Martin Lecter

Entrepreneurs are the people who drive our society forward. They are the free spirits of our world who develop new and innovative solutions to commonly occurring problems. They are the problem solvers, the creative people who are willing to risk their security for the sake of expressing their ideas in the form of innovative products and services.

Imagination & Creativity

Whatever it is that you create in the real world will be a direct reflection of the objects you create within your mind. You can’t reasonably create something that you have not first completely understood and broken down into individual components within your own mind. While it’s always good to move into action and begin creating something that we have not yet fully understood, we are still forced to completely understand something before we are able to finish the process of creation.

For instance, in order to build a computer, you would have to have all the parts and have an idea of how the parts should fit together and in what order you should assemble the parts. You may use the instruction manual to help you with understanding how the parts fit together, or you may use your creativity and imagination to build a custom machine.

If you choose to use your creativity freely and take the experimental approach to life then be prepared for all kinds of undesirable and dysfunctional combinations as the result of your experiments. That’s part of the game. You create something, test it –  if it doesn’t work then you try something else. Eventually you will stumble on solutions that do work and then improve on them even further. It’s kind of like taking the Darwinistic ‘survival of the fittest’ approach to problem solving – you create a bunch of solutions, then discard the ones that do not work properly and further evolve the ones that do work. The result is that you have a bunch of ‘failed’ solutions and a few ‘fit’ ones that you evolve even further.

While you could apply existing solutions to a predetermined set of problems, the true challenge is putting together a combination of individual parts that has never been created before. Entrepreneurship is when you come up with such innovative solutions to a recurring problem. During 19:th century everybody had a problem of not having reliable enough lighting – people had to resolve to using candles in order to light up their homes during the night – sometimes literally lighting the whole house up. Edison then created a solution that solved that problem for everyone by creating the electric light bulb. This is what entrepreneurship is about. Facebook is another example of a solution to a widely experienced problem.

Building Solutions

The way I personally prefer to look at building things is the top down approach. You first decide what it is you want to build – for instance a space rocket. Then you ask “how?”. The answer to that question might be for example that you need to figure out a way to built the fuselage, the engine and the launchpad. Does the rocket need to return back to earth? Does it need to be in one piece when returning back to earth? Depending on the answers to these subsequent questions, you then decide what engine to put on the rocket and whether you need to add a parachute to it or not. This is the top down approach, while the bottom up approach would involve taking a prefabricated engine with related components and assemble them all into a finished rocket. The top down approach is creative and flexible, while the bottom up approach is more rigid and fixed within the current way of doing things.

The approach to building things in a top down fashion always starts with our imagination and an inquiring attitude towards building a solution. The longer we think about an idea, the more clear it becomes within our minds and eventually when it is properly incubated – it comes out in the form of a tangible product within the material world. In fact, I think that strong ideas have a tendency to leak out from our personalities and somehow take shape in the tangible world before we actually realize that we are in fact creating something.

Why Everything Is Possible

Everything that we can possibly imagine within our minds is possible to implement in the real world. This is because every single idea that occurs to us is a combination of all the impressions that we have absorbed during our lives through our senses.

We can not come up with an idea that is not in some way related to our memories or experiences. We can not reasonably imagine things that are truly impossible, such as a mountain without a valley. So because every idea created by our minds is built out of impressions that already exist in the tangible world, this means that every idea is a composition of concepts that already exist – in other words every idea that we can think up is possible to implement in the real world.

What exactly is knowledge and how do we define it? Knowledge is the patterns that we are aware of that exist in the real world. We are able to reason things out through the use of previously learned patterns and by doing so we determine what course of action to take.

Knowledge Is Your Action Map

The way I prefer looking at knowledge is like a navigation map that gives us clear view of the directions we should take to reach certain goals in life. The knowledge map is like one of these RPG game maps where portions of the map are only revealed to you as you progress within the game. You are place somewhere on a random location on this map and your job is to navigate through the map and find treasures and pathways to other levels. You are not able to see the whole map from the start, but as you build experience, your awareness of the environment expands and you can visit more and more interesting locations within the game world. As you gain more knowledge, your experience of the game is greatly enhanced because you know where to find the things you need, such as for example extra energy packs when you need them.

Our knowledge of the material world works in very much the same way. When we are born, we start out with a sphere of awareness that does not extend further than our parent’s bedroom where we spend most of our time as infants. As we learn the skill of crawling, we are able to explore other areas of the apartment on our own, and consequently our sphere of knowledge and awareness grows accordingly. We are now familiar with the apartment and can navigate freely to places like the bathroom and the television without thinking very much about finding our way. We learn were grandmother hides the matches and we learn our way to the gas stove – then we learn how to play with gas while parents are not home (hmm..). We simply learn how to get where we want to go and so we crawl first to the right, then to the left and then to the right again – and we end up where we intended.

Later in life our sphere of awareness about the world expands even further, enabling us to travel alone to different countries and speak to people all over the world over the internet. The more experience we have, the more detailed our map of the world becomes. Whatever goals we set for ourselves become far easier to realize if we know how to navigate through the maze of circumstances in order to reach these goals and visions. Much like a manufacturer who knows where to get all the raw materials for their new product, when we know where to get all the raw materials for the realization of our goals, we would be able to get there sooner and faster than a person who first has to figure out where to get the stuff.

Accurate Knowledge

Knowledge is composed of our beliefs about reality and one of the goals of acquiring knowledge is to make sure that these beliefs, as accurately as possible, reflect the way in which the actual reality works. When our beliefs are true, we are able to take advantage of the circumstances and get things going our way. When beliefs are false, we struggle. So the goal when acquiring knowledge is to make sure that these beliefs that we are learning are true in nature.

There is no real knowledge, for example, in believing that the sun is of the color blue and neither is there any knowledge in believing that breaking a wine glass brings bad luck. This is because we can’t provide sufficient proof for these statements – we can’t say that they are true and neither can we apply this knowledge in any effective manner to our every day tasks. While the sun might look blue through blue colored glasses and a person who breaks a wine glass might end up in a car accident, we are still unable to prove that it was the breakage of the wine glass that caused the car accident. It’s merely a belief, but it’s very difficult to trace it to the actual effect because there will be another dozen people who have broken wine glasses and are doing just fine. Therefore we might conclude that such a belief is sometimes true and sometimes false without being able to clearly define exactly what constitutes to it being true.

This is where we run into challenges when defining true knowledge. If knowledge is really just beliefs that have to be true, then how do we know if our process of defining a true belief is actually ‘true’ or flawless in itself? For instance, how do we prove to a color blind person that the color green actually exists and is different from the color yellow? Since green and yellow look the same to a colorblind person, they can not see the difference between these two colors. Proving to such a person that a green traffic light does not look the same as the yellow light might be quite tricky. While science can prove that the colors green and yellow are different in nature, a colorblind person might find it hard to tell the difference. This is because science has more knowledge about physics and is able use a different perspective in looking at reality by perceiving colors in terms of their wavelength – and in that domain, the actual colors of green and yellow would clearly appear different in nature – no mater how similar they look to a color blind eye.

This is an important point because it illustrates the importance of having accurate knowledge and gaining many different perspectives on our reality in order to be able to make accurate judgements about the way things really are. And it’s also essential to have accurate knowledge if we are to lead others. For instance, in order to make sure that the color blind person acts correctly while driving through an intersection, we might have to advise them to “drive when the bottom light comes on” instead of telling them to “drive when the green light comes on”. These are simply two ways of expressing the same truth about reality – the fact that we should drive when the correct light turns green, except that a color blind person wouldn’t know the difference between green and yellow so telling them to drive when the green light turns on would be a highly inaccurate advice.

Having accurate knowledge of different perspectives also enables us to handle many different situations that we have never experienced before. Suppose we are the color blind person in the traffic light example above. We now have two different criteria that we can use for moving ahead – the one of moving ahead when the green light comes on and the one of moving ahead when the bottom light come on. Suppose further that we have a horizontal traffic light where all the lights are placed horizontally along the same line. In this case we wouldn’t be able to use the ‘bottom light’ criteria and if that’s all we knew about traffic lights then we would be stuck. However, because we also have the ‘green light’ criteria, we are likely to make the correct decision in this situation regardless of how the lights are placed.

Learning Through Experience

The most obvious way to learn is through our direct experience of the world. Whenever we move our body around, we accumulate experience and we can later use our previous experience to make more accurate decisions in the present. This approach is how most people learn – you learn by doing. And there is nothing wrong about this way of learning, except that it doesn’t have any predefined structure and may lead us to wrong conclusions because we are unaware of something that lies completely outside of our direct experience. In other words, we often don’t know what we don’t know.

And this is the main drawback of learning through experience – it doesn’t allow us to easily learn something that lies far outside of our own sphere of awareness. We learn the things that we need to know in order to exist within our local world, but over time it becomes harder and harder for us to expand this experiential sphere of awareness through experience alone because as the sphere gets bigger, the amount of possible directions in which we could potentially navigate becomes larger as well. In the end we don’t really know which direction to take and so we settle down for the sphere of awareness that we have managed to acquire up to that point. This is where most people who stop learning new things end up – they are very good at their local every day tasks, but they are completely unaware what other possibilities that may be available to them. And the main reason for that is that these exciting possibilities reside far outside of their local sphere of awareness.  They become stuck in the experience and are unable to see the way out unless a third party figures out a way to lead them out of that situation.

Consider a depressed person.  A depressed person does not know how to think in a way that will make them happy. They might go through exactly the same circumstances in life as someone else, yet they would be so depressed they want to hang themselves while the other person would be excited and enthusiastic about all the challenge and learning experiences that they get to experience. The depressed person’s sphere of awareness does not include the knowledge of how to think in a way that makes us happy so consequently they can not put that knowledge to good use in order to make themselves happier. Instead they continue exploring their own local experience and talking to other depressed people, yet never becoming aware of the more positive ways of interpreting the world simply because these more positive ways do not exist in their local sphere of awareness. What this person would need to do here is to make a leap out of their local sphere of awareness and explore some of the ideas found outside of the ordinary day to day life – either by physically connecting with an extremely positive person who can teach them the strategies of happiness or to read a book written by such a person so that they can soak up some of the knowledge found in that book.

