Category:

2020

6 – Challenge The Rider and The Elephant

by Jill October 19, 2020

“The human brain is a wonderful organ; it starts to work as soon as you’re born and doesn’t stop until you deliver a speech” – George Jessel.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt wrote a book called The Happiness Hypothesis. He says that there’s two independent brains, “The two brains are like an elephant and its rider, The Rider can steer and pull The Elephant in a particular direction, but ultimately, The Elephant is going to go where it wants to go.”

https://www.happinesshypothesis.com/

There’s another book that takes that theory and really tries to bring it to our personal habits. It’s called Switch – How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath. The book is from 2010. The book talks about The Elephant and The Rider, and how to bring them together for our own good. We’ll go through each of the different steps, they talk about taking each of the different personalities.

Switch

The Elephant

First, The Elephant, The Elephant is powerful, stubborn, and emotional. It gets scared. Think about that fairy tale about the mouse and The Elephant, it panics, and it runs away. It also really hates negative emotion, like fear, and it desires positivity, you can use urgency to make The Elephant move, but eventually it will tire of it and just leave. The Elephant really needs to be motivated or have the removal of negative motivation. It hates to fail. It also finds hope, as fuel. It has to know that it can do it.

Here are three suggestions for helping The Elephant work. First, find the feeling. It really wants to be successful. Whenever you think about leaders or speakers who are very positive and very meaningful to you, it’s because they’re bringing that emotion out of you. They’re inspiring you and it’s talking to The Elephant directly. Emotions motivate The Elephant. The second step is shrink the change. We think that big challenges are motivating. We like to accomplish big things. But in truth, we need the steps to be smaller. that will help The Elephant realize they can win. By starting out with those small steps and encouraging The Elephant to make it look easier. The Elephant will work in our way. The Heath brothers talked about milestones; they said their dad used a phrase instead called “inch pebbles”. Small steps! The next item is to grow your people. Get people excited about this change. Which means we’re not going to be down on ourselves when we fail. We’re going to be positive. And we’re going to understand that ‘failure is necessary’ and that ‘you’re just starting out, of course, things were going to go wrong’. But in the movies, that’s when the hero comes back and wins the day.’ Try to encourage ourselves into having that positive outlook.

The Rider

Next comes to The Rider. The Rider is rational and loves to plan. And it tries to determine what the best path is. It looks for ways to move The Elephant, but it can’t really make The Elephant go where The Elephant doesn’t want to go. Then The Rider gets overwhelmed, stuck in planning and constantly looking for different ways and different paths and different methods to do it. It’s not very effective when you’re talking to an emotional being like we are. We would never train a dog by trying to appeal to the rational side. We always look for the excitement and the reward. We have to give The Rider some help in finding the right direction. Otherwise, they may spin, or they might go in the wrong direction. They talked about how there’s this positive/negative asymmetry. If we were to talk to a friend for a while, and they were giving you a critique about something. And they said some positive things and they said some negative things. We would only remember the negative things. If we get stuck with a problem, The Rider can get burned out and exhausted because The Elephant’s not doing what they want. And so that negativity really hurts The Rider and The Elephant,

To help The Rider they suggest first direct the rider and they call that by finding the bright spots. You’re driving on a road and you’re wondering if you’re going the right way. And you see the city lights off into the distance. Lights are always guides to where we want to go. I try to do it in such a way of thinking of what would a professional do or what would someone who I think is a great version of what I’m trying to do. What would they do? This person they lost a lot of weight or this person used to be out of shape, and they got into shape. And then I would try to figure out what they did and look for their bright spots. Then the next step they said to take is script the critical moves which just means that you want to make this familiar. You want to make this clearer. We always think that we love choice. And we like a lot of choices. We love to go to a grocery store and see 47 different kinds of jams. But what they found in psychology is it actually hurts our choice making, because we get overwhelmed with too many jams. And it actually doesn’t make us happier. This is where something called “Choice Architecture” comes in. It really helps us define things down. So, if you’re that person who decides that you’re going to go to the gym. Then you stand there, in front of several hundred pieces of equipment. You might not really exercise, or you might not exercise as long as you could, because you’re just walking around trying to decide what to do. By giving yourself Choice Architecture, you will say, ‘well, it’s a day’s cardio day, either you’re going to get on the bike, or you’re going to get on the treadmill. Those are your two choices.’ That will help you to really motivate to do the right thing. We actually do better when we limit choices, instead of giving ourselves every choice. The last step is to point to the destination. And this is really my favorite step. They talk about “destination postcards”. If you were from the future, and you are going to send yourself a postcard about what it looks like when you’re on the other side of this project. What would that look like? Would you be standing there on top of a mountain in the Netherlands? Or would you be on the banks of Paris because you saved money for your vacation? How would you look when you achieved your goals? This is a lot of fun to try to think of ways to help you imagine what your future self looks like. They talk about the future self versus the present self. And we are always more concerned about our present self. We make choices for ourselves that are about today. And those choices don’t tend to be very good. We can look at the future self. And actually, bring it into today with these future postcards or these destination postcards, it’s really going to help us get there. Give us a way of seeing the vision for it. And what they said was “Don’t obsess about the middle. Because the middle is going to look different once you get there. Just look for a strong beginning and a strong ending. And that’s what you should focus on.”

The Path

Then the last item that’s here is The Path. And The Path represents what we want to change. But what we have to do is we need to make The Path work in our favor. The first step is to tweak the environment. That means we make The Path easier; we make The Path looks smoother. Maybe we make it easier for us to do the right thing by setting out our gym clothes. But they said is to make the right behavior a little easier, and the wrong behavior a little harder. And then they said, “When it comes to changing behavior, environmental tweaks beat self-control, every time”. Make it smooth. Make it downhill. Try to make your path as easy as possible. The next step is build habits. Habits are the cruise control of our lives. Once something is a habit, it becomes easier for us and we don’t have to focus on it. It really helps us to do things without burning ourselves out or burning out The Elephant. I’ve always been that kind of person who thought habits are boring. But in fact, what it does is it helps us take the things that don’t require a lot of mental energy and makes it entirely easier. Then we can take our focus on what’s important. And those fights that we have with our goals and habits will have more energy, because we got there through the power of habits. Think about cruise control in a car. Maybe that’s boring, but that’s also easier. It helps us go at a constant pace. The last step is “Rally the herd”. Behavior is contagious. When we see people doing something, we’re more likely to do it. How can we go ahead and try to change our behaviors? They talk a little bit about organizational change and trying to get people to join in on that. And in software as a trainer, I look for people that have a gleam in their eye, and maybe a little smile on their face. I go introduce myself to them, and I bring them on as my champions. They’re the ones that are going to help me sell this new behavior and this new activity to other people, because they’re excited about it, and their excitement will be contagious. It’s also true that if you have dissenters, they will also cause contagions inside your new system. Their quote is, “When change comes into conflict with culture, a new rule is no match for the culture.” Even if you order people to do something, they won’t do it if the culture goes against it. What you want to do for yourself, when you’re talking about your own habits, is trying to get people on board. Maybe it could be people in your house. Maybe they have different reasons for doing the things you want to do. I see people go for a walk with their kids outside, but I’m sure their kids probably didn’t really want to go for a walk. But maybe they did actually want to talk to their parents. Or maybe they just wanted to play Pokémon. But somehow, the parent who’s trying to get exercise is now walking with their kid and it’s encouraging the behavior. You can try to get people inside of your family to help you support your habit. Sometimes it works, sometimes it just doesn’t work. And then you have to find a different group of people to help support you. Maybe it’s a Facebook Group. Or maybe it’s a group of people in your reading club, who’s going to encourage you to get your books read. But whatever it is trying to bring people in because that behavior is contagious. Find the champions who will help you do what you want to do. You can’t find anybody, you can look online and try to find a group or become your own cheerleader and start talking to yourself, in a good way.

They also mentioned that “Change often fails because The Rider can’t keep The Elephant on the road long enough to reach the destination. changing behavior requires careful supervision by The Rider. And what looks like laziness is often exhaustion.” “And what looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.” In these battles that we have with The Elephant, The Rider and The Path, try to make it clear to avoid resistance, and try to make it easy and have a nice path and try to avoid exhaustion.

