Habits Great Leaders Have

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Key Points for LIFE DESIGN

Prioritizing, planning and scheduling is the process by which you design your life. By doing so you can reduce your stress levels and maximize your effectiveness.

 

Habits Great Leaders Have

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Follow this nine-step process to prepare and implement:

1. Decide on the essential priorities necessary for you to succeed in your job/business/life.
2. Identify the time/resources you have available.
3. Identify what goals and targets you need to achieve.
4. Identify what is irrelevant, intrusive, and drains energy.
5. Eliminate habits and behaviors and commitments that do not serve you.
6. Create firewalls to protect your boundaries and learn to reject what doesn’t serve you.
7. Schedule the goals and targets you need to achieve to meet your priorities.
8. Ensure that you have the right habits in place to achieve your targets.
9. Execute your plan and course correct.

It’s crucial for your professional and personal goals that you schedule your time. If you have little or no discretionary time left when you reach Step 7 above, revisit your tasks to see if you can do them differently. Otherwise, your work-life balance will suffer.

Here are twelve time-management habits. Tailor these as you like, but whichever you’re working on, ensure you do so in twenty-one-day cycles.

Habit 1: Strive to be authentic. Be as honest with yourself as you can
about what you want and why you do what you do.

Habit 2: Favor trusting relationships. Build relationships with people you can trust and count on. Ensure those same people can trust and count on you. Train your staff to assume greater responsibility. This will free up your time.

Habit 3: Maintain a lifestyle that will give you maximum energy. This includes exercise for at least 120 minutes a week, sufficient sleep, and an appropriate lunch.

Habit 4: Listen to your biorhythms and organize your day accordingly. Schedule your tasks based on how your energy fluctuates throughout the day. Stop working impossible hours trying to do it all on your own.

Habit 5: Set very few priorities and stick to them. Plan your time so you are working on a maximum of two things, both of which are your highest priorities. The negative effects of bad meetings are much more dramatic than the positive impact of good sessions.

Habit 6: Turn down things that are inconsistent with your priorities. Saying “No” to other people will make you more productive. Stop people pleasing and be more driven by your values and your priorities. One of the more common reasons for overwhelm and burnout is not being able to say “no” and protecting your time and energy for what truly matters.

Habit 7: Set aside time for focused effort. Schedule time every day to work on just one thing. We have spoken about how “attention fragmentation” afflicting the always-connected executive harms productivity and happiness.

Habit 8: Automate repetitive tasks and improve them if possible. Consider ways of doing things better and faster. Consider using templates.

Habit 9: Build solid processes. Set up processes that last and that run without your attention.

Habit 10: Spot trouble ahead and solve problems immediately. Anticipate potential problems and build solutions for them in advance. The further in time you project, the more potential problems you can anticipate. The idea is not to be overwhelmed by all this but to design just in time solutions.

Habit 11: Chunk up your work into small units. Focus on one unit at a time. Instead of dreaming about the big goal, spend most of your time working on what’s in front of you.

Habit 12: Unless there’s a good reason to give it up, don’t terminate what you considered worth starting. Stop doing what’s no longer worthwhile; finish what’s important.

Creating your Strategic Plan (You may pause the audio every time you are answering a question) – For the CEO, Entrepreneur, Manager

1. Identify the core business beliefs you need to succeed: I believe the
following things are true and they are how I want to run my business (Write down ten.) This is also the time to look at these beliefs and decide if they are really valid or are archaic shadows from your past and limiting beliefs.

2. Your Personal Vision: Write out all that you want to be, have and do if money were no object. How much money would you like to have flow through your life to make this happen?

3. Your Company Vision: Write out your company vision as if it were already true (present tense). Include the value of your company and any other details you want to make sure happen
for you.

4. Your Ideal Future: Write your ideal future here. What will you see, feel, hear and touch when you are living your ideal future? Who will you be sharing this ideal future with? How will you look, behave and feel when you are living this future? Who will you be working with? Have fun with it!

Average success is often based on setting average goals. Decide what you really want: to be the best, the fastest, the cheapest, the biggest, whatever. Aim for the ultimate. Decide where you want to end up. That is your goal.

Then you can work backwards and lay out every step along the way. Never start small where goals are concerned. You’ll make better decisions — and find it much easier to work a lot harder — when your ultimate goal is ultimate success.

