Self Improvement Process

Introduction

Now that we have covered the Principles of Self Improvement, let’s cover the basic process framework for self improvement. I think this process is best expressed in four parts: Mindfulness, Goal Setting, Planning, and Execution. The goal of this article is to give a holistic understanding of the process and how each part works with the others. In the future, I will dive deeper into each part with their own dedicated article.

Understanding The Process

The goal of self improvement is to improve ourselves and our lives, moving us closer to accomplishing our goals and improving our ability to obtain them. To do that, we first need to understand what we want to strive for. Mindfulness is a critical first step in helping us understand our thoughts, feelings, and desires. From these desires we can define goals in our Goal Setting stage. Once the goals have been set, we Plan out a routine and a schedule that will help us achieve these goals. Execution is all about how we keep ourselves motivated, execute our plans, but also update our goals and plans as we learn more about the world and ourselves.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness is best understood as the practice of purposeful awareness. The goal of Mindfulness is to orient yourself so you can effectively navigate your life journey. Proper orientation is extremely complicated as it requires awareness of many elements. But we almost never consciously think about the complexity required as we have learned to navigate the world intuitively through many years of accumulated experience. We already have mapped out the common spaces of our lives, we rarely encounter objects we don’t understand, and we have found effective ways to communicate and interact.

But when it comes to our journey of self improvement, we may need to learn a whole new space, discover new tools, and find new ways of communicating with ourselves and others. We can use Mindfulness to consciously explore all those elements we need to be aware of to be properly oriented. We need to know both ourselves and about the world around us. We can further break each of those parts down into past, present, and future:

Most people tend to think of mindfulness as focused on the internal present, which is certainly the most important, but we cannot ignore all the other aspects. We need to know our own past as it will inform how we feel in the present and what we want and are capable of in the future. A strong understanding of the external world will inform our situation, what is possible, and how to achieve our goals. Ultimately, we need to be mindful of both ourselves and our environment to effectively orient ourselves in our self improvement journey. 

Internal Mindfulness

If there is literally only one thing that you take away from all that I have written on self improvement, it is the importance of internal mindfulness, specifically, mindfulness of our internal present. How you feel and what you think is the source from which all your goals, plans, and motivations will come. Internal mindfulness will help you identify what you should be more mindful of in the external world, and what you need to think about in regard to your own past and future. The goal with internal mindfulness is to take the thoughts and ideas that are floating around in your head and give them form, either in the written or spoken word. This allows us to bring them from the subconscious to the conscious mind and understand them more clearly so we can act upon them.

Essential to success in mindfulness practices is honesty and unreserved exploration. The more forthrightly you explore your feelings and allow yourself to process what you feel, the more you will come to understand what you really care about and thus, what to focus on.

Strategies for Internal Mindfulness

There is no mindfulness practice that works best for everyone. You should try a few different methods that appeal to you and see what works. As I will be going into greater detail in my article focused on Mindfulness, this is just a quick list of the most common methods you could try.

Journaling

Simply writing, whether it is in a physical journal or typing something up, can be a powerful way to reflect and process your thoughts and feelings. 

Meditation

There are many different types of meditation, but this form of mindfulness is about taking time to put away distractions and focus inward. Seeing what bubbles up when you quiet your mind and reflect can be a powerful way to get in touch with yourself.

Video Journaling

An easy way to start being mindful, simply taking out your phone or sitting in front of your computer camera and recording a stream of consciousness reflection can be a great way to express your thoughts and feelings and hear your inner voice.

Therapy

Done correctly, therapy is not about a therapist giving you advice, but asking you the right questions so you can explore your own thoughts, understanding and process them.

Conversations

While it might seem simple, talking to someone you trust about the things that are on your mind is a great form of mindfulness.

Prayer

While some in the modern world might consider religion outdated, prayer is simply one of the oldest forms of mindfulness. When we talk to our inner self, and whether we understand that to be god, the universe, or just our own conscience, we can use prayer to explore the thoughts, desires, and feelings that are important to us.

External Mindfulness

For proper orientation and navigation, we also need to think about the world around us. This can be a daunting task as there are simply too many things in the external world to pay attention to all of them. So understanding what to be aware of and focus on is a key element of proper external mindfulness. This comes from our internal mindfulness, the thoughts, feelings, and desires we have should direct what we focus on externally.

