Are You Planting the Seeds for Your Future?

Last week, I was researching a software tool for my business. After reading raving reviews, I decided to try it out. So I posted an inquiry in their forums.

Imagine my surprise when the CEO, Deep, responded to me personally with “Celes, you probably don’t remember but you coached me during some of my tough times. You and Tony Robbins helped me tremendously. You helped me do the limitless. 🙂 ”

Surprised, I quickly scanned my memory of the clients I worked with and realized it’s a coaching client whom I worked with in 2009! The details started flooding back. Deep signed up for my coaching back in 2009, which was 8 years ago. At that time he was a manager in a top bank but felt empty with his work and life. He was also feeling negative and low in confidence. During our sessions, we worked on finding his life direction, creating his career vision, and building his business plan, among other things.

After our sessions ended, Deep left his job and freed himself from his baggage. He traveled for a year, evolved to be a different person, and then started to build a product, which led him to create his software company today. With over 15 million client orders processed, it is helping thousands of business owners today with their businesses and the rewards of his labor are paying off!

Planting Seeds

When I looked back at our coaching logs, it’s remarkable to see Deep’s vision manifested into reality:

  • His life vision: “To generate enormous wealth used to help the human community.”
  • His business vision: “To make awesome tools, information products, and online marketplaces to help small business owners across the world. To be a preferred choice for all our clients, customers and partners.”

That’s exactly what he is doing now.

It got me thinking about the concept of planting seeds. How a seemingly small action can blossom and lead to some unimaginable, amazing outcome later.

For Deep, when he decided to act on his emptiness in life, he didn’t have a grandiose plan to start a world-class business. He just wanted clarity on what to do next. He had planted his first seed — to act on his unhappiness. His second seed was when he took the leap of faith to sign up for my coaching. After all, he didn’t know me personally, and the only thing he knew about me was through my articles.

During one of our sessions, I told him: “Don’t restrict yourself with your situation in life. Don’t worry about whether something is possible, realistic or logical. Just imagine this as your anything-goes menu where you can order anything you want from the universe.”

This really struck Deep deep (no pun intended). Following this direction, he opened his heart, wrote his vision and was extremely inspired by what he wrote. This was the third planted seed. Subsequently, we discussed other things during our calls, including his goals, values, and plans. These planted seeds would germinate and grow into his software company today, with him being the CEO of a team of 12 employees across the United States and India.

It is the same for other goals in life. Every goal, no matter how big, starts off as a seed:

  • Dating — You want to meet the love of your life. It starts by clearing your limiting beliefs surrounding love. Then opening your heart to others. Then meeting new people. Then building relationships. Then assessing the right guy/girl, if the connection is for you. These are some of the things I teach in Soulmate Journey, my course on finding love, and some of my participants have been updating me on their new-found relationships and upcoming nuptials.
  • Friendship — Having best friends you can rely on doesn’t happen overnight. It starts by being there for others first. Giving without expecting to receive. Being responsive. Making the effort to maintain your friendships. 
  • Health — Having good health doesn’t come from exercising and eating healthily for one single day. It’s something that you build over time. Choosing healthy over unhealthy food each day. Choosing to be active. Many seeds planted over a long period, every day.
  • Family — Having positive family relationships takes time, especially if your family relationships aren’t perfect to begin with. Caring for them. Doing little acts of kindness. I had a client who made the decision to work on her estranged relationship with her mom. One year after our coaching, their relationship is now in a much more positive place, where they talk with love and understand each other more.
  • Career — Getting an amazing job doesn’t happen overnight. You have to first plan your career. Build your skills and talent stack. Then network and build relationships with industry peers, recruiters, and headhunters.
  • Business — Same for a successful business. It starts with a vision. Then taking an endless series of steps to build your empire. Making endless iterations, adapting every second. Being open to failure and criticism, because these will always be there no matter what you do.

For each seed, you nurture it by giving water, warmth and sunlight. As you do that, it grows into a seedling. Then a sapling. Then a tree.

Big tree

(Image: Gilly Stewart)

The tree here refers to what you want to achieve — run a successful business, have a great career, have a great relationship, have great friends, have great health, be financially abundant, be a prominent figure in your field, have your TV/talk show, move overseas, travel around the world, or some other goal.

The seeds here refer to your first steps to make your goal happen.

Many people often look at the trees, wondering when they are going to get that. Nice, big, gorgeous trees that they want in their garden.

But that’s missing the point. The critical point is not the manifestation of the trees, but the planting of the seeds. Because when you are not planting seeds, how can the trees grow in your backyard? How can you expect to get results, when you have not put in the effort to get things moving?

Corn seed, planted on soil

Corn seeds, ready to be planted into the soil (Image: Mohammed Anwarul)

Planting Seeds in Your Life

This brings me to these questions:

  1. What goals have you been meaning to pursue, but are putting off? In Love? Health? Carer? Business? Family? Friendships? Pick two areas.
  2. What is the first seed you can plant to get it going?
  3. How about the next 3 seeds? What can you do to keep this momentum going?

Say you want to switch to a career in Machine Learning. However, your past experience and skills are not in this area. A possible seed you can plant is to take up a course in Machine Learning. I have a friend who is doing a two-year Masters course in Machine Learning for this very reason — to switch to this field after he graduates. 

If you have an aptitude for programming, you can self-learn with free materials online and tools like TensorFlow. You can develop open-source tools using machine learning, get user feedback and market results (e.g. X number of downloads, featured on XYZ magazine), and highlight these achievements in your resume as validation of your skills in this area. This is exactly what my husband did in the past year, though in a different field, and he’s now able to pivot and switch his career to this new field.

Or say you want to get married at some point. You are 35, single, and constantly tied up with work. Maybe a good first step is to draw some boundaries with work. Stop working all the time and create a cutoff. Set aside a few hours each week to meet new people. Examine if you have inner blocks to love, which is very common for long-standing singles, and engage a coach to help you address these blocks. Staying immersed in work, without opening yourself to others, will not help you get into your dream relationship.

Not all the seeds that we plant will blossom. Sometimes there are seeds that just don’t germinate. For example, when you reach out to a friend to build a connection, but it’s not reciprocated. When you want to build a relationship with someone, but he/she is not interested. When you start a project and put in the due effort, but it doesn’t turn out the way you want. When you try to help someone, but get a negative or lukewarm response. When you open your heart and trust someone, but he/she bites you in the head.

But that doesn’t matter. Not all actions will lead to results. But some will. The goal is to plant as many seeds as possible in pursuing your goal. To plant the right seeds by getting advice from the right people and sources, because these shape your day-to-day thinking and long-term direction. To create so many avenues and possibilities for success, that success is imminent. To never stop taking action.

So… what seeds do you need to start planting? Can you get started right away today? Because the sooner you plant your seeds, the sooner you water them and care for them, the faster they will germinate, grow, and blossom into the beautiful trees you are looking for. 🙂 And how your future will be, 10, 15 years down the road will be shaped by the seeds that you plant today.

Be sure to check out: 

The post Are You Planting the Seeds for Your Future? appeared first on Personal Excellence.

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Following Another’s Vision of Success

Question:

I am 31 years old. Married. My father has been an extremely successful person in his life, professionally and personally. I have a younger brother who to is heading in my father footsteps in his life and career which makes us all very happy and proud. My wife is an extremely talented, intelligent and hardworking woman who has her dreams and aims and which she is extremely capable of achieving. Among all this happy scenario, I am stuck in a life which seems to be going nowhere. Career wise I am going nowhere in spite of putting in my best efforts and success seems to be indifferent to me. I cant leave this job for certain reasons which are beyond my control for at least another 10 years. And by then I think it will all be too late for anything. What seems to be easy and ordinary for other people just doesn’t happen to me. all along in my conscious memory my life has been a string of failed attempts, so near yet never there episodes. I have repeatedly tried to put my failures aside
and work harder but still it has been for nothing. I am a believer but of late have started feeling that even God has turned a blind eye to my situation. I really feel desperate for some miracle to pull me out of this gloom but I don’t know whether that will ever happen. I feel my life is just running out without any purpose. I have tried taking solace in good books to find my answers but to no avail. I hate to be in this kind of melancholy but don’t know what to do. I feel that I am wasting my wife’s life too because of my situation. I am not sure if anyone will have any answers. What do you think? Is there hope?

