The Enhancing Life: Recent Episodes
Alex Adamick
My podcast is conversations with me to help people see things differently through another perspective so they can improve their lives. Using examples from my own life for analogies and metaphors as well as anything else that has to do with the innovation of personal growth, with a touch of humour.
In this episode I talk about awareness, and how to sharpen the skill of pattern recognition. After doing this work I’ve come to realize that not only that a belief is just a habit of thought, but in every moment you are practicing a habit that’s either serving you or not. So this simplifies it to the point that, you can see (the only thing that you can change) how you’re responding to whatever thought you are thinking in a given moment, and that there’s an unknown number of these attempts to recognizing a pattern at its beginning stages) that once you achieve that number of responses, it equates to a new habit of practicing better quality responses. Particularly it would be kind of like a habit that is a (beginning of an old pattern/habit, new pattern of responding habit.)
How does a person who isn’t behind in an area of life respond to the fact that they are not as ahead as they would like to be? Do they rush around frantically and do tasks in a less than thorough manner? No. They learn the process of building a foundation for themselves that is prepared and laid out in a fashion that which most times when they slip up, because they have many useful habits that serve them, (that have become easy to maintain due to the length of time that they have spent practicing the habits) and different types of stability. They use the back up plan, and only briefly experience the set back.
In this episode I touch upon the woo woo subject of NOW. So if you don’t like this spiritual stuff you are welcome to change the channel to something else more your style. But if you’re curious to find out how this kind of material can be useful to you in your practical life, than it may resonate with you. It’s all about noticing at a deeper level, that the past and the future is now, and never has been anything else because of the fact that they are just abstract concepts that can often be used incorrectly by way of how you think about your internal and external reality.
In this episode we plunge deep into how imbibing a substance regularly or even infrequently can still have a negative effect on your life, if you think about it in a unresourceful way. I also touch upon the benefits that I experienced from significantly decreasing the amount of alcohol that I would consume, and how good habits can support you on your mission of sobriety or lowered alcohol intake.
The real work is the way you think. If you can’t change that, you can’t really change much of anything. If you over complicate, catastrophize, hesitate, or some version of over-thinking that leads to periods of procrastination, then this episode may be useful to you. The start is the most difficult part of taking action, and in this episode I talk about how to do the simplest yet easiest thing to overlook the difficulty of. Simplicity is indeed, the ultimate sophistication.
In this episode I talk about how to continue moving forward as you did before the physical relationship existed, and how to gain clarity on the matter so that you can take the required steps of action towards what is best for you in the future which may or may not involve the other person you shared experiences with in a relationship.
In this episode I go over 3 strategies for changing habitual thought patterns (that are often unconscious) that lead to bad behaviours that can create a cycle, and if not addressed, can after a period of time, create unnecessary problems in difficult contexts. If you find yourself in difficult contexts/circumstances where thoughts that aren’t useful (like the ones I describe further in this episode,) come up habitually, (as if you’re addicted to them) it is extremely useful to at least exercise some willpower to try strategies like the ones that I provide, that get your direction of focus heading in the right direction. This often leads to more useful behaviours, which evoke more useful responses from the people you surround yourself with on a daily or weekly basis.
If you change how you think about money in terms of energy currency, and you acknowledge that you’re thoughts are energy just like your actions that follow them. Than you can understand and experience that being sick with less energy currency than what you usually have flowing to you, is something that you do, where LESS money follows, just like if you have and energetically create more energy currency to which you can use to zestfully earn MORE money/have more money than what you’re currently and usually earning follow and flow to you.
When you lie to others you are lying to yourself, because if you were in their shoes, you wouldn’t like to have someone lie to you. So if you have lied to yourself, and gotten into a cycle of bad behaviour, consistency/being true to yourself and behaving in the manor that you want requires demonstrating to yourself a particular period of time that are full of points at which it would be easy to do the bad behaviour but didn’t. Than you can refer back to those points of a reference to continue to not do the bad behaviour, because you already declined the inclinations to do it several times.
