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The 5 Best Self-Help iPhone Apps

Nina East — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 14:28:25 +0000

If you’re an iPhone user, you’ll want to know about these top self-help apps. They provide additional tools and shortcuts for helping you track and maintain your personal growth. They aren’t magic and won’t create instant transformation, but like most useful tools, they are simple and straightforward. That means they are also fun and easy to use, and especially useful for the electronically-minded.

I first read about some of these at Mashable, and then researched further to find out what real people thought of them. Here they are in no particular order:

HappyTapper has 3 self-help apps:

Gratitude Journal – this works like an electronic pad. Everyday (or however often you want) you write/text in the top 5 things you’re grateful for. You can also add photos to your entries – to to spice up the bulleted list – add inspirational quotes, and even rate your day. Plus you can password protect your list, email it to yourself, and search previous entries. Price: $0.99

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Little Buddha - Just rub Buddha’s belly to access over 39,000 inspirational quotes. You can search the quotes by keyword, add your own quotes, and share them with your friends via twitter, facebook, and email.
Price $0.99

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Vision Board – the authors describe it as a “sacred place in which you define your hopes, goals, and dreams.”
You can pick from the 7 different board themes/styles and then start adding your inspirational photos, quotes, etc. It comes with sticky notes, star labels, torn white paper, and a few other graphics to give it pizzaz. It looks pretty cool. (I’m more of a “create it with my hands” kind of gal, but I can definitely see the appeal of having it right on your phone.)
Price $0.99

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Live Happy - Live Happy is a positive psychology iPhone app developed by Signal Patterns’ SP Labs research team together with Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky, author of the book The How of Happiness and professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside. It’s a whole mobile happiness boosting program based on principles of positive psychology – including evaluating goals based on her system, keeping track of happy days, and a way to remember random acts of kindness. It also includes a personality analysis and science of happiness information.

Price $0.99

And just to make you feel even better about it, they are donating a portion of every app sale to the Live Your Life Well program, a public education campaign (launched by the non-profit Mental Health America) dedicated to helping people combat stress and promote well being.

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My Thoughts – If we become what we think about all day long (Earl Nightingale), then it’s a good idea to monitor your thoughts. When you change your thoughts, you change your destiny. Use MyThoughts+ to focus your thoughts on what you most desire.

This app includes 0ver a thousand affirmations, multiple categories of thoughts, plus lots of customizable features, such as 9 different background images (or use your own), the ability to change font, text size and color, as well as adding your own music, just to make it a multi-sensory experience.
Price: $0.99, or free version with limited options.

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That’s just a few of the many, many self-help apps. And, of course, they are just for the iPhone. We Droid users will have to wait a bit for the library of apps to grow.

Do you have a favorite self-help app you use? If so, let us know – leave a comment below and tell us what it is and how you use it.

What the Dynamic Opportunity Model has to do with the Science of Making Things Happen

Nina East — Mon, 17 May 2010 21:02:37 +0000

Last week I posted an article about the Dynamic Opportunity Model (used with permission from CoachVille).
This is a powerful model for transforming a “problem” into an “opportunity”. It is simple, though not necessarily easy, but only because most of us are not very practiced at it.

What’s particularly intriguing is how this model ties in with the featured book summary for May, The Science of Making Things Happen by Kim Marcille Romaner.

One of the key elements in the Dynamic Opportunity Model is learning to be an observer. Sometimes we try to hard to figure something out, focusing on what’s not working and why it’s not working, that we neglect to see what is really there.

Likewise, the role of observer is key to the science of making things happen. Kim talks about how the act of observing directly affects what happens to the thing or person being observed, the actual activity of the observed. She talks about it in scientific terms, using experiments with berylium ions (subatomic particles), and then relates it to daily life at the human level. This is called the Zeno Effect. (Members, see pages 10-11 of your book summary for the full explanation).

