Regardless of what you do, how you do it, how good or bad your life is… you are always stuck… Stuck in some deep bad place, or stuck on a plateau… stuck is stuck.

So learning what keeps you stuck and how to unstuck yourself, at will, is one of the most important things you can do… and the sooner the better. Because being stuck is not fun.

Cognitive biases, those knee jerk reaction tiny pieces of automatic responses, are at the root of your misery.

What do I mean? Here is one: commitment and consistency: If you invest time, energy in something, even if you don’t like it, you have a huge tendency to continue investing in it… Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know…

This idiom, this sentence is a good example of “commitment and consistency”, a cognitive bias.

Habits, habitual ways of thinking, cookie cutter “solutions”… meanings, they are the “meat” of this cognitive bias.

No one is exempt. Not one person. Because everyone has a mind… Even animals start there… they remember.

When I had a cat, I used to watch her: she went to the food dish and smelled it, and then you could see as the wheels turned as the mind was searching for earlier-similar smells…

Avoid poisonous plants… but in the case of cats: this practically means: only eat what you already know.

Photo Taken 08/01/07[/caption]I have students who are like cats… and as a result they are seriously undernourished… They just eat the same thing day in and day out.

This is also why humans like diet cults: they can avoid experimenting: the “already always” which is part and parcel with this cognitive bias, will guide them to eat ONLY in one particular way.

No thinking required.

The “enemies” of this cognitive bias are

1. “seeing the big picture”… which, by expanding the cone of vision, shows the puny one-solution mind that it is just one solution among many.I remember when I learned “flashing” out my cone of vision… going from normal to near a 180 degree cone.You see, fear is what caused us to narrow our cone of vision. Fear of anything and everything. Justified or not.The world is big, and we are puny, compared.

   The sense that you cannot handle it, that it’s too big, too much, too complicated caused, naturally to gradually cut out, don’t even see anything that is outside of what’s comfortable.

   And it’s getting worse with the world getting more hectic, more messages bombarding you…

   I have successfully escaped the busy-ness by physically withdrawing to my hermit-like living…

   But even at a smaller gathering, like a block-party with barbecue and chatting can cause the automatic reaction of narrowing one’s cone of vision… because it is too much. Too much noise, and one must.

   But truth be told, it is not a must. You don’t have to be a hermit.

   The number one predictor of success is awareness… but if you narrow your cone of vision to a tunnel… you can only be aware of what’s in the tunnel.

   Yesterday I wrote about the difficulty people have to include a new thing to do into their already busy life… their tunnel. The paralysis, the fear, the ineffectiveness.

   The need to look first at one thing and then the other… and then switch back and forth…

   But if you had a wider cone of vision, this would be the case: with one calm, sober, assessing eye you’d see both… without having to move your eyes…

   One real big price one has to pay with this cognitive bias, is the inability and unwillingness to change where you are looking.

   And for most of you, most of the time, this is deadly.

   You feel stuck, you are stuck, but unless you see where you are in context: there is no way out. You remain stuck.

   So how do you learn to widen your cone of vision?

   Every learning process has phases, that if you skip them, no learning takes place.

   • 1. inventory, astute and exact, or what you know, what you can do, what skills you already have.If you misidentify your level of knowledge or skill, you’ll do the things that can’t take roots…
   • 2. learning the practice, and learning it accurately. You cannot expect anyone to explain it to you in a way that all your assumptions are covered and negated.Practice under supervision, under the guiding eyes of a coach.Just think about sports: you can read in books what to do, but no one who is not supervised by a coach is going to be a winner, a big winner.The first job of a coach is to “kill” the habits that you made up thinking that they are good habits.

     I have come to learn that every instruction can be misunderstood, and unless people stay in the program, they are going to do “god knows what” with what I gave them.

     The crude joke of the desert soldier comes to mind… “But what about sex?” “We use the camels for that…” It’s funny because we all have been there… making up our own meaning. Mis-understood.

     The correct practice of the correct things, in our case flashing out the cone of vision.

     The eyes, the physical eyes, are controlled by muscles, and widening the cone of vision is done by a muscle. You need to practice that muscle, so it can stay open, comfortably, wider than it was.

   • 3. You need to know why you are learning the practice, or it will be still unusable in real life.In the movie “Karate Kid”, the boy learned many moves of karate, but didn’t know why… so he didn’t use them until Mr. Miyagi, the coach, showed him that he had them.And obviously, if you didn’t do step one, you’ll fail at step 3… And most of you will, because you never think you need to do step one… because… because you already know everything, don’t you?
2. Experimenting… the other enemy of the cognitive bias of “commitment and consistency”.Big fear just from hearing the word. Fear of wasting your time. Fear of not doing the right thing. Fear of choosing. Fear of losing out, missing out.All preventing you from experimenting. Especially if and when you feel like you are home free… which is one sure way to be stuck and get stuck.Experimenting works best if you have a plan. If you say: “I want to test this…”

   You want to find out if you do this, what the results will be…

   You can do experiments in any area of life.

   Any and every experiment goes against the cognitive bias… and therefore it’s frightening.

   Most scientists have a cognitive bias… i.e. they are really not scientists.

   To experiment, you need to be willing to get what you get… I mean the results. Different from what you are expecting, different from what you know, answers, results that make you wrong, make you look bad.

   But unless you are willing to make mistakes, moves that don’t pan out, you are stuck, and you are sticking with a tiny stupid life… not worth living.

I have a coaching program that its main purpose is to move you out of the narrow confines of a ditch or a plateau.

It works to the degree that a person works it. And even people who have been resistant to coaching have been widening the ditch they can look for solutions, and where they can practice the different spiritual capacities that will ultimately cause them to live a life worth living, to become a deserving human, at the helm of their existence. The captain of their ship…

It’s not talking. Or better said: I am not doing the talking.

I have learned that it is not effective.

Instead, the client, the student does most everything, talking, doing, and I do the tweaking.

It’s priced like a group coaching, but it is done personally and privately…

I have been in coaching programs that cost hundreds of bucks a session and were less effective than my little program for 10-20 times less money.

You do the work, you invest the time, and I do the tweaking.

This way I can make it inexpensive, and I can work with as many people as want to do it. Some students get as much as an hour of my time in a week… And my going rate for an hour is between 150-250 dollars… And the current weekly payment of the coaching program is $15.

I have had a commitment to always give ten times more real world value than what people get anywhere else.

This coaching program is not an exception.

• I know that even to sign up you need to take off your eyes off where you are currently going…
• I know that you need to be willing to be overwhelmed and integrate this new piece into your already too busy life.
• I know that you’ll need to be willing to say no to some things, and yes to other things, and that you’d rather be comfortable than have what you say you want to have.
• I know that you only want things where someone else is doing the dirty work, and you benefit.But that is not how LIFE works… that is not how the world works.

You are sitting on a horse facing backwards… No wonder your life stinks.

Read more about the coaching program in this article –> Conscious awareness is the best predictor of worldly success…

Read the original article: The biggest reason you are stuck… on a plateau or in a ditch, but stuck nevertheless