change

Morning Pages make us more graceful, but that grace is intensely practical. We are nudged to act on our own behalf, and if we balk, we are nudged again. The pages will nag until we are willing to take action. The pages inaugurate change, and they walk us through that change. We do end the bad relationship. We do get sober. We do lose unwanted weigh

Of course it sounds as if it were the most abject fatalism to have to admit that I am what I am, and that no escape or division is possible. It seems that if I am afraid, then I am “stuck” with fear. But in fact I am chained to the fear only so long as I am trying to get away from it. On the other hand, when I do not try to get away I discover that

It turns out that even when students understand that retrieval practice is a superior strategy, they often fail to persist long enough to get the lasting benefit. For example, when students are presented with a body of material to master, say a stack of foreign vocabulary flashcards, and are free to decide when to drop a card out of the deck becaus

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.

The moment we deny ourselves some gratification, we feel deprived. Part X appeals to our selfishness, telling us we should never have to feel deprived.

The only way to fight this is to have an equally selfish reason not to give in to our impulses. In other words, we need to find a reward in depriving ourselves. In the lower-channel, purely material

To summarize, the story-editing approach tries to change people’s personal interpretations of themselves and the social world in ways that make them happier and lead to more desirable behaviors. It is a family of approaches developed by social psychologists that includes writing exercises, such as the one developed by James Pennebaker; the story-pr

In our everyday life we are usually trying to do something, trying to change something into something else, or trying to attain something. Just this trying is already in itself an expression of our true nature. The meaning lies in the effort itself. We should find out the meaning of our effort before we attain something. So Dogen said, “We should a

ADHD can make the future seem hopelessly distant. A goal that requires a significant investment of time, incorporates waiting periods, or has to be done in a sequence of steps can prove so elusive that you feel overwhelmed. When that happens, many adults with ADHD yield to the temptation to find an escape route.

Most of our attempts to become better people, fitter and healthier, more moral/ productive/ organised, and so forth, make this problem worse– because it's basically impossible to pursue any program of personal change without the thought, somewhere in the back of your mind, that successfully completing the change will catapult you into a new and som