What Romaner found is that when you measure the wrong benchmarks, you actually slow down the process of change. And the intervals at which you measure them has a direct effect on how slowly the process goes. This is called the Zeno effect. The good news is that when you start measure the right things, and measure them more frequently, it has the effect of speeding up the process of change – quite dramatically, even – which creates the Inverse Zeno Effect.

When you are measuring your progress, you don’t want to measure yourself in relation to the original condition (“Am I still in the same place financially?). Rather, you want to measure the progress you are making, the evidence you are moving toward the thing you want (“Look at all the things I’m doing to get out of debt!”)

The “right” things to measure are the times you do something well, the times you have a success, no matter how big or small. Measure yourself on what’s working, what’s “good”, and you will accelerate the process of making the shift toward more of that.

In the Dynamic Opportunity Model, if you keep looking at symptoms of the problem and focusing on your situation as it is, you will continue to get more of the same, in part because of the Zeno Effect – you are measuring the wrong things (The symptoms and what is wrong), and probably at the wrong intervals.

When you shift to identifying the underlying dynamic – and celebrate the fact that you have discovered it – you are able to reorient yourself. Your vision of the situation can change completely, releasing you to look for solutions and strategies. In effect, you are now measuring what is working, what is possible, and the shifts you are making, and the more frequently you do so, the faster you will experience change – transforming a problem into an opportunity.

Read the full post here. And to view the full book summary of The Science of Making Things Happen, log in to the members page.

Not a member? You can still join as a Founding Princess and lock in the basic membership rate for life!

How to turn a problem into an opportunity

Nina East — Tue, 11 May 2010 17:40:47 +0000

Since you are a personal growth enthusiast, I suspect you are often looking for ways to turn problems into opportunities. That seems to be wired into the DNA of people who are into self-help, personal development, self-improvement, etc.

Of course, being in the midst of the problem is often the hardest time to even get your mind to shift to thinking about the opportunity inherent in it. I have a friend who always asks me “What’s great about this?” when I bring up something that is frustrating me. Usually this helps me shift, but every now and then I want to bop her on the head for it. Every cloud has a silver lining, but when it’s cloudy, sometimes it just feels cloudy.

As with anything, practice and use increases your skill at not just finding the opportunity, but to remember to do so in the first place. It’s easiest to practice new “ways of being” before the problem arises. Once you’re in the throws of it it’s harder to do, unless you’ve been practicing it so that has become automatic for you, or almost automatic.

One model you can use to help yourself re-think problems is called the Dynamic Opportunity Model.

The Dynamic Opportunity Model was created by Thomas Leonard, founder of CoachVille – one of the largest and most innovative coach training programs ever. (Thomas is no longer among us, but Dave Buck, who inherited the company, has graciously given me permission to share this model with you.)

The diagram shows the natural progression from a problem (symptom or situation) to opportunity. Note: read from bottom to top.

With each step up, you are identifying something deeper about what is really going on, and shifting the way you look at it. The key is on the third step – the green one labeled “underlying dynamic”. It’s not enough to just identify the cause or source of a problem, but you want to look deeper, to identify what is the dynamic underneath the cause that actually allows the situation to occur in the first place.

Once you do that, releasing your attachment to what has been holding you back becomes easier. Once you identify the underlying dynamic, the dynamic no longer has the same hold on you. This allows you to shift or re-orient yourself and how you look at the problem, which in turn leads to generating more possible solutions or strategies. Eventually these ideas coalesce (integrate and evolve) and you identify an opportunity waiting for you – one that has been identified because of the problem, not in spite of it.

Here’s an example that might help explain it a bit more.

Let’s say the problem or situation is that you have a lot of credit card debt (assuming you don’t want this, of course).

If that’s the problem, what is the cause or source? It could be any number of things depending on who you are and your specific situations. Some examples of possible causes/sources are: overspending, not being aware of budget, not being able to resist impulse buying, you just lost your job and are using credit cards to cover basic living expenses, you paid for your sister’s wedding and put it all on credit…

You see, there could be any number of “reasons” this has occurred – and they don’t have to be “bad” reasons.

