Change Is One Decision Away--If You Practice

As I've written before: If I want to be a writer, I just have to be a writer. I don't have to do anything. If I want to do writing, I have to be a writer, and then start writing. If I want to have written something, then I have to be a writer, do the writing, and then keep at it until the piece is done.


The start of any change--to be something different, to do something different, or to have something different is just one decision away. Making decisions is not hard. If I'm not writing, and I want to write or to have written something (wanting is not the same as deciding) then the change will start when I decide to be a writer. Many times that's enough. I declare (once again) I am a writer.  The decision results--almost magically--in me starting to write. And after a while I will have written something.

If deciding to "be a writer" doesn't do it, and I still want to have written something, then the next change is just one more decision away: to decide to write now. Not time in the future. But now.

The decision has to have a now in it because decisions have an expiration date. They are ephemeral. My decisions to be a writer and to write are effective only as long as I am on my way to writing (that is, walking up to my office, or pulling out a notebook,) or actually writing, or doing something while maintaining the deliberate intention to write about it later (doing it as a writer, rather than just doing it). Once I stop re-deciding or re-creating that decision, I go back to whatever state of being my environment seems to demand of me at the time--or if no demands then to just drifting.

Decisions produce change. A decision may start a visible change (a decision to act), or it may cause an invisible change that flows naturally into action (a decision to be).  Absent decision things may happen but nothing really changes.

Making a decision is a skill. And keeping a decision in place is a skill. As with all other skills, if you don't deliberately practice you won't be very good.  If you do practice, and do your practice deliberately, then after enough good practice, you will get good.

That's the goal of all practice: to be able to carry out an act without thinking about it. I've become strong at deciding to do my daily pages per The Artist's Way. Nearly every morning I decide "it's time to do my pages." The decision is effortless. The doing is nearly effortless. And I've got a stack of notebooks to prove it. What's in them? Who cares. The goal of doing pages is just to have done  them. And I've done them. For more than three years.

But my other writing is sporadic. I think it's because I make the necessary decisions in a weak and undisciplined way, when I remember to do them at all. Here's what I do most often: not decide. Here's what I do second most often: I decide to write something (later), and later never comes. Here's what I think I should do:

• Remember to decide to be a writer
• Decide to be a writer
• Decide to write
• Write
• Keep those decisions fresh until the writing is done

As I am doing right now.

Periodically I realize that I am letting circumstances and inertia make decisions for me and I decide to . When I realize that I'm drifting, and I decide to change.  I need a periodic reminder: "Decide!"

Then I need to practice making the decisions I want to make more decisions become as effortless as my decision to do my pages.

Such a decision has gotten this blog post started, and now finished. 

Now, let me decide what to do next!

Most common words in English

I'm working on improving my typing speed. The theory is:

If I can type in larger chunks then I can type faster.

So I should learn how to type the most common words, really, really fast.

Here are the 100 most common words.

How to type upside down.

˙ɯopuɐɹ 'ʎןןɐǝɹ 'ʎןןɐǝɹ sı sıɥʇ

˙uʍop ǝpısdn ǝdʎʇ oʇ ʎɐʍ ǝɥʇ s,ǝɹǝɥ

˙ǝuo sıɥʇ ɹo 'ǝʇıs sıɥʇ oʇ oƃ

˙uʍop ǝpısdn ʇxǝʇ ɹnoʎ uɹnʇ ʇɐɥʇ sǝƃɐd ǝʌɐɥ ʎǝɥʇ

˙ʇxǝʇ uʍop ǝpısdn ǝpoɔıun oʇ ʇxǝʇ ɹɐןnƃǝɹ ʇɹǝʌuoɔ ʎǝɥʇ

ɥƃnoɥʇ sɹǝʇʇǝן ןɐʇıdɐɔ ǝʌɐɥ ʇ,uop ʎǝɥʇ

¡uɯɐp

Practice Starting!

For years I've been writing that I have no trouble writing. The hard part for me is sitting down to write. Once I sit down, the words come. Like right now.

