What was once so important
In one motion, waves upon the shore
Washed away into oblivion

A smile or a frown
Melt into one
Leaving only a flower

One that I neglected to mention but probably deserves the highest priority in a ‘tight’ routine is your thinking. Whereas you might control other activities by scheduling them for an hour of your day - thoughts are automatically on your schedule at all times! For this reason - high value thinking is your most important routine.

How do you ensure that your thoughts are of a high value nature? Engage your relationships in a way that lead to high value thinking (love). Engage your work in a way that leads to high value thinking (do what you love, love what you do, give, make a difference.)

Actions leave thoughts in their wake. This is why it’s important to engage in work that you enjoy, that you’re good at, that you feel is making as difference in the world versus work that merely satisfies your material interests. Again, Actions leave thoughts in their wake.

The most consistent routine is that which goes on in your head. Your thought patterns dictate the quality of your consciousness. Unless you take direct control over your thoughts in the form of filtering thoughts and choosing to engage in activities that make it easier for positive thoughts to circulate - you will find it difficult to be happy. And remember, to truly be happy might mean cutting off activities that are unfulfilling yet offer some form of security. This is one of the toughest sacrifices you’ll ever make, but one that must be done if it’s holding you back.

FULL POTENTIAL ACTION STEPS:
1. What actions could you take to improve your thought routine?

Lucid happiness is NOT passive. Lucid happiness is NOT a state of effortless nirvana. Lucid happiness is a choice, an act of will. Lucid happiness does NOT happen to you, it’s something that you decide you want to experience and then you go about creating it.

Lucid happiness is not just creating happiness through material pleasures, although temporary happiness is to be had in material pleasures – but lasting, lucid happiness is created in the way you perceive things; making a choice to change perception if it doesn’t serve your personal happiness, like a person who tries on prescription glasses and makes the choice to change them until they can see clearly.

The decision to be happy is not to be confused with positive thinking while standing in a painful flame. Denial of painful realities is not going to produce the clarity essential for lucid happiness. Be aware of the painful realities and take action to resolve them. Once you’ve stepped out of the pain of your own fire, you’ll be happy for a while; compared to life in the fire, life out of the fire is much better. But then it isn’t long before you feel compassion for those who are still standing in the pain of their own fires and through helping them out of it an even higher level of happiness is possible. That is lucid happiness - a higher awareness.

So the four steps to lucid happiness are:
1) Making the choice to be happy (and never wavering in this decision!)
2) Becoming aware of painful realities
3) Stepping out from the pain of your own fire
4) Helping others do the same

Where are you when the forest is burning? If you don’t even know
the forest is burning its not significant to you. If you’re inside
the forest while it’s burning, it’s very significant. If you’re the
ground soil - you don’t mind because you’ll be more fertile for
next year’s growth.

A leveled home is quite significant to the person who owns it, but
insignificant to a person half-way around the world that lives in a
cave.

Who loves me and who do I love? Significant relationships depend on
factors like geographical proximity, duration of time invested into
the relationship, level of pleasure derived from the relationship.
An untimely death is significant to family and friends but quite
insignificant to strangers passing by the funeral. In general
deaths of strangers are only significant to the extent: what is the
threat level to me and how can it be avoided?

What about deeper issues like the meaning or purpose of life? It
depends on what time frame you’re talking. If you are comparing the
significance of your life in this generation - it could be quite
significant. If you contrast the significance of your life over the
course of all humanity - it can seem quite insignificant. And if
you measure your life out against all time, to borrow from the
words John Keynes - “in the long run we’re all dead.” If that’s
true, what is the significance of any action if there’s nobody
around to remember it? Good question.

Significance is relative, which in my opinion leaves us with one of
two options: Zoom out and despair over the insignificance of our lives
in contrast with an infinite universe or zoom in and live from our
single lifetime which is the most significant position in the world
to us, for at least right now.

My favorite quotes in the book so far:

We may think of the mind as a vast hall of combat. In that environment various stories, ideas and values compete, wrestle and vie with one another for survival, for long term entrenchment in the brain, for the opportunity to stimulate consequential behaviors.
- Howard Gardner, Changing Minds, based on theory of economist Thomas Malthus

To change minds effectively leaders make particular use of two tools: the stories they tell and the lives they lead.
- Howard Gardner, Changing Minds

Making sense is not the same as being correct.
- Howard Gardner, Changing Minds

Habits preserve conscious processing power. Scientists have concluded the conscious mind is capable of processing up to around 2,000 bits (e.g. 2,000 characters) of information a second whereas the subconscious is capable of processing 4,000,000,000 bits of information a second. What these studies exemplify is that conscious brain power is a limited resource. Therefore, the brain must allocate repetitive information to the subconscious so the conscious can filter new information.

