. Maintaining a consistent daily rhythm with no days off is important for creating a sense of flow.

So if you’re going to get up at 5am or write for 2 hours per day, then do that 7 days a week.

It may seem harder and less flexible this way (that’s what she said), but it’s actually easier. A major point of failure is when people slack off on the weekends and then try to get everything working again on Monday. It’s almost like starting the Supertrial all over again each week.

A habit is a memorized solution. This memorization will occur faster if you maintain daily consistency with no breaks. Once your brain has the solution memorized (your 30 days are up, and the habit is installed), then you can cut back on the frequency, such as by skipping weekends, with less risk of complete slippage. But it’s better to stick with daily actions while you’re getting these habits installed. Remember — it’s only 30 days!

If you still wish to include non-daily habits in your Supertrial, read How to Maintain Not-Quite-Daily Habits to educate yourself on how to do it.

Define Your Baseline Performance

To reduce the difficultly level, define each habit in baseline terms. What’s the minimum level of performance that will still give you some worthwhile positive results?

For example, instead of reading for an hour per day, you might set a baseline goal of reading for 15 minutes per day. If you’re running late and can’t squeeze in your hour of reading without losing sleep, you can just do it for 15 minutes those days. Some days you may go longer, but 15 minutes is your minimum.

Once you complete a trial at your baseline level, now you have some success under your belt. You also have a basic version of the habit installed. Now you can push beyond the baseline level to a more optimal level for the long term, such as by doing another 30-day trial focused on improving or expanding that one habit.

It’s better to install a baseline level of performance in each area of your Supertrial than to try to go for the full monty and fail to make any habits stick. The results may not be as good as you’d hoped, but at least there will be some results to speak of.

It’s much less difficult to exercise for 45 minutes per day when you’ve already conditioned the habit of exercising for 20 minutes per day… as opposed to installing the 45-minute habit from a cold start.

Adding 5-10 new baseline habits (15-20 minutes per day here and there) can be a terrific use of a Supertrial. Afterwards you can maintain these new baselines and then try to increase them, either with a new Supertrial or with individual 30-day trials that focus on one habit at a time.

***

If you do attempt a Supertrial, I wish you the best of luck. You must be really disciplined, really crazy, or really naive — or some combination of those.

Today is actually my Day 1 of a new Supertrial that involves a major rebalancing of how I invest my time each day. I’m not going to share the details or blog about it along the way (as explained in the “Don’t Announce It” section above), but if you follow this blog for the next 30 days, you may be able to guess at one or two of them…

… unless every molecule in my body explodes at the speed of light, that is.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Attention Worthiness

How do you decide what’s worthy of your attention and what isn’t?

Let’s consider some potential concerns.

On a scale of 1-3, make a quick rating of how attention-worthy each concern is for you (see list below).

1 = unworthy of your attention
2 = somewhat worthy of your attention
3 = very worthy of your attention

Here’s the list. These are in no particular order, and it’s not a complete list. It’s just a list to get you thinking.

“It depends” is a perfectly reasonable answer if you feel your rating would depend on the situation or circumstances. If that’s your answer, see if you can gain clarity about how the situation would affect your answer.

• your favorite TV show(s)
• astrophysics
• government
• national/global news
• local news
• your neighborhood
• your home
• your job
• your income
• your best friend
• your boss
• your parents
• your family
• the economy
• Facebook
• productivity
• your nighttime dreams
• your goals
• literature
• poetry
• movies
• porn
• gossip about people you know
• email
• Twitter
• the latest software
• income taxes
• your net worth
• your weight
• your physical appearance
• your wardrobe
• your primary relationship partner
• meditation
• physical exercise
• reading non-fiction
• reading fiction
• music
• art
• travel
• fine dining
• cooking
• smoking
• doing drugs
• pharmaceuticals
• conspiracy theories
• healthy eating
• forming positive habits
• overcoming addictions
• making money
• protecting the environment
• cleaning
• being organized
• personal hygiene
• dating
• going to bars or night clubs
• theater
• dancing
• sex
• marriage
• having kids
• parenting
• law
• mathematics
• medicine
• biology
• science
• chemistry
• physics
• manufacturing
• mining
• stocks
• real estate
• investing
• farming
• coffee
• geography
• learning other languages
• writing
• Internet marketing
• philosophy
• metaphysics
• video games
• gambling
• technology
• computer programming
• entertainment
• education
• national debt
• the military
• personal growth
• psychic development
• your emotions
• being in nature
• developing new skills
• science fiction
• your next promotion
• public speaking
• attending conferences

You can print out this list and jot down a numerical rating for each item, or you can simply say each rating aloud as you read it online.

Feel free to add your own items too — anything you’d like to include is fair game.

Take your time as you do this. Don’t necessarily go with your initial impulse rating for each item. Pause for a moment and think. How do you know if an item is worthy of your attention or not? What makes one item worthy and another unworthy? Push yourself to come up with a reason to justify each rating. This is a learning exercise to help you discover what matters most to you and why.

Precious Attention

Notice that if you want to, you can choose to give your attention to anything you desire. If you want to focus on your income, you can do that. If you want to give some attention to the environment, a fiction book, or your girlfriend, you can do those things too.

Notice that in the absence of such choices, your attention will be pulled towards something by default. If you don’t make a conscious choice here, someone else will decide for you. It may be your boss, a family member, an advertiser, a collective social influence, or someone or something else, but it won’t be something of your deliberate choosing.

When you don’t make these choices yourself, you fall back into unconscious living, and generally speaking, your results will suffer for it. Such unconscious results are usually quite poor compared to the results you can get from living consciously.

And lastly, notice that attention is a very limited resource. You don’t have an infinite attention capacity. You can only give your attention to one item — or at most, a few items — at a time. Attention should be viewed as a precious resource, something you invest carefully and thoughtfully. You don’t have much of it to spread around, so don’t let it go to waste.

Where Is Your Attention Going?

Now that you’ve given some thought to what’s worthy of your attention, it’s a good idea to make a list of what’s actually capturing your attention.

I suggest that you set aside a full day or two for attention capture. You can do this very easily. Get a blank piece of paper, and each time something new catches your attention that isn’t already written down, add it to your paper.

Don’t worry about tracking how much time you attend to each item. Just make a complete list that reflects the variety of thoughts and activities that captured your attention throughout the day.

At the end of the day, your list may look something like this:

• feeling I should get out of bed earlier
• wanting to lose weight
• wanting to eat healthier
• figuring out what to eat
• web surfing
• email
• working on Project A
• worrying about money
• thinking about the weekend
• talking with my partner about something trivial
• feeling stressed
• driving to work, thinking about bills
• attending a meeting, mostly zoning out
• reading work-related items
• watching TV
• …
• etc.

When you feel you have a pretty good representation of your attention-grabbing concerns, whether it takes you a few hours or a few days to complete the list, go ahead and give each item on your list a 1-3 rating like you did earlier. Of all the items that captured some of your attention, which ones were truly worthy of it?

What do you notice about this? Are you giving your attention to items that are worthy of you? Or is your attention being drained away by trivialities? Which items weren’t on your list that should have been?

Determining Attention Worthiness

How do you know if an item is worthy or your attention or not? How can you separate the important from the irrelevant?

Here are some key criteria to consider:

Consequences

What are the consequences of giving an item your attention vs. withholding your attention?

If there’s little difference either way or if the overall consequences are unimportant, it’s fair to say that the item isn’t worthy of your attention.

When it comes to understanding consequences, you must make your own assessment in this area. Don’t blindly subscribe to someone else’s assessment of the importance of a particular concern.

