The start of my virtuous life

I recently finished working through the best self-help book that I have yet come across. "Ab Heute erfolgreich" (Successful from Today on) by German trainer and coach Alfred Stielau-Pallas. What makes the book so effective is the approach to read just one chapter per week (I usually did on Sunday) and then practice its teachings for an entire week. I liked this so much that sometimes I took a week off from the book to practice another important thing that I just had learned or been reminded of.
One of the many great ideas the book contains is Benjamin Franklins concept of 13 virtues which he practices one week per virtue for his entire life. (Going through all of them four times a year.) When I read this chapter I instantly thought that this would be a great way to continue the "weekly focus" which I liked so much about the "success book" (as I like to call it). But I also realized that Franklin's virtues aren't just right for me and the success book's practices are better, but still not completely reflecting my own virtues. So I knew from the moment of reading that I would have to come up with my own list.
Now, this actually wasn't easy and I procrastinated over it quite a bit. Fortunately I had already decided to go on sailing holidays for the May day long week-end and since sailing only takes a few hours each day, that's the prefect opportunity to do such kind of important work in the morning. (I only like be outside in the afternoon and evening anyways!)

So I came up with my own list of virtues and some practical exercises to go along with them, because I know too well, that just focusing on an abstract topic alone doesn't make it appear. It always needs concrete actions to take and finding those is not easy either. In fact, I plan to still spend at least one half-hour of focused thinking time per week to customize and concretify that week's virtue.

To start off, I wrote down some virtues which I think I already embody perfectly and which I don't want to practice in a focused way. Of course, I hope to still get better at those virtues, but I practice them spontaneously often anyway, so it doesn't feel just to give them even more weight. Those intrinsic virtues are Positive Outlook on life, Appreciation of small things, Gratefulness for what I have (and what I additionally get on each new day).

• Not criticizing myself or others and instead focus on what's great about myself and others.
• Thriftiness, frugality, and humility.
• Humor.
• Curiosity.
• Creativity.

If you, dear Reader, now feel that I am at little arrogant and presumptuous here, praising myself so much, I can only reply that this is a simple exercise of my second virtue! While I hope to be well-aware of my shortcomings, I simply decided to focus on my strengths first! As the success book says: accept and love yourself as you are and only try to improve yourself one weakness at a time. I also want to add that this list is not set in stone. After each iteration through all my virtues (and especially after the first time through) I might decide to move any item from the "already perfect" list into the focus rotation list.

But now, let's get to my focus virtues. For each one, let me briefly call it out, define it, say why I want it, and sketch some actual concrete practice exercises.

Mindfulness: The full and untainted awareness of what I am doing, what I am thinking, and what I am feeling. Also the knowledge that my thoughts can be mistaken or can focus on entirely unimportant things. And the knowledge that all feelings are temporary and fleeting and most of them even go by without any action by myself. There's actually a lot more to say about mindfulness and there might be better definitions, but let me just explain why I intentionally put this in the number one spot. You might know the saying "what you can't measure, you can't manage." Obviously what you're not aware of is even harder to improve!

As with every other virtue I want to practice mindfulness every day (and in every moment) and specifically I want to keep up my daily sitting meditation practice and weekly visits to a meditation group. During the regular mindfulness focus week I might then do extra activities like trying out new kinds of meditation, doing longer stretches of meditation or on different times of the, or visit new practice groups, read or reread some books or articles on meditation, and finally try to plan the week so that every activity can be done in a mindful fashion. 

Empathy and Listening to others: Everybody loves talking and by listening we give the gift of our attention to the other person. It's a great way to become liked and also to learn a lot. For practice, revise some deep questions to ask others, don't be afraid of silence and long breaks to give them room to think and answer, and finally be aware of how much you are talking yourself and keep it to the minimum of things that the other person actually wants or needs to hear. 

