Pleasure V Pain

Ever wondered why you keep coming back to goals that you never quite get around to achieving or keep procrastinating about the same thing but never do it?  It's because everything we do is motivated by gaining pleasure and avoiding pain.

Let’s look at some examples:

Procrastination - if you’re procrastinating about doing something it’s because you link more pain to doing that thing than the pleasure you will have when you’ve done it.

Weight Loss – if lose a few pounds then spoil it all by eating copious amounts of  alcohol, that’s because you link more pleasure to eating the chocolate than the pain of losing the weight!

Relationships – If you’re in a relationship that isn’t working and you can’t seem to leave, it’s because you link more pain to ending the relationship than the pleasure you may gain if you do.

Changing Jobs – If you’re unhappy in your job, but don’t leave, it’s because you link more pain to finding and starting a new job than you do to staying in your existing role.

Excessive Drugs/Drinking – If you drink to excess or take drugs, it’s because you link more pleasure to that than the pleasure of being clean/healthy.

As humans every single action we take is geared towards getting out of pain and in to pleasure.  You may say, “But I really want to lose weight!”  Or “I really want to do/be/have that” my answer would be, “Obviously not enough, or else you would have it, or at least be working towards it”.  So how do we do that?  We do it by leverage, until you make the reason for doing/being/having the thing you want bigger than your reason for not doing it, you’ll never achieve it.

In a future post, I’ll talk about leverage and how you can use it in order to achieve your goals.  Until then, whenever you find yourself procrastinating, ask yourself whether it's because it's less painful to do something than it is to do it!

Jo

 

Choose Your Thoughts

I’ve talked about this in previous posts, but I thought it was worthwhile mentioning it again in a bit more detail following my post, 3 Ways to Improve Your Life. 

Each one of us perceives a situation/event/person’s behaviour in a different way.  The situation/event/behaviour is just that and nothing more, until we put meaning to it.  The meaning we put to it can be based on numerous factors including our race/colour/creed, our current mood, what’s happened to us that day, previous experience of a similar situation, our learned behaviours, our general view of the world etc etc and is usually done on a subconscious level. 

As you will know if you read my posts regularly – I had quite a lot to deal with last year and it actually came down to two choices, I can either see it as a massive negative and let it consume me and drift in to helpless negativity, or I can use this situation to empower me, to learn from and to hopefully use my experiences help others.  Which do you think is the more empowering option?  The second obviously otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this!

We often can stop a situation happening, but do have full control over how we feel and what we do about it.  Whether we see it as a positive or a negative, whether we take the learning and move forward or let it engulf us, it’s a choice, our choice, no one else’s.  A situation is basically neutral, it’s the meaning that we put to it depending on all the factors mentioned above (and more) that make it positive or negative.

So the next time something happens that is uncomfortable or upsetting take a step back and choose how you see it.  Could it mean something else?  What can you learn from it and what can you do differently to stop it happening again?  Ask yourself better questions and consciously change your perception and you’ll find that your feelings and emotions will change as a result.

Jo

Have Fewer Rules

 

 

Have you ever noticed how many rules you have? For example rules around:

• How others should behave towards you

• How people should greet you

• How your family should act/talk

• Who’s turn it is to call who (“I’m not calling them, it’s their turn to call me”)

Have you ever wondered if everyone has the same rules?  Well the answer to that rarely, even your own family are unlikely to have exactly the same ones as you, especially if they see yours as being unneccessary!

So how do we build our very own book of rules?  We collect them as we go through our lives, some rules we take on board from our religion or lack of religion, our parents/grandparents/teachers, what we see on the TV, what we experience in our lives, from how we’ve been treated in the past; in fact our rules can come from pretty much anywhere.  But that’s the point, they are OUR rules and not everyone has the same ones.

Here’s a good example of a ‘rule’ that I picked up from my mum - she is very strict on timekeeping, which I seem to have ‘inherited’ from her.  It was drilled into me at an early age that you should never keep people waiting and you should always be one time.  Therefore, one of my rules is that I will NEVER be late for anything unless there’s an exceptional reason for it and, unfortunately, because that’s one of my rules, I’ve always thought that everyone else would be the same – but they aren’t. 

