Learn these 3 methods to silence the mind (+1 BONUS!) and you will be entering deep states of meditation in no time.
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Learn the difference between eustress and distress and how to utilize the power of your attention to tilt the scales in your favor.
If you liked this video, schedule a free 30 minute healing session with me, where you and I will dive into what’s keeping you locked in distress, how to shift your perception to one of eustress, and raise your consciousness to new heights.
Learn how to do less and achieve more, the secret of how I wrote an entire book in just three months.
If you liked this, check out the book I wrote, which is available on Kindle, Holistic Health in the Modern Age.
For anyone looking for more life hacks on how to do less and achieve more, schedule a free 30 minute healing session with me, where you and I will dive deep into what is holding you back, and what you need to give up in order to grow and achieve more.
Learn how to be at peace by discovering what it is you truly want.
For any further thoughts on how to be at peace, leave any tips you have found useful in the comments below, and don’t forget to like and share if you got value from this post!
To learn more about discovering true peace, schedule a free 30 minute healing session, where you and I will dive deep into what it is you need to find true serenity.
As I’m sure many of you know I am an avid reader, mainly of books in the personal development genre, but many of them lately I would have to say fall into a more specific category of peak performance development. Not just my reading list, by audio programs I listen to, such as those by speakers like Tony Robbins and Les Brown.
Anyway, my latest read is The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance, written by Josh Waizkin, world champion in both Tai Chi Push Hands and chess, as well as the main character in the movie Searching For Bobby Fisher. Josh’s story is truly inspiring, but it has been one of the most educational books I have ever read as well. Let’s hope so, given the name, right?
Much of what Josh discusses is about emotional awareness, and how those who lose themselves in their emotions, i.e. those who get too angry to perform well under pressure, tend to get eaten alive by those who can either keep cool under pressure or use their passion to their advantage.
Personally, I can attest to both sides of this argument. In my football years, I was never able to keep my cool, but was able to use my anger as a conduit for peak performance. If someone made me look bad, you could bet they were the one looking like a fool during the next down, or maybe even the whole rest of the game, depending on how they handled my aggression.
Contrastingly, I was not quite as good at wrestling, or at least I didn’t perform as well at it, and often got frustrated, unable to separate myself from my apprehension of whether I would be able to live up to the potential I thought I had, but was constantly wondering whether it was truly within me or not.
In football, our team honed our passion as one entity, walking out onto the field with our heads held high and our heart on our sleeves. We instilled fear into our opponents from our raw animalistic shouts and cheers, roaring things like “We will set your ass on fire,” or stealing war chants from movies such as 300 as we marched into battle.
It might appear that I am being hyperbolic I have been using, but this is what harnessing emotion and exploiting it is all about. Peak performance is as much about training the mind as it is the body, and seeing your sport, or whatever your endeavor may be, as a battlefield may be what you need to prevail.
So, passion and anger might have been what worked for our team, but it is not what works for everyone. Some people crumble under pressure because they do not have fiery personalities, but attempt to rise up to the level of intensity that others are portraying. Some people need to steel their emotions to perform.
Using emotion to fuel peak performance, for some, is about allowing their emotions to pass them by, like clouds in the sky, and calmly watch as their opponents either tire themselves out, or get frustrated by the lack of emotional response. For someone who uses their anger to knock their opponent off track, the most frustrating thing is when they receive no emotional response in return.
For the more docile personality types, remaining poised is what truly works most often, but if you have fits of rage where you can’t handle what is happening inside of you, there is work to be done. You have to master your emotions by embracing them before you can ever have a chance of living up to your true potential.
It’s all about going with the flow. You have to learn what works for you and what doesn’t, utilizing your strengths when they are present, and weathering the storm when they are not. You can’t always expect the ideal conditions to be present when you need them, so learning to ride the wave is true intelligence.
My senior year, the reason we won the State Championship was because we had mastered the emotional game. Yes we got angry when things didn’t go our way, and yes we were passionate when it looked like our game might fall apart, but the thing that held us together was the focus on “leaving it all on the field,” or giving it our all and never looking back, regardless of how things appeared to be going.
