Three important questions to ask before starting any project of personal development

Before you start a new project, it is a good idea to pause for a moment and ask yourself the following three questions:

1. Why am I doing this? It is easy to get lost in a lot of activity without being sufficiently clear about the purpose of your journey. Have you considered other ways of achieving the same goal? For example, many people work extremely hard and burn themselves out in the hope that at some uncertain point in the future they are going to travel, practice their hobbies, and enjoy life. However, there are ways to enjoy life in the here and now that do not require much money and come without the risk of burnout. Moreover, travelling and practicing hobbies might also be better done now rather than later, since in the future you might no longer be able or interested in doing so.
2. Who says that it is worthwhile pursuing? Is it really you who wants to undertake this project? Or is it a mere result of peer pressure / other people telling you what you should do? If your goal is in line with what everybody else is doing, you should at least be slightly suspicious :-)
3. What will I do once the goal is reached? It is a common phenomenon that people become discontent shortly after they reach a goal. They have to face reality and can no longer hang onto the idea that everything is going to be better once their goal is reached. So how are you going to handle this situation? For example, Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, found it very hard to adjust to normal life after returning to earth. Moreover, achieving goals often has decreasing marginal returns, i.e. you need to achieve higher and higher goals in order to keep achieving the same level of contentment. Additionally, once a goal is reached many people find that they get over the initial excitement pretty quickly, and face the pressure to keep working very hard just to maintain what they achieved.

For your next or current project, how are you going to answer these three questions?

Based on: Niazi-Shahabi (2014), Ich bleib so s... wie ich bin - Lockerlassen und mehr vom Leben haben, p.221-224

A very important life lessons to be learnt from the movie "About Time" (2013)

"About Time" is a beautiful movie about time travel and how to make the most out of life. A great key to happiness is the following:

"Live every day as if you had traveled back in time just to enjoy this very day!" :-)

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Reviews of the "About Time" (2013) movie can be found e.g. here: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/about_time/

How can we become more persuasive?

The ability to persuade others (via speaking or writing) is absolutely key to success in life. The good news is that we can all work to improve our persuasion skills. These skills are not rocket science and many might call them 'common sense'. However, the truth is that most people are not good at applying them in practice. So, what can we do?

The Greek philosopher Aristotle provided a great framework to categorize persuasion skills into three main areas:
(1) Logos: the rational logic content of your message
(2) Ethos: your credibility as the messenger
(3) Pathos: the feelings and attitude of your audience

For each of these areas, we can take practical steps to improve. Regularly practicing these steps will make us more persuasive. Here are a few examples:
Logos

• Ask: "What are the 1-3 key points that I would like my audience to remember?". Focus your message on these key points.
• What analogies and metaphors can I use to illustrate my points? Will these suit my audience?
• Draw two overlapping circles. In the first, write the topics you alone are interested in. In the second, write the exclusive interests of your audience. In the overlapping area, note topics that are interesting to both yourself and the audience. In your persuasive message, focus on talking about these common interests.
• Repeat your main points several times.
• Where possible, be specific without adding irrelevant information.
• Where possible, make comparison with facts that your audience already knows.

Ethos

• Practice to really listen to people. Sounds easy, but is one of the hardest things to do in life :-)
• Always answer the implicit question: "Why should my audience listen to me?"
• Use humor where appropriate, i.e. it suits your personality type and the respective audience.
• Think of things that you can afford to give away as a gift (material or immaterial). People usually feel like returning the favor.

Pathos

• Spend extensive time to know your audience. Who exactly is your audience? What is their background? What are they most interested in?
• Give examples of other people and organizations that are already doing what you are proposing.
• Actively engage your audience, e.g. by asking questions or practical exercises.

So, what are you going to do to regularly work on your persuasion skills? What is your time plan to achieve these goals?

The power of "power postures"

For those who have not seen it, I highly recommend watching Amy Cuddy's TED talk on power postures. Available, for example, here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ks-_Mh1QhMc

Here are some useful key take-aways we can apply in our personal lives:

1. Assuming a powerful, confident and relaxed posture, e.g. opening up your chest and arms, can significantly boost your level of confidence prior to crucial events, such as job interviews or presentations.
2. Pay attention to your posture during the day and correct whenever you notice a problem. For example, try sleeping in a power posture and enjoy the additional energy you will have the next morning :-)

How can you apply power postures in your life?

Some take-aways from the book "You don't have to be born brilliant"

Just finished this very good book by John McGrath and thought that there some very valuable insights that I would like to share with you.

