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101 - The Compound Effect

Hello there Kevin here with another episode of the Feel Good English podcast. The only podcast that’s helping you become more fluent in English and more fluent in life, and today I’m going to help you become more fluent in making big things happen in achieving your life goals.

So does it ever feel like you give up pretty quickly after deciding to do something positive for your life? You want to make a big change or add a big skill to start strong but only a few days or sometimes a few weeks later you give up, and we feel bad when this happens.

Or do you constantly notice yourself doing things that you know aren’t good for you, aren’t healthy, aren’t positive, aren’t helping you get closer to the life that you ideally would like to live? Well, I’m going to talk about a book today called “The Compound Effect” by Darren Hardy and it’s going to tackle these issues.

Most of us struggle at times with reaching our goals, and according to the book “The Compound Effect” this comes down to, this is all based on our daily habits, the choices we make from moment to moment. If this sounds stressful, like “uh oh, Kevin I don’t want to think about my choices every moment!” it shouldn’t. There are tactics and strategies from the book that we can start applying to our life to help us create daily routines based on our goals. Getting clarity on what we should be doing and what we should not be doing, and also some tips on how to start adding positive habits into our life.

So I’m going to talk about some key principles from this book, I hope - it’s helpful.

As a reminder, if you do like what I talk about here on the podcast you can also join my email list and get weekly lessons direct to your email based on inspirational, motivating, even at times enlightening ideas that I share with you. If you want to join that email list just go to my website feelgoodenglish.com, search out the bear, the bear will probably find you, and sign up! and wait for my next weekly email to brighten your day. :)

Now let’s get into this episode on “The Compound Effect” by Darren Hardy and learn how to take control of our lives which will bring us closer to our dreams.

So the first idea I’m going to talk about here is the importance of habits daily habits, according to the book 95% of everything we feel think and do and achieve as a result of a learned habit. 95% of what we do is based on habits. How you spend your free time, what you eat every day, do you exercise? Do you not exercise? Who you talk to, which you do when you first wake up in the morning? What you do before you go to bed? All of these things are habits. We probably don’t even think about them we do them kind of automatically, but they are learned behaviors.

So one of the biggest ideas in the whole book is turning your goals your life goals into habits. Now your life goals these are the big goals, the long-term goals you have in all aspects of your life business, finances health, well-being, family relationships. These overall plans are dreams you might have for the future. Getting clear, having clarity on exactly what you want is vital. Our brain needs to be able to focus on something, so taking goals breaking them into habits that will help you get closer to that goal is the key. But before you can fill your life with positive habits with goal driven habits, meaning habits that are directed by your goals, before we can fill our days with these positive habits we have to eliminate bad habits. What are some of the bad habits you might have in your life right now? Think about that for a second, maybe it’s watching too much television, spending too much time playing video games, drinking too much alcohol, eating bad foods, sleeping too much, not sleeping enough. So thinking about the bad habits in your life that aren’t energizing you, aren’t helping you, aren’t moving you closer to your goals is very important.

The problem here is the longer you’ve had a bad habit, the harder it is to quit you can’t just you know watch T.V. for two hours a day for many, many years and then just completely take it out of your life in one day.

It’s difficult, you have to replace it with something positive, one thing that will help you start to eliminate these bad goals is to recognize the triggers. Something called the triggers to trigger or a trigger is something that activates an action or an emotion in you, so in this case a trigger might be walking into your house your wife is watching television and you are triggered by the T.V. and your wife sitting there and you sit down and do that as well. If you’re trying to reduce your television time you have to realize the trigger is coming home, having the T.V. on and your wife sitting there, and you have to find something else to do. Don’t hurt her feelings but find something else to do. Identify the trigger maybe it’s food, you have junk food in your kitchen. Even if you don’t eat it all the time, if you’re trying not to eat it when you see it, it will trigger an emotion inside of you, your mouth might start to water, and you might end up eating something you didn’t want to eat. So identifying the triggers the who, the what, the where all of these different aspects of things that activate a certain reaction in you.

Tricky part of bad habits is we don’t really see the effects they have on our lives right away, usually it takes a long time to see the negative effects. So if we’re eating hamburgers every day, and no Americans, don’t eat hamburgers every day in case you thought that, but if we’re eating bad food every day we won’t gain a lot of weight quickly, but over time, over months and then years, we will gain weight. Those people that way hundreds and hundreds three four five hundred pounds didn’t get there in a few months, it was an accumulation of years of bad choices, of bad eating habits.

So it’s really being mindful of our everyday habits and trying to eliminate the bad habits and add good habits. And don’t get me wrong, this

is not easy. It can also be quite stressful thinking that we need to correct our behavior at every chance and we have to eliminate all bad habits and only have good habits. That doesn’t work I’ve tried it just causes frustration I think, but the first step is always awareness, being aware of the bad habits we have, being aware of our life goals and being aware of the habits we need to add to our life to help us get to those goals.

The next big idea here I’m going to talk about is called the Big Mo, MO, mo as in momentum, and how important it is to create a routine which you can stick to so you won’t lose your momentum.

The space shuttle uses more fuel during the first few minutes of its flight, during its take off, than it does the rest of the entire trip. Why is that? Because it has to build up tons of energy, tons of momentumto break free from the pull of gravity. Leaving the Earth trying to get into space and out a lot of gravity pushing the space shuttle back down, so it needs tons of power to get up into space.