Until I understood that we all have different ‘rules’ I would get really frustrated, sometimes offended and often quite upset if someone was late when we’d arranged a specific time.  I would actually get quite wound up about it.  I know now that the pain that I was feeling was because they were breaking one of my rules.  I saw it as a lack of respect or that they didn’t care, however, now I don’t see it as being directed at me personally, others just have different rules and therefore, I’ve learned to manage my own feelings and emotions accordingly, causing myself a lot less pain.

I have a good friend who has 5 children all under the age of 10.  I recently asked her how she manages to cope with having so many children all relatively young, her reply, “We don’t have too many rules.”  She explained, “When the first two were born, we had all these rules about what they could and couldn’t do or how they should and shouldn’t behave.  For example, ‘no eating in the living room’, ‘no TV before bed’, ‘finish everything on your plate’.  The more children we had, the more impossible it was for these rules (and we had lots) to be met and I was feeling constantly disappointed and out of control.  Once we relaxed the rules, the easier things became and the happier the family is as a whole.”

If you have too many rules, you are setting yourself up for a very painful life.  There will doubtless be times when you’ll end up breaking your own rules (causing pain) and they will definitely be broken by others (most people won’t even be aware what your rules are!) causing more pain.

As rules are something that we create, here’s the good news, we can change them or let them go.  The fewer rules you have, the less chance there is for you or someone else to break.  Try loosening your rules for 3 days and see what happens.  It may be a little difficult to let go at first, you only have to try things and have positive results a couple of times before you’ll start to create new neural pathways in your brain which will start to change your current default setting.

Give it a go.  What have you got to lose?

Jo 

Quality Questions

Following on from the article I recently posted, 3 Ways to Improve Your Life, I thought I would break down each of the ‘ways’ into 3 separate posts.  This is the first...

Whether you realise it or not, we all have the answers to our own issues/problems/dilemmas within us.  What a skilled coach will do is ask a series of pointed questions in order to pull those answers out of you.  However, we don’t all have coaches on speed dial (although we should!), but we can ask ourselves better more empowering questions that will help us to find a solution to whatever the issue is. 

The quality of the questions we ask ourselves is so important as we have the power to turn our situations from negative to positive and vice versa through our questioning process.  I’ve talked about the Reticular Activator System (RAS) before, but in essence it is that part of the brain that has to go and find the answer to any question that we ask it. 

Here are some disempowering questions that are likely to give a negative response if you ask them of yourself:

• “Why can’t I lose weight” - “Because you’re fat and lazy”

• “Why does this always happen to me?” -  “Because you’re unlucky”

• “Why does nothing ever work out right?” - “Because that’s just how it is”

• “Why doesn’t this stuff happen to other people?” – “Because you’re a failure”

WHATEVER QUESTION WE ASK OF OURSELVES, WE WILL GET AN ANSWER – whether we like the answer or not.  It’s therefore really important that the questions we ask are positive ones eg:

• “What can I do to lose weight?”

• “What can I do about this?”

• “What else can this mean?”

• “What can I learn from this?”

• “How can I use what I’ve learned?”

• “How can I turn this in to an opportunity?”

The second set of questions are much more empowering and as your RAS system HAS to give you a response, it’s likely that you will quickly find a solution or the right path to finding a solution for your problem more easily than asking poor/disempowering questions.

It seems incredibly simplistic, and it is.  Listen to the types of questions your ask yourself (we do it all the time so it won’t be hard), I can guarantee you’ll be surprised as how negative they can be and how disempowering our answers are.

Over the next 3 days or as a difficult situations arise (which they do for all of us from time to time) try asking a different set of questions.  If it helps, write some empowering questions down (the ones above are a good start) and keep them somewhere accessible so that you can start to break your old ‘helpless’ questioning habits and replace them with better ones.

Give it a go, you’ve nothing to lose.

Have fun!

Jo

3 Ways to Improve your Life

 

Through conducting countless coaching sessions, personal development and life experiences, I’ve learned that there are some things that you can do immediately to significantly improve the quality of your life.  Of course there are many others, but I think that these are perhaps three of the quickest and simplest:

   

1.   Choose how you want to perceive a situation

In any given moment, we can CHOOSE how we view a situation and whether we see it as positive or a negative.  A situation is not good or bad, positive or negative, every situation is neutral; it’s the meaning that we give to it that makes it positive or negative and how we view a situation can be attributed to whether we live our lives as Victims or Owners. 

