Author: oliviernovel

Categories
English Growth Mindset

Where was I? Oh yes, a post on focus.

Hello again my faithful triad of readers. After friday’s post maybe I’ve convinced a fourth one to come join you so you will be a quartet from now on. If you don’t know what post I mean go check it out, it was fun, not funny. Again, where was I? Laser focus Right, FOCUS, I was going to talk to you about focus. As I see focus is the ability to concentrate one’s efforts or thoughts on a single object or idea. Pretty simple right? Well, as we’ve seen I am a little odd so focusing for me is very difficult. I get distracted by almost everything, or everything, I’m not sure. I really have to work hard to be able to focus, and that’s where problems start, because you see, I use part of my energy just to be able to use my energy, very silly if you ask me. So, to overcome this, I am exercising on pure and simple focus right now. In my morning meditation I focus on different parts of my body and I cycle through them. And I go like that for 30 to 40 minutes. Again, it sounds silly but I know better now than to dismiss practice. You know, unlike most of you I didn’t practice a sport regularly as a boy, so that part got missed by me, this is something I have to learn now, and it’s not easy. Back to focusing, see what I mean. During my day I have to worry, as you might have to, about many things pertaining to my work, home, or personal spheres. Each one requires my attention. And I try to focus on each particular task, until something else pops up that is. This is where productivity experts of many sorts have been able to help most of us. Many of you have already a productivity routine in place, but some don’t. I’ve found out that the most important part of this routines is being able to focus anew on the task at hand when focus gets broken. We can try to prevent external interruptions, and we must, but there will always be internal interruptions that can’t be muted, sent to voice-mail or unattended in some way. And those are the most frequent ones. So, in the coming weeks I’ll try to post regularly on this topic, much more pertinent this blogs unstated mission (note to self, write the mission out, not just think about it) of helping people fight procrastination. If you are asking “how a productivity hack can help me prevent procrastination?” then either you need this more than you think or the cause of your procrastination is deeper, and that’s another subject that we’ll take on on another post. In the mean time, how do you think that focusing and regaining focus immediately would help you finish your tasks better? How about achieving your goals? How about having a better life?

Categories
English Growth Stories

Masquerade and vocabulary…

Maschera per il carnevale
Maschera per il carnevale

Hello my readers, all three of you. I’m here out of schedule because of something that happened to me recently and I’d like to share with you. I’m terribly disappointed as I’ve been duped by someone I trusted. We all use masks, that is the way we protect ourselves and we present ourselves to others so they will like us.

Maschera per il carnevale
Maschera per il carnevale

This masks might be more or less complex and we all know it, but there is a point where the mask detaches itself and transforms completely into it’s own distinct persona. When that happens and you are made to believe this persona is somebody else then there is something wrong, then there is pretense, there is trickery, there is deception. Deception, even with the best of intentions, is still deception. It destroys one’s confidence, sets you back to a point before the lie started and makes you question all the decisions you’ve made from that point on. And I can honestly say that if I hadn’t grown mentally as I have in the last months this would have been a terrible blow. But I have and it isn’t. I am, yes, disappointed, but that’s it. I am not angry because I’m really trying to expunge that feeling from my life. A few days ago I heard a Tony Robbins track where he speaks precisely of this in a way that was new to me. What he said was, to me, so new and so right that as soon as I heard it “became evident”. I am sure you know the feeling, it is the same feeling you have after solving a complicated riddle or a problem and finding the solution to many more from that, well, that was the feeling. He was saying how growing one’s vocabulary helps us growing one’s set of emotions. He used the example of anger. If the only word we have for it is anger then, mentally, we won’t differentiate between feeling a little angry or a lot, because the underlying emotion is the same, and even if it varies in intensity the effects on ourselves are the same. Now, if we have many words for that emotion, describing each one a different degree of the emotion, the underlying effects are not the same. The next step should be to ban from our vocabulary the word that has the most damaging effect on us. It may be because it takes us back to a moment so terrible that we are in a way reliving it because of the simple use of this word. Words may not be so powerful as smells triggering memories, but they are pretty good at it. So, back to this that happened to me. I’ve been set back and duped by people close to me, but I’m not angry, I’m just “peeved”, because getting all worked up about this will in no way help me getting my life back in place, it will take longer and more work, yes, but I’ll do it regardless. And you, what words will you ban from your vocabulary and thus create that change you need in your life?

