Tag: Habits

New Year resolutions….don’t bother, I’ve got a better idea

Posted on by philipdodson

Here I am again. 750Words.com it’s been a while.

I am sitting here starting to type, after having had a week or so off. I have previously done over 100 days since first joining in September 2014, with only having missed 2 days in 3 1/2 months. I had bashed out over 85k words.

New year resolutions

Each day that has passed since I decided to take a break has left me feeling a little less keen about restarting. Then the other voice has said to me ‘taking a break is good – it freshens things up’.

This is a dilemma that we face with most things in life, taking a break from any regular activity is definitely good, however, consistency and keeping the momentum going is also good.

Life is full of these pro’s/con’s situations and at this time of year, we are not only bombarded with diets and holidays offers, but we are inundated with self-help guru’s and experts.

They all have the magic formula for success and they all have their different ‘pearls of wisdoms’ and different takes on the same old things.

Wow that’s 176 words done, I guess the break has rejuvenated me and starting this again isn’t anywhere near as hard as I had built up in my mind it would be.

So what is the answer to all this annual ritual of New Year resolutions?

The answer is don’t make them, don’t have them and don’t set yourself a tsunami of new things you’re going to change this year. Don’t set yourself all these silly goals that you will run out of steam on within a month or so.

The answer is make changes in life all the time, but make the changes that are needed at the right time and take one thing at a time. Make life changes or life resolutions.

Don’t set them all at once, don’t set ridiculously huge changes and set yourself realistic expectations and realistic timeframes.

For example, I lost 7 1/2 stone, but I lost it over 4+ years and I didn’t do it via a fad diet, I did it in a series of small steps, changing habits and sticking to them. The changes I have made, have been life changes. The habits I have broken took years to break, that’s because, like most habits they took years to build up in the 1st place. Things take time.

Other changes I have made to other habits have equally taken years and some I am still in the process of changing and I know that I am still slipping back on some of them.

Here is the other thing, it’s OK to slip on them, I am human and in the past I would have beaten myself up about it, then not felt happy with myself. Then that would have triggered the things that created or made the habits worse in the first place.

Life isn’t about success or failure, money, achievements, etc. Life is about happiness. Happiness is a difficult thing to define, it is very woolly as a concept. It is subjective, as what ‘happiness’ means to me, is different for you.

Happiness is really about positive emotions and things that create well being within us.

We are all conditioned to think about working hard on goals, jobs, projects, relationships, New Year resolutions etc…We believe that once we achieve all these things, then we will be happy.

The most successful people (fill in your own bits here as to what success looks like to you) are the ones who are happy first.

If you are happy with positive thoughts and emotions, you will do happy things, others will want to be around you and you will create with them more happiness/wellbeing etc. When you do happy things it energises you and again it is what you define as happy things, you can’t read a book on it and become happy.

Today, for example, I gave some money to a regular homeless person I see, that made me feel happy. I then found £10 dropped outside the hub and found who’s money it was and that made me happy. I walked my daughter to the station this morning, as she was getting the train to school for the first time and was a bit nervous and sad that the holidays had ended. That made me happy to spend time with her and help her to feel happy. So today has been a great day at work, why? because I feel happy. I am typing this with a smile on my face – it feels good.

Success in what ever shape you want it to come in, comes to those who are happy.

So the only resolution you should have, not just on the 1st January, is to have a life resolution to be happy.

That is it, job done for the rest of your life. It is, like all things, very easily said, slightly less easily written and requires effort and the right mindset to achieve.

Whatever number of grains of sand are left in mine or your’s ‘egg timers’ of life, none of us know, but we are going to have that time, every one of those days. So we can make the choice to approach that positively, with happiness, with a sense of adventure, a sense of fun and with an open mind or we can choose to hope that we can change it all with will power and long list of things we want to change in January, just because it is a new year.

Be happy – the rest will follow.

New pathways – leopards can change their spots.

Posted on by philipdodson

It’s 11.32 pm Friday night, I’d fallen asleep watching an episode of Sons of Anarchy. I woke and realised that I hadn’t done my 750Words for today.

I have religiously done 11 days in a row.

I was going to give in and not do this today, I said ‘don’t be too hard on yourself, you can’t expect realistically to do every single day’

So here I am at my desk at home listening to Ian Brown F.E.A.R. and you know what, I am doing my 750 words, I am not a quitter and it’s not about sheer will power, it’s about a determination to do something because I have a reason and a strong reason.

I know that I am a good writer and I know that if I practice, I will get even better. I have always wanted to write and I want to write a book, may be more than one, but one to start with would be great.

This is all part of my desire to deal with the gremlins in my head, the ‘truths’ that we all tell ourselves. Guess what if we tell ourselves these ‘truths’ often enough. Then they become the ‘truths’ that we believe and start to allow our lives to be determined by.

Well I have had enough of allowing the so called ‘truths’ about me, that I have told myself over many years, continue to stop me doing the things that I really want.

We all have them, those limiting beliefs, that prevent us for getting to the goals and dreams that we want to achieve.

I wrote only a couple of days ago about the ‘why’ power and that if we aligned this with our values then we would continue to do the hard work necessary to achieve our goals.

This is true, but there is one other factor that stands in the way of progress. That is the gremlins, the limiting beliefs, the untruths that we turn in to the truths. These gremlins as you get older become more stubborn and difficult to remove.

So that’s why I am sitting here doing this commitment.

This is one of those days, where the gremlin would have normally taken over and stopped me from going on.

Even though I am tired and probably not at my best for writing anything that will make a great deal of sense, I am here 404 words down, writing.

The longer we allow these so called truths about ourselves to remain unchallenged, the deeper they become ingrained and the more we act upon them without even realising that we are doing so.

The fact is that we can change anything within ourselves, if we are prepared to tackle them and if we are prepared to stick to it religiously to change, what after all is only a habit.

It’s a bit like a path through the forest. The path is the bad path that we walk every day and that path stays free and remains clear through the thick forest undergrowth.

So we decide we want to cut a new path. So we get out our machete and we start to cut a new one. On the first day it’s really hard work and we make a little progress. We start to make a new one. Each day that we go back to the new path and cut a bit more, the new pathway starts to open up and over many weeks of hard work, we get a new path.

The old one is now starting to get a little more overgrown every day that we don’t return to it. Eventually with enough time it will become overgrown and disappear.

This is what happens in our brains, if we work hard and long enough on something, the connections fade and new ones are made.

This is how you deal with removing the untruths, that we have held as truths for as long as we have kept walking that same path.

This is the amazing thing about life and it is the reason that I no longer believe, that we are what we are and some things just can’t be changed. The leopard can change it’s spots, it can become different.

So next time you are telling yourself something about you, that you believe is a ‘truth’, then ask yourself, if it’s really true. If you are not happy with that truth, if it makes you feel bad about yourself, then it’s time to believe that you can change that and cut a new pathway.

I’ve finished my 750 words for today, it took me 23 minutes to do and it has helped me to continue to cut that new path, had I not done day 12, some of the new path would have become a bit overgrown.