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Using systems and habits to improve your life is a proven method to succeed. It requires seeing the work as a system and then adjusting your thoughts and behaviors to be able to take advantage of your opportunities in life.
I used to think that to improve meant that you had to have some negative emotion that you were trying to correct. In other words, there has to be something that you don’t like in order to work hard to change something.
Years ago I came across the Yerkes-Dodson curve. The Yerkes-Dodson curve shows that as arousal and anxiety increase our performance increases up to a point and then decreases as we add more arousal or anxiety.
Read MoreOur society likes to make assumptions about the effort one makes towards a goal. We see a tennis player win a tournament and say their effort is what made it happen.
Or we see a scientific discovery and assume their effort in thinking through the problem was the key factor that allowed them to succeed.
Read MoreIn college I was struggling with a problem that I eventually solved in a way that made that problem obsolete in the future. It seemed like a problem that I had to solve over and over until I used a simple, systematic way to make sure the problem never came back up.
That is the benefit of systems thinking to solve problems and reach goals. It extends beyond the specific problem you are facing right now and provides long-term solutions that can eliminate similar problems coming up in the future.
Read MoreWhenever we set a goal, there is a surge of excitement and motivation around that goal. We can visualize the accomplishment of the goal.
This might provide a spark of motivation and hope but it also tends to gloss over the path to success. It minimizes the difficult work ahead.
Read MoreThe other day I was listening to a speaker that I really admire and they were talking about goals. They talked about sitting down and setting over one hundred goals.
They talked about how important it was to do this and how most people never write down any goals, which means they keep them in the wish arena rather than concrete goals.
Read MoreMany years ago I falsely believed that in order to improve, we have to have a hole in us that we strive to fill. We have to be unhappy in order to push harder to get better.
I assumed that being happy meant that we didn’t need to work any longer, that we must have arrived. Seeing individuals at the top of their fields who continued to work must mean that they deny themselves happiness in an attempt to gain more success.
Read MoreWe all want better things in our lives. Whether we just want more of something, or we want an improvement in something, we want to see things get better.
It might be that we look at the government and hope it can improve to better fit our beliefs. It might be that we want our boss to stop nagging us and let us do whatever we think is best at the time.
Read MoreA lot of times when people that I talk to struggle with their goals, we find that one of the best ways to get past that struggle is to change the timeframe in which they view those goals.
We have all probably heard someone say they are going to do something great with their life. They go on and on and then you come to find out that they haven’t done any of the hard work yet. They have only spent time dreaming about what it will be like after they do the work.
Read MoreHave you ever wanted to change something so bad that you couldn’t imaging wanting that change more than you do right now? You felt passionate, motivated and invincible. But then over time you slowly fell back into your old habits and routines and the drive for change slowly evaporated.
Most people that I know rarely change. They remain relatively the same throughout their lives.
Read MoreFor the latest version of this article, click here.
Read MoreI’ve written several articles on linear thinking versus systems thinking and one of the things I say is that human thinking is flawed. We tend to miss the full system and instead we look to understand the whole by only seeing a small part.
In How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer, the author explores this idea further. The brain expert examines how we make decisions and why we decide what we decide.
Read MoreMany people think of self-improvement and assume it just means some sort of self-help for those with problems. They think of psychologists psychoanalyzing patients or touchy feely books about loving yourself.
Years ago I stumbled upon some books that looked at self-improvement differently. One of the first books that I read related to this was Jack Canfield’s The Success Principles. This was the first time I broke away from thinking that anything related to self-improvement must just be for those with problems and realized that everyone could look to improve.
Read MoreI meet a lot of people that claim they want to improve in some way. It might be to get a degree, a promotion at work, or drop 10 lbs. But while the desire for improvement is there, most of the time there is such disconnect in how to reach that goal that failure becomes inevitable.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We can make strides in the right direction and move towards our goals. But we have to change our thinking.
Read MoreMany of us are taught at a young age to judge. We judge situations, we judge others, and we judge events.
But if we get caught up too much in judging we tend to move away from accountability in our lives. Instead we can always point to something that we judge is wrong or unfair, instead of owning up to our lives and taking full responsibility for where we are and what we have.
Read MoreI found a great website that discusses Peter Senge’s work and explains it very well. Senge is one of the most popular systems thinking writers around and his ideas are very profound.
The website simplifies the concept of systems thinking by stating, “The world IS NOT created of separate unrelated forces. However, individuals have difficulty seeing the whole pattern. Systems thinking is a conceptual framework, a body of knowledge and tools that has been developed over the past fifty years, to make the full patterns clearer, and to help us see how to change effectively and with the least amount of effort – to find the leverage points in a system.”
Read MoreMost people want success. They want money, accolades, rewards, recognition etc. for a job well done. They can easily point to things that they have done to deserve those things. But they also seem to gloss over the areas where they didn’t really work towards the right areas, or they didn’t work hard enough, or they weren’t willing to sacrifice what was truly necessary in order to reach their goal.
Some people say it is a problem with motivation. They assume we just need to better motivate our teams or ourselves and we will succeed. But I tend to see motivation as a very small part of it.
Read MoreSystems can be used to create order and structure to our lives. They can be developed to build the right habits in order to reach our goals or increase our chance of success.
But systems can also hurt our ability to succeed. In life, we have to remain flexible. We can’t build and plan for every possible situation. We have to build up our foundation and then allow for us to take different approaches to different situations.
Read MoreMost problems that we face today are actually patterns that go unnoticed. In business we may have the same culture issues that we keep wrestling with, each time feeling as though it is a unique problem with a unique staff member.
In our personal lives we may continue to mismanage our schedule only to complain to everyone we know how we are too busy all the time. We may never take the time to truly fix the real problem, only willing to address the symptoms of the problem.
Read MoreWe all want to see results of hard work quickly. If we are putting ourselves in an uncomfortable position, we don’t want to remain there for very long.
That is the drive that many use as fuel to drive harder and harder at their goals. They work extremely hard so that the goal can be reached quicker. The mindset is to suffer now so that later we can stop suffering and enjoy the fruits of our labor.
Read MoreThere is a tool that is often used in medical facilities, airplane cockpits, businesses, schools, the military and many other areas. It helps prevent mistakes and has an incredible ability to make sure that individuals do not forget important, yet routine, aspects of what they are doing.
The tool is so simple that a young child can utilize it. It is so effective that brain surgeons use it. It doesn’t require high intelligence or years of life experience. It doesn’t limit an expert but helps them break free from the mundane and often tedious actions that have to happen over and over again.
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