I suspect a lot of resolutions are driven by a desire to “fix” the unwanted effects of excessive indulgence over the previous month or so, and fixing something is never a good foundation for creating lasting change. You can start a new behaviour any time you want, and I recommend that is what you do. When you want to change something in your behaviour, whether it’s the 1st of January, the 11th of March or the 27th of October, that is the perfect time to do it.

Incidentally, it’s worth noting that stopping an undesired behaviour works best if you relate to it as starting a new behaviour – trying to stop a behaviour (say eating fatty foods) is all about giving something up which immediately creates a lot of resistance, and all you want to do is eat fatty foods; on the other hand, starting to eat healthy food is all about moving towards a desired future.

So, if you want to start a new behaviour, at whatever time of year, there are some things you can do to increase your success rate.

1. Pick something that’s important to you. Let me say that again, pick something that’s important to you.

Often we do things because we think they’ll get us something else, or will make someone else happy or impress them, but these are in-order to goals. We do them in-order to get some other result. Never use in-order to goals. Very quickly you will find it increasingly difficult to maintain your motivation.

2. Clarify your goal. It’s very simple – the more specific and measurable your goal is, the more likely you are to attain it. If you know exactly what success looks like, and by when you intend to achieve it, it’s a lot easier to make a plan to get there.

So many behaviour change goals are vague. For instance someone might say “I’m going to lose weight” without specifying how much, or by when. So they have a very fuzzy target and will find it extremely difficult to know what to do to achieve it. On the other hand, “I am going to lose 15 kg by the 30th of April” is a clear target, which is much easier to pursue.

3. Have a plan. Often people create a goal but fail to design a clear plan. Continuing our example: “My plan for losing 15 kg by the end of April is to eat healthily, drink no alcohol on at least 3 days a week, and workout at the gym for an hour, 3 times a week.”

Each part of that plan can then be developed and made even clearer. For example you can define what healthy eating is, the types of food, the quantities, what time of day you will eat, etc. Each element can be made more specific and measurable until you are completely clear what you are going to do, and when you’re going to do it.

That way you know exactly what you have to do to win, and it will be easy for you to see whether you are on track, and any adjustments you might have to make to your actions.

With just those three basic steps the likelihood that your change effort will succeed will be boosted tremendously.

If you’re keen to maximise your results, here are 3 further enhancements to help you even more.

1. Time block your actions. Put your actions in your calendar and make sure they fit with everything else you have to do in your life. Life getting in the way is another of the major causes of failed behaviour change efforts.

2. Tell other people what you’re doing. Making a public commitment to friends and family will encourage you to keep going even when you’re struggling, and provide a powerful support network.

3. Find a buddy who wants to achieve a similar goal and work on it together. There’s loads of research that says we are far more likely to follow through on activities like going to the gym if we’ve made a commitment to meet someone else there. It’s one of those strange human being things that we’re way more reluctant to let someone else down than ourselves.

These few tips will massively increase the likelihood of achieving your goal. And remember, this is not just for New Year’s resolutions, it’s for any goal you want to achieve – work goals; work life balance; relationships; relaxation – you name it, you can achieve it using these simple steps.

Enjoy your success!

To book a call with me CLICK THIS LINK

Following on from Focus Pocus Part 1, here are 10 Steps that when followed, will help you increase and sustain focus, and give a significant boost to your energy, productivity and fulfilment.

Notice that I said when followed. To get the results you have to do the work, and the work in this case is to follow the steps – completely and in order. Use all of them. Don’t edit the list, or decide that some of the steps don’t apply to you – they do. They are a set, and they are designed to work together. They have been extensively researched, and they work – if you do them. 

Here are the 10 Steps:

1. Start with Why
2. Be a Pessimist 
3. Break it down
4. Be specific
5. Time block
6. Clear the decks
7. Start
8. Take breaks
9. Make notes
10. Remember Why

Start with Why

Everything needs a purpose – otherwise, why bother? So right at the start, whatever it is that you are doing, create a powerful purpose that you are convinced by.

Ideally it will inspire you as well, but the nature of work is such that that is not always directly possible. Sometimes things need to be done just because they need to be done, and on those occasions you can borrow the inspiration from a bigger purpose. For example, you might find it difficult to get inspired by writing a proposal, but if you remember that it’s an important step towards fulfilling your business growth target, and that that in turn takes you towards an important and inspiring life goal, than you can borrow inspiration from the life goal.

