Saturday = peace within – High Self-estem = peace within = saturday everyday

Saturday my friend. Yes. That’s a fact. And I Imagine that’s the case for you too. It’s my  ‘me-time’ time and preparation for the coming week’s challenge. Hence, I’m going to keep it short so I can focus on understanding the decision-making process, which is the challenge theme of next week!

Instead I’m going to talk briefly about my favourite book The Six pillars of self-esteem, written by Nathaniel Branden, a self-esteem researcher and a guru within the field until he passed away some years ago. It’s without a doubt the book that has made the biggest impact on my life. Why? It gets to those 20% that makes 80% of the difference, and is does so in a straight forward and easy to grasp way. It’s about changing from within, taking control of what you can take control of. Your mind.

The book presents Six pillars that are essential if we are to develop and live a life with high level of self-esteem. The six pillars of self-esteem are:

1. The Practice of Living Consciously
2. The Practice of Self-Acceptance
3. The Practice of Self-Responsibility
4. The Practice of Self-Assertiveness
5. The Practice of Living Purposefully
6. The Practice of Personal Integrity

What’s self-esteem you may ask, because I didn’t even know there was a difference between self-esteem and confidence two years ago. Nathaniel Branden, came to the following definition:

“Self-esteem is the disposition to experience oneself as being competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and of being worthy of happiness. It is confidence in the efficacy of our mind, in our ability to think. By extension, it is confidence in our ability to learn, make appropriate choices and decisions, and respond effectively to change. It is also the experience that success, achievement, fulfilment – happiness – are right and natural for us. The survival-value of such confidence is obvious; so is the danger when it is missing.”

So, what’s the point of this blog post? Well, I just wanted to open you up to the concept of self-esteem, and personally testify to how it changed my life after putting some serious effort into developing it. If you’re curious, you can listen to the audiobook here (link), it’s only three ½ hours long. And if you want to have it as an mp3 on your phone, just copy the YouTube link and use this webpage (link) to download it.  If you want the quick fix, here’s kind of a summary I did a while back:

Besides that, I wish you a great day. For me, the evening is going to be spent with friends and board games. Did I mention I love Saturday?

/Alexander

Do you ever find yourself feeling happy in one moment but then totally lost in the next one? Or even more subtle – like a weird undefined gray-misty-mood coming and going.  But since you’re constantly keeping yourself so occupied with external inputs, you’re not allowing yourself the breathing room to ‘vent’ what’s going on. But reality will eventually catch up. It always does.

That’s my reality right now. Or well, let’s not exaggerate things – my life hasn’t totally imploded on me! I’m just realizing I’ve got some things to deal with. Just ended a great week – had a blast at work, nice morning workouts, a focused and controlled mind, and on top of all that a weekly challenge that pushed me to meet and talk to 5 beautiful women. Three of these conversations making me smile in this very moment just thinking about them. Honestly, had such a tremendously awesome week! But it was also intense. So today when Friday came around, and I gave myself some much need breathing room, clarity stroke with an essance of chaos stroke.

Now this is a regular recurrent thing for most people. I Imagine. We have our periods of clarity in direction and purpose, then we staggnate, or dip down if we don’t adress the issue. This can be described with S-curves, which I took the liberty of borrowing this picture to describe ( source in the caption ):

Source: https://hbr.org/2012/09/throw-your-life-a-curve

True for most people is also the part of not having time to address the much-needed tings that needs to be addressed. It’s related to living with a low level of consciousness, which I’ve talked about earlier in this blog. That’s why I’m a strong advocate of having a scheduled moment at least once a week to sit down and reflect on your life – a weekly review. What has happened, what reflections and learning can be extracted looking back, what was my top moments, did I progress towards my goals the way I intended; did I do what I sat out to do, and if not – why? Looking forward, Is there something I need to tweak and what do I want to accomplish in the coming week?

The weekly review should also include a birds view perspective on your life; what do you want to achieve in life; goals, purpose and vison for yourself. Regularly evaluating your journey to make sure that you’re doing the ‘right things’. That your way of living life is in fact a reasonable good match to how you WANT to live life. Giving yourself that moment every week is priceless. Sometimes you’ll not throw yourself out to the high-altitude-level-stuff, but if you have the routine of doing a weekly evaluation – you’ll fell when it’s necessary!

The practicality of it all happens in OneNote for me, which is part of the Office365 package. A free alternative is Evernote which has a similar look. But you might just as well use a sheet of white paper. If you don’t know where to start, you can download a  weekly evaluation guide (here https://liveyourlegend.net/email-updates/ ).

