(continued from a facebook note of the same title – find out steps 1 & 2 by clicking here)

STEP 3: ALWAYS ASK YOURSELF “WHAT’S THE WISEST THING?”
“Intuition is the clear conception of the whole at once…”
~ Johann Kasper Laveter

Whenever you feel stuck or notice yourself starting to fall off-balance, just stop and ask yourself, “What’s the wisest thing for me to do right now? What’s the most productive, beneficial and intelligent action I could take in this moment?”

Deep within each of us is a higher form of intelligence, and I’ve found that if I just propose a question to this intelligence it always gives me the correct answer….from that point, all I have to do is follow up. Convenient, huh?

So anytime you’re feeling frustrated, overwhelmed or anything else negative about your personal effectiveness, try it – just take a deep breath, pause for a second and ask your Higher Self, “What’s the wisest thing for me to do with myself right now?”

Ever since I started doing this, I’ve been getting these really wise and interesting answers like, “Just turn your computer off and go to sleep, so you can get your behind up on time tomorrow morning fully refreshed and have an effective day,” or, ” Call so-and-so back, because she left you a nice voicemail message the other day and you didn’t say thanks yet.” It’s like I have this elder inside me that I can consult with as I wish, because I always get a profound answer that I’d never think of unless I paused to retract myself from whatever was going on.

I don’t have it all figured out yet, but my theory is that we experience frustration, stress and other negative emotions because we have cycles of thought that lead us there (and bring us back there after we think we’re through with it). These cycles are like habits, and unless we learn how to subtract ourselves from them we’ll get consumed, and in effect, never gain the leverage, or altitude, needed to see what’s really going on…

By learning to catch yourself mid-process however, with questions like, “What’s the wisest thing?,” you’ll get a better vantage point and not be so likely to miss the forest for the trees.

So we’re not as in control of ourselves as we’d like to believe: really, we’re creatures of mental and emotional habit who need intervention techniques to keep these habits in check – to make sure they help get us where we want to go and not keep us where we don’t want to be.

Remember what I was saying earlier, about how if force yourself into doing things you’ll begin to associate them with pain subconsciously? Well, this dynamic of subconscious association is something you can learn to control. I don’t mean to get too theoretical here, but this is important to understand because it’s really the most empowering life-skills you can ever have. Here’s how I see it:

The way we think, feel and behave is determined by the content of our subconscious mind – the deeper level of thought and belief that lies outside of our normal (conscious) awareness, and the friction we experience in our lives comes about when we have what’s called a subconscious limitation – a conflict between what we consciously want and what we subconsciously believe.

For instance, if we’d like to get involved with a really great person romantically, but on a subconscious level, we feel unworthy of love from someone that great, we’ll sabotage whatever chemistry we might have going on.

If we’re in a financial situation and we know we need to leverage ourselves into a better position, but on a subconscious level we believe that money is an inherently evil thing, we’ll never manage to take the actions needed to change our circumstances. (In fact, if we do happen to get some money, we’ll spend it all and return to our comfort zone in an effort to not be “evil” by having an excess of “evil money.”)

So what we need are techniques to give us an understanding of the subconscious mind in order to make modifications when we need to. We need to get a glimpse of what’s going on back there so we can “edit the source code” when we experience friction, and fortunately, there are a lot of ways you can do this: in psychotherapy there’s a technique called free association, and in the yoga tradition there’s a variety of meditation exercises. There’s also dream analysis, NLP and (don’t get scared) self-hypnosis, along with many others, but the one I want to focus on here is called “Conscious Autosuggestion.”

Autosuggestion is also referred to as accelerated success conditioning, or affirmations, but the basic idea is to

1 – create statements that affirm the states of mind that you wish to have,
2 – create statements that dis-affirm the states of mind of mind that do not wish to have, and
3 – find ways to repeat these statements to yourself when you’re at your deepest states of mind, such as:(a) right before you go to sleep at night, (b) as soon as you wake up in the morning, (c) in the middle of a meditation exercise, or (d) at any other time you’re deeply relaxed.

Since the focus here is productivity and personal effectiveness, some sample affirmations would be:

You can either write the statements out, say them aloud or (if you’re really serious about this) record yourself saying them and play the recording back to yourself at the appropriate times. Whatever you do, say it like you mean it, because emotion is what makes this believable. Here’s a few more:

If you persist with this and do it right, you’ll notice yourself changing almost effortlessly: certain bad habits will start to feel unnatural to you, you’ll find yourself thinking differently about certain situations and creative solutions will start coming to you more often. Since we always act out of our subconscious drives, once you put the work in to change things on that level your behavior changes as well. Essentially, you have no choice but to act in accord with your new self-image.

So there’s your mini-crash course on the science of autosuggestion which really, you can apply to any field of life, not just productivity and time-management. Click here for a great website that goes way more in depth (there’s a program there I use all the time, and since I signed up as an affiliate, if you decide to get a program too, I’ll get a commission. But for now, just check it out: the free information is great).

And here’s an audio clip that goes more in-depth on productivity and time-management in general (it’s part of this free mixtape I put together which you can get here).

How to Master Time:

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