Think about how the project or task fits into your wider goals and objectives. What it will allow you, or others, to do that you wouldn’t be able to do without this step happening first.

Don’t take too long working out the purpose for any particular project or task – that’s really just a form of procrastination. However, do remember that having a convincing and powerful purpose will help you maintain focus and follow through to completion. 

Be a Pessimist

Don’t overestimate what you can get done in the time available. 

Most of us tend to set ourselves up for failure by underestimating how long something will take to complete, whilst simultaneously overestimating the amount of time you have to do it in.

I call this the Best Result Bias, and it comes about because if we have once managed to do something in, say, one hour, then our optimistic mind interprets that best result as the standard time it takes. It’s not.

Similarly, if we have eight hours available in our work day, your Best Result Bias will calculate on the basis that you will get eight of hours of solid work done. You won’t.

This double negative impact of the Best Result Bias lies at the source of stress and missed  deadlines, and consequently undermines your sense of achievement and ability. 

Instead, be a pessimist.

When planning make sure you include everything that could go wrong as you estimate how long a task or project will take. And remember that the theoretical length of your work day will be substantially reduced by interruptions, travelling, breaks and other incidentals.

It’s far better to schedule more time than you end up using, rather than less. You will suffer less stress, be on time more often and feel good about your achievements. You’ll also receive little pockets of “bonus” time, that you can use for whatever you choose.

Break it down 

Break down your projects and tasks into manageable chunks. This has several advantages:

• The task feels less daunting and easier to take on – so any resistance is reduced.
• You know exactly what you have to do, so you won’t forget bits.
• You’ll do things in the most efficient and effective order.
• If it’s not immediately urgent you can spread the tasks over time – meaning you don’t have to rush everything when a deadline arrives.

Be specific

The more specific you are as your define your task, the clearer you’ll be about what there is to do, and the easier you’ll find it to maintain your focus all the way through to completion, because you’ll be more aware of how you are progressing. 

Time Block

Once you’ve decided how long you need, and when you’re going to do it – block out that time in your schedule, and treat it as sacred. Do not allow other thoughts, things or people to steal it from you. 

Clear the decks

Get anything and everything that could distract you out of the way. This can include other work, objects, apps and people.

A clean and tidy environment (mental as well as physical) will help you focus. 

Turn off your phone and close your email and any other distracting programs. (see Kill Your Distractors Part 1 and Part 2 for more detail)

Train people not to interrupt you when you’re doing focussed work. This can feel uncomfortable at first, but is remarkably easy to do.

It’s also a really good idea to schedule time each day to deal with the little stuff. How long and how often you give to this depends on the nature of your work and day. For example, you might find that an hour at each end of the day allows you to deal with all the small but (seemingly) urgent things that arise – the two minute email, scheduling appointments, returning brief phone calls etc.

Generally try to apply the two minute rule from David Allen’s Getting Things Done productivity method to this time slot. If you can complete a task or follow-up in two minutes or less, jump on it and get it out of the way. If it’s going to take longer than that – because you need to research it, talk to someone else, look something up, or produce something – then schedule a specific time to do it 

Start

It might seem obvious, but when the allotted time block arrives – just start.

Procrastination is one of the biggest enemies of focus. You will always be able to come up with reasons why now is actually not the best time after all, so don’t even entertain those thoughts.

Just Start!

Take breaks

Frequent, but short, breaks keep your mind fresh and focused. Every half hour or so, take a five minute break. Get up, walk around, get some water. Even read a book for a few minutes. 

The key though, is to stick to the five minutes. Longer than that and you’re likely to lose where you were in your task and will have to take time to reset yourself again.

Every couple of hours take a longer fifteen minute break.

Make notes

Sometimes, despite all your preparations, and all your good intentions, you will get interrupted. 

Emergencies (real or imagined) do arise. People who can’t be ignored will trample into your immaculately prepared workspace.

When this happens, and before you allow the interruption to take hold, take a few moments to write a brief note about where you are in your task. When you return to it later this can save you a lot of time – literally hours in some cases.

