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)?

Sign up below to get early notification and a discount on my forthcoming book, How Not to Change Your Life.


comments: 4 » tags: ,
Nov 1

Why You Get Upset (and What You Can Do About It)

Posted in Techniques

I know I said in my last post that I was going to talk this time about undoing the past, but that post isn’t ready in my head yet. (I really need to stop predicting the future, even the bits that I have some control over. It so seldom works out.)

Instead, I’m going to talk about why you get upset, why that’s completely understandable, and what you might do about it if it distresses you. It’s a direct follow-on from How to Hold Your Outcomes Lightly.

Over on my other blog, How to Be Amazing, I wrote recently about what to do when you offend someone. It wasn’t just a random choice of topic. I’d offended some people – not deliberately – with a guest post I wrote on another blog. One of the people I’d offended later came to my “what to do when you offend” post and left a lovely comment, and that got me thinking about why people get upset, as she had originally done.

Why you get upset

You get upset – angry, sad and/or afraid – when you feel threatened. That’s probably not a big revelation, but let’s think about it for a minute and unpack some of the implications.

Any time I’m feeling these strong emotions, it’s because I believe something has threatened my wellbeing. I talked about this last time in The Real Secret.

I have some belief that things “should” or “must” be otherwise than they in fact are, and that because they are not that way my identity, my existence, my wellbeing or the things I value are under threat of destruction.

And the reason that I believe this is that the situation reminds me, in some way, of a situation in which I felt that way before.

Often, what’s going on is what the Transactional Analysis folks call “hooking the not-OK child”. All of a sudden I’m a helpless little kid again, one who’s in a bad situation that he doesn’t know how to deal with. I feel intensely unresourceful in that moment, and so instead of using my many years of experience of solving problems rationally and effectively, I strike out, run away, or turtle up and stop interacting.

When I wrote a post that used stuttering as an analogy for procrastination, I hooked a number of not-OK children who had been teased and bullied for stuttering. I don’t stutter, but I’ve been teased and bullied, and it’s painful. Naturally, in many cases, their first reaction was to strike out. (The non-striking-out ones didn’t leave comments, but I’m sure there were some people in that category too.)

Getting upset is perfectly understandable

Crying
Creative Commons License photo credit: rabble

Getting upset when you feel threatened is understandable. It’s natural. It’s usual. It’s human nature. Everybody does it.

It’s not necessarily desirable.

Crapping in your pants is also natural, also part of human nature, but we teach our children not to do it.

As children, we also get taught not to express our upset, or at least not to express it in particular ways that are unacceptable to our particular parents or their culture. That doesn’t mean, of course, that we don’t get upset, just that we get better at hiding it, and/or express it in ways that were rewarded (or at least ways that escaped the degree of punishment that would have caused us to change our behaviour).

What we seldom get taught is how not to get upset in the first place. The parallel with defecation only goes so far. We have to relieve ourselves regularly, but we don’t have a biological need to regularly get upset.

If we know how not to get triggered, or how to deal with the feelings if they do get triggered, there’s no reason we can’t deal maturely with all of our challenges, without falling into the unresourceful not-OK child mode at all.

Anger, fear and sadness are often distressing, not only to you but to people around you. They don’t usually help to resolve the situation. They are completely understandable, and no blame attaches to you for feeling them (you feel what you feel, and nobody can tell you not to). But it’s often more adaptive and more helpful to give those feelings less control of the situation rather than more.

What happens when you don’t act out of upset

I’m not going to claim any kind of flawless victory in the Incident of the Ill-chosen Metaphor. When I first started to see the comments piling up on my guest post, I was, yes, upset. I had several reactions:

  • Anger at being misinterpreted
  • Defensiveness at being criticized
  • Sadness because I’d hurt other people
  • Fear for my reputation

All of those were natural and understandable.

