change

One shift that can help us all is to change our minds about planning. Like search, planning is a literacy that’s not taught in school, and yet it’s a key to success in life and work. We plan events, trips, families, sites, systems, companies, and cities. We do it all the time but make the same mistakes. First, we procrastinate. We fear complexity,

The ego likes big, dramatic actions that seem as if they’ll magically change the future. This gives the ego a sense of power. Real discipline is quite the opposite. It’s made up of an endless number of small steps, each of which can seem meaningless on its own. The ego has to humble itself to keep going on a productive course.

“The practices that carry the greatest potential for transformative change are usually counter- instinctual.” I take him to mean that if you’re trying to get better at life in some way– more patient, or better at listening, or less prone to procrastination or anxiety or self- sabotage– the necessary actions are pretty much guaranteed not to feel

this is the point where people self-destruct. At the first taste of success, they stop working on themselves. But reality hasn’t changed. They need the tools even more than before.”

The way we work seems fixed and unchangeable—until it changes, and then we realize it didn’t have to be like that in the first place.

We have the best chance to change our behaviour over the long term if we start with a realistic idea about the difficulties of behavioural change (Dean 2013).

One major advantage of springboard stories is that they combat skepticism and create buy-in. Denning says that the idea of telling stories initially violated his intuition. He had always believed in the value of being direct, and he worried that stories were too ambiguous, too peripheral, too anecdotal. He thought, “Why not spell out the message

Morning Pages ask us to have courage. When we do, they give us positive reinforcement. On an “off” day, we can still tell ourselves, “At least I did my pages.” Most days, we can count some small forward motion. Pages lead us to large changes by very small steps.

At the same time, do not expect the mind to change simply because you are identifying less with it. You are not trying to change your mind! That's not possible. You can, however, change your relationship to the thinking mind, and this is great news. Your life will change and the mind will keep running its inflexible, predictable computer program.