“Early education makes us mindless” states social psychologist Ellen Langer.
In her book “Mindfulness” Langer argues that from a young age we are taught to focus on goals rather than the process by which they are achieved.
With such an intense focus on achieving goals and high results you may have become locked in a certain way of thinking. “Mindless” is how Langer describes this state.
Instead of asking “How do I do this?” or “How can I do this?” you find yourself anxiously thinking “Can I do this?” and “What if I fail?”. The joy of learning ceases to exist.
It can be tough being a student in a highly competitive, results oriented school system. As Author and Educator Allison Zmuda states –
“In their efforts to do well in school, students have largely become low level bureaucrats who complete the requisite paperwork but suffer from the monotony of the experience”.
Sadly, this was the case for me. In high school I was a rote learning parrot. Bored out of my brain but extremely driven.
Did I care about whether I had a deep understanding of my subjects? No, not at all. All I wanted were gold stars, high percentages and the letter A on my work.
Then almost overnight everything changed.
I got 1 out of 20 on my first test at Law school.
That’s right. 1 out of 20. And boy, did that hurt.
High school had trained me to become a masterful rote learner, capable of churning out hundreds of abstract, sterile facts. But this skill no longer served me well in a system that required you to have a deep understanding of complex ideas.
In my heartbreak of receiving such a lousy mark, I remember asking myself –
“What is the point of going through another 5 years of study if it’s only for a piece of paper? Is there any point if I don’t enjoy myself and grow as a person?”
At that point I let go of my obsession with results. I became fascinated by the process of learning (eg. How does one learn information at a deep level?). For the first time in my life I started to enjoy learning. I mean really enjoy learning. Some subjects gave me such joy and changed my entire outlook on life.
10 years later, I am now doing my PhD. My uncle would call me a “professional student” but I don’t see it that way. I love learning.
I spend my days exploring original ideas that fascinate me. It’s common for me to stumble across an idea that makes me want to scream out with joy. I only wish it hadn’t taken me so long to arrive at this point.
When you shift your focus from results to the process, not only do you experience greater happiness and fulfilment, but you stop comparing yourself to others. I’m sure you’ve had the experience where you compared yourself to another person and subsequently, felt jealous.
Langer argues that often when we feel jealous of another’s accomplishments it’s because we focus on the end result (not the process the person has gone through).
When I first started my PhD I would compare myself to a 70 year old accomplished professor. I found myself thinking “He is so smart”, “Look at these articles he has written…I can’t write like this” and “His ideas are so deep…I’m so simple”.
Here I was embarking on the beginning of my research career comparing myself to a professor who had been developing and thinking about ideas for over 50 years!
This is indeed a trap that many postgraduate students fall into. Langer states –
“They begin their dissertations with inordinate anxiety because they have seen other peoples completed and polished work and mistakenly compare it to their own first tentative steps.
With their noses deep in file cards and half-baked hypotheses, they look in awe at Dr So-and-Sos published book as if it had been born without effort or false starts, directly from brain to printed page.
By investigating how someone got somewhere, we are more likely to see the achievement as hard won and our own chances as more plausible”.
In my experience, learning can be a tremendous source of fulfilment and joy. But to experience this takes valuing the process over the end result and not comparing yourself to others.
The paradox is that when you immerse yourself in the process, you will most likely get a better result and experience far more rewards along the way.
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But just to be clear – this car wasn’t in bad shape when I first got it. I turned this car into a jalopy through neglect and ignoring basic warning signs.
Whenever I gave my friends a lift in this car, I remember that they always looked visibly uncomfortable. They’d say with a nervous laugh:
“Jane, what’s that strange rattling sound?”
“Why is there a red warning light on your dashboard?”
I wasn’t fussed about the red light or the strange rattling sound.
Somehow, I’d missed the adulting lesson on basic car maintenance.
For many years, I never bothered to get my car serviced. I drove it to the point where it rattled and shook violently, the engine would cut out while driving, and the brakes squealed at a painfully high pitch.