Now, I have got some high-level altitude questions I need to address; career, future, love life, friends, family, living arrangement, YouTube channel, lifestyle choices (training & health). But I wish you a happy Friday evening?.

If you want to listen to the live stream summary of my week’s challenge, just check out this video:

/Alexander

Ahh.. Food.. Come to me baby! Delicious sweet potato with a sunny side up egg, served with a perfect avocado… And maybe some sun-dried tomatoes – or did I eat all of them?!

As soon as I’ve posted this post, I’ll break my 21 hours fast. Hang in there Alex. I’ve been starting to play around with intermitting fasting – again – this week. Something I started doing quite regularly on and off 3 years ago. However, the last year it has only happened sporadically like every other week. When you’re not used to longer fasting, well, then it momentarily can feel like someone cracked your head  open like an egg, and the mess is floating out all over the place (can’t stop thinking about them..). Weak, hungry, itching in the body, distant from the world and a bit foggy, yet in some strange way that’s hard to pin point, absolutely amazing.

I can’t explain it, but it’s something about. Especially when these tougher moments disappear, because it’s a temporary state. Like right now I can feel myself coming out of that awfulness, into the better place. But I won’t deny that the last three hours required some serious willpower to keep me going. And not die.

What’s intermitting fasting? Well basically it means that you have an eating window of 8 hours and then a fast of 16 hours. These time windows aren’t set in stone, but the idea is to put your body in a fasting state which you transfer into after around 12 hours. Anyways, there’s a bunch of claimed advantages, some backed up with stronger studies some perhaps not so much. A quick googling gave me this article “7 Science-Backed Health Benefits of Fasting” (source) and they stated the following benefits:

1. Fasting Can Help the Aging Process And Increase Longevity
2. Fasting May Help Promote Weight Loss, Predominantly Fat Loss
3. Fasting Can Help Reduce the Risk of Developing Type 2 Diabetes
4. Fasting Can Offer Protection Within the Brain
5. Fasting May Offer a Promising Therapeutic Potential Within Multiple Sclerosis
6. Fasting Can Switch on Specific Repair Genes: Autophagy
7. Fasting Can Offer Protection from Certain Cancers and Help Mitigate the Side Effects of Standard Treatment

I don’t buy into these too serious. Let me rephrase that – they are not the reason for why I’m fascinated by fasting and have tried to implement it as a regular thing in my life. Or well, I do have a goal of living to at least 130, so the longevity part for sure interreges me and was what first arose my curiosity. No, for me the number one reason is the practicality of not having to think about food for so long. It’s black and white. When I’m not supposed to eat, I’m not going to eat. That’s the end of it. And I don’t need to keep battling my mind to convince me otherwise. To clear my mind like that and be free, man do I love it.

The second reason I think it’s amazing is due how you train yourself to resist urges. Which actually increases your willpower long-term (video link ) – even though it drains the shityou’re your willpower when you’re not used to it. Today really was a struggle, let’s just say that. And that’s also why I chose to do my weekly challenge ( approach-a-girl-every-day-and-start-a-conversation) on my way to work instead of on my way home. If you’re curious to find out how it went when I started talking to a random girl this morning on the train, check out this live stream I just did below.

Besides that, I’d just like to invite you to try some fasting out. It’s interesting and helpful to get to know your body. Before I’d ever tried it, I thought it was impossible for me to go without food for more than 6 hours. It would kill me. Now I know I can make it for days. I think the longest I’ve went was something like 48 hours. It makes me flexible and okay in situations where food isn’t available ( yeah that happens sometimes ), and just that in itself is worth a lot to me!

Have a great evening!

/Alexander

Hey guys! It’s Wednesday and we are half way through the week. Just love that feeling. Not because I hate the beginning of the week, but because the mode shifts to a different kind of mode. And variation is one of my favourite things. Even the bad kind. Perhaps not initially, but long-term, as it always brings me new perspectives and appreciations for things. Getting to know myself better.

Anyways, I don’t if your Wednesday is as good as microwaved Banas with cardamom served with walnuts, raspberry’s and yogurt, but mines freaking great! I just had an exciting conversation with a random girl I approached on my way home from work. If you’ve missed it, it’s a part of my week challenge. If you’re curios you can see the video where I introduced the challenge here (link), and if you want to hear me tell the story of what just went down, you can see the replay live stream I did 30 minutes ago here:

Besides that, I’m not going to say much more today. Need to get working on a video I’m editing. BUT, I just have to share this great video on the topic of willpower I stumbled across today ( it’s in the beginning of this post). I know I’ve already been discussing it a whole lot here – but willpower is the theoretical focus of the week. And I just love to nerd in on stuff.