Compassion and Listening to myself: This is based on the idea of a silent retreat for one week, but still going to work. I will restrict myself to only professionally needed conversation, and spend my private life in complete isolation for this week. While that sounds really extreme, it is just one week after all and I don't have that many private interaction with people anyway. I think that by offsetting such a Silent Week with its opposite –a Connection Week– I might even get more socializing and certainly higher-quality socializing than by just floating along through life.

Generosity: You might have heard about that psychological study which showed that people actually become happier by spending money on others instead of spending it on themselves. So there's not much here to say: just do at least one good deed per day and don't let it just be tipping generously. Spend some quality-time to think creatively about possible gifts. When you buy something, think: who of my friends or acquaintances might like that, too? Sometimes I just buy two of a thing and later decide who to gift the spare one to! When you see some advertising, think: who of my friends might like this? or something like this? 

Creativity is important here! Don't just dismiss an initial thought because you don't think any of your friends will like it. Just continue a theme with a chain of associations until you get to something that will actually be appreciated. For instance, when I see another beautiful Porsche car at the traffic light, I might think of a friend who's going on a road trip (be it by car or bike or by hitchhiking doesn't matter here!) Now I can think of anything that my friend might need for that trip, be it a map, a guidebook, a dictionary, a scarf, or some nice tires for the bike. 

Decisiveness: Now we get to the core of self-improvement and to the harder stuff (at least for me). I grew up as a rather indecisive person and liked to go with the flow and with the opportunities that present themselves. One of the big things I have learned from the success book is that decisions just have to be made to get anywhere. Going with the flow only takes you where others want you to go or think or should go, but finding your own way requires to make decisions! I was so very fortunate to have read a great (despite the cheesy title) book on decision making just before starting the success book. I found it very helpful to have some decision-helpers (like simply sketching up a pros-and-cons list). It's also important for me to avoid procrastinating on decisions by asking myself "until when do I need to decide that? and what additional information do I really need to decide well?" I can also unblock my own undecidedness in a question by setting myself a timebox of five to 30 minutes (or more for harder decisions) and use that as quality thinking time just for this one decision. 

But even with all those techniques (and many more in the decisions-book), I can still be in a circle of thoughts without realizing that a decision is needed. Therefore it is important to regularly practice explicit decision making in the hope that it will become more and more automated with time.

Vision and Planning: After a strategic decision is made, nothing will happen unless I have some concrete action-steps that I can follow. That's why setting aside quality time for planning things is so important. I also include "vision" in this point because planning becomes much more powerful if it's done for medium or long-term goals. If I plan a project for three months or even a year then I can include many more cool things in it, while still being in sight of a clear finish line. I am not sure, whether a focus week is the best way to practice this, but since the topic is so important, I just mention it here.

Order and Finishing small projects: This one is also very important and fits perfectly to be the end spot in the list. I enjoy creative chaos as much as I like some order and having one week per quarter year where I really clean up, sort through things, tie loose ends, and absolutely don't start anything new (unless it takes less than, say, thirty minutes) seems like a perfect compromise. This is also a great ime to decide what to do with projects that have been stagnating for a while. Do I want to finish something (and, if yes, to what degree?) or just archive it? Also it's great to have a "clean house" before starting off with new plans for a new era of my life...

Finally, there are some other virtues or focus which do not fit well with the weekly rotation, but I want to mention them anyways:

• Most importantly for me, there is reading text books and writing my blog (often inspired by what I have read). I try to read some pages of a book every week and write a blog post for at least every book that I've read.
• Next, there is learning new skills.
• And finally, there is finding role models, mentors, and advisers and spending quality time with them.

While reading and writing works well since I resolved to do it more regularly about a year ago, the other two items need some more thinking about how I'll go about them. But this post is long enough already, isn't it? Let me know in the comments if you are inspired by this or not. ;-)

A stay at Plum Village, Mindfulness Practice Center, off-season

Already when I started meditating a little more than a year ago, I heard of the concept of "meditation retreat" or "going to a monastery" and I found it so fascinating that I also wanted to do it. Since I had hoped that my girl friend at the time would come with, I had delayed my trip, but this month I finally made it. During the last year, I had already found that meditation has helped me a lot, but I also sensed that there is a lot more there to attain. So I went to Plum Village very enthusiastically last week: to deepen my practice, to find fellow practitioners, to meet monks and nuns and generally see what it's like. And it was wonderful!

