Tag: Self-improvement

Do as I do, not as I say

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

Annie Dillard

If someone could look at what I do, instead of what I say, what would they think my priorities are? It’s a thought that’s been knocking around in my head and it shined a spotlight on the difference between what I say versus what I do.

For example, if someone did as I did rather than as I said they would:

  1. Spend many many hours on their phone despite saying they’re going to read.
  2. Find simple reasons to not train such as “I woke up too late” rather than just shortening the workout.
  3. Plan for things but when it comes down to working on it, it can be done tomorrow because “they have time later”.
  4. Make plans to study, but almost purposely never make a specific enough plan so it’s easier to skip
  5. They would read a healthy amount and workout a few times a week though.

This list isn’t intended to be mean (it does sound like it on reflection). There are more positives but we’ll get there.

I write all of this to say that our actions are the true reflections of our priorities, not what we write down on a piece of paper.

The paper can be forgotten, lost or ignored.

When we think of our priorities, we also need to think about what we are regularly doing.

Regularity is boring

The small steps we make to get to where we want to go are ultimately pretty dull.

When we look at the small actions we take on a grand scale, they ultimately look unexciting. The exciting part comes when you add them all together and see the end result.

  • Eating a healthy breakfast every day might be monotonous but when you look back on it and realise that you actually had much more energy through the day than usual, you’ll be thankful.
  • Working out even when you don’t feel like it, isn’t too exciting but realising that you’re fitter for it later down the line, that’s the exciting part.
  • Studying for a test that’s difficult is irritating and sometimes demoralising, but later, regardless of whether you passed or failed, you’ll be able to appreciate that you have the discipline to work towards something even if it’s difficult.

How we spend our days is how we spend our lives

If my actions reflected my priorities, would I be happy?

Potentially. There’s a chance I wouldn’t be. However, I’d be in a much better place to change my priorities if I knew how they actually impacted my life.

Perhaps I’d simply be happier I do what I say I’m going to do. If my actions matched the priorities I claimed I had for myself, I could trust in my word significantly more.

That is where small amounts of confidence come from. Let’s talk about the more positive examples:

  • I’ve been vegan for about 4 years now and I’m happy about it because at no point have I wavered, made excuses for myself or simply lied to myself. Here I’m living purely in line with the value I have set out for myself.
  • Every fundraising event I’ve done, I’ve completed to the best of my ability and, as an average person with large presence anywhere, I’ve been able to raise money while keeping fit at the same time.
  • I actually do read, even if it’s not as much as I’d like. There are a lot of great books out there and I get to enjoy them.

Taking the bird’s eye view

Back to the original question, if someone could only see what I do, and not hear what I say, what would they say my priorities are? Would I be happy with their answer?

Probably not delighted. My priority isn’t to be the largest consumer of TikTok or YouTube content (honestly, one of the inspirations to get words down about this was looking at my screen time on Youtube and I almost threw up).

There is space for better alignment of my words and actions and that’s something I’ll work on in a healthy way.

Yet, it doesn’t need to be perfect. It never will be. It can be slightly better. Which is the whole point of improving slowly.

How to copy the entire internet | Data Science Somedays

Photo by Markus Winkler on Pexels.com

My honourable guests, thank you for joining me today to learn how to copy the entire internet and store it in a less efficient format.

A recent project of mine is working on the Police Rewired Hackathon which asks us to think of ways to address hate speech online. Along with three colleagues, we started hacking the internet to put an end to hate speech online.

We won the Hackathon and all of us were given ownership of Google as a reward. Google is ours.

Thank you for reading and accepting your new digital overlords.

Our idea is simple and I will explain it without code because my code is often terrible and I’ve been saved by Sam, our python whisperer, on many occasions.

  1. Select a few twitter users (UCL academics in this case)
  2. Take their statuses and replies to those statuses
  3. Analyse the replies and classify them as hate speech, offensive speech, or neither
  4. Visualise our results and see if there are any trends.

In this post, I will only go through the first two.

Taking information from twitter

This is the part of the hackathon I’ve been most involved in because I’ve never created a Twitter scraper before (a program that takes information from Twitter and stores it in a spreadsheet or database). It was a good chance to learn.

For the next part to make sense, here’s a very small background of what a “tweet” is.

It is a message/status on Twitter. With limited amounts of text – you can also attach images.
These tweets contain a lot of information which can be used to form all sorts of analysis on. For example, a single tweet contains:

  1. Text
  2. Coordinates of where it was posted (if geolocation is enabled)
  3. the platform it came from (“Twitter for iPhone”)
  4. Likes (and who liked them)
  5. Retweets (and who did this)
  6. Time it was posted

And so on. With thousands of tweets, you can extract a number of potential trends and this is what we are trying to do. Does hate speech come from a specific area in the world?

OK, now how do we get this information?

There are two main ways to do this. The first is by using the Twitter Application Programming Interface (API). In short, Twitter has created this book of code which people like me can interact with with my code and it’ll give me information. For example, every tweet as a “status ID” that I can use to differentiate between tweets.

