How To Train Your Brain

You’d better relax and set aside some time for yourself, because this post is going to be rather long. And it will also be something different from what you’d expect from me. One could argue that this will be a tutorial for rewiring your brain, while others may think that this will be just a review for a product I like. No one would be right, of course. It will be something in between.

Without further ado, ladies and gents, let’s talk about how to keep your brain in good shape. There has been a lot of research conducted in educational psychology on learning in the classroom; here I will talk about how to keep your brain in good shape outside of traditional learning settings.  And, with your permission, let’s talk first about why you need to keep your brain in good shape.

Your Brain Is Your Main World Interface

Some of you may remember the series of posts in which I made a comparison between a human being and a computer, and I’m talking specifically about how to keep the best version of yourself. For the sake of the game, let’s pretend again you’re like a computer. In this case, your brain will be your main world interface. (It’s not the CPU, as some of you may think. The CPU is just processing information, and that is only one cognitive function among many others the brain has, like attention, flexibility and so on).

So, everything you feel, think, imagine and create, everything would go through this interface. If this interface will be broken, your sensations, thoughts and memories would be severely affected. If this interface will become faster, wider and slimmer, your sensations will be more vivid, your thoughts will be more complex and your memories will be accessible much easier.

Now, let’s take this a little further. Let’s pretend you’re much more than a computer. You’re an airport. Thousands of planes are going in and out to this airport. Some of the planes are carrying sensations, some of them are carrying information and some of them are carrying thoughts or memories. Some of the planes you send out are carrying words or gestures, and they land on other airports.

In this case, your brain is your main control tower. It dispatches sensations, thoughts and memories and creates complicated storage structures and algorithms. It keeps all the traffic going on in good conditions. And it does that by constantly monitoring the incoming flow of planes, the available departure lanes, the weather, the remote airports availability, the flight schedule and maybe a thousand of other parameters.

Imagine what happens if this control tower fails at some point. Plane crashes. Colliding sensations. Erratic words going out to other airports. Missing pieces of information from other airports, because their planes will never land. Total damage. And you don’t need a severe failure to observe a significant decrease in brain performance. It suffices to have just a lazy control tower operator and you’ll start noticing delayed responses, crowded landing lanes, rushing takes-off and so on. I’m sure you’ve been there: saying what you didn’t want to say, remembering stuff when you don’t need it anymore or experiencing sudden talking blocks.

Hopefully, you have a better idea now about how important your brain is for your overall functionality as a human being. And still, this metaphor is just a feeble image of what your brain does. It also monitors your energy levels sending stimuli of hunger (that would be the equivalent of re-fueling the planes), it does long-term planning (equivalent of upgrading the equipments and planes) or makes estimations (learning by example, for instance, after a plane collision).

OK, I get the feeling that you know why you need to keep your brain in good shape. Let’s start talking about the how.

How To Train Your Brain

First of all, let me tell you that I was in search for something similar to Lumosity for a long time. When Lucaino Passuelo posted a tweet about how cool Lumosity is, I clicked to see what it’s all about. (It’s not the first time when Luciano, who blogs brilliantly at litemind.com, is pushing my limits. Last time he did it, I ended up on the first page of Delicious, Digg and a few other social media outlets, after I wrote my first huge list post: 100 Ways To Live A Better Life).

After a few clicks (or touches, since I was more attracted by the iPhone version) I confess I was totally sold out. Lumosity is a collection of scientifically designed “brain games”, which are challenging various areas of your cognitive process: from flexibility to attention, and from speed to memory. The best way to explain Lumosity is “fitness for your brain”. If you exercise regularly you already know all the benefits: your body tends to be slimmer, you walk steadier, you’re more aware, your muscles are always ready to act, you detox faster and so on. Well, those are the exact benefits you should expect from a brain exercising routine too. You’ll think faster, you’ll increase your attention and memory, you’ll be more flexible, reacting better to environmental changes, and so on.

