Archive for the 'Self-awareness' Category

If you’re going to vary the recipe…

Published on 13 January, 2011 in Creativity and genius, High performance and Self-awareness. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

I love cooking. The way that we can transform ‘simple’ ingredients into something deliciously complex is a wonder to behold, and a delight to experience.

If you don’t know how to cook, you can follow a recipe. With a little bit of discipline, focus, and the right ingredients, you can find yourself producing great quality food quite easily.

After a while, you can start to figure out how the recipe works. You find that a little bit extra of one ingredient will vary the taste, texture or appearance. You might even start to experiment.

Some people can start to create. Not just to follow the recipe, but to come up with entirely new concoctions, based upon the test kitchen in your mind.

Yet I would be reluctant to rely upon the skills of someone who hadn’t yet mastered a single recipe. Maybe they would create something delicious and creative and new. Maybe you would get food poisoning.

Individuality and self expression are great things, and it is good to note that most great innovators didn’t come from “the establishment” in their domain. Whether they be Rodin or 50 Cent, Einstein or Gershwin, Branson or Brin, innovators learn enough to speak the language of their chosen domain, though not so much as they lose their accent.

Before we start changing the rules, let’s find out what they are.

The trouble with whining

Published on 6 April, 2010 in Inner game, Overcoming and Self-awareness. 3 Comments Tags: , , .

A friend was lamenting that he was sick of whining. And I could understand why – he had inflicted his whining on me too!

Whining doesn’t get us very far itself but it can be a phase that we need to go through until you figure out what you want and start working on how. While you’re whining, you’re not focusing on what you want; when you can get clear, set some targets and at least start moving – even if only with baby steps. And once you’re moving towards where you want to be, the world is a very different place.

Like a rocking chair: Fun for a while without getting you anywhere.

The trick is to break ourselves out of the cycle of whining and complaining. We’ve got lots of good reasons to whine too – life isn’t fair. Yet whining doesn’t make things better. Whining gives us a sense of connection with ourselves and with others when we whine to others – a feeling of self pity is at least a feeling of connection.

Sooner or later, the solution is to stop it. And when you do, remember that there’s a great intention behind that behaviour – that you want things to be better and you want to connect with others. Rather than chastising yourself for having whined in the first place, what would happen if you focused on the positive intent of the behaviour and started connecting positively and working towards what you want?

Dealing with seasons of change

Published on 1 April, 2010 in Inner game and Self-awareness. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Last month I left Brisbane on a 30 degree day and arrived in a Shanghai with snow on the ground. Normally seasons don’t change this quickly, though they always change.

And seasons change whether we want them to or not.

The question is always how you cope with those changes. Do you lament the end of the sunshine as autumn begins, or do you embrace the beauty of the changing colours of the leaves on the trees?

Since arriving back in Shanghai, my lifestyle has changed a lot. Whereas previously, I was working closely with one company delivering trainings, now I am running my own events. Instead of focusing my energy on just delivering the best that I could deliver, now I am handling most everything myself, learning about all the little stuff that I used to have a team to handle for me.

(So if you’re in Asia and after some great NLP training, you know who to call!)

The last time that I found myself in this season was when I registered my first business in July 1998. It was scary and exciting and wondrous. And it’s been pretty amazing so far this time around.

Stuff happens that doesn’t bring us pleasure. How do you handle that stuff? Do you fight against it? Do you long for the longer summer with the leaves on the trees? Or do you embrace the present and get on with making the most of it?

Be outstanding!

Optimization of everyday life: Making better decisions

Published on 8 December, 2009 in Education, Inner game and Self-awareness. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

Most of the time we don’t make rational decisions. Much of the time we can’t – there’s too little information and too much uncertainty. But if we can start to use some numbers, we can make the comparisons simpler, less subjective, and give us more of what we want, more often.

