32 Things You May Regret 10 years From Now

Some of us are just existing and not living. Wouldn’t you rather set the world on fire and do something that challenged you, caused you to get up out of bed each morning actually looking forward to the day ahead, do something about that dream you’ve always had, start that business you’ve been talking about for years, or write that book?

We’ve all got something we’d love to do. It would be fantastic to say to your grandchildren, I gave it my best shot, instead of saying ‘I sat in and watched TV a lot and didn’t really do much with my life.

It’s easy to get caught in the trap of doing nothing, which actually drains your energy more than doing something; anything.

Here are 32 Things you may regret 10 years from now

1. Caring what other people might think

2. Doing what you thought would please others

3. Staying in that job you’ve hated for so long

4. Not going after a dream

5. Giving up at the last hurdle

6. Settling for second best

7. Putting others before yourself

8. Sitting on your arse watching TV

9. Not paying attention to the people who really do matter

10. Not taking risks to do something you’ve always wanted to do

11. Thinking that it’s all about the money

12. Not getting over your fears in life

13. Staying in a relationship you knew had ended a long time ago

14. Not taking care of your body

15. Not finding enough time to sit and enjoy the journey

16. Not laughing at yourself enough

17. Not opening your mind to new possibilities

18. Always thinking about the past

19. Chasing money instead of seeking happiness

20. Always thinking ‘mañana, mañana’ – you’ve got to make your own tomorrows

21. Accepting only the love you think you deserve, when you should have set your standards higher

22. Not realising that it’s your own thoughts that create your world

23. Thinking that the world owes you a favour

24. Listening to reason ALL the time, sometimes you’ve got to just follow your heart

25. Not being braver

26. Not trusting yourself enough

27. Not realising that something good comes out of every bad situation

28. Knowing that you chose this life and that it’s up to you to manage it the way YOU would like

29. Letting someone else use you as a way to realise their dreams

30. Allowing yourself to follow someone else’s beliefs instead of investigating your beliefs for yourself

31. Not being honest ALL THE TIME with yourself and with others

32. Not letting the small things go, and focus on the things that really matter

What about you, is there anything you would add to this list? leave a comment below with your thoughts

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The Prison of Your Mind

The 3 lessen to learn from this video:

1. Never believe a prediction that doesn't empower you
2. You are not your condition
3. Love Yourself

Will I Ever Be Happy? Stop Waiting For The Perfect Moment

It is pretty hard to feel content in a world that is consistently offering you the “next best thing”. I mean, how can your possibly pay attention to the now when you can’t wait for the future to arrive?

Because it will be better, right? It will be bigger, faster, more efficient, more effective, more fulfilling and…perfect, somehow.

But how reliable is relying on the future? And what evidence do we have that it will bring a better life than we have now?

The only thing we can be certain of is the now; this moment you’re experiencing as you read this post. And as for the evidence of a better future, well if you’ve yet to experience a moment that truly fulfilled you, even though you have been promised it would a thousand times – by yourself and others, then the likelihood of some distant moment in the future fulfilling your insatiable desires is pretty slim, don’t you think?

The reality is that we spend far too much time mulling over the past and anticipating the future. We look to the future for prosperity and, when it lets us down, we look romantically to the past at the way things once were.

The mind is always trying to take us some place else, to somewhere better, a place we have convinced ourselves will make everything worthwhile, a place where we feel content and fully realise our purpose and place in the world.

But that place doesn’t exist in the future.

In actuality, all that transpires is disappointment. We become increasingly impatient with life as it fails to deliver the perfect picture of happiness advertised to us through a plethora of marketing mediums on a daily basis.

The more we own and achieve the bigger the discontentment grows as the gap becomes impossible to fill. We become unhappier and more stressed, more self-centered and judgemental, more anxious and sleepless, more disenchanted with the world. This impacts negatively on our relationships with others, and on our ability to connect with the true nature of things.

If I had a dime for every time I heard someone say, “Things will be better when I….,”  “I’ll be happier when I…”

When what?

• When you move house again?
• When you get a higher-paying job?
• When the kids go off to college?
• When you finally take that holiday?
• When you get a bigger car?
• When you achieve what your parents expected of you?
• When you meet Mr/Mrs right?
• When you retire with that pension you’ve been slaving to accumulate?

