BE A BETTER YOU - CHANGE YOUR HABITS AND YOU CHANGE YOUR LIFE

BE A BETTER YOU - CHANGE YOUR HABITS AND YOU CHANGE YOUR LIFE

Below are some observations from Habit Stacking: 127 Small Changes to Improve Your Health, Wealth, and Happiness by S.J. Scott, plus some observations from my own life.

ACTION IS EVERYTHING. SUCCESS IS A HABIT.

To quote Jeff Olson, from his book The Slight Edge: The truth is, what you do matters. What you do today matters. What you do every day matters. Successful people do things that seem to make no difference at all in the act of doing them, and they do them over and over and over until the compound effect kicks in.

THE CHAIN REACTION OF POSITIVE HABITS

Keystone habits are a powerful concept that Charles Duhigg discussed in this book The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business.

Simply put, a keystone habit can have a positive impact on multiple areas of your lifeeven if youre not intentionally trying to improve them.

A common example that people use is a thirty-minute daily exercise routine. Lets say you start running to lose a few pounds. As you get fitter, you subconsciously start to avoid fatty and sugary foods, so your weight dramatically decreases. This improves your self-esteem, which creates a positive change in both your relationships and your career (because you now feel confident enough to ask for a raise). On the surface, all you did was exercise for thirty minutes every day, but the addition of this single habit caused a chain reaction of positive results.

ELEPHANT HABITS, ONE BITE AT A TIME

The goal here is to chip away at a simple but time-consuming project in five-to fifteen-minute daily increments. You can do this with many of the larger tasks on your to-do list:

Decluttering your home Packing for a move
Organizing your paperwork
Studying for an exam
Completing a time-consuming homework assignment
Reading a difficult book

I use elephant habits all the time whenever Im faced with something unpleasant. Rather than building it up in my mind as a horrific ordeal, I overcome inertia by scheduling a five-to ten-minute daily block where I can chip away at the project.

It always surprises me that some people do tasks as late as possible and then leave no time to address problems. An early start need not make the task any longer, you get success sooner, and you have time at the end to address problems.

RESISTANCE OR CONSTRAINTS BURN MOTIVATION

In the book Willpower, authors Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney described a concept known as ego depletion, which is a persons diminished capacity to regulate their thoughts, feelings, and actions. Simply put, our willpower is like a muscle. It weakens throughout the day because of constant use.

Baumeister and his colleagues have tested ego depletion in a variety of scenarios. One was called the radish experiment. Here, they brought three groups of people into a room and offered a selection of food (before working on a puzzle): pieces of chocolate, warm cookies, and radishes. One group could eat anything they wanted. Another group could only eat the radishes. The final group wasnt given any food options. After that, each group was moved into a separate room, where they had to work on a challenging puzzle. The groups that didnt previously exert willpower (i.e., they ate whatever they wanted or werent given a food option) worked on the puzzle for an average of twenty minutes. The group that had to exert willpower and resist the tasty treats worked on the puzzle for an average of eight minutes.

Similar experiments and resulted are noted in Danny Kahneman system 1 and system 2 in te book Thinking Fast And Slow

Thinking, Fast and Slow, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacationeach of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions.

More generally, System 1 uses association and metaphor to produce a quick and dirty draft of reality, which System 2 draws on to arrive at explicit beliefs and reasoned choices. System 1 proposes, System 2 disposes. So System 2 would seem to be the boss, right? In principle, yes. But System 2, in addition to being more deliberate and rational, is also lazy. And it tires easily. (The vogue term for this is ego depletion.) Too often, instead of slowing things down and analyzing them, System 2 is content to accept the easy but unreliable story about the world that System 1 feeds to it. Although System 2 believes itself to be where the action is, Kahneman writes, the automatic System 1 is the hero of this book. System 2 is especially quiescent, it seems, when your mood is a happy one.

This is why Im most productive in the morning, before the distractions that sap my time and energy.

SMALL HABITS MAKE BIG CHANGES

In the book The Compound Effect, author Darren Hardy explains it best with a simple formula: Small, Smart Choices Consistency Time = RADICAL DIFFERENCE To demonstrate this concept, let me give you five examples of how simple actions can help you in any area of your life.

As a Commonwealth Games Triathlete and World Championship Rower I know my successes were more to do with routine than talent or heroic effort.When asked about lessons from the Commonwealth Games or World Champs Rowing Ive always offered the following quotes

Quote1 >> 80% of life is just turning up Woody Allen

I just turn up, to every training session, to every lesson, to every meeting. It's amazing what your learn, who you meet and how you improve by just turning up.

Quote2 >> Do exactly what is says on the tin Ronseal

Life often is just doing the obvious: eat, sleep, drink, think. Every weight loss programme. Every training regime. Every qualification is simply a matter of do this, then that, then the other. Everything is obvious in the world of google. The challenge is doing it.

Quote3 >> If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything thats in it, And which is more youll be a man, my son!
By Rudyard Kipling

We all have the same 24 hours, how do you use yours?

USEFUL REFERENCES AND LINKS

Thinking Fast And Slow
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/books/review/thinking-fast-and-slow-by-daniel-kahneman-book-review.html