This type of ‘teleportation’ into a completely different portion of our awareness map is what we call a ‘quantum leap‘. We take a leap out of our current knowledge base and into a completely new realm of possibilities. We are scared and alone when we find ourselves in this completely new world of ideas that are completely alien to our ordinary way of thinking. But the longer we stay in this new world and explore the ideas found there, the larger our new sphere of awareness grows and so the more certain we feel when we navigate this exotic new world. Much like it takes us a while to find all the necessary stores and services when we arrive in a foreign country, it takes us time to establish to establish ourselves in this whole new world of ideas that we have had the chance to explore.

Learning Through Reading

What reading does for us is that it enables us to temporarily teleport ourselves into these far corners of the knowledge map, where we are not yet able to navigate through the experiential approach. For example, we might not have enough confidence to do public speaking, but as we read a book on the subject and get to temporarily experience public speaking within our own minds, we become more familiar with the way it works and then are able to invest more time into doing it in the real world. In other words we first teleport ourselves into this far corner of the world and then, if we like it, we also have the choice to travel there in the actual reality. This is a very effective way to try out new things because it only takes you 8 hours to read a book, yet it may take you considerably longer amount of time to actually try something out for real.

For instance, have you ever played the ‘what if’ game? What if you could sell your services to ten people for ten dollars at the same time? What if you could get these ten people find another ten who are willing to buy your products. What if? You would end up with quite a great deal of sales. The ‘what if’ game is quite a fun game to play and you can play it with any person who has written a book or done a speech or written a song. ‘What if’ you were doing the same? ‘What if’ you could deliver the same impact on other people as the speaker or the writer is having on your thinking while you absorb their material. Reading introduces us to more patterns that we can apply in our lives.

Every time you read a book, a light goes on somewhere on your map of knowledge. This map of ‘truth’ is the same for everyone regardless of where we live because we are all part of the same reality. The difference between different people is that we just have different areas of the map that are being lit up with lights of our conscious awareness. The more books we read and the more things we experience, the more areas of the map we become familiar with. Eventually the map becomes more and more clear so that you can easily navigate around it without feeling any anxiety or uncertainty.

By reading good material and learning from other people we are able to cast more and more light on these darkest corners of the vast knowledge universe and to assess whether it would be worth the effort to travel in one of these directions physically. While we can travel to these far away places quite easily within our minds and explore the truths that exist there, we still need to travel there in person in order to be able to fully enjoy the benefits available to all the people who’s sphere of awareness has grown to the degree of encompassing these truths.

What About False Knowledge?

What about the type of knowledge that appears to be true knowledge but is in reality not congruent with the real world? For centuries people thought that the earth was flat and all the evidence pointed to that. Until we expanded our sphere of awareness to encompass the possibility of actually travelling into space where we could observe that the earth was indeed not as flat as we originally thought. This is a very common situation in all areas of life and science. We simply try our best to find the real truth, but in reality we really have no way of knowing whether what we believe to be correct is right or not – we simply go with the best possible guess.

What if we learn about a city that we think looks like New York on the map, but is in fact a pirated copy of New York located in China? The map is all dark and the only two light spots are the location where we are right now and this city that looks like the real thing. How do we know whether the city that we see on the map is the real one? We can only know that if we have a prior knowledge of the whole map before looking at this particular city – which we don’t. In other words, the only way for us to know whether the city is real is by knowing what lies in between our local position and the coordinates of the city that we are able to see on the map. We might have heard about New York from a friend who clearly described to us how the city looks like from above, but we don’t know where the real city on the map is supposed to be located relative to our current position – and consequently we don’t know that the location is correct.

Let’s pretend that you really want to go to New York, and once you learn about the city on the map you begin moving in that direction thinking that you will eventually reach the real New York. You move through Europe into eastern Europe and the into Russia and you wonder whether you are on the right track. All the villages and woods certainly don’t look like the road to New York. Besides aren’t we supposed to get wet soon? Isn’t there an ocean between Europe and New York? Perhaps the map was wrong? You begin doubting the map, but you don’t know where the real New York is so you keep moving in the direction of this Chinese copy of New York.

Finally you arrive at the city you are both confused and surprised. The city you arrive at looks very much the same as you have expected New York to look, except something is not right. You notice that the statue of liberty is nowhere to be found and you notice that there are not as many English people around. You are surprised to find an abundance of Chinese food and you meet many interesting people whom you never thought that you would meet before. However, you also realise that you have been deceived by the map – by your knowledge of reality. Whether it is a good thing or a bad thing, wouldn’t it still be better if you knew in advance where you have been travelling? Perhaps then you would be able to quickly take a plane and explore both cities, instead of travelling on foot through the Russian country side.

Continuous Learning Is Important

This is why continuous learning is important. You can never learn quite enough because there are always new things that you can learn and new books that you can read in order to expand this sphere of awareness and enable yourself to make more exact and effective decisions. The knowledge about the map enables us to travel to our intended destinations by taking the most efficient route possible without having to waste any time exploring different directions that do not lead us to our personally intended goals. However, the only way to gain such knowledge is by investing your time into self-education and experience.