The thing that I did right, though, was that I didn’t respond immediately and primarily out of those upset feelings. Instead, I:

  • recognised that the upset feelings of the people leaving comments were natural and understandable – I adopted some of their viewpoint.
  • realised that some of their upset came not from what I had said but from what it reminded them of.
  • accepted responsibility for my own role in the situation.
  • apologised.

This had two good outcomes, from my perspective, in that two of the strongest critics calmed down and became much more positive. To use the language of transactional analysis again, by speaking from my Adult I had engaged their Adults and brought them out of the not-OK child. One of them has actually become a subscriber, which is a result well beyond what I expected.

So there are the benefits of not reacting out of upset - but how do you get to do that?

How not to get upset

If you’ve read the Emotional Hamster Wheel ebook that’s part of my free Simple Stress Management Techniques course, you’ll know the answer already.

The key is to start paying attention to your upset reaction so that you can start to slowly, slowly insert wedges between the stimulus (the event that reminds you, rightly or wrongly, of a threat) and the response, and widen the gap.

You can work backwards from the reaction to the irrational beliefs that trigger it off. You can work forwards from it, and put longer and longer pauses in before you react, to give your brain chemistry a chance to normalise and your rational brain to come back online.

And you can use self-calming techniques (such as the ones in the other ebook in Simple Stress Management Techniques) to reduce the intensity of your feelings in the moment and let you see above the emotional alligators.

With time and practice, you’ll be able to do it without as much concentration.

It’ll become natural and usual. Like second nature.

Sign up below to get early notification and a discount on my forthcoming book, How Not to Change Your Life.


comments: 2 » tags: , , ,
Oct 27

The Real Secret: How to Hold Your Outcomes Lightly

Posted in Techniques

There’s a movie that you may have seen. It’s been very successful, and a lot of my fellow personal development bloggers are into it.

It teaches you to fantasize obsessively about material possessions, to deliberately delude yourself into relentless positivity, and to blame yourself whenever things go wrong.

Why any personal development blogger would promote this claptrap is beyond me, particularly since the research is so consistently against it. (Fantasizing about outcomes reduces your chances of achieving them, trying to remain relentlessly positive arguably leads to worse outcomes than realism, and self-blame is, surely, a problem, not a solution.)

And yet, the Flaw of Distraction has made millions, not just for its originator but for many other promoters who know an easy sale when they see one. Tell people to do what they were going to do anyway (dream about the impossible), promise them that they’ll get what they want without doing any actual work, and then leave yourself the out that if it doesn’t work, it’s not because the process is wrong and completely flawed, it’s because they weren’t doing it perfectly? That’s a formula for success – not for the suckers, I mean customers, who buy it, of course, but for the hucksters who sell it.

Now, there are some people who promote this idea who genuinely believe in it, of course. Most of them, though, have probably adapted it and added to it to make it work – put the nuance back in and realigned it with actual reality. What they’re selling is not the original, pure snake oil.

Anyway, I’m going to tell you about a completely different, in fact opposite, secret. This one actually works.

The secret to success and happiness is holding your outcomes lightly.

Easy as ABCDE

Let me introduce you to Albert Ellis.

Ellis was a very strange, but very brilliant man who founded Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy, basically to deal with his own issues, which were numerous.

He introduced a very simple mnemonic – you’d strain to make up a simpler one – for the process of his therapy. It goes like this: ABCDE.

A is for Adversity

Adversity (or the Activating Event) is any challenge that we face in life. It might be getting turned down for a date, an extra demand at work, a near-miss on the road, being eliminated in a competition - anything.

In itself, it’s just a thing that happens.

B is for Belief

We think the problem arises from the event, but it doesn’t. It arises from our irrational belief about the event.

The Adversity is just a thing that happened. The Belief – that that thing should not have happened, must not happen, is the end of the world, cannot be allowed to stand - is what converts a thing that happened into a crisis.