All you need to do is apply for developer status and you’ll be given authentication keys. There is a large limitation though – it’s owned by Twitter and Twitter, like most private companies, value making money.

There is a free developer status but that only allows for a small sample of tweets to be collected up to 7 days in the past. Anything beyond that, I’ll receive no information. I also can’t interact with the API too often before it tells me to shut up.

Collecting thousands of tweets at a decent rate would cost a lot of money (which people like myself… and most academics, cannot afford).

Fine.

Programmers are quite persistent. There are helpful Python modules (a bunch of code that helps you write other code) such as Twint.

Twint is a wonderfully comprehensive module that allows for significant historical analysis of Twitter. It uses a lot of the information that Twitter provides, does what the API does but without the artificial limitations from Twitter. However, it is fickle – for an entire month it was broken because twitter changed a URL.

Not sustainable.

Because I don’t want to incriminate myself, I will persist with the idea that I used the Twitter API.

How does it work?

Ok, I said no code but I lied. I didn’t know how else to explain it. 

for user in users:
    tweets_pulled = dict()
    replies=[]
    for user_tweets in tweepy.Cursor(api.user_timeline,screen_name=user).items(20): 
        for tweet in tweepy.Cursor(api.search,q='to:'+user, result_type='recent').items(100): # process up to 100 replies (limit per hour)
            if hasattr(tweet, 'in_reply_to_status_id_str'):
                if (tweet.in_reply_to_status_id_str==user_tweets.id_str):
                    replies.append(tweet)

I’ve removed some stuff to make it slightly easier to read. However, it is a simple “for loop”. This takes a user (“ImprovingSlowly”) and takes 20 tweets from their timeline.

After it has a list of these tweets, it searches twitter for “ImprovingSlowly” and adds to a list whether the tweets found were replies to any statuses.

Do that for 50 users with many tweets each, you’ll find yourself with a nice number of tweets.

If we ignore the hundred errors I received, multiple expletives at 11pm, and the three times I slammed my computer shut because life is meaningless, the code was pretty simple all things considered. It helped us on our way to addressing the problem of hate speech on Twitter.

Limitations

So there are many limitations to this approach. Here are some of the biggest:

  1. With hundreds of thousands of tweets, this is slow. Especially with the limits placed on us by Twitter, it can take hours to barely scratch the surface
  2. You have to “catch” the hate speech. If hate speech is caught and deleted before I run the code, I have no evidence it ever existed.
  3. …We didn’t find much hate speech. Of course this is good. But a thousand “lol” replies doesn’t really do much for a hackathon on hate speech.

Then there’s the bloody idea of “what even is hate speech?”

I’m not answering that in this blog post. I probably never will.

Conclusion

Don’t be mean to people on Twitter.

I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. If you are looking for retweets, I can tell you I don’t have any to give, but what I do have are a very particular set of skills.

Skills I have acquired over a very short Hackathon.

Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you.

If you stop spreading hate, that’ll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you, but if you don’t, I will look for you, I will find you and I will visualise your hate speech on a Tableau graph.

What I’m currently learning in Data Science | Data Science Somedays

Black and white keyboard with red space invader icon

It is 26 September as I write this meaning that I’m on day 26 of #66daysofdata.

If this is unfamiliar to you, it’s a small journey started by a Data Scientist named Ken Jee. He decided to “restart” his data science journey is invited us all to come along for the ride.

I’m not a data scientist, I’ve just always found the young field interesting. I thought, for this instance of Data Science Somedays, I’ll go through some of the things I’ve learned (in non-technical detail).

Data Ethics

I’m starting with this because I actually think it’s one of the most important, yet overlooked parts of Data Science. Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should. Not everything is good simply because it can be completed with an algorithm.

One of the problems with Data Science, at least in the commercial sphere, is that there’s a lot of value in having plenty of data. Sometimes, this value is taken as a priority versus privacy. In addition, many adversaries understand the value of data and as a result, aim to muddy the waters with large disinformation campaigns or steal personal data. What does the average citizen do in this scenario?

Where am I learning this? Fast.ai’s Pratical Data Ethics course.

Coding

How do I even start?

Quite easily because I’m not that good at programming so I haven’t learned all that much. Some of the main things that come to mind are:

  1. Object Oriented Programming (this took me forever to wrap my head around… it’s still difficult).
  2. Python decorators
  3. Functions

All of this stuff has helped me create:

None of them are impressive. But they exist and I was really happy when I fixed my bugs (if there are more, don’t tell me).

Where am I learning this? 2020 Complete Python Bootcamp: From Zero to Hero in Python.

(I said earlier I haven’t learned much – that’s just me being self-deprecating. It’s a good course – I’m just not good at programming… yet.

I also bought this for £12. Udemy is on sale all the time (literally))

Data visualisation and predictions

Pandas

After a while, I wanted to direct my coding practice to more data work rather than gaining a general understanding of Python.

