Raw Food Diet Update: Two Months After

It’s been almost two months since I started the raw food diet and I thought it would be a good time to share some of the effects this diet had so far. For those of you unfamiliar with this type of eating I’ll just say that raw food means eating uncooked and unprocessed food, exclusively fruits, vegetables and seeds. I’ve been on this type of diet before, but now I do it much more strictly, while monitoring its effects more closely. First and foremost, I have to say that there were several exceptions from this diet, all of them because the events were out of my control.

It’s about the trip to New Zealand, which in itself counted as almost 4 days from the total amount of the last month. And two of these days were literally on air, the flight from Bucharest to Auckland is more than 22+ hours. So, on the plane I had to eat some cooked food, but I limited myself only to some bread now and then, some cheese, and the rest of the meals were just the salads, fruits or juice. The stewards were most of the time puzzled by my choice – and I have to admit that I could organize the trip a little better, by informing the airline company in advance about my culinary preferences – but they did their best to accommodate my appetite. So, with a little compromise from my part, I managed not to starve on the 4 transcontinental flights, and still keep the cooked food at a minimal level.

Another exception was an experiment. After reading a lot about B12 vitamin deficiency I decided to incorporate some B12 fortified food in my eating routine. I experimented with some cheese and then settled for B12 fortified cereals. I intend to eat twice a week a plate of B12 fortified cereals with plain water. It’s a compromise I need to make until I have a better understanding of this situation. The vast majority of raw food gurus seems to agree on the B12 necessity, while some other part claims that B12 can be found in seeds, especially sesame seeds. Will see more about that…

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What You Know Is What You Get

They say you cannot really enter a Universe, without modifying it. This sentence is especially frequent in quantum physics and it witness a very simple fact: whenever you go, whatever you do, you’ll be influenced in your perceptions by whatever you already know at that moment. Every Universe you enter will be shaped by your prior knowing about what a Universe should be. If you think the Universe should be round, all the Universes which you will explore will have the roundness property. If you think the Universe is flat, all the places in the known world will have just one dimension for you. At least, this is what they say…

This is very important especially when you translate it to personal development. If you think at the next level of your personal development like a Universe you want to explore, then you have already an approach for working with it. You’ll know that every level of your personal development will be actually shaped by your prior knowledge about it.

I take this in 2 ways:

1. there is an intrinsic limitation of the Universes you may explore, because your knowledge is limited
2. there are no limitations whatsoever to the Universes you may explore, as long as you first know them, or you have the power to imagine them.

There are decent arguments to sustain both approaches.

Most of the skeptics would go with number one, and prove that your experience is fundamentally limited because your knowledge is limited. Your knowledge is fed within the current world, so the next world should be more or less identical with this one. As long as your input is limited to this environment, it’s impossible to expand it to new, completely different environments.

Those left after the skeptics have spoken will attach to number two, and state that you can actually imagine everything and then experience it. I must say that I lean more towards this part of the world. The part who say that you have unlimited power to tune your imagination for unlimited Universes and then experience them physically, because you already knew them in your mind and made them possible.

I wrote this small and somehow abstract introduction because I recently experienced something related to these concepts. It’s a series of encounters and logical deductions which strongly pushed me to accept the second way of experiencing the world. Let’s start the story first, and then the revelations.

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Change management: it’s still you, only better

Each and every personal development program gives you at least one big thing: a promise of change. It tells you that during this program or challenge, you will change your habits. That’s something pretty big. And, most of the time, overlooked or ignored. People tend to forget that changing is a difficult process. Not because you have to spend your time and energy to make it happen, but because it will shift your identity. It will, literally, make you another person. Are you totally in sync with this new person? Are you identical with the new you? Are you congruent in thoughts and actions?

Perhaps not. It’s trivial to know that because you do that personal development program in order to change something about you, and that something is something that you don’t have yet. And those things in the old new and those things in the new you will collide, sooner or later. At that moment you will have an identity problem. If the change is small, the identity problem wouldn’t be big, not even noticeable, most of the time. It’s like loosing 3-4 kilos, it will show a little difference, but not so big, many people won’t even realize that.

But if the change is big, like a total lifestyle shift, then the identity crisis will be for real. You will notice it and people around you will notice it. It will make you question yourself almost every minute. It will challenge your thoughts and values. It will be something really important. 

