personaldevelopment.fm

Week three report was skipped because I didn’t do anything different from the existing schedule. But Week Four has some new developments and I wanted to report on them.

Planning For a Half Marathon

I found out that there’s going to be a half marathon, called Race to Robie Creek, which will take place in April. The registration for it is in February so I don’t have a confirmed spot yet. This half-marathon is considered “the toughest in the northwest”, and the reason is because it goes up the mountan for about nine miles and then down hill for the rest.

Changing My Training

Because of this new half-marathon that I’m planning on racing in, I have to change my training to include a lot more of incline work. Basically I’ll run on a treadmill with an incline to help my muscle become condition to the new requirements.

This last weekend I trained by running up to Table Rock route, which is pretty steep. The steepest I’ve ever run before. But this is needed because the Robie Creek route goes up the same face of the mountain. This route is aprx. 6.5 miles. It’s a pretty fun run if you take away the pain of going uphill. And coming down is really fun and pretty steep and muddy. There was still some snow on the ground in some shaded areas, and the temp was around 40F.

Open Culture writes about top business school offering many lectures for free for you to download and list to on your iPod. Here are direct links to the schools:

Wharton: iTunes Feed Website

Harvard: iTunes Feed Website

Stanford: iTunes

Link

In health psychology there are many models of change. One of these models is the Health Belief Model. This is a continuum theories model, which means that we are going to change several or all variables that affect behavior and we are going to change them at once. Health Belief Model is an actual model used by professional psychologist and it has been found to be effective around the world in producing behavioral change.

The Health Belief Model can be summed up this way: Our beliefs in how effective the change will be, what the barriers are, what the costs are and what the consequences are of the change will determine if we undertake the change or not.

Basic Model Outline

1. Belief in a threat or a problem – is this a health threat or a problem? or not?
   1. General concerns about health – does the person even care about their health?
   2. Specific concerns – will or is this affecting me now?
   3. What are the consequences of this threat or problem?
2. Belief in effectiveness of change – will the change in behavior be effective in reducing the threat or removing the problem?
   1. Perceived Effectiveness – do you believe that the change will be effective in eliminating the threat or removing the problem?
   2. Perceived Costs or Barriers – will the cost of change actually exceed the benefits that will be produced?

This Health Belief Model has been applied to increasing TD screenings in the 1950s, increasing breast cancer screenings, stop smokings and other change.

How can you use this?

You can apply this same model to change a behavior that you want to change.

Example: Let’s say you want to lose 20 lbs of weight by starting a running program.

Current situation: how much do you enjoy eating out? do you live with people that don’t believe in healthy eating? is running anathema to you?

Severity: how often do you eat out or eat fast food? every meal or once in a while? have you ever run before or are you a total couch potato?

Benefits: why do you want to lose the 20 lbs?

Cost: What will it cost in time for you to lose 20lbs? how much money will it take for you to eat healthier and buy running equipment and gym pass? are you willing to lose your friends who might not like your new behavior?

There are many times when you might feel internal friction, because you are in one place and you want to be in a different place. Or you might be one person and want to be different. Everybody has experienced this in their life at one point or another. Some people try and shut it down. They want this friction to go away, to leave, to die. What they don’t understand is this friction is the beginning of their process of changing. They should embrace this friction and guide it towards what they want.

Sometimes it is not easy to convey this in words, so I’ve drawn up some graphics to illustrate this concept.

The Current State

You are starting from somewhere. You currently have an internal state. This could be all of your current life or it could be just a small portion of your life. But you are somewhere, and you have a state which you want to change. There are many different ways to find out where you are at, and I won’t cover it here. Once you understand where you currently stand with your internal state you are ready to move forwards.

The Future State

Once you have your current internal state, you’ll need to develop a future state. This usually begins with an idea of who or what you want to come or change. It could be that you want to allow greater wealth to enter your life. Or you want to conquer your body and take it to the next level by running a marathon. Or it could be as simple as replacing your coffee habit with a tea habit.

Once you do have this new idea in your mind and on paper, this becomes your future state for this particular area of your life and you are ready to let internal friction move you towards this new future state.

The Internal Friction

Once you know what your current state is, and your develop your future state and hold the future state in your mind, by either reviewing it regularly, visualizing it or by other means, you will generate internal friction. This friction might not feel good, it might feel like your stuck or that it’s not you, but if you let this internal friction continue it will eventually take you from your current state to your future state.

This will happened because the mind will think that the future state that you are holding in your mind is actually the real state. It will think that that is who you are now, and it will move into the new state by triggering different actions, feelings and thoughts for you. Then your future state becomes your current state and you can start thinking about the next level.

After a while you’ll be able to use this internal friction to change any and all area of your life that you choose.

PS. How do you like my art?

“Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Clearly, what gets the most attention in our media driven world are the effects. The causes are rarely covered, as they are not as sensational and don’t get the rankings.