Achieving a goal — no matter how huge — isn’t the finish line for highly successful people. Achieving one huge goal just creates a launching pad for achieving another huge goal.

Maybe you want to create a hundred-million business; once you do that you can leverage your contacts and influence to create a charitable foundation for a cause you believe in. Then your business and humanitarian success can create a platform for speaking, writing, and thought leadership. The process of becoming remarkably successful in one field will give you the skills and network to be remarkably successful in many other fields. Remarkably successful people don’t try to win just one race; they expect and plan to win a number of subsequent races.

5. Long-Term Targets: Pick a specific date somewhere between three and five years from now. Write down the long-term targets you want to have accomplished by that date for your business.

My general experience is that we very often over-estimate what we can do in one year and under-estimate what we can do in five. So the impact of picking a longer term target is that it helps to focus the current short term target as well as helping you create a detailed map of how to get there.

6. Long-Term Priorities: Write down the most important areas of your business to focus on in order to accomplish your long-term targets. Write down ten, but identify your top five and then write them down.

7. Short-term Goals: Pick a specific date somewhere about one year from now. Write down the short- term goal that you want to have accomplished by that date for your business.

8. Top Five Short-term Areas of Focus: Write down the most important areas of your business to focus on in order to accomplish your short-term goals. Write down ten then identify your top five.

9. Key Metrics: Write down all the things you may want to measure in your business. Write down the four things you will measure on a weekly basis to ensure you hit your short-term goals.

10. Key Short-Term Area of Focus: Detail what all the Weekly Tasks aim to accomplish.

11. Quarterly Initiatives: Write down your first Key Short-Term Area of Focus then break it down into no more than five quarterly initiatives.

12. Weekly Tasks: Break down each quarterly initiative for the upcoming quarter into smaller tasks. Write down how long each task will take. Go back and break down any tasks that are longer than thirty minutes into smaller tasks.

You are done when all tasks on your list are no more than thirty minutes long or two cycles on 15 minutes. These tasks must also be routine and easily accomplished and better still can be delegated. If they are not routine tasks, then they have not been defined accurately and chunked down appropriately.

One lucky listener that posts a review on iTunes will win a private confidential consultation and coaching with me on discovering your soul’s purpose. I will lead you on a personal journey to discover your unique mind-body psychosomatic map of your life. You will get a detailed report and a personal 45 minute consultation with me that is worth thousands.

On this podcast I’m going to help you design a life that works. So you are able to say yes to the things that matter and eliminate everything else that slows you down. The more clear you can be about how to organize your daily life to support your bigger vision, the more you’ll step into your true potential, stay on track and accomplish all that you want and deserve. Are you ready to make that happen?

Feel free to reach out to me to ask your questions at AskDrSun.com. Your life is a gift. Design it. Do what matters and join me each week as we get closer to designing the life of your dreams. I am Dr Sun. Join me next week on Your Life by Design.

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Self-Renewal

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The concept of self-renewal may be the most important idea of all when it comes to becoming more productive and successful long term. Our bodies, emotions, and minds have natural systems where they renew themselves.

 

Self-Renewal

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They get rid of the junk, replace the sick cells, put new ones in place, etc. The interesting insight here is that these processes can’t be impacted consciously.

Life is a marathon, not a sprint. So unless there is a continuous and ongoing attempt at self-evaluation and self-renewal you may not even reach the finish line before dropping out of the race.

You can’t just say, “OK, stop feeling depressed right now”, or “OK, start attacking the cancer cells” to make it happen. When you realize this, you’ll understand the power of renewal and how to use it.

You’ll understand that you need to provide yourself with basic building blocks so your systems can renew themselves automatically, as they’re designed to. You’ll also need to stop doing the things that prevent these systems from renewing themselves.

On a physical level, most people want to feel better, more energetic, etc. If you don’t feel this way, you’re probably not giving your body the necessary building blocks. Water is one of these building blocks.

On an emotional level, we have processes that let us take advantage of opportunities and become optimistic, and processes that put us in a natural cycle of grieving when we lose something special to us. But many people block these natural emotional cycles, often with tension.

Inspire positive emotions by doing things that make you feel good inside, e.g. mentoring someone, doing something for another without expecting anything in return, etc.

