People who don’t get their creative projects done, usually have some excuses for not making progress.

Time

There’s never enough time to make a dent in your projects, right? Except, there always is. A lot of people started their creative journey by investing only 30 minutes a day. Andrrea Hess, a successful spiritual entrepreneur, started her business when her daughter was only two weeks old. Because she couldn’t afford daycare she worked during her daughter’s naps and in the evening.

Making time for your projects is a habit. The sooner you learn it, the sooner you can expect making progress. If you don’t invest the 30 minutes you have today, you will not invest the 60 minutes you will have tomorrow.

If you seriously feel like you have no time left for your creative endeavours, I suggest that you log your time for a few days. How much time do you spend surfing the internet, reading newspapers/magazines/blogs, reading books, watching videos/movies/TV, playing games, chatting or participating in online communities or doing anything else that is not necessary/productive?

If you find that your current lifestyle really gives you no time to be creative (maybe you’re at your job 14 hours a day), it might be necessary to seriously turn your lifestyle around – IF being creative is really that important to you.

Time is really not an excuse. You have got 24 hours a day like everybody else. If others can finish the projects, you can do it, too.

No Muse

So, maybe you manage to reserve 30 minutes a day (or more) for your project. However, there’s another problem: You don’t feel like being creative. The muse just doesn’t seem to be there and so you start doing something else.

The missing muse seems to be a good excuse at first: If you depend on the strike of inspiration, what can you do except waiting for that creative strike? The assumption that many unprouctive people make is that you are dependent on your muse and that you have no influence over your creative moods.

So, how do successful creative people manage to work on their projects so regularly? Many of them write, draw and compose almost every day. Are they just geniuses who happen to be in the flow all the time? Is this something that just happens to them?

I can’t speak for everyone but to most, it doesn’t. Instead of working only when they feel like they’re exploding from inspiration, most successful creative people give their muse plenty of room and time to show up. How do they do that? By working even if they don’t “feel like it”.

“Not feeling like it” is a very common symptom if you want to be creative. In fact, you would be quite extraordinary if you always felt like doing the work that needs to be done. The reason why we don’t feel like being creative is NOT because we are not in a creative mood but because being creative is often uncomfortable: We need to step out of our comfort zone in order to create. We need to go beyond out creative limits, confront our fears about expressing ourselves and even take the risk that our work is going to suck. It’s only natural that we’re feeling a slight resistance when we think about working on our creative projects.

The solution is not to run away from these situations and wait for the day we feel like doing our work but to face our fears, leave our comfort zone and start working. By doing that, you will soon figure out that your muse is more often ready than you thought. However, she will only show up regularly, if YOU start showing up regularly.

The good news is that the more often you take action inspite of being uncomfortable, the more you will get used to it. Leaving your comfort zone will become part of your normal routine and it’s not gonna be such a big deal anymore.

More Preparation

Many people who want to be creative, never get out of the preparation phase. There’s always one more thing to research, one more book to read, one more course to take. You can literally spend all your life preparing yourself for that one big project.

However, if your goal is to actually produce something, you need to be clear about the fact that as long as you’re not creating something, you’re not going to get closer to this goal.

Preparing yourself more will not necessarily lead to a better product anyway. How do you get better at creating content? By creating content! If you spend all your time researching, “learning” and planning, there’s a fair chance that your product will suck. You will not have the necessary skills that are required to create something.

The only way to get out of this trap, is to limit your preparation time to a reasonable timeframe. What’s reasonable? It depends. Which tasks do you absolutely have to complete before you can start the creation process? Define every task that needs to be done and only add tasks along the way if they’re absolutely necessary.

Not making decisions

One of the biggest problems for people who want to be creative (but aren’t) is making decisions. But producing something IS the process of making creative choices and executing the resulting tasks. So if you shy away from making decisions you will never get anything done.

It starts with big question like:
- Am I going to write a novel or a book with short stories?
- Am I going to produce an action movie or a drama?
- Which concept/form/topic am I going to choose for my album?
- Am I going to write from an ego-perspective or will I tell my story in the third person?

Most people never start their creative work because they want to avoid these basic questions. They fear that they will make the wrong choices. What if you find out that the first person perspective doesn’t work out after you’ve written half of the book? What if the concept you choose for your album will not fulfill the needs of your creative self-expression? What if the story you choose sucks?

Well, what if? If those things happen, you deal with them. Running into creative “problems” is only to be expected when you’re producing something. Your job as a creator is not to develop a plan that will cause no difficulties – such a plan will never exist. Your job is to follow your plan and to find solutions for the problems that will cross your way.

Decision making always means that you will have to give up options. That’s the very essence of making decisions and there’s no way around that. So don’t wait for the day where you don’t have to make any decisions anymore. It won’t arrive.

The trap of not making decisions is a big one because you might feel like you’re still somewhat active: After all, you’re pondering the important questions, right? So you ARE making progress, right?

Don’t fool yourself. Decision pondering won’t get you anywhere. Only decision making + execution will.

Arrogance

Some of the people who want to be creative don’t only make excuses but are also arrogant about them. Examples:
- “I’m different than everybody else. The normal rules of creativity don’t apply to me.”
- “My work is more important than other people’s work. That’s why it takes me so long to produce something.”
- “It’s easy to create (commercial) trash – but creating art takes time.”

Of course, different rules apply to different people. However, there are a few rules that apply everyone. For example: If you don’t work on something, you won’t make progress at it.

As long as you’re sticking to the excuse that you’re unlike everybody else, just be aware that right now thousands (maybe millions) of people are creating something similar to what you want to create. However, while you’re making excuses, everybody else is improving the skills, gaining experience and contributing to the world. Still feel so above everybody else?

Some people spend all their life making excuses. Do you want to be one of them or do you rather want to start creating right now? What are you waiting for? The answer to this question is probably an excuse.

Related posts:

1. How To Get Motivated To Be Creative Or How To Start The Creative Flow In the last article I talked about a simple way...
2. Going Beyond Creative Limits It’s become relatively easy for me to write 200 –...

