Self Help and Personal Development | Steves Goal

Hi all, sorry that Stevesgoal hasn’t been updated in a while. Firstly I was at a castle in Scotland for a family wedding, and then everything just went crazy. I havn’t even had Internet access for the past week. Anyway, things should be more back to normal now, and I hope to have some more super-useful advice on all things self-improvement soon!

Moving. Yep. In case you didn’t guess, motivation as word has strong links to motion. Often, it is the act of doing something that brings about motivation. Whilst you could see that as circular logic, with motivation being required to self motivate, the truth is rather more promising.

If we agree for a moment that motivation comes from action or motion then the next most important thing to deciede is if the motivator required to kickstart your motivation needs to be the same type of motion/action or not. If it were the same, then motivation would end up being a virtous or vicious cycle, depending on your initial success.

Luckily this is not the case. I have found such simple things as going for a long walk, deep breathing and swimming are often enough to provide the motivation kickstart I require. Having said that, there is some truth also, to the idea of motivation as a cycle. If you take on too much to begin with and then fail, you are much more likely to fall into a despondant mood and give up.

So, for me at least, the key is to take some physical action, such as swimming and then once motivated, tackle a very small part of the task to ensure that I have a high chance of creating a sort of feedback loop of success that keeps me motivated. Why not try it yourself?

Ok, I gave it a go. I tried to leverage the “power of intention” / “law of attraction” thing for the past month as part of my Steveslab feature. I don’t like theorecticl stuff but I do enjoy testing and I just had to know if the latest cash cow doing the self improvement circuit was of any real use, or it it was a way to fill up space and sell products.

My conclusion - the law of attraction, as stated by many, is nothing more than a pile of rubbish. In my previous entry I mentioned a study done at PEAR, and the pioneering research into human intention and how it can effect entropy. However, I don’t feel that this scales up, at least in the way the law of attraction predicts.

In brief, the law of attraction states that whatever you focus on will come your way. I beleive that. What I don’t believe in, and why I did this experiment, is the notion that there is some sort of cosmic force that will then work to deliver on things that the most committed focus on. The whole thing is too vague and ill defined to win me over anyway. From a more objective point of view, I just don’t believe that this new definition of the law of attraction is correct.

What I do beleive is that the law of attraction is a very real, very effective force that can change your life. Its nothing paranormal though, its just that the concentration that you invested results in you spotting opportunities that would normally slip you by. For me, it is as simple as that.

Steveslabe casefile 1. Closed.

Stevesgoal is generally a very down to earth self improvement blog, avoiding most of the more esoteric adventures that other personal developmenet sites seem to go on. My new feature - “Steveslab” is about as far out as this site will get, testing my theories and then reporting back on the results.

One thing that has always interested me is the power of intetion - in other words, does the desire for something to be done or something to happen have any actual effect on the outcome? From my perspective there must be some effect even if it is only caused by psychological factors. We all know, or should be now, that a happy positive outlook is much more likely to lead to success than a negative one, if for nothing else than that negative people tend to sabotage their own success.

The other component that could be ascribed to the power of intention is some sort of actual universal phenomena, described by many as the “law of attraction” which says that what we concentrate on comes into our lives. This obviously presupposes some sort of paranormal phenomena, although I dislike the term and would call it outside the known physical reality - paranomal conjures up too much ghosty type stuff for my liking.

Anyway, its hard to say if this second componenet, the non psychological one, has any real bearing. Up until recently I would have said that this compenent was not real and any percieved results were due to wishful thinking. However, after a recent foray onto the Princeton website (Princeton.edu) and reading over the latest research from PEAR - the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research lab, I am unsure what to think.

They have been conducting experiments which measure a persons ability to effect entropy. Entropy is the natural rate of change or decay of a system as it falls into disorder. All system tend towards greater entropy or chaos as they age, at least thats how the theory goes. The PEAR team measure entropy by using a random number generator based on radioactive decay, not a pseudo computer random generator and tested people’s ability to alter the output of the generator.

Whilst on an individual level the results were nothing amazing, when taken as a whole, over a number of years the experiment has revealed a very distinct bias in entropy that can be caused by the humna mind. Now, I don’t know if this due to some flaw in the logic of the experimnet, a poor analysis of the statistical data or due to some explainable phenomena, but if it is not, then this is the clearest proof ever that people’s intentions do effect their physical relationship.

As such I think we should all reconsider the importance of positive thinking and visualisation in our lives. I hope to have some sort of small experiment for Steveslab to try fairly soon!

I am convinced that many of us under perform. I know I do, most days I am very inefficient with time. Now, many people who argue for time management claim that the point of time management is to become more efficient and more successful. That’s all very well, but I also beleive that there is no point flogging a dead horse!

What do I mean by that? Well, some days you may not be very productive, regardless of your time management skills. Time management alone doesn’t guarentee efficiency and I am fim believer that relaxation and “fun” time is just as important and work time.

What does’t make sense to me is when peopl strictly organise their day, get ahead of schedule and cram extra work in, usually from tomorrows to do list. I should know, that used to be me a few months ago. What I began to realise was, that my work day constantly expanded to fill my whole day, unless I marked out time for my work day to end and my leisure day to being.

The point of what I am trying to say is that you need to learn to confine your work day to a set number of hours, whenever possible. Obviously, this doesn’t work all the time and some days you will need to work over, but I have found, time and time again, that compacting your work day into a set few hours brings another self improvement ‘law’ into play.

The law of forced efficiency is something that I picked up from Brian Tracy and it absolutely does work. For some reason the human mind will always spread to fill the time available. By setting deadlines for task, rather than thinking, I have a whole day for this, you will complete the task much quicker and have more free time.

Except, you shouldn’t leave this time as free time, you should block out specific time - your leisure time. Once you have mastered basic time management you are at risk of becoming a work aholic and alsoof becoming inefficenct due to a lack of work boundaries. Your newly found efficiency due to time management makes you take on more and more work, and your liesure time suffers more than ever.

Only by taking your non working time seriously and planning it out in advanced can you maintain or even improve your efficiency and well being. Crazy, but true, at least in my experience.