To do this, I started learning Pandas which is a library (a bunch of code that helps you quickly do other things), that focuses on data manipulation. In short, I can now use Excel files with python. It included things such as:

  • How to rename columns
  • How to find averages, reorganise information, and then create a new table
  • How to answer basic data analysis questions

Pandas is definitely more powerful than the minor things I mentioned above. It’s still quite difficult to remember how to use all of the syntax so I still have to Google a lot of basic information but I’ll get there.

Where am I learning this? Kaggle – Pandas

Bokeh and Seaborn

When I could mess around with excel files and data sets, I took my talents to data visualisation.

Data visualisation will always be important because looking at tables are 1) boring, 2) slow, and 3) boring. How could I make my data sets at least look interesting?

Seaborn is another library that makes data visualisation much simpler (e.g. “creating a bar chart in one line of code” simpler).

Bokeh is another library that seems to be slightly more powerful in the sense that I can then make my visualisations interactive which is helpful. Especially when you have a lot of information to display at once.

I knew that going through tutorials will have their limit as my hand is always being held so I found a data set on ramen and created Kaggle notebooks. My aim was to practice and show others what my thought process was.

Where am I learning this? Seaborn | Bokeh

Machine learning

This is my most recent venture. How can I begin to make predictions using code, computers and coffee?

So for all of the above, I still find quite difficult and there will be a little while until I can say “I know Python” but this topic seemed like the one with the biggest black box.

If I say

filepath = “hello.csv”

“pandas.read_csv(filepath)”

I understand that I’m taking a function from the Pandas library, and that function will allow me to interact with the .csv file I’ve called.

If I say sklearn.predict(X_new_data) – honestly what is even happening? Half the time, I feel like it’s just luck that I get a good outcome.

Where am I learning this? Kaggle – Intro to machine learning

What is next?

I’m going to continue learning about data manipulation with Pandas and Bokeh as those were the modules I found the most interesting to learn about. However, that could very easily change.

My approach to learning all of this is to go into practice as soon as I can even if it’s a bit scary. It exposes my mistakes and reminds me that working through tutorials often leaves me feeling as though I’ve learned more than I have.

There’s also a second problem – I’m not a Computer Science student so I don’t have the benefit of learning the theory behind all of this stuff. Part of me wants to dive in, the other part is asking that I stay on course and keep learning the practical work so I can utilise it in my work.

Quite frequently, I get frustrated by not understanding and remembering what I’m learning “straight away”. However, this stuff isn’t easy by any stretch of the imagination. So it might take some time.

And that’s alright. Because we’re improving slowly.

The two-week experiment|The Sunday Monday Post

We’re two weeks into 2018.

How many new year resolutions have been broken and revitalised already? How many are still going strong?

That doesn’t matter too much. We all hear the same advice – make it a habit. Shoot for sustainable change rather than drastic alterations to our lifestyle. If you slip up once, get back on track as quickly as possible.

I agree with all of this advice because it’s helpful. However, it doesn’t address the main problem I find with New Year Resolutions.

They’re often boring and create too much pressure for perfection.

Who cares about being healthy when Pringles are £1? or exercise when it’s raining and windy?

2018 isn’t special. Neither will 2019 be. There is nothing grand about the change of year. We all know this, yet depend on it anyway even if we decide not to formally create any resolutions.

Why is this a misleading mindset?

Let’s take a quick look at the term “resolution”:

The firm decision to do or not to do something

“I’m going to exercise more”

“I’m going to eat less junk”

“I’m going to call my parents once a week”

Whatever the form, the underlying philosophy is that “this is the time I finally make a change!” When we make resolutions, we often treat them as though we should make a specific change and if we fail, we are failures. That isn’t true – it’s a misleading train of thought.

Experiments and Projects

I returned to an idea I probably heard from the likes of Tim Ferriss and that is the two week experiment and six month project. 

Experiments are an opportunity to try something new or do something slightly differently. They view failure as a possibility rather than something which must be avoided at all costs.

With New Year Resolutions, we always have the possiblity that we’ll fail but it’s as though we choose to ignore it because we believe we can will ourselves to success (it’s not that easy).

Two weeks is a short enough timeframe for our efforts not to feel unproductive and damaging. If we choose to jump ship early, we haven’t sunk too much time into it. If we enjoy it, we can simply carry on and maybe we’ll stick with it long enough.

It’s also a short enough timeframe for it to stay exciting, I’ve found. It’s like we get to become a slightly different person for a short time! Given how easy it is to get stuck in mundane routines, small changes can be wonderful.

The six month project allows for an overarching theme to come from the experiments.

A six month project: Learn data visualisation.

Two-week experiment no.1: Only utilise data on a sport you know nothing about when creating visualisations.

Two-week experiment no.2: Produce a new visualisation every two days.

Two-week experiement no.3: Work on a detailed visualisation that utilises a new skill and produce a story at the end of the two weeks.

You get the idea?

A current example of mine is the following.

Six month project: Lose weight.

Two-week experiment no.1: Have a vegan meal a day

It’s been going very well actually. They’re fun and a helpful break from the bad and good habits that I’ve maintained for a while.

