I remember countless conversations with people telling me they have always wanted to start a business, or they have a true passion for a particular field, but in most cases it remained an idea at the back of their head, or better yet, a fantasy, something they never believed could become a reality. There are several reasons why most people don’t pursue their dreams.
1. Change – People fear the unknown. As Les Brown said, “for a lot of people, a known hell is better than an unknown paradise”. People don’t like to step out of their comfort zone. They complain about the routine but don’t want to change the routine. The idea of starting something new, something different, scares them. 2. Confidence – It takes self-confidence to decide to pursue a dream. People either think they are not capable of pursuing their dream or think they don’t deserve to live their dream. Most people don’t believe in themselves enough to trust that they can do whatever it is they really put their mind into. 3. Society – Believe it or not, society has a huge impact on how we live our lives. Society determines the major we should study in university, the career we should pick, the kind of neighbourhood and house we should live in, even the type of car we should drive. It takes a lot to ignore the path to success society has defined for us and follow our own path instead. 4. Family and friends – Similar to society, family and friends also interfere with our lives. Some people don’t follow their dream simply because they worry about family and friends’ reaction. People also rely on the support of family and friends and often get discouraged when that support is not there. 5. Fear of failure – Fear of failure is a big one! Even though a lot of successful entrepreneurs failed many times before they actually hit the jackpot, some people don’t want to get started just because they are afraid to fail. If you have a dream and really want to pursue it, you can certainly overcome all of these obstacles and have the opportunity to live you dream. So, why not start today? Source
"The human soul can always use a new tradition. Sometimes we require them."
~Pat Conroy~
I have daily rituals that help me think clear, improve my health and reduce stress. I'm betting that you have daily rituals too. The word ritual is usually associated to religious practices and ceremonies. But I promise that I'm not going to go there. I'm more interested in the practical definition of ritual: A detailed method of procedure faithfully or regularly followed. Daily rituals are powerful because over time they become deep-seeded habits. Do you wash your hands before you eat? Do you even have to think about it? You've probably practiced the ritual of washing your hands before you eat so many times that you now do it automatically with little thought. It is a habit. The cool thing is that you can create new daily rituals and therefore new habits. You can also get rid of destructive rituals and habits. A resource for you to check out is the book, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. I've read the book and found it to be a useful tool for understanding and changing habits. Here's a video from Charles explaining how to break a habit.
You can also checkout this flowchart explaining how to break a habit and this flowchart explaining how to make a habit. Establishing a new habit is the act of creating a new daily ritual that you practice over and over again. For better or worse, eventually you have a habit. Let's look at 5 Daily Rituals you can start today to create powerful habits that will lead to health, clean energy and reduced stress levels. 5 Daily Rituals for Health, Vitality and Longevity 1. How you start your day is a major influence on the rest of your day. One daily ritual that I've found increases my energy and helps wake me up is to drink a tall glass of cold water as soon as I wake up. I've found that drinking a glass of cold water first thing in the morning wakes up my mind, increases my energy, helps with digestion and ensures my body is getting all the benefits of drinking water. Instead of running straight to the coffee pot in the morning to get a shot of caffeine have a glass of water. Soon you'll wake up reaching for your water glass without thinking about it and you'll be enjoying all the health benefits this new habit brings. I'm not suggesting you skip your coffee. Just make sure to have some fresh water first. 2. Another ritual to practice first thing in the morning is to show gratitude. I keep a gratitude list in my journal. Usually my journal is on my nightstand and I can grab it as I go out to the kitchen for my glass of water. There's no set number of things you have to write down. All you need to do is write one thing in your journal that you're thankful for. It could be as simple as being thankful that you woke up today. I used to believe that I could just think about things I'm grateful for and that would be good enough. But the truth is that there is something more significant about actually writing these things down. I've not made this an actual habit, yet. I have to make a conscious effort to write my gratitude list every morning. But taking that time in the morning to concentrate on what I'm grateful and happy about puts me in a more productive state of mind for the rest of the day. I also find that I appreciate my life more and it helps me realize that I'm surrounded by abundance.
“Be thankful for what you have; you’ll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don’t have, you will never, ever have enough.”
