Art and Sketching
I am developing an art skill, drawing. To this point, I have no sketching or drawing talent. Hopefully, this will inspire you to create a creative outlet and talent.
I came across Danny Gregory from Sketchbook Skool on YouTube. Danny has a wonderful way of demystifying art and sketching. He builds your sketching and art skills by focusing on increasing your confidence and a positive inner voice vs. the technical drawing skills/techniques.
To sketch better, you need to sketch.
I am taking his course How to Draw Without Talent, A self-directed course that'll get you drawing in 26 easy, fun steps. I have phased the 26 videos into daily chunks. Danny also takes you through technical discussions and drills during the course.
Each video works on your confidence, repetition, or a specific sketching skill. If there isn't a particular assignment, I pick something to sketch.
I aim to draw and post something for the next 365 days.
Consistency and Self Discipline
Sketching every day and the accountability of posting online drive improvement.
Patience and consistency are essential for improvement and transformation regardless of the skill. Works for everything from public speaking to running and sketching. I'm using self-discipline to bring consistency and improvement to my sketching.
Here is my first sketch – My Left Hand
Danny considers this a benchmark drawing.
It is where I am now and provides a benchmark for me to build on.
The key is that I am not striving for perfection, just using self-discipline, consistency, and deliberate practice to develop and improve my drawing skills—no burst or bust, as Ryan Holiday states. In "Tiny Habits," BJ Fogg indicates, "Consistency helps scale your habits/behaviors from small to large."
What creative outlet can you develop through consistency?
Review of Tiny Habits: Small Changes that Change Everything
Author: BJ Fogg, PhD
Pages: 306
Publication date: 2020
Three Take-Aways / Actions:
Set me up for success but setting tiny habits that are extremely low
Celebrate immediately after each success
Remind me that my bad habits are not character flaws, just bad behaviors that need to be adjusted.
Rating 4.5 / 5
BJ Fogg, a Stanford University Ph.D., used his extensive research to develop a methodology to creating lasting, sustained change. His Tiny Habits method espouses the approach of setting tiny, small behaviors that, through repetition, and celebrations can grow to more significant and more impactful change. He gives the example of building a flossing habit by celebrating flossing one tooth a day.
His Tiny Habits recipe is:
After I ….. I will ……. To wire the Habit, I will immediately celebrate by ….
BJ’s approach and mindset are to never personalize your habits but rather be open to adjusting your approach to get what you want out of the Habit and behavior.
He shies away from using willpower. Using the action/celebration chain and not willpower will drive change. He argues that willpower takes too much effort and adds unnecessary friction to the process.
To BJ, Motivation and Ability are the critical factors in determining the success of the behavior becoming repeated. You need to increase motivation and or ability to get the action outside the Action Line. Motivation and ability are complimentary. The amount you have of one affects the amount you need of the other.
Another critical facet BJ offers is the no behavior happens without a prompt. And the most essential prompts are action prompts. Prompts are imperative and vital in developing positive behaviors and habits and stopping unwanted ones.
BJ is all about striving for improvement and consistency and not perfection. Don’t get into a burst or bust situation. Consistent execution of your prompt, habit/behavior, and celebration will reinforce and grow your habits.
The action prompt needs to be precise as possible to help reduce the inherent friction. You want to reduce the need to think about what the prompt COULD be. You want to make it almost automatic. Positive emotions (built through celebrations) make the behavior even intuitive.
BJ also notes that hope and fear push against each other, and the net is your motivation. Works towards increasing your hope and reducing your fears.
In the end, habit creation is about mindset. Here are four successful keys to a great mindset:
Be open, flexible, and curious about the possibilities.
Lower your expectations for success
Celebrate every success
Change your process, don’t personalize your actions / bad habits.
You can’t force change on others.
When working with others, you need to help others do what they already want to do; you are influencing others, not trying to force change.
This is a great book and worth your time. In the end, after making tiny Habits, you should be able to ask yourself, “I now see me as the kind of person who…..”
Celebrate Small to Go Big
I celebrate small to go big. Here is how I do it.
Tiny habits. I have been going through BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits book. I’ll have a review published shortly. Using Fogg’s techniques in the book, I have made significant, consistent improvements in critical areas.
