Zen Tools - Insights & Features







Why You Should Embrace Anomalies - The Incredible Value Of Disconfirming Evidence

Is Your Desire To Be Right Greater Than Your Desire To Have Been Right?

An anomaly is a deviation from what is expected or commonly regarded as the norm. It often appears as an unexpected observation that defies conventional wisdom or established theories.

It is frequently regarded as an abberation, a nuisance or an inconvenient interruption to a long cherished assumption.

There are two fundamental reasons why you should embrace anomalies, and they are both related to your long term health wealth and happiness:

[1] The identification of new and unrecognised opportunities.

[2] The avoidance of ignored risk and disaster.

Please read on to find how to do this...

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Amazing Grace - The Majesty And The Mercy of Freedom From Your Pain

"I once was lost, but now I am found, was blind, but now I see."

The hymn and popular song "Amazing Grace" was written 250 years ago by John Newton, a former slave trader who in 1748 nearly died in a shipwreck off the coast of County Donegal, Ireland.

Folk singer Judy Collins released what became a very popular a version of this song in 1970 and described it as: "a song of hope and healing. It has a feeling about surviving terrible things. But it gives you a moment of hope. Sometimes that's all you need, isn't it?"

In this brief article I want to offer some practical suggestions as to how you can experience this amazing grace in your life.

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The Transformative Power Of Acceptance

Experience The Power Of Acceptance.

This website contains about 500,000 words. You could read every single word and it wouldn't make any real difference to you. You might become better informed, but that won't change you.

There is one word in amongst the other 499,999 words on this site that does have the power to change you and to transform your life - if you choose to act upon it.

This one word describes one simple teaching and one powerful practice.

That word is acceptance.

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Inversion - The Power Of Opposite Thinking

How To Avoid The Unwanted Outcome.

The power of opposite thinking, also known as inversion, lies in its ability to stimulate creativity, enhance problem-solving, and provide a fresh perspective on challenges.

It is especially useful when launching a new initiative or attempting to resolve a difficult problem.

Instead of focusing on how to achieve a desired outcome, you consider the opposite – how to avoid the undesired outcome. Here's how to do it:

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Are You Aligned With Reality? Or Do You See What You Believe?

We tend to see that which aligns with what we believe, and to act upon that rather than acting on reality.

Being aligned with reality starts with a clear and accurate understanding of the world. It means perceiving and understanding the world as it truly is, without distortion or delusion.

Alignment has been described as:

"The key to success nobody ever taught you. The person who aligns themselves with the general principles of the world goes further and faster than the person who doesn’t."

This sounds simple but is hard to put into practice. Here is how to do it.

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The Law Of Response and Outcome

A New Approach To A New Life

At time of writing we are entering a new year which is traditionally a time of making resolutions to change our behaviour and improve the quality of our lives.

And yet powerful as this motivation is, it remains an aspiration, a figment of wishful thinking without a clear focal point for personal action together with steps to making it happen.

The law of response and outcome provides that focus.

Are you are ready to move beyond aspiration and wishful thinking?

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Clear Thinking - Turning Ordinary Moments Into Extraordinary Results

There are two ways to handle the world - try to predict, or try to prepare.

"Clear Thinking" by Shane Parrish, published in Oct 2023, is a laudable testament to the art of cogent thinking, and will be of interest to those invested in the developing and improving their thinking skills.

The first half of the book is about identifying the enemies of clear thinking and creating the mental space for reasoned thinking.

The second half of the book is about how to practise clear thinking by acquiring the necessary skills and making them your defaults.

He concludes with some practical considerations of why you would bother to do any of this anyway.

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Self Dialogue - Working With Your Many Selves

Self Dialogue Is About Working With ALL Levels Of Your Mind.

The key to effective self dialogue is to have tools, techniques and resources that work with all levels of your mind.

This simple self-facilitated technique that I am going to share with you here will enable you to do two things:

[1] To access your unconscious and "hard to reach" parts to enable you to break and change habits and to overcome your inner resistance to personal change.

[2] To access, experience and communicate directly with your higher or transcendent self to give you the power to actually follow through and make these changes and have them stick.

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The Balanced Brain - The Ultimate Route To Personal Transformation

How To Experience The Benefits Of A Balanced Brain.

