Yaro Starak: How to Remain Productive When You Feel Like Giving Up

There was a great post on Yaro Starak’s blog “The Entrepreneur’s Journey” yesterday entitled How To Remain Productive When You Feel Like Giving Up.

Dialoguing

One of the techniques recommended in my book How To Make Your Dreams Come True is dialoguing. This is a very useful technique for accessing your own unconscious mind, and can sometimes provide remarkable insights. I want to show my readers how this technique works, so how are we going to do this?

The best way is by demonstration, so let’s show how we can cover this subject as a dialogue between two voices.

So who do these two voices represent?

In this case, they are simply you talking to yourself. In the book, you recommend having a dialogue with your “future self” - that is to say yourself after you have achieved your current major goals and vision.

The idea is that one voice is looking at the goal from the present, and the other is looking back from the perspective of having achieved it?

Yes, you’ve got it. It’s a powerful technique because research has shown that you get more creative answers from the perspective of “I’ve achieved the goal, and here’s how I did it.”

Rather than “I’ve got this goal to achieve. How on earth do I do it?”

That’s right! But that’s not the only way to use dialoguing. You can for example make one voice yourself, and the other an imaginary coach. That can be very powerful. And a lot cheaper than a real coach!

Or you can write an imaginary dialogue with someone you are having problems with - a difficult boss or customer or perhaps a member of your family. It’s amazing what you can learn from having to take the other persons point of view.

Isn’t there a danger that the dialogue will go something like this? “I have behaved perfectly and all the problems have been caused by you alone” - “You’re right, I can see it now, I most humbly apologize and beg your forgiveness.”

Funnily enough that’s very rare. The “other person” usually puts up a spirited defence! This can make you realise in no uncertain terms where the real other person is coming from. That of course will then make it much easier to have dealings with them in real life.

What about dialoguing with a “higher power”, like in Conversations with God?

Personally I think there’s a danger, because it’s supposed to be God you are speaking to, that you come to believe that the answers are infallible. You always need to keep the perspective that it’s an imaginary conversation and both parts are being written by you. Otherwise you will just end up confirming your own ideas, rather than challenging them.

What you are saying then is that dialoguing is a very useful tool, but that as with any other tool you need to be aware of its limitations.

Exactly that. 

Related article:

Journalling Revisited

Better than Mind Maps?

A reader, J.S. Smith, has drawn my attention to an intriguing variation on the mind-mapping theme - the Universal Organiser (UNO).

If, like me, you find mind maps difficult to follow because they confuse the levels of hierarchy, you might find this an improvement for certain types of work.

"Dreams" - the underestimated book

Some people consider How to Make Your Dreams Come True to be my best book. Others can’t stand it. This ambivalent response probably explain why the sales have never been as good as my other two books. Personally I think it is at least as good as many top selling self help books and a good deal better than many!

But you don’t have to take my word for it. You can find out for yourself very cheaply because it is only £5.99 on Amazon UK at the moment. And to whet your appetite I plan to run a series of articles on this blog over the next few weeks on themes from the book.

Buy How to Make Your Dreams Come True

Project Management

There’s been quite a bit of discussion on this site in the Comments and the Discussion Forum about the best ways to manage projects using the Do It Tomorrow techniques. The word “project” covers everything from writing an article about fly-fishing to building a bridge from the English mainland to the Isle of Wight. Do It Tomorrow is not intended to be a project planning manual, and so much of what is involved in a major project is far beyond its scope. What it is intended to address is how you manage yourself within a project - or multiple projects.

The key to managing yourself within projects is your Task Diary. You can use it for all sorts of project related activity, especially for keeping track of when actions fall due (which is not the same as the deadline for completing the action).

One very important aspect of using the Task Diary is that you need to put plenty of “project management” type tasks in it. It’s a great mistake to use it only for concrete actions such as “Call Pete”, “Place monthly order for supplies”, “Draw up budget”.

