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

“The common denominator of success — the secret of success of every man who has ever been successful — lies in the fact that he formed the habit of doing things that failures don’t like to do.” – Albert E.N. Gray from The Common Denominator of Success

The first time I read The Common Denominator of Success, I didn’t “get it”. It was a long time ago and I kinda shrugged it off, but I’ve recently came back to it and really taken it in after realizing the importance of creating empowering habits.

If you want to be as successful as the people you look up to, you’re going to have to develop habits that empower you as much as or more than their habits empower them.

If I were starting all over consciously pursuing personal growth again, I would make building empowering habits a top priority. To be more specific after I chose a goal that would impact me the most, I would immediately begin creating new habits that would empower me to achieve that goal. So putting a focus on habits would be step #2.

The experts recommend habits

I notice that the high quality, credible advice from the blogs, the books, the audio, the interviews, or straight from direct conversation with successful people usually comes with a habit attached.

- When first began taking piano lessons, the piano teacher advised me to get into the habit of practicing 30 minutes a day.

- When I hired a personal trainer, he wanted me to get into the habit of eating more empowering foods, and get into the habit working out.

- Spiritual growth books or videos they might recommended getting into the habit of meditating, or praying, or visualization

- If you want to be a writer, good writers will tell you to get into a habit of writing.

Many times they won’t come out and literally say the word “habit” but they’ll tell you do something daily or in some way consistently which points to a habit.

The successful athletes, musicians, singers, actors, and hosts you see on TV all have developed empowering habits. The successful writers, engineers, developers, business owners, professors all have developed empowering habits.

Personal Experience

When I first started getting into personal growth I didn’t know where to start so I tried a lot of stuff. I listened to everyone say “Take action!”. I read some different books and blogs. Listened to different personal development audio. Wrote in my journal a little. I started a personal growth blog, hired a personal trainer etc. Eventually I realized that I could keep taking action but none of it would make a lasting, long-term difference if I couldn’t be consistent with whatever I was trying.

Every time I started something I would do it for a little while, then fall off with it leaving me overwhelmed with a trail of unfinished projects and unconsciously reinforcing in my head “I don’t finish what I start”. I guess continuously trying stuff and not following through with it was a habit too! :smile: Since I fell off with that stuff, I shifted back to the old comfort zone where the old, disempowering habits were further enforced and overall frustrating the hell outta me.

Without knowing it, what I was really trying to do was develop a habit with the things I tried, but I didn’t know how to do that. I didn’t know about 30-day trials/challenges or starting small or focusing on the essential or accountability and support. Habits are how real growth happens.

Right now I’m close to the middle of my 2nd 30-day trial. For the first time since starting this blog, I feel like I’m where I’m supposed to be with it, and it’s all because I’m developing new habits that I have consciously chosen.

I started pursuing personal growth on August 22,2008. If I had done some small 30-day trial each month I would have done 13 trials and working on the 14th right now. I’m sure there would have been several empowering habits that stuck out of all that.

Think about how your life would be different if over this next year you developed even just 5 new empowering habits to keep for the long term.

It took about 13 months for it to really click for me. It doesn’t have to take you that long!

This is a continuation of 30-Day Trial #2. More detail about the trial can be found here.

I know. I originally said I wasn’t going to give an update until Day 15, but since I’m adding a new goal to the trial I might as well give a quick one. :smile: Just in case you missed it there have been daily updates here on Steve Pavlina’s Forums and here on Zen Habit’s Forums.

Update

This trial has been going great so far. I’ve done everything I set out to do every day and the direction on where to go gets clearer and clearer.

My goals with this trial were to:

1) Wake up at 6:00am
2) Write for 2 hours a day
3) Visualize for 20 minutes daily

Waking up at 6:00am is starting to seem natural if I go to bed at a reasonable time. Today I woke up at 5:57am which tells me it’s becoming more automatic because I didn’t need the alarm.

I’ve been writing for 2 hours every day. If I can’t think of anything to write during that time, I’ll start writing affirmations just to keep writing. For the next 30-day trial I’ll probably cut down the writing and add in time for marketing and reading.

Visualization has been going great as usual. Still want to learn some more about it though.

Goal #4

I want to add another goal to the trial. I thought about waiting until the next 30-day trial to add it in, but there’s really no use in waiting.

I want to cut out all highly processed starches that contain processed wheat and white flour and foods containing white refined sugar. This would include breads, pastas, cakes, cookies, candy, processed fruit drinks, sodas, cereals, fried foods, etc. There are exceptions, but for the most part this stuff is crap and I know it. The problem is I feel like I’ve become addicted to them.

This is Day 3 without the processed garbage. Even though the plan is to cut this stuff out, the real focus will have to be on what to replace them with seeing as they were a big part of my diet. Basically the plan is to eat more of everything else. More meats, more poultry, more fish, more vegetables, more fruits, more seeds/nuts. So far, it seems like the best strategy for sticking with it is preparation. As soon as you don’t have anything to eat, then that’s when the temptation to eat the processed food is at its highest.

This diet change will be a huge challenge for me, but I’m up for it. I’ve tried this before when I was working with the Atkins Diet but I didn’t make it past 2 weeks. At the 2 week point I had super intense cravings for it all which is how I knew I was addicted. But I did lose about 15 pounds before those cravings kicked in and I felt a lot better. We’ll see how it goes. :smile:

This is the first day of 30-Day Trial #2. For more details about the trial go here!

I did all three!

Waking up at 6:00am wasn’t easy but it felt really good. There were a lot of times I wanted to go back to sleep so I just walked around a lot to try to shake it off.

Writing for 2 hours was hard. There were lots of distractions, people interrupting, and I kept feeling like stopping so I broke it up in pieces. I wrote in the morning for 45min, 20min + 10min in the middle of the day, then 45 minutes at night. Eventually I’d like to be able to write for 2 hours straight and have it done before noon, but I’ll see what happens.

Visualization – Easy. :smile:

I won’t be posting about this again on this blog until Day 15 to give an update. I will be posting about it daily on Zen Habit’s Forum here and Steve Pavlina’s Forum here.

Since finishing the 30-day visualization trial, I have been curious to see exactly what I could do, so I want to push myself even further and do another 30-day trial.

My three goals with this trial are to:

1) Wake up at 6:00am
I’ve noticed that productivity is much higher when I get an early start to the day. During my first semester of college I took all early classes and it felt so good because I felt free for the rest of the day.

2) Write for 2 hours (internet off)
I want to put up more quality content on this blog so writing for 2 hours would be a great habit to lock in. I have a tendency to drift off to internet browsing when I write on the computer, so during this trial while writing I will cut the internet off.

3) Visualize for 20 minutes (extension of the visualization trial)
I want to continue visualizing since I had some great results with the visualization trial. Hopefully I can learn, tweak and really enforce this as a habit.

I really wanted to add one hour of reading in there, but I’ll see if I can handle this first. I really feel like this would push me already without overwhelming me.

I won’t be posting about it on this blog every day. I’ll be checking in on forums daily, but for this blog I will give updates on Day 1, Day 15, and results at the end.

Let’s Go!