equivocate: to be deliberately ambiguous or unclear.

Acting equivocate has increasingly become a major problem in modern society. Every day I can’t help witnessing people who are either unable to express themselves in a clear way or deliberately avoid doing so, out of whatever reason. Communication, by its very meaning, has always had to do with passing something to another entity. Communicating equivocate takes the essence out of the communication: The information shared. Instead, misunderstandings are aroused. And misunderstandings are often the source of conflicts.

I have experienced one major reason why people opt to deliberately blur information clarity: fear.

Probably the most common type of fear associated with unclear communication is the fear of rejection. The probability that your counterpart will disagree with or get hurt by the information you are about to transmit is sufficient to drive people to withhold information in most cases.

The level of information transmitted is directly related to the level of self-acceptance and self-love. The more the person is in touch with itself, the less the damage an undesired answer can deal. A person with a high level of self-worth is hard to hurt – in any case, this person will have realized that any level of interpersonal incongruence has no impact his or her worth and the level of validity of his or her perspective. A person with little self-worth that is out of touch with itself however is easy to hurt. Even small levels of incongruence in interpersonal communication will directly translate in a diminished self-worth and a devastated validity of the person’s perspective.

Translated to real life experiences, the brink of an conflict sparked by incongruence in communication will be experienced much different. Here are a few examples:

A person that is very much in touch with itself will most probably reply: “Okay. We’re out of congruence in this point. I have reasons to believe that my perspective holds true as much as you will have. Could you therefore help me understand why your perspective is correct?” The dominating mind-set here is acceptance of the own perspective and understanding for the other’s perspective. This mind-set is growth-oriented and enables the person to experience new insights. The possibility that he or she might be wrong is none of a threat – cooperation and learning better is the goal of communication.

A person, whose ego is really blown-up, will most probably reply: “I don’t see why your point makes any sense. My perspective has to be closer to truth than yours, because so and so.” Forcing the opponent into congruence is the dominating mind-set for the ego-driven person. In reality, this person also experiences fear – fear of not being right. In order to avoid being wrong, the person is very keen on its own perspective and would never allow the opponent’s perspective to hold true (which would mean defeat). This way, the person keeps itself from learning new insights and while he or she may be able to convince his or her opponent by force, the discussion is ended with a mind-set of conflict and concurrence instead of a mind-set of cooperation. Ego-driven people often become hugely successful in life, from a perspective of monetary or other mundane riches, but often lack true friends and a loving relationship and hence are far from being happy or satisfied.

A person with a lack of self-worth but a pile of knowledge will most probably reply: “But see, my perspective has a point because so and so. Please understand.” The underlying phrase this person communicates is to beg for acceptance and praise. While generally open for other perspectives, this person experiences just too much fear to be able to give in – in the belief that they would lose themselves by doing so. Occasionally, such a person can be confused for a arrogant one because of the persistence of their arguments, even if proved wrong. The opponent to this person is like a life-threatening danger. This type of person is normally very well-educated and intelligent but has a hard time being respected and finding real friends. The pseudo-arrogant outside blocks the revelation of a lovable inside.

A person with a lack of self-worth and mediocre knowledge will most probably reply: “I see, I am wrong here. Sorry for being wrong. Thanks for clarification.” He or she will never defend his or her perspective and willingly give in to whatever criticism comes along. Due to the lack of self-worth, this person will have no faith in the correctness of its own opinion – others always know better is the dominating mind-set. Even if right, these people will have no faith in what they do unless they are encouraged by others – thereby making them dependent on their consent. This person is the archetype of the follower – a person without own opinion that accepts whatever opinion the currently chosen leader has. For this kind of person it is normal to regularly change the leader in search for protection from the former leader as these individuals are easily abused when straying from their former leader’s opinion.

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It only is the first example that has the ability to communicate information just as it is: Acceptance of the own perspective and openness for the other’s. All the others have problems either to accept the other’s opinion, the own opinion or both and therefore are driven to conflict-laden communication and therefore problematic relationships.

