Digital Detox

The late communications professor Clifford Nass said in a 2010 interview:

“We have scales that allow us to divide up people into people who multitask all the time (checking emails, text messages, etc.) and people who rarely do, and the differences are remarkable. People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy. They’re chronically distracted. They just can’t focus and keep on task. They are pretty much mental wrecks.”

Once you are wired for distraction, you crave it.

According to a recent report majority of people would rather go without food and other daily staples than be without their mobile devices, therefore digital detoxing is not as simple as it sounds.^[14] Symptoms include lack of concentration, a feeling of irritation if separated from your device or when your battery is running low, looking at your phone first thing when you wake up, ignoring people while you are at your digital device, and reduced productivity resulting from overwhelming use of digital devices.^{[15]  (Source-Wikipedia)}

Many people are realising the importance of digital down time in cultivating healthier lives, achieving ambitious career goals and in generating more productive work habits. 

Digital detox refers to a period of time during which a person refrains from using electronic connecting devices such as smartphones and computers. It is regarded as an opportunity to reduce stress or focus on social interaction in the physical world.

“Cool it. Carve out spaces of silence and solitude in order to do the deep thinking that creates meaning out of chaos. Emptiness is powerful and sacred, the birthplace of new possibility. Make those spaces for yourself.” (Annalie Killian-social media maven)

The benefits of digital detoxing go beyond the ideological. Research has shown that too much time with technology can disrupt sleep patterns, hinder the ability to think deeply and increase stress.

Meanwhile, the opposite of compulsive smartphone use - mindful meditation – has been shown to reduce stress, eliminate insomnia and increase ability to perform under high pressure.

Challenge yourself: Any feelings of panic you may experience about being switched off are habitual. The world is unlikely to fall apart if you don’t answer an email (side note: the people in high-pressure jobs need digital detoxing more than anyone!). Challenge any thoughts about needing to switch on, and draw your mind back to the here and now.

Enjoy

While digital detoxing is a reward in and of itself, the journey can be rocky. Schedule in some time to reward yourself for sticking to the plan, by choosing something you “never” have time for. Enjoy!

Purging Time!

It’s spring and time for the new, out with the old.

Sometimes, I look but I don’t really SEE. Yesterday, I opened the underwear drawer as I do every day and finally SAW. Saw the hundred pairs of socks, saw the fifty knickers, I’m embarrassed to say how many bras – many of which may have fit at one time.

What was different? It disturbed me (finally). I wash weekly so I just use a certain number of each garment, laundry those things and put them back into the drawer. Every week it’s the same.

Except for yesterday.

So I bought some containers to keep the socks in one place, one for undies albeit leaving no more room for the bras. Hmm, maybe I’ll be hippie and go braless. Ermm, no. They are still hanging from the doorknob, waiting for a home.

On a roll, I went straight for the jugular – my sports stuff. Out with the old, in with a few. I generally wear my stretchy training clothes because I train almost daily. Still, they are not stylish enough to wear to my work (but so comfortable that I’d like to). So, clenching my teeth, I picked five pairs of training pants and five tops. The same with the spin cycling clothes. The rest will soon be in Poland (with assistance from my polish cleaning lady).

Purging is like Christmas!

While going through my things, I re-discovered objects and clothing I had forgotten. I hadn’t seen them at the bottom of the piles. So it seemed like I was getting something new! If I didn’t get a great feeling looking at them or if the clothes didn’t fit anymore (now THAT’S another problem), I got rid of them without arguing to myself that they are still good as new.

Only kids wear things out. It was time to decide.

I’ve resolved to start really looking and deciding if I need everything I own. The painting and drawing things I don’t use every day but I still need them at certain times. The 10 boxes I am keeping “just in case” probably not.

What about you? Is it time to open your beautiful eyes and really SEE? Then go for it!

Just do it.

Upsize Your Life 101: Finding Your Purpose

Why are you here and what do you really want?

By Alexander Loyd, PhD, ND

the author of Beyond Willpower

Do you remember the story of Aladdin and his magic lamp? This was one of my favorite stories as a child; I don't know how many times I imagined, while walking around in the backyard, what I would choose with my three wishes, and then what might happen as a result.