But what’s going on underneath those causes?

Is it…
…you buy things in order to make yourself feel better, perhaps fill an emptiness you don’t talk about?
…you don’t have the skill set to manage a budget, or that you do, but you receive some other benefit from playing the victim by always finding yourself in hardship?
…you are embarrassed about how much money you make, so you pay for the wedding to “prove” you’ve made it?
…you stuck your head in the sand about your company downsizing, not wanting to face what might really happen, hoping it would all work out?
(I don’t mean to imply that people who have lost their jobs are sticking their heads in the sand…just using the example that in some cases we do fail to see the writing on the wall.)

These are examples of possible underlying dynamics.

Once you know the truth about yourself, and are willing to look at it honestly, it is easier to re-orient yourself, to shift your way of thinking, to recognize that’s not who or how you want to be. That is the shift that will pull you toward identifying the opportunity now in front of you.

I’m curious…what is a “problem” you are currently facing that you could transform into an opportunity by applying the Dynamic Opportunity Model.

I’ll share one of mine. For a long time I was frustrated that I was spending so much money on self-help and personal growth books, but never getting around to reading them, much less applying what I could have been learning. Using this model, I was able to identify some great solutions and strategies, which resulted in the creation of Personal Growth Princess! Now it’s great when I spend money on new books because that’s what my business is all about. And I get to read them – during regular work time! – because that’s how I create value for all the members. That’s what my business actually IS, so I have total permission to read, learn, and apply.

What about you? What problems can you turn into opportunities?
Leave a comment below – or if you prefer, send me a private note.

Do More Great Work – Michael Bungay Stanier [video] [Book Review]

Nina East — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:04:08 +0000

Michael Bungay Stanier, author of Find Your Great Work, has written another book – Do More Great Work. As you would expect, he has a way of capturing exactly what you and your clients are thinking about busy work and great work.

His message is: Stop The Busywork!

We’ve all been there, right? You’re up to your eyeballs answering email, returning phone calls, attending meetings, scrambling to get things done. But when did being busy become a measure of success?

Here’s a video he created to share a little about the new book.
(Secretly I have video-envy when it comes to Michael’s videos. They are truly great!)

You can see this and the rest of Michael’s Possibility Virus resources on his website.

Let me know what you think of the video – and the books – in your comments below. I’m especially curious to know how you might use this in your own work.

Taking Action – Do Deadlines Really Work?

Nina East — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 19:36:08 +0000

All of us, even with the best of intentions, fail to take action on things, even when we’ve said it is really really important. Why is that?

In an ideal world, our behavior would be based on our values – what we say is important to us. But that’s not always how it works, is it? I can really value and want a clean house, but that doesn’t mean I’ll actually get out the broom and Windex.

What does get me to clean my house?

Company.

Sound familiar? Company is coming over for dinner, and boy can I go into a whirlwind of cleaning, straightening, and cramming things in the closet so they’ll be out of sight.

But WHY do we clean our house at that point in time when we could have cleaned it last weekend rather than snuggling up with the latest romance novel? Because all of a sudden it has become URGENT!

Human behavior almost always depends on urgency. That doesn’t have to mean urgency of a dire or catastrophic nature. It can be the simple urgency of friends coming over to visit in 20 minutes…and you with a messy house.

Knowing that urgency has a significant affect on our behavior, and that implicit in reading this post, there is something about yourself or your behavior you would like to change, you can design your environment to support you.

One way to do that is to manufacture urgency…in the form of Deadlines.

The D word.