Underpinning all of the belief systems and practices that offer routes to personal change, transformation and spiritual growth is the balanced brain.

These beliefs systems - and I am thinking of Christianity and Buddhism with which I am most familiar - are full of theologies, beliefs, concepts and practices that are intended to lead to the desired changes in behaviour and states of consciousness.

But, out of sight and unknown, there is a very fundamental physiological change that has to take place for these things to happen, and it involves a rewiring of the hardware in our skulls.

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How To Make Better Decisions - By Avoiding The Narrative Trap

To Understand The Truth We Have To See The Whole Picture.

One of the best ways to make better decisions is to have a deeper understanding of the many things that might stop that happening.

To understand the truth we have to look at all the known facts, and see the whole picture which is often not as binary as presented.

In this article we are going to focus on another often overlooked factor, and that is the stories that we tell ourselves, the narratives that we weave, and to look closely at how we can avoid what is referred to as the narrative fallacy.

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The Greatest Love - The Most Important Relationship You Will Ever Have

Yet Most Will Never Know It

Everyone of us has a place, in our hearts there's a space, that is home to the greatest love of all.

This love transcends everything we think we know about the world of form, the realm of thought, ideas, beliefs and dogma.

It transcends all sense of "myself", "my life", "my story", everything that we conventionally think of as "me", in fact it transcends everything that seems to us so real.

This love is the energy of all life, this love is consciousness, the ground of all being, it is not out there, it is in you, it is part of you, it is you.

But, and here's the kicker, you probably don't know it, and you can't feel it.

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Everything Is Connected And Why You Don't Feel It

...And Why It Matters

As human beings we are skating on very thin ice with our sense of self and certainty about "how things are" and what we like to think of as reality:

- What if everything we think we know and base our security and certainty on really is an illusion?

- What if most of the world's major religious and philosophical traditions have actually all been pointing to a far greater truth and reality to which we are oblivious?

- What if there really is a better way of living in alignment with this greater truth and reality?

- What if our blindness to this greater truth and reality and our consequent non-alignment will lead us to a post death oblivion and cause us to miss out on being alive, more alive, and more whole than we had ever been this side of the grave?

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Who Is In Charge Of Your Brain?

How Not To Be Stupid.

Who is in charge of your brain? This is not a silly questions. It matters because the outcomes that you experience in your life are determined by how you respond to the events that impact you.

The quality of your responses are shaped by how effectively you think, and this is a learned skill.

Your ability to think effectively, your responses, and the long term impact of the choices that you make can have a major effect on your health, wealth and happiness.

So let's take a look inside your skull and see if we can figure out who is in charge of your brain and what that means.

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How To Be A Winner On A Very Large Scale

The Incredible Benefits Of Selective Attention.

This is not a typical article about how to be a winner. We are not going to talk about goal setting, the importance of habits, the power of focus and all the other usual practical pointers to winning in life.

This article is about how to be a winner on a very large scale.

I am a business man so inevitably my focus is on the world of business, but whilst the principles that I am going to share with you here are derived from the world of investment and business they have a wider application in many different contexts.

These are not only principles but I will also share practical action points on how to be a winner on a large scale.

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The Metagame Approach To Life

How To Achieve Your Biggest Objectives.

The metagame approach to life is all about winning and achieving your biggest objectives by:

- Understanding the bigger picture
- Being better by doing things differently
- Making moves that others find hard to imitate or counter
- Redefining the game on your terms and creating your own path to success

The metagame approach to life can be used in various different contexts which may include your career, your business, your education and personal development and even your personal relationships.

This is not about abstract ideas and concepts, this is about actions. Here are 3 strategies for applying the metagame approach to life.

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Shantideva - The Way Of The Bodhisattva

Walking The Path Of Compassion.

Shantideva the 8th century Indian Buddhist sage is famous for his treatise "The Way of the Bodhisattva" delivered as an extended teaching to the monks of Nalanda monastery/university.

In Buddhist terminology a "Bodhisattva" is someone who has taken a vow to put others first and to postpone his/her entry to Nirvana [a permanent state of enlightenment] until all other sentient beings have achieved enlightenment, but what exactly do we mean by enlightenment?

This all sounds very worthy and dramatic, but what does this really mean in practice?

