Senia.com Positive Psychology Coaching

This gym is a reason to climb in the Westchester and Stamford, CT area. If you were ever considering climbing, this gym is why you actually should. The Cliffs at Valhalla.

* It’s NEW!!! So great - everything is clean. The holds that you use to hold onto while you’re climbing are not chalked up - you can still feel their ridges. * It’s safe. Mike the owner has done a great job of making sure the folks that work there know what they’re doing in climbing, and they won’t do what they don’t know very well. The mats on the floor for regular climbing are great. It’s not too cold or too warm. * It’s thorough - there are two elliptical machines upstairs and one rowing machine for warming up; there’s a shorter wall upstairs for beginners, there’s bouldering, of course a chin up bar, and there’s regular climbing and a good number of lead routes too. You can borrow the gym’s ropes. (more…)

“People seem not to see,” says Emerson, “that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.”

“What you are will show in what you do.” ~ Thomas Edison

There’s a set of questions that I heard about today for the first time. They could be useful as questions to ask yourself when you’re goal-setting and planning to create a new habit or change an old habit.

Ken Blanchard created this system, and it’s called SMART Goals. The idea is that when you’re planning, here are the areas you can ask yourself about:

• Specific: What specifically are you going to do? What do you ultimately want to accomplish? How? What are the steps?
• Measurable: What will you keep track of? How will you keep track?
• Accountable: To whom will you be accountable? Who else knows that you’re doing this and can share in your small or large successes?
• Realistic: What are your concerns about achieving this plan? How does this differ from when you may have tried something similar before? How can you ensure that the goal is attainable? Is the timeframe realistic?
• Timely: When do you expect to see results? Are there intermediate milestones?

What’s nice is that it’s a simple acronym, and using it can make sure that you cover a lot of the bases of setting a goal. You’ve probably come across Ken Blanchard with the One Minute Manager.

Wouldn’t it be strange if you learned that yes, you can make brand new habits, and that the brand new habits can stick, and yet . . . that the old habits are still somewhere deep in your brain, and given an old triggering environment, the old habits may return?! That seems like the exact opposite of what you would want to hear on Jan 2, getting ready for the New Year and for new habits.

There’s actually valuable information in this - it’s the information of ‘be careful.’ Be careful not to fall into your old habits and old environments in which those habits fester.

Bob Condor of a Seattle newspaper writes, “What [Ann Graybiel] has found is that the brain never completely deletes old patterns, say, smoking, eating junk foods or, yes, riding a bicycle, from the basal ganglia region deep in the brain’s neural structure. Instead, those habitual patterns “retain memory of context,” such as a cocktail and conversation for an ex-smoker or potato chips in the pantry for the junk-food snacker.”

Ann Graybiel is a Neuroscientist and Professor at MIT. Her latest researach about the basal ganglia brain region appeared in the journal Nature in October, 2005. In short, Connors argues that you can beat yourself at the same old game. By keeping the resolution and the new habits at the forefront of your mind, you can act successfully towards creating new habits and setting aside old ones. Connors suggests several verified techniques: do the new habit consistently, write your goals down, and do not put yourself into environments in which old habits are easily triggered (”Just the sight of a piece of chocolate can reset all of those good intentions,” says Graybiel).

This echoes the thoughts of philosophers from Aristotle to William James. Aristotle says, “We are what we repeatedly do.” (more…)