Prayer

I have already posted about my regular morning routine, so I'm gonna commence with my evening ritual.  The first portion is prayer.

I personally find this one a particularly interesting one, being that I am an atheist.  It seems pretty futile, even comical, that an atheist would engage in prayer at all, much less every night that he remembers to do so.  But I think there is power in ritual.  Strip it of its mystical or spiritual overtones, it still has a profound effect on one's psyche.

I'm not sure what exactly those effects are, though I'm convinced that if I were to look into them I could definitely find some pragmatic and even concrete benefits it has on your psychological health.  If nothing else, it helps me to focus on the positive and, more importantly, on being active.  Seeing, being an atheist, I hold no pretense about any omnipotent supernatural beings coming to the rescue and taking care of things for me: I realize that if I am to manifest something into reality, the burden is on me to do it.  Prayer, at least the pretenses of prayer, permits me the opportunity to pronounce what I wish to see manifested freely, without restraint.  It is an opportunity for me to declare what I would have be, removing the shackles of what is supposedly realistic or practical.  I give myself permission to dream and push my creative limits in terms of what I feel I can cause to materialize.

So I practice prayer fairly regularly.  Call it unrestrained and benign, even altruistic, goal-setting if you will.  In either case, it amounts to the same thing: willing yourself to conceive of possibilities beyond your perceived limits.

Optimism is a habit

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."
- Aristotle

I make a habit of regularly thinking positive thoughts at certain intervals during the day.  Does that sound odd?  If I contemplated it from a common sense point of view, I think it would.  I, personally, don't know anyone who does that.

But what Aristotle said struck a chord in me.  Why are we able to wake up at the same time every day?  Why can we alter our bodies through diet and exercise?  How can we build a skill or competence at something?  Habit.

Why, then, should our thoughts, our mental processes, even our personalities be any different?  What, if anything, defines a personality?  How can other people accurately say that we're happy or motivated or kind or shy or ascribe to us any other personality trait?  By observing how we normally behave.

If that's the case, then optimism, like any other dispositional trait, is just a succession of habitual behaviors, the act of continuously and repetitively being optimistic.  So my strategy is simple: Be optimistic regularly.  Three or four times a day, my bell goes off on my phone and I stop and think about why I'm happy, or what's going well, or what I did well.  It doesn't matter how trivial it might be, for just a couple moments, I contemplate only the positive.  And I think it's working.  You will be hard-pressed to find me complaining and even if I do venture into the negative, it's pretty fleeting.  It's soon succeeded by a positive outlook.  Almost as if by habit.

Basically what I'm saying is that if you want to change, if you want to be more motivated, happier, upbeat, outgoing, brave, confident, whatever, it's simple: don't assume it's never going to happen, or that it will magically happen some day.  Start changing what you do.  Rather than ask "Why aren't I happy?"  ask yourself a more productive question like "What do happy people do?  Am I doing that?"  If you're not, try it.  What do you have to lose?

Always question

I recently had a realization, and I'm going to feebly attempt to verbalize it (no, verbalize does not necessarily mean "say", it means "put into words", so writing counts. Go look it up if you don't believe me).

As people canvass life, they come up realizations as, quaintly enough, I just have.  We have experiences, we reflect upon them, sometimes with more emotion than reason, but in any case we instinctively draw conclusions.  Some of these conclusions are faulty, some not so, usually in direct correlation with the extent to which our emotions were involved in making them.  In any case, we then settle upon an assumption, which is used to make inferences in the future and even shape more solidified beliefs regarding associated phenomenon.  Simply put, our experiences shape how we view the world, some times rationally, sometimes not.

What often happens afterwards is we feel compelled to tell (or in the worst cases, lecture or preach) our newfound wisdom to those around us.  We can often feel encouraged in our beliefs when we share them with those in our closest circles.  After all, even if they don't necessarily agree with us, they still are supportive.  It is when we try to pass this knowledge on to others, particularly others who hold on to opposing views (which they came upon via profound experiences and equally deep realizations... see where this is headed?) and we run up against a stone wall that is called either a principle or close-mindedness, depending on which side of the wall you are on.  This can be immensely frustrating, and I realized why.  It's not that you are necessarily angry at the individual per se; there will always be individuals whose views are opposed to ours.  It's that you realize that if the goal of changing the hearts of an individual is so daunting, then how can you hope to have any meaningful effect on the entire world?  If the expenditure of such copious amounts of energy and effort are to no avail to just one person, then what does it take to move whole societies?  The thought is intimidating, overwhelming even.  So how is it to be accomplished?

