Nov 9

How to Digest Your Goals in 7 Fun and Easy Steps

Posted in Techniques

As part of writing my Stop Procrastinating, Start Succeeding course, I’ve been researching other people’s advice about procrastination, and one of the commonest pieces of common sense about it is, “Break down your tasks.” After all, often we put off the tasks we’ve set ourselves because they’re too big and intimidating, right? So you need to break them down.

Well, I assume a reasonable level of intelligence in my readers, and it seems to me that you’ve probably thought of that already. So if that piece of obvious advice isn’t working for you, perhaps “break the task down” is itself a task that needs to be broken down and turned into a method. Or even a game…

Let’s play the Task Digestion Game!

Digestion is a complicated thing.

You actually have a small second brain to run your digestive system. There are more nerve cells in your digestive organs than there are in your spinal cord, plus a whole vocabulary of signalling chemicals – many of which also occur in the brain in your head. It’s tricky being an omnivore.

I spends all my time in pursuit of virtue and when I finds it I eats it.

And breaking down your big goals into achievable steps isn’t always easy either.

One of my key goal-achievement processes is what I call “two-level goals”, where you start with the things you really want to achieve and end up with the steps you can take right now to move you closer to them. I’m going to use a digestion metaphor to describe some steps to get from those high-level goals to those concrete steps or tasks, and I’m going to do a worked example using one of my own goals.

1. Chew it over

The first step to digesting your goals is to take firm hold of them and chew them into big pieces, just small enough to swallow.

One of my goals is “Live a profitable life of service to my Right People”. Let’s chew that up. Let’s break it into three parts to start (I like threes).

“Live a profitable life, of service, to my Right People”.

And let’s chew those three into three parts each, starting with “by”:

“Live a profitable life”: by doing some good, making some money and enjoying the process.

“of service”: by connecting people to resources, teaching them skills, and showing them that they can be glorious.

“to my Right People”: OK, “by” doesn’t fit here, so I’m going to say “people who appreciate what I provide them with, take action, and share the results with others”.

You could keep on breaking down into further threes (and you could use twos or fives), but you get the principle. You’ve given yourself a certain number of slots and declared that your goals will break down into that many slots, and then a number of sub-slots. Just start ad-libbing it and you’ll be surprised how it flows. It’s like impromptu theatre: if you commit, keep moving, and don’t second-guess yourself, creativity results. (I just signed up for an improv class next year, so you’ll be hearing more about that in the future, by the way.)

2. Get it damp and soft

Another thing that happens in your mouth, besides chewing, is that the food gets mixed with saliva, which does a little bit to break down some parts of it but mostly just makes it easier to get down your throat, to the next stage.

Let me introduce you to a concept that just struck me a moment ago: the Smear Chart. This is like the love child of a brainstorm and a mind map (and is nothing to do with papilloma viruses). You know how in a brainstorm, you put up a whole lot of concepts more or less randomly, without censoring or critiquing? And how in a mind map, you make a beautifully ordered chart of concepts that connect and branch from each other? Well, a Smear Chart is somewhere in between. To make a smear chart of my work so far, I write out the three main concepts (profitable life, service, Right People) on a piece of paper, then write the three next-level breakdowns around each concept (without overlapping, but with no other layout rules).

Then I do the smear: start free-associating and slapping down words, approximately clustered around the nine concepts I already have, but again, without being rigid about it.

Like this (click to embiggen):

smearchart example

You’ll see that I’ve used different colours to distinguish the three levels – the free-associated words are in red.

3. Add solvents and churn

Once the food hits the stomach, its muscular walls get to work and mix the food into the stomach acid to form a substance called chyme. (Look how educational this post is.) Also mixed in there is bile, which helps to break down fats.

These substances start to break down the larger molecules so they can be absorbed later on in the process.

How would you break down the lowest level on your smear chart so that you get closer to actions?

What about some good questions? Like this:

  • Have I succeeded at anything like this before? How did I do it?
  • Who else has succeeded at this? How did they do it?
  • Can I get anyone’s help?
  • Is there a course or a book I can learn from?
  • What’s the most obvious next step?

4. Absorb the easy stuff

Once the chyme leaves your stomach, nutrients start to be absorbed through the walls of the intestines, which are specialised for the task – their surface is arranged in such a way that there is a great deal of it in a very small space.

The things the body can use straight away, like glucose, go directly into the bloodstream.

So go and do some of the stuff you came up with that you can act on immediately.

For example, if I decide that I want to do more speaking, I might book into a public speaking class.

5. Reconfigure for the current situation

If you change your mix of fats, carbs and protein dramatically, it takes a few days for your gut to reconfigure itself so it can digest most efficiently. (In the meantime you may notice a slight “upset stomach”.)