THE ideal lifestyle is the way of living that’s supposed to be the best for everyone. People talk about THE ideal lifestyle when they’re talking like this:
- “You need to travel while you’re young.”
- “We all should grow our own food at home”
- “Living minimalistically is the true way to find happiness.”
- “Having a family will give your life it’s real purpose.”
- “Everybody should be vegan.”
- “Everybody should go to college.”

Notice something? It’s full of “shoulds” and “needs”. Believing in THE ideal lifestyle means that you believe everybody is supposed to live the exact same way. That’s pretty dogmatic, of course.
The consequence? Instead of finding out what their own ideal lifestyle would look like, many people start follow those who dictate them THE ideal lifestyle. Then they measure their success by measuring how much their life matches the ideal lifestyle.

There are two problems with that.

1) THE ideal lifestyle you’re following might not be YOUR ideal lifestyle.
Usually that means that you’re not gonna be very motivated to follow it. You will keep sabotaging yourself and feel bad because you’re not making any progress. Subconsciously you always know what you want and it’s very difficult to put in a lot of effort for something that you do not want.
But even if you can trick yourself into following this path, there’s a problem: After putting in all this effort and time, you might end up living a lifestyle that you do not really enjoy or that is not fitting to what you want to do in your life.
For example, if I went on a three year long round-the-world-trip now (because I believed that this is the ideal lifestyle and everybody should do it), I wouldn’t be able to form a rock band and play gigs (which is what I really want to do). Or maybe you do really want to travel but THE ideal lifestyle tells you that you grow your own food at home. From what I know, it’s pretty hard to take a garden with you. So if you followed THE ideal lifestyle you would stay at home and be probably not very happy about that.

2) Comparing yourself to others always makes you look like a loser.
There’s always someone who has perfected THE ideal lifestyle more than you have. Someone who seems to have a more perfect life from the outside. It’s very hard to be satisfied with your life if you’re always competing against some ideal (which is not even ideal because nothing is) that is out there. Measuring your life from the outside is a stupid idea anyway. The outside can never tell you what’s going on on the inside.

Maybe you don’t think that you’re following THE ideal lifestyle. You still might be doing it. It’s easy to confuse your desires with other people’s desires. Many people mix those up every day. They think they’re following their dreams while they’re actually following something that was defined to them as “THE ideal lifestyle” at some point.

Depending on how you grow up, where you live, who your friends are, how old you are and many other factors, THE ideal lifestyle may look different for you than for other people. Look at those examples for THE ideal lifestyle:
- Retiring early and lying at the beach for the rest of your life.
- Creating a family, building or buying a house, working at your 9-5 job.
- Sex, drugs & rock’n roll.
- Working on your internet business while travelling the world.
- Creating and living in a small sustainable and self-sufficient community.
- Wearing gold rings and watches, driving a Ferrari, owning a huge mansion with a pool.
- Hippie-Lifestyle
- Yuppie-Lifestyle
- Living with only 100 items or less.
- Working 16 hours a day and being as productive as you can be (living for your work).
- YOLO-Style.
- Meditating 12 hours a day (living for your spirituality).

You see, there are many different lifestyles that are supposed to be the best lifestyles depending on who you ask – however, only because there are many of them, it doesn’t make them individual.

You are your own person. You are, in fact, different from anybody who has ever lived and will ever live. Of course you share the same basic needs with everyone but the need to express yourself will always be different from everybody else. You have your own desires, your own dreams – YOUR own ideal lifestyle. It might look similar to one of the examples above, it might look totally different. It’s not better or worse than anyone’s ideal lifestyle. Just as other people’s ideal lifestyle is not better than yours.

A lifestyle always consists out of many factors: How do you want to work? What kind of friends do you want to have? Where do you want to live? Do you want to have a family? What kind of family? What’s your ideal living arrangement? What skills do you want to master? How do you want to spend your free time? If you’re not sure about what you want, there’s always the trap of adapting to what other people want or to what other people want you to want. Instead of asking yourself “What would be the best choice?”, ask yourself “What would make me really happy?” or “What do I really want?”. Start listening to your heart, stop observing the outside world so much – they don’t know any better than you do!

Your ideal lifestyle will change

Don’t get too attached to your idea of your ideal lifestyle. It’s probably gonna change a few times during your lifetime – and that’s a good thing: Your changing desires will make sure that you keep growing and have new experiences. As long as you’re sure that you’re creating something you really want to create, you’re moving into a good direction: the direction of YOUR ideal lifestyle.

No related posts.

A common reaction is the attempt to escape it: Getting a new job (because the old one apparently sucked), befriending new people (because the relationships you already have are troublesome), finding a new place (because your old location just couldn’t give you what you needed), looking out for new activities (because what you’re doing now is not working or not enjoyable).

There’s nothing wrong with that reaction and sometimes this is a viable approach. Oftentimes, however, it’s not that simple: A few weeks or months after the respective changes we’ll find ourselves being discontent with our new job (apparently this one sucks, too), have problems with our new relationships or are annoyed about the situation at our new place.

Did this ever happen to you? Did you ever feel like you’re not making progress because there is always a problem, always something that bothers you or always something that is suboptimal? Well, maybe it’s not your life that sucks, maybe it’s your attitude that does.

What do all your situations in your life have in common? They have you in common. If you’re constantly feeling like something about your life sucks, it’s YOU who puts on that perspective.

Let’s face it: Situations by themselves are neither good nor bad. If you always end up seeing only problems, annoyances and and imperfections, it’s not because the situations themselves bear those qualities. It’s because you choose to only see those qualities in the situations.

Every situation carries many qualities. Instead of focusing on the facets that make you feel bad, you can choose to concentrate on the better feeling aspects. Of course, that takes some practice.

