Steve Pavlina's Personal Development Blog This is an RSS file. You can use it to subscribe to this data in your favourite RSS reader or to display this data on your own website or blog.

The COVID Omicron Surge (and Why I Got Vaccinated)
The objective arguments for and against vaccination are already pretty well presented by society, so I’m sure you’ve encountered an abundance of that by now. I’m not going to rehash those arguments here, partly because I don’t find that side the most interesting to consider. What I did consider was which of the objective stories I found to represent the most interesting invitation to explore. Since I don’t have the means to personally prove or disprove anything about vaccination – it’s not like I have a bio lab in my garage – I could frame it as a question of whom to trust. But th...
Source: Steve Pavlina's Personal Development Blog - December 30, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Steve Pavlina Tags: Creating Reality Health Source Type: blogs

Surround Sound Intentions
In November I did a 30-day challenge regarding ideation, sharing progress updates in the CGC forums as I went along. My version of the challenge was to generate 100+ divergent ideas per day for each day of November. My intention was to stimulate some thinking in new directions. Most of the ideas I generated weren’t useful. However, some notable ideas did lead to interesting results, as I shared in CGC along the way. One I’ll share here is that I ended up diving into the rabbit hole of figuring out how to set up a decent home theater system, which is a project I’ve wanted to do for a while but always found ...
Source: Steve Pavlina's Personal Development Blog - December 25, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Steve Pavlina Tags: Abundance Creating Reality Lifestyle Source Type: blogs

101 Reframes for a Richer Social Life
Yesterday I brainstormed a list of reframes that I’ve found useful at various times for exploring a better social life. I shared this in the Conscious Growth Club forums and felt that it would be nice to share it here as well. A frame (or reframe) is a way of looking at reality and assigning meaning to events and experiences, similar to an attitude or perspective. A frame is not a belief. You don’t have to believe a frame to use it effectively. Much like any hardware tool such as a hammer or drill, you can use a frame for a short time and release it again when you’re done. Here’s the list. ...
Source: Steve Pavlina's Personal Development Blog - November 18, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Steve Pavlina Tags: Lifestyle Relationships Source Type: blogs

Octo Intensive Recordings Are Now Part of CGC
Our 3-day October workshop, The Octo Intensive: The 8 Keys to Self-Motivation, was a beautiful success with more than 100 people registering for it. Although we’ve done 16 3-day workshops, this was our first-ever online workshop, so we had people attending from all around the world, and no one had to travel to Las Vegas this time. The workshop was recorded, and the recordings have been made available to everyone who enrolled in the live event. We’re not planning to release the recordings as separately; however, they have been added to Conscious Growth Club’s permanent library, along with all of o...
Source: Steve Pavlina's Personal Development Blog - November 10, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Steve Pavlina Source Type: blogs

Upgrading the Healing Frame
One thing that seemed to keep me stuck for quite a while when I was younger was the healing frame, i.e. layering a desired area of improvement with the perspective that I needed to “heal” something within myself. The healing frame remains a popular way to frame various aspects of self-development, addiction recovery, human relationships, and more. It also carries some major downside baggage though, so it can bey very risky to use it, not just for yourself but for others you interact with. How the Healing Frame Slows Us Down With healing physical wounds, the body largely does that for us, so healing bas...
Source: Steve Pavlina's Personal Development Blog - November 3, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Steve Pavlina Tags: Emotions Health Source Type: blogs

The Octopus Intention
Maybe you’re familiar with the idea of setting intentions, which is similar to setting goals, but with an intention, you’re focusing more on the relationship you want to have with some part of life. So it’s not just about the surface outcome. You also want to clarify what kind of experience you want to have along the way. Do you want to have a chill and relaxed experience? Do you want to feel stimulated and excited? Or playful and adventurous? Warm and cozy? Or something else? What kind of experience are you trying to invite into your life? Invite the Experience Imagine that like an octopus, you&...
Source: Steve Pavlina's Personal Development Blog - October 28, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Steve Pavlina Tags: Abundance Creating Reality Source Type: blogs

The Octo Intensive: The 8 Keys to Self-Motivation
This weekend only (Friday-Sunday, October 29-31, 2021), I’m hosting a one-of-a-kind online training to help you improve your self-motivation skills, with a combination of hands-on teaching and individual practice. Over the course of 3 days together, I’ll show you how to engage your self-motivation as a collection of 8 key skills. You’ll practice these skills one-by-one as you learn them. Then I’ll show you how to combine these skills in various ways to create even stronger motivational effects, and you’ll practice the combos too. To get the details, just listen to the audio invitation: ...
Source: Steve Pavlina's Personal Development Blog - October 27, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Steve Pavlina Tags: Announcements Source Type: blogs