Categories
English Mindfulness Stories

Love yourself first, second part

Hello my two readers. Well, I may have to change that because I’ve received a lot of comments on the last post, so many that I had to write this one. I firstly have to agree with many of you that it wasn’t my best effort that put through that piece, it was hurried and it showed, and for that I apologize. Then again, see the sign on the door to this blog, yes, that one, what does it say? “Procrastinator’s Den” that’s right, I hurried my last work because I procrastinated, of course I did, I had a good excuse to do it too, but that I’ll tell you tomorrow. Let me get started so I don’t take too much of your time. I had many questions regarding the amount of love, what amount of love was too much or not enough. That was never the point. I don’t think of love as a measurable entity. Some will say love is infinite, let them. I can only say that within each one of us there is enough to seem infinite and that’s all the love we need, and if it seems we are running out, we can create some more, so not a problem. What if we love ourselves much more than we love others? Then we are not really loving ourselves because real love is a love that transcends our bodies and expands around us. It’s stronger within us, then our closest family or friends, then people we know, then the rest of the world. Please, don’t ask me if it follows an inverse-square law because as I said before, it can’t be measured and therefore doesn’t have a unit of measure, but if I was forced to answer I’d say it was sort of like that. There are exceptions like people suffering from NPD you won’t “love” anyone but you. On the other side of the spectrum, you can be a “Francoise” and love and worry more for an unknown person living on the other side of the world than for people close to you. sea-dawn-sunset-boatsBut those cases are extreme. Now, on the other hand, people who don’t love themselves enough or not at all are much more common. I myself am going through an episode right now, when self doubt and loathing were part of my routine, as you can deduce from my earlier posts. Loving myself means respecting myself, doing what is right and good for myself, not letting others hurt me or the ones I love as suggested on a comment somewhere, all of that and much more are components of my love of self. As mentioned in the previous post this includes shutting down my inner bully. You may think “not that inner bully again…”
Believe me, it’s very real. It even comes out in certain circumstances, like, when we are driving. Yes, that’s him/her that screams like a mad person to the other driver that he’s the most stupid person that ever lived on this or any other planet in this or any other universe just because he had the terrible idea to change lanes in front of you. How dare he! Well, it’s the same creature. But it screams and shouts at you all the time if you let it. It’s tell you “you’re fat, but go ahead, eat that muffin, you deserve it… fatty” and once you ate it will recall you “you shouldn’t have done that! It’ll go straight to you belly or hips! Whatever… fatso!” or something of the sort. That bully inside our heads prevents us from truly loving ourselves, that’s why we need to silence it. I’ve been using Mindful Meditation for a few months now and it’s helped me so much. The same question, and now I’m leaving a poll what do you do to try and shut down that little bully?