Exercise

Think about the person, task, location, device or situation that is bothering you. Now slowly zoom out of the problematic aspects and the bad feeling you get when you think about it. What else is there? Which aspects about it do not make you feel bad? Try to get a more neutral, objective perspective on it. Expand those neutral aspects in order to minimize the bad feelings as much as possible. Now zoom out of your usual perspective even more: Is there even something that makes you feel good (no matter how tiny it is)? Zoom in. Look at it. Concentrate on the good feelings and expand them: What can you appreciate? What can you be grateful for? Which other aspects are good feeling as well? Start thinking about those things and don’t stop until you feel better. If you do it well enough, you will start feeling really good.

This is not a process you can rush through – especially if you’re a novice in the realms of conscious thinking. If you’re not used to changing your thoughts consciously, you might feel a lot of resistance doing it. It’s not very comfortable to break out of your usual thinking habits and perspectives. It’s not comfortable to accept your responsibilty. So take your time when you’re going through this exercise and don’t expect fast results if you’re not ready to leave your mental comfort zone.

Looking at things in a more positive light will not only serve you in problem situations, it’s also good to have this ability in general: It just feels better! Life becomes more enjoyable. You will stop seeing so many problems and start seeing challenges instead. You will appreciate people for what they bring into their life, instead of condemning them for what they’re not able to give you. You will appreciate the lessons you learn in your career, instead of being dissappointed that you’re “not there yet”. Only because there’s ALWAYS room for improvement, it doesn’t mean you have to be dissatisfied constantly. The things that are in your life are already great. You just need to start seeing it.

Related posts:

1. Challenges Versus Problems I meet a lot of people who tell me or...
2. 30 Day Trial: Feeling Good, Feeling Better – Review Last January I started a 30 trial where the goal...

In order to be more successful it seems that I need to do more, more and more. But what happens when you just focus on doing more, producing more, achieving more? I’ve tried focusing on the quantity of my achievements for a while, so I can tell you a little about that.

At first, when you focus on quantity, something magical will happen. You will go beyond your own creative limits and surprise yourself with how much you’re able to do. I found out that I could write 4 songs a day or write 5 articles a day if I wanted to.

Increasing your productivty like that will motivate your greatly. The feeling of being super-productive will boost your confidence and your willingness to work even more (it just feels so rewarding). This might be very welcome to you, esepcially if you’re not used to experiencing that kind of motivation, confidence and drive. You will feel like you’re in the flow and like you’re able to achieve anything.

As your motivation levels will be high, you will want to take on even more work. You will choose even more ambitious goals and pursue even bigger achievements. Maybe that will lead you to break even more of your personal work records.
As nice as everything of that story sounds, there’s a major downside to it: At some point you will not be able to do “more”. Even if you trade pretty much all of your personal life for your work life, even if you make room for productivity wherever you can, there’s a time when you can’t do “more” anymore. Even if you work and work, you can’t really get any faster because – after all – producing something just takes some time!

Another thing will happen, too, if it hasn’t happened already: The quality of your work will either get stagnant or it will even decline.

Quality Needs Time

The idea to do “more” is nice. But “more” eventually leads to “less” quality. Let’s look at the example I mentioned above: I found out that I was able to write 4 songs a day. Is it really surprising that none of those songs were really good? When I was working like that, the songs I produced
- started sounding more average and boring
- often sounded exactly like something I had already produced
- lacked production quality (as I was focusing on writing more, I didn’t really take time to produce them properly)
- didn’t attract the attention of potential buyers as much as the older songs did

So, although I was producing way more, it wouldn’t necessarily lead to more sales or more people liking my music. What’s the point of producing “more” then? Producing more mostly led me to working more but not to achieving my goals faster.

I had to face the fact that creating high quality content – whether it’s articles or music or anything else – or, generally, doing high quality work would take some time. That meant that I could either focus on creating more stuff that would have a lower quality or I could focus on creating less stuff that would have a higher quality.
But it’s not even as simple as that. Even spending all your time on producing high quality work is not the solution yet.

Quality Needs Relaxation

One of the major reasons why the quality of my work decreased was that I couldn’t really come up with new ideas anymore. It was like my brain and heart were empty. There weren’t any high quality, inspired ideas anymore. I also generally began feeling empty. I started lacking drive and motvation and found it very hard to get out of bed in the morning – even though I was spending my days doing what I love. I literally had to force myself to go on every day. I felt extremely stressed out although the only one who was pushing me was myself. Very hard to do good work when you’re feeling like that.

I guess I experienced a mild version od what generally is considered a burn-out syndrome. It didn’t only feel bad but it also decreased the quality of my work – oh, the irony!
I had to learn that in order to produce better results I also had to invest more time into relaxing and not working.
But wait, there’s more…

Quality Needs Variation

Relaxation is nice and useful – but hanging out on your couch, watching TV or browsing facebook is not enough. When my relaxation time looked like that, I never felt really relaxed. A real break is when you do something new or different: Learn some skills, meet people, experience life.
I needed to learn that in order to increase the quality of your work, I had to restore my life balance. Ideas would always flow more easily to me and work would always seem less stressful when I was living a balanced life – with lots of time for exploring, playing and laughing.

Quality vs. Quantity in all Life Areas

The question about quality and quantity is not only relevant in your work life. Think about your personal goals. What’s more important to you?

- Having many friends or having good friends?
- Having knowledge in many areas or being an expert?
- Experiencing many things or experiencing intensively?
- Possessing many things or possessing things you love?
- Visiting many places or exploring places thoroughly?

Of course, the answer will most likely be somewhere in between. You can benefit a lot from quantity but you need to make sure that you also experience some quality. Otherwise, the quantity doesn’t have any value. It’s empty and pointless. If you’re not sure, ask yourself:
- Do I rather want to live a life with many different experiences or a life with high quality experiences?

Related posts:

1. Excuses for Procrastinating on Your Creative Projects As a creative person I am surrounded by many creative...
2. 30 Day Trial: Delivering Value – Review How did my 30 days of delivering value go? I...
3. Going Beyond Creative Limits It’s become relatively easy for me to write 200 –...

People are still visiting my website
Last summer I posted links to my website in film forums and on youtube and wrote that I was offering to create music for movies and games. To this day people are sill using those links, visiting my website and, which is the most important thing, ask me whether I want to score their films. I certainly don’t get flooded with mail but I’ve got at least one new request every month since then.

