Creative avoidance – when you get creative at blocking your own progress

I firmly believe that everyone can be creative. If nowhere else, you can easily witness creative behavior in every single person when the time comes to make up a good excuse for not taking action or to face irrational fears. With no exception, we can all get so creative when it’s time to prevent ourselves from getting out of the comfort zone. There’s even an expression for such behavior. It’s called creative avoidance. You basically find every possible way to stop yourself from taking action. The subconscious goal of creative avoidance is to protect yourself from danger. But ironically, many times you are not protecting yourself, but rather stopping yourself from progress, growth and new wins. Creative avoidance can be the tough goalkeeper preventing you from entering a bigger league. It doesn’t make sense to invest your creative potential at avoiding your progress.

The Milo of Croton story – Start small and never give up

Milo of Croton was an ancient warrior who decided to carry a newborn calf on his shoulders. Day by day, for more than four years, he carried an animal on his shoulders. While people were laughing at him, the small calf slowly grew into an adult ox and Milo got stronger and stronger along the way. Don't you think that was an awesome idea? Every day, when Milo woke up, he lifted the calf, put it on his shoulders and carried it around all day. After four years, Milo was lifting and carrying around an impressively big ox. By then, people stopped laughing a long time ago, when they saw Milo’s muscles grow. That's how Milo became very famous Olympic winner. Do you wonder what Milo did in the end, when the ox was fully grown? Well, I invite you to read his story.

Understanding schemas – Mental structures that support deep negative beliefs

You view the world through your schemas. Schemas are mental structures providing a framework for representing some aspect of the world. They not only help you organize the vast majority of information in a manageable way, they also provide lenses for interpreting reality. Schemas are cognitive structures for screening, coding, and evaluating every stimulus from the environment. You do use schemas to organize your current knowledge, but they also provide a framework for further understanding – predicting what will or should happen in the future. They influence your attention and absorption of knowledge. They also represent your core beliefs and values. Schemas are like lines of code that run in your brain, giving you instructions for how to interpret things, feel about different events, react and, in the end, also predict the future. They create feelings, thoughts and lead you to certain decisions and actions.

Cognitive reframing – it’s not about what happens to you, but how you frame it

All situations that happen to you in life have no inherent meaning. You are the one who signs a meaning, seeing a situation through a certain frame. With cognitive reframing, you can change the way you look at something and consequently change how you experience it. That kind of an approach enables you to implement the ancient wisdom that you can’t always control what happens to you, but you can certainly control how you react to different situations – no matter how tough your position might be. And that’s the ultimate power you always possess. If you want to change something, be it how you feel, how you do things or what you believe, the change always begins with you switching your thoughts and reframing how you see reality. Your thoughts about the situation that happened to you are always more important than the situation itself.

How to successfully deal with failure and turn it into a big win

No matter how big or small a failure is, failing sucks. Period. It’s true that you can learn much more from failure than from success, and it’s true that every successful person went through a series of failures before reaching the top, but still … winning is sweet, and failing sucks. The problem with failure is that if it’s not managed properly, it can do serious damage to your life or potential. A big improperly managed failure can get you financially or emotionally bankrupt, stuck in the comfort zone forever, or even cause you to quit when success is just around the corner. That’s why I decided to write a (short) manual on how to properly deal with failure. In this article, you will learn all the important things surrounding failure and how to turn it into a big win.

Switch – How to change things when change is hard – Book Summary

By nature, we all like status quo, certainty and control over every situation. But life has become extremely complex, fast-changing and uncertain. That means the only constant in our professional and personal lives is change. And change goes against our basic nature. The winners are people who learn to do hard things. Managing change is one of them, because it enables you to become flexible and adapt to any new situation. It enables you to grow and move forward. One of the best books that teaches people how to change things when change is hard is called Switch, written by Chip & Dan Heath. The book presents many interesting stories of how change was successfully implemented. It also offers a very precise and simple step-by-step formula for implementing change. That’s why I decided to write a summary of the book.

Calculating macronutrients: Your calorie, protein, carbs and fat targets (to lose weight or gain muscles)

Several years ago, in the supermarket where I most often buy groceries, I picked up some packaged food, looked at the nutrition facts label and said to myself: “I want to know exactly what these numbers mean”. I’m so happy I did that, because learning about macronutrients (proteins, carbs, fats) was some of the most valuable knowledge I ever acquired about dieting. So, I want to share with you, in a very structured and simple way, all the important basics of macronutrients that every single person should know. Among many other things, learning how to read nutrition fact labels and understanding macronutrients (macros, in short) will help you to: Easily calculate when you are in a caloric deficit or surplus, depending on whether you want to lose weight or for your muscles to grow, the percentage of proteins, carbs, fats and sugars that you intake and how to fine-tune your …

Not sure which diet to follow? Here is how to choose the perfect one

If there is a single area of life with the most confusing and contradictory information, it’s dieting without a doubt. There are hundreds of different diets out there, most of them claiming to offer you a miraculous solution for high levels of energy, a fit body and absence of any illness. After reading a few dieting books or articles, you have no idea who to believe and what really works and what doesn’t. For almost every type of food in existence, you can find several “scientific” studies that are for and against eating that specific food. And for almost every type of diet, there are gurus explaining their stories of how they easily acquired a six-pack, got cured of cancer and now they need only 2 hours of sleep. All you have to do is to click the buy button. And you know what. They are all wrong. Because I’m …

How to become the best version of yourself

You are here on this world for three main reasons. The first one is to experience as many different things as possible and enjoy life to the full. The second one is to create, contribute, share, and leave a positive legacy behind. And the third reason why you’re here on this planet is to improve, evolve, grow and become the best version of yourself. So the question is: what can you do to make sure you become the best version of yourself? The initial step towards becoming the best version of yourself is knowing your ideal self very well. The best way to do that is to make a persona of your ideal self. In general, personas are used in marketing for fictional characters representing the ideal customer or a typical representative of a user segment, but they can easily be used to clarify who you want to become. The …

Emotional accounting – The formula for transforming negative thoughts into positive ones

In this blog post you will learn how to really think positively and how to simply transform negative thoughts into positive ones (or at least neutralize the darkest ones). As we all know it, positive thinking is a very important part of a happy and successful life, but you can’t just decide to think more positively. If it were that simple, everyone would be happy and optimistic and super positive. As you can’t just decide to think more positively, you also can’t force yourself into positive thinking. It will only make you miserable. Trust me, I tried that approach. When you try to force yourself into positive thinking, every time a negative thought crosses your mind, you will only get mad and angry and disappointed, and that means even more negative thoughts. You accomplish the opposite. What you need is a simple step-by-step process to gently outsmart your negative thoughts. …