That’s the point of this post – and I’ll get back to that in a minute…

I have been reading Common Wealth, economist Jeffrey Sach’s take on how to make the world a better place. This morning, I came across his chapter on the economic proposition justifying social welfare – how increased taxation with a corresponding increase in social services can be fiscally responsible and yield quantifiable social benefits. While his argument was quite one-sided – after all, it’s his book – it got me thinking how we can use a bit of mathematics to make better decisions. Sachs was asking this sort of question:

If you were in government and thought that you had too much money, would you cut taxes or increase social welfare?

But I was thinking about my everyday decisions.

In the next few months, I have a number of flights scheduled though not yet booked. For example, I am due to fly from Sydney to Brisbane sometime after 7pm on the evening of 28 January. That route is mainly serviced by Qantas and Virgin Blue at that time. So how does one decide which flight to take?

Continue reading “Optimization of everyday life: Making better decisions” »

Welcome Alexander Daniel Smith 厉丹轩

Published on 7 December, 2009 in Self-awareness. 5 Comments Tags: , .

Wendy and I welcomed our son, Alexander Daniel Schwen Lee Smith, 厉丹轩, into the world last Thursday, 3 December, 2009 at 10:28pm… All are well :)

Alec Baldwin is a failure as an actor?

Published on 1 December, 2009 in Inner game and Self-awareness. 3 Comments Tags: , , , .

Alec Baldwin is a well-known actor. Many would consider him successful. He has starred in many moves and appears in popular television shows. Yet he sees himself a failure. Just recently, he said, “I consider my entire movie career a complete failure.”

I couldn’t help but ask myself, “How?”

Rather than trying to reassure him that he wasn’t, or denying that he was a failure, I got curious and wondered how he could feel a failure after so much ‘success’. And sure enough, the answers were clear too. For him,

“The goal of movie-making is to star in a film where your performance drives the film, and the film is either a soaring critical or commercial success, and I never had that.”

And although he starred in the 1990 action film The Hunt for Red October, which made more than $200m, it was successful because it was based on a popular Tom Clancy novel – not because of his performance.

Damn, people can be hard on themselves!

He feels that his career is a failure not because it “is” – after all, how can we really define whether someone’s career is a success or a failure? But he feels that is is a failure because of how he defines success.

What do you want most? What drives you?

Success?

Happiness?

Joy?

Achievement?

Love?

Money?

Each of us have many things that drive us. Some things that pull us forward – that we want to experience something. And maybe there are other things that we desperately want to avoid.

We all want to experience different things. And that’s great – that’s one of the things that drives the rich and diverse world in which we live. Yet how well are we setting ourselves up to feel good? There are so many ways that we can find to feel bad. And there are so many things in the world today about which we could feel bad if we wanted.

Feelings – good and bad – are a process. We have a mechanism for feel happy or sad, excited or anxious, loving or angry. If you can get to know how you feel the way that you do, you can find yourself back in the driver’s seat.

What could happen if you could feel better more and more often?

Follow your passion

Published on 11 November, 2009 in Lifestyle and Self-awareness. 3 Comments Tags: , , , .

I was just reading how some people make excuses for not following their passion… and thought that I might respond in support of following your passion.

When I was small, I wanted a Ferrari Testarossa. You see, I have red hair (well at least it was when I was younger!); when I found out that “Testarossa” literally means “red head”, I decided in the unequivocal way children can, that it was my dream car.

Then I saw one… and I thought, “hmmm… that’s a pretty ugly car” – but it was my publicly stated “dream car” so I held onto the dream.

Shortly after starting my first company, I sat in a Ferrari for the first time. It was in a dealership in Brisbane and I was so excited – finally, I was going to get what I had always wanted. As I sat myself into that hard seat of fine Italian leather, it felt fantastic… For a moment… until I realized, “It’s just a car.”

And it hit me like a cement truck falling at terminal velocity. It wasn’t the car that I wanted. It was the concept that the car represented. It was the feeling that I thought the car would give me. Pursuing the car was great in that it took me closer towards things that I really did want (excellence, achievement, impact, joy, passion…). But it wasn’t about the car.

