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A couple of weeks ago, Leo at Zen Habits ran an Ask Me Anything You Want post that yielded tons of great questions and answers. His reply to Question #60 (he answered over 100 questions in all!) really caught my attention because it has to do with personal change:
60. JEMi asked: “Would you say when you started Zen Habits it contributed to a personal change (since you are focusing on self improvement) and if so, how have you kept up the positive “momentum” so to speak - in your own life as well as what’s reflected on the charming ZenHabits :)”
Great question! Definitely, starting this blog has changed my life in so many ways. I thank all of you for that.
One way is that it made me realize that I can do something I love and make a living at it. That’s been tremendous for me. Another is that I’ve found the power of encouragement from all of you, and that feeds me to keep going and to improve.
I’ve used these lessons in many ways since then, fueling my drive to be able to quit my day job, to pursue a book deal, to use my sister as a workout partner where we encourage each other to continue our running and healthy eating and to continually improve.
I didn’t get a chance to ask, Leo (I was late to the party), but I have a strong suspicion that he had no idea that starting a blog would be such a powerful force for change in his own life. Over the course of two years Leo has gained a huge following and garnered enough attention to be able to quit his day job and become a full-time writer. This is a huge and very rapid transformation.
How did Leo do it? Read along for my theory:
Public Accountability Leo is an A-list blogger, but even before he grew his blog to the large audience he now enjoys, he was publicly writing about his personal changes, both on his own blog and through numerous guest posts. Even though Leo lives in Guam and not too many readers of his blog will ever have the chance to catch him sneaking a cigarette or some chicken fingers, I’m sure that internally he created a lot of pressure on himself to continue his positive changes. At the very least, I’m sure his friends and family read his blog!
My thanks to Evan Hadkins for this guest post. Evan is a blogger with a major interest in health, broadly defined - including the physical, emotional, mental, spiritual and social aspects of our lives. He concentrates on writing about simple things we can do to improve our health. His blog is www.wellbeingandhealth.net. He enjoys suggestions for topics and how to improve the blog as well as reading the comments on his posts.
Sometimes it all gets too much. And there are things we can do. What we do will depend on how the complication came about. To make our life less complicated or handle the complications better may mean changing the situation, changing what we do; or even a bit of both.
Changing Ourselves
1. It may be because we have said yes to too many things. And we usually say yes to too many things for good reason. Reasons like: we don’t want to offend people, others have been kind to us, we want to be kind to others. All good reasons. And the result can be that we simply have too much to do. As long as we keep saying yes we will keep having too much to do and all the organization in the world won’t help.
If this is the reason for our complicated life then we need to learn new behavior: saying no. It is possible to say ‘no’ graciously. It may be that you know someone who can do this; they would probably be happy to talk about how they do it (it is very likely that they have had to learn how to do it - it doesn’t come naturally to many of us). It may be that you need to find little things to try out. Saying no to little things that don’t matter much, and with people who you think won’t mind. (If you had an upbringing where saying no was genuinely dangerous you may need to enlist the help of a counselor.) And it is possible to learn that you are as valuable as others (no more, no less). That considering others is important - and so is considering ourselves.
2. Competing Desires. It may be that our life is complicated because we want things that, at first look at least, seem incompatible. We want fun and peace, we want children and a career, we want to help others and have time for ourselves. Then there are qualities in ourselves that we desire: to be strong and vulnerable, to be kind and assertive, to be calm and joyous.
If we fight with ourselves we lose - even if we ‘win’. With competing desires it is important to listen to both desires: they are both part of us. Usually what they both want is quite healthy (though the way this is expressed may not be). Our anger may be expressed poorly but the desire to have time to ourselves can be healthy. We may manipulate with sadness but our desire for sympathy from a good friend can be entirely appropriate.
There are a couple of approaches when we have competing desires.
