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How can I successfully change my behavior?

October 10, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Answer: Avoid these 10 proven mistakes:


Top 10 Mistakes in Behavior Change

View more presentations from Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford


I can think of some more possible mistakes:

1. not writing down our goal, detailing all the nitty-gritty how and when and with whom and where and what, etc.

2. Not mentally rehearsing the desired behavior, especially for avoidance behaviors.

3. Not setting mini-goal targets (e.g. do it once, three times, 10 times, 30 times, etc.)

4. Not using a checklist to check whether we’ve remembered to do it.

Filed Under: achievement, learning, learning new habits

What are the essential ingredients to a happy, effective, flourishing life?

September 28, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Answer: Everyone will come up with their own answer to this question, but it’s definitely worth wrestling with.

As incredible as it sounds, ballet is made up of just 13 basic moves! Our English language is made up of just 26 letters. Our mathematical system is made up of just 10 numbers.

So what is a happy, effective, flourishing life made up of?

Here’s my answer — for  today, anyway:

22 basic building blocks of a happy, effective, flourishing life


  1. Look after my body — if I look after it, it will look after me!
  2. Whatever I am doing, be there! Be alive. Be mindful. Pay attention.
  3. Embrace the growth mindset. Believe I  can learn most things, given enough time and effort.
  4. Keep learning and growing myself.
  5. Learn how to think–rationally and creatively. Learn how to learn and remember things. Learn how to solve problems and make decisions.
  6. Be aware of the unconscious forces that  determine my behavior if I’m not awake to what’s happening.
  7. Embrace change. Embrace progress. Stay current.
  8. Participate. Have a go. Be proactive. I am what I do.
  9. Finish what I start (if it deserves to be finished).
  10. Choose to be optimistic and positive about life. Learn to spot the good and to savor it.
  11. Learn to tip myself out of negative emotions.
  12. Find meaning and purpose in life and pursue these things wholeheartedly. Aim to make a difference and add value to the world.
  13. Be brave. Believe I can handle whatever life throws at me. That way I don’t let fear hold me back.
  14. Practice the golden rule: “Don’t do to others what I don’t want them to do to me.” Keep my promises. Tell the truth. Be fair. Forgive, etc.
  15. Learn to love–to give to others for the sheer joy of helping others flourish.
  16. Prioritize. Make time for the things that matter.
  17. Learn how to make beautiful conversation–how to listen and really “feel” the other person, and to be interesting and open-minded and to disagree without being disagreeable, etc.
  18. Help others flourish.
  19. Respect myself. Like myself. Be gentle and forgiving towards myself. Don’t feed myself toxic nonsense. Let my “wise self” look out for my best interests.
  20. Dare to dream big, and then to come up with an intelligent strategy to achieve the dream, and then throw myself wholeheartedly into achieving it, while all the time improving my strategy to make it better.
  21. Develop this strong inner core of principles to guide my actions and to protect me when bad things happen or others behave badly towards me.
  22. Practice reflection often to check my progress and thinking up ways to do things better.

There– they are my 22 essential building blocks for a happy, effective, flourishing life!

You know what? That kinda sounds doable–especially if I devote the rest of my life to mastering it!

What does your list look like? What have I left out? What shouldn’t be there?

Filed Under: achievement, achieving the important things, the secret of success Tagged With:

How can I get a book full of good ideas to change my behavior?

September 14, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Answer: Try these ideas:

Step 1. When you’ve finished reading the book,  skim through it again, searching for up to 20  key ideas you’d like to incorporate  into your life.