Close your eyes and imagine that Aladdin's genie is standing right in front of you, right now. There's no one else around; it's just you and the genie. Here's what he tells you: "I'm going to give you one wish. You can wish for anything you want, with only two limitations: You can't wish for more wishes, and you can't receive a wish that will take away someone else's free will. But wish for basically anything else, and you will get it. If you wish for 10 million dollars—done! An 'incurable' health issue healed—you got it! A big achievement goal accomplished—victory! You get the idea. No one will ever know how you got it; they will think it just happened naturally through the course of life's circumstances. Also, you can never have another wish fulfilled in your lifetime, and if you don't tell me your wish in 10 seconds, you lose it."

Okay, this is it; the moment of truth. Treat this as if it were really happening to you right now. No filtering; you've got 10 seconds. Close your eyes—go.

______________________________

What did you tell the genie your wish was? Write it down.

Guess what? I tricked you. This is the only way I've been able to figure out how to help you identify what you really want most in your life. You see, your answer above is actually the number one goal of your life right now. But if I'd asked it that way, chances are you would have said something different.

So why do I want to know the number one goal of your life? Because it's why you do almost everything that you do. It's why you have the thoughts that you have. It's what you really believe in the most, no matter what you might say. And it betrays your underlying programming. Everything you do, everything you've ever done and everything you will ever do is because of a goal you've set at some point in your life, even if you've long forgotten what it was. You don't get up in the morning unless, at some point, you have that as a goal, consciously or unconsciously. The same is true for brushing your teeth, getting dressed, hailing a cab, getting married, getting divorced, having children, using the restroom—you get the idea. Identifying the number one goal in your life is the first step to making any real change.

Here are the next two important questions:

If you got what you most wanted in question 1, what would that do for you and what would it change in your life?

If you got the things that were your answers to both questions 1 and 2, how would you feel?

Your answer to question 3 is actually the right answer to the original question, "What do you want right now more than anything else?" That's what you really want more than anything, and it is always an inward state; it is never an external material circumstance. This internal state is what we're going to call your ultimate success goal, because that's exactly what it is. But if this inward state is really your ultimate success goal, then why didn't you naturally answer that way to begin with?

Here's why: Almost everyone answers question 1 with an external circumstance because they believe that circumstance will purchase for them the inward state of how they answered question 3. Let me give you an example. A few months ago, I was doing a live event in Los Angeles. I was taking the audience through this exercise to help people find their ultimate goal. A lady volunteered to come up on stage and share her answers. She had had a rough few years, like so many have in the recent economy. Her answer to question 1 was "a million dollars." When she said it, the look in her eyes was the same as if she were talking about the love of her life, her favorite food or a decadent chocolate dessert. Her answer to question 2 was what you would probably expect: "I could pay off my bills, have a little breathing room, go on a much-needed vacation and have less pressure on my life." Her answer to question 3 was "peace." She thought that in order to have peace, she had to have money. In her situation, she thought money would literally purchase peace for her.

I explained how all this works, and then asked her: "Is it possible that what you 'really' want, more than anything, is peace, but you think that money is the only way to get that peace for you internally?" Her jaw dropped, she covered her face and she started weeping right there on the stage in front of many people—gasping-for-air weeping.

So many of us pursue some end result—whether it's a career, a possession, an achievement or a relationship—because we think that this external circumstance will purchase the internal state we really want most in our lives. In fact, we probably believe that achieving the external circumstance is the only way we can have the inward states of love, joy and peace. But this is never true. In fact, it's one of the greatest lies on the planet.

Source: Oprah.com

Using WOOP to reach your goals

Stop Being So Positive

• Gabriele Oettingen
• October 27, 2014

• Harvard Business Review

We’ve all heard a great deal about the power of positive thinking. Organizations encourage it among their employees in an effort to boost performance and engagement, and it’s a key tenet of “managing yourself” well; affirmative messages about perseverance, resilience, and vision adorn many an office wall. In the wake of the Great Recession, some businesses even hired happiness coaches to get their workers looking on the bright side. And an optimistic attitude is expected of leaders; politicians and corporate executives should always have that “think it-do it” spirit on display.

There’s just one problem, however. Research my colleagues and I have performed over the past two decades suggests that positive thinking doesn’t actually help us as much as we suppose. In fact, examining the effects of positive visions of the future on people pursuing various kinds of wishes — from health-related, such as losing weight, quitting smoking, or recovering quickly from surgery, to the improvement of professional or academic performance (for example, mid-level managers wishing to reduce job-related stress, graduate students looking for a job, or school children seeking to get good grades) — we’ve consistently found that people who positively fantasize make either the same or less progress in achieving attainable wishes than those who don’t.