This perpetual cycle of desiring to get to some moment other than the one that’s in our presence is causing us mental suffering. We live in the realm of our imagination, a delusion reliant on the prospect that happiness is just one more purchase, one more action or goal away.

But what if we just stop for a moment? What if we could find absolute contentment in just being here right now?

I assure you that if you let go of the grasping for just a moment, you’ll see just how perfect this moment is and how wonderfully complete you feel.

Because no matter what is going on in your life right now and how you perceive it, this is how it was meant to be in this moment.

Every moment is part of the interdependent transience of life. Mother Nature doesn’t use a clock. There is no time, only a sequence of perfect moments that form our existence. And they can be nothing more than moments, because one only ever exists at any given time.

And if you need any more motivation to free yourself from the cage of contemplation over what the future might bring, remember that one day there will not be another moment to ponder. The cold, hard reality is that you’ll die before that perfect moment you envision ever arrives.

Every moment we wish away, ignore or dismiss as not good enough, we never get back. Conversely, every moment is ours to seize and appreciate, to love ourselves, others and this amazing world.

Don’t ignore the potential for unconditional joy and fulfilment that can be found in your life right this moment. The way you engage with this moment will have a direct effect on the next, subsequently affecting the level of opportunity and prosperity that opens up in your life.

So today, bring your mind home. Stop longing for something better to happen, to have more than you own or to be someone else, somewhere else.

There is no perfect moment to come. There will never be a more perfect moment that this one. Because this moment is absolutely as it is supposed to be.

There is no “I’ll be happy when…” moment that will fill that longing for self-actualisation deep in the pit of your stomach. And you know this to be true because every time you get to that new product, have that new partner, reach that new goal, it isn’t long before you the emptiness creeps up on you again to let you know that you still don’t have that sense of achievement and contentment you were seeking. And so you set a new target, and the cycle continues….

Your happiness doesn’t reside in the future, and it hasn’t passed you by, either. It’s right here. Step into this most beautiful moment and connect with your existence. Life is happening right now. Don’t miss out.

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"Success Is The Freedom to Do Whatever You Want To Do"

This is probably the coolest, most inspirational TED video I have seen so far!!

5 reasons why people don't follow their dream

I remember countless conversations with people telling me they have always wanted to start a business, or they have a true passion for a particular field, but in most cases it remained an idea at the back of their head, or better yet, a fantasy, something they never believed could become a reality. There are several reasons why most people don’t pursue their dreams.

1. Change – People fear the unknown. As Les Brown said, “for a lot of people, a known hell is better than an unknown paradise”. People don’t like to step out of their comfort zone. They complain about the routine but don’t want to change the routine. The idea of starting something new, something different, scares them.

2. Confidence – It takes self-confidence to decide to pursue a dream. People either think they are not capable of pursuing their dream or think they don’t deserve to live their dream. Most people don’t believe in themselves enough to trust that they can do whatever it is they really put their mind into.

3. Society – Believe it or not, society has a huge impact on how we live our lives. Society determines the major we should study in university, the career we should pick, the kind of neighbourhood and house we should live in, even the type of car we should drive. It takes a lot to ignore the path to success society has defined for us and follow our own path instead.

4. Family and friends – Similar to society, family and friends also interfere with our lives. Some people don’t follow their dream simply because they worry about family and friends’ reaction. People also rely on the support of family and friends and often get discouraged when that support is not there.

5. Fear of failure – Fear of failure is a big one! Even though a lot of successful entrepreneurs failed many times before they actually hit the jackpot, some people don’t want to get started just because they are afraid to fail.

If you have a dream and really want to pursue it, you can certainly overcome all of these obstacles and have the opportunity to live you dream. So, why not start today?

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The Body-Mind Connection

Most people are aware of the mind-body connection—how your mental processes can affect your physical state. If you feel frightened, your heart races. Being embarrassed can cause you to blush. When you think of something happy, you are likely to smile. Meditating may even lower your blood pressure. But what about the reverse—a body-mind connection? Can altering your physical state in some way affect your mental state?

Accumulating research is revealing that body position, postures, gestures and facial expressions can indeed influence how you think, feel and even behave. For example, if you wrinkle your nose, an odor may smell more unpleasant. Raise your eyebrows and you may be more surprised by something you read. How you physically lean may, oddly enough, affect your perception of size: Lean left and you’re likely to think the Eiffel Tower is shorter than when you lean right. And though it may not have worked for Lady Macbeth, recent studies have found that handwashing can have a psychologically cleansing effect, lessening feelings of guilt and remorse.