Firstly, some competing desires can be compatible: being both strong and vulnerable is a soft and flexible strength, combining kindness and assertiveness produces a gracious presence, calmness and joy together leads to an abiding elated calmness that bubbles along throughout our day (if not absolutely every day at least most days). The insight required is to get beyond the behavior to what is wanted, the need to be met. Once you can get to the needs you will usually find that they are compatible.
One is a kind of time tabling (as the wise man said: there is a time for everything under heaven). This means having enough time for our work and enough time for recreation too. Having the time for contemplation as well as action. This means finding our own flow - and then gradually finding ways to organize our lives in accord with our own rhythm - which brings us to changing the situation.
Dealing With the Situation
3. It may be because the situation we are in has too many things to juggle. Here all the advice about prioritizing and goal setting and scheduling comes into its own. A couple of tips.
Allow time for disasters. We can all too easily slip into thinking we are omnipotent, unconsciously. We don’t control everyone and everything in the world. So we need to allow time for all the other stuff that will probably come along and not fit our plans. If we find that we have allocated too much time for a task then a reward is in order.
You and your health are a priority. So much of the time our goals are about external accomplishments. Don’t forget that you count more than your achievements.
The goals and schedule are only as useful as the priorities. Take time to be clear about your priorities. It may be that you get the job done but find that it cost too much time away from friends and family. It may be that your friends and family really like how much you have done for them but your health has suffered. It is the priorities that are the priority.
4. It may be because we have let things get out of hand. This is really a variation on having too many things to juggle. It may require a revision of the goals or schedule. More seriously it may mean a need to look again at priorities. Was it that other things came along turned out to be more important? Was it that something unpredictable came up and we hadn’t allowed enough time for the unexpected. Perhaps we need to have the goals broken down into sub-goals so that they are manageable chunks. It helps me to have weekly tasks to move toward a goal. This will depend on what you need to achieve and the kind of work involved. For me a week is specific enough to know what I have to get done and enough flexibility to handle what comes up. For others it will need to be daily or even less. For others with different goals a year may be the appropriate time period.
5. It may be because we don’t have the ability or resources to get the outcome we want. This is especially a problem, such as employment, when we have been assigned a task by others. At worst, we can only find ways to provide relief and restoration for ourselves. We reward ourselves for coping with an impossible situation. (This can also apply to situations not given us by others - such as being a single parent.)
At best we may get the task re-designed or be able to enlist assistance.
In between we may be able to re-negotiate the schedule or some of the standards to be met.
If it is not a task assigned by others we may be simply able to drop it. If it was something we valued, then we may need to allow ourselves the time to be sad.
In summary when our lives get complicated there are simple things we can do:
Learning to say no.
Taking the time to listen to ourselves and find what we want and need.
Taking the time to know our real priorities.
Revising out goals and schedules to be more realistic.
Re-negotiating where we can.
Rewarding ourselves as often as we can: all of us cope with a complicated world - and most of the time we do it well. We deserve some acknowledgement for doing well - sometimes from ourselves most of all.
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Ok, I have to start this post with a confession. I LOVE Reality Television.
So, now that you’ve lost all respect for me, let me try to justify why long nights curled up on the couch with Survivor and the Amazing Race aren’t a complete and total waste of my life. You see, the best reality TV (or at least the stuff I like) always features some element of radical personal change.
Seem like a stretch? Bear with me for a minute.
One show I find really interesting in a voyeuristic way is called Wife Swap. And no, it isn’t about ’70s key parties The premise of the show is that two wives/moms from two very different families exchange places for two weeks. For the first week, they must duplicate the other mom’s routines. During the second week, they get to make “rules” that their temporary family has to follow.
Of course the show goes for maximum conflict, so the families are extremely different from one another. A vegan mom might be placed with a cattle ranching family, for instance. Or even better, a devout Evangelical Christian mom might have to live with a pagan family.