Categories
English Mindfulness Stories

Love yourself first

Love yourself first. Yes mi dear readers, both of you, you have to love yourself first. Does this mean only love myself? No, that’s why I end my sentence with “first” and not “only”. Why should I love myself first? You should love yourself first because it is the only way you can have real love in your life, or could you love your spouse, your kids, your friends or your pets with a heart that has hate in it? Some are saying “wait, I don’t love myself first, but I don’t hate myself, that’s going too far” But is it really? Tell me, if you don’t hate yourself, then why do you let that little bully inside your head call you all those names that it does? Wouldn’t you let someone else treat you like that? Or wouldn’t you, at the very least, be alarmed if you saw someone been treated like that? We are our worst critics, that we know, but sometimes criticism is over the top and turns into plain old abuse. And abuse ourselves we do, and a lot, don’t we? Not only with the little bully that lives inside our heads, but by our actions or inactions. Some of us drink too much, or smoke or abuse drugs. Some of us find comfort in food. Some of us don’t like to move to much, let alone exercise. Reality TV? Yes please! Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all we can. It’s been 5 minutes, selfie time. All this actions and inactions don’t come from a place of love of ourselves. We indulge in this behaviours because we hate ourselves? Not necessarily, mostly because we don’t even care to find out why we do them. We end up in patterns that feel good by accidents or because we intentionally put ourselves there, but with another end in mind. Little story follows to illustrate the point. I started smoking as a teenager because it was cool, I was short and that let me feel older, bigger in a way, so I smoked, really smart. Like all smokers I didn’t even like it when I started, but the feeling I got from other people looking up at me, or even noticing me more than compensated for it. And then I got used to it, the displeasure changed into pleasure, yes, smoking is pleasurable, and then both combined and that was it. By the time I quit smoking I was burning through 30 cigarettes a day and 15 years had gone by. Did I really love myself during that time? Certainly not because by then the dangers of smoking were well known by all and by me. Do I love myself more because I don’t smoke anymore? Yes, a little. So, to love myself I only need to quit vice? Not that fast my friend. Yes you should quit vice, but it’s not the only thing.sun-741812_960_720 To love yourself you need to go deeper and silence the little bully. You need to love you so much that your love irradiates from you to the world. It sounds terribly corny but it’s right. True love irradiates from you like light from a candle or a star. It’s brighter near the source and fades with distance, and the only way to shine bright enough to illuminate the whole world is to shine stronger at the source, and that’s within yourself. So, please, love yourself first.

 

Categories
English Procrastination Stories

Patience is a virtue, so they say

Marshmallows

So here I am, waiting for some news from a client on what will happen with a project I’ve been pitching. They haven’t given me an answer, not a yes or a no. It gets to be really annoying doesn’t it? Waiting, expecting, imagining a bunch of “what ifs”. These “what ifs” feed our wild imagination that goes to places we wouldn’t have thought even existed in our minds. They build their own worlds with wonderful scaffolding that grows upwards in the most beautiful dreams, and that digs down dip into the most awful nightmares. Because we imagine great futures with this result as a starting point, don’t we? Nah, I’m sure you’ve never done it, am I right? But dreaming is not the problem here. The problem is when our next decisions come with the dream as a starting point. Because you know, “what if”. So we need now to be patient. We must take a page from meditation and learn to bring the focus to where we want it when our mind strays. Curiously this also happens to have something to do with procrastination. because one of the characteristics of a certain type of procrastinator is his inability to delay gratification. This procrastinator is impatient. He wants it all and he wants it now as the song says. His limbic system wins the battle over his prefrontal cortex and then he loses all control over his impulses. Whatever brings the most immediate pleasure is what gets done, what is important gets shoved to the later drawer.

Marshmallows
Marshmallows

This is the basis of the famous marshmallow experiment conducted at Stanford some 40 years ago by Walter Mischel. If you don’t know it I’ll give you the basics here. In this experiment the investigators tested the ability to wait of children of both sexes aged 7 to 9. What the kids had to wait for was, as the name may be implied already, eating a marshmallow. More precisely the experimenter left the kid in a room with a marshmallow and then told the kid that he or she could eat it immediately, but if they waited for him to come back a few minutes later he’d give them another marshmallow, so they could eat in fact two. The experimenter left the room and filmed the results. This is pretty much it. Then there’s the follow up studies, after many years follow up interviews were done with these kids, and the results were that those kids that showed more restraint, more patience, were the ones with better grades, were better adapted and more mature. Does that mean that we are screwed if we’re impatient? No, patience is an ability we can develop, like many others, the funny thing is that it requires dedication, and that means, yes, some patience, so it’s a little of a catch-22, but not that much. You can exercise patience by giving yourself a buffer time before making a choice or taking some action, like 5 minutes before pushing that “buy now” button on the web site, or sleeping on it when you have a big decision to take. I like to meditate. What do you like?