In this episode I touch upon the motivating factors in realizing that quantifying how much of a pay off and how much of a price that you’re paying in feeding a bad habit and in its consistency of doing the unresourceful behaviour over time/the same unwanted results that followed, is worth quantifying/recording just how much of a price you’re paying by doing it. When you write it down next to just how much of a pay off it has been, and compare the two in your life overall, you start to see that it’s not such a hard decision to make especially if you know you can still exercise some self control for a period of time. By doing this, you see what possibilities not doing the behaviour affords you, especially when accompanied with resourceful behaviours that are practiced consistently.
In this episode we go into how to sort your reality of necessities so that you can be prepared for when you see the opportunities. (The more you Fully engage in this present moment, whatever the circumstances, the more you’ll be practiced in fully engaging in a present moment that will come when it is no longer the future.
In this episode I’m plunging into ways to change how you respond to unexpected circumstances and emotions that seem to accompany them. Although sometimes, for some people they can find their emotions to be like a roller coaster, where they feel like they have little to no control. If you’re experience is similar to this, doesn’t it seem kind of dumb from a perspective outside of yourself looking in, that you’re emotions can go up and down like a roller coaster without any real outside influences happening around you, and yet it feels mentally challenging, to the point where you feel as though you don’t have the freedom to choose, even though you’re just sitting in your car thinking about the past or the future. (Often it’s a perfect mixture of both. Yet one you can’t do anything about, and the other you can’t do anything about it yet/as of right now.)
In this episode I share some of my thoughts on changing an unresourceful behaviour. One of those behaviours that seem to be taking most of the energy out of your life when you consider what your life was like before you began to really start to abuse yourself or the thing that you used (habit that doesn’t serve you). Than perhaps you realize that you deserve something better. You may not have it clearly defined, but you know you deserve something better than what this behaviour seems to have in store for you.
In this episode I talk about how to understand your long term goals as just ideas with potential. And how crucial it is to see them as a seed that is extremely important to let them germinate and become something more, before you share them with others.
In this episode I touch upon a way to recognize and perceive a pattern of thinking and behaviour in a whole new way. It deals with paying more attention to how you actually feel in a moment to moment basis, in which you see yourself and the logical pattern of emotions that you go on when you’re headed for a loss of control in the way you behave.
In this episode we tackle the thinking process that often goes into and creates a behaviour that doesn’t serve you. Like noticing that you don’t have to feel any particular way after you’ve noticed how you have identified with the harsh and unsettling voice in your head that often goes under the radar in your mind. This is just one way at which you can think from this moment onward. And have a sturdy or at least neutral thought to jump off of, so to speak. (Like a diving board)
In this episode we get into some ways you can use your alarm on your phone to make it into a game of reminding you of the best times to work on your questions to ask yourself at those moments of doubts that often come up when we least expect it, or at least when we have something else on our mind. “What was that? What did I just say to myself?” “What was the picture that I just manufactured in my mind?”And just watch what specific words we use, the tonality that we use them in, the dimness or the fuzziness of the picture etc. The whole inner conversation, and than what we say to ourselves after we first see what we’re saying to ourselves, than notice that.
Have you ever noticed how the smallest annoyances on a daily basis seem to slow you down the most. But the biggest adversities tend to have a more (adverse) effect that usually is really good. We learn about how life can vary in experiences, and after that big adversity, the rest of life is a bit easier because of it. It prepared you for future adversities, and you wouldn’t be where you are if it never had happened. All that change wouldn’t have made you change to the extent that you did.
Have you ever seen someone day dreaming and tried to get their attention? Or maybe they were figuring something out, like trying to imagine a solution to a problem. The more you practice how you imagine something you want might go/ how you want it to go, the more likely you are to see a solution and succeed in performing better at it in reality. Wouldn’t you feel more confident with yourself and your idea of how you want it to go, if you were able to imagine the result you want and convince yourself that that’s the way it’s likely to go?
In this episode I talk to my friend Ken Gip, about the 3 insights that work for me that get me to a better feeling conscious state, and get me more prepared to take action and deal with life’s problems. Like for example: looking at the similar skills, experiences, and accomplishments that you bring to the table when looking for a job for instance, that you may not give yourself credit for, that can also be used to implement into being qualified for a new and better job.
In this episode I talk about how dreams can have patterns that we can also recognize playing out in our daily lives, on a different scale. Just one example of where most of the dream has a similar emotional state as others and in several daily life situations that changes to a substantially different better feeling emotional state at the end of the dream or (in daily life) over certain hours of the day.
