3dmindsolutions.com

Photo credit: missyredboots from morguefile.com

There’s research that suggests that having too many options causes us to be more indecisive. A study found that when presented with 24 varieties of jam to sample for free at a grocery store, 60 percent of people passing by tried a sample while only 40 percent tried some jam when there were just 6 varieties. The interesting thing, though, is that only 3% of the people in the larger group bought jam, while 30% of people from the smaller group with the smaller selection actually ended up buying jam.  When given more choices, people more often than not choose to avoid choosing!

There’s more to this than our jam-buying habits, however.  There are so many instantly-gratifying distractions out there-movies, tv, and only millions of things on the internet-that it’s easy to procrastinate. That’s not the only thing that stops you, however. We also tend to have lots of things on our to-do list, and doing one thing means something else isn’t getting done.

When that list gets too big, the result is overwhelm and paralysis. You may want to kick yourself for not getting anything done, but sometimes the reality is that no one else would either. You have to take a look at your environment, physical and mental, and figure out how you’re sabotaging yourself. Sometimes the best remedy is to cut away not just the distractions, but the goals that end up becoming distractions as well.

The truth is that you can only juggle so many commitments at once. Some people may be able to handle more, but they’re not important. What can you handle right now? I say right now because you can’t use the excuse of being able to learn to handle more because you’d just be avoiding facing something you’ve probably been denying all along if any of this resonates with you so far…

You’re not all-powerful. You can’t do everything. You’re not perfect.

It’s okay. No one else is, either.

Some times when we have too many goals, as soon as we run into sticking points we turn toward another goal and leave the first one unfinished. This wouldn’t be so bad if we actually finished the second thing at least, but usually a third thing pops up.  Maybe that third thing goes unfinished when you go back to the first. The result is a lot of things that get started but very few that get finished.

So cut it out. If you have this problem, find only one or two things you can focus on and see them through to completion. If you’re not sure where to start, figure out what your priorities are first. If you have difficulty with that, get some help from someone else.

The goal here is to simplify, simplify, simplify, which research has shown to help with a jam.

P.S. Here’s the actual research article, courtesy of Columbia Business School.

Photo credit: darnok from morguefile.com

Kicking yourself when you do something wrong is perhaps the worst possible thing you can do… But we all do it anyway.  Studies by psychologist Paul Bloom (The Moral Life of Babies – NYTimes.com) suggest that from as early as 6 months old, babies have a tendency toward rewarding good behavior and punishing bad behavior.  It may just be perfectly natural for us to want to punish ourselves when we do something we consider to be “bad.”

Of course, it’s perfectly natural to feel bad when we hurt someone else, but there are lots of times when we don’t even hurt other people where we still feel bad and still feel the need to punish ourselves. Maybe you’re not as attractive as you feel you should be, or you’re not the right weight. Maybe you don’t make as much money or have as much status as you think you should. Maybe, if you’re a self help buff like me, you feel like you should have better habits or somehow just be better than you are right now. These are all stupid little things that don’t hurt anyone but you and yet you may still kick yourself for them. That’s because somehow it just feels right.

We tend to think of this as a way of motivating ourselves. After all, we don’t want to feel good about that thing we think is bad, right? If these bad habits felt good then we might never escape from them, right? Because of this line of thinkng, we embrace that feeling of “bad” because we think it motivates us to avoid the things about ourselves that we think are bad.

But of course, as usual, we’re wrong.

It’s hard wired into our brains to move towards the things that make us feel good and actively avoid the things that make us feel bad. If you attach bad feelings to a habit that you do all the time, such as smoking, or to an everyday state of being, such as your weight or your job, you will feel bad all the time.

Because we are hardwired to avoid feeling bad, if it’s something that you cannot escape you instead have to distract yourself by feeling good to counteract it. Bad habits such as smoking or eating junk food that causes you to put on your weight are there because they do make us feel good. Because these things make us feel good, the worse we feel the more we want them so we can feel better.

Because kicking yourself makes you feel worse, that actually makes the problem worse. When the problem just keeps getting worse you end up feeling anxious, discouraged and even depressed, and from there you can pretty much kiss any motivation you have to change goodbye.

So in order to stay on track, part of any goal to change should also include either taking the time to build a stronger acceptance of yourself so that you can be okay with your flaw or use something like 3D Mind to clear out the emotions that cause you to want to kick yourself in the first place.

Hopefully this helps to clear things up if you’re wondering why you can’t seem to keep your motivation going on your New Years resolutions.

Our brains have this amazing ability to distract, confuse, and dismay us as a way of avoiding things.  It’s totally natural, too.  We naturally want to avoid things that make us feel bad, and gravitate to things that make us feel good.  When faced with the deadly duo of having to do something that makes us feel bad (such as sitting down to write an article for your website, doing homework, or cleaning a messy house) and the possibility of doing something else that makes us feel good (screwing around playing video games, watching TV, or checking Facebook obsessively) we, of course gravitate toward the good feeling.

The thing about our brains, however is that they value things by comparison.  The difference between 3 and 30 is big, the difference between 30 and 300 is bigger, the difference between 3 and 3003 is huge, but 3000 pounds compared to 3003 pounds isn’t much of a difference at all and doesn’t seem significant.  The same goes for emotions.  When you feel pretty neutral, feeling good seems, well, good, but when you feel like crap, feeling good seems like a GREAT idea.

The power of that contrast sometimes makes the good feeling so darn tantalizing that it’s almost irresistible.  It seems like something that you REALLY want to do…

Unless you neutralize the bad feeling you get from something you’re trying to do.  Then you become much less distract-able.

That’s how you take care of procrastination quickly and easily.

Make sense?

It’s a multi-billion dollar industry, you know.  There are thousands of different books, tapes, CDs and DVDs out there.  There are hundreds of different techniques and theories and guides on how to live the right way.  It can be pretty confusing.  And most of it is crap.

You see, the reason there is such a variety of viewpoints out there is that no one really knows for sure what works.  Most people just grasp at straws and are quick to celebrate anything that seems to work.  And then there’s the fact that people are desperate.  Desperate people do crazy things.

There’s an easy way to not get caught in it, though.  Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I worked 3D Mind with a great guy who’d made a mistake, and it cost him. There was a car accident and he was sober, but someone else died and so he went to prison for over a year. Obviously, it wasn’t a pleasant experience, but his time in prison isn’t the focus today. It’s how it affected him later and what the simple cause of his problem really was.

He came to me because he was afraid to go out on the town. He didn’t want to run into people who he’d worked with before he went to prison and lost his job and have to talk to them about it. He wasn’t comfortable talking to his friends about it either. Also, he was avoiding meeting up with a friend he’d made in prison who’d recently gotten out. My client had gotten a basic counseling certificate while in prison and discovered that he enjoyed helping people, so he wanted to help this friend adjust to life after prison.

But he kept avoiding all this with a desperate need to put it all behind him. Now, many people would say that putting it behind you is a good thing, and I generally agree, but the problem was that it was in front of him constantly. It was getting in the way of simple things he wanted to do, like meet up with old friends and continue on with his life. That’s where it crosses the line past regretting the past and causing a problem. Read the rest of this entry »