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mattbellI've consolidated my writing on personal development fundamentals into a single post. If you've read the individual posts, you've seen all this already. Feedback on any of this is definitely appreciated. This is still very rough.
-------------------------
In thinking about the various personal development tasks I want to accomplish, I've realized that there is a set of fundamental things that make all personal development easier.
I'm starting to maintain such a list of these fundamental things:
- Surround yourself with people who are also into personal development.
- Learn to be mindful of your mental state.
- Figure out how to tag things "important".
- Become aware of your strengths and weaknesses.
- Experiment
- Find a way of tracking progress and things you’ve tried
- Exercise. (Physically) It helps your brain.
- Self-control
- Learn to be honest with yourself
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
In detail:
Surround yourself with people who are also into personal development.
People often want to change their habits but sometimes lack the willpower to do it. However, people are innately social creatures. Having other people of a particular type around you uses the "peer pressure" that overprotective adults warned us about as kids, but harnessed for a self-chosen purpose. Want to exercise more? Hang out with people who like to exercise. Want to learn to be more optimistic? Hang out with optimists. Even if the pressure is not overt, the presence of the other people will at least provide constant mental reminders of the habit you want to change as well as a positive reinforcement structure for making the change.
Discussed here: http://nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com/95286.html
Learn to be mindful of your mental state.
People often will get frustrated, bored, distracted, lethargic, or in various other mental states without realizing it. Some people know innately to snap out of this state once they find themselves in it. This would be a really good skill for the rest of us to learn. I think the first step to learning this is setting up a mental trigger such that the moment you enter one of these states, you become aware of it. I think I have found a reasonably effective technique for this... I've set up an alarm on my cellphone that rings every half hour. It provides me an opportunity for me to pull away from whatever state I'm in and think about whether this is how I want to be spending my day. I have found that the presence of the periodic alarm makes me think more about what I'm doing even when the alarm isn't ringing.
Discussed here: http://nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com/107225.html
Figure out how to tag things "important".
In order to change a habit or start a new one, you need to call attention to the act of the habit every time it happens. This is often hard, as our mind may not automatically tag the habit as important. For example, if you decide to get into the habit of remembering people's names when you meet them or flossing before you go to bed, your brain won't automatically think "THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT" every time you were meeting a new person or getting ready to go to bed. If it did, it would be extremely easy to get into that habit. Our brain does tag some things strongly with importance. In the case of life-threatening situations, a lifetime habit can be created or changed in just a few seconds. So there's basically a subconscious process that we can't entirely control that helps determine importance. So I'm looking for methods that would help bring the importance tagging process under conscious control:
-- Tie the habit to something that is important to you. For example, the website Stickk ( https://www.stickk.com/ ) makes you put a financial penalty on not hitting a goal, and changing a habit could be the goal. A friend of mine managed to lose a lot of weight that way.
-- Tell all your friends so that they can nag you about it. Social reinforcement is a strong force.
-- Think about the habit change in a way that's intense. A friend of mine concocts rituals to help her more intensely experience things she wants to change or focus on. She symbolically lets go of the old ways and embraces the new. The Temple at Burning Man, and the Zozobra festival in Santa Fe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zozobra ) are just two examples of public versions of this.
-- Think about the habit change while on hallucinogens. A friend of mine has told me that hallucinogens make everything seem salient and profound, so if you think about a habit you want to change while on them, you’ll have no trouble remembering it later when the opportunity to change presents itself.
Become aware of your strengths and weaknesses.
There are various online surveys you can fill out that will help you become more fully aware of your own strengths and weaknesses.
One place you can do so is the strengths assessment at: http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/testcenter.aspx
While you may think "oh, I already know my strengths", it's still interesting to see them enumerated, and there are sometimes some surprises... things that come so naturally to you that you don't realize that they are strengths. Any personal development techniques should be modified to play to your strengths and avoid your weaknesses. For example, if one of your strengths is creativity, find ways of making personal development projects incorporate creativity so that you'll find them more fun.
