June 2009

The Snowman Theory of Personal Development

by Vlad Dolezal on June 29, 2009

Have you ever tried building a snowman when the snow wasn’t quite right?

At the beginning, you put together a small ball of snow. As you roll it around, small bits of snow stick on to it… but then they fall off again. And stick, and fall off. It makes you feel like Sisyphus.

And lots of people experience personal development like that. They try something small, it works for them, but then they drop it. They try something else, then forget it. They develop a good habit for a week or two, then break it.

And like with building a snowman, there’s a simple solution. Focus on building up the core ball first. Gather together a bunch of snow, and make a respectable-sized ball. Then, once you start rolling THAT around, you suddenly notice the new bits of snow stick, and stay on, because of the weight of the ball!

Your life is like a snowman

Personal development works the same way! Once you develop a few core skills, suddenly everything else starts sticking on, the momentum builds, and before you know it, you are happy, you feel a sense of purpose, you contribute to the world, and you wake up every morning with a smile on your face!

For example, taking consistent action and overcoming procrastination is a core skill! (It’s surprisingly easy with the right approach.)

Then there’s skills like building habits that last, positive thinking, and treating your body well. And once you gain some basic competence in all of those, suddenly every other bit of advice you hear will stick on to that!

In fact, improving your life is just like building a snowman, because:

  • having a vision is crucial – unless you know what you’re trying to build, you’ll just end up with a heap of snow
  • it’s all about fun – life is too short to take everything seriously. Have fun with it!
  • every snowman is different – and so is every person
  • people will love to join you once you get the ball rolling

And the first step is getting the basic ball right. The core skills of personal growth. Without them, no amount of fancy tricks will save you.

And yet I see, again and again, people who try to improve a snowman by simply switching around the accessories. Trust me, no amount of carrots and pieces of coal will make your snowman look good if your basic snowball is just a heap of dirty snow.

But if you take time to build a solid core ball, and add the two smaller balls on top, then you can switch around the accessories, and get great results no matter what accessories you use!

Get the basics right first. You’ll thank yourself a thousand times.

Enjoy building your personal snowman!

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90 Day Free Hugs Challenge

by Vlad Dolezal on June 22, 2009

A few weeks back, when my post about Free Hugs in Leeds went viral, I heard from a ton of people that they love the idea.

But I know from experience that with posts like that, most people read them, nod their head, love the idea, share it with their friends, and then put the idea of giving out free hugs firmly in the “would love to do someday” pile in their brain, and never do anything about it.

So when simply stephen contacted me about putting on a 90 day free hugs challenge to get more people to take action, my immediate answer was – “Hell yeah!”

And now, after a few weeks of preparation, the challenge is ready!

The challenge is for you, if:

  • you love the idea of free hugs
  • you’re scared like a puppy when you think about giving them out yourself
  • you love meeting other people who enjoy sharing positive emotions

Sounds good? Okay! Check out the 90 Day Free Hugs Challenge for yourself!

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Awareness on Steroids – Stranger Than Fiction

by Vlad Dolezal on June 16, 2009

Harold lives the epitome of a routine, boring life.

Every morning, he wakes up at exactly the same time. He walks the exact same route, takes the exact same bus, and works the exact same job.

Then, one day, he suddenly starts hearing a female voice narrating his life. It jolts him into awareness, and leads to a bunch of fun moments, because he’s the only one who can hear the voice.

That’s a quick summary of the 2006 movie Stranger Than Fiction.

It’s also a really fun way to kick-start your awareness! (I go into a lot more detail on why awereness rocks in my free e-book 5 Simple Steps to An Awesome Life. Check it out if you haven’t already.)

Awareness on steroids

Simply start narrating your life in your head, while you’re living it, like a movie voice-over.

“Vlad was sitting in his chair, typing up a blog post. He ignored the soft feeling of hunger, set on finishing the blog post today…”

Damn, I didn’t even realize I was hungry before I started thinking that! That’s exactly what I’m talking about!

I could say more, but the technique is pretty self-explanatory. Give it a try, you’ll find it’s fun and surprisingly useful :D

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5 Simple Ways to Reframe a Situation (that make a huge difference)

by Vlad Dolezal on June 13, 2009

Imagine you have a water glass, and you’ve asked two of your friends what shape is its outline.

“It’s a rectangle” says the first one.

“It’s a circle!” exclaims the other.

And they’re both right.

A water glass can be both a circle and a rectangle, depending on how you look at it. And the same is true for many situations in your life. There are several equally correct ways of looking at every situation.

