What is harder than rock, or softer than water? Yet soft water hollows out hard rock. Persevere.
~ Ovid
If there is one key to creating what you want in your life, it is daily practice. When you repeat again and again, you learn so much about the habit you’re building and about yourself. There are nuances that you do not learn from a how-to guide. Such as how to persevere.
Why daily? And why action?
- DAILY! Daily moves you toward putting in hours to develop your expertise and toward repeating an activity to develop discipline and focus. Whatever your regularity is, you build your own daily practice. You can choose if your daily means 5 days a week (work week daily) or seven days a week (whole week daily) or three times a week (M-W-F regularly).
- ACTION! Action is a form of commitment. A thought can be transitory, passing. An action is you saying to the world, “I am ready and I am doing it.” An action is more powerful than a thought - by definition, Action = Thought + Activity.
But why do it? Why take regular, structured, self-scheduled daily action as opposed to acting whenever you feel like it?
The Deep Math Example. As my very good friend and a former math professor says,
“It takes a while to get into the problem. You need to sit with it at your desk for several hours at a time just to start to focus deeply enough to be able to create any new conclusions.”
It takes time to get deep enough into a subject that you are no longer skirting the surface. |  |
| The Ballroom Dancing Teacher Example. Have you found that some people who are excellent at what they do returrn to the basics from time to time? Like a yoga teacher taking a basic refresher course. Or an author going back to the structure of his characters? I know dance teachers who regularly take beginner classes. Why? |  |
- When you are at an advanced level, you get a lot more from beginner lessons. You start to see the nuanced distinctions that you didn’t notice at the beginning - “When I ask my students to ‘rock-step’ here, some are still thinking that they are rocking when the important distinction is that they are there-and-immediately back, on their toe and immediately forward… it’s more about the forward than it is about the rock-step back.” You start to see new ways of describing something, new ways of understanding and then being able to explain a concept.
- You take the beginner class to come back to the beginner’s mind. To return to that joy that you loved about the activity to begin with, and to hear and see and feel and imagine what it is like to learn the steps for the first time. As Chip Heath and Dan Heath say in Made to Stick, we are sucked into the Curse of Knowledge: We are no longer able to often explain things to a five year old because we know too much detail. Avoid the Curse of Knowledge. Play as a beginner.
| The Twyla Tharp Creativity Example. You make space for yourself - in your head and in your heart when you practice something regularly. You make space for yourself to be creative, to focus, to live in the moment. So much of life ends up being planning and rushing that unless you make the Creative Habit as Twyla Tharp says in her book, then you don’t ever create the discipline of creativity, the space for allowing yourself to do. That space is often only possible within the constraints of time allowed for that activity. |  |
| The Alaska Hiking Example. It is through action that you create a habit, and through habits that you create the life you want to live. According to Ann Graybiel, neural pathways - i.e. the pathways that create a new habit or new behavior pattern - form when you go over them again and again. Again and again. Like a hiking trail in Alaska worn by all the footsteps repeating over the ground again and again, so a new mental pathway forms when you repeat an activity. Best results are daily. |  |
| The Guitar Example. My guitar teacher years ago said, “The most important thing in learning guitar is daily practice. Even if you play 15 or 30 minutes a day, do just that. And if you have the choice to play once for 30 minutes or twice for 15 minutes, play twice for 15 minutes.” According to him and many other musicians, the mind learns when it starts a-new - when it comes to a project a-new. So scheduling that “new” regularly allows a habit to make that deep Alaskan hiking trail pathway. |  |
And then, once you have taken the daily actions, keep track of them. Put a star on your wall calendar. Post about it on your blog. Write yourself an email accounting for that day. Track your progress.
Roy Baumeister of Florida State University says (
23-min interview) that one of the keys to creating a new habit is writing down those times when you have acted on that habit.
Is it really possible to achieve anything in life?
Let me ask that another way: what is harder than rock, or softer than water?
Lesson and Take-Away: 1)
Take daily action and 2)
write down your daily actions!