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GTD one liners: it’s not how you feel about what you’re doing, but about what you’re not doing…

The GTD one-liners are just short sentences that synthesizes in a very simple way some of the GTD concepts I found interesting or somehow become especially close to my activity. There are already 3 other GTD one-liners available and I also started a new section, available directly from the menu bar. The whole one-liner concept comes from the early stages of bash programming in Linux, when programmers started to write incredibly complex or useful programs in only one line of code. There are times even right now when I look for some specific one-liner in bash that could save me dozens of minutes of maintenance performance on my servers.

For now, let’s stick with our GTD one-liners. Today: it’s not how you feel about what you’re doing, but about what you’re not doing…

One of the most interesting things I’ve incorporated in my behavior from the GTD system is the way I feel about things I’m not doing. You can only do one thing at a time, you know? Even your brains works in sequentially patterns, one thought after another. At a very high speed, I agree, which can make you think sometimes there is some form of parallelism, but I assure you, the thinking is always done in a sequentially way: one synapse after the other. But because you’re not keeping everything in one place, as GTD requires, and your Inbox is not zero, you tend to split your focus among different thoughts. Trying to organize as you go. Or even worse, trying to do many things at once. That’s right, most of the time you try to focus about what you’re doing, but you can’t really make it because you’re thinking at something else. Something that you’re obviously not doing at that specific moment.

The consequence for this is something trivially simple: you really can’t do your job anymore, or at least in the initially agreed parameters. Or, in a more corporate-like form: your productivity is dramatically declining.  All of this because your focus is somewhere else.

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7 simple GTD rules for bloggers

We all know what GTD can do for top managers or busy businessmen, this is what David Allen is doing all day long, training big guys to get things done. But GTD is not necessary a business-only process. It can be used with great results in other activities, such as blogging. If you are not familiar with the GTD concepts, you can start by reading articles in the GTD category of this blog. Feel free to also look at the series about GTD one-liners. Now let’s see how 7 simple GTD rules can improve your blogging effectiveness.

1. Write with a mind like water

Try to keep your subjects inbox at zero, all the time. That means you should organize your subjects, your ideas, your thoughts and blog development plans as often as you can, until your thoughts are no longer tied to them. Separate your blogging sessions into several patterns: collecting data, processing it, and writing. Collect your ideas about future posts, process them, and never start to write unless your mind is freed from the noise of “generating new posts”.

2. Renegotiate your writing commitments

Renegotiate your writing pace each month, if possible, if not at least at three months. As a blogger you establish a monthly or weekly goal for the number of posts you want to write. But you’ll soon find out that you are either writing too fast, exhausting yourself, either too slow, and your readers are not coming back. Renegotiating your commitments should become a regular habit.

3. Do the 2 minutes rule on your comments

You are reviewing your comments on a regular base and try to keep close with your readers. Great, but when you do that, try to apply the 2 minutes rule, meaning you don’t spend more than 2 minutes on a comment. In GTD, if you think an action should take more than 2 minutes, you are either postponing it, either moving it to a Someday / Maybe tray. Do the same with your readers comments, or you’ll be soon writing more comments than blog content.

4. Use the drafts folder for Someday / Maybe items

The drafts folder is a great functionality of every blogging tool, including the one I use here, namely WordPress. Use it constantly as a placeholder for all your Sometime / Maybe items. Even if it’s just a thought, or a small piece of an idea, put it there, and let it stay until you decide that you’ll do it sometime, or you won’t . The constant habit of keeping a healthy drafts folder was a great way for me to become more productive, and sometimes even more inspired.

5. Never have the same subject again

Unless you really love that subject… In GTD, they say “Never have the same thought again, unless you love that thought“. Diversity is the queen of content. If you are repeating yourself too often the audience will drift away. People are looking for nice subjects and good writing, but if you write the same thing in 100 quasi-identical ways, they will eventually realize that and leave your blog.

6. Do only what is doable

As a blogger you will spend a lot of time surfing the net and promoting your blog through social networking websites. It’s very easy to get caught in new mini-projects like reading somebody’s tags on del.icio.us, or making a new lens on squidoo. That will suck your time away. Identify any doable item in your activities and do only that. You can easily postpone dreaming and play after your work session was finished.