What I particularly want you to take with you is a breathing exercise they present – 10 seconds in and 10 seconds out. I tried this for 20 minutes on the train home before approaching that girl I talked about. It’s some scientific evidence backing it up for enabling you to enter a state of “pause & Plan” – the opposite of the Fight & flight mode we enter when adrenaline enters our system. Don’t take my word for it, I’ve just started doing it (but I liked it). Instead watch the video if you’ve time, it’s well put together.

Thanks for stopping by & See you tomorrow!

/Alexander

Tuesday! And I just had my second live stream of this week where I talked about my little daily quest that happened an hour ago. in other words – I feel great!

What did I do? Well I approached a girl at the subway station with the intention to practice some social skills and be a bit flirty. And the whole thing might have ended up costing my 860 SEK. If you want the details you just have to watch the live stream in replay yourself.

BUT what I do want to emphasize is the MAGIC of doing these small little uncomfortable challenges on a daily basis. It really adds so much excitement to the everyday life. I was kind of drained of energy and exhausted before talking to this girl – afterwards I just felt great, and still do.

It’s fascinating to me how such a small thing like being a bit uncomfortable and flirt some with a stranger can add so much excitement to the day. And it doesn’t have to concern “flirting”. When I did my Christmas calendar this December turned out to be such a blast (one challenge each day for 23 days where I was supposed to prove to myself that I didn’t care what people thought of me)! Now it for sure also was a hustle, but I have so many great moments to look back at. It makes me smile in this very moment just thinking about it. I’m so convinced that those truly great moments, only comes after some kind of effort was invested to reach that moment. The greater the effort, the greater the emotional reward. Food never tastes as good as after you’ve worked out hard to earn that extra peace of treat.

I have a naive hope for what the people living on this world can accomplish.

The beauty of all these small little challenges I’ve done, is how little time they actually took. Of course, they required a whole lot of willpower and varying degree of anxiety to live through before pulling the trigger. But the actual execution often only lasted a couple of minutes – yet they gave me so much in return. So much. Connection, joy & laughter, great moments to look back at, social skill development and so much self-esteem growth for doing what I had set out to do. Perhaps most importantly – hope in people and the joint world we live in. Proof of how much the people we walk by everyday can add to our lives if we just choose to open that door.

Anyways, time to reward myself with some food for today’s efforts:).

Hope all of you had a lovely day, see you tomorrow.

/Alexander

Hey Guys! So this week there won’t be any extensive blog posts, instead I’ll be sharing what’s on my mind through my live streams that’ll be having every day Monday – Friday, I’ll be doing them just as I get home, which means that I’ve just performed the daily quest I have this week:

Cold approach one girl each day on my way home from work and start a conversation with her. Purpose: Practicing my social skills; getting used to handle rejections; building self-esteem ( doing the necessary actions I’ve put up for myself to reach my goals)

In the live stream I also briefly discussed my first day of preserving my willpower throught the day through some teqniues I presetned in a blog post I did this saturday.

See you tomorrow,

/Alexander

So It’s Sunday, and once more we stand on the verge of throwing ourselves into yet another week. A week of personal growth – If you choose to. As always, I choose to – it just makes life so much more fun!

In this video, I’m going to present a little social challenge for you and me to do each day, Monday through Friday. Is it going to be hard and fill you up with anxiety. So Why the heck should we do this? Well, I don’t know about you, but I believe in pushing myself to those uncomfortable places to develop the social skills I so long for. Being able to enjoy every social situation, anywhere, any time. I’ve come far, which means I more and more often get to connect with and truly enjoy social situations.

We’ll always have problems in life, but we can choose what kind of problems we want to have. Much of our happiness is born out of solving problems, hence it makes sense to choose the areas we want to have most of our ‘problems’ in.

“We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change. We have evolved to always live with a certain degree of dissatisfaction and insecurity, because it’s the mildly dissatisfied and insecure creature that’s going to do the most work to innovate and survive.”

― Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck:

It’s important to understand that it’s about the process – who you become on your journey to that end goal. And how much fun, excitement and joy it adds to your everyday life when you have small little mini quests to overcome. If you don’t enjoy the journey, it isn’t going to last. I try to see life as a game – and I want to level up and have a blast doing so!

