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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.

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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.

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People love stories, so much so that it seems to be hard-wired into us. We’re always looking for ways to make sense out of the random events in life and find a way to relate them to ourselves.

We gotta stop it.

Here’s the thing. We feel before we think, and problems are created by associated emotions that push us into reflexive behaviors. If our bad habits and phobias and problems are reactions that happen without thinking, why do we think so much?

We do it to make sense of our reaction to ourselves after the fact (even if after the fact is only a split second after you start feeling drawn to act out the problem)  and we try to justify and explain what’s happened or what’s happening. This helps us feel more in control of our lives, but the downside is that sometimes we can’t (or don’t want to) come up with an explanation right away and so we create reasons why we can’t understand what happened.

The 2 most common reasons that ensure you’ll never change the behavior are that the problem is unconscious and there’ a deep-rooted core belief, and both of these causes can’t be solved without a lot of work. You need lots of Freudian-style digging or deep hypnosis to root out unconscious stuff. As for core beliefs, you may even have an idea of what the core belief is, but the fact that it’s a core belief means you’ll have to spend a long time trying to dig it out. Both of these reasons make it seem like changing the problem will be a HUGE undertaking.

And then there’s the little voice that sometimes asks, “what if it’s buried deep for a reason?” That alone takes the problem and turns it into something that’s caused by the mental equivalent of a monster under the bed.

Watch out! You might not like what you find in the darkest recesses of your mind, and it may even destroy you!!

Except that’s all a lie.  Try looking at it a different way.

The feelings that cause your problem are just feelings. There’s nothing special about them. They don’t have a deeper meaning. They’re not caused by beliefs.  There’s nothing dangerous or scary. They’re just reactions you have, and if you learned those reactions once, you can un-learn them.

Looking at it that way takes away all the extra stories we tell ourselves and simplifies.

That’s important, because change is simple.

Think about it. Where in your life have you been making your problems more complicated than they really are? What happens if you take that all away? You might find yourself thinking about your problems in a different way.

The holiday season is here, and just around the corner it’ll be time for new years resolutions. They always seem like a good idea, so everyone has them.  I even have one (and I’ll tell you what it is in a bit.) There’s just something about starting fresh, isn’t there? It makes us feel like there’s a new beginning and maybe this time will be different…

Right?

Unfortunately, no. One of the problems with making a personal change is that our brains trick us using what Tom Vizzini likes to call “mind traps.”  These are flaws in our thinking that seem reasonable but really trip us up.  one of the biggest mind traps is called the mind trap of contingency.

The way this one works is simple.  We naturally try to avoid things that are unpleasant, and anything that allows us to do that seems like a good idea.  We devote all our energy to that thing because it relieves us of the stress of the thing we want to avoid.  This is the basis of procrastination, but a contingency mind trap adds one more thing.

A contingency mind trap happens when we decide that we have to do something before we can do something else and we essentially create a new problem to distract us from the original one.  For instance, focusing on getting up early to go to the gym.  In this case the problem becomes learning to get up earlier and once you can do that then supposedly you’ll be able to exercise.  It’s the idea that if we solve one problem, the problem we’re avoiding will become easy.  Of course, it never works that way.  In the example, you wouldn’t be able to get up early because in doing so you’d end up going ot the gym.  The real solution is to be okay going to the gym, no matter what time you’re going.

We like to think that if we can find the perfect time, place, or supporting circumstances in which to do something then the problem will fix itself.  If we don’t deal with the problem itself, however, we might spend forever trying to chase the perfect circumstance.

So let’s look at New Years resolutions.  We like to think that if we can create the right plan, or the right resolution we’ll be able to finally change.  We like to believe that if we have a set starting point (after the year is over) we’ll feel good aobut making that change.  We like to believe that starting fresh means that we can forget the old failures that held us back during the previous year.

But this just allows us to spend all our time thinking about making that resolution instead of tackling it right away.  By deciding to wait until the new year to tackle a change, you’ve set up an unnecessary contingency.  It feels good to think you’ve got a new starting point, but the closer you get to the actual date of starting the resolution, the scarier it will get and the more you’ll want to avoid it anyway.

The only way to get around that is to just to make that change, NOW.  I know it’s scary or intimidating.  That’s okay and perfectly natural.  The more you get in the habit of putting it off, though, the longer you avoid making that change and the harder it becomes.

If you think about it, how many years have passed in that way already?

Here’s my New Year’s Resolution.  I’m going to stop wasting my time with excuses and focus on growing my 3D Mind practice.  But I’m NOT going to wait until January 1st of next year to start.  There’s a lot I need to do to add content to my website and establish more of a presence online.  I need to write more and share my perspective with the many people who are stuck in limited ways of thinking and can’t find their way out.  I’d like to revise my website to more closely coincide with what I’ve learned about personal change and 3D Mind in the last couple years.  It’s going to take a lot of work to make people more aware of what I can do for them and to create the kind of website and the kind of business that I want.

And if I focus on all that, I’ll never get a damn thing done.

I want to work with more clients, so I’m going to do something NOW to make that happen.  For ANYONE who is reading this, I’m offering you 3 free sessions, no strings attached.  If there is something that you want to change, email me right now at dave@3dmindsolutions.com and we’ll get started on making that change right away. 

Skip that New Year’s resolution and get the life you want now instead of later.

Dave

Last month, I had my 10 year high school reunion. A lot of people look forward to something like that with trepidation, going so far as to make excuses for not going. But not me.

I was really, really curious. 10 years is a long time, and people change. I know this for a fact, after all.

I think what I wanted to know most, though, was if I had really changed. Over time, small changes add up, but unless you have something to compare it to, it seems like you haven’t gone anywhere.

It WAS very different, and so was I.
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