Showing results by author "Steve Pavlina" in All Categories

Someone asked about the best way to handle competition. How do you ensure that your efforts will pay off instead of merely jumping into a giant pool with everyone else and being unable to stand out? My strategy for dealing with competition is the same no matter what field I work in. I’m sure you can apply it to your particular field as well, although there’s a good chance you won’t want to, since it isn’t easy.

Personal branding is basically the way you market yourself to the world. Your personal brand is what other people think of you. In some ways it’s outside your control, but you obviously have some influence over it. Personal branding is unavoidable. As others interact with you, they’ll automatically form mental associations that connect you with certain labels, often within the first few seconds. You can’t avoid being labeled.

One of the most difficult matters to confront with respect to family relationships is that you don’t control the entire relationship yourself. Whether the relationship thrives or withers isn’t up to you alone. As the saying goes, it takes two to tango. When major family relationship problems are encountered, it’s common to attempt a control strategy. You try to get the other person to change. Sometimes this approach works, especially if your request and the other person are both reasonable. But many times it just leads to frustration.

Suppose a group of superintelligent aliens came to earth. Or suppose that humans developed some advanced A.I. that’s far beyond our mental and physical abilities. If we could somehow communicate with these beings, what might we say to them? We might be too scared to say anything. We might just run and hide. But if we could manage our fear enough to say something, we can imagine some possible scenarios.

While I normally write for people who are interested in improving their lives, I’m aware that many are committed to the opposite path. These people deliberately decline steps that would lead to measurable improvements. They prefer that everything goes wrong - for as long as possible. Sometimes they screw up and accidentally do something right. They’re usually able to sabotage these unwanted successes in short order, but they like it best when they can prevent these positive experiences from ever happening in the first place.

When you desire to attract and meet a new relationship partner, a common approach is to be more social, start connecting with new people, and try to be as likeable as possible. I think that’s a mistake.

One of the conscious growth principles I’ve been teaching for years is the principle of Love. This principle states that you’ll grow significantly faster - and enjoy the process of growth much more - when your life is rich in supportive, encouraging connections. People violate this principle constantly - and to their detriment when they do so. Partly that happens because they don’t understand this principle deeply enough. Consider two scenarios.

There's a notion that's been spread around the spiritual side of the self-help field that suggests one of our primary aims in life should be ego-less enlightenment, a state where we achieve near-perfect inner peace, where we're one with everything but attached to nothing, and where nothing in the physical world can knock us off balance.

What does it mean to be a man today? How can men consciously express their masculinity without becoming cold or closed-hearted on the one hand... or wimpy and emasculated on the other?

The most important aspect of manifesting money is to approach it from the right heartset. Think of your heartset as the overall vibe of your relationship to the activity of attracting money. How would you describe that relationship? Is it greedy, needy, excited, hopeful, etc? If you approach this process from a place of neediness, clinginess, scarcity, or too much seriousness, you’ll most likely fail.

One of the most important considerations when helping someone in a negative state is that you must avoid falling into negativity yourself. It makes no difference what particular circumstances negative people blame for their negative outlook. Ultimately it's still a choice rooted in free will. No matter how unconscious the person was when making the decision to sink into negativity, in this moment that person still has the power to choose otherwise. So if you decide to help such a person, your primary role is to help guide him to make a more conscious choice, one that will likely be much more empowering.

After a tragedy or loss, your initial reaction is unconscious and instinctive. There isn't much you can do about that except to ride it out. But the passage of time will soon reduce the intensity of those emotions, and that's when you regain enough consciousness to choose your ongoing reaction. Now you have a choice.

When you make a decision that goes against the grain of the prevailing social pressure in your life, such as by quitting your job to start your own business, there's a tendency to think of yourself as being rebellious, independent, willful, or just plain different. Other people may label you thusly, so you might start applying such labels to yourself as well. Be careful with this type of thinking though. It could have unwanted side effects if you go too far with it.

Have you ever had the experience of looking back on your week with the sinking feeling that you didn't get as much done as you'd hoped? When building a successful career or a business of your own, your time is perhaps your most valuable asset, and your income is a direct result of how you spend your time. You cannot buy any more time than you're given, and the clock is always ticking.

I had already dropped TV news and newspapers, but I still had the habit of checking Yahoo News or CNN every day or two, so for 30 days I decided to drop all news sources and go totally news-free. In this audiobook I'll share what I learned from this experiment. It went well enough that I intend to remain free of the habit of daily news checking.

If a lack of clarity prevents you from taking action, then find or develop a process to gain sufficient clarity to act. Stop acting like this is an unsolvable problem. It isn't.

In this book you will learn all about how to make sense of infinite possibilities, love the chaos, find order and clarity despite chaos, stay or go decisions, what to do when objective reality beats you down, shedding personal weaknesses, EQing your life, turning weaknesses into strengths, how to address core weaknesses, how to work from your strengths and train up your weaknesses, how to move a skill to a different part of your brain to improve productivity, how re-framing fear could improve productivity, learning new skills, and the skill of calibration.

Are you still on your journey to become a productivity master? With this book, you'll learn all about why you need to "do it now", be flexible, use single handling, why failure is your friend, triage ruthlessly, identify and recover wasted time, apply the 80-20 rule, and more. Enjoy this book and enhance your productivity today. Not tomorrow, today.

Do you wish you could regulate your life better? Many people do, and they don't realize that the most important investments we, as humans, can make are investments in ourselves. Stop putting up with yourself and make some strides in your personal development today. Not tomorrow. Today.

About 100 articles written by Steve Pavlina, and narrated by Lior Stemer on a wide range of topics: creating reality, emotions, law of attraction, lifestyle, productivity, psychics, relationships, spirituality, being vegan.