Personal Growth From the Bottom Up – BroderickDurisseau.com
A Blog Dedicated to Personal Growth, Success and Goal Achievement

This is a continuation of 30-Day Trial #3 Revised.

Waking up at 6:00am and staying awake.

I think I’ve now formed a habit of waking up at 6:00am, walking around, then going back to sleep about an hour or two afterwards.  

I underestimated how difficult this would be. I thought it would be easier because I’ve had to wake up at around 6:00am for school and for jobs, and I also remember the yuck, sluggish, unrested feeling I would have forcing myself to get up. That situation is totally different from waking up at 6:00am feeling totally alert and well rested simply because you want to wake up early.

I’m pretty sure the problem stems from not going to sleep when I’m sleepy. Lately I’ve been considering the possibility that I’m self-sabotaging.  I don’t want my life to even remotely resemble a 9-5 job so maybe subconsciously I’m stopping it from getting closer to that. In many cases, it just comes down to decision. Usually late at night is when people message me, call me, or want to go places, so I might try connecting with more people that wake up early and value going to sleep at a reasonable time.

Visualization

This part of the trial has been going great as usual. I do it throughout the day now too, along with the daily 20-minute sessions. When I’ve been feeling self-doubt or frustration I take a deep breath and start visualizing. When I do that, my state changes instantly. Indecision, procrastination, doubt, worry, and anxiety are replaced with peace, appreciation, excitement and an eagerness to get started. I know that feeling is the most important part of the whole success process and I understand it a lot more now. When I do it before I write, the writing just flows and everything seems to go much easier. Because I feel abundant on the inside I can give abundantly on the outside. Contribution = power, so as a result I end up feeling more powerful too.

No processed starches, foods with refined sugars, or cheese

This part of the trial has yielded the most significant results for me. I’ve lost 27 pounds by just this diet change. The crazy thing is that I’m doing it with a lot of processed starches, fast food, and foods with refined sugars in the house I live in.

I’ve been able to keep this up because I’ve focused on less. First, I eliminated fast foods. I actually gained weight after that because I loaded up on store-bought processed junk foods, but once I had proven I could live without fast food then I cut out all processed foods. I realized cheese had the same kind of effect so I stopped eating that too. That caused me to load up on chicken/fish/beef/pork and vegetables. Taking it one step at a time has really allowed me to keep moving forwards. Glad I learned that from The Power of Less.

Since my day is wide open and I have plenty of time to work on building empowering habits to accomplish goals, the question I’ve had lately is do I do my best, push myself, give it my all, and possibly focus on multiple goals? or do I put my focus on less and work on locking in one habit at a time during the 30-day trials?

I feel this could helpful to anyone starting from scratch trying to learn how they can be more effective at learning and implementing what they want to do, so I’m more than happy to share my experience with it.

When I did less, when I focused on building one habit at a time, I always felt like I could do more. During my first 30-Day visualization trial, I would visualize for 20 minutes a day, then wonder what to do with the rest of the day. I didn’t feel like I had done my best or got much accomplished. When I focused on less and took less action, it just didn’t feel right.

On the flip side, with 30-day trial #3 I set out to push myself with 7 goals to accomplish, and I made it to Day 2 before stopping. The 7 goals were ranging from health goals to productivity goals to reading goals, etc. It started feeling like an overwhelming job, and it was spreading my focus to thin.

The Solution

My best answer to that question came when I dropped the either/or thinking. Why not both? Why not do my best to immerse myself in and learn about one goal at a time? What would happen if I take one of the goals I wanted to lock in as a habit and learn all I could about it for 30 days, experiment with it, and find out the most effective way to ingrain it as a habit.

For instance, the main goal for this 30-day trial now is waking up at 6:00am (early for me). I could read articles on how to wake up early, talk to other people who wake up early now, practice to get my feet wet, and maybe even hang out with a family that wakes up early.

I got this from Steve’s article on rapid improvement and somehow it clicked that he’s approached many aspects of personal growth that way, so I want to do it too.

