Just Seven Things

Exploring why and how we do what we do, and how we can do it better

Archive for the category “Conscious and Unconscious”

21 Jun 2008

How Easily Simplicity Tips into Bad Habit

The interesting thing with the whole concept of simplicity is how close a bed partner it is with habits, and in particular bad habits.

I think.

The challenge I have is the apparent ease with which I can fall into bad habits vs. the challenge of maintaining a good habit. And whether the concept of ‘neutral habits’ is the answer.

Game playing and simple routines like keeping scorecards or tracking must be so close to creating a habit. I can see that when you consider the analysis of reactive and rational brains, the reactive is a blocker to a good habit vs. being acceptant of a bad habit.

As the bad habits are normally the ‘juicy morsel’, the reactive brain will be attracted to them and quickly addicted to doing the thing that gives it the reward. The reactive brain equally rejects the good habits as ‘hard’ and without the immediate reward. Our rational brains counter this with the longer-term reward. However, to turn the good habit into a routine involves a lot of battling against defaulting to the bad habit.

Does game playing lessen the ‘weight’ of the reactive response? Does it remove resistance because the new routine to be adopted is being done so as a game/ challenge as opposed to a mental challenge? It is therefore made ‘neutral’ by the game.

So in a sense, game playing and a simple response to routine accelerates the journey to the neutral point of a routine being as easy to continue as it is to stop. A route to the 21 days habit tipping point….

Hhmm. A Fooled by Randomness moment? 3 times 7 = 21?

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Posted in Conscious and Unconscious, Game Playing, Habits and Routines and tagged , , | Leave a comment
20 Jun 2008
2 Comments

Why Do Personal Games Work?

Danzo08 ico_ol_3So, building on the shift I identified in my randomness post, I’ve been thinking a lot about lightness of touch. I’m contrasting this against the heavy-handed ‘mental edict’ approach of thinking that I can affect change in my consistent, persistent behaviours by instructing myself to do so.

It really brought me back to what my coach, Alison Down, highlighted when we first started to work together. That I had to start feeling instead of thinking. That I had to trust my gut rather than analysing and planning.

Even before starting to read Fooled by Randomness I had started to question what was obvious to me as an internal lack of commitment to top-down (brain-first) change. I recognised the cycle that I tend to enter of creating a structure to achieve what I want. I then try and apply the new routine. And then it fails. Invariably however I have noticed that some elements of the desired change have stuck. This tends to be the reason why I have continued trying:

  1. Because some things do stick
  2. I learn a lot during the analysis and creation of the structure to achieve what I want

Also invariably, I endeavour to create tools as part of this top-down process. Checklists or time tables to ensure my compliance.

What I’m now starting to question is whether these are something that I should avoid dismissing as being part of a top-down approach that will invariably fail. Jim Estill’s CEO blog post led me to NSC Blog by Nathan Collier and a post on Making it a Game. Both of which talk about how the simple things are the things which can harness change, or help you to make a change. They reminded me of Allen’s point at the start of Getting Things Done about the way in which we leave things by the front door to remember them the next day. The point being that the mind seems to work in simple ways.

So what does this mean for me? Well I’m going to see how relaxing the pressure on myself to change/ improve has an impact. How the use of games or scores/ scorecards can simply prompt me to incrementally achieve. Watch this space….  

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Posted in Action Orientation, Conscious and Unconscious, Control, Focus, Game Playing, Mindfulness, Time Management and tagged , , , ,
19 Jun 2008
3 Comments

Influenced by Randomness

I’m reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s marvellous Fooled by Randomness.

A couple of initial observations:

1. I love the comment in the acknowledgements for the updated second edition: ‘human warmth: Something in our nature may help us grow ideas while dealing and socializing with other people’. It felt like an angle on my comments in my post on creativity and focus in talking.

2. I fear I am on a journey from being a ‘utopian who believe(s) in an idealized humankind….. your how-to-reach-happiness-in-twenty-steps and how-to-become-a-better-person-in-a-week book writer… thinking we (I) can control our nature at will and transform it by mere edict in order to attain, among other things, happiness and rationality’

Item 2. very much makes me observe (already) that I feel like something has shifted and that I currently feel like a different person from the one who wrote over a number of days the happiness system series of posts.

Posted in Communication, Conscious and Unconscious and tagged ,

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