Dancing Geek

Yoga for Geeks by kk+

We have reached the end of the Lazy People Series and this one is for people like me who want to start developing self-discipline to help with things like personal development but don’t want to give up their lazy ways.

Lazy people can use self-discipline

Having self-discipline and being lazy are not mutually exclusive! To explain: imagine wanting to keep a daily yoga practice routine going (yup, this one’s right out of my life) but finding that you often lack the motivation on days where you’ve not slept as well, or whatever. Well, self-discipline can be about remembering why you wanted to do it in the first place, thus meaning that the lazy person realises that they do want to do it really, et voila! Yeah, it doesn’t always work, but that’s ok – it helps me not have to fight the fact that I’m a lazy guy, so I thought it might help others.

Self-discipline: the basics

Self-discipline can, at it’s core, be broken into two parts:

1. Awareness
2. Choice

These two things are simple, but not easy, thus qualifying as key to personal development, and bloody annoying.

Non-lazy people can simple make the requisite effort to stay conscious and aware of a particular situation and then make the suitable choice as preferred. This guide is for lazy people however, so I’m gonna break it down into itty-bitty, easy, bite-size steps.

Awareness

There’s a few rules that will help a lazy person (any maybe anyone else too) when they are working on awareness.

1. When you realise later on that you forgot, get mad
2. As soon as you get mad, get over it
3. Think about when you wanted to remember

Notice I said when, not if. This and getting mad is the easy part for everyone. Part 2 is easy for lazy people – staying mad is a lot of effort, so forgive yourself and let it go. Part 3 is key, just think about what the situation was where you wish you’d remembered. Nothing more, else it’s too much like effort. Again, this will probably happen naturally anyway, but if not just take 2 seconds to remember.

The idea here is that slowly, over time (but with minimal effort at any one point), you will remember sooner and sooner until you remember before you go to act.

Seriously, this really works, it’s how I learnt changes to my customer service technique and is really great for something that comes up fairly often as you’ll start to see results pretty quickly.

Once you remember before you are about to act, you are now fully aware and ready for step 2.

Choice

The boring rinse and repeat part is over now and you are ready to take some very easy action. Here, all you have to do is remember the reasons you wanted to use self discipline in the first place and then choose what to do next. If remembering something feels like too much effort, write it on a bit of paper and keep it in your pocket – or just write it on your hand or forehead.

An example is called for here.

I want to practice yoga in the mornings. Some mornings I just plain forgot, but slowly over time I remembered as I was walking downstairs, and even getting out of bed, that I wanted to do this. Next I had to remember why I wanted to do this. The increased flexibility, the feeling after having had a good stretch for 20 minutes, the increased strength, the chance to show off at how much progress I’ve made at the next class (oh yes, when it comes to motivation appeal to your ego, it’s a genius at getting you motivated for no effort at all). Having remembered those things I could drag my sleepy head over to a yoga mat, do a few sun salutations and then relax into corpse pose (the lazy person’s favourite – lie flat on your back and relax).

Hey presto, two weeks later and I’m reaping the benefits from doing no yoga most days to doing a little bit most days. And, to quote Dave Navarro, sometimes shooting for OK can give incredible results.

Had a thought you want to share? Please leave me a comment below.
Want to see what I come up with next? You can subscribe to my feed.

tug-of-war by nothing

Quick apology

First off I apologise. I’m so late getting this out. Consider this my way of learning as I try and help us all learn about the lazy people in our lives. Anyway, on with the show…

Lazy people are different

Lazy people don’t do something unless they want to, and whilst they will get on with something they think is important it can be near impossible to get them to do something which they aren’t fussed about.This post is designed to help you see how you can manipulate persuade a lazy person to do something they don’t want to.

Lazy people are the same

Things to remember:

• Lazy people will do something if they want to
• People want to do something if they think it’s worth it
• People will do some crazy shit if they think they’ll get something decent out of it
• In business terms, people often ask about cost/benefit. This works here too!
• Yes, this is true of everyone – it’s just about persuasion and seeing things from the other person’s point of view for a change
• No, it doesn’t have to be sales-y and yuck.
• There’s a fine line between expressing how you feel about something and emotional blackmail – be very careful not to create resentment

Ok, I think that’s enough things for now. Let’s give an example.

Persuading a lazy person – an example

Persuasion is about defeating objections which come from assumptions

How to get a lazy person to do something – the bit where I get to the point

Magic is true! by photographer padawan

A brief explanation

Ok, so this is the second post in my Lazy People series and I’ve a title which is a contradiction in terms, so now I have to try and make this make sense. You ready for a little linguistic magic?

Last week I established that being lazy isn’t necessarily a bad thing and that it depends how you go about it. This time I want to talk about how being lazy does not prevent you from getting stuff done. So, linguistic trick number 1 goes like this:

“Lazy people are productive” becomes “Lazy people are productive (sometimes)”

See how the way you say a sentence can totally change it’s meaning? And hey presto, we can move on to the interesting part.

Being lazy as a default starting position

Being lazy is my natural state, which means that when given a choice between action and non-action, all things being equal, I will choose non-action. So yes, I’m disinclined to exertion. However, I will take action if all things are not equal. And in life, things are rarely ever equal.

All that a default position of non-action does is require that any proposed action be justifiable. This seems like a fairly sensible way to make sure that you don’t run around doing stuff that is a waste of time. So if lazy people only take action on the critical tasks, they must be super productive!

If only life were that simple, right?

Of course, I’m over simplifying to make a point. It’s possible to carried away at a task or set of tasks and keep going long after it stopped being justifiable, and it’s quite common for our ‘justification’ to either perform certain tasks or not to be biased at best.

In order to prevent such heinous corruption of the beautiful, pure essence of laziness I have a nice, neat, simple and very difficult solution: stay aware. Be conscious of your motivations and your reasoning. A lot easier said than done, I admit, but I would happily argue that this is true whether your default position be action, or inaction.

Tower Complete by teotwawki

But any action is better than none, no?

It’s true that common advice would say that doing something is better than doing nothing. In fact, I think I wrote exactly that in an earlier post. So I guess I need to explain a little more.

Whilst it is true that to get yourself moving, to get out of a rut and to start seeing some kind of results you have to take action, there are times when purposeful non-action is the best thing to do. To wait, see what happens, see what turns up for you and how you are feeling about a situation and then, once you have a direction to head in, take action.

You could spend forever waiting but that’s where the staying aware part comes in. If you remain aware of the situation then you will be able to decide when action is right for you and be ready to take it then, not waste time, energy and money rushing around getting nowhere but neither waste away watching life from the sidelines.

It’s a tricky balance – as I think most things in life are – but the more practice you get at balancing, the better you become and the easier and more automatic it will become. It works for training your body to do pirouettes and it works for training your mind to find the point between the two extremes where you can stay in a state of flow.

Next week I’m going to let you know how to use the above information to get a lazy person to do something. Then after than how lazy people can apply this themselves to learn skills like self-discipline (and even why the hell they’d want to!)

If you want to catch these you can subscribe to my feed.