Jill’s Take

I really liked this book, it taught me that I’m way too focused on The Rider. I really have to start speaking to my inner elephant, I tend to be a real Rider-focused person, I come up with plans. I spin forever with all these different scenarios and pathways left and right. I can just spin in the plan making mode. Not only that, I probably talked to my inner elephant by nerding out, The Elephant doesn’t care. The Elephant wants to see hope and vision and excitement. That’s where I really go wrong and that’s where this book really helped me to understand that I have to sell a different part of my brain, not just the intellectual side of things.

Some ways that I’ve worked on and trying to get my goals to work is I love the destination postcards. I do a lot of things in my house and at work to try to encourage me to meet these goals. I have bulletin boards filled with goals. I also have photo boards that are filled with me actually doing those goals. I have this picture with a coworker when we went to Hawaii and did the hike at Diamond Head. And when you stand at the bottom of Diamond Head, it is intimidating! But you know what? I was in shape enough that I could go up this mountain. It was just such a huge achievement to get up to the very top and get rewarded by seeing whales swimming in the ocean on the other side. That picture always motivates me. It’s on picture frames that I have inside my house. I also have digital picture frames. And at work. It just cycles through all these goals and places I want to go and places that I’ve been that really excite me so I can motivate to keep away from the snack room and remember to exercise. I also add inspirational quotes from books and podcasts. That’s why I create quote images on Instagram and Pinterest, for you so that you can also use them to inspire yourself. Then I also like to put these pictures on my phone so I can frequently look at them. I want to show myself the vision I have. I want to show the reward of all my hard work. I know friends of mine also like to bullet journal so they can see in this book, all the things that they want. The next thing I do is I love to think about my future self and who I will be and sometimes I even asked myself if you are an adventure who is going to go and climb the mountains of Norway. What’s the next best action I can do, or what’s the next best choice I can make? I also work really hard when something goes wrong, or I didn’t do a thing I needed to. And again, telling ourselves that we knew that this was going to be hard, reminding ourselves that we understood that, but we knew it was going to happen, and really giving ourselves self-talk to help that elephant not be so afraid of failure, ‘Hey, this is just how it goes’. ‘It’s okay, we got this.’ I used to be a part of a bowling team. And on the bowling team, I had a teammate on there, who at crucial times in the match would say, “You’ve got this!”. And I always think of that, whenever I come up with a tough time to just say that in my brain, “you got this!”

Summary

1. Make sure you entice The Elephant by making small changes, giving it those feelings that it wants to have a positivity and get some peanuts!

2. Help The Rider know which direction they should go. Put up some bright lights, so they know where the destination is located. help them plan, script the moves, reduce the number of choices that The Rider has to make, and help them by making the right choices at the right point by giving them guidance, then point to the destination. create these images of their future self so that they know what the destination looks like.

3. Shape The path – tweak the environment, make The Path as smooth and easy to travel on as you possibly can. And build habits so that we have a little bit of cruise control

4. Build a community of contagious behavior to carry you through.

Challenge

Find things in your house that you can create that would help The Elephant be enticed The Rider have a path and a way that you can show The Path as being easy. Come up with creative pictures that will inspire you to see the future you.

The Scarecrow Had a Brain All Along — The Beauty of Your Dream is the Journey | by Michael | The Startup | Medium

Fun Quote

Now we’re going to have our fun quote of the day from the Wizard of Oz

“I don’t know. Some people without brains do an awful lot of talking, don’t they? Yes, I guess you’re right.”

And there are people who like to talk without brains. Try not to do that by engaging both sides of your brain.

Thanks so much for listening. Come to the website. If you want the transcripts of the podcast. You can find out ways of contacting me either on the website itself or in social media. Please subscribe. Please leave a review and tell your friends and have a great week.

October 19, 2020 0 comments

5 – Prevent Mistakes and Look Upstream

by Jill October 13, 2020

“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” That was a quote by Benjamin Franklin.

The other day I went grocery shopping. And right now, with the pandemic going on, I tried to go grocery shopping the least amount of time I possibly can, just to keep safe. So, I get to the grocery store, and I didn’t have a list and I didn’t really look at what I was missing or what I had in my house. And I never bought the things that I really needed to buy on that grocery shopping trip. Sure, I got about 80% of the things that I wanted, but not much more. And when I got home, I realized I didn’t have the things I really wanted. Was that a bad grocery shopping. Or was that a bad night before grocery shopping, when I didn’t even look in my fridge to see what I needed? It was definitely my failure to prepare. We see errors in our lives all the time. But we want to try to reduce them so that we can attain the goals we’re looking to get. And when I didn’t prepare to grocery shop properly, I had to go back a second time, it cost me an extra hour of time and all it would have taken was just a few minutes with my head in the refrigerator to see what I needed.

Pre-mortem

Mistake, Spill, Slip-Up, Accident, Error, Careless

This is where we get into the conversation about a pre-mortem. You’ve heard the word post-mortem, where you look at something and say “wow, what happened?” But a pre-mortem is when you look at something ahead and try to prevent the mistake in the first place. According to the Harvard Business Review, in an article from 2007 “On like a typical critiquing session in which a project team member are asked what might go wrong. The pre mortem operates on the assumption that the patient has died. So, what did go wrong? The pre-mortem seeks to identify five the threats and weaknesses via hypothetical presumption of near future failure.” It used to be Murphy’s law that said, “if anything can possibly go wrong, it does.”

Poka-Yoke

This is where the concept of Poka-Yoke comes in. It’s a Japanese term, which means to basically prevent mistakes. You look at it in terms of trying to determine what will go wrong, not what has gone wrong. Some examples you can see of Poka-Yoke in our lives are things like airbags or spell checkers, fire extinguishers, nightlights, remember those Mac books that had the magnetic plugs? You can imagine that someone tripped on it just one too many times. And they wanted a way to prevent dropping your laptop on the floor and breaking it. There are two kinds of mistakes that happen. something stupid just happened. It was random and you could not have prevented it. If you want to. You were driving to work. You had every intention of getting there on time but traffic was backed up because of an accident. Can’t prepare for that. Maybe you can leave a little bit early in case it does happen. But for the most part, it happens so infrequently, that you can’t really prepare. Or mistakes that are part of the process. For example, I do laundry on Sunday night, I take my gym clothes out of my car and Friday, I wash them Sunday night, it gets late, sometimes the laundry isn’t done very early. And then I forget to put them back in the gym bag and put my gym bag back in the car. Or maybe I just forget to take the gym bag again. That’s a process mistake. Something in my process is causing things to go wrong. I made a deal with myself that I didn’t have to exercise every day after work. But if I didn’t exercise, the one thing I had to do was write down in this specific notepad, all the reasons why I didn’t exercise. The items I got from that; I forgot my gym clothes, I was too tired, I really was pretty hungry, I wanted to go home didn’t have time at the end of the day because something came up. Once I knew what was going wrong, I was able then to prevent it from happening again. I did it in a reactionary way. I reacted to a mistake I was making Poka-Yoke is about preventing the mistakes from the first place. So, whenever you start going in and start thinking about your plans, that’s where you want to try to prevent mistakes.

https://kanbanize.com/lean-management/improvement/what-is-poka-yoke

Upstream by Dan Heath

Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen: Heath, Dan: 9781982134723: Amazon.com: Books

Dan Heath in his book upstream talks about how we can go from solving problems, but instead think ahead to preventing problems. We have to figure out what the problems are going to be. We have to figure out who the person might be that causes the process. But we also have to look at costs and benefits. You can’t have big Prevention’s for things that have little costs little problems if you don’t address them can eventually lead to big problems. Think if you never exercise because you’re always forgetting something, or always too tired it can lead to big health consequences later. By not making shopping harder, we might overspend, little things add up to big problems. His first condition is called “Tunneling”. That’s when no one sees or cares to look at the big picture, they only see their aspects of the issue, or they don’t have the resources to fix it. They suggest that you get people to stop, see the big picture, talk to other people outside their teams, then you try to work on fixing it. In software, we try to get people in complimentary teams together, all in one room, so that you can see what’s happening step by step, and then you can see the big aspects of the problem. The second issue is “Lack of Ownership”. “It’s not my problem” “I don’t benefit from the problem being solved”. Maybe in fact, “I even benefit from having the problem”. And “to be honest, I don’t really care.” When I started to exercise, I would constantly forget to put my gym clothes in the car. For a long time. I didn’t really care to solve my problem with the gym bag, because it was nice, because then I could just go home and not worry about exercising. How do you deal with that you really look at the issues and try to determine what’s going wrong, make people care about the issue and prove that it’s solvable? Maybe suggest some ideas where other people have solved similar issues that will get people excited about trying to tackle this issue or build in a reward system for overcoming apathy. You make people your helpers, if you are working with a child who keeps forgetting their backpack at home, and then you have to drive it in after they get to school, make them part of the team and have a blame free discussion. How can we get that backpack in the right spot, make them part owner of the issue, not just someone who benefits from having a problem? And then the third issue is called ‘Problem Blindness”. “Well, nothing can be done.” “It’s just how it is.” Or maybe people just don’t even think it is a problem. That’s just like, how you get people to invest in solving a problem is by showing the harm the problem causes, showing them the downstream, get them on your side by showing them why we need to solve this problem. Dan, he says “Downstream is reacting responding to symptoms, it’s easier to think about what you know, and what you’re comfortable with, than it is to think about those other things that we could do to solve a problem. Meanwhile, upstream thinking is preventative. It understands the problem and the results of the problem.