It got to the point where I could no longer ignore these problems, but by then, it was too late. My car was beyond repair and could only be salvaged for scrap metal.
I’m embarrassed to share this, as that’s no way to treat a car that gets you from A to B and uses the Earth’s finite resources. But stay with me because there’s an important point I want to make, and it’s this. . .
When I was younger, I engaged in several unhealthy lifestyle practices. Whilst I never smoked, took drugs, or consumed alcohol, I ate huge amounts of processed junk food (I didn’t know how to cook).
I also frequently sacrificed sleep to pull all-nighters to complete my assignments (I struggled with procrastination).
My body seemed resilient. It appeared capable of handling the shocks. But over time, I started feeling tired and rundown. Still, I kept pushing myself like my old car. The only time I could rest was when I got sick.
These days, everything’s quite different.
I am physically unable to thrash my body around like an old jalopy.
Something as simple as consuming too much salt or sugar can send my brain spiralling out of control.
I was reminded of this a couple of weeks ago when I visited a friend in hospital. Because I was spending a lot of time at the hospital, my usual routines of grocery shopping and cooking from scratch were disrupted.
But then to make matters worse, I was given $80 worth of vouchers to spend at the hospital cafeteria. I thought, “How bad can hospital cafeteria food be?”.
It turns out really bad.
Cheese kranskys (sausages), heaps of salty hot chips, deep-fried chicken, and soft drinks were the main options at this hospital cafeteria.
Unhealthy food seemed completely normalised in this hospital environment. My jaw dropped when I saw a patient order not just one but five cheese kransky sausages!
In this hospital setting, I also started to eat poorly. It was on my third day of eating hot chips from the hospital cafeteria when I noticed that these chips weren’t doing me any favours. I was feeling off my game.
So I decided enough was enough. I gave the remaining hospital food vouchers to a homeless man who was hanging around the cafeteria, desperate for a feed. It was back to home cooked meals for me!
This greasy processed hospital food had a ripple effect on the rest of my life. I slept badly, which impacted my ability to run the next morning (my joints hurt). I felt resistance to using my treadmill desk because everything felt much harder than usual. Since I was moving less, I was more distracted.
I know all this might sound a bit dramatic, especially to those of us who enjoy a few hot chips (e.g., my husband). Given my friend was in a hospital bed and couldn’t walk, I am fully aware of how lucky I am to be able to run in the first place (even with sore joints).
The point I’m trying to make is this . . .
I also know that small decisions, like eating too many hot chips or staying up late, can add up and take their toll on your mind and body. These tiny decisions can have a big impact on the way you feel.
When I was younger, I could eat whatever I wanted and still feel pretty good. Sometimes I’d feel a bit off, but not in a noticeable way.
As Dr Randy J Paterson states in his book How to Be Miserable in Your Twenties:
“In your twenties, some people can do practically anything to their bodies, experience no immediate physical consequences, and feel emotionally more or less well. Random sleep cycle, sedentary lifestyle, lousy diet, 90 percent of the day staring at screen, binge-drinking, isolation, the works. The body doesn’t completely fall apart, and the mind, while not thrilled, hangs on.
Later on, the effect is more immediate. Live exactly the same way at thirty-five, at forty-five, and things don’t go so well. Take a middle-aged car and drive it aggressively down jolting roads, loaded to the max, old oil clogging the engine, and it’s not going to last long. The baseline mood at forty-with no maintenance, no exercise, no dietary adjustment, no stability, and no social life- is misery. ”
Like a car, the human body requires regular basic maintenance. I see this basic maintenance as a collection of small behaviours that leave me feeling calm, grounded, and focused.
Here are a few things I need to do to keep myself running smoothly:
Every now and then, I’ll abandon these behaviours. I’ll have a day where I eat and do whatever I like. I’ll order takeaway, sit on the couch and binge-watch a series until late at night. I usually pay for it the next day, but it also gives me a better appreciation of these healthy practices and what they do for my body and mind.
It’s all about tuning in and noticing how certain things make you feel. For example, when I was in my mid-20s, I noticed every time I ate deep-fried chicken, I experienced sharp stomach pains.