Experiment
Experimentation is key to just about every scientific field, so why not apply it to yourself? Try something new… take your brain somewhere it hasn’t been before. You might learn something. It’s not just about getting out of mental ruts (though it is a nice benefit) it’s about systematically pushing your own boundaries in order to figure out what will work. Most people really aren’t in the habit of doing this. They just keep trying the same thing over and over or avoiding the problem altogether. It’s an interesting mind-state to get yourself into. You may think you know yourself, but imagine you are an alien creature, and you’re constantly trying to understand why this creature does particular things under particular circumstances.
Another benefit of experimentation is that you get the Hawthorne Effect for free. Years back, some psychologists were studying what would make factory workers more productive. They tried turning up the lights. The workers became more productive. They tried turning down the lights. The workers became more productive. Eventually they figured out that was making the workers more productive was paying attention to them and making them a part of the experiment.
Find a way of tracking progress and things you’ve tried
This goes hand in hand with the philosophy of experimentation. You’ll want to note what is working well, and what isn’t. There is a very well developed set of procedures in psychology for tracking progress (eg beepers that go off at specified intervals, at which point you record how you are feeling)
However, the key part of making the tracking work is making it *fun*. You’re much more likely to do all the necessary tracking and follow-up work if you’re enjoying the process. If you enjoy keeping meticulous records, it should be easy. For the rest of us, various other structures can work. I’m achievement-oriented, so I have been creating personal development tasks which give me points upon completion. (It’s like an MMO that I’m playing inside my own mind!) For other people, the fun may come from telling other people what tasks they’re up to, tying concrete pleasurable rewards to finishing the tasks, or something else entirely. You basically have to find a format that you find fun enough that you’ll work it into your daily routine.
OK… enough about format… here are some things that are interesting to track:
- Observations about yourself.
- Problems you’d like to solve
- Experiments you’d like to try
- Maxims that seem to apply to your own life. “Experiment on yourself” would be a big one for me.
I recently read about a tracking technique for increasing happiness. It basically consists of writing down every good thing that happened that day at the end of the day. If you get into the habit of doing that for long enough, you’ll end up noticing and being thankful for more good things, which will likely make you happier.
Exercise & sleep well
There have been several studies linking physical exercise to greater mental alertness and acuity, especially in the elderly. Personally, I have found this to be true as well. There are also studies linking exercise to happiness, though more recent research finds that this may be correlation rather than causation. People who don’t exercise think of exercise as a burden. The secret to making it work is to find exercise that’s fun. Some people find long repetitive exercises at a gym fun. If you’re not one of those people, don’t despair. Depending on your interests, fun exercise could be a wide variety of things, from tennis to rock climbing to going on long bike rides to going out dancing to playing Dance Dance Revolution.
Proper sleep makes a huge difference as well. If you get poor sleep, there are some basic things you can do to make things better. The internet is filled with advice on this. Experiment and see what works for you. Here’s what works for me:
- Don’t exercise within 3 hours of bedtime
- Don’t listen to overly energetic music before bedtime
- Avoid caffeine late in the day
- Keep roughly consistent bedtimes (I break this rule fairly frequently for social occasions, but that’s a conscious decision. Yes, I would rather stay up till 5am having wild hot…)
- Get the bedroom as dark as possible.
- Get a big mattress if you sleep with a partner. I also tend to steal the covers, so I bought two quilts so my girlfriend and I can both have one instead of our unconscious selves warring over control of it. Some friends of mine actually sleep in separate beds to maximize sleep quality.
- Drink a glass of warm milk before sleep. It’s full of tryptophan, which your body will convert to melatonin and serotonin.
- Have sex before bed. Or at least have an orgasm. It releases serotonin, which should help you relax for sleep.
- If it’s taken more than an hour to fall asleep, take a melatonin pill. I stay away from most OTC sleep medications because they make me drowsy the next day. The chemical at fault in these medications is Diphenhydramine HCl. Melatonin is produced naturally by the body, so it tends to have fewer side effects.