When he talks about shifting to upstream thinking compared to downstream thinking.” First of all, surround the problem. Bring in all the people who are directly involved in the problem. If it’s a child who forgets their backpack, bring the child in, maybe have a family discussion about how backpacks get to school. They can talk to the other children who maybe have succeeded in being able to bring their backpacks and come up with good ideas. Get everyone together so they can talk about the problem. The second thing is immersing yourself the problem. Dan tells us very interesting and funny story. He says “You and your friends are having a picnic by the side of the river. And suddenly you hear a shout in the direction of the water. A child is drowning, without thinking you both dive in and grab the child and swim to shore before you can recover. You hear another child cry for help you and your friend jump back into the water and rescue her as well. Then another struggling child drifts into sight. And another and another. The two of you can barely keep up. Suddenly you see your friend waiting out of the water and seemingly leaving you alone. ‘Where are you going you demand?’ your friend answers. ‘I’m going upstream to tackle the guy who’s throwing all these kids in the water’.” Just an analogy to say you can spend all of your time firefighting and solving problems. But instead, what you can do is prevent the problem from happening.

What you really want to do, he suggests is creating what you call a feedback loop. That means you can just check and see how everything is going. But try to create the system so that you can check to see if things are working. And if they’re not working find out early. He mentions that part of the problem that we have for downstream thinking is that we only reward people for solving problems. You’ll see this at workplaces all the time. People get awards for solving a really horrible problem. Maybe they fix a horrible technical issue a customer was having. Maybe the salespeople recover an angry customer who is about to cancel their contract. Rarely, the people who solve the problems ahead of time and keep the customer from getting angry, get rewarded. They’re usually forgotten. I always said when I was a server admin, the best recognition you can hope for is that everyone ignores you.

https://heathbrothers.com/books/upstream/

https://www.entreleadership.com/blog/podcasts/dan-heath-upstream

Moral Hazards

So when we think about our families do we always exclaim over the kid who finally remembers to do their homework or brings their backpack to school, and not the kid who never forgets, you don’t want to set up a situation, where people are rewarded to fail, because they’ll do it later. And they’ll start getting better at failing and start failing more and more. People learn how to game the systems, whether they’re meaning to do it or not. This is called a “moral hazard”. When you create a situation where people are rewarded for the wrong behaviors. Think of the situation when you have a workplace that gets technical support calls, and the person who answers the most number of calls gets highest rewards. We’ve created a situation where they’re getting rewarded for the most calls, not the happiest customer. So what are they going to start doing, they’re going to start answering questions quicker, and cutting the customer off. Which leads to angry customers. So really don’t set up that situation where staying in the old system is rewarded. For me, I was forgetting my gym bag. And it was a reward for me because I didn’t have to go to gym the next day.

Moral Hazard

Problem Prevention

Slip Up, Danger, Careless, Slippery, Accident, Risk

Here’s some thoughts about how you can set up a system that really helps you figure out what the problems are and start thinking about preventative matters. First of all, don’t set up a situation where people are rewarded to fail. When having discussions with your family members or whoever is having the issue that’s causing the problem? Make sure it’s a blame free discussion. Everyone feels free to answer questions about what went wrong in the process, and how they might solve it. You can try to make it impossible to error. Could I set my gym bag in my car on Sunday nights so that I don’t forget it on Monday? Or make the mistake harder to make. Maybe my car keys sit on top of my gym bag and so I can’t drive the car until I grab the bag with it. Maybe make an early warning system, something that warns you things are not going the way you thought would. You want to do is make it very hard to make a mistake. The last thing you can try to do is to build a process that tolerates errors. That means if you make a mistake, it’s not so bad. In the end, make it simple, duplicate it, leave a note or set a reminder on one of your smart devices. Try to make it impossible to fail.

Over Preparation

Don’t get into a situation where you over prepare. It’s sometimes a form of procrastination. Prepare for the proper errors and take care of things that are likely going to happen and try your best to not overdo it. You don’t want to turn your life into such a chaotic situation where you’re preparing for every eventuality that you stop doing the important things you need to get done. Is at the end of the world if I forget my gym bag? Nope, not really. Can just put some easy things in place? Is it a hardship if your child forgets their backpack at home and you have to come home from work, get the backpack and then drive it to school? Yeah, that can be quite time consuming and leave your kid without their resources and leave you having to exit work for a couple of hours. That checklist might be bigger, because of the cost involved with having that child forget the backpack. Don’t try to prevent every mistake, try to prevent the likely ones. Otherwise, you’ll just have a headache in life, and you’ll be dealing with too many fake problems.

https://www.nbcnews.com/better/health/how-stop-over-preparing-actually-get-things-done-ncna810126

Summary

Do a pre-mortem look into what things that you really want to have happen and try to figure out ahead of time, what might go wrong.
Make sure that you don’t have tunnel vision. Make sure that you’re not just looking at your own little world but you’re looking at the bigger picture when trying to solve a problem.
Make sure that the people who are involved in the problem are involved in the discussion of the solutions. Make sure that they feel comfortable in telling you what went wrong
Be preventative, think upstream. Try to think of the problems and the solutions before they happen.
Try to make the solutions not worse than the problem themselves.

Challenge

Find one thing that seems to be consistently going wrong in your life and try to think ahead about how you can avoid those mistakes. Try to make it hard to fail. Let me know how it worked.

Fun Advice

Here’s our fun quote of the day. It comes from The Office and Dwight Schrute

“Do something ‘I think would an idiot do that?’ And if they would, I do not do that thing.”

So do you think you can prevent mistakes like that? Maybe that’s a good idea, at least is kind of a fun to think about.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast. Let me know what you think of it or tell a friend. I’m happy to hear any feedback that you may have. Or if you want me to cover a particular issue for something that you’re struggling with that you’re trying to get done. You can find me and all the ways to contact me at smallstepspod.com.

October 13, 2020 0 comments

2020 Psychology

4 – Use Personality Tests to Achieve Goals

by Jill October 6, 2020

Knowing yourself is the beginning of wisdom – Aristotle.

Personality tests are interesting, I’ve always been very intrigued by them. They can reveal certain parts of our brain or certain aspects of how we act. Most of them are not science based but are instead observational. There is one personality test that has any scientific backing, and that is called the “Big Five”. We’re not discussing that one today, but that one does have some research behind it. Keep in mind, though, just because it’s observational and not scientifically based, doesn’t mean they’re untrue. UC Davis’s Psychologist Dr. Vazire says “It’s fairly easy to reach some level of validity. If I were to ask you to make a questionnaire on extroversion, you would probably do a pretty good job. It’s because we are all judges of character. And we often do well at intuiting, whom to date or hire, or who we are. If the process seems confusing, or if the question veers into abstract, that’s a red flag. Personality is not that mysterious. There are often others who scoff at personality tests and even call them dangerous. Of course, mistakes can be made and there are limits in place to how much personality tests can tell about ourselves. They are based in opinion of the writer. They do have some biases built into them. But they also can be valuable if put into their proper perspective. They point out aspects of our personality that may give us insight of how we work and how we think. Today we’ll talk about two tests, and specifically speak about what motivates you to act. Since we’ve been working on goals and trying to put things into action. personalities are often double-edged swords; our strengths are reflections of our weaknesses. Maybe you’re very nice. But maybe that also means you get walked on by others. If you’re highly skeptical. That means you have a keen mind and can sort truth from not true. But it might mean that you’re tearing down good things in your life, because you can’t find any evidence or validity in them from other sources. The key is to take your strengths and push them. Then take your weaknesses and try to reduce them. You can you be nice without being taken advantage of? Can you be creative and ordered prior to take all those different aspects of yourself and sharpen them. Two tests that we will discuss will help us move towards our goals.