On a mental level, the mind has processes to keep ourselves mentally healthy, for example with sleep and dreaming. If you don’t know what to do to avoid blocking these processes, you won’t be operating as well as you can.

One super important key here is to learn how to rest correctly and deeply, rather than resist resting or experience anxiety about resting. Pay attention to when you start feeling tired or unfocused. It’s your body telling you there’s a cycle that needs to be honored.

Your digestive system is super important. Chew your food thoroughly. Eat small meals and try not to snack between. Drink water about thirty minutes before a meal instead of drinking with the meal (it dilutes your stomach acid).

Your respiratory system is also, obviously, critical. Practice breathing from your stomach — like a baby does — instead of from your upper chest.

Your muscular and skeletal system is vital. Your body balances itself when it’s moving. Spend thirty-sixty minutes a day moving your body. Stretch. Your immune system is important, too. Eat raw and organic foods when you can.

Time Cycles

(Seasons in a Man’s Life, Daniel Levinson)

There are certain natural time cycles that everyone goes through. We can choose to work with these time cycles or be out of synch with them. Most of us normally work with these cycles of time in an instinctive, automatic fashion.

The overview below is a summary from the very excellent book The Seasons of a Man’s Life by Daniel Levinson. For the purposes of managing time, I will draw a very sharp distinction between the use of willpower and goal setting at different times in our lives.

There are many theories and models about developmental psychology and life structures. These include the likes of Erik Erikson, Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, and others.

Life structure refers to the underlying pattern in an individual’s life at any given point in time. A person’s life structure is shaped mainly by his social and physical environment, and it primarily involves family and work.

There are six stages of adulthood in Levinson’s book. From early childhood up to age twenty-two, the use of willpower in running one’s life and in goal setting is crucial. In fact, those who fail to do so pay the price by not having these faculties developed later on in life. This is when the 10,000-hour rule comes into play.

However, after age twenty-two, willpower must be used more and more sparingly because it ends up exhausting your cognitive, affective, and conative aspects of your psyche. The cognitive part of the brain measures intelligence, the affective deals with emotions, and the conative drives how one acts on those thoughts and feelings.

Once these faculties are exhausted, you will go back to making choices the way you have always done. You become a legal adult at eighteen or twenty-one, depending on the laws of your country or state, but you reach your biological adulthood only at thirty-five.

Once this occurs, the rate at which your cells break down speeds up. So the energy required to exert the use of your willpower will be used up faster.

So the more the number of positive habits you have to develop to manage your life better, the harder it gets. It’s therefore crucial that you develop the right habits as early as you can.

If you want to successfully manage time later (after thirty-five) in your life, learn the right habits first. Keeping to a regular schedule of waking up on time, having all your meals on time, sleeping on time, etc.… all these seemingly-small habits contribute.

In Levinson’s Life Structure theory there are two key concepts:

1. The Stable Period — This is the time when a person makes crucial choices in life.

2. The Transitional Period — This is the end of one stage of adulthood and the beginning of a new one. Life during these transitions can be uncertain but the quality and significance of
one’s life commitments often change between the beginning and end of a period.

I have mentioned the two different ways of living your life. The model adopted by my father. He was swept up in the current, coasting along, not choosing his destination and ending up in a place he never would have chosen if he had consciously been aware of it.

He was pulled in a hundred different directions and whichever pulled hardest was the focus for the day, week or month.

Unfortunately, that’s how a lot of people approach life. They just operate automatically. They are caught up in life’s distractions. They don’t think about where they might be going, and before long they end up at a destination they would not have chosen if they were conscious of what they were choosing.

The unintended destination may be a health crisis, a marital crisis, a business failure, or a career upset; whatever it is, they end up in a place far from what they thought they were going.

But the alternative — that’s where I was, and you may be there too — is what I call “The Compulsive Life”. This is the overcorrection to “Coasting Along”. This is the type of person that takes great pride in setting and achieving goals. They are hyper-driven on making progress.

But this person is so driven at excelling in one area of their life that they often neglect the other areas, and that’s what happened to me. You ignore, until it is too late, whatever does not contribute to your goals.

And if you are not careful, it can lead to the destruction of important relationships, your health, and a lot more. We get so rewarded for being successful and appreciated for being ‘On time, on target’ that we keep doing more and more.

