Keep Going
These days I am beyond the horror, drama, darkness of depression and I have dived fully into never getting there again.
As a reader of this blog or my personal weekly email, you will have watched this unfold with both the joy and the crap.
Habits and Comfort Zones
My “deliberate practice” mega mission is to develop habits that will get me doing what matters.
This made me identify the exit out of my real comfort zone. I thought my getting out my comfort zone was running fast, a cold shower or waking up early.
I can do all those things and they are physical, I make them look hard (a waste of energy in itself) and some people go “aren’t you good Bernie!”
Or “I don’t know how you do that, I couldn’t!”
To which I go “oh it’s nothing” just to look sweet, but I am a fucker, it really is nothing to me.
Snuggle Blankets and Energy Drinks
Some nasty and upsetting shit happened to me but as I talk in therapy these days I can see how I hung onto it like a snuggle blanket.
Getting out my comfort zone is making myself thrive on creating stuff, embracing responsibility and following through on my promises to family and coworkers.
This is energising.
Really energising.
A super sugary energy drink is not energising it is a pacifier.
I had been drinking too many energy drinks.
Now I eat good protein, avocados and caffeine free bulletproof coffee.
Building Habits & The Compound Effect
This is so easy I am dumb for not doing it sooner. It is so easy you probably did this years ago and I am the only dickhead who did not get the memo.
Just do the same thing every day until it becomes a habit.
This works, how hard can it be?
Most of us wake up, have a shit and eat every day without thinking about it – it is a habit.
So it can’t be that hard to chuck write 750 words and don’t eat crap food into the mix?
Turns out it is hard, I have come to think that it is so hard because it is so easy, maybe at some perverse level I resent that something so easy could be so effective and I think it is beneath me.
I am too good for that.
I have no more bandwidth for “I am too good for that” – I never woke up with the intention of thinking things are beneath me so this might be hard to shift.
I’ll go into more mind-numbing detail in future posts, here are the headlines for now.
Do the same things every day. I track and remind myself every day with Productive and an app called Momentum.
These are both enabling me to fine tune my day. Emily and I talk about it in our daily scrum stand-up meeting to nudge each other along with organising our day.
People are inclined to say, you can do that with a bit of paper, I don’t need a daily meeting or you can write in Google Docs for free, why do you pay for 750 words?
In six months of stand-ups with Emily and nearly three years of spunking $5 a month on 750 words, I have made the most life changing progress I have made since I learnt to walk as a baby.
Having everything out of my head and into Trello or my mind mapping app before writing about it is exhilarating.
I wish I’d had this arsenal of software when I was a frustrated dyslexic teenager, but that’s another blog for tomorrow.