At one point I was pondering why it was I was able to help customers do any tasks. I was diligent about getting them done. But why is it I can’t get myself to exercise simple things just for myself. I also noticed that when a friend would ask if I could help them garden or work on a project, I would jump at the chance of doing it. But I would never garden for myself. What was that I was trying to figure out why it was that I’m so good at some things and so terrible at others. I just realized it’s because someone else is asking me to do it. At that point, I hired a personal trainer and told her just asked me to exercise and expect that I would do it. And every once in a while check to make sure I did. And I would do it. She told me at some point that if I didn’t exercise she would be able to tell. And I said never tell me if that’s true or not. Those words that she said, Put me on the right path to motivation.

Gretchen Rubin and the Four Tendencies

This is a few years before Gretchen Rubin came out with her book, the Four Tendencies: The indispensable personal profiles that reveal how to make your life better and other people’s lives better too. I am very into this book, spent a great deal of time in her community on our website and really love the information that it gave because it made something very clear to me, that I do things because other people asked me to do those things. But she explains how this works, and how to really dig into this personality type to make it work. She got into her theory by observing people who were able to get things done and other people who were not people who were able to do certain things, but not other things. She said, “As I consider these questions, I tried to make sense of certain patterns that I saw. So many people told me, ‘I can take time for other people, but I can never take time for myself.’ Other people told me. I don’t make New Year’s resolutions because January 1 is an arbitrary date.’ And still others tell me ‘When someone tells me to do something I immediately don’t want to do it.'” She goes on later to say by asking one simple question ‘How do I respond to expectations?’ we get insight into ourselves. When we look at how other people respond to expectations, we understand them far more effectively as well. Knowing our tendency can help us set up situations in ways that make it more likely we will achieve our aims. We can make better decisions, meet deadlines, meet our promises to ourselves, suffer less stress and engage more deeply with others.” This was really true for me. When I started reading her book and realizing how her scheme fit into my life, I realized how I could really not only succeed with my own goals but help my friends and others around me succeeded. there’s because now I understood them better. She breaks up all tasks into two different types of tasks, outer expectations, those are things like going to work, doing your homework, going to the doctor, getting a request from a friend, then there’s inner expectations, practicing meditation, or cleaning your house or exercising or eating the right foods. Things that are intrinsic are inside of us. And then she breaks people up into four personality types. The first one is Upholders. They just write something down and they do it. They can do resolutions; they can do tasks for themselves and for other people. They just really take to things. But on the downside, sometimes they won’t take on new tasks because they worry about the obligation. They know they will uphold it. They know they will obsess about it getting done. And it could become quickly overwhelming to do everything that you have as expectations for yourself. Then there’s Questioners who question everything. They’ll do something if they think they understand it correctly if it meets their own standard of truth. When I first heard about this theory, I thought I was a questioner. I do I question everything. A downside of this personality can be that they can talk themselves out of doing something that’s really working for them, because they can’t find evidence that it’s truthful. It’s good to know the truth. But sometimes a little bit of fantasy can help us get through life too. Then there’s Obligers, they meet outer expectations, but struggle with inner expectations. Obligers will do anything for anyone. They will have no problem when someone is expecting them with a deadline or something to do. But they would struggle to do the very same activity for themselves. Because there’s no expectation there’s no oversight, no accountability, and they can just feel burned out and overworked and sometimes quite honestly being taken advantage of. This is where I fit in. I used to think knowing the truth about things motivates me. But instead, obligation motivates me. Knowing that someone is expecting me to do something that will get me in line right away, no matter how much I understand it, or don’t understand it. My endless questioning and learning were just a form of procrastination. There’s also something called Obliger Rebellion. And I think that comes along, at least it does for me, when you feel like someone may be taking advantage of your ability to accomplish things for other people. You always come through for them. There can be kind of a flash of anger that comes in there. You have to be really careful with your Obliger friends. Then there comes Rebel, they resist all expectations inner, outer, they don’t want to do anything anyone expects to them. They want to be a unique person, they want to be independent, and they hate to do the mundane. And so a lot of times, the way they get themselves and other people get them to do things, is by insisting it’s not important, Insisting that they don’t even have to do it if they don’t want to. This test taught me how I need to get things done. I need accountability. That might be telling someone else what I’m doing so that they can hold me accountable. The other interesting thing about the personality test is my friend who’s the upholder always wondered about me. She just never understood why I struggled so many times to get things done. Just put it on checklist and you’ll get it done. Just write it down and just do it already. Gretchen has classes and books on our website. She also has a podcast and an app, and the app is there where she breaks people up into their personality types so they can help each other. Again, for Obligers. There’s a lot of accountability groups in there. For Upholders. It’s about really how to throttle

https://gretchenrubin.com/books/the-four-tendencies/intro/

Enneagrams

The next test I want to talk about is called Enneagrams. This test is used by a variety of groups and businesses. It’s finding out how you motivate by based on what you are compelled by and what you fear. This test puts people into nine categories and reports the top three attributes. For example, the type 1 personality wants to be right wanted to strike for a higher ideal, it’s very important to them that they are doing things wise and noble and heroic. They fear being wrong or being bad. personality type number 2 wants to be loved. And their fear is really being unwanted. 3’s are self-assured and charming, and they have the fear of not being valuable or not being successful. Type 4 is that they want to be authentic and unique. And their fear is not really having an identity or not being significant in their own way. 5 love intellectual understanding of things, they like to be competent, and they fear not knowing something 6’s like to be safe, be self-sufficient, non-demanding. They really fear being unsupported or being without that good friendship. 7’s like to be upbeat, and they also enjoy contentment. But they fear pain, they fear being deprived, 8’s, they are independent, and they are scared by being controlled by others. And 9’s would like to be at peace, and they fear, conflict and separation. I’m a seven to nine. I seek contentment primarily. I also love future plans. I think about the possibilities that are out there. My second number means I crave to be with others.

So how can I use this personality test to help me achieve my goals? First thing is I love thinking about what I will do in the future. I plan things I know that when I have a trip coming up, like an adventurous trip, it motivates me. I had a big hiking trip to England, I exercise like crazy, I also saved money. But as I get older, if I don’t take care of myself by eating healthy by sleeping well, by getting exercise, I will eventually lose my ability to have adventures that’s motivating to me. Type 2, where I crave being with other people and having great relationships. When I look at that, I want to think of all the fun things I will do with my friends in the future. But if I can’t do those things, I could be left out. You’ll have to take the tests on your own and determine what could be motivating to you.

https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/type-descriptions

Quick & Free Test (not as good as the paid tests)

https://www.truity.com/test/enneagram-personality-test

Sleep Chronotypes

Our last personality type, since you don’t really need a test, are Chronotypes which have to do with whether you are an Owl or a Lark, and I know for years, this was highly controversial. Scientists didn’t used to think that night owls and larks existed, it was just a matter of laziness. People who slept in later, and went to bed later, were lazy. Even though they were getting the same number of hours of sleep. Remember, the early bird gets the worm. Morning people or larks are able to just get a ton of stuff done in the morning, they’re able to just get up and exercise and do things before work. It’s really pretty amazing. But you also have to realize that by early evening, they’re spent. They’re ready to relax and watch TV or read a book. They like to go to bed earlier. The key here is to know yourself and matching your goals to your schedule. This is where you have to know what really works for you. If you’re at Owl, does it work you to exercise before you’re barely awake? Because you don’t even really have energy to fight yourself? Or do you prefer to do it in the afternoon? You’re a morning person, can you get up and exercise and do all the things that are part of your goals early on before the day takes its toll on it. It’s nice to be a person in the morning, because the longer the day goes on, the more chances you have to decide you’re not going to do a thing. Let me give you an example. If I were decided to get up in the morning and exercise at a time, I do not like at least I get it done. But as that day goes on, I think well maybe I should work out at lunch. Well, no lunch is pretty busy. I’m not going to work out at lunch. Well, maybe I’ll exercise after work. While work really knocked it out of me. I’m pretty tired, and I just want to go home and watch some TV. I missed all my opportunities through excuses to actually get my exercise done. I think again, you have to analyze what really works for you. In the end personality tests are interesting and possibly informative. Realize that they’re not exact science, so be careful with them.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-25777978

Alternative Chronotype

Your Sleep Chronotype Is the Key to Productivity, Not Being a Morning Person

The best advice I can give you is to use ways to pick apart your personality. Know yourself. Once we break apart our personalities and are able to dissect how we get things done. We will know what triggers work for us. How you do one thing is how you do everything.

