Why Try To Get Out Of Your Box, When You Can Use What's In It?
Every problem is like a closed hand, gripped tight, made into a fist and devilishly hard to open.
You would think the solution to the problem is in the hand, you just have to figure out how to open it.
When really, the solution is in you. And once you discover it, the hand opens and what remains is a gift. There is always a gift.
Stay Positive & The More Problems Solved, The More Gifts
Garth E. Beyer
Success is really what you call “Mastered Creativity”. What you will find below are some constructed writing challenges and exercises to push your creativity. They are formed in a way to apply practice to parts of writing (and thinking) you have rarely practiced before. The goal is to get your creative mind to push limits, stretch its imagination and to give it a game to play.
To have an open and expanded mind that is capable of using objects, sounds, movements, etc., and turn them into something solid and applicable is exactly what the most successful creators do. So why not start with the basics – Creative Writing. You might just realize that there are some life lessons to be learned from the writing exercises.
1. Newspaper Headline: I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of reading all the negativity in the newspaper. Old Zig Ziglar always said that the reason foreigners can come to America and become millionaires within a year is that they can’t read all the negativity in the newspaper. For this challenge, write your own headline article for the newspaper and share what you think is important enough for all to know. Lesson: Make sure the positive is what remains on the front page. Focus on the good, the happy, the love and remember to share it with everyone. Put all of the negativity in the obituary section.
2. Oddvertisement: You have seen great advertisements that may have even gotten you to buy something, but you have also seen terrible ads that feel like a continuous prod in the ribs. Advertisements are only fun when you see an advertisement for something odd. That’s why I call it an Oddvertisement. Open up your pantry or closet and dig for something in the far back that never gets used. Now it’s time to sell it. Write an oddvertisement that is creative and encouraging enough for someone to consider buying it. Lesson: Anyone can make a sale, but only the creative make a living off of it. There is always a different way to look at things, you just have to have the right mindset.
3. MadLib Promotion: While MadLibs are extremely fun. The joy can be even more fruitful when you are the one who created the MadLib for someone else to complete. Lesson: Challenge others by giving them the authority to choose what word goes in a certain spot.
4. Word Of The Day Stories: Dictionary.com has a Word of The Day every day. For a beginner writer, try freewriting and using the words from the last seven days. For a more expert writer, create a story using all of last months words. To take it a step further, you can even start your story by using the time and setting of the actual month that you are using the new words from. Lesson: Time really does go by quickly, yet it’s still possible to learn something new everyday and apply it to your life.
5. Improv Writing: Improv, Improv Character Building, Improv-ing Writing Skills Lesson: People-observation skills and the ability to make a correct judgement can be critical in some situations. In others, it’s necessary to keep an open mind about a person since truly, you don’t know where they come from, what they are thinking or where they want to go in life.
6. Who’s Quote Is It Anyway?: Have a list of famous quotes you absolutely love? Create a story that implements them word by word, as the theme, or by using your own derivative of the meaning. Give the quote an all new definition and background. Who knows, if you switch it up enough, you just might be quoted for it. Lesson: Emulating The Successful Through Quotes.
7. Poetry Walk Or Meditation. While walking and becoming aware of all that is around you, carry a journal and write down notes and ideas to create a poem from. Lesson: Living in the moment and remaining aware.
8. Connect-The-Sentences: Either pull random sentences from different books or use sentences you have recently heard someone say. Make three columns and in the first and third, write down the sentences that you gathered. The middle column is for you to write your own sentence that can connect the first and third sentences. The more challenging you want it, the more columns you can add, making every other column blank. Lesson: To achieve anything in life from where you are, you have to create a bridge. There is never skipping steps. You can’t just skip the middle column of this writing game or skip the work you need to do to get to where you want to be in life. It’s also great to realize that you can make the bridge as interesting and be as creative as possible.
9. Word Jump. While freewriting, start every sentence with the word that you blindly land your finger on in a book or newspaper. Lesson: You never know what’s going to pop up in your life to knock you off track. Are you creative enough to adapt and overcome?
