The big aha-moments, you know?
- when you realize that even, if you fail an exam your life continues and the sun doesn’t really care about you just rises, like it did for the past couple of million years.
- when it becomes clear that you don’t know, why your business GROWS and when it goes better it is usually thanks to a lucky situation or to another random event.
- when you understand that even the growth or fall of your hair depends on what you eat
when you get the difference between your comfort zone and habits
It was a beautiful summer. I am not sure there was any period in my life before, when I had so many revelations in such a short time. I’ve overcome my biggest dilemma: do habits really stop me from growing and make me an annoying person?
I so much feared having a habit that in the past couple of years I just had none. I fought against them. The only habit was running, which I justified with necessity. Running is something special for me – for all runners, I believe. When I run my thoughts fly, the best creative ideas reach me during runs and I feel so good afterwards, I am happy, balanced and calm.
Beside running, I avoided every regularly repeating action, which lead to the insane situation that lately whenever I had no urgent work to do, I sit at home bored, thinking about the many things I should/could do – sales calls, client hunting, painting my office, brushing the cats, shopping clothes, going to the hairdresser, whatever).
It was James Clear, whose newsletter helped me to start this phenomenal change of my life. While I thought, I’d have no habits at all, in reality I had the worst ones (sitting around bored or watching series’ endlessly thinking that I am relaxing in between the long and exhausting translation sessions, going from 4 hours to 10 days, depending on the project(s))! This led to a series of problems, from an unhealthy diet to procrastinating my own life and seeing the days passing by without me being part of it. I just worked and “relaxed” in between.
I still had my ideas about what I need to do, I just didn’t want to take time to realize them, since I always feared to do something repeatedly – aka having a habit – which makes me boring and will close me into a cage. Most of the time I tried to understand, what could be an unusual thing I could do to “free myself from the imaginary chains”, maybe going for a walk in the morning and not after work or watching a movie after lunch in the middle of my usual working hours.
When I realized that my happiest moments were those, which I didn’t revolutionize for the sake of being random – so when I worked and ran – and when I understood James Clear and the idea of sticking good habits, my life became something wonderful. I could slowly form it as I wanted.
I had my willpower back. Better: I didn’t need to think about my willpower anymore, since I “habitized” the activities of my days. Just a few things, which I couldn’t accomodate into my daily life and which gained – or will gain in the next months – a fix place in my life, growing it towards a better one:
1. Exercises: I just stand up from my desk – from any desk and couch really – and do exercises. I am not a mono-sport-fan anymore. There are days, when I do pilates, when I walk or when I run or go by bike to Rimini. It depends, if I have 40 minutes or an hour or two to dedicate myself to this activity. The only important thing is to move.
2. Weight loss: I plan my diet. The smallest change was here, which gave me the biggest result: I now insert every meal I consume into my calorie-counter profile and try to understand from the past days, where I had too much from what. I am not planning ahead, I am learning from the results of the previous period. This requires from me to insert every day, what I ate and drank. (thanks to the barcode scan function I’d say it takes between 2-4 minutes every day).
Learning from my past days and results also freed up my soul from wanting to change the truth (inserting less food, than I had or not inserting something at all. The goal is to have it all and to know where I do something wrong, not to seem cool and keep a weight which I am uncomfortable with).
3. Socials, which I like: I use socials beside facebook. I discovered twitter, instagram, pinterest (since I use pinterest, I also cook tastier, that social is amazing, you just click yourself to the food you imagine and you are right there at the receipt. I imagine this is true for whatever topic you search. I love hashtags and I seem to be more up-to-date on certain topics, since I broadened my social-ism.
5. I sleep eight hours again every night. Beside keeping a healthy diet I also realized that sleeping is as much important as exercise.
6. I see my shortages in a new way. I am not sure, how to explain this better. I see everything through health. Global health too, the planet, the animals, forests, businesses and minds are just as important as my teeth. Everything has its scope of lasting long and evolving.
Sometimes I see so many opportunities in the world around me that it makes me dizzy. I know, something will change in my business too but it is too early for me now to understand, what I want to change. I want to become an expert I want to see the world like Neo did, in all its particles to understand more than others, to see in words another level to see opportunities there where others only see a news. I just did so much for myself in the past months that I know now, I am capable of doing anything with my mind and my body, if I keep them healthy.
I am getting out of my comfort zone thanks to my new habits, which I form just as I want to. I grow and see where I can do more where I should do less. I guess people have right when they say that forty is the new twenty.