Summary

Go find some personality tests and see if you can learn a little bit more about yourself

2. It doesn’t take a personality test to necessarily learn about what your personality is. Start writing down time. When you thought you were able to get things done, what motivated you? How did you accomplish those things, really look into what has been successful to you in the past? Can you draw string between them and realize key factors to what makes you do things or when you find it hard to do things? Just by observing our own life, we should be able to come to conclusions about ourselves.

3. Once you’ve taken some personality test, jot down those key factors that really made sense to you.

Challenge

Start this reflection of your personality, take the personality test, write down, what makes you motivated and what stops you. Here’s our fun quote of the day, you know,

“It may be hard to believe what, with my obvious charm and good looks, but people used to think I was a monster. for a long time, I believed them. But after a while, you learn to ignore the names that people call you and you just trust who you are.”

That is from our wise green fellow Shrek. And what Shrek knows is that when we learn our personalities, and we learn about ourselves, not only does it empower us to be ourselves, but it also stops the people who are trying to bring us down by telling us things that are not true about ourselves and we can fend them off. T

Thanks a lot for listening.

I hope you’re enjoying the podcast. Please give me feedback, leave a review. Tell your friends, join any of my social media and let me know how you’re doing. Are you able to pick a particular task that you’ve been working on? Have you learned to say no, thank you and have a great week.

October 6, 2020 0 comments

2020 Goals

3 – Ruthlessly Eliminate Noise

by Jill September 29, 2020

In this podcast episode, I dive into the topic of eliminating noise in life and the significance of focusing on what truly matters. The episode stresses the need to prioritize tasks that have the most impact and eliminate low-value distractions that consume a lot of time and energy. To achieve this, the episode introduces the Pareto principle, which helps identify the 20% of tasks that cause 80% of problems. By concentrating on these high-impact tasks, individuals can make the most of their time and effort.

In addition, the podcast suggests reading Essentialism by Greg McKeown, which is an excellent resource for anyone looking to eliminate noise and focus on what’s essential. McKeown’s book emphasizes channeling energy and resources toward the most significant tasks while eliminating low-value distractions. It also urges readers to prioritize their goals and make space for what matters most. This podcast episode also offers practical tips for prioritizing and eliminating tasks, including writing down goals and ranking them in order of importance, identifying the tasks that contribute most to problems, and removing tasks that don’t help overall progress. By adopting these strategies, individuals can focus on the tasks that matter most and progress toward their goals.

Overall, this podcast episode is packed with valuable insights into the significance of eliminating noise and prioritizing what really matters in life. Individuals can optimize their efforts and make the most of their time by focusing on high-impact tasks and eliminating low-value distractions.

https://jamesclear.com/buffett-focus

Transcripts

[MUSIC] Hello! This week, I’d like to thank my friends who helped me with this podcast. They saw every version of the recordings, every graphic, every website style, every color choice to make this podcast great. “You can do anything, but you can’t do everything,” as David Allen, the creator of Getting Things Done, said. We all have the same number of hours in a day, but some people are better at planning, producing, and knocking out a schedule. We must eat and care for our loved ones, have fun, have hobbies, chill out, spend time doing nothing, and sleep. We will break if we don’t do these things. We get burned out, feel like our tasks are bossing us around, and eventually feel like we’re victims of our schedules, not leading our lives.

We won’t get anywhere if we plan a vacation like many of us plan our lives, with no ambition or direction. If we were to go to the center of the U.S. and decide to drive to Los Angeles, no wait, New York, no, let’s go to Fargo, we would go nowhere. We would speed across Interstate 80, and then in a few hours, do a U-turn and go back. If anyone saw us doing this, they would wonder what’s wrong with us. Well, that’s how we live. It’s not our fault. The world demands a lot from us. Then we get frustrated that few of our plans succeed. We’re frustrated that we can’t make traction on what needs to happen or what we dream of happening. We start to blame the very people and activities we love.

We suffer from sunk cost bias, where we feel we must stick to something because we’ve already put so much effort into it. But this is where it becomes hard. Are we just at a tough part of our adventure, and sticking to it would help us win and love our goal? Or are we just doing something that is not worth our effort? This is hard to tell and takes a lot of deep soul-searching to figure out what is true. Work harder and get to the goal over the plateau or just quit and confess this wasn’t for us.

When eliminating the types of tasks that we have in our lives, what we’re really looking for is what gives us the most bang for our buck, the most win for the least amount of effort. Especially if we’re starting new habits, once we start seeing payoffs with good habits, they will gain momentum. Right away when we start doing them, it’s hard to creak out those habits and behaviors. So start small, get the most impact for the least amount of effort, and keep the effort level down.

This is where the term “essentialism” comes in. Greg McKeon, in his book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less from 2014, advocates for the main point of the book: focus your energy, resources, and prioritize. He talks about getting down to what it really means to move from a person who says, “I have to or I must,” and insists instead on saying, “I choose to,” and only a few things really matter. You move on from saying yes to everything to deciding what matters. You go from being out of control in your life to feeling like the right things are getting done. You go from thinking that most everything is important to thinking that only a few things are important. You go from big goals and desires and big shiny wins to small steps and big actions over time.

He then discusses eliminate, the ongoing process of eliminating any and all things that are low-value distractions and take away from our effectiveness. For eliminating, he suggests that we write everything down as a candidate and start crossing them off. While many people ask us to imagine future success and our happy selves, he says to stick to what’s important now. He suggests adding 50% time to what we think something will take. We are terrible at estimating time. We usually think that something will take a very little amount of time, and it ends up taking a lot longer. With buffer, we could reduce that stress and get those things done on time. This ensures that the important things will get done.

According to this book, we must prioritize, and some things just won’t drop off the list. But we realize that they are so far down that we won’t even have time to worry about them. We have to realize that not everything is an A1 in our task list or our life. We should look for the right time, the right thing, the right reason, and also have the right resources in place. Greg also warns that his book is not about going back to a simpler time. It’s not about lamenting emails or disconnecting from the web and living like a hermit. That would be backward. It’s about applying a principle that less is better to how we live our lives now and in the future. That’s innovation. Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done. The way of essentialism means living by design, not by default, and figuring out what the minimal viable progress is. We use this concept in software. What fields must you fill out for the product to work?

He reminds us to reward progress. Then he says, “If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.” He mentions one of my favorite quotes by Stephen Covey, “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” He talks a little bit about backpacking as an analogy to essentialism, and that the number one goal is getting to the campsite. There are pretty things to look at on the trail. There are trails that go off in every direction. But do we want to set up our tents in the dark? Do we want to go to bed without a cooked meal? The first thing is getting to the campsite in daylight, building a fire, setting up our tent. It isn’t about denying us the pretty things along the way. It’s about the tradeoff between the pretty things and the main goal.

So, in conclusion, essentialism is about identifying what matters most in our lives and focusing our time and energy on those things. It’s about saying “no” to distractions and low-value activities, and saying “yes” to the activities that will move us closer to our goals. By prioritizing and eliminating the non-essential, we can live a more fulfilling and purposeful life.

Thank you for listening, and have a wonderful week! [MUSIC]

September 29, 2020 0 comments

2020 Goals

2 – Choosing Where to Change your Life

by Jill September 22, 2020

It does not take much strength to do things, but it requires a great deal of strength to decide what to do. —Elbert Hubbard

I struggled in my 20s. I saw my entire life in front of me along with every opportunity or direction. Where should I live? What should I do for a living? Do I get more school? Do I get married or have children? There were so many paths and so many directions. I couldn’t think about what to do next because I couldn’t figure out which direction to go. I didn’t even know how to decide. It was like the worse Choose Your Own Adventure book ever.

When we don’t pick goals or directions, decisions are made for us. At some points, some decisions are made, and other paths are closed off. But other doors open too. It’s just how life is. So how do you decide now which goals and dreams you want to take on and make a reality?