For example, here are the 20 key ideas from Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People that I’d like to incorporate into my life:

  1. Be proactive
  2. Begin with the end in mind
  3. Put first things first
  4. Think win/win
  5. Seek first to understand, then to be understood
  6. Synergize
  7. Spend one hour/day sharpening the saw
  8. Watch the P/PC balance
  9. Make deposits into emotional bank account
  10. Focus on my circle of influence
  11. Use the  space between stimulus and response
  12. Develop a strong inner core of guiding principles
  13. Love is a doing word
  14. Trigger upward spirals
  15. Explore interdependence
  16. Keep promise to self and others
  17. Write and follow personal mission statement
  18. Do Quadrant 2 (important but not urgent) things
  19. Adopt abundance mentality
  20. Value the differences

(Note: Because I read the book carefully, these seemingly vague abstractions are rich in meaning for me now. Therefore, I only need to use a few words  to remind myself of these content-rich ideas.)

Step 2. Now memorize your list.

Once you’ve finished reading a book, you’ll probably not look at it again for a long, long time, if at all.  If these 20 key ideas are going to have any chance of changing your behavior, you’re going to have to plant them safely into your long-term memory.  If you can’t remember what they are, they can’t change your life!

What is the best way to memorize these 20 key ideas? Rote-learn them! Test yourself each day, maybe even test yourself several times a day to start with. It only takes a couple of minutes to whizz through 20 items in your mind.

Identify the items you usually forget and spend extra time learning these. Use whatever rote-learning methods work  for you.  I find the  peg method works brilliantly for me  in this instance. This is how I do it:

  1. For each letter of the alphabet, I think of a person I know well whose name begins with that letter.  For instance:
    A = Alice
    B = Bruce
    C = Christian
    D = Dad
    E = Eleanor, etc
  2. Each of my 20 key ideas gets paired to the  person corresponding to the idea’s number ranking (e.g. idea 1 gets A=Alice).   I form a rich mental picture in my mind that somehow combines each idea to its person.

    For instance, the idea “Be proactive” gets paired with Alice.  I form a rich mental picture of my daughter Alice being very proactive in lots of ways. (This one’s easy as Alice is naturally proactive.)

    Similarly, the next idea “Begin with end in mind” gets Bruce, my Father-in-Law. Bruce is prone to being pessimistic so I imagine him coming up with  gloomy, bad endings to everything.The idea “First things first” gets paired  with Christian.

    Christian travels a lot so would be often packing his suitcase; I imagine him putting the  most important things in his case first… and so on.

    To recall my 20 key ideas, I simply recall each person and wait to see what image flashes into my mind.  If all goes well,  I will see Alice being amazingly proactive and Bruce imagining bad endings and Christian putting important things into his suitcase first. And then it’s an easy step from that recalled image to the actual key idea  represented by that image.

    This peg technique is fun, easy to do  and almost miraculous is its effectiveness. It’s so much easier than trying to drag 20 unrelated items out of my memory randomly. I’ve tried that enough times, and it hurts!

Step 3. There are lots more steps to getting good ideas in a book to change our lives forever. I’ll talk about those ideas  soon.

Filed Under: achievement, creating new habits, turning good ideas in books into good habits, turning good ideas into action Tagged With: , , , , ,

How can I create habits that will help me be successful?

August 13, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Answer: Identify the key success-generating habits you wish to establish, remind yourself of these habits at the start of each day, and review your progress at the end of each day.


Stephen Covey, in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People ( p 147), offers these two questions to help you identify your key success-generating habits:

Q1: What one thing could you do (you aren’t doing now) that, if you did on a regular basis, would make a tremendous positive difference in your personal life?

Q2: What one thing in your business or professional life would bring similar results?


Print off these two questions and your answers and place somewhere prominent such as on the wall in front of your desk.  At the start of each day, read these questions and your answers to keep these habits in the your mind during the day.

Then, at the end of each day,  review the things you did during the day to strengthen these habits.

Here’s a worked example:

Step 1: Answer these two questions:

Q 1: What one thing could I do that I’m not doing now that if I did on a regular basis, would make a tremendous positive difference in my personal life?

A 1: Try hard to accurately understand and “feel” others.

Q2: What one thing in my work life would bring similar results?

A1: Create my website just  the way I have envisioned it in my mind.