When you read about the experiences of different people you get to see the truth, or reality, from different perspectives – much like the perspectives of the traffic light situation presented earlier. You accept different points of view because you realise that they are just different ways of looking at the same thing. For instance, all religions of the world are basically intended to develop the same joyful emotional state of existence that enables us to enjoy our lives to the fullest. They all take different paths to reach this goal, but ultimately all spiritual teachings are directed at viewing the same spiritual reality that all of us experience – except they do it from different angles.

As we learn continuously we begin to make completely new connections between different areas of knowledge that we have accumulated up to that point, and the number of these connections eventually grows exponentially. This is what Brian Tracy calls ‘the compounding effect of learning’. The more we learn, the more previously unknown knowledge we can synthesize by combining the different ideas we already know in new and unique ways. So essentially we are creating something completely new from something that already exists. Like a castle being built from worthless rocks.

Final Thoughts

The main reason for learning more is so that we can do more and produce more. Knowledge is the starting point of creation. When knowledge is properly organized and presented in a certain way, it has the ability to help us solve many different problems within our experience of reality. And therefore it is important to always be learning about new ideas and trying new ways of doing things. We succeed in life through production and production is directly linked to the amount of usable knowledge that we can apply to our immediate physical reality in order to build something that has never been built before.

Your fears are the primary obstacles that are stopping you from taking action towards the realization of your own goals.

Do you feel a sense of anxiety right now? Have you ever felt nervous or unsure of yourself? Think of your greatest fear. What is that fear? Is it the fear of public speaking? Is it the fear of being judged by others? Is it the fear of failing to deliver the results that you desire? We have all experienced these feelings at some point in our lives.

What I’ll do in this article is I’m going to do a quick overview of the different types of fears, then we will discuss some of the effects of fear, and after that we are going to do a quick overview of the causes of fear. Finally towards the end of this article, I’ll finish of with a section on how to overcome fear and recondition your brain for taking more courageous action towards your goals.

Personal Story

When I was growing up I developed a fear of speaking to other people – particularly strangers. It was a completely irrational fear, but it made me feel very uneasy when I was speaking to somebody I haven’t known for a some time in advance. I felt as though I didn’t know what to say and how to say it when I was meeting people whom I didn’t know from before. You have probably experienced this before as well – you feel uneasy and anxious about the things you will be doing next. This fear limits your ability to establish new relationships with people because it prevents you from initiating the first contact yourself.

Finally I realized that this anxiety was completely irrational and I decided to take action in order to free myself from it. For a while I pondered upon the best action that I could take and pretty soon an opportunity has revealed itself to me. We had a party in the building where I lived for all the other students who lived there as well. We had put posters where people could see them and we had promoted the party to everyone we knew. That’s where I had an opportunity to overcome my fear and anxiety – I’d go and knock on every single person’s door and invite them to the party! I’d have to speak to about 60 people whom I’ve not known from before in a single evening. I was so scared that I figured I needed a partner – so I pitched a friend to come with me on this exciting little journey and just stand there and smile while I did the talking.

I remember how incredibly exciting it was to go out there and do what I had felt so much anxiety about. When you face your fears, you feel alive. When I got back to my room that night I felt as though I have really accomplished something amazing. I was so excited and so happy that I took this first step, that I couldn’t believe what had just happened. Although it was only the first step towards victory over this irrational fear, it still felt as though I have made huge progress on the way towards developing better skills at speaking to people. Although I laugh today at how silly it was to feel that way back then – I still remember how real that fear has been and how tremendously limiting it was for me on a day to day basis.

That day has started a journey of exploration for me into the types and causes of various fears and anxieties. We’ll first start with the most common types of fears, then move into the effects of fears on your life and finally we’ll discuss the ways that you can use to overcome your fear.

Types Of Fear

There are basically two types of fears. These are natural fears which are inborn and then there are learned fears which are conditioned responses to certain types of stimuli – such as large crowds or speaking to strangers.

Natural Fears

When you are born you have only a handful of inborn fears. When you are a baby, you are typically only afraid of falling and hurting yourself, and you are afraid of loud noises. You may also be afraid of spiders and other potentially dangerous animals. These basic fears are inborn and they serve you well because they protect you from getting into dangerous situations. All other fears are learned fears.

Learned Fears

When you are growing up, you become conditioned to fear many other things that pose no real danger to your survival. This includes fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear of success, fear of the future, fear of ill health, and fear of intimacy. This short list might not be complete, but it includes the most common fears and anxieties that many of face on a day to day basis. We’ll start with the fear of failure.