~Oprah Winfrey~
Sorry to sound a little new age with this gratitude stuff but I believe that I have to tell my mind what to focus on or else it finds things on its own... and what it finds is not always good. A cool site to checkout is Gratitude Log which is coined as "The Happiest Place on the Internet." 3. Get outside in the afternoon for a walk and some Vitamin D. This might sound crazy but I think you would actually do your body, mind and spirit more good by skipping lunch and taking a walk outside with fresh air and sunshine. Lunch is one of those meals during the day that I feel is more of a ritual then it is a necessity. Do you have to eat lunch? I'm not convinced that you do. If I follow my regular schedule of eating a high protein and fat breakfast I find that I'm usually not hungry until late afternoon around 5 o'clock. If I'm staying hydrated by drinking plenty of water my energy levels actually improve as the day progresses and I might even make it until 6pm, or later, before I'm actually hungry. I hear from a lot of people that they feel sluggish after lunch. They might even need a nap! This is especially true for people who eat the typical sub sandwich for lunch with a bag of chips and a cola on the side. Lunch or no lunch one thing is certain, we sit too much. I also think that most of us don't get enough natural Vitamin D from sunlight. Usually you're inside eating lunch during the part of the day where you can get the most Vitamin D from the sun. I encourage you to try a new daily ritual. Get outside at lunch time. Take a walk. If you want to eat something take an apple or a handful of nuts with you along with a water bottle. I promise you it will be the best lunch ever and you'll have more energy for the second half of your day. Bonus points if you grab a friend and have fun talking as you take your walk. Of course, everyone is different so test it out and see if it's right for you. 4. Practice mastery in an endeavor outside your normal work and obligations. I've had the goal to learn to play guitar for a while. I've dabbled and picked up some chords but I haven't really dedicated myself to practicing a little each day. When I was practicing on a regular basis I felt a calm and presence that is hard to come by during "normal" daily activities. I get this same type of feeling playing sports or going to the gym. It comes from having a clear mind and focusing on one objective. Think about something you've wanted to learn and go do it. It's exciting to learn new things and to become good at them. To learn more about practising mastery I encourage you to read Mastery by George Leonard.
"How do you best move toward mastery? To put it simply, you practice diligently, but you practice primarily for the sake of the practice itself."
~George Leonard~
5. Turn off your phone, computer, laptop, tablet and TV at least 90 minutes before bed. This is another ritual that has been hard for me but I'm persisting. When I practice the no screens before bed ritual I find that my body naturally winds down and I get sleepy. If I'm on the computer or reading on my phone my mind starts going and I could stay up until 2 am. This leads to not getting enough quality sleep and the next day my energy and productivity suffers. Instead of staring at a screen that two hours before bed you could practice mastery in your new subject from ritual number four. You could spend that time reading a new book or writing in your journal. It could be a great opportunity to spend time with your family and loved ones. The possibilities are endless. Good sleep is so important to our overall health and well-being that it deserves serious attention. Here's a great article from Mark Sisson on how light can impact your sleep. "Blue light regulates our secretion of melatonin, the sleep hormone. Exposed to blue light, we limit the production of melatonin, and we stay alert and awake; in the absence of blue light, melatonin production ramps up, and we get sleepy." Mark Sisson Turn off those screens and immerse yourself in something "offline." Disconnect and let your mind wind down naturally. Sometimes deadlines and obligations get the best of us and we have to burn the midnight oil. But if you're able to make this ritual part of your normal day to day life it will pay dividends. 5.5. Here's a quick bonus ritual that you might want to try. Meditate or practice positive visualization for at least 5 minutes a day. It doesn't matter what part of the day you do this as long as you do it for at least five minutes every day. I like to visualize the goals I have and picture what it will be like to achieve them. It's actually a lot of fun trying to see how bright and clear you can make the pictures in your mind. Take this five minutes and do some deep breathing as well. Sometimes I find myself taking shallow breaths. This is especially true when I'm stressed out. Taking deep, mindful breaths can relieve stress, increase energy and boost your immune system. Check out this clip from NPR. Going forward be mindful of the daily rituals that are part of your life. Have you consciously chosen these daily rituals? Do you have habits that have chosen you that you would like to change? It all starts with recognizing our current daily rituals and deciding which ones to keep and which ones to get rid of. Make sure to share these ideas with your friends. Good ideas and good health are worth sharing.