That was like the red warning light on my car dashboard going off in my body. But instead of ignoring it, I paid close attention. Eventually, I decided it wasn’t worth the pain. So I stopped buying greasy deep-fried chicken and eventually went plant-based, which immediately improved my mental and physical health.
There’s no doubt that modern life can be hectic and stressful. When you’re rushing from one thing to another, it’s easy to overlook the basics and ignore the warning signs.
I’m not proud of how I treated my first car, but I learnt from the experience. Now I make sure I get my car serviced regularly. This saves me time, money, and stress in the long run.
Similarly, we need to pay attention to the way in which we look after ourselves. By dedicating time, energy, and attention to the small things that make us feel better, our experience of the present moment becomes richer. As longevity researcher Dan Buettner says, “You can add years to your life and life to your years”.
“Suzuki Swift 1.3 GTi 1990” by RL GNZLZ is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. (used in image 1)
“Scrap yard 22l3” by Snowmanradio at English Wikipedia (Original text: snowmanradio) is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. (used in image 2)
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On these days, the temptation to procrastinate and distract oneself can be strong.
I recently spent a few days with my family in the countryside, where I enjoyed reading by a crackling fire. But when I found myself back home in my office, I struggled to get back into the swing of things.
I was experiencing a full-blown holiday comedown.
For some context, I had printed out the slides for an upcoming presentation that I needed to practise, but I felt resistance every time I looked at the slides.
My mind screamed, “Nooo! I don’t want to practise!”. Without even thinking, I kept pushing the slides away like a toddler smooshing their vegetables around on their plate.
But at some point, I caught myself in the act. Without berating myself, I managed to turn things around and ease into my practice.
In this blog, I’ll share a couple of simple strategies I use to get a better handle on my procrastination and overcome resistance.
According to Procrastination scholar Tim Pychyl, procrastination isn’t a time management issue. It’s an emotion management issue. If you can get a better handle on your emotions, you’ll have a better handle on procrastination.
Let’s unpack this…
Often, when we procrastinate, it’s because we’re trying to avoid experiencing negative emotions. The task we need to do brings up feelings of discomfort (e.g., boredom, fear, guilt, anxiety, and stress), so we avoid the task to make ourselves feel better.
But avoidance makes no sense when you think about it.
Oliver Burkeman explains the problems associated with avoidance in his book Meditations for Mortals. He writes:
“The more you organise your life around not addressing the things that make you anxious, the more likely they are to develop into serious problems – and even if they don’t, the longer you fail to confront them, the more unhappy time you spend being scared of what might be lurking in the places you don’t want to go. It’s ironic that this is known, in self-help circles, as ‘remaining in your comfort zone’, because there’s nothing comfortable about it. In fact, it entails accepting a constant background tug of discomfort – an undertow of worry that can sometimes feel useful or virtuous, though it isn’t – as the price you pay to avoid a more acute spike of anxiety.”
Dutch Zen Monk Paul Loomans labels the tasks we avoid as ‘gnawing rats’. He says these tasks “eat away at you under the surface”.
Have you noticed that whenever you try to avoid a task, it’s usually still on your mind, using up your precious mental resources?
That’s what Loomans means by the task eating away at you under the surface.
Why does he use the peculiar term ‘gnawing rat’? Looman’s daughter used to have pet rats that would eat loudly under his bed, keeping him awake at night.
Loomans explains that if you can befriend your gnawing rats, you can transform them into white sheep. Just like a white sheep follows you around passively, once you transform a task into a white sheep, it’s a lot easier to make a start.
The question is, how do you transform a ‘gnawing rat’ (a task you are avoiding) into a white sheep?
The key is to approach procrastination from a place of curiosity.
Loomans suggests creating a positive, open relationship with the task you’ve been avoiding. You need to sit with it or visualise the task. Instead of giving yourself a hard time, get curious about why you have such a strained relationship with this task.
