Those days can be the toughest to overcome because you’re effectively working against yourself. Part of you is at war with another part of you. The No We Can’t is mixing it up hard with the Yes We Can.

How do you put yourself back on track?

We look to some of the ninja traditions, traditions steeped in centuries of having to win against all odds, no matter what. One of these traditions known as the kuji kiri, or nine syllable cutting, might offer us some help on those days when we’re our own worst enemy. Master teacher Stephen K. Hayes describes the kuji kiri practice in part as a smashing of past successes together with potential future successes to help you make that breakthrough in the here and now. While you’d need to train directly with An-Shu Hayes for the actual kuji practices themselves, you can take inspiration from his words and implement the idea itself in your workplace or home.

What are the symbols and reminders in your life of past successes, of things that you absolutely got right? Maybe you have some keepsakes of sorts, whether they’re hard-won diplomas from school or photographs of childrens’ graduations. Perhaps it’s a newspaper article or a speaker’s review that highlights how successful you were in the past. Perhaps it’s a special song on an MP3 player that brings you back into that moment of crowning victory. It could even be a particular scent or perfume. Whatever it is, you know you’ve got it right when, as soon as you remember the past, all of the elation comes rushing back, energizing your mind and body.

Whatever your totems of success are, have them available as a potent reminder to yourself somewhere so that you can take a quick look, listen, or experience and be reminded of your full capacities and capabilities. It’s not an ego wall; you could keep your totems and sigils in a desk drawer or office closet if you felt the need for extreme modesty. Its function is not to impress others, but to remind you of who you really are and who you can be.

When you remind yourself of successes past, reinforce in yourself that if you take your self-doubt and cut it out, future success isn’t far away. You have physical, concrete evidence of your ability to generate results. When that belief in yourself flags, re-experience just how capable you really are, and use that to restart your momentum towards more success!

If you’d like more information on the actual study and practice of the kuji kiri, An-shu Hayes has a couple of educational history programs to get you started on DVD.

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The flip side of the coin is that we tend to become the company we keep. If we surround ourselves with bitter, angry, uninspiring people who do nothing but urinate into our mental pool, we go that route too – and unlike positive, inspiring people, it doesn’t take much. As Tony Robbins once quipped, you don’t need to drink a gallon of poison to have an effect – just a little is more than enough.

Go open Twitter or Facebook right now. Take a look at the people who put stuff into your head ever fleetingly, 140 characters at a time. Is their stuff good for you or bad for you? When you read what they have to say, do you feel better or worse? When you hear them speak, do you feel energized and excited or cynical and dismissive? Do they use their social media channels to inspire with stories about people in their lives who have helped them or whine about the poor service someone gave them?

It’s easy to tolerate negativity and incredibly poisonous to do so. Sometimes you feel socially obligated to if it’s a close friend or someone you care about. Here’s a nifty, somewhat sneaky antidote to those people. First, create a network with a lot of people in it. Tons. Follow everyone that you can that’s inspiring to you. This increases the probability that whenever you do open a social network, the chances are good that someone will be saying something that brings some positive energy to your day. Next, to the extent that a social network permits you to, create a private list of positive, powerful, inspiring friends, folks who seem to always have something good to bring to the table. Finally, prune out those friends who don’t necessarily bring good cheer to you from that private, secret, quiet list of those that do, so that you don’t have to hurt someone’s feelings by cutting them out of your network, but you don’t have to put their baggage in your taxi either.

You have enough negative forces in your life without voluntarily adding more to it with social media. Unlike a workplace or home, you have complete freedom to choose who you listen to in social media, to choose who you allow to influence you.

Choose wisely for you become the company you keep.

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6 minute meditation MP3

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Please DO SHARE IT with anyone you think might benefit from it.

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So why, when we’re facing new possibilities, do we so routinely and firmly cringe from them? I just saw in my Google Buzz feed someone saying that they’re still on the fence about using a salesforce automation tool. My experiences with CRMs and SFAs has been that if you have a good implementation of one, you’ll wonder how you ever did business without one. Why do we hesitate?

