#thought work

There is real danger in curiosity.

While it may not be a deadly trait (as it apparently is for cats), it can be a besetting characteristic for people who do a lot of thought work.

Don’t misunderstand. Curiosity is a great characteristic. The problem can be information overload, which leads to idea debt (more ideas to act on that you can possibly act on. I love this article by Jessica Abel on the subject), which leads to frustration and a serious lack of productivity.

This doesn’t mean you should not be curious. Curiosity is a great characteristic, especially when harnessed. But unharnessed curiosity will kill your soul, at the very least.

Curiosity is a blessing and a bane. I can tell you this from personal experience, as I’m more distractible than most squirrels. Especially when it comes to taking a deep dive into new realms of information and knowledge. It would be VERY easy for me to spend days wallowing in a mire of information about anything from bookbinding to music theory to the history of the Huns.

None of which would be profitable at this very moment.

I’ve found a simple way to harness curiosity.

And (you may have guessed), it all has to do with a calendar.

Schedule Your Input

Block time in your week for unabashed reveling in information. Read whatever you want. Go down whichever rabbit hole suits your fancy. Browse academic articles or comic books (I’ve done both). Just do it in the allotted time. There may be days for focussed input. If I’m working on a project, I may limit my input time to a particular subject matter. But, for me, input time is almost like playtime.

Caution: this is not entertainment time. Input doesn’t mean watching mindless videos on YouTube. There is purpose in that this is a time for satisfying the things I’m most curious about at the moment.

Schedule Your Output

Output sessions have some pretty strict rules. I set a 50-minute timer (you could start with 25 minutes or 12 minutes if you need to) during which:

Work on only one thing

All notifications are off

No Internet (There are some very rare exceptions here.)

If focus is lost and that 50-minute session is broken - start over.

It’s astounding to see what can be finished with 50-minutes of focus.

Scheduled input puts a limit on your curiosity while not stifling creativity.

Scheduled output trains your brain to focus.

Industrialist imagery still applies to non-industrialist thought work.

An assembly line must be optimized with exacting precision. Input should equal desired output. Balance is key.

If the correct amount of raw materials are not entering the line on one end - the output (final product) on the other side is minimized. Production is low.

If there’s too much input, output is frantic, frenzied, and hopeless. It feels like you’re beginning to “fight a losing game” (to quote Lucille Ball from the classic candy factory episode.)

There must be a balance of input and output on every assembly line.

There must also be a balance of input and output in creative and thought-work.

Too much input, or the wrong kinds of input, without sufficient output, will stifle creativity and cause blockage in the brain. We are not created to merely consume. Frankly, I’m concerned when I see people spend the majority of their time scrolling social media and binging Netflix without creating anything. Input should be intentional. Thoughtful. Premeditated. Our culture inputs so much digital clutter, we fail to see the pixel-hoarders we’ve become. Frenzied, panicked, and full of fear that one of those chocolates will slip past us on this cyber-assembly line of feverish FOMO.

The other side is just as bad. Creativity and thought work doesn’t appear out of a magic hat. Few people are able to simply draw ideas from scratch in their own minds. Great ideas are built on the ideas of others. “Steal like an artist,” as Austin Kleon exhorts us. If you’re feeling creatively blocked or dead, check your input. This is more than likely the root of your problem. Read more. Read better. Consume material from the greats. From the archetypes.

Too little input is as big of a complication as too much input. Both results are less than ideal.

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Work at home is not everything fun and people should movement uprise for this. One material you have until do is glom on to the right infrastructure, and the first lap priority is the furniture.<\p>

Essential Tips to Think back<\p>

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Make Your Comfort under consideration - Doing work for extended hours is probably the most common choses local contemporaneousness. So, isn't it half note that you simply keep the comfort in mind? The better comfortable you might be met with, it is going in passage to automatically enhance your work utility. Pathetic ways of functioning over create an difficult impact on your overall soundness. And so the arising glitch will not likely lately hamper your stint quality but additionally your health too. There are several selections for home office photocomposition that will make inner man spoilt inasmuch as choice. So take your pick judiciously.<\p>

Single out Your Furniture Well - This is one of the mass center ingredient that you are unable to sacrifice for overlook. Understanding the office apparatus that self-restraint hit the spot the most, with regards to english, comfort and finances are very crucial. And gross which fits the formality perfectly will go on the present-age office furniture. The power elite may be custom-designed supplying herself inclusive of transformed comfort that you need while present-day handling and is also very pocket friendly. Inasmuch as the name suggests, contemporary tackle gives your admit everything home office an incredibly fretting and stylish look, a thing that the youth these days likes.<\p>

