Practice These 10 Tiny Habits Every Day And Watch Your Entire Life Change

Little Things to Change Your Life 

 

 Photo Lala Azizli on Unsplash

 

Nicolas Cole

Nov 10, 2020 · 5 min read

I am a firm believer in the power of positive habits.

It’s so easy to point at the clouds and say, “This is where I want to be.”

Anyone can do that.

The challenge is to get your hands dirty and do what you need to do each and every day in order to turn those dreams into a reality.

1. Keep your first promise of the day.

The first promise all of us make to ourselves every day is what time we’re going to get up.

And you know what? A large majority of us break that promise.

The alarm goes off. You hit snooze. And without even meaning to, you’ve already started the day on the wrong foot.

You made a promise the night before that you decided not to keep.

Get in the habit of practicing making a promise to yourself and keeping it.

This is about more than just “waking up.”

This is about the habit.

2. Dress for success.

Look good, feel good.

Part of your morning routine should involve embodying the energy you want to bring into the world.

This has less to do with “looking professional” and more to do with getting yourself in a positive frame of mind.

When you feel comfortable in your own shoes, you carry yourself with a different energy.

It’s the energy that matters.

3. A meditative moment.

Before the chaos of the day begins, take a moment to yourself.

For some, this is meditation.

For others, it might be reading a few pages out of a book, or sitting quietly with a cup of coffee and the newspaper.

But take a moment and feel the calm of the day. It will help you later on, should a storm hit (metaphorically).

You’ll think back to these early morning moments of calm and remember that life is full of waves.

It’s all about riding them out.

4. Eat lunch!

So many people underestimate the value of taking a break for lunch — even if it’s just 15 minutes to eat a sandwich.

Personal health is so important to the long game, and if you ignore it, then you’re only setting yourself up for a much bigger problem down the road.

If your schedule is so busy you can’t make time to feed yourself, something is out of balance — and I promise you, it’s not the lunch that’s the problem.

5. An afternoon moment.

How many people take five minutes in the middle of the day to just reflect on where they’re at?

Not too many.

Instead, once our days get started, we push and push and push until we land on our couch at 9 p.m. and say, “Wow, I am exhausted.”

Life is not a sprint. Life is a marathon.

Instead of having only a quiet morning and/or a quiet night, make time to have five minutes of quiet in the middle of the day as well.

If it’s “impossible” to find that, then excuse yourself to the bathroom for those five minutes.

Everyone has to use the bathroom, right?

Whatever it takes, make those five minutes happen sometime in the afternoon.

You’ll be amazed at what five minutes of quiet can do for the rest of your day.

6. Find some free time.

If you’re a driven individual, the concept of “free time” doesn’t really exist.

Free time is more time you can spend working toward your goals.

However, in the long run, this can also produce problems.

Everybody needs time to unwind.

It’s not the length of time that matters as much as the quality of time.

An hour completely detached from your daily grind is much more productive than 5 hours detached in which you mentally punish yourself for “taking a break.”

Free time is crucial, especially for creatives.

Let your mind wander.

Take a step back.

See the forest instead of the trees.

7. Manage your money, don’t let your money manage you.

A lot of stress is rooted in money.

But is it really money’s fault?

Or is it rather our relationship with it?

Take the time to learn a bit about finance and how you can set yourself up for success.

Implement positive habits here and then stick to them.

Put away a chunk of each paycheck to a retirement account.

Put away another chunk to your personal savings. Make purchases within reason.

And then once a month, do a quick review with yourself and look at where your money is being spent.

The more diligent you can be here, the more you will be able to build habits that set you up for the future you truly want.

8. Introduce yourself.

When was the last time you struck up a conversation with someone on the train?

At the grocery store?

In line waiting for your coffee?

You never know who you could meet — and it’s these moments of serendipity that keep life moving in a playful way.

Some of my best business connections I met through random conversations at the gym.

Some of my favorite stories have been the result of deciding to talk to someone new.

Make it a habit to introduce yourself to people who cross your path.

It’s the easiest way to keep life interesting.

9. Explore.

Building off the above, it’s so easy to fall into routines of going to same places, ordering the same dishes, meeting up with the same people.

Make it a habit to explore new things.

If you’ve been wanting to go to that new coffee shop down the street, then go.

If you’ve been thinking of trying a new restaurant, make a reservation.