Media is just one cause in our world of the focus on effects by most unsuccessful people. People want the effect, and they want it now. They don’t want to wait, they don’t want to analyze, they don’t want to accept responsibilities, they just want the effect.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the area of weight-loss and dieting. People don’t want to look at the underlying cause of their problem of being overweight. They don’t want to stop eating bad foods. They don’t want to exercise. They don’t want to accept responsibility that they are actually the cause of this problem.

They just want the pill.

They just want to quickly treat the effect and get results. Now!! They go on new diet every other week. They gorge down pills. They starve themselves. They get surgeries. They’ll do almost anything but look at the real causes of their problem.
The real cause of being overweight is their thoughts; their thoughts about food, exercise, and their body image. Change these thoughts once and you’ll have a lifelong solution fix to the effect.

What to do?

Examine your life and see where you are stuck or are not getting the results that you want. Now trace back the effects to all of the causes. Sometimes you’ll come across only one cause, sometimes its many causes. Make changes to these causes and watch the effects take care of themselves.

I’m going to be changing the design of this website this weekend, so you might notice some things break while I fix it to work with the new theme.

Sitting there in front of the TV, you hear different information being beamed to your brain. Is this information true? Do you believe it? Do you even have a choice? Critical thinking strategies are designed to make us better consumers of information. Once you adapt them into your life, you won’t be just a zombie allowing everything to enter your mind unexamined, unquestioned and unfiltered. You’ll be a changed person.

How To Become a Critical Thinker:

1. Be skeptical, ask questions, and be willing to wonder
   1. Be curious about the puzzles of human behavior.
   2. Don’t always believe and accept everything you see for the first time.
   3. Ask the question “why?”, ask “What is the other side of this story?”, ask “What is being left out?”
2. Define the problem, and examine the definition of terms
   1. Indentify the issues in concrete terms. What is the true topic, what words are being used to describe the problem and do they have the same meaning for you as they do for me?
   2. In psychology: operational definitions
   3. Many times the vocabulary being used has different meanings to different people, make sure that you understand what the vocabulary means.
   4. Example: “Theory” in science is the closest you can get to a “fact”, but many people think “theory” is something unproven, unstable and full of holes.
3. Examine the evidence
   1. Presumption of desiring evidence. Do you want the evidence to be true because of some personal reason? Are you closing off your mind to anything contrary because you like the result?
   2. The goal is to have evidence or facts that are reliable and true. Hearsay or wishes can’t be used as evidence.
   3. One of the most important concepts in science is the idea of replication. If you are making a claim, somebody else should be able to do what you did and get the same results. If they do, then your claim stands, if they get different results your claim in false.

4. Be cautious in drawing conclusions from evidence
   1. Conclusions differs whether true experiment (cause and effect) or correlational (+,-)
   2. Many times you can’t get different results from the same experiment and some people some of the results and say that it’s a cause and effect relationship, but it is not. It’s more of a correlational relationship.
   3. For a cause and effect relationship to be true, the cause has to produce the effect 100% of the time.
   4. Example: Smoking does not have a cause and effect relationship with lung cancer because smoking does not cause lung cancer 100% of the time. There are people that smoke and never get lung cancer and there’s people that never smoke and get lung cancer.
5. Consider alternative explanations for research evidence
   1. Look for other influencing factors. What else might have been the cause of this? What is not being show, represented, repressed?
6. Examine biases and assumptions
   1. Both your own and those of others. What do I want to hear? What do you believe in? Do I automatically discount if it doesn’t agree with what I’ve learned before?
   2. Look for spins, filters, prejudices. Who is presenting the information? What is their background? Would they have any reason to have an agenda?
   3. Consider evidence that may contradict your beliefs. You don’t have to discard your own beliefs to consider or think about contradictory ideas. Maybe they will strengthen what you believe. Or maybe not. Wouldn’t you want to know if you were going through life believing something that is not true?
7. Avoid emotional reasoning as a substitute for rationality
   1. Feelings should not substitute for the careful appraisal of arguments and evidence. Many people feel emotionally attached to ideas and arguments that they were taught as children or at critical moments in their lives and are afraid to let go, or even consider anything else. They allow emotion to control their thinking and will not approach it with rational thinking. Don’t allow yourself to fall into this trap, know when to put your emotions aside for a moment and use your mind.
8. Don’t oversimplify or over-generalize
   1. Reject simplistic, either-or thinking. In 99.9% of all issues there is more than a pro and con, there are many variations and many variables. Consider this when you are presented with only two sides, which is over simplified.
   2. Look beyond obvious. Ask “What else can be true about this?” What else is being hidden or left out or covered over.
   3. “Shades of gray” – most of life comes in shades of gray. Many people want to tell you its either black or white, but that is simply not true. Learn to always see the other shades of any issue, idea or fact.
9. Tolerate uncertainty
   1. Settle on guiding beliefs, yet be willing to change those in the face of changing evidence. You might be at a time in your life where your beliefs are perfect for your situation, but when things change, be responsive, reevaluate what you believe and why you believe it, if the current beliefs still work keep them, if not upgrade them to something better.