The Connell Eagles, our rivals, were a very strong team. They won the championship the year before and beat us during the season both years. We were the underdog of the game, but came out on top because our resolve would not be shaken. It was far from our most perfect game technically, but our drive to win overcame theirs.
We became the Royal Knights, embodied the namesake of our mascot and instilled it into the minds of our opponents that we were a force to be reckoned with. Yes we had some of the top athletes in our division, but our coaches inspired us to come together as a team in such a way that, even before any of us were even in elementary school, became the reputation of our team.
We were fast and strong, and, most of the time, when we needed a first down the other team might as well have laid down and handed it to us, but when other teams stepped out onto the field with us it was the name that put doubt into their hearts.
During my first practice as a Freshman, Wiley Allread, our head coach, was discussing what a difficult game we had ahead of us, to which one of the seniors responded, “Come on coach, its gonna be like 50 to 0,” referring to the score. As someone who played sports but never really watched them, I had no idea he was telling the truth. The vast majority of our games were in fact blow outs of this magnitude.
So, how can you apply these principles in a way that is practical to your own life? Some of you reading this may not be athletes, and are probably thinking this all nice to read about, but how can I apply it to my life? Well, emotion is always present. If you are not feeling emotions 24 hours a day, you have become numb to them.
Anyway, the best way to use your emotions to your advantage is to master them in your own time. Whenever you feel an emotion, whether its positive or negative, embrace it and be fully present with it, because repression is what creates most of the unbalance in our lives.
Once you really get in touch with your emotions in your personal time, you can begin to fully utilize them during your times of performance. If you are an artist of any kind, learn to harness whatever you’re feeling and incorporate that into your art. I will finish this post with one of my poems so you can get an idea of how you can use your emotion to fuel creativity.
If you’re a businessman, salesman, or something on the more technical side, emotion can be your bridge into really thriving. In your relationships, either professional or personal, learning to tap into your well of internal feelings can be the best way to connect with someone and create rapport with them.
You have to learn your emotional triggers, and then create a routine that will do this automatically. For some people meditation is great for this, while others are more inspired by listening to a particular kind of music or even playing catch with their son. Only you can know what inspires you, but testing the waters will give you a pretty accurate blueprint of what fuels your peak performance.
So, without further ado, here is a poem I wrote. I will let you decide how I allowed my emotions to guide me during this one.
Odd marvels with profound bends, likeness to the creature within/Thorns afoot and knives taken aback, not what the others will lack/Darkness below the eye, such a keen sight/Marveled by the ones who spare, vilified by those who dare/Pledged to those who have taken ahold, this banner of splendor will fall.
The crow flies and the raven cries, wind and wing taken from above/All that has been shared has been stolen away, cut off from the source/The wellspring of maintained finery, severed from eye and mind.
Heart and soul alike, such a keen sight/Darkness below the eye, secrets in the dead of night/Shared by those who relish, lost in the ones who relinquish/The crow spreads its wings, as the raven refuses to deign.
Shame is dispersed among the refugees, trapped inside their separation/Beauty in the eyes of cursory, sketchily cast aside/On display for all to see and chide, those who stare are cold and snide/Refuse in the dilapidated mind, such negligence has rendered them blind.
The phoenix arises from the ashes, a paragon of transcendence/Crows taking flight in the frost, ravens losing sight from their loss.
Well there you have it. Getting in touch with your emotions and learning how to utilize them to your advantage is yet another key to the puzzle of peak performance.
For more tips on how to live up to your true potential, schedule a free 30 minute healing session, where you and I will dive into whatever you need to live a more productive, emotionally balanced life.
If you’ve heard my talk about living on autopilot, you may be wondering what it means. Well, here it is:
For anyone with any more thoughts on what it means to be living on autopilot, and how to wake up further, leave them in the comments below, and don’t forget to like and share if you gained value from this.
Also, for more tips on how to stop living on autopilot and wake up to life, schedule a free 30 minute healing session, and we can tackle whatever it is keeping you locked in a blinded mindset.
The harder you try to silence your mind, the less successful you will be. Its all about getting into flow.
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Let’s examine that statement scientifically for a minute, shall we? In nature, the idea of natural selection is that it determines which traits are passed onto future generations and who (or what) remains to pass on those traits, all of which is governed by those able to adapt to changes in the environment.