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How Social Media Creates a Fear of Missing Out (And What To Do About It)

How Social Media Creates FOMO (and What To Do About It)

FOMO — or the fear of missing out — has become a pattern in today’s world. We are constantly on our phones, glued to social media feeds and checking what other people are up to. The more updates we see, the more anxious we feel. We see people living this exciting life, achieving this new milestone, doing that exciting activity. We feel like we are missing out, that we are not living a good enough life, and we have a compulsion to keep up.

So we keep up… buying, keeping up, and absorbing as much information and updates as we can. And this addresses our anxiety… or does it?

Can you relate? Well, today’s episode is just for you. 🙂 In this episode of The Personal Excellence Podcast, I cover

  • What is FOMO [0:29]
  • Signs of FOMO [1:27]
  • 4 reasons why FOMO exists [4:39]
  • 5 strategies to tackle FOMO [15:06]

Listen to this episode here:

If you’ve found The Personal Excellence Podcast useful, I’d really appreciate it if you can leave a nice rating and review on iTunes. Your review makes a difference and will help spread the message of conscious living to the world. Thank you!

Fear of Missing Out [Transcript]

Celestine Chua: You’re listening to The Personal Excellence Podcast, the show that’s all about helping you be your best self and live your best life. I’m Celestine Chua, your host and founder of PersonalExcellence.co. Let’s get started!

Hey everybody. Welcome to The Personal Excellence Podcast! This is Celestine Chua from PersonalExcellence.co. Today we’re talking about the fear of missing out, otherwise known as FOMO.

Have you heard the term FOMO before? I’m sure some of you have. But if you haven’t, FOMO refers to the apprehension that one is not in the know, or one is out of touch with some event, experience, or interaction. This compels the person to constantly want to know what’s going on, what’s happening out there, and whether they’re missing out on something.

In today’s world, FOMO exists on some level in many of our social media habits and online behavior — even if you don’t realize it. This is why I want to discuss this topic today because I feel that FOMO has become such a prevalent issue.

Some Signs You Have FOMO

Some signs of having FOMO include

  • Continually refreshing your social media newsfeed to see what’s going on, what’s the latest update, and the new things that people are discussing right now.
  • Feeling the need to know what so-and-so people are doing. This can include the people in your social network. It can also include the people you don’t know, such as celebrities or famous people.
  • The constant feeling that you’re not satisfied with your life, and because of that you keep looking outward at what others are doing.
  • Feeling that perhaps you are not doing enough.

So as opposed to enjoying your time right now with the people you are with and the life you have right now, you are constantly checking and seeing what others are up to, because you feel that otherwise, you may be missing out.

Why FOMO is Unique to Our Era

I feel that FOMO is a phenomenon that’s unique to our digital era. FOMO as a term was coined in 2003 and it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2013. That’s just a few years ago. So why is FOMO unique to our era?

Imagine in the past, way before the internet was invented. Say it’s a Friday night and you just finished work. What do you do?

Perhaps you would read a book. Perhaps you would do some simple activities. Maybe you like to knit so you knit. Maybe you watch a video of your favorite movie. Or you have a quiet conversation with a loved one. So you do that and you sleep. And you could be feeling pretty satisfied with your Friday night, doing something that you like.

Nowadays, everybody is connected. You can see what anybody is doing and everyone’s updates. With the Internet today, typically what happens is this: It’s Friday night. You could be browsing your social media newsfeed and your Instagram newsfeed.

  • You see this professional coach or guru going to some event, achieving some new level of success, getting this new interview, living the high life.
  • Or you see this celebrity, this person partying at some gala event, living in some mansion, doing some new photoshoot, or having some brand new product launch.

So you could be excited and feeling satisfied with your Friday night, reading a book, knitting, talking to a loved one, whatever it is. But now you are left feeling like you’re boring and lousy because you’re not doing all of these things that these “exciting” people are doing. And that, in essence, is FOMO.

4 Reasons for Fear of Missing Out

I see FOMO as the result of a few factors.

1) Prevalence of Fast-Speed Internet

First, the wide prevalence of fast-speed Internet. It’s incredibly easy to get information today. In the past, when the internet was new, it was slow and we were on dial-up modem. Some of you guys may still be on dial-up.

But in the past, dial-up was the norm. Over the years, as the government, societies build up the infrastructure, high-speed internet became more easily accessible and at a lower cost. Many people around the world have fast internet today.

So you can easily get information at the click of a button. With that, you can easily see what people are doing with the click of a mouse. What Brad Pitt is doing right now, what Angelina Jolie is doing right now, what the Kardashians are up to. All this information, just easily accessible at the click of a button.

Because of that, you can instantly know what others are doing. This starts this whole comparison cycle and behavior because now you can easily compare and put side-by-side what other people are doing and what you are doing. This starts to create a feeling of lack, a feeling of inferiority, that maybe you’re not good enough.

2) People displaying a perfect version of their lives

The second factor would be people using the Internet to exhibit their best selves. Along the way (in the 2000s), the Internet became this platform where people get to share about themselves. But now, instead of people sharing about themselves, people are using the Internet to exhibit a very manicured version of themselves. Sometimes this version may not even be true to reality.

So there’s a very heavy level of self-monitoring and self-altering behavior going on.

We have magazines out there isn’t it? In the media industry, with the magazine editors heavily photoshopping magazine covers, they create this “picture-perfect” version of beauty and very narrow definitions of beauty. That’s the magazines and it’s enough that media industry is doing that.

But now, instead of this being an issue isolated to magazines (and the media), we have people everywhere on Instagram, Facebook, etc. editing the photos that they upload. Instead of it being an authentic moment — which it used to be, where people were genuinely sharing what they were doing as part of connecting with others — now it’s become a situation where people are sharing very edited, manicured, and perfected versions of what’s going on in their lives.

So they could be living their day and essentially doing mundane activities — as with most people living their lives. Some of the things they’re doing will be mundane and usual, nothing to shout about. Then they have this one hour when they are doing something exciting, and then they will take some pictures of that and edit that, make them perfect, add filters, and so on. And just highlight those moments.

When you have people everywhere doing this online, it creates this impression of, Oh this is what’s happening in everybody’s life all the time. So I’m missing out! My life is not good enough! This creates a really skewed and warped sense of reality.

3) Existing social issues magnified by Internet

The third factor contributing to FOMO is there are simply existing (social) issues that the Internet exacerbated. As opposed to the internet creating problems, I would say there were existing problems such as loneliness or low self-esteem. The Internet, with the way it has brought the entire world closer and stripped away many boundaries, exacerbated this issue as we no longer have a strong sense of boundary or space. People who already feel lonely or low in self-esteem may feel more isolated, while people who felt slightly lonely at times may have this feeling magnified in the presence of everyone else’s success and “exciting” life.

4) How today’s websites are designed

The fourth factor contributing to FOMO is how companies have designed their websites.

To understand how this works, it boils down to this underlying principle. Essentially, most companies operate on profit. Well, the essence of a company is to be profitable because if you’re not profitable, you’re out of the game.

When companies focus on profit as their sole objective — without regard for their audience and adding value to their lives — their number one goal becomes to maximize each user’s time spent on their website. This is particularly true for platform companies like Facebook, Snapchat, Netflix, Instagram. The more time you spend on their site, the better it is for them, the more advertisers they can get, the more revenue they can get.

What’s the best way to maximize the time spent? By maximizing interaction, maximizing the number of engagements you (as the user) have on their site, be it by making you click from one place to the next within their site. Whatever keeps you within the site and gets you clicking, interacting, commenting, and spending as much time as possible on the platform itself — whether it’s Facebook, Snapchat, or Netflix — even if it’s to the point of detriment of your well-being, your productivity, or the utility value you’re getting from the website.

This is particularly so when a company starts to focus on profit and what it gets off its user base rather than having the users’ best interests in mind and designing its services around them. This is where profit supersedes value — where companies focus on profit rather than giving value, as opposed to creating value as the priority and earning profit as a result of that.

So platforms are now creating site designs to build addiction. We have Facebook — or any of these large attention companies really — having large teams of growth hackers, where their sole job every day is to get together to discuss, find ways to hack your brain, and figure out how to break down your mental barriers, so that you’re constantly glued to their platform. Getting you to stay on their site, making you feel compelled to come back, and making you feel, Oh I’m missing out if I’m not coming back to the site. I’m missing out if I’m not clicking this notification.

So it could be

  • Facebook popping up a message and saying, “You haven’t been here for a while” or “You haven’t posted on your page for a while. Do you want to interact with your followers (if you have a Facebook page)?”
  • Snapchat. They introduced a streak feature in the past couple of years where they encourage you to continue this streak of messaging someone consecutively each day or over a period of days, so that you can maintain the streak.

Some of these are questionable. Because, okay, Snapchat has this streak feature to message this number of times or this frequency with someone. But does this help forward your relationship with that person or help you live a better life? These are questions to ask ourselves.

So we have these companies coming up with all kinds of strategies. Many of them implicit — you don’t know they are happening unless you take a step back to think. Or unless you run a website yourself, where you become conscious of these issues. Ultimately, they are there to suck you in. To get you addicted. To make you feel like you’re missing out. Hence, the feeling of “missing out.”

So you constantly refresh your social media feeds to see what you are missing out. You feel, Okay! When I refresh and the thing is loading in my browser, I’m doing something with my life. Something is happening and I’m seeing all these updates! The page is now loaded, you see this barrage of new updates. Okay! Now I feel marginally fulfilled. Then 30 seconds later, you are back doing the same thing, loading the webpage and seeing the next wave of updates.

Social Media Updates — Junk Food for the Brain

All these are very much what I call, junk food for the brain. It’s like you eat junk food, and maybe for a few seconds, you feel satisfied. After a while though, you feel, Hey I need more! Like, This is not satisfying me.

Why is that? It’s because these little pieces of updates are inherently not satisfying or nourishing. Junk food is not nourishing for our body. Media news sites and the attention companies, or any of these websites using these strategies to maximize attention and it can include content mills with very low-quality articles, designed to make you click from one thing to the next — these are junk food for the brain.

When you have all this junk food content and you’re consuming it, the quantity may be huge and there may be many pieces of such content everywhere. But because it’s not nourishing for the brain, you have to keep clicking and refreshing and returning just to keep this “nourishment “going. Because it’s so ungratifying, you’re not being fulfilled, and hence you need to do it so many times.

Compared to if you are reading a piece of high-quality content, you can be just reading a short amount and that’s food for thought. There’s something you have gained, that makes you think for the next few days.

So these four factors contribute to the phenomenon of FOMO. Even in the online business world, FOMO has created the shiny object syndrome. Where you feel this need to constantly buy that next app, that next plugin, that next web service, hoping that you’ll create that next big breakthrough in your business. I’ve shared before in an article on the magic bullet — there’s no secret sauce or magic thing that’s going to transform or create some huge results. Ultimately, it’s back to the same fundamentals and it boils down to the strategy that you use and how you approach your business.

5 Strategies to Tackle FOMO

So how can you tackle FOMO? I have 5 strategies.

1) Stop comparing yourself to others

Stop comparing. I know it is difficult because all this information about people’s lives is everywhere, and social media companies have made it so easy for us to access this information. When you come online, you have all these companies hungering to grab your attention, even if it’s to the detriment of your productivity. You have all these companies fighting and eliciting you to, “Come and click, come and click over to my website.” It becomes really difficult because you are fighting all these forces: the macro forces and also the internal force in you, where perhaps there is a sense of dissatisfaction or feeling that, Okay, maybe there’s something out there that I need to know.

So I know it’s difficult, but it is important to stop this behavior from within. This can include limiting your social media usage and controlling the way you use social media which I’ll talk about in tip #3.

With regards to not comparing, two episodes back I talked about our unique path in life. In that episode, I talked about how everybody is on a unique path. You are on your unique path. I am on my unique path. We are all on our unique paths in life. Don’t feel like you need to compare because perhaps you’re not making the best of your life.

Sure, you can benchmark. Benchmark meaning you reference and look at what others are doing as an indication of what you could be doing.

But don’t compare in that you keep looking towards what other people are doing as the reference point for where you should be. Because we are all different. We all have our unique paths. We have our individual aspirations, our individual paths to realize.

You can be the fastest swimmer on Earth. If you keep looking at the bird in the sky and wondering why you can’t fly, you’re just putting your God-given talents in swimming to waste. This is the same between the bird and the swimmer. The bird can be in the sky flying, with the ability to fly and soar, but instead, it looks at the fish in the sea and wonders why it can’t swim.

So the fish gets to explore the wonders of the marine world. The bird gets to explore the wonders of the sky. Everybody is on their individual path to self-actualize and self-realize, and this path may not be comparable in many instances because it’s just unique.

Unfortunately, we live in a society right now with the tendency to diminish and condense people to a metric, and try to simplify human worth or value to some number or statistic. But there’s something for you to keep in mind: We are not statistics and we should not be condensed to a number. Even if society or government or media tries to do that to us, we are not that. Each of us is unique and we are unique individuals on our unique path to contribute and create massive value to the world.

Always remember that and don’t compare yourself to other people. Don’t try to alter yourself or shape your life so that it looks like other people’s lives, because you have your life and you are your unique individual, and it’s about embracing that.

2) Fill your schedule with meaningful activities

My second tip is to fill your schedule with meaningful Quadrant 2 activities. I talk about this in my article Put First Things First. It refers to the activities, tasks, and goals that are the most important in your life, but not necessarily the most urgent.

Why aren’t they the most urgent? That’s because the most important things in our life rarely become urgent until it’s too late. They include our health, our relationships, our biggest life aspirations. Fill your schedule with meaningful Quadrant 2 goals or tasks, whatever they may be. This requires you to take a step back to really think, reflect, and ask yourself:

  • What are my Quadrant 2 goals?
  • What are my most important life goals?

For those of you with Live a Better Life in 30 Days Program, many of the tasks (especially in Week 1) are about goal setting. Assessing your life right now. Identify what is your ideal life, your ideal goals. Creating a life map and your vision board. And so on. All the 30 tasks in the program are meant to get you to think about the different Quadrant 2 aspects of your life. For those of you with the program, review the tasks inside, and start thinking about your Quadrant 2 goals.

When your life is exciting and filled with meaningful Quadrant 2 activities, you will automatically not be interested or very interested to see what other people are doing. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t know what others are doing. To do that would be to isolate yourself from the world and that is just swinging from one end to the other. But you won’t have this constant or unhealthy compulsion to keep seeing what other people are doing and filling your life with this filler information. Because you are living your life. These Quadrant 2 activities could be, say, being with your parents. Having a meal with them. Being with your loved ones. Social activities. Volunteering work.

One of my recent coaching clients went on a six-week volunteer trip in Taiwan. He’s from Australia. He was in this rural village at a homestay, taught at a rural school, and ran some conferences. From this trip, he gained so many insights about his future goals, what he wants to do for the next 10 years and beyond, and what he wants to do as his life direction. That’s because the work was inherently fulfilling and it was something that he was personally interested and passionate about. Pursuing and doing this gave him insights on what he would want to do in the future. That was a huge Quadrant 2 activity. He could have spent these six weeks in a frivolous way or just doing nothing — which is fine too because sometimes relaxing or taking time out for ourselves is important. But he could have just wasted six weeks away. Instead, he used it in a meaningful way, in his own definition. That helped him gain so much insight on what he wants to do for his long-term goals, his 10-year goals, and his future life direction.

Quadrant 2 activities can also include exploring a new place you haven’t been to before. Learning a new skill. Doing something you like, whatever it is.

So fill your schedule with these meaningful activities, as opposed to filling the entire day with refreshers of your social media newsfeed or what Kylie Jenner is doing. Ultimately, this won’t fulfill you. But taking action on your personal goals in life? That’s going to fulfill you.

3) Cut down on social media usage

My third tip is to cut down on social media usage. I mentioned just now that the Facebook newsfeed is like fast food for the brain. Tickles you and keeps you busy. May taste well in the first bite. May even make you think that you’re satisfied. But there’s nothing much there and it will ultimately kill you in the long run.