Attitudes of a Critical Thinker

10. Critical thinking is hard work. Even Thomas Edison said that thinking is the hardest job on the planet, and critical thinking is up there. But critical thinking is important, it is what makes you human, makes you feel alive.
11. Errors provide valuable feedback. Sometimes error or mistakes tell you more about yourself or a problem that you are working on than if everything go smoothly.
12. Every major issue has multiple points of view. Going to war is good, going to war is bad. Abortion is good, abortion is bad. Democracy is good, democracy is bad.
13. Theories, traditions, beliefs must be understood completely before acceptance or rejection. If you are able to argue both sides of the issue and then take down an opposing issue, than you have come to a point where you full understand the issue. To be able to only talk about your side of the issue doesn’t prove that you know the issue fully.
14. There are no simplistic solutions to complex human problems. Most of human problems have multiple variables to them. You can’t just solve one variable and say that the entire problem is solved, that would be premature. Learn to look at problems as not just one cause and effect, but multiple variables, multiple causes contributing to one or more effects or results or problems.

I’m a BIG user of Google Calendar, my whole life pretty much is schedule on there. So when google started acting up six hours ago, I didn’t think much of it. They are building those big data centers, right? Well, maybe not. There is something to worry about. I’m just hoping that everything is OK with my calendar data. Now it makes me think that I should have been more cautions.

There’s many people out there that rely on Google Calendar for their primary calendar, I wonder how many are affected… If your calendar is affected, please leave a comment.

The other Google services are working great, including my Gmail. Here is a screen capture of what I am seeing when I try and visit Google Calendar.

Now it makes me think that I should be planning a back up of my Google Calendar in case this continues to happen in the future. What if if the other Google services stop working for hours or days at a time. Makes you want to listen to all of those preachers of backup, backup, backup…..

UPDATE1: Please DIGG this so we can know if others are experiencing this also

UPDATE2: It looks like it’s coming up, but sporadically. Or with some calendars not loading (I have 8 Calendars).

UPDATE3: Other people have reported that their Gmail is down, which is also not good.

My marathon training is continuing better than I expected. This week, the daily running was not difficult at all. I guess the slow, progressive building up is working great.

The 5 mile run. I was planning on running the 5 miles yesterday, but the weather was so cold that I thought today would be warmer. It was. Today, when I went to run the temperature was a nice chilly 26 degrees F. Yeah, way below freezing point. The route that I ran was the Harris Ranch/Warm Springs portion of the greenbelt. The snow was removed from the path, so that made the running easier.

After two long runs in this cold winter weather, I have nailed down the gear. Regular sweats will work, bringing gloves is a must, a hat is also required, and a windbreaker is necessary to cut down on the wind chills. Another item that was unexpectedly useful are my orange driving/safety glasses, they are perfect for stopping wind from watering my eyes. The reason that I’ve run the longer runs outside is because it’s very boring to be running such a long distance inside.

Getting my mind off of running. I’d discovered that when I focus on something besides the running, the legs go into autopilot and I hardly notice any pain or strain on the legs. I’ve been able to do this because I’ve brought some audio that I’ve been meaning to listen to on my “iPhone” (aka Blackberry Pearl). I will have to test this more on longer runs and see how it progresses.

Chi Running I’ve been looking around the Internet a bit and came across something called Chi Running. This type of running supposed to make it easier and more pleasurable to run. I’ve ordered the book and hopefully I’ll receive it read it before my next long run and report if and how it works.

Pain Report This five mile run wasn’t as painful and I thought it would be. I stretched before and after and so far it feels like I’ve run today, but nothing that feels like it was a much longer distance. Maybe tomorrow will be different.

With the new semester approaching, I’ve been rethinking the idea from David Allen of Getting Things Done and it’s application to college students. I’ve been using a modified version of Getting Things Done up to now.

David Allen summarizes his approach this way:

Get everything out of your head. Make decisions about actions required on stuff when it shows up—not when it blows up. Organize reminders of your projects and the next actions on them in appropriate categories. Keep your system current, complete, and reviewed sufficiently to trust your intuitive choices about what you’re doing (and not doing) at any time.

Adaptation For College Students
The idea here is to manage everything about college in a way for you to get the grades that you want in the most efficient manner and still have time for partying calling mother and friends. And to do so while flying under the radar from the geek police your fraternity brothers/sorority sisters.

