Dec 5

Best Personal Development Resources

Posted in Reviews, Tools

I’ve received several emails recently inviting me to take part in a personal development “giveaway event”. This is where a large group of personal development coaches, online marketers and the like make free resources available in exchange for signups to their email lists.

I took part in one before (which is why I’m getting those invitations). I got about 300 new subscribers to my newsletter. But I’m not doing it again.

Why not?

Because part of the expectation in participating in those things is that you’ll promote the giveaway. And frankly, most – no, practically all – of the stuff in the last one was crap. The giveaway was HYPE HYPE HYPEHYPEHYPE from start to finish, and it was dominated by unprofessional promoters of get-rich-quick schemes (both literal get-rich-quick schemes and the personal development equivalent *cough* flawofdistraction *cough*).

I picked up a dozen things myself that looked less dire than the average. Some were competitive products to mine, others were “build your online business” sort of things. None of them were up to much, and some were just ridiculous nonsense. If there was a single new idea in any one of them, I must have overlooked it, because I certainly don’t remember any.

A few months later, I’d unsubscribed from all the mailing lists and deleted all the worthless material I downloaded. (If you joined the giveaway on my recommendation, my belated apologies. And if you subscribed because of the giveaway, and you’re still here - well, I hope that means that something good came of it.)

What I’m going to do instead of taking part in that giveaway is to point you to the best personal development resources I know of personally on the web. I’ve got three criteria for inclusion:

  1. The person producing the resource is genuine, not a non-stop crazy hype machine, and has a good story to tell about their own personal development journey.
  2. It contains original ideas and material I haven’t seen anywhere else. It’s not just restating truisms that anyone with half a brain could figure out for themselves.
  3. It’s practical, and tells you how to apply the principles it’s teaching in real life.

Now, you’d think that there’d be a huge mass of material that would meet those three simple criteria, but if there is then it’s hiding in the Dark Matter internet where I can’t see it. If there’s someone out there doing this stuff that I haven’t noticed, by all means jump in and comment below (no self-recommendations, please).

I’ll structure this by person rather than by topic, since (let’s face it) you take your personal development advice from people, because of the people that they are. And I’ll go in alphabetical order, to be fair.

Some of the resources I’ll mention are free, and some are paid. Of the paid ones, some have affiliate programs, meaning that if you buy them on my recommendation (using my link) I get a cut. I only ever recommend things with an affiliate link if I’d recommend them without.

Steven Aitchison

Steven’s genuine personality shines through every line of his blog Change Your Thoughts. He’s not the greatest writer on the internet, but he has some excellent insights and a generous heart.

He has a free “best of” that you can get by subscribing to his newsletter. Steven is doing a lot of offers lately, I will warn you, for his own and other people’s stuff.

His leading paid resource is How to Become an Advanced Early Riser (link is to my review). It hasn’t got me down to 5 hours of sleep, but then I haven’t implemented everything in it. And it has got me up early to exercise, which has been one of the best changes I’ve made.

Leo Babauta

I’ll admit that I wasn’t that impressed with Leo’s Zen Habits blog when I first looked at it. It seemed too obvious. But maybe that’s his strength: he points out the obvious and draws attention to it in a new way. I’ve been following him on Google+, and I have to say I’m warming to his approach.

The only one of his resources I’ve read myself so far is The Essential Motivation Handbook. It’s a competent, useful ebook.

Vlad Dolezal

Vlad is one of the new breed of young coaches that are making the Internet a better place. I first came across him through his free course on procrastination.

To find out what Vlad’s all about, start here: Best of Fun Life Development.

I reviewed his truly excellent ebook Unleash Your Confidence back in March, and it got a great big tick in each of the boxes: genuine, original and practical. It’s the confidence ebook I wish I’d written – and the kind of material I wish everyone was producing, so I could recommend more resources.

Charlie Gilkey

I’ve recently subscribed to Charlie’s Productive Flourishing, and it’s refreshing to read something so intelligent and thoughtful on an internet that’s usually more full of fluff than a feather pillow.

I haven’t looked at any of his products yet so I can’t say anything about them. But the blog is unusually good. It’s primarily for people in creative businesses, but there’s personal development stuff woven through.