Since there’s a lot which happened inside and outside my mind, I’ll just focus on few topics here and describe them with a bit of detail. (The link above already contains a lot of the overall basic information…) One important thing to keep in mind is that during summer-retreat season there’s lot’s more people and also all the families with kids, so the atmosphere is probably quite different from what I experienced off-season: less people and more of them had previous experience with Plum Village or where staying for a longer period of time. 

Daily Activities: the sample schedule of a "normal day" applies only to three days out of four in the week, because 

• there is a reduced schedule on arrivals and departure day (the monks do "mindful work" either receiving or seeing off guests or doing stuff around the village), 
• there are two "Days of Mindfulness" (Thursday and Sunday when I was there) where monastics and visitors all gather in one of the hamlets to hear a lecture (see below) together, share a formal lunch, and have mixed Dharma sharing (also see below). On Sundays there are also a lot of visitors coming just for the day (which I think is a really good way to spend a Sunday) and to my surprise even Thursday had a lot of external visitors.
• and finally there is one lazy day.

First of all, why people go to retreats like this:

• to pick up positive energy from nature, the calm and silence, mindful being (eating, walking, rituals, simple work), and all the wonderful people around (lay and monastic alike).
• to deal with specific or unspecific problems in their lives. Buddhists would call it “deal with suffering”, but the term really doesn’t matter.
• to figure out what they want to do with their life. Instead of travelling around the world, travelling their inside world, so to say. Although I met several people who actually travelled Europe or the World and included one or more weeks at the monastery in their travels. Many of them had already done retreats in one of the Plum Village offspring practice centers (for example at EIAB in Germany, AIAB in Hongkong, or Plum Village Thailand) or retreats held by travelling monastics around the world (for example in Toronto or Malaysia).
• to develop their character, become more skillful, become a better person.
• and again, do all this learning and growing in an environment which is very relaxing, laid-back, and free from stress. Not just external big stress, but also all the small stresses of human interaction, especially if you decide to do it as a silent retreat.

During my last year of mindfulness I had known several “kinds” of meditation, but they were all basically sitting meditation only differing in what I do with my thoughts I what I focus my attention on. (Notable exception: cycling meditation where I focus on the movement of my feet in order to stop my thoughts going wild.)

At Plum Village I discovered a whole lot of new meditation practices:

• The first and most important practice is breathing with the mantra “I have arrived. I am truly home.” to remind ourselves to be in the present moment, to feel our feelings, whatever we do. This practice spans through all of our daily activities which we want to conduct mindfully, keeping in touch with our breathing.
• Walking meditation: appreciate nature, appreciate our breathing of fresh air in nature, imagine to walk with someone holding their hand (ex: someone who has died, someone who is far away, someone who is in difficulty).
• Sitting meditation: enjoy sitting there! enjoy your breath. watch your thoughts, watch your feelings and you impermanent they are and how they disappear.
• Working meditation: do simple tasks around the village (like cleaning, picking up fruit or nuts, making jam, carry things around, …) and do them mindfully, that is work silently and with your attention going to your work or your breath whenever you notice that you’re thinking of something else.
• Mindful eating: recite the five contemplations (or your own katha). eat in silence for at least the first 20 minutes. concentrate on the taste of the food. (even if it becomes boring! overcome the boredom and start sensing something deeper!)
• Listening meditation: one of the most important and difficult applications of mindfulness in practice! listen to someone without judging, without formulating your own answers, without reacting emotionally. instead just concentrate on listening. when you feel your own thoughts or feelings arising, just ask yourself: what kind of feeling is it? when did it start appearing? and then go back to listening. (or notice your breathing, if you need calming down.)
• Listening to the bell: whatever we are doing, the bell calls us back to feel our breath, our body, our feelings, and our purpose, so we don’t get distracted by what’s going on around us.