This makes perfect sense, if you think about it. Dreaming about a successful outcome in the future is pleasurable, leaving you with a nice, warm feeling of satisfaction. But in a workplace setting, that’s counterproductive. You’re less motivated to buck up and make the strong, persistent effort that is usually required to realize challenging but feasible wishes. In some of our studies, we found that positive thinking produced measurably lower systolic blood pressure — a key measure of how energized someone is. In others, positive thinkers were as likely as participants in a control group to take easy steps toward a goal, but significantly less likely to take more cumbersome and difficult steps, such as donating meaningful amounts of their time or money.

“Okay,” you might say, “Forget positive thinking. I’m going to dwell on all the daunting challenges I face in my job.” But, unfortunately, dwelling on reality doesn’t help much either.

What does help is mental contrasting, an exercise that brings together our positive fantasy about the future with a visualization of the obstacle standing in the way. Even more beneficial is adding if-then planning that allows you to address the obstacle when it arises.

In our research, we’ve developed a mental contrasting tool called WOOP — Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan. Here’s how it works: Find a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed, switch off your devices, and close your eyes. Name a wish that is attainable or realistic for you — say, landing a new client. Then imagine for a few minutes what would happen if that wish came true, letting the images flow freely through your mind. Then change things up. Identify the main obstacle inside you that stands in the way, and imagine it for a few minutes. Now on to your plan: If faced with obstacle X, then you will take effective action Y in response.

WOOP is simple, easy, and inexpensive — so much so that you might not think it would work. After all, behavior change usually requires expensive  coaching or training programs, right? Our results suggest not. In a study of health care providers, we found that those who used WOOP were significantly more engaged with their work and less stressed than members of a control group. In studies of college students enrolled in a vocational business program, we found that it helped them manage their time better. And we’ve also used WOOP to help school children study more for the PSAT, do more homework, and get better grades.

Why does it work? Because the process either helps people understand their wishes are attainable, giving them energy and direction, heightening their engagement and prompting them to act; or it helps them realize their wishes are unrealistic, leading them to disengage  and freeing them up to pursue other, more promising endeavors.

Although positive thinking feels good in the moment,  it often bears a false promise. Only when it’s paired with a clear view of potential obstacles will it consistently produce desirable results.

Things and Messes – minimize across the board

Embrace Simplicity - Throw out Anything you don't Need! 

William Morris once famously said: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” In other words, most of us hoard too many dust-ridden items for no good reason. I have been researching Tiny Houses and, to live in one of those, you can only keep the basics.

Michael Guerra's Compact Living: How to Design Small Interior Space, explains the importance of reducing consumption and personal clutter while designing ingenious space saving solutions for small spaces. This is a powerful guide to anyone wishing to live with less debt and more freedom.

Graham Hill, founder of TreeHugger.com, has recently set up LifeEdited, making the idea of simple, responsible living accessible to a much wider reach.

Hill explains: “Since 1950, the average American consumes six times more energy and carries 24 times more personal debt. He uses three times more living space, but still doesn’t have enough room to store his stuff, a fact made clear by a $22B personal storage industry. Despite this excess (or perhaps because of it), we find ourselves no happier than we were 60 years ago. Most of us realize it’s about relationships and experiences – not possessions – that make us happy. Why don’t we design our homes, products and lifestyles accordingly?”

More storage is not the solution

o   Sell, donate or throw away at least one item a day.

o   Think before you buy (do I really need this?)

o   Make a list of everything you nearly bought over the period of a month and work out how much you save.

o   If you have several cars in your household, consider getting rid of one or more and replace with a bicycle... it's healthy and cheap to run.

o   Get rid of your TV... if you still want to watch certain programs, use your computer. It will allow you to be more selective of the information you consume. I don’t have a TV and I don’t miss it either. Try it – you’ll like it!

o   Try apartment living... if your neighbours turn on their heating, you may not need to use yours at all as you benefit from being insulated by others.

o   Digitize your life a little. Scan all of your old pictures sitting in boxes and opt out of paper bank statements, these will open up the storage space for the things you actually need.

o   Eliminate debt. Most people work to pay off the money they never had, for things they don’t really need. Downsize, sell what you don’t need and experience some extra piece of mind.

