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1. A Note From Shawn

If you just can’t get enough simplifying but would like a little change from reading, and you live in the greater Nevada County area, come on over to the first annual Green Aware Fair in Loma Rica, CA next Saturday the 23rd. I’ll be speaking at 1:10 about how increasing the richness and satisfaction of your own life contributes to improving the world. (Remember the “proof” from May: Simplifying Your Life Increases World Peace?) It should be a fun and educational event (with free admission, no less.) Be sure to introduce yourself if you come and we haven’t met before!

Last issue co-editor Lance kindly wrote the Note for the newsletter. The price he extracted was high: a mention in this issue about his favorite musicians, a cappella group The Bobs, who were recently featured performers on NPR. (You may remember them from issue #52‘s Keep Smiling.) If that’s his “high price”, then I might have to get him to write the Note more often.

Turning your attention to the intrepid adventures of this issue,  you’ll be bagging self-limitations, putting a “table of contents” to work for you, visiting with Laverne and Shirley, meeting a smiling lobster, and more!

Enjoy,

Shawn Tuttle
Head Simplifier, Project Simplify
Co-editor, The Simplifier

 

 

 

 

2. Our Featured Quote

“I have never been contained except I made the prison.”

-Mary Evans

 

 

 

3. Article: Stop Sandbagging Yourself 

By Shawn Tuttle

Do you believe in your vision of yourself as a natural professional; in other words, do you love your work and feel satisfaction deeply? Or does this vision feel a little out of reach? It might seem so elusive that the thought of manifesting it in your life doesn’t even seem like a possibility. Maybe you are hindering yourself with self-sabotage.

Science has a name for something that sucks on your energy, while giving nothing positive in return. Something that will continue to feed on you until you cut it off: a parasite. Think of a tick. A disgusting, blood-sucking little tick. You might not feel it initially, but as it grows from feeding on you, it begins to wear down your immune system and tap your strength, perhaps even leaving you diseased.

Each of the little things that get in your way are like sandbags holding down a hot air balloon. You are in the basket looking to the sky with a desire to fly, and yet there you are hovering over the ground because of all the sandbags tied to your basket. One by one you cut them off… until… oh! what’s that now? You’re rising! Soon you are soaring through the air, dream come true!

There are different strains of self-sabotage that gain strength when you give them energy. One of these mutations involves self-limiting beliefs and negative talk. These seemingly-offhand little outbursts are really quite harmful. Maybe you feel increased frustration or anger, or your shoulders and back slump. Maybe it sparks a flash of self-loathing. They get to you whether you feel them or not. 

Whether you say it out loud or think it to yourself, negative talk has the same result as sandbags holding down a hot air balloon. 

The situation:
You use visualization to imagine your goal—you are unstoppable! Then you open your eyes, and deflate with a sigh: “If only I wasn’t such a mess”.

Without even thinking about it, we commit insidious acts of self-sabotage by saying or thinking things like:
“I’m such an idiot.”
“I’ll never get organized.”
“I can’t handle this.”

We know that telling our kids they are dumb or useless is a horrible thing to do. So why is it OK to say these things to ourselves? Not only do they bring you down, they lower your belief in your abilities to handle situations. Hopelessness spreads when you feel inadequate to deal with situations, which in turn raises your stress level. Just as the ocean slowly wears away the seaside cliff wave after wave, self-limiting beliefs erode your belief in yourself. 

Oddly enough, when working with people on their self-limiting beliefs, I sometimes hear a tone that resembles pride. Maybe they have a misplaced American glorification of “more is better”? Or maybe they’ve pumped so much energy into their self-labeling that they’ve tied up their identity in it. Whatever it is, there can be a real resistance to stopping the negative talk.

Here’s the thing: self-limiting beliefs suck your energy just like a tick does. That’s the bad news. The good news is that it might take less effort than you think to cut it off. You can’t leave a tick once you know it’s there. You may have to push through a little discomfort when you take it out, but you can’t let that stop you. 

