The Viable Alternative

It’s the New Year, 2012 and just like every other New Year, people are running around making New Year’s resolutions.

Many people are skeptical of New Year’s Resolutions because most people are more than willing to make them but rarely ever keep them. An example is that swaths of people make promises to lose weight or get in shape at the beginning of the year and gym memberships soar, with the subsequent effect of gyms across America becoming more crowded. Yet, come early February, the number of people at the gym dwindle down to the size it was in December, before the New Year started.

Skeptics of New Year’s Resolutions also argue that a “new year” is meaningless in that one should always be setting goals to better himself, and should not be using the new year as an excuse to get his life together. They further argue that if one is TRULY responsible for his life, they shouldn’t be waiting for the insignificant change on a calendar to start.

I agree with these skeptics but then I also disagree. I agree with their points that “time” as we see it is a man made measurement and as such, we shouldn’t need a New Year to get our act together, because nothing has REALLY changed per se.

However, I think that skeptics discount one thing that a “new year” brings: the power of MOMENTUM. For the simple fact that we perceive in our minds the year as something new, a fresh slate, a new beginning, it can really propel us to make some life transforming changes in our lives that we may not necessarily have in say March or April.

When we have a STRONG intent for something, it paves the way for us to go and acquire that thing, whatever it is. The stronger the intent the more likely it is to happen, and what isn’t a better time than the perception of a new year to use the resulting momentum to intend something new and better for our lives?

Things shouldn’t be this way, we shouldn’t need a New Year to do this, but in reality that’s just the way it is, and we don’t have success in life dwelling on the should’s, we have success AFTER we first accept things the way they are and move forward from that point.

I personally love the New Year simply because I look at it as a marker to measure your progress in your life as to whether you’re accomplishing your goals and objectives in different areas of your life. I look at it in a way similar to how the leader of a country sets his goals as to what direction he wants to take his country in, where he wants to direct its resources and money, how he wants it to develop.

It was the momentum of the New Year back in 1999 that I made a resolution to join a gym and hit it regularly. Four months later I gained almost twenty pounds of muscle, completely transforming my body (for you smart asses thinking I used ‘roids, my success was due to a combination of genetics, consistency in going to the gym four days a week, protein shakes and the rave of the day, Creatine, so…..HA!), and creating a habit that I’ve stuck to till this day, twelve years later.

I can also see why many people are skeptical about making “New Year’s Resolutions” because when people in The Illusion talk about it, it completely reeks of insincerity. When you hear people talk about it you can hear that they know in their minds that they’re made to be broken and they don’t even believe they can stick with them.

Case in point, I remember watching the NY1 channel the day before New Year’s Eve and a reporter asked a pedestrian if he planned on making any New Year’s Resolutions and if so what they were. The man answered, “Eh, I plan on watching what I say more.”

When I listened to this, I could tell that the man clearly had no intention of keeping this resolution, and that it was, like for so many other people, a form of mental masturbation. I in fact personally wanted climb into the television and punch the dude in the face, not because I’m a man with violent tendencies who needs to be on meds, but simply because his insincerity spoke about many bigger issues that people deal with a whole that totally triggered a sizeable amount of frustration in me.

First off, he, like so many other people, was squandering the wonderful opportunity that a new year could provide in making some serious changes that probably he and many other people NEED to make in their lives simply by not taking advantage of the momentum the new year provides.

Second, it brought to mind how people are such sheep, following The Illusion, where they repeat the same cycle over and over again like a broken record, year after year after year, engaging in the same old destructive behaviour patterns, continuously settling for less, refusing to take responsibility for their lives, choosing to lie to themselves rather than confronting the truth, accepting mediocrity and overall just accepting lives of quiet, miserable desperation.

It was a painful reminder of how most people never improve or change because they don’t think it’s possible and think that their utter misery is just the way things are. It reminded me that most people never change, they simply remain stagnant year after or year, or get worse, which, technically is one in the same.

I’m an ARDENT believer of never, ever settling and living the life you truly desire to live, so it pains me to no end when I see others living, mediocre, miserable, uninspired lives, so excuse me for wanting to punch the dude I mentioned on TV in the face….repeatedly.

That being said, I really think that there are people who want to make some serious changes in their lives, but because they’ve tried repeatedly and failed, they’ve given up and don’t believe true change is possible.

I believe that the reason that many people have failed in making lasting change in their lives is that they don’t know how to get out of their own way and thus, whenever they try to go forward, they keep bumping up against themselves, stopping them dead in their tracks. You know the saying, “he that fails to conquer himself can expect to conquer little else.”