• Fear Of Failure is learned when your parents punish you verbally for not carrying out a chore such as cleaning up your room. Instead of giving you a reason to clean up your room and rewarding you for a completed task with a candy bar, you may find yourself shouted upon or punished in some other way if you don’t carry out the chore. Consequently you see yourself as less worthy and fear failing at important tasks in the future. People with this kind of fear might feel very stressful at performance related work and might put a lot of energy into pleasing their boss because they are afraid of loosing their jobs if they fail to do their job well.
• Fear Of Success. This fear is rooted in your low self-esteem and your feelings of unworthiness. When your parents criticise your ideas and tell you that you are not doing things right, you develop a fear for successfully implementing your ideas which can then develop into a full blown inferiority complex. This happens when parents do not cooperate with their children in the development of their children’s creativity. So instead of supporting you in your projects and helping you succeed, they tell you that you are supposed to be doing something else. Consequently you start fearing your own initiative – which creates ‘success anxiety’, preventing you from taking the initiative at implementing your own goals.
• Fear Of Rejection. When you are feeling anxious in front of people, it is usually because you have a fear of being judged by them. Overly manipulative and controlling parents usually attempt to bend their children to their will and punish their children if the children don’t conform to the parent’s demands which causes the child to feel left out and rejected by the parent. This is the result of conditional love – as a child you subconsciously learn that you have to seek approval from your parents or else they wouldn’t love you enough. These children develop an aching need to please their parents, which transforms into neediness and a desire to please others later in life.
• Fear Of Intimacy. Sometimes we fall in love with somebody during our early adulthood and the person we love hurts us in some way. This creates a lot of negative emotions and might result in a fear of opening up and being intimate with people later in life. This fear is also connected to the fear of rejection – the difference is that this fear prevents us from fully trusting our relationship partner and committing to the relationship while fear of rejection only prevents us from expressing ourselves fully. Because we have a fear of being intimate, we hesitate to enter into relationships with other people in order to avoid being hurt so consequently we begin to subconsciously avoid relationships, which limits our chances at developing an more intimate connection with other people.
• Fear Of Ill Health. Another common fear is the fear of ill health. Thousands of people are putting themselves out of work because of this irrational fear being stressed out and sick. This is a conditioned response to watching other people suffer and then mentally imposing their suffering upon yourself. This fear results in imaginary pains and illnesses, which in turn may develop into a full blown anxiety where the person is afraid of contracting a fatal disease or having a heart attack. The truth is that you are going to die anyway, so there is no point in worrying so much about your health. Take preventive measures, eat well, exercise – but stop worrying about getting sick all the time.

The primary cause of fear and anxiety is that we don’t have enough knowledge about the situations that we fear. Anxiety in particular is primarily the result of negative anticipations. We are preoccupied with negative images of the future even though these anticipations are not likely to happen. This is why the acronym F.E.A.R is sometimes expressed as False Evidence Appearing Real. This anxiety causes us to loose track of our daily tasks and dwell into a state of depression. The way to prevent yourself from entering into this negative state is to change your thoughts from the things that you don’t want to the things that you want. More on this in the section on setting and clarifying you goals.

Realize that your knowledge about any given situation may not be accurate. You don’t know how people will judge you when you speak to them because you are simply projecting your own judgement upon yourself. You have no way of knowing what other people are thinking and the truth is that most people are thinking about themselves most of the time anyway. You don’t know what will happen when you take the chance and take the steps necessary towards the realization of your goals – you might as well succeed. Much of your anxiety is caused by your lack of experience and knowledge about the situation, which causes you to think in ways that are based on preconceptions instead of real world information.

Effects Of Fear

Fear is one of the strongest of emotions and it prevents millions of people from realizing their full potential. This is because fear prevents them from acting upon their desires. Fear is the greatest enemy of initiative. Being a conditioned response, learned fear can also be unlearned. More on this later, but first I’d like to tell you a story about little baby elefants in India.

The Elephant Story

Once I heard a story about the way people in India domesticate their baby elefants. What they do is they tie the baby elefant to a stick with a rope tied to one of its rear feet. The baby elefant tries to free itself from this rope, but it doesn’t have enough strength yet to break free. Eventually the baby elefant assumes that it’s impossible to break itself free and so consequently he quits trying.

This elefant then finds itself in a state of learned helplessness all the way into it’s adulthood. The result of this conditioning is that the full grown elefant can be safely tied to a small stick with a rope and he wouldn’t try to escape because he has learned from an early age that it’s seemingly impossible to break free from the rope – even though the full grown elefant is more than capable of breaking itself free.

Conditioned Fears

In much the same way as the elefant becomes conditioned to believe that he can not break free, we become conditioned from an early age to fear certain situations even though there is no logical reason to fear them. These fears then prevent us from realizing our full potential by limiting our concept of what we think that we are capable of doing.

Some of the effects of learned fears are listed below.

• Low self-concept. When you fear becoming successful or fear failing in your endeavours, you severely limit yourself in terms of the things that you think you can do. You have an absolutely unlimited potential. Virtually any goal that you set to yourself is achievable if you decide to pursue it. The only limit that you set on yourself is in terms of what you think you can and can not do. Fears limit your potential because they prevent you from taking action in the direction of your dreams.
• Lack of decision. When you are fearful of the consequences of your actions, you will naturally not be able to make a firm decision. In fact, lack of decision is what causes fear in the first place and then becomes reinforced by the fear itself. The longer you stay in this circle, the harder it becomes for you to break yourself free – just like illustrated the elefant story. However, the concept of you not being able to break free is merely a product of your own thinking. You need to make the decision that you are going to act upon your desires in spite of fear. Consider detaching yourself emotionally from the outcomes of your actions and acting solely for the sake of the experience – more on this in the section on overcoming fear.
• Paralyzed willpower. When you are fearful you are pushed into a reactive state of existence where you react to occurring events instead of being proactive and taking actions in relation to you won goals. This causes you to think about the things you should avoid doing instead of thinking of the things that you are supposed to be doing in order to realize your goals. If you find yourself thinking more about the things that you should be avoiding than about the things you should be doing, then you know you have slipped into this ineffective state – what you are fearing is failure and success. The solution is to focus on your goals and focus on the actions you should be taking in order to achieve them.
• Anxiety. When your willpower is paralyzed and lack of decision kicks in, you fall into a state of anxiety. Some people call this state ‘decision anxiety’ and it’s cause by fear of the consequences of a given decision. This fear is in turn causes by a lack of clear goals in your life. Anxiety increases your heart rate, it increases your stress levels and causes you to feel bad both mentally and physically. When you find yourself in this state – focus on what you want in your life and how to get it.

