Mind the Beginner

“In order to engage in life fully, we sometimes have to subject ourselves to small, calculated risks. And though we can’t control anyone else’s behaviour, we can learn to control ours to minimize those risks.”

This is a quote from Neil Strauss’ book Emergency. (Page 385 if you want the context) and I found it rather thought provoking. In daily life, what are the risks we take every single day. I gave it a hard thought while taking a long ride on my motorcycle and realized that just by taking that ride I was taking risks I didn’t have to. 

But although I didn’t have to, I wanted to take this risk. I thoroughly enjoy riding my motorcycle in the warm spring sunset and I’m not alone in this. I spotted at least thirty other riders and as is the custom with “bikers” you wave at one another, just to acknowledge what all bikers know: that riding is better than driving. But in order to wave you need to let go of the handlebar for a second. Going 60 mph and letting go of the handlebar with one hand to wave. A calculated risk if you ask me. Less dangerous than eating a snack in the car or using your mobile. That is not the only risk in riding a motorcycle, they are everywhere. But as in the quote, we can learn to control our own behaviour and minimize the risks involved. You won’t see me waving while cornering or overtaking. Use your own judgement to control your behaviour. But, also look around what risks are considered “normal” and what is excessive. Are you overly cautious or are you taking more risks than you should?

Any entrepreneurial effort is also a risk, the stakes can be high and the possibility of failure are real. Are the rewards worth the effort and the risk? I think they are. It’s hard work and a path filled with setbacks but in the end there is nothing that quite beats the rush of the startup, it’s highly addictive though. Take this blog for example, it’s a startup of sorts and it’s a great feeling to see the number of subscribers and readers grow day by day, knowing that this is a direct result of your own work, you alone are responsible in the end, failure is all yours, success is all yours too. Although success in blogging could never happen without your readers, they are your friends and can break you just as easily as they have made you. The risks involved with starting this blog are minimal, there is no monetary commitments yet (for me) , and likewise no monetary rewards (for me, yet). 

The chance to have your own business, or even your own blog is something everyone should try. Don’t get in to deep and spend thousands of dollars on it. Look into the possibilities to start a small side business that won’t cost to much and enjoy the rollercoaster of startup and the joy of every single cent you make. Find out if you enjoy the thrills or if the risk is to great and you can’t stand the feeling. Either way, take the chance if you can and find out. To many people out there have the dream of being an entrepreneur and only a small percentage of those really give it a go. Blogging on a free wordpress hosted blog is a great way to experience your first startup and get a feeling for marketing. After that, the steps to investing some money seem less daunting. 

Start monetizing your blog, offer your skills to others for a modest fee, try a small drop-shipping business. Give it a go and find out if it’s what you thought it was. 

…This is one of the reasons for me to start blogging, I dreamed about it and in stead of just dreaming, I acted on the dream and now that dream is reality… Engaging in life fully and not standing at the sidelines dreaming of what could be. Take the chance! 

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Change is all around us and there are a lot  of people writing about this subject. But what is the essence of change? In this post I would like to write about something I learned in my eduction as an exercise therapist. It’s about making a change in your life that will last. Not a simple overnight venture but true, lasting change in your habits. It comprises of seven steps that actually describe the complete process of changing behaviours and can be adapted to anything we do in our life.

Be open: You can not change anything in life if you’re not open towards it. It seems logical but think about it for a second. If you don’t like to learn languages you’ll never be open to learning one. Set aside you presumption and experience what there is to be offered. Look around, look inside yourself, is there something there you would like to change? Or are you happy with things just the way they are.

Understand: You need to understand what it is you want to do, understand what it is exactly that you want to change and how you want to tackle the process of changing. Explore the road you will be taking so you know what’s ahead of you. There will always be unforeseen events but the better you explore these the easier it gets. Watch out for paralysis by thought however. You want to understand things, but don’t overthink them.

Want: You can be open to change and understand how the change will work and what’s in store for you, but if deep down somewhere you don’t want to change the change will never come. Do you really want something or is it just another dream you’re having that you don’t really want to work for? Change always means work, hard work even. Are you up to it? Do you want to change?

Can: We need the right environment to change our behaviour. If you understand what you want but your environment won’t support your choice of change you’re still not going to change. It might also be that you’re not realistic out things. As therapist it’s sometimes hard to get people to realize that that they want, their body won’t do anymore. Honesty hurts sometimes but if your unrealistic about what you want to change you will never get there.