We hesitate because of pain. The perceived pain of change, of doing something new, of trying something new, is usually much greater than the perceived pain of staying as is, of keeping the status quo. I’m as guilty of this as anyone else. It’s buyer’s remorse up front, when you fear regretting the change before you even have a chance to pull the trigger, or when you only dip your toe into the water half heartedly to make a show of trying it out without actually jumping in.

So how do you make the change? How do you make the jump? How do you push yourself over the line?

You sell yourself the change.

Go and learn this pile of closing techniques that powerful, effective salesmen and saleswomen have been practicing on you for decades. Learn them, become minimally proficient at them, and then figure out how to sell yourself on the change you want to make.

For example, let’s say you want to lose some weight and you’re a fairly rational person most of the time (as opposed to an emotion-driven person). Grab a sheet of paper, draw a line down the middle, and then list all of the benefits you’d get out of losing weight (healthier body, longer life, more energy, etc.) and list all of the reasons not to change (less work, less to manage). Compare the two and decide which looks more appealing, which has the stronger sell. Chances are with something like improving your health or weight loss, the self-sell will help motivate you. This, by the way, is a Ben Franklin close.

Look at how you self-sell already. The testimonial close that salesmen use to persuade you (see all of our other satisfied customers?) is one of the most powerful self-sells now in social media. You’re executing a self-sell testimonial close every time you hit a review site on a product or service, or read a blog post about someone else’s experience that you want.

You self-sell with an opportunity cost close every time you upgrade a piece of gear in World of Warcraft, justifying that the stats on an improved item, no matter how small the improvement actually is, is worth the opportunity cost of slogging through another Violet Hold in quest blue gear.

You self-sell all the time with a minor points close every time you fire up Twitter and say you’re really only going to just check really quick to see if anything interesting is happening, but only just for a minute.

We know these sales techniques work. They’re proven, they’re designed to manipulate minds and take advantage of blind spots in our human brains, in our emotional and rational makeups. Sales companies have been forcing crap into our homes and bodies since the day we were old enough to understand language…

… so why not take what we know works about manipulating other people and use the techniques to manipulate ourselves towards the outcomes in life we really want?

If you learn these sales techniques, you’ll find that you can sell yourself damn near anything. If you’re one of those folks who knows you have to make a change but you just can’t seem to ever get the momentum you need, learn the techniques and sell it to yourself. Sell it to yourself powerfully, and sell it to yourself often. It might be losing weight, going back to school to finish a degree, starting the martial arts, whatever.

Make up your mind and sell to yourself, because if you don’t, someone else will. When you’re done, you too will be saying, how did I ever live without this?

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Even more control can be exerted by controlling what your nonverbal language says. Watch how different people do seemingly mundane actions – opening doors (do they hold doors for others? if so, how?), shaking hands, sitting down in chairs. Does their body language convey a sense of control over themselves? Elegance? Casual ease? All of these little things matter as a collective way to measure what kind of person someone is.

What are you conveying in your own language, in your own style? Have a friend follow you around for a little while, especially at a conference or event, and just keep a video camera recording you. Record the little stuff, too, like getting up to get a cup of coffee or checking your email.

Watch the footage of yourself and ask yourself what habits you have that aren’t conveying the kind of impression you want to convey. Ask yourself if the habits you have are reinforcing in others a perception that you no longer want attached to yourself. Are you careless in your body language? Sloppy? Timid? What don’t you want to be any more?

Next, try this experiment: determine what impressions you want to make on other people. If you want to be perceived as a competent, effective policeman, find as much material to study like video footage and on-the-street observation as you can to isolate the behaviors that those you perceive as effective perform. If you want to be perceived as a successful public speaker, what cues and behavioral traits do you see and can you model?

