A Skeptic’s Approach to Personal Development
Being the skeptic that I now am, I wasn’t going to dive into personal development with the same faith as religion, but I’d have to come in at a more objective, scientific angel because I wanted to make it the most productive area in my life while raising the bar in general by challenging some of its tenets which are also taken up on faith in the absence of evidence. In my journey, I read about faith-like ideas in personal development like Law of Attraction, which sounded a lot like prayer to me and I was intrigued by it and decided to go further and investigate it.
Having to choose from only religion or spirituality to live life is a limiting dichotomy. I realized that you don’t have to be either religious or spiritual. Both are extreme subjective reality perspectives that fail to explain anything about the universe from an objective standpoint. Religion is known for being disempowering and limiting while spirituality is supposed to be empower one like crazy. They’re considered to be the two major polar opposites in the self-improvement world. Religion wants control over your life while spirituality says, “You’re God, and you’re the best; if you can think about something it will manifest to you”.
Changing your beliefs can alter your worldview and the actions you take, but it doesn’t necessarily change physical reality. It only changes the way you view it. If your beliefs are not based on any knowledge of this physical universe we live in, they’re probably not true. There’s fact and there’s fiction. If I imagine Bertrand Russell’s celestial teapot in the sky, it won’t appear by simply imagining it. If I imagine Santa Clause vigorously, he won’t spawn into existence. If you believe you can fly, and you jump off a building, you’ll fall. You cannot break any scientific law because you wanted to “manifest” it with your mind. I’ve noticed that a lot of self help promotes psychosis instead of actual help.
Understanding subjective reality
Subjective reality can be a powerful tool when used intelligently. Every thought, action, feeling, and belief is stored in your brain. You don’t have to believe in the transcendent to get that point across, but if it helps you then that is okay, as long as you realize that it is only illusionary. 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 started with my imagination but went through the process of elimination in the real world through the use of the objective reality lens.
Implement the best of both worlds
You generally don’t want to shift to any opposite extreme in objective reality or subjective reality. 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. Use your subjective reality to think about what you want to accomplish based on this objective universe we live in. That’s how Albert Einstein discovered new scientific laws and was able to create theories to explain them. However, if you only believe in objective reality and subjective reality is pure mythology to you, you will have very little control over your life because everything has to go by the rule book.
The Science behind the Law of Attraction
Through confirmation bias you will start to see your thoughts changing your reality to a degree. If you believe you’re going to attract more money, you’re going to start noticing dollar bills on the floor. You also might attract great money-making ideas. If you’re praying for something fervently you’re going to start noticing, in your reality, confirmation biases that are going to seem like the prayer is really being answered. It doesn’t mean that your mind’s hand put the money there or that your prayer was answered by the Almighty. Whether you thought about the money or not, the money still would have been there but you wouldn’t have noticed it was there. Life presents you with opportunities; you just have to be open and take them. Your worldview decides how you respond to reality. If you think people are hostile, you’re going to treat them that way. If you think they love you, you’re going to treat them accordingly.
Understanding intuition
Intuition is a very interesting subject. I don’t know if science has a lot of explanations on it, but I see it as one of the most valuable resources in our brains.
Intuition contains fast information when you need it most, based on your social conditioning, how you were raised, your culture, and your life experiences. Instead of taking a lot of time to think critically in an urgent situation, intuition gives you a fast boom of information you can use right away.
I also see intuition as a collective unconscious, like an antenna tuning into your surroundings. At first I wasn’t much of a believer. I thought it was all confirmation bias (maybe I’m wrong), but I kept noticing that my intuition kept making these social decisions that felt above chance. It felt like I was tapping into the minds of other people, not in an intrusive mind-reading way, but in an informative way. It felt like situations became a little more predictable. I think there are things in life that can’t be explained fully, but just seem to work and we enjoy the benefits of. It might be a mixture of my own social conditioning working from the collective unconscious of other humans. Maybe classic religious and spiritual literatures that talk about beings like the Holy Spirit or spirit guides might be talking about intuition because it’s the closest evidence I see for any sort of transcendent guidance. However as skeptic, I see intuition more as a mental skill that can be developed, than a spiritual force.
Applying intuition
I like to follow my intuition in most situations, detaching my logic/critical thinking from them and just following intuitive guidance. It actually lets me think logically and analyze the situation later on. I can put the events together and see why my intuition told me to do certain things.
Ask questions
Many times intuitive advice can be vague and fuzzy. So I use counter-intuition to question whatever I intuitively plan. 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 problem to its lowest common denominator.
What I mean by factoring each problem 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 more general. For instance, when I was a door-to-door salesman 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.
Evaluate different perspectives
One day 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.
Try 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 until you find the right one. Small changes in your beliefs can make whatever you’re doing a whole lot easier.
I wrote 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.
Get out there
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.
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This article is Copyright © 2008 by Gerry Cueto Jr. To send feedback or request permission to reprint it, please contact Gerry.
