Introduction To Self Improvement

Introduction

Ok, so you want to improve yourself, but where to start? With so many self help books and online videos promising to change your life in a few easy steps, it can be daunting to figure out the self improvement approach for you. This series of articles on Self Improvement will give you a comprehensive understanding of the fundamental philosophy, principles, and process for how you can build a better you and set you up for success on your self improvement journey. 

I have broken down this Self Improvement guide into two main parts: Principles and Process. In Principles, I will cover the ideas underlying self improvement. In Process, I will cover the four main steps of self improvement: Mindfulness, Goal Setting, Planning, and Execution. In subsequent articles, I will dive deeper into each step of the self improvement process in greater detail.

Why Engage in Mindful Self Improvement?

The first question one might ask when considering taking more ownership and orienting themselves toward a better life is “why bother?” You might think your life is pretty good how it is or you might feel like you don’t actually have the agency to make your life much better. But not orienting yourself toward your desired future can be more wasteful and detrimental than you think, and engaging in self improvement, more fulfilling than you realize. 

You Have Agency

To start, we all acknowledge at some level that we can make decisions that either make our lives better or make our lives worse. You can do common self improvement activities like workout, eat better, and get more sleep, or you can watch tv all day, eat junk food, and stay up late on social media. Those are the extremes, and most people are somewhere in the middle, but the point here is that we have the ability to choose what we do with our life. You have agency. Your fate is your own to write.

Opportunity Cost

Every second of our day is a resource. Whether consciously or not, we spend that time on something. It might be on work, sleep, watching tv, working out, reading a book, posting on social media, or any other thing, but the important point is that we are making a decision to do one thing over every other thing we could do. This is the idea of opportunity cost. You aren’t just deciding to spend time watching TV, you are also deciding not to spend that time working out, reading a book, or calling a friend. Self Improvement is making decisions to spend our time in a way that is beneficial and moves us towards our goals.

Decisions Aligned with Goals

So if we agree that we have the agency to choose, and we understand that time is a valuable resource, we should want to make deliberate decisions on how we spend our time that best aligns with our personal goals such that we are getting the most from our lives. We should want to optimize. The problem I often see is that many of us have not taken the time to reflect critically on what we want, set goals for ourselves, and make a plan to get there. As such, it is hard to understand what the best way to spend our time is. How do we improve if we don’t know what we are aiming for and how to get there?

The Cost of Not Being Mindful

You do have goals, whether you are aware of them or not. You might not be consciously aware that you want a better job, to be more in shape, or have a better relationship, but if someone sat you down and forced you to think about it, you would come up with clear goals for your life. And so, without conscious self improvement, you are failing to achieve your goals and optimize your decisions, you just aren’t aware of it. You are not going to hit a target you don’t aim at, and you won’t realize you have been wasting your time until that fact has become too inescapably obvious to ignore. So don’t wait!

Mindful Self Improvement

Self Improvement is not just something that you do after a bad break up or when you hit a rut. Self Improvement is about making sure that your actions are in alignment with yourself and your goals. It’s about taking the time to reflect critically on what you feel, think, and want. From there, create goals in alignment with what you want, and make a practical and thoughtful plan to get there.

Outline of Self Improvement Articles

The following articles in my Self Improvement series are designed to help you understand everything you need to know to get started on your own journey of mindful self improvement. Going forward, I am going to outline the different articles and the content you can expect to learn about from each.

Principles of Self Improvement

To start our self improvement journey, we need to first understand the principles that underlie self improvement. Understanding these principles will ensure we understand not just the what of the process of self improvement, but the why as well.

Taking Ownership

Self Improvement rests on the fundamental idea that we have agency to make our lives better or worse. And so when we embark on a journey of mindful self improvement, we are taking ownership over our decisions and thus our lives. 

Focus

It is easy to get lost in all the things you can do to make yourself better and so understanding what to focus on and what to ignore is key to success. Our time is valuable and we don’t want to waste it on things that are beyond our control. Defining our area of focus helps us do that.

Learning and Adapting

To improve not only ourselves, but our process of self improvement, we need to constantly be learning and adapting. Sometimes this comes from the wisdom of others and sometimes from our own personal experience, but the essential thing is we are always looking for ways to improve and adapt on our journey of self improvement. 

Practicality

Just as it is important to know what we can and can’t control, it is important to understand what is and what is not practical. We want to set goals we can achieve and make plans we can execute.

Patterns

There are many types of patterns in life and an understanding of these patterns can enable us to build and execute plans that are more likely to succeed. Habits are the fundamental human pattern to understand for self improvement. An understanding of the pattern of trigger, action, and reward can be used to identify bad habits, change them, and build good habits. We can also use an understanding of larger cycles and routines to further augment our plans and execution.

Motivation

Motivation is the force that powers us to move toward our goals. Understanding what motivates us and how to harness it will be an important element of our success in our journey of self improvement. 

Process of Self Improvement

There are four parts of the process of self improvement. It is important to see how all these pieces fit together on a macro level. While I have an article that covers the process as a whole, I will also dedicate individual articles to each of these four aspects to dive into greater depth and explain best practices for each.

Mindfulness

Reflection is the first step to orienting yourself on your journey of self improvement. You need to start by being aware of your thoughts, feelings, and desires. To do this, we use mindfulness. Mindfulness can be many different things to different people, but in this section I will define how I think of mindfulness, what is important to successful mindfulness, and the toolbox of different ways you can be mindful so you can find the way that works for you. 

Goal Setting

It is not always easy going from an awareness of your desires to well defined goals. In this section I will talk about best practices for goal setting, such as the common business tool OKRs, and how we can clearly define goals to set ourselves up for success. 

Planning

It is hard to achieve any goal if you don’t have a plan for how to achieve it. And while having a plan is better than not, through research and adaptability we can build plans more likely to succeed. I will also explain how we can use our understanding of patterns to build a plan that works with our natural habits, cycles, and routines to achieve our goals. 

Execution

Finally we want to talk about execution. At the core of execution is motivation. What keeps us moving forward? There are also practices that can help us execute better like tracking progress. And finally, being adaptable and mindful as we execute.

Conclusion

Hopefully you now have a little bit of an understanding of the value of Self Improvement and the ideas I will be covering in this series. I hope you have the time to read the series in its entirety, but if not, feel free to jump to the articles you think would be the most relevant to you. Looking forward to going on this journey of self improvement with you!