7. Stick to it

Well, that’s not directly GTD but it’s pretty useful. And pretty simple also. Once you managed to keep a fairly normal discipline on that, keep doing it. Over and over again, even if the results are not showing right away. It will surely pay off in the near future, Discipline is not a state, or a quality you have, it’s a process that you enjoy all of your life. Don’t get out the wagon too soon, or you’ll lose all the fun in the trip.

[tags]GTD, getting things done, blogging, motivation, success[/tags]

Do It For Yourself – who’s benefiting from your actions?

Remember that we started this series with a fundamental sentence: you are the most important person in your life. You, and only you, are responsible for your actions, for their outcome, and for the level of energy that fuels you as a result. You’re responsible for your wealth or poverty, for your relations, for your mistakes or successes. Or in a simpler way: you’re the only one responsible for your life.

In the first post we formalized the way you interact with the world, which is based on a 4 steps path:

1. intention
2. energy
3. action
4. outcome

And each of your action will respond to 3 simple questions:

1. how you do it?
2. why you do it?
3. who’s going to be the beneficiary?

The answer to these questions have a direct impact on the energy you can use at every moment in your life. Each answer can influence dramatically your overall energy as human being, or, to be simpler again, it will shape your entire life.

If you just come here I recommend that you should first read the other posts in the series, although they wouldn’t be mandatory for this post. And in this post will talk about the third question, the final one:

“Who’s going to be the beneficiary of your action?”

The third answer is the most easy to understand: who is going to actually enjoy what you’re doing? Who’s at the end of the line? Who you try to reach? Who’s the target? If the second answer was about the “because”, the third is about the “for”: you do things because somebody drives you to, but those actions are for somebody also.

Most people tend to think they have a clear understanding of their targets. They think they obviously know the actual goal for their actions. And at the beginning of your life this is entirely true: a kid is always crystal clear about what he wants. You’ll never have doubts about that one.

But as you grow up, as you adapt to different communities, habits or beliefs, you tend to blend your action goals in a much larger picture. You start to do things for the benefit of others, just because you’ve been thought that. Is wonderful to do things for others, but as a result of a direct, non-biased experience. Do things for others because you feel good about it, not because they told you it’s good to do it. You start to do things because it’s an established habit, or because “it was always like this”. You start to do things sometimes not really knowing why you do those things.

And here comes what I call the fake-targets, or the fake-beneficiary: those persons, or concepts, or things for which you do things in your life, without even knowing that. Take a moment and think about all your actions and try to answer to this simple question: “who was the real beneficiary of that?”

It might happen that all you’ve done in your career was not entirely for you. All those extra hours of work were beneficiary not for you, because they failed to give you that promotion, but for the company. You even got a worse health after that…

In relationships, you do a lot “for the sake of the relation”. You compromise, you pretend not to see things, you accept situations or words that you shouldn’t accept, but you do this “in order to stick to the relation”. Guess what? Those relations never work.

Dig deeper into your life and try to find out all of the actions that you thought you’ve done for you, but actually they had another beneficiary: starting from school, from your job, from your friends or so-called friends, from your family. You’ll discover – with a little bit of bitterness, in the beginning, I have to warn you about it – that most of the time you’ve been acting for other peoples. You’ve been feeding with your actions other beneficiaries…

Those are all fake-targets, as I already told you, they pretend to be something but they aren’t. Most of the time they pretend to be you, your desire for success, for a relationship, for a family or for prestige. But at their core they are nothing but cultural habits that you embraced without judgment. And that you’re actually feeding by giving them all your energy in your current stream of actions. Making them stronger and even more appealing as they grow.

It’s true: you cannot live in a society without adapting to it. And adaptation is nothing but a compromising process: you give something from you, part of your freedom, most of the time, in exchange from something from the society, wealth and respect, most of the time. Those actions are taking your energy and putting it back into the society. It’s nothing wrong with that, as long as you are doing in consciously. As long as you know every second who’s the real beneficiary.

You have to always observe what you do. You have to always know who’s the real beneficiary, in order to identify all of your fake-targets, induced either by the social conditioning, either by early thinking patterns or whatever context you want, but not you. You always have to chose your personal path, and most of this blog is about that.

