Simple Mind Trick for Empowerment
by blogrdocWhenever I’m feeling low in enthusiasm or motivation, I always bring up this simple line of reasoning to get me back on track:
- Is life affecting me or am I affecting life?
- Am I going through the motions or am I putting things in motion?
- Am I at the mercy of my distractions; or have I tuned them out and am I focused?
- Am I being re-active or proactive?
- Am I letting my environment get the best of me, getting tossed in the waves, so to speak; or am I imposing my will on my environment?
All of these questions draw a clear line between the self and the surroundings. When the surroundings dominate the self, the feelings of despair set in.
Clearly, the environment imposes constraints, in the form of conservation of various consumables or correlation of certain variables, but from these constraints, like solving for ‘X’, we define the solution.
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8 Responses to “Simple Mind Trick for Empowerment”
By Rx4Life.info on Mar 25, 2008 | Reply
I like that phrase, “imposing my will on my environment.”
Lately, I’ve been thinking about how much I can control or actually want to control. For example, in dealings with other people, how much can you exert an influence on them, and when do you just let them “do their thing?”
By blogrdoc on Mar 25, 2008 | Reply
yeah.. it’s a bit dramatic of a phrase, but I think it gets the point across. I do it at work all the time as an engineer. At home, I wanted to cut back on our meat intake and no-one else wanted to. There was a lot of disagreement. So I just did it on my own… and magically… everyone else followed suit. Then there’s really times when there’s nothing you can do…
Check out my post on using the Jedi mind trick for more info on exerting influence on others.
By William Profet :: OneJobTwoSalaries.com on Mar 25, 2008 | Reply
This is a very inspiring mind trick :)
Asking yourself questions is like doing a search in Google. What You Ask Is What You Get.
Regards,
William
By blogrdoc on Mar 26, 2008 | Reply
I think it’s the binary nature of the question(s) that does it for me.
It’s like: ‘are you in or are you out?’
By Sam Crockett on Mar 27, 2008 | Reply
I agree. Once you phrase the question in binary form it seems so simple. Or maybe as a CS major I’m just used to thinking in those terms.
By blogrdoc on Mar 27, 2008 | Reply
@sam: Hmm… I think we’ve stumbled on something interesting here… thanks for the feedback!
By Alik on Mar 27, 2008 | Reply
I adopted Tim Ferriss’ “reality is negotiatable”. I am libra - it was pretty easy choice ;). This my “what”. The “how”? The how is a radio dial metaphor, i use my inner “radio dial” to tune in what i like and tune out what i do not. Sometimes i just shut off the radio at all…
By blogrdoc on Mar 27, 2008 | Reply
Alik,
I understand the phrase that ‘reality is negotiable’ and on some level, I agree. Especially in the case of dealing with human relationships and perceptions.
*But*, and this is really one of the themes of this blog, I find it useful to try to analyze situations to find the objective reality - which is *non*-negotiable (e.g. diet-health correlations, businesspractice-income correlations, workhabit-result correlations, lifestyle-happiness correlations). This defines the constraints. THen, I identify the ‘knobs’ which I have control over.