ā
Good Morning
I hope you all had a lovely Christmas & New Year!
šŖš½
Welcome to 2020
Around May last year, I became very interested in personal development, goal setting and habit forming.
Whilst starting a new chapter, taking on photography fulltime, it was a really important step.
I took the advice of the internet and after a lot of trial and error, I want to share what Iāve learnt and continue to learn.
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This is a long one, but I promise a worthwhile read!
And I also have some exciting news ā¦ (near the end of the email
)
Cāmere to meā¦
How to hit the ground running š
Actual tips for goals and habits in 2020
I know you have heard this ALL BEFORE, trust me I know.
Iāve always found that too much information online can be overwhelming and often contradicting.
However, I truly believe these things have helped me massively in the past 8 months. Read slowly.
1. Understand
We are lazy.
Habits are unconscious.
Our brains are simply running these ingrained processes, repeating learned memory loops. We love having a go-to way of doing things without having to think.
Our body has many habit triggers, anything from our feelings, the environment weāre in, or even a time of day.
š Your body forms a loop - response, reward and repeat.
Wake up, check Instagram, get a hit of dopamine, repeat.
For ābadā habits, you need to slowly break the loop rather than try to change the entire thing in one go.
Saying āIām never going to use Instagram againā will set you up to fail, you simply canāt be that drastic.
What if your phone wasnāt beside your bed? - that breaks the loop, you donāt need to check social media first thing in the morning.
2. Start Small
This is definitely the most cliche but I genuinely donāt think it can be said enough.
šÆ Focus on this week, this week only.
See how you get on and adjust your targets accordingly.
Saying āI will go to the gym every day for the next yearā is ambitious for anyone.
So try it, for one week, if you only managed two sessions then maybe that is a more realistic goal for next week?
When that gets easy to do, add another day, that is progress.
A huge thing for me this year was the idea to just try, even for a short time.
Say you aim to āread for 1 hour a dayā, but today is really busyā¦
Instead, read for 15mins, sure it is not your entire goal but it starts to build the habit!
Slowly but surely, crucially just keep doing it. Plus the ability to read for an hour must be practised, it does not come from anywhere.
š It can still be a good idea to make a list of āyearā goals, a short set of quite broad things, it helps you focus on just a few big ideas.
However, this is what I was guilty of not doing, you must break them down.
āEat healthy in 2020ā sounds perfectly well-intentioned but how is that going to get you to do anything about it?
Think of goals like and instruction manual, you need chapter headings but you also need the step by step.
3. Reduce Friction
This is key for forming new habits and is what I really worked on.
This is what stops us before we even get started.
If your gym is miles away from your home, the journey in getting there will be enough to discourage you at the slightest temptation.
š² Essentially look to reduce the obstacles in the way of you performing the habit, the easy outs.
Habits are formed through consistency and repetition.
Therefore, you are much more likely to repeat the behaviour again and again if the access level to do so is much lower.
Youāll be surprised by the amount of friction you can avoid if you apply yourself.
4. Track
No trendy app will ever form you a habit or make you a better person, but nonetheless tracking your progress is really important and can be very helpful.
Try to track over short periods, say a month. Indefinitely can be daunting.
It is much easier to try something new knowing you just have to stick it out for a month.
Then after each cycle, you can adjust goals, sticking with what worked, removing what you hated and even adding a new habit.
š Tracking your progress also allows you to look back on what you HAVE completed, not what you havenāt yet.
Please be strict about tracking your failures, they will come to motivate you.
Donāt lie to yourself, but also donāt be disheartened by any shortcomings.
It is crucial to remember that nobody is perfect and before you started this new thing, you had done nothing. So even if you miss 10 days out of 30, you still bloody did the thing for 20 days!
So pat yourself on the back and try again. Progress is slow and that is the harsh reality of it.
Youāve said it yourself though, time flies, although today and this week seem like forever, if you commit to something before you know it itāll be 2021 šŖš½
āCāmere to meā started in August of 2019, 23 weeks ago.
Since then, I missed two weeks entirely, and a few others I sent out a day late on a Tuesday, but they are not failures.
I got straight back up, Iām so proud of how far Iāve come, I even wrote one about dealing with anxiety.
The longer you do something the more you have to lose by stopping or breaking the streak, so you just keep going.
In the last few months, I have become better at writing, better at reading and analysis, more aware of interesting topics I stumble across, more curious than ever about how the world works. Iām also a faster typer š
To recap:
Understand
Start Small
Reduce Friction
Track
Photos I Saved š·
Watch š¹š
Vox Media put together a 2019 Recap, it is very well done šš½
Cāmere to meā¦ The Podcast š¶
Everyone and their mother has started a podcast
This might be the worst idea Iāve had yet but this is something I have always wanted to try.
As this evolves I want to keep trying new things, I believe failure is the best way to learn.
Personally, I love listening to podcasts and I have become increasingly interested in them, I seem to always run out of episodes of my favourites.
Please check it out if itās something youāre interested in! šš½
So far just an introduction has been published this morning,
If not already when you read this, it will very soon be on every major podcast platform, Spotify, Apple etc
Think š¤š¤Æš
Rice is probably the hardest food to eat with sticks
Thatās all for now š¤š½
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I love to hear your thoughts.
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If you enjoy reading this every week Iām sure your friends would too.
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Thatās how they get yaā¦
Thank you,
Guy