Personal Brand: Motivation, Discipline, and Breathing

Welcome everyone to this blog post. In the last posts, I have been sharing a lot of technical knowledge that someone needs to master for interviewing for a coding job. Nevertheless, the part of studying and preparing might not be the most difficult part. One might say that controlling the nerves can be very difficult, and also not losing the path and being consistent throughout the preparation. In this article, I would like to talk about some information that can be helpful for these specific aspects.

Below, you will find my takeaways about some articles to put you in the right direction when it comes to accomplishing something. Do your best, rest enough, and keep chasing your dreams!

Navy SEAL MOTIVATION | Jocko Willink on DISCIPLINE, MISTAKES, and FOCUS

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Fight on: As you rise above where you were and as you take the form who are you supposed to be. Become and remain unbroken. Discover what your weaknesses are by trying and failing if necessary, so you can attack those points and improve. If you break it means it is time to fortify your will to make it stronger. Every time you break there is an opportunity.

1. Focus on the things that matter: Back off enough on the little things that don’t matter, so you can concentrate on the things that actually matter. Identify what’s important and what’s not important in your life.
2. Learn from mistakes: Learn from your past but do not stick with it. Take the positive things that you learned, a failure is something positive to happen because you realize the value of the opportunity that you had, and you learned the lesson and never let that happen again.
3. Just do more: If you have the stuff to do keep hammering until you can’t hammer anymore. Then if you feel you need a quick rest, rest and then get back to it.
4. Make a change: Identify when you need to make a change. If you have something to change, change it and don’t think it twice, start acting for yourself.
5. Be a good leader: Don’t be offensive when you take ownership. Ask politely and offer your help to solve problems.
6. Be well-rounded: Learn to communicate with people effectively. Learn to interact with other human beings. The better you are at these skills the better you will be in other aspects of your life because you will be able to read people, deal with confrontation, understand other people’s motivations.
7. Question leadership: Question everything that your leader is telling you and if you do something wrong, raise your hand. This is more part of our duty as professionals or just as persons, to look for doing the best we can. If a leader is questioned, he becomes stronger.
8. Get discipline: The actions that you take now, affect your future. What you are doing right now, really will have an impact on your future.
9. Learn to deal with stress: Put yourself in stressful situations with the purpose of learning to step back mentally to figure out what’s going on.

Effortless Mastery: Liberating the Musician Within | Kenny Werner | Talks at Google

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The fear of mistakes stunts creativity.

• Go ahead and do bad things, otherwise, you won’t get to great things.
• If you don’t even try because you might not get it right, you will never know if you can get it right.
• Most of our problems are in our thoughts.
• Everybody suffers from being in one place and thinking they should be somewhere else.
• We might get small because of the thoughts we have in the conscious mind. Which thought about you will take you further.
• The larger the swath of material you have to study, the less likely you are ever to play well.
• The smaller the example, the more you can go into the space and master it.
• Effortless mastery means Precision with ease.
• If you train the way a monk study scriptures over and over again. If you train with complete devotion, but you perform with complete detachment, you can do something really profound.
• The smaller the amount of material, the more possible it is to absorb it.
• Be self-generous.
• If you are willing to at least experiment with not needing to succeed but connecting with the flow, you’ll probably have an awful lot of success.
• Free music is, music free from self-judgment.
• Go to the things that attract you, and then they will attract you all the time. You will then develop something within the things that attract you.

Asleep in 60 seconds: 4–7–8 breathing technique claims to help you nod off in just a minute

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This is a technique described as a natural tranquilizer for the nervous system helping to quickly reduce tension and allowing the body to relax.

The steps of the 4–7–8 breathing are as follows:

• Keep the tip of your tongue behind your upper front teeth all the time.
• Breath in quietly through your nose to a count of 4.
• Hold your breath to a count of 7.
• Finally, blow air out forcefully through your mouth.
• Repeat for 4 cycles, if it helps close your eyes.
• Do this at least twice a day.

The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey

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This book is about explaining through Tennis examples (however not about Tennis), how to get out of your own way so you can perform at your best. That is, how to get out of your head so you don’t try to control your unconscious processes with your conscious mind.

• We play two games, the game that is happening in our heads, and the conscious game where we are aware of the things that we are doing.
• The skill of mastering the art of effortless concentration is invaluable in whatever you set your mind to.
• Quieting the mind is a gradual process involving the learning of several inner skills.
• Letting go of judgments does not mean ignoring errors. It simply means seeing events as they are and not adding anything to them.
• See and feel what you are doing.
• It is much more difficult to break a habit when there is no adequate replacement for it.
• To allow yourself to go through our natural process of learning follow:

1. Nonjudgemental observation
2. Picture the desired outcome.
3. Trust in yourself.
4. Nonjudgemental observation of change and results

• One thought in the book to make a reflection: the instant I try to make myself relax, true relaxation vanishes, and in its place is a strange phenomenon called “trying to relax.” Relaxation happens only when allowed, not as a result of “trying” or “making.”

Concentration and learning to focus

• How to maintain focus for extended periods of time?
• Not assuming you already know is a powerful principle of focus.
• It is almost impossible to feel or see anything well if you are thinking about how you should be moving (acting).
• “Since the mind seems to have a will of its own, how can one learn to keep it in the present? By practice. There is no other way. Every time your mind starts to leak away, simply bring it gently back.”
• When feeling really nervous focus attention on breathing.
• Winning is overcoming obstacles to reach a goal, but the value in winning is only as great as the value of the goal reached.

Conclusion and final thoughts

If I would have to describe what do I think is the most important thing among all the concepts we discussed is, don’t be afraid of failure, make mistakes through your path of learning, be patient and keep investing your time in the things that you want to accomplish.

Turn these principles into a way of living, and remember to 4–7–8 breath.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash