You can spend it watching an episode of your favourite TV series.

You can spend it just lazing around.

You can spend it working out.

You can spend it honing your foreign language skills. 

You can spend it just surfing aimlessly–something I’m guilty of often, unfortunately .

So.

What is one thing that, if you’d just spend 30 minutes every day doing it, will change your life SIGNIFICANTLY? A lot of major achievements are not about one-time big major effort. Many of them are the fruits of sustained effort over a long period of time. Picking up a foreign language is one example. Your health is another. Relationship with people is yet another example. 

For me, it’s exercise. I know that if I spend 30 minutes everyday on intense workout, my body and my health will be significantly better. It’s just that it’s difficult to follow through with it sometimes. 

What is your one significant, life-changing, 30-minute every day thing?

… the moon has no dark side? (Sorry Pink Floyd.)

… when a meteor lands on Earth, it’s actually pretty cool? (Cool as in not hot.)

… shampoo and conditioners manufacturers who claim to have the cure for splits ends or damaged hair are ripping you off?

… monkeys are not apes and apes are not monkeys? (WTF?)

… humans did not evolve from monkeys or from any current non-human apes?

… Thomas Edison did NOT invent the light bulb?

Get smarter NOW by reading one of the most awesomest Wikipedia pages ever.

(Thanks reddit!)

I’m aiming to improve my average typing speed to 90 wpm using this fun website. You always can get somebody to race with. Fun!

(UPDATE: And 83 races later, my average has improved to 90 wpm. TypeRacer works! I’m shooting towards 100wpm now.)

Go ahead and read many other interesting facts about how the greatest athletes, musicians, dancers, actors/actresses, and even statesmen handled failures and kept going towards greatness anyway in But They Did Not Give Up.

*Audience clapping*

Several people from the audience approached me after my speech to ask a few questions and thank me before leaving. Their last words were: “It was very useful! Thanks a lot!”

That still feels so good 72 hours later. Public speaking is really fun when I’m on fire like that. That audience laughed with me, they frowned with me, they got curious with me, they answered my questions and asked many questions… the satisfaction I get from a well-received speech like that lasts for days.

Just to clarify though, there were nowhere near to 600 people attending my speech that day. It was closer to 30. The audience-of-600 speech–the one that transformed me into somebody who could actually enjoy speaking in public–had happened roughly about a year ago. 

The many, many false starts

Before that 600-people speech, I had always been very much aware that I had had a problem speaking in public. I mean, it was kinda difficult not to notice when your palms felt like vibrating wet ice slabs, your armpits were dripping Niagara Falls, your lips were doing tectonic shifts, your voice was… okay, I kinda run out of metaphors here. Let’s just say my voice was shaky and weak, like somebody was choking me the whole time. None of the usual strong, melodious, testosterone-dripping voice that I have when I’m alone (I might be a little biased on this one). 

The thing about nervousness and fear is that they are not something that can be analyzed and rationalized away. Hey, I tried. I tried NLP, I tried Hypnosis, I tried telling myself that the fear’s not rational, that nobody actually cares whether I suck or not, just calm down, and so on, and so on. None of that worked.

I even tried joining the Toastmasters in 2001. I did register myself as a member at the end of the session, but that’s it. I never went there again despite the good people there trying to call me up and persuade me to attend again. 

It was just that terrifying. Ice Breaker Speech?! No way man. No way I’m gonna let all those strangers see me shaking and sweating and choking my own voice like that!

It took me twelve years (yes, 12 long years) to finally start enjoying speaking in public again. Well, twelve years, and 600 people, to be exact. Or probably it wasn’t the 12 years, but the 600 people. Anyway.

The audience of 600

“You have to deliver a speech in July to a large audience,” said my Dad.

“Er, eh, what? How large, exactly?” *start sweating*

“Around 600, probably 700.”

“Huh! Er, are you sure?” *palms getting icy*

…

To cut a long story short, yes, he was sure. That was not a pleasant prospect for me. But I had to take some drastic action not to make my Dad lose face, and even gain face if possible. Face, you see, is very important for us Asians.

But at this point I’d kinda run out of options. If hypnosis, both self and expert-inflicted, doesn’t work, visualization doesn’t work, NLP doesn’t work, rationalization doesn’t work… what else can work? 