All that you want to change is an inside job. The way some is responding to you isn’t just coming from them, in a big picture sense, it’s coming from both you and than by way of the way you tend to respond to them. So change the way you respond to them and you’ll see that change in one way or another, in them. Just like in a hose, the water isn’t coming from just the spray gun, it’s also coming from where you rotated the knob to turn on the water. That’s where it came from.
If you break the thing that you want to remember, into smaller pieces, and associate it with things that are strange and that you already remember, you will remember them a lot better.
We tend to often overlook how many possibilities of different ways to do life on a day to day basis, are within our reach. Often, all you have to do is ask better questions that automatically prompt you to discover better answers to other questions that you are curious about how you didn’t see it before.
This episode dives deep into one of my favourite concepts that I gained knowledge from my own experiential point of reference, about how trying to move away from focusing on what you don’t want always ends up back at (like the beginning) where you decided to focus on what you don’t want to somehow move away from it. When the solution is to realign your focus back on what you want. Sometimes again and again, like the perpetual habit that you’re trying to get rid of.
In this episode I explore how plunging into the building of a habit of constant improvement that can be measured and therefore more easily tweaked along the way as life changes, so that you change with it with measured improvements that feel doable when you see the bigger picture of the nature tendency of humans to succeed and when you also look closer at particular (sometimes intense) turning points in your life that lead to the desires of these improvements. How many times does it take for you to notice that you’ve improved just a little bit more than your last improvement, in a particular area of your life that it looks very likely that it’s not frequent but consistent and incremental? You’ve seen the same kind of /version of improvement before, where if you keep going at the same pace for more than the small span of time at which you measured, but over a longer span of time, you’ll see that your life will be on a trajectory of substantial success.
In this episode I dive into ways to get out ahead of impulsive behaviour and beliefs that you don’t want to exercise and take time to do. By noticing what, when and how you find yourself thinking about what your thinking about, whether or not your circumstances have changed.
If you can find a way to learn to not only prioritize your tasks and tweak the order of the tasks and goals that you do to give you more energy to get more done while remembering to plan and than execute them well in advance. And constantly be thinking about these goals and tasks throughout your day, and do the same with your week and month and other longer term lengths of time for setting goals, you can eventually do a whole lot of the things that you really want to do while producing quality material, and get them done in less amount of time.
This episode is about family relationships and the concept of living in the end. When you work on yourself first, you can change the way you respond to others who are close to you, evoking them to respond in a similar way. Generally, if you look for similarities rather than differences between others and yourself, you can begin to form a quality and longer lasting relationship
This episode is full of statements and questions that you can ask yourself when you’re in the midst of a challenging situation or are experiencing some negative emotion.
The long term benefits of work that you enjoy doing are made out of short term benefits. Generally, the more often the better. That’s why it’s useful to think about your goals constantly, if you can’t act on them at the moment.
Mental discipline is best done in a persistent yet light and gentle way where you’re letting yourself see the possibilities of why or how you could be responding in the way that you’re responding.
When you experiment with whatever decision you have made, you begin to reveal the mysteries of your life. The truths that would have happened anyway. Life is perfect in its freedom to have imperfect plans or to have no plans at all for the future, and it’s freedom to have new extracted insights about the past, or not a thought about the past. The acceptance of those imperfect concepts leads to a better ability to imagine something perfect.
It is possible to create more time for the things that give you zest for life. When you find a way to do the things that would feel the best or better to have done, than you’ll find that you have more energy to do other things in a more efficient and enjoyable way.
Alanis falls asleep and begins to dream again more vividly. She finds out she’s in 1998 again, and begins to gather some data that hints the fact that she is dreaming close to when her dream that she had dreamt before made her reality go off on a tangent down a trajectory creating an alternate reality.
It’s extremely important to know what you value. It’s also important to know how much you value them. One way to do this is to make a list of them and than apply them to a particular life circumstance that you may not be fully aware of how and why you are valuing what you are valuing in the situation. Than once you become more aware of them, you can do something about how much you value these things that you perhaps didn’t see the opportunity to value. (Ex: Relationships, Life Mission, Career, Cultural Refinement/skills cultivation, Family, etc.) Maybe your in the best place you’ve ever been in a relationship because you’ve never experienced it quite like this before. Maybe you’re doing better in the relationship than you thought, up to this point.