Power poses and confidence
Much of the research on the body-mind connection (called embodied cognition by researchers) has focused on various expansive (or “power”) poses, which involve open positions, with arms and elbows away from the body and chin raised—as opposed to closed postures where the legs or arms are crossed, the head is down and the body slumped or slouched over. For example, in a small study published in the journal Psychological Science in 2010, people who sat or stood in expansive poses for just one minute not only felt more powerful and in charge, they also had an increase in testosterone and a decrease in the stress hormone cortisol. “By simply changing physical posture, an individual prepares his or her mental and physiological systems to endure difficult and stressful situations,” the paper concluded.

In another study that year in the same journal, people who assumed open body positions (the ankle of one leg resting on the thigh of the other leg, and an arm resting on the back of a chair) were more likely to take action (pick a card) during a blackjack game and reported a higher sense of power than those in constricted positions (legs together, shoulders dropped, hands under thighs).

Just sitting up straight, a simple power pose, may increase self-confidence, according to a study in the European Journal of Social Psychology in 2009. Participants wrote down their strengths and weaknesses and described themselves in a variety of ways, including whether they were good candidates for a job. Those who did the task while sitting up straight, chest out (“confident” posture) rated themselves higher and had more confidence in their self-attitudes than those who sat slumped, with face looking down at knees (“doubtful” posture). That is, “fake it till you make it.”



Power poses may also help lessen pain, suggested a study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2012. People who assumed expansive yoga poses (standing with legs apart and arms raised) had higher tolerance to discomfort and pain than those in submissive (kneeling) or neutral poses (standing with hands at sides). The researchers concluded that even if you don’t have control over your circumstances, you can behave as if you did by assuming a dominant pose, which, in turn, may decrease sensitivity to pain.

Words to the wise: Research on the body-mind connection, though still in its infancy, suggests that you may benefit by paying attention to how you hold your body. If you act as though you feel powerful and self-confident, you may achieve that actual feeling due to changes in body biochemistry. A few caveats: Being aware of the phenomenon may lessen the effect. And even if you achieve the effect, it may not persist over time.

Keep in mind, too, that body postures have a cultural element, as was illustrated by a 2013 study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology that included Americans and East Asians. Though some expansive positions (like hands-spread-on-desk pose) increased feelings of power in both groups, the “feet-on-desk” power pose did not have this effect in East Asians because their cultural norms value modesty, restraint and humility. Nor would this pose be viewed well in Arab cultures, which consider it an insult to show the bottoms of shoes.

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The Puzzle of Motivation

Again a great TED talk by Dan Pink a career analyst who shows facts that there is not a clear correlation between high rewards for employees and results. In many cases the intrinsic motivation is much more important than incentives offered.  

Realizing that intrinsic rewards can give us the motivation needed to succeed at any level should be the most important reason for each of us to go and find what they are! We all need to know what our true life values are to be successful in any area of life, whether it's in business, health or relationships. 

Enjoy this great video and use your intrinsic motivation!

How To Recover From 10 Types of Demotivation

Motivation is central to creativity, productivity and happiness. Motivation is what causes us to act, and when we act, we create movement, growth and change, we feel involved, masterful and significant, we feel powerful through experiencing how we can change the world, and we create more of what we love in our lives. And all of this gives our lives purpose and happiness.

De-motivation is like snow

It’s said that Eskimos have multiple words for snow because snow is so familiar to them that they can appreciate the subtle differences between different types of snow. These additional distinctions enable Eskimos to respond differently to different types of snow, depending on the challenges and opportunities each particular type of snow is presenting them with.

Most of us have just one distinction for demotivation, which means that you’re likely to assume that you’re struggling with the same problem whenever you’re demotivated, when in fact demotivation is a category of problems that has many different distinctions within it. When you have just one distinction for demotivation, you’ll apply the same old strategies whenever you feel demotivated, which for many people looks like this: set goals, push harder, create accountability checks that will push you, and run your life using GTD methods and to-do lists. These strategies are ineffective with most types of de-motivation, and in some instances they can even make you more demotivated.