People are still buying tracks I uploaded back then
I also used the opportunity to upload quite a few tracks to multiple audio stock websites. People are still buying these tracks today. So what I did is still creating passive income for me.

Relationships
One of the best things about business is that it brings people together. Although you can’t preserve all relationships that you made via your business, there are always some that will stay longer. I am still in contact with people who I met as a result of my trial. There are probably going to be more collaborations and projects because of that – which again will help my business grow.

Experience and knowledge
The knowledge that I’m benefiting from making offers and the experience that I can make many offers in a short period of time still helps me to this day. Since then I uploaded a lot more tracks to audio stock websites, for example, which helped me create a nice little passive income stream.

Making offers is not the same as “marketing”
If you think about doing this experiment yourself, be aware that making offers is not passive marketing like “getting people to your website”. Making offers actually means that you have a sales page (or multiple sales pages) or at least a page where you describe what you’re offering – so people can buy it. It’s really about asking for the sale. Online or in real life. If you don’t ask for the sale, people will not buy anything.
A lot of people are trying to get around the asking because it can feel uncomfortable. If you’re trying to do this yourself, though, you can’t hope for a lot of sales.
Just my experience of offering nothing for many years.

Related posts:

1. 30 Day Trial: Making Offers – Conclusions Last month I announced that I was going to conduct...
2. Making Offers – 30 Day Trial Creating and delivering content is great. However, if you want...
3. How Money Works Today I will talk to you about money. I won’t...

I love writing reviews about my life because they help me understand my development better. So how was 2012?

The situation

Let’s start at the beginning of the year so we can see what changed in the course of the last 12 months.

About a year ago I was living in an apartment in Bamberg, Bavaria. I was single. I was waiting tables part-time. Every few weeks I had a theater gig. I didn’t have any big projects coming up. Everything was very open. The only thing that I had decided was that I wanted to concentrate more on my marketing for Follow The Red Queen. I also knew that I wanted to move to Berlin in spring. However, it wasn’t etched in stone back then and I didn’t have any concrete plans.

Berlin

Fast forward 12 months and now I live in Berlin. So that has worked out apparently. I moved there at the end of May because I felt like I needed to change my surroundings in order to create more change in my life. It was definitely one of the most important decisions this year – because, indeed, my life has changed a lot since then.

Berlin is a great city for someone like me. It’s a city with a lot of diverse people, which creates an open-minded energy. As someone who is a little weird, I can appreciate that very much. It’s not very hard to find other polyamorous, vegan, gay, self-employed or spiritual people here.

What I really like is that you can explore so many different things. There’s always a lot more to see and to discover.

Creativity

Creatively speaking, 2012 has probably been the most productive year of my life (so far). Although I’ve always been working hard, this year I understood a lot more about productivity: Productivity means that you’re creating results in the real world (duh!).

Composing 10 finished songs in a year is way more productive than composing 100 unfinished ones. I finally got that now. And so I’ve never published as much music as I did this year.

Short Movies

All in all, I created music for 8 short movies. One of them was longer than 20 minutes. The final score for this movie contained 10 different tracks. This is also the movie where I didn’t only create the music but also played a character. I got offers for even more movies which I declined because I wanted to concentrate on more commercial projects (most of the short movies where non-commercial).
Comparison: Last year I created the music for ONE short movie.

Audio Stock

One of the best things I discovered this year was the existence of audio stock websites and the possibility to earn money with it. There’s this so called “micro stock” where you can upload your music in order to sell it on an online market place. I started uploading my first songs in February, had my first sale in March and have grown my passive income to more than 150€/month since then. In order to get there, I uploaded almost 50 music tracks to 5 different audio stock websites.

I also started offering my music to music libraries. I got more positive feedback than I expected from them and now I’m getting ready to sign a few contracts.

Writing

I also wrote a lot of texts and articles in 2012. All in all I wrote more than 40 articles for Follow The Red Queen and more than 100 articles for another company which I sell my articles to.
Besides that, I released my ebook “Why You Haven’t Changed Your Life Yet”, which you can receive when you sign up to my newsletter.

Love, Romance and Sex

2012 has brought me more than a few epiphanies in the matters of love, romance and sex. First of all, I discovered that I am into girls. Second of all, I discovered, that I’m (currently?) not into guys. These realizations were ground-breaking for me and very important to make.

One result of that: For the first time of my life I’m in a romantic relationship. This has been a major source for happiness and contentment this year. Also, I’ve been learning very much from this experience and I’m grateful every day for the way it’s changing me.

It’s a polyamorous relationship – so it’s a little different from most relationships. Polyamorous basically means that we’re not exclusive and are free to connect with other people in any way we want (emotionally, mentally, physically, spiritually, sexually).

Besides exploring this romantic relationship, I made also new experiences with the spiritual side of sex. Did you know you could have sex with someone while not even touching each other below the belt? No, I’m not talking about petting. I have a very sensitive, spiritual friend with whom I tried to have sex with only our hearts and hands. That means basically, sending each other loving energy until we have some sort of orgasm in our hearts.
It’s an incredible intense experience and it seems like we’re getting better at connecting each time. I’m very happy that I have the chance to experience this. It helped me open up my perspective on sex even more.

Relationships

2012 was generally very interesting in terms of relationships. First of all, I didn’t get to know as many people as in 2011. When it was clear to me that I would move to Berlin soon, I didn’t want to make any new friends in my former home town and so I didn’t care about networking anymore. Interestingly enough, I still made quite a few connections in that phase because people kept approaching me.

Although I met fewer people, I made more friends. The percentage of people I met who were compatible to me was a lot higher than in the previous years. I met more vegans, spiritual and intuitive people, self-employed people and polyamorous people than ever before. This led to a very fulfilling social life.

Fun and Adventure

I always spend a lot of time on my work. However, I know that balance is important. So I tried to not forget my personal life this year.

Personal interests I explored this year included playing soccer, cooking, outdoor and survival, politics, economy and Esperanto. Especially non-mental interests like cooking and playing soccer helped me to relax and unwind.