That’s why people need to keep refreshing and seeing their newsfeed so regularly. Because it’s inherently not fulfilling. That’s why they need to keep seeing it over and over and over again, hoping that it will bring a different result each time — except that it doesn’t. It’s not much different from pulling the slot machine at the casino. In fact, many elements of Facebook and a lot of these leading social media sites today are designed with reference to the addictive elements of a casino or gambling dens.

To avoid being in this negative spiral, limit the time you spend on social media. Think about it: when you are in Facebook — and I’m using Facebook as an example, but it can be any website with the agenda to maximize a user’s attention without taking into consideration their personal goals and life. So you could be in Facebook’s “walled garden,” and this is a common term used to describe the way Facebook has designed their site. It’s like a “walled garden,” to keep you inside their universe and away from the outside world. Once you step into Facebook’s “walled garden,” it becomes an uphill battle to gain control of your conscious self and you have lost the game. Because now you’re up against this seemingly innocuous but very meticulously and strategically designed website, designed to suck you in and get you to stay there as long as possible.

The best way to avoid this is to limit the time you spend on social media. 30 minutes, 10 minutes, I don’t want to set a specific time limit because it depends on why you are using social media, whether there’s something you need to get out of the site at the moment. It could even be not using social media on some days. So it is subjective. But the underlying principle is to limit the time you spend on social media. Because when you step inside, you’re going up against 100 or 1000 different strategies put in place to suck you deeper and deeper into the site. Because all of us have a limited amount of mental energy per day, it becomes a downward spiral. It very quickly drains you, and soon you find yourself in this loop where you are just refreshing and seeing the next new update and so on.

So, limit the time you spend. And remove notifications except for crucial ones or for crucial apps. Most websites and mobile app notifications today, they’re useless. They don’t serve a role in our life except to get you to go back to the app. They don’t tell us about anything important or significantly urgent. You can check these apps once in a while, whenever you remember to. But there’s no real need to have notifications alerting you every single time someone messages you or some update is rolled out. This is a call that you make, but I personally feel that most notifications today don’t have a role and they are not really useful.

4) Stop following people who promote an unhealthy lifestyle

My fourth tip is to stop following people who promote an unhealthy lifestyle. Again this requires you to be conscious of how you are using social media and how you’re approaching your Internet usage. Take a step back and evaluate the people you follow and the kind of lifestyle and messages they promote. This includes people on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, websites and so on.

As you are doing that, ask yourself:

  • How do you feel when you see the updates?
  • Do you feel inspired or do you feel bad or negative about yourself?
  • Does it make you feel like you’re not doing enough when you see these updates? And not in a good way but in a negative way?

Once I was following this guru. At first, it was interesting, seeing his updates. But after a short period of time, it started feeling “off.” I realized that he was constantly talking about his achievements, and not in a once-in-a-while way. It’s fine to talk about what you’re doing and what you’re achieving — it’s fine to share that.

But his updates felt sort of like he was… bragging? It was constantly namedropping and talking about how he’s really awesome for having achieved certain things above and beyond other people. After a while of seeing that, it started to become toxic. Because he created this feeling like I wasn’t doing enough, or maybe I wasn’t doing enough to build my business.

So instead of it being a positive experience, it became a toxic and negative one where seeing his updates made me feel like somehow I wasn’t good enough or that I wasn’t doing enough. I wasn’t sure if it was just me, so I asked two other people who knew this person and both of them got the same vibe too. The overall sense was an off-putting one. Looking at this person’s updates made me feel a great sense of FOMO.

After that, I stopped following this person because it was a negative experience all in all. I wasn’t getting any positive messages from it. For me, as someone who has a platform and shares messages with my audience, I have a certain standard in the kind of messages I send out and the intention of my messages, and I felt like this person’s updates wasn’t congruent with what I expect of my own platform.

Or it could be a totally different type of message. For example, you could be following people who promote a materialistic lifestyle or a way of life that is not very healthy or not in line with your values. If so, you want to limit your exposure to these people. Maybe they are constantly getting you to buy things, buy material goods. Or showing off branded stuff or insinuating that somehow having certain branded goods or possessing certain physical possessions validate yourself or a certain part of who you are… which wouldn’t be a message that you want to carry.

When you are exposed to and following these people, this would keep creating the FOMO feeling. This fear that you’re missing out. That you are not buying this thing (but you should). That you’re not being good enough. That you’re not living it up. That would naturally perpetuate the feeling of FOMO in you.

Another example: with the people you follow, maybe they present a very skewed version of reality. Maybe they constantly photoshop images or present a very cherry-picked aspect of life. And this cherry-picked aspect is a little bit twisted and not accurate to reality. So you’re no longer learning or seeing an authentic side of the world and people’s lives, but a very manufactured version of reality. This will naturally skew your perception of the world.

When you are following people and their updates, know that these are things that you are allowing to enter your consciousness. Ask yourself: Are these the kind of people you want in your living room, with you? Are these the people you want right beside you, in your daily life? If no, why do you want to see these updates on such a regular basis?

So be conscious of who you follow, the updates you see. If people’s updates keep making you feel negative, fear-based, that somehow you’re not good enough, that you’re missing out, that you should be doing/buying/getting that thing, take a step back and ask yourself: Are these the kind of people you want to follow?

Maybe’s it’s good to unfollow them. Limit your exposure to these people. Instead, follow people and content that inspire you to improve, as opposed to making you fearful or feel that you have a lack, because that is not true at all.

5) Consume information in a targeted way

My fifth and last tip is to consume information in a targeted way. The Internet today is characterized by an explosion of information. We have all kinds of information around us now. You want to be conscious of how you consume this information.

You want to receive and focus on content that’s tailored to you, that helps you in your life. For example, some of you may be in Facebook groups. When you join a Facebook group, Facebook automatically makes you follow that group, that group’s updates, and automatically adds you to the group’s notifications.

The way I do it is whenever I join a group, I will immediately unfollow the group’s updates and remove the group’s notifications. So I’m still in the group, but I just don’t see its updates by the second. Instead, I go into the group whenever I want to look at what it is up to. Why do I do that? This helps me to be conscious of the kind of updates I see when I enter Facebook’s main page. So firstly, I limit my usage of Facebook. Next, when I enter Facebook, I want to be conscious of the kind of updates I see on the front page. Facebook has its own algorithm and it cherry picks and selects whichever updates fit that algorithm. Typically these are updates focused on increasing and maximizing engagement, and that’s not necessarily what I want. Sometimes I want to see everything that the group has so far, discussions, etc. so that I can zoom in on the ones that are relevant to me. As opposed to having an algorithm that pre-selects and pre-filters, and the pre-filtered material may not be what I’m looking for.

So being conscious in terms of how you consume information. You pick and choose the sites that you want to see, the updates you want to see, the groups that you want to focus on for today or for a week. That’s the same for websites you follow, newsletters, YouTube channels that you subscribe to. You don’t need to be following everything. You don’t need to be subscribed to everything. You want to ask yourself: Which are the [sites/channels/etc.] that give you great value? Where you genuinely feel uplifted by the content? And the content helps you to live a better life, live a conscious life?

These are the channels/websites/newsletters that you want to stay subscribed to. Don’t worry about missing out because there’s just so much information out there. Your role today is to pick what works for you. Tuning into the information, the updates, the activities that are relevant to you. Rather than feeling that you need to be in the loop of everything. I feel the websites today — how conglomerates have designed their websites — are created to elicit that feeling that you’re not seeing enough, that there’s more content you need to see.

Because of that, we need to learn to draw our boundaries. Deciding that, Okay today I just want to consume this ABC piece of content. And that’s because this channel is something that I like, this website is a high-quality one. Hence I consciously choose to read and follow these things. Beyond that, I’m doing other stuff.

Closing Note

So that’s it for today’s episode. I have a few articles that are relevant to today’s episode that I’ll be linking to them in the show notes.

If you have found today’s podcast helpful, I would really appreciate it if you can leave a review on iTunes, and that’s at personalexcellence.co/itunes/. Doing so really makes a difference. It helps to spread the message of conscious living out there to the world. And I feel that is something that we massively need today.

If you are interested in living a better life in just 30 days, check out my 30-day life transformation program, Live a Better Life in 30 Days Program. I’ve packed my 30 best tasks on life transformation and that includes some of my best exercises that I share with my life coaching clients, to help them discover your life direction, discover their life goals, review how you are doing in your life, evaluate your routine, transform your to-do list, expand your comfort zone, discover their values, and many more. So you can check that out at personalexcellence.co/courses/30dlbl/.