For example, I have never voted in any political election. I have never registered to vote. Certain social pressures may try to get me to believe that voting is my civic duty and that I’d be a bad person not to vote, but I say B.S. to all of that. Ultimately I have to make my own assessment of the importance of this action, and my personal determination is that in the grand scheme of things, my individual vote is irrelevant and statistically meaningless. Calling it a “right” or a “privilege” seems more like marketing than truth to me. So I do not vote… ever. Voting is a waste of time.

Not voting doesn’t mean I don’t care about world affairs. Of course I care. However, there are more intelligent options available to create change than the wasted effort of filling out a ballot.

Whether I vote or don’t vote, the consequences are negligible either way. As an activity, voting is unworthy of my attention.

You’re free to disagree with me of course. If you think voting is a good use of your time, by all means continue the practice. My point is that you cannot blindly accept social programming when it comes to determining what is or isn’t important to you. You have to make that determination for yourself.

Attention-worthy tasks show a pattern of having impactful consequences if you focus on them. Giving them your attention makes a very noticeable difference. If, however, you squander your attention on unworthy items, your results will be either negligible or negative.

Control

In addition to consequences, also consider the degree of control you have over a particular concern.

If by giving your attention to a certain item, you have the ability to influence it in a meaningful way, then it’s more attention-worthy than an item that you cannot influence much.

For example, through my writing, I’m able to exert a lot of influence over people’s results when it comes to personal growth. This is an area where I have a lot of control. I can decide which topics to write about and how to express key points. Since I’ve been doing this for many years, I can see that my efforts have a positive impact. I can nudge people towards making more conscious choices. Every time I post a new article, it creates many ripples.

On the other hand, I don’t seem to have much control over the local politics in Las Vegas. I could give that subject a lot of attention, but I’m not currently in a position to have much impact there. So keeping up with local politics isn’t a good use of my time, relatively speaking. Consequently, I largely ignore local politics, so I can focus on other areas where I can make a more positive difference with less effort. This choice helps me be more efficient.

If you give your attention to items you can’t control, you’re essentially wasting your time. It’s more intelligent to focus on what you can control and influence. Then your influence will expand over time, and your power will increase.

Opportunity Cost

The attention-worthiness of any particular concern is relative to other items you could be choosing instead.

Will you watch TV or read a book? Will you go on a date or work on your Internet business? Will you get up early and exercise or sleep in late?

Whenever you give your attention to one concern, it means you’re withholding your attention from all other possible concerns. This entails a hidden cost of the potential value of the items you’ve declined to pursue.

If you had used your time differently during the past 5 years, you could have an extra million dollars in the bank. Another path might have led you to travel through dozens of different countries. And still another path might have you looking at a very fit and sculpted body in the mirror right now.

Are you happy with the path you’re currently following? Do you feel you’ve been giving your attention to thoughts and activities that are truly worthy of you? Are the opportunities that you’ve declined to pursue of lesser value than the ones you did pursue? Have you been turning down the good in order to pursue the best?

Or are you feeling disappointed with yourself right now?

Attention = Investment

Think of your attention as an investment. For each unit of time you invest, you’re generating certain results.

Some investments yield positive returns. Others yield zero or negative returns.

Don’t expect to be perfect right off the bat. This is a growth process that plays out over many years. To live more consciously, keep withdrawing your attention from trivial concerns, and redirect it towards those areas where you can have a stronger and more positive impact.

For example, I spent a lot of time during my 20s creating and publishing video games. Eventually I pulled my attention away from that field and redirected it to personal development. Shifting my attention thusly has allowed me to have a stronger and more positive impact, and I also reap greater rewards from creating and delivering more value to others.

Making these kinds of shifts can be a real challenge. Don’t expect the journey to be easy. Many people remain addicted to trivialities all the way to their graves. Often they can’t get past the social conditioning that tells them they should care about things that simply don’t matter. Don’t fall into that trap.

Conscious Attention

To live consciously, you must be the one to clarify and decide what matters most to you, and then you must discipline yourself to focus your attention on those items by deliberately withdrawing your attention from lesser concerns. Don’t expect life to do this for you. Don’t expect others to help you much. And never, ever whine that you don’t know what to do. It’s your job to figure it out — the task sits squarely on your shoulders. To complain that it’s too burdensome will only make it seem harder.

It’s okay to make mistakes as you figure this out. You don’t need to concoct a grand plan in advance, so don’t use the lack of one as an excuse for procrastination. Simply do the best you can in each moment, and you can continue to upgrade your choices as you go along. Keep pushing yourself to drop low-value activities, and replace them with higher value ones. Drop TV and read non-fiction instead. Dump the gossip-addicted friend who does nothing for you intellectually, and replace her with a more intelligent and resourceful friend. Quit the cigarettes, and shift that slice of your attention — and your budget — to becoming a fitness maven. If you still insist on using the “I don’t know what to do” excuse, then drop to the floor and do push-ups until you think of something that’s a better use of your time than doing push-ups. I suspect your brain will come up with a few ideas very shortly.

Very often when you reduce the time wasters by dropping low-value relationships and activities from your life, your understanding about what really matters to you will skyrocket. Time wasters will invariably fog your vision. Get rid of them as quickly as you can, and clarity will return. You will not miss the time wasters, even if you feel you’re addicted to them now.

Don’t let the difficulty of the task become an excuse for laziness. Keep pushing yourself to upgrade to more attention-worthy activities while dropping trivialities from your life, and you’ll find that your life becomes something quite special — rich in meaning and purpose. The alternative is a life of increasing disappointment and regret.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Unfortunately he’s dead wrong.

I can understand Tony’s intent in making such a statement. Sure it’s part of his overall sales pitch, but essentially he’s telling people that they have the power to break from the past and use their power to create a new future. In general that’s a positive message to convey. Unfortunately it seems to do more harm than good. Quite often it makes people all gung ho about changes that never quite materialize. The underlying idea that we can escape the past actually wastes a lot of people’s time.

I know it feels good to think about the idea that we can somehow break with the past and create a whole new future for ourselves, but how often do people actually pull that off when they attempt it? How often have you pulled it off?

So what’s the truth?

The truth is that past performance is in fact the best predictor of future performance, not just with individual human beings but with teams, companies, technology, political bodies, and other time-bound entities.

Even when it comes to personal growth and conscious living, for all intents and purposes, the past DOES equal the future.

Looking to the Past

If you want to know where your current path is taking you, look to your past. That’s the best way to predict where you’re headed.

Looking to your past is more reliable than looking at your goals and intentions.

If I want to know where someone is headed, I’ll take a look at their past, especially their recent past, and make a prediction based on that. I don’t need to hear about their goals and intentions — that information isn’t relevant. (I’ll explain why I say this a bit later in this article.) Just let me see what they’ve been up to for the past few months, and that will give me a pretty good idea of where they’ll be in a year or so.

Obviously there’s some randomness in life. There are chaotic events we can’t very well predict. Sometimes the unexpected happens, and it spins our lives in completely new directions.

But most of the time, our lives succumb to predictable patterns, especially in the long run. We may not be able to predict what will happen tomorrow or next week with much accuracy, but barring an unusually consequential chaotic change, our lives tend to be a lot more predictable over longer stretches of time than we usually care to admit.

Eat a little bit more than you burn in an average day, and you’ll be heavier a year from now. The result is fairly predictable, given the patterns observed in the past.

Is your expected future really so difficult to predict, at least in a general way?

If you go to college and major in a subject with little or no market demand in terms of jobs, isn’t it largely predictable that you may struggle to find paying work after graduating… and if you do find work, that it will likely be outside the field of your major?