Travelling

Unlike a lot of people, I don’t belong to those who dream of constant world travelling, being on the road and working from everywhere. However, I became more interested in travelling in 2011. I just want to see more of the world and meet all kinds of people.

This year was filled with many trips between Berlin and my former home town. Even before I moved to Berlin in May I had visited the city three times since January. Because of these many trips I didn’t feel a lot like travelling elsewhere in the beginning of the year. In the summer I went on a short trip to the Baltic sea (for the first time in my life), though, and in December I went to Sweden for five days (also a first time). Sweden was also the first time that I travelled by airplane on my own, which was a good experience to make.

Intuition

One very interesting thing that happened to me: My intuitive abilities skyrocketed this year. This helped me a lot in my every day life. Don’t know what to do? Ask intuition. Don’t know how to do it? Ask intuition. Of course, this doesn’t work with everything but at least with the important things you can get some directions.

As you see, there are a lot of things I experienced in 2012 that I haven’t even mentioned here. I think many of those things are still so new to me that I’m still in the learning phase and don’t feel ready to share my insights yet.

2013

I don’t make concrete plans for the whole year anymore. However I know which directions I want to take.

Music

Filling music libraries with my compositions will be a big focus for me in 2013. I want to multiply the size of my catalogue in a big way.
Along with that, I want to increase my passive income as much as it’s possible this year. Going from 20€ to 150€+ was a nice experience already – now I want to take it to a level where it’s a serious source of income.

Creative Projects

Besides composing music I want to get back into film and also into live music. I’m not in a hurry with that, though.

Travelling

Travelling will be a bigger part of my life this year. I already booked a flight to Portugal and I’m planning on going on a few other trips, too.

Follow The Red Queen

As you might have noticed I’m currently not focusing a lot on Follow The Red Queen. I try to keep up my blogging routine but other than that it’s relatively quiet around here. The main reason is that I’m busy with other projects – especially with earning money and creating music. I do get heart-warming feedback (thank you, everybody!) once in a while, though, which motivates me to continue blogging. I see FTRQ more like a long-term project anyway. My desire to talk about personal development topic is not going to fade soon – however, it’s not the most important thing for me right now.

Spirituality

At the moment, I feel that spirituality becomes more important for me. Could have something to do with the fact that I have a lot of spiritual people around me.

Relationships

Relationships will probably be very interesting this year. I don’t really have an agenda in this area of my life except exploring the road of polyamory further and deepen connections and friendships.

So, these are the directions I feel good about at the moment. However, nothing’s etched in stone yet and life will probably come and mess it up anyway (usually in a good way!). I’m looking forward to the mess.

How was your year? Feel free to share your conclusions about 2012 and your goals, resolutions or directions for 2013 in the comment section.

Related posts:

1. Review 2011 – Preview 2012 What can I say about 2011? Haha, a lot. Oh,...
2. 30 Day Trial: Feeling Good, Feeling Better – Review Last January I started a 30 trial where the goal...

For example you might choose to leave your job in order to become self-employed. However, your parents are against that decision. They don’t understand why you would want to give up the stability and security of having a job and trade it for the roller-coaster lifestyle of self-employment.

Another example: You’ve started exploring spirituality but your friends consist mostly of intolerant atheists. When you tell them about your spiritual experiences, they might not only be skeptical but also become unsupportive of your spiritual undertakings.

Often people don’t express their problems with your perspectives, actions and words directly to you. In those cases, you will usually still pick up their vibe. This can feel very uncomfortable.

A lot of people who are in this situation get angry. They try to explain and “justify” their behavior to the unsupportive people in order to convince that they’re doing the right thing. However, usually the opinion of the unsupportive people will not change in a discussion like that. Depending on how angry or insecure you are, they might even become more sure about their own perspective: Defending yourself too heavy might be seen as a sign that you’re doubting your own decision – and that therefore, you are probably wrong.

So, what to do in this situation? Can you still convince your unsupportive friends or family?

Accepting Other People’s Views

Okay, let’s pretend for a second these people are not able to change their perspectives. It’s not the end of the world. Because even if they can’t, you can.
What do I mean by that? I mean that your first responsibility when you’re dealing with other people’s perspectives is to accept their perspectives. That does not mean that you have to agree with them. Just accept that they have a right to have any perspective they want (yes, even horrible ones!).
The second thing to do is trying to understand where they’re coming from. Even if those people will never change their perspectives, it’s going to be easier to deal with that when you can understand their perspectives. Most of the time it’s not that hard to understand other people. You just have to be willing to.

Let’s take the example with the job. Is it hard to understand that your parents want you to be secure? Is it hard to understand that they would feel more secure if you had a more stable life? Is it hard to understand that they have different definitions and ideas of “happiness”, “securitiy”, “job” or “self-employment” in their head? I don’t think so.

Show, Don’t Tell

Fortunately, there are a lot of people who have the willingness to change their perspectives. However, in most cases it will need more than just a conversation in order to change someone’s opinion.

If you really want to convince people to support you, you will need to SHOW them that what you’re choosing is working out for you. In real life.

That means: Show your parents that you can run a business, if that’s what you want to convince them of. Show your friends that a vegan lifestyle gives you great results by living it. Show your girlfriend that you manage to handle your finances by handling them correctly.

Of course, showing how you live your choices and the results of your choices will take a while. And yes, maybe you will not get the support you hoped for before you are actually able to show those positive results.

However, generally I made the experience that the longer I was walking down the path of a certain choice (be it my food choices, my career choices or my philosophical choices), the less resistance I got from my surroundings. The more I have to show for in certain areas of my life, the less skeptical my social surroundings become.

Don’t forget, though, that showing doesn’t equal showing off.

Doubting Yourself

Sometimes the reason why people won’t support you lies very deep in themselves and you can do nothing about it. However, that’s not always the case. I would even say that in a majority of cases the reason for people’s doubt lies at a completely different place: It lies in your own doubt.

