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One of the things that I have always been pretty terrible at is organization. Not the simple tasks, of putting things away in some semblance of order or keeping track of where I put things. Rather, I have always been bad at sticking with things because I’ve never kept track of my progress or taken the steps each day to make something new a habit. Now, this doesn’t really hold you back in tasks which only require you to answer a basic yes or no question to determine whether something got done that day.

For instance, in high school I one day decided that I was going to stop drinking soda all together. I never planned anything out or marked on a calendar how many days into this process I was. Yet, I was successful in quitting my daily soda drinking habits. Why? I made one change in lieu of drinking soda and that was replacing it with water. Thus, I could easily ask myself whether or not I had drank soda that day and know the answer. After 30 days of “No” in a row, there’s really no point in asking. (As a side note, I dropped 15 pounds within months by dropping that habit completely).

The downside to this cold turkey method of just quitting soda ended up having a negative effect on me and how I approached more complex changes I needed to make. What happened when I needed to track my finances or my diet or what work I had done for the month? That simplistic method no longer yielded good results and the bad part of it is that it sort of became ingrained in me that this approach worked well. I could maintain changes in these more complex areas of my life for days or perhaps even a few weeks before I lost track of my progress or why I had even started in the first place.

Keeping track of multiple variables over a middling or lengthy amount of time is way too much to focus on. Can you remember off of the top of your head exactly what you ate on a Thursday three weeks ago? Maybe, but could you do every other day? Probably not. It’s crucial to understand in life that big changes are precipitated by smaller changes carried out over a long period of time. So, it is these smaller changes that are perhaps the most important thing to master in your life in order to see results. They serve as sort of a beachhead from which you can build up your force and push forward towards attaining a larger goal.

I have found that the easiest habit that I can do in order to create major change in my life is to simply write things down. It is one thing to know that you ate terribly last Wednesday but to actually have to write it out piece by piece, kind of sets it in stone how much you’re screwing up your fitness goals. Also, you start to see patterns emerge in your behaviors which you can then remedy and correct.  Many people tend to think that writing out what you eat for the day is sort of overkill or obsessive. However, when you start to do it, you realize how much it can keep you on track.

“Oh, I ate tons of pizza four days ago. Probably shouldn’t pig out today.” These simple corrections in behavior help to break down bad habits and replace them with better ones. I like to write down my workout routine, what I eat, and the amount of money I spend on food. I stopped tracking what I ate and how much I spent on food for more than a few months and it astounded me how out of whack my budget and diet became. My brain will not simply keep track of these things on its own, most likely because I’m always thinking about other things I feel are more important to me.

Even though online banking exists and I can track my purchases digitally, writing it out forces me to confront my daily choices, and I have to read and add up any receipt for the day. This way, I cannot hide from any impulse buys or foods that I know I shouldn’t be eating and since it’s a daily habit I have to think about making these changes daily and think of ways I can avoid falling into the trap. Just in the first week of starting my spending log back up again, I have saved a humongous amount of money and am on pace to spend probably 60% less on food within the next month. Yes, I am that bad at keeping track of this stuff on my own, I need structure to keep myself in line.

It seems like each day now I think of a new thing to tell myself in order to keep me on track or I find a new thing to cut out. For instance:

• I stopped thinking of small purchases in the immediate and started thinking more about their larger implication. That $2 drink each day could be $60 a month. That’s $60 I could invest in my Sharebuilder account or pay off some debt. Really makes me second guess impulse buys.
• That $2 drink isn’t water, so why are you drinking it and making your workouts less effective?
• Cancelled Netflix and Amazon Prime, saving about $200 a year. Both can be cool to have, but did I really need either of them?
• $200 on a $1000 debt is 20%, is either of them worth that? Why not pay things down instead?
• I’ve got plenty of books that need reading instead of watching some random movie. As such, I’ve finished two books I was in the middle of, almost done with another, and about half way through another. Boom! Productivity.
• Started running again and can track each entry to motivate myself to go for another run.

This one little change of writing more things down and keeping my brain in the loop of what I’m really spending my day doing is spurring so many more changes to take hold. Plus, it is simplifying just about everything in my life and it will continue to get better as these newer habits take hold and start to run more on auto-pilot. It becomes easier to make changes in life when they don’t all have to be wholesale changes. Starting a new way of eating from scratch can be hard because food addiction and the behavioral patterns that have become ingrained. However, making smaller changes and tracking areas you need to improve upon over the long haul makes it a smooth process and all of the areas in your life become more aligned to how you want them to be.