Here is the context that I’ll be assuming here:

1. Dorm living – This assumes you don’t have a lot space to work with, so no fancy file cabinets, but a very compact system.
2. College environment – The context here is college and any and all services provided by it, with minimal services assumed, so your community college might work as well.
3. Cost sensitive – College students are usually broke or on the way to being so, so we have to manage with the smallest cost or FREE.
4. Strong on technology – Since most colleges are pushing forwards with technology and I usually like to use technology if it helps, I’ll incorporate it whenever possible.

Without further delay, let’s dive in:

Collecting or Trapping
The idea here is to make sure that nothing slips.

1. Your bag – your bag will become one of your biggest “in baskets”, so if it’s important just dump it into your bag. Designate one big pocket of your bag as your “Inbox”. Than at a predetermined time you can go through your portable Inbox and process everything into its proper place.
2. One subject notebook – this will become your day planner and list keeper. In this notebook you’ll write everything that you need to remember, this will be your memory outside of your brain. You shouldn’t spend more than 70 cents on this.
3. Email box – you’ll be doing a lot of emailing in college, everything from communicating with professors, friends and family. Get yourself a Gmail account and forward all of your email to this account, you’ll find this the best long term solution.
4. Digital box – most colleges provide for some kind of space on their network for their students. Unless this network disk space is available outside of your college network, I wouldn’t recommend using it. Your best bet is to use a service like Google Docs, as there’s Internet available everywhere around colleges, you’ll have no problem connecting and working on your papers. DO NOT use a thumb drive, as the chances of you losing it are great (I’ve lost two during the first semester).
5. Laptop - I wouldn’t recommend storing your papers or other valuables on your laptop as the incidence of them breaking, crashing, dieing are huge. If you area going to use it for taking notes, connect to the college WIFI when in class and write your notes directly into Google Docs. Your laptop should be used for more productive things, like gaming, listening to music, watching videos when listing to boring lectures. etc.

Processing
OK, so you got your “boxes” of places where you have stuff. What to do now?

1. Do it now - if it’ll take two minutes or less, you can do it on right then. This means that if your professor mentions something and you need to send an email and your laptop is on, then do it right then, send the email. Or if you need to contact your buddy for the weekend plans, send him the txt msg right then.
2. Make it a project – if it’ll take more than one step, write this into your 70cent notebook under the projects, and then write the very next thing you need to do to move this project forward in the NEXT ACTION area of your notebook.
3. Not ready to act on – if you get an idea, but it’s something that you are not ready to act on, put in your 70cent notebook under a list called Someday/Maybe. This will make sure to get it out of your head and out of clutter and into a nice list. Then during your weekly review you’ll be able to spot it.
4. File it – You should get one manila folder for each class that you are enrolled in, and everything should be put in there that relates to that class. But, only put relevant stuff into the files, if it’s a past assignment or test and you won’t need it, Archive It.
5. Archive It – Everything that you want to keep from your college work needs to be archive, professors screw up or you want to show your mommy your A+ after you go home for summer. The chances of you ever actually needing your archives are small, but you’ll need want to keep them. The best way to archive everything is to go to your local OfficeMax or Staples and get a 12″ by 12″ box, and put everything in this box. Hopefully you will never have to go through it again, and after the semester is over you can just tape up the box, label it and put it away until your retirement.
6. Trash it – if it’s something that has no current value and will not be needed in the future, you can trash it.

Organize
Once you have everything out of your head and being processed, you’ll need an organizing system to glue it together. Here’s how to work it.

1. Projects Lists – This list should be long and it should be in your 70cent notebook. Anything that will take longer than two minutes you’ll want to get out of your head and into this list.
2. Waiting For List – If you are waiting on somebody else to move ahead with any project, such as waiting for another student to finish their portion of a group project before you go do yours, this will go here. This list will remind you of what other people are doing for you so you will not lose track.
3. Calendar - You will need to have keep track of day/time specific activities, such as your class schedules, when tests and assignments are due, and the end of the semester.
4. Context Lists – There are some things you can do in one place that you can’t in others. For instance, you might want to leave all of your studying for when you are in the library. Or do your homework when you are in front of a computer. This makes sure that you do the right things in their right context. Some example contexts: dorm room, computer lab, library, Inclass and so on. Put your action items here, so when you are at a specific place you’ll be able to look at the list and move alone.

Review
You’ll need to review your calendar and your Next Actions at least once a day, this will ensure that you can take care of what needs to be taken care of today. You can review the other lists also if you have time. You should also schedule a weekly time with yourself to review all of your projects, lists and actions at least once a week. I have found that Sunday night is a great time to do so as that is when many students get back into their “school mode” after the weekend.

Do What Needs To Be Done
Once you have this system set up and you keep with it, you’ll be able to track everything that’s important and needs to be done. It’s up to you to actually do the tasks, assignments and projects, and you probably already know how you work best so it’s up to you to take care of the actions and graduate with that A+ average you mother wants to see. LOL.

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