Picking a more useful way of looking at the same thing is called reframing. And today, I’ll show you a few simple ways to do that.

5 simple ways to reframe a situation

Here are five great mindsets that let you reframe some common situations to make the most of them:

1. Problems are just challenges

Mark Twain said: “my life has been filled with terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened”. Most people do the same thing, except they use “problems” instead of “misfortunes”. Problems are not real, any more than a water glass is really a rectangle. They’re just a very inefficient way of looking at the situation.

Instead, how about you fill your life with new and exciting challenges! Wouldn’t that be much more motivating?

2. All behavior has a positive intention

Stop thinking some people are purely negative and evil. Every behavior has some positive intention behind it. Once you realize that, you can deal with “negative” people much better. For example, you can help them achieve their positive motive in a way that doesn’t harm anyone else.

3. Fear indicates a great opportunity to build confidence

When you feel butterflies in your stomach, what’s your first thought?

Is it “Uh oh, something uncomfortable coming up”? That’s okay, I’ve been there.

But since then I’ve learned that the best way to build confidence is facing your fears. Nowadays, to me, butterflies in the stomach mean “Yay! Exciting opportunity to build confidence ahead!”

And dealing with fear is one of the most exhilarating experiences. And I’m not talking about doing stupid life-threatening things either. I’m talking about completely non-lethal but equally scary situations, like public speaking, or approaching someone you’re attracted to.

4. “How can I most easily do this?”

This is a great question for reframing your attitude.

Instead of thinking “this is impossible”, or “I’ll never achieve this”, it gets you focused on finding a solution. It works like a charm because it presumes:

  • you can do it
  • there are several ways to get it done
  • it’s easy

5. “What can I learn from this situation?” (reframe failures as learning opportunities)

“I will have failed when I stop learning. Until then, every outcome is a success!”
- Tony Robbins

Feel free to steal Tony’s attitude. There’s no reason to create failure in your life. Instead, choose to face a life full of learning opportunities. It’s more productive, more motivating, and more fun!

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Kickstart Your Day – How to Wake up Excited and Full of Energy

by Vlad Dolezal on June 9, 2009

When I was a small kid, I had to wake up around 8 to get to school on time. I used to wake up tired and groggy, and wanted to just crawl back into bed and sleep for another hour or two.

Yet at the weekend, I would jump out of bed before 6, excited and full of energy. Why? Because morning cartoons were on TV!

Have a reason for waking up

A great way to wake up excited and full of energy is to find your mission in life. Your purpose for existence. And then go, and take daily action to get closer to achieving it!

If you find a purpose big and exciting enough, it will pull you out of bed in the morning, and fill you full of energy better than a cup of coffee, yerba mate, and cocaine all together! (not that I have ever tried that)

But even if you haven’t found your mission yet, or aren’t working on any specific part of it right now, you can still wake up with a smile on your face.

Just find a fun and exciting thing to do, and plan it first thing in the morning!

One of the best productivity tips you’ll ever hear is doing the most uncomfortable thing in the morning. That’s great once you’ve woken up… but to get yourself to wake up, planning something fun and exciting works far better.

If you plan something boring and uncomfortable for your morning, you will wake up, and just pull the covers over your head, and pretend the world isn’t there. Or even go back to sleep.

If you plan a fun and exciting task for your morning, you’ll wake up, grin from ear to ear, yawn a loo-o-ong lazy yawn, stretch from head to toe like a cat, and then jump out of bed, and be off towards a new exciting day!

So what’s the exciting task you want to plan? That depends on you.

I personally love juggling. So if I had a tough day ahead of me tomorrow, I might decide to do some juggling first thing in the morning! That would get me out of bed and excited for the rest of the day :D

Just pick something you love, and do it first thing in the morning. You’ll love the results.

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Free hugs challenge update:

In a few days, me and Simply Stephen will start a 90-day free hugs challenge. It will be very simple – a challenge to you, to go out with a free hugs sign giving out hugs to strangers, anytime within the next 90 days.

We’ll put up a website where you can tell others about your intentions, ask for tips, and share your experiences. The 90-day free hugs challenge is coming. Let’s share the love! :D

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How To Develop Abundance Mentality (with specific steps)

by Vlad Dolezal on June 5, 2009

So you’ve heard other personal development authors talk about abundance mentality. How believing that there’s enough of everything to go round will bring you riches, happiness and big fluffy teddy bears (or so I’m told).