WHEN DOES A ROUTINE BECOME A HABIT

A routine becomes a habit when it has been turned over the subconscious. The subconscious takes over acts that have been performed repeatedly by the conscious as a way of preserving this limited resource. Scientists have observed that habits generally take about 30 days to form.

It’s important to note that chemical dependencies also play a role in how fast a habit can form and how hard they are to break. Addictive substances like nicotine, caffeine or heroine are external, meaning generated from outside of your body but addictions to substances can also form internal chemicals such as dopamine or adrenaline which are released during intense experiences like skydiving or sex can also play a role in what I call ‘habit change resistance’. Habits linked to addictive chemicals will require a greater level of commitment.

CONSCIOUS EFFORT IN HABIT FORMATION

The task is to be aware of habits before they form; this is when habits are easiest to create or change. After a habit has already been formed it becomes far more difficult to change. You must first identify the habit (by observing repetitive behaviors that you can’t fully explain) and then consciously work to replace wasteful habits. The longer a habit has been running the more conscious effort it may require to replace.

ARE YOUR BEHAVIORS PRODUCING DESIRABLE RESULTS?

Study your current behaviors – how many of them would you say are habitual? Now for the big question – ARE YOUR HABITS PRODUCING DESIRABLE RESULTS? In many cases because the habits formed during early childhood and adolescence little thought (conscious effort) was given to the habit formation process. This is like a child choosing the most important programming for its life operating system. As an older, wiser individual does it not make sense to go back and evaluate the choices you might have made as a child?

HOW DO HABITS APPLY TO TAKING MASSIVE ACTION?

For many years I wondered what it would really look like to take massive action to produce results. It sounds great ‘massive action’ – but what does it mean? I read all kinds of books on time management. I spent countless hours creating to-do lists, schedules, time logging and using life management software programs. What I have realized is that the answer is not a system ‘out there’ so much as it is ‘in here’ – in the brain, in the subconscious.

What I was trying to do was exceed my 2,000 bit processing limit consciously when all I really needed to do was decide very clearly on the actions I wanted to take on a regular basis that would eventually be picked up by the subconscious. These actions are what I call ‘evolutionary’ actions (even though the actions are generally the same, their content evolves over time) – like planning, meditation, reading or writing. There are a few ‘maintenance’ actions that should also be built into the routine like eating healthy and exercising. Once you carefully choose the actions you want to perform over and over again – you just have to exert enough conscious effort to get over the habit formation hurdle.

If you take the meager 2,000 bits of conscious processing power you have on a daily basis and you work like a little each day at sculpting a routine, you will eventually turn the task of ‘massive action’ over to your subconscious. When an action is taken over by the subconscious, in theory your power to perform that action goes from an army of 2,000 to an army of 4,000,000,000. Imagine if you turn the wrong action over to the army – uh oh is right!

And remember an action applies to doing, feeling and thinking. So if you want to produce more desirable doing behaviors, or more desirable feeling emotions or more desirable thoughts – you must begin today to re-shape the habits that form your life. So I leave you with a step by step plan for habit reformation.

STEP BY STEP HABIT REFORMATION

Step 1: Identify behaviors, emotions or thoughts you no longer wish to perform. If this is your first time doing this exercise – begin with physical behaviors, they are the easiest to notice.
Step 2: Before you attempt to eliminate the behavior – ask yourself what value are you honoring when you perform this behavior? (Assumption: All behaviors, emotions and thoughts must serve you in some way.) Your brain must be honoring some value system in order to perform the behavior. Sometimes simply becoming aware of the underlying value of unwanted behaviors can liberate you from those behaviors because you can still honor the value if it’s important– you’ll simply choose a more serving behavior to do so.
Step 3: Decide on the values you want to give the highest priority to.
Step 4: Decide on the actions you associate with your higher values.
Step 5: Begin designing a daily routine that will incorporate the new actions in your every day life. (This action is going to become a habit soon!)
Step 6: Notice if it’s working or not and make the necessary changes to your routine.