Well, for those truly wanting to make changes in their lives, here are several ways that I’ve used to get past my blocks and allow me to make some lasting changes in my life. I haven’t reached the “promised land” yet, but hopefully these ways that helped me can ultimately help you in transforming your life:

1. Be where you’re at…
   We all have habits that prevent us from completing a goal and enabling us to be successful, whether it be procrastination, lack of patience, losing focus easily, allowing ourselves to get overwhelmed and stressed out easily, etc. What winds up happening is we blame one or more of these things as reasons why we can’t stick to our goals and are not successful, and use them as an excuse for why we can’t go forward.

   Often we think to ourselves, “When I can fix this ‘thing,’ then I can start going after what I want.”

   I was a prime example. Knowing that I had all these habits that blocked me from consistently sticking to a goal, I would read 3,000 self improvement books in order to find a fix to my “problem,” thinking I had to fix my problem FIRST before I went forward.

   It’s no wonder I went NOWHERE.

   Now I say, screw all that, and just be where you’re at. Accept whatever “issue” you have for what it is and move forward anyway.

   Instead of trying to fight it, or let it continue to get in your way, learn to use the energy of that issue against it, like they teach you in Aikido or Brazilian Jiu-jitsu.

   Huh?

   Well, to use myself as an example. A couple of years ago, I decided to get into affiliate marketing online and where I promoted someone’s product and got paid a commission if someone bought the product through my own affiliate link.

   Now, I tend to unfairly too hard on myself and beat myself up over the slightest thing. Moreover, I tend to get very impatient. These are obviously things that I need to work on, no doubt, but rather than letting them stop me by stopping to “fix” them or by having them sabotage my progress once more, I decided to work with them.

   I made the decision that I was only going to check my affiliate account into which any commission I earned got paid into twice a month, on the first of the month and on the fifteenth. By doing this, I didn’t have to deal with the stress of checking my account everyday and wondering why, as in any skill you learn initially, I wasn’t getting results, which would lead to me getting discouraged and beating myself up which in turn would affect my progress.

   BUT, checking twice a month gave me some reasonable leeway to monitor my progress and see what changes I needed to make to get the results I was looking for.

   Soon enough, after about a month of starting, I had checked my account one June 1st and realized I made my first commission, and after several months, I was able to check my account more frequently than twice a month without getting frustrated when I didn’t make anything and without beating myself up.

   By accepting my faults and working with them instead of against them (or them against me), I decided to accept them and use them to my advantage.

   It’s the same thing with me cultivating the habit of drinking 8 glasses of water a day, which is the equivalent of 2 liters. Before this, not only did I not like drinking water, but I drank sparsely, probably the equivalent of two glasses a day of fluids. To force myself around this habit, I bought a 1 liter water bottle and carried it with me wherever I went in my bag so I wouldn’t forget to drink, and made sure that I drank two full bottles everyday.

   I’ve been drinking 8 glasses of water daily for almost four years now, and the visible results have been better skin, healthier looking fingernails and healthy looking eyes.

   So if you’re trying to lose weight and get into shape and up until now you haven’t been able to get over those food cravings, have a cheat day where for one day of the week, you eat whatever you want while staying committed to your new lifestyle every other day of the week. That would help shut your mind up by giving it a day to look forward to. I know many people who do this and tell me it works.

   In the same token, if you have a craving for fast food and always wind up succumbing to the temptation of going into a McDonald’s when you’re hungry and happen to pass by one, make sure you always carry a snack to nibble on frequently so you don’t get those bouts of hunger that make you go beserk and make you run and take refuge in a Wendy’s or a Burger King.

   Think creatively of ways you can learn to work with your personal challenges instead of against them. There are as many ways that exist as there are people walking this planet and then some. You may come up with your own way that’s totally different from the next person because you’re you.

   It’s great to want to work on your shortcomings, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t, but in rather than let them get in your way, just be where you’re at, accept yourself at the point where you’re at in your journey, and learn to work with them.

   Be where you’re at, you’ll be better for it.



2. Learn the “Magic of thinking small.”
   When you think to yourself that you have to lose 200 lbs or you’re trying to give a two pack-a-day cigarette smoking habit, it’s quite easy to look at those numbers and get so intimidated that you give up before you even start.

   Your mind gets so overwhelmed by such numbers that it begins to trigger anxiety and stress every time you think about one of these goals that are sure to improve your life that it’s no wonder you can’t make any headway.

