Apparently humor helps.

Per Bari's recommendation (the goddess of Conscious Bookkeeping), I set up a savings account with the online bank ING Direct.

My goal is to make saving automatic by tricking myself into saving money before I can spend it. My saving goal is to get 6 months of expenses tucked away in my "Freedom Fund" for if I ever find myself unemployed again.

It took about 30 minutes to set up (not quite the 5 minutes advertised, but pretty fast considering I read all the fine print--which is actually written in human language for once!).

You need a checking account at your own bank--the ING Orange savings account depends on deposits from your checking account.

There are no fees, no minimums, and a 4.5% APY. Pretty good, especially considering my bank Wells Fargo has a 0.2% APY and a $300 minimum daily balance.

One thing to note is that transfering your money from ING to your checking account at your bank can take 2-3 days to show up. And I also found this key bit of information in the fine print (italics mine):

Details About the Orange Savings Account ("OSA"):

·    Limits on Withdrawals/Transfers from Your OSA:  Pursuant to Federal law, you're only allowed to take money out of your OSA 6 times per monthly statement cycle ("Cycle").  If you repeatedly make more than 6 withdrawals during a Cycle, we may close your account.  Under Federal law, we must reserve the right to require you to give us at least 7 days written notice before you take money out of your OSA.  (This hardly ever happens but legally we have to say it!)

You'll have to have your checkbook handy to set up the automatic transfers, because you'll enter the routing and account numbers.

ING will make two tiny deposits within 2-4 days and you'll have to check to see what they are (call your bank or log on to your bank online) and verify them with ING Direct to finalize the account setup, but that's not too hard. Just put a reminder on your calendar or to-do list.

Then you can set up an Automatic Savings Plan where ING automatically transfers from your checking to your ING Orange Savings Account when you set it to do so...or you can always manually transfer funds.

I highly recommend getting this set up. Saving can be easy if you just make it automatic.

So recently I've begun a new phase of life. I'm 27, and have learn a lot, experienced a lot, grown a HUGE lot.

I've faced down extreme social anxiety to become a charismatic dancer, I've meditated 12 hours a day on 10-day silent retreats, I've gotten organized and learned how to Get Things Done--but I've never learned to balance my checkbook, set up a budget, or set up a savings account...until now.

Yup, I'm afraid of money. Terrified. Horrified. Most of my nightmares are money nightmares (and action/commitment nightmares--"oh god, did I remember to do X?"--hence the positive power of GTD on my life).

But I know from experience that fear is an opportunity for courage. Fear is an opportunity for courage. I repeat this like a mantra, for it helps me see that when I feel the fear and take action anyway, the fear melts into excitement, boils over into ecstacy, and later condenses into power.

The last 2 weeks marked a great turning point in my relationship with money. I took a class on Conscious Bookkeeping last weekend, and I learned that bookkeeping can be a great spiritual practice, and also great fun! (The instructor says that part of what makes bookkeeping conscious is the addition of "homepathic doses of chocolate." :)

I set up a savings account today, and it felt great! I'm excited about setting up Quicken! Excited! Fear is trapped excitement, so of course I'm excited...and I'll probably also feel frustrated, terrified, and ecstatic at times along the path. These are signs of growth.

I'm reading a number of great conscious money books too. The first one I'm tackling is George Kinder's The Seven Stages of Money Maturity. What's remarkable about this book is that Kinder was a Buddhist teacher first and Certified Financial Planner second, which means he's both deeply spiritual and deeply knowledgable about money. His approach is the most mature I've yet encountered around money, and a wonderful antidote to pseudo-spiritual, naively capitalist, egoic crap like The Secret.

What a great time to be alive!

My buddy Casey is working with Shawn Phillips, owner of the world's finest abs.  Shawn has created a nutrition product called Full Strength, which is basically powdered high-quality protein and vitamins that you blend with water and ice into a chocolate (or vanilla) shake. Compared to all other protein shakes, it tastes really good (if you can stand sucralose).

(By the way, I recommend emailing or calling them instead of trying to figure out their current website, which forces you into some strange sales flow. Besides, Jodi is quite lovely on the phone!)

For those who don't know me, I'm a skinny dude. A really skinny dude. One time in my life a few years back I decided to do something about this and so I lifted weights intensively and ate 6 meals a day. Protein shakes were part of my nutrition plan, and they seriously worked. I gained 20 lbs of muscle in 8 weeks...before I gave up my plan.

I gave up because I was pushing myself so hard with the weights that I was constantly in pain. My legs were sore up to 5 days after my once-a-week leg workout. I was tearing up my shoulders with bench presses. Basically I lived to train instead of training to live...even though I only worked out 3 times a week for 90 minutes.

This year I have been doing yoga every day. I find my yoga practice to be much kinder to my body, probably because weights to me represent aggressiveness and vanity, but yoga means spirituality and compassion. (I don't think these associations are true for everyone--Shawn in particular has a philosophy and a method that integrates strength training and spirituality.)