Aaand… that’s about it 

I’ll admit that I haven’t obsessively tracked down every personal development writer on the Internet and looked at all their products, but I keep my ear to the ground, and there’s really not a lot else that I’m aware of.

And, ultimately, personal development isn’t about resources you buy. A good resource can help with a specific issue, definitely, but personal development is about developing resources within yourself. The people I’ve mentioned can definitely help you with that, but there’s no such thing as “done for you” personal development.

So, what have I missed? And are there personal development resources you’re looking for that you can’t find (or can only find crappy examples of)?

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Mar 10

Review: Unleash Your Confidence by Vlad Dolezal

Posted in Reviews

Lack of confidence is one of those issues that most people have. For me, it used to be meeting new people. For you, it might be speaking in public or launching a new project. So I’ve been thinking about creating some kind of confidence resource for a while, particularly since I’ve been increasing my own confidence.

But now I don’t have to write something, because Vlad Dolezal has a new ebook out called Unleash Your Confidence, and it’s excellent. (Read the whole review – there’s a surprise from me near the end.)

Who the hell is Vlad Dolezal?

I “met” life coach Vlad Dolezal when I was preparing to launch my Stop Procrastinating, Start Succeeding course. A Google ad in my gmail alerted me to his free course on procrastination. I subscribed to it, as well as to several others – and his was far and away the best. I emailed him to tell him so, and invite him to be part of my Eight Action Takers post, and he graciously accepted.

The other anti-procrastination courses I found had the faults of so much personal development crap material:

  • There was nothing in them that a reasonably intelligent person couldn’t figure out for themselves,
  • They consisted of what I call “vague encouragement”, without much in the way of concrete exercises to actually change things, and
  • They were flat-out dull.

Not so with Vlad’s. He had specific techniques which he explained well, which weren’t just worthy good conventional advice, and he presented them in a casual, enjoyable yet always responsibly professional voice. (His site is called “Fun Life Development”, and he delivers on that promise.)

So when he approached me (personally, not in a mass mailout) to be part of launching his Unleash Your Confidence ebook, I had high expectations. And I can tell you that all of the same good things that I’ve just said about his procrastination course are also true of his ebook on confidence. It’s well-written, concrete, practical and enjoyable.

5 products I won’t review

A while back, I looked at another confidence product which had an attractive affiliate program (meaning, if I recommended it I would potentially earn nice money). I subscribed and read through the lessons – nah. Not going to recommend that to my subscribers, sorry. It was flat and ordinary and I just couldn’t summon any enthusiasm for it.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve had five approaches by people wanting to joint-venture with me in various ways. One came from a virtual assistant who misspelled my name even more badly than people usually do, and asked me to promote a website that didn’t excite me – I ignored that one. One came off as spammy, and I ignored that too. One was just another worthy vague encouragement ebook, like a thousand others (ironic, given that it was about how to stand out as an individual). And the fourth relied on a technique which I’m not convinced is effective.

Vlad’s was the fifth, and it’s the only one I’m going to recommend to you. I am very, very fussy about the products I review – too fussy, in some ways. Most personal development products get me thinking, “I could write a better one than this.” Vlad’s got me thinking, “I wish I’d written this.”

Yes, it has an affiliate program, which I’m part of – if you buy it using my link, I get some money. But that’s true of most of the ones I didn’t review, too.

As I mentioned before, I’ve been increasing my own confidence over the past several years, and the methods I’ve used are largely the ones in this book.

What’s in the box

Unleash Your Confidence coverSo what’s in Unleash Your Confidence?

The main part is a 55-page ebook. It starts with a minimal amount of definition and theory (I’m always happy to see minimal theory and maximal practice). Then it sets out half a dozen straightforward, well-described techniques to increase your confidence. They are:

  1. Changing your “mental movies” around situations where you don’t feel confident,
  2. Dealing with the voice in your head that criticises you and reduces your confidence,
  3. Moving beyond the limiting beliefs you hold about yourself and the world,
  4. Taking gradual action to build up your confidence,
  5. Using confident body language to feed back into your mental state, and
  6. Pre-capturing a confident mental state to play back in critical situations.