Yet so few authors give you specific steps to build abundance mentality. They only give you vague statements like “really believe it” or “ask your heart”. How are you supposed to get a big fluffy teddy bear with advice like that?

Don’t worry, I’m going to change that. Here’s a specific, no-nonsense way to develop abundance mentality, based on timeless psychological principles…

How to develop communist mentality (wait, what?)

During the Korean civil war of the late 1950s, the Chinese Koreans successfully converted an unprecedented number of American prisoners to communism. They didn’t use threats or rewards. They were much smarter than that… they went directly for changing the soldiers’ beliefs.

What the Chinese understood was that our behavior is a direct result of what we believe about ourselves and the world. Think of it like a loop – we are constantly taking action that confirms who we believe we are, but we base our beliefs on who we are on our actions. It’s a catch-22.

So the Chinese interrupted the loop. You might think it was a big task reprogramming men who had been highly trained only to give their name, rank, and serial number, but the Chinese did it bit by bit.

During an interrogation, prisoners were persuaded to make one or two mildly anti-American or pro-communist statements. (For example, “The United States is not perfect,” or “A communist country has less unemployment.”) Once these apparently minor statements had been extracted, the prisoner would then be asked to define exactly how the United States was not perfect. When he was worn down and weary, he would then be asked to sign his name to the list of reasons he had come up with.

Later, the prisoner would be made to read his list in a discussion group with other prisoners. The Chinese would then broadcast his name and list of reasons during an anti-American radio broadcast not only to his own camp but to all the other North Korean POW camps and the rest of the American forces in South Korea as well.

Suddenly, the prisoner found himself labeled a collaborator, someone who participated in the kind of behavior that helped the enemy. When fellow prisoners asked why he had done it, he couldn’t claim he had been tortured. After all, he had said those things and signed his name to them.

Psychological research has shown that human beings can tolerate only a certain amount of discrepancy between their thoughts and their behavior. Like anyone unaware of the power of his own beliefs, the prisoner felt he had to justify his actions in order to maintain consistency with his own internal sense of identity. He would say that what he had said was true. In that moment his beliefs changed. He now believed that he was pro-communist, and his fellow prisoners reinforced his new identity by treating him differently. The loop was complete.

Before long, his desire to act consistently with his new beliefs would drive him to collaborate with the Chinese even more, thereby further reinforcing his new beliefs until he no longer even questioned they were true.

How to develop abundance mentality

Abundance mentality is simply a belief. A belief that there’s enough to go round for everybody. And you can cultivate that belief using the same strategy that the Chinese used to convert prisoners to communism.

Simply list specific actions you would take if you believed there’s enough for everybody, and then take those actions.

At first it will make you feel very uncomfortable. If you hold a scarcity mentality about money, and start giving out as if there was enough to go round for everybody, your mind will be screaming at you that you’re wasting it. That you’re throwing value out the window. That’s scarcity mentality.

But after a while, your mind won’t be able to take the disrepancy between your actions and beliefs anymore. So it will go “Hey, I’ve been doing all these things demonstrating abundance mentality. I must really believe it!”. And just like that, your beliefs will flip, and you will truly believe there’s enough for everybody.

And you know what? There IS enough for everybody! Once you realize that money is not a commodity to be hoarded, but just a representation of how much value you provide to others… once you realize that by giving out smiles and nice comments, you’re not losing out, but have MORE happiness yourself… you will truly be able to have plenty of all those!

So let’s get right to it!

Abundance mentality actions

Here a few ideas on what you can do:

  • give away money to charity (especially useful if you feel you have barely enough money to get by)
  • smile at 10 random strangers in one day
  • uncopyright your writing
  • in a teamwork situation, praise other people’s contributions and avoid drawing attention to your own work
  • volunteer for a good cause (especially useful if you feel you’re always busy and have very little time for yourself)
  • when you’re eating out with other people, offer them some food
  • give out free hugs
  • let somebody else take the spotlight

Write down all the actions from the above list you want to take, and any you come up with on your own. If you have scarcity mentality in some situation, you’re not likely to remember the actions just like that, so writing it down really helps.

Once you’ve written your abundance mentality actions down, review them every morning. Imagine yourself really taking those actions during the day, whenever you get a chance.

You will start to take those actions, and within days, you will begin to feel happier and more free, because you will truly believe there is enough for everybody.

And in the spirit of abundance, please share any abundance mentality actions you can think of in the comments below!

