I have a theory, there are moments in life when we are in chaos, and there are moments when things are in order. These times can last days, months or maybe even years, but we switch between the two, which can often be caused by external circumstances, but also internal.
I also think there is both good and bad chaos, and good and bad structure, let’s call them positive and negative. Here’s how I would describe each of them.
…Last year at my peak, I worked out six days a week, sometimes twice a day, and I was in pretty good shape (now I’m down to once a week). I never quite got the hang of my diet though, I was working with a personal trainer in the gym, and she drew me up a diet plan to help with this.
It had three complex meals per day, all of which required cooking from scratch, it also had snacks that required preparing between each meal. The prep and cooking time for the week was sky high, and the cost of the ingredients was 2-3 times what I was used to paying.
…With the stage I’m at in my life right now, I think it’s important to share the bad as well as the good. There’s no point pretending that everything is great all the time and it’s easy and to just say “here are all the great things I’m doing” because that just wouldn’t be true or authentic and it’s not my style.
I underestimated how easy it would be to jump back into super-productivity, and to get to a level of learning and creativity that I was at previously. I wanted to send my fasting email 2 weeks ago, but it did not happen, it’s only half written right now and I think there are a couple of reasons for this.
…Research shows that forming a new habit takes an average of 66 days, and can take up to 254 days! This is a long way from the more common misconception that it only takes 21 days. Perhaps this is why so many of us struggle to form new, positive habits… we begin the process with misguided expectations.
I think another common problem with forming new habits is that we often try to do too much at once. It can be easy to get motivated and think we can start going to the gym five times a week, eat a salad every day, get up an hour earlier, stop watching TV, read an hour a night, start going for daily walks, start a gratitude journal, go teetotal and stay off social media all at once.
…This week I had intended to share my new goals in different areas of my life, habits I planned to change, the system I planned to use and what I was getting started on first.
I thought after last week’s post, the correct response would be to immediately speed up, make something good out of the bad, and get moving forwards with my life.
And then something happened…
…It’s been over two years since I wrote any content for my blog and my newsletter, there are a couple of reasons for that, and this particular post is the hardest I’ve ever had to write.
14 months ago I moved from New Zealand back to England, with my wife, two children and dog. Then within a month, my wife left me. I don’t want to go into detail about what happened, except that there is no pain like it, and it has been the most difficult period of my life.
…As it’s (almost) the end of the year which seems like a natural time for reflection, I’m going to try a different format this week and take a look back at some of the things I’ve done and learned in 2020 in a 5-4-3-2-1 format.
…If I had to look back and identify my biggest weakness in my twenties, I would probably say that I was too much of a perfectionist.
I would sit on good ideas because they weren’t perfect, they’d often end up getting shelved and I would never have the opportunity to find out if they would have worked in the real world.
…I have long been fascinated with habits and self-improvement. One of my main drivers in life is basically to constantly get better at the things that are most important to me and to find the best way to achieve such improvement through good habits.
One thing I’ve learned about motivation is that it rarely lasts. For example, I have found that one of the best ways to motivate myself to get out for a run multiple times a week, even in the dark of winter, is to enter a competition.
…It’s been a while since I had some meaningful time off, certainly before this year – so it was well overdue that I took the family away for a few days in Rotorua last week.
Sometimes in the past, I’ve felt that time off is time wasted, but I certainly proved to myself that this wasn’t the case last week. As I’ve discussed previously, I’ve felt overwhelmed at times this year with everything going on, including an increase in stress and a decrease in ways to relieve it.
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