You don’t necessarily have to keep a diary of long drawn out passages to keep yourself on track and your goals in clear view. Just by writing down the food you eat, exercise you did, and the money you spent, so much of your life can start to fall into line. It’s one place you can start building from today to reach a goal somewhere in the future.

In the past few weeks, there have been a few experiences which have kind of ‘reawakened’ me and have gotten me to reconsider the paths I was close to undertaking. Towards the end of April, I had a series of interviews with a company, about a job opportunity. I went through the usual corporate battery of three interviews with various HR and management types, as well as a panel of my would-be peers. In the end, everything seemed to be going well, and a friend on the inside of the company told me that I basically had the job. It wasn’t a dream job or anything of the sort but the pay was much better than I am currently receiving and could add another solid experience to my resume for the future.

For a few days I coasted, thinking that I was about to embark on a new path with a new company, and I’ll admit I felt rather excited at the prospect. It was all a matter of time, of course, before I would leave my current gig and start anew. However, a few days after I had been assured that the position was mine, I received an email telling me that the position had been eliminated due to some change involving one of their corporate customers. At first, I was pissed. All of that time and effort (literally, the last interview was two hours), was down the drain with nothing to show for it.

The second event (well, series of events) involves my work online. I had been during this past month, focused almost solely on money. I wanted the new job because of money and all of my efforts in writing seemed to be about the bottom line rather than creating something that I had wanted to. It was during this barrage of efforts to make more money that I got smacked down by Google. My rankings in the search engine began to plummet and ultimately I have lost about 80% of my traffic within a week, thanks to an ‘algorithm penalty’ of some sort.  Maybe these old pages will recover to their proper spots at some point but who knows. The funny part, to me, was Google notified me that my revenues were 98% below estimates and that I should look into the reasons why, as if they weren’t the sole cause! Anyways, it pulled me away from this site and y other ventures for a few days, as I questioned the point of it all.

It seemed that another financial misfortune would overtake me, when some reconfiguration at my current workplace was taking place. I had turned down one offer from them when I had thought that I pretty much had the new job locked up. Now, it seemed that my role was going to be redefined and my hours possibly cut by 25%. At this point, I really said enough is enough and decided to take action.

I made the case to my bosses that I should only work three days a week because it would entail less driving to and from for me and I could focus more on my work in larger blocks of time. They were receptive to this idea, as they wanted to cut my hours anyway, and figured this would be the perfect way to do so. For a few days, it was like this, before I hit them with the second piece of my plan to secure more hours, more money, and a three day per week schedule. Their marketing efforts have been haphazard for the longest time and mostly abandoned but online marketing and website building is something that I happen to have plenty of experience with. In the end, I basically created my own job title, got my schedule condensed into to three days per week, and can essentially control my own destiny and pay based on how my plans perform.

All of these experiences this month got me thinking about gaining and losing opportunities and how much of an effect making decisions can have on your life. These experiences are all neutral experiences in reality; it’s just that at the time they happened I may have interpreted them as positive or negative. Had I gotten the new job, I would have had to drive to another city each morning and be stuck in some office cubicle from 8 to 5 doing work that I have zero interest in. What kind of ramifications would that have had on my life? Gotten out of shape? Lost my interest in writing? Lacked the time to pursue things that I am passionate in? When I really think about it, not getting hired there was kind of a blessing in disguise. I didn’t really feel comfortable in such a place and was only really in it for the money.

Also, I now have the opportunity to compress my work schedule into three days out of the week and have the other four off to explore my own interests. Beyond summer vacation and whatnot as a child, I’ve never had the majority of a week to simply explore my own interests without work or school getting in the way. I have decided to use this time to increase my reading and writing and also start a new carb cycling diet. Personal development is now my main focus and doesn’t feel like something that I have to squeeze in between certain hours of the day or weekends.

