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What are the Core Ideas of Self-Improvement? | Scott H Young
Goal-Setting
Goal-setting is required to decide what you want and planning how to get there. Just having an idea of what you want to achieve is usually not enough. Setting a goal needs to be paired with plans, systems, or habits to make it achievable.
Goal-setting should be SMART (Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.) However, some people argue for being completely process-oriented and ignoring outcomes.
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Habits
Habits form a core idea in behavior change. It requires that you change your behavior by regularly doing something.
To get fit, you need to have a habit of eating well and exercising. To have loving relationships, you need good habits of communication.
Goal-Setting
Goal-setting is required to decide what you want and planning how to get there. Just having an idea of what you want to achieve is usually not enough. Setting a goal needs to be paired with plans, systems, or habits to make it achievable.
Goal-setting should be SMART (Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.) However, some people argue for being completely process-oriented and ignoring outcomes.
Systems
Systems organize your behavior and decisions with formal rules. They are often built off of concepts of scientific management and organizational theory, but it is applied to your personal life.
A productivity system is one type of system that is aimed at helping you get work done by organizing the things that need doing and telling you when to do them.
Emotional Self-Regulation
Much of self-improvement has to do with managing or listening to our emotions.
Emotional self-regulation includes overcoming fears and anxieties or dealing with motivation and willpower even if they are separate from subjective feelings. The way you think about things affects how you feel, which affects what you do. How you feel affects your thoughts and actions. Your actions affect your feelings.
Learning
Learning is a synonym for studying. But it is also a basic psychological process: Every time we change from experience, we get better, we're learning.
Learning is a core concept of self-improvement because it's how we understand the other tools better.
Values and Meaning
A core concept of self-improvement is considering the purposes themselves.
- It is considering what you ought to value in life. You might want to change some of your vices and enhance your virtues. You might decide happiness is the meaning of life or how you feel in the moment.
- The second part is how you find meaning.
Thoughts and Beliefs
Thoughts are the things you say to yourself in your mind. It is an important part of the quality of life and as a way to achieve something. Thoughts can create emotional feelings.
Beliefs are sometimes classified as a propositional statement in your head. Others see it as a probability. Still, others might say beliefs don't really exist in our heads at all. Yet it is a central part of self-improvement.
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Self-control
It’s your ability to resolve conflicts between your short-term desires and your long-term goals.
For example, successful self-control means sacrificing immediate pleasure (cookies a...
Why self-control matters
People who have high self-control aren’t missing out on enjoyment. Not being able to resist temptation and enjoying life are not the same things.
They tend to eat in a healthily way, exercise more, sleep better, drink less alcohol, smoke fewer cigarettes, achieve higher grades at university, have more peaceful relationships, and are more financially secure.
Biological limits to self-control
Research showed that self-control is ultimately limited by our biology. We can’t exercise effortful self-control indefinitely – the brain has to do regular maintenance to remain functional.
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Practice loops
Practice loops are useful as a concept to think about learning any skill. A practice loop is an activity or group of activities you repeat over and over again while learning somet...
Loops and drills
Many loops aren’t straightforward repetitions. You may never write the same essay twice. The loop isn't writing a particular essay, but the overall process for writing essays.
In the same way, each thing you learn may have more than one loop. Drills are smaller loops to focus on smaller parts of the bigger loop.
Designing Your Practice Loop
Step one involves figuring out what your loops are. These are the activities you repeat over and over when learning something.
Next, analyze the loop for different parts to see whether you can make improvements. It will result in faster learning.
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“It ain’t what you know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Mark Twain
The most useful learning
The most useful learning isn’t usually a strict addition of new knowledge, but first unlearning something false or unhelpful.
Types of Unlearning
- Straightforward refutation of the old idea. This complete refutation is atypical. More likely the new knowledge doesn’t contradict the old one, but it may modify it in some way.
- The new knowledge revises a simpler picture by filling it with more complex details. This is similar to adding new knowledge, although because the older, simpler view of the issue has been overwritten with more detail, there is some unlearning going on.
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