These brain games I’m going to talk about are hosted at Lumosity.com but there is also an iPhone version. I personally prefer the iPhone version and I think that being a digital nomad plays a huge role in this decision. Games are also structured as courses, or series of various games mixed together in sessions. The iPhone version features such a course with 35 sessions. One neat thing about the iPhone version is that you can set up alerts and you’ll be notified at the time of the next session. Total time spent on such a session is between 4 and 7 minutes. Of course, you can play the games individually and I do this all the time. But I would recommend doing the session first, it seems there is a certain progression which will tune in your brain faster if you that.

Another cool thing about Lumosity is that you can evaluate your progress, by using a proprietary metric, the so called BPI, or Brain Power Index. Citing from Lumosity website, “Brain Performance Index (BPI) is a measure of your performance in a given cognitive function. You can use BPI to track your performance, and compare your ability in one cognitive area to another. An increase in BPI indicates improvement. An increase of more than 200 points represents a substantial improvement of about 1 standard deviation.”

If you wonder how this BPI is calculated (I know I did), there’s an answer for that too: “The BPI scales are based on an analysis and ranking of over 13,000,000 real game results. We used these game results to create a distribution of scores for each activity so we know how an individual score stacks up to all others. We then evaluate your game scores and use a proprietary algorithm to derive your BPI. Each time you play, we update your BPI to accurately reflect your current brain performance.”

But that’s not all. You can track your BPI in various cognitive functions (by playing the associated games) over time with some nice looking graphs.

Now, let’s talk about the most important games in the pack (I won’t spoil the surprise for you by talking about ALL the games).

Brain Exercises

Just like physical exercise, brain training must be performed in a balanced way. Excelling only at one cognitive function of your brain wouldn’t give you any big advantage. Yes, you may have a fantastic memory, but if you lack attention or flexibility, it wouldn’t make you perform better overall. So, if at the gym you’re doing intervals, weight lifting and running, in a brain training workout you’ll do memory, attention, speed and flexibility.

Train Brain for Attention: Lost In Migration

Apparently, this was the most difficult game for me. You have to spot the center bird in a group, without getting distracted by the other birds. Once you saw its direction, do a swipe confirming it (left, right, up or down). If you got it right, you get points (and a bonus if you do it really fast). If you got it wrong, your iPhone will vibrate and you won’t get points. Each session lasts about 45 seconds. The goal is to keep your attention steady, without being distracted.

The game features several backgrounds (balloons, desert, city) and I suspect there’s a different difficulty level in each of them. It can get really frustrated in the beginning, if you’re getting 2-3 vibrates in a row, but it surely becomes better as you practice. I still find it very difficult to pass over a certain physical limit: there are a few milliseconds between the visual identification and the finger gesture. This gap is very hard to minimize. In other words, the brain-finger muscle cooperation must be enhanced too.

Train Brain for Memory: Memory Matrix

By far, my favorite game. You get a matrix of cells (growing from 3×3 up to 8×8), in which you are presented with a random model of colored cells. The model stays around a second, then it disappears. Your job is to re-create the model by touching the corresponding cells. If you got it right, the matrix advances to the next level and you get points. If it doesn’t, you get a nasty iPhone vibration and have to start over from the previous level (for instance, if you screw it at the 7 cells level, you gotta start again by doing the 6 cells level).

There are 15 turns, starting from 3 cells models, which means the maximum you can go is up to 17 cells models. In my experience, around 9-12 cells there’s a threshold. If you get over these levels, you’ll find it surprisingly easier to solve a matrix with 14 or 15 cells. This game was the first one in which I got a BPI higher than 500 (a part from the Chalkboard Challenge where I got the maximum after the first game, but more on that in a minute).

Train Brain for Speed: Circles

I picked up Circles for this short presentation, but there are a few other variations of this in the package, feel free to get the app and look it up for yourself. In this game, you’re presented with a circle in a certain shape, you have to memorize it and then the first one disappear and another one comes to the screen. Your job is to see if the previous circle matches the current one, by pressing the corresponding buttons. If you got it right, you get points, if not, yes, you’re right, the iPhone will vibrate and you won’t get points.

I find this type of game very challenging, because it forces you to stay alert AND keep your short term memory in good shape. Also, you gotta have a pretty good reaction speed.