Whenever I’m getting too attached to a goal – whether it’s doing another degree, making more money or even buying a new mobile phone – I’m lucky to have my wife ask me, “What do you want that for?”

What will it give you?

What will that allow you to experience?

And I find that there’s usually something even more important that lies behind the surface desire. Sometimes what we think we want is the best way to get what we really want; sometimes it’s not…

I wanted to feel strong and able to defend myself. I could have meditated and transcended my insecurities. Instead, I did a black belt. Good plan – but it was just the beginning. I wanted to feel confident running a business so I did an MBA. I’m not sure that was such a good plan ;)

The feelings of what you really want are the destinations… the surface desires are just vehicles for getting there. Make sure you get to the destination by a vehicle that suits you rather than just one that seems to work for you.

Perhaps this is particularly significant for me since my wife is pregnant with our first child. If I don’t live my life true to my heart – giving it my all, pursuing with passion the object of my heart’s desires – what sort of role model will I be for my son? What sort of husband will I be if I am not living with the integrity of being my own man?

And when you can live in the present with passion and purpose, opportunities show up that you could never have prepared or planned for… when you can put your cup of water back into the ocean, you can work with the force of the ocean.

Rubik’s Cubes: Let go of what you have to get what you want

Published on 1 October, 2009 in Self-awareness. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Sitting on the subway, I watched with wonder as a girl was trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube. Such a simple invention, yet apparently something like 350 million cubes have been sold worldwide. As I watched her, I noticed that she had managed to solve one of the sides – all one side was yellow.

Yet she had a problem.

Although all that side was yellow, the other edges weren’t in the right place. She had different colours on the adjacent sides. And that meant one thing: The side that was “solved” wasn’t really solved.

And to solve her problem, she would need to rearrange the whole of that side so that the appearance of order would necessarily be replaced with disorder – temporarily if she got it right!

As tempting as it is to hold onto something that is almost good enough, sometimes you need to let go of what you have that isn’t quite right in order to get what you really want.

It is rational to screw people over?!

Published on 3 September, 2009 in Self-awareness. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

We usually trust people who think rationally more than we trust those who rely on their gut feelings. But should we?

Chen-Bo Zhong (from the University of Toronto) decided to find out by asking whether people would lie and screw someone over. Some did and some didn’t.

If they were encouraged to “make decisions based on gut feelings,” they would rip off the other person by lying just 27% of the time.

But if they were encouraged to “think rationally” they would screw them over 69% of the time!

The effect was so strong that they concluded, “Deliberative processes can license morally questionnable behaviors by focusing on tangible monetary outcomes and reducing emotional influence.”

That’s why it’s important to make moral, ethical and strategic decisions without relying upon the numbers. Sure, use the numbers. Check the downside. Make sure you can afford it if everything goes wrong. But ultimately we make better decisions – at least morally better decisions – when we allow our ‘inner goodness’ to shine through.

For me the warning is that the next time I’m making a decision, don’t just rely on the numbers… You gotta listen to your heart.

Sorry Spock.

Preparing to Awaken Genius

Published on 30 June, 2009 in Creativity and genius and Self-awareness. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Tonight we have our second Awaken Your Genius event (also on Facebook). It’s really exciting for me – though challenging to compress the very best material into perhaps 90 minutes!

It’s always like that though. There is so much that we can say, yet we have very limited attention spans (ala my friend Warwick’s book, The One Minute Presenter)… effective communication is so often more about deletion than it is about creation.

When we communicate with people that we care about, we need to delete information. We can’t tell them everything. So we generalize. We delete. Sometimes we even (innocently?) distort what happens and what is going on.

One of the participants on my current Personal Transformation workshop shared how she doesn’t tell her parents what she is doing because she fears that they wouldn’t understand and instead would just worry about her. But we all do it.

We change our focus on the basis of many things. Mostly these are unconscious. But what happens when you can take personal responsibility for the spotlight of your attention is amazing.

It’s genius.

-->