This is all highly amusing, but I am often pleasantly surpised by the amount of real change that seems to occur in the families that go through this experience. At the beginning of the show, these families are always extremely rigid. They have a routine that seems to never differ and their personal roles in their families are absolute. Then of course they go through a traumatic experience with people that they consider freaks who live in a totally unacceptable manner. By the end of the show they have been forced to try many new things that they are determined to resist - but often find interesting.
The last few minutes of the show features some follow-up with both of the families to see if any of the experimental changes have taken hold in their lives. Quite often, the families have found some sort of middle ground between the way they were and the way the swapped mom asked them to live. Most of the families have seemed happy about the change.
So, without actually going on television and exposing your weird habits for all the world to see, what can we you take away from Wife Swap?
Be open to new experiences. As I said above, many of the family members put a ton of energy into resisting the new “rules” when they come up. By the end of the week, they generally find that it’s not that bad and some of the changes are actually improvements on the ways they were living.
Realize that you can learn from anyone - no matter how weird Okay, reality TV shows feature extreme personalities (check out the video below to see what I mean). The interesting thing is, they all manage to make valid points. There is definitely a need to separate the wheat from the chaff here, but we might all be a bit happier if we got in touch with our crazy bag-lady side a little more!
Model yourself after the kids. The youngest children on these shows generally adapt the quickest and enjoy themselves the most. They haven’t had a chance to become set in their ways or cling to one set of habits over another. The parents my be fighting like cats and dogs even after two weeks together, but the kids seem to get over themselves within a couple of days.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this journey into Reality TV land. Perhaps you have learned a lesson or two from other people’s very public bad examples. If so, please share in the comments.
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Adaptive capacity refers to the ability of any system to respond to change and return to a state of balance. I first heard of this concept in relation to the nonprofit sector in the United States. However, it can be applied to ecological systems, any type of organization, and even individuals.
An example of adaptive capacity in an ecological system would be of a river valley experiencing heavy rainfall. For a time the water level in the river will be much higher than normal. Most of the time the river basin will absorb the water fairly quickly and the water level will return to normal within a day or two. However, if the volume of rain exceeds the river basin’s capacity, the river will flood.
Change Fatigue When an organization or an individual has an excessive amount of change in a short period of time, something has to give. To build on my previous analogy, the system will “flood” or break down in some way. For an organization the “flood” may take the form of communication breakdowns, high turnover, and low productivity. For an individual it could be extreme stress, relationship problems, or even physical and mental health issues.
These symptoms of change fatigue occur because the system isn’t strong and flexible enough to adapt.
Building Adaptive Capacity
It is possible to build adaptive capacity in and organization in much the same way as it is possible to build muscles in a human body - through regular, sustained exercise. When an organization is proactively engaged in steady, small changes, it will be much better positioned to handle external changes when they come up.
Here is just a small sampling of exercises that can build adaptive capacity.
Scenario Planning. An in-depth look at scenario planning requires its own post. For the time being it is enough to know that the process involves a team envisioning possible futures and detailing plans for those futures. The idea is to have possible actions for many situations, so that the organization is prepared for as many outcomes as possible.
Cross Training. Many organizations are running so lean now that they don’t have adequate “bench strength” in the case of a team member absence. Cross training is definitely helpful during times like flu season. However, it’s also an advantage to have cross-trained members so that the organization has multiple perspectives to adapt and improve processes. One person performing the same job for years can become inflexible or run out of ideas for making changes. Multiple perspectives of the same job can build the capacity for adaptation and continuous improvements.
“State of the Industry” Meetings. Many fields, such as real estate, have annual, local forecast meetings. These meetings allow members of that profession to get together and discuss expert projections and their own hunches of the coming year. If you don’t work in one of these fields, you can still have your own information exchange sessions with other members of your organization. Assign everyone a sub-topic to research and discuss the findings among your team or the whole organization. In rapidly changing fields, a quarterly meeting might be even better.