It’s about learning how to do things for myself, because I am the most important person in my life. It’s about how to overcome my obstacles, being them simple but devastating habits like procrastination, or deeper things like my twisted roots. It’s a constant witness of my efforts in doing better and better. And is also a witness of my mistakes in the process. We’ve been born with a dark side too.

I admit, this requires more than average skills and ambitions. This is not a thing that you may do on a moderate level, because you cannot perform with your greatest potential without investing all your energy. It takes time and patience to learn how to do your actions, to find out why you do what you do, and to identify without mistake the real beneficiary of your life.

But the reward is huge. Is a life of unparalleled richness and fulfillment. A life of freedom and achievement. Of love and understanding. I’m not enjoying this life right now, I’m only glimpsing at what it can be. But I’m already on my path to it.

Are you on the path for the life that you deserve? If not, you can start right now. Just watch the way you act and put all your attention to it for a while. Soon you’ll be finding your own way to do things for yourself. As I told you, this is not an easy task and requires a lot of discipline and energy. There will be times when you’ll fell out of the wagon. But even if you’ll have your breakdowns along the way, you can always start over.

As long as you’re the most important person in your life.
[tags]personal development, personal growth, beliefs, motivation, success, productivity[/tags]

Do It For Yourself – who’s driving your actions

My first post in the series “Do It For Yourself” was about the “how” in your actions. If you come here directly, and didn’t have the chance to look at the whole series here’s a little recap, to help you better understand the concepts. First, and foremost, you are the most important person in your life. This is the fundamental concept in these series, and starting from this point we designed a simple action workflow. This workflow is really just a 4 steps path that you follow on every conscious act that you perform:

1.    intention
2.    energy
3.    action
4.    outcome

And for every action I saw 3 fundamental questions that you must answer every time you do something:

1.    how you do it
2.    why you do it
3.    who’s going to be the beneficiary

In this post I will talk about the “why”, and that “why” is usually the response to:

“You are doing that action to please you or to please somebody else?”

Every action you perform (or, to be a little more understandable, every thing that you do) has a cause, you do it for a reason.  That reason can be inside you, or outside you.  By “inside” and “outside” I understand two very simple areas: your conscious being is the “inside”, and what you can observe from this conscious being, without acting on it, is the “outside”. In a more simple definition, the “inside” is you, with all your integrated beliefs, and the “outside” is the others: people, social beliefs, concepts that you can observe but do not necessarily embrace or accept.

Every time the reason for an action is inside you, chances for the energy level to grow after the outcome of the action are greater. Because most of the time you preserve the energy in yourself. If the reason is outside you, chances that the energy level to go down after the outcome are greater. Because most of the time you are directing your energy outside you.

Let’s put it like this: if you do something because you really want to do it, the result will always be part of yourself. But if you do an action driven by an outside factor, your outcome – and, subsequently, your energy flow – will follow that factor, being it a person, a social belief or a concept that you don’t agree.

If this sounds to fuzzy right now, let’s have an example. We will talk about your required actions when you chose – and follow – a career. The choice of a career is always based on your beliefs about it. You know in your mind what a career is and, based on that knowledge, you chose the most appropriate one for you. Suppose you think a career should be something fulfilling, something that will not limit your freedom and something that you’ll be happy doing it. And, apparently, you chose your career based on this set of beliefs.

But instead of doing this, you focus on other things, like making as much money as you can in as little time as you can get, having much more properties that you can actually use, and hunting a social status based on your car, clothes and so-called friends. Doing this requires a lot of energy. You put as much energy as you can afford into this set of beliefs, and, before you know it, you really start having all those things. And to act upon a second set of beliefs, different from your initial one.

But, strangely enough, you don’t feel happy about it. You have more and more money, more and more stuff, and more and more respect from those who share the second set of beliefs, those based on money and social acceptance. Your time is more and more limited because you have to manage all this, your freedom is surrounded by more and more properties that starts to act like walls, and your fulfillment feelings are starting to fade away.

You do believe that your career should be nice but you do the opposite. Why? Because your actions are driven by the other set of beliefs, the set based on money and external proof of well-being. The “why” in your actions is outside you. Without even noticing, you succumbed to a social pattern and replaced your internal driver of your career with an external one.