From my own experience, the problem with unclear communication has become an epidemic one. I personally see myself as either Type III or Type IV – as a human being that has problems with acceptance of the own opinion and is easily influenced by criticism from others. I know that I am not alone – many people share this problems in an age that is infested with so much information that conflict is almost pre-programmed, regardless of what we do or say. The probability that our own behavior is against someone else’s norm is steadily approaching one with a rising number of people around.

In order to become a human being that is able to safely navigate through these rough times, it is important to achieve a level of self-worth and self-acceptance that enables you to accept your opinion, even when faced with harsh opposition. Interestingly, your opposition can easily transform to an alliance from the moment you at least try to understand their perspective.

For all those who haven’t yet achieved this goal (like myself), the way towards it is the key. There are numerous ways to increase your level of self-acceptance. The easiest to implement in daily life to me is choosing situations where you show self-acceptance in spite of the fact that they require a little bit more than you normally have. This way, you can gradually grow to become more self-confident.

A lot of small steps form a long way. I believe that you can do it If you are already there: Congratulations. You are amongst the souls that this planet is in high need of

Be yourself and trust yourself.

In love for life
Simon

alacrity: a cheerful readiness, willingness, or promptness.

Derived from the Latin word for lively, alacrity is something worth attaining throughout the course of your life. It is the attitude you should have towards your life’s mission, your purpose, your reason to live from day to day.

You should awaken every day with the sparkling motivation to create something great in your life – that surpasses your own imagination. In Japan, the word KAIZEN is colloquially used. It simply means to continually improve yourself – from day to day become a better you. This is synonymous to permanent personal growth – this is why you are here on this planet, after all.

If you haven’t already entered a state wherein you awaken every day with the urge to create the reality of your liking, you have to take certain steps in this direction. They are the following

• Learn how to motivate yourself
• Find out your deepest core values
• Translate your core values into a life mission
• Translate your mission into specific goals
• Use the power of your motivation to get going this instant – and never stop until you perish

Motivation

Motivation is optional. You will probably never need motivation due to your burning urge to fulfill your life mission anyhow, but for every moment of doubt that overshadows your determination to live your mission, knowing ways to motivate yourself to get going anyway is an enormously empowering insurance. This way, you will always be able to take action towards your the fulfillment of your life mission.

Core Values

Your core values are the values that mean most to you. You have three options to find out, what your core values are

• Analyze situations that emotionally hurt you. These situations reveal your core values, as they have become hurt therein.
• Imagine situations that truly empower you. These situations also reveal your core values, as they have been empowered therein.
• Be silent and introspect. Search for a solitary place and undergo meditation. Tap your core and find our the values that matter most to you

When you have found out all your core values, think about why they are so important to you. This will further reveal the values that stand behind these core values – these are the truly important ones. Write them down.

Your Mission

For every set and combination of core values, there are missions that represent these values in a perfect way. If your core values are excellence, communion, sharing and compassion, you might opt for becoming professor or teacher or you become a therapist representing the same values. Possibilities are endless – your creativity is the limit.

Thoroughly assess the possible missions and for every mission, go into a meditative state and imagine living this mission already. Evaluate the feelings you go through during this imagination and let it be the emphasis for your judgment which mission will be the right one for you.

Remember: Even if your mission is a huge commitment, you are not entitled to follow it for a lifetime. Humans are entities that undergo change, sometimes radically. Our missions have to adapt to these changes. So if you – at any time – feel out of sync with what you do, re-assess your core values and your mission statement thereafter.

Milestones

For every mission, there are milestones you have to achieve what you have dreamed of. Lay out a rough milestone landscape and break down every piece of the way into smaller milestones. The bigger goals have sub-goals and every sub-goal has specific action steps.

While planning out your goals, never lose touch to the greater context. Always keep in mind, why you are doing this and why this is of true importance for you. Cut out everything that is useless in context of your mission.