Images: math, dance, Twyla Tharp, hiking path, guitar.
Well, it’s about a month into the new year. How’re you feeling about exercise these days? What steps could you take right now - today - if you wanted to ensure your exercise success?
I read a sheet on this recently from a health club. Here is what they recommend. What would you recommend?
Five Steps to Exercise Success
- Make it personal - What works for you: for your lifestyle, time constraints, budget, likes, dislikes?
- Make it fit - Schedule time every day or whatever your frequency is. Work blocks of exercise into your schedule.
- Set some goals - Set a long-term goal and break it into weekly or monthly targets (amount of weight to lose, amount of weight to benchpress).
- Reward your efforts - Celebrate successes! Reward your commitment to improving your health. Try to make the reward not food.
- Get back on track - Anything can get you off track (a trip out of town, cold weather, a bit of a cold) - how will you get back on? Can you plan to restart, maybe with lower weights or half the exercise time to readjust.
Ok, and what would I recommend as my steps to success in exercise?
My Steps to Exercise Success
- Get to the gym - Decide how many times a week, and go those times hell or highwater.
- Play and Have Fun - Vary your routine sometimes or go with a friend or go to a weights or cardio class to play around with it and see what you like. Say hi to other people at the gym, get curious, enjoy it.
- Push yourself (e.g. Interval train) - go mild, then increase and go hard, then go mild, then increase and go hard (Body for Life has a good description of this). Interval training has a faster effect on your body, and it keeps you in the moment more about the exercising, doesn’t allow your mind to wander - it must be focused on the exercise.
- Reward yourself sporadically but often - Set yourself incremental goals like as one or two pounds per week weight loss or particular increase in weight, and reward yourself by getting on the phone with a good friend or by stopping by a goodwill and getting anything you like.
What do you think?
Q: What are your steps to exercise success?
What is your advice for good sleep?
I suggest these three things:
- Create a relaxing bedtime ritual. Create cues for sleep.
- Go to bed 10-11pm.
- Read in bed until you’re tired enough to fall asleep.
Q: What do you find are the best things for you to do to get great sleep?
This is Quetion Friday. Thanks and happy weekend! For fun, check out yesterday’s quotes on sleep.
I’m getting married in the mornin’!
Ding dong! The bells are gonna chime.
Pull out the stopper!
Let’s have a whopper!
But get me to the church on time!
~ My Fair Lady, Get Me to the Church on Time
How can you get to sleep on time? On your time. At the time you want to fall asleep? WebMD has 12 tips for better sleep. I completely agree with one of the tips:
Allow yourself one hour to unwind before bed. Brush your teeth one hour before getting into bed and wash your face slowly with warm water. Set the mood for relaxation before bed. This is not a time to be rushing about or planning the following days events. Do this earlier in the evening.
What can you do to relax as completely and as simply as you can before bed?
Can you
* Light a candle,
* Have some camomile tea,
* Brush your hair,
* Meditate,
* Breathe,
* Read some poetry?
What can you do to prep your body that it is about to go to bed? What cues can you give to your body (smell - light-fragrance candle, sight - darken the lights, touch - put on pajamas and night clothes, taste - brush your teeth, hear - put on classical music)? Or other cues? How can you give your body a clue that sleep is about to happen?
That is the single-best thing you can do for your body to get ready for sleep - to put it in the mood for sleep. I suggest getting ready for bed between 10 and 11pm. You need to be in bed by 10 or 11pm for optimal functioning, in my humble unscientific in this case, opinion.
And, yes, this will take longer than your usual routine, and yes, you’ll need to factor that time into your day, but it will pay off in healthy, full sleep.
One more tip: get ready for bed, get everything ready (including all these above cues), and then just get in bed and read. Read books for fun, not necessarily books for work or for homework. Marsha Norman says that if you’re a writer, you should read for four hours every day, and if anyone asks you what you’re doing, tell them that you’re busy and you’re reading. And for those of us who are not writers, reading is so opening, so exhilirating, so freeing, so full - it is the ideal pre-bedtime activity. Reading takes us into different worlds. And by doing so absolutely prepares us for bed.