If you’re changing your approach to be able to head towards your goals more effectively, give yourself a little time to realign your life accordingly. Figure out what a person who’s succeeding at that goal does, what their day and their week looks like, and make changes that bring you closer to having a day and a week like that.

I’m experimenting with this at the moment as I focus on the “enjoy the process” part of my “live a profitable life” goal. I’m introducing a rhythm of work and rest that is getting closer and closer to an enjoyable, sustainable process.

6. Crack the hard stuff

Some of the nutrients need further processing before they can be used. For example, fruit sugars have to go through the liver to be broken into their component parts before they can be used.

Use the “chew it up” exercise again on the bigger, harder tasks that come out of the chyme, to break them down until you get to something you can do immediately.

Then go and do it.

7. Get rid of the crap, after you get the juice out

After all the nutrients have been pulled out by the small intestine, the large intestine’s job is to reabsorb the water that has helped to break everything up so it’s easy to reach, and expel what remains (dietary fiber, dead cells and other unrequired odds and ends). At the end of this process, what you have is, quite literally, crap.

There will be some crap that results from breaking down your goal. There will be things you thought you had to do that you really didn’t have to do. There will be false starts and learning processes, including the kind where you learn not to do that again. There will be the equivalent of dietary fiber: Something that’s not actually a valuable product in itself, but is essential to the process, like an administrative spreadsheet. There will be things you need to get rid of in order to clear space for achieving your goals.

Reabsorb all the juice – the process itself and all the valuable stuff you learned from doing it. Then get rid of the crap.

So there it is. It’s a game. It’s a metaphor. It’s fun, educational, perhaps mildly disgusting in an amusing way – and helps you get creative about your big, important goals, so you can come up with some useful steps towards them.

For much more like this, sign up now to the preview list for Stop Procrastinating, Start Succeeding. I’ll let  you know when the course is ready (and give you a discount, too.)

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Jun 1

How to Find Your Way in Less than 20 Years

Posted in Background

What I do – working with people as a health and personal development coach and hypnotherapist – is a personal work. I know what I know not just from academic study but also from my own experience, which is why I can help others who are going through some of the same stuff. But although I’ve been blogging here for two and a half years now, I’ve never told the full story of how I came to be doing this. Here’s that story now.

When I was young I wanted to help people, so I joined the staff of a religious organisation that had helped me while I was at university. Unfortunately, its approach to helping people was like the Greek legend of the bandit Procrustes, who had an iron bed that all travellers must lie on. If they weren’t big enough for the bed, he stretched their limbs, and if they were too big, he cut pieces off until they fitted. There was only one true way, and it turned out not to be my way.

I couldn’t use my creativity or my intuition; I had to try to be exactly like the leaders, and I wasn’t much like them at all. There were interpersonal problems, too; nobody’s fault, no malice involved, but no less painful for that. I ended up in a major stress breakdown, depressed and very ill, and took several years to get back to the point where I could even work full-time. I didn’t lose my faith, but it froze over and became a hard, rigid, rational thing. I felt safer that way.

That experience put me off working in a direct people-helping role for years. Instead, I used my skills to arrange information, first as a book editor and freelance nonfiction writer, then as a technical writer and corporate trainer, and finally as an IT consultant. I was drifting, accepting whatever job opened up for me next – but I was also collecting valuable skills. I began to get a vague sense that someday they’d all come together.

Eventually, I grew enough inside that the very straight and narrow faith I’d been following became too constricting. I realised that there must be more to it, and found myself hanging out with a group of fellow burnouts, dropouts and rebels from the mainstream, meeting in a run-down old building on the city fringe. One of their mottos was, “Thinking allowed, thinking aloud allowed”. I slowly started to rebuild and restructure my inner life, and to explore in strange new directions. During this time I also met my wife, and discovered emotional resources that I didn’t know I had.

Meanwhile, I still had very little energy a lot of the time. I started to think that some kind of personal practice might help, and eventually found a Tai Chi class at a local high school. This gentle, balanced exercise, along with improved eating patterns, started to rebuild my energy, and eventually I began to search again for a way to help other people grow and change. I took a wonderful, transformative course on creating rituals and ceremonies, and made a significant step forward in my own healing, but that wasn’t quite it. Then I found hypnotherapy.

I took a community class first of all in self-hypnosis, and even though it wasn’t well taught, it was still amazingly effective in helping me focus and moving me forward in my emotional recovery. So I enrolled in a training programme to become a hypnotherapist.

