There’s a popular saying that 10 percent of your life is what happens to you. 90 percent is how you react to it. The 90/10 Effect is the recognition that your reactions shape your reality far more than your circumstances do. And if that’s true, you have considerably more control over your life than you’re…
“How do I tell my wife?” That’s what he asked me. Not “Am I going to die?” Not “How do we beat this?” Not “What do I do now?” Just “How do I tell my wife?” I’d just told him he had cancer. He was a man’s man. The one everyone leaned on. The provider….
They say that the more you struggle in quicksand, the quicker you’ll sink, and the less you struggle, the better your chances are to get yourself out safely. Your density is half that of the quicksand. Physics says you should float. The difference is how much you struggle. The more you move, the more you…
I had my foot down on the accelerator. Engine revving. Going nowhere. Not a metaphor. Actually happened one morning. Driving to work, engine screaming, but the car wasn’t moving. Or rather, it was moving, but painfully slowly. Like pushing through mud. Then I realised. Schoolboy error. The handbrake was still on. That’s the feeling I…
In the last lesson, we talked about habitual inertia and how we want to build good habits that trigger automatically, without thinking. This happens when our mind connects a trigger with a practised response or behaviour. If this habit or response is practised enough, it happens under the radar of our consciousness. You don’t think…
You’re driving forward whilst staring backwards. That’s the problem. People often tell me they want to change their life, lose weight, quit smoking, sort out their anxiety. Great. Brilliant. Let’s do it. We make a plan, and weeks later I ask them what they’ve been doing since we last spoke. They look sheepish, because they…
You consistently label yourself. Maybe you don’t realise you’re doing it, but you do. You look at yourself through the same stereotypes you use to judge everyone else, and in doing so, you can inadvertently put yourself in a box that you’ve never consciously chosen. Let me explain the problem with this in a little…
You overvalue things simply because they’re yours. I’ve got a wardrobe full of clothes I haven’t worn in years. Won’t wear this year. Probably won’t wear next year either. But I can’t throw them away. Why? Because they’re mine, and I like to hang onto stuff. That’s the endowment effect in action. You hang onto…
Often, it’s easier to blame others when bad things happen rather than blame yourself. It’s easier to look for someone external to carry the can than to accept it’s actually your fault you’re in that situation to begin with. This is a self-protective conditioned response. It’s a recognised thing most of us do from time…
Have you ever known something before you could explain why? A decision that felt obviously right, or obviously wrong, before you’d worked out the reasons? That’s intuition. And you’ve got it too, even if you don’t trust it. In a new situation, intuition can feel absent, or you can mistake a rushed decision for a…