At its essence, demotivation is about you not being fully committed to act, and there are many reasons why you might be in that position. Having more distinctions for your demotivation will help you to identify the real reasons for your unwillingness to commit to action, so that you can pick the right tools and strategies to get motivated again.

Here are 10 different types of demotivation and the strategies that will help you to get motivated again (click to share – thanks!):

1.) You’re demotivated by fear

When you’re afraid, even if you’re entering territory that you’ve chosen to move into, a part of yourself is determined to avoid going forward. Fear slows you down and makes you hesitant and careful, which can be beneficial to you, but sometimes your fears are based on your imagination rather than an accurate assessment of the risks in your reality. If your fear is big enough, even if you’re also excited to go forward, the part of you that wants to keep you safe can successfully prevent you from going forward into territory that’s both desirable and safe.

How to get motivated again: To get motivated, you need to deal with your fear. Start by naming your fears so that they’re out in the open. Remember to say a gentle thank you to your fears – they’re trying to protect you after all. Then question your fears; “Why am I afraid of that happening?” “What are the chances that would really happen?” Some of your fears will slip away now.

Look at the fears that are left. What are these fears telling you about the research you need to do, the gaps you need to fill and the risk management strategies you need to put in place? Honor that wisdom by building it into your plan. Finally, consider breaking the changes you’re wanting to make down into smaller steps and focus on just the next few small steps – this will calm your fears.

2.) You’re demotivated by setting the wrong goals

Martha Beck has a great model for understanding motivation. She explains that we have an Essential Self and a Social Self. Your Essential Self is the part of you that’s spontaneous and creative and playful, the part that knows what’s most important to you. Your Social Self is the part of you that developed since the day you were born, learning the rules of the tribe and working hard to make sure that you’re safe by making you follow the rules of the tribe.

We’re all surrounded with so many messages that feed into our Social Selves and we’re keen to impress our tribe. When you feel demotivated, it’s because you’re setting goals based purely on what your Social Self wants and this is pulling you away from the direction your Essential Self is wanting you to take. Your Essential Self uses demotivation to slow you down and try to disinterest you from the toxic goals you’ve set.

How to get motivated again: Take some time to review your goals. Because your Essential Self is non-verbal, you can easily access your Essential Self through your body. Notice how your body responds as you think of each of the goals you’re trying to work on. When your body (and particularly your breathing) show signs of tightness and constriction, that’s a pretty good indication that you’re trying to follow toxic goals. If you get a constricted reaction, scrap your current goals and question all your stories about what you “should” do with your life. Notice what makes you smile spontaneously or lose track of time and set goals around that stuff instead.

3.) You’re demotivated by lack of clarity about what you want

When you haven’t consciously and clearly articulated what you want, your picture of your future will be vague. We like what’s familiar and so we resist what’s unfamiliar and vague and we stay with and re-create what’s familiar to us instead. If you’re not clear about what you want to create, then it makes sense that you’ll lack motivation to act because you’d rather stay with your current familiar reality.

How to get motivated again: If you want to create something different to what you’ve been experiencing, it’s not enough to just know what you don’t want. You need to know what you want instead, and you need to articulate a clear and specific vision of what you want to create so that you can become familiar with that new outcome and feel comfortable to move towards it. Take some time to articulate what you want and why you want it.

4.) You’re demotivated by a values-conflict

Your values are what’s important to you in life. If you have a values conflict it means that there are two or more values that are important to you but you feel that you can’t satisfy all of those values in a particular situation. This causes you to feel conflicted and pulled in different directions as you try to find ways to get what’s important to you. You might have brief spurts of motivation to work on something and then lose motivation and start working on something else or your motivation might dry up altogether because the energy of dealing with internal conflict quickly tires you out and saps your motivation.

How to get motivated again: You need to unpack your values-conflict and play mediator to get the parts of you that are advocating for different values to play on the same team again. Start with acknowledging the internal conflict. Grab a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle so that you have two columns. Write about the two different directions you feel pulled in, one in each column and summarize it with a statement of what each part wants. Now pick one column and chunk it up; “Why does this part want that? What does it hope to get as a result of having that?” Keep asking the question and writing your answers until you feel that you’ve hit on the end result that part ultimately wants. Now do the same for the other part and notice when you get to the level where the answers in the two columns are the same.

