Category: Blog
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Ten Ways to Change Your Behavior Immediately #9: Commit to One Minute
The hardest part of any task is getting started – or maybe even before getting started, while you’re still busy worrying about doing the task instead of getting it done! Luckily inertia works in both directions: once you’re already underway with a project you realize it isn’t nearly as bad as you originally thought. So…
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Ten Ways to Change Your Behavior Immediately #8: Break it into Sub-Steps
One of the most common causes of procrastination is that the task at hand feels incredibly daunting – the project is so large that it seems impossible to complete. Somehow even thinking about the project makes you feel tired! When you imagine the project it feels like a giant monolith in your mind, leaving you…
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Ten Ways to Change Your Behavior Immediately #7: Be Mindful
The most common response to encountering resistance is to try harder, feeling a host of negative emotions about the situation, and retreating into thoughts that cycle repeatedly with no resolution in sight. By now you may have experienced this resistance so often that it feels like is just the way the world is, that it…
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Ten Ways to Change Your Behavior Immediately #6: Turn it into a Game!
Work couldn’t possibly be fun… or could it? The very word conjures up images of endless factory lines with single repetitive tasks for hours on end, or row upon row of cubicles with people chained to their desks… Of course this is all very melodramatic, but you get the point: work is not something that…
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Ten Ways to Change Your Behavior Immediately #5: Use Curiosity
The most natural thing in the world is to get stuck in our usual patterns. We do the same thing day in and day out and it becomes a habit, it feels incredibly easy or maybe even right to take the same action. Each time we follow the path of least resistance we create a…
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Ten Ways to Change Your Behavior Immediately #4: Change Context
There is no doubt that when we change the physical configuration of our body, there is a corresponding psychological change. Earlier I posted about smiling making you happier, even when you’re feeling down. Another example is non-verbal communication, the complex signaling that happens between people based entirely on posture, hand gestures, vocal tonality, and many…
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Ten Ways to Change Your Behavior Immediately #3: Connect with your Reasons
Here you are, locked up with internal conflict, unable to work and yet unable to play guilt-free. Remember the old saying, it takes two to tango. This conflict is inside of you, which means you are in the unique position to understand both sides of the argument – how often do we get that opportunity…
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Ten Ways to Change Your Behavior Immediately #2: Cultivate Positive Mind-States
Once we start to get upset, these negative feelings can become self-perpetuating until it seems like we have never felt and could never feel any other way! The more intense the build-up becomes, the harder and harder it is to break out of those beliefs. The best way to escape this cycle is to interrupt…
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Ten Ways to Change Your Behavior Immediately #1: Take a Deep Breath
Have you ever completed a really big project, or had a difficult conversation with someone you care about, and literally sighed with relief at the end? You subconsciously used that sigh to release the tension you had been storing up in your body, and return you to a state of calm curiosity. It turns out…