Two posts in less than 24 hours and another coming soon!
We just wrapped up another project, this one for PGP (Personal Growth Plan), which is the PLP Careers course. In this project we read the book Atomic Habits by James Clear and did daily positive brain training. We also connected to the ideas from the book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Sean Covey which we explored last year. The goal was to reach an answer to the driving question:
How does balance within my life create opportunities?
Achieving balance within your life by building positive habits enables you to change limiting beliefs and to be more productive, giving you more confidence and energy to explore diverse opportunities. Taking advantage of the dopamine-driven feedback loop by making positive habits more tempting and easy to follow through on allows for greater success in achieving goals. Choosing who you spend time with influences your habits, and an effective workspace helps make future habits easier. Using technology to automate habits also allows for less thought to be put into the habit. Reflection helps to remain conscious of performance over time. Achieving balance within your life and cultivating positive habits leads to greater productivity, physical and mental health, and allows you to be the best person you can be.
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This is what I learned from each of the activities:
Atomic Habits
Atomic Habits is all about how tiny habits can lead to phenomenal improvements in productivity, mental clarity and becoming your best self over time. The top six key ideas I took away from reading Atomic Habits were:
- We only have so much brainpower for thinking and planning, so when you develop habits you have more energy and brain space to put into other opportunities.
- Choosing who you spend time with influences you and your habits because as James Clear says: “most days we’d rather be wrong with the crowd than be right by ourselves.”
- The more positive habits and less negative habits we have, the more likely we are to be more productive and healthy (physically and mentally) and achieve our goals and be the best people we can be.
- Clinging tightly to a specific identity makes it hard to grow beyond it, so habits allow you to change your identity which gives you more opportunities as you can change limiting beliefs.
- Having an effective workspace (ie. social media notifications turned off, clean desk, quiet room) helps make habits easier to follow through on, and using technology to automate your habits allows you to think less about the habit and more about other things.
- Reflection allows you to remain conscious of your performance over time and enables continuous improvement.
I feel that if a person is able to build habits that allow them to accomplish the ideas above they could be more incredibly effective in all areas of their life. I already have many habits that allow me to operate with limited thought such as checklists of things I need to bring for activities like work and school, morning and evening routines, and recording to-dos and thoughts in Things so I don’t have to try and remember them.
Positive Brain Training
In addition to reading Atomic Habits, we did Positive Brain Training, which is a system developed by Shawn Achor that helps rewire our brain to work more optimistically and successfully. We learned about Positive Brain Training in this TED talk which I highly recommend you watch:
Positive brain training is taking the time everyday for just two minutes, for 21 days in a row, to complete the any of the following activities which allow us to rewire our brain to think positively. The different activities include:
- 3 gratitudes
- Journaling
- Exercise
- Mediation
- Acts of kindness
My personal favourite was 3 Gratitudes as my family already shares gratitudes every evening at dinner. We did get an opportunity to try each of the activities and after each one we wrote a short reflection of our experience. I won’t share all of my entries as some of them are personal, but here are a few that I am comfortable sharing:
I like to think I already have a pretty positive outlook on life and the world around me and I feel that continuing some of these activities will enable me to become even more positive, less stressed and happy.
7 Habits
Last year in Grade 9, we read Sean Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” (click here to read my blog post on it). The 7 Habits are:
You can also watch this lovely animation that talks through each habit:
7 Habits contains similar ideas to that of Atomic Habits. Click each habit below to read how I believe I’ve improved or still have room for improvement for each of the habits:
Improved: I don’t think I blame nearly as much school related stress on teachers and instead realize that if I’m feeling stressed it’s probably because I’m doing something wrong.
Room for Growth: I can still work on taking responsibility for any and all situations I find myself in such as this blog post which I had done some preparation for but was not expecting to have to write this evening.
In grade 9 one of the things I had as a goal was to become a lifeguard and swim instructor for North Van Rec. I was able to begin with the end in mind and by doing that I was able to work towards my goal and achieve it.
Improved: I’ve gotten a lot better at doing school work based on deadlines instead of on how appealing the work was. For example, I used to procrastinate less enjoyable homework with more enjoyable homework and go above and beyond anything I was supposed to do in order to put off the less appealing work.
Improved: I continue to cooperate in groups and make sure that everyone has a role. I have integrity to stick with my values and opinions.
Room for Growth: I could still work more on expressing my ideas and feelings with consideration for the feelings and ideas of others.
Improved: I think I’ve come a long way in listening to others’ ideas and trying to understand their perspective.
Room for Growth: I still need to work on being able to put myself in the other person’s shoes and be more welcoming of others’ ideas and opinions and views of the world.
Improved: Being open to others’ ideas.
Room for Growth: I can improve on looking to find others’ talents and use them to positively contribute to the group.
Improved: I have been able to spend a lot more time on my personal life this year. This is because I have realized that I can put a lot less effort into work and still produce a great final product while also having time to enjoy the outdoors and time with family.
Room for Growth: Continuing to only spend as much time as needed on school work and no more.
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I learned a lot from this project and I hope to utilize what I’ve learned in the future. I feel that right now I’m doing pretty well at being the best person I can be. I most want to work on using technology to automate habits such as time-blocking events and responsibilities, using Things to record To-Dos and using Craft or Notes to jot down a thought or wonder.
What habit(s) would you most like to build? Let me know in the comments below.
Thanks for reading!
I would love to work on my habits with putting my personal life first. I know I need to habit stack these more!