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Reframing History - Deconstruction And Discussion Not Destruction

History is always about context, not imposing our own moral values on the past.

For those of us fortunate enough to live within western democracies, we are living in an age where a vociferous and intolerant minority have an uneasy relationship with their own country's history over the past 300 years.

This has led to what has been framed as the ‘culture wars’ that are being actively pursued in our media, public spaces, museums, universities, schools, civil services, local government, business corporations and all other public institutions.

This vociferous and intolerant minority claim that ‘facing up’ to a past which they present as overwhelmingly and permanently shameful is the route to "a more inclusive future".

But is it?

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Tao Te Ching - Connecting To Your True Source Of Power.

How To Be Lived By The Tao.

The Tao Te Ching is one of those books that many people read, few understand, and even fewer put into practice.

The only way to know the Tao is to experience it, and it is experienced in your heart not your head.

The words in the Tao Te Ching are not a belief system. This is not something that you can grasp intellectually.

"Only in being lived by the Tao can you truly be yourself."

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How Things Really Are - The Inbuilt Design Flaws

Chaos, Disorder And Decay Is The Natural Order Of Things.

Nobody has the perfect life. We all struggle and strive to attain health, wealth and personal happiness.

Yet these three big areas: our health, our wealth and our relationships are where we all get hung out to dry – sooner or later.

To see how things really are is to become conscious of our unconscious assumptions about ourselves and our world, and to bring them into the light of full consciousness, and to notice how, on close inspection, these assumptions often contradict our actual experience.

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Intuition Or Anxiety - Are There Angels Or Devils Crawling Here?

How To Tell The Difference Between Intuition and Anxiety.

How do you know whether the voice of your intuition is real or just the product of your inner anxiety?

Several months ago I was having a drink with a friend and I asked how she was getting on with her boyfriend.

"Oh he's a very good man, a really decent human being, he'd make a wonderful husband and an excellent father... but I'm gonna end it."

So naturally I asked why.

"I have this feeling, this intuitive feeling, that this is not right for me..."

Fast forward 3 months and they were spending their weekends together and planning a holiday in Portugal! I asked what had changed, and why, and she said:

"I now see that so many times when I was dating or in relationships I thought I was hearing my intuition but I was actually hearing anxiety.

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What Is Truth - How To Tell A Partial Truth From The Whole Truth?

How the truth and nothing but the truth is often not the whole truth.

My great aunty Flo broke her arm and died.

It is true that she broke her arm in 1923. It is also true that she died in 1949. But there is no cause and effect relationship between these 2 events. The only connection between these events is that they appear in the same sentence.

That is a simple illustration of how the acccurate and honest reporting of two truths is not the whole truth.

To understand the whole truth we have to look at all the known and established facts and see the whole picture, which is often not as binary as it is often presented.

Anything less than this is a partial truth.

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Duality And Life Beyond Your Thinking Mind

Duality and life beyond your thinking mind focuses on the limitations of time, foreground and background, duality and "stuckness".

The first aspect of duality and life beyond your thinking mind focuses on the limitations of time, or more accurately our perception and experience of time.

Put simply, and dramatically, there is no time.

Time – more accurately described as “clock time” or “psychological time” - is a product of the mind.

The course of time is really like the course of a ship in the ocean. The ship moves, and leaves behind it a wake, and the wake fades out, and it tells us where the ship has been in the same way our past, and our memory of the past, tells us where we have been.

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The Conscious Mind Is Limited - Be Aware And Be Prepared

Being aware is the first stage of being prepared.

The conscious mind is limited in so many ways. There are some who would argue that there is no such thing as conscious thought and that it is represents little more than an internal multi-modal display of thoughts arising from processes that are hidden to us.

Let's temporarily park the idea that the content of the conscious mind is an illusion and take a practical look at some of the many ways in which the conscious mind is limited, and how to deal with it.

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Your Inner Map Of Reality - Here's Why You Think The Way You Do

The big picture of how your inner map of reality creates your feelings, thoughts, and behaviours.

Your inner map of reality is based on the filters of your own ethnic, national, social, family and religious background, and you interpret and experience life from the perspective of that map.

It can grow, change and adapt in response to new information and this in turn will be heavily influenced by your attitudes and beliefs.

