Gerry Cueto

I was reading Steve Pavlina’s “Thought vs. Action” article and I totally agree that thoughts, actions, feelings, and beliefs play a vital role in success and must be wholly congruent. I don’t have a problem with imagining a spirit that helps me get my belief system about success and personal development together, but I see no positive evidence how a belief in the spiritual makes life more efficient. I do believe that the importance of taking objective reality into account when it comes to self-improvement in general is being undermined by a lot of great personal development writers. Nonetheless, Steve Pavlina is really great at what he does and has a lot to show for it.

Every thought, action, feeling, and belief is stored in your brain. You don’t need to create imaginary characters to get that point across, but if it helps you then that is okay, as long as you realize that they’re only imaginary. Albert Einstein himself said that imagination is better than knowledge because with imagination you can create new knowledge. A lot of my personal solutions and development ideas start in my imagination but go through the process of considering them with the real world by putting on the lens of objective reality.

There is a great blog series by a practicing physicist entitled “Imagination without Knowledge Is Ignorance Waiting to happen,” citing various common examples of how Einstein’s quote is often bastardized to mean that any subjective reality can be true and useful. What really makes a subjective reality true and useful is a firm understanding of what’s already known about the objective reality we live in.

Ask questions

Many times intuitive advice can be vague and fuzzy. So I use counter-intuition to question whatever I intuitively plan for a goal. I keep doing it until I come up with a concise plan and receive basic small steps I can implement to move to the next part of my goal.

I love analyzing things, and because of that, I don’t find myself in analysis paralysis often because I’m always coming up with new ways to define and solve a problem. If you do feel like you’re in analysis paralysis, maybe you’re not questioning the analysis enough. A great analysis will make you want to take the first step of action because you’ve factored each step to its lowest common denominator.

What I mean by factoring each step to its lowest common denominator is planning for the worst case scenario and for the best case scenario. Downgrade your goal. Take a specific question or problem and make it general. For instance, when I was selling physical therapy in my previous job, instead of using the actual company name and saying that I was selling physical therapy, I would tell the potential customer that I was a home health employee doing a medical inquiry. People were more apt to listen to me, and later on I was able to tell them about the company and its services without any problems.

Many Law of Attraction advocates believe that it’s all about focusing on the positive, which is true to degree, but the negative situations and worst case scenarios are a great place to start. Come up with positive solutions for these issues incase they are to arise before you implement a new goal.

My ex-boss gave me a monologue to practice with, for a door-to-door salesman job I recently had, that stated the opening information I was to give to a potential customer when knocking on his or her door. I later realized that merely reciting the monologue wasn’t going to cause a sale but having enough knowledge on the product or service to have a consistent dialogue and being able to answer any questions would. It’s all about the dialogue. Monologues are just a good way to get you started.

Polarization

In order to have a great, attractive, and engaging conversation with someone, you need to become polarized to your information or else it will seem like you are reciting a scripted routine. However, there is nothing wrong with pre-planning what you want to say or talk about. The only time I use a pre-scripted routine in sales or general conversation is if I can get emotionally charged to it. One of the routines I used in conversation when learning how to be more social was, “In a relationship, what counts as cheating? Simply looking at someone else, flirting, or having sexual intercourse?” I grew up in a Christian home and the teachings of Jesus were really important to our family. Jesus said, “If you lust after a woman, you’ve already committed adultery with her in your mind.” Because of that, I grew up with standards on cheating and lust which were dangerously high. It was a lifestyle that gave me superfluous guilt I didn’t need. Humans do lust after each other no matter how great their relationships are going; however, a simple thought isn’t going to damage a relationship. Why inflict guilt and pain over a crime that was never even committed? That is why this is a very polarizing issue for me, as you can tell. When you’re thinking about topics to talk about or topics to sell to people, it’s important to emotionally polarize to it. That doesn’t mean you become an extremist or a fringe person that barely anybody could possibly agree with, but someone who feels strongly about what s/he thinks. Polarizing on an issue means that it affects your worldview. It’s so strong that you want to share it with others and attract others to you, but on the flipside you might end up repelling some people as well, kind of like a magnet would. Congruence is finally achieved when you polarize to your beliefs about reality.