Train Brain for Flexibility: Color Match

That was a real challenge for me and I’ll explain you why a little later. It’s a nice little game in which you get a two areas zone: in the upper area you get a word designating a color: red, blue, yellow or black, and in the lower area you get another word designating a color, which, attention, must MATCH the upper word color. So, if the upper word is “red” the lower word must by in a red color, regardless of its meaning, which could be “yellow”. That’s tricky.

I’m not an English native speaker, so I had a little overhead in this game because I had to perform 2 more translations: one for the upper color and one for the lower color. In the beginning I was a catastrophe at this game. But after a few days I got better. Which means nothing, but nothing, but nothing that these games are really working.

Train Brain for Problem Solving: Chalkboard Challenge

Now, last but not least, the game in which I surprisingly got the highest possible score from the first time. In this one, you get a two area zone, only this time on an horizontal split. The left and right areas are holding numbers, or various operations with numbers and you gotta pick the highest result. For instance, if on the right area you got number 9, and in the left area you got (6 + 3) * 2, the right area is the correct one: 18 > 9. The operations can get really complex.

At some point, the areas are starting to shake, making the identification of symbols pretty difficult (not to mention the actual computations). As I told you, I got the highest score at this from the first time, meaning 1700. I had a few blunders along the line but overall I am at the same level – 1698 – 1700 – during the last month. It took me a while to understand why I got the highest score so fast but I think I finally got it: as on online entrepreneur[ I exercised this estimation function on a daily basis. Especially in the online business, where everything is so volatile, making accurate estimations is a key process. So I was already there, so to speak.

My Brain Training Personal Experience

Now, I have more than one month since I practice this. And I must say that it was quite an interesting experience. First of all, I took all the 35 sessions from the iPhone introductory course. I didn’t take them one per day, as they recommend, but rather 2-3 in a row. Meanwhile, I did a lot of other exercises separately and closely watched my BPI. I was able to go from 1100 BPI to 1500 BPI in around 30 days. According to Lumosity terms, I had at least 2 standard deviations (one increase in 200 BPI being considered 1 standard deviation).

Physical Sensations

I am a true believer in neuro-plasticity, which is the ability of brain to re-organize itself, or even to re-create new cells as they are required. Not long ago, the large majority of brain scientists believed that we are basically limited by birth conditions to the number of neurons we have, hence our brain performance was something “frozen” or at least highly predictable and limited. I don’t believe this. I think we can reshape our brain the same way we are “sculpting” our bodies at the gym.

During the first part of my 30 days experience with Lumosity I experienced some mild headaches. I couldn’t even describe them as headaches, but more like an inside pressure or some increased awareness of some of my brain areas. Something very close to the sore body you get after a good workout.

I also felt more alert and ready to start or to finish things. It wasn’t about motivation per se, but more about my presence in the moment.

I also had more intense hunger feelings and I clearly felt the need to eat differently. I know there is a link between proteins and our nervous system, but I don’t know exactly what it is. I can only tell you that I felt the need to eat more proteins as usual (beans, for instance).

I continued to drink around 3-4 liters of green tea per day (I gave up coffee a year ago) and I also observed some subtle correspondence between the level of liquids and my overall state. Clearly better when I stick to my regular tea routine.

Some Visible Improvements

In the last 30 days I was invited to 3 public events where I talked about entrepreneurship and lifestyle design. I never was afraid to talk in public, but these last 3 times I felt really great. In two cases I didn’t had any written presentation and I spoke freely to an audience of about 30-50 persons. I surprised myself being coherent and catching the flow even without a pre-established structure or plan. At one event I was on the board of advisers, in front of a 120 persons audience for 9 hours straight and I never had any drifting away moment. I consider this to be a direct consequence of exercising my brain.

In the last 30 days I also launched the website of my New Zealand company along with my first public product. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my first app in the App Store was a little cute memory game. The game was developed in about 10 days and it features both iPhone and Android versions.

Another area in which I clearly saw a visible improvement was my learning ability. I was able to finally freeze my long time postponed company products roadmap for the next 9 months, including some old, dusted projects, and to bring to alpha version a few new apps. Being busy, so to speak. What’s interesting is that I noticed an increased ability to juggle with different programming environments and languages, switching easily from Objective C (yes, I finally become a friend of Xcode) and Lua (using a somehow exotic SDK for cross-platform game development).