Ultimately, when you chunk up, all of the parts of yourself always want the same thing, because they’re all you. Now that you know what you really want, you can evaluate the strategies that each part had been advocating for and decide which strategy would work best.

Often once you’re clear on what you really want, you spot new strategies for getting it that you hadn’t noticed before. Sometimes by doing this exercise you’ll find ways to satisfy all of your values, but sometimes that’s not possible. If you’ve taken time to think through your values and you’ve consciously chosen to prioritize a particular value over your other values for a while, this clarity will ease the internal conflict and your motivation will return.

5.) You’re demotivated by lack of autonomy

We thrive on autonomy. We all have a decision-making center in our brains and this part of us needs to be exercised. Studies have found that this decision-making center in the brain is under-developed in people who have depression and that, by practicing using this part of the brain and making decisions, depression often clears.

In his book, Drive, Daniel Pink writes about the research that shows that when it comes to doing creative work, having some autonomy to decide what we do, when we do it, how we do it and who we do it with is core to igniting and sustaining motivation, creativity and productivity.

How to get motivated again: Consider how much autonomy you have in relation to the goals you’ve been trying to pursue. Are there areas where you feel constricted and controlled? Consider how you could gradually introduce more autonomy in your task, time, technique, location and team, and then if you’re employed, have a discussion with your manager and ask for greater autonomy in a few specific areas of your work.

6.) You’re demotivated by lack of challenge

Challenge is another crucial ingredient for motivation that authors like Daniel Pink and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience", highlight. When it comes to dealing with challenges, there’s a sweet spot. Too great a challenge and the fear becomes too great and saps our motivation (see point 1), and if the challenge is too small, we quickly get bored and struggle to stay motivated. We’re designed to be living, growing creatures and we need constant challenge and opportunities to master new skills. Without challenge, our Essential Self steps in and demotivates us as a way of telling us that we’ve departed from the path that’s right for us.

How to get motivated again: Review your goals and the projects you’re working on. Are they challenging you? Are they going to require you to grow in order to achieve them or are you treading water in your comfort zone doing only the things you know you can do? Try tweaking your goals to make them a bit more challenging, take on projects that will require you to grow and find a new thing or two to learn to stimulate yourself.

7.) You’re demotivated by grief

At the beginning of any change, we go through a phase of wondering if we should or could hang onto the way things were and grieving what we’d be losing if we make significant changes. Confusion, self-doubt, mistrust of the world around us and feeling lost are common symptoms and the bigger the change, the more powerful these symptoms. Sometimes we even go through a bit of depression and social withdrawal. Martha Beck calls this the “Death and Rebirth” phase of change in her book, Finding Your Own North Star. With all the grieving and fearing and feeling lost that goes on in this phase, it’s normal for your motivation to dry up.

How to get motivated again: If you’ve just experienced a trauma or loss, or are going through a major change and finding that there are days where you’re hit hard with Death and Rebirth symptoms, don’t try to make make yourself motivated and proactive. You can’t rush grieving and the undoing of your old life and ways of thinking and you can’t skip the Death and Rebirth phase and go straight into Dreaming and Scheming.

You need to give yourself a lot of space for nurturing and reflection. Look after your body with good food, rest and exercise. Express your grief, confusion and fears with people who can listen lovingly. Spend time in nature and with calm, loving people to center yourself. Accept every feeling and thought you have – they’re all normal and safe. Take one day at a time and go easy on yourself. Confusion, forgetfulness and clumsiness are all normal in this stage. The grieving will end when it’s ready and if you relax into it and express your grief, it’ll be sooner rather than later.

8.) You’re demotivated by loneliness

This is an especially important one for those of us who work alone from home. You know those days when you feel a bit cabin-feverish, you just don’t feel like working and you’d rather be out having a drink with a friend or playing a game of soccer? Well perhaps it’s because we’re designed to be social creatures and sometimes your Essential Self is just longing for some connection with other people and so it steps in and hi-jacks your work motivation so that you’ll take a break from work and go and spend some time with other people and give your Essential Self what it needs.

How to get motivated again: Take a break and go and spend some time with someone you enjoy. You may be surprised at the motivating impact this has and find yourself much more clear and productive when you return to your work. And then look for ways that you can begging to build more networking and joint venturing into your work.