When you become strongly polarized, you can attract the people that you want and repel those you don’t want. When the focus goes from being self-conscious to getting your message across no matter what, you generally become a more attractive person because self-consciousness only leaves a socially awkward vibe.

Fear vs. Love

Are you doing what you’re currently doing because of fear or because you really love to do it? Are you at a 9-5 job because you love it or because you’re afraid of suggesting a change in shift to your boss? This concept has to do with the context behind your actions. People who are polarized to fear might take the same actions as the ones polarized to love, but the reasoning behind their actions is completely different.

When you love what you’re doing, that energy will be felt in the room, and you’ll make others feel good, if not you’re only poisoning the emotional workspace in your area.

Today I had writer’s block all day. I tried all sorts of different techniques to try and cure it, from recording myself talking for an hour to reading a ton of personal development material to watching motivational speakers on YouTube for some ideas, none of which seemed to work.

What finally cured my mental block was a shift in my perspective. I imagined that I was writing to a young teenager who was a little down on his luck, which to me, was a more empowering mindset than writing to a bunch of people I’ve never met on the internet. I got so caught up in making my article meet everyone’s standards that I lost focus on why I started writing in the first place. Changing your mindset can make you more comfortable sharing the great ideas hidden within you.

Mental role-play

Focus on simply changing your perspective. Redefine your problem and see how someone else in a different career or situation would solve it. How would a particle physicist solve your problem? How would a health coach solve your problem? How would you solve your problem 10 years from now? Attack the problem directly, and use as many perspectives as possible till you find the right one. Small changes in your beliefs can make whatever you’re doing a whole lot easier.

I talked about the courage sheet in my “Finding a Meaningful Career” article and the “How to Be Confident” blog post. It can be used to write down the problems you may have and the reasons why you think they’re there. Then write all sorts of random solutions down until one debunk the reasons you have for the original problem.

Take the first step

You want to consider the problems you have, but bear in mind your situations aren’t impossible to solve. With the right mindset, you can get whatever you want done without any extreme stunts. Unrelated “solutions” are pointless. People who fire walk just to get out of debt aren’t going to refinance their home nor have their co-workers treat them more nicely. Focus on the little things, and find the smallest way to tackle your problem directly to get you started.

If reading is the first step, then do it. Tony Robbins said that his goal in life was to have an answer for everything so he would always be reading. Get an accountability partner to get you going if you need to. When I was figuring out how to go to bed early one day, I grabbed a long black sock from my dad’s drawer and tied it around my eyes as a blindfold. I was finally able to go to bed at whatever time I wanted and wake up early.

Use the best of each perspective to form a strong identity

To use a dating example, the thing that helped me the most was focusing on building my personality. I read a lot of books and articles on the internet of all sorts of subjects. A strong identity is the most attractive asset in social relationships. Use as many perspectives as possible to build who you are.

I decided to become an early riser recently because I figured I could get more done during the day than staying up all night on the computer. Ben Franklin and Aristotle both made a good point with connecting early rising with success.

Failed attempts

When I first started trying to get a handle on this situation, I got up at 5am for thirty days as a trial. The alarm would ring, and I’d wake up in a slightly unconscious state until 8am. My strategy was to simply set the clock back to 5am and go to bed anytime I wanted. I had read about this technique on Steve Pavlina’s blog; however, I didn’t find it that effective because I had to hold my eyes open for 3 hours until I was fully awake. I later realized I needed to figure out how to change my biological clock as well as the alarm clock.

Another thing I tried to do was decrease my wake-up time in slow increments. I noticed how slowly evolving from a diet to another actually helped my friends lose weight. So I thought, “Hey that could work for getting up early too!” At first I was getting out of bed at 2:30pm which was pretty bad. My goal was to wake up at 8am the latest, so I set the clock back 13 minutes a day. I went from 2:30 to 12noon successfully, but the hard part was trying to go below 12:00pm. I would always sleep in and get up at noon. The evolutionary method for waking up earlier was deemed a failure for me. I guess my circadian rhythm doesn’t reprogram itself that way.

