Answer: Master these 5 tips:
Simple, practical advice, but really smart:
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Simple, practical advice, but really smart:
Click here for a printable copy of John Wooden’s Pyramid of Success.
Go to the Pyramid of Success section of his website and click on each of the pyramid bricks to read a description of each of the 15 success values.
1. Draw up a list of 10 desirable behaviors you rarely do and that you could do multiple times a day.
2. Look for a chance to do each of these behaviors at least once before you go to bed.
3. Tick off each behavior as you do it.
4. Repeat this exercise each day for a week.
Hopefully, by the end of the week these rare behaviors will feel more familiar for you.
1. Run up the stairs instead of walking.
2. Wait 3 seconds before replying to someone to make sure the other person has finished talking and to think more about what to say.
3. Be “fully present” for the first 3 minutes of a conversation with someone.
4. Don’t eat everything on your plate; instead, throw the last bit away or feed it to the dog!
5. Wash your mouth out with Listerine for 15 seconds.
6. Eat a handful of beans before eating what you want to eat.
7. Do “mindful listening” at your desk for 1 minute, where you close your eyes and listen attentively to all the sounds you can hear.
8. Be”mindful” while eating something.
9. Express your appreciation, admiration or affection to someone.
10. Say something empathic to yourself when you catch yourself feeling upset about something.
11. Savor every bite of something you eat.
12. Do some neck stretches for a minute.
13. Wash hands for an extra-long time.
14. Check posture while walking or sitting.
Just think up 10 simple things like that–things that are easy to do and good habits to get into, once you do them enough to break the ice with them, or as Edward de Bono says, “getting over the edge”.
From the book Change Anything:
Delancey Street in San Fransisco, California [is where] we find Mimi Silbert. the founder and genius behind the most successful life-changing facility on earth. The entire facility is run by Mimi and fifteen hundred residents–each with an average of eighteen felony convictions. Delancey Street admits drug addicts and criminals and transforms more than 90 percent of them into productive citizens. (p 56)
Watch Mimi speak from 30 minutes into this video. Delancey Street is an amazing story: to take thousands of the bottom 2% of society and have them transform themselves into contributing,well-adjusted, beautiful human beings! And Mimi tells the story with so much passion. There is so much we can all learn from this model.
The Mimi Silbert story: Re-cycling ex-cons, addicts and prostitutes
Atul Gawande explains how in this 3-minute video: Do Surgeons Need Coaches?
Atul Gawande: Coaching and the Four Stages of Mastery from The New Yorker on FORA.tv
An implementation intention looks like this:
If………………………………………….then I will…………………………
If I am riding the bus home from work, then I will eat an apple. (Intended goal is to increase fruit intake.)
If I am watching television and want a snack, then I will reach for the fruit bowl and take an apple. (Intended goal is to reduce unhealthy snacking while watching TV.)
If, while doing this task, a distraction arises, then I will ignore it. (Intended goal is to concentrate hard on a boring task.)
The power of making a vivid implementation plan has been confirmed over and over in research by Peter Gollwitzer and his colleagues since the 1990s. (Click here for links to all the research papers.)
Carol Dweck, in her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, sums up how to make a vivid, concrete intention plan:
What works is making a vivid, concrete plan: “Tomorrow during my break, I’ll get a cup of tea, close the door to my office, and call the graduate school.” Or, in another case,: “On Wednesday morning, right after I get up and brush my teeth, I’ll sit at my desk and start writng my report.” Or: “Tonight, right after the dinner dishes are done, I’ll sit down with my wife in the living room and have that discussion. I’ll say to her, ‘Dear, I’d like to talk about something that I think will make us happier.’ ”
Think of something you need to do, something you want to learn, or a problem you have to confront. What is it? Now make a concrete plan.
when will you follow thorugh on your plan? Where will you do it? How will you do it? Think about it in vivid detail.
These concrete plans–plans you can visualize–about when, where, and how you are going to do something lead to really high levels of follow-through, which, of course, ups the chances of success. (p 228)
What we believe determines how we behave.