Sometimes in life, things seem like they are working against you, and it feels like you’re stuck in a really bad place. However, not every opportunity is the correct one for you or your plans. I can imagine had I gotten that job how unhappy I would be by this time next year. I would be stagnating and probably slip further and further into some existential despair. This didn’t happen and things started to seem as if they would fall apart in many ways, so I decided to get creative. You want to cut my hours? Good. Let’s give me three days per week. Wait. You guys are having problems with marketing? It just so happens I have a ton of experience with that but I’ll need to keep a full-time schedule in order to fix things. When things get bad, get creative.

I’m pretty excited about the opportunity that I have now and am trying my hardest not to squander my time and actually pursue things which will help me to improve and develop. Starting with my 30-day super trial, I hope to implement many positive habits over the next month and get more done than I ever have before. Disappointment strikes in many forms, work related, personal, relationships, etc. The key thing to remember is that not all missed opportunities or failings are necessarily bad. There is usually a greater opportunity or challenge which you can find among the wreckage of your failures and you’ll never see it if you keep focusing on what you ‘missed out’ on.

Fear of rejection, social anxiety, approach anxiety, or whatever else you want to call it, that feeling of fear you get when you approach women in a bar or club or wherever, is one thing that holds many guys back from success. There are plenty of guys out there who could be getting many more women than they currently do, if they could simply get past the anxiety they feel when initially approach women. If they could just skip that step and get into a conversational flow they’d be good. How does one get past these intense feelings of fear and anxiety in the heat of the moment? The prescription is quite straightforward, so in this post I’m going to break it down to the basics of getting past approach anxiety, so that talking to women is no longer a dreadful thing to experience. It does take some work but once things start to click you can have some amazing experiences.

Frame of Mind

The first step towards reducing approach anxiety comes by working on your own mind. The anxiety and fear stems from being so far in your own head that everything seems like a life or death situation, even though it is just a basic social interaction. In my own interpretation of these fears, I feel that I am at most selfish and eco-centric, when I am feeling this way. It sounds weird to put it like that. After all, the cause of your fear seems to stem from outside of you (the girl, the other people around). However, the fear stems from your own perception of the situation. When I feel approach anxiety, I know that my perception of the situation is completely self-absorbed.

There is a stage of life that people go through, often around their middle or high school years, in which they think that their own problems are the most important things in the world. There is very little awareness of the outside world and their role within it. This phase usually passes as a person matures and people begin to think outside of themselves. The problem is we can often slip back into this kind of thinking when we are put in certain situations and it becomes tough to see the forest from the trees. For instance, when we approach a woman who we do not know, in a club or bar, we feel like she will reject us and everyone will laugh (this can be a completely subconscious fear). Will that all actually happen? Probably not.

Still need more help with women? Try these:

***Read this free pdf guide to Breaking Up Like A man and then click here to get more info on the 10 Ways You Know that a Woman is attracted to you***

Rejection may or may not happen. It doesn’t matter either way, in the correct context, and only matters if your ego is in control and trying to protect itself. This means that if you place value on the outcome of the interaction, you will feel fear no matter what. If she reacts positively, you feel good. If she reacts negatively, you feel bad. Either way you are placing the way you feel about yourself in someone else’s hands, so of course your ego will want to protect itself, as there is no control over your sense of self.  In order to remove the dependence on outcome, you need to stop seeking validation from those external sources.

How I began to do this was to begin thinking about what my reality consisted of. I started to see perception as like looking through a microscope with different lenses. When I was fearful and seeking validation from others, it was like being zoomed in 1000x, and I was completely absorbed in myself and my societal conditioning. I couldn’t see the world around me because I was too zoomed in my own perceived problems. When I ‘change the lens’ and begin to look at my situation in a greater universal context and don’t place a judgment on it, I feel much more centered and the fear is simply not there.

In the zoomed out context, I see the world around me more clearly and I am less involved in my own narrative about my life. I start to understand that I am one of around seven billion people on this planet and my own interpretation of what rejection is isn’t that important. How many other people have experienced the same feelings that I have? So, what is all that unique about my situation? Nothing. Ego and feeling are simply taking over for rationality. If I talk to a girl, and she yells at me and tells me to go away, will people be talking about it in 5 years? 10 years? 500 years? Highly unlikely and if they are what does it really matter?