Why do deadlines work so well – even when it is outside the work situation?
There are three primary reasons:

deadlines represent commitment – commitment to yourself, to others, to the project itself, and perhaps to some greater purpose. We all like the feeling we get when we’ve followed through on a commitment.
deadlines enforce accountability – accountability makes a difference. When you go public with your deadline, and especially if you enlist the support of your friends and coworkers, you are much more likely to follow through. It’s the only way to save face, as well as live up to who you say you are.Even if you don’t tell anyone, so it’s accountability just to yourself, YOU still know when you didn’t live up to who you say you are. You might think that doesn’t matter, but over time, all those seemingly little episodes build up and show up in self-judgment, fear of taking on something new, and even difficulty in relationships.
deadlines create a sense of urgency – no doubt about it. And since this is the #1 factor affecting behavior for 99% of us, it makes sense to use it to our advantage.

When these three factors are in place, you are much more likely to follow through and take action.

So, how can you use this right now in a way that is manageable, maybe even fun, and gets you to take action on the things you said you would.

Here’s one way to do it.

This week I am having a sort of deadline game with my good friend Sandy. Every day we talk at 9am, noon, and 5pm. In each of those quick phone calls, we COMMIT to what we are going to accomplish in the next couple of hours, before we talk again. In the noon and 5pm calls we also CELEBRATE what we accomplished.

It’s only Wednesday, and already both Sandy and I have completed projects that have been on our desks for weeks, if not months. And we’re having fun by making it a game with each other.

What about you? How have you used deadlines effectively? What suggestions do you have for other readers about how they can play with deadlines in an effective way? Type your comments below!

New Year Calls for New…What?

Nina East — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 14:56:06 +0000

This time of year personal growth professionals, bosses, friends, family, even Nancy Neighbor down the street, will ask you what your New Year’s Resolutions are and how you’re going to keep them. Implicit in this are 3 things:

You should have New Year’s Resolutions.
You should have more than one.
And that you should keep them.

I wonder…could this all be much ado about nothing?
Do you really need to have New Year’s Resolutions? If it’s a requirement, it must be because they are effective. Hmmm…. I suspect it’s more that it has become habit.

And who said you had to have more than one. Goodness knows we have enough on our plates as it is!

How resolved are people to keep their resolutions? At first, to a great deal, but it generally wanes – as anyone who has lamented about the parking difficulty at the gym in the month of January, only to be elated when it’s easy again half way through February.

I quit making resolutions a long time ago. It turns out I was just resurrecting the same old resolutions, and obviously getting nowhere. A great mechanism if your goal is “how can I make myself feel even worse this year”

Of course, this time of year is a good one for planning. In the northern hemisphere, Winter with its pending Spring brings forth all kinds of growthful thoughts. In the southern hemisphere, the turn of the new year, the slow movement from the fullness of Summer to the harvest of Fall has you thinking of what you have sown – is it enough, do I need to do more/better/different next year in order to reap more?

So, given it is a natural time for planning, I humbly suggest we think in terms of EVOLUTIONS rather than resolutions.

After all, we are changing and evolving all the time. (And, of course, that’s what Personal Growth Princess is all about.) It’s important to honor that it goes on all year. It’s a way of validating who we are, what we’ve learned, and how we’re using it today.

One of the things I am evolving this year are my beliefs and my rituals, which according to neuro-scientists, are closely linked.
To the outside world I look like I’ve got it all, that life is great, and I’m a huge success. While some of that is true – more at some times than others – it’s also true that I put up with quite a bit that bugs me. Like the rear windshield wiper in my car that works when it wants to, which is generally not when it’s raining.

I’m developing a worksheet to help princesses, me included, to start doing less of this, and having more of what we want. In the meantime, I’m developing some new beliefs, and have a handy ritual to help reinforce it.

One of my new beliefs is that “There is always a way to have it the way I want it.”

The picture at the right is a quick graphic I created to help me remember just that. There IS always a way to have it the way I want it.

The graphic actually comes from an inspirational video I created for myself. I shared it in an earlier post, but haven’t been using it as I planned.

So that’s the new ritual…to watch the video every morning as part of my morning ritual. Just so you know, I created this specifically for me, so it has pictures of me and uses my own handwriting. My guess is you’ll want to create one for yourself. One the page with the video is a link to the person who taught me how to do this. (If you have powerpoint or something similar, it’s really pretty easy.)

