Tag Archives: habits

Blank Canvas

Leave a reply

It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve created something, there are times the blank canvas or the blank page is an exciting thing to look at, and other times when it is the scariest.

It amazes me how writing daily can be a fully inspiring experience: Today I get to create something novel, to share my view of the world!

And writing daily can also be overwhelmingly challenging: Start an idea… delete. Start another idea… delete. ‘Why do I even bother?’

I know the answer. If I don’t bother, I won’t write… at all. I’ll have great intentions, but intentions without commitment leads to inaction. Skip a day, and I create an excuse to skip another day. And another. And another.

Daily-Ink. Weekly-Ink. Occasional-Ink. Think-but-no-Ink.

The commitment involves hard days and easy days. Like I’ve said in reference to regular exercise, it’s the hard days that matter most. It’s easy to work out when you want to. It’s easy to write when the ideas flow. It’s the days when it’s challenging, when energy levels are low, or inspiration is lacking, that make the habit worthwhile. Because without persevering on the tough days, the tough days become excused days… and then the excuses keep coming.

The days when the blank canvas is daunting are the days when practicing your art are most important. The problem with ‘waiting for inspiration‘ is that waiting is not creating. Waiting is not really doing anything.

The days when the blank canvas is daunting are the days when you decide if you are a creator or a wanna-be creator: An artist, a poet, an athlete, a writer, or a procrastinator. The blank canvas holds a world of potential. But potential stays latent without effort. Either potential is developed or it is wasted.

Never walk away from a blank canvas. Create, don’t wait. Start, don’t postpone. Inspiration is created through action, and the longer you wait, the more ominous the blank canvas becomes.

Breaking Bland

Leave a reply

I don’t know what I’ll be doing today after work, but it won’t be what I’ve done the past couple days. For two days now I’ve come home, sat on the couch, and only really got up to eat leftovers and go back to the couch… and then to bed.

It’s easy. It’s lazy. It’s unproductive. And ultimately it’s unsatisfying.

It’s ok to do for a couple days, but I can’t let myself just default to this daily. Sometimes it takes intention to change. It takes awareness and also effort. A plan helps too, but honestly I don’t have one right now. That will have to change before I get home. If it doesn’t change I’ll probably choose the bland option of doing nothing much again.

~

Breaking Bland

Breaking a bland routine is to thrive, to feel alive, rather than satisfactorily survive.

It doesn’t need to be profound, exciting, or fun. It just needs to be an evening where I don’t get home from work and think, “I’m done!”

A walk, a talk, a task with a goal will do. A chore or ‘to do’ list item will suffice too. Perhaps a recipe with flavours that are new. A book, a podcast, a meditation, a conversation with you.

The experience need not be perfect, this I understand. I just want to choose something that is more than bland.

I blew my streak

Leave a reply

I started Wordle with a perfect attempt, but it was a cheat. My daughter was trying to solve one and I looked at the 3 attempts she had and declared that I knew the answer. She said, “Don’t tell me”, so I went to the puzzle and tried the answer, and it was right. What I didn’t know was that when I started to play a while later that this first attempt would show up in my game history. So while I have one correct first-guess attempt on my stats, it’s not real.

What was real until today was that I was just days away from a year-long streak… and I blew it!

I lost today after a 361 day streak:

I share my Wordle daily in a couple WhatsApp chats, one with my Mom, sisters, nieces and nephew, and one with a couple friends in Toronto. I have one friend that I share other puzzles with and we occasionally share Wordle, but usually other games. I don’t share on social media, and so for some people this sad post will be the first indication of my chronic habit of playing this puzzle.

Tomorrow I’ll start a new streak. I have a weekday morning ritual: Wordle, Daily-Ink blog post, meditation, 20 minute cardio, stretch, and then a quick workout of at least on body part before showering for work. I go off script on weekends, but still start with Wordle. It’s fun, it gets my brain going, and it connects me to family and friends on WhatsApp.

But I’m quite disappointed this morning that I didn’t get to a full year streak. Hopefully I’ll share better news one year from tomorrow! #Optimism

_____

Spoiler alert, here is my failed attempt for Wordle #1,037 (click here to see it).

Time limits

Leave a reply

I’ve written quite a bit about creating good habits and using time well. It’s a focus of mine because I find my work day gets absorbed in a whirlwind of busyness and interruptions, and I get home after a long day, exhausted. So using time well matters, and there is always room for improvement.

But time has limits. Time is limited.