1. Retrain your mind to habitually think thoughts that are useful. Being positive and solution-oriented is always the best choice. This does not mean to ignore pain or suffering, but rather to look for solutions wherever possible and to accept what is not changeable.
2. Most change comes slowly and requires hard work and persistence. Don't give up and you can improve your life in the areas that matter most.
3. Be disciplined and use systems to automate mundane areas of life, e.g. checklists, routines and information technology. Note: A brilliant example of this is described in David Allen's "Getting Things Done". This way, you free up your mind to do the really important things, e.g. doing creative thinking and working on your most important life projects.
4. Regularly update your personal goals (long and short-term) and discuss them with people holding you accountable. By clearly knowing the direction of your life every day, you are much more likely to make the right decisions and find new creative solutions to problems you encounter.

Summary of Chapter 11: "Playing Inside the Piano"

Most of us think we understand biblical spirituality; we think we have heard it all before. Yet the more I learn, the more I realise that biblical faith radically surprises you, just when you think you understand it. The Bible is like a never-ending river of spiritual resources, like on of those computer-generated fractals that keeps going deeper and becoming more vivid. The Bible has radical ways of teaching us about the redemption of our desires and the path towards holiness and shalom.

Take the story of a couple with marital difficulties where the spouses seemed to be bored and take each other for granted. Their counsellor advised them to make a radical experiment. He told the wife to dress up, head down to the bar, and sit at a table. The husband was ordered to enter the bar separately and sit away from his wife, watching her. The husband began to notice that men in the bar were sneaking glances at his wife. Some men even made advances toward her. When one man initiated an attempt to seduce her, the husband, enraged with jealousy, rushed across the bar, his heart pounding with passion and anger. Suddenly, the husband no longer saw the woman he had become so familiar with; instead, he saw this woman whom other men were trying to seduce. Likewise, the wife no longer saw a man who had become bored with her; now he was a lover, fighting off other men just to have her. The couple, whose sex life had been almost non-existent lately, who had fallen out of love with each other, were so filled with passion that they couldn't even make it home and ended up making love in their car. The point is: jealousy, brought under the Lordship of God, that is in its correct place, can be holy.

Similar truth applies to sexual desires or lust in general. Our culture tries to turn the physical into a commodity. Instead of seeing beauty as a fleeting pointer to a reality beyond, lust turn us onto a dead-end street. The antidote to list is to put beauty in its divinely ordered place, to treat it as a calling card from the redeemed world to come. Sexuality is about so much more than just the act of sex; it is about the whole person. We need to learn to stay on the path of holiness, moving closer and closer to our true self.

To find our true selves, we first must give up our lives. We see this most clearly in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The victory for humanity, the defeat of evil, death, sin, flesh, sarx, and injustice, comes through the giving up of life. This is the last but hardest part of our journey toward our true selves. It is the final step - to become our real selves, we must die to those parts of us that are not truly us. As Jesus said to his disciples, "Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it" (Mark 8:35).

Once you begin to shed your media masks and false public self, you begin to walk the path of holiness and shalom toward your true self. You will find that you begin to see sparks of eternity in your own life. You will see tiny signs each day of how you are becoming more like Christ. But you will also begin to see that spark, that potential, in others. You will often see it in people who cannot see it in themselves - perhaps in a family member or friend. But other times you will look down into the mud and much of contemporary life, and behind the public selves, the media masks, the actors in your life movie, the people turned into products, you will look into the eyes of others and you will see that undeniable spark of the image of God. And you will find your fingers fumbling in your pockets to find a white stone, with a new name on it. Everything within you will wish that you could pass them that smooth, cold, tangible reminder that Jesus stands holding a white stone with their true name written on it.

And so I wish that I could reach into my pocket and hand you a white stone. But I cannot, so this book is my white stone to you. A stone that also works as a key, opening a doorway out of the cramped, stale confines of the horizontal self, filling you with the gusts of fresh air perfumed with the scent of eternity.

Conclusion, I want to recruit you to become part of a revolution of the vertical self. More than ever individuals need to see themselves as God sees them. So many of the problems in our culture stem from a misunderstanding of our true identities.Let's not beat around the bush; if you are to shake off the effects of living under the horizontal self, and if you are to journey toward your true self, you will need people to keep you accountable and that journey together with. Three people would be a good number, even though it could be more or less. Now, here is where the magic lies. Just imagine if the three people that you choose go on to each choose another three people and so on. You have the power of multiplication at work, and before you know it you have affected hundreds of people. Keep multiplying and you are talking about a movement of people discovering their true identities in Christ. Be creative and find ways that work with your personality type. So it does not matter how you do it; what matters is that you do it.

Let the movement toward our true selves begin!

Source: Mark Sayers (2010), The Vertical Self, p.151-171

Summary of Chapter 10: "Meeting Your Future Self"

As Christians, we need to practice a holiness rooted in the biblical notions of creation and re-creation. For too long, Christian holiness has been defined by its dualism, the tendency to divide to divide the world into good and bad, spirit and matter, saint and sinner. You are a vital and irreplaceable element of God's good creation. We don't need to find ourselves; rather, we need to rediscover our original purpose by imitating God's creative endeavours in making the world a better place. God invites us to join him in making the creation whole. We possess tremendous power; we can improve the world and our lives through cooperation with God, or we can bring injustice, destruction, and death into the world through our insistence on relying not on God but on our own abilities and powers.