EXAMPLE:
Here’s an example of how these steps would work:

1) I no longer want to smoke. (I don’t smoke by the way :), this is just a simple example)
2) Smoking relaxes me. I honor my value of relaxation or PEACE. (Now I’ve clearly identified the value smoking honors – I can see the absurdity of smoking. There are other, healthier ways of meeting my need for peace or relaxation such as meditation or deep breathing.)
3) For now, I value HEALTH over PEACE. (I am now telling myself that I’m willing to sacrifice a little peace to be healthy. This clarity will help me when I’m craving the PEACE a cigarette brings. This is an important stage in the habit reformation process – because all behaviors honor some value, you have to temporarily sacrifice that value and replace it with something you value even more. It’s usually the sacrifice of a value WITHOUT a clear replacement that causes unwanted behaviors to continue. Imagine how difficult it would be to try to stop smoking when smoking is the only behavior that honors PEACE. If you weren’t aware of the fact that smoking honors PEACE, you wouldn’t have come up with a replacement behavior that also offers PEACE, so you’d be making a sacrifice with no clear benefit or replacement for your value system – which makes the change nearly impossible. In short, a sacrifice can only occur when you have clearly given another value higher priority or you’re honoring the same value with a replacement behavior.)
4) The actions I associate with my higher value HEALTH, would be eating healthy, exercising and NOT smoking – (but remember because smoking honors PEACE, I can increase my chances of NOT smoking only by replacing smoking with a behavior that also honors PEACE. Again, if I simply try to NOT do something – there is a big hole in my value system – my brain will automatically ask the question - how will I achieve my peace? If I do not have a HEALTHY replacement option, in a time of weakness I might sacrifice HEALTH to meet my need for PEACE.)
5) Now I need to simply add healthy eating, exercise and meditation (or whatever your replacement activity for smoking might be) to my daily plan. To make sure I’m eating healthy I could plan WHERE I’m going to eat, or WHAT I’m going to eat. To make sure I am going to exercise I can plan WHERE I’m going to exercise, or WHAT exercise I’m going to do or WHO I should invite to exercise with me. To make sure that I honor my need for PEACE before I even feel the need to smoke – I will proactively plan my replacement activity – in this case meditation or deep breathing anytime I feel like I need to relax.
6) I might suddenly realize that smoking honors more than just my value for PEACE, (and I might find this out after I give in for other reasons) instead of getting frustrated – it just means that maybe I just need to investigate a little further. If I was honoring HEALTH and I was feeling PEACE, yet I still needed a cigarette – aside from the obvious chemical addiction, what could I possibly value more than HEALTH or PEACE that I felt the cigarette gave me in that moment? Ah ha, maybe I felt like the cigarette gave me CONTROL over how I was feeling. So even though my body is going through withdrawal, the reason why I wasn’t strong enough to deal with those withdrawals is because I wanted an immediate solution for CONTROL. Now I can use this new discovery in steps 1 through 5 to possibly succeed the next time.

Can you see how this step by step approach is so much better than trying to STOP an unwanted behavior without understanding the underlying mechanisms that cause that behavior in the first place?

A CLEAR PERSPECTIVE

Can you imagine just trying to stop smoking and then starting again and stopping and starting again – without a clear idea on why you start or why you’re stopping? It’s like blindly slashing your way through a jungle. You might make it to the other side- you might also fall into a canyon and die. Why take the chance when you can survey the land from your helicopter above? This is the clarity you’ll have when you begin to link behaviors to your value system. You can move with precision and make the decisions that have nothing to do with how ‘strong’ of a person you are and everything to do with your value system – the root of human motivation and behavior; the epicenter of habit creation and reformation.

STEPS TO SLOWING THE MIND DOWN

1) Do a focused breathing meditation. Make an effort to get to ten breaths without thinking of anything else. Saying the statement “I’m right here, right now” over and over again while you take each breath in and out will help bring your focus into the present. If you think of something else start back over at breath number one. If this is your first time it will take some real effort. And you may get frustrated - good - frustration will serve as a fuel for a greater will to focus.

2) When you’ve achieved 10 breaths you can let the thought of counting go, and begin to notice the air moving in and out of your lungs. Just feel the sensations of air breathing in and out of your lungs.

3) After several breaths of just noticing sensations, begin to sense the universe breathing you every time you breathe out. Color the breath in your mind and visualize it filling your lungs and entering the world to be shared with other life - plants, humans and other creatures. Sense the greater connection with all life.