Get Going

The main reason, why most people fail is that they never got going. It is problematic to perpetuate the planning phase of a mission ad infinitum – rather than planning it out to perfection (which is impossible, with you undergoing constant change), start following your missions and make adjustments on the planning on the fly. Take your time to assess your plans every week but never get hung up planning – proceed working. Without working on your goals, you will never be able to figure out possible problems anyhow.

As mentioned, make good use of your motivational skills to push you further. A good quote to get you through difficult times was done by Calvin Coolidge – it is easily the single best thing I have ever read on the topic of success

Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘Press On’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.

Press on and you cannot ever fail. Live alacrity. Be a shining role model for your environment and the whole planet.

You can do it. I believe in you

In love for life
Simon

efficacious: producing, or capable of producing, a desired effect.

Whenever you pursuit a goal in your life, you have to take steps towards your goal – into the right direction. To take this steps, you will need specific tools that enable you to do so. Not always you are able to walk the way through green grass under bright sunshine – those are the low-level goals, the low-hanging fruits, goals that you will achieve anyhow and that show few opportunities to grow.

To chase high-level goals that require a tremendous amount of growth, the question of how you will make your way is of vital importance. Will you go barefooted or ride the bike? Will you have to cross a river using a boat? How to cross the rapids without getting crushed into the rocks that endanger your life amid the river’s width? While these are metaphors, they easily translate into real-life situations where you have to decide well how you are going to proceed.

Doing a brainstorm on the possible options is highly recommended but this is the easy part – finding out what is possible. The hard part is to evaluate, which way is the one best suited to the situation. To judge the options, ask yourself the following questions:

• Is this way congruent with what I truly am?
• What will be the long-term ramifications of taking this option?
• How much will it cost me financially, physically and mentally to do so?
• Imagine being the best you can be, the perfect you: Would you still opt for this solution?

These questions empower you to get into touch with your inner self. They guide you to act authentic and train your vision – thinking about how your choices impact your life and the life of others is of tremendous power when pondering about possible solutions. Sure, murder can clean the way sometimes and it looks like a decent solution from a very short-term perspective but from a long-term perspective, the ramifications of this deed are far too grave to actually consider choosing it

Thinking about what you have to invest includes some risk-management as well. The more you put on the line, the more you can win – and the more you can lose. Still, sometimes a safer bet is still far more rewarding than a risky choice. It all depends on the situation and you have to judge it anew from case to case. Not only the finances are of importance. What good is a tool, if it empowers you financially but devours your physical energy and mental well-being? There are too many financially successful businessmen out there that suffer from burn-out syndrome – do yourself a favor and do not join them.

Finally, the imagination of your perfect self is a vision that enables you to look at problem and solution from an elevated perspective. It strengthens your internal congruence because with every choice congruent with the one of your perfect self you do one step further becoming this person. A promising outlook

Start tomorrow to judge your tools using these questions. Proceed to live a life in congruence with who you really are and want to be.

In love for life
Simon

logorrhea: excessive talkativeness.

What comes to mind when pondering about a word like logorrhea (which sounds a lot like diarrhea, as it shares the same Greek word root: ‘rhein’ – to flow – in one case, the words flow, in others… well, you know ) is the excessive flow of words society is confronted with on a daily basis these times. With the invention of interactive media, the amount of information produced (and likewise consumed) has topped every peak known until then – everyone is now broadcasting his or her opinion and the sheer amount of information has already reached an epidemic state. My blog is no exception from the rule – I, too, am merely a single soul broadcasting its message out to the world.

Interactive Media – Gift or Curse?

It would be wrong to label interactive media as a plain bad thing. Prior to interactive media (published by internet services), classical media like television and print media was the only source of information a person could get – and these sources of information always represent an underlying opinion which render them subjective instead of the objective information most individuals are in search for when looking up a topic. While internet content is also far from being objective, the range of information sources and thereby perspectives represented is significantly broader. There is much more information that could potentially be true and overheard voices too have their share in the broadcast – an advantage that is too relevant to be omitted.