Loomans advises:
“… you’re not being asked to immediately do whatever it is that’s gnawing at you. The assignment is only to establish a relationship with it. You let all the various facets sink in and then let them go again.
The rat no longer gnaws at you, and it has settled down. It’s no longer trying to get your attention, but follows quietly behind. It now has white legs and curly fleece – it’s turned into a white sheep.”
I decided to follow Looman’s advice with this presentation I had been avoiding. To begin with, I pulled out my slides and I just sat with them.
I closed my eyes, tuned into my body and asked myself:
“Why am I feeling resistance towards practising this presentation? What’s going on?”
Within 30 seconds, the answer came to me. The resistance came from how I thought I’d feel after doing my speech practice: exhausted and emotionally depleted.
You see, when I practice a presentation, I typically go into turbocharge mode. It’s like I’m delivering the real thing: I gesticulate, project my voice, pace around the room, and rely on my memory and the pictures on my slides to remember the content (I don’t refer to my notes).
All of this takes a lot of mental and physical effort.
So, naturally, when I looked at my slides for this one-hour presentation, I felt flat and heavy.
I equated one hour of presentation practice with having a fried brain by the end.
But then I had a brilliant idea. I thought, “What if this practice session didn’t have to feel like a hard slog? What if it could be fun, light and easy but still effective? What would that look like?”
It immediately occurred to me that I had to shorten my practice session, which brings me to the next strategy . . .
To keep my practice session fun, light and easy, I settled on doing just five minutes of speech practice.
Instead of pacing around my office and practising in turbocharge mode for an hour, I sat myself down with a hot chocolate. I set a timer for five minutes, pulled out a mini whiteboard and started recalling the content (scribbling out and drawing pictures of what I needed to say).
When the timer went off, I checked my notes to see how I went (What did I remember? What did I forget to say?).
Then, I checked in with myself – “How am I feeling after that mini practice session?”. Instead of feeling depleted, I was feeling good! I felt less overwhelmed by this presentation. The resistance had subsided. As Paul Loomans would say, the presentation had transformed from a gnawing rat into a white sheep!
I felt excited, even a little inspired.
I could have easily kept practising for another 10-20 minutes, but I decided to give myself a break to re-energise (I got up and walked on the treadmill for 2 minutes).
This gave me insight into the need to vary the intensity and mode of each study session, depending on my energy levels and what I have planned for the rest of the day. Sometimes it’s good to go into turbocharge mode, but not always.
Not every study/work session has to be hardcore. Work sessions that leave you feeling completely drained by the end can be counterproductive. As Professor BJ Fogg says, “Tiny is mighty”.
Firstly, tiny study sessions are less scary for your brain. Five minutes of speech practice and flashcard practice feels easy. You think, “I can do 5 minutes!”.
In contrast, one hour of study feels scary for your brain, which means you’re more likely to procrastinate.
When you go tiny, it’s also easier to give your full focus to the task at hand. Here’s the thing about focus: focusing your mind takes a lot of your brainpower. And you have a limited supply of brainpower!
As you sit there and study, your brainpower gets depleted. But research shows one way to boost your attentional resources (i.e. your brainpower) is by taking regular breaks. If you study in short focused bursts and then take a break, you can stay refreshed and ensure your study sessions are effective.
But most importantly, tiny study sessions help to create momentum, and they leave you feeling good!
I tend to push myself to the point of exhaustion when I practise my talks. But I can see now that this makes it hard for me to want to practise in the future.
By dedicating just 5–10 minutes to the task and enjoying it, I’m more likely to do another 5 minutes (or more) of practice tomorrow. Doing five minutes of practice every day is infinitely better than doing no practice or cramming a long practice session in the day before.
You’re not going to go from good to great in one tiny study session. But you can make meaningful progress and create the momentum you need to keep going.
So, don’t turn your nose up at five minutes of flashcard practice or 10 minutes of doing a practice test. If done with focus and intention, that’s a solid study session that can set you on the path to success.
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Rat: “Fancy rat blaze” by AlexK100 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
I understand this cringe factor.
