Kensray.com

This is a guest post from Keith Braithwaite, from keithbraithwaite.com.
He has contributed greatly to my blog with insightful comments and reflections.
He’s an employee who’s been doing crazy shift work, working at odd hours and up to 7 days a week! In whatever spare time he has, he has been working on his online business. His website is about setting up affiliate income streams.
Now his business is growing to a point that he’s looking to work full time on it and thus leaving the rat race forever! Bravo!
He definitely practices what he preaches!
Enjoy this post from Keith and check out his site if you’re interested in setting up your own online business.

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Whilst driving home tonight along a pitch dark, narrow country lane, I only just missed a man walking in the road in dark clothing with his back to the traffic. He was vaguely holding out his thumb as if he wanted a lift.

I hope he got home okay. When I got back, I got to thinking: why would someone needlessly risk his life in this way?

I realized you see this every day; people who take stupid risks for no apparent reason. Motorcyclists weaving through busy traffic at speed, drivers following each other too close, people crossing the road without looking (sometimes texting on their phone): the examples are numerous. So, why do they do it?

You could argue that litigation and over regulation means that people are encouraged to be no longer responsible for their actions and I think that is undoubtedly true. But I think it goes deeper than that and the clue lies in how we treat each other.

All too often we treat other people with little respect and I think this is because we treat other people as we treat ourselves. How can you respect other people if you cannot respect yourself?

And that is the root of the problem – we do not have self-respect. Many of us do not care what happens to us, we act as if death would be a blessed relief.

A good example is alcohol. Of course, in moderation there is nothing wrong with consuming alcohol but increasingly individuals are using it to forget themselves.

Now, I have to say here I am 100% teetotal and have always been so. I have never sought to convert other people but inevitably the discussion comes round to why we drink. Too frequently I hear ‘I could never socialise if I did not drink.’

To me that is sad. But it does get ridiculous sometimes. At one party the hostess, the wife of a judge no less, said to me ‘oh, you’re the one who does not drink. I’m so sorry.’ Forget it, madam, I am teetotal, I haven’t got leprosy.

This just illustrates how ingrained the need to forget who we are has become. A lack of self-respect is endemic. Depression is an everyday challenge. The abuse of alcohol and drugs is far too common.

Why is this? I think most of us have lost our purpose. Modern society seems to want to rob us of our individuality so much so that we seem to lose our will to live – our survival instincts.

Nietzsche said “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.”

Viktor Frankl spoke of fellow concentration camp inmates “Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost.”

In his book, ‘Man’s Search For Meaning’, Frankl relates a study made of 7948 college students by John Hopkins University.  Asked what they considered ‘very important’ to them now, 16 percent of the students checked ‘making a lot of money’; 78 percent said their first goal was finding a purpose and meaning to my life.’”

Governments, corporations, bureaucracies understandably find it easier to categorize and dehumanize people in order to operate. But this helps lower our respect as individuals. You become a label: an accountant, a middle aged man, a youth, a low-income earner.

I advocate a level of individualism. No, don’t go and destroy parliament, or rail against the police, but turn off the television and find and assert your purpose, your reason, your direction, your goal, your individuality within the society in which we live.

Think forward to your deathbed. Of which could you be most proud? For which you will respect yourself?

James Allen:

“Aimlessness is a vice, and such drifting must not continue for him who would steer clear of catastrophe and destruction.”

“A man should conceive of a legitimate purpose in his heart, and set out to accomplish it. He should make this purpose the centralizing point of his thoughts. He should make this purpose his supreme duty, and should devote himself to its attainment, not allowing his thoughts to wander away into ephemeral fancies, longings, and imaginings.”

“Thought allied fearlessly to purpose becomes creative force: he who knows this is ready to become something higher and stronger than a mere bundle of wavering thoughts and fluctuating sensations; he who does this has become the conscious and intelligent wielder of his mental powers.”

Why do you think you are inferior to another individual? You are not. Each of us has the potential to be great, to pursue our goals.

Maybe the lone walker can be persuaded he does want to take care of himself and find and pursue his purpose in life – and use the path!

