Categories
English Growth Self-confidence

The last day of the year. 

Looking back on the year that has been and not label it an annus horribilis is difficult as it was a very hard time. The thing is that hard times don’t end when the calendar does, so they will probably extend well into 2017. That’s how it is. That being said, there are also many reasons to be thankful and hopeful. For starters I am alive. That may seem trivial but if you want to do things you first need to be alive. Secondly, I am healthy, less trivial than the first statement, now what I need to do next year is keep it that way, and that includes taking better care of my body and mind, so that goes to the “need to better next year” box. Thirdly I have people, I am not all alone. Although I love being alone and am seldom lonely I also love to spend time with some of you, not all of you at the same time, that’s insane, but some of you for a brief period is nice. Fourth and that’s more difficult. I have a way of producing income. I’m not producing as much as I could but I’m working on it so that’s another thing for the “need to better next year” box. Fifth is my take in the future, this one goes with the last one but also on my own mental imaging of the future, to give it more value than I’ve been doing so far. 

There they are, five points to ponder and be thankful and better next year, there are many more of course but those are, for me, the main ones. Some of you will be wondering where’s my spiritual side, or romance or whatever, feel free to update your own lists with what you feel and think is important to you and comment below if you like.

In the meantime, let me wish you a HAPPY NEW YEAR. 

Categories
English Growth Mindset Self-confidence

I’m a Toastmaster

I’ve recently joined an organization whose purpose is the teaching of public speaking skills and the development in each member of leadership abilities. For those of you who know me you’ll easily see how both skill sets might come handy to me. I am not a confident person as you might very well have figured out by now. I also am someone who’s changing his worldview, mostly on what I want in life, how I can achieve it, and how I can get help getting the results I want. That last part for me is very difficult, not because I am arrogant, that I might be, but because I’m really not that smart and it’s very hard for me to learn and I don’t like to show that side of myself. How I’m dealing with this will be the subject of another post, maybe next week.

Now, all that been said I’d like to talk more about this wonderful organization that is Toastmasters. First things first. Toastmasters was founded in 1905 by Ralph C. Smedley while he worked as education director at the YMCA in Bloomington Illinois, USA. There he saw the need to teach young men speaking abilities, how to conduct meetings, plan programs and leadership. I will not elaborate here on the history, you can check it out by yourselves following this link, suffice it to say that since then Toastmasters International has grown to a worldwide organization with more than 280,000 members in some 14,000 clubs in 116 countries, a big success.

My first experience with Toastmasters was on february of this year when I attended a meeting as a walkin. I arrived a little late so I didn’t get to see the start of the session. I was immediately mesmerized. The diversity of the people was complete, but yet they all seemed no only at ease, but in sync with what was going on. They all presented their speeches, they were evaluated by one of their peers, given advice on what they did right and what they could do better, and there was absolute camaraderie yet there was complete order. I was hooked. I returned the following week as an walkin again to see the complete development of a session, I was so impressed again that by the end of the evening I was subscribing to become a member.

As Toastmasters primary goal is to teach we are not only there to socialize, we are there to learn. More experienced members teach newer ones by serving as mentors and evaluators, and we also get a set of manuals where we can find the different skills that we must learn in every step of our self paced learning. In the month and a half I’ve been a member I’ve given one speech, my icebreaker, which is the first one that a new member gives and where he makes an official presentation of himself to the club and invites. I’ve also had the opportunity to act as Toastmaster for the night, which means I had to host the meeting, which is a challenge on itself of leadership, organization skills and speaking skills, all of my shortcomings were graciously accepted by my colleagues and not one of them rolled her eyes, or stood up and left, so I would like to thank them for that.

As I ready myself to present my second speech tonight, march the 29th. 2016, I am really excited to do this, which would seem odd. As poll after poll show how the fear of public speaking is amongst the most prevalent of all, in some cases topping the fear of death, which inspired Jerry Seinfeld, funny person amongst funny persons, to write the joke that says “the average person, if you have to be in a funeral, you would rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy”. So, I’m starting to see myself a little bit differently, because if it only takes one meeting a week for six weeks to make me get rid of this “big fear” either it’s easier than I thought to get rid of my fears or in the end it was not such a big deal to me and it’s something I rather like. I’m thinking the latter.

There you have it for today. If you’d like to face your fear of public speaking, would like to learn the skill and also pick up some leadership resources, check out your local Toastmasters club, if you live in Mexico City you can come to mine, Club BIAM, you’re more than welcome. As always I’d love to see your comments down below.

Categories
Actionable English Mindset Procrastination Self-confidence

“The art of the start”

The title comes from a quote from the title of Guy Kawasaki’s book because it fits so well to the point I want to make, even though his book is about entrepreneurship and this post, well, is not. Now, what this post is about is getting started. Getting started might seem so simple, and in a way it is, but, at least for us procrastinators, it is the hardest part to get to. Starting means being decided, being committed, being there. As we get ready keep fumbling and stumbling, we might think things twice or thrice, yes, that’s a word, and is important to know words, before thinking them once again, and that’s OK, we can think and plan all we want, but when it’s time to start, we start.