Both these approaches will result in the individual in question struggling to deal with the mid-life crisis or transition that affects everyone from about 45 to 55. Those who fail to deal well with this phase will watch the breakdown of their health, their relationships and sometimes even their finances.

So renewal is an ongoing dynamic process that takes different forms as well progress through life.

DO you have the following habits/routines/DMs in place?

• Identifying the Core Priority
• Waking up
• Getting ready to work
• Winding down before sleep
• Dealing with relationships (Work and Personal)
• Dealing with Challenges
• Problem Solving
• Renewal (physical, emotional and mental)

One lucky listener that posts a review on iTunes will win a private confidential consultation and coaching with me on discovering your soul’s purpose. I will lead you on a personal journey to discover your unique mind-body psychosomatic map of your life. You will get a detailed report and a personal 45 minute consultation with me that is worth thousands.

On this podcast I’m going to help you design a life that works. So you are able to say yes to the things that matter and eliminate everything else that slows you down. The more clear you can be about how to organize your daily life to support your bigger vision, the more you’ll step into your true potential, stay on track and accomplish all that you want and deserve. Are you ready to make that happen?

Feel free to reach out to me to ask your questions at AskDrSun.com. Your life is a gift. Design it. Do what matters and join me each week as we get closer to designing the life of your dreams. I am Dr Sun. Join me next week on Your Life by Design.

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Habit Formation for Success

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Habit Formation for Success.

This model is the most powerful concept I’ve ever learned when it comes to productivity and getting the most out of yourself. It’s called Habit Formation, and it’s a synthesis between Zen and Systems Thinking. Weird, I know. The most important and powerful state we can be in is the state called Awareness.

 

Habit Formation for Success

Habit Formation

Awareness is when we remember we’re alive. We zoom out for a second and see the bigger picture. Imagine you get in a major car accident, and it shocks you so much that you call up all the people you love and tell them you love them. That’s Awareness.

The rarest and most precious form of ENERGY we have is Will Power. We get a tiny bit of it each day, and we often waste it on things that aren’t that important (like holding back our true emotions). Now, it takes about twenty-one days to form a new habit. If you do something every day, it’ll take on a life of its own after twenty-one days.

Days 1-7 is the first phase. I call it Defying Inertia. Inertia is the innate resistance to change. Everything inside you will tell you, “No, I don’t want to do that!”

Days 8-14 is the second phase. I call it Resistance. You’re no longer defiant, but you still have to push through. You don’t naturally feel like doing it yet.

Days 15-21 is the third phase. I call it Acclimation. The resistance starts going away, and it begins to feel like what you are doing is the natural thing to do.

Here’s how this ties back to Awareness and Will Power. When we get some Awareness and Will Power, we can use them to start or develop a new habit (what I call a Routine). That way, twenty-one days later it’ll have a life of its own, and you won’t need more Awareness or Will Power to keep it going.

Then, the next time you get Awareness or Will Power, use them to start a NEW habit, and repeat the cycle. When you do, you’ll become so productive you won’t even believe it.

The goal is to work in a way that creates not only great results but also satisfaction and enjoyment for us. We don’t need to become robots that just produce results, but we also don’t need to get swept away by things that give us immediate pleasure but cost us results we’d proud of having, that make a difference in our life.

Another important element that’s often overlooked is that it’s the TRANSITIONS that often trip us up. If you want to start going to the gym, you have to plan for the ‘on ramp’. If you don’t, and spend time looking for your clothes, shoes, or keys, your time gets cut short, causing you to fail before you even get started. The same goes for your ‘off ramp’ when you get done working out and re-join your track for the rest of your day.

Planning for these ramps will increase the chance that the new ritual will stick, and reduce your anxiety and sense of ‘rushing’. Most people who are trying to learn a new habit or ritual use Will Power to move through it. If you do so, you will probably find that after half an hour or an hour, you are exhausted. The moment you are exhausted, you will go back to your former habits because there is simply no more energy left. After a few days of this, you will conclude that you are incapable of learning a new habit.

I once saw a lady in my practice who wanted to learn three new habits at the same time. I explained to her that she was setting herself up to fail. Those entrepreneurs I work with who get this point go on to design very effective work schedules.