Doubting yourself is the number one reason why people would choose to doubt your choices and actions. Their subconsciousness can pick up the skeptical vibe you have towards yourself or your particular choice. Then they might feel like there’s just something “off” about your choice and thus will be skeptical themselves.

In many cases, people would deny that they doubt their own choices. Not because they’re liars but because they aren’t aware of it. They don’t see their doubt because they’re trying really hard to convince themselves from the righteousness of their ways.

Here are some signs that you might be doubting a certain choice you’ve made:
- You get a strong negative emotional reaction if someone criticizes you or doubts you.
- You get easily offended.
- The feeling of being right about your choice is a very emotional one, maybe mixed with a big bag of pride.
- You feel like you have to defend or justify your choice in some situations.
- Your mind keeps coming up with new arguments why your choice is the right one. It wouldn’t need to that if you weren’t doubting your choice.
- You think that your choice is the “right choice” in general (for other people, too). You have a hard time accepting if someone else is living a different choice in that life area.

If you’re really secure about your choices, this security should feel easy and quiet. It should come from your whole being, not only from your mind or your emotions. In fact, it should be rooted way under your emotions and thoughts. Counter-arguments, skeptical and doubtful perspectives will not be able to de-stabilize your feeling of security – at least not in the long term.

If you’re just starting out making the desired changes, it’s very normal to feel a lot of doubt. And even if you’ve been on this way for a while there can still be a huge amount of self-doubt left if you’ve never confronted it. Your subconsciousness will always get a little upset when you start making changes – and so it will doubt you and your decisions. However, after a while it should get less and less and your inner security will grow more and more – given that you actually chose the “right” path.

As self-doubt is so common in the beginning of a new endeavor, it’s also very normal to be doubted by your social surroundings. It’s a human reaction and you don’t need to condemn it so hard. However, you still need to find a way to get over this doubtful phase, right?

Sorting out your environment

There will always be the more doubtful people and the more trusting people. Unfortunately, the more doubtful people might be able to seriously hinder your progress when you’re changing your life. Their doubts might increase yours – and that is, of course, to be avoided.

In those phases it’s very important to choose your friends carefully. There are two things you need to do:

- Avoid unsupportive people.
Yes, avoid them wherever you can! It might seem harsh and unfriendly (maybe a few of your best friends fall into this category) but it’s really important. If those people stay unsupportive for a longer period of time, it might even be better to drop them as your friends entirely. Who needs unsupportive friends, after all?
If you can’t avoid them, don’t tell them about the changes you’re going through. Distract their critical energy onto something else.

- Connect with supportive people.
The more supportive people you got around you, the better. Not only will they support you emotionally and physically but they will also motivate you and keep you accountable.

If you don’t have any people in your surroundings that support you in your decisions, it’s probably time for you to change your social environment. Although that will require some effort, it’s quite simple: If you want people to understand your decision to become a vegetarian, befriend other vegetarians. If you want people to support your choice to become an energy healer, befriend other energy healers. But also: Look out for people who are generally open-minded and accepting. If you got some of those as friends, you will always have someone to support you.

No related posts.

As I was not able to be with the man of my dreams, this became a dilemma: I’d found the purpose of life, the only thing that made sense, and I couldn’t live it. I couldn’t live the purpose of my life. And so I felt like my life had no purpose at all. I fell into a giant black hole.

It was a void beyond sadness. I became more hopeless and disempowered every day. When I wasn’t mourning, I felt totally empty. So I tried to keep mourning. Life became pain. I began wishing to die.

I kept all of this to myself. However, one day (after one and a half year of pain) I opened up to a teacher I trusted and talked about my situation. He asked me what I wanted. I said “I want to be happy”.

Back then in my perspective there was no way to be happy while being unhappily in love with someone. However, there was already a nagging feeling inside me that something about that perspective couldn’t be quite right. Something told me that there should be a way to be happy regardless of existing or non-existing relationships or any other circumstances. A few years later I found out that this intuitive feeling had been right all along.

Dependent Happiness

There’s a problem with the perspective that you need to have/be/do something specific in order to be happy right now: Whenever you’re not in the position to have/be/do this thing, you’ll be predestined to be unhappy.

Just like me and the man of my dreams: I thought I needed him to be happy. So as he wasn’t there, I couldn’t be happy.

As long as your happiness is dependent on something or someone, you and your whole life will be dependent. In the worst case this could mean that you’re never going to be happy. Do you want to take this risk?

I didn’t. That’s why I started opening myself up to new perspectives.

Happiness As a State of Being

A few years after my unrequited love incident, I had gotten over the depression but I still wasn’t happy yet. I felt “okay” most of the time, sometimes better, more often worse. I had discovered new meaning for my life but I was only living it a few hours per week (= creating music, acting, writing…).

Then I got in touch with Buddhism. I’d been increasingly interested in philosophy, so picking up a book about Buddhism wasn’t so out of the ordinary for me. Of course in the beginning the idea of reincarnation and other theories seemed silly to me as a Western person. But I didn’t only learn about other models of the universe, I also learned about ways to experience relief from pain and inner peace. After all, Buddhism was about becoming enlightened.

I decided to “try out” Buddhism and started my spiritual practice. And while I was practicing and meditating I did it consciously for the first time of my life: I deliberately changed my state of being to a happier one. I would start meditating feeling okay, and after a few (15 – 25) minutes I would be in a state of deep compassion, happiness and peace. The world became magic and beautiful and full of love. And those emotions were independent from any circumstances. I deliberately created them.

However, when I didn’t practice and meditate, my state of being was only okay. So while I had a few hours and days where I reached new peaks of happiness, the rest of my life was not very influenced by these peaks.

The Power Of Now

Two years later I was busy exploring personal development material and came across Eckhart Tolle. I read his book “The Power of Now” and it presented me to a very profound perspective towards happiness.

This is what I learned: Our true state is one of happiness, joy, peace, beauty and abundance. This state can be accessed any time we want to! It’s our natural state – so the only thing we need to do is to let go of the resistance that keeps us away from it.

Basically, the message was: You can be happy and at peace anytime you want to be. You can be happy right now! You just need to re-connect to your natural state.