Step 2: Type up  the questions and my answers and place on the wall in front of my work desk.

Step 3: Create two new goals on my daily goal-tracker program:

  1. Into the breakfast routine category:  “Read  Q & A habit printout.”
  2. Into the end-of-day routine category: “Review habit progress for the day.”

I use my goal-tracker program every day. Once I’ve included these habit goals onto my goal-tracker, I won’t have to worry about remembering to do them.

Step 4:  At the start of each day, read the Q & A printout to keep these sought-after habits prominent in my mind during the day.

Step 5: At the end of each day, answer these two review questions:

Q 1:  What specific things did I do today to “try  hard to deeply understand and “feel” other people”?

A 1:  I listened very attentively to Mary when she was telling me about her problem with her son. I successfully resisted jumping in offering my advice, but instead  practised some awesome empathy (for me!). Afterwards I tried hard seeing things from her perspective, even though it was hard for me to understand why she reacted the way she did. I thought of a better way I could have said something during the conversation ( re-scripting).


Q  2: What specific things did I do today to  “create my website just the way I have envisioned it in my mind”?

A  2: I wrote up two more articles, I wrote down a couple of clever ideas that perhaps I can ask the web designer to create for me, and I proof-read and edited three old articles.

Have a go!

To create a habit, we need focus, monitoring and lots of repetition. That’s what this strategy offers.  Why not give it a go for 30 ticks on the goal tracker and see what happens?

Filed Under: achievement, creating new habits Tagged With: , , , , ,

What is the single, underlying secret of successful people?

August 10, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Answer: Successful people have “formed the habit of doing things that failures don’t like to do,” according to Albert E.N. Gray.

Albert Gray wrote up his “discovery” in 1940 in this six-page essay The Common Denominator of Success.

Here is how Gray’s essay opens:

The Common Denominator of Success

by Albert E.N. Gray

Several years ago I was brought face to face with the very disturbing realization that I
was trying to supervise and direct the efforts of a large number of men who were trying
to achieve success, without knowing myself what the secret of success really was. And
that, naturally, brought me face to face with the further realization that regardless of what
other knowledge I might have brought to my job, I was definitely lacking in the most
important knowledge of all.

Of course, like most of us, I had been brought up on the popular belief that the secret of
success is hard work, but I had seen so many men work hard without succeeding and so
many men succeed without working hard that I had become convinced that hard work
was not the real secret even though in most cases it might be one of the requirements.

And so I set out on a voyage of discovery which carried me through biographies and
autobiographies and all sorts of dissertations on success and the lives of successful men
until I finally reached a point at which I realized that the secret I was trying to discover
lay not only in what men did, but also in what made them do it.

I realized further that the secret for which I was searching must not only apply to every
definition of success, but since it must apply to everyone to whom it was offered, it must
also apply to everyone who had ever been successful. In short, I was looking for the
common denominator of success.

And because that is exactly what I was looking for, that is exactly what I found.

But this common denominator of success is so big, so powerful, and so vitally important
to your future and mine that I’m not going to make a speech about it. I’m just going to
“lay it on the line” in words of one syllable, so simple that everyone can understand them.

The common denominator of success — the secret of success of every man who has ever
been successful — lies in the fact that he formed the habit of doing things that failures
don’t like to do.

It’s just as true as it sounds and it’s just as simple as it seems. You can hold it up to the
light, you can put it to the acid test, and you can kick it around until it’s worn out, but
when you are all through with it, it will still be the common denominator of success,
whether you like it or not.

It will still explain why men have come into this business of ours with every apparent
qualification for success and given us our most disappointing failures, while others have
come in and achieved outstanding success in spite of many obvious and discouraging
handicaps. And since it will also explain your future, it would seem to be a mighty good
idea for you to use it in determining just what sort of a future you are going to have. In
other words, let’s take this big, all-embracing secret and boil it down to fit the individual
you.