Categories
Stories Uncategorized

When you’re your worst enemy.

So my dear reader, I’m going to tell you a story, again. It’s a story that happend to a friend, and yes, you might have one of your own like this one. This is the kind of person that would sabotage every opportunity available and afterwards be kicking the seat of the pants for for doing so. Well, this friend of mine went to a job interview. It was a good opportunity to continue a career left on hiatus for some years. So it was, the day on the interview, getting ready for it, with affirmations and visualization, meditation and breathing exercises. The resume was reviewed, again, checked all facts and dates, all was checked and ready. In the interview everything seemed
to be going great. Rapport was reached with the interviewer, who would have been the direct boss. This person said directly that he loved the resume, something my friend had never heard before because of how strange it is. The would be boss explained my friend all of the things they did at that place, how big, important, and complicated it was. My friend was impressed and in awe, working in a place like that would be great was the main thought. And then it came like a gust of wind from a hurricane. The would be boss told my friend “I want you to help me run this place”. My friend was overwhelmed, and it showed. For the expectation was for a low level management position and all of a sudden what was been offered was this super juicy fruit of a job, but with a lot more responsibilities. Well, there it is, opportunity knocking at the door, no more complaining that Lady Luck always passes by, almost. What happened next was to be expected. If it had been a movie this would be the part where we would be the spectators of the mythical train wreck, in slow motion and all. My friend hesitated, for a second, and the recruiter noticed, “you’ve got vertigo don’t you? Don’t worry about it, it’s the same thing you’ve done here and here in your resumei_always_look_down_on_myself___by_photohunny-d3h791a, just bigger, it’s only a matter of scale.” Not even those reassuring words from the recruiter could comfort the candidate. It was the same effect headlights have on deer on a mountain road at night, and the expression must have been very similar because the interview was pretty much over there and then. When my friend recovered the damage had been done, the enthusiasm the would be boss expressed was gone and he only managed to remind how this was a complicated process and he had more people to interview for the post. That was it. Or was it? The truth is dear reader that I can’t offer you closure right now because this is an ongoing situation, so we will see how it unfolds. If you want to know how this ends please come back later and you’ll know.

So tell me if you relate to this or are you full of confidence? Do you believe in yourself as much as this recruiter believed in my friend? Because this I can tell you for sure, I am my worst critic, my worst enemy. I am working on this and I am making progress, certainly I am. That little bully that lived full time inside my head has been evicted, he only comes once in awhile now, be he can still do a lot of damage. I’m working to get him out for good, but it’s not easy. So to you I say this my dear reader, you’re in for a treat if you’re willing to join me in my journey, you won’t be disappointed, or maybe you will, I don’t know… See, that little bully did it again, but I’m wrestling it down, want to see?
Categories
English Mindfulness

I chose to be happy

Lone tree
Lone tree Photographer Jon Ottosson

Sometimes I get frustrated, angry, sad in fewer words, unhappy. I might be driving down the highway and someone would cut me off and I’d get angry and curse, sometimes terribly angry, you might know the feeling, a murderer lurking behind your own gaze. Other times it might be a terrible sadness that takes hold of me, but it doesn’t start big, it grows, like a balloon being “inflated” by my own thoughts. All this is “happening” to me just by pure choice! After a while I start to come back and think “I’m so dumb I swear to you that I bring misery to my life.”

Lone tree
Lone tree Photographer Jon Ottosson

You know the feeling, yes you do, and you relate, yes you do. And you know what the worse part is? I do it to myself. Nobody else is responsible for the way I choose to feel and react. It may start innocently by thinking too much about something or someone and what I would have done if it is a memory. Or by thinking about what other people would think, about how other people would act, about how other people would react to something I’ve got to say. It’s not even real! But I’m sure you don’t do it, do you? Of course you don’t because that would be crazy, wouldn’t it? Truth is, we all do it, and it’s terrible, we cause ourselves and our loved ones so much suffering. So I’ve chosen not to undertake this imaginary battles, I still think what I’m going to say and plan what my moves would be according to this or that reactions, but a plan is not an enactment. So you can be a master of your own emotions here, not that hard, is it? So in every situation you can can choose how to feel, and I chose to be happy.