It’s never going to happen unless you make it happen.

10. Keep a journal and sleep.

And of course, there are two of the most underrated habits in the world — journaling before bed, and then actually sleeping.

The reason I advocate so much for journaling before bed is because it is one of the few moments during the day when all is calm.

This is time that is best used to reflect, see how the day went, see how you feel, see how you can improve for tomorrow and then set your intention.

The other reason it’s crucial to do this right before bed is because it will then soak into your subconscious while you sleep.

If you can make this a habit, then you will find yourself consistently waking up the next day very clear on what you need to do in order to be successful.

You will have just spent a whole night planting those “next steps” into who you are — and when you rise, it’ll be time to get to work.

Sleep is so undervalued.

For a long time, I thought the less you slept, the harder you were working.

And actually, that’s true — less sleep and you will feel like you are the hardest working person on the face of this planet.

But that doesn’t mean you’re working smart.

Seven to seven and a half hours of sleep is the sweet spot. If you can get eight, great. If not, that’s OK.

But do not settle for five or six.

A well-rested mind is far more productive than a tired one (regardless of how much coffee you drink).

Better Advice

Written by

Nicolas Cole

100M+ Views | 5x Author | Founder of Digital Press | Want to build a Daily Writing Habit? Join me in Ship 30 for 30 all of 2021: https://ship30for30.com/

If Reading Books Hasn’t Transformed Your Life, You’re Doing It Wrong

The Value of Reading

Five simple steps to retain and master what you read

Barry Davret

Thanks to Jonathan Borba for sharing their work on Unsplash.

In my early 20s, I worked for an obnoxiously rich boss in New York City’s financial district. On my first day of work, he convinced me I could achieve what he had.

“But first,” he said. “You need to read this book. He opened up his desk drawer and pulled out a fresh copy of Think and Grow Rich by Napolean Hill. “It will change your life.”

On my subway ride home that evening, I read the first few pages and devoured the rest of it that night. The next morning, I sprung out of bed in my dreary studio apartment, certain the wisdom dropped into my lap would catapult me to the stratosphere of success.

Three months later, the riches never came. Broke, discouraged, and sickened by the industry, I quit. The book, apparently, did not change my life.

Years later, I hired a mentor and told him this story. He disagreed with my assertion that a book couldn’t change your life. I had gone about it the wrong way, according to him. He then shared with me his technique to make books truly life-changing.

The secret is to read one book ten times, rather than read ten different books once.

His reasoning made sense. You can’t get the full value from a book by reading it once. It takes repetition to learn and master the material.

That revelation was both depressing and encouraging. I hadn’t benefited from books because I had rifled through them, intent consuming rather than harvesting the wisdom contained within them.

But to read a book ten times. Who could motivate themselves to wade through the same material over and over? I couldn’t. I got bored after two readings of even the most engaging texts.

But what if you could read a book only once but benefit from it as though you had read it ten times?

That’s when I came up with a system.

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Five simple steps to retain and master what you read

Let’s be honest. Just about every nonfiction, self-help book you read can be distilled down to two or three pages of notes. The rest of it is all fluff.

With that in mind, we need to extract the valuable material once and then organize it into a summarized version that makes sense to us.

Sure, you can buy book summaries and forego this effort. But I find that I need to read the book and write notes in my own words. Otherwise, I miss out on context and meaning. I’m also not as invested in the assimilation phase — a phase you are unlikely to do if you’re buying the cliff notes.

Step 1 — Notate

As you read your book, place an X or checkmark next to every concept or idea. Don’t worry about repetitive points. You’ll deal with that later. In some sections, you’ll find examples that explain a concept. For each one, put a star next to the beginning of the example. Different symbols help distinguish between instruction from explanation.

If you’re working off an electronic book, make use of the highlighting and note feature to distinguish between teachings you want to flag and examples that help you understand the lessons.

Step 2 — Distill

Once you finish reading and notating, go through the markup and transfer the salient points to a document. Be sure to put the page number at the end of each entry, so you can refer back to the book at a later date if you need further reference. Put your notes in your own words; it helps the learning process.

You’ll find redundancies as you go through your notations. Whenever you see repetition, ask yourself if the new explanation supersedes the old one or if the previous one proves superior.