Initially I assumed reason, logic.  Human beings have an unprecedented capacity to use critical thinking to rise above their current situation, to not be swayed by ephemeral moods and to look at events from an objective viewpoint.  The key word is capacity; this does not necessarily mean we exercise this potential or develop it.  We can be, and often are, still swayed by our psychological attachments to our identities which are wrapped up in our beliefs.  Whether or not this is "right" is irrelevant.  It simply is.

So then I started to think the solution was persuasion.  Humans are emotional creatures, there is no escaping that.  So in order to change hearts and minds we must appeal to their emotions.  Sway others to our cause, that's the solution.  But this did not sit well with me, and I soon realized why: This type of thinking is what induced masses to compromise their morals or values and allow for such atrocities as the Holocaust.  Hitler was a master of mass persuasion at the expense of reason.

So what is it?  You could mix the two and become a politician, but if you consider it, is it any wonder, then, that politicians are considered untrustworthy?  You could relinquish the dream of inspiring the masses because they are too [fill in any negative adjective you feel is appropriate, for instance "ignorant" or "blind"], while relinquishing a tiny bit of your hope, your humanity.  You could continually futilely battering people with your cold, calculated reason, or manipulating them with your impassionated persuasion.

None of these solutions sit well with me.  Then it dawned on me.  Use the oldest philosophical trick in the book: Questions.

The socratic method.

The few times I have managed to open minds or hearts, albeit only slightly, was with patient, considerate but reasoned questions.  It is the ideal mix of reason and empathy, all the while acknowledging that the other person's thoughts and opinions matter (and they do, I'm not just saying that).  Why do they matter?  Because you can never be sure that YOU are right, and if you practice this method, you are giving the other person a chance to persuade YOU with their reason, with their experience.  Scary, isn't it?  The other methods do not allow this.  The socratic method does.  As far as I can see, it is the straightest path to the truth: the alliance of two diverse minds in cooperative endeavor to take a small step closer to the truth.  A slow, ardous, exhausting process, but in the direction of truth.  If you allow another to expound his or her truth, you permit them the opportunity to persuade you.  If you allow another person his or her own thought process, you allow them to change their own mind without having to shove your agenda down their throat or swindling their rational faculties.

So I want to go back to it: questioning people's claims, asking them to examine their beliefs.

The perfect weapon against faulty reasoning?  The question "Why?".

Motivation is a habit, not a state

I remember reading or hearing something awhile ago, it had to do with motivation.  It struck a chord (or perhaps a nerve) with me in particular, because I used to wonder about all this self-motivation, affirmation, self-improvement stuff.  How come, even though I've read so much of it and practiced so much of it, do I still hit lazy spells and lose motivation?  If it's so effective how come so many people just go back to their old habits?

To answer that question, I have two questions for you:

1. How come you keep getting hungry, even though you keep eating?  You put food into your stomach six hours ago, why is it grumbling again, goddammit??

2. How come you keep feeling sleepy every night?  Didn't you just sleep 4, 5, 6 maybe 7 or 8 hours last night?  Why does this keep happening?

I hope my analogy is pretty clear, but just to be on the safe side: Your mind needs a consistent intake of motivation, just like your body needs a consistent intake of rest and fuel.

I wish I could remember which motivational speaker said this and turned the light bulb on in my head, but I don't.  I want to say it's Tony Robbins or Steven Covey, but then I might be doing a disservice to whoever actually said it.

It made sense to me because I am aware of how most people view motivation: We watch a movie like Rocky or Beautiful Mind, feel wonderful for awhile, are satisfied by that ephemeral feeling, ride it for awhile but decline to make the effort to SUSTAIN it, to keep it going, through daily, ritualistic (and often tedious) practice.  It's the quinessential story for failure: it was fun and exciting at first, became drab or tedious, and we stopped.  The same is true for health, diet, sleep and exercise: if we keep it up even when we don't feel like it, it'll stick around and results will inevitably (but precariously or randomly) appear.  If we quit, the results we have built up will stick around for awhile, but gradually disappear.

I realized this when I developed two habits: think positive thoughts consistently throughout the day, and watch something motivating, positive or optimistic every morning before starting my day.

It starts the same.  At the beginning, it's powerful and I can feel the effects tremendously: I'm pumped, ready to go, wondering why I didn't discover this (or keep this up longer) earlier.  Soon enough, I reach a sort of plateau, where I can think of a dozen "better" things to do.  Eventually, I make excuses: it's been working, I can skip once; it's not that important; I could use the time to play a little poker or check out some interesting website.  Up until now, this was enough to turn the snowball into an avalanche and eventually I'd quit, weeks or months later wondering where my motivation had gone.

