Tag: goals

One day away from an Albatross

Posted on by philipdodson

Today is just one day away from being an albatross and that’s not to be sniffed at! It means I will have completed 30 days of writing my 750 words each day in a row without missing a single day.

albatross

It’s funny by having the arbitrary levels, that they have set, motivates me to keep going, I mean all I get is an online badge with a graphic of an albatross on it, it’s not like I even get a picture and I am certainly not going to be given the real thing as an award. Not that I’d know what to do with a real albatross, that has a wingspan of 12 feet. Plus I guess a real albatross would eat a lot of fish and smell pretty bad.

It shows that by having something to aim for no matter how small, has a big impact on our focus. It isn’t about the badge itself, it’s actually about the status of it and that as you write more and more, without a break, and as you write quicker, you reach an elite of writers on 750 words.

This is interesting in life, that we are often driven by very odd things. People set off thinking that it is going to be all about money and the perceived status that can be bought by money. As you get more money, you can naturally upgrade your status by having bigger and better stuff than the ‘Jones’ and therefore have more bragging opportunities.

However, most people work out that the money motivation wears thin pretty quickly and that it only tends to lead to dissatisfaction when you cant keep up. You then feel like you have failed because you can’t afford the next financial upgrade to your life.

Anyway so my point about the badges in 750 words is, that they were put there by the guys who wrote the app and they decided that 30 days of continuous writing was to be awarded an albatross. It could have been 28 days and you get a goat or 35 days and you get a goldfish.

The fact is that badge is enough to keep me going, especially as I have got closer and closer to it. Also the other factor in this, once you have gone so far from the ‘shore’ you feel less like giving up, as you have put so much in already. I have invested now approximately 14 hours of writing and about 22K words.

Therefore, the trick to this is to find other areas of your life that you can apply this to. After all, I can set my own badges for my own goals that I can achieve. In fact not just a badge, but a reward as well as a badge.

The badge is the recognition, the status symbol, that to be honest we all need in life. Not a materialistic badge, as they are just shallow.

So I am going to think overnight and add to my routines some badges that I can add, like to my weight loss target, to my marketing goals, in fact to any target or goal that I have set myself in my biz or life.

The next step is to then add a reward to each stage that I reach. Rewards are a critical part of success. Now for example, each pound I take off on the way to my target weight of 15 stone by end of October, I could reward myself with chips and a doughnut – joking. But I could say that each pound I lose, I could put some money towards a massage or some new sports kit etc.

It is important to celebrate success and it is important to get recognition from peers/family/friends. The measure of what success looks like is personal to all of us and it only you that can decide.

Success is a funny thing, that we tend to often look at it in very black & white terms. It’s either 100% success or we have failed. There is often no in between, we have it hounded into us that 2nd place is a failure. Life needs to be lived in the grey zone. Therefore we need to have a different outlook on success and realise that we rarely achieve 100% total success and therefore, we need to say that partial success is OK and isn’t a failure.

Failure really does not belong anywhere, as it is an opportunity to learn and then to be forgotten about and moved on from.

So add badges to your goals and celebrate the steps to your realistic success.

My mind gym

Posted on by philipdodson

This is my mind gym, 750Words.com, I love this 20-25 minutes each day, sometimes it’s good enough to release on the world via my blog and sometimes it is just private thoughts and ramblings, which would only make interesting reading to me or disturbed people.

So these 20 minutes that I write my 750 words each day is firstly a great discipline and more importantly, it is a place that I can exercise my brain.

This is an area that very few, me included until very recently, focus on. We all think about what we eat and what exercise we could be doing or are actually doing.

There is a lot of focus on physical exercise and that is very important to our health. However, the exercising of the mind is important to our mental and physical well being.

Our minds control everything that happens in our lives and it determines whether we are healthy or not physically.

Many illnesses, some of the most chronic, are result of stresses in our lives. These stresses are caused by a number of factors, however, it is our mind that determines how we deal with these stresses and determines what effect these stresses have on our physically health.

For me it is important to put down in writing a review of what happened during the day and to put down what my thoughts were. To write about my reactions to events that happened.

It’s important, as it allows me to think about the situations and learn where I could have dealt with situations to get a better outcome in the future.

Often, our lives just go by without us realising and certainly without pausing to take stock of things that have occurred.

So doing this writing everyday allows me to press the pause button in my head and to scan back over the day to take stock and think about things.

The other thing that this writing is good for, is to celebrate my successes for the day and to think about my goals and what I could do the next day to get closer to them.

Some people have no goals and certainly none that are ever put in writing. Others spend so much time planning and writing goals and targets, that they actually forget the doing part.

A review of my progress is important to me and it allows me to continue the focus. It is important to feel that you are moving forward to towards your goals. It is important to recognise progress and give yourself a pat on the back for your achievements.

I never use this to beat myself up, although I do use this sometimes to deal with things that are preying on my mind.

I pick a particular worry/concern and write down what it is. I then think of all the worst possible outcomes, then say ‘so if that happens…then what next?’. I repeat this for each outcome and keep going ‘so if x happens, then this will be next and then this’. Eventually the process leads to the fact that you can deal with every outcome, however bad you can imagine it to be.

Then you realise, having actually put them down in writing, when you read them back through, nearly all of the outcomes lead to nothing that you can’t handle and I often laugh at how silly 99% of them seem on reflection.

The other exercise I do at my mind gym, is to write down the things that I am grateful for and the positive thoughts that I have had that day.

So it is not all about exercising the gremlins, demons and worries. It is also about writing and reminding myself of the good things that are going on each day.

So this mind gym that I do each day has a number of exercises that I do and that enables me to keep my mind super fit and healthy. So if you don’t have a membership to a mind gym, I strongly recommend getting one.

I go for a family walk nearly every evening for 3 miles or so, which gives me a chance to spend family time combined with physical exercise. After that it’s off to the mind gym.

Since the 1st September, this has become the most important thing to me on a daily basis, it clears my head, recharges my brain, helps me to express my thoughts more precisely, helps me reduce worry, helps relieve stress and gives me a real confidence boost.