But the most visible improvement was in awareness.

In less than a week since I started this brain exercising routine, I observed an increased capacity to focus and to remain focused for larger chunks of time. I don’t think many of the so-called social media enthusiasts will like what I’m going to say now, but this 30 days trial made me reconsider my social media approach. I’ve been extremely quiet on Twitter and only at the minimal level in Facebook. I do think social media is making us prone to attention disorder and it highly affects our ability to stay focused. Toldya you ain’t gonna like this.

Another visible improvement was on the analytical side, especially on the relationships side. We all have our own idiosyncrasies and we tend to react the same way to the same social stimuli. Some persons are making us angry and other are making us happy. We’re reacting to them on autopilot. I noticed that I have an increased attention to my reaction to relationships, giving them much more attention and weight that I did previously. For instance, I avoided a few fights just by being able to see more clearly what the point of the discussion was, and I also was able to start a few fresh contacts with persons I wasn’t usually very attracted to (there were business contacts, mainly).

Tips For A Better Brain Fitness

Now, if you’re going to start your own brain exercising routine (which I believe you’ll do, judging from the fact that you’ve been curious enough to get to this point of the article ), here are a few tips and tricks from my personal experience.

- don’t do attention games after 20:00 in the evening (or with less than 2 hours before going to sleep). It will create an unneeded state of awareness. I couldn’t sleep for hours until i realized that I just challenged my brain attention function and it will stay alert for the next few hours.

- do some brain games before meetings: memory games when you’re doing some public speaking, especially if you’re talking freely, without a written presentation. Do some flexibility games before a negotiation, it will make easier for you to see the opportunities in the discussion. If you’re planning something, do some problem solving exercises and strengthen your forecasting abilities.

- to improve your memory matrix results: try to create stories associated to the the images. I saw that if I give names to some of the shapes, I can solve the matrix faster.

- in attention games is more important to give accurate results than to be faster. The goal is to train your ability to stick with the correct situation than to do it faster. You can become faster in speed games.

- don’t let a gap bigger than 100 BPI between your various cognitive areas, otherwise it will be pretty difficult to advance. Even if you score the highest score on Estimations, for instance, it will be pretty difficult to increase your overall BPI.

The Brain Training Price

Initially, this last paragraph was meant to give you a short overview of the prices for this product. But as the article unfold, I realized that there is really a price you pay if you DON’T enhance your brain. Of course, Lumosity isn’t the only method to train your brain, it’s not the greatest miracle in human evolution, nor even the best thing since the sliced bread (I think the Internet could easily win this one). But it’s a solid service and it does a very interesting thing from a business perspective: it finds a good opportunity and exploits it. The price is affordable, the service is solid, the results are unquestionable (again, at least for me) so it does what every business should do: sell something valuable at an affordable price.

Now, let’s talk about the real prices. The iPhone app is free, and so are the first 20 training sessions. After that, you subscribe using InApp Purchase (meaning you’re buying a subscription from within the iPhone, using the credit card you use for buying stuff on iTunes and App Store). The most affordable yearly plan is 7.99 USD. Please keep in mind that you can play the games for as long as you want without paying, the subscription will only give access to your BPI and tracking statistics. Also, on the iPhone some of the games are sold separately for prices from 0.99 and 1.99. The individual apps offers statistics only for the BPI associated with the game (i.e. only memory BPI if you’re buying the Memory Matrix game).

On the website, the monthly subscription costs 14.99 USD, but there are a few yearly packages which can drop this as low as 4.99 USD for a two years subscription. Keep in mind that when you sign up to Lumosity.com you can use all the features in the website for a limited time. There’s no associated fee for creating an account. You pay this subscription only if you want to access your BPI all the time, access personalized courses and see how you compare with other Lumosity users. Speaking of which, there is also a ”friend this user“ option, so you can get in touch really easily with other guys. If you want to befriend me on Lumosity, my nickname there is edragonu. As for paying the subscription, just keep an eye on your mailbox, because I saw that Lumosity is pushing some special offers and discounts pretty every now and then, so you can get even better than 4.99 USD/month.