These are a few things I’d like to do if I had the time:

  • Podcast – I really enjoy listening to podcasts, and I also enjoy making them. But my last one was almost 4 years ago, and I find editing them time consuming and they are a lot of work for one person.
  • School visits – I would love to travel to innovate schools and learn about them.
  • Connecting- I’d love to spend more time with friends.
  • Video editing – I have a personal video project I’m doing for students at my school and a fun video project I’m doing with my uncle and they both require a fair bit of editing time.
  • Writing – I have 3 book ideas, but it’s hard for me to get sustained writing time. I’ve considered stopping my Daily-Ink and using this time to write other things, but I don’t consistently spend a lot of time writing these and it’s harder to continue an idea for short bursts daily than to pick daily short topics.
  • Traveling – it’s a big world and I’ve seen very little of it.

I could go on but I think I’ve made my point. It doesn’t matter how efficient I get, I will still wish I had more time to do the things I’m passionate about, the things I’m interested in doing… if only I had the time.

The trick isn’t to try to get everything I want to do done. The trick is to create opportunities to do some of these things, and to commit to them fully and in a way that I enjoy doing them without beating myself up for not doing all of them. It’s about not wasting time being inefficient or lazy, but also not running myself ragged and feeling like I’m rushing through time, not getting enough done.

Yes time is limited. And so it is to be enjoyed and not spent worried about what isn’t done, or what still needs to get done. Time is not just limited, it’s also precious.

Habit versus motivation

2 Replies

It’s so blatantly clear to me now how good habits require less motivation. On any given week day I wake up and I just start my routine: Wordle -> blog post -> mediation -> cardio -> stretch -> strength set -> shower. My habits are stacked, and I just have to start solving the daily Wordle puzzle and the rest of my routine effortlessly falls into place. No thinking, no effort, no motivation needed.

But I do things differently on weekends and here I am at 5:30pm writing my blog post, and I am needing to motivate myself to get anything else done. Motivation is hard. Stacked habits are easy.

Now, I just need to figure out how to stack these things on my weekends, because starting this routine when I should be thinking about dinner sucks.

Alarm set for a bedtime meditation, and off to the treadmill I go.

Positive Peer Pressure

Leave a reply

I think part of growing up involves being peer pressured into doing something stupid. It doesn’t have to be big and life-altering. It can be as simple as being pressured by friends to ask someone you like out, but you knew all along you were going to face rejection. Or you were pressured to go first off of a giant toboggan ramp you and your friends built on an icy day. The dumbest things I was peer pressured into are not going to make it into a list of things I plan on sharing, so the above examples are going to have to do.

When you get into adulthood peer pressure doesn’t have as strong a hold on you, and so in most cases you really aren’t going to be pressured into doing something stupid, or something you really don’t want to do. But what about things you do want to do? I think here we have amazing opportunities to use peer pressure to our advantage.

A perfect example is that I never would have done 2,000 pushups in February without my buddy Dave challenging me. And we held each other accountable, checking in with progress and reminders. Another great example is a spotter in the gym. Done well, spotting isn’t just about safety, it’s also about encouragement and motivation. I know that I push myself much harder when I’ve got a workout buddy telling me to push one more rep out when I want to just give up and end the set.

We can really use positive peer pressure to our advantage. Want to build a powerful habit? Do it with a friend or have your friends hold you accountable. Want to try something for the first time? A friend or life partner’s encouragement is invaluable. Increase the pressure when things don’t go as well, or there is a slip, and praise the behavior when things are going well.

As a kid, peer pressure is usually something to avoid. But as an adult it’s something to seek out… as long as the outcome is positive.

2,000 pushups in February

1 Reply

It started as a challenge from a friend. I didn’t get started until February 3rd. So I did some math, and realized that 80 pushups a day for 25 days would get me to 2,000.

Here are my daily sets, tracked for the month, including two rest days, since there were still 27 days left to go:

2,000 pushups sounds like a lot. 80 a day isn’t necessarily fun. 80 in one set, that really wasn’t fun. But 80 in a day is totally achievable. How many things seem insurmountable, but really aren’t if we just break them down into smaller, attainable chunks?

Habits and goals

Leave a reply

I know setting goals works. I have a few fitness goals and they inspire me to work harder. But I’ve never really been someone who sets a lot of goals and I am not overly goal driven. I can remember teaching students SMART Goals and watching them create goals that I just knew they wouldn’t hit… SMART or not.

Habits are what get you to your goals. Habits are the repeated patterns that lead you to improvements. Goals are just lofty ideas until you build systems and habits that move you towards them.

A career goal doesn’t happen if you haven’t built solid habits and routines to consistently do your current job well.

A diet weight is a goal you want to hit. A habit of regular exercise and a habit of eating well are what get you there.

Goals are important, but it’s the habits you create that get you to those goals.

Maintain and Sustain

Leave a reply

If you asked me, before today, I’d say that I was slumping with respect to my daily workouts. But what does that really mean? For many, slumping would mean that I’ve ‘fallen off the wagon’, or that I’ve stopped my habits and routines and need to get back into them. That’s not the case. I’ve only missed 2 workouts out of the first 32 days of 2024. That’s not a slump, that’s a great habit. One of those 2 days was a choice, the other was an unexpected day trip to the island, and I was either with people or traveling from 6:15am to after 11pm. So why was I thinking I was slumping?