o   Be conscious of your health. Eat local, fresh food. By supporting your community, you cut your dependence on supermarkets and the weight of carbon intensive food products.

o   Express gratitude everyday. When living simply, you have an opportunity to value the things that really matter in your life. Allow yourself the luxury of a notepad and write down everything that you are grateful for.

o   Most paperwork people file away in box files never gets looked at again. So do yourself a favor and shred paperwork straight away. If it’s important scan it first. And then shred it.

o   Get rid of picture albums. Scan the photos and ditch the pics.

o   Get rid of pinboards. Most of the things are forgotten on them anyway.

o   You can dispose of your landline telecom connection and phone. Try VOIP – a proper Internet phone. You might even  consider replacing even that with a simple redirect to your  smartphone.

o   A lot of kitchen stuff could also go. Like your large multi-functional kitchen mixer that could do all sorts of tasks short of launching a satellite. It probably seemed a good idea at the time you bought it, something to spend money on.  But in practice it is a useless overkill piece of kit which is hardly ever used other than to make the occasional milkshake or pancake.  

o   I actually have clocks in every room and I’m not ready to give them up. I don’t want to have to go to my smart phone to check the time (I rarely wear any of my 20 watches!) Still, your smartphone would do. 

    Also, stop buying gifts that will end up in somebody’s clutter. Most people give presents at Christmas, for example, because they feel like it is expected.

 

The principle behind tiny homes is fascinating. Learning to get by with less stuff  but with a higher quality of life is important.

The internet is full of terrific examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3SwqNzsNwg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0p47D-XIzs

Check out this video,too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XSJ-kI4VVg

4 Keys to Unlocking the Life of Your Dreams

Would you like to live the life of your dreams? Do you feel like you're not living up to your full potential? Do you see other people around you succeeding and you would like to be those people? 

Here are keys to unlocking the life of your dreams. If you follow them, and you apply them, you will see that you are much closer to living the life of your dreams.

People make their own luck. It is a matter of applying specific steps to your life which lead to the result -- the life that you dreamed about!

1. Purpose -- There are far too many people who don't have any idea what it is that they want to do and more importantly don't understand the purpose of what they do. Too many people talk about their occupational objective which is to be a Butcher, a Baker or Software App maker, but they fail to have the more important discussion which is what the purpose of their life is. How is purpose defined? Purpose is "the reason why you are on the planet." If you take the time and the mental energy to sit down and truly figure out what your purpose is, then you will be driven and you will be successful. Why? Every morning when you get up you know why you're doing what you're doing and why.

2. Passion -- how is passion defined? The dictionary defines passion as "pervading spirit, ruling passion, master passion, fullness of heart flow of soul." If you want to live the life of your dreams, is very important that 1) you identify what it is you have a passion for and 2) you try to make your passion the way that you make a living. When you have a passion for what you do, it comes through in how you perform, how you act, how you talk, and people want to associate and do business with you. It makes you unstoppable. As Sheila Graham once said, "you can have anything you want if you want it desperately enough. You must want it with an inner exuberance that erupts through the skin and joins the energy created by the world." (I love this last sentence! )

3. People -- one of the ways of living the life of your dreams is to make sure that you are very careful about who you associate with. There is no question that the quality of your life is in direct correlation to the quality of the people that you spend your time with. This is your life, so be extremely careful about who you spend time with. There are two kinds of people in the world -- there are positive people and there are our negative people. Negative people are energy sucking vampires and if you want to live the life of your dreams you must stay away from their negative energy sucking life force because they will tear you down, and drag you down with them, down into the abyss. When you do the opposite by being with happy, optimistic and upbeat people, those people will encourage you, motivate you, inspire you and help you. Consciously select who you are going to spend time with and eliminate people who will not help you achieve your dreams. That sounds a little bit cold, but this is your life and there's no question that you need to be around people who are life builders and not life destroyers.

4. Productivity -- If you want to live the life of your dreams you have to invest the hard work. You have to get stuff done to make sure that it's going to happen. People who are successful are also extremely diligent about how they spend their time and what they need to do in order to be productive. Follow some sort of time management system, and you learn how to make your personal and professional life as productive as possible. If you want to live the life of your dreams, it is going to take a lot of hard work, but you need to make sure that the work you're doing is the most productive work which is going to lead you to the result that you're looking for. Make a list of goals for the year, and you make a list each day of what you need to get done, and prioritize which things are most important and which things are least important.