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Update on free hugs:

After my article on free hugs went a bit viral, with a ton of people saying they loved the idea… me and some other bloggers decided we’ll be issuing a challenge to you to try it as well! Stay tuned, more info coming early next week.

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Free Hugs in Leeds

Free Hugs

by Vlad Dolezal on June 2, 2009

Last Saturday, I decided to go out to town here in Leeds, giving out free hugs to people.

I had no idea what kind of response to expect. I thought people might consider it weird. I thought a few extraverts here and there might go for the hug.

I ended up giving out over 200 hugs in one hour.

The preparation

I made myself a big cardboard sign saying “FREE HUGS” (on both sides). I also got a good night’s sleep, and picked a sunny day to give out the hugs.

Those were the easy bits.

The hard bit was gathering the courage, which took me about 3 months.

But I did finally did it, and it was one of the most extraordinary experiences ever!

Why I did this

I did this because I love sharing positive emotions with people.

I did this because it was absolutely crazy, weird, and interesting. I got inspired by this youtube video. (Worth watching if you haven’t seen it. It’s been watched over 40 million times.)

I did this because I was scared shitless about doing it. Because doing something you truly believe in, even if you’re scared like a puppy, is one of the most awesome experiences ever. It’s also the best way to build confidence, as I explain in another article.

People’s reactions

The moment I got off the bus, and started walking towards the big shopping streets, holding up my sign, I got passed by a group of teenage girls. They passed comments along the lines of “eewww, creepy!”. Not so great for the morale.

But I kept on walking, because I had decided to offer free hugs for at least half an hour, even if nobody accepted.

I got into the shopping streets, and started getting better reactions.

A few people looked puzzled, then looked up at my sign, and cracked a smile as they passed by.

I started offering hugs with the simple “Want a free hug?”. A couple of people said “No, thanks”, but they almost always cracked a smile while doing so.

Then the hugs started pouring in.

I gave hugs to guys.

I gave hugs to women.

Both young and old, though generally younger people were more open to getting a hug.

Once or twice I got randomly tackled by a group of guys all giving me a hug at once :D

Some guys picked me up while giving me the hug (not that easy, I’m a big guy).

Some teenage girls just ran to me, sheepishly asked “Can I get a free hug?”, got the hug, than ran off giggling back to their friends.

About two dozen people in total took a picture of me. Sometimes just holding up the “FREE HUGS” sign, but usually hugging one or more of their friends while holding up the sign. They’ll have a great memory of this Saturday :D

But my favorite huggers were the timid people. The ones who walked up from behind me, tapped me on the arm, and sheepishly said “err, excuse me, can I have a free hug?”. Or the ones I could see making eye contact but too shy to openly ask for a hug – so I offered with “Want a free hug?” – and they went for it!

I also loved seeing the smiles on the faces of people who passed by, even if they didn’t want a hug.

Here are some things people said that I can remember:

“I‘ll give you a hug, bro!” (and he did)

“Why are you doing this?” (some people asked this one repeatedly. They just couldn’t wrap their mind around the concept of doing something just because it’s fun.)

“I don’t know why you’re doing this, but it’s wonderful!”

“No thanks, not today.” (Response to my “Want a hug?”)

“Maybe another time.” (same as above)

“Come here, man!” (followed by a big bear-hug)

“Okay, I’ll have a hug!”

“Awesome idea, mate!”

There were a ton more great comments, but I can’t remember them now. But really, the greatest comments of all were all the smiles I got from people, even if they didn’t go for a hug or say anything.

Share the love

You too can do this. It took me several years from seeing the “free hugs” video to seriously start considering this, and another three months until I gathered the courage to pull it off. But I did it, and so can you.

And even if going out and giving free hugs to strangers is too much for you, you can still share the love.

A simple smile can do wonders.

So can a nice comment.

As someone said:

“Nobody needs a smile more than the person who has none left to give.”

Remember that when somebody is rude to you.

Giving out smiles and positive emotion is not like giving out money. Because you don’t lose out… the more positive energy you give to others, the more you will have yourself!

So share the love, any way you can think of.

Have a great day! *hug*

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Update: After the overwhelming positive response, me and simply stephen have decided to put on a 90 Day Free Hugs Challenge, to get as many people as possible to experience the joy of giving out free hugs. The challenge runs from 1st July to 28th September 2009.

If you…

  • love the idea of free hugs
  • are scared like a puppy when you think about giving them out yourself
  • love meeting other people who enjoy sharing positive emotions

…then the challenge is perfect for you!

Check it out – 90 Day Free Hugs Challenge.

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