If the secret of success lies in forming the habit of doing things that failures don’t like to
do, let’s start the boiling-down process by determining what are the things that failures
don’t like to do. The things that failures don’t like to do are the very things that you and I
and other human beings, including successful men, naturally don’t like to do. In other
words, we’ve got to realize right from the start that success is something which is
achieved by the minority of men, and is therefore unnatural and not to be achieved by
following our natural likes and dislikes nor by being guided by our natural preferences
and prejudices.

Click here to read the whole article.

Of course, whether Gray’s answer is the definitive answer can’t be proven, but his idea sure gets a lot of support from other great thinkers:

Men’s natures are alike. It is their habits that carry them far apart. (Confucius)

Success is the sum of small habits, repeated day in and day out. (Robert Collier)

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit. (Aristotle)

Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habits. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny. (Lao-Tzu)

Filed Under: achievement, achieving the important things, the secret of success Tagged With: , , , , ,

What are some good goals to shoot for?

July 28, 2011 by Leave a Comment

   

  1. Read a book a week:
     
    “There’s no better way to inform and expand your mind on a regular basis than to get into the habit of reading good literature. . .You can get into the best minds that are now or that have ever been in the world. I highly recommend starting with a goal of a book a month, then a book every two weeks, then a book a week.”
     
    (from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey, p 296)
     
Filed Under: achievement, good goals to achieve

What are the most important skills I should master above everything else?

July 7, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Answer:  I don’t know! The answer is different for everyone–and our answer will be different at different times in our lives.

The best answer is the answer that best sums up how you feel today. What are the skills you wish you could master today more than anything else? 

Here is my best answer. Today,  I wish I could learn how to:

  1. finish what I start more often;
  2. focus like a laser on whatever I’m doing;
  3. be “fully present” when listening to people;
  4. find more people who are a good fit with me and to  form close, loving connections with those people;
  5. learn and remember things better;
  6. live my life free from irrational self-doubt;
  7. be more effective in helping others I care about.

Your wish-list, of course, will be entirely different. For instance, you might want to learn how to:

  1. better care for your body;
  2. help your child be less shy;
  3. tip yourself out of negative emotions more easily;
  4. handle receiving criticism better;
  5. be more persuasive;
  6. break bad habits;
  7. conquer procrastination.

Once we’ve identified our wish-list of skills we’d dearly love to master, we then just have to:

(1) find out how to master those skills;
(2) draw up a campaign of skill-mastering strategies that best appeal to us;
(3) implement our skill-mastering campaign, where we try all the various strategies on our list, retaining those that work and dropping those that don’t.

That sounds a simple-enough plan!

The two key goals of this website are to provide lots of strategies (and hopefully mostly proven strategies) to help you put together good skill-building campaigns and to help you monitor your progress as you build those skills. As you can imagine, this is an ambitious project. It’s not surprising that I am plagued by lots of self-doubt! It will take me ages to collect all the information I have in mind and to set things up. In the meantime, you can research your wish-list topics yourself and compile your own skill-mastery campaigns to implement.

I hope to do follow-up posts to demonstrate how I put together skill-masterycampaigns to address the skill deficiencies on my wish-list. This way, I can show you what I’m talking about here. (Of course, since I struggle to finish everything I start (see No.1 item  on my wish-list!), I can’t guarantee I’ll write these follow-up posts!  Sigh!!!)

Filed Under: achievement, achieving the important things

How can I cope better with failing to achieve a cherished goal?

April 7, 2011 by Leave a Comment

A:  Read this article for some comforting and inspiring ideas:

Laura A. King and Joshua A. Hicks

My summary of the article

Missing out on a cherished goal is excruciatingly painful.

Not only have we missed out on the important goal we’ve set our heart on, but we also have to cope with the loss of our hoped-for “new self” that would have come with our achieving our goal.

For instance, a woman with the goal of becoming a mother loses her hoped-for new self as “mother” the day she hears she cannot have children.