In high school, goal setting felt forced. I’d think, “Why are they making me do this?” and “What’s the point?”.
However, once I got to university, I realised that goals are a helpful life strategy.
In this article, I want to share my perspective on goal setting and how this strategy has helped me to get things done.
I’m going to tell you:
• What goals are
• Why you’d want to have them
• How to stick at them
• Why you need to protect your goals from destructive outside forces
Let’s go!
Goals are things you want to do. Perhaps you want to write a book, jog around the block every morning, start a podcast, get a part-time job to save money or learn to play an instrument. These are goals.
• Goals give your life a sense of purpose
• Goals give your life meaning and a reason to get out of bed
• Goals help to focus your mind on what you want/need to do
• Goals help you to create a better, less boring life
As Giovanni Dienstmann explains in his book Mindful Self Discipline:
“We all need to aspire to something and feel that we are going somewhere. Otherwise, there is a sense of boredom in life. Our daily routine feels stale and unengaging. As a result, we seek relief through bad habits, and seek engagement through mindless entertainment, news, social media, games, etc.”
Have you ever set a goal, you felt excited, but then that excitement quickly dissipated, and you gave up on the goal?
Whenever this happens, it’s easy to think, “Goal setting doesn’t work!”.
However, the problem isn’t with goal setting as a strategy.
The problem is that motivation is completely unreliable (it comes and goes). Plus, you were probably never taught how to achieve your goals in the first place.
In other words, you were set up to fail.
There’s a lot of pretty average advice out there about goal setting. I’ve heard dozens of goal setting pep talks, and many can be summed up like this:
“Set a goal, make it SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound), break it down, blah, blah, blah.”
Most students tune out when they hear these pep talks. You can feel the energy being sucked out of the room.
This advice doesn’t work for most people. And it’s incomplete.
I’ve found that the following simple ideas can make a big difference in helping you move from inaction to action when it comes to pursuing your goals:
Achieving big long-term goals requires consistently engaging in small behaviours over time. You need to chip away and develop habits to get there.
For instance, after taking a hiatus from writing books (because I felt stuck and overwhelmed by the idea), I finally started writing down my ideas.
By starting small.
I told myself all I had to do was open the Word document and write one sentence. And the sentence didn’t even have to be good! But I had to do this every single day.
If I wanted to write more than one sentence, I could. But one sentence was my absolute minimum. Most days, I wrote at least a paragraph. But when I didn’t feel great, I would show up and write one sentence.
Nine months later, I had a draft manuscript ready to send to my editor.
Many different behaviours can help you achieve your goal. The first step is to brainstorm all the possible behaviours that can help you move closer to it.
One way to do this is with BJ Fogg’s tool, Swarm of Behaviors (also known as Swarm of Bs).
Here’s what you do:
You write your goal/aspiration/outcome (whatever you want to achieve) in the middle of a sheet of paper. Then, you spend a few minutes listing all the behaviours that will help you achieve it.
Dr Fogg stresses:
“You are not making any decisions or commitments in this step. You are exploring your options. The more behaviors you list, the better.”
When I was brainstorming behaviours that could help me to write my next book, I came up with the following list:
1. Use an Internet blocker app and block myself from distracting websites
2. Carry a notepad and pen with me everywhere I go (to capture ideas)
3. Write one sentence every morning
4. Speak my ideas into a voice recorder when I go for a walk
5. Use the Write or Die app
6. Manage my inner critic (when it strikes, say to myself, “It can’t be all bad!”)
7. Give myself a pep talk each day (e.g., “Done is better than perfect!”)
8. Do Julia Cameron’s morning page activity (i.e., free writing)
9. Attend a writing retreat
10. Sign up for the ‘Turbocharge your writing’ course
11. Pick up a mind map, select an idea and use it as a writing prompt
Once you’ve finished brainstorming potential behaviours, go through your list and select just a few behaviours to get the ball rolling (I selected #1, #3, and #6).
It’s well worth spending a couple of minutes making each of these behaviours ‘crispy’ (i.e., specific). For instance, for Behaviour #1, I decided which websites I would block myself from using and at what times.