If you linger in a relationship that you wouldn’t rate as a 9 or 10 on a scale of 1-10, isn’t it predictable that dissatisfaction or resentment or apathy will develop over time, as opposed to love and gratitude?

If you eat unhealthy foods and experience high stress levels, can you not make certain predictions about what kind of lifestyle problems you may experience down the road?

Looking to Others

Consider some of the people in your life — people you know pretty well.

Can you reasonably predict where they’ll be a year from now? Can you make a decent guess at where they’ll be in terms of their career, finances, relationships, health, daily habits, spiritual practices, etc?

I’m not asking you to predict with any sort of exactitude here.

I’m simply asking you to paint a general picture of what you expect each person’s life will look like in a year or so.

Pick one specific person for starters, someone you know well but not someone you’re in a romantic relationship with. (Pick someone where you don’t have too much of a vested interest in where they’re headed.)

What kind of career or job situation will this person be engaged in a year from now? Blue collar or white collar work? A job to pay the bills or a dedicated career path? What is this person’s attitude towards their work? How hard do they work? What kind of hours do they put in each week? Where will they be in a year?

What kind of income does this person earn? Make a ballpark guess. Are they making $50K a year? $500K? Millions? How much money does this person have? What assets does s/he own?

What kind of relationships does this person have? Is s/he married? Is there a significant other? Living together? Solo? Looking for someone? If this person is in and out of relationships all the time, don’t worry about predicting the exact relationship position at the end of a year since that could be a coin toss. Just predict what general relationship patterns you’ll expect to see play out over the course of that year. How many new partners will this person have during that year, and what will those partners be like?

How will this person do health-wise over the next year? What kinds of foods will they eat? What kinds of exercise, if any, will they do? Will they gain weight, lose weight, or stay the same weight this year? Will they diet or yo-yo at all?

What kinds of daily habits will this person have? When will they get up? When will they go to bed? Are they lazy? Super productive? Highly or minimally effective at getting things done?

What spiritual practices will this person have a year from now? Will they go to church regularly? Will they shun all spiritual practices? Will they meditate often? Will they put candles around their bathtub and label it spirituality?

See if you can get an overall picture of where each of a few people in your life will be a year from now.

Where Predictions Come From

Notice how you made your predictions.

If you’re like most people, you based your predictions on how each person has behaved in the past, particularly the recent past.

To predict the future, you simply projected the past into the future. You looked at the momentum of where this person is headed. You also looked at where they’re stagnant.

For example, if you know that someone got a 10% raise last year, you might predict another 10% raise this year. You might also predict that this person will still be in the same job.

If someone has been in a relationship for 10+ years, you might predict they’ll be in that same relationship next year.

If someone’s company has been downsizing like crazy, you might predict they’ll be out of work within a year and either unemployed or working at a similar job in a year.

If someone is late on their mortgage payments and is getting foreclosure notices, you might predict they’ll be out of that house within a year and maybe living in a smaller house, an apartment, or a condo somewhere.

Now you might say that we need to include the present as well as the past in making decisions, but since the present is just an instantaneous moment, that isn’t necessary. The past includes everything from the last microsecond back to the beginning of time, so that’s as much data as you really need. If you think you need to include something that really is happening in the present, wait one more second. Now it’s in the past.

If you can claim to know anything about a person, it’s from the past.

Recording Your Predictions

I suggest you write down some of your predictions about the people in your life. Record them in your journal.

Then put a note on your calendar a year from now that says something like, “Review journal entry on predictions from a year ago.” If you use an online calendar, this takes only seconds.

Then when your reminder pops up a year from now, review your predictions. How did they turn out?

If you were basically right about certain things, how did you know? Why was your prediction so accurate?

If you were wrong about anything, why did you miss? Did something unpredictable happen that you couldn’t have anticipated? Did you not have enough information to make an accurate prediction? Did you over-emphasize or under-emphasize the importance of certain factors?

What can you learn about this exercise to make better predictions?

You’re More Predictable Than You Realize

Sometimes it’s easier to make predictions about other people instead of ourselves. When we look at other people’s lives, our egos don’t get in the way as much.

It can be pretty tough to look at ourselves so objectively, especially when we don’t like what we see.

No one wants to predict that a year from now, they’ll have lost their home due to foreclosure, gained 20 pounds of fat, and endured a string of bad relationships.

If you’re fortunate to have some intelligent friends who are willing to make honest predictions about where you’re headed and share them with you, you’ll find it very eye-opening to have a candid discussion with them on this subject. However, this will require turning off your ego as much as possible and really listening, which isn’t easy for most people to do.

Try this: Make some predictions about where you’ll be in a year, but base your predictions only on hard factual evidence from the past 30 days of your life.

Take note of how you ate, slept, exercised, worked, communicated, related, created, etc. only during the past 30 days. Assume those same patterns in every area will continue for another 12 months.

If you feel the past 30 days were very atypical for you, such as if you were on vacation or traveling during that time, then use the past 90 days instead.

Use this time frame to predict where you’ll be in a year. Project those same patterns forward in time. Where will they lead if you largely repeated the patterns of the past 30-90 days for a full 12 months?

Aligning With Truth

A huge part of aligning yourself with Truth is being able to make honest, objective predictions about where you’re headed. How will different aspects of your life evolve over the coming year — or longer?

In order to make accurate predictions, you cannot look to your goals or intentions. For all intents and purposes, you can consider goals and intentions irrelevant.

Imagine that you’re in a court of law that’s trying to make a ruling based on the facts of the case. Goals and intentions for the future are inadmissible as evidence because they aren’t hard facts. They’re merely opinions or speculation about what may be.

In order to make accurate predictions of where you’re headed, you must look to your past and only your past.

This may be something you didn’t want to hear, but I’m playing it straight with you.

If you start getting emotional about your predictions (either positive or negative emotions), stop and take a break. This is an exercise that requires logical, left-brained thought. This isn’t the time or place for emotional or illogical thinking. Pretend you’re a Vulcan or an android, and have at it.

Review the questions I asked you earlier about your friend (under the subhead “Looking to Others”). Now ask those same questions of yourself. Look only to your recent past to predict the future, i.e. the past 30-90 days.

Pretend for a moment that you’re Mr. Spock or Mr. Data, and make your best determination as to where the person whose body you inhabit will be a year from now — in terms of your career, finances, relationships, health, daily habits, spiritual practices, etc.

Whichever parts of your life you consider important to you, make some predictions for those areas.

Then do the same thing with recording your predictions in your journal, and mark your calendar a year from now to review that entry.

And don’t give me that pathetic eye-roll. So what if it takes a year to complete this exercise? The time is going to pass anyway, and a year from now you’ll find this data very valuable. Would you rather be feeling intrigued when you see that message on your calendar a year from now, and open up that tremendous gift of growth, or would you rather have another “normal” day instead?

The Gung Ho Dufus

When you study and learn from your past, you’ll notice certain patterns that come up repeatedly in your life. Many of these patterns are ineffective for you. Based on your own history, the results are predictably bad. But how easily we forget and repeat those same mistakes…

One of those bunk patterns I’ve seen in my own past — and you may recognize this in your past as well — is what I call the Gung Ho Dufus approach to personal growth.

This is when someone gets all amped up about a change they’re going to make. They feel a surge of something — adrenaline maybe… sometimes caffeine — and decide that finally things will be different. They usually believe it too.

They make some new decisions and start taking some actions, but their actions are inconsistent and chaotic. Most of their actions are one-offs, meaning that they never get integrated as permanent habits. For example, they’ll tell a bunch of people about their desire to change, and maybe they’ll ask for advice to get started, but that’s often as far as it goes.