When we start we engage, we build, we produce. By starting we set on a journey, we give our lives some sense, even if the task can seem meaningless or is a lifelong journey. Starting is something we do all the time. Every morning we start a new day, we start a new meal or we start a new commute. We are constantly starting. You might think it’s not the same thing because we are repeating and we know what will happen. In a way you do, although you already know that not two days are the same, similar, but not the same, surprises happen. And let’s use that familiarity with our willingness to start. We don’t even think it twice before going out the door in the morning. Familiarity of what’s to come has diluted the fear or anxiety we might have had before. We know where we’re going, what route we will take, how much time it’ll take and we have it pretty much known. And that can be the same thing for something new we are going to embrace for the first time. How? By using some of many visualization techniques that are available to us. I have already talked a little about visualization in my post “Seeing the future” that you might want to check out. You can then visualize your way into familiarity and that will help reduce your fear. We can overcome all when we start, we can overcome none when we don’t. Starting is getting the ball rolling, we roll and roll and roll when we’ve started, but not when we are yet to do so. Even in physics there is more resistance to start than to keep on moving, what’s called static friction and dynamic friction, it takes less work to keep an object in motion than to put it in motion. We are the same, once we are in motion it takes less work, in this case, willpower, to keep going than what it took us to start moving. What can we do to start then if that is the hardest part? We make up excuses, like the following ones.

Start

The “It’s too late excuse”. We’ve all been there, when we face the excuse that “it’s too late now, why even bother” and unless it physically is too late then any moment is a good one to start.

The “I’ll do it later” excuse. It’s good to wait for the right moment to do something, no use in getting to the office at 2:00 AM or starting preparing for the New Year in the first week of March. But when the time is right, we start.

The “I’m not ready” excuse. This one’s a little trickier because we might not be ready. But we can feel it when we are genuinely not ready and when we are just stalling. When we are getting ready we are eager to start, when we are stalling, we are not.

The “I don’t know why I am doing this” excuse. Again, this one is also a little tricky, because we might not know why we are doing something, we have to figure it out first. Most of the time a valid reason not to do something is when we are being forced to do it by someone who is manipulating us. For all other reasons, we take the Nike stance and “Just do it”

Last but not least, the “I don’t want to do it” excuse. Like the last one this can have some validity, but we can feel it in our gut when it doesn’t, then we can also “Just do it” and start.

Now, starting is easier than doing, we are not committing ourselves to go all the way, just starting. We’ll just start. We’ll only lay the first brick. But we know how this works, and we’ve seen above how much easier it is to go on than to start. Once we start we tend to keep on going, inertia takes over and we go on and on and on until we’re done or until a stronger force stops us. I hope this helps you, remember, just getting started helps you getting to the finish line in a way you didn’t imagine it before. I’d love to read your comments about this and other posts either here or on our Facebook page, and thanks for reading.

Categories
Actionable English Mindfulness Money Procrastination Self-confidence

The “Productivity Equivalence”

Since the last quarter of 2015 I’ve been changing my habits to positively change my life. I’ve changed the way I see time and also what I do with it. All of this to start applying the “Productivity Equivalence” or SE for short.

PE = Sleep + Diet + Exercise + Meditation/Prayer/Silence – Stress – Distractions

This simple equivalence tells you where to put in and were to take out to attain a higher level of productivity. Higher levels of productivity give you more results, whether your goal is being healthier, spending more time with your family, being wealthier. What this means is simple. You can’t get better results by removing where you should be adding and adding where you should be removing. Also, you can’t eliminate any of the components totally, either the good ones or the bad ones. The good ones have minimums you have to try to achieve and the bad ones, no matter how hard you try to eliminate them they find a way to creep up again if you ever take your eye off of them. You can’t, for instance, stop sleeping altogether and use that time to exercise because that would not work, the result would be a lesser PE value than before. And remember, this is only an equivalence, it’s not a complete equation for Productivity, you can think of things missing here that are important to you. You should put them in and evaluate for yourself what is better. I use it as a reminder and as a guide of what to look for if I suddenly notice a drop in my productivity, so I can make an introspective assessment of what might have changed on this equivalency and work on that.
Let’s take a moment now to view the components.

 

  • Diet. This one is obvious, we need to eat right, I don’t need to tell you that, again. Now, maybe something you didn’t know is this hypothesis that says that our willpower is like a gas tank, we can use it again and again and again until it’s drained and then we succumb to temptation much easier. What does that mean? That we need to be careful on what we use our willpower. If we have to refrain ourselves from taking a donut instead of a piece of fruit from a platter in a conference, then we will have used some willpower to do that, if we have to choose from taking the elevator instead of the stairs then again, willpower. What to do then? We need to save our willpower for really important things. We can remove this decisions in two ways. Always make a decision in advance, we talked about triggers before, well, here’s an example of one of them. “If I have to go up I always take the stairs” “If I want a snack I’ll never eat pastry” We decide beforehand what we want. We can compound that with physically removing temptation and get as far as we can from those delicious chocolate chip cookies.

So, as I’ve accustomed you to this before I won’t change it today. I’m going to stop here for length but I’ll continue tomorrow, how about that, a two day piece. In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you, please comment down here, even if it’s only to say hello.