9.) You’re demotivated by burn-out

Since I attract over-achieving Type A’s, and as a recovering Type A myself, I know that sometimes we’re banging on about wanting to get more done even after we’ve exceeded the limit on what’s sustainable. If you’re feeling tired all the time, have lost your energy for socializing, and the idea of taking a snooze sounds more compelling than the stuff you’re usually interested in, then you’ve probably pushed yourself too long and hard and you may be burned out.

Your Essential Self will always work to motivate you to move towards what you most need and away from goals, projects and ways of working that take you away from what your Essential Self craves. So if you’re burned out and needing sleep, your Essential Self may even sap the motivation from the things that you’re usually really ignited about – just to get you to meet your core needs again.

How to get motivated again: Sleep. And then when you’re done sleeping and the quality of your thinking has been restored, check back in with your Essential Self about what’s most important to you, hang out here on Charlie’s blog and start building sustainable ways of doing more of what’s important to you.

10.) You’re demotivated by not knowing what to do next

Your end-goal might be nice and clear, but if you haven’t taken time to chunk your end-goal down into smaller goals, you’ll get stuck, confused and demotivated when it’s time to take action. Some projects are small and familiar enough that they don’t need a plan, but if you’re often worrying that you don’t know what to do next and you don’t have a clear plan, then this might be the source of your demotivation.

How to get motivated again: If you want to keep your motivation flowing steadily through all stages of your projects, take time to create clear project plans and to schedule your plans into your calendar.

Use your fears to point you to the potential risks you need to manage in your plan. Write down all your, “I-don’t-know-how-to” concerns and turn these into research questions. The first part of any planning stage is research, and you’ll find new research questions along the way, so realize that conducting research should be part of your action plan at every stage of your project. Finally, ask yourself what smaller goals need to be achieved for you to achieve your end-goal and schedule deadlines for yourself.

Goal-setting and pushing is rarely the answer

Goal-setting, planning, organizing and accountability structures are often touted as the big solution to demotivation and the silver bullet that will get you creative and productive again, but notice that it’s only a useful strategy for dealing with some types of demotivation. With many other types of demotivation, goal-setting, planning, organizing and accountability structures will only make your demotivation problem worse.

Over to you…

• Have you been able to pin-point the type/s of demotivation that you tend to struggle with most?
• Have you been stuck in demotivation right now?
• What do you need and which motivation strategy is going to give you what you need right now?

This post has originally been posted at Productive Flourishing by Cath Duncan from Remembering for good.

Being Honest with Yourself is Hard

I remember talking to a psychologist once about the difficulties of social science. She told me that the easy thing about being a physicist is that most people aren’t very familiar with physics—stars, quarks and gamma rays—so if you’ve done the research and have good reasons to believe something to be true, people will take you at your word.

In contrast, most people are incredibly familiar with the subject of social sciences: people. They already have many beliefs and intuitions about how people are. Therefore, when you do the research and find out something about how people behave that contradicts their intuitions, they won’t believe you.

There’s a similar phenomenon with self-knowledge. Knowing things about yourself should be the easiest thing in the world. After all, each of us has a lifetime of research on the subject of ourselves. We are our own experts.

But that expertise can also be misleading. Not only do human brains suffer from a wide variety of well-documented biases: overconfidence, placebo, loss-aversion and prototype effects, it may even be that we are hard-wired to be self-deceptive.

Built to Lie
A common problem in doing research via surveys is that people will lie to create a favourable impression of themselves. Social desirability bias is so widespread that it can suggest conclusions which are mathematically impossible.

A 1994 survey of men and women asked them to count the number of sexual partners they have had. In this survey, men were found to have 74% more sexual partners than women.

Counting only heterosexual partners, however, you can demonstrate mathematically that the average number of partners for men and women has to be exactly the same (assuming an equal gender ratio). It takes two to tango, and likewise, for every man who has had a female partner there must also be a woman who has had a male partner.

Here we don’t need sophisticated methods to show people are lying, the math does it for us.

People don’t just lie to experimenters however, we lie to ourselves. Being willfully deceptive is hard work. There’s a chance your story will crack and the lie will be discovered. Police interviewers have long known that talking to someone long enough will often lead to them incriminating themselves because they couldn’t sustain their lie.

Lying is a lot easier if you don’t know you’re doing it. Social desirability bias doesn’t just influence what we tell other people, but what we tell ourselves. After all, if we want to maintain a rosier picture of ourselves than we actually possess, it helps if we believe that rosier picture as well.