I had no other choice

Well, I decided to give the Toastmasters another try. But this time, after hemming and hawing for a few weeks, finally, I really did the Ice Breaker. I had no choice! Given the prospect of embarrassing myself in front of less than 20 people and embarrassing my Dad and myself in front of 600… it was a no-brainer. 

Fortunately, it turned out to be a very small meeting. There were only 5 present then, including myself. My ice breaker only took slightly more than 2 minutes, although it felt more like 20 minutes to me. Ten seconds into my speech, I started trembling and my heart started beating really, really fast.

Man. I can still even remember the exact shirt I was wearing that day. 

One thing that really sticks to my mind until today was how supportive the Club President was. He maintained eye contact throughout my speech. He smiled when my nervousness was peaking and I was able to relax because of that. He laughed the hardest when I attempted a joke. It’s something I probably will never forget, ever. 

That night when I was going to sleep, I remember saying to myself: “Wow, man. You can do this. Wow.”

The rest, as they say, is my story

My Dad considered my audience-of-600 speech a success. No, I didn’t move them the way truly great orators do. Nobody broke down and cried, although they did laugh once or twice at my jokes–probably thanks to a few loud friends that were in the audience. I was quite nervous too back then, but my voice was steady. I did look normal on video. That night, I truly had come a long way.

I stayed with that Toastmasters club until late 2007, when I had to move to another part of the country. I still keep in touch with the President, and to this day I’m still thankful for his support during my Ice Breaker. 

Today, I know that as long as I come prepared, I will deliver a decent speech. I’ve come to accept the nervousness that sometimes precedes a speech, if they come. I have done enough speech to know that I will do OK despite the initial nervousness. But then again, they rarely show up these days. Because I know that I can do this.

Lessons I learned

Looking back, there were a few things that helped me to grow to what I am today. Not all these things happened by design, some of them were coincidental. That was my luck, because I didn’t know any better back then. But with my 20/20 hindsight, I see what those things are, and I’m gonna share them with you now to end this post:

1. Practice is everything. Nothing can substitute real practice. You can do all the hypnosis in the world, all the intellectual discussion in the world, all the NLP, EFT, Silva, and whatever mind techniques in the world, but the best way to get better at something is by doing it, evaluate, and improve. I never really improved until I actually started doing public speaking.
2. Practice without pressure. In his excellent book “Psycho-Cybernetics, A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life“, Dr. Maxwell Maltz emphasizes the importance of practicing in no-pressure situations. Pressure retards learning. I didn’t realize this until much later, but the fact that I was starting “small”, with a small Toastmasters club and very supportive and friendly members, I was practising without pressure. As little pressure as possible and as much encouraging feedback as possible in the beginning are essential.
3. Always come prepared. In the beginning, forget impromptu speech, unless you have to. If you know in advance that you need to deliver a speech, deliver the entire speech at least once before you do it in front of an audience. I always do that, while visualizing the audience in front of me. That way, I don’t get nervous because I know I’m coming in prepared, and my speech will have a logical structure and conclusion.
4. Accept that you may get nervous or jittery. That is fine. Trying to fight nervousness, acting as if I wasn’t nervous, and all those mental tricks never really worked for me. The more I tried to not becoming nervous, the more nervous I became. Instead just accept that you will become nervous.  Success breeds confidence. As you’ve seen yourself delivering speech after speech with no problems, your will become less and less nervous. 
5. Keep improving yourself. I’ve always been a voracious reader–I’ve read many books about public speaking and try to put them into practice, and that would be my recommendation to you as well. It’s hard to recommend one because there are so many good ones, but if I have to pick just one, it would be this: Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story, by Jerry Weissman. It’s a superb book that has brought my public speaking and presentation skills to another new level. Highly recommended!
6. And finally: don’t believe yourself when you tell yourself you can’t do something. I surprised myself many times when people say good things to me about my speech. Especially when they tell me about something I never knew I was good at! Just focus on constant improvement, and see how far you will go. My guess is, it’ll be pretty dang far!

I submitted this post to the Public Speaking and Presentation Skills Blog Carnival. Please do check it out, as well as the earlier editions–there are many really useful and informative entries!

But lately, since I spent some time listening to Tony Robbins and Brian Tracy, I’ve found one absolutely fail proof way of having enough time to do anything you want. I’ll share it with you now. Ready? This is it:

“You have to really, really want it.”

Yes.

That’s it. As simple as that. Seriously.

If you delay doing something for months because you “don’t have enough time”, then let’s face it, you just don’t want it badly enough. In which case you’d better just acknowledge it to yourself, accept the idea that you don’t want to do it that much, and go on with your life with one less baggage in your mind. 

On the other hand, if you really, really want something, trust me, heck, no, trust yourself, you will make time for it. You will create a timeslot within your schedule, no matter how busy, to do it. 

See, there is a difference between (a) the things that you genuinely want, and (b) the things that you think you want, or you think you should want. For things in category (a), come hell or high water, you will make time. You will postpone other things so that category (a) can get done. It’s those things in category (b) that you never seem to have time for.  

Don’t believe me? Fine. Read on.

How to tell whether a person likes you or not

Remember the last time you were pursuing a girl? You asked her out for a date, and she said she couldn’t make it, but she was apologetic and really nice about it.

Man, what a dilemma we were in, right? If she was obnoxious and rude, then it was really easy to tell, she didn’t like you, period. But she was so nice, and her apology sounded really sincere, so maybe she really couldn’t make it to the date but she actually liked you and really wanted to go out with you, right? So how could you tell?

There’s one very simple way: watch what she does.

If she proposes another time/place, then yes, she does want to go out with you.

If she’s being very nice about it and very apologetic, but she doesn’t propose another time, forget it. She’s just not that much into you.

This applies to guys as well, ladies. In a lot of things, what a person says is meaningless. What matters is what he or she actually does. 

Having enough time

So, think again of the time when you were doing something you really liked. Let’s say, for the gamers among us, World of Warcraft. Or, for the older gamers like me, Diablo II.

Ever stayed up all night playing till the morning? Did you have something else that you should have been doing instead? Bet you did. But we played anyway because we really wanted it, didn’t we? All those homework and exams just slipped away from our awareness in the face of the mighty Diablo, didn’t they? All for the simple reason: at that time, there was nothing else in the world we wanted more than playing Diablo. Not even sleeping or eating! 

Now that I have a family, I don’t play games that much anymore. But this is out of my voluntary choosing. I guess I just don’t like playing game as much as I did 10 years ago. I want to spend time with my family more. 

Another of those “I think I should do this” thing that never gets done: for years now I’ve been trying to learn a certain foreign language. In the end I’ve always given up. I used to think that I gave up because I didn’t have enough time. But looking back, I was lying to myself of course. For countless nights I was watching TV instead of learning the language. For hundreds of train rides I was reading a novel instead of reading materials in that language. For thousands of hours I was listening to music instead of the instructional tapes.

I just don’t want to learn that language that badly, I guess. But hey. At least I’m honest with myself. 

The conclusion

Some of us, have truly legitimate reasons for not having enough time or not being able to spend time to do something. Perhaps you are working 14 hours per day for your family’s survival. Perhaps you’re in a country where you will be shot if you do the activity you want. For you, I wish you the best of luck. I hope you will be able to do something that you really want soon.

But for the rest of us, 99.99999% of the time, there’s no such thing as “not having enough time”. There’s only “I just don’t want to do this badly enough to make the time to do it”.

One day, just by pure chance, I came across Steve Pavlina‘s website. There I found my answer in one of his super money gold posts. Quoting from that post, the reason why habits don’t stick is: “… we often psyche ourselves out of getting started by mentally thinking about the change as something permanent — before we’ve even begun. It seems too overwhelming to think about making a big change and sticking with it every day for the rest of your life when you’re still habituated to doing the opposite.”

Permanent change is hard. Heck, even now I think the prospect of exercising everyday till I die doesn’t sound so good either.

But… what if we can quit? Again, quoted from his post: “But what if you thought about making the change only temporarily — say for 30 days — and then you’re free to go back to your old habits? That doesn’t seem so hard anymore. Exercise daily for just 30 days, then quit. Maintain a neatly organized desk for 30 days, then slack off. Read for an hour a day for 30 days, then go back to watching TV.”

That doesn’t seem so hard anymore!

The Result

And you know what? That seemingly trivial, even a bit silly, mental trick WORKS. For the first time in my life, I could actually exercise every day for 30 days, with minimum numbers of off day. Right away after that, I decided to start a 60-Day Trial. Same result, pretty much the habit sticks now. I just finished my 60th day, and after a break of 4 days, I’m on a 90-Day Trial now.

Didn’t know it’d be this easy! Steve Pavlina is a genius. Please, do yourself a favor and read his post: “30 Days to Success“. It can potentially change your life!