Category: Josh Feingold Blog

I learned this about a year ago, and found it really helpful.

Basically, it goes like this.  You only touch work one time.

That means if you pick up a box in your car that needs to go to the bedroom.  It doesn’t first go to the kitchen table to sit for a while, rather it goes straight to the bedroom.

It means that if you open a bill, it gets paid immediately, which further means, you don’t open your bills until you are ready to pay them.

The benefits of this rule are great.  Besides the fact that it results in less physical work, I find that the most amazing gain is mental.  Specifically, I am not always passing the box in the kitchen thinking, I really need to take that upstairs.  Or fingering the bill that needs to get paid.  You get the idea.

Apply the touch once rule.

OK, folks.   Time for a little soapbox.

Voyeurism is ruining America.

At first I thought it was a fad.  Then I realized that we had turned into a nation of voyeurs.

You know I’m right, and I won’t expound on how voyeuristic TV and constant friend updates has become one of the major activities of the under 40 generation – and perhaps even those above – right Grandma?

However, in our interest of following others, we have stopped living our own life.  We spend our days, and nights, living vicariously through others.

Instead of enjoying our own lives, we sit and watch other people brag about the good stuff in their lives on Facebook and make ourselves feel bad about what we aren’t doing, or watch TV and see how bad their lives are, so we can feel good about our life. Either way, life is full of non-reality reality.

So do yourself a favor, shut all the crap off, and go live your life yourself.

We aren’t mind readers, but it seems that people often expect us to be.

Part of the general issue is that often we ourselves are not clear about how we are feeling.  We think we are, but really we have a vague idea of our emotional state, and create some type of generic term that may or may not have meaning to the other person that we are talking with.

By identifying our main emotional states, and clearly articulating them (which I think you will find not to be more than about 10 believe it or not that you ever want to communicate) you can better wrap your arms around yourself, and better communicate yourself to others.

So all you have to do is write down your main emotional states in your journal and then put down how YOU feel and what you feel like doing in that state.  The interesting thing is that sometimes our body goes into the “feel like doing” state and not into the actual state, so by doing this exercise, you can know where you are going emotionally before you actually get there.  Pretty cool, huh?

Also, by doing this you can tell someone how you are feeling with your label, and they will know what you “feel like doing” and can help you do just that.  Instead of fishing around for permission to go there, and eventually getting there.  If you got that, you got that.  If not, don’t worry about it.

Anyway, I have found that the better defined you make yourself, the clearer you become to yourself, and the more real you are to yourself and others.  So good luck, I hope it helps.

What was, was.

You can’t take back the past or change it.  It is now part of history, and you must accept it for what it is, for better or worse.

There is no sense knocking your head against the wall, or wishing the past was different, or pretending that things went down more to your liking.  What was, was.

All you can take from the past is a lesson.

A lesson of what you won’t do in the future. A lesson of what you will do differently in the future.  A lesson what you won’t allow in the future.

Perhaps just a lesson that what was, was, and you can only take your past and look forward.

So how do we identify our fears?

I can tell you what I did.

I wrote them down.

I asked myself, “What am I afraid of doing?”

Then I asked, “What are the traumatic events from my childhood, and how do they still impact me?”

I followed that up by watching myself carefully, and noticed those areas where I was defensive, offensive, put other people down, or built myself up.

I put them all down on paper, and grouped them into categories, and pretty soon, I noticed a pattern in my fears, and with a little help from a good therapist, realized that they all boiled down to two or three key issues which were my original pain points from my childhood.

What was amazing about the exercise was that once I realized that the underlying issues were, the issues seemed to have magically disappeared.  (This is not to say that I don’t need to be diligent about staying on top of my pain points, but the fears are gone.)

It seems that the funny thing about certain issues is that what bothers us more about things is that we don’t understand ourselves, and not the actual issue itself.  So its almost like once we understand the issue, the issue seems to dissipate since in truth, the internal friction goes away – and it was this friction that needed to be addressed.

Of course, to get to the bottom of these core issues, probably took me hundreds of hours if not more, and it is possible that I am still not close to done, and am just fooling myself.  However, I have a general feeling that I am really getting close, and if nothing else understand myself better, and that really is the whole goal of this project anyways.