This results in absurd statistics, such as most drivers claiming to be above average in ability. If you believe you’re the best, it’s easier to get others to believe it too.

Self-Honesty is Hard
Because we’re designed to lie to ourselves, truly knowing oneself can often be difficult. Are the motivations you pursue the genuine logic behind your actions? Or are they self-deceptions, elaborately constructed to help you pursue different goals while you can honestly claim to be pursuing something else?

One common pattern of self-deception is claiming to pursue higher motivations, while actually being driven by baser ones.

Consider drinking wine. A high motivation for only wanting to drink the finest wine is that you have well-developed and discerning taste. You, as a sophisticated, cultured individual can readily tell the difference between a bottle which costs $100 and $10. The price may be higher, but with it, comes higher quality.

Except in random, blinded taste tests, many so-called wine experts couldn’t even tell the difference between red wine and white wine.

Maybe a more cynical story is that your love of fine wine is an elaborate self-deception. The intrinsic qualities of the wine aren’t what make it taste good, but the fact that it is rare and expensive. Your brain fakes discernment on flavor, when it really cares about boosting the image that you are cultured and sophisticated.

The simple view of this story is that the two wines have no difference, and therefore you’re a gullible fool for purchasing the expensive one.

But I don’t think the simple view is correct either. When you include knowledge about the vintage and price, people will actually enjoy the expensive one more. The deception isn’t that there is no difference between the quality of the two wines, because there is. Instead, the deception is that the quality of the two wines depends solely on the flavor, omitting the knowledge surrounding it.

Picking on wine lovers is an easy target, but I believe this kind of self-deception is commonplace. Why do people prefer books to blogs? Shakespeare to soap operas? Is it actually intrinsic differences in quality or is it hidden signalling?

Untangling Self-Deception
My instinctual reaction to learning that there may be large patterns of self-deception is to correct it. After all, if we lie to ourselves constantly, how much better off would we be if we could just be honest with ourselves?

However, many of these self-deceptions are probably useful. They evolved because they were more adaptive than having to know the truth about yourself, and many of them likely remain adaptive to this day. Radical honesty is not the best policy.

Consider a friend of mine who enjoys drinking excellent wine. Does my careful explanation of the fact that his appreciation for good wine is heavily influenced by price and status help him enjoy the wine any more? It probably does the opposite, making him feel angry at me for revealing this truth or foolish for believing it. Both of us are worse off.

But even if a lot of self-deception probably is useful, an inconsistent theory of life makes decisions a lot harder. When you can’t be entirely sure of your own motivations for your behaviour, its much harder to have a stable theory of how you should try to live in the world.

The constant popularity of life philosophy, from religion to self-help, shows that most of us grapple constantly with uncertainty over the best way to live our lives. The fact that we may be hardwired with built-in self-deception seems to make that path much foggier.

Conducting Experiments on Your Own Behaviour
Science, of course, is a potent tool in helping us understand ourselves. But a science of human nature often only gives broad principles, and even those are often riddled with exceptions.

Instead, I think each of us needs to treat our own behaviour and motivations as something worth investigating. Not merely through introspection, which runs the risk of bumping into the numerous hard-wired self-deceptions, but through observation.

One way to do that is to keep a journal of your thinking about things. Write down your supposed motivations, then ask what those motivations would actually predict. Then, when you’ve had more experience, look back and see whether those predictions are true.

Maybe you believe you fear switching your career because it might set you back financially. However, when you actually make the switch you are earning less money but it doesn’t bother you. Digging deeper, you realize that you were actually worried about being criticized by the people around you.

Journalling is probably one of the best tools for combating self-deception, since you aren’t able to creatively reinterpret past experiences with the benefit of hindsight. Instead, you can examine exactly what you were thinking at the time.

Getting this kind of self-understanding may be difficult, but I can’t think of a better subject to study.

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9 SUCCESS FACTORS FOR PERSONAL GROWTH: MOVING FORWARD TO ACHIEVE YOUR BEST LIFE

There are nine success factors that you must know in order to start moving forward in life. Each one of these success factors has been proven to be critical to the achievement of the best life possible for any given person. By systematically implementing one or more of these success factors into your life, you can put your foot on the accelerator of your own career and achieve the best life for yourself.