4) Let the exercises go. Notice how much the mind has slowed down at this point. Just relax in the calm. Observe yourself in the present, ask the question “Who am I really?” over and over again. Your mind may begin to drift at this point - do your best to remain aware of where it goes. Notice how you feel - be as present as possible.

This exercise is one form of meditation. As you begin to slow the mind down and train your brain to focus you will notice your effort to meditate goes through the four traditional stages of personal development:

1 - Unconscious incompetence - Sleep walking through life - vulnerable / reactive to environment.
2 - Conscious incompetence - You are aware of what you want to focus on but your mind strays quite often.
3 - Conscious competence - You are aware of what you want to focus on, your mind strays less often.
4 - Unconscious competence - You have achieved a deep level of awareness. Presence is your middle name.

GETTING ON THE SAME PAGE

Inertia - inertness, esp. with regard to effort, motion, action, and the like; inactivity; sluggishness.

Newton’s first law of motion states that “An object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion.”

INERTIA AND THE FIRST LAW AS IT APPLIES TO SOCIAL SUCCESS

It has been my observation that because our bodies are made up of matter we are vulnerable to all of its laws. What applies to matter ‘out there’ also applies to the matter that makes up 100% of our body.

Among laws like gravity (the force pulling our bodies down), or entropy (the force that causes our bodies to age), we are also greatly influenced by inertia - the force that dictates an objects momentum; if at rest it’s easier to stay at rest - if in motion it’s easier to stay in motion.

In a very practical sense - if you do not interact with people very often, it’s EASIER for you NOT to interact. If you do interact with people on a regular basis, it’s EASIER for you to interact. And here’s the kicker - social inertia appears to reset EVERY DAY and sometimes only in a matter of hours. Here’s what I mean.

MY EXAMPLE OF SOCIAL INERTIA

I find that when I first wake up in the morning social inertia has crept into my psyche. Yes I can say hello and be polite but when it comes to interacting beyond just politeness, what I call a quality interaction, especially with regards to interacting with the opposite sex it takes a little ‘revving up’.

Now of course some people are just more naturally talented in social settings or their aptitude for socializing has been going for so long its more hardwired into their system. But for many - it’s the force of social inertia that creates a wall to more quality interactions in greater quantity - especially with regards to dating, attraction and the like.

UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL INERTIA IS ALL IT TAKES

Once you understand the concept of social inertia - you realize that your ’shyness’ or excuses for not communicating with people really just stems from not doing it on a regular basis. You can set the force of social inertia in your favor every day by communicating with everybody you meet. And if you find it difficult to communicate with the opposite sex - you can start in small indirect ways by asking “what is the time?” or “where is this street?” and even these interactions begin to move the ball of social inertia.

BE AWARE OF SOCIAL INERTIA

Notice when it was easier in the day to interact. Sometimes within just a few hours of the ball of social inertia will have started to slow down and suddenly you might be a bit more withdrawn again.

If you truly wish to make new friends, business connections and create more opportunities for love in your life - keep the ball of social inertia moving by taking little opportunities to connect with people. Don’t judge them based on attractiveness - every person you connect with will keep the ball of social inertia moving and when you come across someone you are attracted to you can direct the conversation a bit more towards whatever end you wish.

The overriding point here is to KEEP THE BALL OF SOCIAL INERTIA MOVING. It is my observation that most people never even get it moving and so they call themselves “shy” as a way to rationalize it. Or they don’t move it for most of the week and then they try to go out on a Friday or Saturday night and get all nervous, drink alcohol and hope someone will come talk to them.

Don’t rationalize why you’re not communicating with others - this is a trick of the brain! (The logical brain creates stories to ‘fill in the gaps’ for why the more ancient emotional or instinctive parts of itself react the way they do.)

COMPETENCE BREEDS CONFIDENCE

When you keep the ball of social inertia moving you’ll acquire a new self image (no matter what your old self image). Why? Because you’ll have new competencies in social interaction and as your skill level improves you’ll have increasing confidence in your ability to communicate. The cycle becomes viciously positively - positive feedback becomes the reward for reaching out.

THE BOTTOM LINE

In human society, there is not much reward for remaining reclusive. A socially successful person will meet many new friends, many new potential business partners and will have a greater selection of potential mates.

Every day make it a point to get the ball of social inertia moving. Begin with the next person you make eye contact with.