Make sure you always have whatever you need to make your notes (pen, paper, post its, note software etc.) close to hand.

Remember Why

Keep your purpose in mind. When you’re tempted to do something else than stick to your plan, remembering your purpose will help you maintain your focus through to completion.

Finally

Don’t worry if you are not perfect at implementing this strategy straight away. That’s not the point.

Try it. Do you what you do. Notice what worked, and what didn’t. Bring your learning to the next you use it. Repeat and get better.

Over time you will gain more and more benefit, and eventually these 10 steps will become a habit.

In today’s world that’s really not surprising as we have so many more things than ever before constantly vying for our attention.

Yet to produce any kind of result, in any area of life, you need to maintain commitment and focus over time. To a great extent this is also a product of today’s far more complicated and complex world, as we find ourselves juggling a large portfolio of projects and commitments.

Life really was a lot simpler in the past. (I know, I used to live there!)

A lot of the time we say that we want to achieve things, and we even say that we’re committed to achieving them, but then we just don’t do what it takes. Sometimes that’s because we’re just not prepared to – we want the result but we’re not willing to exert the necessary effort – and sometimes we actually are willing to make the effort, but we’re unable to keep it up consistently over the required period of time.

Unfortunately, when we find it difficult to sustain the necessary focus, we have a tendency to decide that this makes us a “bad” person, because we “should” be able to maintain our effort and focus. And, of course, having that conversation running in our heads just makes it even more difficult.

But here’s the point: your ability to sustain focus has absolutely nothing to do with being a “good’ or “bad” person, or even “good” or “bad” habits.

We are, quite simply, not evolutionarily programmed to maintain our focus over long periods. In fact, we’re programmed to keep switching attention.

Think about it. When we were hunter gatherers roaming over the plains, maintaining focus on a single subject for a long time was definitely not a good idea.

Imagine yourself as that hunter gatherer, walking through the bush looking for berries. All you’re interested in is berries. Nice big juicy ones. Find them, and all the family will be happy!

So, being a “good” 21st Century person, you’re fully focused on your task. You have your checklist and schedule and you’re out there focused on finding those berries and filling your sack with them.

Now, there are a couple of problems here.

First, by focusing only on berries, you’re going to miss out on all the other food opportunities that are around you. There could be all sorts of other fruit, vegetables and animals around you, but if you’re singularly focussed on berries you just won’t notice them. (This is also true today. By focusing on your task in hand to the exclusion of everything else there are going to be opportunities, and other good stuff, that you completely miss.)

But there is an even bigger problem for the hunter gatherer you.

Remember that evolutionary adaption is mostly about survival. On that basis you might think that focussing on berries is a good thing, because you’ll get food to survive.

The problem though, is that while you’re focussing on berries, that big, hungry carnivorous predator is focussing on you.

While you’re looking for your lunch you’ve just become someone else’s.

So, you can see that switching focus from berries, to threats, to other fruit, to threats, to edible animals, to threats, is actually a really, really, good idea if you want to survive.

Looking at it from today’s point of view, switching attention is still a good idea.

The problems you encounter really arise because you switch attention too often, and too much to things that are either unproductive or worse, counter productive, in relation to what you want to achieve.

Just taking “five minutes” out to look at Facebook would be fine if it was a conscious focus switch choice, and genuinely lasted only five minutes. But the very nature of most of the things that pull your attention away from what you want to achieve is that they are addictive and habit forming, and five minutes so easily becomes half an hour or more.

In Part 2 of this blog we’ll explore how to effectively distribute your focus in order to make sure that you get the results that you really want.

There’s nothing unusual about that, there are loads of people cycling across London Bridge at that time in the morning. However, there were a few things that made him stand out.

First, rather than the self-protective urban warrior look that many cyclists very sensibly adopt, he was wearing a rather natty cream coloured overcoat; he also had ear buds firmly in his ears and was, most notably, sitting up straight on his bicycle, with his hands in his pockets! Needless to say, he was not wearing a helmet.

Even when he changed lanes (directly in front of a bus), he achieved it with a subtle shift of his body weight. During the whole time that I could see him, his hands remained firmly buried in those pockets.