The sort of tasks I am talking about here begin with these sorts of verbs:

Think about…

Investigate…

Discuss… with …

Plan…

Review…

List…

You can probably think of more for yourself.

When I blogged yesterday about getting my business going again, the very first action I put in my Task Diary concerning it was “Think about the future of my business”.

Remember: Thinking is the most important action a manager does, and using your Task Diary allows you easily to translate that thinking into action.

Buy Do It Tomorrow

Attention

When you give something your attention, just how much attention do you give it?

I said in my first book Get Everything Done and Still Have Time to Play that the key to dealing with any task, problem, challenge or project is to give it the amount of focused attention that it needs. You can’t succeed if you don’t give it your attention. Or if that attention is not focussed, or if you don’t give it sufficient attention.

That is one of the reasons why it is so important to make sure that you don’t take on more things than you are able to give that sort of attention to.

When you do give something your attention, it starts to move. But it doesn’t always move in the way you expect it to. For instance a couple of years ago, I decided to make this website produce a lot of income. I expected the income to come from advertisements. But in fact what I found was that advertisements were hard work. What instead I found was that the website was an excellent way of attracting firms and organisations which wanted in-house time management training, and also for selling my own seminars.

So giving my attention to the website did indeed produce excellent results, but they weren’t quite the ones I was looking for. This is quite normal: when things begin to move new opportunities start opening up all the time. That’s a good reason why plans should never be so rigid that you can’t adapt to the new opportunities.

One note of caution though: don’t think that just because something is a good opportunity that you therefore have to take it. Taking on opportunities indiscriminately is a fine way to dilute your attention, not focus it.

Goalless living?

One of the questions I have been asking myself recently is “What happens if we deliberately live without any goals?”

All the books I’ve written in the past and just about every other self-help book assumes that goals are essential to success. But is this true?

We tend to think that living without goals would result in lying on a couch in front of the tv all day with a six-pack of beer (or whatever your own particular form of goofing off is!) But I suspect that this is actually the result of negative goals, rather than no goals at all. A negative goal would be something like “I don’t want to do the housework”, “I don’t want write that report”, or “I don’t want to do any work”.

The reason I have been asking that question is that I am conscious that many major positive changes in my life have come about without my having formed any definite goals about the changes. It’s been far more a case of acting on opportunity out of a deeper feeling that I am taking the right action for me. I’ve written before about how it’s sometimes only possible to see what is important to you by looking back to see where your past actions have been leading you.

So if you genuinely live without goals, positive or negative, what are you going to be doing? I think a fair amount of the time you would be doing the things which you enjoy doing, simply because you enjoy doing them.

If you enjoy doing something, you are far more likely to do it well in my experience.

I’m not quite sure where this is leading me, but I am sure it will be interesting to find out!

Getting Going Again

I have been conscious for a while that I have been neglecting this blog and my newsletter, and one of my New Year resolutions has been to get back into full-scale production.

The main reason I have not been writing very much over the past year has been that I have spent most of that year experimenting with some new methods of time management. Unfortunately they haven’t worked very well!

I’ve always seen myself as someone whose main calling is to experiment, rather than to find one answer which I then write about for evermore. The problem with experimenting is that by its very nature more experiments go wrong than go right. But one of life’s lessons is that it’s only by being willing to be wrong that you can discover the right answers.

Towards the end of last year I was beginning to feel that I really am making some positive progress. You will probably be able to judge by the quantity and quality of postings on this blog over the next few months whether the new ideas are actually working, or whether it will have to be back to the drawing board again.

So watch this space!

How to Be Creative

I guess some people are naturally creative and some are not, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t all improve our creativity. So here is a list of some of the best ways to improve your creativity:

Creativity comes out of new combinations. It’s very rare to produce something which is completely new in every respect. Creativity is much more commonly the result of bringing together two or more existing ideas and combining them in a new way.

Creativity comes out of perspiration. If you want to have new ideas then it’s important to keep working at them. Inspiration comes to those who are actively engaged in a problem, not to those who are just sitting back waiting for the big idea to come to them.