Try the following:

  1. Write down a goal you’ve wanted to achieve.
  2. Think: six months has passed – what do I want it to look like? That is your new project.
  3. Experiment: what’s an interesting way to make progress on your project? What haven’t you tried before? What has been unsuccessful in the past and how might you make a change to it?

Now, be reasonable. I don’t recommend you try fasting for two weeks or skydiving without a parachute to aid weightloss.

Happy 2018!

What might you experiment with next?

Follow me on Facebook and Twitter for updates!

How to Love Yourself: Stay On Your Own Team

We all talk to ourselves in some form. It’s less weird than you think.

But I’m not interested in the times that we just recite a shopping list or wonder whether we’ve locked the back door properly.

What about the times you hate yourself?

The times you call yourself stupid, worthless, meaningless. The times when, if you said them to anyone on the street, you’d probably be punched in the face and the aggressor would be cheered on.

When you repeat these things to your friends, you’re probably told that you’re not stupid, worthless or whatever other mean word of choice you pick that day.

The problem is… they are just so believable in the moment.

Whatever caused these thoughts are probably still present. Negative thinking is just continuously being triggered and reinforced.

I didn’t go to the gym so I’m fat and worthless -> I’m still not going to the gym -> I’m even more fat and worthless.

Now, these thoughts are often completely untrue if you give yourself the chance to challenge them in a meaningful way.

Does missing a workout suck? Of course! Does it completely shatter your self-worth? No – the same way one workout probably doesn’t justify your whole existence.

You may be told to challenge these thoughts. It’s a valuable way to tackle negativity and if it works, keep at it. However, I’ve found something else to be useful.

papaioannou-kostas-337812.jpg
Photo by Papaioannou Kostas on Unsplash

Stay on your own team

Or “talk to yourself as you would a friend”.

If you had a team of people to help you out in life, think of how you’d assemble it.

Would you have a person who you can turn to for advice?

A person who makes you laugh?

A person who makes stellar banana and chocolate chip cake?

Even a person with a voice that’s like audible silk?

Now, what about yourself – where would you stand?

Of course, you’re the person moving forward because you’re not being carried all the time. However, even if you stand still or move backwards, remember that you’re on your own team.

It’s the best thing you can do for yourself. A good teammate wouldn’t tell you that you’re a piece of shit if you missed a basket (and mean it) or conceded a penalty. They’ll help you get back on your feet and move on again. I’m not sure why I mixed up two sports.

They’ll be encouraging rather than demoralising and realistic rather than endlessly pessimistic (there’s a difference).

This is where talking to yourself helps. You can imagine yourself as a separate member of the team you’ve assembled and help yourself with a reminder that the hateful things you’re saying about yourself aren’t true.

Even if you really believe it, you can use that as a way to improve your life regardless. As Ryan Holiday says – The Obstacle is the Way.

When you begin, it won’t be believable. With practise however, you’ll slowly begin to correct your outlook on your own self-worth and reduce the negative self-talk that doesn’t inspire helpful self-improvement.

daniel-mccullough-348488.jpg
Photo by Daniel McCullough on Unsplash

How stay on your own team

A thought that flies in my head when I think of advice like this is that I don’t deserve to speak to myself so kindly. Because the things I say are true.

Well, that’s not true. They just often feel true. And feelings aren’t facts.

Do you need to deserve a helping hand to have one? Maybe not. If you can offer yourself that helping hand, it may be the most useful thing you do for your own mental health.

I’m not asking you to lie about yourself – that’s simply not believable. I’m not the greatest writer in the world so I won’t tell myself that. However what I can do is tell myself but I can improve. For example:

  • I’m a terrible swimmer … but I can get better with consistent practice.
  • I’m not a kind person… but I can do one kind thing a day to learn how to treat others better.
  • I’m not good at studying… but I can ask for help.
  • I’m worthless… but I can find or create my self-worth with time and patience.

I try to use the “But I can improve” correction because I find telling myself “no I’m a perfect swimmer!” empty. It doesn’t mean anything to me.

Reminding yourself that you’re a draft in progress is a smaller and more realistic step to take. And it’s possible to prove it to yourself!

  • Swimming: after not being able to swim a length without getting tired, I practised consistently and now can swim 1.5km without hating myself.
  • Kindness: years ago, I challenged myself to point out good things about people and now it’s a habit.
  • Studying: I took the time to ask for help and learn about better studying techniques, now I’ve done well academically throughout university.

Give yourself a chance

Really, this is all about giving yourself a chance. You’re a draft in progress and we all are. Sometimes your brain malfunctions and tells you falsehoods that you want to believe. Like any part of your body, it can just be faulty.

So remember, you’re on your own team. Try not to join the opposition – they aren’t as good-looking as you and don’t have nice cakes.

As always, thank you for reading!

My question for you is:

What stops you from treating yourself with compassion?

You can follow me on Twitter and Facebook for more updates!

It’s Important To Do the Things You Enjoy

It’s obvious. But it’s really important

You’re not bored, you’re not happy – you’re mindless.

One thing that I’ve said about being addicted to your phone is that it’s just a really bad habit but unfortunately, a really effective one.

