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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.
There is a saying, “Fake it till you make it,” that I have heard often in life. It might be advice in a book about success or justification from someone acting abnormally.
I have struggled with this saying because of the fact that it can be incredibly helpful to “fake it till you make it.” But at times this simply becomes an excuse for acting against your own values and beliefs.
Read MoreThere are moments that mean more than others when we are trying to improve and reach a goal. But many improvement strategies ignore them and assume every minute is the same.
It could be the moment our friend walks in our dorm to see if we want to hang out that leads us away from studying for our upcoming final. It could be driving home from work when we decide we are too tired to stop at the gym.
Read MoreWe can all look at successful people with envy and wish we could have the success that they enjoyed in their area of focus. Maybe we see someone at our company that has an extremely large salary and think “I wish I made that much!”
Or maybe we see a famous athlete and wish we had the ability to succeed at the pro level and play among the elite. Maybe we see our personal trainer and wish we had abs like he or she has.
Read MoreOur world is filled with external stimuli. All day long we are interacting with other people, other situations, other places etc.
This makes it easy to give too much control to external sources. We start to think we are powerless and it is up to someone or something else to decide what happens.
Read MoreUsing systems to manipulate our own habits in order to get better is a great way to succeed in almost any area. We can use it to help our finances, health, education, career etc.
The reason is simple. The systems and habits approach takes advantage of the automatic response that our mind and body utilize to keep doing things that it feels are working.
Read MoreWhen you utilize the systems and habits approach to improvement, you likely don’t see everything clearly in front of you when you start. Some elements seem easy some seem hard and some seem impossible.
When I first started to improve a few areas of my life I had a very vague idea of where it would lead. I always struggled with having a very clear vision despite reading over and over how important it is to have this vision in the early stages of goal setting.
Read MoreUsing the systems and habits approach to improvement, we have to be willing to try different, new tactics in order to succeed. We can’t just keep doing what we currently do; otherwise we end up with exactly what we have.
But change can be scary. We are wired to find the dangers first, and then the opportunities second, and only if no danger is present.
Read MoreThere is a false belief that only those people with extreme issues and problems should focus on improvement. I have given many speeches about improvement and reaching goals and I have noticed that many people immediately assume that everyone else needs to listen to the message, but not them.
The reason is simple. It is much easier to see weaknesses in others than in our selves. Most self-improvement focuses on ways to improve upon weaknesses. But there is more than can be gained from self-improvement. We can use it to also grow our strengths.
Read MoreWe all know what bad habits are. They are smoking, drinking, eating too much, biting our nails etc.
But these aren’t the habits that we use in the systems and habits approach to improvement. The habits that are important to leverage in order to improve are often much more subtle.
Read MoreWhenever we are manipulating a habit or system, we want to find small things to improve. But it can be tricky to know what to actually do. That is where the systems thinking concept of leverage is important.
Points of leverage in a system are the parts of the system where a small action produces a large outcome. It could be that we leverage time by doing something over and over again until it starts to become a habit. Or it could be to focus on key times when decisions and actions create the most important outcomes.
Read MoreIn a lot of motivational and self-help books the authors explain that in order to be accountable for your goals, you have to share them with others.
The idea is that if others are watching then you are more likely to actually do it. And when you struggle, others are more likely to help you keep moving.
Read MoreToo often when we want to change something in our lives to get better, we assume that the answer is that we just have to be tougher. We have to fight against the urges that we know lead us in the wrong direction.
We have to focus. We have to be strong. In short, we have to rely on our willpower in order to succeed and reach our goal.
Read MoreWhen it comes to setting goals and trying to get better, most of us inherently gravitate towards effort. We think we just need to put forth more effort in order to succeed.
Effort is important. Without at least some effort any attempt at improvement will likely fail. But because most people only know effort-based execution, they can’t see the horrible limitations that are imposed if all we can do is give more effort.
Read MoreFor the latest version of this article, click here.
Read MoreOur ability to use systems thinking to see the whole is important. Instead of relying on linear thinking and only seeing small sections of the whole system, we can envision the interrelationships, patterns, structures and mental models.
But why is it that linear thinking tends to guide us towards only a small snapshot of the whole? Why does it become difficult to see the full picture?
Read MoreWe all know the feeling. We have some big problem weighing on us. Any moment that we aren’t distracted by something else we think about it.
We worry, we stress, and we want so desperately for this problem to go away. We focus so much on wanting the problem to be gone that we try every trick in the book to relieve the stress on our minds.
Read MoreI read a lot of articles on systems thinking and one thing that I notice is that many times they focus too much on the negative. They point to a large system and show how the structures reinforce something bad or we can never improve as a society because of too much linear thinking.
Systems thinkers become expert critics of everyone and everything else around them. Sometimes they use it to be smarter than everyone they talk to.
Read MorePeter Senge talks about a concept called dynamic complexity in his book, The Fifth Discipline. He says that the world is becoming more and more complex every day.
Most of understand this from the standpoint of detail complexity. This is the complexity around the specifics of an issue and around the details.
Read MoreCreating a new system can be great way to try to improve and change something. By creating a new system to address a problem we are tackling the problem in a very direct and purposeful way.
But creating a new system can be extremely difficult. There is no certainty that the new system will work and no way to know exactly how to structure it.
Read MoreBlaming others for our problems is incredibly easy. In almost every conceivable scenario we find a way to shift some blame towards something external.
But blaming something “external” doesn’t make sense from a systems thinking standpoint. In linear thinking it does because the way the problem is framed, but it doesn’t make sense when look at the full system.
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