People that live the life of their dreams focus on these four keys.

Your life is in your hands, and because we are the only species that has the ability to change our life through conscious thought, you have an incredible ability, brainpower, and you live in an era where resources are available at the tip of your fingertips; easy to get, easy to find, and inexpensive. Decide that you going to live the life dreams, and starting right now make a list of how you're going to go about taking your first step.

It's all up to you, at the end of your days, when you're sitting on the porch in the sun, Be able to say that yes -- you have no regrets, you truly lived the life of your dreams.

Source: Shawn Doyle  (Huffington Post)

Dabbling at Life's Offerings

Upsize Your Life by Dabbling at Life’s Offerings

Some adults, in support of forcing their children to stick with an activity, argue that they wish their parents had pushed them to learn an instrument, for instance, and others will say that they are grateful that their parents forced them.

Sometimes, you don’t know if you’ll like something until you give it a try. If it doesn’t “turn out”, at least you know what it was like. I teach piano and cello and about a quarter of my students over the years didn’t really enjoy playing these instruments. Some never touched them outside of the lessons.

Am I for letting them quit? Yes. If they’ve given it a good try and have practiced enough to get past the rudimentary skills and still don’t enjoy doing it, then STOP for heaven’s sake! But they wouldn’t have known about the instruments and the necessary work at all if they hadn’t tried.

Some people dabble at acting while working at a daytime job. Others take writing courses and develop blogs. I teach adults who really enjoy time at the instruments and with me during the lessons. Recently, a lady stopped lessons, feeling very guilty about doing so. She had taken piano for four years and had gotten far enough to play some pieces and, more importantly, try out new pieces on her own. She doesn’t need lessons forever.

It used to be that having a lot of varied interests meant that you are flighty.

Not anymore, according to the founders of Dabble, a Chicago-based startup that offers one-time courses allowing participants to try something new. "In the past, those who dabbled were thought of as scatterbrained, [they] can’t focus," says Erin Hopmann, co-founder and CEO of Dabble, a Chicago-based company that offers one-time courses in everything from pasta making to calligraphy and glassblowing, says dabbling in different interests can stimulate the creative juices, expand your network, and aid in the pursuit of better balance. "Today, it’s seen as beneficial to be knowledgeable in a number of areas." The idea came after Hopmann and fellow co-founder Jessica Lybeck, both lifelong learners, wanted to tap into their interests without a huge time or monetary commitment. "People get caught in the rut of the 9 to 5," Hopmann says. "They don’t want to wait until retirement to enjoy life."

Dabbling is a willingness to be a student, a non-expert, we are observant and develop more understanding for other viewpoints. We re-experience pushing through a challenge, honing and polishing until a slight luster glows through.

Here are some ways dabbling, even for a few hours, can benefit your work:

1) Dabbling can get your creative juices flowing. By getting new information and experience something different, you are more able to think outside the box when you generate ideas. You can experiment with new ways of doing something, which jars unused portions of the brain into use.

2) It makes life even more interesting. When you’re trying something new, you often dive into an area that makes you uncomfortable, which is also a bit hard on your old ego. Dabbling is a willingness to be a student, a non-expert again. Being unsure is unsettling, that’s true. Certainty is nice but ‘same old, same old’ is also boring. Expose yourself to new ideas for a creative stretch. If you are someone who’s spent their entire career in business, you may benefit from taking an art class, where you may connect with other artists and expand your thinking and visual skills through interaction with them. A seemingly narrow topic can open the door to a broad and deep array of interests and explorations.

3) We become observant and develop more understanding for other viewpoints. We could become more tolerant with and attuned to ‘beginners’ in our workplaces. Potential dabblers should take a one-day course in an area outside their comfort zone to get the most out of their experience.

4) Dabbling is cross-training for the brain. Pursuing interests in a variety of subjects stretches the mind and pushes the imagination, causing us to be more creative. Dabbling is simply a way of gathering new information and experimenting with new ways of doing something. It causes you to think differently about everything else that you do, a process which can lead to incredible innovation. The best way to discover something is to take an existing concept in one discipline and apply it to another.

5) We build a stronger brain. Dabbling in diverse interests strengthens neural connections in the brain. Your brain is a muscle, so just as your abdominals get stronger with the more crunches you do, the more you exercise your brain, the better it will perform.

 What have you "always wanted to try"? Just Do It!