So, go ahead: sign up at Lumosity.com (even if you plan to use only the iPhone version, you gotta have an account at Lumosity, your BPI score and evolution are stored remotely on the server).

Start playing, befriend me and let me know how you feel about that.

Happy brain fitness

“I Can” versus “I Do”

“I can” is empowering, while “I do” is life changing. There is a subtle yet powerful difference between those verbs.

“I can” will change your internal reality, will make you believe you are truly able to do it. But it won’t do it for you. It will always remain at the internal level, it won’t reach out.

On the other side, “I do” will modify your surroundings and make things happening. “I do” is the reality itself, not just an internal representation of it.

This is one of the most important, yet widely ignored confusions in the personal development field.

“I Can” traps

I can lose weight.
I can be a millionaire.
I can have a fulfilling relationship.
I can create a fantastic career.
I can change the world.

All those sentences are empowering, but they are not modifying anything. They are just a potential. In fact, they are even less than a potential, they are a trap. The trap of “it’s ok just to say it”. The trap of “ok, I said it, now can somebody please stand up and do it?”. The trap of “I had a revelation and that’s enough”.

Having powerful thoughts and using powerful verbs – and “I do” is a powerful verb – is certainly important, but it’s not enough. It can give you a kickstart, it can motivate you, but it won’t do it. It won’t make it happen, unless you switch to the “I do” level.

“I Do” thrills

I am losing weight.
I’m becoming a millionaire.
I’m creating a fulfilling relationship.
I’m building a fantastic career.
I am changing the world, starting with myself.

Notice the difference? It’s not about the fact that you can do all those things, but about actually doing them. Notice the change in your emotions while reading this? The “I can” sentences are giving you self-confidence, clarity and perhaps some motivation boost. But the “I do” sentences are giving you the thrills.

And this is where all the fun is, at the thrill level. All the connection and joy of life is taking place at the “I do” level. All the rest – including the “I can” preparation – is just a scaffold to reach this thrill level. Once you got there, is not important anymore.

From “I Can” to “I Do”

How many times you’ve been stuck at the “I can” level? How many times you wrote powerful and motivating sentences but never actually did something? How many times you visualized your goals, set up milestones, allocated resources only to see the dust covering everything because you didn’t do anything to move things forward?

Switching from “I can” to “I do” is difficult. Here’s why:

“I Can” is comfortable, “I Do” is riskier

I can keeps you in the comfort zone, it won’t move you in any direction. I can in itself, without a follow up in the real world, will bury you.

I do gets you out of the comfort zone. It pushes you to break the limits and actually do. There is always a risk of failing if you do something. But if you don’t, you won’t change anything either.

“I Can” is nice, “I Do” is grumpy

At the “I can” level things are pinky and perfect. You see your goals, you imagine a self without extra fat, a perfect career, a nurturing relationship. Everything is nice.

At the “I do” level things are sometimes ugly. You have to fight, to resist, to pull, to strive. Getting there means almost every time beating some obstacles. Which is not always nice.

“I Can” makes no promises, “I Do” respects all the promises

At the “I can” level you don’t make promises, you’re just telling “ok, I’m able to do it”. You won’t commit to anything. You’re just acknowledging some facts.

At the “I do” level you have to respect your commitments. Doing things means keeping your promises. Make things happening. Stand up for your words.

“I Can” is easy, “I Do” is hard

Because you make no real commitments, “I can” gives you room to dream big. I can be whatever I want. It’s spectacular and easy. You’re just saying it.

Once you start keeping your promises, the big dreams must become reality. And that’s hard. It’s not always spectacular and it requires constant, difficult work.

“I Can” is a thought, “I Do” is an action

Think for a moment at this situation: you met the love of your life, you fell in love and now you want to move forward. “I Can” marry you is a thought, while “I Do” marry you is an action. You can replace your example with whatever situations you feel attracted to: “I can” have money versus “I do” have money, “I can” be happy versus “I am” happy.

