Skip navigation

Monthly Archives: January 2017

Redefining Setbacks

“Good, we’ve learned something.”

“It’s okay to feel this way.”

“Step back. Breath. Make a call.”

There are a number of ways we can choose to react to setbacks.

We can get dragged down by feelings of rejection and failure. Focus on the way we want things to be and the way they aren’t. More times than not this is our automatic reaction, subconscious and not so subtle.

Alternatively, we can step back and admire the process. Acknowledge that in a week these emotions will be nearly impossible to remember, a mere speck in our experience. What will be left is a challenge that we either tackled and learned from or let beat us down.

Oftentimes the only difference between joy and suffering is where we choose to focus- on how the situation has failed to meet our expectations or on cultivating gratitude for what we currently have. The choice is ours.

10 Things for Creativity

An exercise for nearly instantly increasing your creativity:

  1. When faced with a challenge you’d like to apply creativity to, come up with 10 ideas for it. This works for anything from creating new business ideas, ways to meet new people, how to transition in a song, new dishes to cook, anything.
  2. If you struggle to come up with 10 ideas, bump the requirement up to 20.

Creativity is, more often than not, about getting out of our own way. Creativity is allowing for the good, the bad, and the absurd until something new and authentic is generated.

Can’t come up with any solutions? Then come up with 20.

Questions to Change your Life

“What if you did the opposite?”

“What would this look like if it were easy?”

“What if everything is fine just how it is?”

The beauty of questions like these is that they demand you break from your automatic viewpoint. Our automatic reaction is often irrational, biased, and not too helpful. What would happen if we cultivated the practice of regularly asking questions that forced us into brand new perspectives?

The result isn’t just one new perspective, but the ability to see our initial perspective, a new one, and everything in between. A new world opens up.

To give credit where credit is due, the full list of questions (by the original author) is below. The above are just three of my favorites.

http://fourhourworkweek.com/2016/12/07/testing-the-impossible-17-questions-that-changed-my-life/.