I also liked to contrast how I was feeling in different situations. I remember going camping when I was a kid and looking at all of the stars in the night sky. I was in awe of the beauty and how much more there was than just my life in the universe. Why could I feel this way in nature, but when I was older and went to a club, I felt complete anxiety because I wanted to have a conversation? The difference was my perception of the situations. In the first instance, I was completely in the moment and centered in my sense of self. In the second, I was projecting into the future (how she would reject me) and into the past (how other girls had rejected me, what other people had thought of me) and ignoring the moment.

Once I began to think really deeply on perception, and how it was screwing me up, things started to change. When I started to approach girls with this new mindset, I gave up on pursuing certain outcomes (making out, phone numbers, sex) and instead focused on expressing myself fully and exploring who she is. That’s it. Initially, I was still using a lot of ‘gaming’ techniques, but it became clear that it was incongruent with who I was. For instance, I would start having great conversations with girls and then try to do some pick-up technique and completely lose her interest. However, when I was expressing and exploring, I would get girls who would be completely into me within a short period of time.

I didn’t need to press her for sex because I viewed it as something that would simply happen. I am a man and she is a woman, we’re kind of built for that. I realized that the best game was to have no game. I became more open and stopped putting up fronts and as a result they began to do the same. The girl starts feeling safe to express her true self, thus becomes more comfortable, and thus becomes more attracted to you as a man. That’s it. That is what interaction looks like when social conditioning is cast aside. It really is that basic, if you can stop the anxiety, fear, and constant judging of situations, and just learn to be in the moment.

Here are some further posts that explore these ideas:

• How to Have Confidence
• How to Talk to Girls if You’re Shy/Awkward
• How to Deal with Loneliness
• Changing the Perceptions About You
• Attract Women Main Page

The moment your attention turns to the Now, you feel a presence, a stillness, a peace. You no longer depend on the future for fulfillment and satisfaction—you don’t look to it for salvation. Therefore, you are not attached to the results. Neither failure nor success has the power to change your inner state of being. You have found the life underneath your life situation. – Eckhart Tolle, Practicing the Power of Now

Frame of Reference

It is one thing to read about this kind of thinking but it is another thing to actually apply it to your day to day life. I know how difficult it can be. I still struggle with maintaining my more centered approach towards life and will often slip into the really socially conditioned frame of mind for weeks at a time, before pulling myself out of it. It’s hard to interact with a completely conditioned society and try not to fall into old habits, sort of like trying to lose weight but being surrounded by your favorite junk food constantly. The good news is that, I have gotten better at it by practicing more and more, and a lot of the beliefs I used to have about myself and my situation no longer exists in my mind. So, it is possible to shift into this mode of perception.

Reading books on philosophy, psychology, history, and the like has helped to shape my world view in a rather unique way. After 10 years of reading consistently, my brain and my behavior have continually evolved into new outlooks and viewpoints. This is a reason why I recommend reading on a daily basis so much, because it will completely flip how you think about and interact with the reality around you. It helps to open you up to new ideas and experiences. However, reading alone is often not enough to concretely change certain aspects of your reality, experience is a necessary ingredient to help break old conditioned patterns. This is especially true for those things where fear and anxiety tend to be the highest, such as public speaking or approaching women. In those situations, the understanding of a shift in consciousness has to be backed up by experience in order for it to truly take hold and run as a sort of default.

Simply put, if you want to get over approach anxiety you have to talk to women. This doesn’t mean you necessarily have to approach 1,000 random women in the street, though you could, but when you are in social situations such as a bar or club, you need to socialize and learn to interact without caring about how it turns out. You have to work on expressing yourself in a natural way that isn’t forced or a scripted part of your social mask. I wrote about this here, How to Talk to Girls at College Parties, and gave examples from my own life as sort of a demo of what I am talking about.

The cool thing is that you can begin to use a new perspective on reality in any situation in your day to day life and it translates over to talking to women. It’s sort of like shooting hoops in your driveway prepares you somewhat for running a full court game, you’re still not in game shape, but you might at least have a wicked jump shot. Recently, I have been interviewing for a bunch of new job opportunities, and I honestly felt more anxiety about those than I ever did trying to pick up chicks. Meanwhile, I have been experimenting with a more complete implementation of being more present in the moment and getting rid of social conditioning and it has helped tremendously in interviews. I find myself more relaxed, engaging, and aware of my behaviors in the moment, which has allowed me to garner better responses from employers while getting positive reinforcement that this perception of reality is the most beneficial for me…which means I’m more likely to run it as a default setting.