One thing I learned over the years, is that the impossible really is possible. I know when I was in my 20s I didn’t think anything was possible. That I would be as happy as I am today. That I would have a job I would like as much as I do. It just seemed so far away. When I was in my 20s I had three jobs and the job market was bad and I was extremely poor. I could see my way to do anything I wanted to do in my life. I resigned myself to being poor and alone and not really have much going for me. I really needed to think how to change my life. So even when you are stuck in a place when you don’t have advantages in life, you still must go through small steps. You might have to go through more steps because you are starting in a place where you are disadvantaged. But the process is still the same. You just must go through and figure out what is the next thing you must do to do better and keep going through the process until you see yourself clear of it. As you start to achieve these things you start realizing that dreams are possible.

If I were to ask if you were to pick the one thing you could do to change your life what would that be. What if a fairy godmother came down with a single wish, what would that be?

We can only do so much change at the same time. While we are talking about small changes, also think about limited changes. Some of the planners and books talk about having a few tasks for areas of life family, work, spiritual, physical. To make changes we must have enough time to do them and enough resources either financial or time.

So how do you decide what things you want to take on and make it a reality? We can only do so much at the same time. And when we are talking about small changes we are also thinking of limited changes. So, when we are deciding we have to think about the time and the resources, either financial or material. Do we have the umph to carry them out?

A good place to start is to decide on an area in your life that you want to work on. There are a few areas to consider. Where you live in terms of your location or your home, health, faith, purpose, fitness, financials, work, happiness or grit, community, friendships, hobbies, charity, learning something new, relationships, hobbies. There are quite a few areas we can tackle in our lives. The problem is they are not all equal and there are some areas that just demand our attention all the time. We can’t give up on our family because this isn’t the year we aren’t involved with our family. We can give up on our job because we are not focused on this aspect this year. They all come at us and we must make them a part of our lives. Truthfully even if we pick areas to work on, we cannot always guarantee we can follow that plan. Maybe when we thought our job was stable and needed no immediate care or your family was quite stable but then suddenly someone needs some more focused attention. Sometimes we must go after something else because it became more important. Sometimes we even make bad decisions when it comes to our lives. We dated bad people and had bad jobs. But despite the fact we are bad at picking our priorities, we are still the biggest experts in the world on what is good for us.

Questions to Ask Ourselves

If we step outside and treat ourselves like we are own friend, it helps us look at the big picture. If we pretended we were watching our lives as a movie, what would you scream at the screen? “Just go do______ already!!!” I spent a summer abroad in college and came back with an entirely new perspective. It really changed my life! Travel can help too. But to get at the core of what is most important for us to tackle starts with asking yourself great questions. Dig deep and listen to your answers.

If I were to ask you what would make your life amazing, astounding, and happy what would it be?
When you pray at night what do you pray for? Do you even pray for yourself?
What do you want your life to look like in 5 or 10 years?
What areas of your life would benefit most with attention?
What area of your life scares you the most when you think about your future?
If you asked those closest to you were to tell you the thing that would best improve your life, what would they say?
What do you love?
What did you dream of as a child?
If you acted as your own best friend, what advice would you give yourself.
What is the most important problem do you need to solve right now?
If you gave a thank you speech in 20 years what would you be thankful for?
If you could have all the money and time you needed, what would you do?
What would make you happier if you could achieve it?
What could stop your happiness if it happened?
What makes you cry?
What makes you angry?

My best friend and I have a lot of things we are opposite on and this area is one of them. She thrives when she aspires to a goal or a vision of future gain. I thrive better out of fear of a bad alternative. I often say to myself “So you want to go into retirement without a penny? And so overweight you can’t have adventures?? Well you better go do something about that!” It might be the voice of people in our lives when we were younger but either way you must find out which question means the most to you.

When considering your future goals, you must consider current circumstances. What kind of goal do you have time to tackle? Do you have the money to do this thing now? Maybe circumstances require a particular focus right now. Maybe something has your attention and energy right now. There is nothing like having focus and joy and attention to a goal to help you make it happen.

I wanted to do a podcast for a while as I said before. Because of current circumstances I have the time now. I have the interest now after being invited to create segments on another podcast and found I loved it. But all things came together to create a podcast that I have now. If I had goals to travel the world, perhaps now would not be the best times.

Now that you picked a focus, you must figure out how many goals to choose. We will look at a few ideas on picking goals now that maybe you have a general topic.

Somethings to keep in mind is we all have 24 hours in a day and 365 days. We have obligations and hobbies. But what will happen while walking towards your goal you might change your mind. If you are new at goal setting start small. Build trust in yourself and as you get some goals done you will see what you are capable of. Then you might be able to take slightly bigger steps. But in general, keep it small. IT is hard when you are new at goals and you aren’t sure if you will succeed at that you dream of doing.

Focus Planner

The focus planner is part of Michael Hyatt’s planning tools. It is really geared towards high performance checklists and goals with plenty of reflecting on what went right and wrong in that time period. They split goals into two kind: achievement goals and habits goals. Achievement goals are something that has a set goal like to pay off house or go on a big vacation. Habit goals would be more like daily like have two servings of vegetables or take a walk after work. Then they have people pick 7-10 annual goals. They think anymore might get overwhelming.

They mention that according to one study by Dr. Gail Matthews at the Dominican University indicates that there is a 40% bigger likelihood of achieving a goal if you write it down. Their planner is built around gathering and measuring these goals with records of the reasons and the goals and sub-goals and habit tracking. Planners like this are great for some people. They love the plans and the check-boxes. Some people love the paper format and others digital. Some others, like me, can’t deal with planners in their personal lives while do fine with them at work. https://fullfocusplanner.com and https://focusonthispodcast.com to see more.

The ONE Thing

Then there is The ONE Thing and it’s a planner and a system which starts from a book and podcast by Gary Keller. His ONE Thing is to get the reader and listener to pick ONE THING. Really focus on that by planning it out, blocking off time and doing it. He gives us data that a habit takes 66 days to form or a plan to stick. Stickiness is what we want because we don’t want to fall easily back to our old ways or fall away from our goals.

“What’s the ONE thing I can do right now, such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?” He suggests doing this every day.

He has a plan called the 4-1-1 plan. The first step is to set a long-term goal, maybe look five years into the future too. Then set year goals based on this look at the future you. Then break those goals into monthly goals and then derive weekly goals from there. From here you block off time for work on your new goals and start writing specific actionable tasks. In that sense it is very much like the Focus Planner. On a podcast I heard him talk about seeking those items that would make the biggest impact on the year, month, or week. Then it comes to today “if I were to achieve this action, my life, my goal would be so much better.”

He more recently developed the 66-day plan. The goal is to pick one thing and work on it for 66 days until you nailed it. Maybe you repeat this 66-day plan until it takes you to where it is effortless. He takes these small steps and really does the heck out of them until they are set. For me who is not that into planners, at least not in my personal life, this seems much more appealing. He warns not to make this a to do list. The activities must fit int the ultimate goals and not just be something to check off. To find out more about this kind of plan https://www.the1thing.com/blog/the-one-thing/66-day-challenge-tip-1-set-bigger-goals-focus-on-smaller-habits/

In his book, he frames for the plan is a Someday Goal > a One-Year Goal > Monthly Goal > Weekly Goal-Daily Goal and the Right Now Goal. They all work together and are sub-groups of the Someday Goal. This sets up what he considers to be dominoes that fall right into success. As the small tasks and goals are accomplished, the bigger dominoes fall. He insists that you block time for this ONE THING. Once it is done, the rest of life can continue as well as other goals and tasks you have. He says you should live with purpose and visualize your goals. You should never compromise on the ONE THING even in the face of work. He says we must pursue these dominoes “ruthlessly?

I have not used his plans for my personal life. I have used it for customer projects at work. I do go into work and every Month ask myself what the one thing is I need to do to make this a good month. I do the same for the week. Every day I ask myself what the one thing is I must do today to make it a great day and help my customer succeed. It isn’t the intent of the planning system, but it really helps me focus.

He has a nice goal planning guide here which you can find in my show notes on my website: https://www.the1thing.com/thank-you/?resource=3917. It’s long but it fully lays out his plan.

So, you can see the idea is to pick a goal or a few goals but not too many. Make tasks that directly fall in line with your main goals. As the small steps come together they are pointing towards a successful end of a goal. But what is too much? When do we know we are planning too many things? In my opinion one is too few. It’s a luxury most of us can’t afford. But the Focus Planner suggests too many. To win at achieving our goals we need enough energy, money and time and resources. This will vary based on what is going on in your life already. Each of us will have to decide what our bandwidth on fully dedicated goals without excuse.

Alice in Wonderland

“Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?