Categories
English

What’s love got to do… with procrastination and binge watching?

Here’s an article I read today on the Huffington Post. It’s about binge watching but the interesting part is about how this shows today are manufactured to get us pinned to our screens and they won’t let us go without us exerting a lot of willpower, and I mean a lot.

As a procrastinator I can tell you this is hard. My limbic system is always on the lookout for a new and improved fix from all those sweet distractions, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter even the Huffington Post or Business Insider, but the main culprit now is Netflix and that binge watching the so much like us to indulge in. I’ll shut up now and leave you with the article, you’ll see what I mean.

The Netflix Addiction: Why Our Brains Keep Telling Us to Press Play

Categories
English

HELLO, BE READY TO BE AMAZED

I realize it’s a bold claim “be ready to be amazed” but that’s what we should strive for, bold, crazy goals. That’s what pushed us when we were young, ready to take on anything that came our way. Then our first setbacks came and we were told to slow down, to take it easy. More often than not it was our sweet dear mom who said this, trying to protect us from harm. Here we’re going to learn how to steer towards greatness again, not to take our eyes from the prize without dropping the ball before getting there.

View from the top
Achievement completed
Categories
English Stories

The man with the torn coat

A man who used to work in an office in a big building downtown used the subway everyday for his commute. He was lucky enough to live in a city where public transportation works relatively well and this allowed him to walk a little every day, it was good exercise Beggar_with_a_Lyra,_by_Svishchev-Paola_1900severyday too. He would pass an old man who used to beg on a corner and everyday he would give him some coins, in one occasion he even gave him a bill. This daily ritual repeated itself until one day when the man had no coins and no bills, for the first time he was barely making ends meet. “I work hard for my money and I deserve a prize from time to time” he thought as he was buying that pair of gorgeous and expensive Italian shoes on which he had spent much more than he used to. He didn’t expect to be ambushed by all the emotions that he felt when he saw the old man and wasn’t able to give him any money. Surprise was the first emotion, surprise when he realized it was the corner where the old man used to be and that he couldn’t help him today. Shame was the second, shame when he tried to go back on his steps but they gaze of the old man crossed his own, who, upon seeing him, smiled, just a little. The third one was rage, the rage that he felt with the old man for making him feel ashamed, after all, it wasn’t his duty to give him money. Sadness was the fourth the sadness that the old man shared with him when the man told him “I don’t have money today old man, can’t you see I bought this gorgeous and expensive shoes and spent it all?” that’s when the smile on the old man’s face turned into a frown of extreme sorrow.  So great why the sadness in the old man’s face that the fifth emotion was curiosity, because by no means the amount that he used to give him could mean so much to him to cause this much pain. “Easy old chap, I’ll double it next time, don’t be sad, I owe you” he told him trying comfort him. The old man answered “What makes me sad is seeing myself, you know, I was you once, but somebody stole all my money and I ended up here, in the street
begging for money to survive.” The man was outraged, his sixth emotion, and said “that’s horrible, did you catch him? Did he escape? Why didn’t you get any of it back?” The old man answered serenely “He didn’t escape, as a matter of fact I see him all the time, the man who stole all my money and no I couldn’t get any of it back because he spend it all, every last cent.” The man felt his seventh emotion, disbelief. “How come you can see him everyday?” he said “at least tell me who he is so I can give him a piece of my mind, he cannot steal and not be punished” The old man stood up and stood tall, put his hand on the man’s shoulder and said “the thief who took all my money and left me begging on the streets is me, it was me because I didn’t save when I was young like you, for having spent it on shoes, travels, cars and restaurants, like you. That’s that’s why I was so sad to see you today with no money, because this will be the first of many days like that. You don’t owe me anything, but you owe yourself you owe the old man you will be one day.” The last motion of the men she was taking the old man’s hand in his was gratefulness.