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We have the best chance to change our behaviour over the long term if we start with a realistic idea about the difficulties of behavioural change (Dean 2013).

This change cannot possibly be brought about without knowing oneself, self-knowledge. This is not knowledge of the “higher self” or knowledge of some “supreme consciousness,” for they are still within the field of thought. Unless one understands one’s self, the self of every day—what it thinks, what it does, its devotions, its deceptions, its ambit

As you're presumably aware, this is a terrible mindset for actually making lasting changes. What you need, instead, are tiny goals and a commitment to incremental progress (" small wins"), plus a willingness to encounter failure after failure as you stumble toward improvement. To put it another way: fresh- startism is a form of perfection

this is the point where people self-destruct. At the first taste of success, they stop working on themselves. But reality hasn’t changed. They need the tools even more than before.”

But it’s worse than a mere contradiction– because what we are really doing when we attempt to achieve fixity in the midst of change, Watts argues, is trying to separate ourselves from all that change, trying to enforce a distinction between ourselves and the rest of the world. To seek security is to try to remove yourself from change, and thus from

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has discovered in his research that one of the simplest and most common forms of flow that people experience in their lives is reading a book—and, like other forms of flow, it is being choked off in our culture of constant distraction. I thought a lot about this. For many of us, reading a book is the deepest form of focus we

There’s one key fact, he said, that every human being needs to understand—and everything else he was going to explain flows from that. “Your brain can only produce one or two thoughts” in your conscious mind at once. That’s it. “We’re very, very single-minded.” We have “very limited cognitive capacity.” This is because of the “fundamental structure

Left- brain attempts to control the body or emotions often sound something like this: I need to go to sleep right now; I'm nervous about my meeting at work tomorrow and I don't want to be; I don't have any right to be angry. Perhaps there's a memory you keep reliving and you wish it would go away. Or a feeling of regret you can't seem to change. Th

One major advantage of springboard stories is that they combat skepticism and create buy-in. Denning says that the idea of telling stories initially violated his intuition. He had always believed in the value of being direct, and he worried that stories were too ambiguous, too peripheral, too anecdotal. He thought, “Why not spell out the message di