The quality aspect of focus is WHAT you are focusing on. For example, the outcome you want rather than just the work in front of you. Additionally, as we build our ability to focus on just one thing at a time, we want to work on our ability to focus for longer and longer periods of time. That’s the quantity aspect. Right now, how long can you work on one thing at a time before you go check your email or voicemail?

And how many different things do you focus on during the day?

We want to work our way up to focus for a full forty-five minutes on just one thing. Most people don’t focus on one thing long enough to get big results. We want to fix that.

In life, we have a few leverage points that can give us tremendous results. These are things we usually have to be proactive about, to go and get done. These include things such as educating ourselves, working out, etc. You must be the one to decide to do these things. If you have a business, there are just a few places where most of the leverage exists.

The same goes for your relationships and health. Most times when someone starts something and they cannot carry on or they procrastinate, it’s either because they don’t know how or they have unmet emotional needs.

I have found that when you can break something down to fifteen-minute chunks, it becomes something that you can do.

The converse of the above is that if you cannot break down a project into doable fifteen-minute chunks, you cannot even start the project. I have written twenty books, published about ten of them, and developed new business projects using this rule.

When I cannot provide chapter headings for the main ten or twelve chapters of the book in fifteen minutes, I know I am not ready to write the book.

When you don’t know how to do something, you simply need to learn how to do it. For example, you are supposed to balance your checkbook, but keep procrastinating. Finally, you can’t put it off any longer, but when you sit down to do it you don’t know what to do because your
business manager who normally does it is now on vacation.

Simply having someone walk you through the steps once or twice would have solved the problem.

By learning to accept feedback and constructive criticism, you will be able to expand your thinking and become much more creative.

Part of setting good goals is thinking about how you will achieve them. The important part of the process is how you manage that change and how you can grow as a result.

You may choose to have an accountability partner. If you are doing the online coaching version of Freedom Formula, every time you have a coaching call you have the opportunity to be held accountable.

In order to get leverage if you just focused on three things, for forty-five minutes each, and did this every single day, what would those three things be? Make the list.

Next, what would the outcome be if you focused on each of these three things for the next three-five years. Write down the actions required for each of them.

Pause the audio for a while if you need to.

It’s important to focus on what you want to achieve, not on what you want to avoid. Your unconscious mind doesn’t know how to get rid of the “Don’t” part of a thought, so if you’re focused on the negative you’ll attract more of it into your life.

For example, if you say to yourself, “Don’t drink, don’t drink, don’t drink”, your unconscious minds hears “Drink… drink… drink.”

You may want to find out what you are really good at. You may have some ideas yourself, but you can also get objective feedback from people around you. Sometimes you may have taken on someone else’s idea of what you are good at. You may even have convinced yourself that you are good at something because your best friend or your father was good at that. So it’s important to be objective.

What do you enjoy or what would you enjoy given a chance? It’s important that you explore and discover what really excites you. So focus on achieving positive outcomes, not avoiding negative ones. At the same time, it’s important that you are honest with yourself about what you want more of in your life and what you want less of.

You may want to test different types of businesses or opportunities if you have not done so. Sometimes you may have some idealistic or romantic notions that may not stand the test of time. You may want to do a medical degree because you want to help others. You start on a
medical course then discover that you cannot stand the idea of drawing blood.

One lucky listener that posts a review on iTunes will win a private confidential consultation and coaching with me on discovering your soul’s purpose. I will lead you on a personal journey to discover your unique mind-body psychosomatic map of your life. You will get a detailed report and a personal 45 minute consultation with me that is worth thousands.

On this podcast I’m going to help you design a life that works. So you are able to say yes to the things that matter and eliminate everything else that slows you down. The more clear you can be about how to organize your daily life to support your bigger vision, the more you’ll step into your true potential, stay on track and accomplish all that you want and deserve. Are you ready to make that happen?

Feel free to reach out to me to ask your questions at AskDrSun.com. Your life is a gift. Design it. Do what matters and join me each week as we get closer to designing the life of your dreams. I am Dr Sun. Join me next week on Your Life by Design.

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Create Your Success Ritual

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“For every minute spent organizing, an hour is earned.”
-Benjamin Franklin

The rarest and most valuable form of action is ‘Deliberate Repetition’. This technique will help you get the most from the efforts you put into your life. One of the highest-leverage ways to use Deliberate Repetition is with your Personalized Success Ritual.

