Scott H Young

Today will be my last post for 2006. Aside from celebrating the holidays with family I’ll be without internet access for a little over a week, so that means no new postings. I should be able to resume soon after the start of January.

Given that the year is about to come to a close I thought I’d spend a little time reviewing the past events and giving a quick update on my future plans. Normally I avoid self-indulgent posts discussing myself directly, but I think some of you guys and gals might like to know what is going on behind the scenes here.

This Website

A lot has happened in the ten months since I made my first posting here on this website. I’ve written close to two hundred articles, released an interactive goal-setting program, and seen my traffic ratings go from a few views each day to a couple thousand. A lot of growth in this area and it shows no signs of stopping.

Right now I have no major plans in the works for this website aside from continuing to post, trying to increase the amount of value I can provide while increasing readership. Sometimes the simplest strategy is the most effective, so I’m just going to try to keep creating valuable content and hopefully things will continue moving upwards.

While I believe some of my readers might benefit from additional forms of content (podcasting, vidcasting, newsletters, more interactive content etc.) I think that for creating the largest amount of value to the largest amount of people can only come from just improving the posts that I write here.

Although ads and donations provide a small amount of revenue, I don’t believe they are the most effective methods for making a living off of this. Instead I will probably release a secondary product or service once the readership for this website gets high enough and the value I can provide increases. Depending on the growth I can create in the upcoming months that might be a year or two from now.

The beauty of this website is that it feeds upon the growth that I make and experience in my own life. The more I grow and learn, the more I can share here. So aside from continuing to post, I feel the best way I can improve this website is to improve myself. Which brings me towards my own life.

My Life

As some of you may know, I started attending the University of Manitoba this fall. As I hail from a small town originally, this required moving out on my own to a bigger city for some completely new experiences. Here is some of the more important points:

Habitual “Spring-Cleaning”

When I came to a completely new environment in the fall, with completely new and different objectives than I had back home, I decided to loosen up a lot of the habits I had created over the past year and a half. Although many of my habits stuck, I relaxed a lot of the structure that I had previously created.

Now that I’ve had a little bit of space to adapt to a new environment, I’m thinking of slowly building some new habits into my life. Considering it has been a few months since I’ve gone through the process of conditioning a habit, I’ll probably have to start small.

My new goals for interpersonal effectiveness require a lot more flexibility than when it was just myself, so I’ll have to be careful with what I try to do. It’s a careful balance between flexibility and organization, chaos and order.

For anyone who is just on the first steps of there personal development I can tell you it is an amazing feeling to know that you have the tools and skills to change any aspect of your personal life. Personal development is a skillset. Build the appropriate skills and you have immense power to guide your life.

Interpersonal Development

The past few years for me have been a time of major personal development. Cultivating an understanding and effectiveness of my own mind. I’ve learned a lot over those past few years and it has been extremely helpful in my life.

Recently, however I decided to move my focus towards interpersonal development. The last four months have been spent trying to be able to understand and effect all the relationships in my life. The complexity and difficulty in mastering this field is at least an order of magnitude greater than it was to build up personal strength.

There was a point not too long ago where I felt my own level of personal development click. I looked back and all the times I had failed, been frustrated or struggled and they started to make sense to me. Although I am by no means perfect, there was a sense of pride that I had a deep understanding of what makes me tick.

I’m not at that point yet with my interpersonal effectiveness but I can see it coming. I feel that if I continue pushing hard on the current path I’m in I might actually have some useful insights to share on this blog. My understandings and ideas are still too fuzzy and inexperienced to be meaningful, but I’m hoping a few months will give me the experience I need to start offering some small insights here.

New Activities

I haven’t started as many new activities as I had hoped when coming here. I blame this mostly on simply the time spent adapting to a new environment. Relatively, I’ve been in a place of stimulation overload most the time so getting used to things was my first priority.

Now that things have settled a little bit, I plan on taking up some new activities. I have a surplus of energy and time that can be invested in something new, so I plan to spend it wisely.

When I pick activities to try I focus on how I can generalize any skills I learn. For example, in Toastmasters the specific skill I learn is public speaking, but this can easily be generalized to improvements in basic communication. So I’m hoping on picking up a few activities that have some skills I can generalize to other areas of my life.

Right now I’m considering with the ideas of improv, dancing and martial arts. Each would be fun to try and has some skills that I’d like to generalize. I’m avoiding strictly personal activities/hobbies at the moment to go along with my interpersonal focus.