As I watched him it struck me – fortunately nothing struck him! – that he was far more interested in looking cool than in staying alive. In fairness, he probably hadn’t actually thought it through quite like that, but in reality it would only have taken a small object or pothole in the road, or a distraction as he was changing direction for him to be sprawled on the ground in front of 12¹/₂ tonnes of rapidly approaching Routemaster.

As he went on his way, I started thinking about the number of people I meet who are doing pretty much the same thing with their businesses.

They appear to have it all. A business that is growing, a big house, flash car, expensive clothes, maybe kids in private school. Everything about them says they are a SUCCESS!

Except they’re not. Well, I guess it depends what you mean by success, but by my definition, they’re not.

The house is 95% mortgaged, the car is leased, the clothes have been bought with maxed out credit cards, and the school fees are being paid with a bank loan.

Yes, their business is growing in turnover terms – it has to, because it’s the only way for them to keep ahead of all that debt – but it’s never made a consistent profit and, in reality, they’re living from cheque to cheque and are only ever one bad month away from disaster.

One bad month away from sprawling on the ground in front of 300 tonnes of rapidly advancing debt mountain!

And it’s not just people with larger small businesses. I meet plenty of people with much smaller businesses, who are trapped in the same loop. Who will always tell you that they’re ‘busy’, when they’re not. Actually, that’s not strictly true. They are busy (in fact too busy), because they’re struggling to keep their business going; but the business itself is usually not busy.

At some level, all these people are paying more attention to looking good than to making sure their business has underlying strength, security and profit built in.  I know, because I’ve been there. I’m one of the lucky ones who eventually learned how it actually works.

Many business owners find themselves in this situation just because they don’t know, and can’t see, any other way to do it. Most people running small businesses simply do not know how to run a business! They have had no training and they just pick it up as they go along, getting tips and advice from other people who have no idea either.

But it’s not their fault.

Good training in how to run a business is very hard to come by. Even a business degree or MBA doesn’t train you to run a business. They teach you some of the theory of how businesses work, but businesses rarely work in the way the theory says they should. Particularly small businesses, because they are often an extension of the emotions, psychology and personality of the owner. And the owner, being a human being, wants to look good.

Fortunately it doesn’t have to be that way. It is possible to build a business which works for you, rather than you having to work for it.

It takes time, focussed activity and consistently placing your attention on the things that will actually help you achieve what you want to achieve. And eventually, simply as a side benefit of building a genuinely successful and profitable business, you end up looking pretty good, even though it was never about that.

It’s a bit like cycling really. The people who put in the consistent focussed work like, say, Victoria Pendleton, Chris Hoy or Chris Froome eventually also get to look very, very cool – even though it was never about that.

Which brings us back to the guy on London Bridge. I hope he lives a long and happy life, never having to learn that he’s just one small bump away from disaster.

Even more that that, I hope he discovers a way to create a great and fulfilling life, so that he no longer needs to place his attention on looking cool rather than on staying alive.

I was interested in how the research that Bruce and others have been doing into interventions for improving physical, mental and social wellbeing might fit with some work I’m currently involved in, and he wanted to explore whether my knowledge and thinking about intrinsic motivation could be useful for his project. We had a wide ranging, productive and very enjoyable hour long call, from which I think we both gained some real benefit. 

However, it wasn’t until after our call that another level of value started to kick in.

That evening I was at UEL for the weekly lecture on my Psychology MSc course. I noticed myself listening to it, at least in part, from the point of view of the questions that Bruce and I had been discussing earlier. The next morning when I was in the gym and listening to my current audiobook, once again I found myself running what I was hearing through the filter of “how do you get people to start and continue engaging in exercise?” 

Most of the time we are told that filters and biases in the way we listen to, see or interpret things is a bad thing. That they get in the way of insight, innovation and learning. 

But what became really clear for me this week is that when you are conscious of them being in place, filters and biases can be extremely powerful tools to enhance your understanding and to help you see different sets of connections that wouldn’t otherwise have been apparent; to enable you to develop and grow in a way that would not have been available without them.

It’s a bit like when you have an eye test and the optometrist is trying out different lenses and saying “Is it clearer with, or without?” “With A, or with B?” Some of the variations make your vision blurred and dull, and some of them result in exceptional clarity. 