Your fears are the main obstacle that exists between you and your desire to be living a life that you want to be living.  Irrational fears and anxieties are something so common that some people even think that it’s their natural state of being. I used to think that before myself so I can relate to the statement.

Overcoming Fear

There are several strategies that you can use to overcome your fears. What you want to do is to develop the courage you need in order to take firm action towards your own goals. The best way to build courage is to simply put your fears aside and concentrate on what you are aiming to achieve – that is your goals. Do you have goals in your life? That’s a classical question that a coach might ask you – and it makes equal amount of sense today as it did a hundred years ago.

Goals

Desire, Determination, Destination. When you set goals, you are focusing your mind on the things you want so that it does not have time to think about what you don’t want. One of the primary causes of anxiety is that you are anticipating fearful events that are unlikely to happen – so when you focus your mind on what you want, this habit leads you towards thinking less about the things that you don’t want. Which in turn lessens your feelings of anxiety and increases your levels of confidence and positive self-esteem.

Courage

The best way to build courage is to start taking the first steps towards your goals. When you begin taking the first step then the next step will appear in front of you. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you have to plan everything in detail before you start. Ask yourself: How can I materialize my goal today? You have to find a way to materialize your goals right now in your current reality. They have to be present in one form or another. I wrote an article earlier on the power of now – you should read that article.

When I first realized this principle of living in the present moment and finding ways to materialize my goals in the now, I realized that if I wanted to have a website I had to set one up right now. There was no reason to somehow wait until I had enough experience or enough knowledge about a subject – the key is to start realizing your goals right now. It’s so simple. I started by registering my domain and setting up wordpress on my hosting account. The first step was completed. All I had to do now was to start filling the website with quality content. Even if I might not know enough about a whole lot of subjects, there still always something interesting to write about.

Never underestimate the power of now. Live in your current moment and figure out a way to materialize your goals in your present reality right at this very moment. Courage is the natural product of desire – when your desire to realize your goals is strong enough then nothing else matters. The first step is for you is to start thinking about what you want and how to get it. This is how we get into the subject of attitude.

Attitude

Part of the process of freeing yourself from the bondage of fear is working on your internal attitude. Attitude is the way you think and how you interpret to yourself your own actions and the events that happen in your life.

Acceptance. The first step in building your attitude is for you to accept yourself the way you are. Nobody is perfect and you are no exception. Be willing to look foolish and inexperienced when you first begin your journey of realizing your goals. Look at the babies who are learning how to walk. They fall over all the time – yet they sit on the floor, cry a little, and then get up and try again as if nothing has happened. Imagine if babies gave up on learning how to walk? What would our world look like? Somehow babies have the courage to take action towards their goals – they are not afraid to fail. Why would you be afraid of failure then?

Mind Games. With fears such as the fear of public speaking, a good way to overcome such fears is to play mind games on yourself. When you are on the stage and about to give your presentation, pretend that everybody in the audience is naked. Wouldn’t you just laugh out loud if you walked up on the stage and realized that the audience was naked? You could also imagine that you are having a dream – that the everybody in the audience is not really real. In your dreams everything is possible and there is nothing to be afraid of. Your audience is just a dream so there is absolutely nothing to worry about when you are giving your speech. This concept is also something referred to as subjective reality.

Detachment. An effective way to overcome the fear of failure and fear of success is to mentally detach yourself from the outcomes of your actions. Realize that whatever happens to you is merely an experience. Look at all your actions as experiences that you can learn something new from. You really can not fail because every action you take can be seen as a successful learning experience. What you do is you imagine yourself being in the moment with no worries and no fears. You are here in this very moment and you are experiencing life in all it’s colours. Why would you want to attach yourself to specific outcomes? Penicillin was discovered as the result of an accident. Sometimes what you did not expect to happen is better than what you did expect to happen.

Stay Positive. The best way to keep yourself motivated to take steady steps towards the realization of your goals is to keep yourself positive. Stop taking in information that stimulates your fears of ill health, failure, and the future. Stop thinking about the things that are highly unlikely to happen. Stop watching the news and start reading positive books instead. Start listening to educational audio recordings and reading educational material that will help you to realize your goals. Think about the things you want and how to get them.

When you overcome your anxieties you will realize just how free you are to truly enjoy your life. Then you can focus on your creativity and start expressing yourself in the way that suits you the best.

Final Thoughts

The fears and anxieties that you have are for the most part learned during your early childhood. You have the power to break free from these anxieties just like a grown elefant has the power to break free from the little stick that holds him tied up.

