Love, Laugh, Live

I have read many books so far. Several hundreds of them. But on Monday I started reading the BEST one ever!

Now you are probably wondering what the book is…but I am not going to tell you. YET! (follow my next posts and you will find out)

But what I do want to share with you from the book is how to get out of you comfort zone. FAST!

Short Answer:

DO something outrageous! Something you would normally not even consider doing.

Okey, now just before you start putting this into practice, here are some examples of outrageous behaviour:

(I wouldn’t like you to go and start blowing up buildings or anything like that)

- stare into people’s eyes in public transport (the bigger and more confident they are, the more this will push you out of your confort zone)- and remember, staring is LEGAL!

- go and ask somebody to pay for your lunch. To make sure you follow through, go to lunch with no wallet.  So you really need to ask somebody otherwise you do not eat.

- on the street, ask an atractive looking person of the opposite sex for their telephone number (in case you are married, or bound to get married like I am- go for a less atractive person

- go to a ticket entry place (may it be museum, cinema, gallery, etc) and ask  for a free admission

- and feel free to add

Now, just before you go on thinking this is just adolescent play (because that is exactly what I thought as well when i read them), TRY in ON! DO it!

Get out of your confort zone and have fun!

I can almost guarentee that after you do it, you will have a great feeling of achievement, no matter the result. It is the DOING that matters!

Oh, and let me know how it goes!

Some of you may be familiar with this movie… it is a short, but comprehensive story about consumption, the way it works and what we can do to stop it.

Howdy-dooo!

I would like to start this post with a question:

Has it ever happened to you during a self development training or presentation (or maybe while reading a self development book), to say to yourself:

“Oh, but I already know that. Nothing new for me”

I know it has happened to me several times. But the question that I hardly asked myself was:

“And what did I do with what I knew?!?”

Because we can be very knowledgeable…we can read and know about a lot of things that could improve our lives and make us happy.

But knowing is just NOT ENOUGH! Actually, i would go so far as to say that you are better off not knowing then knowing and just doing nothing.

Because if you don’t know how you can improve your life, then it is like you own the best computer in the world. But you have no idea what you can do with it, so you only use it for watching movies. That’s all.

But if you know how to make your life better, happier, more beautiful, it is like you know you have the most powerful computer. And you also know how you could use it to the best of its potential. You could even use it to CREATE the movies you had only watched before!

But because you just don’t take the ACTION of learning how to use it, how to install and run the programmes you need, you just stick to doing what you have always done: just watch movies.

Let me give you an example from my personal experience- because I also used to be just watching the movies a LOT myself!

Somewhere at the beginning of last year, I really wanted to go on an internship in Asia, in the field of training and human development.

And I knew a bunch of people that had found internships in Asia, so I knew it could be done (I knew my computer was a powerful one).

But, after looking a bit around (yes, in this case I did take a BIT of action), I found there was no internship on training and human development.

So I STOPPED!

Too hard!

And it wasn’t until, two weeks later, I took the decision that I will not give up that easily. And then I started writing emails to my friends, acquintances, joining internship portals, looking on the websites of different training companies. And after probably hundreds of emails send out and tens of hours looking, I FOUND it!

Exactly the internship I wanted- and it only came after ACTION, ACTION and again ACTION!

So now I will have THE question for you:

What is the thing that you know would improve your life (may it be personal or professional) and that you can start taking ACTION towards RIGHT NOW?

After a loong time of inactivity on the blog, I have decided last weekend that I am want to restart writing…and this time to KEEP to IT!

And funnily enough, the very topic of this very blog post shows HOW I took the decision and I am now 100% sure I will stick to it.

Because after starting the blog somewhere last year, and posting a bit…I just stopped.

And started creating some pretty scary pictures in my head:

“oh, people will not read what I am writing!”

“or even if they did, they wouldn’t like it”

and from there “actually, i am pretty sure they will not like it because I am not a very good blogger”…and so on and so forth.

Bottom line is that, soon enough (and though a number of my friends had praised me for the blog posts and the comments were good), because I just kept amplyfing the bad pictures…I really ending up being SCARED to write on the blog.

If you knew for sure you would be judged, blamed, people would think less of you, would you probably be SCARED as well?

(the only thing I was not aware is that all this movie was just in my imagination)

SO, I didn’t write anything any more.

Adn then, last week, I came across this quote:

“Name your FEAR, before BANISH it you can”

Yoda, Star Wars

“AHAAAAAAAAAAAAAA”, I told to myself while loudly slapping my forehead.

In a flash, I realised what I had done.

How I had created a whole fantasy and how because I never for once actually stopped to disect my FEAR MOVIE about writing on the blog, I had not even known that I was afraid. I just stopped writing.

Immediately, I started naming my fear:

What am I actually afraid of?

What is the worse that can happen if I post on the blog?

And after clearly realising that it all boiled downt o people judging me as a poor blogger, I kept asking questions:

“So what if they judge me?What is the worse that can happen?” (well, I would certainly still live, so it isn’t that bad

“Who do I actually write for” (well, I write to share my learnings, and if the readers will take something out of it, GREAT> If not, well, that’s that)

“Am I forcing them to read” (if I am bad, they may just choose another blog)

…

“pfiiiiiuuuuu, does that feel good”, I said to myself with a big relief when I finished answering the questions.

I here I am writing my first post now.

Surely it does work: “NAME the FEAR, before BANISH it you can”

So, What is your biggest fear now?

(if you tell me you have none, I will nave great difficulty believing

THen ask yourself specific questions about the fear:

What are you really afraid of?

What is the worse that can happen to you?

(ask yourself questions as if you were a child wanting to learn from you how manage to be AFRAId)

Would love to read how you feel after doing the process…is the FEAR still that BIG?

Or even better, is it still there?