Extend it a step further and look at how your successful role model operates in an online capacity. If you’re going for the respected dignitary or celebrity, what do the folks you deem successful say and do online? If you’re going for the rock musician persona, drunk tweeting is not only appropriate but expected – consider doing so even if you’re stone cold sober, for example. How often do the people you believe to be successful blog, for example? What do they blog about? What do their profiles say about themselves online?

Take your new modeled behaviors out for a test drive. It can be incredibly difficult to effect change when those who know you best are accustomed to (and therefore locking you into) certain behaviors. Go to a conference or meetup where the majority of people have no idea who you are, and test out the traits you’re modeling. Start up a different online account and model some behaviors. See what a new you might look, feel, and act like. The opportunities to interact with people you don’t know and change who you are as a result are more limitless than ever.

The ultimate mind control trick is on you – and that’s a good thing. We as human beings respond to feedback loops. The more the people around us tell us we’re worthless, the more we begin to behave and believe that we’re worthless. The more that people around us tell us that we’re a rockstar, the more we begin to behave and believe that we’re a rockstar. You aren’t told by the company you keep – you become the company you keep. Changing the perceptions of those around you of the kind of person you are changes how they treat you, which in turn changes your perception of yourself.

Decide who you want to be. Decide who you know, who you have access to, that’s successful (in whatever success means to you), determine what behaviors they have that contribute to the perceptions of their success, and try them out for yourself.

Try it!

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First, you have to have an idea of what to re-run. Fire up your statistics package of choice. I’ll be using Google Analytics. Now, go to Content > Top Content. In the filter, type in the earliest year that you’ve got content for – in my example below, I typed in /2007/. Now look at the top content data you see. You’re looking at content for that year that search engines and visitors to your site still consider relevant today.

This is very important. Don’t use the data from way back then as a starting point because what was important and hot then may not be now. Use today’s data set (last 30 days) but filter on your post dates. I should add that if your URL structure doesn’t include the date in it, I have no idea how you’d do this. You’d have to know which of your older stuff was still popular.

Take a look at the list. Which stuff is evergreen, which stuff is still popular long after other content has gone to content heaven, in terms of audience interest?

Find a couple of these pages and pop them open in your editor. Re-read them, re-edit them, spruce them up, make any relevant updates to them, add links to your newer content that might have reference the older content, and then make a new summary post on your blog about the older pages you’re going back to.

Now, you may be saying, why shouldn’t I just copy and paste into a new blog post, so that it appears as brand-new content on my site? Those of you who mentally replied, “because older pages have valuable inbound links you want to keep”, pat yourselves on the back. Go back and spruce up, but leave the old URLs alone so that any existing links don’t break. You’ll also revive older comments and discussions if you leave the existing post alone and just shine a spotlight on it.

Remember this above all else when it comes to old content: it’s old to you, and probably you alone. In the ever-increasingly hypernetworked world we live in where new friends find us all the time, what you think is old content (assuming it’s not time-sensitive, like news, obviously) is brand new and fresh to them. Help them find your best stuff, no matter when it was written.

Here’s my old stuff highlight for now: How to build a video or camera stabilization rig for about $7. Still good after all these years, and for the very few of you who have been reading me for that long, did you remember this post existed, or was it just as much a refresher for you as it is new content to the newer friends reading it for the first time?

Good luck in dusting your old stuff off, and I look forward to reading what I’ve missed.

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Here’s why your personal brand sucks. Here’s why you’re trying to be a clone of Chris Brogan or CC Chapman or Whitney Hoffman and failing miserably at it. It’s not because you’re stupid (well, most of you aren’t, except for the folks who repeatedly get phished on Twitter for clicking on “LOL iz this u” links – yeah, you’re stupid), it’s not because you’re boring (again, most of you aren’t, but if your Twitterstream is filled only with “New Blog Post: …” – yeah, you’re boring), it’s because you’ve failed to distill your essential quality.