While you connect to your natural state in (Buddhist) meditation, too, you do it only for a certain time frame each day. The Power of Now however, encouraged to access this state all the time, outside of traditional meditation.

When I was reading The Power of Now, I didn’t only learn theoretical concepts. If this book had just explained another philosophical theory to me, it wouldn’t have changed very much.
However, I started feeling a shift in my own thinking and being while I was reading it. I started glimpsing these Now moments that the author described. I began reconnecting to my natural state as I was reading the book.

This proved to me that you don’t need to sit down in a quiet room to deliberately change your state of being. You could do it anytime anywhere with minimal effort.

I understood that happiness was indeed inside of me, unconditionally available – and if I didn’t feel it, I could create it.

Practice

Of course, I didn’t switch from unhappy to “always happy” in a few minutes after I had made this realization. I didn’t became suddenly enlightened. I found out that happiness and peacefulness need to be practiced like anything else. And so, over the weeks, months and years it has become easier and easier for me to be happy and peaceful.

Nevertheless, it still takes awareness and self control to reconnect to my natural state of being. For example, the last twelve months, I let these efforts slide and therefore I felt generally less blissful than the years before.
This doesn’t mean that I was discontent. The last twelve months were more satisfying for me than many of the years before (for example in terms of money, friendship, love and success). However, I experienced fewer out-of-the-blue happiness highs than before.

I think the number one reason for this is that I didn’t focus a lot on my happiness and the power of now. In times where I focused on it, my happiness always skyrocketed.

So, being happy works just like a habit. For example like getting up early or eating healthy. If you don’t put in at least some effort every day, the habit will dissolve automatically.

The Power of Now – Techniques

As I already said, with the Power of Now I learned to deliberately return to my natural state of being – which is a happy one.

This is not a complicated process. What makes it complicated, though, is that’s it’s very hard for the mind to grasp.

There’s no official technique that you need to learn in order to connect to your inner state of happiness and peace – ideally it should be totally natural for you. However, there are a few approaches that you can use when you’re not used to being happy and peaceful yet.

Letting Go of Your Thoughts

One of the most popular techniques is to let go of one’s thoughts. This is a traditional meditation technique.
- Be aware of your thoughts and feelings but do not hold on to them.
- Concentrate on the empty spaces between your thoughts.
- Give your thoughts and feelings the permission to go.

Concentrating on the Present Moment

Another method that can help is to concentrate on the present moment.
- Become aware of the fact that the future and past are nothing but imaginary constructs in your present moment. You are never living in the past or future – it’s always the present.
- Realize that this moment is all you have. There’s nothing more real, nothing more precious and nothing more important.
- Notice that the stream of happiness and peace inside of you is already present. You just have to allow it.

Focus on the Physical

For some people present moment awareness can be most easily attained by focusing on their body and their physical surroundings:
- Focus on your breath. How you breathe in and out. Especially become aware of the small gap between breathing out and breathing in.
- Get aware of all of your senses: What do you see, hear, smell, feel or taste right now? Feel the texture of your clothes on your skin, look at the details of everything you see, get aware of all the background noises you usually ignore.
- Try not to get caught up in thoughts about the physical. Just observe and let go.

Notice that in the beginning it might be very difficult to consciously access your natural state of being. But don’t give up yet. It’s just a matter of habit and the investment is well worth it.

If you’re not sure whether you managed to get closer to the present moment or not, these are signs that you did:
- you feel relieved.
- you feel more at peace.
- you feel happier and more joyful.
You might even feel
- more loving.
- like you’re one with the world.
- mind-blowing bliss.

Happiness – A New Standard

When you found out how good and easy it is to be happy and at peace, you probably will not want to miss it again. After experiencing happiness and peace through the techniques of the Power of Now, the maintenance of my happiness became my daily main task.

There were times where I would ask myself every few minutes whether I was happy so I could get back to my natural state of being if I wasn’t there already. I was extremely happy at these times because I would constantly create new happiness moments for myself.

Happiness is a choice and a habit. In fact it’s one of the most important choices because it will shape the way you perceive reality. If you know that you can always be happy and peaceful, this will give you a lot more patience and contentment. Also, you will feel much more empowered: You will not be dependent on your life circumstances anymore. And nobody will be able to take this away from you. Your happiness and your inner peace are always there. Are you aware of them?

Related posts:

1. How To Release Negative Feelings With The Sedona Method In the summer of 2010 I went through a emotional...
2. 30 Day Trial: Feeling Good, Feeling Better – Review Last January I started a 30 trial where the goal...
3. 30 Day Trial: Feeling Good, Feeling Better „Nothing is more important than that you feel good.“ Abraham-Hicks...

However, working doesn’t automatically make you productive. Spending more time on your “work” does not mean that you will get more of your desired result.

Maybe you have even found yourself in a position where you worked and worked but felt stuck because you never got closer to your desired results?

There can be many reasons for this. One is missing compatibility.

Compatibility

In order to make sure that you’re creating results, your work has to be compatible to your desired result. It’s the same in your all day life: reading won’t make you lose weight, playing Skyrim won’t improve your social life, checking your emails doesn’t help you write an article faster.

While this seems to be obvious, with more complex goals this is something that’s often overlooked.

For example, if I want to earn money with my music and decide I want to work 50 hours a week on that, I won’t get very far if I invest all this time only into composing music. Composing music does not make me money. Selling my music does. So if I decide I want to work 50 hours on earning money with my music, I need to invest a serious amount of time into the selling part.
You might think that’s common sense. But you know what, I used to spend a lot of time working on demo songs while never making an offer to the public. Guess how that worked out for me?

Q: Is your work compatible to your desired results?

Balance

Another important factor is balance. Let’s take the example from before: Will I get better results (= earn more money) when I use 1 hour for marketing (=selling) and 49 hours for composing? Maaaaaaaaaaaaybeeeeee. But probably not. In order to get your desired results, you need a balance that supports these results. Investing 10 – 20 hours into marketing would probably be a lot better, wouldn’t it?