Weird, yet slightly successful attempts

Due to the failure of the last attempt, this time I decided to become an early riser without any alarm clocks. I stayed up the whole night first night of this exercise. When the sun came up at around 7 or 8am, I went to bed and slept during the day. I cracked the window a little bit to make sure there was some light while I was sleeping, but not enough to keep me awake, just enough to keep me out of REM. So I slept during the day for 2 days. I noticed that after doing this, I went to bed the next night at around 10pm, and got up at 2am. Then I went to bed the following night at 10pm because I was extremely tired, and I woke up at 5am. What messed up the whole thing was that the third night, I forgot to set the alarm clock to a goal time and instead woke up at 10am, forcing me to go to bed at 2am the fourth night. This attempt would have been successful had I used an alarm clock.

I figured out this method from when I used to DJ at clubs and came home the next day. I would get mad and assumed I messed up my sleeping schedule, but actually I noticed it would reset my weekday schedule because I’d sleep during the day and lose REM, and then when Sunday rolled around I was going to bed early. Instead of building my sleep schedule from the top down, I was building it from the bottom up.

My breakthrough

Here’s how I became a consistent early riser. One day I thought to myself, “If I could only be able to keep my eyes closed during the night, falling sleep wouldn’t be a problem.” So then I grabbed a long, clean black sock from my dad’s drawer, tied it around my eyes like a ninja, and went to bed and kept it tied for 20 minutes. I then took it off because I didn’t need it and it became slightly uncomfortable; my eyes were shut closed, and it felt like the sock was on anyway. I had my alarm clock set to my goal time which was 7am, and woke up without a problem. I stayed awake throughout the whole day.

Confidence is a state of being certain that a particular way of doing things is the best for the given circumstance.

I like to use my intuition to figure this out. I run by a bunch of scenarios in my head and I won’t stop until I get a big intuitive boom, then I act from that thought which clicked in my head. One of the common problems I see is that people overanalyze situations, but when you start following your intuition, many areas in your life become easier.

Confidence can also be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Some people will fail just because they didn’t even try while others will succeed by simply acting.

Self-confidence doesn’t mean you’re loud and reckless. If you keep reading this article you will see the difference between true confidence and fake ego pumping.

Think ahead

There is no such thing as 100% security, but there are things you can do to elevate your intelligence on security. There are preventive measures you can take. Realistic security tells us we’re not 100% safe, but we can increase security by thinking outside of the box. You have to be ready when crisis comes and have a plan.

There are other kinds of security too, not just physical security. One of the biggest struggles most people face is psychological security. Once you start thinking rationally about any kind of security and get rid of superstitious notions like “it’s okay because a supernatural spirit will protect me,” you can actually start to solve your irrational fears rationally.

There is no magic pill

Attack whatever fears you have individually and directly. People have this misconception that if they can do a fire walk or an equally over the top stunt then that cures all fears. I’ve heard people say things like, “The fear of my job is miniscule compared to the fire walk!” Wrong. You can attack the biggest fear on the planet, but you will not cure other fears in your life you think are smaller. If you fire walk, you’ve only acquired the courage to keep fire walking, not the courage to deal with your co-workers. People want a quick fix, and they’ll go through whatever radical extremes to get it.

Human emotions are extremely irrational. A human will attach certain emotions to a stimulus or person. Let’s say a guy likes a sales clerk, but he’s afraid to ask her out on a date. Downgrading the goal to smile at 20 girls, won’t solve his fear. He needs to figure out the worst case scenarios of asking the clerk out and come up with solutions for each.

Start thinking critically about your irrational fears

Irrational fears are useless because they don’t threaten your life or your check book; all they might be doing is threatening your pride. It’s amazing that we even have fear of success, fear that people might be asking for our money and for hookups if we get rich and famous and not knowing what to do about it.

Why is losing a job such a big fear? I’ve had friends who’ve been laid off and they’ve been able to find a way to make money while unemployed. They might have had an internet business going or been living off their savings or family. I don’t know what the big fear is when you have something to cover you or can plan just incase a layoff does happen. Fear is lack of intelligence, lack of planning. If my friend would have thought about that before he had gotten laid off, he wouldn’t have been so upset. Another thing that could be causing fear for most people is that people tend to attach themselves to their job.