To close the circle, all those forms of meditation serve the purpose of bringing mindfulness from the pure (sitting) meditation sessions out into your life, especially when dealing with other people and the emotions caused by this.

I think that during the themed retreats (up to three or four weeks, dates announced each year), which are led personally by Thich Nhat Hanh (“Thay”), all those kinds of meditations are explained in the Dharma talks. I came for stay in-between seasons and there was only short introduction to the village’s practices on Saturday morning (and a mini-short personal intro when I signed in on Friday). Those non-themed stays are thus more for people who have some previous experience with mindfulness and meditation. If you need more info just ask any monk (or if you are female, any nun) during the not-completely-silent times of the retreat. When I was there, many of the lay guests where long-term stays (many of them aspiring to become monks) so I could also ask them.

Dharma lectures (or Dharma talks) are giving by Thay himself when he is present at Plum Village. At my visit he was travelling on his North America Tour and holding a themed retreat on “Finding our true home”. I think the retreat had a Dharma talk or Q&A by Thay every day, while the ordinary (non-themed) retreats only have Dharma talks on the Days of Mindfulness, that is, every Thursday and Saturdays, when there are also guests coming for just this one day. So during my stay, we viewed video-recordings of Thay’s sessions given the same week at Deer Park Park Monastery: one lecture and one Q&A.

One of the most transforming aspects of the practice are the Dharma Sharing sessions. I don’t want to describe them in detail here and just say that they are a wonderful occasion to practice deep listening (or mindful listening meditation) and to connect profoundly with other participants of the retreat. (Links: Purpose of Dharma Sharing, Rules of Dharma Sharing, Another list of Guidelines for Dharma Sharing)

Finally, one aspect I want to shed more light on is the “Noble Silence” and the Silent Retreats. Generally, Plum Village is both a place to relax and have fun as well as practicing complete silence and I think that their house rules provide a very good compromise for that:

• Noble Silence for everybody is every day from the (silent) evening meditation (8pm in the Fall schedule) until after breakfast the next morning (7pm). This notably includes the morning meditation (except of course the chanting and reciting during the ceremony) and all the free time in between which people use to walk between meditation hall, bed room, wash room, and dining hall. Since the schedule is always quite stable there is really no need to talk to anybody else or even wait for anybody else. Everybody just silently goes their way. If you really want to say “Hello” or rather “Good Night” and “Good Morning” to someone then just silently fold your hands and bow. :-)
• I have to admit that I sometimes broke this noble silence in the evening to ask if any of my six room mates needs to go to the wash room before I take one of my rather long showers. But otherwise, it worked quite well and especially in the morning I found it awesomely refreshing to be awake for two hours (5:30 to about 7:30) and be around nice people without need to talk to anybody.
• Self-chosen Noble Silence was also practiced by some people to different degrees. For example, some people (including all the aspiring monks) did all their daily walking around as walking meditation in silence. If they wanted to talk to somebody on the way, they’d just stop walking and gave that person their full attention. Some others simply chose to not start conversations and stay away from group conversations so they’d get a lot of silence for themselves.
• One nice example was a long-term staying musician who answered all my questions on where to find the lines and notes of the breathing songs and then, when my questions became unspecific and chatty, he told me that he is “actually trying to do three months of silence”. (For the curious: the songbook is A Basket of Plums and you can listen to the songs online, too.)
• Dharma Sharing and communal singing or of course exempt from noble silence, although someone could of course choose just not say anything during Dharma sharing and just use it to practice listening meditation!

To sum up, my stay at Plum Village was awesome, relaxing, and inspiring. And I met some people for whom it was very healing, too! One thing the stay inspired me to do is to visit the German Plum Village spin-off before I start paid work again. The European Institute of Applied Buddhism also hosts some monastics and is located in an old hospital within a park in the small town of Waldbröl (which is between Cologne and Frankfurt, or in higher resolution for the Germans: between Bonn and Siegen). I also want to connect with Sanghas in Berlin and generally with practitioners in Germany. But I think that after a while I’ll probably enjoy going back to the original Plum Village because it still seems to be the original thing!