Still, the masses of information are a challenge for the consumer. Even if the internet offers the possibility to look for information on-demand, the average internet user has a hard time avoiding push content (meaning content that is offered deliberately, like a host of articles on a webmail page) and limit the consumption to pull content (meaning content that is offered only by demand). By this logic, surfing the web confronts the individual with so much information that it is hard to choose what to read – nearly everyone will have found themselves reading something they weren’t looking for initially by chance – and got hung up in the process.

The second hurdle to take – after selecting the information itself – is to evaluate the quality of content. Since everyone is entitled to publish content without anyone checking validity, the recipient himself is responsible for checking it. In the internet age, it has become vitally important to have a good sense of differentiation. Authors always have an intention when writing an article – they always transport their views with their writing, this is normal human behavior. Consuming media, one always has to think about what intention it follows and have to think over statements that are presented as facts constantly. This requires a log of energy but is the only possible solution not to become lulled in by tricky writers.

As a rule of thumb, always double-check statements that sound too good to be true and watch out for relativity, when it comes to figures, statistics and comparisons.

I will take this Twitter tweet from Steve Pavlina as an example, because I feel that it is representative:

An average American eats as much meat in one day as an average Indian eats in about a month.

This is a statement and it is true by itself. Still it does not take a few things into consideration

• India is amongst the poorest countries of the world. Meat is an expensive food. Most Indians struggle to survive on cheap foods like grains and legumes – meat is just out of consideration.
• According to Wikipedia, up to 40% of all Indians are vegetarians – in the US, only 2.8% of the population are.
• Considering daily caloric intake, no nation consumes more calories daily than Americans do.

Conclusion: After taking these variables into consideration, the figure would still show that Americans eat more meat than Indians, but the extreme margin would be cut down in magnitude.

This is only one example how figures can be altered to cause a specific effect (in this case, Steve Pavlina, who is a strong raw vegan proponent, wanted to point out the meat consumption madness of the United States) – watch out for figures in future information you absorb!

Is Constant Talking a Sign of Wisdom?

An ancient saying goes like this:

Those who know much talk little. Those who talk all the time know nothing.

In modern society, this holds true oh so much. You will find these people everywhere that simply do not seem to stop talking. They may not notice it, but all they do is constantly boasting their ego in public – by talking to a broad audience about what they have achieved and how they did it without a pause. Most people have done this at some point in their life, but it normally is an acute state, not a chronic one.

People who act like this are normally poor listeners. They are too occupied with themselves and their thoughts to fully perceive what they are told. By this reason, conversations with this kind of person often are unidirectional – as opposed to what conversations should be like: bidirectional, with equal shares in giving and receiving. These people often have the tendency to gather weaker minds than themselves around them – and constantly make them applaud or at least approve what they have to tell. They have little interest in real growth-oriented contacts – too deep is the fog of delusion they are caught in.

At the other end of the scales you will find the people that are widely regarded as wise men or saints. These are the people that rarely talk a lot. Sure, they will tell you about their past experiences in length when asked to do so, but they will never do so deliberately. They will rather listen to what you have to tell them and answer in short but right words – never will you see them using more words than necessary. It is the determination to fully understand the other part of a conversation that drives them to be a excellent company – better listeners are found nowhere. Normally, people tend to grow in this direction when becoming older and slow their pace for effort, but there are numerous young spirits, bursting with energy, that have proven to have this skill as well. Be on the lookout for these individuals – meeting them will probably a life-changing even for you.

Final Thoughts

As a final note, I want to suggest to you that you wield the power of your mind consciously. Choose only information that is of use for you and never take a word for granted. Always investigate on your own before accepting conventional wisdom. If necessary, experiment to discover truth. Be careful with your words. Stop the talk for once and try to listen as openly as possible. Be of excellent service to others. Discover for yourself – the wisdom of silence.

In love for life
Simon