QBQ! The Question Behind the Question

This blog is about a book I finished in about an hour; short, sweet and to the point, just like I like books to be.  It’s all about personal responsibility, or as he puts it personal accountability.  He states that questions that begin with why or when and have a they or them in them are incorrect questions.  Better to ask how or what, have an “I” in the question and then an action step.

I found this book to be beneficial because it talks about how to eliminate blame, complaining, and procrastination. 3 things I can easily struggle with if I’m not careful.  It made me think of my dad who has always emphasized taking action rather than just thinking through a problem forever and ever.

The book has you asking yourself questions like, “What can I do about this situation?”  “How can I change this aspect of my life?”  It focuses on changing yourself rather than the people around you.  Who hasn’t wanted to change someone else?  I know I sure did as a teacher; I can assure you of that!  What I should have focused on was how I could have changed my teaching style to better meet the needs of every student; easier said than done though.

It also reiterates the need to put ourselves in others’ shoes.  “What can I do to better help that person?”  “What are some problems they may be facing in the field that I need to address here in development?”

I highly recommend this little book.  Like I said it takes a whopping hour to read so turn off the TV for an hour tonight and read this book  :)

New Habit

After reading The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, I’m inspired to try a new habit.  He talks about keystone habits in his book; certain habits have a way of causing other habits to extend from the original habit.  Think of a virtuous cycle type of thing; you start exercising first and start eating better as a direct result of your new exercise program.  He talked about it mainly in the arena of business but it has personal application as well.

My new habit is exercise.  I’m not going for a lot, just a little each day.  I’ve been doing a couch to 5k program the last couple months.  I’m not as consistent as I’d like but today I ran two 8 minute stretches with a 5 minute walk in between and felt pretty good about it.  My cue is doing it when I first wake up.  Now I’ve started waking up earlier which is a good thing as well as I feel more accomplished when I wake up early and exercise first thing in the morning.  My dad has done this habit for as long as I can remember and it’s one I’m trying to emulate.

I don’t intend to run every morning.  Some mornings I’ll walk and do some strength training.  Running I actually enjoy though.  Strength training is a burden to me it seems like.  I know I need to do it but I’ve never enjoyed it for some reason.  My friend who is a trainer thankfully gave me some bodyweight exercises so I don’t have to lift any free weights.  I don’t want to be bulky, just toned.  I can’t do all of the exercises he gave me, not even close, but I’m working up to them.  The problem is now after I do them I’m sore for 3 days and so don’t do strength training as often as I should.  Yesterday I went for lower reps in the hope that I can strength train every other day since I theoretically won’t be as sore.

In the past I’ve started exercise regimens only to give up on them fairly quickly.  What makes this time different you may be asking?  I have a cue now, waking up early.  The reward is that I feel good about myself and accomplished.  I haven’t really experienced the runner’s high but know that I will soon enough because I have in the past.  I just feel stronger all the way around when I exercise.  Hopefully that will be enough reward to keep me consistent with it like my dad is.

The Power of Habit

These ideas are again from the book titled The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.  I just finished this book the other day and wanted to write some ideas about what I read so it helps stick in my mind.  Taking notes has always helped me remember things.  Writing things down in pen is even better but this will suffice so hopefully these ideas can help people who read my blog.

The main ideas from the last few chapters of the book are that change is possible.  Meaning, it is possible to change a habit and therefore change your life.  His appendix offers some practical ways to work on changing bad habits into good ones or just starting good habits period.  Here’s an excerpt:  “Experiments have shown that almost all habitual cues fit into one of five categories:

Location

Time

Emotional State

Other people

Immediately preceding action.”

I should back up here and explain the habit loop that he discusses throughout the book.  The habit loop is made up of 3 simple parts; Cue, Routine, Reward where routine is the habit.  Every habit, good or bad, has some type of reward, otherwise we wouldn’t do the habit.  It may be a destructive reward mind you, but in the mind of the one performing the habit it is a reward all the same.  Think about the nicotine hit that a smoker gets; that hit is the reward.

Back to the cues...those 5 categories help you identify what your cue is.  If you want to know why you mindlessly overeat, why other people keep with an exercise routine, etc., look for their cues and rewards.