PS: Here's a very interesting report of Plum Village during Summer Camp time with 800 visitors staying there!

a hobby that gives a sense of meaning... and progress

I always had sense of ambition about me that I couldn't explain or even understand myself. When I quit my first job to start working on a PhD (which I later abandoned), some coworkers expressed their non-surprise mentioning that they had sensed some kind of ambition in myself which I hadn't even noticed myself.
What I had noticed, however, is that I like a lot to accomplish things and my work in all the previous jobs has rarely provided me with accomplishments that made me really happy. Conversely, in my free time I am really having trouble to find activities which I enjoy so much that they "charge up my batteries" and compensate for stress I have at work. In fact, I have been looking for interesting hobbies to do ever since my first job and I only had slight success. Two things that worked, but only for a while were sailing (while I learned it and made a lot of progress) and building my own bicycles (but when I had four bicycles, this was enough and I stopped :-).

Currently meditation and personal development is my main "hobby": I meditate since more than a year and I can still feel progress. Additionally, the benefits of meditation radiate into my life and help me with work, relationships, and the things that need to be done for daily life. I also read more regularly now, books about happiness, meditation, finding and reaching goals in life. Those books make for meaningful "edutainment" because they inspire me to new ideas and also to try out new things in my own life.

It actually took me a long time to find this field of interest which both provides me with meaning and accomplishment. I remember that my first "hobby" interest starting in 2004/2005 when I was looking for my first job were trains and public transit systems in general. After many years of reading and thinking about this topic, I found that it just didn't provide me with any suitable way to contribute. I am not the kind of person who's an "activist" for anything and getting a job in the rail or transit industry wouldn't be much different than working in IT (with the additional hurdle of not having matching degrees). As a side note, I even worked at Berlin's public transit company for a while (in the IT dep't, unsurprisingly) and concerning the day-to-day work it wasn't so much different from my previous job in IT for banking.
Because of this, I consciously decided to look for other pastimes which better allow me to accomplish things... and at first I easily found that in the domain of bicycle making. It was really a good experience to "make" my own bicycles. Even though most of the making was just to screw pre-made parts together, with wheel-building from hubs, rims, and spokes being the most exiting part. And it's even better to ride those bikes regularly (or have friends and visitors ride them) and thus be reminded of having build them myself, which gives my a great sense of meaning in the world.
I also read a lot about bicycle gearing, especially epicyclic gears (also called "internal gears" which are usually "hub gears", although not all variants are in the wheel's hub). I had fun disassembling gears to see how they worked. Count the teeth of cog-wheels to calculate the resulting gear ratios. And I "invented" some new gearing mechanisms. But alas, I am not the person to actually go produce such new things (or have them produced or even get the design to a point where it can be produced) and I am even doubting that there would be many people interested in buying such a thing. In any case, this hobby also seemed like a dead end and so it was about a year ago when I decided that I wanted to go back to one of my early-youth pastimes and start again to program computers as a hobby -- but to cut a long story short. This didn't work either.

It is therefore that in the recent weeks (and especially after doing the "realise2" strengths test) I have come back to the viewpoint that it's probably best to have a hobby that is quite separate from work. I think that I could be actually quite happy doing programming for money, if I having something energizing (which uses my other strengths!) on the side and as a hobby.