Prioritize your lifestyle - Working at hearth bump have being a tad besides at soothing than disposed to office because it helps save travel paleozoic. It additionally enables you to responsibility while sitting in your comfort zone. This does not necessarily mode you may work round the clock giving almost no time for your family or yourself. Don't forget it is just work; it's just an element of your way upon life and never your review life entirely.<\p>

I’m in a coaching group with women from all across the globe. (Yes, you can pretty much guarantee most coaches continue to get coached themselves!)  We’ve been discussing the Law of Attraction and how it manifests.  Most of us have vision boards.

One of the women in my group, Mary, shared a great example of how vision boards can work in our lives:  she created a vision board last year with herself on the cover of Forbes magazine.  Just two weeks ago, she got a call that she made the first round of cuts for Forbes “Top 100 women in finance” issue—she’s made it into the top one-third of contenders and is now in the interview process for the final round!!!  Now that’s a kick-ass call to get, and that’s the magic that can happen when you work the law of attraction by creating a vision board.

Vision boards don’t get as much play as they used to when Rhonda Byrne’s book “The Secret” was all the rage a few years ago.  But they are very powerful tools, and I can personally attest to their power in my life, which is why I got together with 15 other women a few nights ago to teach a class on making them.  Today, I’m going to share a little about how they work, and then give you steps to creating your own.

One of the best vision board resources out there is one of my coaches and mentors, Christine Kane, who talks about three kinds of vision boards in her terrific e-book “The Complete Guide to Creating a Vision Board”  (see resources below for where to download).  I saw all three of types last night at my workshop:

“Opening and Allowing” Vision Boards—For those of you who—like me doing my first Vision Board—are not sure what exactly you want. You know you want to change but don’t know how it’s possible.  Go through each magazine. Tear out images that resonate, without trying to figure out what it means. It will become clear.

“I Know Exactly What I Want” Vision Boards—For those of you who are very clear about something you want to manifest in your life. Look for those images. The dream house. The dream job. The dream organized closet! (Just saying…whatever it is!)

“Theme” Vision Boards—This works best for those of you who are focused on improving one particular area of your life, for instance, career. The only difference between the Theme Vision Boards and the others is that this one has very clear parameters and intention.

My own Vision Board experience

I read The Secret. I watched Oprah. I wanted to make a vision board long before I did.  I thought that just wanting something would attract it to me. Not so much.  I waited. Nothing happened. But then beyond the thought, I did nothing to attract what I wanted. Our thoughts ARE powerful, but they need to manifest!

So the truth is that I made my first vision board last year during an enjoyable evening with a few friends.  I accumulated magazines, grabbed my scissors and a glue stick and got stuck in, not really sure what would come out of it.  But my vision board, once completed and displayed outside my closet, worked its magic on me during the last year.  I got very clear about what I wanted in my life, got clear about my career, and, well, found a few surprises.  I made an “Opening and Allowing” board.  Turns out, what I wanted to open and allow for was a change to come into my life: I wanted the feeling of adventure, to feel calm, relaxed, and to make some real life decisions.

How you want to feel, not just what you want

Creating a vision board that works is pretty simple. The key is to focus on how you want to feel, as much as what you want.

Your vision board should focus on how you want to feel, not just on things that you want. Don’t get me wrong; it’s great to include the material stuff, too. However, the more your board focuses on how you want to feel, the more it will come to life.

My first vision board. I still don’t know quite what the copper bath tub was about. 😉

Here’s an example: my last vision board had images of Positano on Italy’s Amalfi Coast on it.  But I had already been there.  What I wanted was the feeling I had in Positano, the feeling of adventure, camaraderie, and connection.  I wanted to create than on a daily basis.  What I did was seek out more adventures, more opportunities to say “yes” to trying something new, and more opportunities to connect with people whose company enriched me.

The most intriguing thing on my vision board was a series of quotes around change—at the time I was going through an internal struggle about my career—whether to continue at my corporate job or do branch out and do something else.  At the time, I thought all the quotes around indecision were related to getting off my butt and ramping up my exercise routine.  I wrote a whole blog post last week about that quote in the middle: “The way you do anything is the way you do everything“… so profound!

There aren’t any rules. That’s the beauty of a vision board. You can’t do it wrong! You can’t mess it up.