But we should not limit ourselves to an awareness of the outside world, but also include reach and learning. We might want better relationships with our family and we should not only be focused on what they say and how they feel, but we could also take time to learn about psychology and read books on relationship building. 

Continuous Mindfulness

Mindfulness is the first step and necessary to inform the initial goals you will pursue in your journey of Self Improvement, but you will also need to make both internal and external mindfulness a continuous practice. Inevitably, your goals will change not only as you learn more about the world and yourself, but also as you yourself change. You should also be adapting your plan as you learn what works and what doesn’t. Having a mindfulness routine so you can be aware of these changes and adjust accordingly will be a key element to your success. To do this, work your mindfulness practice into your routine using the strategies I outlined in the Patterns section of the Self Improvement Principles article. 

Goal Setting

Through mindfulness we have discovered what is important to us and what we want to focus on, and the next step is to define clear goals. Goals are an essential part of orienting ourselves and give us a north star to inform our decisions. The more clearly defined these goals are, the better we can decide how to focus our attention, judge our success, and update our approach. Without clear goals, we might still be able to improve ourselves, but it will be hard to tell if we are focusing on the right things or making good progress. 

The Structure of Goals

To correctly define our goals we need to understand the proper structure of goals. A great tool for this is the OKR framework (Objectives and Key Results) used in business. The idea here is to have objectives that break down into smaller, actionable goals. For example, say you want to pursue a better career. You might break this down into things like “learning more about your profession” or “networking with other professionals in your domain”. These things are actionable and you can create metrics to measure your success. Simply put, everything you do should flow up into achieving the high level goals you set for yourself. 

Prioritizing

Another key element of good goal setting is understanding how to prioritize your goals. Priority is based on importance, but also work required and target due date. Priority of our goals then informs the plans and routines we will make to achieve our goals. 

Practicality and Adaption

As I talked about in Principles for Self Improvement, good goals push the limits of what you can achieve, but are practical. It is not always easy to tell what is practical and so I highly recommend starting out slowly and with goals you feel confident you can achieve. As you learn more about yourself and the world, you can adapt your goals to be more practical. And as you experience success, you can push yourself to pursue more ambitious goals.

Planning

We have used Mindfulness to reflect on what we want, we have set clear goals to orient ourselves, and the next step is to build a plan for getting there. A good plan consists mainly of habits and routines, but it is also important to build in space for ad hoc tasks. Just as your goals should be practical, so should your plan. You need to understand what you are capable of and, as your goals and knowledge change, it is important to adapt your plan to be more successful. Finally, we can use tools like Kanban boards and Calendars to organize and track our progress.

Goals Inform Your Plan

I have said this a few times before, but it bears repeating that a good plan flows directly from your goals. If you follow the OKR framework and clearly define and prioritize your goals, you should have no problem identifying clear and actionable tasks that will contribute to your progress in achieving your goals and build those tasks into a comprehensive plan for success.

Best Practices

Starting out, you are going to want to understand the basics and best practices of whatever you are attempting. There is an unfathomably large amount of accessible information on the internet and it shouldn’t take long to find beginner’s guides to pretty much anything you are interested in trying. This will save you a ton of time and effort figuring out a good strategy on your own.

Use Patterns

We can leverage the power of patterns to build plans that are more likely to succeed. The most powerful of these patterns are Habits and Routines which I talked about at length in the Principles of Self Improvement. Start with the action you want, like reading a book or going to the gym, think of what that trigger is going to be, a time of day or a place, and what we will reward ourselves with after. We can string habits together and place them inside cycles to build routines. We should always strive to build routines off natural and manmade cycles like days or our work week respectively.

Not Only Time, But Place

You should not only have a plan for the time you will work on certain tasks, but also where you will do it. You will quickly find that triggers for habits and routines are much stronger if you also tie those triggers to a place. We might not want to workout, but if we are able to drag ourselves to the gym, we will quickly find it is easier to motivate ourselves to do the work when we are there. If we work in our bedroom, we might find that it is hard to put our work down when it is time to sleep.