“I change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad”
That is BJ Fogg’s maxim on change, and it is working for me. I’m not relying on willpower or “grit” daily to complete my habit items. Instead, I have the bar set low and celebrate right away.
To develop actions into habits for critical areas, I set a small, easily achievable daily target. Don’t laugh, but I mean small; Reading – 1 page.
Content Creation 5 min. Yes, I set the success bar that low.
I read one page and then immediately celebrate. What happens?
I get a dose of dopamine; I get another dose when I check it off in Streaks (the Habit tracking app I use). Same thing with content creation. Using the timing app MultiTimer (here is my review) to count down for 5 min. When the timer goes off, I give a little clap and celebrate. What tends to happen is I just sit back down and continue writing. Long past 5 min.
What makes this successful is that after I celebrate, psychologically, the pressure is off on keeping my streaks alive and achieving my daily goals. And what is interesting is what happens next. I read continuously throughout the day.
A physical book, my phone’s Kindle app when I have a second, even before tennis starts on my Kindle. I end up reading probably 30 minutes a day. All stress-free and in my minds’ eye, “extra reading.” I feel great; I don’t have the stress of coming to the end of the day and needing to read 10 pages or something. I have cleared all I need to do in the morning and feel great. Really works for me.
Same works for exercise.
I started my strength habit by doing 1 exercise. Yes, I go down and do a curl or even a few wrist exercises and check it off. What has that turned into? Anywhere from 25 – 60 min of strength 4 days a week. But I am sure to check off the Streaks app.
So, I would look to set yourself up for success low, build that habit, feel good about what you are doing and go from there.
What techniques do you use for setting habits? Share with all of us in the comments below.
Break Through Perceived Limitations
We all face limitations; are they real or perceived?
The majority of limitations we face or think we face are perceived, not real.
Merriam-Webster defines limitations as “1 : an act or instance of limiting. 2: the quality or state of being limited. 3: something that limits: restraint. 4: a certain period limited by statute after which actions, suits, or prosecutions cannot be brought in the courts.
Even physical limitations can be perceived.
When scientists study physical exhaustion, they find that exhaustion occurs not when the body faces a hard limitation like glycogen depletion but rather when the person experiences the maximum level of perceived effort they are willing to tolerate. The scientists argue that perceived effort tolerance’s psychological limit is reached before the true physical limit is reached. Read more about this in Fitzgerald Matt, How Bad Do You Want It?
Okay, we encounter a limitation; how do we determine if it is real or perceived? Step back and objectively ask these five questions:
· Have I faced this limitation before?
· If so, how did I handle it?
· If I didn’t break through it, what could I have done differently?
· Have a successfully navigated a similar limitation before and pushed through?
· Here is how I moved through other limitations before; how can I use what I learned from that experience?
Get Your Self-Confidence where it needs to be.
Now we have put the limitation in the proper perspective. We need to get our confidence and self-worth in an excellent place to be then able to tackle it.
Do you have the proper confidence or self-worth? This is critical. If you constantly compare yourself to others and if losing, or backing down to limitations, makes you feel worthless as a person, it should be clear why this is damaging to your mental health.
It would be best if you worked diligently to maintain a positive view of your self-worth. Remember, self-worth is 100% internal; and 100% in your control. Own your self-worth.
Let’s attack the limitation.
You’ve got your self-worth on a great track, now what?
Attack the limitation with these Five steps made popular by Hugh Culver:
1) Become crystal clear about the challenge (we already did this!)
2) Determine the best possible solution,
3) Adopt a belief that you will succeed,
4) Take action and pay attention to evidence of your success, and
5) Repeat.
You’ve tried everything – time to break the rules if the rules don’t work for you.
Don’t always follow conventional thinking when there is a better way. Look at things from a different perspective, attack them from the opposite side. Flip your attack.
It may be time to bring in Discipline and Persistence.
Persistence is essential because success is rarely imparted on the first attempt. One of the keys to successfully executing the complexities of anything is a devotion to the principle of persistence.
Take your actions and break them down using systems thinking. Focus on creating a process that generates a hammer that will break down your limitation over time. Focusing on executing the strategy vs. ruminating on the limitation will provide you the willpower, discipline, and energy to move forward.