 

Create Your Success Ritual

Success Ritual

I recommend doing it first thing in the day. Why? Your morning sets your context for the day; it sets the ‘frame’ by which you judge everything else that happens during the day. If you set the context in the morning right, you’ll have a great day. If you have a great day, it’ll
set the context up for a great week, month, etc.

Your inner game — how you’re feeling about yourself — is the highest leverage in your life. Your morning ritual can really help you get into a great inner-game state.

When planning your ritual, think of what would make you strong physically, emotionally, and mentally. My morning ritual includes drinking water, exercising for twenty minutes, taking a bath, and having a healthy, energizing breakfast.

After I’ve done my morning ritual, I feel clear, I’m centered, and I’m ready for my day. I’m ready for anything that comes at me. I feel like nothing can really knock me off.

When I don’t do my morning ritual, I feel like I’m in reactive mode all day. I still get a lot done, but I’m not nearly as productive, and by the end of the day I can feel pretty worn out.

Find a first meal of the day that really works for you. Consider making it as organic and raw as possible. Include some protein as well. Write down the conditions that need to be in place for you to focus during the “First two hours of your day”, and ‘flow-chart’ the actual steps in your new ritual. Imagine how it’s going to go; see if you forgot any steps. Then go out there and do it.

If you’re getting stuck on a particular step, fix it or remove it. Improve your ritual a little every week. It’ll pay HUGE dividends.

The key to designing the new habit is as follows:
1) Chunk it down into fifteen-minute bits.
2) Make sure every minute in that piece is carefully planned.
3) Ensure that your environment is designed so that everything is in place for the new habit to take off.
4) Ensure that timing includes preparing to start and winding down.
5) Ensure that your brain does not get tired going through each piece.
6) Note that every new habit takes twenty-one days to form.
7) Rest for twenty-one days before starting a new habit.
8) Have a clear and compelling picture of your life with these new habits in place.

Plan your morning ritual intentionally, step by step. Plan the ‘wind-up’ to your ritual — that’s the ten-fifteen minutes before you start your ritual. Plan the ritual itself, and be super specific. If you’re drinking water, how are you going to remind yourself, where are you going to get it, etc. Plan your exercise, your first meal, etc. Finally, plan the ‘wind down’ to your ritual: how you’ll come back into the stream of the rest of your day. Do your morning ritual every day for the next seven days.

How Does Happiness Relate To Productivity?

— 31% higher productivity
— 37 % higher sales
— Creativity 3 times higher.
Happiness at Work Survey, Nic Marks, nef (new economics foundation, London) 2012

If you have a way of monitoring your productivity, use it. Keep track of your productivity before and after the new habit forms. Often, as you notice the continued gains, this provides the motivation to continue making changes.

Plan to do your most productive work in the first two hours of your work day. The rest of the day should have rituals focused on all the necessary follow-ups that are part and parcel of any business.

Whether we want to admit it, we are all creatures of habit. 99 percent of the things we’ll say, feel, and think today are the same things we said, felt, and thought yesterday.

It’s almost impossible to ‘remember’ to do something different when we need to remember it. The answer is to practice it and make it a routine… so when we need to do it, it’s automatic. This way we leverage our nature as creatures of habit, for our benefit.

If something is the most important thing, if it’s the thing that gets you the highest results, it makes sense to do it every day and make it a habit. To create a successful new routine, you need to plan it IN DETAIL.

When you plan it out, you’ll see it’s a series of steps. You’ll soon find the most efficient sequence for you.

Change is always uncomfortable. If you understand that, you can make the process of learning a new habit more painless and comfortable. The most important rule for learning a new habit is that you must repeat it for twenty-one days.

When you do so, you will initiate a process called neural canalization, literally forming new brain pathways. In addition, when you are learning a new habit, it is important to plan every step down to the last minute and rehearse it. This then provides your brain a template as how to do it. Make sure that you reserve your limited will power to initiate the whole process. (Why is this last important? Remember that after age thirty-five you have only five minutes of will power daily, so use it sparingly, and for the right things such as jump-starting new habits and processes.) Thereafter, the sequence should kick in.

