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Track Your Progress in 2019

How are you doing with your New Year’s Resolutions?  Have you set your goals?  Created your task list?  Started changing your habits?

After you have created some new habits, remember to track your progress. Tracking your progress can get you to your desired outcome more quickly and easily.

It Helps to Keep Up the Momentum

Keeping up with new habits is a challenge, since you are adjusting to doing something different in your daily life that you were not doing before. From switching from your morning cup of coffee to tea, to remembering to fit in a workout before bed at night, you need time to adjust to the change. There might also come a time when you lose some of your motivation, making it harder to stick to your new resolution. By tracking your activity in a journal or planner, you can see how you’ve been keeping up with the new habit and remind yourself every day that you’ve created a new priority.

You Can Track Your Progress

Tracking the resolution isn’t just a matter of checking off a day’s accomplishment, but also making notes about how your success is impacting your life. This is why using a journal is highly recommended. You can write about how you feel about the change, if and when you are seeing improvements from the new habit, and what adjustments you’ve made along the way to improve your outcome.

It Helps to Tie Them in with Your Goals

Many new habits are created in an effort to reach certain goals in your personal or professional life. By tracking progress of your habits, you can also record your completed tasks from your larger-scale overall goal.   Maybe you have a goal of one day completing a 10k, so you need to start new habits of walking each day, then running each day, then making sure you are fueling your body with healthy foods. These habits are helping you to reach your end goal.

Tracking Makes it Easier to Adjust Your Habits

Some of your new habits will need to be adjusted to fit into your actual life. Be sure to allow enough time for a fair assessment before giving up on your original idea. How long do you give your new ‘habit’ before you decide to trash it or amend it?  Look through your journal and make an informed decision.  Have you been consistent?  Is it providing benefit?  Have you been sabotaging yourself because you really don’t want to change? 

It’s your life.  Design it, create it, and live it to match your vision of your best life.

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Great Expectations in 2019

Are you too hard on yourself?  Do you expect to do everything perfectly the very first time you try something new? You’re not alone.  In this world of “I want everything now”, we expect instant perfection in everything.

Here’s a little gym story for you.

Mandy was working on her handstand walk. She was following a little routine her coach prescribed for her.

First, she chalked up her hands. Next, she flipped up onto her hands into a handstand supported by a wall. Then she lowered her legs to the floor, stood up and applied chalk to her hands again.

Next, she stepped a half-inch back from her first attempt and repeated the process. She verified that she was further back from the wall by her handprint left on the floor.

She did this a few more times; just inching out away from the wall a bit with each attempt. On the last attempt, she remained balanced against the wall, but began shifting her body weight from left to right hand several times – like she was walking.

This whole routine was designed to train her body AND her mind to be comfortable walking on her hands. Eventually.

We always want something quickly, but why would we expect to do this the first try? Humans are so impatient, and then we scold ourselves when we can’t meet our internal expectations.

Here’s the thing…  We learn more quickly by taking tiny steps. The tiny rewards encourage us to move forward (pun intended).

What tiny step will you take today to move your toward your 2019 resolution?

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Learning New Things in 2019

Did you make a New Year’s Resolution to learn something new?  Has it been a while since you’ve taken a class?  Do you need to remember how to study?  Here are a few tips to help you re-engage your “learning” muscles.

  1. Find a quiet spot where you will have few (or no) distractions.
    Keep the television out of this space, if possible. Let your family know this is your area for studying and that they should only interrupt you if something is REALLY important.
  2. Make sure you have adequate lighting.
    The fastest way to get tired is to read while you are struggling to see. Why make studying harder than it has to be?  Focus the lighting so your work area is bright, but the light doesn’t shine directly into your eyes.
  3. Include some background music with no lyrics.
    It’s better to listen to music that does not contain lyrics, because the words of the song can distract you from the words you’re trying to absorb.  Classical music and jazz are good candidates as long as they don’t contain vocals and lyrics.
  4. Find your best learning platform.
    If your preference for learning is via visual stimulation, use videos and resources with pictures. If you learn best with audio, use books-on-tape, Audible, etc. Some people prefer books for their learning as they can control the medium and the pace. Experiment with the different formats and mix it up.
  5. Take a break.
    Some people try to cram a study session into several hours and wonder why they aren’t learning the material. Your mind needs to rest. In fact, you will digest the information much more easily when you step away from the material occasionally.
  6. Sleep is a crucial aspect of studying.
    Some students believe they can pull all-nighters before a test, but they generally don’t perform as well on tests as students who are well prepared ahead of time and come into the test well-rested. Don’t fall into the ‘I’ll cram for the test’ trap.
  7. Map out what you are going to learn and use that as the basis for your study session.
    Don’t try to learn everything there is to know about a subject in one session. Space out your sessions in such a way that you have time to explore and reinforce the information, and get it stored in long-term memory.
  8. Study with a group of people.
    Many colleges require their students to form study groups. The interaction provides instant feedback, and the support system is useful if there are things you don’t understand in the original presentation.

Look below for some action steps you can take today help you get back in the groove. If you have study blocks you just can’t break through, start releasing old trapped emotions that are standing in your way. You can do it!

TIP #1: Watch videos on the subject you are studying. Check out YouTube and websites such as Udemy.com or KhanAcademy.com. Utilize a free trial of Audible (Amazon). Check out the selection before signing up to see if they offer material suitable for your studies. The idea for both of these exercises is to find the medium you prefer for studying. If you are more of a book learner, Amazon has an Unlimited program that you could try.

TIP#2: Search forums to find people who are studying the same subject. Ask if there are people from these forums in your area, and offer to form a study group. An alternative is to search Meetup.com for a local group that’s already meeting in your area, or you could decide to start one of your own.

TIP#3: Find someone who already knows the subject. Model their success pattern.  Ask them how they got their start and what techniques they use for studying and learning. Ask them if you can touch base with them from time to time. Set up sessions with a tutor, coach, or mentor.