Creativity comes out of knowledge and experience. This is closely related to the previous two. The person who will have the most creative ideas about a subject is the person who knows it back to front.

Creativity comes out of questioning. There is a danger that people who know a subject well become wedded to “the way it’s always been done”. This is not a bad thing when that way is built on years of knowledge and experience. But the person who can bring a “new mind” to the subject will frequently see things which the old hands can’t see because they are blinded by familiarity.

Creativity comes out of restrictions. It’s much easier to be creative when the terms and boundaries have been defined closely. The closer you define the question the more likely you are to be able to answer it.

Creativity comes out of dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction with the way things are at present is one of the keys to creativity. But beware - this dissatisfaction can express itself in destructive ways instead of creative ways.

Creativity comes out of changing one thing. Often the key to creativity is to list the various factors involved and experiment with doing just one thing different.

Have you got any ideas to add to this list?

The Role of Restrictions

Most articles and books on creativity encourage us to “think out of the box” and get rid of all the restrictions on our thinking. The trouble with this advice is that it is almost entirely wrong. It is very difficult to be creative when “anything goes” and you have no limitations, because it is the limitations that actually encourage creativity.

Give your mind a focused problem and it will respond. If I ask you to come up with a revolutionary new idea for improving motor cars in general, the best you could probably come up with would be a few vague suggestions. Yet if I asked you to think of a way of improving the steering wheel in your own car, you could almost certainly come up with some very useful ideas. The more focused the problem, the easier it is to be creative with it.

A good example is rhyme and meter in poetry. Consider the following poem, one of perhaps the greatest collection of poems in the world, Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

No longer mourn for me when I am dead

Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell

Give warning to the world that I am fled

From this vile world with vilest worms to dwell:

Nay, if you read this line, remember not

The hand that writ it, for I love you so,

That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,

If thinking on me then should make you woe.

O! if, I say, you look upon this verse,

When I perhaps compounded am with clay,

Do not so much as my poor name rehearse;

But let your love even with my life decay;

Lest the wise world should look into your moan,

And mock you with me after I am gone.

In writing this poem, was Shakespeare hampered by the fact that he had chosen to use a very conventional format, in which not only are the metre and rhyming scheme fixed, but also to some extent the subject matter? No, not at all. He produced a great work of art by the very fact that he was exploring the limitations of the format. And not only did he do it once, he did it over a hundred and fifty times — each time producing a different effect!

What has all this got to do with us in our daily lives? Well, have a think about your life. Are you thinking and working on clearly focused objectives with clearly defined boundaries? Or is your life and work diffused over many poorly defined projects with no clear boundaries? Which is likely to produce the greater degree of creativity in your life?

If you have the feeling that you are getting nowhere or that you can’t keep your impetus going, the moral is narrow your life down. You will find paradoxically that you are able to able to exercise far more freedom within your narrow boundaries, than the deceptive “freedom” which has no focus, no boundaries and is ultimately unsatisfying because it is going nowhere.

Come and See Me Make a Fool of Myself

I have been foolish enough to accept an invitation to give a short workshop to the London Coaching Group on Coaching for Creativity on the evening of March 27th. This is a subject that I have never given a seminar on before.

Anyway I thought “in for a penny in for a pound” so I made the blurb for the event as ambitious as possible by adding in every single angle on the subject I could think of, and then some. Nothing like setting oneself a challenge!

During the session you will (subject to time available):

• Learn to do what you like and make it profitable
• Learn to overcome resistance
• Practice saying yes to life
• Monitor how good you are feeling
• Learn about practices which will enhance your creativity
• See where your life has been leading you up to now
• Identify what has been holding you back
• Explore how decisions are made
• Explore how to make inspiration strike
• Learn how to live in the flow
• Examine the brakes on our creativity

So I really am going to have to be creative to cover all this in less than two hours!