Thank you so much for listening. I truly appreciate you. If you have a question for me, you can post it to me via the podcast page on personalexcellence.co. Until next time, remember: you are beautiful and you are perfect the way you are. Thanks so much guys. And I see you guys in the next episode. Bye guys!

Endnote: Thanks for listening to The Personal Excellence Podcast. If you have found today’s podcast helpful, I would really appreciate it if you can leave a review on iTunes at personalexcellence.co/itunes/. Every review goes a long way to letting others know about the show and spreading the message of conscious living to the world. For more tips and articles on how to live your best life, visit www.personalexcellence.co. Be sure to stay in the loop of my free content and updates by subscribing to my free newsletter at personalexcellence.co/newsletter/.

Related Resources:

The post How Social Media Creates a Fear of Missing Out (And What To Do About It) appeared first on Personal Excellence.

Read More

Taking a Chance

Question:

For the moment I´m totally lost and confused and it causes me daily feelings of stress, anxiety, headache and stomach pain.

I am in a situation regarding job and place of living that I have to change and now an opportunity for that might have come. But the problem is that I don´t know if the timing is right or not, I have
longed for this opportunity to come, but now I am extremely scared. The problem I have is that I don´t know if I have these tough feelings because the timing is not right (if I have to prepare more, or if that is
not the right place to live),if I am just scared of change and uncertainty regarding money (I have to give up a good salary for not knowing if I will have any money), or if I´m afraid to know what I really feel since my opinion might be in conflict with others.

Stress, feelings and thoughts are whirling around so much in my body that I can´t even feel or think clearly. I have a healthy, regular lifestyle and also meditate twice a day. Right now I feel this is what makes me keep my head above the water line, otherwise I think I would freak out. But even if my meditation practice works well and I find peace, I don´t find the answers of what is right to do and how to handle my feelings and fears, and how to sort out what is what, what is fear and what is my honest will. Do you have any suggestions on how to do that, how to go on?
I would appreciate any answer a lot.

Read More

Trusting Inner Guidance

Question:

How can I get happy if I can’t trust my Inner Guidance?

I’m like a hostage needing to fall in love with it’s captor if I’m going to survive, while all the while praying to be rescued. I’m overboard emotionally and physically: depression; tiredness; exacerbated hypothyroidism from chronically getting “What I don’t want” and only recently learning the “why” of that.

I’m waking up from a life lived backwards. Clairvoyant, clairaudient, I’ve blindly followed the advice of my Inner Guidance for as long as I can remember. And the past 3 years, I’ve come to realize – wake up to – the fact that my Inner Guidance’s advising hasn’t been so loving. In fact, the “unhappy” I have in my life is because of having followed the advice of my Inner Guidance.

A few weeks ago, when I metaphorically inherited Unhappy and Bitter’s house, I realized I HATE my Inner Guidance. I realize we’re not playing on the same team and that I’ve been foolish to trust it, believe it. And it confirmed that that is so. It went on to say it doesn’t respect me … that it would have been braver for me to have died in childhood than have survived through becoming a people pleaser. Harsh!

Is Spirit this harsh to all clairvoyant/clairaudient’s wishing conscious contact? Do you know why I have such a mean, unloving Inner Guidance?

At the end of my rope (almost too literally) I want peace. I pray for peace. What I get is Inner Guidance’s acknowledgement of my making the wrong mental choices, or complex emotions to untangle myself from, or lies or false futuristic prophecies to ignore the fear of.

My people pleaser-ness in desperation, has tried to make peace with Inner Guidance, but honestly, what kind of peace can be had where there’s no trust? So accepting I no longer trust my Inner Guidance has been a hard acceptance to come to. And of course, Inner Guidance, hearing my everything, just dishes up more fear for me to find myself clear of. I dig myself out of Unhappy and Bitter, and IG drudges more. And it’s happening more and more. I feel emotionally controlled, dumped on, by Inner Guidance. The weeping, grief, and crying jags go on for days, and take me back to childhood and my shock and unfathomability at what appears to be my intrinsic inappropriateness.

I don’t know how much longer I can endure this kind of “spiritual” treatment. My grip on reality is waning in my confusion and cluelessness about what is happening to me and why. Inner Guidance says I’m doing the Great Work. Even gave me a bouquet of red and gold tulips in a meditation a few weeks ago. But I can’t tell the truth from the lies any longer.

In a recent meditation. Inner Guidance sent me a dolphin. I pet the heart-sick dolphin which spoke in an old old language I didn’t understand. And when I said I don’t understand you it said in PERFECT English, “Don’t worry. Be Happy.”

Abraham-Hicks say it takes a happy road to make a happy end. I want more than words can say to take this loosing hand of a life (having inherited Unhappy and Bitter’s house) and make it win. I see now how the deck has been so stacked against me from the very beginning by Spirit having used my Inner Guidance to create mayhem in my life against my trying to be “good.”

Each day, I get up determined to “BE happy” but succumb to the futility of that when I feel Inner Guidance laughing at me. I try to hold onto appreciating the present moment like your book THE WAY OF THE WIZARD says. As it turns out, the present moment is the only place I feel safe these days. But it takes a force of Will for me to stay there. Given I’m so tired, I’m hit and miss. And there’s Inner Guidance’s quick acknowledgement that I’m creating “MORE of what I don’ want.”

God is love. I’m love and I do the best to be the love that I am. If I could do better I would. As I live at the edge of the world in the Japanese countryside, in isolation and rejection, fearing what my Inner Guidance is going to do next to me, has become more than I can bear. I pray for help.

I probably haven’t learned the lesson that my Inner Guidance thought it was teaching. I’ve learned that although I don’t have the GREAT power and ALL KNOWINGNESS It does, in the least, I’m kind and allow others to be as they are, even when it’s to my detriment.

Know that I know you’re a very busy man and that I’m grateful and appreciative of whatever feedback/encouragement/advice you have to offer.

Read More

Leadership in mind

We’re so bombarded by our mobile devices that our ability to pay attention is declining—and extensive research on leadership shows a crisis of engagement in the workforce. Leaders are not satisfying their employees’ needs to find engagement in what they do. Hear about the three most important qualities a leader needs to help solve the crisis.

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How to Be Productive, Not Busy

How to be Productive, Not Busy

In today’s world, it is so easy to be busy rather than being productive.

That’s because we have so many notifications, alerts, to-dos, things screaming for attention. Oftentimes, when we are not aware, we could simply spend an entire day just doing things, rushing from place to place, clearing item after item. But these may not be the most impactful things that move us towards our goals.

So how can we focus on the impactful and make the most of our days?

In this episode of The Personal Excellence Podcast, I share

  • 6 tips to be productive, not busy
  • Why you should not start your day with chat [1:25]
  • How to separate communication between inner circle loved ones and others [4:50]
  • Why I turn off alerts and notifications [8:21]
  • How to deal with incoming emails, alerts that you need to respond to [10:59]
  • Starting your day with a priority to-do list [12:44]
  • Why you shouldn’t beat yourself up when you go off task [14:49]
  • Using batching to group similar tasks [17:07]
  • How to create your 80/20 to-do list [20:32]
  • Using a “Will do” list to defer incoming tasks [20:32]
  • The importance of delegating [21:59]
  • Why delegating was my Achilles heel in the past [22:42]
  • 3 factors I used to determine when to delegate [25:05]
  • 5 questions to ask yourself in a weekly/bi-weekly audit [29:16]
  • Asking ourselves WHY, WHAT, and HOW as we live consciously [30:20]

Listen to this episode here:

If you’ve found The Personal Excellence Podcast useful, I’d really appreciate it if you can leave a nice rating and review on iTunes. Your review makes a difference and will help spread the message of conscious living to the world. Thank you!

How to be Productive, Not Busy [Transcript]

Celestine Chua: You’re listening to The Personal Excellence Podcast, the show that’s all about helping you be your best self and live your best life. I’m Celestine Chua, your host, and founder of PersonalExcellence.co. Let’s get started!

Hey everyone. That is Celes from PersonalExcellence.co. Welcome back to the podcast!