As you review examples of different points, choose the one instance that best helps you visualize the lesson. It’s tempting to include multiple “for example” entries, but that will clutter up your summary.

Step 3 — Edit

Once you finish the distillation process, step away from your document for a few days. You’ll need to distance yourself from it before you can edit effectively.

As you go through the editing process, reword anything that doesn’t make sense. Remove remaining redundancies and cut anything that fails to advance your understanding of the topic. By the time you finish, your summary should be no more than three pages.

Continue this process two or three more times. Take additional steps to consolidate and clean up your verbiage. Each time you go through the process, it solidifies the learning.

Step 4 — Assimilate

It’s this step that most folks skip. They finish a book, feeling like they’re on the cusp of a life change. They see the world through a different lens. And then, they move onto the next book without taking the time to test-drive, customize, and absorb what they had learned.

Execution closes the learning circle. It’s where the great teachings become part of your everyday thinking and skillset. It’s here that the wisdom from a great book can truly change your life.

Review your summarized notes once per day. For each lesson in your document, do one action each day to practice it until you assimilate it into your daily routine. In some cases, you may need to practice a new way of thinking. In other books, it could be skill development or technique refinement.

Here’s a snippet from the document I created for the book On Writing Well by William Zinsser.

Back when I read this, I spent a week making sure I reduced each story to the smallest possible objective. Once finished, I moved on to the next lesson.

Step 5 — Reinforce

What about a year or five years from now? You’ll end up with a ton of book summaries. It’s cumbersome and unrealistic to review each one indefinitely. Here’s a practical way to reinforce what you’ve learned.

For each of your most-read book categories, draw the essential points from each summary, and create a checklist. This practice gives you a handy way to review material long after you’ve finished the assimilation phase. You may end up with a bunch of different checklists. I have ones for writing, personal finance, creativity, sales, and mindset.

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Written by

Barry Davret

Duo helps women find their strengths

A Scheme To Help Women Find Their Strength


Always great to read about such schemes!

Posted by Lyn Rejahl Pry

Date: Sunday, February 10, 2019

Kristin Clark and Madlin Mangrum help navigate women through life’s changes. (Photo by Helen’s Photography)

With it being a new year, many people are looking for ways to jump-start something new and need guidance to make it happen,” said Kristin Clark, a Gallup-certified strengths coach.
She and Madlin Mangrum, another Flower Mound resident, host Women’s “What’s Next” weekend retreats in the area.
They help women get through times of change in their lives– divorce, empty nesting, loss of a job, starting a new career or a desire to make their current situation better– by guiding them through goal-setting and using their natural talents, based on the CliftonStrengths 34 Assessment test.
Strengths Finder, a self-help book written in 2001 by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton, is the basis for the internet-based “Clifton Strengths Finder;” an online personal assessment test that outlines the user’s strengths. The authors advocate focusing on building strengths, rather than focusing on weaknesses.
The theory behind the book is that each adult individual possesses a certain number of fixed universal personal-character attributes– or traits– defined by the authors as “talent themes,” which, combined, result in an individual’s tendency to develop certain skills more easily and excel in certain fields in a sustainable way.
The Gallup Organization claims to have distilled the trait theory into practice by interviewing 1.7-million professionals from varying fields. Having quantified the different traits of the people they interviewed, they came up with 34 distinct patterns, or “talent themes,” that best-describe the range of human uniqueness observed from their research.
According to “personality trait” theories, like the Gallup Organization’s CliftonStrengths 34 assessment, for example, introversion and extraversion are part of a continuous dimension; with many people in the middle. Personality traits could be interpreted as quantitative differences, embodying a smaller-grouping of behavioral tendencies.
Many people have taken other assessment tests, such as the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), an introspective self-report questionnaire with the purpose of indicating differing psychological preferences in how people perceive the world around them and make decisions.
It’s used in corporate Human Resource Departments to assess a person’s personality type, based on a total of 16 categories. It uses psychologist Carl Jung’s conceptual theory that humans experience the world using four principal psychological functions – sensation, intuition, feeling and thinking; and, that one of these four functions is a dominant type for a person most of the time.
These “personality type” assessments involve qualitative differences between people. According to type theories, for example, introverts and extraverts are two fundamentally different categories of people.
“After I took the CliftonStrengths 34 test myself (March 2017), it was so revolutionary for me that I had my family take

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