You want to improve your life. I’m about to present three great exercises that help — you could say one exercise in three parts. My seminars cover them over the course of the first day, with a fourth follow-up if time permits (which I link to at the end of the third exercise here). People report finding them deceptively simple for how much they help. They create a structure that[…] Keep reading →

Yesterday I wrote about what I called the heart of freedom, stating that being able to choose your beliefs was more important than being able to change your environment. I quoted Viktor Frankl stating that being able to choose your beliefs was a freedom that could never be taken away. What does that freedom get you? “Just” feelings? Or does it get you more than that? He followed up yesterday’s[…] Keep reading →

Viktor Frankl, whom the Nazis captured and imprisoned as a slave laborer in concentration camps including Auschwitz and Dachau, perhaps best clarifies and shows that you can feel free independently of physical constraints and that feeling free gives you all the value of being free. We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They[…] Keep reading →

You can get reward from every part of your life. You may not realize you can if you call emotions positive or negative because if you think some emotions are bad, you’ll try to avoid them instead of learning from them and using them to improve your life. By considering emotions’ characteristics instead of calling them good or bad, the Model gives you a greater wealth of types of reward[…] Keep reading →

I’m not a fan of putting positive spins on things. You can’t call something positive without calling something else negative. Calling some emotions negative makes some people want to shun them and act like they don’t have them. How many times have you seen someone obviously angry or enraged, saying through gritted teeth and clenched jaws, “I’m not angry,” in blatant denial of their emotions? They confuse how an emotion[…] Keep reading →

Continuing yesterdays’ post… In the examples above, the categorization schemes worked because they categorized something with an underlying structure — the photon and its wavelength, the atom and its nucleus and electrons, natural selection and DNA, the (so far) fundamental particles and the laws governing their interactions. But not everything with patterns has an underlying structure. Let’s look at anatomy, for example. As we’ll see, it will reveal a lot[…] Keep reading →

Discovering the periodic table of the elements told us wonders about chemistry and pointed the way toward understanding atoms. Figuring it out pointed the way toward tremendous understanding and improving our lives. We found similar structures that revealed underlying structure in the spectrum of light, life’s family tree, the standard model of particle physics, and others. Wouldn’t it be great to find such a structure for our emotions and motivations?[…] Keep reading →