- If it takes a long time to fall asleep or you’re dealing with jet lag, take an Ambien at bedtime. Ambien is a heavy hammer… it makes you somewhat drowsy the next day. However, it helps reset your circadian rhythms such that you’ll feel very drowsy again 24 hours after taking it.
Self-control / willpower
Since much of personal development involves shifting yourself out of one behavior pattern and into another one, self-control is a key fundamental skill. Like other skills, the degree of innate self-control varies widely from person to person.
There’s been some interesting research that essentially shows that self-control is akin to a muscle – it can tire from overuse in the short run, but you can exercise it in order to build up its strength.
How do you improve self-control? Based on my research online, the following things are useful to know:
- Beating yourself up over a failure to control an impulse is very counterproductive. It lowers self-esteem and increases stress, both of which weaken your willpower. It’s better to look at a failure as an opportunity to learn “OK, what led to the failure, and what could I do differently next time?”
- Positive reinforcement is very powerful. You should congratulate or treat yourself for your successes in self-control. It’s good to have your subconscious working with, not against, you. Associating acts of self-control with good emotions encourages both the conscious you and the unconscious you to keep it up and continue to achieve. The positive reinforcement should come along the way, and not just at the end. It should occur as closely as possible to the act of self-control itself so that it is strongly reinforced. See Don’t Shoot The Dog for more information on positive reinforcement.
- Don’t self-control needlessly. Have fun with your life, and focus your self-control on a few key areas. Question whether you actually want self-control in every area you’re considering. Trying to control everything will just make you miserable, which will cause you to fail.
- Social reinforcement enhances self-control. If you tell all your friends that you want to hit a particular goal, you’re more likely to actually complete it.
- Removing the temptation is a very effective method of self-control in situations where it’s applicable to do so. If you want to quit drinking, don’t go hang out with your friends at a bar. However, removing the temptation doesn’t necessarily solve the underlying problem, so it’s more useful as a stopgap measure when other approaches aren’t working.
- Studies have shown that people are better at self-control when they have more information on the consequences of their actions. Thus, making notes on your actions and their consequences (eg tracking what you eat and your weight if you’re trying to lose weight) can help you improve self-control.
- Optimism helps tremendously. If you view a lapse of self-control (say, indulging in an unhealthy meal when dieting) as a fluke, you’re much more likely to persevere than if you see it as a sign that you don’t have the requisite willpower to pull it off. Lacking that optimism can lead to cascading failures whereby a single lapse leads to abandonment of the whole effort. Optimism can be learned to some extent – see Seligman’s work for more information on learned optimism.
Learn to be honest with yourself
Intellectual honesty is hard for most people to achieve. It’s common (and even healthy in moderation) to have an overly positive self image. For example, most people think they’re above average when it comes to looks, intelligence, and other factors. However, it pays to be aware of your own strengths and weaknesses. This is different from being defeatist and giving up on improving your weaknesses. (eg “I’m clumsy.. I can’t dance”) People can work to improve their weaknesses and make progress, but it takes time and a concerted effort, and there’s always an opportunity cost – time you spend working on your weaknesses is time that could also be spent improving your strengths. Leaders who are aware of their own weaknesses and surround themselves with others who make up for those weaknesses are more likely to succeed than those who assume they are great at everything.
Actually achieving intellectual honesty in everyday life is difficult. Self-esteem helps greatly. People with genuine high self-esteem do not feel the need to hide their weaknesses, and have no trouble admitting them to others without feeling like they are debasing themselves.
There is a different type of intellectual honesty that has to do with being able to question your own beliefs and assumptions. This is a skill found in good scientists; as a scientist, you shouldn’t let your identity get wrapped up in a particular hypothesis. You should actively look to refute your own hypotheses so that you can test whether they are valid. (Too often this does not happen in the academic world, as people let their careers get entangled with a particular hypothesis) Applying the same approach to your own life takes some work, as most people are not used to doing that sort of thing. In addition, people tie their identities to their beliefs, so having your beliefs questioned can be like having your identity questioned. It helps to spend time socializing with people who hold different beliefs than you, but you have to do so open-mindedly for it to work. If done successfully, you’ll end up thinking critically about the foundations of your own beliefs. Ideally, you should get into the habit of examining your own beliefs automatically.