Your inner map of reality will reflect your past experience and therefore influence your expectations and behaviour. It represents the truth as you understand it.

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The Failure Of Cancel Culture - Suppression Not Engagement

Why we need to wear our beliefs lightly and develop negative capability.

Throughout history people have campaigned to fight beliefs, ideologies, and injustices that they perceived to be oppressive, discriminating and morally wrong.

Brave men and women have dedicated their lives to succesfully campaigning to bring about major change in society.

They have achieved this by debate, demonstrations, lobbying, discussion and argument and above all else engagement.

But the failure of cancel culture is that it does not seek engagement. It does not allow for any point of view other than its own.

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4 Big Reasons Why We Get Stuck In Our Attempts At Personal Change

Most People Spend Their Entire Life Imprisoned Within The Confines Of Their Own Thoughts.

This first of the 4 big reasons why we get stuck is, in my view, the most important.

The "self-help industry" generates $ USD billons per year, and many of us buy books and attend courses on how to improve ourselves.

Yet most of the time we don’t change.

We can’t change - it's why we get stuck.

We have unconscious (and thus hidden) resistance. And yet we believe that if we keep on trying we can somehow gain control of our lives.

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How Do I Change And Why Is It So Hard?

We Would Rather Die Than Change, And We Usually Do

In my experience, the vast majority of people who say they want to change don’t change.

Most people reading this won’t change because they don’t really want to change.

They may on the surface, consciously, believe that they want to change, but there are at least 3 powerful forces at work that will likely undermine you.

Unless you are aware of these forces and know how to deal with them, you will not succeed and you will remain the same as the vast majority of the human race.

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The Illusion Of A Separate Self - Windows 11 With Self Awareness!

Beyond the content of your mind you are so much more than you think you are.

When we talk of "myself" this is the conventional way of referring to our self image which is in fact the ego's construction of its sense of self.

I find it helpful to imagine the ego as our operating system and absolutely essential, in the same way "Windows 11" is essential for successful functioning of our laptops.

But as with "Windows 11", however clever it is, it is just a piece of software. So when we say me, myself or I, metaphorically, think of “Windows 11" with self awareness!

But beyond the content of your mind you are so much more than you think you are...

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Finite And Infinite Games - Dazed, Confused & Ultimately Transcendent

This is not an instruction manual, it is a wake up call!

Over this past week I have read Professor James Carse's highly regarded "Finite And Infinite Games - A Vision Of Life As Play And Possibility" from cover to cover several times.

It opens with the lines: “There at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite."

Carse uses game theory as an analogy for two alternative views of how to play the game of life.

This is a strange and challenging book that can change what you think you know about life and how you live it.

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The Gap And The Gain - How Your Brain Sabotages Your Happiness

How Your Lizard Brain Sabotages Your Happiness

We are hardwired to measure our progress in any and all areas of life where we have goals and aspirations. We can't not do it.

But what we measure and how we measure matters because our default progress measurement setting leads to self sabotage and results in deep unhappiness and dissatisfaction with our lives.

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How To Wake Up - 4 Simple Practices To Help You Wake Up Now

So What Exactly Does It Mean to Wake Up - What Is "Enlightenment"?

There is nothing magical, mystical or mysterious about waking up we’re actually having glimpses of enlightenment all the time.

Enlightenment - waking up - means:

- To be free of the effects of your mind
- To be unencumbered with thoughts about the past or the future
- To be 100% present-moment-aware

This is also sometimes referred to as a "Unity Consciousness".

This is an experience and not an idea. This is not something to attained or sought after. This is a deeply practical way to live.

The focus of this article is to offer 4 simple practices to show you how to wake up and to live like this now:

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Situational Communication - Different Strokes For Different Folks

Situational communication is about taking account of 3 often ignored factors about the other person.

You are a situational communicator when you recognise that effective communication is not an event but a process.

This process is about understanding the other person's past experience, their competence and the way they behave in relation to whatever it is you want to accomplish, and then adopting the appropriate type of communication.

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How To Influence Without Authority - 6 Key Tips

The secret to how to influence without authority is that you get what you really want by giving other people what they really want.

We live in an interconnected world and knowing how to influence without authority is an increasingly important communictation skill.