Routines of Olympians

For years before Michael Phelps became the gold medalist at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, he followed the same routine at every race. He arrived two hours early. He warmed up according to a precise pattern that included an eight-hundred-meter mixer, a fifty-meter freestyle, kicking six hundred meters with kickboard, pulling a buoy four hundred meters, and more.

Thereafter he would dry off, put in his earphones, and sit (not lie) on the massage table. He would not speak to his coach Bob Bowman until the race was over.

Phelps would put on his race suit at the forty-five-minute mark (i.e., forty-five minutes before the race). At the thirty-minute mark, he would get into the warm-up pool and swim six hundred to eight hundred meters. He would walk to the ready room at the ten-minute mark. He would sit alone with two empty seats next to him, one for his goggles on one side and one for his towel on the other.

When he was called for his race, he would walk to the blocks. There his precise routine was two stretches: first a straight-leg stretch and then a stretch with a bent knee. He would always start with his left leg followed by his right. Then the right ear bud would come out. When his name was called, he would take out the left ear-bud. He would step on the block, always from the left side and dry the block. Then he would stand and move his arms in a precise, unique fashion.

As the same routine is practiced day in, day out, it takes over. Phelps was going through the same winning race over and over again. In other words, he was repeating what he had done numerous times in training and winning. The Olympics was no exception.

One lucky listener that posts a review on iTunes will win a private confidential consultation and coaching with me on discovering your soul’s purpose. I will lead you on a personal journey to discover your unique mind-body psychosomatic map of your life. You will get a detailed report and a personal 45 minute consultation with me that is worth thousands.

On this podcast I’m going to help you design a life that works. So you are able to say yes to the things that matter and eliminate everything else that slows you down. The more clear you can be about how to organize your daily life to support your bigger vision, the more you’ll step into your true potential, stay on track and accomplish all that you want and deserve. Are you ready to make that happen?

Feel free to reach out to me to ask your questions at AskDrSun.com. Your life is a gift. Design it. Do what matters and join me each week as we get closer to designing the life of your dreams. I am Dr Sun. Join me next week on Your Life by Design.

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Meaning and Purpose

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Are you aware of the hidden meaning and purpose that guides your life?

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour … “
William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

As a poet, philosopher and mystic I remain fascinated by these words. As a physician, scientist and businessman the above lines spell “Danger”.

 

Meaning and Purpose

Meaning and Purpose

As humans we are meaning making machines. In the absence of relevant data we can make all kinds of connections. Like the sound of thunder is the thunder god throwing his hammer to walking pass a black cat brings you bad luck.

The three layers of your triune brain and meaning making:

Instinctual/ Reptilian: This is the Seat of the Reticular Activating System (RAS). This part of your brain automatically makes meaning out of what happens. Most deep seated programs involving fundamental survival reside here, including programming about safety, security and money.

Limbic/Emotional: This is the part of your brain connects with your emotions. All your decisions are emotional in nature. Your emotions help you choose and make choices. It is also the seat of the amygdala. Your amygdala is part of your ‘emotional” brain that works to keep you safe. It restricts or reduces your choices so that you are “safe”. Your beliefs run this area. At the best of times your beliefs limit your freedom of choice.

Neo-cortex /Thinking brain: The only part of the brain where you can make conscious choice.
Every day I meet clients who struggle with challenges in their lives because they fail to recognize the reality confronting them. Some of these processes were useful in a given context. Out of that context it became downright dangerous. These processes include;

1) Deletion: Your brain has to make sense out of thousands of stimuli per second. So after awhile it screens out the repeated back ground “details”. There are also things you don’t want to see or hear because they make you uncomfortable, so you screen that out as well.

As a result you don’t pay attention to your loved one when they are struggling with a real problem and get shocked when they get a heart attack and drop dead.

You don’t pay attention to how your client is presenting himself/herself and you miss vital clues that could help you close the sale. You kiss a thousand dollars goodbye.

2) Generalization: You have always done it a certain way. So you conclude that is the only way.

Something happened enough times in your life with enough intensity to create a neural pathway in your brain. So you conclude that, “love hurts” because some people you were close to die or leave. You saw enough examples of unethical behaviour by rich people so you conclude “rich people are bad people”

You do not pay attention to the changes in the environment or people. You fail to recognise major changes in the environment that would invalidate that particular marketing or business approach. If you are “lucky” your business dips only 10% because you missed the trend.

