I'll be presenting thoughts on staying ahead of the game in a rapidly changing world at Ignite Anchorage 5 tonight:

Natural selection is often analogized to the Red Queen from Through the Looking Glass: when Alice asks her why she is running on the treadmill, she responds “it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place”. In business and in life, the environment is shifting and changing faster than people, teams, or organizations can possibly keep up… or is it? What if it were possible to keep pace with the world? If you have ever had to “do more with less”, you’ll want to learn how to Simplify to Diversify.

 This is a great series of quick lessons in money and finances:

Each comes with a full blog post explaining the error and ways to correct errors in your thinking.

Need help making your resolutions? Dogbert is more than happy to help:

Email is, apparently, losing ground to instant messaging in overall message traffic around the world:

An interesting thing happens when you talk: you change your mind. I mean you physically change the makeup of your mind. When you talk, you program yourself to be a different person than you were.

What you put into your mind determines what you get out of it. And the words you consciously convey (whether vocalized or kept silent) are given particular importance in the self-programming process.

The most basic example of this is "talking yourself up" and "talking yourself down". If you want to boost your confidence, you can build it with the right words. A good coach knows this. And if you keep telling yourself you can't, well, you pretty much make it so. Henry Ford once said "Whether you believe you can or you believe you can't, you're right." He was talking about this, specifically.

But it can be more sinister than just basic confidence messages. If you go around quoting movies that tear people down, you fill your mind with a lopsided perspective of your role in the world. The net effect is that you erode your ability to have powerful relationships. If you sing songs that are full of anger, you increase your stress and decrease your ability to feel peace. If you read books about conspiracies, you find yourself discovering conspiracies around you.

The inner monologue, the "little voice", is the direct key to programming yourself. And the little voice is the words you say and the words you hear.

The good news is you get to direct the monologue. You choose which people you surround yourself with. You choose what books you read, what movies you watch, and what music you listen to.

Speak your truth, to be sure. But if you find that your truth is conflicted, angry, immature, or unsuccessful in ways that matter to you, then practice speaking the truth you wish you were. You will become that in time.

As I discussed previously, you can leverage pain and pleasure to change your responses to experiences and to alter your behavior to become the person you want to be.

Direct physical pleasure and pain are the quickest way to achieve this. If you get burned by something hot or you get a rush from a roller-coaster, you won't forget it.

The second way to achieve similar results is with language. Our brains are built to symbolically represent the world we live in, and a language is the agreed translation of those representations into a common set of symbols. Language is tightly integrated with our brains, so much so that the right words can cause us to believe we've had an experience even when we actually haven't.

You don't believe me? Have you ever been brought to tears by a well-told story? Have you ever listened to a good storyteller and been able to smell the scents emanating from the spaces in the story? Language has immense power.

If you fill your mind with any particular set of symbols, you set in motion the entire power of your mind to process, analyze, and judge those symbols. That's what your brain is supposed to do. It keeps you alive by applying it's full power on critical circumstances. It increases the resources at your disposal by finding efficient ways to acquire the things you need. If you fill your mind with the symbols necessary to achieve wealth, you will find wealth; if you fill your mind with representations of peace, you will find peace.

The problem is that most of us spend most of the time filling our minds with garbage. Do you watch a lot of TV, read a lot of trashy books, or spend a lot of your time gossiping with friends? If so, you're programming your brain to focus on and analyze those things. Since thought is a limited resource, the time you spend focusing on junk is time you don't spend improving yourself or your circumstances.

A long time ago, we had a term for the value of computer output: GIGO (garbage in, garbage out). If you put bad data in a computer, you get bad data out. The mind is the same: if you fill your mind with meaningless drivel, you become an expert at meaningless drivel. That's fine, if that's what you want, but I believe that isn't what you want, is it?

Am I saying never read or watch fun media? Not at all... play is good. But limit it.

Pay attention to what you put in. Choose books, videos, and real-world experiences that expand your experience. Consume media that teaches you. It can be direct (text books) or indirect (stories and fictitious work), the choice is yours. But definitely pay attention to what you're putting in.

You wouldn't eat garbage, so why would you want to feed your mind garbage?

Do you hold a grudge against anybody? A sibling? A parent? An ex-wife or ex-husband? What is that grudge doing to you?

I'll tell you: it's keeping you from being happy. Holding a grudge causes stress, anger, and sadness. Hating somebody takes away from you without having any impact on the other person. It destroys you.

I like this article about forgiveness:

What exactly is forgiveness? When we are in the state of unforgiving, we are holding on to a grudge. A grudge is a story of hurt and resentment that we believe to be true and repeat over and over in our thoughts. It lodges in our body and mind like a freeloading visitor who won’t leave. It keeps our hearts clamped shut, depletes our energy, and hijacks our creativity. The story of the grudge involves blaming someone else for what happened, which turns us into a victim. And as a victim, we are powerless, bitter, and stuck. If you are clinging to an old painful story, check in right now to see if this is true in your own experience.

So forgiving is about letting go or releasing the past so that you can live in the present.

The holidays are often a time of reflection, and often the events we attend during this season stir up memories of people we haven't yet forgiven. This is a good time decide to finally let our grudges go.

I challenge you to forgive one person this season. I mean fully forgive them for whatever they've done to you. To the point where if you suddenly bumped into them it wouldn't stir up any negative emotions at all.

Can you do that? Can you choose the way of peace and serenity? Or would you rather hold a grudge and continue to hurt yourself?

When you’re really scared, fearful, pissed off, angry, frustrated, and annoyed you’re coming closer to the edge. The edge of discovery about you, about your goal, your methods, and the people around you. The stuff that you look back on in the future and comment, “If I could get through that I can get through anything.”

OnTrack is made for times like these. It keeps you focused on the outcome and the actions necessary to move the project forward and gain the outcome.

Personal emotions come and go. They need to be acknowledged. With OnTrack you have a tool that helps you do just that. Then it allows you to set the immediacy of those emotion/s aside while you take the action defined from the structure of the project that the OnTrack process provides.