The name “psycho-cybernetics” doesn’t turn my crank. The psycho-cybernetics impact on my life makes me more tolerant of the name.
Today is my birthday, and I’m looking back at 47 years of living. There are happy, sad, negative, positive, angry, and joyful memories. While talking with Sandi after the writer’s workshop, I told her I cherish all the memories. Sure, there’s a natural part of me that would like to have skipped over the bad stuff, but I recognise and appreciate that I would not be the man I am without ALL of my experiences.
The most important, on-going experience is using psycho-cybernetics. Here are three pieces it has helped me put into place for my life:
- Anger Management
- Personal Productivity
- Results Orientation
Let me share the changes that have happened, then I’ll share where I’m planning to go in 2014 and beyond.
Anger Management
Life started in an angry household. I can remember my dad expressing his anger one day by pointing a shotgun out the front door and firing a shot into the air; we lived in a town of 25,000. Yea, you can safely say I grew up with a lot of anger and violence in the house.
Today, it takes a significant effort for someone to make me angry. But I also don’t hold my anger in anymore.
There are two sides to anger management. One is realizing that anger is a natural, healthy emotion. Getting angry is a signal that something is wrong. For example, one of the kids breaks a lamp, or somebody cuts you off in traffic. Both are things that legitimately make you angry.
The other side of anger management is choosing how to express your anger.
Different situations call for different levels of expression, so it’s hard to give even a rule of thumb. But there is one thing I can claim from personal experience: Anger expressed in a way that scares people is rarely useful.
Psycho-cybernetics techniques have helped me reshape my self-image so I see myself as calm, patient and more understanding.
Personal Productivity
It’s fair to say that I’ve always been able to get a lot done. My difficulty has been believing that I can only be highly productive for short periods of time. I have always claimed that I need external structure to stay productive.
It wasn’t exactly fun figuring this one out, but I’m glad it happened. Admitting you’ve been selling yourself short, and holding yourself back, is a hard thing to do. On the bright side, it allows you to change that piece of your self-image. I see the change as partially complete, and I already see a big difference in my personal productivity.
For the first time, I have an actual editorial calendar written. It covers all five blogs, and goes until at least June of next year. A couple of the subject threads fill the calendar further into the year. It feels good to be getting things done much more consistently (which is good incentive to keep working for more improvement, right?).
Results Orientation
This ties into personal productivity. You see, I’ve always been quite productive, but a lot of my energy was poured into things that didn’t produce business growth. For example, I wrote a lot of articles for Technorati and Blogcritics. That was fun, and got my name out there, but I didn’t do the work to take advantage of the exposure.
Before, I would have made the editorial calendar and written the articles. My self-image was of a writer, and that’s what I did. The change has been to make my self-image that of a professional writer. It’s a small change that cues me to focus on the whole process of building a business instead of just writing.
Where I’m Headed
With five blogs to maintain, and three books under contract, you can be sure I’m going to be writing for a while. More importantly, shifting the focus onto building a business means I’m doing the work to build a list and my author platform.
In the coming months, you’ll see attractive marketing devices (a.k.a. subscriber bait) added to each blog. You’ll also see a lot more affiliate marketing and product creation, and I’m seriously considering picking up podcasting again. Social Media: Cheap and Easy was very popular – I just didn’t get it monetized. And I’m thinking about podcasts for affiliate marketing and getting happy.
What do you think? Would you listen to a weekly, 30 minute podcast about how to get more happy in your life? It would be great to know what sort of topics you’d like to hear about. Please do leave me a comment, and tell me what you think.