Your essential quality is something that transcends any particular job, technology, platform, or idea. Your business card may say that you’re a database engineer or a sales associate or the Vice President of Strategy and Innovation, but that’s not what’s essential about you. What’s essential about you is a quality, a trait, a method of working in the world that is unique to you and very difficult to even put into words, much less copy.

Your essential quality will take you years, possibly a good chunk of your life, to even realize. Once you know it, though, once you find it and cultivate it, you rise rapidly above your peers. You rocket past them because you know this strength of yours and can focus what you do in your life to feed it and deliver results that no one else can deliver.

It’s taken me close to two decades to figure out my own. Put into words succinctly, I’m really good at playing with blocks. I used to call it derivative thinking, but that’s largely meaningless outside my skull. What I mean by playing with blocks is that I can see all these different pieces of systems and put them together in new and different ways. This lets me do things like make odd Twitter videos combining tools and techniques together. This lets me be a competent martial arts practitioner, breaking free of only pre-arranged routines to use the tools in whatever fits the moment. This lets me talk to people of wildly different professions and trades and find ways to make whatever I have work with their businesses, and vice versa.

What you’re good at, what your essential quality is, what makes you who you are isn’t something anyone else can tell you. Others can’t see inside your head, just the results that you produce – and how you got to those results is different from your perspective than anyone else’s. Defining and refining your essential quality takes a lot of introspection and a lot of self-honesty, because as you investigate yourself more and more, you realize all the things that you’re not good at, some of which may have defined your very identity in the past.

You’ll have to let go of an awful lot that you think is you. For years, I thought I was a damn good technology professional. I’m not. I’m a certain kind of thinker whose essential quality happens to work well with technology. In the past half decade or so, I’ve thought I was a marketer, and heck, other people think so and even made me a professor of marketing. I’m not. My essential quality works well in marketing, too. In another decade, who knows what I’ll be doing, but it will have that essential quality at its core.

The one suggestion I can offer if you have the guts, the bravery, to set out on that journey is to find a creative outlet for expression of some kind. Photography, art, music, dance, playing World of Warcraft, writing, speaking, martial arts, anything that lets you express yourself will do, because it will help you to pull out of yourself the various ways you express your essential quality. The process of figuring out what I’m good at took years. Most of it came from practicing the martial arts, because the method in which I train is ideally optimized for this kind of thinking, which means I get to practice the pure form of how I think on a regular basis in a way that delivers instant, unmistakeable feedback. Your method of figuring out what you’re good at will differ, but I recommend it be something expressive so that you can see your essential quality in action.

Once you figure out your essential quality, your personal brand will take care of itself. You won’t even need to name it or publicize it on your blog or Facebook page, because you’ll be so damn good at being yourself that your name will become your brand. Folks might not even be able to put into words why it is they like you or want to work with you. They’ll just know that they do, that they want to be around you, that they want to work with you, hire you, marry you, etc.

You will transcend personal branding itself, and ultimately live the life you were meant to live: yours.

Good luck on your journey. It’s long, but the destination is worth the journey.

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Ever listened to someone recount a tale of legitimate good work and say that it wasn’t a big deal?

Don’t ever do this to yourself. Why?

Part of our personal power is our ability to draw upon not just the knowledge but the emotion and energy of past successes to generate future success. Tap into all that was, all that you’ve done, all that you’ve achieved in order to firm your resolve against future obstacles. You know in your mind, in your heart, in your spirit that you do have what it takes to win in tough situations, that you can pull victory from the jaws of defeat.

Unless.

Unless you diminish and demean your past successes with diminishing words under the excuse of modesty. Unless you undermine your own past power by calling it nothing, by calling it a little thing, by saying that what you have done wasn’t a big deal. The words you use to describe what you’ve achieved color how you perceive those achievements. If you were trying to set up your life for failure, for frustration, for mediocrity, this is exactly the approach you’d take – amplify your failures and diminish your successes in your own mind, through your own words, and failure is guaranteed.