10. Guest Post: Instead of getting a guest to write a blog post for you, you write it. Open up the post like you normally would on a subject of your choice (preferably controversial, but it doesn’t need to be). Then introduce your guest that will be writing a post on the subject (Create an alias for yourself). Now begin writing from a different perspective, as the guest blogger. Lesson: Getting different perspectives.
11. Word Play: Write a poem with word play… wait, weight, waste, waist, hole, whole. Lesson: Simply just fun!
12. I Write Dead People: Open up a newspaper to the Obituary section and write a story about how a person died. Lesson: Makes you happy to be alive doesn’t it? Life’s too short to not be creative.
13. Telephone Book Tale: Open to a random page of your yellow book, placing your finger on a part of the page and using what is written in that ad, put it in your story. Did your finger lie on a Muffler shop? Has there been a recent murder there? Was all that was left at the scene a piece of paper and the phone number which has been disconnected? Big yellow phone books don’t do any good unless you can write a story from them. Lesson: Nothing is ever as it seems.
14. Where Do You WANT To See Yourself In 5 Years?: Simple as that. Write every detail, every dream come true, every aspect of the life you want. Get crazy with it! So many people will ask you this throughout your life. Create an answer that will blow them away.
Stay Positive & Then Follow Through To Make That 5th Year Come True
Garth E. Beyer
Especially easy ones.
But fulfilling the wrong ones (also known as easy ones) can lead you astray, taking you off the course of fluidity and least resistance. For example, if you get woken up at 4:30am by someone being loud and insincere, it’s so easy to yell at the person who woke you. Why? The person expects you to. For some reason it’s been engrained in your mind that if you get woken up early, you have the right to be mad.
But are you really upset? Is it the end of the world? Did anyone die? Was it a life altering event? Could it have been worse? Maybe the person was in a rush to get to work on time? Maybe something woke them up early so they were aggravated?
Instead of listing more examples, discover your own. For one day, write down all the problems you have with people throughout the day. After you write them or at the end of the day, reflect on the experience and cross it off IF after you think about it, it really didn’t make you upset, but it was only how society expected you to feel. You will find that most of the problems will get crossed off.
If people expect us to act a certain way (typically negative types of feelings: sad, angry, upset, stressed, frustrated, injured), were going to feel that way and fulfill their expectations. Sure because it’s easy but also because you unintentionally don’t want to let other people experience the dissatisfaction of being wrong in expecting you to act a certain way.
Why?
It seems silly but the reason for it is that you feel that since they assumed you’re going to react a certain way- that they are prepared for it, that they deserve it, that everything is set in motion for you to react by fulfilling the expectation. (Status-quo is hard to break!)
The last attribute to fulfilling expectations is instinct. With instinct every person will act selfishly. When you do the experiment above and take that moment to write down the problem and reflect, you will see that you may be putting more trouble and stress on the other person than what troubled you to begin with.
It is damn hard to live in Zen and to prevent yourself from fulfilling the expectations of negative reactions. It’s difficult to remain relaxed, stay centered, and to be focused on the “why” of your reaction.
Stay Positive & It Doesn’t Do Good To Either Party When You Fulfill An Expectation Of A Negative Reaction
Garth E. Beyer
Confidence in public speaking goes much deeper than simply being prepared and excited to give a speech. Those who strike the audience with an unexpected amount of determination are those that create a balance of the two types of public speaking confidence.
Type 1: Confidence In What You Are Saying
To have confidence in what you are saying you have to do your research. You need to know the topic you’re speaking on inside and out. Depending on the topic of choice, you may even have to know ideas and concepts that do not support the outlook you are taking on a topic. For more a more simple term, you can label this Analytical Confidence. To acquire this confidence, which is vigorously sought after in all professional positions, you have to be able to analyze every aspect of your topic. For example, you know how most people only know how to sing the alphabet? Well, to have analytical confidence, you have to know how to say it backwards, say it in German, French and Gibberish, create it in Morse Code, have a hieroglyphic example and be able to sing the alphabet to rhythm of the Canadian national anthem. Those who have this type of confidence, are considered Mavens on the subject and are the most respected people and speakers in the world.