IN SUMMARY:
- Create a relaxing bedtime ritual. Create cues for sleep.
- Go to bed 10-11pm.
- Read in bed until you’re tired enough to fall asleep.
Note: I know these above won’t work for everybody. That’s why they’re my opinoons and my suggestions only.
Why does a day sometimes start the night before? For example, in religions, if tomorrow were a fasting day, then the fast would start at nightfall today. Also, in sports, your coach will often tell you what you eat the night before and how you sleep the night before are very important. Folks often arrive to far away meetings the night before to “be fresh” the next morning. Another example: Christmas EVE. Evenings are the precursor to days.
Recently, a group of researchers led by Nobel-prize winner Daniel Kahnemann has been studying people’s happiness in a very simple-to-grasp way: people were asked to write down at the end of each day which activities they enjoyed and which they didn’t (as you can imagine, “intimate relations” was highest and commuting was lowest on the list). Most interestingly, “Events such as a poor night’s sleep had a large impact on how people felt about what they did the following day,” says this study summary.
This reseach appeared in the Dec 3 issue of Science Magazine (abstract here). The method of asking to sum up the enjoyments of the day is called the Day Reconstruction Method, and the researchers asked about 900 women in Texas to complete these forms. Because the data was for women only, the researchers do not claim that it’s generalizable to the entire population.
The fascinating book Sleep Thieves talks in detail about the physical harm to the body that happens when deprived of sleep. The author Stanley Coren talks about people being more accident-prone and increasingly exhausted. One of the more interesting parts of the book is when Coren describes the fact that sleeping less one night and trying to “catch up” the next night or few nights does not get your body back into its balance: there is something lost when sleep is lost.
Today we’ve talked about why sleep is so important. And tomorrow, we’ll talk about how to get more full, healthy sleep.
Some fun thoughts on sleep:
- CNN reports that stock strategist James Montier recommend in ‘04 that people focus less on stocks and focus more on things that really make them happy - love, sex, exercise and sleep.
- “Sleep in the City” study (summary here) that finds that people get the best sleep in cities including Minneapolis , Detroit, Anaheim, San Diego, raleigh, DC, Chicago, Boston, and Austin, and the worst sleep in cities including Detroit, Cleveland, Hashville, Cincinnatti, New Orleans, NY, Las Vegas, Miami, San Francisco.
- There is a recent study in the UK that looked for what gives people “a sense of well-being”. One of the results is that “a good night’s sleep [is]… linked to contentment” (article here)
Hi, here is the new topic that I’ll be covering in depth: What can make you happiest? What is happiness for you in practice? How can you be happiest, most productive, most successful?
In this series,
- I’ll tell you about research that works.
- I’ll tell you about books you can read for more info.
- I’ll tell you a general order that generally works, and then you can fit it best to yourself.
Ready?
Here’s the syllabus:
- Sleep (update: Sleep (1-10-07) , How to Get to Sleep on Time (1-11-07), Q: Your advice for good sleep? (1-12-07))
- Exercise (update: Q: Steps to Exercise Success? (1-26-07))
- Goals (update: the Create New Habits series (part 1 Self-Regulation (2-1-07), part 2 GOOD Constraints (3-1-07), two more coming), How to Achieve ANYTHING in Life (3-12-07), Q: What’s your recent self-challenge? (2-23-07) …
Also, BOOK Yourself! The Challenge (2-22-07), Little mouse story (3-6-07), Conscious Decision (3-1-07), and Expertise is Trainable (8-1-06))
- People You Like
- Attitude
- Physical Goals
- Career Goals
- People Goals
- Alone Time
- Self-Growth
At the end, we can discuss whatever else we decide by the time we get here.
You can read all the Happiness 101 posts by going to this hidden Happiness 101 category.