-------------------------
In thinking about the various personal development tasks I want to accomplish, I've realized that there is a set of fundamental things that make all personal development easier.
I'm starting to maintain such a list of these fundamental things:
- Surround yourself with people who are also into personal development.
- Learn to be mindful of your mental state.
- Figure out how to tag things "important".
- Become aware of your strengths and weaknesses.
- Experiment
- Find a way of tracking progress and things you’ve tried
- Exercise. (Physically) It helps your brain.
- Self-control
- Learn to be honest with yourself
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
In detail:
Surround yourself with people who are also into personal development.
People often want to change their habits but sometimes lack the willpower to do it. However, people are innately social creatures. Having other people of a particular type around you uses the "peer pressure" that overprotective adults warned us about as kids, but harnessed for a self-chosen purpose. Want to exercise more? Hang out with people who like to exercise. Want to learn to be more optimistic? Hang out with optimists. Even if the pressure is not overt, the presence of the other people will at least provide constant mental reminders of the habit you want to change as well as a positive reinforcement structure for making the change.
Discussed here: http://nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com/95286.html
Learn to be mindful of your mental state.
People often will get frustrated, bored, distracted, lethargic, or in various other mental states without realizing it. Some people know innately to snap out of this state once they find themselves in it. This would be a really good skill for the rest of us to learn. I think the first step to learning this is setting up a mental trigger such that the moment you enter one of these states, you become aware of it. I think I have found a reasonably effective technique for this... I've set up an alarm on my cellphone that rings every half hour. It provides me an opportunity for me to pull away from whatever state I'm in and think about whether this is how I want to be spending my day. I have found that the presence of the periodic alarm makes me think more about what I'm doing even when the alarm isn't ringing.
Discussed here: http://nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com/107225.html
Figure out how to tag things "important".
In order to change a habit or start a new one, you need to call attention to the act of the habit every time it happens. This is often hard, as our mind may not automatically tag the habit as important. For example, if you decide to get into the habit of remembering people's names when you meet them or flossing before you go to bed, your brain won't automatically think "THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT" every time you were meeting a new person or getting ready to go to bed. If it did, it would be extremely easy to get into that habit. Our brain does tag some things strongly with importance. In the case of life-threatening situations, a lifetime habit can be created or changed in just a few seconds. So there's basically a subconscious process that we can't entirely control that helps determine importance. So I'm looking for methods that would help bring the importance tagging process under conscious control:
-- Tie the habit to something that is important to you. For example, the website Stickk ( https://www.stickk.com/ ) makes you put a financial penalty on not hitting a goal, and changing a habit could be the goal. A friend of mine managed to lose a lot of weight that way.
-- Tell all your friends so that they can nag you about it. Social reinforcement is a strong force.
-- Think about the habit change in a way that's intense. A friend of mine concocts rituals to help her more intensely experience things she wants to change or focus on. She symbolically lets go of the old ways and embraces the new. The Temple at Burning Man, and the Zozobra festival in Santa Fe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zozobra ) are just two examples of public versions of this.
-- Think about the habit change while on hallucinogens. A friend of mine has told me that hallucinogens make everything seem salient and profound, so if you think about a habit you want to change while on them, you’ll have no trouble remembering it later when the opportunity to change presents itself.
Become aware of your strengths and weaknesses.
There are various online surveys you can fill out that will help you become more fully aware of your own strengths and weaknesses.
One place you can do so is the strengths assessment at: http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/testcenter.aspx
While you may think "oh, I already know my strengths", it's still interesting to see them enumerated, and there are sometimes some surprises... things that come so naturally to you that you don't realize that they are strengths. Any personal development techniques should be modified to play to your strengths and avoid your weaknesses. For example, if one of your strengths is creativity, find ways of making personal development projects incorporate creativity so that you'll find them more fun.
