Posts Tagged ‘self help’

#Habit Building is About New Not Old

Posted: January 9, 2024 in Stimulus Space Response
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It feels like I’ve spent my entire adult life trying to improve my habits.

At least the periods of time I care to remember. Which are the periods of time in which I cared to care and tried to try. I also remember many instances of the internal resistance to trying to build new habits being so strong, it felt like a literal force from within my body pushing me the opposite direction.

In 2023 I read the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. One of the best books I’ve ever read. I strongly recommend it for a host of reasons. While reading the book and after reading the book, one of the concepts that stuck and that I noticed when consuming other material related to habit formation, is the necessity of focusing on and doing the new thing rather than focusing on not doing the old thing.

That was a light bulb moment for me. Reading about that in the book, I knew both in my heart and in my head that I had spent the majority of time when trying to form new habits on what I didn’t want to do versus the new action I wanted to cement.

This concept legitimately helped me and is actively helping me now. You reading this blog is a product of me focusing on writing and publishing my work, rather than focusing on the time spent not writing and fixating on the details of what I want to write through the paradigm of perfectionism.

I like writing. I like blogging. I wanted to write again. I wanted to blog again. I posted an article that I liked one day last year. I just wrote it, revised it, and posted it. Then when I sat down to do the next one, the old habits of focusing on the topic, the title, the body, a catchy opener, and a well wrapped up closing line all creeped into my mind and put a writer’s block in front of the habit of blogging.

A couple of months later I read Atomic Habits. After finishing the book I read various articles and watched various YouTube videos on habits. The concept I found myself implementing the most in my day to day life was thinking about the new action, rather than thinking about past actions, past mistakes, past failures, etc.

The value of this concept is directly proportional to the action taken. It’s real value that can be measured externally, based on the real action one takes. I’m very grateful to have this paradigm taking hold in me. I hope it can do the same for whoever reads my words.

There’s Value in Just Getting Through

Posted: January 2, 2024 in Stimulus Space Response
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You have to survive in order to thrive.

Crawl, walk, run.

You can’t pour from an empty cup.

We all want to be better people. We all want to do better.

But sometimes, some days, we just need to survive.

External factors show up.

Internal factors bubble up.

There is no instruction manual.

There is no such thing as normal.

As long as you’re not negatively effecting other people, it’s okay to just do what you have to do to make it through to the next day, the next hour, the next minute, the next choice, the next breath.

XXX #SelfEsteem Exercise

Posted: December 30, 2023 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional, Stimulus Space Response
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30 Things I love about myself

As an exercise in building self esteem and self confidence I was recently challenged to list thirty things I like or love about myself. My list is below. I found it to be an effective and pragmatically valuable exercise. I recommend it.

1. BxB XI Experience

2. Pro wrestling experiences

3. Vest in the world

4. Beard

5. Blog

6. Poetry

7. Journaling

8. Meditation practice

9. Weight training

10. Yoga

11. Bracelets

12. House plants

13. Media Communications BA

14. Alcohol tolerance

15. Sense of humor

16. Reading habit

17. Music taste

18. Concert experiences

19. Rave experiences

20. Poker experiences

21. Hair

22. Nightlife Experiences

23. Knowledge of/Taste in entertainment

24. Knowledge of/Taste in sports

25. Study of stoicism & philosophy

26. Study of spirituality

27. Desire for personal development

28. Hallucinogen knowledge/experiences

29. Supplement knowledge/consumption

30. Survival and thriving through grief and depression

Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff

Posted: December 28, 2023 in Stimulus Space Response
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One of the first audio books I ever rented from my local library was Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff and It’s All Small Stuff by Richard Carlson. I had a bad habit of turning molehills into mountains. Of turning little things into big things. Of taking serious, things which were meant to be taken lightly.

Through nature or nurture, I inherited this habit from my parents. Both of them, up until they both passed away; dramatized insignificant day to day happenings in their personal lives and the events of the world around them. So frequently and with such fervor, that it short circuited my internal ability to distinguish between the important and the irrelevant while judging each in a negatively passive aggressive manner.

I was in my twenties when I had a roommate who told me that my priorities and way of seeing the world were totally out of whack. That I focused my time and attention on things that I had no control over and/or had nothing to do with me.

Around that same time is when I got more serious about a regular-daily meditation practice. That was likely a new years resolution around that time when I first downloaded the Calm app.

When this prompt popped up on one of my recent Daily Calm meditations, it brought back a flood of memory pieces from the times spent listening to that audiobook during my commutes in and around Chicago. The concept of don’t sweat the small stuff is modern wrapping paper placed on the gift of traditional philosophy.

I wasn’t ready to implement and habitualize the concept back then. Because it was just touching on the edges of philosophies like stoicism and taoism. I didn’t need to dip my toes in philosophy and spirituality, I needed to dive head first into the deep end. Because my head was already drowning in constant thoughts and negative emotions.

Flushing the negative judgements of myself and others with the pressure washer of philosophy and the cleansing waters of a spirituality practice were what I needed then, and what is helping me so much, now.

But some people need to just dip there toes in. Change is hard. Paradigms die hard. Perception shifts are slow. The modern personal development/self help genre is built on the foundation philosophy.

So do check out some non fiction self help books, audio books, podcasts, YouTube videos, etc if you need help. Modern people, language, examples and stories will be a necessary ingredient for many people. Since ageism applies to concepts as well as people in the world we live in.

Whatever works, whatever helps.

#Mental Space to Choose

Posted: December 26, 2023 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional, Stimulus Space Response
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“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

It would be nice to say that I had an awakening or an epiphany that changed the way I lived forever all at once.

The older I get, the more I feel like that isn’t how change works.

I’ve had, what I thought were life changing epiphanies, repeatedly. Life changing visions, repeatedly. Life changing moments, repeatedly. I thought after X or Y happened to me that I would live differently from that point onward.

Habits always win out however. Choices, actions done repeatedly make our lives.

The concept of Stimulus-Space-Response was a concept I first learned from a rented audio book by Stephen Covey. He was telling the story of Holocaust survivor Dr. Victor Frankl.

Learning about that concept I can still remember thinking, in the library I was listening to the audiobook in; that this was going to change my life from that point on.

I thought my depression, laziness, anxieties would all be instantly and forever changed now that I knew that there was a space between stimulus and response.

I get to choose how I respond?! I can cultivate and grow that space?!! Surely this will change my life immediately. I will only make good choices now. I will only do right actions.

The older I get, the more I feel like that isn’t how change works.

But learning about Stimulus-Space-Response is one of the closest things I’ve ever experienced to an epiphany that stuck. I suppose a more apt metaphor would be that of a seed being planted. A seed of lasting change was planted that day.

Stephen Covey also used farming as an analogy for change and for life. I may have planted the seed(s) for growth, but I failed to tend to the soil properly with patience and persistence. Then the harvest was nothing.

It is a great concept that more people should know about. The knowledge that we can choose what happens to us no matter what happens. Because we have the ability to think, perceive, and assign meaning in our brain. Unlike most animals.

I think most people are unaware of this. I know I was. I think most people think that to live, is to live reactively. Just reacting to whatever happens to us and around us whether good, bad, or indifferent.

But we can choose to stop, breath, think, and choose.

It’s no magic pill, no such thing of course. But it can help. It helps me.

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