"A" is for Action: the 5mm

Hello, Steve Barnes here with my Borg pal in the background. Have having magic in the rough. So just wonderful to see people. Sometimes you're on here live but then since you never know exactly when it would be on sometime between 9 and 10, that's not surprising. But I know that you'll watch later. So today I need to take a look at where I'm going, what it is that I'm doing which is finishing this Star wars novel. I've got less than three weeks in one week. I want to offer, I want to give Tananarive a copy of the book, give her a link into the document so she can start reading it. It'll take her about a week to do that. I'll keep working while she's doing that and then by the 1st of January I will be taking my final run. You know, just really, really bearing down in that sense. So interruptions during the holidays, things going on, life is what happens while you're making other plans. So you always have to build in some flexibility into your goals. You have to recognize that things are going to go wrong. Things are going to, you know, they're going to be unexpected stresses. And during the holidays, I mean in a very real sense I should be taking this off, I should be having a two week vacation, but I need to be working. So the thing to do is to be able to work and to not stress myself out too much. So the idea of the A is for action is what is the, what are the daily actions I need to take that will move me towards my goal at the rate of at least 1% per week and have fun in the process, you know, add that. So my brain is not looking to hurt me but it's looking for ways to, to do things as simple as possible. Today that's going to be using my Pomodoro cube, which is really cool. I just set it and just turn the number that I want up like 25 and turn that up and in 25 minutes it would be and then I take a five minute break. And what I found is that every one of those 25 minutes I can do about 10 pages of editing. You know, and this is very light editing. I'm doing what I call low hanging fruit. I'm not stressing myself out. If I don't a way to fix something. I just put in a note saying fix this, go on and let my unconscious mind chew over that. Understanding what is going to get you to your goal, you know, because the magic formula mapper model daily actions, gratitude, we'll deal with gratitude tomorrow. Intention, goal and conviction, the belief that you can do it. Those are the magic formula. If you have at least a one in each of those categories, you can succeed. And if you take a look around you at people in your life or look at yourself and realize that if they're not reaching their goals, if they're frustrated, so forth, you can guarantee that they're going to have a zero in one of those categories. They're either not going to have a map of what to do to get them to their goal that is tested and tried comes from outside them. They're not taking daily action. They're not filling their hearts with gratitude. They're going to be angry or frustrated a lot of the time. They don't have clear goals, goals or dreams with deadlines. So make sure that they are categorized right. Dennis Dickens is watching live for once. Hello, Dennis. And they don't have real conviction that they can and should do this. So. And we're going to keep going over these and answering questions for them. And today is about action. So let's take a look at the question of action. That means that you take at least the minimum action that represents a single step towards your ultimate goal. If you don't know what to do, that step might simply be identifying people who have accomplished your intent. If you don't know your goal, then your first goal is to find a goal, work backwards for what will relieve the most pain or increase the greatest pleasure. The answer will almost certainly be in the arenas of health, love, or money. And quite frankly, those are the things that people don't want to look at. They don't want to admit that they want to lose weight. They don't want to admit that they need to meditate or they need to heal a relationship. They don't want to admit that they need money and want money. So they end up lacking it and then being out of alignment with themselves. They say, on the one hand, they don't want it, on the other hand, money is what they need. It's, it's sad to watch, quite frankly, because that's not proper navigation within the adult world. If you're totally paralyzed, then start with the five minute miracle. The, that's, that's your base. Simply breathe abdominally for 60 seconds once per hour. That's, you know, 12 minutes a day, 18 minutes a day maximum. The list of benefits from this simple practice, just vast. But they involve increased focus, centering, creating a cognitive break that allows your mind to relax, breaking the cycle of stress to Strain and more, Much, much more. But the point is this. You can research all the benefits of abdominal breathing combined with synaptic facilitation, because that's what the five minute miracle is. Or you can perform the experiment and see yourself. Five minutes a day, six days a week, for two weeks ought to do it. That is a single hour, a single hour of your time to find out whether or not you can take control of your emotions in your life. My morning tea. Here's possibly the greatest benefit of this exercise. This is why this exercise is only for people who have courage. You do this simple five minute a day exercise and it will tell you whether your major obstacles are outside you, social, in terms of logistics, time, so forth, or inside you, whether they are emotional. Because if you had the time to watch this, you've got the time to breathe. If you have time to be on Facebook and social media, you've got the time to breathe. The question is, will you lie to yourself about this? Can you keep your word to yourself? Do you love yourself and value yourself enough to to look directly at yourself without fear that if you look closely at yourself, you're going to see something unclean or unbeautiful? Your goal is to move forward at 1% per week minimum, in all three arenas, body, heart and head. And passing all three gates with your actions. Is it true? Is it kind? Is it useful? Magic is how you know you're in the game. Let me repeat that again. Your goal is to increase 1% per week in all three, all three centers with your actions and words, passing all three gates. Intent to improve 1% per week. Magic, map, action, gratitude, intention and conviction is how you do this, how you know that you're in the game. Okay, so look at yourself. How do we define success? Because people do that. Well, you know, maybe I'm already successful. Maybe you are. I mean, seriously. Success. I would invite you to listen to what I consider success to be and ask you yourself whether or not this works for you. Success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal. In other words, as long as you're getting better in an arena where you can feel that if you got good enough at this, you'd be very happy with the results, you're going to be happy with that day. The meaning of life, which would be another way of looking at this question of success, is, according to the Dalai Lama, to be joyful and of service. That means that any day that you take a step towards your goal, being joyful in your actions, that's a successful day. You