Behaviour scientist BJ Fogg explains a painless strategy to personal growth. For years, I've aspired to achieve the same simple goal: Floss daily. It seems so easy. But time and again, after being faithful for a few days, I fall off the flossing wagon. And each failed attempt makes me feel lousier about myself. After all, it’s just flossing! Then earlier this year, while surfing the Internet, I stumbled upon the social scientist who may have found the secrets of human motivation and behaviour. Professor BJ Fogg, Ph.D., has spent close to two decades founding and directing the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University, studying how human behaviour works. His expertise is in creating systems that change human behaviour—as he calls his work, Behaviour Design. In exploring a few shortcuts to creating positive behaviour, Fogg found a particular method that worked extremely well. He called it Tiny Habits. “I started doing it on my own, and decided to share it with friends and had no idea it would keep going and going,” Fogg says. “It is a way to change your behaviour without relying on willpower.” Eventually, Fogg launched a week long Tiny Habits test program online, asking participants only to stick to the methods, and offer constructive feedback. The results have been ground breaking. Perform a quick search on Twitter and you’ll find hundreds of #tinyhabits testimonials, an underground stir that earned Fogg a platform at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin this year, to present his “life hack.” Three Baby Steps Fogg’s research has taught him that human behaviour is systematic. Each of our actions and decisions is fuelled by three components—motivation, ability and triggers. Our behaviour, particularly our habits, comes from an underlying motivation, the ability to complete the particular action and a stimulus that provokes the action. For example, your morning alarm blares and you immediately turn it off and get out of bed—or you do after a couple rounds of hitting the snooze button. Getting up to start the day is your motivation, locating your alarm clock within arm’s reach creates your ability to fulfil it, and the loud, incessant beeps are the triggers, reminders to your instincts that the next action is to turn off the alarm. The road to any desired behaviour—say, increasing productivity on the weekends, making more sales calls or eating healthier—can be jump-started with three baby steps: 1. Start small. “Pick a small step toward your goal—a step so tiny, you’ll think it’s ridiculous,” Fogg says. Because it’s radically easy, you’re more likely to actually complete the behaviour, regardless of how much or how little motivation you feel. 2. Find an anchor. Choose an existing routine in your life to act as a trigger for your new behaviour. Parking your car, brushing your teeth or taking a shower are all routines that can act as great anchors to trigger a new habit. “Whether you realize it or not, you have all sorts of routines,” Fogg says. “I call these anchors that you can connect to your tiny behaviour. The key is to pick which routine is the right trigger for your small, simple behaviour.” The blueprint for your new behaviour should complete the following sentence: After I (routine), I will (tiny behaviour).
“I've created all these tiny habits in my life, from really practical to kind of crazy,” Fogg says. “One practical habit is, as soon as the phone rings, I put on my headset and I start walking. This has grown to lifting kettlebells or doing little one-leg squats while I'm on the phone. The desired behaviour is to be active and working out in these small ways. I'm on the phone two to three hours a day, and now it’s a habit that I probably can’t stop. When I take calls, I'm up and walking around.” Another habit Fogg has introduced into his life—one that might be considered crazy—is meant to build his upper-body strength. “After I pee, I do push-ups,” Fogg says with a big laugh. “And then I promptly wash my hands. I mostly work from home—I wouldn't do it in a public restroom.” In the beginning, Fogg would do only two push-ups after using the restroom. Because doing two push-ups was almost effortless, it quickly became a habit for Fogg to hit the floor right after using the restroom. Once two push-ups became too easy, he started doing five. When doing five became really easy, Fogg increased it to eight. Eight push-ups became habitual, and soon he was doing 12 to 15 push-ups every time. Now he effortlessly incorporates north of 100 push-ups into his daily routine. He’s since transitioned into lifting kettlebells. “My arms have gotten so much stronger,” Fogg says. “Since I focused on these Tiny Habits, I've lost 25 pounds and am back to my college weight. And frankly, it has not been hard. It’s a lot of little teeny things. I'm drinking more water, I'm doing push-ups, and just little by little as you do these things, you start seeing progress.” Part of good behaviour design is evaluating which existing routines to use as anchors for new habits. Because the average adult uses the restroom seven times a day, it was the perfect anchor for Fogg’s habit of doing push-ups. Fogg advises that someone like me, who aspires to floss every day, anchor the new habit to its natural trigger, teeth-brushing. Like a seed flourishing under favourable conditions, if you plant your new behaviour in the right spot, it’ll naturally grow without further coaxing. “If you try to start a habit and it hurts, you’re making it too hard. It has to be something that’s not a big deal, where you just think, Oh, it’s just two curls with the kettlebells. And after it’s over, be happy that you did it when you had planned to do it.” 3. Celebrate immediately. In building a habit, it helps to reward yourself in positive ways that are as small as your tiny behaviours themselves—give yourself a thumbs-up, a smile in the mirror, or tell yourself good job! “Notice how often athletes celebrate and when they do it—immediately,” Fogg says. Not only do small celebrations reinforce desired behaviour, but they design for what Fogg calls “tiny thrills.” “Our brains are very bad at distinguishing between I did this huge thing and I'm feeling awesome about it and I did this tiny thing and I'm still feeling awesome about it,” Fogg says. “Somehow in our heads we exaggerate, which is a good thing. That’s part of the hack—building success momentum, allowing yourself to feel successful, allowing that success to be larger than it rationally should be, then growing and leveraging that attitude into bigger things.”