So, yes. The cost is high enough to work on eradicating the parasites. Depending on how deeply rooted they are, the effort may be as easy as quitting them cold turkey, or as involved as going to therapy. Here are some simple steps to try before you resort to looking in the yellow pages under “T”. 

Create replacement phrases
Using replacement phrases is a great way to change the self-limiting beliefs into something positive, or at least neutral. The trick is to create phrases that your brain is willing to accept. 

For example, let’s consider replacement phrase for the following situation: every time you walk into your office you think, “I’m such a mess! I can’t get organized.” 

Here are some options:

1. State the opposite: “I’m organized!”
   Since this currently is so far from the truth, your mind just might not take it seriously. It’s important to get your mind playing on your team! This one can work if you know that your disorganization is a temporary state. If you scoff at hearing yourself say, “I’m organized,” one of the following options will probably work better for you.
2. Acknowledge the process: “I’m getting organized.”
   This gives you an allowance for the ebb and flow of the state of organization in your space.
3. Focus on your capabilities: “I am capable of getting organized.”
   This is a good option because it focuses on your potential rather than what your ego is trying to establish as an unchangeable truth.
4. Be action-oriented: “I can put five things away today.”
   Taking action pulls the spotlight away from debilitating thoughts and shifts it to something you can do today. Let the goals be small to give your self plenty of room for success.
5. Be silly: “Piece of cake! Pigpen never had it so good!”
   Reminding yourself that a situation is rarely as bad as you make it out to be can help put it into perspective. Lighten up – life is meant to be lived, not pummeled! 

See how these options take the focus away from discouraging dead-end thoughts and instead give you an escape route to a better situation? 

Putting it into practice

1. Identify self-limiting thoughts and words as they occur.
2. Stop the thought in its tracks. 
3. Breath deeply to expand your lungs and relax your shoulders.
4. Repeat your replacement phrase.

You’ll want to say your replacement phrase with confidence and conviction—though depending on the venue, you may get some weird looks if you say it out loud. =)

Depending on how long these negative loops have been playing in your life, a good dose of perseverance may be required. Happily, it gets easier to stop negative thoughts on demand. If you don’t achieve success after a while with the above simple process, you may want to call in some reinforcements. 

– If you are willing to do a self-guided exploration to unravel your self-limiting thoughts, Byron Katie shares a process of inquiry called The Work. A thorough explanation and worksheets for download can be found on her website here.

– If your overactive mind resists any budging of your self-limiting beliefs, working with a therapist may be the nudge needed to get the ball rolling. 

The first step toward halting the detrimental effects of negative thought patterns is acknowledging they are a part of your speech or internal dialogue. From there, you have options for turning those around. See what works best for you.

Where will you go in your hot air balloon once it’s off the ground? Whether you know exactly or not, reforming self-sabotaging thoughts into supportive ones will provide you with fuel to soar. You can do what you set your mind to—let your words and thoughts reflect your ability to make progress towards your heart’s desire.  

—

Shawn Tuttle is founder of Project Simplify.

4. Your Simplification Tip

by Shawn Tuttle

Approach list-making from a “table of contents” perspective

One of the reasons we tend to leave a project until the last minute is because we look at it as a whole and don’t know where to start. You know that it helps to break a project down into smaller pieces, but sometimes you don’t even know where to start for that!

Here is a simple list-making method that not only serves as a parking lot for the smaller steps you’ve identified, but makes tracking your progress easy: a “table of contents”-style checklist.

For example, I’m preparing an informational binder to hand over to the incoming Admin Committee of our Downtown Association. When my informational binder is complete, it will have sections for each of the tasks that they will be responsible for.

Since “prepare informational binder” is a biggie, I’ll break it down by creating a table of contents. While a simple table of contents will be useful for the final binder, I’ll do a detailed one in checklist style for myself. Sort of like a snapshot of the project on one page.

In my example, one of the sections to be included is, “prepare potential board member packet”. Below is my checklist for that section. Notice the completion points are measurable (so it’s obvious when to check one off).

__ make a list of all the items included in packet
__ document the file names of the originals and whether they are digital or hardcopy
__ write out when needed by
__ include sample packet

I’ll probably be able to knock these off in 10-15 minute increments. As the due date approaches, it will be easy to track what still needs to be done.