These last three elements are a kind of trinity. After going through these three steps, and this can happen in an order or even simultaneously we’re ready for the two final steps in changing our behaviour, our habit. The last two steps are where most people get stuck. They read tons of self-help books and on a subconscious level know what the next step is but somehow they don’t get there. This step is:

Do it: We know what to do, we know why we want it and everything is in place to start doing it. Now comes the hardest step of all. Actually doing at needs to be done to change your habits. This has to be  conscious choice and we need to support it with all our heart and mind or this is were things will go wrong quickly. We succumb to our old habits and then start beating ourselves up with thoughts about being a failure. This is a very though process, and we can use all the help we can get. Write about it in your blog, tell people about what you are doing. The more people know about what you want to change the more likely it is that you will get there. It’s something called peer pressure and it’s a very powerful motivational tool. You don’t want to let everyone down now do you? The last step in enduring change gets easier every week:

Persevere: Keep doing what you need to do, it might result in a inner struggle because we all want to keep our old habits but it’s going to get easier every single day. One day we realize that we made it through all the steps and changed our habit.

Everything we do can be deconstructed into these steps, we take it all for granted most of the time but once you sit down and think about these steps you can find out where things went wrong or what’s keeping you back in changing.

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Information is all around us, we get bombarded with it every single waking minute. And if this passive information (TV, radio) isn’t enough we constantly look for new information. After all you – my appreciated reader – are reading this blog after all. You sought it out and decided to read this post in order to find something you didn’t know or to reaffirm what you already knew.

Even the least (self) educated person in the western world today knows more than prehistoric man. But the speed of this information is getting the better of us. Take twitter for example, a great resource for information but if you follow enough people it’s hard to get the information you’re looking for. To help with that there are some great apps to handle twitter. My personal favorite is Tweetdeck in this matter. 

There are more “hacks” out there to help with the information overload. Lifehacker writes about those things daily. However, there are some skills that are not digital, they are true skills you will want to develop in order to get on top of things. I distinguish three groups of these:

1. Information intake
2. Information processing
3. Information storage and recollection

Information intake is actually the most important of them all. We need a way to effectively get the information we want. Seeing the speed at which information is presented we need a fast way of doing this. How do we take in most of our information?  Either through our ears or our eyes. Speeding up listening isn’t going to get you far, the big gain in intake is to be had in the eyes. Google reader and tweetdeck both present information for us to read, the only way to get through this information faster is to read faster. Yes, the infamous skill of “speedreading” is what I’m talking about. The skill to read 1000 words a minute or more. (The average speed is 200-250 words per minute) Although some claim it’s a myth, with some training you can raise your reading speed towards the 1000 words per minute without loosing comprehension. Just think about it, reading blogposts in half of the time or faster. That certainly would save you some time each day. 

Information processing  to me is what we do with our information, it’s what we do immediately after getting the information through reading or perhaps listening (think about college). We need an effective way to handle things. Take notes perhaps. But how do we take effective notes? Again, there is one system that seems to keep popping up out there and it’s called “mindmapping”. Although this system has it’s advantages for me it just didn’t cut it. I’m actually very bad at taking notes on just about anything. That being said, If I want to make notes I do it all in a simple small moleskine notebook. There are some attributes of mindmapping that did help me though. The main thing being images. I have that little notebook within reach at all times and jot down anything I might want to recall later. It’s full of one-liners from all the blogs I follow and quotes from books or conversations. While reading about mindmapping it got clear to me that images stay in your mind much better than words. We think in images so why not take notes in images right? This brings us to our third skill.

Information storage and recollection to me is being able to remember what you read. Even if that was a few weeks or months ago. How do we do that? It’s very simple but you need to practice it a lot: use images to remember. Exaggerate anything and everything and make it ridicules. If I was talking about an elephant I saw in the zoo, that wouldn’t be something you could remember. But just imagine a purple elephant on a unicycle holding a baseball bat with it’s trunk getting ready to take a swing at the giant pumpkin you’re throwing at it. Our memory works with images and remembers anything out of the ordinary we throw at it. 

So what is in this for the beginner? Think about all the information you are taking in every day and rethink how you deal with it all. Can you optimize the process? How do you handle all the information? Please tell me all about it.

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