Eventually the excitement over the new direction fizzles, and the person gets sucked back into their usual behavior patterns from the past. No real lasting change occurs.

If you look to your past, especially if you’ve been journaling, you may have seen yourself cycle through this pattern, along with some other patterns that you can see have never worked for you. Armed with that knowledge, you can intelligently reject such strategies. You can see evidence that they don’t create lasting change in your future. Those approaches haven’t worked in the past, so there’s no reason to suspect they’ll suddenly start working in the future. If you repeat them, you’ll get a result that looks strikingly similar to what you’ve seen in the past. Journaling is a great way to become aware of some of those patterns and avoid repeating them; otherwise it’s too easy to forget and remain stuck in dufus-land.

What other patterns do you observe in your past that haven’t worked?

What patterns actually have worked? When you experienced your biggest breakthroughs, how did they happen? Can you reverse-engineer and re-apply those same general strategies today?

Change the Past, Change the Prediction

My next suggestion may sound a bit odd, but I think it will give you a fresh perspective on how to create lasting change.

Instead of trying to change your present or your future, focus on changing your past.

In other words, if you want to improve some part of your life, your must inject evidence of change into your past.

Obviously you can only do that by taking action in the present, but not just any action.

If you take haphazard action, such as was mentioned in the Gung Ho Dufus approach, then what are you injecting into your past? Not success. We could say you’re injecting failure and even stupidity into your past because you’re simply repeating a strategy that’s a known failure. And that leads to a perpetuation of the past in your future.

Instead what you need to do is inject some form of consistency into your past. You need to establish a new pattern of behavior. That new recent past, if it looks consistent enough, will alter your predictions about the future.

Like I said, this may seem an odd way of looking at things, but it can get you thinking in new directions, and that’s what we want.

What kinds of actions will you need to take that will inject a fresh chain of consistency into your past, thereby giving you enough certainty to alter your predictions about the future?

As you might guess, the best kinds of actions — in terms of their predictive value — are those that are done regularly and that can be sustained for at least a year or more.

Those are the kinds of actions that we base our predictions on when we make predictions about other people.

What kinds of meals have we seen this person eat? What sorts of partners does this person hang out with regularly? Where does this person go to work each weekday? What kind of paychecks does this person bring home each month? How does this person spend their Sunday mornings?

These sorts of actions have a name of course.

They’re called habits.

Evidence, Not Wishful Thinking

You’ll cross the threshold of being able to predict success instead of failure once you establish certain habits. But until that happens, the perpetuation of the status quo (i.e. failure to change) will remain the dominant prediction.

If you don’t establish new habits, your goals and intentions are toast. They will not come to pass.

Those habits could be new ways of thinking, but even if they’re thought-based, they’re going to surface in the form of new behaviors too.

No new behaviors means no new predictions.

If you want change, you must create evidence of change. Evidence of change equals new habits. No new habits equals no change in prediction.

Predictable Change vs. Changing Predictions

Now it’s possible that your existing habits are serving you well. Maybe your predictions for the future are very positive already, and you expect them to remain good for a while.

This is a great place to be. I enjoy this situation in many parts of my life. It’s nice to observe that if I just keep doing what I’ve been doing, some parts of my life will probably keep getting better and better.

That’s predictable change — the good kind. That’s an easy situation to manage because if you simply maintain the status quo in terms of your habits, you’re golden.

The focus of this article, however, is on the situation where you dislike some or all of your predictions. You don’t feel good about what you see coming up. Maybe your predictions are negative or neutral. Or maybe they just aren’t positive enough for you. In that case you want to change the predictions.

You can’t just fudge your numbers because that means falling out of alignment with Truth, which is a great way to bring your personal growth to a halt. Don’t lie to yourself or exaggerate where your current habits are taking you. Remember — this is for posterity, so be honest!

Again, forget about your intentions, and focus on making predictions from reliable past data. Don’t predict that you’ll double your income this year if last year you saw less than a 10% increase — unless some reliable indicators have shifted to make that prediction likely from an objective standpoint, and you can name other people who’d agree with your predictions.

If you can’t fudge your numbers, the only way you can change your predictions without losing accuracy is to change the past. Ironically, that will take time, but it can be done.

You can change the past by installing a new habit or breaking an existing habit. Really these are the same thing, since you can’t break an old habit without installing a new one to replace it.

So this is where to focus your efforts of personal growth. Focus on changing the consistent patterns in your life, and begin injecting new consistent patterns into your past by performing them in the present (which instantly becomes the past). If you can’t do that, your honest predictions won’t change. You’ll just continue to head in the same direction as before.

Breaking the Past

Look at the elements from your past that are contributing to your predictions. Which habits are causing you to make negative predictions about your future?

Do you feel miffed about your patterns of eating or sleeping? Are your dating habits letting you down? What results are you getting from your work routine and productivity habits? Where are your current spiritual practices leading you? Are your spending habits leading you astray?

Habit change can be tough, but a great place to start is to use the 30-day trial method. There’s also a whole chapter on habits in my book, so I recommend that you review that as well. This will get you off to a good start with tools that have worked well for large numbers of people.

If you really want to create some serious changes, another perspective I can share is that you want to think about breaking your past. Shatter those past patterns, so they absolutely cannot continue in their current form. Deliberately create a disconnect with your past which — at the very least — makes your previous predictions impossible… even if it means trading the comfort of certainty for the discomfort of unpredictability.

For example, break off a disempowering relationship that contributes to too many negative predictions. Drop the lazy friends from your life, and start befriending the most productive and organized people you know. Move to a new city where you can expect more career and financial opportunities. Drop the most health-destroying foods from your life, and offer $100 cash to anyone who catches you eating them within the next year. Make it impossible to continue the same past patterns for another 30 days.

If you can’t break the past by injecting a discontinuity into it, then the past will essentially be your future.

To Change the Future, Change the Past

Consider two scenarios.

Bill and Ted both want to have written a book within the next year. Neither has written a book before.

Bill has no habit of daily writing. But he has a clear written goal/intention for his book. He knows what kind of book he wants to write. When people ask him what he’s working on, he tells them he’s writing a book. In the past 30 days, he has spent a lot of time thinking about his book. He’s even jotted down some ideas for it, but mostly at random intervals.

Ted has no written goals, intentions, or plans for his book. He hasn’t told anyone he’s writing it. He’s not even sure what the chapters will be. But for the past 30 days, he’s gotten out of bed every morning at 5am, and he’s worked on his book till 7am before having breakfast. He has averaged about 2 pages of potentially usable content per day. He’s been working only on his book during that time and nothing else. He’s done this every day without fail. Nothing has come up in his life during that time that would disrupt this habit or indicate that it’s likely to be disrupted.

If I told you that only one of these two gentlemen finished their book within that year, which one would you bet on? Which approach do you believe is more likely to lead to a completed book within a year?

Which approach are you betting on in your life right now?

How’s that approach working for you?

Is your success predictable? Is your lack of success predictable?

Goals and Predictions

Now don’t get me wrong. Goals and intentions are awesome. Having clarity about what you’re going to do next is certainly important. But deciding what you want is only the first step. And if that’s all you do, then I predict some occasional spotty successes for you against a far more consistent backdrop of long-term mediocrity. I’ve seen that pattern play out enough times across enough people’s lives that I consider such results fairly predictable.

Eventually you must inject your goals and intentions into your past to create the evidence that will alter your predictions about where you’re headed. This is how you change course.

Setting a new goal is like punching in a new course at the helm of the Enterprise.

Creating a new habit is the act of saying, “Engage!”

