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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.

For the last couple of years, I have to admit that I’ve been bumbling around a bit, trying to figure out exactly what I want to be doing.  To be honest, I consider myself a failure in that I’ve achieved some of the goals I’ve set for myself, but they’ve only been small, average goals and I haven’t really set BIG goals.  Now, setting big goals in itself is not the important part.  People who tell you that big goals are what you need to really be successful tend to be stuck in an overly-positive delusional mode of thinking that is destined for failure.  I didn’t have that problem.

What I did have were fears of stepping out of my comfort zone and stepping up to the challenge of living up to my potential.  Having the ability to change your own mind is a lot of power… and a lot of responsibility.  It’s pretty comfortable to be just a regular guy, and much less intimidating.  I didn’t step up and do the things I knew I needed to do to get my ideas out there and make this site worth reading.  I pretty much kept my ideas–and my doubts–to myself.  The thing, though, is that I didn’t consciously dodge all this.  I didn’t intend to be lazy.  What happened–and this happens to everybody–was that I ran into a few emotional obstacles I had trouble tackling, and when I couldn’t seem to do anything about them I ignored them and lived my life around them.

That’s how the mind works, after all.  We build invisible walls around ourselves, all within our own mind.  We tend to avoid the things that make us uncomfortable or afraid, and that includes avoiding thinking about them.  Pretty soon, we’re thinking about anything BUT the things we’re avoiding and they tend to seem less important.

To get back on track, you have to start to look for those invisible walls.  That’s what I’ve been doing.  This post isn’t about me admitting to being a failure, however.  I don’t feel any shame for getting off track.  I realized shame is one of those things that gets in the way of getting back on track because if I can never admit that I screwed up, I can’t start honestly examining myself and where I’m at so I can make improvements.  I’m not obligated to feel bad for not being perfect.

I’m writing this post to make an announcement.  It is time to change this site.  While I am probably going to re-do the look of the web site, what I really want to change is the content and some of the ideas.  You see, quite a bit of what I have up here was written several years ago.  At this point, many of my ideas have changed and matured along with my understanding.

I’m going to take everything down and start from scratch. I’ve struggled with making some important personal changes, and because I’ve struggled I’ve had to put a lot of work into understanding what really does and doesn’t work.  Working with other people can be rather easy since it’s easy to see someone else’s problems.  Being able to see through your own problems is a really tough one… but I find it’s a skill that can be learned if you know what to un-learn.

In the next month, I’m going to un-do this website.  Then I’m going to start doing things a better way.  I like you to join me.

3D Mind is all about getting to the root of what’s going on.  One thing that makes it difficult sometimes, though, is that after the initial reaction or belief that sears itself into the mind, we have reactions to that reaction.  We beat ourselves up after the fact.  We try to make sense of why we didn’t meet our own expectations with a judgment of ourselves.  From there, we elaborate on the judgments we made until we have a whole host of reasons to blame other people, the world, and ourselves.

I’m lazy.  I’m a loser.  I can’t do it.  I’m not good enough.  I’ll never be…  These are all excuses and rationalizations we make to explain what went wrong because what really happened was too quick for us to notice.  We felt something and reacted and tried to explain away the aftermath, but instead only confusing the issue. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been working at personal change, both for myself and others, for at least a few years now.  If there’s anything I’ve noticed that’s a real pitfall when one is trying to change, it’s giving up.    And everyone does it.

I mean, we’ve spent our lives trying to avoid the things we’d really like to overcome.  If we didn’t want to avoid them, then they wouldn’t be a problem in the first place!  It would be great if it were simple enough to just immediately get over the problem and not have to sweat it.  Even with 3D Mind, though, sorting out your mind, behaviors and life in general is still a lot of work.  It’s easy to fall back on the behaviors we’re trying to change.

That’s life.  Unfortunately, it’s hard to examine ourselves in a completely objective way like an engineer programming a computer.  In a way, we ARE the computer, so any programming we do on ourselves can be muddled by what’s already there.  That just means it takes more work to see through our own mental crap to get to the other side. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a popular topic… and a good one at that.  I was reading Bart Loos’ blog a few days ago and he shared something pretty important.  Another coach told him, “Motivation is the feeling you need, to be able to do what you didn’t want to do in the first place.”  Bart, being a 3D Mind guy as well, pointed out that the best way to “motivate” yourself is to clear out the beliefs that keep you from wanting to do whatever it is you need to do.

Now, with this in mind, a 3D Mind buddy asked me about setting goals and staying focused.  I figured this would be a great topic to talk about.

Basically, I asked him what his goal was.  He wanted to learn more about web design and was having problems focusing on it.  The problem with that is that learning is NEVER a goal.  Learning is only a means to an end.  Now, that end could be satisfying curiosity, killing time, allowing someone to feel educated or important, or accomplishing something, but regardless of the intent learning is always a means to an end instead of a goal.  This is because learning is a process, and processes can’t be a goal.

So we narrowed it down.  What was the learning for?  So he could make money on building websites.  Now this is where most people create problems for themselves.  They think that money is a motivator.

It isn’t. Read the rest of this entry »