But I'm still massively underweight, so I decided to try out the Full Strength shakes--2 shakes a day for 3 months...in addition to 3 meals a day--to see if they can help. I also have trouble maintaining consistent energy throughout the day, and I believe eating more (and more regularly) will help.

Let the experiment begin!

My amazing girlfriend has a 9-year-old son. Her ex-husband is not living locally, so I've begun to take on some parenting roles.

While part of me doesn't feel prepared to be a parent, I'm starting to discover how awesome parenting can be for growth and service.

Parenting is a natural spiritual practice. It's kinda like the opposite of therapy in that instead of delving into your past, you are actively creating the past for a future adult.

Doing so brings up questions of how you were raised by your parents, which leads to doing your own therapeutic work. The greatest part is that you get the opportunity to heal your past by creating a new future for another person!

Your performance in parenting will largely determine how healthy and mature this little person becomes later in life. You can repeat old patterns your parents taught you, or you can rebel against them and thus create the opposite patterns and problems, or you can seek to find a third way out of the karmic cycle.

I'm finding lots of great resources and books on parenting that mirror many of the techniques and strategies in other areas of communication I've studied. It's fun to see the overlap, and to practice courage and compassion in a new area of life.

Part of my Full Strength 12-week experiment is that I'm doing 2 shakes a day plus 3 meals a day. I haven't quite ramped up to the full 5 meals yet, but today I found the first challenge: making and drinking a shake when I'm not hungry. (Luckily I really like the taste of these things!)

A big reason I lack bulk (i.e. why I'm so skinny) is that I skip meals when stressed. Somehow as a kid I got conditioned to feel in my nervous system that in times of stress, I need to conserve my resources, which means not eating. So part of getting myself back to a healthy weight is to push myself a bit to eat when not hungry. I know from previous experiments that after some time, I will start to have a bigger and more regular appetite as my stomach capacity increases.

People who are consistently overweight have the opposite problems. They eat when stressed, and they eat so much and so often that their stomach capacities are larger. They've trained their bodies to crave more calories than they actually need. I've trained my body to crave less calories than I need, which is one reason I consistently find myself underweight.

While it's a less common challenge to be underweight than overweight, it still is a significant challenge that takes a great deal of behavior change to impact successfully. But with some luck I will be successful, and this will provide me with more energy and vitality that I can use to make a bigger difference in the world.

Timeboxing is a time management technique from software development that basically involves setting deadlines for sub-projects so that they don't go on forever (which they otherwise would!).

Used in personal productivity, timeboxing means setting a certain amount of time to do a task or project, then stopping. Timeboxing is useful because it can help overcome perfectionism, and create a sense of urgency to get things going.

Micro-timeboxing however is a new word I made up. :) I'm defining micro-timeboxing as timeboxing for periods of less than 30 minutes (especially 5 or 10 minutes), specifically for those Next Actions on your list that cause you anxiety and have seen no progress in a week or more.

Similarly to Kaizen, micro-timeboxing works not because you actually get much done on the project or task, but precisely because you take a tiny and almost inperceptible step, which can be the breakthrough you need to actually make real progress later.

For example, today I found myself very frustrated with some physical stuff in my home. I have had this pile of stuff listed on my Next Actions list for over a week and had made no progress. My excuse was that I've been so busy with work and tired when I come home.

So I decided to spend literally 5 minutes cleaning. I set a countdown timer on my cell phone and immediately got into action asking "what's one tiny thing I can do right now?", cleaning things up, throwing things out, and putting things away as fast as possible until the timer went off.

Even though I was tired, I was willing to do 5 minutes of cleaning. Micro-timeboxing helped overcome the resistance to taking action. I recommend it!

Simple idea, big results: work as fast and hard as possible for 48 minutes, then completely break and relax for 12. Repeat 4-8 times daily:

http://successbeginstoday.org/wordpress/2006/09/the-power-of-48-minutes/

God, I love the internet.

If you haven't checked out Last.fm, you should! Basically Last.fm functions as an internet radio that you train--similar to Pandora--but with some cool social features that make it smarter, more linked in the library of music on your computer, and connected to others of similar musical taste.

So far its been playing me amazing music I would never have heard any other way, with no repeats (unlike Pandora, which gets old fast).

A lot of people fear that they aren't good enough. The question to ask of this fear is "good enough for what, for whom, and for what contexts?"

And I think a much bigger problem is that often times we are too good at the wrong things. In the information age, there are near infinite things we could learn about, and almost all of them are endless rabbit holes.

There is an entirely new skillset developing, the skill of "just enough"--just enough information, just enough Photoshop knowledge, just enough meditation, just enough exercise, just enough time spent on your GTD system.

How can we determine what is just enough? Having goals helps, as long as we focus on our goals "just enough" and not obsessively. It's really a variation on wisdom, and only can be taught to a certain extent.

http://www.theonion.com/content/infograph/the_secret

What's wrong with "The Secret" and the "Law of Attraction"?

A great question to ask if you want to be wise is "To what extent is this true (or false)?" What's wrong with The Secret is that it's message is true, but only to an extremely small extent.