Type 2: Confidence In How You Say It
Knowledge is power when you are public speaking, but remaining shy and quiet renders your intellectual stature meaningless. You may know what you have to say, but are you saying it right? The one technique for putting the most confidence in how you speak is to fuel it with passion. When you deliver a speech on a topic you are passionate about, you somehow create just the right balance between remaining humble and being assertive. For example, a person can know everything they need to get the job they want, but they won’t get it unless they show their knowledge, passion and the combination of the two which is confidence.
Confidence in what you say is gained from preparation and research. Confidence in how you say it is accredited to the level of motivation and passion you have with the idea. Combine the two and you have the everything it takes to be a world class public speaker.
Stay Positive & Take Control Of Your Confidence
Garth E. Beyer
Thinking Body, Dancing Mind
TaoSports for Extraordinary Performance in Athletics, Business, and Life is the one sport that if you were to become a professional in, you should pick. Although, I would add or change the word extraordinary because the lessons taught and experiences shared in this book are the ordinary techniques that are used by the extraordinary. The way I am going to regurgitate this book to you is by first sharing everything that I actually wrote down while I was reading it. These items are the most important parts of the book that sparked the brightest ideas and concepts in my brain. Then I am going to list the chapters in the book to let you know of all the different lessons that you can learn and improve on. The reason for this process is that the book can be picked up and started from anywhere you choose: the beginning, the end, or a random page. My advice for you is not to go and purchase the book, but to go and flip it open to a chapter that you think you want to improve in your life, read it and see if you want to read the other chapters. Lastly, I will share some of my favorite affirmations that were shared in the book that hopefully you can use.
Garth’s Dancing Mind
Why fight your way to the top, when you can rise to it? There is no such thing as a victory in an uphill battle; there is only a plateau and it’s never at the top.
Having a winning attitude is a defiance to the expectation of feeling the thrill of victory and agony of defeat. Both of which are detrimental to any possibility of being successful in the future. To have a winning attitude is to break down the process to moments. Thinking and feeling that you have won each moment. Success is relative to the quality of the process. There is more than one finish line in a 5k race, there are actually 6,200 finish lines. Every step is a victory and should be viewed as one.
What Not To Be –
“You don’t dance to get to the other side of the floor” – Alan Watts
There are three visualization processes that I have taken from the book (which probably has 30+ in it). The first is a visualization of your sanctuary that you can retreat to based off a trigger (mines putting my index finger and thumb together to create a circle). You get to create your own place of ritual and relaxation. My place was based off a picture of a monk sweeping in front of his hut that was cuddling the base of a mountain, the monk is my guide, as you will read more about when you open the book. The second visualization process was to imagine a steady beam of sunlight coming down on top of you, entering your head and circulating it’s power throughout your body, delivering energy, healing powers and enlightenment.
The third visualization example was actually the first in the book which goes like this:
“For example, close your eyes right now and imagine a juicy, sour lemon. In your mind, cut a big wedge from the lemon and place it in your mouth. Bite down, and let the sour juices permeate your entire mouth. Did you find yourself puckering or salivating?”
It simply goes to show how powerful visualization can be. With consistent practice, you can have the same trigger affect to visualizing winning a race, visualizing closing a deal or whatever will help you succeed.
While visualizations are confirmations for your mind, affirmations are confirmations to your heart. “Affirmations are not self deception, they’re self direction.” At the bottom of this post, I will list my absolute favorite affirmations from the book. It is loaded with them! You can also create a list of perfect affirmations for yourself by turning your favorite quotes into affirmations.
5 Stages of Injury: – Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. (When you read this section under the chapter titled Injuries, you will agree at first, but then you will disagree because when you finally realize the process you take, you are able to shorten and change it.)
Challenge: Find the book at the bookstore and read the beginning of the chapter on page 76. (Half a page) By far the most “Woa” moment in the entire book.
One of the most important excerpts I took from the book is that you, me, we – are never as great as our greatest victory or as bad as our worst defeat. We are above it all, we are apart from it because we have a winning attitude.