This is a metaphor for what it’s like when we start something new, when we have a new goal, if you’ve ever experienced it it’s very difficult in the beginning. We need to put in a lot of energy, a lot of effort we might suffer a lot, a lot of mental struggle. Your brain trying to tell you to not do that, your body fighting against you, it’s tired, it’s trying to keep you from building that daily routine but the idea is once we build up momentum put in a few weeks on something, it will become easier. We have to really push through the beginning stages.

Realize that momentum works on both sides, so bad habits are actually creating a downward momentum meaning an opposite momentum pushing you down. So we have to be careful pay attention to our bad habits because they’ll act as almost the gravity that’s keeping us from taking off, going into space still they’ll hold us back. To hold someone back means to prevent them from doing something, to create an obstacle. You could say,

“your negativity is holding me back from

reaching my goals.”

And some more thoughts on momentum here, to keep the momentum rolling your healthy behavior your healthy habits have to be built into your daily routine. You need a plan, don’t try to change everything in a very short period of time. You have to add habits into your current life.

You’ve heard me talk about many times, if you want to do daily listening, daily English listening listen to this podcast every day which people do write in and tell me they do that’s wonderful. Anyway you have to add them into your routine. Don’t go out of your way to listen to a podcast. Keep it in your life, so if you’re on the bus if you’re driving to work, coming home from work, on a lunch break these types of things, add good habits routines, that enable you to continue with the current lifestyle that you have, and ease these into your new life, ease them in EASE, kind of sounds like easy. So ease these actions into your life. Be gradual, be gentle, make it easy to implement. Start small, build that momentum keep putting in that energy building the foundation, which will start boosting you higher, lifting you up, creating momentum.

Objects in motion tend to stay in motion.

Put in a little extra effort at the end, where most people would stop and be satisfied with what they have done, you’re going to put in just that extra little effort. In the book he talks about Arnold Schwarzenegger, something called The Cheating Principle. Once he reaches his maximum number of lifts in a perfect form meaning doing it the way that he should be doing it. He’ll get to his limit but then he’ll change his body he’ll move his body in a way that isn’t exactly perfect just to get some different muscles to be able to do a few more reps, repetitions. This would allow him to do a few more. So what does this mean? It means if you feel that you’re at the end, you’ve done what you’ve needed to do and you’ve maxed out your energy for the day, find ways to just a little bit extra.

Maybe in a business context, let’s say you’re creating a presentation and you’ve created this wonderful presentation, you think it’s good enough, and that’s exactly when you’re going to put in just that little bit of extra effort, which most people don’t put in so maybe or to add an extra conclusion or a joke or a story or something at the end, a little bit of research on the company you’re presenting about, just something to separate yourself.

In an English context, you do your 15-minutes of listening every day, that’s wonderful. Maybe going to take that a step further write down a few words that you learned that day and start creating an English journal of new vocabulary. That would be one step further. Just putting in a little extra effort which most people don’t do.

We’re also creating momentum here as well. Creating momentum on going above and beyond, putting in a little extra effort to get better results.

And this could also just be adding little tweaks into your day, little tweaks, little adjustments, tweak, TWEAK. Adding little tweaks into your day, positive tweaks. For example taking the stairs instead of the elevator, drinking water with lunch instead of Coca-Cola. How many of you drink Coca-Cola every day? That’ll add some weight on to your belly. Having a little English app on your phone it can open up real quick when you’re waiting in line, just a little tweaks like this to add into your day to start accumulating good effects to start accumulating positive outcomes.

And so now I’m going to leave you with an action step, I’m going to give you one action step based on this book and if you like the book go search it out read the book, listen to the audio book The Compound Effect, you can also find it on my website feelgoodenglish.com/compound.

So what I want you to do is think of your number one goal right now, what’s the number one thing you would like to accomplish? And let’s think of a life goal here, so not something you want to achieve in the next month or two, it’s something you want to happen in the next year or two years or even five years from now. Something you really want to have happened in your life, think of that. Next step think of the habits that could be getting in the way of you getting there, think about what actions you’re taking every day you might not feel good about, you’re always a little guilty when you’re doing this. What are the habits that might prevent you from getting there? And start trying to eliminate them.

One first step you could take is going on something called avice fast vice VICE.

Vice is something we’re addicted to doing or it’s like a bad habit, what’s your vice? Maybe your vices smoking cigarettes or staying up late, going on advice fast. Now fast here spelled like fast like fast and slow, but fast here is different. A fast is when you stop doing something, you stop eating or you stop on a daily action that you take often in religions you’ll go on a fast. You’ll go on a fast, you’ll stop eating for a certain number of days. So you going to go on a vice fast, choose the one habit you think might be good for you kind of negative, and for 30 days not do that. Stop staying up late for thirty days, stop playing video games for six hours a day for 30 days, and only play for one hour a day. Focus on that one, attack it, go in a vice fast and see how at the end of 30 days, maybe you won’t even want to return to that habit maybe you will, it’s not important. Don’t beat yourself up, don’t judge yourself if you go back into this habit, but for 30 days going to vice fast, eliminate that bad behavior. The bad behavior that’s going to keep you from reaching your big life goal.

I hope you enjoyed this episode on “The Compound Effect” by Darren Hardy, very powerful lessons here easier said than done I know that however, we have to start somewhere right. Be gentle with yourself start small, be smart write things down, get organized and start taking the little steps it takes to make big things happen.

If you want to be a fluent powerful English speaker it’s all about the little daily choices you make on if you’re going to practice, train, learn versus doing nothing. If you have any comments or questions please send them to kevin@feelgoodenglish.com. If you want to transcript to this episode you can also get that at my website I provide transcripts to all episodes for a small monthly fee, you want to check that out I’ll see you on the website.

Until next time good luck eliminating the bad and adding, the good.

Bye, bye.