***

Now, how can you really move from “I can” to “I do”? If you read the differences above carefully, I think you already know. And, surprisingly enough, it’s not complicated. You knew it all the time.

If you really, really want to switch from “I can” to “I do” you have to get out of the comfort zone. You have to be prepared to fail. You have to make and keep promises. You have to work it out. Thinking that you can do stuff is important, but making it happen is a completely different process. And in my opinion, this is where all the fun is, at making things happening. Thinking big is good, doing big is even better.

And, yes, the most important step to actually do something is to move away from the computer right now and start making things happen. Reading blogs, including this one, won’t help for long. It might help in the beginning, it will give you some directions, but it won’t make things happening in your place. The real master of your life is you, not a blog.

Step out, take risks and do something with your life.

Of course you can. Now do it!

Starting To Coach

Yesterday I had my first session as a coach. It started at 10:00 AM in the morning and lasted about 70 minutes. I just felt great during the whole session and from the feed-back I got from the person being coached, the feeling was shared. What is this coaching about? And why and how am I doing it? Well, let’s take it one step at a time…

After several weeks of discussions and alternative scenarios, Diana and I decided it’s time to slow down the move to New Zealand for a few months. It doesn’t make any sense to pursue it on this economical context. The destination is still the same, but we delayed the date of departure. It’s the same thing as looking through the mirror and decide to postpone your hiking because it is so raining outside. We both agreed this is the best move we can make now.

So, after waking up with a buffer of few more months ahead me I had to face a challenge. What am I going to do? A part from this blogging on eDragonu, of course. While being a very fulfilling activity for myself, this blog – and the business behind it – doesn’t necessarily have to be the only activity. I had to do a short analyze and sketch the short term schedule for the next period.

It took no more than a few days and I came up with two main goals: teaching and coaching. The teaching will involve live training sessions on topics that I’ve been writing about in the last few years, like time management, personal development, productivity and effectiveness, and, of course, GTD. Coaching will have the same underlying fundament, it will only have a different, one to one approach.

Why Am I Coaching?

The short answer is: because somebody asked me to. The long answer has some more subtle reasons, of course. (more…)

Training yourself for happiness

For me, happiness is one of the most mysterious yet over-hyped word in this universe. Everybody talks about happiness. It’s everywhere: in music, in movies, in art or in spiritual techniques. Some of us are taking it for granted, some of us are making a job from talking about it, and some of us are making a living keeping the world as far as possible from it… It’s so present that we’ve almost forgot about it. But this constant presence hides the most wanted mystery of our existence: what is in fact, happiness?

Relax and don’t run away: I’m not going to explain you what happiness is. I truly and honestly don’t know how to explain this or even how to get closer to it. But what I can do is to share some of my ideas, experiences and insights about this process that you may find useful. Or ridiculous, maybe . Either way, it could worth a reading.

The first major obstacle in front of experiencing happiness is in fact its own celebrity as a word. Everybody seems to know, as I already told you, everything about happiness. A simple google search for the word “happiness” reveals more than 70.000.000 millions of entries. Seventy millions! Googling is not an option for this, let’s be fair…

So, one possible way to get close to this is to turn away from the word and get back to yourself. Get some space from the official definition and in turn start to analyze yourself. Try to ask simple questions, like “what could make me happy right now?”. Or “how can I define happiness in this exact moment?”. Keeping track of those situations is a great exercise. Not only it would strengthen your discipline, but it will reveal, in 99% of the cases, a definition of the happiness that you never dreamed of.

Because my guess is that happiness is a different thing for each person. And even for every moment of each person’s life. RIght now a glass of water would make you happy, but ten minutes after you would rather go for a salary raise. A family, a house and a career would also be great, but tomorrow you’ll want to climb Everest. Being a priest would truly fulfill you, but then traveling the world would seem even more interesting. 

The main idea is that happiness, or the definition of it, is more of a personal choice than a general concept. It’s what you think it’s happiness.

But even after exercising this question and answer long enough, and circumventing your own definition of happiness, you will notice that it is not all the time as consistent as it might be. It’s like a fluctuant radio wave: sometime it’s with a higher amplitude, and sometime with a lower one, even if most of the time it has the right frequency for you. There are moments, contexts, situations in which you are more likely to receive that radio wave, and situations in which the transmission is weakened. And with that conclusion we are getting to the theme of this article: training for receiving that radio wave.

