How to be happy all the time

I could do it if I wanted to...

8/13/2013

At first it seems like an encouraging thing to tell yourself "I could do it if I wanted to." and maybe sometimes it's exactly what you need to hear to get going. Maybe you even need to believe this at one point as a step towards getting it done.

But that's why it's tricky... more times than not, it's an excuse to put something off, and often a small white lie to yourself in order to make you feel good about yourself. I mean... life is full of surprises - how could you know for sure whether you can do it successfully until you try?

This brings us to the principle of working effectively with time. Obviously if you think that you could do something successfully eventually, it only becomes a real challenge if you set yourself a time limit of some sort.

The time limit doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to get it done by a certain time, it can be that you are going to allocate your time to the challenge as your first priority once your basic life needs are met. That is definitely a specific time, and not any time.

However, let's just use the method of picking a set time for now, and creating a sense of urgency - that this is an important thing that must be done by a certain time. It's important to get in the mindset that it's a crisis and if it doesn't get done, bad things will happen, or alternately good things won't happen.

There is a "sweet spot" in terms of picking a time. It's important to not go overboard and create so much pressure and stress with a short deadline that productivity is impacted as well as quality of life, but the goal needs to carry enough threat of penalties, or desire for rewards, that we definitely start moving towards getting it completed right away. How can we tell if we've succeeded? It's simple, it's all in the emotions. Notice the word "motion" in emotion. With sufficient emotion, we start the motion towards completing a task. It takes some practice, but if you do it right you will literally feel that you are holding yourself back from completing the task, and will just need to stop holding yourself back in order for progress to start.

So when picking a time, it's important to find a deadline that will definitely motivate us to start working on it right away (or to start at a very specific time) but won't be impossible to achieve... to pick the right spot where you have motivation to start, but that limits exposure to additional stress beyond what is needed to accomplish the task.

You need to sincerely believe that something must get done under some sort of time limit for life to get better, to put it all in perspective. This is essentially a value exercise and resetting your values is covered in the book.

Mark

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Sometimes coaching is being the "bad guy"

6/29/2012

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People love their coaches and swear by them... but only *after* they get the result.

During the process, it's a different story. That's because a good coach gets the person to do something they could not do alone, something too painful for them to push through without the extra motivation and attention coming from their coach.

It's not a new concept, it's the time honoured principle of "Short term pain, long term gain.", and the coach is trying to help that person get that long term gain that has been eluding them alone. But, in the moment, it can just look like the coach is trying to cause the person unnecessary pain. The complication is that if the coach is inexperienced, he might in fact be causing the person unnecessary pain, and if he is incompetent, he may actually be causing them harm, and it is difficult to know whether you can trust the coach's experience.

If you knew what worked, you would have already tried it, and you would not have that issue, you see? It can help to see whether the coach has many others vouching for them, or whether they have given you great results in the past. Then again, they may have given you great results for one area they were experienced in, but you have moved to another area where they have no experience. For all these reasons, it is hard to judge any particular exercise before you try it, the only valid judgement that can be made is by looking at the results.

So in effect, the coach is the "bad guy" pushing the person towards and through some degree of pain, and it's made worse by the fact that you don't know exactly how bad they are, or whether they actually are inexperienced or incompetent, which can raise a lot of suspicions.

So how do you spot a good "bad guy" as opposed to a bad "bad guy"? An experienced and competent coach for a particular area of performance? It's simple:

First, a good coach will commit to helping you achieve some of your goals, which you will put down in writing. If they can't commit to something specific, then they don't feel confident in their knowledge and ability. Then they will tell you straight up what exercises you will need to do to achieve those goals, including making sure you agree with the purpose of each one, and write that down. Then they will tell you what you will absolutely need to avoid while doing them, and why, and write that down as well. Then, you start doing the exercises.

If you don't complete the goal, you either broke a rule about what you needed to absolutely avoid, or you found an incompetent coach. If you completed the goal and got the reward, but didn't feel it was worth the effort, you either got an inexperienced coach, or you didn't do a great job of following the instructions in the exercise. If you complete the goal and look back and feel it was all well worth it, you got yourself a good coach.

A good coach "knows" you aren't giving things your best shot, even if it's due to some decision you made a long time ago that you've totally forgotten about. They know you are short changing yourself and could do more, and that it's your habits that are holding you back. How do we generally feel about someone who knows some deep dark secret about ourselves that we don't want anyone to find out about? It's threatening to some extent, we wonder if they will tell anyone. These types of secrets that are exposed through coaching are so dark and secret that we have even hidden them from ourselves.

A good coach should feel like someone you want to run away from, but yet you are still attracted to since you can somehow tell that they have good intentions and are competently getting results, and so you realize that the short term pain will result in long term gain, for something that you genuinely want to gain.

The good news is that while the coach may know that you aren't giving things your best shot, they shouldn't really care why, or what that secret is, and don't want to expose it to anyone, except to you, and you don't even need to tell them what it was when it becomes obvious to you. It may be as simple as realizing "Hey, for some reason, I'm not really trying." and feeling a surge of energy and suddenly you are trying much harder and getting better results... and that "secret" habit is gone, and nobody else found out about it, and maybe not even you.

And when that happens, the good "bad guy" becomes the good "good guy" once again... for a while they are awesome and incredible and so on and so forth. Then the next issue comes up that requires coaching and they will be the "bad guy" for a while again. lol.