This morning I realized (finally) that the solution to this problem was simple: I needed to practice sitting down. So I did. After my morning pages, I got up, went to the kitchen. I took a breath, and then headed back to my writing room, sat down, and wrote.

Then I got up and did it all over again.

Each time I did it, I did it a little differently, and each time I learned something.

The major lesson "learned" is something that I've known for a while: that if you want to get good at something, then you have to practice. I'm not good at sitting down to write, so I need to practice it.

More generally, I'm not good at starting. Once I start I can generally (not always) keep going, but starting is the hard part. So, the remedy is clear. I need to practice starting.

I'm also not great at finishing, but that's for another day. Right now my "deliberate practice" is starting.

To do that, I need to try to "deliberately start" whatever I do. I can practice starting lots of times, each day.

Who knows, I might even get good at it!

Staying on Course

In a course on usability, my friend Jared Spool described what happens when you fly from New York to Boston. Most of the time, he said, the plane is off course. Still, you get there. What gets you there despite being off course most of the time is course correction. The pilot (or the autopilot) is constantly correcting errors. Head a little too far North and it points the plane a little further South. Perfection is impossible, so the correction will inevitably head the plane a little too far South. Fine. Correct it again. The wind blows harder than expected and you’re off course again. Correct it.  You might get blown so far off course that you need to touch down and refuel. Get back up in the air and adjust your course once again. That’s how planes get from coast to coast. They correct, correct, correct and eventually they get there.

Life’s like that, too. You try to reach a goal and find yourself headed in the wrong direction. Maybe you’re not a little off course; maybe you’re way off course. It doesn’t matter. What will get you there is course correction.

It’s hard to course-correct effectively if you’re busy berating yourself for being off course. Self-criticism or self-abuse won’t get you back on course; it wastes time and energy. And it sucks.

Being hard on yourself won’t keep you from going off course again. When you’re flying a plane, going off course is part of flying. When you’ve living a life, going off course is part of living. You need to accept it, and adjust.

Sometimes the winds of fortune or errors in life navigation will push you way off course. So refuel. Do any necessary maintenance. Then get back flying again. But before you do, you might take a look around. Your unscheduled stop may turn out to be a pleasant surprise.

Hard to Make, Easy to Break

Good habits are hard to make, easy to break. I should know. I’m back in recovery again after having built, and then broken some really good habits. If I examine them, maybe I will learn something and be able to keep things going the next time.

And this post is further proof of how hard it can be to repair a broken habit. I started writing it on 7/26. The stuff that’s highlighted like this was written on 8/11 when I finally got the goddamn thing off my desk. But in the course of it I think I learned something. I hope I did.

So with that in mind, let’s proceed first to the data then the examination.

What Happened

In May I decided I was going to write. I was going to do it regularly and diligently. I started writing, and as I  wrote I found good tools and configured them so my writing was easier and smoother. And I made a resolution: if I opened a web page with something useful, I would not close the page unless I’d written about it. I worked diligently on my other writing projects. And the results showed it.

	TWR	RSILT	WPFW	BWAS*	Other	Total
May	5	10	2	0	0	17
June	8	35	6	0	0	49
July	13	2	4	3	0	22
Total	26	47	12	3	0	88

This does not include daily pages, which are a well established habit for me, and it does not include my first ever stage play, started in June and finished in July.

And this does not count August which has been pretty much been a washout up to now.

To read the stats: my blogfest in May started near the end of the month, so those first 17 posts have to be extrapolated to the whole month. June was a rockin’ month. I was in a pretty steady state, with continuing improvements. And in July the roof caved in. Why? And what can I learn?

What happened in July?

The obvious and wrong answer was my computer problems. I feel like I have been fighting it all month. But that’s not true. It crashed the weekend I went down to Boston: that was July 10th. It’s only been two weeks that I’ve been fighting it. It just seems like forever.

Then I thought it might be Evernote. Once I started using Evernote I just clipped interesting web pages instead of blogging about them. Turns out this is half the story. I blogged about Evernote on July 6th. My Evernote notebooks show that I started clipping on July 3rd – and I started clipping articles about Social Media. Ahh!