The ship doesn’t move until you say that word. Wesley Crusher will just give you a blank stare, and no one wants that.

Sorry, Tony.

… and Wesley.

For more on this topic, especially the how-to aspects, read Goals Into Habits.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

This method isn’t very well publicized, but it’s commonly practiced by some of the most successful business people in the world. I first learned of it several years ago when Jay Abraham mentioned it on one of his audio programs. He said that it was a method Napoleon Hill had learned from many successful people while doing the research for Think and Grow Rich but that Hill didn’t comprehend why it was so effective and therefore didn’t integrate it into his book.

There are many variations on this method. Some people work for one week and then take two weeks off. Some do two weeks on, two weeks off. Some do one week on, three weeks off. The basic concept is that you work in fairly short intense bursts of no more than a week or two at a time (one week seems to be an upper limit for most people), followed by a period of no work for at least a week.

On Weeks

During your “on” weeks, your focus is on work, work, and little else but work. You can limit yourself to 40 hours, but it’s wise to experiment with longer hours. Try pushing yourself to do 60, 80, or even 100+ hours of work during this week. Fully engage in what you’re doing. Play full out.

Pick one project, and make a big dent in it during this time. Don’t get caught up in minor busywork. Bite off a meaningful piece of work, and get it done quickly and with solid focus.

Work hard. End your days with a feeling of being spent.

Put off distractions. You can always watch TV and surf the Internet later.

Tell yourself that it’s only a week… really just a few days… little more than a cup of coffee. The time will pass quickly if you immerse yourself in a project. Your goal is to fully engage in what you’re doing for this short period of time.

Allow yourself to become obsessed with your work during this time. Everything else can wait. Friends and social outings can wait. Family can wait. Personal tasks can wait. Recycle your dirty clothes if you must, but stick with solid work tasks during this time. Remember — it’s only a week.

Off Weeks

An “off” week is all about sharpening the saw. Let me clarify that this is NOT the same thing as having a lazy week. It’s not about taking time off and chilling out. That’s the equivalent of putting the saw down. The blade won’t get any sharper if you just put it down.

Off weeks are a time for personal renewal and fun. This is the time to really live. Go out and have a life.

Think of your off weeks as vacation weeks. Treat them as seriously as you do your work weeks. However, instead of focusing on your work life, focus all your attention on one or more aspects of your personal life.

Go travel to another city during this time. Have some fun new experiences. Go skydiving or scuba diving. Read a few new books. Go out and spend many hours with friends. Attend a workshop or seminar. Learn to dance. Do something that will enrich your life instead of just spinning your wheels.

If you have a family, consider taking a week to be with your family, giving them your full attention during this time. But don’t just sit around doing nothing. Go out and do fun activities with them each day. Travel to a new city with them. Go to the beach. Go camping. Go outside!

You can also “work” on personal projects during this time. Clean out your garage. Purge and donate unwanted items. Replant your garden.

Benefits of This Method

Why would you want to manage your life this way? Here are some of the benefits.

Motivation

Because of the time constraints, you’ll likely see a major boost in your motivation. Knowing that you’re going on vacation in a few days can help you flow through a lot of work. And knowing that your vacation week will soon end can help you pack in a lot more renewal time.

You will typically hit the start of your workweek with a strong desire to work. (If that doesn’t happen, you should definitely consider a career change.) And you’ll hit your off weeks with a strong desire to focus on your personal life for a while. Before you have a chance to start feeling demotivated and bored, it’s time to switch cycles. This keeps life fresh, interesting, and fun.

Focus

Instead of trying to work on all parts of your life in a single day or two, you focus on one important slice at a time. It’s okay to be largely unavailable for your significant other during your on weeks if you know you’ll be 100% present for him/her during an off week. This is far superior to not being fully present week after week.

Would you like it better if you had a significant other who was 100% there for you, enjoying your company for days at a time, but you also had breaks of several days where you each focused on other parts of your lives? If this sounds interesting to you, then try it. You can always switch back if you don’t like it.

Productivity

The productivity boost can be significant due to your increased motivation and focus during the work weeks. But it’s also interesting to note that your personal weeks can be just as productive. Instead of wasting your personal days on idleness, you’ll be putting those days to good use.

Also, the weekly flip-flopping helps you think more realistically in terms of planning and scheduling. You’ll be inclined to start thinking ahead and allocating certain weeks to projects, travel, etc. This is a good discipline to develop. It helps you avoid biting off more than you can chew.

In one solid week of focused work on high value tasks, you can easily exceed the normal output of two regular weeks. So even though it seems like you’re taking a lot more time off, this overall method is geared to produce a net productivity gain compared to sustained back-to-back 40-hour weeks.

Don’t overlook the positive impact this method can have on your personal life. When you work week after week and only take weekends off, it takes a huge toll on your personal life that you don’t even see. Weekends and evenings just aren’t enough to have a life outside of work. You need to devote significant chunks of time to the personal side as well. Otherwise your work will seem endless, and your motivation and passion will eventually tank, even if you normally enjoy your work.

Money

Higher productivity can easily generate an income boost. Money isn’t a result of time spent at the office. Hourly rates are largely a joke. Money flows from completing important tasks that deliver value. During your on weeks, you’ll be focused on completing meaningful projects and tasks. What can you finish before the week is up?

Also, your off weeks will give you more motivation to boost your income because that’s a great time to enjoy your money. You can expect to spend a lot more money during your off weeks, especially if you love to travel, eat out, and enjoy fun experiences that cost money. When you get a taste of what your money can do for you if you spend it wisely (to enrich your life instead of creating clutter), you’ll be more motivated to earn even more, so you can continue the pattern. Imagine how fun it would be to take one or two weeklong vacations each month — and still get more work done than you do now.

A lot of very wealthy people use this method or something similar. For example, in the personal development field, many friends of mine will put on a seminar for a week, during which they’ll work very hard, sometimes 12-16 hours per day. After that week they’re totally spent and hardly capable of productive work, even though their work is very fulfilling. So they’ll take off for a week or two or three and go travel, play golf, or spend time with their families. They try to do very little work during their off weeks. Once they’re restored they return to the office and begin working intensely on another project for a week or two, and their families don’t see them much during this time. Because they focus on high-value tasks while working, they can generate more than enough income during one solid workweek to offset a month of expenses, even while traveling and vacationing.

Balance

This method may look unbalanced at first, but it can actually create more balance in the long run because it helps ensure that you attend to your professional and your personal life without allowing one side to overpower the other.

You’ll work hard with this approach, but you’ll also play hard and have a lot of fun. Your life will become both productive and enjoyable. It feels great to be in such a state of flow.

Think of all the cool personal projects, experiences, and vacations you’d love to indulge in — if you only had the time. Well, just imagine what it would be like if you devoted 26 weeks — minimum! — to that side of your life this year.

No one is stopping you from making this a reality but you. You really hate it when I remind you that you’re 100% responsible for your results in life, don’t you?

Perspective

Alternating between your work life and personal life helps you regain perspective periodically. For example, during your work weeks, your subconscious mind will be processing some of the experiences from your last off week. How could you have enjoyed that week even more? Did you hold back? Did you overindulge?

During your off weeks, you’ll be processing many work-related ideas in the background. When you start on a fresh week, you’ll be kicking it off with a fresh perspective, inspired by new ideas. This helps you avoid getting stuck in long-term patterns that don’t serve you.

There are other benefits of course. These are just a few to get you thinking.