I wish all of you the best times over the holiday season and all the best for the new year. I’m going to keep pushing onwards in my own journey and I wish you the best in yours. Hopefully the road will teach me something I can share with you, and if our paths ever cross don’t be afraid to say hello.

The year is almost up and with it will come a whole new round of resolutions. Frantic attempts to change habits, make commitments and radically shift the direction of your life. A hopeful new outlook on the upcoming year. Unfortunately, most New Years Resolutions suck.

The vast majority of New Years Resolutions fail to make it past a few months and many crash and burn within weeks. I’ve seen many different cited figures ranging from a ninety-five to ninety-seven percent failure rate. With such incredibly low odds of success I think it is an amazing testament to the optimism of people that they still keep making them, year after year.

Do I believe that change is impossible? That you should just give up because the chances of making that resolution stick are low? Of course not. I created this website because I believe dramatic change is possible for everyone and it is the philosophy from which I live my life.

I believe the true problem lies in the process of setting a resolution itself. I think the whole process of making a commitments for the next year is so horribly flawed it is almost doomed to failure. So why exactly do New Years Resolutions suck?

Reason One: Expecting Spontaneous Changes

Sorry, Tony, I ‘m going to have disagree with you on this one big-time. Massive life changes do not happen in an instant. Epiphanies are rare and the great majority of personal change results in steady optimization and improvement.

Within all of us are certain personality traits and belief systems. Courage, discipline and the proper attitude are deeply ingrained in your psyche. It is for this reason that creating a change in momentum and direction often takes time. Unless you have more discipline than you did for your last resolution, how do you expect to stick with it?

Sometimes change appears instantaneous. Accumulated efforts and changes in mindset can slowly accumulate until a certain moment causes the results to show themselves all at once. This can definitely happen, but expecting a sudden reaction to change your life is a weak prayer. Focus on steady improvements and the lightbulb flashing moments and rapid changes will take care of themselves.

If you want to make the change having the attitude: “I might fail a lot, but I’m going to keep picking myself up, learning from the experience and continuing to do my best.” Having the attitude that everything will change in an instant is only useful if you have magic powers.

Reason Two: No Plan of Action

I’ve said before that I believe the majority of your obstacles don’t exist in the world, they exist in your mind. But what do people inevitably plan for? The real world obstacles! They completely ignore all the mental ones that often prove themselves to be far more difficult and challenging.

If you plan to lose weight, getting that fancy tracksuit and a gym membership are important steps, but they pale in comparison to determining how you are going to keep yourself motivated.

Has your New Years Resolution plan ever looked like this?

You can look at that and laugh, but that is how most people plan to make big changes. Ask them how they are going to stay motivated and they might give you shrug. Ask them how they are going to handle spontaneous obstacles like getting sick or injured, holidays or extra work and they might just look at you with a confused expression.

Your plan shouldn’t have an “Insert Magic Here” step. Every part of it should logically flow from one part to the next and offer assistance to ensure you stay committed to the path.

Reason Three: Lack of Proper Technique

Technique is rarely the problem in creating a lasting habit or change. What using proper technique does do is it ensures you have all the proper ingredients to make a change. Like baking a cake, having the proper technique ensures that all your ingredients get added to get the result you want.

If you have the right ingredients, you can make change no matter what technique you use. All proper technique will do is make sure you didn’t forget to add the yeast or flour to your cake before you try to bake it. No magic, just a little check-list before you head off into the world.

If you want to start making effective changes for 2007, I’ve written a lot about different techniques that can help. Here is a starter list of articles that may give you an extra edge:

Habitual Mastery (Series) - Creating lasting habit changes.
Goal Setting (Series) - How to properly set goals that stick.
The Seven Keys to Leverage - When willpower just isn’t enough.
How To Recover From a Broken Commitment - What to do if you slip up.

If you still want more, I recommend Anthony Robbins and Brian Tracy. They both offer excellent programs on making changes. I may disagree with Tony’s excessive hype about making changes instantly but the guy does have some very solid techniques for making changes.

The road of growth and success is a rough and difficult one. You can go down it, but it inevitably will mean a lot of initial scrapes and bruises as you learn. Work hard and aim for incremental improvements. Plan out your road map to success and take time to prepare for mental obstacles. Find an effective technique and practice it out.

In the end, you should stop making New Years Resolutions. Resolutions of growth, change and improvement aren’t an annual event. They are something you should be doing every day of your life. They are a way of thinking about the world.