Today I want to talk about productivity — specifically how to be productive, not busy. I feel that in today’s world, it is so easy to be busy rather than to be productive. That’s because we have so many notifications, alerts, to-dos, things screaming for attention. Oftentimes, when we are not aware, when we are not conscious of it, we could simply spend an entire day just doing things, rushing from place to place, clearing item after item. But these things may not be the most impactful things that help us move towards our goals.

So today I want to share some simple tips, six tips in fact, on what we can do to focus on being productive rather than being busy.

1) Don’t start your day with chat

My first tip is don’t start your day with chat. It is very instinctual to want to open your chat application in the morning and see who messaged you. Thinking, What do I have in my chat inbox? What messages do I have? It feels exciting because you are getting messages from people, people you care about, or new people you just met. Also, it is sometimes like a little gift, like each message is a little gift and someone has a special message for you and you want to see what’s that. So I totally understand that.

But unless it is an off day where you are not working, for your work days, I recommend not starting your day with chat because it can easily derail your day into a series of chat exchanges where chat is your main focus, as opposed to what you need to get done. This is especially true if you are an entrepreneur, you control your day, you control your routine, or if you are a freelancer. It is very easy to have your entire day derailed because of chat or even because you are looking at your social media news feed. You know, the social media platforms today. I shared in a previous episode on FOMO, the fear of missing out, about how social media applications and platforms today are designed to get you to come back to the platform.

When you start your day with chat and this may be a chat application or a chat tool built into a social media platform, you have already entered their arena where there are all these design elements designed to get you to come back to the website. From the notification button color to the placement to the user interface, and so on. The best way is simply not going into chat at the beginning of the day. But instead focusing on the things you need to do.

Another reason is that at the beginning of the day, our energy is at its highest and you want to direct that to the highest purpose activities on your to-do list. As opposed to pumping that into chat because then you’ll be putting your best energy into chat messages and replies which may not be the best use of your energy.

There is an exception to this rule, which is if the person is a family member, an important loved one, like your partner or your kid. With these people, you should have a channel where they can easily access you. So this could be chat, this could be some other channel. That’s because there could be some urgent family matter or important issue where they need to notify you. Having this instant access lets you know if there anything that you need to tend to and so on.

This is where there is a conundrum. Because then you’ll be wondering, Oh okay, if I need to be easily accessible to these people, the problem is when I check messages from them, I will naturally see messages from others. My answer is to use two different chat applications. This is if you find that it’s worth doing that. Using two different applications: (1) One for your super important, inner circle loved ones. The people who need 24/7 instant access to you; and (2) The second for everyone else.

The good thing is there are so many applications today. Line. WeChat. Whatsapp. Facebook. Telegram. And so on. Simply designate one app to everyone else, I guess the default channel that everyone uses like WhatsApp and Facebook. And use a different channel that very few people use. Use that channel and allocate that to just your loved ones, like your parents or siblings or your spouse, your children. This way you have a separate channel that’s just for these people and you can use that without all these non-stop notifications, all these elements trying to pull you in. At the same time, you can still connect with the other people in your circle using the general application for everyone.

I do that and I find that super useful in helping me stay focused. Before that, I was just using one application for everyone when the one person I communicate with the most and I need to communicate with frequently would be my husband. I found that a lot of times when I was checking the chat application for his messages, I would naturally see the messages from other people. Some of these messages, in fact, most of the conversations were not essential. It’s like banter, casual banter, which is fine and good for socializing, but not to the extent where I need to see it all the time every day. The problem is when you log back onto these chat applications, you know that many of the social media tools today will show what time you were online and many of these tools don’t have a feature for you to turn it off — which is terrible. Then other people will see, “Oh you’re online, but you’re not replying to me. Why are you not replying to me?” And then that’s all this nonsensical stuff which is totally unnecessary.

So I find the best way is to simply use a different app for these inner circle people whom we need to communicate with on a very, very frequent basis throughout the day. And also with them, they understand that each of us has things to do. I have my things to do. You have your things to do. And our priority is to focus on these things. But at the same time, we check back this application throughout the day, just in case there are urgent matters, home matters, household issues, etc. that we need to see and deal with.

Another way that one of my ex-professors uses is having two different phone numbers. One number for close family members. Another for everyone else. That can work too if you are okay with using two different numbers or you have a dual SIM card phone. Otherwise, using the two chat applications,  that works pretty well.

2) Remove distractions

My second tip is to remove distractions. By that I mean the notifications, the alerts, all these different things that are so common and part and parcel of every application, software, website that we use or visit nowadays.

I find them very intrusive. I always turn off all these notifications and alerts. Whenever I install something new, if I have to install — So firstly, I rarely install new apps or software, only the essential ones. That’s very important, knowing the key things you need to have and saying no to everything else.

Then, with the apps that I do install, I will disable all the alerts, notifications, and so on. On your phone, there is an overriding feature in Android — I’m not sure in iPhone — where you can disable notifications. This is a phone-level setting, not a setting with the individual app. In the “Settings,” I think it’s there on most Android phones, there’s a feature in “Applications” where you can turn off notifications for each individual app. Doing so overrides the notifications for that app, if it doesn’t give you that option to turn off its notifications (which I find quite common in today’s applications).

So turning off these alerts. Email alerts as well. I don’t have email alerts. I only check emails at specific moments of the day when I’m taking a break from my core task. Because when I’m doing a task, especially a high-level task, just having this stream of incoming notifications, be in terms of SMSes or email alerts or any app notifications, I find them very disruptive and they often take my mind from a high-level mode to a very low-level reactive mode. When there are all these notifications going on, even if no active notifications right now, I don’t enter into high-level mode because I’m constantly sitting in wait for the next alert, the next message, the next notification. So I’m sitting there, in reactive mode, anticipating, Okay there could be a next alert, so I don’t want to enter into this high-level thinking mode where I’m thinking about ideas or writing an article and so on.

Some of you may be in positions where you need to be accessible all the time. For example, maybe you are an account manager at a PR agency and you need to be accessible to your clients. That is totally understandable. For these situations, I recommend designating fixed moments throughout the day where you check your messages, emails, return calls, and so on. This could be once every hour, at the start of the hour or once every 40 minutes. It could also be after you finish a task or a segment of a task. This way you introduce some structure into your days, as opposed to being in reactive mode 100 percent of the time.

You want to be clear on the Quadrant 2 priority tasks that you want to get done, while being responsive to the incoming alerts, the firefighting staff you have to handle as part of your job. In our job, it’s common to have a lot of Quadrant 1 tasks, which are the firefighting stuff, the urgent and important tasks. And there are the Quadrant 2 — the very important but never urgent tasks. We want to strike a balance between getting the Quadrant 1 tasks handled, and also having the time to work on the Quadrant 2 tasks that never become urgent but it is important to work on them to make significant headway towards our goals.

3) Have a priority to-do list

My third tip is to have a priority to-do list. Get clear on the 2-3 key things you would like to accomplish for the day for it to be rewarding.

As part of this priority to-do list, you can have other things that you need to get done too. For example, scheduling this doctor’s appointment or returning this critical email and so on. These are little tasks that may not be in the top 2-3 things you need to get done, but you need to get them done as part of moving things forward. But in this to-do list, you want to be clear of what are the 2-3 key things, the big rock items, that you want to spend a substantial or considerable amount of your time working on and make good progress in them.

When we don’t have a priority to-do list, it is really easy to spend our entire day working on 10 to 20 little things. But these 10 to 20 little things often don’t make a significant change or a significant dent in our Quadrant 2 goals in the long run. So we could be spending our entire day doing all these little things every day and constantly busy, thinking, I’m rushing and doing this and that, I’m multitasking, I’m doing all these different things. But that is not a good use of our time. If anything, when we are doing all these things, we are running in our rat wheels, as opposed to taking a good look at the tasks that require our time and energy, the tasks that we should be working on.

When trying to transit from this working on 10-to-20-different-things mode, to the work-on-2-to-3-big-items mode, we can often feel a lot of resistance. Because there’ll be all these things trying to pull us away from our priority tasks. All these things screaming for attention, firefighting stuff, seemingly super urgent critical stuff. I would recommend not seeing it as an absolute change that you need to make. Like, Oh, okay, I must just do these 2-3 big things and that’s all. I don’t want to do anything else. Oftentimes it is a transition that we do where, okay, we spend some time on the 2-3 big things. We know what they are. We spend some time on them. But there would still be the little things that come in.

