personal development

Fearing the Unknown

The unknown tends to get in the way, doesn’t it?

You want to know what questions will come up in an exam, but that is unknown until you sit down and turn the paper over.

You want the party to go well because you’ve prepared so much for it. But you won’t be sure until the party’s over.

You have a job interview coming up. You understand the type of person the company is looking for (you, of course!), but you still don’t know what type of questions the panel might throw at you.

These situations can easily eat away at you. You imagine a million and one possible scenarios and outcomes. You panic over the negative thoughts going through your head.

photo by zetson

photo by zetson

None of those million and one scenarios turn out to be the correct one in the end. Often, you’re not even close. And the negative stories always drown out the positive ones in the end.

Not exactly a recipe for clear thinking.

I noticed this before a recent family gathering. Twenty of us were meeting up from all over the country for a special meal in a posh country restaurant. One of the organisers felt a tinge of responsibility and felt that everything had to pass off perfectly. Should anything go wrong with the orders or the timing, they thought the blame would be theirs.

The stress built and built. There was no need for it. The meal was great. Was it really worth hours of stress beforehand?

It made me wonder why the unknown is so good at making us weaker at the very time we’re trying to be strong.

Then it struck me. A very simple thought that makes a lot of sense:

It is much easier to attach importance to non-events than it is to attach importance to *the* event.

Why? Because there are so many non-events swimming around your head, ready for you to re-enact whenever it suits. But there is only one actual event. And since it hasn’t happened yet, it’s easy to latch on to non-events.

It’s right to be aware of unknowns, but it doesn’t help to worry about them beyond initial awareness and preparation.

A while back, I was going for a meal with a group of old school friends with the aim to catch up and look back at our past. The food was a general focus, but the company was more important.

It could have been so easy to worry:

  • What should we talk about?
  • Will people have changed?
  • Have we picked a good enough restaurant?

But I didn’t bother. It was impossible to know what the future would hold. So I went without rehearsed expectations and concerns.

And then it all went wrong. In all the right ways…

It began when I didn’t get a starter along with everyone else. I guessed it would come along soon. After a minute or so, my friends stopped waiting and got stuck in to their food. They didn’t miss the opportunity to make a big deal of how delicious the food was!

Plates were cleared and main courses were put out. I hadn’t got my starter.

Guess what? I didn’t get a main course either.

The joke was now a big part of our conversation. Not getting my food had become the entertainment. None of us were going to forget what had happened.

None of us could have predicted this either.

The waiter asked how we were enjoying the food. This in itself got a big laugh. I replied, “I couldn’t comment on the food, because I haven’t eaten any yet”.

After explaining the issue to the waiter, he made a rather embarrassed apology and ran off to sort things out.

The thing is, he didn’t. Other staff came out of the kitchen and handed my friends their desserts. To make the hat-trick, my pudding didn’t turn up. My entire order had disappeared and, it seems, so had the waiter.

At this point, the manager was walking about and casually asked us if we were enjoying the evening. When we, still full of laughter, explained why the evening had been so great, the manager went nuts and promised to sort things out.

Finally, my starter arrived just as everyone was finishing the pudding. It felt like I’d been parachuted into a sitcom.

But the entire disaster helped to create an amazing evening. And to top things off, the manager was so apologetic about the oversight that she offered the full meal on the house and let us have more drink as a further sweetener.

Who’d have expected this to happen? When life delivers so many curveballs, what is the point in worrying about the unknown?

  • Stay calm –  Take a walk, talk to a friend, smile, close your eyes and take a deep breath, accept the uncertainty and embrace the possibility.
  • Let go of false control – Personally reject responsibility for anything that you don’t have control over. Give yourself that peace. No matter how much you wish you could control it, you must accept it when the issue is out of your hands.
  • Do more research – Worry about the unknown can develop when you don’t know enough about what you’re stepping into. If you have a question that has an answer, seek out that answer!
  • Ask for help – If you’ve done the basic preparation and you still can’t let go, reach out to others. It’s not weak to ask for help. A few words of reassurance may be all it takes to remove those fears.

Preparation is fine. Acknowledging the situation is fine. Trying your best is fine.

But is it worth going beyond the basics and attaching so much importance to non-events? After all, it hasn’t happened until it has happened.

How to Fail Brilliantly

None of us want to fail. If you could pass everything with flying colours, you would.

However, that requires work.