So some weeks ago, I decided that reading on personal development and blogging about how different books and theories and practices relate to each other. (See my last post for an example.) And since then, I had the pleasure to play the "Jeu du Tao" (exists only in French, see taovillage.com) and to participate in a volunteer-organised self-development workshop and this made me realise how much fun this is and also how deeply meaningful it is to help each other in such a way. I find that this kind of activity uses a lot of my favorite skills:

• learning and understanding (through listening and asking good questions), 
• logical analysis (finding contradictions or synergies in people's self-perceptions), 
• creativity (finding good questions which are both revealing useful things and are confirming/probing what has been found and are of course non-offensive so that a trusted relationship is created)
• even more creativity (to come up with "homework" exercises and experiments for people to test their believes and get to know themselves better)

And there are many activities in this field which I could try and which seem like very energizing and meaningful activities to me:

• teaching about self-improvement, happiness, and personal development (most people don't read books, yet many still want to learn, so there's lots of potential here!)
• participating in self-improvement self-help groups
• doing one-on-one coaching to help people reach their goals (or find good goals!) or just get out of stuck situations

While this also may sound like a job description (for some kind of "community counselor" or an employee counselor in a large company), I think it makes a lot of sense to do this as a non-commercial exchange-based activity, because:

• a lot of people don't want to pay for such services because they don't trust people who are taking their money (fearing that the coach is more interested in keeping the clients coming than actually solving their problems)
• many people feel better talking about their personal issues with like-minded others instead of a professional. 
• participating in group-sessions with peers helps each person not just to learn, but also to contribute back, giving them a sense of meaning and more motivation to stick 
• I think that in a way, sharing your personal challenges and life aspirations is just like sex in that many people prefer doing it with a person they know well and who has the same stakes in it, rather than with a paid professional. Most of the world's personal advice is probably asked of and given by friends. You can understand my mission as making those friend-to-friend conversations more effective by adding some psychological knowledge and practice to them.

Of course I am not saying that the whole business of commercial coaching, counseling, and psycho-therapy is wrong. I simply think that there is also a need and purpose for a non-commercial peer-based alternative.

So that's my new hobby! I'll let you know how it goes :-)

Personal Development from inside out

Recently I heard a talk by Shir Nir of the Handel Group on Personal Coaching. What he explained was very consistent with my own experience in trying to better myself and also mirrors principles from cognitive-behavioral therapy and meditation. The key message is that our actions are triggered by our thinking (be it conscious or subconscious) and our thinking is shaped by our character. Instead of saying "character" Shir Nir actually makes a distinction between our traits and our believes which are two very different parts of our personality.
Personality traits are something that is basically inherited or formed in early childhood and almost never changes. It is things like being introvert or extravert or being heterosexual or homosexual. Although I used those very well-known dimensions for examples, the spectrum of traits is really much much broader and many traits have no name in common language or no precise name at all! Traits are very important, however, since it will always be easier to do this in accordance with your traits than "against your grain". So one very important part of personal development is to get to know yourself better and on a much more detailed level than simple categories like "introverted" or "hard-working" or whatever cliches our culture has to offer. Chade-Meng Tan in Search inside yourself calls this "high-resolution perception" and I find this term really appropriate. One key still to develop such a perception is to not categorize or judge experiences, but just see them plainly for what they are. Vipassana meditation is one method of learning this skill. Another method (or an additional method) could be to get feedback from many people with different perceptions and take each of those perceptions as a part of the truth without judging or categorizing it. (As you notice, this already requires the skill that you want to train, so some amount of meditation would probably be needed to get you started in the process.)

On the other side are your believes and this side is even more complicated. People usually separate believes into the categories of true or false and all your own believes are just what you consider true. However, many important statements are actually neither completely true or false and some are actually quite self-fulfilling: if you believe that you have a certain ability (or don't have it) then this influences your behavior in a way that makes your belief true. (Interestingly, positive believes (like "I can do this") are more likely to be true, since you will do that thing and then see whether you do it well or not. Whereas negative believes like "I can't do this" are much more self-fulfilling because you'll likely never sincerely try to do the thing.)
Trying to change your believes all by yourself is very hard because since you believes are just the things you assume to be true, there will be a lot of things which are really true (1+1=2, earth is round, ...) mixed up with things that might or might not be true. And what's more, of those believes that might be possible to change many are quite irrelevant to your goals. It's really hard to find one or two believes which are both possible to change and worth changing! Once you have found such a belief, then all you need to do is imagine a world in which this belief would not matter or its opposite would be true. Then you'll ask yourself what would be good actions to take in this world (actions that are not harmful in your current world, but beneficial in the other world) and you write down those actions and resolve to try them out. It's important to write down actions because in your day-to-day life you don't live in a parallel universe, so it would be very hard to remember those actions exactly as you planned to do them in the imagined world.
Once you've done the actions and see results that are beneficial to you, then your believe will start changing by itself. (This is not from Shir Nir's talk, but rather my naive understanding of cognitive-behavioral therapy.)