Now all my experiences and skills are drawing together, as I’ve suspected for years would eventually happen. I use my creativity and intuition to put together metaphors for healing, either in the moment in the therapy room or when I create my audio recordings and ebooks. My editing and technical writing helps me translate scientific research into practical, clear steps that ordinary people can take in their daily lives, to solve their problems and come closer to their best selves. My past explorations in symbolism, ritual and spirituality enable me to draw on centuries-old traditions of personal transformation to complement the science, and acknowledge the richness and complexity of human experience. And I use information technology to reach more people worldwide with my resources.

So that’s how I got here. I didn’t follow a map or have a guide; it took me 20 years of wandering around in the underbrush, more or less at random. The thing is, now that I’m here I can call out to other wanderers – you, perhaps – and guide them on a more direct path to their own authentic goals.

If you’re in Auckland, New Zealand you can come and see me in person, but wherever you are in the world you can connect with me over this marvellous Internet dingus. At the moment I’m putting together a reference group to help me map out what resources would benefit people most in their current life situations. If you’d like to be a part of it, my email address is in the blog sidebar, or you can leave a comment on this post. Or direct-message me on Twitter: @MRMHypno.

Thanks.

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Apr 27

3 Things I’ve Learned from Creative Cooking

Posted in Recipes, Techniques
This entry is part 3 of 7 in the series 3 Things I've Learned

I like to cook. I like watching reality cooking shows, too, the kind where amateur chefs learn to be professionals (though that is so not my ambition). Part of the reason I enjoy the shows is that they inspire me to creativity and to try new things.

Cooking is enjoyable for me because it turns something that must be done into a skilled pursuit which exercises my creative side – at least, the way I do it. Here’s what I’ve learned.

1. Start with the best ingredients

You can’t go very far wrong in cooking if you are starting with good ingredients: fresh fruit and vegetables, whole grains, lean protein and monounsaturated oils. And you can’t go very far wrong in life if you are starting with sound basics: willingness and ability to learn, hard work, perseverance and a desire to connect to other people positively. It’s like learning your scales if you want to play jazz. You can’t jam until you know the basics of how to play.

Mr. Paul Jeffrey
Creative Commons License photo credit: ragnagne

My go-to book for good ingredients, by the way, is George Mateljan’s The World’s Healthiest Foods, Essential Guide for the Healthiest Way of Eating. That’s an Amazon affiliate link, but I’d recommend it regardless. It’s about 700 pages of wonderful knowledge on over 100 foods, including scientific evidence on what is good about them, how to store and prepare them, and some quick and simple recipes – the author claims that all the recipes take less than 7 minutes. I’ve based several of my own recipes on ideas in this book, including my delicious healthy fruit and nut treat bar, which is consistently the most popular post on my blog.

2. Stand on the shoulders of giants

Sometimes on the cooking shows, you will see creative cooks whose specialty is combining unusual flavours together. Almost invariably, they are knocked out because they produce some ridiculous random combination like pork and peaches that was never going to work, “because if it works it’ll be amazing”. Well, yes, it would be.

Don’t be those people. I rarely follow someone else’s recipe exactly, but what I do do is look through recipe books and websites for recipes that use my planned main ingredients, and get a sense of what else is frequently combined with them. I then imagine what that would taste like and come up with my own combinations.

La Zi Ji (Chicken with Chiles)
Creative Commons License photo credit: FotoosVanRobin

If I’m learning to do something, I’m aiming eventually to do it my way, but I’m going to do that after I’ve learned what generally works. You don’t seriously think that nobody ever considered pork and peaches as a combination, do you? The reason that you don’t see it served as a classic dish is that the flavours just don’t work together that well. Someone tried it and discovered that – so you don’t have to. Pork and apples, on the other hand…

3. Season to taste

Sometimes, when I create a new recipe, it’s a success first time (though I’ll usually still try variations when I make it in the future). Sometimes, it’s OK, but it’s not quite right. The other week I made a venison and mushroom pie. The flavours of the herbs and the red wine and the onions and garlic that I used (following principles 1 and 2) were lovely, but they lacked a bit of oomph. I knew just what it needed – tomato. And indeed, when I opened a can of tomatoes and added them as a kind of sauce, the taste was, if I can say so, excellent.

The thing about creativity (or any new thing you do) is that your first attempt often isn’t amazingly wonderful. What the first attempt does is show the potential and suggest ways to improve. This is where your creative imagination comes into play – figuring out what would make a good thing even better.

Those, then, are my three principles. Start with good basics, learn from what classically works, then do something that’s new – as a learning experience, a data point towards producing something amazing.

I’d love to hear your comments and suggestions on how to apply these principles to things I’ve never thought of, by the way. That’s part of my learning too. (Oh, and some of my other recipes are here.)

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