The fundamental principle of how to influence without authority is mirrored reciprocation whereby you get what you really want by giving other people what they really want.

This goes beyond the transactional and is about building a "win-win" that addresses our deepest needs as human beings.

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Change Questions To Change Your Outcomes

Asking The Right Questions Is Critical For A Successful Change.

Every time we initiate a significant change - whether in our personal life or in an organisation - we will most likely over-estimate our chances of a successful outcome and under-estimate the likelihood that things will not work out as we had planned.

This article is part of a series on the art of persuasion, communication and change based on my 45 years in business, and I going to share with you a framework of questions that will enable you to successfully handle any significant change.

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Group Culture - The Invisible Software That Rules Your Life

Group culture is: "How we do things round here".

We like to see ourselves as free agents making our own choices and living authentically but the reality is that The Matrix has many layers and we are unaware that we are more enmeshed and ensnared than we realise.

We are, to a very large extent, governed by our conditioning and our hardwired cognitive biases.

Group culture is another one of those things that also has a very powerful influence on our thought processes, decisions and behaviours.

Here's how group culture affects you and how you can take advantage of it.

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Why Getting From A to B Is Not Aways A Straight Line

In circumstances of significant change, the progress from A to B will not be in a straight line.

We run our lives largely on auto-pilot. In most circumstances your experience of getting from A to B is relatively smooth and seemless, and when it isn't you have established ways and means of overcoming the bumps and obstructions.

But when getting from A to B involves making significant changes such as (a) doing something new that will change the existing modus operandi; or (b) launching a major initiative or new venture, the progress from A to B will not be in a straight line.

For you as an individual or an organisation it is critical that you apply the "business as usual" test.

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The Art Of Persuasion Planning For Success - Here's How To Do It!

To be successful in the art of persuasion you must ensure that certain things happen.

To be successful in the art of persuasion you must establish a framework of what has to happen to get you to that successful buyin to your proposal by the other person.

Circumstances will vary enormously. Persuading a friend to bring their family and join with yours on an Airbnb holiday is one thing and less complex than persuading the leader of a special interest group or a public institution to commit to a programme of activity or to adopt a policy.

The process outlined here can be scaled up or simplified as the circumstances require.

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The Art Of Persuasion Advanced Communication Skills - Gaining Buyin

Create The Environment Where They Want To Buyin to Your Proposal

In order to build the win-win you have to uncover what it is that the other person really wants or needs, and to do that you have to ask questions.

There are a series of steps you need to go through, which make the other person feel comfortable with you and see the purpose in your questions.

In this article we are focused on advanced communication skills that will help you achieve this.

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The Art Of Persuasion The One Fundamental Principle - Create A Win-Win

The art of persuasion is based on the simple idea that you get what you want by enabling the other party to get what they want.

Being a nice friendly person with good inter-personal skills may be a good start but it is not enough.

For this to happen you, as the persuader, need to exercise these skills that will enable this to happen.

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Communication Persuasion And Change - Key Skills To Survive & Succeed

It's not the strongest that survive, nor the most intelligent, but those who are most responsive to change, the most persuasive, and the best communicators.

We are living in an age of unprecedented change.

We are now part of a world of far greater globalisation, connection and interdependence than at any other age in human history.

In the current age, it's not the strongest that survive and succeed, nor the most intelligent, but those who are most responsive to change, the most persuasive, and the best communicators.

Here's why the skills involved in communication persuasion and change are so important:

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The Eisenhower Box - What Is Important Is Seldom Urgent

What Is Important Is Seldom Urgent And What Is Urgent Is Seldom Important.

The Eisenhower Box is a time management and decision-making model devised by President Dwight Eisenhower to help him prioritize and address the many high-stakes issues he had to deal with as a US Army general, Supreme Allied Commander of NATO Forces, and as president of the United States.

The Eisenhower Box has two key elements that are not always present in other time management tools:

[1] It distinguishes between what is urgent and what is important.

[2] It has a ‘delete’ option.

Here's how to prepare to apply The Eisenhower Box:

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Zen Enlightenment [Satori] - The Stink Of Zen

Lost In Our Delusions About Enlightenment.

There is something in human nature - a desire to glamorise, sanctify, objectify and idolise – that elevates people who have offered deep insights to the human race and thus put distance between them and the rest of us.