Maybe I’ll write some blog entries on these bullet points in order to get into practice.

Anyway if you can make it, I’d love to see you there. If you would like to attend, contact the organisers not me.

The 10-Minute Writing Practice

A method of problem solving which I haven’t written about for a long time is the ten minute writing practice. I first came across this in Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones (highly recommended) as a way of freeing up one’s natural writing abilities. She saw it mainly as a way of writing fiction. But since my ambitions didn’t lie in the direction of fiction, I quickly saw that it could be an effective tool in the armoury of methods which one can use in order to increase one’s creativity.

The idea is simple. You just write for ten minutes continuously without lifting your hand from the paper. You are not allowed to revise or correct. This is very similar to journalling. The differences are that you normally write about a specific subject and that it is shorter. When writing the three pages in my daily journal for instance I normally take 35 minutes plus or minus. Ten minutes is a much sharper focus.

To use the method, take a problem or issue that is facing you at the moment and just write round it for ten minutes. When I say “write round it” I mean don’t just write about the subject itself, but also write about your feelings concerning the subject, the circumstances surrounding it, its history, in fact anything that comes into your head.

Then when the ten minutes is up, go back and underline anything that represents a new insight, a point for action, something further to investigate, and so on. You will often find that you have some quite valuable points. And even if you don’t, you may find that new ideas come to you spontaneously over the next few days, because you have stirred your brain up to think further about the issue.

This is an effective method and can be applied to a lot of situations. I have in fact been writing in exactly this way to produce this posting. The only difference is that I have typed this to save time, but normally I prefer to do the 10 minute writing practice in handwriting.

What is Effectiveness?

One of the really sad things about the world these days is that there are enormous numbers of very talented people who never succeed in creating very much. They are creative but do not create. Very often they are immersed in activities but take very little real action .

I come across people like this all the time. I see self-employed people who have wonderful ideas for their business, but seem to get bogged down and discouraged. I see business managers who are ambitious and capable but seem to spend their lives rushing from one thing to another.

The qualities of creativity and order affect each other very closely. You can be as talented and creative as you like, but if you aren’t ordered as well, you won’t be effective. You will spend your time thinking up great ideas but never being able to make anything of them.

On the other hand your life can be wonderfully ordered, but if it doesn’t contain any creativity it will be sterile – just coldly efficient. You will be one of those people who drive others mad because of your passion for keeping things in their place. You will never be effective because you are more concerned with how things look rather than how they really are.

It is impossible to be effective without both creativity and order. Effectiveness is a compound of other qualities, rather than a quality on its own. You could look on it as a measure of how far your creativity is free to express itself without being hampered by a lack of order in your life.

At the risk of oversimplifying things, you could express the relationship like this:

Effectiveness = Creativity x Order

How might this relationship be affecting you right now?

Let’s see where you are at the moment. Mark yourself out of 10 for how Creative you are and how Ordered you are.

Multiply them together and you have your percentage measure of how Effective you are. For example if you consider yourself to be very creative you might give yourself an 8. If you are rather disordered you might give yourself a 4. Multiplied together these give a score of 32. That means that although you are a very creative person you are only working at 32% effectiveness.

Note that you however hard you work on your creativity you can only succeed in raising your effectiveness to 40%, an increase of only 8 points. On the other hand, if you work on how ordered you are, you have the potential of increasing your effectiveness to 80%, a rise of 46 points. So now it is clear where to put your effort.

You may have been struggling for years against your inability to get ordered. And you may regard this as a deep character fault – something which is innate in you and which you cannot change.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Being ordered has little to do with character; it has everything to do with how your life is structured. If you have a structure which makes it easier to do the right thing, then the right thing is what you will do. If you find yourself consistently doing the wrong thing, it is because the structure of your life makes it easier to do the wrong thing than the right thing. You may have noticed that in certain circumstances you are more ordered than in others. Why? Because the structure is different.

Get the structure right and everything else comes right too.

[This article was originally published in my newsletter in November 2004]