Experiment
Experimentation is key to just about every scientific field, so why not apply it to yourself? Try something new… take your brain somewhere it hasn’t been before. You might learn something. It’s not just about getting out of mental ruts (though it is a nice benefit) it’s about systematically pushing your own boundaries in order to figure out what will work. Most people really aren’t in the habit of doing this. They just keep trying the same thing over and over or avoiding the problem altogether. It’s an interesting mind-state to get yourself into. You may think you know yourself, but imagine you are an alien creature, and you’re constantly trying to understand why this creature does particular things under particular circumstances.
Another benefit of experimentation is that you get the Hawthorne Effect for free. Years back, some psychologists were studying what would make factory workers more productive. They tried turning up the lights. The workers became more productive. They tried turning down the lights. The workers became more productive. Eventually they figured out that was making the workers more productive was paying attention to them and making them a part of the experiment.
Find a way of tracking progress and things you’ve tried
This goes hand in hand with the philosophy of experimentation. You’ll want to note what is working well, and what isn’t. There is a very well developed set of procedures in psychology for tracking progress (eg beepers that go off at specified intervals, at which point you record how you are feeling)
However, the key part of making the tracking work is making it *fun*. You’re much more likely to do all the necessary tracking and follow-up work if you’re enjoying the process. If you enjoy keeping meticulous records, it should be easy. For the rest of us, various other structures can work. I’m achievement-oriented, so I have been creating personal development tasks which give me points upon completion. (It’s like an MMO that I’m playing inside my own mind!) For other people, the fun may come from telling other people what tasks they’re up to, tying concrete pleasurable rewards to finishing the tasks, or something else entirely. You basically have to find a format that you find fun enough that you’ll work it into your daily routine.
OK… enough about format… here are some things that are interesting to track:
- Observations about yourself.
- Problems you’d like to solve
- Experiments you’d like to try
- Maxims that seem to apply to your own life. “Experiment on yourself” would be a big one for me.
I recently read about a tracking technique for increasing happiness. It basically consists of writing down every good thing that happened that day at the end of the day. If you get into the habit of doing that for long enough, you’ll end up noticing and being thankful for more good things, which will likely make you happier.
Exercise & sleep well
There have been several studies linking physical exercise to greater mental alertness and acuity, especially in the elderly. Personally, I have found this to be true as well. There are also studies linking exercise to happiness, though more recent research finds that this may be correlation rather than causation. People who don’t exercise think of exercise as a burden. The secret to making it work is to find exercise that’s fun. Some people find long repetitive exercises at a gym fun. If you’re not one of those people, don’t despair. Depending on your interests, fun exercise could be a wide variety of things, from tennis to rock climbing to going on long bike rides to going out dancing to playing Dance Dance Revolution.
Proper sleep makes a huge difference as well. If you get poor sleep, there are some basic things you can do to make things better. The internet is filled with advice on this. Experiment and see what works for you. Here’s what works for me:
- Don’t exercise within 3 hours of bedtime
- Don’t listen to overly energetic music before bedtime
- Avoid caffeine late in the day
- Keep roughly consistent bedtimes (I break this rule fairly frequently for social occasions, but that’s a conscious decision. Yes, I would rather stay up till 5am having wild hot…)
- Get the bedroom as dark as possible.
- Get a big mattress if you sleep with a partner. I also tend to steal the covers, so I bought two quilts so my girlfriend and I can both have one instead of our unconscious selves warring over control of it. Some friends of mine actually sleep in separate beds to maximize sleep quality.
- Drink a glass of warm milk before sleep. It’s full of tryptophan, which your body will convert to melatonin and serotonin.
- Have sex before bed. Or at least have an orgasm. It releases serotonin, which should help you relax for sleep.
- If it’s taken more than an hour to fall asleep, take a melatonin pill. I stay away from most OTC sleep medications because they make me drowsy the next day. The chemical at fault in these medications is Diphenhydramine HCl. Melatonin is produced naturally by the body, so it tends to have fewer side effects.
- If it takes a long time to fall asleep or you’re dealing with jet lag, take an Ambien at bedtime. Ambien is a heavy hammer… it makes you somewhat drowsy the next day. However, it helps reset your circadian rhythms such that you’ll feel very drowsy again 24 hours after taking it.