It is interesting to note that when some people in the Bible encountered Jesus, they were given a new name, like the name we will be given on the white stone mentioned in Revelation 2:17. Therefore, if we are to rediscover who we really are, we must find the blueprint of who we are meant to be in the person of Christ. We have two choices before us. We can attempt to find a sense of self in the patterns of this world, or we can put our trust in the source of our true identity. Just as in Paul's day, our culture today offers competing visions of self. The "powers and principalities" exist in our time just as they did when Paul was writing.

The same choice confronts us today, and the ramifications of the choice we make can be just as serious. We can bring upon ourselves a kind of self-judgement in which we fall into a forgetfulness of God, an ignorance of the fact that God is the source of all life. Cut off from this source, we find our behaviour becoming less human and more animalistic. This is what happens when we give ourselves over to what Paul describes often as "the flesh". When Paul, writing in Greek, penned the world we translate as "flesh", he used the Greek word sarx. To describe our physical bodies, he used the word soma, which is most often translated as "body".

Thus, the path of holiness is about ridding ourselves of sarx that is, anything in life - attitudes, relationships, actions, desires, or worldviews - that carries with it the spirit of death and corruption, that moves against God's intention for the world. Imagine Paul's plea to rid ourselves of our flesh as a plea to rid ourselves of that which is not our true self. For example, casual sex carries with it the spirit of sarx. By sleeping with people with whom we have no binding relationship, we end up using them as commodities through which to satiate ourselves. This outcome may not be immediately apparent; in fact, a casual sexual encounter may initially seem thrilling and satisfying. But that misses the point. The spirit of sarx is corrosive, i.e. its effects wear at us over a long time. Treat others as commodities rather than humanising them, and ultimately you find yourself becoming dehumanised by others or by yourself.

We all desperately want to move toward our true selves, but our desires, egos, and impulses derail our attempts. Our culture doesn't have the answers for the conflicts that we feel over our desires. Sometimes we feel power urges to yell at people, to have sex with people we are not married to, or to eat large amounts of junk food that we know isn't good for our bodies. Thus, we find within ourselves a battle. Part of the problem lies in the way we, as Christians, have dealt with our desire: we have been encouraged to either ignore them or completely repress them. Yet when we repress something, we know it usually returns with more force or pops up in another place or in another form. However, the Bible offers a completely different approach: the redemption of our desires. The point is that God has placed our human desires in us for a purpose; they are not to be destroyed but harnessed. For example, sex can be an uncaring, selfish and empty act between to self-loathing individuals, or it can be the pinnacle of a lifelong commitment that becomes a spiritual act of worship.

Those of us who are determined to take seriously the challenge of spiritual growth see our desires as a chance to find our true selves. Biblical spirituality recognises that our temptations are unique to our personalities. For example, some of us are able to drink alcohol with no ill effects, while others of us find that alcohol harms our health, impedes our ability to make wise decisions, and affects the way we treat others. Some people have no problem enjoying healthy friendships with people of the opposite sex, but for others, the world of those relationships is a minefield of sexual and emotional entanglements. In most cases it seems that we challenged and tempted in the areas in which we are meant to grow. While we can't avoid challenges and temptations, we can choose how we respond to them when they arise.

As C.S. Lewis wisely wrote: "Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospel, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday to the sea. We are too easily pleased." God has much greater pleasures in store than the very short-term exciting pleasures of sin that corrode our true selves over time.

Scripture provides us with four great themes that aid us as we attempt to bring balance to our impulses and desires. They help us to redeem our desires so that we can move toward our future selves:

1. Bringing our desires under Christ's lordship: Humility is a forgotten art in our culture of self-promotion and self-obsession. By admitting that we are works in progress, we create a space of humility. We are saying that when it comes to becoming fully human, we don't have all the answers; those answers are to be found only in God.
2. Bringing our desires under covenant: The Bible calls us to covenantal relationship with other believers, with the poor (Prov 31:20), with the marginalised and despised (Lk 10:25-37), with creation (Gen 1:28-31), and even with our enemies (Lk 6:35)
3. Testing the worthiness of our desires: A great way to test the worthiness of our desires is to examine whether they reflect a respect of the image of God in others and ourselves. Our culture has moved away from the idea of respecting the image of God in others. Instead, it turns others into mere social images and robs them of their humanity. Therefore, we must ask ourselves whether our desires are helping us cultivate the image of God in us. Scripture is the standard against which we can hold our desires to ensure that we are respecting the image of God.
4. Testing the fruitfulness of our desires: We can tell something is in correct balance when it produces fruit. An excellent test of our desires and impulses is to ask whether they are cultivating godly fruit in others, our desires and actions should add to the betterment of this world.

Source: Mark Sayers (2010), The Vertical Self, p.102-150