As a person with a lot of former irrational fears, irrational fears aren’t cured by convincing yourself that you really aren’t afraid of anything. It’s a step by step process. When you’re trying to solve irrational fears, you need to know exactly what it is you fear. Within that you might realize that what you thought you feared wasn’t the actual trigger for the fear. It’s an evolutionary process. It takes a while to solve your fears and become known as a courageous individual.

Get a sheet of paper

Find out what you’re afraid of. Let’s say you’re afraid to get laid off. Write down on your paper why. List your reasons for instance:

1. I love my job
2. I don’t know how I’m going to get income
3. Etc

For each reason keep writing solutions until you find one that counters the original reason completely. You might be an hour or more on one fear trying to figure out solutions, but don’t stop there. Keep doing this over and over till you’re aching to do something about it. It’s not about repeating generic positive affirmations; it’s about literally attacking the fear with the right affirmation for each negative rationalization.

What you’re doing is focusing your mind on something more important than the fear and it turn solving the fear. It might not solve it 100% right now. You might come to the actual stimulus and find more rationalizations for why you fear it. The wheel keeps going. Go back and write them down, and keep using the same pattern until you’ve thought about it so much and acquired intuitive solutions that the fear is gone for good. Fear isn’t something you’re going to totally destroy overnight. Some people are like John Wayne. They’re motivated by fear and do it anyway. Weigh different techniques out and see what works best for you.

The worst fear I feel is actually writing down the scenarios on paper. This is pretty awesome because afterwards in the real situation I don’t feel that extreme fear anymore. Sometimes you’re not able or don’t have time to write down and rationalize your fears away. Sometimes you have to grab your balls and go in and do whatever it is. Don’t limit the methods you’re going to use to attack your fears.

When doing the courage sheet, you might even be afraid to apply the rational solution. Do the whole process over again till you’ve destroyed the wheel of fear. Even if you don’t know how you’re going to be the world’s next greatest motivational speaker, you can get a small idea that gets your feet moving forward. Maybe you might start preparing some motivational speeches for youtube and grow an online fan base until somebody asks to book you. Don’t deny that you’ll ever reach the goal. Keep moving your feet forward.

Focus on building true confidence

Confidence isn’t caused by listening to the right song or album. All that does is give you a short adrenaline boost, and you’ll probably lose your confidence right away when you think about the original fear-causing stimulus. When you’re actually confident, you don’t really need to “pump” yourself up. When you drive a car, do you really need to have a song pumping you up just to get you to drive? No. You have enough courage to drive from experience. Once you have reconditioned your mind to not feel fear anymore, you don’t really need to get pumped up with music or have a cheerleader team behind you when you’re going to do whatever it is you were previously afraid to do. Confidence is a matter of intellect. It’s not just a feeling.

Reward yourself intermittently when you take small steps in building courage. Don’t be so hard on yourself. Remember it’s a gradual process. You didn’t become afraid by being totally courageous one day and overnight you became afraid.

Think rationally

I remember when I was full of irrational fears. I’d meet a confident person and tremble. I was like, “crap! I’ll never been like him. What did he do to get that?” I would be scared of not taking his advice or feel good if I was already taking it. Now I can take their advice and disagree with them when I think they’re wrong or agree with them when they’re right as an intellectual, and elaborate on what they’re saying. Raising your consciousness by thinking critically gives you confidence and authority in these situations.

Rise up and be heard

I hear a bunch of peer groups saying that they’re being oppressed. I’m not talking about brutal, violent oppression. I’m talking about people who can’t take being made fun of or ridiculed. The truth is that if they take hater comments personally, they’re oppressing themselves. If you have a sheep mentality and don’t think at all for yourself of course you’re going to feel oppressed. This is true no matter what race, religion, and gender you’re in. Think of something so great that your oppressors will have no choice but to respect you. Don’t let yourself be knocked down. It’s not about starting demonstrations, protests, violence, or a cheerleading team. It’s about coming up with rational solutions to solve your oppression in a mature, peaceful way. You can acquire social skills, hypothesize certain scenarios, and come up with solutions creatively.