So another answer: At the start of July Mira and I decided to work on a blog. That sent me into another round of process improvements—including Evernote. I let Evernote be a proxy for blogging what I learned about. Then the computer crashed. And things got worse from there.

And the last answer: I just lost momentum, and did not know how to gain it back. And here’s the proof. I started this particular post on 7/26 (or before—that’s the date of the last draft before I picked it up on 8/11)

Now what do I do?

Well, this is a first step [I wrote in my original draft]. I’m writing stuff in the blog. But it’s not enough. I’ve gotten out of some really good habits, and into some bad ones. Just getting myself to write this post was a real struggle. I kept wandering off, surfing web pages and NOT WRITING!

So the answer to this seems to be: put the discipline back into your life.

Really?

That was my remedy on 7/26. “Put discipline back in your life.” And where did it get me? Nowhere. Why? Because “Put discipline back in your life” is a slogan. It’s not a behavior.

And worse, I’ve got bad Beliefs. “I’ve lost control.” “I don’t know what to do.” “I can’t handle it.” All that old shit.

Well, I can handle it. And here’s how I’m going to do it.

My Daily Pages is a fully established, very reliable habit. When I started doing the Pages it was partly with the idea of making it a keystone or foundation (depending on your metaphor) for other good habits.

I got myself into the writing habit and when I lost it I did not have a reflexive way to recover. So I was unstable

What will stabilize me? My answer is good, tight management. I need to managed, or coached until the habit is set, and to intercede if I slip.

Right now I need management at a very granular level. A day is too long a time. The right level of granularity is: a Pomodoro  at a time.

So here’s the current plan.

I will build on Pages. I will start each day with Pages, rather than doing them “some time during the day.” I will follow the Pages with Daily Planning. I will figure out some things that I am going to do—or at least attempt that day. Then start to work on the plan a Pomodoro at a time. Each time, write some notes. Coach yourself on a continuing basis.

Ellis cautions that to make changes it’s necessary to approach the problem both cognitively and behaviorally, and to reward the right result and penalize the wrong one. So: if no pages, I will take a cold shower. I hate cold showers. I have a strong incentive to avoid them. I will avoid them.

Will it work? Time will tell. Pages work. Building on Pages just might work.

I’ve got a new blog (Oh no! Not another!!!) Yes. It’s a personal one. To give myself that feedback and create a sense of history. It’s a personal blog. I may or may not make it public later on. We’ll see.

Today, under this new regime, I’ve done my pages, made my plan and made two posts in the personal blog.  I’ve completed two Pomodoros of varying sizes.

This one will make three of each.

We’ll see what happens.

Not sucking at empathy

I suck at empathy--at least sometimes. I can empathize with some people in some situations, but sometimes when someone I care about has been unhappy about the same thing for a while, wants my empathy, and  isn’t willing to take my excellent advice on how to work to alleviate their problem--well, I can sympathize, but I just can't empathize.

What's the difference? Here are the definitions that I will use: sympathy and empathy both involve relating to the thoughts and feelings of another; but empathy  contains the idea of putting oneself in the place of another, and experiencing those thoughts and feelings as one's own.

So let's take a concrete case of sympathy coupled with lack of empathy. Bobbi, a normally sane person, has a list of things that, regularly and reliably, get her upset and occasionally miserable. She tells me about her upset. I listen, then give her excellent advice, which she does not take. In fact, it pisses her off. This strikes me as stupid, which I don't say outright, because I am not crazy. Instead, because I do care, and because she does want me to, I try to empathize, but I can't do it. So I say, "I suck." and quit.

But today we talked this through and I realized that my problem wasn't that I could not empathize; it was that I absolutely wasn't willing to. Empathy involves putting yourself in the other person's place, and I could not do that because in her place I would never, ever think, do, or feel the things that she thinks, does, and feels. Instead, I would take action. I would ask me for some excellent advice; I would listen, respectfully; I would do what I advised; and I would go on to live a happier and more productive life.