Last night I saw a lot of travel photos – those came from people who wanted to attract feelings of adventure, freedom, enrichment into their lives.  I saw some relaxation, more subtle, but evident from softer colors, decor and calming photos.  And then there’s the energy I saw exploding from some boards, reflecting the drive and passion of the creators who wanted to go further.  In short,  there was a great mix of everything, reflecting all the individuals there.

The whole purpose of a vision board is to guide you visually towards what you’d like to attract.  So here’s how to create your vision board and channel the magic of the law of attraction.

I’ve been gathering magazines for about a year

Eight steps to Vision Board Magic

Gather all the supplies you’ll need

Collect magazines. I suggest something like 6-10 magazines of various kinds: travel, home, fashion, business…whatever you like. I browse Barnes & Noble!

Curate anything else that’s meaningful to you: photographs, postcards, ticket stubs, ribbon…you get the idea

Buy some poster board – I found the cheapest and most practical were from Target, but you could go with cork or something fancier from Etsy.

Grab some scissors, tape, pins, and/or a glue stick to put your board together.

Add some of those cool new gel pens, stickers, washi tape, or anything else that you like

Get quiet and get clear

First, get clear on what you want in your life, but be specific, in your life where? Job? Home? Office? Relationship? Set your intention.  Be clear about what you want.  When I did my first board, I was less clear about what I wanted, and what manifested for me was clarity about what I wanted.  So from that perspective, my board worked p.  This time, I’m much clearer about who I want to be.

Bring the things you want to life on the board.  What motivates and inspires you?  The purpose of your vision board is to bring everything on it to life. First, think about what your goals are in the following areas: relationships, career and finances, home, travel, personal growth (including spirituality, social life, education) and health.

Flip & Rip

Flip through the magazines… when something catches your eye, cut or rip it out. Don’t ask why, don’t belabor it. Trust your subconscious here.

Sort

Next sort you’re your cache into stacks, again without thinking too, too much about it. Let your intuition guide you!

Arrange!

Now grab the poster board and arrange the images, quotes, etc. on the board.  Don’t forget to put yourself in your vision board with that photograph!  Then, you might do as I did and make quadrants for career, health, travel and relationships.  Or, you might have a wheel-spoke type arrangement.  Do what feels right to you. No rules! The options are endless.

Paste & decorate

After you’ve arranged all the items in a way that works for you, paste everything onto the board, add some decorative touches: paint, gel pens, whatever strikes your fancy.

Display for magic!

The magic of vision boards happens once you hang it where you can see it every day. Remember, it’s essentially a daily visualization of the feelings and things you want to attract into your life.  So put it where you can see it every day.  Mine hangs outside my closet.

Take action!

Your vision board may have goals, dreams, and desires that seem light years from where you are, but remember that every journey starts with a single step.

Visualization is a powerful mind exercise

Christine Kane is fond of saying “energy flows where attention goes,” which means that what you focus on expands. Putting a vision board in a place you can see it— for me that place is outside my closet—is like a mini visualization every time you look at it during the day. As Christine says:

“When you surround yourself with images of who you want to become,

what you want to have, where you

what you want to have, where you

where you want to live or vacation,

your life changes to match those images and those desires.

Your attention is that your life changes to match those images and those desires.

Your attention is that powerful.”

So my friends, make some vision boards!  It’s a great thing to do with a group of friends, or on your own on a quiet afternoon.  It’s crazy powerful.  I didn’t know. And now I would not be without one.

With love,

Resources:

Christine Kane’s “The Complete Guide to Vision Boards: How to create your perfect life effortlessly” – this e-book has been downloaded tens of thousands of times.  You’ll love it!

The reason the way you do anything is the way you do everything is because of your belief systems.

I love this saying, I even had it on a vision board in recent past (photo above!)  I love it because in my life, and in the lives of my clients, the realization of its truth has been a catalyst for understanding their belief systems.  Does this saying resonate with you?  If you reflect on it, is how you take action in any situation how you handle them all?

Each and every action you take contributes to the life you’re choosing to live.  And remember from my earlier post on the Model: actions arise from feelings, which arise from thoughts about the facts of our lives. Those thoughts take hold, often at an early age, and become fixed as beliefs. A belief or a belief system arises from a thought, or series of thoughts, that you’ve held for a long time—deeply rooted, emotionally charged beliefs about who you are, and who you are supposed to be.

A belief gives you a feeling of certainty (which can be comforting) about what things mean and who you are. Belief systems can also keep you stuck.  

If you take action from a core belief of scarcity, or unworthiness, that’s going to play out in how you think about the world and how you relate to it.

