July 31, 2013

Dealing With a Personal Development Information Overload

Information overload is very common for people who are into personal development. It’s essentially when you’ve learned so much theory that your mind is overburdened and so it’s difficult to put it into practice.

What happens is that you consume a lot of conceptual information from books, articles, trainings and so on, and then instead of applying it, you get even more information; and more, and more. And when you finally decide to start applying it, you find out there is too much competing information in your head, to many concepts, ideas and voices telling you what to do.

You can recall everything and nothing at the same time, you don’t know where to begin with practicing, you feel confused and overwhelmed. So you become paralyzed and all that information goes to waste, because you don’t actually apply any of it to build real-life skills or attitudes.

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I think that personal development information overload is very common because many of us, when we decide to improve an area of our life, we want to get all the information from the get go, to make sure he have any hypothetical scenario covered, and only then start using it.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t work very well. There needs to be a continuous balance between theory and practice in personal development, otherwise is gets disrupted. Considering this, here are my top 3 pieces of advice for dealing with a personal development information overload.

1. Take a Clean Break

Obviously, you’ll need to stop learning new concepts in order to prevent burdening your head with even more info. However, at first it’s also good to not try and jump into practice right away either. Instead, it’s best to take a short but clean break from both theory and practice.

You see, if you have too much information and you wanna start applying it, you’re like a person who ate an excessively big meal and wants to go jump in the swimming pool. With all that food in their stomach, it won’t be a pleasant experience. What they need is to wait a while and give time to some of that food to digest.

Similarly, you need to wait a while and give time to some of that excess information to go out. Your mind will quickly begin doing a cleaning job in your memory, dump some of the surplus info and keep and reorganize the info it sees as the most relevant.

This does indeed mean that you’ll lose some of the knowledge you acquired, but it’s much better this way. Because with less knowledge, your mind is more flexible, it can dig through the knowledge faster and it’s much easier to apply it.

2. Select Just a Few Ideas to Practice

When you start to practice the theory, don’t try to use it all at once. It’s too much. Your actions will be all over the place and you’ll make little progress in terms of building new habits.

The best route is to select only a few key ides and concentrate on applying them until you feel they’ve become a part of you and you now employ them naturally. If for example you want to be more outgoing socially, pick just 2-3 techniques and apply them. Then select a few more ideas and apply them, and so on.

This is the step-by-step approach to personal development, which is much more effective than trying to make one big jump and be done with it. The human mind works best if it focuses on a few simple tasks at a time. With this approach you’ll make the most progress in the long-run.

3. Set a Theory/Practice Ratio for the Future

In the future you’ll want to prevent information overload from happening again. This implies keeping a balance between how much theory you learn and how much you practice it.

The top way I know to achieve this is by setting a theory/practice ratio that you find convenient and sticking to it. For instance you can set a 1 to 5 hours ratio, which means that after 1 hour of conceptual studying, you need to spend 5 hours applying what you’ve learned. And you only allow yourself to go back to acquiring more info after the 5 hours of practice.

There is no universally perfect ratio; you’ll have to find one that works for you and your personal development goals. Just keep in mind that whatever ratio you pick, it’s key to have relatively short periods of learning theory followed by much longer periods of putting it into practice.

One of the perks of setting such ratios it that it forces you to be selective about what you study, since you’ve put a strict constraint on your studying time. This in turn means that you’ll be particularly picky about what you learn and you’ll be much more concerned with the quality of the information you get.

You’ll want to learn from the experts, you’ll be more willing to pay for information if it’s more valuable than free information, and the benefits will show in the results you’ll obtain consistently.

Your self-growth will be real and effective; you’ll see your behavior, your emotions and your life improve day by day, and you’ll enjoy every moment of it.

PS: I recently wrote 2 articles for DatingAdvice.com. One article is about making women notice you, the other is on how to make a girl laugh. Check them out.

Image courtesy of Will Lion

Filed Under: Personal Development, Success Tagged With: , , , , Leave a Comment
May 13, 2011

Dealing with an Attention Whore

An attention whore can be a pain in the ass. This person (either man or woman), due to their deep-seated need for validation from others, will often try aggressively to takeover any social setting.

Their extraversion, theatricality, verbal skills and desperate desire to woo people often makes an attention whore quite loud, pushy and annoying. You just want to either get them to shut up and chill once in a while, or to hit them with a blunt object.

Unfortunately, most of the impulses we may have when dealing with an attention whore will not yield positive results. There are however, effective strategies to handle an AW. Here are the four that, in my experience, work best.

1. Start with a Reality Check

First off, ask yourself this question: “Is this person’s attitude bothering me because 1) they’re loud and aggressive, or because 2) they’re getting more attention from others than me?”

You see, I frequently notice that shy people have a problem with attention whores due to envy. An attention whore is outgoing and social, which is something they’re not. An AW often grabs attention in group settings, while they’re getting ignored.

If the second answer to the question above applies in your case, then the best strategy is not to try and disarm the attention whore. The best strategy is to focus on becoming more outgoing. The AW may make it hard for you to be social, but they are not truly the issue here. You are.