This is where it gets interesting: With a good, functioning balance, you might already be able to reduce the time you’re working: I would reach my goal (earning money with my music) probably faster if I worked 40 hours a week with 20 hours composing and 20 hours marketing than I would if I worked 50 hours a week, with 45 hours composing and 5 hours marketing (assuming that I’m “new” in business and I don’t have a lot of customers already).

Q: Do you take time for every important area of your work? Or are some of your work areas suffering?

Strategy

There’s a possibility that you throw away a lot of your time by investing it into an unproductive strategy. Imagine you want to sell something to people who are 70 years or older and you spend 20 hours a week adding people on twitter in order to promote your business. Your networking efforts on twitter would mostly be wasted because most of the people there are not 70 or older.

With other strategies it might not be so obvious why they don’t work. However, if you’ve been following a strategy for a longer period of time and are realising that it doesn’t bring you the desired results, it’s time to let it go.
This is often a hard step that will require some courage. It’s just easier to do what you’ve always done than looking for new strategies and investing some serious time into them.

Q: What’s your strategy? Has it been working for you so far? Which parts of your strategy show room for improvement?

Priorities

Another danger to your productivity is to set wrong priorities. There are always some parts of your work that are more important than others. If you chose to ignore those priorities, you will inevitably lose some time and effort.

An example would be that you have a misleading website that needs to be re-done but you’re spending your time bringing more and more traffic to your website. The traffic gets lost because your website is so misleading and you don’t get any results. Your priority in this case should be to improve your website and not to do major internet marketing campaigns.

Managing your priorities effectively also means spending less time with generally unimportant work and busywork.
The pareto principle tells us that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. So if you don’t spend most of your time on those powerful 20%, you won’t make a lot of progress.

Q: How important are your individual work tasks? Which tasks bring the best results? What do you need to do more of, what do you need to do less of in order to be more productive?

Stress

When you’re trying to be productive, there’s always the danger that you’re starting to rush. While this might not be a problem with more trivial tasks like replying to emails, it might seriously hurt you with more complex and more important things.
If you publish a flawed product or offer a flawed service because you were trying to save time, it’s needless to say that this will come back to bite you later.

Being productive is not about rushing, hurrying or being stressed. It really is about smart time and focus management. In fact, good time management should take the stress away from you because it will give you the security that you’re heading into the right direction.

Q: Is stress hurting the quality of your work? Which are the tasks where you need to take things more slowly?

Time

So, if you’re thinking about your productivity, don’t only think about how much time you’re spending on your work. Think about how you spend it. Better yet: Find out exactly how you spend it.

I actually keep a time log in order to do that. You only need a piece of paper and a pen. You look at the clock when you start an activity (and memorize the time), then you look again when you stop. Then you write down how much time you spent on the activity. For example yesterday I first spent 40 minutes on writing content for FollowTheRedQueen.com, then another 20, then 60 and later 90 minutes. All in all, I spent 150 minutes on writing content.

Managing your time is a lot easier when you’re conscious about your time usage. Otherwise it’s just too easy to get distracted and drift off to unproductive tasks. So logging your time might be a good start to head into a more productive direction.

How will you spend your time today?

This article was originally posted in the Follow The Red Queen Newsletter. If you want to receive more personal development articles, special offers and my ebook “Why You Haven’t Changed Your Life Yet”, all I need is your email adress:

Related posts:

1. How To Use Facebook And Stay Productive Have you heard? Steve Pavlina, the famous personal development blogger,...
2. Why You Haven’t Changed Your Life Yet It’s there, my first (mini) ebook! It’s called “Why...
3. Choosing More Efficient Actions There are a lot of techniques to become more productive...

Desiring security seems reasonable. And if you want to be secure, why shouldn’t you? There’s just a little problem with that.

There is no security.

I would love to tell you there is. And that your life plan is somehow secure. But it isn’t.
- Your job is probably not very secure, as long as you can get fired.
- But even if your job is “secure”, your money isn’t. An economical crisis can devalue your money in the matter of hours (your money is already losing value right now).
- Your health is not secure. You could get diagnosed with a serious disease today. This happens every day.
- Your relationships are not secure. People can die, people can leave you, people can turn away from you. Anytime.
- In the end, let’s face it: Your life is not secure. You can die today. And if you don’t do it today, you will just die later. Nothing will safe you from that.

You will probably argue against that by saying that you’re aware that there is no complete security but that you still want to decrease to probability that one day you will stand there without food and shelter – maybe with a family to feed.

If that is really the case, I completely understand your need. However if that kind of security net is that important to you, do you also do the following things?
- always have a food and water supply at home that would last for at least two weeks (not counting food in your fridge or freezer)?
- take self-defence classes so you know what to do in case in your physical security is endangered by other people?
- regularly refresh your first aid knowledge so you can help your loved ones in case of a medical emergency?
- have knowledge about where to get water if the water supply is contaminated or just not working any more?
- know how to keep yourself warm if the power supply breaks down and your heating system doesn’t work anymore?
- have invested most of your money in many different assets in order to save your capital from being taken away by inflation?
- build multiple streams of income in case one of them breaks down?
- invest in goods that you can use as currency in case the money system crashes?

If yes: Kudos to you for creating a security network for your life! As long as you don’t get paranoid, you’re doing a great job.

If not: So many things could happen – and the only thing you care about is your job security? Then you might not be interested in security after all. If security was really THAT important to you, why would you live so reckless? Wouldn’t it be rather hypocritical to claim that you have a high need of security while not actually preparing for harder times?

Maybe security is not that important to you after all? Maybe your definition of “security” is just another way of saying “I’m scared”. Following the path of your dreams is always scary and takes a lot of courage. Usually not because it’s so risky but because we’re afraid of being judged, of being rejected, of becoming a failure or even of becoming a success (the list of fears is endless…).

Until you have to deal with that, though, you have to admit to yourself first, that you’ve been making excuses all along.

So, in which life areas is your false need of security holding your back?

Related posts:

1. How to Deal With an Unsupportive Environment When you start living your own life, making your own...