If you want to know what your belief systems are, look at your life. Your life is your beliefs manifested. What you believe encompasses what you do, what you say, and how you react.

If you want to change something, and you want that change to be permanent, it must be changed at the belief level. You can’t simply treat the symptom (overeating, overspending, perfectionism, shame); you need to dig deep and find the belief that caused you to get there in the first place.

For example, if you believe you will always be overweight or strapped for money, then it will be difficult to lose weight permanently or have abundant income. Beliefs and reality like to be reflective of each other. When reality starts to contradict a belief, tension develops, and this tension makes you uncomfortable. You may have no idea when this is happening; you just think you are stressed. At this point, you have two choices to reduce the tension: change the belief system or change the reality. Because you don’t realize you have the negative belief in the first place, you have no choice but to sabotage your reality and gain that weight back, or blow the budget to be back in line with what you believe.

This is a common dance many clients experience. It’s not until you take hold of and change the belief that you can achieve any permanent results—be they weight loss, financial stability, or something else. It’s important to remember: many of the beliefs that drive you are completely illogical. When you become aware of the things you believe in, you might be tempted to disregard them because they seem so silly. This would be a big mistake. Many of your beliefs were formed when you were a small child when you didn’t have the emotional maturity to understand why things happened the way they did around you.

As a child, you may have blamed yourself for everything because you didn’t understand the complexities of other people’s lives and experiences. For example, you might have believed it was your fault if your parents fought all the time. You internalize the blame for the negative circumstances because the alternative, it being completely out of our control, is unthinkable. You then form the belief that if you were better behaved, our parents wouldn’t fight anymore. At least then you feel as if there is something you can do about it. You search for ways to cope and survive by trying to generalize what everything means. You take two unrelated things – your behavior and your parent’s marriage – and you connect them. When your parents later divorce, you might internalize this event and believe you were not good enough to keep them together.

The bad news is that you might be hanging on to beliefs you developed when you were too young to know any better. The good news is that now you can go in and pinpoint all those old, illogical beliefs and evaluate them with new eyes as an adult.

How? By staying connected to yourselves and paying attention. When negative feelings come up and you feel them instead of denying them, they can be the doorway into your beliefs.

For example, if you are feeling anxious because a man hasn’t called, you can evaluate what is really going on at a deeper level. You can think about what the real feeling is. It might start out as anxiety that makes you want to eat because there are no messages on your phone. If you sit with it and go deeper you may see what you are really feeling is fear. You can go even deeper and see that you are afraid he won’t call and he will reject you. As you focus on this, you might realize you are afraid of being rejected because, on some level, you don’t believe you are worthy of a loving relationship. BINGO! Crappy belief system found. Maybe you didn’t have much love from your dad when you were young, so you started believing you weren’t worthy of a man’s love. Here you are forty years later still believing it! Is it logical? No. But, on some level, you believe it to be true and it is causing you to have anxiety about him calling.

To further illustrate, imagine you didn’t have this belief. Imagine you knew that you were worthy of deep, passionate, wondrous love. Imagine you were solid in knowing how fabulous you are. Now, imagine coming home to no messages on the machine. You don’t jump to the belief that you will be rejected because it probably wouldn’t occur to you. If, for some reason this man rejected you, you would simply see he is not the man for you. You would be able to look at it from a place of security and calmness because you believe you are worthy. You would know you deserve love, and it is just going to come from yourself until the right man comes along. So, first, acknowledge and feel the feeling. Second, follow where it leads.

When you get to the belief, pay attention to it no matter how illogical it might seem to you as an adult. See how it has manifested in your life. Then, get busy changing it to something true.

With love,

Next week:  Loving ourselves as we are, right now!

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Learn more:

Blog: What’s a life coach anyway?

Blog: When and how to hire a life coach

Blog: What does a weight loss coach do?

Blog: How the Model can help you solve any problem (Part 1)

Blog: Navigating change (The Model, Part 2)

Book: Self-coaching 101, by Brooke Castillo—This is an excellent book that breaks the Model down into its parts and walks you through in detail.  Order it here on Amazon

Life Coach School Podcast—If you’re remotely interested in being coached or becoming a coach, the weekly Life Coach School podcast with Brooke Castillo is a must-listen.  It has some of the best content to be found on personal development, mindfulness, and achieving your goals in life.  Brooke has about 100,000 listeners a week.  Pretty soon you’ll be taking Brooke in your car, on your walks, to the gym!

Hadass Eviatar Coaching Has Launched!!!

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