2. Ignore, Divide and Conquer

I think that one of the worst things you can do is to give or appear to give your full interest to an attention whore. This only feeds their exacerbated sense of entitlement and makes them even more obnoxious.

You want to moderate the AW and you do this by habitually ignoring them. This means that you’ll sometimes phase out while they’re talking, act as if you don’t care very much, even interrupt and start talking over them. Be assertive; don’t get trapped in mindless conversation.

In group settings, one of the best things you can do is to divide and conquer. Let’s say you’re in a set of five people and one of them is an attention whore. While the AW is talking, turn towards one of the people next to you and start a conversation with them. Thus, you’re breaking the group into subgroups and dividing the attention.

3. Tease Them

One strategy I particularly enjoy using with attention whores is to verbally indicate their tendency to take over a conversation and to tease them about it. For example, I’ll say something like: “Wow! You sure like to talk! Have you’ve been talking for like 30 minutes straight?”

This strategy works wonders because it subtly suggests that the other person is an AW, that you know it and that you’re not going to tolerate it. This kind of confident and clever humor is more effective than becoming aggressive, and a lot more effective than simply shutting up.

4. Let Them Go

In the long term, I think the proper thing to do with a true attention whore is to let them out of your life. All the drama and the struggle of dealing with an AW are not worth it. Cut them out of your social circle.

Occasionally, this is harder to do because your social circles overlap, or you’re in the same department at work or something like that. However, even is such cases, you can find smart ways to manage social dynamics and not deal with them too often.

The one thing you don’t want to do is go into a never-ending psychological battle with an attention whore, trying to outsmart them, dominate them, ruin their reputation or steal their attention. You’ll only end up looking really insecure or an attention whore yourself.

My belief is that a fulfilling interpersonal life gravitates around emotionally healthy people. This is the kind of person you want to be and the kind of persons you want to surround yourself with. Any other way simply will not do.

Image courtesy of Rooney

Filed Under: Attitude, Communication Skills Tagged With: , , 32 Comments
September 13, 2010

Dealing with Envious People

Reach a high enough level of success, skill or happiness, and you find out there are a lot of little green monsters around you, many of which you used to call friends, colleagues, partners or collaborators.

Since envy is a common and tricky interpersonal occurrence, I believe that dealing with envious people effectively is one of the important people skills to master. The primary thing to be acquainted with is not technique, but the fundamental philosophy of handling envious people. This is what I’ll focus this article on.

Reality Check

Before you think about dealing with envious people, answer this question: Are they really envious of you? You see, one thing I’ve noticed coaching people to improve their people skills is that in a many cases, envy is a false diagnostic.

What’s really going on is that a person has a better image of their skills or success than it’s warranted, so they act all arrogant and they expect special treatment. When this special treatment does not happen, the person wrongfully concludes that people are envious of them.

Here’s an example: a recruiter who believes they are the best recruiter in the company and should get the most important recruitment projects. However, their manager accurately believes that this person is not the best recruiter and gives them regular recruitment projects. So, the recruiter decides that their manager is just envious.

This is why it’s good to open your eyes really wide, notice what’s really going on and then decide if it’s a case of people green with envy or rather you being a self-righteous pain in the ass.

Putting Envious People in One of Two Boxes

If you decide that you’re dealing with real envy, the next thing I recommend is to think about those people who are envious of you and their real power to have a practical negative impact over you. Based on this, put them into one of two boxes:

  1. The Harmless Box. These are the people who besides making some bad jokes and not liking you very much don’t have the power or the guts to actually do something which can harm you.
  2. The Potential Threat Box. These are the people who do have enough power and nerve to potentially harm an aspect of your life, such as a work colleague who is very well trusted by all the top management in the company.

Ignore, Ignore, Ignore

The people in the first box are the people you just want to ignore. Let their jokes and passive-aggressive comments be like spears passing through water. There is no real harm they can do and often, if they see their comments have no effect on you, they eventually back off and continue hating you in silence.

By defending yourself in front of them or becoming passive-aggressive yourself, you are giving these people more importance than they deserve. Many of them are hopping this will happen, because they derive power not from real results, but from manipulative, power games.

Address Them Head On

The people in the second box, they are a different scenario. Since they can actually sabotage your career, relationships or life, you want to deal with them as soon as you notice comments or behaviors that suggest envy.

The first approach I recommend is talking to them. Point their conduct, express your honest opinions in a tactful way and seek to get their perspective on things. Yes, if your communication style is good enough, this does work and you can get the other person to back down.

If this approach fails, it’s time to put into play one of my favorite people skills: cutting this person’s power over you. This means you change your environment and your social dynamics so the envious person no longer has power to affect you.

One person I know who had an envious manager did so by becoming a good friend with and earning the trust of their manager’s manager. Another person with an envious manager did so by quitting their job and finding another one. Alternatives do exist; the essence is to act on them.

Envious people can be a bother, but they don’t have to. Know how to deal with them wisely, have the confidence and the people skills to do so, and they become insignificant; which is how I think envious people deserve to be.

Image courtesy of Darwin Bell

Filed Under: Attitude, People Skills, Relationships Tagged With: , , 42 Comments