When you put the effort in, not everything is perfect. You have to get used to it. You’re going to fail once in a while.

original by action datsun
original by action datsun

So why not fail brilliantly? Here’s some help on how to use failure to your advantage:

  • Separate aspects of failure out of your control from those you can deal with – Control freaks don’t appreciate matters that are out of their control. Nevertheless, they exist. Anything you can deal with, concentrate on that. As for the stuff you don’t have a handle of, be aware of it as a random force.
  • Spend more time on rectifying, not blaming – Now you’ve worked out what’s outside your control, work out how best to move on. Don’t attribute blame to others in the process. Spend time more fruitfully: work with others to reach a more favourable conclusion; choose other variables/individuals with better potential; bypass the problem areas completely, if possible. Time spent solving problems is more effective than wasting time accusing others.
  • Analyse why the failure occurred – If you don’t know why events unfolded the way they did, how can you learn from the failure? Take stock of what happened before you try again. For any elements that don’t make sense, try finding out more in that area before moving on.
  • Accept – Sometimes we make the same mistakes again and again due to denial. It *has* to work this way.
    But does it really? Okay, certain situations may succeed eventually with a bit of patience and better circumstances. But most situations will fail until you do something different. Don’t be stubborn if other opportunities arise. Be open to change. You can’t be right all the time!
  • Understand which aspects of the situation *were* successful – The end result may not be perfect, but failure doesn’t mean you must start from scratch. What you do isn’t usually characterised by a succeed/fail mentality. There’s a lot of movement in between. Use the mini successes within a bigger picture fail until you have a bunch of mini-successes from start to finish.
  • Use failure as part of a process, or as a tool – You don’t pick up a tool and use it without learning a bit about it first. Even if it’s only the basics. Before mastering a process or tool, you spend time learning, developing and experiencing. Failure is one step closer to success because, without failure, success can’t happen either.
  • Be responsible – A lot of failure can be turned around by taking a bit more responsibility. Imagine working your butt off for an essay and only getting a bare pass. Then imagine all that hard work was condensed into 48 hours before the essay was due in. You knew it wouldn’t be best to leave the assignment until the last minute, but for many, that’s exactly what happens. It’s what I call a ‘covert failure’. By taking responsibility from the outset, you can manage the situation more clearly and work your butt off without breaking into a sweat. From covert failure to double win.

Now you can fail better, you may still not like failing. Don’t worry, I’ve got tips on how to pick yourself up after a fall too.

Now get out there and start failing, you awesome person, you!

9 (Random) Secrets to Success

You want success and you want it quick. What do you do?

original by lululemon athletica

original by lululemon athletica

Here are nine secrets to help in your quest:

1. There are no secrets

Busted my own post straight away. But that’s fine. Because there are no secrets. There are no quick fixes. There is no narrative. Stuff happens. As scary as that seems, it can be a whole bunch of fun too.

2. Numbers are great

I arrived at nine secrets because I quickly wrote down a list with nine points. It could have been eight or ten secrets. In fact, it could have been 100 secrets that I boiled down to nine. Whatever the case, numbers are sexy. Unless, of course, you disagree. I’m willing to be wrong about it…

3. Be Right & Be Wrong

Kathryn Shulz asks people how it feels to get something wrong. It sucks, doesn’t it? Actually, what sucks is finding out that you were wrong. Getting something wrong feels just the same as getting something right. It’s only when you find out that you feel a particular way. So there’s no harm in being wrong. Be wrong, learn from it and move on. If you’re never wrong, how can you learn anything?

4. Do Nothing & Do Everything

Comfort zones are misleading. Why does it feel so cosy when you fail to stretch yourself? How can plodding along the same old path feel nicer than a voyage of discovery? Sometimes it’s good to have fun with what we recognise. That’s where doing ‘nothing’ new is necessary. Other times it’s good to go places we’ve never even imagined. That’s where ‘everything’ else comes in to play. The old saying ‘the world is your oyster’ doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do something more than once. It means you can make good use of everything available to you. So don’t miss the opportunity!

5. Debate and engage, but don’t accuse

We have different opinions on everything. Your closest friends and family may be soulmates, yet there will always be the odd occasion when you don’t see eye to eye. It may be of no consequence, but a difference of opinion – no matter how obvious it is to you – doesn’t mean one of you is right and the other is wrong. Debate and argument is fine, but the moment you accuse someone of personally being wrong, the moment you close doors on yourself…just to be ‘right’. As soon as you start pointing out an individual or a group as ‘wrong’ or ‘stupid’ or anything negative, you’ve gone beyond a debate. Accusations are rarely helpful.

6. Move on

Once you’ve finished something, stop dwelling. You may still use it, refer to it, and have related dealings with it, but when it’s done, it’s done. Worrying about what has already been takes up valuable ‘doing’ time.