A basic model of how habits are formed are the three Rs – Reminder, Routine, Reward. (I didn’t come up with this myself – Charles Duhigg is my best source). The easier these are to come about, the habit is much more likely to stick.

For our phones it’s this:

  • Reminder(s): notifications, the phone always being in arms reach, needing it for certain tasks (like alarms)
  • Routine(s): scrolling through social media, texting a friend, watching a video
  • Reward: The small pleasure centre in our brains reacting to some kind of approval.

The problem is that these rewards you gain from social media and watching videos may not be deeply satisfying. Instead, it’s just enough to stop you from getting extremely bored but not enough to entertain you significantly.

You’re hovering just above boredom but nowhere near happiness.

I fall victim to this all the time. I spend time doing things that don’t really interest me. They entertain me in the short-term but leave me feeling like rubbish quickly afterwards.

Given that I’m in pain a lot of the time and that impacts my concentration, I want to fill the time that I have with more enjoyment than superficial rubbish.

mohamed-nohassi-223475
Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash

What do you really enjoy? 

All of this seems mighty obvious. To be happy, do things that make you happy.

However, it serves us well to actually think about what makes us happy then think about whether we actually follow through with that.

For example, we might want to think more often:

  • What are the things that make me happy in the short-term but guilty in the long-term?
  • What leaves me feeling really satisfied with myself?
  • Do I spend more time on things that are simply easy or do I challenge myself?
  • Am I doing the same thing over and over again?
  • How often do I end the day feeling satisfied?
  • How often do I start the day feeling encouraged by the plan I have set out?

These questions have helped me better understand what I actually enjoy rather than those activities that are simply easy to do. Rather than going to the path of least resistance, you spend more time carving out a life that you really want to live.

As a result, you may find that after answering these questions that finding happiness in your day requires a bit more self-discipline than you may have expected!

Being satisfied and happy isn’t simply a case of doing “whatever you want” because that can be quite difficult to judge. Rather, we need to think more deeply about the things that we enjoy, then experiment with ways to fill our time with more of it.

The benefit of this approach I’ve found is that it stops everything turning into an obligation. Rather, you want to do certain things because you’re confident that they’ll do good things for your mental health. For example, why would you miss a workout if you know you’ll feel good after and during it?

You wouldn’t. Exercising is something that has a much greater potential to make you happy than sitting down and eating Pringles like they’re going out of fashion. (I promise this does not come from personal experience…)

chris-brignola-7766.jpg
Photo by Chris Brignola on Unsplash

Seneca writes that one of our biggest problems is that we “live as though we’ll live forever”, waste it on meaningless things then complain that life is too short.

Ok, but what if I don’t have the energy? 

What do you do when you want to do something you’ll enjoy but simply can’t because of something like chronic pain?

It’s easy to do the easiest thing (like watch videos mindlessly for hours) because you lack energy. So for me, all of these mindless activities tend to come in the evening after a day of being active in some way.

Here are two things I’ve found help:

  1. High energy and Low energy activities

Split the things you enjoy into high energy and low energy activities. For me, it goes like this:

High energy: Writing, reading non-fiction, exercising

Low energy: Reading fiction, calming yoga, Netflix

2. Don’t worry about it

Worrying about how you spend your time is likely to tire you out even more and make you feel extremely guilty. Sometimes, you just don’t have a lot of energy and you just want to watch videos for a while.

Set a good intention for yourself and enjoy the time you have.

It’s important but think about it, don’t worry about it.

When I was reminded of this concept, I began to feel guilty about how I spend my time (I’ve been like this for years). It’s because I turned the things I want to do into things I have to do.

If you don’t reach an obligation you feel bad.

If you make everything an obligation, you’re likely to feel bad because you can’t do everything.

Not everything is an obligation. Remind yourself of that when you find yourself saying “I should do this and should do that”.

So set out to fill more of your time with the things you enjoy doing. Be mindful of this intention because it is a helpful reminder that our time is often limited by things out of our control.

It sounds ominous but it’s true. Seneca writes that one of our biggest problems is that we “live as though we’ll live forever”, waste it on meaningless things then complain that life is too short.

Perhaps life isn’t too short. Regardless, let’s take the time to do things we enjoy.

If anything, we deserve it.

As always, thank you for reading!

My question for you is:

What do you enjoy and what do you want to do more of?

You can follow me on Twitter and Facebook for more updates!

(Happy 100th post to meeee!)

Am I a Fraud? | The Sunday Monday Post

Last year I wrote this:

“I thought I’d start the Sunday Monday Post so I can to talk more loosely about the things I’ve enjoyed within the self-improvement sphere and how I think I’ve improved in the past week (or since the time of the last edition).”

I’m not very good at this whole “writing weekly” thing. I live on a wheneverly schedule, I suppose.

To summarise, this is a far less structured post than normal and a chance to talk about what I’ve found interesting in the past week with regards to self-improvement.

The titular question – am I a fraud? – is a bit unfair because I’ve already answered it. I often believe that I am.