The world is a fluctuating, flowing place. It could be called fluid, so if you’re rigid and not able to go with the flow, then you get stuck trying to swim up stream and end up causing yourself all kinds of unneeded stress. You are resisting change, unable to adjust, and it creates a sense of internal struggle.
Anthropology has shown us that as human beings we tend to take much longer than necessary to accept new paradigms and draw them into our philosophy such that our higher brain functions of the cerebral cortex actually get in the way. Essentially, our analytical thinking processes work against us.
Similarly, our limbic system, which functions on archaic fear-based assumptions, pulls us in the other direction, creating a delicate balancing act between feeling and logic that can only be bridged through building trust in your intuition.
You have to learn to trust your “gut instincts” because that is your body’s way of saying that you know something that can’t be put into words because the limbic system, that which deals with emotion and behavior, and the higher brain, that which is responsible for thought and language, cannot cross modalities; therefore, we are occasionally unable to cognitively make sense of certain feelings.
We have got to be willing to accept new information, and people who brush their intuitive feelings aside are training themselves not to trust their own instincts, which creates what is known as cognitive dissonance. When you know something in your core but refuse to accept it because it doesn’t make sense logically, it creates stress, because you are going against your own unconscious insight.
Life cannot be put into a box, and the more you try to insert reason where there is only feeling, the less likely you are to grasp the abstract concepts that appeal to your reptilian brain, which are no less valid than your pragmatism, yet distinct all the same.
So, now that I’ve laid the groundwork, let’s dive into the philosophy of why you have to be growing, otherwise you’re dying. If you are not pursuing your true passion in life, cultivating a healthy self-image, and constantly seeking higher perspectives on what makes you tick, then there is an emptiness inside of you that cannot be filled with any amount of entertainment or personal gratification.
I know I said we were going to dive into the philosophy, but this is pure psychology. The more you attempt to distract yourself from the fact that you’re not really moving forward in life, the more you unconsciously sabotage your happiness and end up creating more chaos in your life, rather than the sense of peace we’re all looking for.
Now for the philosophy. Peace and contentment are not the same thing. Being at peace means you are open to however life unfolds, while contentment means to have a false sense of comfort about where you are and, therefore, who you have become as a result. Those who acknowledge that it is more about the journey than the destination truly do have a deeper understanding of a happy, meaningful existence.
Sometimes a part of you has to die in order to grow. You literally have to let go of old thinking patterns, which are not always outright negative ones, that keep you trapped in the same old daily grind of fighting with your true self and the “self” you have been told is you all throughout life.
Allow me to tell you something about myself that I have been trying to hide from my audience to illustrate. To this day I still struggle with social anxiety. Its nowhere near as pronounced as it once was, and I can comfortably go out into public now, but there was a time when even the thought of leaving my house was absolutely terrifying.
I would spend days, even weeks, inside my home, without ever venturing out into public unless I absolutely had to. I was being controlled by this almost agoraphobic debilitation that I created in my mind. I built up the outside world as this jarring, humiliating place where I couldn’t even go to the grocery store without feeling like I was being looked at like some sort of freak.
Now, the point of this story is, I built up this persona by alienating myself from those around me, which trickled down into every facet of my life. I was a very sinister and neurotic person who paraded the fact that I did drugs, listened to some of the darkest music known to mankind, and that I was a misanthropist who couldn’t stand being around people.
Is it pretty obvious how I created my anxiety by building up these walls and then convincing myself that there was something wrong with me that had something to do with the outside world? It should be. I was so hard with my thinking, so close-minded, that I actually thought there was something wrong with everyone else.
This is the illusion that waking up often creates. Most people have this false sense of self-righteousness that only blinds them to the fact that what you see in other people is a reflection of what’s inside yourself, and that just because they think they know something you don’t, they’re somehow superior to you, regardless of whether they act on their ideas or not.
This is called an ego trap, because you think you’re making progress, but in reality if you aren’t changing what you do on a daily basis and still thinking that somehow your life is going to improve, you are not only kidding yourself, but you’re dying inside because that is not how life works.