Take the phrase "Law of Attraction." What would be the difference if we called it the "theory of attraction" or "the untested hypothesis of attraction" or "the unconfirmable and immature but pleasant idea of wish-fulfillment fantasy"?

Or take the assertion "it always works every time." What if instead the assertion was "it often works all else being equal" or "it sometimes works without other influences" or "it is a contributing factor among many" or "it is a negligible but interesting influence that feels convincing but may or may not imply causation" or "it really doesn't work--YOU work, and then you get what you want based on whether you worked hard enough and intelligently enough, oh and occassionally you also get stuff for free but if you bet on that...well let's just say we worked hard on this movie and now buy our products and make us rich, ok?"

But why it appeals is also because of the simplistic message. It's harder to spread the idea "hard work that is also intelligent work with some allowing for sychronicity based on your personality characteristics will really get you what you want, but then what you want changes once you get it, and we all want things from various levels in our being that range from superficial to social to spiritual, and not to mention that focusing on what you want is perhaps the problem itself and that real and lasting happiness comes from using your signature strengths, developing your character, finding flow, and contributing to the lives of others and the world."

Of course, spreading ideas something like this is what all authentic spiritual teaching and philosophy is about, and hopefully what Zaadz is about too.

I would take more bold steps towards becoming the world's best life coach, cultivating courage and compassion with empathy and powerful techniques, marketing myself outrageously and authentically, and scheduling 4-6 clients a week while continuing to give my all to my other work in the world.

A couple months ago I went ice skating. I hadn't been ice skating in about 6 years, and this was going to be my 2nd time ever. But in the last 5 years I'd become a coordinated dancer--a big change from my uncoordinated geeky adolescence. And in the previous 2 months, I had begun practicing yoga every day.

So I expected that some of the dance and yoga would transfer to ice skating. But no, I was still the uncoordinated geek I remembered being in high school! I didn't fall, but my friends (not yogis or dancers) skated circles around me while I tried to stay upright.

This experience got me thinking about transferability, especially with spiritual practices.

Dance and yoga are not very transferable physical skills when it comes to ice skating. So then how transferable is meditation to relationships or business? How transferable is yoga asana to quitting smoking or thinking philosophically? How transferable is the breakthrough catharsis at a Tony Robbins seminar to a time in life that requires great patience?

It seems to me that there is often an unexamined assumption in most spiritual communities that "this spiritual technique works for everything." Upon examination, I've found that techniques seem to have greater or lesser transferability to other contexts. Until this is examined and made explicit, we are living and spreading half-truths about the techniques we practice and encourage others to practice.

At some point along the path, personal development, spiritual practice, psychotherapy, yoga, massage, nutrition, and the quest for six-pack abs morphs from a beautiful expression of human creativity and inspiration into a soul-sucking black hole of narcissistic self-absorption.

I've discovered one way out of this claustrophobic downward spiral: parenting!


Parenting is the new Personal Development

When you help parent a child, you actually get to participate in the development of a person! A real mini-person! No longer is it necessary to simply talk to your inner child with the help of your $150/hour therapist, for now your real child will bug the hell out of you for free! :)

Besides, developing your actual, bodily self is sooooo personal development 1.0. It lacks community, interactivity (unless you are doing the Gestalt 2-chair thing), and not to mention, rounded corners.

Certainly not all parents are aware that parenting is an opportunity to reduce narcissistic self-absorption however. Many parents seek to amplify their narcissism by projecting their unfulfilled dreams onto their children.

But regardless if one seizes the opportunity or not, parenting is a great way to grow up!

My Top Ten Goals for 2007

I set these on a meditation retreat right before January 1st, 2007:

1. Yoga asana practice every day (20 minutes minimum).
2. NLP study and certification with NLP Comprehensive.
3. 20 coaching clients weekly by year end.
4. Begin coaching certification with CTI.
5. Help Jess (my lady) build a 10 client per week massage practice.
6. Pioneer "conscious business" with Steve.
7. Heal digestion completely and gain weight.
8. Master all 4 levels of Intu-Flow.
9. Develop the ability to do a 90 second ujayii pranayama breath (45 in, 45 out).
10. Score 90+ on the GTD Mastery 100.

And because I'm an overachiever, I couldn't stop at 10. Here are some other goals for 2007:

Get a black Macbook
Practice kindness, empathy, and cheerfulness
Become sugar- and caffeine-free
Learn to consistently underpromise and overdeliver
Practice internal visual awareness and skill

If you can't adapt extremely rapidly to new technologies, you will inevitably look like this guy.

Of course, then there's also the problem of figuring out what to get good at, i.e. prioritizing.

Thanks to Casey's mom for this great quote! (attribution unknown)

Check out Solio, a portable electronics solar charging device.

The geeky part of me thinks this kind of thing is great! Gotta love geeky enviro creativity.

The environmental part thinks this is more than useless, for it distracts from the real power consumers have to make change (see The Consumer's Guide to Effective Environmental Choices). The power that it takes to charge a cell phone for the rest of my life is near zero compared to convincing one other person to purchase an energy efficient clothes dryer.

What do you think?