And by putting up small ‘end goals’,  we get to celebrate often. The sense of proudness you feel when you’ve pushed through and done a tough social challenge is just… Well, let’s just say that it’s worth all the hustle (check out this video if you want to see me experience this)

Last Sunday I talked about how to implement three social habits ( link ) and if you want a great video on thw whole conept of habits check this one out. And in this week’s challenge I thought I’d iterate on one of those habits. You see every time I run home from work, I have a three kilometre distances where I’ve implemented the following habit:

Cue: Stepping of the train.

Routine: When passing a girl that interests me in some way, I try get eye contact and then say hello/hi. That’s it.

Reward: Sense of proudness for doing a socially uncomfortable thing I sat out to do

Skill development: Lowering the bar to ignite a conversation with girls/anyone

The 2.0 version of this habit :

Routine: When passing a girl that interests me in some way, I try get eye contact and then say hello/hi AND start a conversation with her. Telling her that I wanted to talk to her because she looks cool/cute/interesting/nice ( whatever feeling I genuinely had for wanting to talk to her).

Skill development: igniting a conversation with a person I’m attracted to

As part of this challenge, I will also be doing a very short live stream daily (Monday – Friday) when I get home just after doing this. Sharing my experiences and reflections, but also trying something new with the channel. Would love for you to join in and share yours too.

But so, the challenge for you is to do this as well, tweak it if necessary to suit you or pick another social challenge. Remember It should be a small daily thing, and it should be pushing you out of your comfort zone. But not overdoing it. Then you’ll just run the risk of creating an emotional scar if it fails badly. Or not do it at all. Also, I want you to design it as a habit; defining when, where and how you’re going to this (que, routine, reward – read more here:). Eliminating as much needed willpower as possible. Remember to remind yourself for why YOU are doing this.

I don’t know about you, but my initial willpower driven New Year’s resolutions efforts have decreased some. Hence, my secondary focus this week is to work on optimizing the use of willpower in my life, making sure I have enough for the right things. For instance, not failing on my weekly challenge quests just because I spent all my willpower on shitty decision like buying crap or what food I’m going to eat today.  Now I addressed this in my live stream this Friday, but I also wrote a blog post about this yesterday.

In practice it will look like this:

• I’ll be looking over my life and see which areas I spend unnecessary willpower through choices that doesn’t matter
• Remove as much temptations as possible so I don’t have to fight urges.
• Sleep more
• Utilize standby mode sessions
• Meditate more

So that’s is, see you tomorrow in the livestream around 1800 Swedish time!

/Alexander

P.S This week’s bok is Fingertoppskansla, By Henrik Fexeus

What up guys? In today’s blog post I thought I share some insights on how our Willpower works, and how we can adjust our days to optimize the preservation of it. Or to put in a meaningful context – not waste willpower on shitty small decisions, so you have some to spend when it really is needed for important things! Like having an important conversation, exercising, or approaching the potential love of your life you just saw walking by. This will also work as a primer for next week’s challenge – because a challenge isn’t a challenge if it doesn’t require some willpower to go through with it!

Bellow I’ll present the gist of it, and I’m basing the content on the YouTube video course by Improvement pill which I’ve mentioned before (link down there). A lot of this content is also covered in The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal – a great book I strongly can recommend. Anyways, let’s get into it.

Willpower is like a battery – The more you use it, the less you’ll have left. We start off with a certain amount when we wake up, but as we go through our days making a bunch of decisions and perform mentally challenging tasks, it’ll drain. So, depending on how your days look like, you’ll use up different amounts. For instance, when your studying for exams (which requires a whole lot of willpower), many find themselves losing all sense of normal everyday life routines like eating, sleeping and taking basic care of oneself. In a research context, they’ve named this state as “EGO DEPLETION” and it in fact makes your brain work slower and you become more emotional and impulsive.

Moreover, we also deplete our willpower reservoir when we are fighting cravings and needs. Over time though if we resist falling into these ‘traps’, we strengthen our willpower. But in the short-term perspective – it drains us! This means if we’re are trying to implement a bunch of new habits at the same time, it will be very hard for us to do so. I naively thought I could implement 10+ new habits as my new year’s resolution. Looking individually at each one of these habits, they don’t look much to the world. But when you sum up all the necessary willpower required, I burn through my daily budget with ease.

However, this view of having a limited resource has been changed in research lately, stating that it’s more about what mindset you have. 30% biological and 70% psychological to put it in numbers. Ironically even having a belief that willpower is limited will decrease your level of willpower (did I just make you a worse person?).

Looking at my own experience these past weeks, it makes sense. First week went by like a charm, super pumped and motivated. Since, still trying to do the same amount of habits, the willpower to do so is far less. Hence it can’t be tied to a ‘daily budget’. But there’s still truth to both concepts, and by embracing them both we can make sure to design our lives in in ways that optimize how we relate to willpower as a finite resource.