If you are delegating some of the list items and want to track who an item was assigned to, it’s easy. Just add (for example) “to Lisa 8/11, due 8/17” after one of the list items.

A positive side effect of this list formation is that it might help you with the organization of the project itself. As you create your table of contents, you’ll be pushed to identify the various parts (that may have been a little amorphous previously).

I’ll store the list at the very front of the binder for easy reference. Then I’ll get to watch the binder slowly build as one little item after another gets checked off. It doesn’t get much easier than that!

 

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5. In the News

Compiled by Lance Brown

Beat Stress Before it Beats You (Journal Record – Oklahoma City)
URL: http://tinyurl.com/66wu2q  
How to identify the signs of stress, and how to turn the tables.

A critical eye can help you cut through the clutter  (The Seattle Times)
URL: http://tinyurl.com/6j2rfy
Revisiting the “love it/use it/need it” test, and other tools of the clutter-taming trade.

Organizing saves money in a tight economy (Reading Eagle – Reading, PA)
URL: http://tinyurl.com/649379
In a world where dollar stores are changing their price to $1.39, it makes sense to save cents wherever you can. And if wrestling the homeless for aluminum cans isn’t your thing, maybe simplifying is. (Or maybe try both…you know what they say about having a diverse portfolio.)

If you know of something in the news that should be featured here, let us know!

 

 

 

6. Featured at ProjectSimplify.com

by Lance Brown

Diggin’ Project Simplify

Can you Digg it? You can now.

If you happen to dig what you’re reading at Project Simplify, you can now “Digg” it at the blazing-hot “social bookmarking” site Digg. The more you Digg our stuff, the more that other folks at Digg will have a chance to dig it (and then Digg it). Which means more folks being exposed to the load-lightening elixir known as “simplification”. You dig?

Plus, let’s face it – you want to be cool. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s totally natural. And maybe you’ve been seeing those little yellow “Digg” icons out on the Internets, and feeling left out or confused. Again, totally natural. After all, you probably are left out and confused. ;-)

But at Project Simplify we’re about “making our dreams come true, for me and you.” (Though I’d really rather not discuss which one of us is Laverne and which is Shirley.)

In this case, you (Shirley), want to be cool, and we (Laverne) just want to be Dugg. And Lenny is you signing up for Digg, while Squiggy is you clicking on the yellow “Digg” icons.

All this will be discussed at length in my upcoming series of fax-based podcast webinars entitled “Seeing the World Through 70′s Sitcoms”. But in the meantime, it boils down real simple:

1. Sign up for Digg if you haven’t already. (It’s free of course.)
2. Digg our blog posts and other pages by clicking on the “Digg” icons when you see them on the site.

Check out a recent example near the bottom of Shawn’s blog post “Having fun finding your passion“.

 

 

 

 

 

 

7. Keep Smiling

Introduced by Lance Brown

Smiling (and otherwise expressive) animals

I’ve recently been debating animal rights with friends of mine, and it usually doesn’t take too long in such a discussion before we’re talking about how “human” animals are (or aren’t). Do they think? Do they feel? Do they have iPhones?

Germane to this newsletter section is the question “Do animals smile?” It’s not something I’m going to debate here – though if one considers a smile to be more than just upturned mouth corners (for isn’t a real smile in the eyes just as much as the mouth?), then anyone who has had a dog or cat for any amount of time knows that they definitely have a “happy face” that is distinct from other types of expression they make.

And if you doubt the “happy face” theory, check out this page of “animal smiles” and maybe you’ll find cause to revisit your stance on the issue. >(:©)~   (<–that’s a smiling dog. or lobster.)

Thanks to Tan Monkey for compiling the photos. The animal smiles page is only the tip of their animal fun iceberg.

 

 

 

 

 

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Thanks for reading!

Publication Information
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The Simplifier is published by:
Project Simplify
P.O. Box 597
Nevada City, CA 95959
phone: 530.205.5775
web: www.projectsimplify.com
e-mail: newsletter@projectsimplify.com