Now of course it’s easy for me, as an outside observer, to help my friend discover the problem and allow him to come up with a solution (phone them up and ask!), but I know we all have things in our lives that we want to do but don’t purely because we don’t know what’s involved.

“Hypnosis in Gravesend”

I’d always wanted to learn hypnosis but had never done anything about it because I’d no idea what was involved. One day I just happened to be in the right frame of mind and I casually Googled hypnosis training in Gravesend and guess what: There was a course running not far away and at a price and time I could afford. It didn’t take much thinking to sign up after that.

Fear holds us back from so many things, but so seldom do we realize that the “fear” is not in the doing or becoming whatever it is: it is the fear of the unknown process of getting there!

Think of something that you really want to do but haven’t. Get a new job? Go on a trans-European holiday? Learn a new language?

Now ask yourself what is it that is holding you back from that and what you would like to have happen.

Could it be that you don’t know what is available, how to organize it, where to go that is the problem? In other words; could be the mystery, the lack of knowledge, which is what you’re afraid of? It’s not the holiday or the job or the language that is scary is it, so it must be the organising of the holiday, the “finding” of the job and the fact that you don’t even know if there is somewhere nearby that even teaches languages.

Diminish the power of the unknown with knowledge

This year, why not choose one of those things that you always promise yourself you’d do and rather than promise yourself that you’ll do it, simply find out what is involved. Choose a starting point and go from there. I bet you’ll find it’s not as difficult as you imagine.

Concepts to convey in your headline

Ask a Question

Simply asking a question raises the reader’s curiosity and they will be more likely to read the contents. See the Key Words to Use section below for the best words to use in your question.

Suggest Breaking News/Discovery

If it sounds like its some kind of breaking news, people will be more inclined to read it to get the lo-down before everyone else does. There’s that quiet satisfaction that most people feel being able to share something of import with their friends that no-one else knows yet.

The discovery element is very similar and if you can combine the two, you’ll capture not just the news hungry, but also the knowledge hungry: a new thing is almost always going to be more interesting than the same old thing discussed ad nauseum (how quickly does news get old!?).

Linked to Latest Events

Leverage the latest search trends and social interests/fashions and build them into your title. Relevance, combined with breaking/discovery news and a question is going to combine to provide a very strong call to action.

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Key words to use in your title

How

How To Make Your Blog Post Irresistible…

We are naturally curious and people will always be interested in reading stuff that looks like its going to provide us with value.

“How” implies that there’s free knowledge being given away.

Take all those endless sites offering a “free e-book on xyz” if you give us your email address for example: Personally I hate them, but they work and I still sign up anyway because the title suggests that I’ll get a load of really useful information as a result. Besides, I can always set up a Google filter to remove all emails from them straight to the bin…

These

How Many Of These Key Words Are You Using To Build Curiosity?

Used with the “How” word, it suggests that there are in fact several important pieces of information in the content and the reader cannot answer yes or no to the headline: they’ll have to open and read the content in order to make up their mind.

Why

Why Do Some Guys Get Nearly All The Girls?

“Why” implies high value content: answers to a question that is of import to the reader. As an added way of increasing the authenticity of such a headline, off set the “Why” with words that suggest that its not the absolute truth. In the example above, I have included “Some” and “Nearly”.

Which

Which High Impact Attention Grabbers Are You Using?

Piques the reader’s curiosity by making them ask themselves what high impact attention grabbers there are and whether they are missing a trick…

What

What to Always, ALWAYS Include In Your Email Signatures…

Very similar to “Which” and allows you to dictate rather than question. As a rule, this is going to be used the least and is best used for subjects that Everybody knows about or wants to know about.

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The next step

Of course there’s a lot more to writing an irresistible subject line or headline such as using emotive and powerful words, presuppositions etc. but get the basics right and you’ll probably find you’re already three quarters of the way there!

Which other situations could you use some of these? Do leave your ideas as comments.

Here’s a couple to start you off:

Blog posts (well duh! lol)

Marketing emails to prospects and customers (your boss even?)

Messages to people you like: to build attraction and curiosity (could you use these in text messages?)

How could you use them in actual conversation?

Thanks to Samuel Ng and Tom Thrush for the info.

Whenever we learn or are taught something new, we often try it out and indeed most any form of training will have you do exercises to practice the new skill. What I find interesting is that, as someone who does a lot of self-learning, I am often testing out things I learn or theories I concoct in real life and I have to be extremely careful when I consider something a success or something a failure.

Most of us, at one time or another, have tried something new and we’ve fallen at the first hurdle, thrown our hands in the air and scoffed at the so-called experts who were clearly wrong as it demonstrably doesn’t work! I watch my daughter do this regularly and it is both challenging to encourage her to have another go and delightful to watch her eventially achieve it (normally after walking off and only coming back when she thinks I’m not watching). 

As adults while we are aware of the concept of perseverance and not judging a book by its cover, I still regularly see both clients and myself making these same mistakes. What is also fascinating is that we also do this in reverse:

We give something a go and when it works first time: pronounce it incredible success and champion whatever it is to any and all who will listen.

So when we fail at something, we have learnt by now that we should give it a few more goes before writing it off, but do we do the same when we succeed?