Throughout, he uses everyday images and metaphors to make his points clear, and tells you exactly how to do the exercises that will (I’m confident) change your thoughts and feelings about the situations that currently intimidate you.

The version I read was an Adobe pdf, but if you like to read on a mobile device like an iPhone or a Kindle, Vlad also provides it in .mobi and .epub. Nice.

As a bonus, he also includes a second ebook setting out a personal development technique called the GROW model. GROW is an acronym, and the technique is fresh and well-thought-out.

At this point in a review I usually talk about what I didn’t like, but honestly, there wasn’t anything. Vlad’s name may be hard to spell, but his ebook is easy to recommend.

It’s $11 (USD) this week and $17 thereafter. That, folks, is a bargain. Go and buy Unleash Your Confidence.

(Vlad will send you an emailed receipt. As an extra inducement, if you forward that receipt to me, confidence@hypno.co.nz, I will send you a download link for my audio track Confident Person as an additional bonus. No extra charge, as long as you’ve bought through the link above.)

Summary: What I Think

Key: 1 Terrible 2 Poor 3 Average 4 Good 5 Couldn’t be better
Editing 4

Design 3.5

Content 4.5

Implementability 5

Overall Usefulness 5

Overall Value 5

That link again: Unleash Your Confidence.

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Dec 21

Living Skillfully Best of 2010, Part 2

Posted in Reviews

(This and yesterday’s post were going to be one big post, but there were technical issues I messed it up. I won’t usually post this often, or this briefly for that matter.)

Continuing our Best of 2010 from yesterday, here are what I consider my 5 best posts on this blog (that is, not guest posts) this year, and the 5 resources I discovered in 2010 that I most recommend.

Favourite Posts

Not in order of favourite-ness, since that would change depending when you asked me. In reverse chronological order.

  1. How to Make Hard Things Easier (part of Stop Procrastinating, Start Succeeding). There’s the fluffy pink unicorns approach – and then there’s the approach that will actually get you somewhere and turn your unclimbable mountains into sand dunes.
  2. The Paramount Pictures Technique for Crushing Fear Like a Beer Can (also part of Stop Procrastinating, Start Succeeding). Blow it up big, then crush it down small.
  3. How to Get Unstuck, my interview with my wonderful client Sarah about how stopping smoking became a personal development journey for her.
  4. 10 Ways to Cultivate a Positive Habit, based on the book by Robert Emmons that I’ll talk about in a minute.
  5. Getting Things Undone, my Lent post about starting by removing stuff.

They’re all achievement-oriented, aren’t they? Hmmm.

Favourite Resources

You can see all my recommended resources at my resources page, but here are 5 that I particularly like and that I discovered in 2010. (Affiliate links.)

  1. Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, by John J. Ratey. I just finished this book, which is about one of the most powerful practices for improving our lives – exercise. It improves your mood and your brain function, not just your heart and lungs.
  2. How to Become an Advanced Early Riser, by Steven Aitchison. If there’s one resource I credit with preparing me for a great 2011, it’s this guide to getting up early in order to do practices that give you more time and energy.
  3. The World’s Healthiest Foods, an Essential Guide to the Healthiest Way of Eating, by George Mateljan. I can’t praise this book highly enough – 800 pages of well-researched advice on the 100 most nutritious foods in the world, including how to choose them in the shop, how to store them, how to cook them, quick-t0-prepare recipes, and what health benefits they’re likely to have. And it’s $25 on Amazon. Everyone who’s got it on my recommendation has thanked me, often several times.
  4. Thanks! How the new science of gratitude can make you happier, by Robert Emmons. The basis for the post I mentioned above on ways to cultivate a positive habit, but there’s far more than that in this little book. Gratitude is another one of the most powerful practices for improving our lives, and a little goes a long way.
  5. A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook, by Bob Stahl and Elisha Goldstein. A good, useful, practical summary of one of the most effective mind-body techniques there is for stress reduction and consequent health improvement.

So there’s some stuff you can read today and some resources for the New Year. Next week, all going well, I’ll be talking about New Year challenges, so stay tuned.

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