Once you glimpsed at your own definition of happiness you will be tempted to make it as constant as you can. Once happy, you’ll always want to be happy, of course. But as surprising as it might be, you’ll realize that this is almost impossible. You can’t keep yourself in this state all the time. And once out of it, you won’t be able to find it again easily. It’s like is out of your control.

And, most of the time, it is. Because you are not trained for this. You are not prepared to be happy. You are not raised to be happy. You are in fact, raised to always talk or think or listen about happiness, but not to experience it. You don’t have the “happiness organ” developed enough.  You don’t have the “happiness receptors” in place for it. It’s like trying to listen a concert from 100 miles, or to see the details of a photo from 100 meters. Your infrastructure is not solid enough.

So what could you do, in this case? Yeap, you guessed: train yourself for it! Prepare for feeling it for longer periods of time, with higher intensities and with deeper sensations. Educate yourself for being happy. The sport analogy is very powerful here: if an athlete could train for the Olympics, and win the first place, why one couldn’t train for being happy and then keep it there for as long as he wants?

Start by analyzing your surroundings more carefully. See what specific context makes you happy, and then start making those contexts manifests more often in your life. It’s your job that makes you happy? Then keep doing your work! It’s family? Then let go the useless time you spend in other contexts and start spending more time with the family. What is around you is always an expression of yourself, so having a greater control of this, will make you in turn more in control.

Then make notes about it. Write it down. Put it in words. Keep a journal. Witnessing your own life is a perfect way to spot your weakness and greatness. But be completely honest. If you read the journal after several weeks or years, it will still “smell” you, not a different person. Write every idea you think it would make you happy. Any situation or context. Write it down, but don’t start by defining it by contrast with your unhappy situations. Just write about your own happiness as it would be your high-school homework for today. As in school, you will start to learn how to be happy. But you’ll learn from your own home-works, your own sentences…

And allow yourself to be wrong. Yes, that surprised you, I saw it. But mistakes are only lessons to be learned. If you do the same mistake over and over again, you are repeating a lesson until you learn it. The social conditioning made us very afraid of mistakes. The competition at work and the never-ending race for being “more then the others” have raised the standards to a ridiculous stake. Mistakes are more and more perceived like undoable actions that will mark your life forever. It’s not like this. Mistakes are most of the time the only way to go through an evolutionary process. As long as you treat them as lessons to be learned, not as frightening situations that could actually hurt you.

So, if you truly define your goals – in this case, your definition of happiness – if you start developing the “receptors” for that, and if you scan your surroundings, analyze your actions and allow yourself to make useful mistakes, you will be soon in a much better position to experience happiness. And doing this over and over again will also make you, as a performance athlete, more and more aware of your “happiness strength” and “your shortest paths” to the desired outcome. You will be learning what to do, in what context and for how many times, like a professional athlete, to put you in shape for happiness.

And once you learned how to do it, keep doing this. Being happy is not a situation, is a continuous process.

Living life like a holiday

We all love holidays, isn’t it? Usually we only need the sound of the word itself to wake up in our brain pleasant emotions and nice memories.

But did you ever wondered what if we could live our entire life as a holiday? Sounds interesting, at least for me, and I’ll try to show you why…

First of all, what is a holiday?

Let’s look at a possible list of definitions:

- at a very general level we can define a holiday as a “break in your current stream of habits”. Using this definition, even a small trip to the mall at an unusual hour could be taken as a holiday. And, in fact, it is.

- another definition for a holiday would be a “reward”, something your receive because you worked for it, because you deserved it, or because, in one form or another, you paid for it. A holiday could be a five minutes break in the middle of a project, or just a beautiful morning in which you make a detour from your regular path to the work, just to see new stuff.