Do what you can do. Do your best to hand those little things. Once you’re done, go back and focus on those 2-3 big items. See this priority to-do list as something to anchor you, to remind you of your priority to-dos. But don’t get pressurized or stressed by those things.

For example, if you don’t make significant progress on these things, or you don’t even get to spend any time on these things today, don’t beat yourself up, okay? Don’t feel bad about it. Because it’s really normal. It is super normal especially when you are at the intersection of a million to-dos and a million things demanding attention, to sometimes have days where you’re working on these million things as well. That’s fine. Just do what you can to get these things sorted out and then direct your focus back to your 2-3 priority to-dos.

That is the most important thing. Constantly making the effort to shift back to your priority to-dos, as opposed to taking it as an absolute standard that you have to follow. Because that can lead to a self-defeating mindset, a self-defeating situation where you feel bad, and you beat yourself up, and that isn’t what we’re going for here.

4) Batch similar tasks

My fourth tip is to batch similar tasks. Often times you will probably find a recurring pattern in the tasks that you do. And when you start seeing a similarity in certain tasks, it helps to batch them.

Batch them meaning, let’s say you need to return email number 1 and then, later on, you need to return email number 2, and number three, and number four, and so on. So as opposed to logging into your inbox every 5 minutes to return one email, I recommend batching all these tasks together. So you can spend 1-2 hours on a Quadrant 2 task, and then at a specific point in the day, log into your email and reply to all these emails together.

Another example is, say, you are a website designer. You are maintaining four different client websites. Say there are several changes that you need to make to website number three. And there are constantly new changes streaming in each day. Maybe it makes sense to batch all these little changes you need to make, and then make them at the end of the day or at a fixed moment of each day. As opposed to making no changes on an ongoing basis throughout the day. Because there is always a set-up cost involved for each task. Where you need to log into a certain interface, you need to key in certain details, you need to set your mind in that mode, and then you need to assess that situation and think about what you need to get done.

This setup cost happens each time you work on a task. When you have many little tasks for an overall project, and you keep repeating the same steps even if each time you are doing one small little task… Say you have five little tasks for this big project. This setup time quickly accumulates. Before you know it, you would have spent the entire day on this setup time and this “switching cost” where you’re constantly switching from task one to task two. Even if you are a superb multitasker, which I’m sure many of you guys are, there’s always this cost involved. Again like what I share in Tip #2 on removing distractions, you’re forever spending your time in this reactive mode, this low-level mode, where you are doing all these administrative switching things, as opposed to getting into the high-level mode where you are making significant changes.

So as much as possible, batching similar tasks together. This does require you to take a step back to evaluate and assess what are the tasks that keep taking up your time each day. Often times we are not aware that this is happening until we take a step back to write down the tasks that have been taking our time throughout the day, and start to see a similarity or trends in these tasks.

This is where having a “Will do” to-do list helps. In Live a Better Life in 30 Days Program, the task for Day 8 is to work on your 80-20 to-do list. For the to-do list,

  • 20% high-impact tasks. I recommend having a column where you write down your 20 percent high-impact tasks, i.e. the tasks that will make the biggest impact, that will be the best use of your time for the day. This would correspond to the priority to-do list in Tip #3.
  • 80% low-impact tasks. Then have another column which consists of your 80 percent low-impact tasks, and these will be the tasks that need to get done, the little tasks that are not the best use of your time but need to get done.
  • Will-do tasks. And then another column which would be the “Will do” to-do list where you write down the tasks that stream in throughout the day and you need to get them done. But you don’t need to do them right away. Oftentimes a lot of the things that we think what we need to do right away, we don’t really need to do them right away.

Putting them in the “Will do” column and then assessing them at the end of the day and tending to them, helps us see the similarity in these tasks and batch them so that we can deal with them more effectively.

5) Delegate

My fifth tip would be to delegate. Now I know that this tip wouldn’t be applicable to those of you who are not in a position to delegate. But for those of you who are, maybe you are an entrepreneur, or you are at a managerial position, or you’re working in a team where the other co-workers handling different tasks, then it is important to learn to delegate. Even if you are not in the position to delegate right now, there will likely be a time in the future when you move to a different position in your career or you move up the value chain in your career ladder, where you would need to learn to delegate.

I have to say that delegating has always been my Achilles heel because firstly, I like to be hands-on. I like to be in the thick of the things that I’m working on. I will say that I’m a creator. I get the satisfaction of creating stuff and you guys can see that. Like with my entire website, Personal Excellence, I’m very hands-on. The entire website is built by me and so on. When I delegate, I stop working on that particular stuff that I’m delegating. That removes one small piece of satisfaction because the creation process is where I get a lot of satisfaction.

The second reason is that I don’t like to trouble people. I don’t like to implicate others or burden people with my problems. I just like to handle things myself and internalize and deal with them as much as possible.

So for a long time, I just didn’t like to delegate. I would just do everything myself as much as I can to the point where I would feel like bursting. But I have found that delegating is an important skill. It is a crucial skill if you want to do much more than you are able to with your own bare hands. Because we can never accomplish as much if we are always relying on ourselves. We can always do more when we have an extra set of hands helping us. We can always do more when we have two different brains working on a problem.

This is something that I took very long to learn. Nowadays I’m learning to do that more. Delegating, identifying which are the parts of my business where I should delegate and let someone else handle and help me in them, while I work on the higher-level stuff that is the best use of my time.

With regards to delegating in my business, I have three factors that I use to evaluate whether I should consider outsourcing or hiring.

  1. Repetitive. Is this task repetitive? Is it highly recurring? If it is highly recurring, it has a high frequency, that means I should potentially look at hiring someone to handle this.
  2. Value of the task vs. my time. Is it the best use of my time? Or can my time be better spent elsewhere? When you are running a business and as your business matures and as your customer base grows, you start to be involved in many, many different tasks of many different functions. So you could start your business and many things are important. But there will be a point where there are just so many tasks and many things are important, but it’s just not possible for you to handle everything. And that will be certain tasks that are more important than others and that are a better use of your time.

    For example, in my business, there could be marketing, editing, audio editing, video editing, site maintenance, content creation. And all these things individually by themselves are important. But is every task the best use of my time? Or can my time be better spent elsewhere? And it is a very critical question because unless we consciously evaluate the value of our time and whether this time can be better spent on Task A or B or C, we will forever be in this mode where we feel that everything is important and everything deserves our time.

    But when we stack up all these tasks side by side, it becomes clear that there are certain tasks are a better use of our time than other tasks. And these tasks that the best use of our time, oftentimes they are the critical aspects of our business and our work. And us putting energy into them can create the biggest rewards.

  3. Pros vs. Costs of hiring. The last factor, whether the pros of hiring outweigh the costs. Because there will always be a cost involved when you’re looking at hiring or outsourcing. Now if you’re delegating to someone in your team, in the company that you’re working in, then the cost element wouldn’t really be applicable. But if you are a business owner or entrepreneur, then the cost element would be involved. Even if say if you are delegating something in your personal life — so you could be working in a company but you are looking at delegating aspects of your personal life, say household cleaning, grocery shopping, or potentially getting a helper, then the pros need to be weighed against the costs and whether it’s worthwhile.

When you’re dealing with something that is highly repetitive, is not the best use of your time, and the pros of hiring outweigh the costs, then you should look at kickstarting the hiring process. It can be pretty difficult to get good talent, good people to help you or good services to help you. In some cases, it may not be hiring someone as much as you are engaging a service to help you in that thing.

But once you find someone who can help you or a service that can help you, you will find the rewards tremendous. Because now you can take a load off your shoulders and dedicate your mind space, your time, your energy on the things that truly would be the best use of your time.

6) Do a regular audit

My sixth and last tip is to do a regular audit. Audit meaning you look back at how your week has been and you ask yourself:

  1. How has this week been?
  2. Am I satisfied with how I’ve spent this week?
  3. Have I spent this week on the most important things on my task list?
  4. Could I have spent this week in a better way?
  5. Moving forward what changes would I like to make, if any?