7. Make up your own secrets to success

See Point 1. It took me a few moments to jot down these ‘secrets’. I hope they help. In many ways, they help me. That’s why I noted them down. Note down some of yours.

8. Know when to stop

This ties in with Point 6. Before you move on from something, you have to finish. It can be hard to find a natural point to finish. The desire to find that non-existent ‘perfect’ is strong. As you obsess over the work, the more time you spend on less stuff. An hour spent trying to get a single sentence ‘right’ is time you could be spending more productively. When it comes to worrying over minor issues, it’s probably time to stop.

9. See Point 8.

Now you’ve got the nine secrets. That’s everything you need. Or is it?

Of course not. Secrets to success are vague. They aren’t a step-by-step guide to guaranteed brilliance and perfection. They don’t tell you what to do, but they start to outline a bigger picture. Think of it as a scaffold to greatness.

For example, Tweet Smarter’s ‘three-step program to Twitter success‘ is:

  1. Care and listen
  2. Engage and question
  3. Respond and adapt

That advice leaves you pretty open to everything. It’s up to you how to care, how to listen, how to engage, and so on. Realising the importance of these things is a good place to start though. The success will still be entirely yours, and you’ll have earned it.

Similarly, Mr.SelfDevelopment highlights ‘5 Keys to Success‘:

  1. Preparation
  2. Work
  3. Remember the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”
  4. Confidence
  5. Lead

Again, you’ve hardly been given a detailed plan to conquering the world, but those vague nuggets suggest you have to put in your own effort before success reaches your grasp.

That’s why there are no secrets (my Point 1), making it doubly important to create your own secrets (my Point 7).

What is important to you? What drives you? What spurs you on? What helps you help others? Take responsibility of what comes your way and the secrets of success won’t seem quite as secret as they did before…

Why You Are Better Than Robotic Willpower

There are many tools around that make sure you’re only doing what you’re meant to be doing. Let’s say you’re supposed to be writing. To help you stay writing, there’s software that cripples your Internet connection, that removes your social network access, and that generally takes control of what you can and can’t do.

photo by jakedobkin

photo by jakedobkin

Instead of willpower, you can set tools to force you away from temptation.

But this is damaging.

Doug Belshaw asked via Twitter:

http://twitter.com/dajbelshaw/statuses/60691447883632641

I responded:

While software like Quiet Hours will automatically switch off email and social apps for you to get on with more important tasks, it’s not all roses and butterflies:

  1. You stop working naturally – The forced nature of your work can scupper creative thinking. There’s nowhere else to go, but you’re made very aware of the fact. Choice is more open than force, so aim for that as often as possible.
  2. It feels like a punishment – Where’s the fun in removing all distractions so clinically? There’s a fine line between giving yourself a bit of peace and pissing yourself off.
  3. A ‘no ifs, no buts’ approach is restrictive – Need to quickly look something up for a reference? Well you can’t. I tried a ‘no ifs, no buts’ practice in the past, but quickly stopped. When you’re busy working and find your restrictions stop you working, it’s a bigger distraction than everything else put together. I didn’t end up screaming, but it was a close thing…
  4. Tools can’t eliminate the problem of forgetting what you were meant to be doing – I’ve walked away from writing something in order to find a quotation in a book. Half an hour later, I’m still looking through books and I suddenly remember what my initial purpose was. A five minute job took much longer than necessary. An automated shut-down tool will remove a couple of these problem points. However, it won’t stop the problem itself.
  5. You may end up believing that you cannot rectify these problems manually (i.e. yourself) – The more you rely on tools to kick you into shape, the less you’ll be in touch with your own talent and power to push on.

There’s nothing wrong with using software to help eliminate distractions. But reliance on software is dangerous. You have the power to do it yourself:

  1. Keep a to-do/task list – An easy way to train yourself to concentrate on what you’ve set yourself.
  2. Leave plenty of time for important tasks – Left until the last minute results in panic. You may be totally focused on the task, but the deadline hovering over you like a guillotine blade will be more than enough distraction.
  3. Do things in small chunks – Rather than commit to an hour on an essay, try to work for just ten minutes. Then take a minute or two off to check social networks and other distractions. Multitasking doesn’t work, so try ‘minitasking’ as an alternative.
  4. Keep ‘valid disruptions’ in check – I’ve said before, “disruptions aren’t always unwelcome, even if they are disruptive”. Be aware of this and you can work more effectively. Give yourself time to spend on the good stuff and mix it up with your other work. There’s nothing like a bit of variation!

What do you think? Would you rather automate the process of removing distractions? Do you feel better when you have control yourself? What tips do you have to stay focused?