Forward Progress Perhaps more helpful than the tiny habits themselves is the success momentum they build. When participants in Fogg’s Tiny Habits online program were asked whether the strategies affected their confidence in creating good habits in the future, a whopping 91 percent said it increased or greatly increased. When participants were polled on whether the Tiny Habits had rippled out to create other positive changes in their lives during the week of the program, 65 percent said yes.
There’s a snowball effect: When you achieve a goal by integrating simple daily habits into your life, no matter how small, you gain a confidence that helps pave the way to reach bigger goals. The success momentum you gain from creating positive habits is the method’s secret sauce.
“Every time a company convinces you to try its new health platform and you don’t succeed, I believe your ability to change in the future decreases. In other words, they are stealing away from you the ability to change,” Fogg says. “We've all been there and experienced it. If you set somebody up on a path where they’re likely not to succeed, or you set yourself up to ‘run two hours every day, no matter what,’ when you stop, it’s not a neutral event—you come back worse. That’s one of the problems in our culture—we overreach.” Overreaching and falling short is the antithesis of Fogg’s Tiny Habits method. Unless your environment or social circle drastically changes, it’s almost impossible to implement radical changes or big leaps. The only way to make behavior changes that actually work is through tiny steps, performed patiently and methodically. “One thing we have to move away from is this idea of big and brittle—I'm going to do this big thing and if I fail once, it’s over,” Fogg says. “It’s not that [high achievers] are necessarily in better condition, it’s their routine that makes the behaviour easier to follow. This is true of virtually all behaviours that are simple. They’re easier the more you do them.” That’s what I'm finding on my ongoing quest to become a daily flosser. I started by flossing one tooth a day, and now, 2½ weeks later, I'm currently flossing exactly 10 teeth a day. Yes, of course it felt silly to floss a single tooth for the first week. In and of itself, flossing one tooth probably didn't go a long way in warding off gingivitis. But I haven’t missed a single day of flossing since I began my tiny habit. So I've successfully created an ongoing behaviour, and I have confidence that it’ll continue to work. “It’s more than a feeling,” Fogg says. “When you [create a habit], you're signalling to yourself, Yes! I can change my behaviour. I'm doing it right now! You’re telling yourself this at least once a day. Just have patience, keep going and don’t give up.”
And really, who doesn't have the patience to floss one tooth?
Fogg-y Thoughts
Almost 20 years ago, before iPhones and way before Google Glass, Stanford professor BJ Fogg coined a term for the potential of computers to influence human behaviour—“captology,” from the acronym Computers As Persuasive Technologies. When Fogg first posited that computers could shape human behaviour, people thought him preposterous. “When I came to Stanford in ’93 to specifically look at how computers can be designed to influence people, nobody had ever done any systematic work in that area,” Fogg tells success. “That was considered kind of freaky and scary by some people; they just didn't think of computers as that instrumental.” Indeed, everywhere digital technology touches our lives—purchasing something online, going on Facebook, reading a text message—we are being persuaded to take action. The technology is molding our behaviour. “My bias is that a positive use of technology can bring out good outcomes in the world,” says Fogg, “not to enslave people or to separate people from their money.” Why we need to study captology, Fogg argues, is that “we are creating machines that control humans and human behaviour.” Kind of gives you pause, right? Fortune has named Fogg, 50, one of the “10 New Gurus You Should Know,” and Forbes states that “no one [else] has perhaps been as influential on the current generation of user experience designers,” the architects of our new interconnected society. As a professor, he’s never taught the same class twice; there was one that explored how social media can promote world peace and another teaching students how to use online videos to persuade people. Perhaps Fogg’s most famous curriculum, the “Facebook Class,” built apps and, for some students, fortunes. (Among his former pupils is a co-founder of Instagram.) “I think every good business is about helping people do what they already want to do,” Fogg says. “That’s what we’re figuring out: What do people want to do and how do we make it simple for them to do it? That’s one of the things I teach a lot now to my students—help people do what they already want to do.”
Sounds like the secret to entrepreneurial success. Source
