New Year / New Pursuits and Habits

Welcome back. Long-time followers may have noted that I missed last week for the first time in over a year. I didn't have a new post ready to go before Christmas week, and I vowed to myself to unplug and be totally present with my family while we were traveling over Christmas week on vacation. The result: We had an incredible time, I am rejuvenated, and I have new ideas and pursuits lined up for the new year that I had time to contemplate while I was out.

In fact, I want to let you know with this post that you should not expect a weekly blog post from me this year because I'm pursuing a project that's going to require the majority of my attention. Let me give you a hint - it has to do with my #1 pastime - sailing! For those of you who know me well, you may understand, but I will post irregularly this year when the spirit moves me to reach out and give you an update on some new thing that I'm learning that I want to share.

I want to be clear about the fact that I'm not going to be posting every week for those of you who have come to expect a weekly thought-provoking post from this blog. However, stay tuned for occasional posts and for updates on my currently top-secret project. I really appreciate and am grateful for YOU and for all the feedback you have provided to me over the past year on the things that I'm working on to share with the world.

Atomic Habits - Recommending New Year's Reading!

In that vein, let me leave you with something that I'm recommending you check out - a book called Atomic Habits by James Clear. This book was recently recommended to me by my very good friend Josh Andrews, and it's awesome! It's a great read to start out your year. I've talked in the past about the compounding effect of doing little things consistently over time and recommended a few other books in that regard, but James really lights the way and gives a process for how to build successful habits. I highly encourage you to check it out if that's something that you've been struggling with.

Some of the key concepts that he puts out there:

1. Ask yourself, "Who do I want to become?" whatever that is, whether it's you want to become thinner, you want to become a writer, you want to become a reader, you want to become a manager, whatever it is that you want to become, then get clear on that first.
2. Then ask, "What habits do I need to cultivate to be that person?" An example would be if you want to be thinner, then cultivate exercise and diet habits, of course. That's the most common one that people work on in the new year.
3. James also recommends building a habit scorecard where you look at all your current habits and rate them as positive, negative, or neutral. Obviously, the negative ones you want to get rid of. How do you get rid of those? He recommends a couple of things. I'm not going to go over everything in the book, but a few of the key points are:
   1. Building a habit intention plan, which is basically focused around time and place. For example, I'm going to exercise at this time on these days or every day at this place, writing that intention down, and being clear about how you intend to tackle building that new habit.
   2. Habit stacking, which is inserting a new habit on top of an existing habit. Let's say you get up every morning and make coffee. Maybe that's okay but you want to use your coffee to trigger you to go do some reading if that's a habit that you want to build. When I have coffee, I read for half an hour or whatever it is that you want to create.
   3. Positive environmental cues. I very much believe in this. If you see my office, it's filled with sailboats. Those are environmental cues to remind me to get out there and do what I love, which is sailing.

Pick up this recommended read, get your habit plans organized for 2019, and stay tuned for what's next on this blog and what's up with my top-secret project and what's going to be going forward in 2019 for becoming powerful beyond measure. Thanks so much. Have a great week!