- and another definition could be: “a time for relaxation”, a time in which you avoid your regular work schedule and instead use everything around you to relax, to calm down, to de-tense…

- and yet another definition would be: “a time for adventure”. Most of us are using the holiday as an occasion for being “adventurous”. Being this at the relationship level, by trying to meet new persons or possible mates, or being this at the more physical level of trying to push the body limits in “dangerous” activities: rafting, scuba-diving, and so on

- and maybe the most popular definition of a holiday is “a time for freedom”, a slice of our existence in which we can break the rules, put out the weight from our shoulders and start living without any limitations

You can chose whatever definition seems appropriate to you, or even mix them together. And of course, you can come up with your own definition of a holiday.

Why we would live our life as a holiday?

First of all, because this is what it is. You can take my word for it, try to find arguments by yourself, or try to find them in other places, but believe me, at some point you will realize that this is just a holiday, a season for adventure, freedom and relaxation, a reward as well as a break in your current stream of in-between existences. As new-agey as it may sound, it will be revealed as true at some point in your life too…

But let’s say you disagree with that, why would you live your life like as holiday then?

Because it will give you some more new experiences than a linear way of living it.

Because it will help you break your general approach to the life as an interrupted stream of routines.

Because it will make you smile.

Because it will bring more colors in your life (have you ever noticed the richness in colors of holidays pictures?)

Because it will connect you with a new source of energy, and it will make use that one instead of your regular sources – which, by the way, you know you will drain up sooner or later.

Because it will help you accept your passage through this life, in which you have a beginning and an end.

And, most of all, because it’s so much fan.

Allegedly, if you came this far, it means you do have a tendency of living your life as a holiday, so let’s start exploring some of the ways in which you can accomplish this.

How to live your life like a holiday

First of all, start to smile . It’s holiday, remember, you do have to smile, this is what people do during holidays, they are smiling.

And then, start your day by expecting the unexpected. Like in a foreign country or an unknown new place, you don’t really know what it should happen next, but you are somehow prepared. This is the feeling, start to experience it day by day, morning by morning. Just imagine that you won’t have the same day at the office, or at home, and the order of things will be somehow, in a very intriguing and interesting way, twisted by an uncontrolled event or person.

Then start to look at the things like you usually do in a holiday. You do admire a lot during holidays, don’t you? Try to this every day: admire, be surprised, and allow you to stare from time to time at the world…

If, at any point in your day, you’ll be faced with a challenge, embrace it. Think that you are climbing a mountain, and that challenge is basically the only way you can continue your climbing, if not taking it, you will be, at the very best, stacked in the mountain, if not already descending at an increasing speed. Living like in a holiday is a great way of modeling your risk-taking capacities.

Be kind to other people. If this is your holiday, it is also their holiday too, so why bother to be grumpy or nervous? Just be nice to them, it’s only a holiday, after all.

Living a life involves spending some of your assets in order to receive some goods or services. By living life like a holiday you will try to enjoy your spending. It’s not like you have to go shopping, it’s like you are going to shop in an exquisite shop located in an exotic place. Or if you have to have business lunch, imagine that you are having lunch on the French Riviera. The waiters will suddenly seem to be kind to you, believe me, I tried it, and it worked.

Another thing that you do in a holiday and you don’t usually do in your normal life is to take things easier. Try to make it lighter, whatever should be. Don’t take it personally. And don’t do it on purpose. It’s holiday, why waste precious time by being angry at the world? It just doesn’t make sense.

Forgive more. That one is self-explanatory.

Forget less. While involved in a huge machine of social commitments, of daily stress and struggles, your brain will try to protect you by putting all the unwanted stuff in the darkest places of your mind. But in a holiday you are open, you are eager to see more in order to keep it in your heart, because it’s beautiful. Keep yourself open to new, because, even in an unusual form, the new is always beautiful.

And learn more. If some new task arrived at the office today, and you feel completely helpless, just imagine it’s rafting. Or scuba-diving. Or mountain climbing or horse-back riding. Or whatever thing you thrive to do in your holiday. Because, even presented in this non-appealing form, deep down that new task will add to your positive experiences as much as a holiday scout adventure.

When you know you are living your life like a holiday?

Basically, when you don’t need a holiday anymore .

If you had similar experiences or want to try some of those described here, enjoy and feel free to comment on this.

[tags]holiday, personal development[/tags]