Over the last two days I haven’t been doing much of anything I had planned to do with this trial. I did manage to stick with visualization and not eating any processed starches, cheese, or foods with refined sugars.

Since I have those two previous goals locked in as habits, for the remainder of this trial I’ll just focus on one additional goal – waking up at 6:00am and staying awake. This leaves me with 3 total goals this trial.

Why I’m cutting back

In the original trial I had 7 goals. After Day 2, I could see that this trial had gone from creating long-term empowering habits to an overwhelming and frustrating job. On Day 4, I just let it go.

I kind of laughed at myself when I first realized I had too many goals. I’ve read lots of self development material strongly advising against taking on too much. However, you don’t know how much is too much until you push yourself to the limit.

There’s no rush to create long-term habits. From now on every month I’ll tweak the trials, but I won’t add more than one goal to focus on.

Having too many goals cuts my focus right now. I can’t spend time tweaking and learning about better ways to do each goal because I’m spending so much time actingg on the many goals I set up for myself.

The time matters

Getting these habits done in a productive way is just as important to me as what I actually do. For instance, I’d like to wake up and visualize soon after waking up each day. I didn’t add that specifically in my goal, but I definitely have become aware that I do want that specification in there if I want to set up the day I envision.

That’s about it for this update. I was thinking about making another blog on this website. I would have a blog for 30-day trials and a regular blog. I don’t want this blog to just be overloaded with my 30-day trials and updates.

1) Waking up at 6:00am and staying awake

So far, so good. Last night I stayed up until 1:00am and still managed to wake up and stay awake. It seems like my body is starting to adjust, so I’ll have to give this some more time.

2) Walking for 40 minutes

I originally made this just to get myself out of the house. I usually do all the other goals inside the house and writing and reading at a computer desk. This has really allowed me to get my head clear and gives me a boost of energy to dive into the other things I have planned for the day.

3) Visualizing for 20 minutes

It’s fun and easy now. I still plan on reading Creative Visualization next after finishing Awaken the Giant Within. Awaken the Giant Within is a thick book though.

4) Writing for 2 hours

Going great. I don’t have to write affirmations as much now because I have so much other stuff to write about.

5) Marketing for an hour

I’m cutting it out! The main reason is because I want to make sure I have all the other goals really enforced as habits before I tackle marketing. I want to create life-long habits, so there doesn’t have to be a rush. Maybe the next 30-day trial I might try it. As a result of really putting efforts into marketing, I know i’ll have lots of feedback and messages to respond to and I want to make sure I’m effective in replying and responding in a timely, high quality manner. I don’t want to feel overwhelmed or stressed out by it, and I’d like to develop a system (or use one that’s already out there) that I could use for the long term.

I’ll just hold off on this for now. No need to introduce three brand new habits anyway.

6) Reading for an hour

I’ve been trying to finish Awaken the Giant Within for about 2 months now. I know that if I’m up late finishing this trial, I don’t want reading to be the last thing I do. Last time I started reading late, it was only a matter time before I started to fall asleep.

7) No processed starches, cheeses, foods containing refined sugars

I’ve been eating a lot of greens and meats. I find when I eat only greens I’m always hungry. Guess I need more nuts/seeds in the diet. I want to step up my food variety. Last time I tried something like this, I found that the more bored I got with my meals, the stronger the urge to completely binge on the things I was trying to avoid.

Problems

Too Long?

The main problem is that this trial is taking up the whole day. I thought this might happen which is why I added the fact that I wanted to have it all done before 2:00pm in the original post. The reason it takes so long to finish everything is because of these breaks I take. When I finish one of the goals above, I take a break, and it usually ends up being more than an hour. After that hour I’m out of productive mode and have slipped into chill mode.

Too much?

If I cut out marketing that leaves six goals. I find that the more goals I add, the less time and focus I have to put on each specific goal. This reason alone has caused me to question having six goals. The ultimate goal is to have these habits stick one way or another, so after this trial is finished I should be able to see if having more goals makes it take longer for the habits to lock in.