Personal Experiences and Some Tips

I’d like to share some extra tips based on my personal experiences that may help you avoid some pitfalls and gain some additional insights. I haven’t used this method religiously, but to the degree I’ve applied it at various times in my life (sometimes accidentally), it’s been effective. This year I’m aiming to apply it more deliberately than I have in the past. So far I’m off to a great start.

First, it’s important to keep a reasonably solid line of separation between your work weeks and personal weeks. Decide what goes in each week, and do your best to prevent cross-cycle leaks. During your on weeks, put your personal life on the back burner, and focus hard on your work. During your off weeks, do as little work as possible, and indulge deeply on the personal side.

I still check email and handle some communications during an off week, but I keep it to a minimum, ideally just 15-30 minutes per day, sometimes less. I delay any complex business communication until the next work cycle. People understand if I respond with a quick note to let them know I’m traveling and will follow up with them in a week or two.

If you’re sloppy about keeping a hard line of division between your on weeks and your off weeks, you’ll lose the benefits of immersion. It’s like getting non-restful sleep and then being a zombie the next day.

Second, don’t neglect your off weeks. This isn’t just time off to hang out and be lazy. This is an active time for growth, renewal, or completing personal projects. If you need a break or a lazy day (which is totally fine), use the weekends for that, or give yourself a down day or two between cycles. But don’t go through your off week in a semi-conscious haze of web surfing and TV watching. This is the time to really go out and have a life.

Travel is a terrific use of an off week, especially if it keeps you away from your work environment. Attending a workshop is another great use of off weeks. Even immersing yourself in computer games for the whole week is great if you love playing a certain game. Indulge fully in your personal desires — guilt-free.

Third, the perspective shifts that come from switching cycles are really powerful. They can accelerate your growth tremendously by giving you time to reflect with some distance.

During an off week, I keep getting ideas for new articles I want to write, so I’m bursting with ideas when I finally get back to work. I also gain a better perspective on which work tasks are worthwhile and which aren’t. When I have limited time for work before going on vacation again, low-value work tasks become annoying really fast because they steal time from high-value work. Low-value tasks don’t generate serious income, which means they don’t help me on the personal side either.

Emotional feedback plays an important role here. How I feel during one cycle has a lot to do with what happened during the previous cycle. If I blow my work week on trivial stuff, I don’t feel as good during an off week. I regret that I didn’t work as intelligently during the last work cycle, and it’s a little bit harder to fully enjoy the personal side. This helps me commit to a better work cycle the next time. However, since the off weeks are still guaranteed, I don’t have the option of deluding myself into thinking that I can steal time from my personal life to make up for low productivity at work.

While I’m in the midst of a workweek, I get ideas for how I can improve my next off week. For example, my girlfriend and I were a bit too indulgent food-wise during our last week together. (L.A. just has so many incredible vegan restaurants.) That can be fun every now and then, but it’s not a wise idea to do that every week we spend together. So next time we may want to tone down that aspect and incorporate more exercise (the vertical kind, that is). An overindulgent week now and then is okay, but in the long run it’s important to strive for balance. On the bright side, it became clear that we both love traveling together, and we have the flexible lifestyles to make that a reality, so we’ve been discussing other cities we might explore together this year.

Fourth, the intensity that comes from such immersion is really awesome. When you give yourself permission to blow off all personal concerns and fully immerse yourself in work for a week, it seems clear that you can get a lot done. But more important than the quantity of work is the quality of work you can produce during the times you can work for days on end without distractions.

This is especially powerful on the personal side, especially when it comes to relationships. Instead of going on dates for a few hours at a time with big gaps in between, imagine diving into a new relationship by spending days on end with each other 24/7. Consider what it would be like to go on a date — even a first date — for a whole week instead of for a single night, including sleeping together every night and sharing every meal together. That can get pretty intense, but if you can handle it, you can build a connection in a matter of days that might otherwise take months.

Applying this to dating might sound strange, but take a moment to ponder all the good practices you’d have to adopt in order to commit to a weeklong first date with someone. You’d probably get really good at pre-screening people for compatibility, so you wouldn’t have to deal with bad dates. And your communication skills will advance very quickly if you’re going to be with the same person for a full week. But since you also know the week will eventually end, it motivates you to enjoy the time spent with your partner as much as possible without taking him or her for granted.

You can use this approach with your family too. Instead of being a half-assed parent on nights and weekends because you’re burnt out from weeks of endless work, consider spending a week out of every month with your family. Give them your full attention during that time. Lately I’ve been thinking about how I might travel with my kids and explore different cities with them, especially when they’re in their teen years and capable of enjoying more of the grown-up stuff.

Fifth, the alternations are more important than the durations. It’s not that critical how many days you spend on each side. What matters most is that you keep shifting back and forth to keep your motivation for both sides sky-high.

At the start of this year, I spent a week working hard to prep for the January Conscious Growth Workshop. I also spoke at a friend’s workshop. Then I spent several days hanging out with my girlfriend Rachelle, during which time I didn’t do much work at all. Then I did the workshop, after which I felt totally spent, and less than 48 hours later I was in Puerto Rico for a weeklong leadership retreat. I gave a one-hour presentation there, but the main focus of the week was personal renewal, so it was definitely an off week for me. Next I returned to Vegas and spent more time with Rachelle, had a poker night with friends, and spent a day at Circus Circus with Erin and the kids. Then Rachelle went to Hollywood, and I worked solo in Vegas for a few days. Next I headed to Hollywood to spend a few days with her there for her birthday, “kidnapped” her back to Vegas with me for the weekend, and then returned to Hollywood to spend another week with her there. When we were in Vegas, she and I also enjoyed a night of wrestling, video games, and hide-and-go-seek with the kids, and we saw two movies and a show on the Strip.

While I was enjoying my off time, I did virtually no work. I didn’t do much blogging and spent only minimal time on communication. Most of that time Rachelle and I were busy having fun together 24/7. Last week we enjoyed a day at Disneyland, explored the L.A. Natural History Museum, strolled along Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica and the Walk of Fame in Hollywood, shared a walk along the beach under the stars, attended an L.A. social meet-up, and indulged in a lot more gourmet vegan and raw food than we should have (including a 6-course gourmet raw dinner for Valentine’s Day).

At the end of the week, Rachelle and I noted that we had committed 4 of the 7 deadly sins. During breakfast yesterday I tried to piss her off so we could check off wrath as well, but my best efforts only made her laugh at me and roll her eyes. Later that morning she definitively kicked my ass at Star Trek trivia for the second time in a row. “Khhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaannnnn!”

Today I’m back in Vegas, and after so much indulgence in my personal life, I’m filled with a renewed drive to get some serious work done, starting with this blog post. No girlfriend in town (which is good for Rachelle too because she needs to work on her next play — she’s a playwright and an actress). Then in a few more days it will be time to shift into personal mode since my family and Erin’s family are coming to town this weekend to celebrate my daughter’s 10th birthday. Wow… 10 already. They really do grow up fast.

These back-and-forth shifts don’t fall cleanly on weekly borders, and that’s okay. The benefits come from the shifting. The duration of each cycle isn’t as important as the fact that you do cycle — and cycle often.

A weekend — even a 3-day weekend — simply isn’t long enough to complete a serious renewal cycle. Six to seven days is a more realistic minimum. It normally takes a few days just to let go of work and become fully immersed in vacation mode (or personal project mode). Taking off every weekend doesn’t cut it. Think of taking a full week off as the minimum, not the maximum. You’d be surprised to learn how many people achieve awesome productivity results with cycles closer to one week on, two or three weeks off. After taking so much time off for personal renewal, they’re itching to get back to work, so their on weeks are highly productive.