The Octo Intensive: October 29-31, 2021
I’m hosting a very unique online event this weekend to help you train up your self-motivation skills, including a blend of hand-on instruction and direct practice. This isn’t an informational workshop per se. Think of it like taking a driver’s training class, except that you’ll be learning how to drive your body and mind into action, consistently and sustainably. First listen to the invitation below: https://stevepavlina.com/resources/octointensive/Octo_Invite.mp3 And then visit this page to learn more and enroll: The Octo Intensive: The 8 Keys to Self-Motivation (Source: Steve Pavl...
Source: Steve Pavlina's Personal Development Blog - October 27, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Steve Pavlina Source Type: blogs

Timing Your Passion
When some aspect of life feels forced, and you have to push through with a lot of discipline to make progress, it might mean that the timing is wrong for you. If you feel like putting it off, maybe do exactly that. Other people may tell you that you need to advance some area of life now, but is that absolutely necessary? When I was in high school, I loved math and invested lots of extra time in it, so I improved at math more quickly than in other subjects. I got A+’s in my math classes, but that still wasn’t enough for me. I befriended the school’s best math teachers and did extra projects with them...
Source: Steve Pavlina's Personal Development Blog - October 13, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Steve Pavlina Tags: Emotions Lifestyle Productivity Source Type: blogs

Units of Meaning
On Monday’s live quarterly planning review call in Conscious Growth Club – which spanned more than 5 hours – I shared some tips about thinking in units of meaning rather than units of time. Many years ago I tried a system of writing 4 hours per day. I did it for 30 days straight but really didn’t like it. It didn’t help me create the kind of relationship that I wanted to have with writing, and it took daily discipline to keep going with it. I felt relieved when I stopped. That might be a fine system for someone else, but it wasn’t a good fit for me. Each day I filled the 4 hours with writi...
Source: Steve Pavlina's Personal Development Blog - October 6, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Steve Pavlina Tags: Abundance Productivity Source Type: blogs

What Is Better Motivational Fuel Than Stress or Anxiety?
If you don’t want to use stress or anxiety as your primary motivational fuel, what kind of fuel would you like to use instead? What can you say about your desired fuel source for taking action and getting results? I like to think of spending a day at an amusement park as a good analogy for my ideal type of work motivation. When Rachelle and I spend a few days together at Disneyland, we always take a lot of action and have days full of fun together. We don’t need anxiety, fear, or worry to motivate us to act. We virtually never go for just one day. We typically go for 3-4 days in a row. This eliminates any f...
Source: Steve Pavlina's Personal Development Blog - September 29, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Steve Pavlina Tags: Lifestyle Productivity Source Type: blogs

When You ’ re Confused, Clarify Your Intentions
On yesterday’s coaching call in Conscious Growth Club – which set a new record at 5.5 hours – I often referred back to the importance of clarifying intentions. This is especially critical when you’re facing those tricky either-or decisions, both of which seem like partial matches. Clarify Your Intentions Whenever you get confused, it’s often super helpful to pause and clarify your intentions. Just declare what you actually want in a sentence or two. Express it aloud or in writing. Then let it sink in and see how your body, mind, and feelings react to it. Does your intention feel like a true e...
Source: Steve Pavlina's Personal Development Blog - September 28, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Steve Pavlina Tags: Abundance Creating Reality Source Type: blogs

Upgrading My Hardware Tools
As part of my garage decluttering project this summer, I refactored and upgraded my hardware tools. I thought some readers might enjoy seeing the before and after pics of this part of the project, especially since it’s easy to see the changes visually. I hadn’t personally selected or bought most of my old tools. They were almost entirely hand-me-downs from my dad and grandfather, most of them decades old. A few items I picked up at swap meets last century. The overall collection was a mishmash of ugly items with some redundancy, consisting of odds and ends that other people no longer wanted. While most of the...
Source: Steve Pavlina's Personal Development Blog - August 14, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Steve Pavlina Tags: Abundance Creating Reality Productivity tools Source Type: blogs

Decluttering Tips
I’ve been decluttering my garage for the past few weeks, so here are some decluttering tips I’ve figured out for processing, purging, and organizing, especially if you have a lot of old tech clutter to deal with. Approach Decluttering with Patience Just chip away at the project one item at a time, not worrying about how long it will take. It’s wise to approach such a project with great patience, allowing it to take as long as it wants to take without feeling any need to rush. I put this project off for years because I could never squeeze it into any kind of schedule. I only made significant progress when I g...
Source: Steve Pavlina's Personal Development Blog - July 21, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Steve Pavlina Tags: Lifestyle Productivity Source Type: blogs

Stature Builders Bonus Added
I’ve added a new bonus to the Stature course called Stature Builders. Course members will find this bonus on the Gifts page in the Stature portal. This is a collection of 15 short audios (1-3 minutes each) for ongoing character sculpting practice. The purpose of these Stature Builders is to help you continue developing and refining your character after you’ve completed the main course. These extra audios can help you with ongoing reinforcement of some key character sculpting principles and practices. Each Stature Builder invites you to do one straightforward character sculpting exercise. Some can be done w...
Source: Steve Pavlina's Personal Development Blog - June 8, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Steve Pavlina Source Type: blogs