Keith Braithwaite

This is similar to the post I’d written previously about me getting sick every single month. I don’t get sick that often but for as long as I can remember I have been tired. Every single day is a big struggle for me. For the longest time I just thought it was my diet or lack of exercise. I would try experimenting with different food and exercise routines but nothing changed

Here are my symptoms

• I have no energy to do anything at all
• I feel a little better when I’m among other people
• I feel extremely lonely when I’m by myself
• I can’t wait to leave my house in the morning
• After work all I want to do is lie on sofa and watch tv
• Feels like someone is sucking energy out of me
• Eating a lot of fruits and vegetables give me different type of energy. I feel fresh and clear minded but that feeling of fatigue, of energy being sucked out is still there
• I feel very sad all the time
• Feels like I can’t breathe
• Feels like someone is choking me
• Feel chained down because just can’t seem to get up when I am by myself
• I can’t concentrate on simplest of tasks
• I forget really simple stuff
• I want to do so much stuff but when I’m by myself I just can’t even get up from sofa or bed
• I have constant body pains
• I get irritated over smallest things
• I can’t seem to decide over simplest matters
• I experience strong feelings of guilty, unworthiness and hopelessness
• I constantly feel overwhelmed
• Whenever I am stressed I get sick
• Just feel like crying for some reason. I don’t cry but still the feeling is there

Depression

Recently it’s gotten much worse. And I figured out that it’s got nothing to do with my diet or exercise. I’m depressed. I used to be severely depressed when I was younger and I thought I had gotten out of it. I worked hard to get myself out of depression and in some ways I was quite successful. Even at my worse I don’t feel suicidal now.

So, that’s good news!

Looks like I hadn’t really recovered from depression. I sort of distracted myself from it. All the time I just kept myself busy with either watching tv, or hanging out with friends.

When I get home no wonder nothing gets done. On the way home when I’m amongst people on the subway I feel quite good and full of energy. I feel like going home and doing this and doing that and even feel like going out for a run. But as soon as I open the door to my condo and sit down I feel really drained. Feels like a vacuum is attached to me and my energy gets drained/sucked out of me. I just fall on the sofa unable to move around.

I don’t even have the energy to get up and get a glass of water or turn tv on or off or go on the computer.

I feel extremely lonely and loneliness eats away at me. But I am actually not lonely. But I just feel lonely. I’m afraid to be alone and now that cable tv is gone I don’t have the television to distract me. I watch some dvds but it’s not like before when the television used to be on all the time and I would hear it in the background no matter what I was doing.

Few days ago after I got home from work, I couldn’t even get up from the sofa. No matter what I did I was just unable to get up. So, I decided to meditate and see if that would help. I wanted to get up and set the timer for meditating but I just was totally unable to get up. It wasn’t until I had an intense need to go to the washroom that I was able to get up.

Meditating while lying down seemed like the only thing I could do but still was a step in the positive direction. Since I couldn’t get up, I just laid there and relaxed. I relaxed and concentrated on my breathing for about 15-20 minutes.

After meditating I felt a little better. Enough for me to pick up the laptop behind me and go to youtube and start watching music videos. Literally, that’s all the energy I had but it was enough. I had saved a few songs that I really liked. I had enough energy now to get them started.

But after listening to the first song I was feeling a little better, so I actually got up. Then I listened to more songs and kept this up for at least one hour. During that time I got out of sadness and was totally with the music and was feeling great.

That’s when I knew for sure that diet has nothing to do with the way I was feeling. I was only able to get myself to feel better by focusing on good thoughts and good songs in this case.:-)

My mind is everywhere. I want to do this but I need to do this or I want to do this but what if I’m wasting my time with this, maybe I should do this, or maybe I should do both at the same time?

Never really concentrating on one thing long enough to see it to fruition.

Recently, I was concentrating on affirmations and finding out what worked for me and what didn’t. Then I got interested in eating healthy. Then it was exercising. Then it was using the law of attraction more effectively. Then it was de-cluttering my house and keeping it that way. Then it was “maybe I should try to go on a vegetarian diet for a month?” Then I thought maybe I should buy organic meat and try that before going on a vegetarian diet. Then I thought about how I can work fewer hours at work and still get paid the same. Then I thought more about gossiping at work and how I am getting involved again. Then I thought about doing some more 30 day experiments. Then I thought about over 4,000 email messages that are in my yahoo account that I should clean out. And this is not all, that’s just what I can think of right now.

In the end I ended up doing a lot of things in bits and pieces but nothing to full completion.