Win, no matter what the temporary result of action might be. Why? Because in this sense, failure is the doorway to success. If you fail and learn and adjust tomorrow and try again and keep acting, observing, being flexible in behavior, and trying again and again and again, constantly modeling some successful patterns in keeping your mood positive, you will run out of ways to fail. There are only finite ways to fail. Only finite ways to run your energy so that you don't accomplish your intentions. Especially if you, like, keep a journal so that you start noticing the ways that you sabotage yourself. It'll get harder for you to repeat those patterns. So your first goal needs to be able to do 60 seconds of diaphragmatic breathing every hour, at least five times a day. Note the excuses you're going to come up with. You will forget to do them. You'll be unable to figure out how to set an alarm. You'll get too busy. You'll be too embarrassed to breathe in public, you'll get interrupted by emergencies, and you'll get distracted by your favorite movie coming on television, etc. Etc. Etc. If you will. If you record your processes of avoidance, you'll start seeing the precise ways you've been sabotaging yourself in physical, emotional, and money arenas. You're too busy. You're too distracted. Too many imperatives, not enough important stuff. You need to treat every commitment you make in your life as something important or don't do it. Don't set a commitment if you're not going to consider it important enough to give it everything you've got. Why? Because every time you set a commitment, if you do it, you strengthen your will and your confidence in yourself. And if you don't do it, you weaken your will and your confidence in yourself. There's one way to gimmick this. There's one way of leveraging yourself that I think is kind of interesting. Consider yourself a scientist, and your intent is to find out how you stop yourself. So you set a goal and then you observe and you note you're performing the experiment. You observe. This time I stop myself this way. This time I stopped myself this way. In order to do this, you're going to need to keep track of your behaviors over the course of a day. So you are going to have to do that. Now. You could take a meta position and notice that you've forgotten to remember, but that ultimately just tells you that you're up in your head entirely too much. There's too many fun rooms in your head. You're bouncing around inside them. This is why you have to get out of your head and into your body. Here's a thought. What you know, if you're very proud of your intelligence, you feel like you know how to do a lot of things, but you just don't do them. What if you change your definition of knowing how to do something to include the ability to do it? In other words, if you say I know how to write and you include in the definition of writing the ability to finish at least one story per month, that if you don't do that, you don't know how to write because you've included in there the ability to motivate yourself to do it and the ability to, you know, do at least one sentence a day. By doing that trick, you might be able to use your ego against itself to, you know, there are plenty of people say I know how to do sit ups. You know, I know how to do this, I know how to do this. I just can't get myself to do it. Change that so that your, your definition of doing the thing includes doing it. And if you're not doing it, you don't know how to do it. It's a trick, but it might be a very useful one as you gain knowledge of yourself. If you're constantly learning more about how to control your emotions and your actions. Motivation, that's a challenge for me. Okay, so a lot of people say that they're not motivated do something, then don't do it. If you're saying you're going to do something, you need to connect that thing with what is most important in your life. In other words, you get yourself out of bed every morning and go to work. Do you love your job? If you didn't love your job, then what motivated yourself to do it? There are any number of things that you don't love, you don't like, but you do them. Figure out how you did that and it's going to be the fact that on some level you, you made it a must, you had to do it. The things that you don't, you don't have motivation to do. Those are not things where you feel like you must do them. Those are things that you feel like you should do them. You know, it would be nice if you did it. Wouldn't it be great if I did it? It's not a. I absolutely have to do this. Because you, like I said, you have an entire set of things in your life that you can look at and see that when you have to do something, you'll find a way to do it. So if you will start with just the breathing, if you will accept this and you will use the breathing as a test of whether or not you can keep your word to yourself and whether your issues in the world, if you could do this, you could leverage yourself forward. And if you can't do this, then the problems were not outside you. The problems are inside you. And that of course is embarrassing in one sense, but it's powerful another because it says you've got the control. So what if you define the knowledge of how to do something as including the ability to do it, the actual ability to set an alarm or notice the clock, including stop to breathe for 60 seconds. Get out of your head. If you can't do it, you don't know how to do it. Get into the game, start researching until you figure out what you need in order to just be able to breathe for 60 seconds. Jaime Rodriguez says good morning. Sounds like part of the first gate. Is it true? Learning how to not lie to myself? Absolutely. Musashi Miyamoto and Book of Five Rings says, do not think dishonestly. That is the first step of one of the greatest warriors in human history. Don't lie, at least to yourself. And that's the same as the three gates. So the people who say that the three gates are weak, that having to be honest is weak, are not noticing that the greatest warriors, and Musasha is not the only person who's pointed in that direction in human history, suggest that honesty and kindness and hard work, daily focused work, are your path to mastery. We're not talking about ordinary success. The chances are very good you're already successful in your life. What we're talking about is leveraging it to the next level. And if you're not successful in your life, how to get out of pain. So it's about how to to move out of pain toward joy and then anchoring that in so that you can begin to share your abundance with the world. See if there are any more questions over here. So, Keith, motivation. Start with the five minute miracle. Start with the breathing. Okay, if you start with the breathing and you learn how to motivate yourself to breathe, just that single thing, five minutes a day, you have just learned something about yourself. You've got out of your head into your body. You're processing your stress. I can build an entire success system off that one. Five minutes. If you have any comments, questions or requests, just ask. If you'd like to be coached by me more personally, come to the fire dance meetings on Saturday. You can get on there by just joining Stephen Barnes. Listen. Com. Take care. And I need to get into my day. I got writing to do. Bye. Bye.