   They key to overcoming this tendency is learning how to get our minds to shut the @#$%/ up by thinking “small.”

   I first heard the concept of “the magic of thinking small” from Mike Littman, author of “Interviews with Millionaires” and internet marketer.

   When I say “small,” I don’t mean setting your sights on a the all so lofty goal of making thirteen cents an hour, or setting other pathetically low standards for yourself when you can clearly do better, rather I mean learn how to take a larger goal and learn how to “chunk it down” to smaller pieces.

   For instance, when you start college and look at the four years it takes to get a degree, it can seem daunting. However, when you take apart your four years by first focusing on finishing your freshman year, then after your sophomore year, your junior then your senior, it becomes much easier, especially when you hit your junior year, because the light at the end of the tunnel is now visible.

   My mind has this infuriating habit of making mountains out of molehills, so you can imagine how I deal with seemingly bigger goals: they tend to scare the crap out of me. My mind makes it into one HUGE, daunting undertaking that causes me to procrastinate or worse, not do anything at all.

   To counter this, I’ve learned to chunk things down.

   For instance, when I go to the gym, after I stretch I do roughly 400 pushups, which I break down into sets of three, with the first set being 200, the second 150, and the last 50.

   Now, when I start with my first set of 200, without fail this huge wave of anxiety hits me because 200 seems so much and also because I’m afraid that after doing it so many times, this time I may “fail” which would cause me to deem myself a loser.

   Ahhhhh……how I “love” my ego!

   To deal with this annoyance, I don’t let myself count to 200 which is way too intimidating for my mind when I’m first starting out. Instead, I break my count to 200 into sets of ten, knowing that I have to do 20 sets of 10 to reach 200. By counting to 10, and knowing I have to do 20 sets of 10, the numbers stay low in my mind.

   For example, I start to count, 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8.9,10 then say to myself 1, to mark my first set of ten, then 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8.9,10 then say to myself 2, to mark the second set, instead of saying 11,12,13……… or 20,21,22,23…..

   By keeping the numbers low in my mind, my mind stays quiet (for the most part) and I can do my 200 pushups without my mind freaking out because it is way easier for my mind to think about doing ten pushups than it is to think of doing 200.

   Strange “trick,” but it works!

   So, in terms of losing weight, or making money (something that I’m working on now), we psyche ourselves out by worrying about losing 200 lbs before we can even lose one pound, or trying to make a million dollars a month before we can even make one dollar.

   If you’ve failed at losing weight up until now, why not start with learning how to lose and KEEP OFF ten pounds every month than focusing on the all so daunting number of 200 lbs or 150 lbs or whatever (if that is your issue)?

   If you feel overwhelmed easily, learn to make consistent small steps and not only will you be surprised how far you’ve come after several months, you’ll build momentum and have the confidence to take bigger steps. Also, because you’ll be more confident, your goal won’t scare you as much as it did in the beginning.

   I remember a conversation I had with a very good friend of mine a few weeks ago. He was depressed because he was still living at home and he felt his life was going no where.

   I was happy he mentioned this to me because my other friends and I had already realized this about him a LONG time ago, so him waking up to see how pathetic his life was was a good sign.

   The problem with him is that he’s so caught up in the hip hop culture and The Illusion of overnight success and having his life look like a rap video, that he absolutely has NO concept of delayed gratification or discipline. He would make an effort to improve his life for two days, and when he sees he’s not living like Diddy, he immediately thinks he failed and goes back to his same old destructive habits.

   So, I told him to stop being so hard on himself. If he wanted to move out of his mom’s house, to focus first on taking a small step and renting a room first, and celebrate that instead of beating himself up for not living in the Waldorf Astoria after one week and then feeling like a loser..

   I told him after he gets into a room, he can then focus on taking another incremental step and celebrate that when he reaches it, and move on to the next step, all the while gaining confidence with each step, until he gets to where he wants.

   If you want to eat an elephant, you have to break it up and eat it piece by piece. So if you want to eat healthier, start by changing one thing first, then after some time, move on to the next thing, step by step. If you want to start exercising, and you are just so damn lazy and undisciplined, start by simply standing on the treadmill every day for two minutes without even turning it on. After a week or two, you may feel like an idiot sufficiently enough to turn it on and start walking on it.

   All in all, with every goal, to make life easier for yourself if you have a problem of getting stressed out easily, take a step that you can handle, one that’s not too overwhelming but at the same time not so easy as to not challenge you, and do that consistently. Trust me, the rewards will be immense!



3. Lie to yourself

   Okay, before you jump to conclusions, when I say “lie to yourself,” I don’t mean finding another man in your girlfriend’s bed and telling yourself that it was only the exterminator making sure that the bed bugs don’t come back, or you got 17 DUI’s in two months and you convince yourself that your life is under control. People do some variation of that EVERY day, and I’m NOT talking about that.

   I’m talking about lying to yourself to shut that incessant negative chatter going in your mind up.

   For example, when I used to do cardio at the gym and run on the treadmill (something I will start doing again shortly because I have to lose ten pounds of muscle since I’m starting to look “top heavy” and look like a bodybuilder), every time I was on my way to the gym to workout, this wave of stress would hit me when I’d think about the “long” workout I’d have to do which included cardio at the very end, because frankly, I’ve always disliked cardio.

   This would cause me to procrastinate and not want to go to the gym at all.

   To counter this, I’d simply “lie” to myself and tell myself that I was skipping cardio that day. When I did this, all the stress that I had would vanish and I’d be able to start my workout in peace. At the end of my workout, having done everything except cardio, I’d say to myself, “Okay, time for cardio,” knowing that truly, if I skipped cardio, I’d feel utterly guilty and beat myself up for it.

   When I resolved myself to running on the treadmill, the stress of running for 20 minutes would hit me, so I’d lie to myself saying I’m only going to do five minutes that day, which would of course, shut my mind up, and then, as I start the treadmill, I’d set it for twenty minutes.

   I’ll say it again, I’ve always disliked doing cardio, so this is how I get myself to do it, by LYING to myself. And in the end, I of course felt THAT much better for accomplishing my goal that I disliked doing so much.

   What I described is a different type of lying to ourselves than what most we’re all used to which is lying to ourselves in order to avoid taking responsibility for our lives. Rather, it’s lying to yourself in order to get yourself out of your own way so you can do the things you need to do to create the life you want to live.

   Two totally different things.

   When we commit ourselves to a sequential routine in order to accomplish whatever goal it is we have, our minds are frequently known to freak out, thinking it’s all too much, it’s going to be boring, it’s going to take too long, etc, etc, and if we’re not careful, we wind up getting discouraged and being thrown off track towards our goals/objectives.

   Yet, any person who is at the top of his/her respective field or anyone who has achieved some type of remarkable transformation would tell you that success requires you taking those small steps CONSISTENTLY over a long period of time.

   That’s why if there’s a certain goal we have that requires stricter discipline than we’re used to over a long period of time, such as going to bed earlier so we can wake up early in the morning to do some type of athletic training for example, telling ourselves that we’re only going to do it for a month even though we know we have to do it for an indefinite period of time can be a BIG help.

   In a case like this, when the month is up, we of course continue our routine, lying to ourselves once more, until our new routine becomes a solidified habit.

   Lying to this incessant chatter by telling it what it wants to hear will shut it up and get it out of our way so we can continue doing what we need to do to accomplish our goals.

   So, if it’s 11 AM and you have an hour to lunch and you’ve committed to changing your eating habits but you’re finding that you have an “unbearable” craving for McDonald’s, tell yourself that you’re going to eat McDonald’s for lunch. Chances are the voice will die down simply because of the fact that it was initially going off because it felt you were depriving it. Then, when it’s time for lunch, simply just make your way to Cosi or whatever place that offers healthy food, and after you eat, you’ll be full enough so you won’t have to think about that disgusting McDonald’s food again.

   Lying to yourself, if done the “right” way, can surely help you achieve your dreams.

When we talk about learning how to stick to our goals, objectives or resolutions through self-mastery to transform our lives and step out of The Illusion, the two MAIN pillars of The Viable Alternative that are involved in this are self realization and self discovery.

With the pillar of self realization, you realize that you are a unique imprint in this world with your very own unique gifts you have to offer, and that you have your own unique idiosyncrasies and peculiarities that you have to learn to deal with in your own unique way to be able to offer your unique gifts FULLY.

Two people may have the same personal challenges, but have ENTIRELY different ways of dealing with them. How one person deals with a challenge is often totally different from the way another person deals with the SAME challenge. The similarity is however, that they are both using their challenges as stepping stones.

That’s the beauty of our uniqueness and individuality.

With the pillar of self-discovery, you go through the ACTUAL process of learning how to overcome these personal idiosyncrasies in order to be able to freely give these gifts to the world.

This is The Viable Alternative.

Hope this helps.