Well, I'm pretty sure there's a correlation, because for the past month or so I've been forcing myself to keep up these two habits whether I felt like it or not, whether I did them well or not (kind of like how I feel writing this now.  I'm pretty sure stylistically what I'm doing sucks, but I don't care, it's more important that I do it imperfectly than use imperfection as an excuse not to do anything).  I set up a timer on my iPhone that goes off every hour and reminds me to think something positive, no matter how trivial or minor.  Every morning, some time between 7am and 7:30am, I watch at least one positive, motivating or optimistic video on YouTube, and then listen to some uplifting music.  If, for some reason, I don't have access to YouTube or videos, I read something positive or motivating.  Here are some examples:

These are just a few examples.  Some small, seemingly trivial, some major.  I don't care, whatever makes me want to work harder, exhaust my effort more and contribute.  Watch and GO.  And it's been having an effect.  It's starting to feel natural, just like eating, drinking or sleeping.  It's slowly becoming an integral part of my day, to the point that I actually feel weird or icky if I don't do it.  People who exercise regularly will probably understand what I'm talking about: even if you don't really feel like doing it, you know you'll just feel "wrong" if you don't, so you do it, without really even thinking about it.  Speaking of which, it's about time for me to do a bit of exercise.

Try it.  Every single day, for at least one month, preferably more.  Even if you don't feel like it, even if it's cumbersome or you're tired.  Just do it.  See if it doesn't make a difference.  If it doesn't, you'll have wasted a total of 150 minutes of your month, maybe less.  You were going to waste that watching TV anyway.

If you're not sure what to watch, here are some channels you can check out:
Sean Stephenson
Brian Tracy
Positively Positive
Eric Thomas the Hip Hop Preacher

Or, just check out the "Motivation" and "Positive Videos" playlists on my channel.

 

every morning

Every morning I wake up and yell "Good morning!" as loud as I can, throw open the curtains and make the bed before I have time to realize how sleepy I may (or may not) be that day.

I then ask myself an empowering question.  This morning it was "What am I excited about today??"

Then I set my timer to go off once a hour and make sure there's a positive thought going through my mind at the time.

Then I listen to pump me up music while I exercise.

Then I get some breakfast and take a shower.

Then I watch motivating videos on You Tube while I work until I feel like I'm gonna cry.

One way to start a morning

It's been awhile, so you'll forgive me if my normally beautiful prose style is a bit less than adequate.

In any case, I'm still working on self improvement on a day-to-day basis, particularly in terms of motivation.  I'm pretty much fully focused on a business venture, and I realize that just like the maintenance of one's physical health, mental and psychological health is a day to day practice, an ongoing process, not something you plug in once and then is complete.

Quite awhile ago I read Tony Robbins' book "Awaken the Giant Within."  I am now a fan of Tony Robbins and highly recommend that book, particularly for anyone who feels lost or like they have no direction in life.

Among a myriad of other things, one concept that I got from the book that I've turned into a practice is the habit of asking yourself empowering questions.  I choose one question a day and focus on it.  It's one among many other things I do to get myself going.  Here are my particular questions:

Monday: What am I happy about in my life now?
Tuesday: What am I excited about in my life now?
Wednesday: What am I proud of?
Thursday: What am I grateful for?
Friday: What am I enjoying in my life right now?
Saturday: What am I committed to in my life right now?
Sunday: What do I love?  Who loves me?

Tony Robbins recommends asking all of these quetions every time, but I'm a bit pressed for time, and I found myself rushing through them rather than really contemplating them and allowing my responses to resound through me and really inspire me.  What questions you use in particular, why, how many and how often you ask are not that important; the central idea is to make them positive and inspiring, and hopefully in a way that charges your creativity.

Passion

Watching a video on YouTube on being successful.  This is why I add motivating videos to my favorites.  Sometimes I get lost, or stray, or have to make a choice.  And it's hard.  But sometimes the right message at the right time sets me back on my path.

There are two questions that popped in my mind after watching the video:

1. What am I willing to sacrifice everything for?
2. Even if I could never ever make any money from it, and I had to be poor or broke my entire life no matter how hard I worked at it, what would I STILL do?

The answer was twofold: write and inspire.

I would write stories, movies, books, songs, whatever, that inspired people.  I would write tales of courage, battle, struggle, hardship and overcoming.  I would let people know that life is not easy, but it's worth it, and it can be joyful.

The crossroads I am at has to do with relationships.

I absolutely adore my girlfriend and she is one of the greatest people I have ever met.  But I also love the adventure of the completely free and single life.  I must choose.  But this is not about women and it's not about my girlfriend, it's about my path.  The only thing that matters is what is going to fuel my creative energy, and how can I learn to inspire and connect with people more?  It's a simple question and, like most simple questions, hard.

Here's the video, in case you're curious.