The best way to break free from your fears is to determine what you want to do with your life and then focusing on the actions that you can take today in order to bring your goals into reality. Don’t worry about the outcomes of your actions and see every action you take as a learning experience.

When you take action, you will develop a better understanding of yourself and the possibilities that you have in front of you. When you take action you gain knowledge and when you have accurate knowledge about something you are less likely to fear it. When you take action you will gain experience that will help to reinforce your self-esteem and self-confidence.

Do what you fear most and one day you will have nothing to fear.

Selling is perhaps one of the best activities that  you can do to improve your social skills. The profession of selling teaches us numerous lessons about life that give us a better understanding of how this world works.

When I started selling stuff directly to the customers, cold calling and signing contracts, I felt as though a whole new world of possibilities had opened up to me. I discovered how little I knew about talking with complete strangers and I felt as though I have only scratched the surface of my understanding of the people around me. The nine months I spent selling stuff door to door were some of the most growth intensive months in my whole life.

Personally I would say that selling is a profession that teaches you the nuts and bolts of business in the most direct and straightforward manner. Selling is like the sandbox, a simulation, where you learn the basic principles of success and the nuts and bolts of business and life. You meet 70 people in one day and get to try different communication techniques on each and every one of them. There is simply no better way to improve your confidence around people. Field sales is a numbers game – much like life itself. And the first lesson we learn from sales is the lesson of persistence.

Everybody Falls 94% Of The Time

Most people have no idea about this simple truth. When you are out there knocking on doors, 94 out of every 100 people will say no – on average – every day. This is completely normal and all you have to do when you hear a ‘no’ is try again. This required some self-discipline to accomplish though, and you are forced to learn how to maintain a positive attitude regardless of the circumstances. Sometimes successes come early, sometimes they come late – but no matter what happens, knowing about the law of averages, you know that if only you continue knocking then eventually what you will get is a successful sale.

This principle applies to any kind of performance based occupation. Brian Tracy talks in one of his programs about a study of really successful businessmen, where they asked each one of the participants how many businesses they had started before becoming really successful. The average turned out to be 16. That’s sixteen ‘failures’ to achieve one success. Did they really fail – no, they learned. The 16 businesses that failed made the 17th possible. And the interesting thing about sales is that you can test this theory every single day and verify it’s soundness. You don’t need to start 16 businesses to learn the truth of the matter – all you have to do is go out there and knock.

When you realize that you are not getting the results you want – step back, look at what the problem might be and experiment. Try again and see what happens. Realize that the reason you are not getting the results that you want is because you are not doing something right. You might not know what it is and that’s your goal to find out.

Not getting the results we have anticipated, in other words ‘failing’, is quite normal in life. Reality is neutral – it’s the way we interpret our reality that matters. The way you want to think about it is that everything you do is an experience that you can learn from. When you are cold calling you are failing all the time, but all that matters are the fraction of the people who actually sign up because they are the ones that turn into customers. Everybody who says ‘no’ is an opportunity for you to practice your presentation skills.

Positive Mental Attitude And Emotional Self-Control

Whenever you attempt something worthwhile, you will meet with a lot of frustration. This is because worthwhile goals require a great deal of effort – that’s the precise reason why they are considered worthwhile. Because they require effort – most people never make an attempt at reaching them. Every attempt that you make at coming closer to your goal is a step in the right direction. The number of steps that you might have to take might differ, but ultimately you are making progress as long as you are taking action towards your goal. Learn from your mistakes and try to improve your approach.

Don’t think in term of results when working towards your goals – enjoy the process. Judging your success in terms of anticipated results is a very limiting perspective. In fact, the discovery of the antibiotic Penicillin that saved so many lives during WWII was the result of a failure. Realize that the reality itself is neutral and whenever we take action and do something, we automatically create a series of results. Every time you move your physical body, you are in effect creating a result. Whether the result is considered successful or not is merely determined by your frame of reference.

Let’s say my goal is to alter your thinking with this article. As I type it up and post it on my blog for the whole world to see, I’m setting into motion a series of events that will in turn lead to other changes within your. You are obviously reading this line right now and the very fact that you are reading this text is a result of my action of writing it in the first place. If this article alters the way you think, then I have achieved my goal – but does that really matter? I’ve had the greatest joy in putting together these ideas already, so I don’t really care if you enjoy this article or not. I’m probably enjoying myself right now writing another article.

Regardless of whether you achieve any particular result, there will likely be plenty of other positive results associated with your actions. You never know what events you trigger with your actions. It’s one of these things that make life exciting.

Reaching Many People Means Better Chances Of Success

Success is merely finding the right people and giving them what they have been looking for all along. The more people we can reach out to with our ideas and products, the better the chances that some of them will buy. I think that if we are not really experienced then we try a couple of times and conclude that an idea is not good enough. However, the truth is that even if 0.01% of people in the whole world are positive about a certain product, then it’s still 680.000 potential customers who will buy if only they get the chance to come in contact with it. Though this means that you would have to talk to an average of 10.000 people before getting a yes. Perhaps internet based attraction marketing is a better strategy in this particular case.