In order to break your conditioning and move past the intense feelings of anxiety and doubt, you have to push your boundaries and do what is uncomfortable and even painful. True growth lies on the edge of your comfort zone and hence that’s what you must approach in order to help shift your mind. Getting rid of this anxiety is like any other growth exercise, such as lifting weights, you aren’t going to gain more muscle by lifting 10 pounds forever and you won’t get any better with women by being too afraid to talk to them.

So, how do you go about reinforcing this new view on your reality? For me, the growth started before I had really gotten deeper into reading philosophy and whatnot. It started when I just got fed up with how things were going. I didn’t have a girlfriend in high school and felt like everyone else was passing me by (wasn’t as true as I thought, lots of guys are in the same boat). I felt as if I needed to rectify this and get some girls in my life, so that I could gain some experience and see exactly what I had been missing out on. I was drawing most of my confidence from making changes to my physical body (working out and dressing nicer) and started to notice some girls holding eye contact for longer and smiling at me…though I was still too much of a bitch to do anything about it.

Then, I started going out to bars and clubs, by myself most of the time, to force myself to confront my anxieties head on. Also, I started talking to more girls in my classes and develop some kind of ‘game’. You know what? I started getting better and better at it, which made me care less and less about getting rejected by a girl (it happened a lot). While I did get better, my confidence and sense of self was all over the place. Sometimes I’d be on a roll with women and feel like the man and then I’d hit a cold streak and felt rejected. Going through that period led me to believing that I needed to shift my perspective and to stop seeking external validation, which has helped to accelerate my results in every aspect of my life.

If I were starting from scratch again and needed to get past approach anxiety on the same level I had when I was younger, I would go about it a bit differently.  I would set it up as a daily program of sorts. I would read some relevant books for an hour a day and listen to audio on personal development while working out. Thus, I could be constantly bombarded with messages to reinforce the changes I want to make. Also, meditation helps to clear all of the negative thought patterns and puts me into a completely open and aware state of being.

Secondly, I would go into complete social overdrive. Talking to as many people as I could each day. A great trick for this is getting a job in face to face sales or in a call center that requires you to make 100 phone calls a day. At some point, talking to people becomes just an everyday occurrence. Also, joining social, athletic, or charitable groups will allow you to expand your social circle and get way more comfortable in talking to people without worrying about the outcome. Plus, there are always some cute girls around, that you can just get to know over a longer period of time. Then, whether you go out alone or with a group of people, when enjoying the nightlife, start conversations with as many people as you can. Focus on expressing your true self and not putting on a social mask, this will help to further stretch your comfort zone and break through all of that anxiety you may be feeling.

That’s really all it takes. You question where you fears are coming from, identify and become aware of those fears, explore a new way to perceive the world around you, and implement it by pushing your comfort zone and reinforcing your new outlook. Remember, that the outcome of your conversations with girls isn’t as important as exploring who she is and making yourself comfortable in expressing yourself fully. It took me months to start learning how to talk to girls and even when I had a few interested in me it was still a process to improve on all the things I was still lacking. Approach anxiety can be gotten rid of but it does require taking action on a consistent basis but doing so will open up your world to a great deal of new experiences.

Maintaining a long term relationship to put it mildly, ain’t no joke. Two people can often meet and during their initial time together, their lives can be almost perfectly in sync in terms of their goals, personalities, and temperaments. However, people do change over time and sometimes, that change leads them away from their friends, family, and even their relationship partner. In other situations, you may have gotten involved with someone who is perfectly nice and attractive but isn’t completely the right fit for you or what you want your lifestyle to be. In still other cases, you have become involved with a hidden disaster, someone who played the part until she got her claws into you and you now realize is borderline psychotic. In any situation you may find yourself in, knowing when to end a relationship with a girl, is a highly important skill to have. Sticking around for longer than the expiration date on a relationship, rarely turns out well and often just drains you of time, energy, and resources. It can be highly difficult to let go and say goodbye once emotions are running so deep but taking the best action for your own well-being is always the right move even if it doesn’t feel that way. Here are a few of the signs you should be on the lookout for when considering exiting a relationship.