So…think Evolution, not resolution.
What evolved for you in 2009, and what are you evolving in 2010? Comment below and let me know.

Happy Evolution!

Personal Growth Princess on Blog Talk Radio

Nina East — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 17:36:21 +0000

On Tuesday, December 15th, PersonalGrowthPrincess.com will be featured on the Blog Talk Radio show “I’m Ready 4 Me” hosted by Yvonne McCoy. The show airs at 2pm eastern time.

Join host, Yvonne McCoy, as she interviews Nina East, founder of Personal Growth Princess about the most common mistakes people make when they “do” personal development, and how most personal growth books and seminars actually set you up to feel WORSE about yourself.

This is the 3rd part in a series addressing successful follow-through and making decisions that stick. Information, alone, isn’t enough. You need Activation, Motivation, and Evaluation to be successful.

Think you need more than a New Year’s Resolution? A Life Resolution will carry you farther. In Part 1 & 2, we talked about how you want to be and how you can make changes. This week, guest Nina East will be sharing information on how to ensure successful follow-through.

Nina is a personal growth expert, published author, and the founder of PersonalGrowthPrincess.com – a site providing self-help book summaries for smart, busy women.

Being a Personal Growth Master

Nina East — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:59:06 +0000

What does it take to master something?

In the book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell studied what it takes to become masterful – at anything. What is surprising is how little talent and luck have to do with whether someone becomes a world class expert – regardless of the field they are in.

You may not be interested in becoming known as an expert in something, but there are things you would like to be able to do extremely well. There are areas you would like to master. My guess is that “personal growth” falls into this category somewhere. Not that anyone can really become a master at personal growth (I don’t even know what they might mean), but you can become an expert on yourself…and on who you are becoming. In fact, part of the reason you have been drawn to this site, or become a member, is that you want to find ways to gain knowledge, experience, and insights that are meaningful.

While natural talent or affinity affects whether you end up being drawn to a particular field – such as, if you have a natural talent for playing the piano or speaking in public, you may have been drawn to fields that require those skills without thinking about it – but talent or affinity will not determine whether you are a “success” at either. And though opportunity and luck play a role in who you get exposed to as you make your way toward mastery, even people with the same talent and same opportunity don’t achieve the same level of mastery. Talent and luck are not enough.

The key distinction, according to Gladwell, is that world-class experts have already put in 10,000 hours of practice BEFORE they “burst on the scene”. Yes, you read that right. Ten-thousand hours. Gladwell provides many examples in his book, but here are just two we think you will be familiar with.

When The Beatles “burst on the American scene”, they had already banked more than 10,000 hours of performance time. Performance time, not just practice time. They credit those hours – which sometimes came in the form of 8-hour performances – as perhaps the most important factor in their success. When you play that long, you have to learn to improvise and to entertain at a level far different than if you play a couple of one-hour sets a couple of nights a week. Being on the spot and having to do your best, for an enormous amount of time, is what forces you to get better.

So, you may love personal growth and attend all the personal development seminars you can…but that doesn’t mean you’ve actually mastered how to apply what you have learned. In fact, that’s probably the biggest source of frustration or let down people feel when they leave a personal development seminar. They get home, only to discover they’ve learned about something, but not truly how to use it and master its usefulness in their life. They got in some good, condensed “practice time”, but it takes hours of practice and application to actually master the new information.

Another example is Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and clearly at the world-class expert level of computers and programming. He was lucky that he attended a high school that invested in computer access – but so was every other student who attended that school. He was fortunate that the university he went to kept their computer center open 24-hours a day – but every other student also had that same access. What set Bill Gates apart is that he USED that opportunity and access for hours and hours of computer experience. In one 7-month period he logged 1575 hours working on programming – that comes out to 8 hours a day, 7 days a week. There’s no doubt Bill Gates was blessed with a great mind and some great opportunities. But the real difference is that he put in tens of thousands of hours “practicing” before he “made it.”

