Scepticism

[dimitry781]

Hi Steve/All!

I just recently started to read your articles and listen to podcasts. Some of your articles are very inspirational and work great for me (for example an article on being an early riser - it is great!), while others (mainly those which touch the subject of conscious, subconscious and reality) are a bit difficult for me to understand. I have noticed that I am very skeptical. I always been told 'Think before doing'. I am not very happy about that because I loose motivation to try methods you suggest (for example in Consulting your Intuition). And this is applicable to many areas of my life. I want to overcome this skepticism and become open-minded. How do I do that?

Thanking you in anticipation!

[Jonathan Mead]

You have to learn how to trust your intuition, or trust your heart/gut. It seems you have a typical case of an imbalance between your reasoning and feeling.

"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift." - Albert Einstein

I'd recommend reading GUT "How to Think From Your Middle to Get to the Top". You can ignore everything about using intuition for success if you want. The main value in this book is it offers countless exercises on using your intuition. It's like a muscle that you must exercise, the more you use it, the stronger and more in tune with it you will become. Also, the more you use your intuition, the more you will begin to trust it and recognize its value.

[Trezker]

Just start doing some of the stuff described. Ask a question and write down the first thing that pops into your mind. I haven't done this myself much, haven't had the patience.

I'm guessing this is not easy to do. For one many people are disorganised and are keeping lots of stuff in their heads. If you don't use GTD I think it'd be a good idea to get that working first so you take all responsibility for remembering stuff off your head.

Then it's a matter of practice. There are many physical skills that are very hard to accomplish. Video games like Quake are good examples of this. Practising something in your mind is likely just as hard. So the key thing is repetition. Just keep asking stuff and be sceptical about what you're receiving because in the beginning you're probably just gonna get tons of crap. If you don't make a jump, you're not where you intended to be and should not act as if you were.

Somewhere down the road, if this stuff works, you'll start seeing that the answers you get make sense more often. I hope. You don't need to get rid of scepticism, it is still a tool you need.

What you need to learn is how to make an educated leap of faith. This means you make leaps of faith, but not from places that'll probably kill you.

"Before you attempt to beat the odds, be sure you could survive the odds beating you."