The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.

Alice: I don’t much care where.

The Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go.

Alice: …So long as I get somewhere.

The Cheshire Cat: Oh, you’re sure to do that, if only you walk long enough.”

Alice in Wonderland - Cheshire Cat Quote - Where Should I go? - 0118" Greeting Card by ContrastStudios | Redbubble

Alice in wonderland looks to be tale of a girl growing up. She daydreams and cannot pay attention. She even falls into the hole and not goes in with intent. She has no direction and no aim. She admits she believes anything. She is curious about everything and has no direction or goal. She is confused by the weird world around her and investigates everything she sees. She meets an elderly caterpillar who has some good advice but is comfortable where he is and not going anywhere. He is perfectly happy smoking and relaxing. A Cheshire Cat who is confusing and only aims to confuse others. He is comforting but his advice is useless. When the cat asks her who she is she says, “I hardly know”. The White Rabbits busy all the time and perpetually late. He is frustrating and frustrated. The Mad Hatter was insane. He is stuck in a party that never ends. The Queen of Heart was bossing everyone making her priorities everyone else’s problems. She doesn’t care at all about what other people need or must do. By the end she grows up in size and determination and returns home. You can look at story as a girl growing from a child to an adult.

According to editors Charles Frey and John Griffin, “Alice is engaged in a romance quest for her own identity and growth, for some understanding of logic, rules, the games people play, authority, time, and death.” When you approach the book with this idea in mind, it offers interesting and meaningful interpretations of the events and characters in the story.

This is what we must do. Throw away the confusion and uselessness. Get rid of being stuck in contentment. Throw off our priorities driving us mad and burning us out and all the priorities everyone is putting on us. Lastly throwing off the bossy other people who make lives more important than you own.

Summary

Dream big about your life. Look at main areas in your life and figure out where you would like to see change or need some work or have big goals.
Ask some hard questions of yourself so you know what you are really looking for in life. Reset your frame in terms of a tv show or you talking to yourself as your best friend. What advice would you give yourself? As those though questions and get the good answers.
Look at a few big goals you would like to achieve in life or in the next five years. Start to create a list of the things you want to tackle.
Determine how many goals you would like to have.

Challenge

Dream big about your life. Look at areas in your life you would like to see progress or attained goals.
Look at a few big goals you would like to achieve in life or in the next five years.
Pick a good number of goals that you are think are attainable with the resources you have right now.
Ask yourself every day “What’s the ONE thing I can do right now, such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”

Fun Advice

Ferris Bueller says “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. “

So, what do you think of this advice? I think it sums up a lot of this podcast. Life does come at us pretty fast and gets even faster as we go. Stop! Look around! Then ruthlessly prioritize. Not sure that is what Ferris meant but let’s go with it.

Please let me know what you thought of this episode and your looking carefully at your life and goals and paring them down. Check out the Slack channel and the website at smallstepspod.com. Please subscribe, leave a review, and tell a friend. SFR Subscribe! Review! Friend! Thank you and have a great week!

September 22, 2020 0 comments

2020 Goals

1 – Why Small Steps Matter

by Jill September 14, 2020

Inspired by Queen Elizabeth II’s Christmas 2019 speech, this episode deeply delves into the power of taking small steps to achieve lasting change. With examples from experts like James Clear and BJ Fogg, you’ll get plenty of practical tips and tricks for breaking down your goals into small, achievable actions. And if you’re up for a challenge, the episode concludes with a seven-day challenge to pick one thing and try breaking it down into tiny, actionable steps.

Welcome to the Start with Small Steps podcast. Thank you for listening! Every day I see people get overwhelmed every day by their daily lives and their projects at work and teams at work getting overwhelmed by projects at work. They take every task, every action and ball them up together until they are a giant dark cloud that follows them around. Just for kicks they throw in a few extra unneeded tasks and unrealistic fears and rampaging emotions. It’s no wonder when they need action, the project is now so large, and it seems insurmountable.

The Queen’s Speech

I wanted to do a podcast for a while. I wasn’t really sure what would be the best way to approach helping people. But then came a speech that finally made it clear to me! Taking small steps! The idea behind this podcast came from Queen Elizabeth II’s Christmas 2019 speech.

She starts out mentioning big events in history. First she talked about the first step on the moon.

“As those historic pictures were beamed back to earth, millions of us sat transfixed to our television screens, as we watched Neil Armstrong taking a small step for man and a giant leap for mankind — and, indeed, for womankind. It’s a reminder for us all that giant leaps often start with small steps.”

If you watched the last season of The Crown you saw the depiction of that event and the impact it had on the Queen’s family. And she is right. Neil Armstrong came out of the capsule after so many small steps before him that made it possible. This was not one heroic event but a million of events! Each of them one small step.

She talks about D-Day reunion and rebuilding trust among the nations that were at war.

“Such reconciliation seldom happens overnight. It takes patience and time to rebuild trust, and progress often comes through small steps. “

“And of course, this is true. There were nations and people who had little reason to trust each other or hope the other would stand firm. But with small steps and building these relationships D-Day was possible. Relations are hard but with steps we too can build each other up and build that bridge of trust again. We can even rebuild trust in ourselves. This what we need right now!

And even the journey from Bethlehem to Jerusalem was about small steps.

“Jesus Christ would show the world how small steps taken in faith and in hope can overcome long-held differences and deep-seated divisions to bring harmony and understanding. Many of us already try to follow in his footsteps. The path, of course, is not always smooth, and may at times this year have felt quite bumpy, but small steps can make a world of difference.”

She ends her speech with this quote. It sums up the goal of my podcast which is to give everyone small steps that we each can take to better our lives, our families, our nations, and our world. Then the Queen brings it to the challenges today which were hard and almost impossible! She didn’t even know about 2020 yet!

She says, “It’s a timely reminder of what positive things can be achieved when people set aside past differences and come together in the spirit of friendship and reconciliation. And, as we all look forward to the start of a new decade, it’s worth remembering that it is often the small steps, not the giant leaps, that bring about the most lasting change.”

To read the full speech read here or to hear her deliver it you can go to my website and my show notes for the link:

https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/tradition/a30260865/queen-elizabeth-christmas-message-transcript-2019/

That is my goal with this podcast and my hope for this community! Together we will look for small steps and learn how to put them into action! The Queen’s speech was inspiring to me! I look forward to inspiring you and to be inspired by you!

So now I want to talk about some of my favorite people who talks about small steps

James Clear on Being 1 percent better

The first person is James Clear’s who wrong a book Atomic Habits. Most of his book is about habits and winning at creating and following through. I am pulling out some thoughts about small steps from his materials. Into what James Clear calls Marginal Gains from the following article https://jamesclear.com/marginal-gains

“Meanwhile, improving by 1 percent isn’t particularly notable—sometimes it isn’t even noticeable—but it can be far more meaningful, especially in the long run. The difference a tiny improvement can make over time is astounding. Here’s how the math works out: if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done. Conversely, if you get 1 percent worse each day for one year, you’ll decline nearly down to zero. What starts as a small win or a minor setback accumulates into something much more.”

In his books he says

“Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them. They seem to make little difference on any given day and yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous. It is only when looking back two, five, or perhaps ten years later that the value of good habits and the cost of bad ones becomes strikingly apparent”

Here is an interesting thought that Business Insider decided to examine. What if you saved $1 every day of your life? In 10 years, in 50 years it would be $18,250. But change isn’t just the change itself. It earns interest. If we were to take a walk every day, we would start to walk faster and burn more calories and get more fit. Maybe it would encourage us to run or hike and then lose even more weight and get even more healthy. Taking on good habits leads to bigger success, like interest. That $1 savings becomes $23,646 with a 1% money market. If it was I a 11% fund it becomes about $600,000 and a better fund at 11.23 it becomes $698,450. Change compounds and grows, even when it isn’t money. Think big! I learned how to save by losing weight. That incremental life helped me understand how to shave money off for savings. They seem unrelated but the lesson was creating ripples in my life! If you keep your house organized, you also gain in not spending time putting things away or looking for things. More ripples!

If you decide you want to write a book. Let’s say you wanted it to be 5000 words. Small book. What if you wrote 50 words a day? You would have your book in 100 days. But you would also get better at writing books! The next book will be easier and better!

For more information https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits

BJ Fogg on Tiny Habits

BJ Fogg is a Stanford Professor who spoke about tiny habits years before writing his books. He has a three-step formula for these tiny habits.

