Personal Development with Gray Miller
This month I’ve been successful in doing my Morning Protocols more than any other month. Here’s what that looks like: Yoga or “5 Rites”: A short stretching routine just to get the body moving. Sitting Meditation: Nothing fancy, just my butt on a cushion for 15 minutes. Journaling: One page, while I have my coffee. Deep …
I talk a lot about various things I try out, and I don’t always follow up on how they work out. However, there are three things that I’ve been using that have really made a significant difference in the way I work, the things I accomplish, and more. I wanted to share them simply because …
My Middle Daughter (who is celebrating her quarter-century mark today) has been working on establishing a “5-Minute Journal” habit for herself. Like any good Personal-Development-Blogger-Dad I saw this as both an opportunity to bloviate to her and come up with a useful practice post. The Problem “I really like the journal,” she said – I’d …
I mentioned in a past post that I really need to work on my practice of sleeping. Later I got a very friendly email from a bloke named Wally, telling me that he had read the article, liked it, and thought that you (my erstwhile readers) might benefit from a smorgasbord of sleep tips he’d …
Get a Pen and Paper: Pop Quiz! Today’s bonus question: what did you do today that you also did yesterday? Can you think of anything? Let’s make it a little harder: did you do it the day before? Did you do it last week? If it is difficult to think of something, maybe you’re trying …
Like many other writers in the personal development field, I’ve been eagerly awaiting Gretchen Rubin’s new book Better Than Before. In fact, purchasing it was basically tax-deductible for me; I write every Monday about practices and habits, so a book all about how they’re formed would be essential to my work…right? Even better, I recently had …
One of the ways to change your habits – whether to remove or add them – is to trick yourself into doing it by connecting it to some other abstract ritual. It feeds into our natural human tendency for pattern recognition – for example, the famous self-help guru Jerry Seinfeld recommends “chaining”, which is simply to …
A Classical Re-Education Pavlov’s Dogs. Skinner Boxes. The world of classical and operant conditioning is often cold and pretty scary, not only because of the methods used on cute and fuzzy animals to learn about them but also because they work. I made the mistake of taking some advanced psychology classes in high school. That meant …
Tricking Elephants Last month I mentioned the work of Jonathan Haidt, who helped popularize the “rider and elephant” model of the human psyche. That is, our conscious mind is a “rider” atop the giant behemoth of our desires, instincts, and subconscious conditioning. One of the weaknesses of the metaphor is the idea that the elephant …
A Simple But Profound Change Last week I said some harsh (for me) things about Cal Newport and his ideas in So Good They Can’t Ignore You. I stand by my evaluation of that particular manifesto, but I don’t want to discourage you from reading more of his work at the Study Hacks blog; it’s a …