Get educated

Some fears can be solved by simply learning new information. I was a little afraid to set up this blog because I had no clue how to do it and I thought I’d have to pay a lot of money to get someone to do it, but then I watched a youtube video, and I realized setting up the blog was extremely simple. There wasn’t even much code to edit early on, only enough to get it to connect to MySQL.

Examine your current career

I don’t understand how people get so attached to their careers even if they hate it. Maybe it’s a product of social conditioning. This lady I know believes that making money is the only thing that matters in a career. Well no, if the career sucks, it sucks. How can anyone stay in a job they don’t like for 10 or 15 years? This lady has done that and she hates it. I don’t get it. Is this a mental disorder?

Turn your hobby into your career

Her obsession with movies and dolls is insane. I think she’s a really god example of using escapism to get away from a career she’s apathetic about. It’s no big deal to watch a movie every weekend or something, but she’ll stay there all night, and she’s loaded with dolls, not like a shelf but the whole room. It’s crazy! It would make more sense to have them if she was a doll manufacturer, but it makes no sense when it serves no part of her life’s purpose. If you have an obsessive hobby, why don’t you make it into your career? It seems perfectly logical.

Long before this website, I used to listen to music all day and write songs, and then I started producing them with computer software and posting them online. Then record labels started contacting me to sign my tracks. Artists were also calling me to produce their music. I later decided I didn’t like that career, so I started this site. There’s always a way to turn your hobby into a career, and with the internet, it’s a whole lot easier now.

So we all know generic stuff doesn’t sell. I’ve made a lot of generic music and all it made me was some lunch money. My biggest tracks were those that filled a niche most other tracks weren’t doing. Then I realized that music wasn’t something I could be my best self in. I became known among my peers as the encouraging motivational guy. What are some of the components of standing out in the crowd?

Emotional value is more valuable than technical refinery

In the gaming industry, game play and entertainment value is more important than design. Consider some of the greatest games in history… The Super Mario Brothers… a simple side-scrolling game that’s extremely fun. Look at Pong… a design 0, but it is still played regularly today.

In music, there are a lot of well-produced tracks, very crisp and cleaning sounding, but that’s not what makes them a hit. What makes them hits are if people can relate to them and if they are catchy and original. Take Soulja Boy for example, the demo version of “Crank Dat” sounds horrible but it’s highly shared and posted on youtube regardless of the poor sound quality.

Don’t let the fine details stop you from doing what you want to do. If you’re giving a speech, focus on getting your material across first then correct the poor body language and voice tones later on. If your speech is great, most people won’t notice those things.

Obviously this concept doesn’t apply in all industries. If you go to a doctor for surgery you want to make sure his or her technical refinery is higher priority than making you feel good.

Be you

I was at a local bookstore’s self improvement section with my girlfriend a few weeks ago, and after reading a lot of the books, they all started to sound the same… “Smile when you meet someone new.” “Give a firm handshake.” There is a great reward in being you. When you speak from experience, you’re able to connect with people. It’s like a paradox of being rare but common at the same time. Your story might be rare, but another person may have had a similar experience which is in common with yours. Maybe there is also a taboo that most people don’t like to talk about, but you do, and that’s what makes you attractive.

Be timeless

The book “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie is a prime example of a timeless product. It was written in 1936, but its advice on social skills can apply to any period in history.

Love your competitors

Competition can be looked at whatever angle you want. It doesn’t have to be fierce. Your competition can be viewed as your helpers. They reinvented the wheel for you and all you have to do is put your idea on it to improve theirs.

Do what you love, yet practice self-discipline

What might be hard for one person might be easy as pie for another. Physics might be hard for some people. Some people believe they can do physics with their eyes closed.

If something is hard for you, you can train your mind to make it seem easy. My favorite exercise is to list all my excuses for why I don’t want to do something. Then write a list of solutions for each excuse, then I box in the one that I intuitively feel is the best. Any type of solution can work. It can be a semantic solution like “keep trying.” It can be a practical solution that tells you exactly what you need to do. It’s like mental weight training. Once you pass a certain amount of weight, the amount you felt was difficult is now easy.