Steve Pavlina – Page 3

Commitment

Consider what happens if you always keep your options open, especially when it comes to your work, relationships, and personal growth. Keeping your options open means you don’t really commit and invest. This is fine if you want to play it safe, play the field, or explore for a while. There’s tremendous value in exploration. But at some point you’re likely to want to plant your flag and more deeply explore a meaningful commitment. Commitment-free exploration has its limits.

Have you run into such limits yet? Is keeping your options open starting to feel stale, boring, frustrating, unsatisfying, or just plain blah?

Do you honestly expect to wake up each morning feeling excited about a commitment to nothing in particular?

A spicier commitment could be a long-term relationship, a business or career path, a skill set, a core area of self-development, or really anything that you consider investment-worthy. What makes you want to shove all your chips into the pot and say, “I’m all in”? If nothing comes to mind, I’d say you have an inner stature problem, and that’s likely to hurt your social life as well.

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Trust Your Own Intelligence

Steve Pavlina:

In the long run, it’s more important to learn to trust your own intelligence than it is to be right. At first your self-trust may be misplaced. You may very well find that you make a lot of dumb decisions by trusting yourself ahead of people who seem to know more. But through this process of failure, you’ll develop your intellectual capacity and expand your awareness, and soon your self-trust will be justified, and you’ll begin making some really empowering decisions that actually generate results.

The reason for self-trust becomes clear when you consider the alternative, which is never to fully trust yourself. You can’t really behave intelligently if you can’t trust your own decisions and act on them. Imagine what would happen if your computer was always doubtful about its computations, so it figured it was best not to share the results with you for fear of being wrong. It would be useless. And it’s fair to say that a human being who cannot trust him/herself is somewhat useless, in the sense that s/he is living far below his/her potential. But in that case, the most likely outcome is that this person will end up serving whatever goals social conditioning imparts. In the USA this means getting a job, going into debt, and gaining weight, among other things.

It’s fine to put more faith in your scuba instructor when you know nothing about scuba. That isn’t a self-trust issue. Self-trust comes into play when you make the big decisions of your life, such as those involving your career, your choice of mate, your spiritual beliefs, and how you will live. It isn’t intelligent to let your parents, your spouse, or your social conditioning make these decisions for you. I guarantee that if someone else makes these decisions on your behalf, your results in life will be nothing but a pale shadow of your true potential.

Trust your own intelligence, even when it doesn’t seem warranted to do so.

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Creating Clarity

Steve Pavlina:

Proactive people are clear about what’s important to them and why. They cut through the clutter of uncertainty to make decisions and take action. Reactive people, on the other hand, allow themselves to wallow in a fog of uncertainty, forever reacting to events and circumstances that seem beyond their control.

When you live reactively, you do give up control, but you can never give up responsibility. To the degree that you fail to make decisions for yourself, someone else will come along and make those decisions for you, whether it be your parents, your spouse, your boss, the media, or societal conditioning. After a time you’ll find yourself enduring a life you never really wanted… always working to fulfill someone else’s goals and never your own.

Proactive people accept that it’s impossible to avoid responsibility for one’s results in life, so they jump in and participate willingly. Instead of living as mere statistics and playing follow-the-follower, they make conscious choices based on their unique values, beliefs, and goals. Consequently, they enjoy a sense of passion and purpose that is forever denied those who live reactively.

Freeing Up Energy

If something isn’t working for you — be it your current work, your living situation, a relationship, etc. — should you quit it as soon as possible, or transition out of it?

Steve Pavlina explains:

The answer depends on how quickly you want to free up the trapped/stuck energy and get it flowing again. The more energy you free up, the faster you can go in pursuing other changes.

And initially, a great way to leverage this is to free up small bits of stuck energy and then use that to free up even more.

For me a huge improvement in my flow happened after my divorce finally went through. I had a lot of stuck energy in that relationship, and shortly after the divorce was done, so many things started falling into place, like getting my website update project done.

Dan Sullivan suggests making a list of your top procrastinations and prioritizing them by which ones you think would free up the most energy – energy that you can then apply to further growth and improvement. Make those items your to-do list. That’s basically his recipe for going at 10x speed.

For instance, one of my areas of stuck energy was not having any lead magnets. So I blasted through that with the recent 10-day challenge. That freed up even more energy, so it’s speeding up how fast I can go…

The more of your energy is stuck/trapped in various things you’re resisting on some level, the slower you’re able to grow and change. The more of that energy you free up, the faster you can go.

Even donating a bunch of stuff from my garage helped increase the flow. Every little bit counts – clearing out your email inbox, cleaning up your kitchen, etc. Wherever there’s trapped energy, it’s friction that puts the brakes on.

How can you tell where there’s trapped energy? You keep noticing something that isn’t changing much, and you somehow want it to be different.

How can you tell when the energy is flowing? You feel excited, happy, grateful, enthusiastic, in love with life, etc. You’re riding the waves and having fun.

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Edgy Goals

Steve Pavlina:

If you’re the type of person who got into trouble when you were younger, always getting punished for this and that, why are you trying to play it straight today? If you struggle to achieve relatively straightforward goals, perhaps you’re not the kind of person who can play it straight and expect to succeed. Perhaps you’re too much of a rebel for that strategy to work.

The key breakthrough was when I asked a simple question:

What can I do that feels edgy, rebellious, and fun but isn’t illegal?

What might be against the rules? What might push some boundaries? What would have some element of risk?

