Supritha S

Visual cues can be used to drive short-term and long-term motivation. The Paper Clip Strategy can provide daily motivation, but you start from scratch each day. However, another type of visual cue, like the “Don’t Break the Chain” Calendar that I described in my article on the Seinfeld Strategy can be used to showcase your consistency over longer... See more

But why? What’s so wrong with trying to learn new things? Here’s what Maya Angelou — herself a polymath (poet, journalist, dancer) — has to say about the saying:“It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Angelou said to the Smithsonian. “I think you can be a jack-of-all-trades and a mistress-of-all-trades. If you study it, and you put reasonable... See more

If you haven’t stepped out of your comfort zone in a while, it might be time to try. Experiencing the unfamiliar allows us to practice being agile, because we’re not always able to default to our usual cognitive response patterns in new contexts.

Many people, myself included, have multiple areas of life they would like to improve. For example, I would like to reach more people with my writing, to lift heavier weights at the gym, and to start practicing mindfulness more consistently. Those are just a few of the goals I find desirable and you probably have a long list yourself.

But we know human moods can fluctuate independent of our circumstances. We’ve all experienced it: your life can seem bright in the morning and bleak that same evening, even if nothing objective has changed.

The forces in our lives that have established our current equilibrium will work to pull us back whether we are trying to change for better or worse. In the words of George Leonard, “Resistance is proportionate to the size and speed of the change, not to whether the change is a favorable or unfavorable one.”

Why is it so difficult to do what we say we’re going to do?The lizard brain.

Although most of us have the freedom to make a wide range of choices at any given moment, we often make decisions based on the environment we find ourselves in.

In order for change to last, we must work with the fundamental forces in our lives, not against them. Nearly everything that makes up your daily life has an equilibrium—a natural set point, a normal pace, a typical rhythm. If we reach too far beyond this equilibrium, we will find ourselves being yanked back to the baseline.Thus, the best way to... See more