* * *

If you’ve never tried this method before, I encourage you to experiment with it. If this is the first time you’ve heard about it, it may sound a bit alien. You may have a hard time grasping why it works. But don’t reject it out of hand just because you’ve been conditioned to work a certain way. For now simply let this idea sit there in the back of your mind, and remain open to trying it at some point when that becomes realistic for you. This idea will resurface and nag at you when the time is right.

Obviously you need a flexible work schedule to pull this off, so it’s up to you to create that. Whatever you do, don’t succumb to lame-ass excuses like “My boss won’t let me.” (If you were about to blurt out some wimpy, whiny, give-away-your-power crap like that, you need to read this article and then this one. And for good measure, this one too.) You chose your boss, your employer, work environment, and your work schedule after all. You can’t pretend you don’t have the freedom to make this work schedule happen if you really want it. If you want the flexibility to experiment with higher levels of productivity and a richer personal life, then you’re always free to make new choices. You’re responsible for your results in life. Are you getting the results you desire?

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Once you get past the socially conditioned attitude that D/s is somehow naughty or deviant, you’ll find that it has a tremendous amount to do with personal development. Let’s start with some of the most basic elements and go from there.

Body Image

First, when you consciously explore your sexuality with other people, body image issues are bound to come up.

What is all this extra fat doing on me? Why can’t I be taller? Why can’t I be more muscular? Why was I born looking like a troll? Why are my boobs so irregular? Why is my sister so much better looking than I am?

How are you processing these feelings? Do you feel like you’re broken and need to fix yourself before you can fully embrace a healthy and abundant sex life? Do you ever say things like, “Once I lose another X pounds, then I’ll be open to dating again”?

Do you give up on feeling attractive because you’re stuck following someone else’s rules?

Well, guess what. Your body is always going to have some flaws. It’s never going to be perfect. And it doesn’t have to be anywhere close to perfect for you to enjoy sexual abundance. Fussing over your imperfections is only robbing you of pleasure. Why not enjoy an abundant sex life now, and work on making whatever improvements you’d like to make from a place of abundance… as opposed to thinking you must do those things first in order to earn your right to enjoy such abundance?

This isn’t specific to D/s of course, but if you’re doing anything sexual, it’s likely you’ll have to deal with some body image issues.

Get over yourself. Accept that we’re all physically flawed. Your body isn’t perfect, and neither will your partner’s be. Recognize that your partner is probably just as miffed as you are. It’s how you use what you’ve got that counts. Often the people who seem to have the most flawless bodies are those with the worst body image struggles.

If you’re truly hideous, then turn out the lights, and master the art of pleasuring your lovers in the dark.

Enjoy what you have while you’re here. Don’t put off the enjoyment of a satisfying sex life just because you’re dissatisfied with how you look naked.

Shift your attention to the parts of yourself you love most. Instead of looking at your fat, notice your muscles. Instead of feeling bad about that big mole, notice how nibble-ready your earlobes look. And instead of fussing over a hairstyle that was a mistake, notice how your eyes look when you smile.

When you love your body, you give others the opportunity to love it too. Don’t be so selfish with your sexuality. You’re only denying yourself and your lover of pleasure.

Communication Skills

Reaching the point of having sex with someone, especially within a D/s context, can certainly challenge your communication skills. Some people are very good at this. Others really suck (and not in the good way).

Are you able to effectively communicate your desires with other people in such a way that you get the results you want? Can you overcome problems like shyness, shame, guilt, and fear that cause you to hold back and hesitate? How often do you miss opportunities because you choke on finding the right words?

What about your listening skills? Are you good at figuring out what your partner likes and dislikes? Can you tell when things are heading in a positive direction sexually and maintain the momentum together? Can you handle the pacing and flow of communicating about sex without coming across as too passive, too aggressive, too dorky, or too creepy?

Can you get a date when you want one? Or are you one of those people that hovers around your target for months, pretending to be “just friends” when you’d really love to jump ‘em and hump ‘em? Does the thought of asking for a play date make you turn pale with anxiety?

The more you explore your sexuality with other people, the faster you’re going to develop some amazing communication skills. You can read as many books as you want, but ultimately this skill is developed through experience. I know that sucks (and not in the good way), but it is what it is.

Good communication skills are particular important when exploring D/s. Are you and your partner on the same wavelength in terms of the type of experience you wish to co-create, or have you fallen out of sync? Can you communicate about serious topics while staying in character?

If your communication skills are poor, it will have major consequences for you in the bedroom, assuming anyone other than you ever visits there.

Overcoming Limiting Beliefs

What’s possible for you sexually? Do you have fantasies that you’d love to experience, the kind that some people have already enjoyed but which you doubt are possible for you? How does it feel considering that if it’s possible for them, it’s almost certainly possible for you too?

How accurate are your beliefs? Are they well-aligned with reality, or do they prevent you from experiencing too much of the possible by mistakenly ruling it out as impossible or highly improbable?

Some common examples of limiting beliefs include:

- Women don’t like sex nearly as much as men.
- I have to be in love or in a relationship before I can enjoy having sex with someone.
- If I can impress her, she’ll like me and will be more inclined to go to bed with me.
- I have to pretend I’m not interested in sex, or she’ll think I’m one of those guys.
- No one in their right mind could possibly want to be dominated by me.
- I can’t discuss my sexual interests publicly because society will shun me for it.
- If I get rejected, I won’t be able to handle it.

False beliefs hold us back sexually. When we dump them and adopt more accurate beliefs, we empower ourselves to create a whole new range of experiences that were previously impossible.

Many, many false beliefs about sexuality are installed by television, particularly in America. One of the best things you can do to improve your sex life is cut back dramatically on watching TV, so you aren’t constantly bombarding your mind with hideously inaccurate beliefs about sex, dating, and relationships.

Here are some examples of more accurate and empowering beliefs:

- Most women and men love having sex.
- Attraction is created by much more than looks.
- We’re all sexual beings. Sex is as natural for us as eating.
- If it can be done in a safe, sane, and consensual way, it’s a healthy experience to explore with a willing partner.
- People frequently enjoy talking about sexually explicit topics within the first few minutes of conversation. They find it fun.
- On a planet of 7 billion humans, there’s an absolute abundance of people who’d be thrilled to explore your sexual fantasies with you.
- If I share my sexual interests openly, I’ll not only attract the attention of compatible partners more easily, but I’ll also help inspire others to be more open with their sexuality as well, thereby helping us all overcome unhealthy sexual repression.

Immersing yourself in the exploration of your sexuality will help you identify, confront, and tear down many limiting beliefs — beliefs that are repressing you outside the bedroom as well.

Sex energy is life energy. Your sexual limits reflect your life limits.

Sex Skills

Being a skilled lover is a line of personal development unto itself. How good are you at pleasing your partner?

Do you consciously work on improving in this area of your life? Do you seek the advice of others who are more experienced than you? Do you ask your lovers how you can make your lovemaking even better? Do you read how-to books on sex? Do you go to sex workshops?

Is this an area of your life you’re neglecting, or do you take charge of it and consciously work on becoming better and better?

D/s requires even more skill development. Do you know how to safely and pleasurably dominate another person? Do you know how to please your partner from a submissive position? Such skills can even be applied outside the bedroom. For example, do you know how to lead your boss?

Self-esteem

Your self-esteem will play a major role in dictating the terms of your sex life. If you have high self-esteem, it’s much more likely you’ll enjoy a happy, healthy sex life.

Do you feel worthy of having sexual abundance in your life?

Is your self-esteem high enough to be able to handle a D/s session? Can you surrender yourself to someone else’s will for a while and still feel good about yourself during and afterwards? Can you feel good about your desire to dominate another person and welcome such an experience?