From Carol Dweck’s book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success:
My work is part of a tradition in psychology that shows the power of people’s beliefs. These may be beliefs we’re aware of or unaware of, but they strongly affect what we want and whether we succeed in getting it. This tradition also shows how changing people’s beliefs–even the simplest beliefs–can have profound effects.
In this book, you’ll learn how a simple belief about yourself–a belief we discovered in our research–guides a large part of your life. In fact, it permeates every part of your life. Much of what you think of as your personality actually grows out of this “mindset”. Much of what may be preventing you from fulfilling your potential grows out of it.
WHY do some people reach their creative potential in business while other equally talented peers don’t?
After three decades of painstaking research, the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck believes that the answer to the puzzle lies in how people think about intelligence and talent. Those who believe they were born with all the smarts and gifts they’re ever going to have approach life with what she calls a “fixed mind-set.” Those who believe that their own abilities can expand over time, however, live with a “growth mind-set.”
Click here to read the whole 2008 New York times article.
From the opening paragraph in Dweck’s book:
“When I was a young researcher, just starting out, something happened that changed my life. I was obsessed with understanding how people cope with failures, and I decided to study it by watching how students grapple with hard problems. So I brought children one at a time to a room in their school, made them comfortable, and then gave them a series of puzzles to solve. The first ones were fairly easy, but the next ones were hard. As the students grunted, perspired, and toiled, I watched their strategies and probed what they were thinking and feeling. I expected differences among children in how they coped with the difficulty, but I saw something I never expected.
Confronted with the hard puzzles, one ten-year-old boy pulled up his chair, rubbed his hands together, smacked his lips, and cried out, “I love a challenge!” Another, sweating away on these puzzles, looked up with a pleased expression and said with authority, “You know, I was hoping this would be informative!”
What’s wrong with them? I wondered. I always thought you coped with failure or you didn’t cope with failure. I never thought anyone loved failure. Were these alien children or were they on to something?
Everyone has a role model, someone who pointed the way at a critical moment in their lives. These children were my role models. They obviously knew something I didn’t and I was determined to figure it out–to understand the kind of mindset that could turn a failure into a gift.
What did they know? They knew that human qualities, such as intellectual skills, could be cultivated through effort. And that’s what they were doing–getting smarter. Not only weren’t they discouraged by failure, they didn’t even think they were failing. They thought they were learning.
I, on the other hand, thought human qualities were carved in stone. You were smart or you weren’t, and failure meant you weren’t. It was that simple. If you could arrange successes and avoid failures (at all costs), you could stay smart. Struggles, mistakes, perseverance were just not part of this picture. (p 3-4)
That’s how Dweck opened her book. This is how she closed it:
Change can be tough, but I’ve never heard anyone say it wasn’t worth it. Maybe they’re just rationalizing, the way people who’ve gone through a painful initiation say it was worth it. But people who’ve changed can tell you how their lives have been enhanced. They can tell you about things they have now that they wouldn’t have had, and ways they feel now that they wouldn’t have felt.
Did changing to a growth mindset solve all my problems? No. But I know that I have a different life because of it–a richer one. And that I’m a more alive, courageous, and open person because of it.
It’s for you to decide whether change is right for you now. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But either way, keep the growth mindset in your thoughts. Then, when you bump up against obstacles, you can turn to it. It will always be there for you, showing you a path into the future. (p 246)
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What strategies can people use to control unwanted habits? Past work has focused on controlling other kinds of automatic impulses, especially temptations. The nature of habit cuing calls for certain self-control strategies. Because the slow-to-change memory trace of habits is not amenable to change or reinterpretation, successful habit control involves inhibiting the unwanted response when activated in memory. In support, two episode-sampling diary studies demonstrated that bad habits, unlike responses to temptations, were controlled most effectively through spontaneous use of vigilant monitoring (thinking “don’t do it,” watching carefully for slipups). No other strategy was useful in controlling strong habits, despite that stimulus control was effective at inhibiting responses to temptations. A subsequent experiment showed that vigilant monitoring aids habit control, not by changing the strength of the habit memory trace but by heightening inhibitory, cognitive control processes. The implications of these findings for behavior change interventions are discussed.
June 20, 2016 By Anne Austin Leave a Comment
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