Change is Easier When You Know What’s Coming
In many ways, building adaptive capacity is a lot like building your crystal ball gazing skills. It’s pretty hard to adapt to circumstances that you just couldn’t see coming. In fact, we usually call those events “crises” or sometimes “acts of terrorism!” The good news is that most change follows fairly predictable patterns. Through careful study and information exchange, most organizations in most fields will be able to get the big things right.
These are ideas that I’ve picked up through my studies and experiences within a few types of organizations. If you’ve had different experiences, or tips for building adaptive capacity, please share those in the comments below.
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This is the time of year when we all sit around and think about ways that we can torture ourselves over the next twelve months in the hope that our suffering, guilt, pain and knee injuries can somehow leave us better in December than we are today. The impetus for this cycle usually begins with a New Year’s Resolution, but it could also be called a Goal. In this post, I’ll argue that traditional goals aren’t the only path to a happy and rewarding life.
S.M.A.R.T. is No Way to Go Through Life, Son
All the traditional advice about self improvement and goal setting teaches that we should set goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound (S.M.A.R.T.) to be optimally successful. In this line a thinking, it’s bad to have a resolution to be more physically fit this year. A great resolution would be, “I want to complete a 5K running race in under 25 minutes by June this year.”
This is all well and good for things that are simple in concept and easy to quantify, but I think this way of formulating goals really misses out on a key point: Humans aren’t good at figuring out what specific actions will make them happy.
I’m sure if you think about it hard enough, you can come up with the name of a person that you know who set very specific goals, worked toward them relentlessly, achieved those goals, and is completely and utterly miserable because of it. In my experience, there’s one in every family (Hi, cuz)
It seems to me that we are pretty good at figuring out what Feels Good, but not at identifying the actions that will get us to those feelings. When we become hell-bent on their being One Best Way to achieve our goals, we become blind to other paths and choices that may be more efficient, pleasurable or accessible.
That’s why we need to be more nimble in our planning.
The Compass Approach
Being nimble is the whole idea behind the Compass, Not a Map approach to life planning. By choosing a direction to travel in, but not a specific path to take, you leave many options open and have the ability to adapt as circumstances shift around you.
For example, you may decide that you want to become an expert in Information Technology. At this point in time, one programming language may be preeminent in your chosen field, but we all know that code comes and goes. As you work in the direction of your dream, you can choose the specific tools and routes that are best suited to the moment without locking yourself into one confined area.
By using the Compass Approach, you keep your eyes open to the world and are better able to accept opportunities as they come. You are also able to recognize when a slight shift in direction might actually be the crooked path that is faster than the straight line.
An Example From My Life
Just two days ago, I was writing about my image for the future year and a specific step that I want to take this month to get closer to that image. What I didn’t write about was several more steps that I charted out on a long car ride. Without even realizing it, I had locked myself into a pretty rigid schedule for the next month. All of the activities that I pre-selected were good and helpful, but they didn’t leave me any room to be nimble.
Well, another opportunity has presented itself and I’ve had to readjust my plans. This is a move that has the potential to move me along in the direction of adding more value to my blog, but it does so in a different way than I had envisioned. I don’t think it will affect my Sunday afternoon planning sessions, but it will probably interfere with some of the other activities I sketched out, so they will have to go if necessary.
Isn’t it great how life teaches us exactly what we need to learn?
Have you ever had the opportunity to learn to be nimble because life brought you new opportunities? Take a moment to share your story in the comments.
How did Leo do it? Read along for my theory: 
The premise of the show is that two wives/moms from two very different families exchange places for two weeks. For the first week, they must duplicate the other mom’s routines. During the second week, they get to make “rules” that their temporary family has to follow.
Okay, reality TV shows feature extreme personalities (check out the video below to see what I mean). The interesting thing is, they all manage to make valid points. There is definitely a need to separate the wheat from the chaff here, but we might all be a bit happier if we got in touch with our crazy bag-lady side a little more!