Remember how far you’ve come. This is living in the now moment but also analyzing the pattern of events of progression and the likely path into the future that it implies.
Alanis discovers herself on a whole new and unfamiliar life Trajectory. How did it change?
This episode is about the first couple pages of my thriller, sci fi story “Trajectory.” It’s about a 37 year old women who accidentally goes back in time to when she was much younger (1998) and changes the trajectory of her life without noticing. With the help of her friends, they go on a long journey of events to change it back to how it was before.
Visualizing the end result as if it’s already done is an immensely motivating concept to use to get more of what you want and less of what you don’t. And Counting your little accomplishments along the way to it.
Go a way of relaxing into things. Going with them. A cooperation of what seems to be happening right now.
Notice the little changes as they come and use them as opportunities to learn to adapt to the continuous changing process of life. The list of necessary tasks that you need to get done will look a lot smaller and often even enjoyable.
If you feed the right addiction the others will become so weak that they will eventually begin to strengthen you when you see the opportunity to not take part in them. Get addicted to something that feels good to do through most of the process of it, like at the beginning of (right before you do it) and at the end, (when it’s done.)
Try it and see each one. One at a time. Which one do you usually do? Strengthen that one so that the other follow more strongly.
The higher degree to which you want something, the more it’s necessary to let go of it if you want to do, be, experience, have it. Letting go is gaining the control you once had but are lacking in that particular moment.
In the middle of adversity is right where the thing you most desire is. Where you can plunge into finding the solution to the one problem that seems to continue to come up.
The more scheduled tasks and experiences that you’re aware of, that make up your bigger goals. The more likely you are to get them done, in the same 16 hours of time that you are awake. Thus, slow down time.
How to perceive the situation of going for what you really desire instead of what you once thought was all you can accomplish, and seeing more of your way to what you really desire as more logical and simple.
If you aim for the board but don’t aim for the specific target you want, you won’t likely get it. Hitting the board is a good start. The next thing to do is aim more precisely for what you want. If you don’t. At least you hit the board. You gave it a shot. And that’s something to work with.
This episode is especially for creative individuals, in the arts. Life is about balance. And finding that balance is key in becoming aware of the value and usefulness of what it is you’re doing in any given moment.
Mental strategies to trick your brain when experiencing negative emotions like anxiety, frustration, anger or depression. And how and when to ask useful questions.
This episode is about the process of motivating yourself to take action on your deepest goals and desires. Coming to a resourceful enough emotional state and some interesting ideas is always enhanced with, and fully experienced through action. There is no good or bad actions, there’s just necessary and unnecessary actions.
This is about a couple tools that I’ve used in my own experience, to help maintain a more resourceful and better feeling state of mind and prepares yourself mentally, before taking action on larger goals.
One problem that many people face is the decision in what to do with their time. How to use your life to make the most of it, and create a better experience. This can be used in creating a more satisfied experience at work or in choosing a fulfilling career that (feels good to have done and do) and creates value in your life.
This episode is about being consistent with your thoughts and actions. In other words it’s about being more resourceful with where you are, and not being distracted about what may or may not lie ahead. If there are holes in an obstacle, water will go through it or around it. I like to be like water. To continue moving even if there doesn’t appear to be a way.
If you were to put every subject on a spectrum with it’s opposite on the other end, and applied this to your own personal growth, you’d be able to see that whatever end you prefer, it’s opposite is what you could lean on to make the most change in your life. It’s about moving up and down the spectrum little by little making changes in each area on the spectrum. For example: on a spectrum of logic on one end and intuition on the other, and you find you would prefer a more intuitive way of thinking, than you could try changing the way you think logically. Like accessing more clearly the facts of a current problem you’re dealing with at which you may not have been aware of before. Sometimes if you rely too much on your intuitive way of thinking /what could be, instead of the facts (logical way of thinking) of what is, you loose your balance of the two ends of the spectrum. And since they are both connected on the one spectrum, the other way of thinking (intuition) would become lacking to the same degree as the (logical) way of thinking on the other end. Or another term I like to use to look at it as more of a continuum than as something static, is a cycle that runs continuously in a circle that very subtly and gradually expands like a spiral.