 

Owners don’t have any less difficulty in their lives; they just choose to manage difficult situations differently.  They look for the opportunity; they look at what it could mean and how they can use it positively and most importantly, what they can do differently should that situation rise again in the future.  Because of their outlook, they are generally in a much more resourceful state to handle the situation positively.

 

A Victim could see exactly the same situation in a negative light, which will leave them feeling powerless, unable to deal with it and potentially feeling helpless and out of control.  Thereby leaving them in a resourceful state and feeling unable to cope.

 

2.   Ask better questions

 

The questions that we ask ourselves about a situation have a major impact on whether we are in a resourceful state able to deal with the issue effectively (Owner) or whether we feel disempowered and unable to see a way through (Victim).

  

Owner questions:

   

‘What can I do about this?’

‘How can I learn from this?’

‘What message can this be telling me?’

‘How can I use this?’

 

Victim questions:

 

“Why does this always happen to me?”

“Why can’t I do anything right?”

“Why do things never turn out right for me?”

“Why doesn’t this stuff happen to other people?”

“What’s wrong with me?”

 

Whatever question you ask yourself, you WILL get an answer – therefore, ask better questions and you’ll get better answers!

3.   Have fewer rules

 

The more rules we have for ourselves and others, the more chance there is for them to be broken and therefore causing us disappointment and pain.  Our lives tend to be driven by the rules that we’ve set for ourselves and for how we think others should think, feel and behave. 

 

Our rules are built up over the years from a mixture of how we see the world based on our perceptions, learned behaviours and modelling (picking up rules from others eg parents, grandparents, teachers) those around us.  Having fewer rules or at least lightening up on your rules, will ultimately give you less pain – after all, they are something that’s been created by you, so you can change them.

   

I’ll break each of these down into more detail in individual posts at some point, however, if you just make these three changes to your life (which are relatively simple and require little effort) and practise them consistently  you will start to see a marked difference in your resourcefulness and your ability to cope better in trying situations.

   

If it seems too much to do all three at once, just take the ‘questions’ and try asking yourself better questions for the next 3 days.  You’ll be amazed at the quality of the answers you will receive … as I said earlier:

 
 

‘Ask a better question and you’ll get a better answer’.

  

Whatever you do, have fun with it and remember, practise makes perfect!

Jo

9 Steps to Success

 

I was recently reading an article from Harvard Business School by Heidi Grant Halvorson that I really wanted to share with you.  It’s based on decades of research surrounding what makes people successful while others continue to not be quite so successful.  The research showed quite clearly that it isn’t a lack of knowledge or resources that stop us from succeeding, but simple what we do/the actions we take or rather don’t take.

It was found that there are 9 distinct things that people who succeed do consistently:

1. Get specific - The more specific you can be about your goal, the more likely to are to achieve it.
2. Seize the moment to act on your goals - To seize the moment, decide when and where you will take each action you want to take, in advance – be specific.
3. Know exactly how far you have left to go - If you don't know how well you are doing, you can't adjust your behaviour or your strategies accordingly. Check your progress frequently — weekly, or even daily, depending on the goal.
4. Be a realistic optimist - Studies show that thinking things will come to you easily and effortlessly leaves you ill-prepared for the journey ahead and significantly increases the odds of failure.
5. Focus on getting better, rather than being good - Believing you have the ability to reach your goals is important, but so is believing you can get the ability. People whose goals are about getting better, rather than being good, take difficulty in stride, and appreciate the journey as much as the destination.
6. Have grit - Grit is a willingness to commit to long-term goals, and to persist in the face of difficulty.
7. Build your willpower muscle - Your self-control "muscle" is just like the other muscles in your body — when it doesn't get much exercise, it becomes weaker over time. But when you give it regular workouts by putting it to good use, it will grow stronger and stronger, and better able to help you successfully reach your goals.
8. Don't tempt fate - Don't try to take on two challenging tasks at once, if you can help it. Successful people know not to make reaching a goal harder than it already is.
9. Focus on what you will do, not what you won't do - Plan how you will replace bad habits with good ones, rather than focusing only on the bad habits themselves

Although I didn't find any of this information a surprise, I think it's invaluable when you see it written down in a list format.  With this in mind, it may be just the time to review your goals and see what actions you need more focus on. 

 

Just a reminder that if you sign up for my monthly newsletter, you will receive a free e-book of the classic 'Think and Grow Rich' by Napoleon Hill.  Just follow the link at the top left hand side of this page.

 

Have a wonderful week!

 

Jo