I wonder how many times we have succeeded the first time we tried something new, pronounced success and then had a series of failures and rather than criticise the new thing, we assume that we are doing something else wrong and embark upon some detailed analysis of everything except the new thing? After all: you clearly demonstrated that it works… didn’t you?

Food for thought and it certainly made my conversation companion go “hmmmm” yesterday.

Now as you read that previous sentence you may or may not have noticed that it seemed to have a rhythm and flow in the words and statements because I was employing the use of the words of power which means that after a while of listening or reading these words, the conscious mind starts to just allow the words to flow through from one side to the other without getting the full scruitiny enjoyed by a normal sentence which doesn’t employ these words in this way because the natural and continuous flow of the language and words in this way is much easier to allow the unconscious mind to process them because  our short term memories which is of course a function of the conscious mind can be commanded by your unconscious mind to change and as the words continue to flow from conscious to unconsious because your unconscious is capapble of processing an amazing amount of information without needing the imput of the conscious mind and I wonder if your conscious mind is starting to wonder which words in this text are the power words and perhaps what happened to all the punctuation.

The hmuan brian is aslo albe to udsenrtnda colmpex pasasges of txet lkie tihs.

And because we are able to process this kind of language where the letters are not necessarily in the right place it means that we are also capable of understanding and processing the meanings and understandings from entire paragraphs and literature where words are missing and in the wrong order and the wonderful thing about your unconscious is that you’re able to process both the surface meaning and the subsurface or unconscious meaning and whether you choose to consciously or unconsciously allow that flow from conscious to unconsious can happen because we are programmed this way to benefit the most from being able to do things consciously and unconsciously.

Now we’ve all heard of the four stages of learning from unconsciously incompetent, to unconsciously competent which means that if we are able to learn new things and make changes on an unconscious level because we evolved this incredible ability I wonder just how limitless our power really is.

Just a few conscious and unconscious thoughts. Enjoy.

Ben

Having recently attended JP Morgan’s awesome talk on fearlessness and how to live outside of your comfort zone, one the most interesting things was the concept that in procrastination hides fear. As an extension of that I discovered that I procrastinate about writing to-do lists and completing the items on it (if writing a new blog post wasn’t on my to-do list, I could even argue that writing this very post was a way of avoiding my to-do list ).

So this post is a short piece summarising some of my research into how to write a good to-do list that you can manage and complete.

Some of the bullet point items that help make a good to-do list:

Keep a single list

It seems like a stupid thing to say, however I have a whiteboard in my office that I write my to-dos on, but I can’t take it with me, so I also have a to-do list in my iPhone. I used to have a little notebook that I carried around as well, so I have to be extremely careful to ensure that the I match up my whiteboard and iPhone task lists. Ideally I want to be able to just use my iPhone task list or find a decent iPhone app, but there’s something I really like about writing a to-do list big on a whiteboard.

Why not find yourself a tool (either electronic or other) that you can keep one single list up-to-date and with you at all time so that you can add to it whenever and wherever you are. If you’re into mind maps, checkout this mind map on www.mindmeister.com which has a good list of online task management tools as well as online collaboration tools.

Categorise your tasks

This is one of those areas where people traditionally keep different lists based on different task categories or projects. I for example had a “music to listen to” list where I jotted down new artists and tracks as I heard them as a remind to find the on Spotify or Last.fm at a later point. Ideally, these type lists should all be on your one to-do list and its where technology and a decent task management tool can help because you can shrink the full list of tasks to only show certain categories or only certain projects so that the whole list seems manageable.

Plan ahead, schedule and prioritise

Always schedule your to-dos (see below). Set a time and date and a duration. This way you know when and how long each item will take. Also, by scheduling, you will get in the habit of checking that your scheduled to-do is not accidentally (or on purpose) scheduled to conflict with a pre-existing appointment.

Some of the advice I read about to-do lists talked about prioritising your tasks and it is a good point, however if you’re scheduling your tasks, then you are already prioritising aren’t you? Of course you may choose not to schedule every task, so perhaps prioritising those that are not timed is a happy medium.

Be factual

Only add those items you know will be coming up.

Adding imaginary or just-in-case items is you adding fears onto your list which will inevitably make your to-do list scarier and therefore less likely to be looked at, so why waste your time and effort creating a to-do if you’re not going to complete it?

Write in pencil

If you’re keeping a manual list, write it in pencil. That way you can re-order and edit your list without making it all ugly with loads of crossing outs and words straying onto other lines fouling up the layout of the list. If you’re list is ugly, you’re less likely to want to look at it.

Review

Put time aside (is that a task by any chance?) to review your to-do list and look at the items that you’ve completed and those that you’ve not. Ask yourself what it is that keeps preventing you from completing those tasks that habitually get postponed again and again and again.

There are two reasons that you might be postponing these items:

• You have an underlying fear of doing the task.
• The task listed contains several sub tasks and seems to big or difficult to complete now.

These are easily dealt with:

• Schedule yourself a dedicated time to complete scary tasks. Steel yourself and visualise yourself successfully completing each one before doing it.
• Turn the larger or difficult seeming tasks into projects each with their own sub-tasks. Now you can approach each sub-task as you would any other each one taking you a step closer to completing the overall project.

I hope you find some of the above useful and interesting and the writing of this has solidified several ideas and tasks in my mind as well, so I’m off to update my to-do list