Developing Social Competence

When you are selling you get to naturally talk to a great bunch of people. And you get to see them from different angles. Some people click with us and some people simply fail to understand us. That’s normal. This is because we are of different psychologies and some psychological types simply don’t mesh together. Personally I know that I have a far easier time to sell to idealists compared to any other personality type. This is because rational types and idealist types are two sides of the same coin and complement each other in a profound kind of way. This makes it far easier for me to relate to people of this type.

The more people you talk to, the more well adjusted you will become. You will mimic the tone of voice and psychology of the other person making them respond more positively to you. Also I think that I have personally developed a great deal of understanding for other people. I simply agree with everybody else’s opinions and then continue to promote whatever I personally consider to be the truth. When you only hang around people with similar psychologies to your own, you develop various unhealthy preconceptions about the rest of the world. I’ve met so many peculiar personalities during my sales adventures that I really wonder how much more there is to see.

What it all really comes down to is developing a healthy vision of the world and understanding the necessity of everything and everyone in the big picture view of the world. We need people of different temperaments for different tasks. We need idealists to teach us yoga, we need rational thinkers to build the systems within our society, we need guardians to make sure the systems are running properly and we need artisans to entertain us. Every person is good at something and every person is capable of realizing their full potential if they keep doing what appeals to them the most.

Final Thoughts

During the time of writing this article, I began to realize more and more that it’s not the action of selling itself that was of the greatest value for me – it’s talking to other people and gaining experience in adjusting myself to their psychology that matters most. It’s only by looking at the world from the perspective of many different people that we can form an accurate image of our own reality and our own lives. The more information we have gathered about the way this world works, the more accurate our own decisions will tend to become. There is simply no limit to how much we can learn.

This is going to be an informative article about how personal development and writing go together. What is it that actually happens when we write? Writing is a direct transfer of our thoughts into a stable medium where they can be read by others, analysed and refined. When we write, we are forced to carefully refine our thinking in order to make sure that the writing we put on paper makes the most sense. How does this relate to personal development? We shall see..

Having been writing down my thoughts in a journal for almost a year and later on this website, I have discovered plenty of benefits of putting my stuff in writing. Most of these benefits are actually personal benefits that really add value to my own life and my own well being – however there are also benefits for other people in the sense that I’m sharing a lot of my experience here on this blog for everyone else to learn from.

I have been keeping a journal since about the start of 2009. At first my journal was very simple with just a few sentences and goals written down in a notebook. Then as time progressed, more and more ideas and goals started popping up in my mind so I started writing them down almost daily. Eventually I had so many little goals to write down that I was almost writing full pages of ideas that I could test and use in my every day life.

For example, one of these ideas was to start a blog back in March 2009 and I did start it – but unfortunately I couldn’t write back then so I couldn’t squeeze out any original content from my brain and into the blog. The idea was back then merely an idea – today it’s more of a reality.  A lot of personal development coaches emphasise the idea of writing down your goals. What’s even better is if you write down all your thoughts and ideas so that you can come back to them later and expand on your findings. Don’t trust your memory – write things down.

When you begin writing down you goals and ideas, your thinking will become increasingly more clear and you will have a far better comprehension of how different concepts fit together. You will also develop a much better sense about what it is that you are supposed to be doing with your life. You will find that your ideas will become more and more elaborate and evolved over time. New ideas will be the combinations of ideas that you have written down previously.

The interesting thing about writing down your goals is that somehow the goal or the idea gets imprinted into your subconscious mind and begins evolving on it’s own. I don’t know how this happens, but whenever we write down what we want in life and what we intend to do – the idea begins growing and evolving inside my mind until I suddenly feel really compelled to take action – and it is this type of motivated action that in turn leads to results. In fact, when you write down a goal or idea, you often wouldn’t know how you will accomplish it – the actions that you need to take in order to accomplish the goal will come to you one by one over a longer period of time.

As your writing gets more and more elaborate, so will your ideas. Remember that the quality of your thinking is directly reflected by the quality of your writing and vice versa. My own writing is not always very elaborate – I do have several areas of my thinking that need a great deal more refinement. For example, after I did my raw food experiment earlier in February, I couldn’t write much about that simply because I didn’t have enough knowledge about the raw diet in order to be able to express myself elaborately on that subject. Perhaps in one year I would be able to write more about it.

It’s very hard to write something unless you have experienced what you are writing about. When you feel that you have hit a block and can’t get anything written, it simply means that you don’t have enough knowledge and experience on the subject in order to write about it. Everything you write will ultimately come from your experience – either personal physical experience, or your experience of reading and analysing someone else’s ideas. This is why it’s hard to write something when you don’t have very much experience. Keep at it though and eventually you will find it a lot easier to write longer articles as you gain more and more experience in life.

This is why writing is such an amazingly useful tool for personal development – it allows you to put down your thoughts into a tangible form where you can clearly see them and then to go through them and debug them one by one while asking “does this really make sense?” Writing your thoughts down is an excellent way to find gaps in your thinking that you need to work on.

Start writing down your ideas, goals, reflections over the day, wisdom nuggets, quotes that you admire, first impressions of people you meet and just simply your thoughts. What are you thinking right now? How do you rationalize your current situation? What can you improve right now? Perhaps take a first step towards some major goal? What can you do today that will feel absolutely in line with your personality and your goals?