For example, one cue I have for overeating is clearing my plate.  I’ve done this for as long as I can remember; I feel like I’m wasting food if I don’t clear my plate for some reason.  A better way would be to have the waiter put half my meal in a to go box before the meal, but I typically forget to do that and end up clearing my plate out of habit.  At home, a better way would be to simply use one of our smaller plates, but I’m usually still hungry afterwards and so I go back for seconds.  I also need to eat slower as I hear it takes about 20 minutes for food to digest and to feel full from your meal.

The Power of a Crisis, part 2

Crises reveal what we need to let go of in order to hold on to what’s really important in life.  They wake us up to let go of things that don’t matter and cling to people who we hold most dear.  Crises force us to our knees in prayer, wondering where God is in the midst of such tragedy.

Crises also reveal what has been there all along.  They have a way of magnifying characteristics that we’ve been unknowingly cultivating along the way.  If we were honest before a crisis, then we’ll be honest during a crisis.  The same can be said if we’re dishonest before a crisis.

Perhaps life is just a series of training days preparing us for life’s various crises.  As a teacher I would encourage that their decisions today would affect their lives tremendously tomorrow.  I still believe that to this day and need to remind myself of that truth often.  What we do today affects our tomorrow.  We don’t often like to think along the lines of reaping what we sow unless we’re scolding a kid.  It is just as much true for adults though as it is for kids.

If we sow dishonest gain and suddenly get audited by the IRS, we will have a crisis on our hands that may well land us in jail.  If we sow gossip in our office culture we will reap a culture that is unhealthy and divisive.  Crises have a way of making these kinds of actions rise to the top.

Make the right choice, again and again, day after day.  When the crisis comes, and it will, you will be ready and well suited for it.  It will still knock the wind out of you to be sure, but at least you can rest on the years of cultivating a relationship with Jesus if you’re a Christian and/or the years of cultivating relationships with friends and family members.  For me though, the choice is clear; Jesus Christ alone will help me navigate through whatever the next crisis is.  Friends and family will help to be sure, but nothing replaces having a solid relationship with Him.

The Power of a Crisis

I’m reading a book right now titled The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg and the most recent chapter was Chapter 6 titled ‘The Power of a Crisis.’  It talked about how sometimes a crisis causes an organization to reevaluate policies and procedures and habits they have knowingly or unknowingly instituted.  It caused me to think a little broader than habits though; allow me to explain.

Crises are very powerful forces, aren’t they?  On any scale, a crisis changes things.  Whether a teenager was dumped and she’s now going through her first relationship crisis or some huge humanitarian crisis on the other end of the spectrum, a crisis changes things.

Nothing is static in life.  We are allured into thinking that way in our day to day lives though if we’re not careful.  We think life will always be this great or this awful or whatever emotion we are experiencing in the moment.  Life is never that way.  Sometimes it takes a crisis to show us this.

For myself and most people I presume, crises have a way of showing us what’s really important in life.  We are all one phone call away from our lives being changed forever.  And yet we hold on to pettiness in the vain attempts to prove how right we are.  We hold onto unforgiveness as if the sins someone committed against us were somehow greater than the sins we committed against God the Father.

Willpower, Part 2

This is probably why exercising in the morning is easier to stick to than exercising after work.  Your willpower is fresh in the morning whereas if you wait till after work you’ve often exerted the full amount of willpower you have for the day and just want to veg in front of a TV and eat a bag of chips, not that I’m speaking from experience or anything there  :)  

I’m determined to start getting up earlier to start my day off with exercise.  Just like the hip and knee replacement surgery patients though, I need to devise a plan.  What will I do if it’s raining outside?  I can work out inside on those days.  How long will I work out?  How many days will I do this?  What will I do if I just want to sleep in?  Remind myself of how good I feel when I exercise first thing.  I don’t always get a runner’s high but I do often feel a sense of accomplishment if it’s the first thing I do.

I think exercise is one of the keystone habits that has the most overall effect.  If you can start there you can go a long way.  Better yet if you start with small wins in exercise it may just be the key to unlocking a whole plethora of good habits.

What I’m curious about is why some areas of my life willpower seems easy and other areas it feels like I’m pulling my own teeth trying to motivate myself to do something.  For instance, money management has always come naturally to me; in large part because my parents taught me good money habits at a young age.  Eating right though is so difficult for me.  Maybe if I start my days with exercise, consistently, that will lead to better eating throughout the day because I won’t want to waste my workouts so to speak.