Play The Rest

When I was learning to play trumpet in grade school, one of the things my band teacher, Bob LaValle, used to always say about Jazz improv is to “play the rests”. A good jazz solo is not just about the notes you play, but the notes you don’t. And this applies to your plan as well. Rest and relaxation are essential if you want to be successful. You need to get a minimum of 7-9 hours of sleep and give yourself time during the day to eat, socialize, and decompress. Make sure to include this into your plan. You should be creating the schedule you want, and that should include downtime and relaxation as well.

Planning Tools

There are a few great tools that will help you greatly to plan, organize, and track your self improvement journey. While Kanban Boards and Calendars are my core tools, you should not hesitate to try out any other tools you come across that look helpful. 

Kanban Boards

One of my favorite planning tools is the Kanban board. This is basically a To Do List on steroids. Instead of one simple list of tasks, Kanban boards are composed of columns and cards. Cards represent work and columns are stages of work. Cards are great for tracking all the information for a task, not only the goal of the task, but links, documents, deadlines, or anything else relevant. You then move the card through the stages of work as it progresses. A very basic column layout would have “To Do”, “Doing”, and “Done”, but you can also include columns like “Blocked” or “High Priority”.

Kanban boards can not only track your bigger picture goals, but also be used for individual tasks and projects. Maybe you want to keep track of the books you are reading, or, if you are writing articles for a website, you can plan out all the articles in advance and track your process.

Calendars

One of the oldest and most powerful planning tools, calendars can help us keep track of our schedules, both our routines but also ad hoc events and tasks. Most professionals live in their calendar and it is essential to keep track of all the meetings and events that need to be juggled in the modern workplace. You can leverage this just as powerfully for your personal journey of self improvement.

Adapting Your Plan

Just as I mentioned with goals, even if your goals don’t change over time, your plan should. You will learn more about yourself and the world around you such that you will discover better ways of doing things. Make sure you are using that regular mindfulness to not only reflect on how your goals might change, but how to adapt your plans as well.

Execution

The final piece of this puzzle is execution. Some of the important elements to good execution I have already talked about such as being practical and learning and adapting, but there are a few more that I want to bring into the mix and cover some more complicated ideas.

Commitment through Buy-In and Confidence

Through my years of competing and coaching rowing, I have come to understand that a core element of successful execution is buy-in and confidence. I am putting these two ideas together because they combine to enable commitment. You need to be committed to your plan if it is going to work, and without commitment, you are already doomed to fail. To commit, you need to buy in that the goal is what you want, and the plan is going to work. You also need to feel confident that you are capable of executing the plan and achieving the goal. Only then, can you push all doubts aside and commit yourself to what needs to be done. 

This is why I think it is important to take all this time to be mindful of what you want, set goals, and build a strong plan. If you put in the work to understand what you really want and make a plan that you think is achievable, you are much more likely to have buy-in. This isn’t someone else’s goal, this isn’t someone else’s plan, this is yours. 

Confidence can be hard at the beginning, but over time, through practice, you will begin to really know what you are capable of. You will start to see those improvements and feel more and more confident you can continue to improve. And the more confidence you have, the easier it will be to focus and commit.

Finding Your Flow

Key to success in any endeavor is finding the right level of challenge. It is all too common that we will burn ourselves out in our first few weeks of hitting the gym or starting a diet because we want immediate results and push ourselves too hard. On the other side of the spectrum, we could also set goals and make plans that are not challenging enough. We could get bored or not see the improvement we want.

Finding that sweet spot between too difficult and too easy is important to proper execution and adjusting your goals and plans will be all about zeroing in on the flow that is right for you. You will know you have found it when you are engaged in your self improvement journey and feel like you are making progress you are proud of. 

Motivation

If you want a comprehensive explanation of my thoughts on motivation, I would highly recommend reading over the Motivation section in Principles of Self Improvement. I don’t want to be redundant, so the bottom line here is to find what motivates you and build it into your plan. Tracking your plan, social pressure, rewards, and purpose all help and this is by no means an exhaustive list, but finding the right balance of motivation will ensure you keep forging forward in your self improvement journey. 

Conclusion

Knowing how to start with Mindfulness, the Set Goals, Plan, and Execute will empower you to take a desire for self improvement and turn that into reality. As you follow these steps, feel free to start to innovate and make changes and adjustments that work for you. This is simply a starting point and everyone will find ways that work best for them. But if you are mindful, set goals, make practical plans, and execute well, you will find your self improvement journey will take you where you want to go.