He calls for a Tiny Behavior an Anchor Moment and then celebration.

When picking the tiny behaviors, he says there are three criteria:

You can do the habit – Make sure it is not too hard.
You think the habit is effective – So you think it will make good changes in your life.
You want to do the habit – Habits are really hard when you want to do them, but if you don’t want to do them, they are impossible.

He then makes them tiny by either making the step towards the goal smaller or making the goal itself smaller.

When you think about it in terms of weight loss. Can you make smaller sub goals like losing 1 pound instead of being faced with the 50? Or can you break losing weight down into a smaller step like replacing a snack with some vegetables? Or making your meals smaller or maybe going for a work after lunch?

When he talks about tiny habits he means really, really tiny. Flossing two teeth! Doing two pushups! Saving $10. That is the goal. So tiny that you will never fail. It will always be the goal even if you are an overachiever and you do more. Doesn’t that sound better to be more awesome because you flossed all your teeth? It is certainly better than lamenting you forgot to floss any teeth. This way if you ever fall flat on your entire behavior you can always settle back down into the tiny habit.

He then matches this identified tiny habit with a trigger which is something you do now. You might drink more water while getting the cats water. You might do squats while brushing your teeth or praying while getting dressed in the morning. It has to be something you already do already and you tie it together. If it doesn’t work he asks you to check to see if the habit was too hard or you forgot and the trigger needed to be better tied to the event.

One thing to keep in mind about triggers is making sure they are not too random or that they happen at the right intervals. I noticed he mentioned unexpected visitors or girl scouts coming to your door as a trigger to do something. For me, I don’t have visitors or girl scouts coming to do his door, often so it would make a horrible trigger. It must be relevant to you and regular enough for you to follow. If it is something that has to be done quickly or often, you can attach it to habits with long timings.

I have tried this by telling myself I only have to put on my gym clothes and the trigger is when work is over. I don’t have to exercise. I celebrate by listening to my favorite Audible book or tv show that is reserved for exercise time. I also celebrate by putting on my more comfortable clothes. The gym clothes stay on until I exercised. If I was not working out at home but riding my bike, I would tell myself that after work I have to get to the bike trail and bike for five minutes. I could go home after that. If I did bike, I could set my alarm for 15 extra minutes of sleep. Every day after the workout, I had to make myself a salad. I don’t have to eat it. I usually do. I clean my kitchen when I make meals and well the reward is a much cleaner kitchen without extra time. At one time I had an adventure fund that got dollars from good habits. It was a tad too complicated to keep but it was a step in the right direction. Every time I go up or down stairs I bring items with me and put them away. It doesn’t take much time and I mentally pat myself on the back. When I travel for work, I always ask the restaurant staff to put half my mean in a container to take back to my hotel. I get another delicious meal without having to leave my room and I don’t put on weight. This is before I even see the meal. There is no temptation to eat too much. A tiny habit with a long time span became that when I got raises I would put that money in my 401k because I was used to living without it. It took some time but now I save a lot towards my retirement.

For celebration, you might save a special show or your favorite movie or eat at your favorite restaurant that week. Maybe you throw a dollar in your fun fund. It can be tiny and low cost, but it should never step on other goals. If you are trying to lose weight, don’t reward yourself with food or restaurants.

On his webpage you can find 300 recipes for tiny habits to help stir your creativity. https://www.tinyhabits.com/300recipes

For more information check out his website at: https://www.tinyhabits.com/.

Stephen Duneier on Small Decisions

Investment manager and speaker, Stephen Duneier has a Ted Talk which discusses his desire to lose weight and hike all 33 trails in the Santa Barbara Mountains. Part of what he said “You have to break this big ambitious goal down into more manageable decisions – the types of the decisions that need to be made correctly along the way in order to improve the odds of achieving the type of outcome you desire. It’s not about even one trail. It’s about those tiny little decisions, you know, like when you are sitting at your desk, putting in just a little extra time at the end of the day. Or you’re lying on your couch and clicking through the channels on your remote control or scrolling through your Facebook feed, and in that moment, make the decisions to put it down. You go put on your hiking clothes, you go walk outside your front door, and you shut it behind you. You walk to your car, get in, drive to the trailhead. You get out of the car at the trailhead and you take one step, you take two steps, three steps. Everyone of those steps that I have just described is a tiny little decision that needs to be made correctly along the way in order to achieve the ultimate outcome. When I saw I want to hike 33 trails in the front country people think about the decisions at the top of the mountain. That’s not what it’s about. But if you don’t make the right decision when you are on the couch, there is no decision that occurs at the top of the mountain.“

He later decided to read 50 books “But again, it’s not about reading 50 books. It’s not even about reading one book. It’s not about reading a chapter, a paragraph, a sentence. It’s about that decision when you ‘re sitting at your desk at the end of the day, or when you’re lying on the couch or flicking through your Facebook feed, and you put down the phone. You pick up a book and read one word. If you read one word, you’ll read two words, three works; you’ll read a sentence, a paragraph, a page, a chapter, a book; you’ll read ten books, 30 books, 50 books.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQMbvJNRpLE

Of course, small steps is not a new concept. Lao Tzu said nearly 2400 years ago “A Journey of 1000 miles becomes with a single step” In business there is the concept of Kaizen which is Japanese word which means change for the better. In business it tends to mean “continuous improvements. These changes tend to be very small and easy to implement. As you can see small steps are everywhere.

Half Sized Me on Slowing Down

Have you ever heard of the Half Size Me podcast? I am a big fan because it talks about hitting the one thing that will make the biggest impact. Just that one thing! If you have two snacks a day, can you try one? If you have a glass of wine every night, can you do four nights? The host talks about people who want to jump in and drop a large amount of weight and groan at losing a pound a week. If I followed that plan I would be down about 2000 pounds. https://www.halfsizeme.com/why-you-need-to-slow-down/

Summary

Small steps lead to lasting change, rebuilt relationships and achieved the goals despite bumps in the road.
If you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better.
Make sure you break your goals into steps that are so small you cannot fail.
Create a connected trigger when you will take the action, name the tiny, tiny habit and create a celebration.
If you can’t make the goal smaller, break it into tinier actions.

Challenge

Let’s pick one thing you can break into a small tiny action that you know for sure you can do. Can you do one push up? Can you clean for 10 minutes? Can you save 10 dollars and put it aside? Then try for the next week to have seven days of success. Let me know if it worked and what happened by contacting me on the Slack Channel (preferably) or Facebook group or my website has a contact page if you wish to remain private! It’s all there for you on the website at https://smallstepspod.com.

Now for a fun piece of advice from culture. It could be from movies, tv or books.

“We need to remember what’s important in life: friends, waffles, work. Or waffles, friends, work. Doesn’t matter, but work is third.”

And that, of course, was Parks and Recreation with Leslie Knope talking about the important of friends, and waffles and work. That was from season 3 in an episode called The Fight. So, what do you think? Is this good advice? Are waffles really this important? I think so! Is business third? Could be! Let me know what you think!

Please subscribe and tell a friend and leave a review! It helps other people find this podcast which is brand new.

September 14, 2020 0 comments

2020 Podcast News

Start with the Small Steps Trailer

by Jill September 6, 2020

Hello, I’m Jill and this is the “Start with Small Steps” podcast. I am a consultant for a software company and spend my days helping organizations change for the better through training, planning and problem-solving.

My gift is learning new ideas and then developing adaptable steps that help people achieve their `goals and the goals of their organizations. My childhood was chaotic, I had few resources in my family or in my community. The local library became my escape. With the help of books, I emerged from my situation and now live a happy and successful life. And I’m still learning and problem solving too!

This podcast is for real people who want to make changes but don’t know how to start. If you feel like positive change is overwhelming or elusive, or building the life you want seems far away, I will help you create easy and practical steps toward success. If you don’t have time to sift through thousands of hours of podcasts, hundreds of books or centuries of advice, let me do it for you!

I will help you start with small steps in categories like productivity, self-help, health, technology or best practices. Each episode of my podcast will be posted in a blog format on my webpage, so you’ll always have the resources and links.

I hope to foster a positive and collaborative community with suggestions, ideas and questions coming from listeners like you! This is a show where all of us can grow as people and help each other. To get more information and join the community visit https://smallstepspod.com. Please subcribe and please tell your friends about Start With Small Steps podcast. Thank you! I hope you enjoy the podcast!

September 6, 2020 0 comments

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