We all know this consciously, but the concept has not really taken hold of our will to rise above the idea that life is all sunshine and rainbows just by thinking it is. Positive thinking does loads of good, much better than thinking negatively, but there has to be action and true belief along with the shift in perception to cultivate a healthy transition into self-esteem rather than egocentric stiffness.
For those interested in learning more about how to avoid dying inside by growing spiritually and emotionally, schedule a 30 minute healing session with me, and we will discover what you need to move forward by seeking out what is keeping you locked in a state of stagnation.
It’s time to wake up! Are you truly experiencing life, or just living on autopilot?
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We live in a complex world. From politics and economics to our own psychology and emotional awareness (or lack thereof), things are getting bogged down in disinformation and propaganda that distract us from the fact that most of us don’t really know ourselves, let alone how to live a simple, happy life.
Here, I will share with you 5 life hacks to declutter, detox, demystify, and otherwise simplify your life, so that you no longer feel overwhelmed by the onslaught of torrents seeking to grab hold of your attention and steal the force of your awareness.
1. Spend Quality Alone Time
Most people spend so much time filling their schedules with appointments, dates, and other engagements, to distract themselves from the emptiness they truly feel inside, so they create a false send of fulfillment by busying themselves with the presences of other people, “validating” their contentment.
Making time for yourself will be the quickest way to step outside of your daily routine of vapid busyness that really only deepens your sense of vacancy. When you can spend quality alone time, actually getting to know yourself, you will find what really makes you tick, and discover passions you didn’t even know you had.
2. Step Outside Your Comfort Zone
This one might sound a bit counterintuitive, but it really isn’t. The reason you feel overwhelmed by everything in your life, is because you have made it that way, convincing yourself you don’t have a choice and filling your schedule with things you don’t really want to do, yet feel like you have to, in order to be have a semblance of achievement.
Allow me to speak frankly: just because you are doing something, does not mean you are accomplishing something or that you are obligated to do it. With everything you do, you are producing a result, but, as I’m sure many of you know, the quality of that result depends not only on what you do, but how you do it.
Becoming aware of what’s comfortable for you can allow for a bird’s eye view of what would be more productive and fulfilling, instead of just doing the same things over and over again, never really accomplishing anything.
3. Turn Off Your Television!
Or phone, tablet, whatever it is you’re constantly glued to that feeds you “information” and drivel on a daily basis. If you think what you see on the news is an accurate depiction of what is really going on in the world, I advise you to stop reading this, because there is nothing I can do to help you.
If, however, you are aware of the fact that most of what you see and hear is false information, inflated by hyperbole for effect, and jam packed with the sugar of entertainment, then take your own advice and stop paying attention to all of the things that contribute to your daily brainwashing!
4. Turn on Your Mind
No, it isn’t dirty. Now that you are no longer inundating yourself with disinformation, I want you to start using your mind to think introspectively, because this will allow you to see your life for what it truly is: a meaningful existence full of infinite possibilities and endless adventure just waiting to be explored.
In neuroscience there is a term called neurogenesis, which is the creation of neurons beginning in embryonic development. Scientists used to believe this only lasted until about age five, but thanks to recent studies, we now know this lasts well into old age. If you’ve read any of my blog posts before, you probably know that neuroplasticity is the nervous system’s natural ability to develop new neuronal connections.
The reason this is significant is because, the more you use your brain, the more efficient it becomes, and the more intelligent you become. Simplification begins with developing higher awareness; therefore, enhancing your ability to recognize and sift through relevant information.
5. Stop Seeking and Start Doing
Most of you reading this have likely been on a long term, if not life long, quest for wisdom and truth. Well, if you’ve read much on Buddhism and Taoism, you know that the more you know, the more you don’t know, meaning the more information you gather, the more you realize there is so much more than you could ever compile in one lifetime.
So, stop seeking enlightenment, and realize that life is about creating balance, that it’s about learning as well as acting, and that it’s about being still and resting as much as it is about seeking your passion and stirring things up.
Give yourself time to recuperate after months, or even years for some, of searching and collecting information, but don’t forget to take action along the way. In the words of Bruce Lee, “If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done. Make at least one definitive move toward your goal.”
For more life hacks to simplify your life and begin to develop your true potential, click here to schedule a free consultation, and we will discuss how I can help you to grow along your path of development.
TJ Hunt Life Hacks 