C is for Consequences

Beliefs have consequences. If we believe that the thing that happened is a horrible, terrible, wrong thing, we will be angry, sad, afraid. We will think things and do things and say things in response to the event – or rather, in response to our belief about the event.

The things we say and do and feel and think are the actual problem. Not the adversity – that’s just a thing that happened. Not even the belief, though that leads to the problem, the consequences. Because those thoughts, feelings, words and actions, arising from our irrational beliefs, don’t change the situation for the better. Instead, they make it worse.

D is for Disputing

Wtf?
Creative Commons License photo credit: Alex Barth

Ellis’s method was to dispute the irrational beliefs. He was very confrontational about this in his own practice, swearing and shouting and talking over his client to challenge their thinking. You don’t need to do this. All you need to do is question the beliefs that lead to the consequences.

There are three key questions to ask about a belief that is causing you distress.

  1. “How’s that working out for you?” Whatever else I think of Dr Phil, this catchphrase of his is pure gold. If your belief is making your life miserable, it definitely needs to be challenged. To take an example from my own life, I get annoyed and frustrated when other people use my kitchen and leave it in a mess. That doesn’t help me in any conceivable way.
  2. “Where’s the proof for that?” What basis do I have for believing that other people “should” treat my kitchen exactly the way I do – put things in the right places, clean them up immediately when they’ve used them (and in the way I clean them), et cetera? Where is that written?
  3. “Is this logical?” Here you’re looking for proof that your belief is not just a reflection of your preferences or desires. If I rewrote my belief as “I would prefer that people who use my kitchen leave it as I would leave it”, does that completely represent my belief, or is there some logical remainder that isn’t just a preference?

E is for Effect

The intended effect of disputing your irrational beliefs is a change in your thoughts, feelings and behaviour that used to arise from those beliefs. You’re able to adopt a response that is less distressing to you (and possibly others), and more likely to result in a positive change to the situation – if such a change is even called for.

You can say, “I would prefer,” or “I would like”, instead of using words like “must” and “should” – as if your preferences were moral laws of the universe.

Your preferences, and my preferences, aren’t any kind of law. They’re preferences.

Holding your outcomes lightly

Rather than obsessing about your desired outcome – imagining it, putting up pictures of it, writing about how great it would be – what if you held it more lightly?

What if you just acknowledged it as something you wanted to happen, and preferred?

What if you put your effort into imagining how to bring it about, and taking action to bring it about, instead of pretending it had already happened and that this had therefore become the best of all possible universes?

What would happen, then, if you achieved it? You would be able to look back on a process – a process you’d paid attention to and participated in and enjoyed for its own sake and been active in – and commend yourself for your hard work, which had earned your achievement. Not by magic, but by a real process of transformation that you brought about in ways you can point to and replicate in the future.

And what would happen if you didn’t achieve it? You would be able to look back on a process – a process you’d paid attention to and participated in and enjoyed for its own sake and been active in – and learn from it so that you could be more successful in future. You’d be free from self-blame, because even if your actions had led to the result you didn’t want, that was a learning experience for you. (You can’t learn from magic.)

Your world would not have come crashing down around your ears because you didn’t get what you wanted. That’s for two-year-olds. You might be disappointed or annoyed, but not devastated or enraged.

And next time round, you’d be able to look out for the same issues which prevented you from achieving your goal last time.

Because you’re allowed to think about the possibility of things going wrong, and plan for it, without it becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Perhaps you might even decide that your original goal wasn’t important to you any more, and you could stop trying to reach it. Perhaps you learned enough just from the process.

Next time, I’ll talk about the effort we put into undoing our pasts – and what might happen if we stopped. But for now, I leave you, as always, with action to take.

Action now

Identify some things that happen that get you upset to no good purpose.

Consider the consequences of the beliefs you hold about those adversities.

Dispute your beliefs.

What was the effect?

Sign up below to get early notification and a discount on my forthcoming book, How Not to Change Your Life.


comments: 7 » tags: , ,
« Previous