Amplify: Lessons 1.1 to 1.3
This week I started the Amplify course by Steve Pavlina. This post is the first post in a series of posts where I will write about my experience and my workbook exercises. The goal of the Amplify course is to make you enjoy the best creative flow of your life. My goal is to find out whether this course lives up to its promises and more importantly to find out if I can make progress in this area of my life.
With this post I want you to give some insights on my progress and what I’m struggling with, with respect to my creative work.
Lesson 1.1: Creative Reframes
This first lesson is all about your framing or perspective of situations and how you can reframe them. For the workbook exercise, I had to create a short list of my biggest creative problems and challenges with some obvious solutions.
Problem 1: Unable to decide between different ideas for side-projects to work on.
Solution:
Pick a random or the latest idea and work on it for a fixed amount of time e.g. 7 days, 30 days, ...
Brainstorm more ideas until I find something I really want to build
Ask around for other people's problems to solve
Problem 2: Lack of energy for creative projects after a full day/week of work for my job in combination with family life and other hobbies.
Solution:
Sleep sufficiently
Remove or reduce all other activities like reading, playing video games, watching tv, sport, ... for a while
Quit job
Go to a cabin or other solitary place without family for a week
Problem 3: Imposter syndrome
Solution:
Focus on my biggest strengths
Pick up smaller and easier side-projects first
Problem 4: Not finishing what I start
Solution:
Be more disciplined
Add social pressure by finding people who are waiting for the solution
Lesson 1.2: Solution Neighborhoods
The second lesson highlights the fact that the way you frame a problem puts you in a certain neighborhood of solutions. Reframing your problem can bring you into different solution neighborhoods leading to more action and fewer shoulds. Or in Steve’s words:
So instead of always questioning yourself or feeling like you need to push yourself more, question the original problem definition you're using; question the original meaning that you gave to your goal; question the way you framed the goal to begin with.
The workbook exercise makes you recall one or more situations where you reframed a problem which lead you to (finally) take action.
Original framing 1: I should stop smoking because it is an unhealthy habit.
Motivating framing: I stop smoking because I really love my new girlfriend who is a non-smoker and who doesn't enjoy the smell of cigarettes.
Original framing 2: I really should write some chapters for my PhD.
Motivating framing: I have 4 months left in my PhD grant, let's write chapter by chapter until I'm done.
Original framing 3: I should lose some weight so that I can bike faster.
Motivating framing: I've bet this tiny amount of money that I would lose x kilos in 6 months and I want to win this bet.
By doing this exercise and reflecting on it I realized that this covered 3 important motivators for me:
Social: doing something for someone else
Time: some deadline getting closer and not wanting to miss it, this is for me also linked with the social as I didn’t want to disappoint my PhD supervisor
Money: earning or not losing money is at least for the short term a good motivator
Lesson 1.3: Framing Traps
In the last lesson of this post, Steve talked about framing traps. He identifies 3 common framing traps:
Blaming yourself or your behaviors as your main problem. This leads to a very weak solution neighborhood. It basically leads you to demand more effort or overtime from yourself, and that is usually demotivating.
The one frame to rule them all. A solution for this is to question how you're defining your problems to begin with.
Pure objective logic framing. To mitigate this you have to include the emotional impact to set priorities.
For the workbook exercise, you have to identify 3 situations where you fell into a framing trap. So, any cases where the framing didn't motivate you enough to take action. Here are mine:
Goal 1: Invest part of my money in stocks to get some returns on my money.
Trap: While this is a logical goal I have too many emotional blockers around money (Steve, thanks for the Happy Money book tip!) which I have to resolve first. While I did some research, I still haven't invested a penny.
Goal 2: Create a side-project that earns some extra income
Trap: I've been guilty of trapping myself very professionally with this one: I've been blaming myself for not being disciplined enough, I haven't really considered any other alternatives to reach my final goal of more freedom/happiness and the more money = happier logic has already been falsified plenty of times.
Goal 3: Completely read and do all the exercises in the books I own/lend
Trap: With this goal and actually with every book I start reading I have the internal rule that I have to finish the books I start reading. Which then leads to nagging guilt for all the unread or unfinished books in the house and on my computer/phone.
Finally, I didn’t want to withhold you this quote:
The telltale sign of a framing trap is the lack of sufficient motivation to take
action consistently enough to get the results you want.
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