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Achieving a Quantum Leap

Steve Pavlina:

Most of the time when people pursue personal growth, they simply don’t invest enough time and energy in a consistent direction to achieve a quantum leap. Maybe you’ve read a book on getting organized, and while you were reading it, the positive energy you experienced moved you closer to making a leap. You felt fairly certain at the time that this was going to work. But then you finished the book (or got sidetracked and didn’t finish it), and the impact of the book gradually faded. You never reached the quantum leap that allowed you to break through to a new level of order in your life. Over a period of days or weeks, your old pattern reasserted itself. Sound familiar?

But it wasn’t the book or the ideas themselves that failed you. The problem was that you didn’t invest enough sustained energy in the same direction to achieve the quantum leap. You never reached the point of no return. Reading a single book was only a small, short-term nudge, albeit in the right direction.

And:

One reason people fail to achieve a quantum leap is that they make only a meager effort in these four areas. They don’t get really clear about what they want and keep their goals in their face every day. They invest only a few hours in education instead of several hundred. They maintain an environment that fails to reinforce their new identity. And they continue to cling to people who hold them back. Year after year they remain stuck in unfulfilling careers, unhealthy bodies, stagnant relationships, and incongruent belief systems.

And:

So what does work? How do you achieve a quantum leap? You need to exert some effort in a particular direction where you want to grow, and you need to consistently sustain it until you achieve a quantum leap. If you stop short, you’ll likely fall right back to where you started. So first of all, if you’re going to target a new quantum leap, you need to commit to sustaining that effort until you hit the leap.

This is why I say personal growth is very hard. Effecting a quantum leap is tough work. It requires a strong force of sustained effort, and you can’t let up until you hit the leap. If you get sidetracked for too long, you have to start over again.

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Creating Abundance

Creating Abundance / Steve Pavlina

Steve Pavlina on creating the vibe of abundance:

What I do is I’ll sit down or lie down on my couch, and I’ll close my eyes and I’ll simply imagine the new reality I want to experience. If I want to have money flowing through my life, then I’ll imagine that. I’ll imagine it as real and feeling good to me — I’m already there and I’m seeing it fully associated, so I’m imagining whatever scene I’m seeing, I’m seeing it through my own eyes.

It’s not the visualization that’s so important; the visualization is merely a tool to create the vibration, to create that feeling. I have to get in that mindset of asking myself, okay, if I was already there, how would I really feel about reality? If I already had massive financial abundance, how would I feel? What is the feeling that would come up in me?

And:

The first time you do this you may only be able to lock into that emotional signature for maybe thirty seconds or a minute. It might take you awhile to visualize the right way of thinking about it, such that you’re creating those feelings.

Just keep doing it again, do it twenty minutes a day, every day. The goal here is to get good at doing it during those twenty minutes, so you really get good at locking on to that emotional feeling. Eventually you will figure something out, you will picture some scene that will make you feel just so abundant.

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Visualizing Your New Reality

Steve Pavlina:

Put yourself in the shoes of that new person. Witness through his/her eyes how s/he goes through a typical day. Imagine that you’re in an episode of Sliders or Quantum Leap.

What time do you get up in the morning? Who’s sleeping next to you? Where are you? How do you feel? What do you eat for breakfast? What do you do in the morning, afternoon, and evening?

You must imagine yourself as already being there. You want to reach the point where it feels natural and normal to be there. After all, this is your reality, isn’t it? So of course it will feel normal in a way. You’re already used to it.

And:

Ideally, visualizing your future should be very much the same as remembering your past. Just as you would recall and mentally review what you did yesterday, that’s how you want to imagine your new reality. What are the highlights of your typical day, and how do you feel about them?

Notice that emotional memories are much stronger than routine events. Such memories can draw the past back into your present, but they can also draw a powerful future into your present if you create powerful new memories of the future.

And:

Don’t just visualize one small part of your new reality, such as having more money come to you. Visualize the entire alternate reality you wish to enter, in as much detail as possible.

It’s okay to focus on one area of your life at a time. I personally find it rather difficult to visualize a whole new life for myself that covers career, finances, health, relationships, my daily habits, spiritual development, personal development, etc. So I generally focus on one area at a time, but I do my best to make sure it’s congruent with my desires in other areas too.

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Imagine

Big Sean:

Imagine you had everything you wanted. Everything.

Imagine you were everything you ever wanted to be — and capture that feeling. That’s the easiest way to manifest what you want.

Steve Pavlina:

My recommendation is for you to sit in quiet meditation for about 20 minutes each day, and imagine yourself already where you want to be. But imagine yourself changing into the kind of person who already has your desires manifested. Feel what he feels. Think what he thinks. Vibrate as he does.

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Feed Your Power to Your Desires

Steve Pavlina:

What kinds of life experiences have you been putting off? What sorts of goals always seem to get shoved to the bottom of your to-do list, drowning in false prerequisites? What would you finally do if you already had the perfect body and unlimited financial abundance? Start feeding your power to those desires right now.

If you want to travel, then feed your power into travel. Start planning and scheduling your first trip today. Buy a ticket. Make a reservation. Set a date for a road trip. Ask around till you find a free couch you can sleep on. You don’t need to get rich first. Just go do it, and stop piling unnecessary crap in front of that desire.

If you want a new relationship partner, then tell the whole world what you’re looking for. Don’t keep it a secret. Don’t feed your power to some people’s adverse reactions. Boldly and unashamedly proclaim what you want. If anyone has an issue with it, tease them about it. Own your desires. How else will your potential partner know you’re looking for someone just like him/her? If you want someone yummy to cuddle at night, then feed your power directly into that.

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