Too Much Fighting

All relationships have disagreements and occasional spats, it’s just the nature of the game. However, constant argument and possible physical escalation leads to a toxic coexistence that is better to be rid of than to try and mend broken fences. You might think that because things didn’t used to be this way, it can be resolved, and things will be how they were. Yes, the fighting may calm down a bit but things don’t revert back to how they were in the past. Bottom line, if she is driving you up a wall with the constant bickering, consider that it doesn’t have to be this way. There are other girls who tensions won’t be so high with and that it might be best for the both of you two go your separate ways.

She’s not a Project Home, Don’t Invest in “Fixer Uppers”

I’ve been involved in a few of these myself. Relationships with girls who are physically good enough for your tastes and are cool to hang out with BUT beyond that there are glaring problems. Real change in behavior and/or personality can be a challenge to undertake, when it’s your own behavior and personality. Trying to get someone else to change for your own benefit? Good luck. It can be something as simple as not having the same underlying goals as your girl has, different ambitions lead to different places. Don’t settle just because you have someone decent and then try to fix them up later or make huge concessions in your life to accommodate her because she’s your ‘best option’. Bad choices can be costly to your future well-being and it’s best to separate now before things go any further.

The Attraction and Passion is Lacking

Things tend to cool off some as a relationship matures and familiarity sets in but if things are getting so bad you’re constantly looking towards other girls then you might want to move on. Don’t stick around just to keep going through the motions of the relationship, if you think deeply on it and decide that you’re not happy, then you should leave.

***I’m against staying in a faltering relationship in most cases but if you still want her,  here is a program to help you with that.***

Respect Shall Be Paid

Respect is the foundation of all relationships, without it, they’re doomed to failure. If your girlfriend is seriously lacking in this department and isn’t supporting you or respecting you like she should then you should strongly consider moving on. How does she treat you, your career, what you like, your personal time? Is she constantly belittling you? Disrespecting what you work on? Trying to treat you like a lap dog or little boy instead of a man? Don’t accept such nonsense in the person you’re supposed to have such a close relationship with. Even you guys reading this who have very low self-esteem, you deserve respect! If she isn’t capable of giving it, then she’s not worth it. Also, if you don’t respect her for whatever reason, that another sign it’s time to end it.

Some Other Helpful Posts:

How to get Over Your Ex-Girlfriend

Following the No Contact Rule After a Break Up

Do You Really Want Your Ex-Girlfriend Back?

Dealing with Loneliness

How to Pick Up Girls 

No, I don’t want to spend time with you….really, just go away.

Some relationships get to the point where you simply cannot stand to be around her on a regular basis. It’s not that you’ve been fighting or anything and on the surface everything seems completely fine. It’s when she texts you, you curse. When she asks to hang out, you would do anything to avoid it. Frankily, it’s just being annoyed and over with the whole process. I remember dating one girl in particular, who towards the end of our relationship, I just couldn’t stand anymore. She would call, I would try to end the conversation as quickly as possible. She’d ask to hang out, I’d decline. It got to the point where she wanted to see some chick flick movie, and I walked out of the theater, because I had a moment of clarity of me having better things to do with my time. Dick move, right? Maybe, but if things get to this point of annoyance with them, just end the relationship quickly because it’s a sinking ship.

No Trust

You need to be able to trust your girlfriend on a deep level. That’s just part of the deal of being together. Sure, girls who are just hookups, you don’t need too much trust invested in them but once she steps up to the girlfriend level, you’d better be able to rely on her. An honest relationship is a healthy relationship and constant trust issues undermine it. If you cannot trust her on a very deep level, don’t keep her around because she hot or she’s cool to hang out with, there are like 4 billion women…you can do better than settling. Also, if your girlfriend cheated on you there are two steps you need to take.

1. Slap yourself for staying with her.
2. Dump her ass immediately.

Cheating is always grounds for breaking up, no excuses. If she violates your trust, then she doesn’t respect you, which we’ve already gone over as a sign to break up. She’s making this a really easy decision at this point, isn’t she?

All of these signs are things that should be considered when deciding whether or not to dump your girlfriend. Take the time to analyze your relationship and decide whether or not she is really worth hanging on to. This is a really important decision to make, you don’t want to spend years with or even marry the wrong person when you simply don’t have to. If your needs aren’t being met in a relationship then it is perfectly fine to move on with your life. You cannot feel guilty about breaking up with someone, even if it is really tough to do. This is your life and you should decide who you want to really be a part of it.