So, you can see that I did not do anything effectively.

This is the multi-tasking world, with multi-tasking mentality! At work, you should be able to respond to your emails, converse with your colleagues/boss, work on your project and update the reporting sheets all at the same time.

I started looking around at people who were achieving enormous results in a very short period of time and every single one of them had one thing in common. They were all focusing on that particular item with all of their energy.

So…. what would happen if I started doing that? hmm…

I’ve done a lot of 30 day experiments but since I feel like there is so much I want to do, taking a whole month for just one item seems like a long time. It’s not really because time is passing anyways and a month is nothing in the grand scheme of things. Also, a month can easily pass by just in all this confusion. Instead of getting confused, I could have done some one thing for that month. If I started to just do things that I want to or would love to do, I would learn a lot more about myself whether I failed or succeeded.

I have trained myself to be disciplined whenever I need to be. I don’t doubt that I can concentrate on one thing for a whole month for example. It’s just deciding which one thing to concentrate on. It’s more in my mind than anything else.

Still I have to look out for myself and work with myself so instead I will devise some 7 day experiments. I will totally focus on one item for 7 days.

That means not even browsing the internet for other stuff. Totally excluding, even going to forums or websites that are not directly related to my goal of the week. Let’s see what happens!

Ivy Lee’s system

In one of his books Napoleon Hill tells a story about Ivy Lee who was working with Charles Schwab, the head of Bethlehem Steel. Ivy Lee is considered the father of modern public relations.

Charles Schawb told Lee that the biggest problem he had was making his managers more effective – helping them better utilize their time. Lee provided a system to Schwab and told Schwab to first try the system out for a while and then pay him whatever Schwab thought the idea was worth.

This is basically what Ivy Lee told Charles Schwab:

1. List the six most important things you have to do tomorrow
2. Number them in order of importance/priority
3. Take the paper out tomorrow morning – start with 1 and stay with it until it is completed
4. Only then go to 2 and repeat until the end of day. If you don’t finish all six you probably wouldn’t have finished them using any other system anyway

In a short while after trying this system out, Schwab sent Ivy Lee a cheque for $25,000. Now this was in 1920s so you can imagine what that amount is today. This shows you what Schwab thought of Lee’s idea and Napoleon Hill gave it to us for free!

There are literally thousands of time management books, tapes, videos, seminars out there but so often we get caught up in designing really complex systems that we lose track of the basics. If Charles Schwab thought so highly of this basic system, and if this simple system helped people at that level, surely it can help us!

Focus on one thing until it’s done! I am going to devise some experiments for myself and find out what can be achieved in one week!

I have been experimenting with various forms of self-talk in the past little while. One form that I find very effective is called self-conversation.

Self-conversation

Basically, you start talking out loud with yourself and have a conversation with yourself just like you would if you were talking to your best friend. I’ve found this to be the most effective method of getting any answers that I might need, any advice, or just getting myself to feel better when I might be feeling down.

Example

I ask myself “Ricky, how are you?” and then I reply to myself “I’m feeling a little sad!” Then I might ask “but why are you feeling sad?” To which I might reply “I feel like I should be progressing at a much faster rate but I’m not, I feel that I’m lazy!” And then I listen to the guidance from with in. If I ask myself or talk to myself in such a way and actually listen to what I’m talking about, I am often amazed how I have all the answers with in myself. I give myself amazing advice and I often feel much better by the end of the conversation and usually am back on track.

I’ve used this method to motivate myself, to stop beating up on myself, to stop constant self-doubt, stop self-defeating thoughts, bring myself back on track, and come out of guilt and a whole bunch of other negative thoughts that can occupy my mind.

The trick I found is to talk out loud and actually listen to yourself as if you would listen to your closest and best friend. If I just do it mentally it doesn’t seem to work as well. I think it’s because when talking out loud, your attention is all there and it’s hard to ignore your words. But if you’re doing it mentally it’s so easy for other thoughts to interfere and thus losing your focus.

Also, never, ever, ever put yourself down. You can have a tough love sort of talk with yourself but never put yourself down, never criticize yourself. Your answers should always be from love.

You can say stuff like “Ricky you know that you can do this! Reason you’re feeling like this is because of this but you know that you can do this, you have done it before many times!”

Try self-conversation and you may be amazed at the results!