I think that the environment which you are in has a big influence on your believes and positive environments (like, for example, great company culture) can make a big difference in your life. However, this difference is also fleeting because you'll lose some or all of its beneficial effects once the environment changes again.

To create lasting change, in my opinion, there are only two ways: one is to have a really great personal coach, whom you trust and who uses the right method (and who understands you personally and who fits your style and whom you can afford, ...) and the other method is meditation. Meditation of course takes much longer, but it also creates very sustainable results. Meditation basically helps you become your own personal coach! Of course you can profit from having a meditation teacher, but in a way this is more like a train-the-trainer relationship. With meditation, it's always you who stays in control and you who's responsible. For your personal development. And for your life.

One Year of Meditation -- Accomplishments and the Road Ahead

It is just about one year now since I started to meditate regularly. My introduction and principal guide to the subject has been the Book Search Inside Yourself and it is also the intro book which I would most recommend to anybody curious about the subject.

I started meditation at a time where I suffered from some burnout and a short depression, so my initial goal was just to improve my mood, be more positive and less worked up about things. So during the first couple of months, I meditated with the mantra "calm and content", just repeating these words, as in "I am calm and content", because that's the state of mind I wanted to achieve. If you also want to try, just sit comfortably, close your eyes and thinking "calm" when breathing in, and "content" when breathing out. (If the phrase "I am calm and content" sounds like a lie to you, because your currently aren't, you can simply replace it with "I want to be calm and content". Whatever makes you not being calm might be truly unnerving, but it's the purpose of meditation to let go of such things for the moment of meditating and find the calm within yourself. Usually, when you open your eyes after that exercise, the outer non-calm will also have subsided a bit.)

After the first couple of months I stopped using my mantra and just meditated by concentrating on my breath or by "observing my thoughts" (a technique I learned from a fellow meditator in Berlin). Observing thoughts is very interesting, but it is also an invitation to get carried away by one's thoughts, so it's very important to notice this and go back to more basic forms of meditation where I just concentrate on breath and practice my focus on this.
Although I didn't use the mantra any more, it was still my motto and my main intention for meditation. That's why now, after one year of progress, I decided to focus on a new intention. But before telling you about it, I want to share some of the good outcomes I enjoyed.

First and foremost, meditation really helped me improve my mood. Depression went away, melancholy and lethargy have become far more seldom guests. And I think this worked for the following reasons:

• I am doing more things which I enjoy (and do them even if I have to overcome a little getting-off-my-butt resistance)
• I am doing less things which I don't enjoy
• if I have to do something which I don't enjoy, I am more conscious about my mood management, such as motivating myself (basically convince myself more deeply that I just have to get over it) and minimizing the pain by techniques such as breaking up bigger tasks, enjoy small successes, time-boxing work, and minimizing work to just what is necessary to get the job done. (for the last point, I 

Now, those are all techniques which I had known about before or they are so banal that you might wonder why it needs meditation to figure those things out? (Like, "do what you enjoy," haha, what else would one do?)

The answer to this is that meditation gives me a better self-awareness which means a much better knowledge of what exactly makes me feel good or feel bad. There's a whole science of "Miswanting" now (term coined by psychologist Daniel Gilbert, here's a paper about it, if you like to read science) and I think that meditation really helps to figure that stuff out. For one example, I don't like grocery shopping a lot and I often procrastinated doing it and tried to compensate by combining it with the pleasant activity of a bicycle tour, buying my groceries on the way back home. But as it turned out, this was a bad strategy: my biorhythm seems to prefer spending most of the day inside (reading, doing housework, cooking, and writing blog articles such as this one) and then go biking rather late in the evening, often coming back in the dark. Combining shopping with biking would mean that I can't bike at my preferred time (because shops will be closed on the way back and I don't want to shop on the way out and carry all my groceries through the summer heat for hours) and it also means that I can't go far away from the city, because I have to plan the route such that a store is on the way back. 