The father who hears his baby son has Down’s Syndrome loses his future self as the dad who was going to teach his son football and have deep philosophical conversations with him one day.

The same happens when we miss out on any cherished goal, such as the break-up of a relationship we thought was “the one”, or the failure of a business idea, or the collapse of an investment that was going to set us up for retirement.

We need time to process what’s happened.

Failing a cherished goal means  somehow we have to accommodate the failure into our life. This is truly challenging:  We have to somehow make sense of our new life without our cherished goal. We have to come up with replacement cherished goals and re-prioritize existing goals.

This adjustment takes time. It’s important to give ourselves that time to process all we have lost. The better we process it, the more we can learn from it.

We can learn a lot from loss and the suffering it brings.

Handled the right way,  the loss of the cherished goal helps us develop insight. We learn to find meaning in our failure and suffering. In the process, we grow into richer, more insightful and complex human beings.

Without life’s unwanted surprise twists, we’d live perfectly routine, predictable existences–with little growth happening as a result.

In time, we may even feel gratitude for the way things have turned out. We may realize that, although we have lost one possible self, we ended up with another– possibly even better–self.

Loss and suffering teaches us equanimity: we have to accept life is unpredictable and that the gods of fate won’t always give us what we want, no matter how much we want it or how hard try.

Missing out on a cherished goal also can teach us that we are robust enough to handle life’s nasty surprises. It’s not the nasty surprises that do us in, but rather our  inability to cope with them.

If we can’t handle the loss, bad things may happen.

If we can’t rise above our loss, then we’ve let ourselves be crushed by a sense of entitlement. We’ve become stuck in thinking that we are entitled to achieve our cherished goal and we feel deeply resentful that we did not get our expectations met.

We get locked into “if only” thinking: “There were so many things I could have achieved if only. . .”

If we can’t rise above our loss, we may lose some of our trust in life and other people and lose our courage to try again for new cherished goals. We may come to believe all our cherished goals will blow up on us and tell ourselves:

“Striving hard for tough goals isn’t worth it. Life’s too unpredictable. I had better not to try as failing hurts too much.”

A question to ask yourself, once you’ve had enough time to process your loss:

“If I had my time over again, would I still want to keep this unexpected experience — or would I prefer to skip it entirely”

Hopefully, for most of your experiences, your answer will be:

“I’m glad I had this experience. If I had my time over again, I would change almost nothing.”

Here’s a heart-warming account from someone who dealt well with her loss.

This mother of a Down’s Syndrome child explains how she has matured as a person from having to deal with her loss of her cherished dream (King and Hicks, 2006, p 133):

“I see myself on an exciting journey. I like who I am. I have many areas that need work but for the most part I’m present and attentive to my needs and dreads and goals. . . . I am finding that giving is truly more satisfying than receiving. I have had a challenge in accepting my son’s Down’s Syndrome. It’s taken time but unconditional love and acceptance are truly there. . .I want to work within the community to be an agent of change. We all have a time of being a caregiver — to our children or parents, or someone. I want to offer. . . tools for people to find their own balance and peace. . . I am quite selfish by nature: My son has opened that perspective — a new window for loving and caring now exists for me. I’m proud that I have taken responsibility for my own growth.”

In a nutshell, if you experience the loss of a cherished goal, remember these four things:

  1. Spend time visiting your loss to learn from it and extract all the good you can. But don’t let yourself get bitter or stuck, longing for what could have been.
  2. Now move on. Throw yourself into new cherished goals.
  3. Remember that life won’t always give you what you want, but, nevertheless,  you must stay optimistic and keep trying really hard for the things that matter.
  4. Embrace life’s rich complexity and unpredictability. This way, you’ll get properly tested and get to discover who you really are.

“Life is a work of art, probably the greatest one we produce.” (Bruner)

Filed Under: achievement, coping with failing to achieve an important goal, goal-setting
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