In the end, only you can push through, so do it. But as Tony Robbins puts it, “here’s the truth: the ultimate thing that stops most of us from making significant progress in our lives is not somebody else’s limitations, but rather our limiting perceptions or beliefs.”
You and only you can place limitations on your progress - you completely control your trajectory.
In the end, no one can do the job of you better than you can! Break down those limitations.
What limitations have you broken through? What techniques were successful for you? Let us know in the comments below.
Improve your Weakest Link
Should you improve on your strengths and ignore your weaknesses? Absolutely not. I say you spend 70% of your energy on your strengths and 30% on improving your weaknesses.
When we think of weakness, many think in terms of physical strength. I like the Gallup definition of weakness as “anything that gets in the way of your success.” We all have weaknesses.
Seth Godin has a great post where he argues you can make your greatest improvement by focusing on the “laggards.” This has a direct application to you personally. He has some mathematical examples the prove his point.
Here are the reasons I go with the 70-30 split.
Focusing too much on your weaknesses, you risk impacting your self-confidence, enthusiasm, and overall performance in life. Don’t drive yourself to the negative, unproductive mindset. It would be best if you stayed in the productive growth mindset.
You have strengths that can actually directly improve your weaknesses. Do you not give up easily? Do you have an infinite mindset? These can be great attributes to use against areas of weakness.
Focusing energy on your weaknesses is aided by a unit view that Career Buzz has in that “maybe your weaknesses are also strengths or have a corresponding strength. By focusing on your weaknesses, you are actually equally improving a strength. Do you view persistence as a weakness as you don’t know when to quit? Maybe working on identifying the right time to quit will give you the skill to understand when you are close to a breakthrough and should keep persisting?
Don’t completely ignore your weaknesses as they can’t be completely ring-fenced. Weaknesses can bleed over into other areas of your life. Just like strengths bleed over into other areas of your life, weaknesses can as well.
They may be holding you back in areas of your life that are critical and preventing you from achieving your ultimate life’s vision.
When you jump into the 30% of focusing on your weaknesses, here are some helpful tips to remain productive:
You are not your weaknesses. Don’t personalize them to the point they define you.
Detach from your weaknesses – view them independently and objectively as something that can be either ignored (yes, that is okay or improved on).
Truly believe that you can improve your weaknesses. Ask yourself What If? What if I can improve X? What would my life be like? After asking What if and truly believing that improvement is possible, you can move to improve it?
You can improve it; you believe it now; just put together a plan or system to move you towards improvement. Set metrics, track progress, and constantly adjust your course to make the progress you want.
Remember to celebrate the victories along the way. Don’t wait until you have completely solved the nut before celebrating.
These tips should help you move forward by focusing more on your strengths while not ignoring and being held back too much by your weaknesses.
Get Yourself Thinking with these Review Questions
We are all trying to put 2020 behind us and are looking forward to a better 2021. Just looking forward to next year is not going to automatically make it better. Hoping that ’21 set the bar so low that ’21 has to be better isn’t a full-proof strategy.
You have to make an intentional choice to make it better. If you can’t clearly state your mission, values, and goals, you need to do more thinking.
Here are questions that I have gathered from people like James Clear, Jim Afremow, and even Han Solo!, to review how things have gone in the past and how I want to intentionally experience the next year, month, day, etc.
I hope some of these questions provide you with inspiration to pause and think about where you are and what you want your future to look like.
Imagine the most important goal or project you are working on right now. Fast forward six months. Imagine the project has failed. Why did you fail?
If you keep living the way you are, what will your life look like in 20 years?
Do I take 100 percent responsibility for my successes and failures?
Have you played the victim? And how can you take responsibility for how you feel?
Imagine the most important goal or project you are working on right now. Fast forward six months. Imagine the project has failed. Why did you fail?
What limits have you placed on your own success? How can you break through these perceived limits?
When the rules don't work you break Them. Where do you need to stop doing the same thing so you can get a better result? Don't always follow conventional thinking when there is a better way.
How will I handle my current situation like a champion?
What will I do now to get to where I want to be in the future?