Keep a pit bull in the kitchen! – Other weight-loss Funnies Here…

influences…

This series continues, the last blog on this was: What’s Our ‘Immunity To Change’?.

According to Kerry Patterson, who’s written other classics like Influencer: The Power to Change Anything, it’s six sources of influence that impact us even when don’t know it. And because we don’t know how they are impacting us on a constant basis, we’re unable to make changes that we desire. These sources of influence overrule sheer will-power all the time, which is why most of our New Year Resolutions languish soon enough!

Here they are, there are 3 ways we’re motivated and 3 areas in which we must learn the skills appropriately. I’ve listed some detail below to illustrate the example of wanting to exercise for better health and lose weight:

the steps

Once we understand and know how to leverage these ‘influences’ we can follow these steps to ‘Change Anything’:

1. Identify Crucial Moments: Under what conditions and circumstances are we tempted most not to exercise and to eat foods that we shouldn’t? Understanding these is crucial to our success.
2. Create Vital Behaviors: These are proven behaviors that work under trying circumstances. We must decide on these behaviors before temptation hits.
3. Engage all 6 sources of Influence: As above, have a plan and follow it.
4. Turn Bad Days Into Good Data: Each human is unique and any approach that we build is subject to improvement. When we fail in our efforts, let’s use that information to improve our plan and re-apply!

Daily Affirmation: Today I AM a change master!

Recommendation: Change Anything by Kerry Patterson

If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is what life is made up of. – Bruce Lee

what next?

So far on this journey we’ve covered the following topics:

1. How Do I Fix It?
2. Be Zen Do!
3. What Needs To Change?
4. How To Become More Aware

Change is easy when we know how to attempt it. Will-power alone doesn’t cut it. We need a guiding philosophy such as be~zen~do and then we need to know what must change. Increasing self awareness is the essential tool to that end.

Next we face two issues:

• How to make time to effect change in our lives? And…
• How to actually effect change, i.e. have the motivation and the skills to do it?

making time

Change is difficult, we often have wonderful excuses, conscious and unconscious ones that thwart our attempts to change. Once we know how to make time we’ll figure out why it’s so hard to change in the first place!

Once we know what we’re going to change, we’ll need to make time in our daily busy life. How do we do that? The way to do that is by streamlining all our daily tasks. If we can be organized about the rest of our life, we’ll make enough time during the day to spend on more worthwhile activities such as step 4 above…

Here’s a basic system that can be applied to our ‘worldly’ tasks! Divide all your work into 3 major projects:

• Have 3 projects. Must finish each project in less than 3-6 months. In this system you shouldn’t start a 4^th project even if 1 or 2 are done; all 3 must be done before you pick the next 3.
• Make steady progress on each project by breaking down the projects into a series of steps and working on them weekly and possibly daily.
• Simplify each step into one or more tasks.
• Select at least 3 HITs (High Impact Tasks) each morning. At least one or 2 of these HITs should be related to your 3 current projects.
• Complete these 3 HITs early morning. Do not check email!
• Now work on your routine tasks. Try to batch them into time slots by context.
• Have a process to capture all incoming information and resulting tasks.
• Must mono-task, no multi-tasking
• Have a fixed time during the day for
  • Email
  • Internet
• Do a weekly review, get back on track and plan your next week.

Daily Affirmation: Today I AM on track!

Recommendation: Getting Things Done by David Allen