In the past, all those complications just demotivated me to go out at all and I didn't really know why. Now I know and I combine grocery shopping with other activities, such as grabbing a quick lunch outside. And for biking, I now more often invest some time on a train to go a little farther away from the city. Or I head directly towards the shortest and nicest way out of the city.

To conclude, I think that I am now somewhat more calm and definitely more positive and happy! Choosing my next meditation goal was very easy, because there are two other basic skills or attributes mentioned in the book, which seemed to be particularly lacking in my life. Therefore I decided to work during the next six months to improve my concentration and my resilience. But more on that in another post.

(By the way, I am planning this for six months because that's my preferred mid-term planning horizon ever since I read Tim Ferris' "Four-hour work-week". It's not that profound a book, but has some interesting tips nevertheless. So I try to plan almost nothing ahead of those six months, because I think when you do really adventurous and great things, they will change yourself so much that after six months, your priorities will be quite unpredictable from now. I find it quite funny to think that "agile software development" teaches something very similar: after each iteration delivered to the customers, you'll get new problems and desires which you couldn't have planned for at the beginning, that's why you should aim for short delivery cycles. But anyway, that's why just six months!)

What's the next small thing?

Here's one small habit I adopted recently which had a big impact on my life in the area of procrastination versus getting things done. There's a lot of tasks --like repairing things in the home or doing one's tax declaration-- which linger on my To Do list way longer than needed. The longer things sit there, th harder I imagine them to be. Whenever I think of such an item on the list, the first thing that comes to my mind is "I don't even know how to start on this, how can I ever finish?"

Now the magic trick that helps me get unstuck in this situation is to simply ask myself the question: "What's the first small step that I need to do to advance this issue?" Here are some examples for simple steps: For the tax situation I might need to research a specific question on how to declare something. The small step could be to google it, or look it up in a book, or call the tax office. Or the small step could be to make an appointment with a tax consultant. In a home repair issue, the small step might be to buy a specific replacement part or to write down the exact measures of the part needed. Usually this small step seems minuscule and I might have avoided it because it seems like a lot of effort already just to make a small step. But if I verbalize this step and make it a To Do item of its own, then it will be easier to do, I will plan a time when to do it, and after doing it, I get the feeling of checking off an entire item from my list. After checking off this first small step, I'll feel more optimistic about the entire issue at all and might even be motivated to do some more work on it without planning the individual steps.

On issues that are truly hard, there will be several points at which I get stuck and won't get moving without some investment of self-control. In each case, I just ask: "What's the next small thing to get done?" and this item will provide me guidance on the larger part. It doesn't feel well to be driven by such small-scale To Do list items --I really would rather like to work freely and intuitively, which works really well for me, even on complex tasks. But for some issues, the intuitive way just doesn't work and then the small-scale items is exactly what's needed to get things done. It's not getting things done pleasantly, or creatively, or liberally, but it gets things done without the pain of high-fee overdue notices or looking at unfinished tasks for months. In fact, it is giving up a little bit of liberty ("Today I need to get this small thing done.") to gain a much larger liberty -- namely a life without big dreading unfinished items on one's lists, in one's life, and on one's mind.

I think the reason why this works so well is that it connects the benefits of the larger goal (getting rid of taxes, kitchen tap not dripping any more) with the small effort and quick accomplishing of the small step. I won't get done the large problem with a small step, but I can feel getting closer by my own effort. That feels good and is effective.

I have used this tactic several times in the past weeks after reading about it in the book "Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard". It's a really good book, with many good lessons and I think this is only the first one with profound impact on my life.