If you are lucky, your wife only smiles at you sweetly (while she quietly curses) because you bought her a gift exactly like what her best friend is wearing. (You did not keep track). In the long term, these little things wear your business and your relationships down.

3) Distortion: This process is the basis for creativity. It creates great artist and poets who do creative things with their imagination like Picasso and his Cubist style of painting. On the other hand, it can also lead to major issues. One person’s model of accuracy is another’s model of obsessive compulsive attention to detail.

4) Projection: Whatever secret fears and anxieties you have, you deny having them. You ascribe it to the people around you. You are an anxious person but you cannot accept it. Your cab driver looks at you and asks you if everything is fine and you conclude your cab driver is anxious.

So all these processes deletion, distortion and generalization and to a lesser extent projection will determine what we allow into our world. In that sense they are filters. They end up forming our values, biases and beliefs.

On the other hand, based on those processes we will also design a future where all our biases, beliefs and values are validated. If that is so you cannot appreciably design a future that is very different from the past.

Based on these processes you design on an unconscious basis a story about yourself called the script. After a while this script is so much a part of you and so real to you that you will call it “Your Real Life Story”. The problem is that makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

All these stories, your automatic patterns of behaviour both good and bad, I will henceforth refer to as “default modes” or DMs. Why? Because when you do not think or reflect or you are in a state of arousal or depression you will revert to these default modes (DMs).

In a day after 35 years of age, you only have 5 minutes of willpower or choice. After that it’s all default modes (DMs) or habits. Its great if you have good DMs or habits. If you have bad DMs or habits, you are in deep trouble.

All your goal setting and planning becomes fatally flawed if only your DMs help you design them because you no longer have any choice in the matter. You are not exercising choice because you are in DMs 99% of the time.

All of these are examples of DMs:

  • You get up in the morning, brush your teeth and get ready for work.
  • You are chilling out with friends.
  • You get angry and frustrated when confronted by something outside your current skill sets
  • When someone makes you angry and you experience amygdala hijack and storm away
  • You make a business decision because you are angry with a competitor

Only when you understand this, can you truly exercise choice in your default programs.

Your DM is your familiar prison. I will repeat that again. The only choice that you can meaningfully exercise is what DMs you can invoke after you have made a decision. We live in a series of psychological prisons.

LBD 16

 

Key Questions:What are your beliefs about success in life, health and relationships?

Have you tested these beliefs?

What are your habits based on these beliefs?

Are your habits working for you or do you experience pain and discomfort?

 

So the collective power of the DMs is that most people are not free to choose. So long as you buy into what the state, religion and the financial system has to offer you unthinkingly without actively choosing, you are hooked. They in turn have a hardworking docile member of their tribe working hard and paying their dues.

If you do so in full awareness of what is happening that is choice. If you do so because you do not know any other way, it is your default mode.

You can decide to enter into a new relationship. Even how you enter into it will be a function of default programs. Once it is status quo, you will default to old patterns. If those old patterns destroyed the previous relationship, the same thing happens again.

So only true choice is that you can design and build new default programs/habits after you have awareness and clarity. Otherwise even if you hit all your goals and targets you are simply repeating the same old formula. This is the only way to have forward movement in your life. This is the secret that most programs to do not address. So even after you achieve all your goals there is a feeling of lack and inadequacy.

Ultimately your habits and default modes (DMs) determine your character. Your character determines your future trajectory and your ongoing future success.

One lucky listener that posts a review on iTunes will win a private confidential consultation and coaching with me on discovering your soul’s purpose. I will lead you on a personal journey to discover your unique mind-body psychosomatic map of your life. You will get a detailed report and a personal 45 minute consultation with me that is worth thousands.

On this podcast I’m going to help you design a life that works. So you are able to say yes to the things that matter and eliminate everything else that slows you down. The more clear you can be about how to organize your daily life to support your bigger vision, the more you’ll step into your true potential, stay on track and accomplish all that you want and deserve. Are you ready to make that happen?

Feel free to reach out to me to ask your questions at AskDrSun.com. Your life is a gift. Design it. Do what matters and join me each week as we get closer to designing the life of your dreams. I am Dr Sun. Join me next week on Your Life by Design.

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