So how do we design our days better from a willpower conserving perspective? Here are some of the tips from the videos (Check them out if you want more details). My personal favourites are more sleep (powernaps), implemeting habits (longterm) and meditation. Altough the one I’m most excited about right now is excluding uncessary decisions from my life. Last week I spent unsubscribing to soo many diferent mails I got coming in daily. Considering all these offers  we get means a whole lot of wasted willpower. Willpower that could be spent much better. Even if we can make a good deal, those earned dollars aren’t cheep if we consider what other bad choices it will make us do.

Good Luck and see you tomorrow:)

/Alexander

Video Links: (playlist :

How To Stop Bad Decisions With Willpower

THE SECRET TO STAYING MOTIVATED – Willpower Efficiency

How To Recharge Your Willpower

5 LIFE HACKS That Will MOTIVATE You To Do ANYTHING

Yeah I just had that moment when I realized all the things I thought was going to happen, isn’t going to happen. To high ambitions, too many goals, in too many areas. It happens to all of us. If you can’t relate to this, you’re either a freak (good for you!) or you’ve never put up any goals.

But I planned for this, I didn’t think it was going to happen this quickly, but an INTENSE week really put me to the test, and I didn’t hold up.  But that’s alright, because I have my weekly Friday evaluation session where I can re-ground myself. Look back at the week, analyse and reflect on how I’ve been progressing on my goals AND do some tweaking.

I talked a some about this in my weekly live evaluation I did earlier today, if you want to watch the replay, you’ll find it here: https://youtu.be/6MaXxsKkcEs?t=20m57s

But the gist of it is that You need to make sure that you know what it is that you want, you have a well thought out strategy for how to reach it, and most importantly you’re properly motivated for WHY you actually want this. This follows both Simon Sinek’s golden circle, and the fundamental principles behind Tony Robins RPM planning method and David Allen’s Getting things Done approach.

• The what – Am I getting what I want
• The How – Is the strategy I’m using working? For instance If it’s concerning training, how an what exercise am I doing. There’s a thousand ways to l lose weight if that’s a goal. Maybe you’ve decided to start running every day, but think it’s the most boring thing in the world. News flash – that’s not going to work! Find a better way!
• The Why – Making sure you have deep motivation for what you’re pursuing is the most important thing. Take the time to actually write this down. And if it’s not easy, then perhaps it not a goal you should pursue?

So I know what I’m up to this weekend – revisiting and planning my New Year’s goals!

Good luck, see you tomorrow.

/Alexander

Video links to related content:

How great leaders inspire action | Simon Sinek

Rapid Planning Method(RPM) Tony Robbins

The Natural Planning Model by David Allen

https://youtu.be/4aW0ROPQNis

There’s a law that I came across this summer that when I read Tim Ferris Book The 4-hour work week (great book) that has fundamentally changed my approach to getting things done. It’s called Parkinson’s law and states: “Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important.”, but it’s its subtext that holds the real learning;

Once I had read that sentence I saw my entire life flash back in an instance, quickly realising how this seemed to be accurate for everything I ever done. I’m just not finished until l really, really, have to be. When I studied to become an engineer, I thought I was clever to start early – so I could finish early. But I never finished. I kept refining and grinding till the very last minute. Spending all my time, time that perhaps could be used more wisely. And this is especially true for creative work. It can always be a little bit better; some words that can be tweaked, some sound effects that could be added, some colours to make it pop.

Source: http://www.outswimmingthesharks.com/lack-of-time-equals-lack-of-priorities/

But knowledge is power, and with power we can change! In other words, you can fix this by actually starting to work with tight deadlines. Specify what it is that you have to do within the limited time you give yourself. Warning – make sure you mean it. Something I failed on with my blogg-every-day-in-January-challenge (so much for that learning). I fail to set a strict deadline for myself, or I told myself I could have 40 minutes every day. But I just stopped caring about it, resulting in all my evening free time going to writing this damn thing. Leaving me with no movie editing time. Which sucks.

And that’s why I’m going to end this blog post right now. Because I just got home from shooting a kick-off event at my company, 7 girls trying to make an impact – Engineers for equality. So now I’m going to edit the shit out of that!

Have a lovely evening?

/Alexander

VIDEO TIPS:

Here’s another video I did for the company I work for a while back, if you’re curious on how it can turn out: https://www.youtube.com/edit?o=U&video_id=eSzb8AKPnfk

A great TED-talk that also highlights the importance of deadlines. This is a funny one and well worth your time!