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 #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. 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.

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.

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!

I’m done with my first 30-day trial! To read more details about the trial go here.

The original goal was to make visualization a habit because it was so beneficial for me when I was at my lowest point.

I also wanted to see how it would affect blog traffic and earnings since that is a huge goal for me. I started this blog with the intention of earning $1800/month blogging and I wanted to see if visualizing would have an impact on that. I threw in that I also wanted 1000 visitors a day too. The first day of the trial I realized this wasn’t very easy to visualize. I had no idea what 1000 visitors a day would look like or whether 1000 visitors would result in $1800/month or what my life would look like earning $1800. Then I questioned why I should even put that limit on it anyway. So on day 1 I changed that and started visualizing owning a blog that had an incredible amount of genuine value on it for readers to freely take. That felt more right and was much easier to visualize.

Traffic stats

I decided to share the stats from September 2 through September 30 to give you a before look. September 2 was the day I put my first post up on this domain. All entries before that were on broderickallen.com

Before Trial

Unique Visitors: 128
New vs. Returning: Out of 159 visits 129 were new, 30 were returning
Adsense Earnings: $0.00

During Trial

Unique Visitors: 173
New vs. Returning: Out of 192 visits 171 were new, 21 were returning
Adsense Earnings: $0.62

All but one indicated positive growth and it’s good to see the trend moving in an upwards, positive direction (2nd pic) vs. down to practically nothing (1st pic). There were more visitors, more page views, more pages/visit, lower bounce rate, and longer average time than the month before the trial. The only thing that went down was the amount of returning visitors. That’s a big stat for me, but I have some ideas on why it went down. One could be that not as many people care to see the duration of the trial. When I view other people’s 30-day trials I look at the beginning then come back to see the results when they’ve finished. I would have to give it some more time to truly see why returning visitors dropped though.

Tweaks

Within the past 30 days there have been several tweaks to the blog itself. I put my picture up, restructured my about page and tagline, played with the location of Adsense ads for better optimization, cleaned up the sidebar, added a “What’s Next?” section under the posts and added a Recommended Resources page.

I’m seeing that small tweaks are what make reality more consistent with vision and lots of small changes over time make a big difference.

Changes to me

Ultimately anything that changes with this blog is an effect caused by me and during this trial I’ve noticed significant changes in myself. Overall I’m just a lot happier seeing that I’m actually progressing with this blog and other goals I have. There’s an awareness increase which allows me to be in more control of my state from day to day. I’m much more motivated to take positive action. Blogging each day has really helped me get into a rhythm with writing and I really want to keep that up. And lastly, I feel I have more direction. If I can lock in more empowering habits I know life has no choice but to go in a positive direction.

What I learned about visualization

Three things.

1. Visualization can help overcome fears. If you have some fears and you play them out in your mind repeatedly, you might see that there’s nothing to be scared of. Honestly, I was pretty scared of putting my picture up online and hadn’t even put it on this blog that I started in November 2008. It really felt good to overcome that. When I visualized I would play it out in my mind and eventually desire just overrode fear and I ended up putting a pic up on my About Page, my Twitter page, and my StumbleUpon profile.

2. Visualization while in motion is easier than while things are still. What I mean is if I’m visualizing a health goal, it’s a lot easier for me to visualize that goal with intensity while I’m working out or taking a walk or drinking water etc. If it’s visualizing a money goal then it works better if I’m actually earning money. It’s easier to see that I can earn more. I know when I had a job and I received a paycheck I would be unconsciously visualizing right then and there what I would be doing with that money.

3. I visualize better laying down rather than sitting in a chair. Maybe it has to do with my weight and breathing, but visualization laying down seems much more clearer and comfortable for me than sitting upright in a chair. Maybe I’ll try sitting on ground during this next 30 days.

I don’t know this for sure, but I think what you eat could have an effect on how clear your mind is which would affect visualization. I’ll have to play with this to see if it’s true for me, but I’m pretty sure it would be. I’ll let ya know after a future 30-day health trial.

67% of what I set out to do

I said on the original visualization blog entry that I would visualize at 8:30am for 20 minutes each day and blog about it. I didn’t realize I was actually trying to lock in 3 different habits by saying that – waking up and 8:30am, visualizing, and blogging each day. I was able to visualize and blog each day but waking up at 8:30am didn’t happen. Two outta three ain’t bad.

The next trial I be waking up at 6:00am. I found productivity was way higher when I got such an early start to the day.

Closing thoughts

I plan to keep visualization as a habit and to further lock it in I’m going to keep doing it for 30 more days. I am a beginner with it so I plan to keep learning, tweaking, and getting better at it. I’ve learned a lot just experimenting with it for the past month and I’m glad I kept going with it.