Where is all the energy that you put in this flow of actions going? Well, outside of you, sustaining the second set of beliefs. Every time you initiate an action related to your career, you give away your energy, because the real reason is not congruent with your real self. And yes, you will soon start to be tired, bored and sad. Your drain yourself out of energy.

The real drivers of your actions are as important as your beliefs about the reality. Even if you have and follow a positive set of beliefs about reality, you can – and most people do – follow other action triggers that your internal ones. This is why the “why” of an action is a fundamental question. By following only your internal reasons you are constantly add to your energy field. Your outcome will always be part of you.

But let’s be honest about one thing: you can’t really and always act only and only by your internal reasons. Sometimes you are on “auto-pilot”, sometimes you are consciously and deliberately choosing an external reason, or sometime you are just compromising. But most of the time you are confused, and you really delegate your power to an outside event, letting it trigger your actions.

How can you know that you are acting upon an internal reason and and not upon an external one? Well, to be short, you will have to learn this all of your life. It’s a process in itself, because you are continuously changing your internal reasons and the external are also in a constant process of change.

The rule of thumb here is: follow your emotions. Follow them with trust because your emotional feed-back system is one of the most precise and precious tools that you’ve been blessed with. If you are doing something out of joy, with enthusiasm and passion, chances are that you are driven by an internal reason. If you are doing something with sadness, fear and pressure, your actions are most probably triggered by an outside reason. Whatever fuel your optimism, must come from within your real self, and whatever feed your pessimism most come from an external source.

One other thing you may do is checking against your beliefs. If an action is performed in congruency with your general beliefs, must be coming from the inside. If you are driven to do something that is not in sync with your beliefs, chances are that you are forced by an outside driver.

The edge between inside and outside triggers is a very delicate thing. Because is very easy to be dragged in what I call “in and out traps”: things that you do for others, but you think you are doing for yourself. In other words, you are deluding yourself. And a vast majority of people can earn a master degree in deluding themselves.

All of the actions you are doing over and over for helping your friends, co-workers or other mates, but you don’t feel any positive emotions in doing them are “in and out traps”. You do them “because of them”, and not for you. There are outside reasons for doing it, and your inner self doesn’t really feel any positive emotions out of it. These types of traps can be identified when you are being excessively polite, extremely socially fit or just shy. Most of the times all of these situations are triggering an outside driver for your actions. You can do them, of course, if you want, but your energy flow will be drained.

At the opposite, there are “in and out traps” that you may consider outside drivers, but they aren’t. Suppose you are doing something nice for your family, like taking them to a walk, or giving them a present. This might look like an external driver, because the family might look like and outside trigger, but it really isn’t. Why? Because you are doing this with happiness and love, most of the time. Your emotional system is telling you: do it, I love it. So, even if this is looking like “outside reason” it really is an internal one: you’re doing it for yourself.

Basically, the “why” question is about your ability to circumvent all the “in and out traps” that you may encounter along the way, and follow only your heart.

In the next post of the series I will be talking about the last question an action should respond to, and that is:

“Who is the real beneficiary of that action?”.

[tags]personal development, personal growth, beliefs, success, productivity, motivation[/tags]

Do It For Yourself

You are the most important person in your life. This is one of my all time favorite sentences in the world. It’s so powerful, yet so simple and easy to understand – once you really, really understand it – that it can, in itself, change my mood entirely into a better one, just by saying it in my mind. Once you understand it and make it works for you, it will change your life.

It surely changed mine. Not in one big leap, but gradually revealed more and more power and energy, clarity of intention and compassion. How this can be? It’s really simple once you understand how you’re functioning in this world. Have you ever thought what are you actually doing, during your entire activity cycle? Have you ever thought of your actions? How do you do them? For whom?

When I decided to write something about they way you act, I had only one post in mind, but after I started to work on it, it quickly become obvious that I should split it in several posts. Therefore, I ended up with my first series on this blog. Without further ado, let’s dig into it:

Everything you do in your life is based on this very simple 4-steps circuit:

1. intention
2. action
3. energy
4. outcome

You intend something, and an action is performed. Being it a thought, a walk in the park or climbing the Everest. That action consumes some part of your energy. If you drink a cup of water, or have a career, all of this requires your energy. You create that action by directing a part of your available energy into your intention. And every action has a result, or, in other terms, creates an outcome.