Asking yourself these questions can be very helpful because oftentimes we are just heads down in our work, our tasks, trying to complete item after item. We often don’t take this step back to get a macro focus on what we are doing, how we are doing things, whether that’s a better way for us to do something. Without this audit, we can forever be stuck in this micro mode, just rushing from place to place, finishing task off the task. Before we know it is already been weeks and weeks or even months, and we look back and we wonder, Where has all this time gone?

Doing this audit helps us take a step back and think about these three points:

  1. WHY. Why are we doing this? Is this the best use of all time?
  2. WHAT. The things that we are doing. Are these truly the best use of our energy? Are these the things that will be moving us towards our highest goals?
  3. HOW. The way that we are doing things, the approach that we’re using right now, is this the best approach? Can there be a better approach? Can there be a better way to do things?

So you can do an audit every week, every two weeks, or even every month. But the point here is to do an audit. Use the audit as a chance to evaluate how you have been spending your time, because it is so easy to be stuck in work mode, busy mode, and spend all the time that way without really thinking about whether this time has been spent effectively. An audit is this chance, this opportunity where we can take that step back to really think about how our days have gone, how weeks have been spent, and whether we can do things in a different way.

Closing Note

Productivity is when we are consciously spending our time. Consciously approaching our days and thinking about how we can make the most out of it.

Busy, in a way, can be considered a lazy way of living. In that, you’re not really thinking about the things that you’re doing as much as you are just doing them.

While it is very important to have a good work ethic, which is what being busy is about, you want to make sure that your time is being spent in the most impactful way. This is what productivity is about: Working hard, while at the same time making sure that your hard work is creating the highest impact. Making sure that your energy and your efforts are creating the biggest impact in the world.

So that’s it for today’s episode. Thank you so much for listening. I have an article that shares more tips on how to be productive versus busy that you can check out in the show notes. I’m going to link that in the show notes, along with links to some other resources related to today’s podcast.

If you have found today’s podcast helpful, I would super appreciate it if you can leave a review on iTunes. You can do that at personalexcellence.co/itunes. Every review goes a long way to helping the podcast to grow and towards spreading the message of conscious living further.

I want to take this chance to thank all of you guys who have posted such positive reviews and sending such wonderful feedback to me through the contact form. I read everything single one of your messages and I’m so grateful for your support. So thank you so much to you guys. You guys know who you are.

So that’s it. Until next time, remember: you are beautiful, you are perfect, you’re perfect the way you are. Talk to you guys in the next episode. Bye guys and have a great week ahead. 🙂

Endnote: Thanks for listening to The Personal Excellence Podcast. If you have found today’s podcast helpful, I would really appreciate it if you can leave a review on iTunes at personalexcellence.co/itunes/. Every review goes a long way to letting others know about the show and spreading the message of conscious living to the world. For more tips and articles on how to live your best life, visit www.personalexcellence.co. Be sure to stay in the loop of my free content and updates by subscribing to my free newsletter at personalexcellence.co/newsletter/.

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The post How to Be Productive, Not Busy appeared first on Personal Excellence.

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Making Wisdom Your Most Important Goal

By Deepak Chopra, MD

It seems perverse that the easier life becomes, the worse our problems. Technology has created life-changing innovations like the Internet that are directly linked with terrorist attacks, giving like-minded fanatics instant global communication. Computers gave rise to social media, which has led to cruel bullying at school, fake news, conspiracy plots, and the anonymity to mount vicious personal attacks—all of these seem as endemic as hacking, another insoluble problem created by technology.

One could go on practically forever, and it wouldn’t be necessary to blame current technology either—the internal combustion engine is directly connected to climate change, and nuclear fission led to the horrors of atomic warfare. But my point isn’t to bash technology; we owe every advance in the modern world to it—except one.

Technology is based on higher education, and whatever its benefits, higher education has almost totally lost interest in wisdom. Wisdom isn’t the same as knowledge. You can collect facts that lead to the understanding of things, but wisdom is different. I’d define it as a shift in allegiance, away from objective knowledge toward self-awareness.

The Greek dictum “Know thyself” doesn’t make sense if the self you mean is the ego-personality, with its selfish demands, unending desires, and lack of happiness. Another self is meant, which isn’t a person’s ego but a state of consciousness. “Self” might not even be a helpful term, despite the age-old references to a higher self identified with enlightenment. It is more helpful to say that the pursuit of wisdom is about waking up.

Waking up is a metaphor for the conscious life, and the conscious life is what wisdom leads to. Every day we are driven by unconscious impulses and desires, and unexamined processes go on beneath the surface of the mind that lead to anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, self-destructive behavior, and every kind of pointless discord, from household tensions to war. The outbreak of World War I led to senseless slaughter, as did the excesses of Communism. These consequences were unforeseen, yet in retrospect it is obvious that World War I was a kind of eruption from the unconscious, of pride, anger, stubborn nationalism, and xenophobic tendencies that people were harboring as a matter of course.

European anti-Semitism wasn’t invented in Germany by a single fanatical Nazi; it was accepted in the most polite and civilized circles almost everywhere. In one way or another, allowing our unconscious to go unexamined has caused the greatest and longest suffering in human history. It was suffering and finding a way to end it that became the foundation of Buddhism, but any spiritual teaching that will show people how to wake up also aims to bring them out of suffering.

In that sense, wisdom has a definite purpose, but escaping the ills and woes of the unconscious life is secondary to the main purpose of waking up, which is to know who we really are. The answer can be formulated in a few words: humans are a species of consciousness whose special trait is self-awareness. Being self-aware, we have the capacity to access the very source of awareness.

At first sight this ability doesn’t necessarily sound positive. The vast majority of people have become expert at denial and were taught from childhood not to dwell on themselves, an activity deemed self-centered if not totally solipsistic. People are also expert at keeping secrets from themselves, at going along to get along, at valuing social conformity and fitting in. These habits unravel when self-awareness awakens. Not everyone wants to let them go, for obvious reasons.

But the worst aspect of being unconscious, or asleep to use the metaphor of waking up, is self-limitation. We all go around with core beliefs about how insignificant a single individual is, how risky it would be to step out of the norm, and how only the gifted few rise above the average. The wise in every generation have asserted the opposite, that the source of consciousness makes human potential infinite. We can think an infinite number of new thoughts and say things never before said. In fact, there is no arbitrary limit on any trait that makes us human: intelligence, creativity, insight, love, discovery, curiosity, invention, and spiritual experiences of every kind.

We are a species of consciousness whose great pitfall isn’t evil but “mind-forg’d manacles,” to borrow a phrase from the poet William Blake. We make up mental constructs, invent stories around them, and tell the next generation that these stories are true. One story says that women are inferior, a complex tale that gave rise to a thousand injustices and false beliefs. Us-versus-them thinking leads to stories about racism and nationalism that caused their own barbarous results.

Waking up allows us to escape all stories and to live free of self-limiting mental constructs. The real question is whether it can be done. Can you and I wake up? If so, how do we go about it? Are there awakened teachers who can provide examples of what it means to live the conscious life? This is exactly where wisdom enters the picture. Without living examples of awakened individuals, the whole enterprise would be trapped in a limbo of fantasy and wishful thinking. But when a society values wisdom, it turns out that the awakened exist among us and always have.

Anyone who wants to wake up is fortunate to be alive now, because despite our global problems, irrational behavior, and self-destructive denial, modern society is open to ready communication about every topic, including the exploration of higher consciousness. Where prior generations had little grasp of higher consciousness beyond the precepts of religion, millions of people today can walk their own path to self-awareness, choosing to include God, the soul, organized religion, and scriptures as they see fit, or to avoid them. Even “spirituality” is a term you can adopt or ignore—the real purpose of waking up is about consciousness.

We have always had the potential to be wise by using self-awareness to explore who we really are. A society driven by consumerism, celebrity worship, video games and social media gossip, and indifference to massive social problems feels like it could never find wisdom, or even the first impulse to wake up. But I’d argue that we are the most fortunate society to wake up in, simply because higher consciousness is open to anyone. I count this as the greatest opportunity facing us, to see that waking up is possible and to hasten toward it as quickly as we can.

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential available on iTunes or Spotify  www.deepakchopra.com

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