Not being able to put myself in her place for that reason seems rational if convoluted, but it has the signs of being really stupid, too. Here’s why: if my goal is to help her; and if she believes that empathy will help; and if I believe that empathy might help, or at least believe that empathy would not hurt; and I believe that providing what she wants might make her amenable to more effective approaches--such as my excellent advice, well--why not empathize?

And if not empathizing leads to conflicts and upset instead of what I want--which is to be helpful, why in hell do I adamantly insist on doing that which doesn’t get what I want and reliably gets what I don’t want? It’s irrational. It's stupid. And I’m doing exactly what I rail against. Acting stupidly. Realizing that, there’s only one rational answer. I need to ask myself for some of that excellent advice.

"Follow the ABC+D model," I tell myself. "Do that, and you will quickly find the irrationality and be able to handle it. "I thank myself, because it’s obvious that this is excellent advice that will quickly lead to good results. And I followed that excellent advice (with some help and attentive listening from Bobbi) and here's how it went.

A) I have an Activating event: a request for empathy. C) I have undesirable Consequences: No empathy; Bobbi not helped, and occasionally pissed off because I will not empathize; me frustrated and sometimes pissed off because I cannot help mainly because she will not listen to my excellent advice. So there’s an A leading to some very bad Cs. According to the theory, that means there are intermediating irrational Beliefs (B). The formula says: find them, and dispute them. It’s not hard to find them. They’re right out in the open. And not hard to dispute them. They’re pretty dumb once you see them in the bright sunlight.

 

First is the Belief that she is being an idiot. That’s easy to dispute. Years of marriage have proved that she is not only much less an idiot than I am, but actually much smarter. At worst, she is behaving in a way that is not productive. Fine. But that does not make her behavior idiotic. It's unproductive and persists for reasons that I don't understand. That makes me ignorant; it doesn’t make her an idiot.

Next, of course is the Belief that she SHOULD take my excellent advice because I don't have the problems that she does by following my own excellent advice in the past. (I have others, but never mind.) And that’s also easy to dispute. The evidence is that she’s not listening based on some causal chain of events. So why should she violate the laws of causality? She shouldn't. 

And my advice is not so obviously wonderful, except to me. And since my advice does not make sense to her, so why followsomething that does not make sense. So fine. So she doesn’t have to take my advice. 

OK, so there's no reason for her to change. Why am I completely unwilling willing empathize? 

To do that, I'd have to put myself in her place. And if I did that I believe I’d be stuck not listening to my excellent advice, and continuing to be miserable about this or that. And I have proof of it. After all, that's what she's doing: she’s not listening to my advice and she is stuck and insisting on being miserable. The answer is: “Even though you’re putting yourself in her place, you are in fact, not her. See prior post, "Anyone can be Anything". Being is the easiest thing to change. You can be her or not be her.”

Alright, next: if I was that way, some people would think I was an idiot. And I have proof of that. I think she is an idiot for being that way. So if I was her, then I would think that I was an idiot;  and that sucks because I much more highly regard my own opinion than she does. But that’s double dumb because, first of all, I/she am/is not an idiot, as shown above. And if I, or anyone else thought I was an idiot, so what? Really, what if I and everyone else thinks I am an idiot? Does that make me an idiot? Does that change anything? No.

So, finally, I am ready to give up the following irrational beliefs: 1) That she is an idiot; I know she is not. 2) That she is behaving idiotically;  I don’t know this for a fact; what I do know is that I don’t understand why she does what she does. 3) That she should listen to me. She shouldn’t because she doesn't; and because I’m actually wrong more often than she is. 4) That I’d get stuck if I empathized. Doesn’t have to be that way. 5) That I’d be judged by me and others. So what?

So I give up these irrational beliefs. Does this make me emphatic? Maybe a little more. Certainly it gets the wrong thinking out of the way. It changes me from being one who  hides behind “I suck at empathy,” and lets me be one who actively tries to get better. That deals with the cognitive side.

The behavioral side: do it. I believe if you do anything often enough you get good at it. So that's what I need to do.

And it encourages me to look for other areas where I adamantly refuse to be or do what would be helpful. Ahh, I feel better already.