That's not a bad thing, that's just the way we're built and how the process works.

So let me end this off with a bit of useful pain for you, as I am okay with being considered the "bad guy" for a while. YAY PAIN! If you are ready and want that and can see it's usefulness from what I described, please read on. If not, please stop reading and go watch chicken dance videos on youtube or something, those are hilarious!

Here's one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sTqJE4sdb0

Still here? Alright... don't blame me too much, you agreed... and I even tried to lure you away with chicken dances. =D

The reason that self-improvement often fails is that there is something about your self that sucks. If it didn't suck at least a little, in your own opinion, you would not want to improve it. Often that thing that sucks is preventing you from improving yourself in some other ways, which means there are going to be other parts of you that suck a bit also, right? Those other parts will often prevent you from improving that first thing that sucks, and things just stay the way they are no matter how hard you try.

So self-improvement fails sometimes... not always but sometimes, and if it fails for something important, that can be extremely dissapointing.

That said, it should be obvious that you wouldn't hire someone who sucked at something to help you with something important. Would you hire a surgeon when you had heard they sucked, to remove your appendix? I am guessing no. I think it would make even less sense to hire yourself to remove your own appendix when you had no medical training, am I right? So for some challenging yet important things, it doesn't make sense to help yourself, but to find someone competent and ask for help. Get that important issue resolved and a whole world of possibilities will open up that you couldn't tackle before.

And by the way, I'm NOT saying that YOU suck, I believe everyone is inherantly fine and awesome in their own way, I am just saying that there may be something about you that you think sucks in yourself, and it may be possible to resolve that with coaching, where self-improvement would fail.

Perhaps the only real thing that could suck about you is that you aren't able to ask for, find, and recognize competent help, and if you could, everything would get solved. I am hoping the underlined criteria I laid out earlier in my post about how to find a competent coach will prove useful for that.

All the best,

Mark

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Money

8/12/2010

1 Comment

I haven't had much to blog about yet. So far things have been going well with the book, and folks have been happy with it. There are a few folks who took the coaching package who haven't contacted me yet with any questions, and I plan on giving them a proactive email at some point to ask how they are doing.

However, I have been having a tumultuous life lately, both my parents have cancer and my mother got operated today while my dad has been receiving radiation and chemotherapy and I managed to remain upbeat and positive during the entire experience. I have had relatives and friends express sympathy over how badly I must feel and how distressed I must be and it's strange as I don't feel badly about the experience, I am managing to maintain a decent level of happiness. I do have a bit of stress and I will, of course, be much, much happier when they are both healthy again, but I am still managing to maintain a positive perspective, and frankly it feels quite wierd. At the end of the day, however, this is the reason this system was developed, to be able to remain positive through life's adversities, and it was put to the test.

I have also been getting a few short, but interesting emails lately though the website, and I wanted to blog about those. The submissions I receive have mainly fallen into three categories: blessings, offers or requests for translations, and on the topic of money. The blessings and translation inquiries are very appreciated, yet it is the topic of money that I find to be the most interesting to blog about due to the questions they raise. Here are two examples:
1: why don't you sent this book freely?
2: money is not all a man need in his life

The first example is interesting as right now, I am essentially giving the book away without any profit. I am just covering my advertising costs. I am not making up incredible testimonials, but using real ones, so selling to people is a challenge. Honesty does not tend to make you a lot of money, it seems. In order to just cover my monthly rent, I would need to make 128 book sales on amazon every month, and then I still need to eat, pay for advertising costs to get people to realize that the book exists, and pay for other internet costs. Unless a miracle happens and this becomes a best seller, I am not going to come close to covering my living costs with this project, but I do hope to cover the costs I am putting in, make a small profit for my time and feel good that I've helped many people have happier lives. Of course, it would be wonderful to be in a financial position where I could give the book away for free. Currently though, unless I get mentioned on Oprah or some other site, this project is basically a hobby that I am doing out of personal enjoyment. (But hey, if one of you knows Oprah and can direct her to this site, that would be totally fine by me!)

The second example I agree with completely, yet it reminds me of a person who was telling me what they looked for in their selection of books in happiness and they said they preferred something that didn't look too commercial. Right now, the web site does look quite commercial and perhaps that is detracting from the main focus, which is to get more people to be happy. I've been thinking about rearranging the site to look less commercial and more personable, so this has convinced me that it is probably a very good idea, and I'll work on doing this soon.

To quickly sum up my thoughts on the issue of money and happiness:
You get what you most highly value.
If you want happiness, you must value it above other things.
Some ways to value are to spend money and time.
Spend on happiness in order to receive it.

Thanks to all for your feedback!

Mark

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Questions & responses

2/12/2010

3 Comments

Hey there! The book is simple to follow, but if you feel that there is something you aren't getting or that you stopped for some reason I want to know about it. I want to make sure you get the results you were promised, and that you get over any hurdle which may appear.
I suggest checking the FAQ section first in case your question has already been answered to get you going again right away with no wait, otherwise please leave your question here as a comment. You don't need to leave your real name, and your email will only be available to me and won't be published. I will periodically answer questions either by personal email or in the FAQ and remove them from this page.

- Mark

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I could do it if I wanted to...

Sometimes coaching is being the "bad guy"

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