Reevaluate life while in downtime. Just because your body may be down, does not mean you can allow your mind to go down with it. You need to focus on what made you lose balance, what you are going to do to achieve balance again and what you will do to prevent from ever entering downtime again. Oh, and remember, laughter is by far the best medicine to get out of downtime, I suggest George Carlin.
Committed to truth no consistency – Buddha
“According to Mark, when you become totally engrossed in your sport, you over-analyze everything.” Contributing to the saying that analysis is paralysis. Ironically, I had just written a blog post about this called The One Quality You Need To Be A Successful Expert
I will top of my Dancing Mind with something I loved most about TBDM. At the beginning of each section, and sometimes within, a chapter of the Tao Te Ching is shared. The characters associated with it were so aesthetic that it made me want to study them. The reason being that the greatness of them is that they are meant to make you visualize and feel their meaning when you meditate on them. The Tao Te Ching inserts reminded me of a post I wrote a long time ago on a particular chapter:An Accord With Greatness
Tao Te Ching no.1
Thus, without expectation,
One will always perceive the subtlety.
And, with expectation,
One will always perceive the boundary.
TMDB Chapters – If you think a topic is appealing, pick up the book and just read the chapter
Visualizations, Affirmations, Beliefs, Positive Thinking, Relaxation, Vision, Focusing, Centering, Intuition, Reflection, Fear, Fear of Failure, Fear of Success, Slumps, Fatigue, Injuries, Expectations, Self-Criticism, Perfectionism, Confidence, Assertiveness, Courageousness, Detachment, Egolessness, Selflessness, Conscientiousness, Competition, Winning, Psychological Tactics, Motivation, Goal Setting, Self-Improvement, Synergy, Leadership, Integrity, Adaptation, Persistence, Balance, Simplicity.
Affirmations
Fixed minds detract from potential. Flexible minds are the essential.
My performance is a perfect mirror of my image of self.
To be in sync, use instinct.
The voice of fear is healthy to hear.
There is plenty of success for all of us.
What I resist will persist.
I don’t dominate – I demonstrate.
I risk temporary loss for the chance for permanent improvement.
When I’m detached, my play can’t be matched.
Helping others find their way gives me the chance for better play.
There is no home court advantage unless I give it to them.
If I persist each day, I’ll eventually get my way.
Stay Positive & One With The Tao
Garth E. Beyer
People want you to succeed.
Those who it may seem that they don’t, are just the ones who are better at preparing you for the success.
Anyone can show you the “right way” of achieving what you want, but you will not feel the power of having succeeded if you did not jump through the flaming hula-hoop that is spinning in air above a tank full of sharks.
Stay Positive & You Have My Support
Garth E. Beyer
The one piece of advice that most people give about starting a blog is to find your niche and then start writing all the content you can about it.
Find Your Niche
Write To Find Your Niche
What remains unseen in some of the most popular blogs that are written on a specific subject is the first or second post that was ever written on that blog. If you go to the back of Shel Israel’s posts you will find that before he began zoning in on his passion (Social Media), he had a blog where he covered everything that entered his mind. He started by writing on every idea that went through his brain and put it on his first blog, RedCouch before he truly discovered his niche and created his current website.
Tim Ferriss had a similar situation. What you see now is his 4 hour work week blog, but if you go to the last page you will find his reminder that you can catch older content on his previous blog Tim Ferriss: The Human Experiment Blog
This is nearly everywhere, you just don’t see it because it is rare that you go to the last page of any blog. Many”famous” bloggers such as Shel or Tim, keep their old blogs because it was their journey to finding their passion. It may be for you too. Then again, other well-known blogs choose to delete their old scribblings because they only want to be known for their niche content and respected for their passion, not the oddball ideas that got them there.
To be more direct, don’t wait to start a blog. Forget the advice to find your niche before you start writing. Just write… write on every idea you sort-of-kinda feel is worthy because that is how you will discover your passion.
You know what happens to people who wait to find their niche before they start writing a blog?
They don’t find it.
Stay Positive & Go Write Right Now
Garth E. Beyer
So You Want To Start Blogging Pt.1
