This man is SO kind and SO
clear and this is SEW what I need right now for #LentPrep and mayhaps yew dew
tew? here are some notes I took from one of his talks. He's all over YouTube.
<<Small habits and little choices are transforming us in little ways
daily.
So, if we can change our
habits, we can change our lives. Change happens from nothing, to getting a
hammer, some wood, some nails, and then plank by plank, board by board, nail by
nail, habit by habit, we can build a house, have proof of our habits, we can
gradually become someone new, a builder. With consistency and repetition we can
not only change our results, but actually our identity. The more evidence we
have for a belief, the more likely we are to believe it. The actions we take
provide evidence for who we are.
So, many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity. Here are four Implementation
Intentions: Noticing, Wanting, Doing, Liking.
Noticing.
People think that they need to
get more motivated, that they need willpower, in order to execute a habit: if I
just FELT like doing something (working out, reading a book, practicing the
guitar), then I would do it. But the thing is we need a PLAN to do things, we
can't rely on FEELING like it. We need to take the decision making out of it by
explicitly stating the WHERE, WHEN, and HOW we want to implement the habit.
Give your goals a time and a
place to live in the world.
If we're not good at making
plans, then here's one:
The Failure PreMortem - Thing
of Everything That Can Go Wrong:
Think about the habit / project
/ goal / the most important thing you want to work on, then imagine six months
out, and guess what? You've failed. Now ... tell the story of WHY and HOW you
failed: what happened, what were the challenges that took you off course, and
once you have all that stuff laid out on the table in front of you, you can
start to make better choices about how to develop a plan. You can start to have
if / then plans, you can identify them, you can strategize ways around those
obstacles, and you can prepare a pathway to succeeding.
Wanting.
One of the most overlooked
drivers of our habits is our physical environment.
Our environment often
influences our wants, simply because it's an option, simply because it's in
front of us at the time. If you want to practice the guitar, put it in the
middle of the floor so you would have to step over it to ignore time you should
be spending practicing on it.
Thankfully, we don't have to be
the victim of our environment, we can also be the architect of it. WE can
decide to design something to make our good behaiours easier, and our bad
behaviours harder.
Doing.
The important insight is, in
the beginning, just shut up and put your reps in (sports analogy: you want to
get good at shooting baskets, shoot baskets over and over and over again. dance
analogy: you want to be able to do a triple on the left? twirl and fall out,
twirl and fall out, twirl and twirl and twirl until you can TWIRL, gewrl). Just
hone the skill. Just power through it. Just do it.
Any outcome you wish to achieve
is just a point along the spectrum of repetitions. Fewer reps is an easy goal,
more is a harder goal; the more reps you put in? the more likely you are to
achieve that goal.
We should optimize for the
Starting Line, not the Finish Line. Don't think about the end result: make it
as easy as possible to get started and get your reps in. Then the outcome just
comes as a natural result.
Liking.
The only reason we repeat
behaviuors is because we enjoy them, because we like the reward. If we don't
enjoy the experience along the way, we're unlikely to stick with it. We need to
figure out ways to bring rewards to the present moment because good habits have
a problem: the immediate consequence is there, there's a cost that happens in
the moment, but the reward is often delayed. So we need to figure out a way to
bring the reward in to the present moment.
The best way to change long
term behaviour is a short term feedback. Long term behaviours, sticking with
writing, or going to the gym, they have delayed consequences. A way to enjoy it
in the moment? Try getting a year wall calendar. Any day you achieve your task?
like writing jokes for 15 minutes? Put a check on the calendar. Now, at first it
looks silly, you may have false starts, empty days, but after a while you'll
get a chain going, you'll see four, five, six days in a row ... at that point
your only goal becomes, Don't Break The Chain. What's interesting about this is
that, by measuring your progress, you get an immediate reward in the moment, by
tracking it.
This tracking becomes evidence,
and the more evidence we have, the more belief we have that we've achieved
something, and the more we believe we've achieved something the more likely we
are to repeat the beaviour because that's who we are now, we're someone who
writes 15 minutes a day and checks off a box on the calendar. It's not that
habits matter more, necessarily, on an individual basis, each moment in life
matters, of course, but over the broad span of time, each of the things we do
once or twice fade away, and each of the things we do time after time, day
after day, week after week, accucmulate the bulk of the evidence about what we
believe about ourselves, about who we really are. >>
Source: APB Speakers: https://youtu.be/U_nzqnXWvSo