Well, even though I’ve been pushing myself on my daily 20 minute cardio, my weights workouts have been tough. I tend to only do one muscle group every day, and so it’s not like I’m in my home gym for a long time. I’m usually in and out in less than 45 minutes, including my cardio and 10 minutes of stretching. So, basically I’m talking about 3 sets of 1 exercise, sometimes a bit more, but not much more. And this one part of my workout has been, well, ‘slumpy’. Normally I can get to my last few reps and really push hard. I can focus and push and grunt my way past the mental pressure to stop, and eek out reps that are unpleasant but very beneficial for growth and/or increases in strength. Recently I just don’t have what it takes to get those last few reps out, and I stop when I should be pushing through… that’s my slump, and it has been a challenge since the Christmas holidays.

The reframe for this, after talking to my buddy after our Saturday morning Crunch walk,  is that this is not a slump. He framed it as ‘the space between’. That didn’t work for me, because I think of those between spaces as sacred times that are productive. Still, I understood the message he was sharing, that I was beating myself up about not making gains, when I was still committed and showing up! I’m not running a sprint, I’m working on perseverance and the long game, and so 30/32 days so far this year is better than the start of any year so far. That’s not a slump.

We live our lives with expectations of always improving. The whole 1% better every day, fake it ’till you make it, push, persevere, strive, and even ‘try-try again’, are all messages that we have to keep going and we have to be better than we were yesterday. These make for wonderful quotes on posters, but the expectation is unrealistic. What about the spaces in between the 1% improvements? What happens there really matters. Are we maintaining and sustaining our previous gains or are we slumping and letting things slide?

I’m not slumping, I’m just not making fast gains. I’m maintaining my positive habits, I’m sustaining my routine so that when I’m both physically and mentally ready I can and will be able to make small, incremental improvements. I’ll repeat that for emphasis: small, incremental improvements. I’m no longer that guy that went on holidays in March of 2018 and couldn’t see the strings on my bathing suit because of my belly paunch. I look better at 56 than I did at 36, (well maybe not my hairline, but everything else).

Right now I can’t seem to get that extra push at the end of my workout sets… the sets I do almost every single day, even when I don’t want to do them. I’m not slumping, I’m just in between gains, I am maintaining and sustaining awesome habits and more improvements are in my future. The more I let go of the expectations, while keeping the positive habits, the happier and healthier I’ll be!

Bad choices

Leave a reply

We all make bad choices. The collective ‘we’ do so in so many categories: Food, exercise, sleep, relationships, procrastination, gaming, social media, alcohol & drugs, even hygiene… Did you know that flossing your teeth can increase life expectancy?

The operative word in ‘bad choice’ is choice. Choice suggests that we have power, we have control, and we can make other choices. That’s easier said than done. It’s easy to skip a workout, to buy a fast food meal, to distract yourself with attention seeking media, and avoid doing something harder, even if it’s better for you.

For me, that’s where my healthy living calendar comes in handy. I can see my progress, and I can see when I’ve made a mistake. I can see the bad habit repeating itself… and I can actually stop it. I’ve missed two daily mediations so far this year. I’ve chosen to take just 2 days off from working out so far (which is still an average of more than 6 days a week). I’ve written every day. I don’t lie to my calendar, and my calendar doesn’t lie to me.

But I have other goals, other good habits that I want to implement, and a few bad habits I want to reduce. I’ve put the dental floss in front of my toothbrush, so I actually have to move it to brush my teeth, but I still don’t floss regularly. I’ve put a mid-week 30 minute time limit on TikTok… my version of watching TV, but I’ll often end up distracted watching similar videos on other platforms. Easy entertainment and also an easy distraction from some of the other things I want to do.

I still make some bad choices. I still distract myself with everything from watching videos to work emails. I still stay up way too late and still get up early to start my routine. I’m writing this late at night, past my bedtime goal. Like I wrote yesterday, the impediment becomes the way. But when I wrote that I made it sound like I had my shit together… I really got the point of the book, and I was living by the quote, “It’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking, than think your way into a new way of acting.”

However, while it’s easier to act your way, rather than think your way, into doing better things, it’s also easier to embrace the impediment: To live in the status quo and continue to make bad choices. I’m not beating myself up about it, I’m just admitting that it’s hard to change, it’s hard to make good choices when the bad ones are so easy and even attractive. Still, I’m winning a lot of battles. I write every day. I exercise and meditate almost every day. I feel fit, healthy, and even happy. Yeah, I’m still going to make some bad choices, I’m just not going to make really bad choices, and I’m not going to let the bad choices define me. The good things I’m doing are pretty good, and pretty good is a pretty good place to be.