We’re going to introduce you to a practice that has saved businesses, and some have said it’s saved their lives or their sanity.

Whether you are over-burdened with “stuff” that you have to do or overwhelmed by the amount of chaos, you have managed to accumulate, or feeling like you’re not getting anywhere…

This strategy can help sort you out if you are willing to engage with — Continue reading this post

Tracking and measuring output… without tears of frustration… is simple.

Once you understand that tighter constraints (precision and specificity) in how you set outputs makes for easier creativity and productivity.

It makes your day smoother and, over time, you get a more reliable quality of output for a given level of effort.

Some people just LOVE tracking their workflow and productivity – it makes them feel like Tony the Tiger – “GRRRRRRRRRREAT!”.

Other people have a less satisfactory experience of tracking – they — Continue reading this post

Here’s a very simple change in thinking that can transform your work. I call it output orientation.

Normally when we think about goal or task completion, we tend to concentrate on organizing and scheduling around the procedures that will create what we want.

With a slight shift, we focus our attention on the tangible results we want to see during the process.

Essentially we are setting our filters to the physicality of our goals – — Continue reading this post

Procrastinating, choosing to delay, choosing to postpone until…, deciding to not decide because… has become almost toxic to our thinking processes.

This is not surprising since the number of decisions we face each day has mushroomed since even our grandparents’ generation – we just aren’t yet fully adapted to handle so many decisions effectively.

By accepting “delay” as our default setting (rather than yes or no) — Continue reading this post

When I first became interested in personal development, I read widely and attended several workshops offering different approaches.

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This concept puzzled me, and it intrigued me:

“People have all the resources they need to deal with their problems.”

My point of view was:

“That is nonsense. It sounds like blaming the person for not using their resources. Almost everyone I know has issues and challenges (myself included) that they can’t resolve themselves.

It took a long time working with people and seeing the patterns of how they resolve their issues and change (or refuse to change) before I understood that the statement about resources was what writers call a sentence fragment.

Important parts of that statement are missing. For it to make sense, the sentence should read:

“People have all the resources they need to deal with their problems – they only need to learn how to access and apply what they have, to improve or change their circumstances.”

And therein lies the rub, as Shakespeare said.

People may have all the internal resources they need to deal with their problems, but their mental maps of the world may completely obscure possibilities and resources, literally blocking their attempts to improve or change their situation.

In maps from the middle ages through the early centuries of exploration, often there would be a sign somewhere on the map (over an “uncharted” land or body of water) that said, “there be monsters.”

And so travelers would avoid those places.

It’s the same with us. Our internal maps of life in the Universe are littered with signs telling us, “I went there (once) and hated it.”

“Badlands: “Keep Out – there’s nothing for the likes of you here!”

“You are not the kind of the person who would…”,

“This was awful, awful, awful; don’t even think about trying that again.”

Part of our job in turning prosperity into a habit is undoing some of the weirdness in our maps that came from not understanding and judging.

We must learn to challenge our senses of impoverishment, resource-scarcity, and victimhood based on poor framing of our experience and social misprogramming.

As we learn to “think better” and improve our mental self-talk about ourselves, learning to change the frames we hold, with greater fluency and speed, asking better questions of ourselves, and choosing to refuse to make ourselves feel bad or feel worse, and instead insisting that we keep moving to better and better use of what we have…

This is how we make the phrase:

“People have all the resources they need to deal with their problems – they only need to learn how to access and apply what they have, to improve or change their circumstances.”

… into a work of joy, goodness, and great prosperity. This is how you set the direction for all the other aspects of habit hacking, and a habit of prosperity that is worth having.

We work at the big picture overview level, and also at the small, detailed level. At some point; they meet in the middle.

Do this:

Schedule this exercise to do in regular small increments of time (it’s not something you can do in one sitting anyway).

You make a list about you and your experiences that are useful resources.

It’s a list about you and what you’ve experienced that is useful as a resource but at a deeper level, it’s really about you right now, and how well you can do resource-thinking.

This exercise has no end… you can continue doing this for the rest of your life, and it will only become more valuable and more useful as time goes on.

I have done (and re-done) this many times.

Here is the exercise:

The list is called “My Advantages”

1. Take a sheet of paper and put the title “My Advantages” at the top of the page.
2. Now list EVERY course you’ve studied, book you’ve read, idea that’s crossed your path, healing modality you’ve ever tried, person, place or thing that has helped you, educated you, or given you something of value, every hobby or interest – basically ANYTHING that taught you something valuable or could act as a resource on current or future projects.

List out WHAT it was and HOW it helped you. In some cases, this will require much, much writing.

As you add more and more items to the list, also review what you’ve written on the list and expand your comments on what you learned.

Without stressful effort the list will multiply into hundreds or even thousands of items under two conditions:

• You work the list consistently for a short amount of time, each day.
• You maintain the practice for at least six weeks.

As you do this, something else will happen. It might seem mysterious from the first-person perspective, but it is quite logical.

The brain gives you more of what you do more.

When the moment occurs, it’s like a kind of unlocking happens. Telling you what my experience of it was like would be as it was in an old Zen koan,

“…If you are thirsty, what good is it if I drink?”

You have to go through the experience for yourself.

I know how valuable the lists have been in my life – personally, professionally, and the profits they contributed to in so many areas.

I know what others have said and accomplished by working with this practice.

As you review your lists over time, your filtering for resources gets sharper and sharper; you remember your strengths, but most importantly you remember to use them to your advantage.

Create your “My Advantages” list now. Once you start, keep going and let momentum carry you to something special.