How do you feel about broadcasting your sexual interests? Can you handle other people’s reactions? Could you handle it if your friends, family, and co-workers discovered what you were into? Is your self-esteem high enough to shrug off criticism and keep moving forward with no loss of enthusiasm, or do you have to hide everything from the public eye to protect your fragile self-image? How much of a chicken are you?

Law of Attraction

How well can you use the LoA to manifest compatible, willing sex partners?

Are you surrounded by abundance, noticing that everywhere you look, fun sexual opportunities abound? Or do you live in a world of scarcity?

Can you hold the intention for what you’d like to experience next and expect it to show up in your life quickly and easily?

You’re creating this experience, you know.

The quality of your sex life is a great indicator of your skill with the LoA.

This is especially true when exploring D/s, and you’re looking to attract something more creative than vanilla sex.

Fun and Enjoyment

Does your sex life help you enjoy more positive emotions like unconditional love, bliss, and ecstasy?

Do you feel good about your sex life at present? Are you happy? Are you having fun with it? Do you feel grateful for what you’re receiving?

When you feel good, you spread that feeling to other parts of your life, and you also spread it to other people.

It’s a wonderful feeling to know that someone else is willing to mate with you. It’s deliciously delightful to co-create a fun experience together, both physically and emotionally.

You may find that these feelings are heightened when exploring D/s. To know that your partner cares enough to help you explore your sexuality in a less mainstream way can generate intense feelings of gratitude and connection.

You’re human — enjoy your sexuality fully!

Courage and Confidence

How do you handle fear of rejection? Are you able to take action in spite of fear?

Can you openly and shamelessly ask someone for what you want? Can you ask a particularly tasty looking morsel of humanity if s/he would like to “play together”?

Or are you one of those soulless minions, missing countless opportunities because you’re too timid to speak up and ask for what you want?

When you do find a sex partner, do you act all clingy and needy, afraid to lose him/her for fear you won’t be able to find anyone better? Do people feel compelled to lie to you to protect your feelings when they break up with you because they don’t think you can handle the truth?

What about the fear of being judged?

Can you publicly reveal that you enjoy what you enjoy, without worrying about being shamed or ridiculed for it? Can you say, “I absolutely love to dominate submissive women — that’s a huge turn-on for me”? Could you handle it if your parents knew that about you?

No courage, no nookie.

Social Conditioning

Are you living your own life as an independent being, or are you trying to fit in to satisfy others’ expectations?

Do you have the will to break with social conditioning when it runs afoul of your true desires? Can you explore what you want to explore, regardless of whether or not it’s socially acceptable?

Success

Are you getting the results you want in your sex life? Are you setting specific sex goals and achieving them? Are those goals in writing? Do you visualize them as real?

Do you treat this part of your life differently than your career development, your finances, and your health? Are you sexually effective? Do you decide upon and then create the experiences you’d most like to have?

Would you say this part of your life is a success… or a failure? And how does that reflect what’s happening in other parts of your life?

Oneness

Are you exploring your sexuality in a way that serves your good as well as the good of others?

Are you a selfish lover, only concerned with your own pleasure? Or are you a generous and giving lover, creating pleasure for yourself and your partners?

Does exploring your sexuality send positive ripples out into the world by boosting your happiness and the happiness of all who share your bed?

Have you learned how to balance the fulfillment of your desires with the fulfillment of others’ desires?

Can you embrace the asymmetical aspects of D/s without losing your alignment with Oneness? When you’re dominating, do you use your authority to pleasure your sub? And when you’re submitting, does your behavior delight your Dom? At the end of a session, are you both feeling happy and blissful?

Can you share what you’re learning with others, so that they may benefit from your knowledge and experience? Can you help us co-create a less sexually repressed world, for the highest good of all? Do you care enough to help make that happen?

Self-discipline

Do you maintain good self-control, or do you take unsafe risks? Do you practice safe sex even in the height of passion?

Can you make wise decisions when your brain is flooded with intoxicating hormones? Can you recognize when you’re emotionally compromised with infatuation and shouldn’t make major long-term decisions? Do you have the self-discipline to stop yourself from doing something really stupid?

You can use D/s to test and to build your self-discipline. How long can you handle being told what to do as a sub — what are the limits of your obedience? And as a Dom, how well can you maintain consensual control over your sub?

Receiving

Do you allow yourself to receive pleasure? Do you feel guilty about asking for what you want? Can you expect your lover to do what pleases you most, even if it’s a bit unorthodox?

If you can’t receive in the bedroom, maybe that explains why you’re broke too. Fix the problem in the bedroom, and notice what happens to your wallet.

Power

When you play the Dom role, how good are you at taking the lead? Do you feel comfortable with the burden of responsibility? Are you strong enough to handle that role?

When you play as a sub, how good are you at implementing your Dom’s commands? Are you able to respond with loyalty and obedience, or do you become restless and resistant?

How do these bedroom roles reflect challenges in other parts of your life? Do you have problems making clear, strong decisions (bad Dom)? Do you have problems sticking with your decisions long enough to fully implement them (bad sub)?

Explore these roles in the bedroom, and notice what you learn about your fundamental strengths and weaknesses in the area of Power. As you build your capacity to handle these roles in the bedroom, you can increase your alignment with Power and grow stronger outside the bedroom.

Balance and Variety

After you’ve been dominated by your boss at the office all day, wouldn’t it be nice to return home and be greeted with, “How may your willing slave serve you this evening, Master?” Wouldn’t it be nice to enjoy someone who takes exquisite delight in carrying out your every command, sexual or otherwise? How about ordering your slave to make and serve your favorite meal, followed by a one-hour massage, and then some deliciously passionate sex — all because your slave truly loves doing those things for you?

On the other hand, if your work life puts you in a role of great responsibility where you must make many tricky decisions, wouldn’t it be nice to release and let go of that responsibility in your private life? How would it feel to completely surrender yourself to the will of a strong, powerful, trustworthy individual who delights in taking charge of your personal pleasure?

D/s can be used to restore balance to an otherwise unbalanced life. You may not understand people who enjoy one role or the other, but I assure you they exist in great abundance.

Truth

Pay attention and notice what’s happening. What’s the Truth about your sex life?

Is your love life littered by a trail of broken hearts you’ve left behind? Or when people interact with you sexually, do you take responsibility for leaving them better off for having known you?

Do you use sexual connections to help people feel good, to heal, and to share love and passion? Or do you use people like objects and then abandon them?

Do you maintain positive ongoing relations with your past lovers, even if you’ve grown more distant with the passage of time? Or do you leave people feeling scorned, resentful, and disconnected?

Is your personal exploration of sexuality helping to improve the lives of others along the way? Are you using your sexuality as a positive force for good?

Do you really believe that having sex with you is a good and healthy experience for others in the long run? Are you certain of that?

Do you consciously choose lovers with a healthy, happy sexual history and good relations with past lovers?

It’s a wonderful feeling to look back on your past lovers and to see clear evidence that they’re much better off for having known you. It feels good to know that by expressing yourself sexually, you’re actually doing some good. This is what it means to be a conscious lover.

Given these many areas of overlap between D/s and personal development (and many more I didn’t list here), it should be abundantly clear that D/s can be a tremendous growth accelerator, assuming you approach it with such an intention. While it may seem like a “naughty” subject to discuss openly, the reality is that exploring sexual power exchanges can help you learn a great deal more about yourself, enjoy a variety of delightful pleasures, and develop your strength of character in ways you can scarcely imagine… not to mention that it can be a heck of a lot of FUN.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina