Mind the Beginner

Last Friday I had a quick 6 tweet chat with Cath Duncan from Mineyourresources about the concepts of learning, change and discomfort. It put me on a train of thought that also brought to mind a quote I posted earlier from Leito Atreides (yes, Dune):

Without change something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.

Cath and I agreed that when you know how your mind & body habitually reacts to change,  and don’t fear that, then change can be quite comfortable. In that case it’s called learning and the more discomfort of mind & body you can endure the more you learn.

Or in other words, wake up that sleeper, hand him a strong cup of coffee and snap to it.

Somewhere down the line learning got a bad taste to it. Learning was something you did in school and was no fun at all. The same went for reading, an activity related to learning and so it’s no fun. That you’re reading this blog tells me that you at least don’t mind reading and probably have no hard feelings against learning as well.

Learning however, is giving your mind a really hard time. All those new things it’s got to master, making sence of things that seem nonsensical on all fronts except what our higher reasoning thinks about it. But our brain does not get that. Take learning to play the guitar for instance. You know you want to make music, all your brain gets is that you’re trying to make your fingers do things it’s not used to do and it hurts your fingertips. Anyone in their right mind would not do something that they know will inflict pain or other forms of discomfort. It takes some effort to get your brain to do those things that are outside its comfort zone.

See your brain a bit like a muscle. Or rather, see it exactly like a muscle. If you use it and push it, it will get stronger. Using your brain can be done in a lot of ways of course. Take your pick:

• Learn a new language
• Play an instrument
• Go an entire day without using your dominant hand
• Try a new type of food
• Start a blog
• Read a good book
• Rearrange all the furniture in your room
• Take up caligraphy
• Install a different OS on your computer
• Break a habit
• Take up touch typing (for the pro’s: on a Dvorak or Colemak layout)
• Basically anything that will change the status quo

The status quo is the sleeper

Keep the brain awake and always find new ways to make your brain a bit uncomfortable. It can handle it and will adapt.

Cath Duncan from mineyourresources.com made a comment a while back on one of my blogposts (What all the “get rich” Blogs don’t tell you) I’d going to have a closer look at today:

I totally agree that action is what makes the difference in results – even imperfect action. In improv storytelling they have the mantra “it’s all about having as many goes as possible, rather than trying to have 1 perfect go,” and I think this is a great mantra for life, and one of the foundational ideas in Agile Living. – Cath

If you’ve been reading about personal development for a while this will sound very familiar. It’s true in all paths of life actually. Practice makes perfect but better yet failure is the way to perfection as paradoxical as it might seem at first glance.

Embrace failure as the path to success and don’t get paralyzed by your thoughts while waiting for things to unfold and happened like you want them to. They almost never happen like you thought they would.

Failure to meditate

Somehow this all makes me thing of my every day practice of meditation. More often than not it seems a total waste of time. I’m sitting there and thinking of all sorts of things while counting my breaths on auto pilot. The thought crosses my mind to just get up and stop this charade. Stop pretending to be meditating and doing it perfectly. But you know what. I’m actually meditating, although not perfectly. I just fake it untill I make it. There you have it. My meditation is fake, I’m a fraud, I’ve been meditation for little over a year now, spending roughly 130 hours in meditation so far. Can I call myself an expert on the subject? Hardly… Have I failed miserably to meditate the way I want to be meditating? Most certainly!

You could call me an expert at failure. I have over 130 solid hours of failure under my belt, and that’s only in meditation. Or you could call my entire life a failure, in which case I’ve had over 2 million hours worth of experience on the subject. By Malcom Gladwell’s 10,000 hour theory I’m an expert at failure many times over.
And guess what, so are you!

The expert failure

Yes my dear reader, you’re an expert at failing. That’s the bonus of not being content with your own life and reading about personal development and lifestyle design. You wouldn’t be reading about these things if you were totally content with your life now would you?

What’s the value you might think by now, why is being an expert failure useful in my life. Well, the failures we had in our early days were simple: If we failed in staying upright we might bump our heads. Later if we failed to write legible we could fail a test. Failing to apply the brakes when driving created a nice dent in the car. A simple failure got bigger and bigger consequences over time as we got better at spotting what could go wrong. By the time you graduated you had enough experience in failure to spot things before they went wrong and correct them.

If you didn’t learn from mistakes you’d be wearing a crash helmet, not be allowed to drive, couldn’t complete an education and certainly couldn’t develop your person or design your lifestyle. Your life might not be perfect right now, but be happy about it. Perfection would mean you can’t learn anything anymore and what a bore that would be.

• Embrace failure, it’s your best friend in life. Seek imperfection in everything you do. Learn from it and be happy that you failed.

More blogposts, related to this subject:

Taking a chance, it is worth the risk

Settling for perfection

Yesterday a tweet came along in my screen I really would like to share with you:

Amazing how often when we think we’re learning, we’re really not. We’re just seeking evidence to reinforce our current beliefs – Jonathan Mead

I would like to follow this quote with another one that I’ve taken from someone I believe is one of the most honest men on the planet.

I never leaned anything that I already “knew” – Peter Ralston

Peter Ralston is a martial arts teacher and in 1978, he became the first non-Asian to win a world martial arts tournament held in the Republic of China. The reason I tell you this is exactly the same reason he took part in this tournament. People didn’t believe what he was saying so he needed to prove his point. Would you take notice to what this guy was telling you if he was just a passer by on the street?

What are Jonathan and Peter talking about here. 

A huge problem that we all suffer from. We’re stuck in our ways. Not only in the form of micro habits but also in how we feel things, react, talk and think. We percieve everything in the world through a filter that we have created ourselves, a filter that by it’s very nature hides the truth from us. 

We might think we understand something but what is there to understand about moving your body. You can’t learn a martial art by reading about it. You need to go past the filter or in other words:

The power of transforming the body lies in the experience of the body, not in our thoughts, opinions and beliefs. If we make a distinction between those two activities, we can progress towards mastery in any endeavor – Peter Ralston

What’s more, we need someone with authority to tell us we are wrong or we won’t believe it. But even in this there is a filter, who has authority in our filter? The only way to get rid of that filter is to really experience what is going on. I’ll give you an example, one that’s perfect to illustrate Peter’s teaching style:

If you have some martial arts experience you’ll probably “know” that the centre of gravity on the human body is somewhere below the navel. You can take this for the truth or you can experience it. So what Peter did was take a strong stick and together with several students he balanced on of the students on the stick in all three axis. They concluded that indeed the centre of gravity in this student was in the lower abdomen, just below the navel.

Although science has provided us with a lot of “truths”, religion has done the same and so have popular media. They all help build our filter, a filter by which we tend to see everything as wrong or right without taking the time to experience it and form our own opinnion. Those with authority (in our oppinion) lead and we follow blindly.

All to often we just want to reinforce what we already “know”. But that’s not learning now is it.

The weekly update is here again and by just looking at the numbers it hasen’t been a great week:

Average number of pageviews over this week: 70

Number of subscribers to my RSS feed: 21 (very nice!)

Where the traffic is coming from: Again it’s mostly from problogger but twitter is pitching is as are the blogcomments I’ve posted elsewhere. I think it’s getting a bit more stable now. The initial hype is over and now I have to work even harder than before, jut to keep it up.

What I’ve done this week to get my blog bigger and what I learned: I have added a lot of people on twitter in the hopes if getting to know more of my readers. A lot is defined by going from 158 following to over 400 and doubling my followerd to over 250. As I said last week I havn’t jumped on every blogpost at probloger anymroe and I don’t think it has caused my to much traffic I musts say. Most traffic is comming from the forum, not the blog comments. I’m also working on a collaboration of bloggers and it’s growing, we have about 10 members at the moment and it’s still growing. Somewhere this week I’ll be posting my plan in how I would like this collaboration to function. So stay tuned and hang on to your hats. This is going to be a wild ride.

Another post comming this week will be ” What’s in my bag” . I’ve always loved these things and I just have to do one of these. (I’m a regular at the EDC forums after all) Besides, I saw one the other day at The simple dollar and wrote in the comment that I would be doing one too. I have to keep that promise. 

Have a nice weekend everyone.

As some of my readers already know I’m working on a challenge to get my blog to grow big enough so that I can reclaim my domain. Big enough is defined here as >500 pageviews a day for seven consecutive days or >300 subscribers to my RSS feed. There already have been several occasions where readers have asked me how things were going. So I’ve decided to give an update every weekend on how things are going. I’ll split those up into four items:

• Average number of pageviews over this week (Monday-Friday)
• Number of subscribers to my RSS feed
• Where the traffic is coming from
• What I’ve done this week to get my blog bigger and what I learned

The observant reader will also know that not only has my domain been bought and I’ll get it for free if I manage to succeed, but another benefactor has stepped in who offered me free web hosting for a year.

Average number of viewers: 117
Number of subscribers to my RSS feed: 8
Where is the traffic coming from:

Mostly it’s getting here through the problogger.com forum (31DBBB)at the moment, a few more get here through my twitter and a few find their way through comments I’ve left on other blogs. The remainder get here through all sorts of little things I’ve done such as putting up a link to my blog in the signatures I have on all the forums I visit.

What I’ve done this week to get my blog bigger and what I learned:

I’ve become quite active on the 31DBBB forum and that alone has doubled my pageviews. I’ve also managed to be (one of) the first to comment on the new 31DBBB blogpost as it hit the net and as the assignment got announced on the forum. These both have resulted in a lot of traffic coming this way but it’s not the kind of attention you want to be getting in the long run. So as of next week I will no longer react to the assignments within minutes but will wait until after 7 pm to act upon them. That’s a good three to four hours after problogger posts the new assignment for the day. It’s not always good to be first. 

On the problogger forum I’ve set up a topic searching for other bloggers so we can help each other through Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.isi.us. and other means of promotion. As I’m writing this I’ve only gotten two other bloggers to join me but I hope more will follow. Perhaps I’ve turned the 31DBBB forum visitors against me already by being to omnipresent. 

I’ve received several mails of people who did a quick review of my site. Stating what they were missing and how things felt to them. The biggest issue is that the niche of my blog isn’t clear right off the bat although the minimalistic style and the “relaxing” green header combined with the title of my blog gives a vague idea as to what it’s all about. So far people are positive about its as a whole. I’ll tweak the layout when I get Wordpress.org. I like this layout a lot but there are minor things I’d like to change. I’d like a three column layout for instance and a subheading to go with the title of my blog.

I’ve seriously edited my “about” page after getting numerous comments (I asked for a review on the 31DBBB forum,worked like a charm) that my picture was portraying me as very inaccessible. People thought I was a speaker of sorts. Truth be told I was a picture taking during my final presentation in order to graduate as B. Health. I’m not a regular suit wearer though. So the picture got swapped for something friendlier. 

The text on the about page also got an overhaul, I hope it’s now much clearer on what this blog is all about as well as who I am as a person and blogger.

At the end of this article I now realize that getting more than 500 views on both Saturday and Sunday will be the toughest of all. As it stands I’ll only keep everyone informed on the average views Monday – Friday just to keep the excitement.

A few days ago Jonathan Mead (Illuminated mind) tweeted who would like to review his new eBook on their blog. I took the chance and tweeted back that I would like to do a review. Lo and behold, the eBook was in my email a few days later and I read it “cover to cover” straight away.

For those of you who don’t know Jonathan, he’s a blogger who isn’t afraid to go against the stream or to leave the stream entirely. To unstream as he puts it. Exposing our presumptions about productivity and life and challenging us to think before we actually (mis)take something for the truth.

So what is this book about exactly? The title gives a slight hint. “Reclaim your dreams” is a book about – and I’ll put it bluntly – stop caring about what others think and do what you want to be doing. Going into the army because your father and grandfather were in the army, now is that a good reason to enlist? Or is it peer pressure and indoctrination about how life should be?

On the inside cover we find several statements about what this book is:

• This is a declaration of authenticity, and act of spontaneity, and a call to live deliberately.
• This is an invitation to dream
• This is a permission slip to be ridiculous

He hit the nail on the head with those statements, this book really does grab you and shakes you about until you realise that you’re not actually living your life. Watching what other people do on TV, Reading about what other people do on Blogs, Listening to what other people do with Music.We read about it, hear it, see it, want it, but don’t act on it. The solution is all about getting out of your comfort zone and getting back in the driver’s seat of your life in stead of standing on the sidelines watching life flow by. You’re invited to dream and to make the dreams become reality even if they are ridiculous according to others. Who are they to judge you’re dreams? It’s your life and you’ll want to live it just the way you like it. Permission granted.

About a year ago I started out with zazen, a type of sitting meditation to get my mind back under control. My mind was all over the place most of the time and I couldn’t focus on anything much longer than a kid with ADD on a sugar high. I was constantly drifting away in my thoughts on things that weren’t important a that very moment. This gave me several problems but the biggest of them being I couldn’t keep my mind to my work as exercise therapist. Imagine your therapist working with you and at the same time not actually being there. Sounds dangerous doesn’t it. This had to stop of course or I would get into serious trouble eventually. 

But how do you get back your focus. For me it was a simple answer since in my early life I’ve already had copious contact with martial arts and Asian philosophy. Just take a look at kyudo, the Japanese art of archery. Look at how concentrated the archer is while going through all the movements to shoot the arrow. You can’t not be there and shoot like that. A kyudo dojo wasn’t near my home though, and it would be hard to practice every day seeing as my back yard isn’t that big. So, the Japanese have a way of concentrating that I would like to obtain. 

Delving deeper into the Japanese budo arts (martial arts) I found that the basis of all of them was zen Buddhism. How could I tap into this source of concentration and oneness with the now. Fortunately there was a zen school (zendo) in my home town and they offered weekend courses to get the feeling of what they had to offer. I participated immediately and found that just sitting there in zazen – a style of sitting meditation – was all I needed to get back in the drivers seat of my mind. I haven’t looked back since, I’ve incorporated a daily session of just sitting into my habits and every evening at 9 pm, I go upstairs and practice zazen for twenty minutes. What do I do in those twenty minutes? I sit motionless, counting my exhales up to ten. If a thought comes up and disturbes my concentration on the counting, I go back to one. Give it a shot right now, move your chair back a bit, fold your hands in your lap and count your exhales. Don’t think about anything… 

…counting to ten was never so hard before in my entire life.

Zen brought me a stillness and concentration I never had before, more in contact what now, just what I wanted.

I’m writing this blogpost because I’m curious, have you ever tried meditation? What exactly did you try, how did it feel, what were your experiences? Please tell me all about them, I really would like to get to know you.

…Day in day out he stared at the statistics of his little blog, he had a dream, get his blog big enough to claim his place among the great blogs out there. Perhaps even cast a shadow over them and become the best of his niche. One day he would get there, he was convinced. They would see, just wait…

For many of us this is a dream we have about blogging. Making it big time and have a blog that will one day get into the illusive technorati top-50 blog list. Considering how many blogs there are out there this is not as easy as it sounds when we first have this dream. As soon as we start to work on realizing this dream we see just how hard it will be to get there. Struggling to get the first viewers, struggling to get people to subscribe to our RSS feed, struggling to get noticed.

A few weeks ago problogger started his 31 days to building a better blog program. The goals would be to make your blog better. With over 9000 participants he recognized a need and who better to lead all these bloggers to a better blog than the writer of the best read blog on the subject. I am one of the 9000 taking part in the program and I have another challenge. Get this blog bigger, and do it in the fast lane.

To get there we need a solid plan, stepping stones to get noticed. How to get more traffic, write quality (and quantity without loosing quality), how to get comments and get people to subscribe to your RSS feed. All these are questions we want answers to don’t we? Well, I can answer al the questions but I’ve asked myself how I would do it and the following points make up my plan:

•  Take part in the 31 days to building a better blog program and follow every piece of advice that is offered. Although this advice is temporary, it’s a great help. If I’m correct the entire 31DBBB will be offered on problogger’s site by the beginning of May.
• Use twitter to get the word out there on your blog and on new posts. Don’t overdo it though as this will become less effective over time because you saturated the market.
• Comment on other blogs in your niche, add value to their posts, be a help and do make sure you give a linkback using the “your website” box. Be honest in your comments, it’s not just about marketing your own blog on other blogs, it’s adding value.
• Participate in the comments on your own blog, let your readers know you appreciate their input and use the feedback you get. Making this obvious will make that reader appreciate you more and tell others about it.
• Set up an RSS feed. I use feedburner for this. This is very important as we all know.
• Write consistently, in the first weeks of your blog, it’s about a steady stream of posts. New readers will want to see that you regularly post on your blog. Only your trusted followers will forgive you if you don’t post for a week. Try one post a day, ever day. Try and use the right time to get your posts out. From other bloggers I’ve been told that the best time is around 1pm GMT. The US will be waking up and read your post during breakfast or in the early hours of work before really starting work. The UK will come back from lunch and take a quick peek. Australia will be done working and see your post in the evening.
• Work on the visuals. New readers will judge the looks of your site in about 0.2 seconds. If it doesn’t look right you’ve lost a reader. (Yes you had a pageview, but those don’t count, you want readers, not viewers.) Make sure your blog visually supports what you are writing. Add pictures to your posts that support the post. As a last note, most people like a light background.
• Make sure people know what your blog is about within a few seconds of looking at your front page. Some people will head off to the “about” page but if your front page isn’t clear you’ve already lost readers. Get a good one-liner up there that captures viewers.
• Don’t write outside of your niche to much. Your blog should express in it’s looks and in it’s writing what it’s about. If your writing is all over the place you won’t build a good base.
• Use all possible channels to get the word out on your blog: Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Technorati, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Blogcarnival, Forums you visit, even if they are not in your blog’s niche (make sure you have a link to your blog in your signature), I’ve probably forgotten a few, please let me know in the comments
• In all these channels, use the same name and avatar. You and your blog are a brand.
• Don’t be afraid to ask other bloggers to help you. Think guestpostings and linkbacks. Do offer something in return though! You could also reverse this and do other bloggers favours, you always get something back.
• Analyze your favorite blogs, what makes them tick for you? Why do you like to read them. Try to incorporate that into your blog. 
• Read anything “on blogging” you can get your hands on. 
• Get out there, leave your PC at times and interact with people and public places. This will teach you what is going on, what colors are used and how things are marketed. Marketing is something for professionals and their efforts are all around us. Watch and learn. Take notes, grab a cup of coffee and think about how you can apply what you’ve seen to your blog.
• Last of all: Write quality, nothing is more important than this.

Over the next months there will inevitably be more and more ideas to implement in the grand plan but this is how that plan stands so far. It’s not all implemented yet, so don’t be surprised if something changes on this blog. If there is anything you missed in this post that is part of your plan to build a better blog please do tell me about it in the comments. You will not only help me but also all the other readers that come here after you. Thanks everyone for all the ideas you’ve already supplied me with, I’m looking forward to hearing more. 

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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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