Self-control / willpower
Since much of personal development involves shifting yourself out of one behavior pattern and into another one, self-control is a key fundamental skill. Like other skills, the degree of innate self-control varies widely from person to person.
There’s been some interesting research that essentially shows that self-control is akin to a muscle – it can tire from overuse in the short run, but you can exercise it in order to build up its strength.
How do you improve self-control? Based on my research online, the following things are useful to know:
- Beating yourself up over a failure to control an impulse is very counterproductive. It lowers self-esteem and increases stress, both of which weaken your willpower. It’s better to look at a failure as an opportunity to learn “OK, what led to the failure, and what could I do differently next time?”
- Positive reinforcement is very powerful. You should congratulate or treat yourself for your successes in self-control. It’s good to have your subconscious working with, not against, you. Associating acts of self-control with good emotions encourages both the conscious you and the unconscious you to keep it up and continue to achieve. The positive reinforcement should come along the way, and not just at the end. It should occur as closely as possible to the act of self-control itself so that it is strongly reinforced. See Don’t Shoot The Dog for more information on positive reinforcement.
- Don’t self-control needlessly. Have fun with your life, and focus your self-control on a few key areas. Question whether you actually want self-control in every area you’re considering. Trying to control everything will just make you miserable, which will cause you to fail.
- Social reinforcement enhances self-control. If you tell all your friends that you want to hit a particular goal, you’re more likely to actually complete it.
- Removing the temptation is a very effective method of self-control in situations where it’s applicable to do so. If you want to quit drinking, don’t go hang out with your friends at a bar. However, removing the temptation doesn’t necessarily solve the underlying problem, so it’s more useful as a stopgap measure when other approaches aren’t working.
- Studies have shown that people are better at self-control when they have more information on the consequences of their actions. Thus, making notes on your actions and their consequences (eg tracking what you eat and your weight if you’re trying to lose weight) can help you improve self-control.
- Optimism helps tremendously. If you view a lapse of self-control (say, indulging in an unhealthy meal when dieting) as a fluke, you’re much more likely to persevere than if you see it as a sign that you don’t have the requisite willpower to pull it off. Lacking that optimism can lead to cascading failures whereby a single lapse leads to abandonment of the whole effort. Optimism can be learned to some extent – see Seligman’s work for more information on learned optimism.
Learn to be honest with yourself
Intellectual honesty is hard for most people to achieve. It’s common (and even healthy in moderation) to have an overly positive self image. For example, most people think they’re above average when it comes to looks, intelligence, and other factors. However, it pays to be aware of your own strengths and weaknesses. This is different from being defeatist and giving up on improving your weaknesses. (eg “I’m clumsy.. I can’t dance”) People can work to improve their weaknesses and make progress, but it takes time and a concerted effort, and there’s always an opportunity cost – time you spend working on your weaknesses is time that could also be spent improving your strengths. Leaders who are aware of their own weaknesses and surround themselves with others who make up for those weaknesses are more likely to succeed than those who assume they are great at everything.
Actually achieving intellectual honesty in everyday life is difficult. Self-esteem helps greatly. People with genuine high self-esteem do not feel the need to hide their weaknesses, and have no trouble admitting them to others without feeling like they are debasing themselves.
There is a different type of intellectual honesty that has to do with being able to question your own beliefs and assumptions. This is a skill found in good scientists; as a scientist, you shouldn’t let your identity get wrapped up in a particular hypothesis. You should actively look to refute your own hypotheses so that you can test whether they are valid. (Too often this does not happen in the academic world, as people let their careers get entangled with a particular hypothesis) Applying the same approach to your own life takes some work, as most people are not used to doing that sort of thing. In addition, people tie their identities to their beliefs, so having your beliefs questioned can be like having your identity questioned. It helps to spend time socializing with people who hold different beliefs than you, but you have to do so open-mindedly for it to work. If done successfully, you’ll end up thinking critically about the foundations of your own beliefs. Ideally, you should get into the habit of examining your own beliefs automatically.