Modesty has its place, to be sure. One of the traits of the folks in my life who I consider to be very successful, very powerful people is that they happily acknowledge and celebrate their successes, modestly outwardly but strongly inwardly. When praised, very often their response is simply sincere thanks. When I receive praise, I copy my role models and simply express thanks and gratitude externally.

Internally is a different story. I reaffirm successes, relish the feeling of winning, and use it to steel myself against future battles. “I think I can” becomes “I know I can, because I have and I celebrate those past victories as the key to even more victory in the future!”

The habit of celebrating your successes becomes even more important when you face enemies who will seek to make you doubt yourself. If you live in the habit of saying that a success was nothing, an enemy need only encourage and amplify those words to steamroll you. They face a much tougher battle when you bear the shield of confidence built from past success (and celebration of it) and their efforts simply bounce off you. These enemies need not just be in the boardroom or on the golf course – they can be your own internal demons as well. Celebrate your successes and every additional success diminishes their sway over you.

Make sure you celebrate your successes, lest you rob yourself of the power you will need to drive even more success ahead.

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Don’t just be thankful for the things you have in your life that you appreciate.

That’s good and a good start, but if you want to take it to a different level, ask yourself this:

How can I create or foster more of what I’m thankful for in the world?

• If you’re thankful for family and friends, how can you help reinforce strong family and good friends in the world for others?
• If you’re thankful for health, how can you bring a healing presence to those around you?
• If you’re thankful for wealth, how can you help others achieve what you’ve done?

In short, what do you stand for? What do you want to see more of? How can you create more of that in the world, in your community, in your life?

As you do your prayers, meditations, gatherings, and offerings over the holiday (or any day, really), think about that cornucopia on the table. From nothingness appears a Pilgrim’s Bounty of what’s needed to bring life, health, and prosperity to your life.

Ask how you can create more of that for yourself and everyone you care about and the universe (or *.deity if that’s your belief system) may just agree to a win-win situation in which everyone gets more of what they want and need in your life.

Happy Pilgrim’s Bounty!

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I had the pleasure and privilege to present at the Web 2.0 Open conference in New York City recently on the topic of Doing More With Less, a topic near and dear to everyone. The session itself is based on so much of what I’ve learned from Mark Davis of the Boston Martial Arts Center and his teacher, Stephen K. Hayes. Here’s the funny part about the session – I can’t replicate any significant part of it here on the blog.

The content is entirely provided by you, the audience. I’m more or less just a tour guide. No slides, no PowerPoint, not even a real presentation, just a guided experience in which you and your fellow audience members discover new things about yourselves.

I called the session the most technologically advanced session of the entire conference, and in a way, it’s true. The human technology was what we explored. I made the analogy that gear and tech will only get you so far. Hand a rank amateur a $50 point and shoot camera or a $2,000 DSLR and you’ll get about the same number of lens cap photos. The gear and tech can improve bad photos potentially to mediocre, but that’s about it.

Conversely, a truly skilled photographer? Give them either camera and they’ll create amazing works of art that nearly ignore the limitations of gear. Don’t believe me? Check out the cameraphone category on Flickr to see some amazing works.

In the session, we investigated four areas of doing more with less:

1. Redefining less. With friends, we examined what less was with our training partners, and then looking at less from a different perspective to gain some mental freedom from a poor resources mindset.

2. Finding authentic self. With friends, we examined things that have always been a part of our lives and how we can align ourselves and our careers, lives, and businesses with our inherent strengths to do more, plus looked at the difference between our current selves and our superhero selves.

3. Reclaiming responsibility. With friends, we examined aspects of our life that appear as luck, good or bad, and how we can change our perceptions from luck to being in charge of our lives.

4. Empowering our minds. We examined in a distilled fashion the idea of using your iPod to control your emotional state.

It’s nearly impossible to convey online any significant part of the experience, so if you weren’t able to make it, I hope you can attend a future version of this, or attend the seminars and workshops given by my teachers. If you were there, I look forward to reading your feedback in the comments.

You can also pick up some of the source material from Stephen K. Hayes as well.

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