1. EDUCATION

The first of the nine success factors is education. In our society, the highest paid people are those who know more than the average. They know more of the critical facts, ideas and information than the average person in their field. As a result, they can make a more valuable contribution to a knowledge-based society and live the best life possible. They are valued more, respected more and ultimately paid more money and promoted more often.

The rule is that, “to earn more, you must learn more.” If you want to increase your level of income and achieve the best life for yourself, you must increase your level of intellectual capital and thereby the value of the knowledge component of what you are doing.

2. SKILL

The second of the nine success factors that you can use to achieve the best life possible is simply “Skill.” Your level of ability in your field will determine the quality and quantity of your results. The better you get at what you do, the easier it is for you to start moving forward to get a particular level of results.

As you increase your skill, through study and experience, you get better and better at doing the small things that increase the speed and predictability of your results.

3. CONTACTS

The third success factor for moving forward and achieving the best life is by developing an ever-widening circle of contacts. You will find that every major change in your life is accompanied by a person or persons who either opens or closes doors for you. The possibility of the best life for you will be determined by the number of people who know you and like you and who are willing to help you.

In order to broaden your network of contacts, you must network continually, at every opportunity. There seems to be a direct relationship between the number of people you know and how successful you are.

4. MONEY

One of the most important of the success factors is “money.” Having money in the bank gives you greater freedom and the ability to take advantage of opportunities when they come along. If you are broke, or in debt, you have very few options open to you.

One of the most important things I ever learned in life is that you are only as free as your options. If you have no options, you have no freedom. If you are stuck in a dead-end job that you cannot leave because you have no money set aside, you have put a brake on your potential. You are locked in place and have no option for moving forward. You can end up spinning your wheels and losing months and years of your time by the very fact that you have no choice but to accept whatever is being handed to you.

5. GOOD WORK HABITS

The fifth of the success factors that enables you to get far more done in a shorter period of time is simply “good work habits.” Your ability to increase your ROTI, or “Return on Time Invested” can enable you to accomplish vastly more in a shorter period of time than another person who is disorganized and sloppy.

Developing good work habits requires that you think before acting. You make a list and set priorities on the list before you begin. Good work habits require that you consider the likely consequences, positive or negative of what you are doing.

6. POSITIVE MENTAL ATTITUDE

The sixth success factor for your career and life is to reduce the amount of time that it takes you to achieve your goals is by developing a “positive mental attitude.” A positive mental attitude is very much a decision that you make. Remember, you become what you do. If you engage in the same activities that positive, confident, optimistic people engage in, you will eventually become one of them and live your best life possible.

Anyone can remain positive when things are going well. It is your ability to look for the good in every situation that you see positive and start moving forward in life.

7. POSITIVE IMAGE

The seventh of the success factors you can incorporate into your lifestyle, and one that can help you achieve the best life for yourself, is the development of a positive image. People judge you by the way you look on the outside, by the way you appear. The fact is that you judge everyone else by the way they look on the outside, as well. Taking time to present an attractive image in your person, your clothing, your grooming and your accessories can have an inordinate impact on the doors that open for you and the people who are willing to help you start moving forward in your life.

8. CREATIVITY

Creativity is another wonderful way to start moving forward in life and to increase the speed at which you achieve your goals. Creativity is something that requires that you continually look for better, faster, easier, cheaper ways to get the job done. Remember, one good idea is all you need to start a fortune.

9. CHARACTER

Perhaps the most important of the success factors to accelerating your life is your character. Self-discipline combined with honesty will open countless doors for you. Trust is the foundation of all relationships. When people know you and believe in you and are convinced that they can trust you to keep your word and do what you say you will do, they will feel that they are far more likely to get the things they want through you, to get the things they want, faster, sooner, easier and with greater certainty.

Thank you for reading this article on moving forward and living the best life possible. Do you know of any other success factors that can help accelerate your life and career? Please share your thoughts and comment below!

Topics included in this article include

SUCCESS FACTORS

MOVING FORWARD

BEST LIFE

This article is from Brian Tracy, who is recognized as the top sales training and personal success authority in the world today. I really like his style and have read some of his work including the famous book "Eat That Frog!", still a few of his books are on my reading list. His work has proven to be extremely helpful for myself and many others. Hope you enjoy it too!

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