Nervousness, fear, panic, low morale, low mood, low energy -- all natural things that happen from time to time.

If you go spend an immense amount of time walking and your feet feel sore, you say, "My feet feel sore right now."

But lots of times, when someone feels nervous or scared, they say, "I'm a nervous person. I'm a fearful person."

But that's not necessarily true. You don't have to identify with a given mood. Just like sore feet, worries come and go. "I feel somewhat worried at the moment" saps most of the power from it. Identifying with the negative emotion makes it stronger; noting that it's just there and fleeting makes it grow much weaker.

Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor, in his Meditations: “When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.”

Abe Sorock is changing the world -- he's the resident and runs the Moishe House Beijing, and he's bringing together very talented and amazing people from the worlds of international business, government, and philanthropy. Professionally, he's the founder and director of Atlas China, which providers staffing and consulting in HR throughout China.

To promote his GiveGetWin deal which is a 1-on-1 session about developing leadership and throwing world-class events, he sat down with me to share his exceptional and brilliant thinking and the methods he uses to bring people together -- and perhaps more crucially, how to become the kind of person who takes charge and sees yourself as a leader co-creating the experience of yourself and everyone in your world.

"The Paradigm Shift: Changing The Fabric Of Your World" by Abe Sorock, as told to Sebastian Marshall

The first step in leading people and putting together great groups is to have a paradigm shift in who you are.

The shift happened for me when I was a student at the Hopkins Nanjing Center. I realized -- if I saw myself as a student paying transactional fee and getting a diploma, I'd behave differently than if I saw myself as part of the fabric of an organization who will be looked on by future classes.

You should never fail at something crucial when it would cost you under $10 to ensure you succeed.

If you ever miss appointments that are really crucially important to you, that means you need multiple alarms.

If you have just one alarm, you might accidentally set it to "PM" instead of "AM," you might otherwise set it to the wrong hour, or your alarm could run out of batteries or the power could go off.

But, two alarms?

Much less likely.

A key thing for motivation is finding a way to see benefits right away.

Now that we've got people volunteering on GiveGetWin, I've become super sensitive to it. Sometimes we all put in a bit of work to get a new provider/deal up, and it's really exciting -- but for whatever reason, launching it gets pushed back a while.

I see that that sets people's morale and happiness back quite a bit.

It's like, "oh, I did all that work, and nothing came of it" -- whereas that's not really the case, because usually the same work gets used a couple weeks later when we do get underway, but the mind doesn't work like that.

I wasn't sensitive enough to this before, even though it impacts me too. When I see benefits right away, I'm more likely to stay engaged and on-track. When they're very delayed, motivation tends to be lower. This, even if you're aware of the phenomenon and generally try to be far-sighted.

Due to loss aversion, people tend to be much more sensitive to losses than gains. Much moreso.

So, it can be interesting to model how people react to losses and potential losses and contrast that to how they react to gains and potential gains.

The first thing we can look at are incremental progressive results -- that's adding 30 minutes of focused work to your day on the most important project you've got in your life, vs. adding in eating a stack of candy bars in one sitting a couple times a week.

With either of those actions, you don't see much big change immediately. But the person who regularly chips away at important projects winds up with a huge stack of interesting things they've done and further opportunities to do more, plus greater pride in their work and enhanced quality of life. Whereas going through a stack of candy bars doesn't hurt so much immediately, but leads to lower energy and more lethargy and worse overall health and feeling over time.

People are quite bad at this. Hence, most people don't devote regular time to an important project that they're passionate about. And the obesity rates in the developed world are rising rapidly.

Noah Gibbs is an author, speaker, lead developer at OnLive, paid Rails expert for Carnegie Mellon, and author of lots of Ruby on Rails software. To promote his GiveGetWin deal, Noah sat down with me to share some incredible insights about working with deep knowledge, how empathy and understanding the user/customer is the path to success in business, and covering many other important insights. If you're a programmer, you'll love Noah's perspective and insights. If you're not a programmer, this might be one of the more insightful interviews you read about why people do programming, and about thriving in a technical skill and business in general.

Building Ruby Castles In The Clouds by Noah Gibbs, as told to Sebastian Marshall

I grew up in the middle of nowhere in East Texas, with nothing there but a state penitentiary. So I had a lot of time with a computer. No internet. Just my Apple II computer, and long stretches of time. They say you need long stretches of uninterrupted time to program.

I had that.

I program because… programming is building castles in the cloud. Concepts on top of concepts. Except that the computer is there to check you -- it's all mental and conceptual, until you find out whether it works or not.

If you're just starting to try to sell, negotiate, recruit, or do anything of high significant with people you don't already have a warm introduction to, at some point you're going to get hit with a barrage of objections and "cross-examination."

You'll very likely fumble the first time or two it happens, and might get demoralized.

Don't.

It's a tremendously good sign. When people are very seriously interested, they hit you with questions from all sorts of angles related to risk and details you haven't thought through before. You might not have great answers on the fly, and you might lose whatever deal or sale or input you're looking for.

But it's actually a tremendous milestone. It means you get real tangible points to work on and get better answers to. And it means people are interested in what you're doing.

Learning about negotiation is one of those culture-shocking things. You start seeing underlying patterns and trends in life.

It can be painful for a while, when you see all the things that went poorly, that you did wrong, or techniques and tactics that were used against you in the past.

It can also be pretty damn exciting, because then you start to feel armed and equipped. A lot of things in life are negotiable, far more than most people think. And the vast majority of negotiation gives you options to have pleasant interactions that both sides walk away feeling good from, especially if you're savvy about it.

But some negotiation techniques that work effectively aren't really honorable under most conceptions of honor, aren't good to the other side, and... yet can be highly effective.

One of those that goes by many different names is the "nibble" or the "chisel" -- as soon as you have agreement in principle, or even a contract signed already, they'll push to get a bit more, and more, and more.

I remember being shocked one day at a comment on Hacker News that cited a study saying the most common successful conclusion to depression.

To give you a hint, it wasn't any particular medication or therapy.

Rather, the most common way depression ends is through "spontaneous recovery" -- where a person gets better for no seemingly particular reason, the mix of thoughts and chemicals having run their course.

I'm nursing a minor tenderness in my elbow right now. Tweaked it lifting weights. I know it'll heal in a few days, so I just plan around doing lower body work and maybe doing more cardio or crunches for a few days. There's no need to obsess over it, it'll be better in a few days.

But how often do we take that same approach when something is holding us down mentally? Perhaps in a particularly bad procrastination cycle, or feeling uncreative and uninspired, not doing great work, or something along those lines?