But these great ones have exactly the same psychological, emotional, and physiological equipment as the rest of us. To put it bluntly – we all share the same basic equipment.

If one can do it so can we all.

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5 Zen Mindsets For Mastery - In Any Area Of Your Life

The Wisdom Of A Person Who Masters In Any Art Is Reflected In Their Every Attitude.

The state and quality of your mind has a very large bearing on the quality of your performance in any area of life that really matters to you.

These 5 zen mindsets for mastery are drawn from the world of martial arts, and are grounded in zen practices.

Fortunately, you do not need to a be a practitioner of martial arts to practice and apply these mindsets - but it does help to have some experience of basic mindfulness practice.

We can all learn and practice these mindsets and benefit by excelling in any area of life that is important to us.

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Dealing With The Toxicity Of Online Dating - 6 Key Tips From A Clinical Psychologist

Toxicity Is The Price Tag Of Accessibility.

In the early days of online dating, users were vetted and had to go through a registration process and agree to comply with a code of conduct designed to ensure that they conducted themselves in a reasonably courteous and civilised manner.

Now in the post-covid era when we have all become so used to ordering just about anything online, with a home-delivery in 24-48 hours, online dating apps are increasingly popular as a quick and easy way to meet new people.

But that accessibility comes at a cost - and the price tag is the toxicity of the behaviour of so many users of these apps.

Here are 6 tips for dealing with it.

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Why Understanding Ergodicity Is Critical To Your Long Term Survival

How Not To Be Fooled By Randomness.

Ergodicity is an ugly word from the world of mathematics. It is an umbrella term for two sets of conditions of probability and outcome.

These two conditions form the basis of a lie that you have been sold by governments, economists and investment "advisors" for the past 150 years.

What may seem to be a dry and boring exercise in semantics and mathematical fancy footwork very rapidly morphs into:

[1] A potent expose of how we have been misled and ripped off by the so called experts, and then offers

[2] An explanation of how to side step these lies and fallacies and position yourself for survival and success.

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Dealing With Imposter Syndrome - Ego Is The Enemy

How You Frame A Situation Has A Profound Impact On How You Respond To It Emotionally.

Imposter syndrome is a psycho-emotional experience of a fear of being found out as incompetent despite ongoing evidence to the contrary.

The effects of imposter syndrome include increased anxiety, under-performance and depression. It can affect mental health and overall functioning. In short, it is debilitating.

In my experience people can, and do, waste a lot of time thinking about their issue and analyzing it, typically how they got it, why they have got it, how it affects them, and talking with other people with the same or similar issue.

This has some value, but it is limited. Being informed about your problem is not going to solve it. The real work lies in dealing with your head and your heart, your thoughts and your emotions.

Here's how it works:

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The Challenges Of The Road Less Traveled

Issues You'll Face When Playing The Long Game.

The challenges of the road less traveled is loosely based around the phrase popularised by M.Scott Peck with his book "The Road Less Traveled".

This article is about the the journey that some of us take as we work towards a long term goal, and that involves hidden steps that we have to figure out as we go.

It involves the sacrifice of short term gains for long-term wins.

The purpose of this article is:

1. To provide a route map
2. To identify the challenges we will face on this journey
3. To offer solutions to overcoming the challenges of the road less traveled.

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How To Benefit From the Unseen Margins - 5 Key Tips For Success

These Unseen Margins Can Have A Very Dramatic Impact On Your Life.

To understand how to benefit from the unseen margins we need to start by understanding what they are and where we find them.

In this article I am going to explain:

# What Unseen Margin Is And How To Measure It

# Where To Find Unseen Margin In An Environment Of Complexity

# 5 Key Tips To Benefit From Unseen Margin

# Guiding Principles To Benefit From Unseen Margin

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Like A Prayer - Life Is A Mystery

It Isn't The Process Of Prayer That’s The Problem, It’s The Way It’s Framed.

Regardless of what we feel about Madonna or her song the topic of prayer often arouses strong reactions.

Usually, it is something that we associate with organised religion and for most of us this is not on our current radar.

For the modern person who is not a practitioner or devotee of a faith tradition this framing of prayer does not resonate.

Here is an alternative approach.

Continue reading "Like A Prayer - Life Is A Mystery"