Writing about self-improvement, overcoming adversity (and daily mindfulness tips over on my Facebook page), seems to put me in a position of authority. If I write as if I know what I’m talking about, then I ask, do people believe that I have everything under control?

I certainly hope not.

Sometimes I’m like the little kid, who has no sense of direction, crying for my parents in a grocery store. Other times, I surrender myself to death by Pringles overdose or drown in crunchy M&Ms .

One of the reasons why I am hesitant to post is that I feel like my posts … lack sincerity? Aren’t true?  I can’t find the right word. If I don’t always live the advice that I give, is it good advice? Am I ever in the position to give advice about anything at 22?

To tackle this, I try to remind myself of the highlight/blooper reel problem. We compare our bloopers to the highlights of other people. If I fear that other people would think I’m a fraud if they found out my bloopers, what does that mean?

It means that, because I write about self improvement, I have to not only present myself as a person who follows all of their advice but I have to be perfect. Which goes completely against the idea of improving slowly and self-compassion!

I don’t have to be perfect. I’m not perfect. I do not want to be perfect. But it’s OK to give recommendations on how to live better because I’m just here figuring it all out along with everyone who reads. You probably have a personal problem that other people do not know about. I do too. And that’s alright – you can still help others.

Even though the fear that other people think I’m better than I actually am is based on nothing factual, I’d like to break that down a bit. I’m going to share some of the positives and negatives I’ve had in the past month:

The good: 

  • I swam 1.5km quite a few times and it felt good.
  • I finished the first draft of my dissertation.
  • I worked on a summer school and seemed to make a positive impact on some of the students.

The bad: 

  • I didn’t write for the blog as consistently as I would have liked.
  • I also struggled to swim 700m multiple times throughout the month.
  • I broke promises to call friends to catch up.

The ugly: 

  • I’ve been in a lot of pain, nearly every day.
  • I’ve polished off 3 packets of Pringles in a week (and m&ms … I told you.) as a result. Stress eating is something I’ve tried to avoid but it sometimes catches up with me.
  • I’ve been overwhelmed with negative emotions that make me withdraw from other people quite quickly.

Despite all of the articles on self-improvement I’ve written, I still make a lot of mistakes. It’s just part of the process. Social media makes it really easy for us to believe that things are smoother than they really are.

So I’ll try to worry less about whether I have the “authority” to help people. A lot of these articles are also reminders to myself.

I hope you find them helpful too!

Here are a few articles I’ve found interesting in the past week:

And that brings me to the end of the Sunday Monday Post.

How do you manage the feelings of insecurity and helping other people? Does it bother you at all?

As always, thanks for reading.

For more updates, you can follow me on Facebook and Twitter!

Here is why productivity doesn’t matter

neven-krcmarek-246988
Photo by Neven Krcmarek on Unsplash

One question that has, for some reason, bothered me quite a lot is: what is productivity?

Throughout all the different personal development and productivity blogs I’ve read, I’ve learned a number of ways to be more productive. Eliminate distractions, exercise, don’t have long meetings and so on and so on.

However, I never really took time to understand what productivity is.

Perhaps this is because the first answer is quite mundane.

The ability to produce stuff.

It’s a keystone behind David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” system which has sold millions of copies and inspired a host of productivity blogs out there.

The more productive you are, the more stuff you produce or complete.

Is this helpful? Anyone can be extremely productive if you take this definition because you can complete a lot of small, relatively meaningless tasks and say you’ve had an extremely productive day every day. This is why answering a bunch of emails or cleaning the house might feel productive even though you’ve put off something more important.

Simply producing more stuff isn’t a helpful definition in a lot of contexts we’re now in. What about…

The ability to produce important stuff.

This is a bit more focused. If complete more important stuff you’re going to be more productive than the person who just completes a bunch of meaningless tasks, right? For example, if you decide not to answer a bunch of emails and instead write the important report or calculate the important calculation, then you’re producing more valuable stuff.

While we’re getting closer to a more usable definition, we’re not there yet. What happens if the tasks you’re working on aren’t important to you but rather someone else? Am I being unproductive because the ‘important’ goals aren’t important to me?

Possibly. But many of us will work for other people and on important tasks that do not completely align with our personal passions. It’s a normal part of a working life in whatever capacity. The importance of the task depends on the context but then we may want to think in more depth about the kind of context we find ourselves in the majority of the time.

We may think about productivity in personal terms – getting stuff done that’s important to you. Doing this might be quite drastic because we could find that we’re largely unproductive despite doing brilliantly at your job or studies. We do want to make distinction between business and personal productivity because not everyone is at the luxury of being able to quit their jobs and focus on things that are only important to them. But it’s a helpful tool when coming to think about your priorities and how you can ensure you’re focusing on them as much as you can.

However, I don’t want to keep on twisting and contorting the definition of productivity. Working on and creating things that are important to you whether that is in a personal or business sense. This discussion leaves us a more important question.

bram-naus-200967
Photo by Bram Naus on Unsplash

Does your productivity matter?

The simple definition of productivity – getting stuff done – is unhelpful. Thinking about getting stuff done in terms of their importance is much more helpful. Yet, the more I think about it, the less I think it actually matters.

In the short term, of course it matters. You don’t want to lose your job or fail university because you’re too busy watching videos on things that barely interest you. In the long term, I think the value of an action might be better judged by its ability to help you live with integrity or overall satisfaction.

Focusing on things that are important to you isn’t good simply because they are productive. Instead, it results in matching the things that matter to you and the actions you complete every day. In doing that, we live with greater presence and a movement away from chastising yourself for “not being productive enough” or “lazy” or “wasting time”.

If we judge something as a waste of time because it doesn’t help us live in line with our values instead of whether it is helping us be productive enough, it helps us do a few things.

First, we stop micro managing our time. Doing this helps us stray away from being overly critical of how we spend our time.

Second, it gets to the deeper cause of our disappointment. We can spend a day with a very difficult problem and not write a single word yet still feel like we’ve done something useful. We can spend a day writing rubbish all day, and feel remarkably unsatisfied with everything. It’s the lack of personal importance that seems to drive this disappointment.

Third, we think honestly about the bigger picture – and make steps towards them. My yearly integrity posts are an attempt to slow down and reassess what is really important to me and how I can mould my life and my days in that direction. Doing this places a useful urgency into my days.

So, if not productivity, what is important?

Seneca complains that

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it. Life is long if you know how to use it.

we say life is short yet treat it as though we will live forever. Regularly returning to important values instead of getting lost in thoughts about what is productive and what isn’t, I think, is more helpful overall.

Thinking about productivity is useful but should only come second to thinking about actions that help us live in accordance with our values.

To do this, we have to slow down and remember what is actually important rather than going so fast you’ve been running in the wrong direction for ages.

As always, thank you for reading.

 

Follow me on Facebook and Twitter for more updates!

twitter and facebook mascots :D

What Does ‘Improving Slowly’ Mean?

In the time that I’ve spent writing about various elements of improving slowly, I haven’t sat down with you and spoken about what it means. I hear the cries already.

“It’s bloody obvious! Rather than improve quickly – improve slowly!”

But I promise, there is more to it. I want to talk about the values of improving slowly and why they’re important.

cameron-kirby-135929.jpg
Photo by Cameron Kirby on Unsplash

The principles of slow self-improvement

Self-improvement is important to a lot of people. Especially to those who feel bad about their skill set and general abilities. Or to those who want to live happier and more fulfilling lives.

The literature is broad – much of it very good (and terrible, but we can ignore that for now). The experience of self-improvement is not spoken about as often as it could be. Largely because blogs and books tend to give advice (as my blog does too) without talking about what it’s like to actually live that advice.

I started my blog so I could do that but I feel that I’ve strayed from that (or never really started). So I’ve been thinking:

What are the principles of slow self-improvement?

When we challenge ourselves to go as quickly as possible (for whatever reason) it’s easy for that doubt to become more and more intense. It’s helpful to slow down, be mindful and enjoy the process of improving as much as we can.

This brings us to the first principle – We are working drafts

I explored this briefly in the last post on self-forgiveness. When we decide to improve certain things, we do so because we believe it could be better. However, it’s easy to slip into perfectionism without noticing. As a result, we might see how quickly we can learn something (in order to get rid of the deficiency quicker) or become overwhelmed by the task and never start.

There’s nothing wrong with learning quickly if we have the right foundation. If we start with the belief that we aren’t perfect and need to be, learning quickly will not solve that.

We take a mindful breath, assess our intentions and remember that we’re a work in progress. We always will be.

And that’s OK.

With this in mind, it becomes much easier to catch those harmful storylines which can often plague our thoughts.

“I’m not moving fast enough!”

“I’m not smart enough to learn this so quickly”

“I’m falling behind!”

And instead of focusing more on the improvement and being kind to ourselves in the process, it becomes much easier to lose ourselves in the storyline or give up when we realise that learning a language or writing a book isn’t as sexy as we first imagined.

Improving slowly is about improving with compassion.

Self-forgiveness is one facet of self-compassion. There are a many others. Small things such as:

  • Cultivating kinder thoughts towards yourself
  • Allowing yourself to relax
  • Appreciating how far you’ve come and your courage to keep going

In the journey of self-improvement and as a result improving the world, it helps to start from a foundation which isn’t infected with hate. Of course, this takes time – I struggle with it every day. But it’s a worthwhile struggle.

One day I’ll see myself in the same positive light that I see my friends and family. I hope the same for you.

Another important principle of slow self-improvement is a deeper adoption of helpful habits.

When we improve slowly, we spend more time with the habits we want to adopt. As a result, we’re far more likely to keep the habit than for it to be a fad.

For example, a study from University College London showed that it can take an average of to 66 days to form a habit rather than the conventional “21 day challenges”.

Next, we resist apathy and cynicism – and fight against it.

Apathy and cynicism are only around the corner and come knocking when we experience multiple setbacks. We must remember that we cannot give up on ourselves. Especially when it is most tempting. Simply remembering that we can be champions for ourselves is a helpful reminder to remain engaged with the world.

Even in the simplest form. There have been times when all I’ve done is reminded myself “I want to be engaged in my own story”. Then gone back to bed.

It can be difficult, but on reflection I’ve understood it as an act of compassion.

austin-neill-160132.jpg
Photo by Austin Neill on Unsplash

Lastly, we become better one step at a time.

It is better to work with focus instead of attempting everything at once. To do this, we slow down, take a mindful breath, and take it step by step.

Conclusion

This journey of improving ourselves and adding value to the world is a life-long one. Our time is valuable but this doesn’t mean we try to complete things as fast as humanely possible.

I ask that we slow down. Savour our improvement and as a result develop a healthier relationship with setbacks and disappointments.

While we improve, we’ll experience many of our ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows.

And that’s more than OK.

Onward we go to improve ourselves and improve the world. With presence and mindfulness.

We improve slowly.

Here are the principles again:

  • We are working drafts
  • We improve with compassion
  • We spend a lot of time with positive habits
  • We resist apathy and cynicism – and fight against it
  • We become better one step at a time

As always, thank you for reading. If you found these principles helpful, please share! Let me know what you think of them below :)

Follow me on Facebook and Twitter for more updates!

twitter and facebook mascots :D

Simply Be.

This is my birds and the b talk

We sit, stand, lie and stay still. We close our eyes, relax our face and breathe in deeply to the slow count of three. Hold it and notice how everything stopped, if only for this moment, for you to focus on this one breath.

Now the time to breathe out begins. Again to the count of three.

We notice how the calm air feels on our upper lip or how our chest falls as our lungs slowly empty.

The world has slowed to the beat of One. Two. Three. One. Two. Three.

That’s what it means to simply be.

Taking the time to find pockets of stillness in your day is important for it is one of the few times where we cannot be consumed by the anxiety of the future or beaten up by regrets of the past. No longer living at the pace of other people’s agendas or taking the frequent journey into our negative thoughts.

The thoughts that bombard us and attempt to dictate how we feel are allowed to pass for what they are. Unimportant.

As with many people, I’ve had multiple moments when I begin to worry nearly endlessly about what the future holds and my inability to control what’s ahead of me. It drags me away from the good things that I’m probably experiencing right now, no matter how small. But sitting down to meditate reminds me to notice the present. To enjoy it for what it is.

It does not force calmness onto any person but it begins to cultivate a habit of staying calm in the face of stressful moments. The act of remembering to appreciate the present instead of getting lost in the future. Taking time to be instead of imagining the worst.

The worrying slows because we don’t attach judgements to the thoughts that fly through our heads, nor do we linger and follow them. When we are still, the thoughts leave our minds with the same speed they joined us with.

Observing this is remarkable. It separates us from the thoughts we have about ourselves and the other things out there in the world. Ever so slowly I begin to understand why there’s so much joy in being as still as possible. There are many really convincing thoughts that fly through our heads – usually about how bad we are at something or a flaw that’s “obviously” irreparable. Spending more time building pockets of stillness into our day forces us to slow down. And more importantly, it doesn’t mean that we analyse the thought in order to determine whether the thought it true for that is a battle easily lost.

We can let it pass. Attach nothing to it. No judgement, no reaction just acknowledgement.

By doing this, we come to better understand that so many of the thoughts which plague us leave our heads then join us again. Then leave again. They aren’t stitched into the fabric of our minds.

This isn’t easy. Stillness doesn’t cure depression or anxiety. It builds appreciation of slowing down and experiencing the day more on our own terms.

We Simply Be. We do not live for the future nor dwell in the past. We experience how we are at the present moment.

simply-be-web

Pockets of stillness can be difficult to make and difficult to sustain. Especially if you can’t find an immediate reward to the practice. To that I say, simply keep trying – it’s worthwhile.

Meditation is a practice not a solution. It’s something you do and keep doing. In the process, you appreciate its rewards. The journey doesn’t end when you’ve reached your first “moment of stillness” – these pass too. With stillness, you won’t find perfection every day. What you can find is a separation from hectic thoughts and negative judgements. For all you do is be.

How can you build more pockets of stillness in your day?

  • Meditate for 2 minutes in the morning.
  • Slow down when you eat, appreciate the flavours and smells of your food.
  • Take 15 minutes of your morning and make it yours. No time for emails, messages, or mindless web browsing.

And so on.

Remember, to simply be, we…

…sit, stand, lie and stay still. We close our eyes, relax our face and breathe in deeply to the slow count of three. Hold it and notice how everything stops, if only for this moment, for you to focus on this one breath.

Now we breathe out. Again to the count of three.

We notice how the calm air feels on our upper lip or how our chest falls as our lungs slowly empty.

The world slows to the beat of One. Two. Three. One. Two. Three.

As always, thanks for reading :)

I have Facebook and Twitter if you want to follow those.

I’ve written more on this topic:

Have the most wonderful day! If you enjoyed the post, please share!