When we work towards big life goals, the process is never neat or linear. Showing up and doing whatever you need to do (even just writing one sentence) can feel like a daily grind. Mild discomfort usually infuses the whole process.
Accept that’s how it is. It will sometimes feel like a hard slog, but the rewards are worth it.
The long-term rewards of working on your goals far outweigh the superficial rewards of scrolling through social media, watching Netflix, etc.
Even if you don’t achieve what you initially set out to do, chances are you’ll still be better off than you were before. Why? Because you’ll have learnt a bunch of new skills and life lessons.
Be careful who you share your goals with. Some people delight in stamping all over your goals and crushing your hopes and dreams.
For example, when I was 10 years old, I started attending drama classes outside of school. These classes were a lot of fun and quickly became the highlight of my week.
I remember thinking, “When I grow up, I want to run a drama academy to help boost kids’ confidence”.
I felt inspired by this idea. Drama had helped me come out of my shell and I wanted this for other kids who were lacking confidence. So, I decided to be brave and share my plans with my primary school teacher at the time.
I was expecting Mr D to say, “Good for you, Jane!”. But instead, he said with a smirk, “How do you think you’re going to do that?”
And then he started grilling me with questions . . .
“Where will you get the money from to set this up?”
“Who is going to come to your classes?”
“Where do you plan on running these classes?”
On and on Mr D went.
Ugh. “Just stop Mr D!” I wanted to scream.
I was left feeling crushed.
So, take it from me: Be careful who you share your goals with. Because some people get a kick out of squashing stuff (e.g., your dreams).
But nowadays, there’s a more powerful (and often overlooked) force that can mess with your goals: social media
If you’re constantly checking social media and looking at what other people are doing, that’s time and energy you could have spent working towards your goals. But that’s only part of the story . . .
Social media exposes you to a hodgepodge of content: the best bits of people’s lives, advertising, conspiracy theories, and outrage-inducing influencers. All this noise messes with your goals by subtly shifting and changing your worldview, beliefs, attitudes, and what you view as important in life.
In his brilliant book Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy, ex-Google strategist and now Oxford-trained philosopher James Williams shares his struggles with this. He states:
“. . . I felt that the attention-grabby techniques of technology design were playing a nontrivial role. I began to realise that my technologies were enabling habits in my life that led my actions over time to diverge from the identity and values by which I wanted to live. It wasn’t just that my life’s GPS was guiding me into the occasional wrong turn, but rather that it had programmed me a new destination in a far-off place that it did not behoove me to visit. It was a place that valued short-term over long-term rewards, simple over complex pleasures.”
He adds:
“…I found myself spending more and more time trying to come up with clever things to say in my social posts, not because I felt they were things worth saying but because I had come to value these attentional signals for their own sake. Social interaction had become a numbers game for me, and I was focused on “winning” – even though I had no idea what winning looked like. I just knew that the more of these rewarding little social validations I got, the more of them I wanted. I was hooked.
. . . I had lost the higher view of who I really was, or why I wanted to communicate with all these people in the first place.”
When you go on social media, you need to realise that there are thousands of highly intelligent people on the other side of the screen and it’s their job to figure out how to capture and exploit your attention.
In short, the values and goals of these big tech companies are not aligned with your values and goals. Facebook’s first research scientist Jeff Hammerbacher summed it up nicely when he said:
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads . . . and it sucks.”
Take a moment to think of the people who you admire. How would you feel if you saw them spending vast amounts of time distracted and obsessed with social media?
I’ll leave you with this powerful quote from author Adam Gnade:
“Would you respect them [your biggest hero] as much if you saw them hunched over their phone all day like a boring zombie? No, you want them out there in the world doing heroic things, writing that great novel/song/whatever, saving the planet, standing up for the disenfranchised, or whatever else it was that made you love them in the first place. Let’s try to be as good as our heroes.”
Whatever you want in life, work out what you need to do to get there (i.e., the concrete behaviours), and then roll up your sleeves and get started.