Willpower

This idea is again from the book The Power of Habit.  The last chapter I read talked about the significance of will power.  It was some stuff I had read before, like the cookie experiment for instance.  Basically, they had college kids put in a room with two plates, one with chocolate chip cookies and one with radishes.  One group was told they could eat the cookies while the other group wasn’t allowed to.  Afterwards they were given an unsolvable math problem to see how long they would work on it before giving up.  The ones who had to resist the cookies gave up 60% earlier on average than the ones who were allowed to eat the cookies.  The point of the experiment was that willpower is an exhaustible resource, we only have so much of it.

What I found interesting in this chapter though was how he talked about willpower as a muscle that can be strengthened.  I hadn’t considered it like that before.  He gave the example of Starbucks and how they’ve taught their employees willpower as part of their curriculum.  Basically they have them visualize different parts of the job that might be particularly stressful and how they will react to it.  They give them a scenario and then have them fill out how they would react.  That way when it happens they’re already prepared for how they’re going to react.

Another example was a Scottish psychologist who tried an experiment with a group of people whose average age was 68 and had gone through knee or hip surgery.  What was interesting was that they gave each participant the same exercise booklet but with one group they also had blank pages at the end and asked them to plan how they would exercise.  Where would they do it?  When would they do it?  What if they encountered difficulty?  What would they do then?  The group who was told to make a plan and specifically how they would handle difficulties along the way recovered twice as fast or something insane like that.  Wow.  A little planning goes a long way certainly comes to mind there, doesn’t it?

Small Wins, Part 2

Ramsey uses a small wins mentality in his debt snowball method of paying off debt.  The basic idea is to pay off your debts from smallest to largest.  You don’t worry about which is the highest interest rate, you only worry about the amount, the actual dollar amount of the debt.  The reason for this is that if you get a small win early on it will add fuel to your fire of getting out of debt quicker.  You’ll feel a sense of pride and accomplishment and it can change your psyche to actually going the whole way of paying off all your debt.

Another area is diet.  Someone gave me a great suggestion on my last blog about switching out refined sugars for honey.  I haven’t started it yet but I’m sure that’ll feel like a small win.  My small wins so far in the diet area has been getting off soda.  And now for sweet tea I only drink half sweet and half unsweet.  Those are small wins for me and I should celebrate those somehow.  Not by binge eating on ice cream preferably though haha  When you’re tackling a big problem like wanting to lose weight it’s easy to lose sight of the small wins you’ve accomplished because the task is just so big.  Little by little though, small wins add up to big victories.

My mom used to encourage me and still does from time to time to take things step by step.  You see, I have a tendency to get ahead of myself and think of the big picture.  That’s not how you make progress though.  Big picture and big vision are great as a starting point but soon after that you need to determine the next step or you’ll never get anywhere.

What’s a small win that you need to take time and celebrate in the new year?  Have you made progress on 2016’s goals or resolutions yet?  If you have, take time to celebrate those small wins or at least acknowledge them.  If you only focus on the problem ahead it can get really discouraging; I’m speaking from experience on that one for sure by the way.  If you look back though and see where God has already taken you, then you’ll gain confidence for what lays ahead.   

Small Wins

This idea comes from the current book I’m reading titled The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.  I can also attribute it to my mom who has counseled me to do life this way through the years and Dave Ramsey who uses this concept in his debt snowball method of paying off debt.  It certainly isn’t a new idea but can give you a lot of traction when you’re tackling something new.

In the book he also talks about keystone habits and how those can cause small wins and then it’s basically a ripple effect.  The example he gives is of a CEO at Alcoa, an aluminum company.  He started with safety as his corporations keystone habit; that was what they were going to focus on first.  From there, they were able to find efficiencies that make processes safer and cut costs and boost productivity in other areas.  But it all started with the keystone habit of safety.

He also mentions exercise as a keystone habit that has ripple effects and can help cause other good habits to emerge.  If you’re exercising regularly you’re more likely to eat better as you realize you need proper nutrition to fuel your workouts.  A small win would be getting out of bed and getting a workout in before work.  Or working out after work even though you’re exhausted by then.

In the book it mentions how small wins have a disproportionate effect on our psyche.  They make us feel more accomplished than is really warranted.  However, it can become like pouring gas on a fire and really light up one’s road to creating better habits.  The first time you experience a runner’s high for instance makes you want to keep working out.  Until you get to the point where you get an endorphin rush though exercise can feel like drudgery.  That’s when you really have to just gut it out for lack of a more polished phrase.