When you think about your own journey with personal development, there’s no doubt that you’ve put in a lot of hours, right? But if you had to assess them more closely, how many of those hours were just learning about something – and how many were hours where you were applying the learning, actually practicing it?

Something to think about….

Are you a Doer or a Dabbler?

Nina East — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:50:26 +0000

What’s the difference between doing and dabbling?

Seems a bit silly to ask that, doesn’t it? After all, everybody knows the difference, right?
Well, perhaps not so much…

Dabblers are people who “try” something out. They think about it, maybe take a teensy bit of action, but always have a reason they don’t fully commit. They don’t have time, they don’t have money, they aren’t sure, they aren’t sure if it will work…

Doers, on the other hand, well…Do. They make a decision and then take action. They may not get exactly what they want, but by DOING, they are at least moving in the direction they want, and can make course corrections along the way.

Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of places where it makes sense to dabble to your heart’s content – hobbies, entertainment, maybe even gardening (depending on your penchant for beautiful flowers or healthy vegetables), etc. I’m sure you can think of many places in your life where it makes sense to dabble.

But the question is, are you dabbling where you ought to be doing?
If you don’t like the word “ought”, ask yourself if you are getting the results you want in a particular area. If not, are you dabbling there, or have you truly committed, past the “trying” stage? Are you taking consistent action toward what you want?

For me, the distinction between doer and dabbler was a mind-altering one. It led me to take a clear look at various projects I’m involved in, and gave me a whole new way of evaluating the progress with each one. It was clear that where I was most frustrated, I was also dabbling. Where I felt most fulfilled, I was doing.

There were certainly areas where I wasn’t making the progress I had hoped for, but I wasn’t frustrated by it. That tells me that dabbling in those areas was OK with me. Obviously they weren’t priorities.

But, where something was a priority in my mind, but only worth dabbling in my actions, I experience monster-sized levels of frustration.

As a result of this, I have shifted how I think about my business and my personal life. It has given me great relief to stop beating myself up when I dabble in dabble-appropriate areas and a new sense of focus and mission in the areas which are my highest priorities.

What about for you? Are there places you are dabbling where being a doer would serve you better?

Tony Robbins: How Your Decisions and Your Needs Shape Your Destiny

Nina East — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:29:20 +0000

What shapes you? What drives you? What is it that REALLY gets you to do things?

We’d probably all like to say that we do things for honorable reasons. That our self motivation is what really keeps us going. That we are motivated by serving others and by doing the “right thing”. If you said that to Tony Robbins at one of his seminars, he’d probably respond, “well, yes and no”.

There are lots of motivation quotes from Tony Robbins about contribution, doing things because it serves others. We are most definitely motivated to action by serving others, but, according to Tony there are 5 other critical human needs that determine what we do and don’t do.

If you’ve ever attended a Tony Robbins seminar, you know what it it takes to really develop self awareness – to get in touch with what is really inside you. If you haven’t attended one of his seminars, this video is a quick way to experience a bit of Tony and think about what his words might mean for you.

In this video Tony is talking about how Decisions and Destiny are intricately linked together, and that no matter what we SAY motivates us, it is really the 6 Human Needs(TM).

We make three kinds of decisions:

What to focus on – which determines what we even notice from that point forward.
What it means – which determines what our emotional state will be about it.
What to do about it – which determines our future results.

How does this fit with destiny?
Ultimately, according to Tony, there are only 2 forces that really shape us.

Our “state” (physical and emotional) – and this shapes us in the moment.

Our model of the World or world view – and this shapes us for the long term.
The 6 human needs fall in the long-term arena because ultimately they are what we are after.

I hope you enjoy this video. It is about 22 minutes long, and if you’ve ever attended a Tony Robbins seminar, you know that 22 minutes is probably a record!

Let me know what you think about what he says, and how you might use it to affect the way you look at decisions and destiny.