It’s February. Have you managed to keep your secular New Year’s resolutions? What about those new targets you set between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur? Are you hitting the mark?
If not, maybe it’s time to ask yourself some tough questions: How do you create change in your life? How do you break bad habits?
I suggest you read Julien Smith’s new book. No, he’s not a Jewish author, but he wrote and then published a free ebook called The Flinch, which he describes as “a book about how to break out of bad habits and break into good ones.”
How do you do that? Move through your fear. Why? Because according to Smith, we all have a “pathological lack of courage.”Change tends to be scary to most people. We think it will be painful. What do we do when we think something will hurt? We flinch. Smith's book, The Flinch, is about helping people to stop flinching. It's about asking people to change, compelling them to change, giving them the tools to change.
I connected with Smith this past fall at BlogWorld and New Media Expo in Los Angeles. We recently had a chance to chat, and I was surprised when he mentioned Victor Frankel and his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, as he discussed the internal strength people need to change personally as well as to create change in the world.
“He was in the Holocaust; he was in a concentration camp, and he was one of the few survivors,” said Smith. “He wrote something which is a famous phrase: ‘Between stimulus and response, there is a moment, and in that moment lies our freedom.’ Basically, you have a stimulus, and you have an ability to react instinctively or an ability to think out a reaction to that stimulus, whatever that stimulus is. He claims the reason he survived the concentration camp is because he was able to stay psychologically strong. He could watch people and see that once they had psychologically given way, their bodies would begin to wither away after that.
“To me, the biggest strength is an internal strength,” Smith explained. “No person can give you a job that will give you this strength. No individual can ever take it away from you once you have it either. To me it’s an internal strength that you build. It is built with a conscious sort of construction that comes from the mind and from the psyche, and then, thereafter, builds out into the world.”
It's not necessary to go through the Holocaust to develop this internatl strength. In his book, Julien writes about our bad habit of “flinching” when we expect to experience pain and how to train ourselves to consciously build the strength to get past our fear–to stop flinching. How do you do that? He suggests doing waht some might think of as "trivial" things--especially in comparison to being in a concentration camp--like getting in a cold shower daily and stuttering on purpose when you speak to store clerks. In general, do things that bring on a “flinch” response but that really have no negative outcome—things you consciously realize you have no logical reason to fear (except possible embarrassment or a moment of discomfort).
Julien, a New York Times bestselling author of two books, Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust as well asThe Flinch, is a consultant and speaker who has been involved in online communities for over fifteen years, from early BBSs and flash mobs to social web as we know it today. He also was one of the first Twitter users and one of the first people to podcast in 2004 (which is impressive to me since I’ve just struggled to get my first podcast up). He has worked with numerous media publications, such as Sirius Satellite Radio, GQ, CBS, Cosmopolitan, and more.
You can read an interview I conducted with him about his book here. You can read two other parts of the interview here and here; these have to do with success writing and blogging.
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