Once you reached the outcome, you can go back either to step 1 or 3. You can either intend to generate another action, starting the circuit again, or you are just being affected by the outcome in your energy potential. You can increase your level of energy, or you can decrease it, based on the outcome of the action.

What Are Actions?

Each and every action you do in your life will respond to these simple 3 questions:

1. how you do it?
2. why you do it?
3. who will receive the outcome?

It will of course respond to many others, but those 3 are the most important ones.

In this post we’ll talk about the “how”. The “how” is the most important part of it, because this is the point where you decide if you will increase or decrease your energy level, and that’s of course because of the desired outcome. The “how” is not related to the actual tools or knowledge you may use to perform a certain action. The “how” is mostly the answer of a simple question:

“Is that action harming any of your beliefs, or it is nourishing your beliefs?”

Let’s think about your belief about a job. You do believe that a job should be something fulfilling, challenging but not exhausting, fun and rewarding. We’ll take this particular belief as an example, although you have zillions of beliefs by which you are driving your life every day, from relationships beliefs to money beliefs.

So, if the action of going to a job is harming your general job beliefs, well, your energy level will always be low. It will drain you out.

Suppose you currently have a boring job and your are “forced” to go there every day. You intend to go to work, put some energy in that intention, and go to a place where you are feeling bad. You don’t like what you are doing, you don’t like your boss. You do think a job should be something nice to do, in a friendly environment. But still, you are going to that boring job. You become inefficient and spend more and more time doing the same type of tasks, with more and more energy and weak results. You argue with your boss in your mind, taking away your focus from the current reality and building a conflicted one in your head. Although you believe a job should be fulfilling and your boss a nice person, you are still going there and do your hated job. You’re doing something against your beliefs.

What’s the outcome? Probably some money, and surely some long term health problems, because you’re getting inefficient and angry. After getting this action outcome you go back to step 1 and do this again tomorrow. Wake up, put some energy into your intention to go to work, and at the end of the day you have the same outcome: some money and some health problems, more anxiety and more lousy professional results.

What’s happening with your energy level? It isn’t hard to guess that it will constantly decrease. It will go down every day because the outcome of your actions. You will constantly consume your energy and will never complete it back.

All of this because you are doing something against your beliefs. You think in a way, but act in a different way. You create conflict and tension.You are performing against you, becoming your closest and more powerful enemy.

But what’s happening if you are doing something that nourishes your beliefs, like having a job that you like? Of course, the energy level will be high all the time and you’ll feel in turn nourished by the outcome of your actions.

Let’s have the same example, but this time suppose you have a very nice job. Well, you intend the same action, to go to work, and arrive to a place where you are feeling good. You like what you are doing, and you’re even doing it with passion, enthusiasm and efficiency. You like your boss, if you have one, you like your team, your clients and your partners. You do think a job should be something nice to do, in a friendly environment. And this is exactly what it is. You become more skilled at what you do and start to constantly receive appreciation from your colleagues and from your boss. You think you’ve made a right choice with this job and are happy about it. You’re doing something that nourishes your beliefs.

What’s the outcome? Probably some money, and surely a better health and a general state of well-being, because you’re getting efficient and happy. After getting this action outcome you go back to step 1 and do this again tomorrow. Wake up, put some energy into your intention to go to work, and at the end of the day you have the same outcome: some money and better health, more happiness and wealth.

What’s happening with your energy level? It isn’t hard to guess that it will constantly increase. It will go up every day because the outcome of your actions. You will constantly add to your existing energy and will never take back from it.

All of this because you are doing something that nourishes your beliefs. You think in a way, and act in the exact same way. You create harmony and wealth. You are performing for yourself, becoming your closest and more powerful friend.

Your beliefs are the core of your being. Everything you do is based on this, and you are actually shaping your world by what you are believing about it. If your actions are harming your beliefs you are actually harming yourself.

Remember how many times you’ve been forced to do something against your beliefs? Every single time you’ve done something against yourself.

So, every time you can consciously evaluate “how” you will do a certain action, do it for yourself. First and foremost.

In the next post we’ll look at the next action question, which is: “Why you do it? To please others or to please yourself?”.

[tags]personal development, productivity, success, beliefs, motivation, personal growth[/tags]