Deliberately and consciously applied filters and biases can actually enhance your vision and understanding rather than getting it in the way of it. They can help you appreciate someone else’s point of view better, and thereby open up new possibilities that didn’t exist before. 

With practice It can also help you become more aware of your own automatically applied biases, thus helping us challenge what we already ‘know’, and become less stuck in our ways. 

So start playing with filters, biases and blinkers and see what happens.

Thanks again for a great conversation Bruce, and Patrick for introducing us. It opened up more than any of us realised at the time! 

One of the problems with doing that is that there are a plethora of reasons one can have for going networking, and few of them are easy to measure. 

I know several people who happily acknowledge that one of their main purposes in attending events is social. It gets them out of the house and stops them becoming total hermits who live in their dressing gowns. 

Then there are the ones who say it’s to get their business ‘out there’. I’m not sure either of us know what they really mean by that. 

Others say it’s their main mode of marketing, or that it’s where they get ‘most’ of their business. However, when you ask them to put some numbers on that – as in return on investment type numbers: How many events? How much do they cost? How many new clients? Time invested. Cost of client acquisition. etc. – almost none of them can. 

Interestingly almost nobody tells me it’s part of a well thought out marketing strategy. Which is what it really ought to be. After all, regular networkers can spend a lot of money over the course of a year, although frighteningly few can tell you how much that actually is. 

And I’m no better. Although I am starting to get more of a handle on all of it. 

There a number of things I’m doing. They’re all things I already knew I should be doing, but until you start to approach networking more strategically it’s very easy to omit them.

1. Working on being much clearer about who my ideal clients are and where they, or people that know them, are likely to be found – I’ve already discovered it’s often not at networking events! 
2. Measuring the time and money I put into it – this has already helped me cut the number of events I attend by more than half, and simultaneously increase the number of relationships I’m building!
3. Making sure I follow up with the people I’ve met. This is an interesting one as when I was doing more networking I didn’t have the time (or inclination) to follow up with everyone. 
4. Developing a structure for nurturing all my business relationships (not just the new ones). 
5. Tracking people’s progress along the path towards becoming clients. As I get better at this it will help me refine steps 1 to 4.

I notice, even as I’m writing this, a mild discomfort with the idea that I’m deliberately moving people from being someone I’ve met into someone who’s paying me for my service. I suspect that idea may get in the way for many business owners. It really doesn’t need to. If you believe in the product or service you provide, what you are actually doing is helping people to benefit from something useful and valuable, and it’s only fair that you get paid for that. 

However, what’s really interesting is that the way I’ve managed to change those habits has nothing directly to do with either of them.

Habits are one of the areas I do a lot of work on with my clients and there’s a great deal of evidence that suggests that upwards of 80% of the decisions we make each day are based on habits.

Essentially, habits are heuristics that save us time and energy – imagine the length of the queue at your favourite coffee shop if everybody had to reread the menu and weigh up the pros and cons of each choice every time before ordering!

The problem though is that because they are automatic, we carry them out literally without thinking, and we get the results we’ve always got. If you want a different result, then you have to change the habit, and one way to support doing that is to build an interruption into the automatic process which introduces an opportunity to make a conscious choice.

And that’s exactly what I’ve done.

I have reintroduced a habit that I used successfully before to help me loose over 15kgs a couple of years ago. In the intervening period I stopped doing it and slipped back into poor eating and exercise habits, and my weight started to drift up again.

So what is this amazing habit?

It is very, very simple. I log everything I eat and drink, and the exercise I take, keeping track of the calories I’m consuming and using, making sure I use more than I eat.

I use a free app called MyFitnessPal which makes the whole process very easy. It has a huge database of foods and you can even enter an item by scanning its barcode.

I’m not too fussy about making sure I’m entering exactly the right item or quantity becuase the thing that is really making the difference is that it is interrupting my old habit so that I am able to make real conscious choices. By putting my exercise in, it also gives me an extra opportunity to feel good about doing it. At the end of the day, when I complete the diary, it tells me how much I would weigh in 5 weeks if I ate like that every day – another encouragement to eat well and notice the impact of ‘bad’ days.

I’ve also been using the same principle on a number of other habits, and that will be the subject of another piece, where I’ll explain how you can adapt this approach to any habits you want to change.