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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.
We all go through periods where things are confusing. We find ourselves stuck and don’t know what to do in order to get past some obstacle or problem in our lives.
These times are important because what we decide to do will have reverberations in other areas of our life. But we also are usually full of anxiety and stress, which can cloud our thinking.
Read MoreMost people overlook the little things in life. They see a major goal or dream of theirs and assume that it is too big to do anything to try and achieve it.
So they don’t do anything productive towards that goal. It just sits there in their mind. Sometimes it sits for years; sometimes it sits for their entire life.
Read MoreWhen you get to a point in life where you realize you want better than what you have, you have to make a decision. The decision before you is to start doing something or to justify not doing something.
Plenty of us get to this decision point and freeze. We let fear jump in and grab onto real obstacles to create something too big to overcome. It is this combination of real challenges combined with our emotional response of fear that stops most people from working to improve their life.
Read MoreWhen you start out using the systems and habits approach to improvement you may just have a single goal that you are trying to reach. You may have one area that demands change so you turn to this approach to help you get there.
But one of the benefits of using this approach is that you start to simplify many aspects of your life. Life is complicated and it can quickly and easily get to a point where you don’t know who you are because you want to be too much.
Read MoreLinear thinking is when we think in terms of two factors. We think of before and after, start and finish, cause and effect. But linear thinking strips out important elements of the system in order to achieve its simplicity.
The simplistic view might seem to make sense but often when it gets applied to “the real world” it doesn’t behave the way we expect. Instead we find that factors that we didn’t anticipate become the factors crafting the change or lack of change.
Read MoreStudying systems thinking provides insight into areas of life that often seen confusing or unclear. They give a better understanding of what is really going on.
One element of systems thinking is the feedback loop. Feedback loops come in many variations but simply put, feedback loops take outputs from the system and then put them back into the system as inputs.
Read MoreWe all have tendencies to think and behave in similar ways in similar situations. It could be that we always tend to act in a certain way in social situations or in relationships or when stress builds up.
Tendencies are natural and represent the systems and habits we have already developed and ingrained in our daily thoughts and actions. It is only when we have the tendency to do something detrimental to our growth and improvement that we notice these tendencies.
Read MoreThe quick fix has been around forever in one form or another and we all experience the attraction to the quick fix from time to time.
It could be at work to overcome a problem that comes up and we see an easy shortcut around the problem. It could be that we want to make more money and get sucked into a multilevel marketing program without fully investigating the products you sign on to sell. It could simply be that a problem surfaces and we see a quick way to relieve the symptoms of the problem.
Read MoreSystems are all around us. Everything we see, interact with, think about etc. is part of multiple systems.
In fact, we are systems. The human body is a system made up of many systems. And we create systems and are impacted by systems around us.
Read MoreBeing proactive is a buzzword that goes around from time to time. It usually comes up when someone thinks that a person is just sitting around waiting for problems to surface before they take action.
Being proactive usually aligns with working hard and getting in front of problems. But too often it just becomes another cliché that can be used whenever someone wants to criticize another person.
Read MoreOne of the obstacles for someone working to try and improve to reach a goal is burnout. Burnout happens when you use up energy and motivation to make things happen but then slowly start having less and less energy and motivation to keep going.
Many times this happens to me when I am using high energy but seeing a lower return on the investment of my time and effort. I assume the harder I work the more I will get in return or the further along the journey I will get.
Read MoreAll of us are influenced by many factors. Everything we do has more to it than we probably realize.
Take your morning routine. Yes you wake up, do what you have to do to get ready for work or school and then start your day.
Read MoreKnowing yourself is important. We have to learn about our strengths and weaknesses and our tendencies to act in specific scenarios.
Some people tend to hesitate before they jump into something. They know they need to do something so they plan and plan. They evaluate. They think about the problem at a high level.
Read MoreContinuous improvement is the opposite of change for the sake of change yet many people confuse the two. They assume constant flux and change is the same as continuously improving upon a process, but it most certainly isn’t the same.
In a business environment this could be similar to saying that every time a company has to create a motor for a car they try something different. This is change for the sake of change. Continuous improvement is to develop a standard process and look to constantly evaluate the process to see if there are better ways. Then we test those ways and if they do result in a better process, we standardize that.
Read MoreWe all use habits and reflexes throughout our daily lives. We take a behavior or a thought and we produce that behavior or thought over and over again.
But most people have no idea that this happens. Instead they focus so heavily on events that they miss the patterns they create. In effect they create powerful underlying reflexes that determine their life, yet they are distracted by the one-offs in life and they don’t even realize it. This leaves them feeling powerless when they have, in fact, incredible power to create the patterns that they choose.
Read MoreYesterday I read an article online about employee disengagement. Some researchers searched for reasons why employees are disengaged at work.
They interviewed workers all over the world and then summarized their findings. They said employees feel undervalued. They said employees want credit when they do a good job instead of management jumping all over mistakes but ignoring successes.
Read MoreEveryone looks at the world a little differently. Our beliefs, experiences, and upbringings all play a role in how we view the world.
Some may view the world as being led by an invisible force. They envision a person up above making all decisions. A traffic light turns red right as we approach it and this deity must be the reason. We get a good grade on a test in school and it must be due to him or her.
Read MoreIn business we often form multilevel systems to manage the operations of the business. A sales person at a retail store is responsible for doing the work, in this case selling the product. They spend all of their time trying to get customers to buy the products that the business sells.
A level above the sales person is the store manager. They oversee multiple sales people to make sure that they address underperforming sales people and coach them up. They make sure that the team is performing at an optimal level and doing what they can to motivate employees and teach them how to be successful at doing the job.
Read MoreWhen we all proceed through life, we are building structures in our lives that we are often unaware of. We make decisions that we barely think about and then make those decisions over and over again.
Those decisions start to form patterns. These patterns signal a structure that is in place that makes it more likely to keep following the pattern rather than break free from it.
Read MoreUtilizing the systems and habits approach to improvement we tend to focus much of our energy on the next step in the process. We have a vision of the end result but our focus remains on the next step in the journey, not the destination.
This is different from a lot of improvement strategies. More often you will hear about vision boards and creating SMART goals that encapsulate what it is you hope to achieve.
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