Tag: Habits

Atomic Habits, by James Clear 📚 (Book Review)

Posted on by brianjpombo

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Brian shares a review on one of his favorite books he’s read of late.

Transcription

Atomic Habits by James Clear – Book Review.

Hi I’m Brian Pombo. Welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Today I’m doing a quick little book review, I am going to go into more in depth on this book, because it’s one of those that’s been very inspirational, very useful to me. I’m not sure if it’s going to be for you or for you know, even a majority of the people who read it.

It was a New York Times best seller, you know, that happens.

Then I saw it on Amazon’s list for years now in its best selling books.

I’ve seen many people recommend this book to me, not necessarily directly either by Chamber of Commerce, I have multiple people that were passing the book around.

It was one of those I have read many books on habits, we’ve talked a lot about them here, you can see them lining up my shelves.

It’s been a topic that is really intrigued me because it’s one of the few things, one of the few ways I’ve been able to succeed in getting anything accomplished whatsoever with my life is finding ways to turn what can seem unbearable, work into being a habitual thing that you don’t even think about.

That’s been very helpful for me, and it’s a, it’s a process I wish I would have learned at a younger age. Because I think a lot of us get emotions and stuff all wound up in our heads.

That ties into habits to a whole lot of post traumatic stress, you know, PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder, a whole lot of that stuff comes from getting our the part that habit part of our brain basically malfunctioning because of a shocking or emotional, overly emotional experience.

As you start cleaning that out, you start seeing well, you can actually use that part of the brain for good.

We do anyways, you know, daily things that we do, from driving to say like riding a bike, right?

Brushing your teeth to all these different things, they’re habits that you don’t need to think about consciously, you just put the first part into motion, and the rest of it just unfolds.

You can do that with many different areas of your life. But it’s really difficult to do, if you’ve got all these bad habits, kind of jamming up the processes.

He talks about that in here, he doesn’t cover a lot of the, you know, the deep traumatic issues and stuff that people may have that result in bad habits or result in, you know, habitual negative thinking.

But he does cover a lot on how to in the most basic way, how to make good habits, and how to how to get rid of bad habits.

A lot of books cover this in little ways. He gives a very broad brush view of the whole process and the how to back it up, which is why I really liked this book.

I highly recommend it to people who are looking to do something different. I was thrown off by the title honestly, I thought atomic habits was hyperbolic.

But it what he’s talking about is atomic in the in really the scientific sense of something being like an atom like the size of an atom.

What if you could you can build your habits on things that are as small as an atom is the smallest possible increments in order to build up a habit and it’s a it’s such an intriguing field and something I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to really wrap my mind around even though I’ve I’ve discussed the mini habits book out there by Stephen Guys.

That’s an awesome book that was extremely helpful.

But this adds a little bit more of the surrounding concepts behind it. It’s just a great addition and really if a person had to read someone asked me if a person had to read one habit book what which one would you recommend?

This is the latest one I’ve I’ve read and reread. So I think that it’s this one gives the overall general idea and the other ones give you little bits of in taste of some of the specifics. If you’re looking for just a very very just a quick start into the habit field you haven’t read anything on it you don’t want to read something this thick. Go it’s a quick read is really simple read that guy’s a good writer, but you I recommend slight edge is a great starter book.

Do I have it right here?

Oh, here’s here’s where my original copies of the slides this was this was got to be one of the first printings of it by Jeff Olson, slight edge secrets to a successful life. And it just discusses that.

How if you can do something in a residual manner, how doing that over a long period of time creates can create something wonderful or can create something horrible.

Still, it happens residually it happens a little tiny bits.

This is a great starter.

This is a great ender this book, and like I said, I’m gonna get into details later. So follow subscribe, wherever you’re listening to this, you can always also catch up later over at BrianJPombo.com.

Go to the media section and you can catch all the old videos and podcasts that where we talk about. We’re gonna be talking about atomic habits in the next few episodes. So stay tuned for that.

You can also check out my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business.

It has nothing to do with habits, but has a whole lot to do with systems that you put into place in order to get you what you want out of your business. 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business.

Get a Free copy at AmazonProofBook.com That’s all I have for tonight. You have a good one. We’ll be back tomorrow.

In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.

TRICK YOURSELF skinny 🙄

Posted on by brianjpombo

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Thoughts on diet, nutrition and exercise for better health.

Transcription

Trick yourself skinny.

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

I’m going to reveal a secret of mine that isn’t that big of a secret. It isn’t something you haven’t heard before, but maybe you need to hear it again. Because I always need to hear it again and again and again.

That is the only progress that I’ve ever been able to make in my life. Specifically in the areas of health, in the areas of wealth creation, and building businesses, in all these different areas that don’t necessarily come naturally.

I’ve had to resort to this one thing, and it has to do with tricking yourself, how do you trick yourself to be skinny?

How do you trick yourself to be healthy?

How do you trick yourself to make more money?

How do you trick yourself to do any of those things?

I’ve only found one thing that is relatively foolproof. The problem is how do you get how do you put everything in place to make that one thing work. But if you understand that one thing, you at least have a direction, you have a strategy you could work with, I haven’t found anything else that works.

That one thing is the development of a habit. A lot of people say that and it’s a really nice, you know, juicy piece, and there’s all these books about it and everything else now.

But some of the books that have come out in the last 20 or so years, I think really pin the nail on the donkey. It’s very, very close.

Many of them have pieces of it and if you read enough of them, you’ll eventually get something that’ll work for you. But I’m not saying you need to go out and read books if you can just get this one concept.

Concept, I’ve talked about it before I first read it in a book called The Slight Edge, which is a short book and it’s a good one. Let me see, do I have it right here.

This isn’t a review for that book, so we’ll talk about that book another time.

The basic idea is if you can take one tiny little step, as the smallest possible measurable step in the direction of, let’s say health if you can take one tiny little step on a daily basis, until the point to where it becomes natural to where you don’t have to think about it.

It should take a very small effort to begin with but if it has zero effort over the long run, you’ve created a habit, it takes even more effort to want to stop it not want to stop it.

You may want to stop it but it’s easier not to it’s easier just to do it. I’ve talked about this before, this is how I started doing daily podcasts, okay, it just became something that I do.

It’s something that I feel uncomfortable if I haven’t done unless I’m in a very like I’ve said before about the only scenario is if I’m in a very different location with different scenario happen, if I’m sleep deprived, anything like that, I might mess, it might mess with my habit.

But otherwise, I have to almost intentionally not do it, in order to not do it, I have to intentionally turn it off because it’s become such a big part of what I do.

This has happened with bootload the food that I eat. The problem is a lot of these things can swing back in the other direction, if you allow them to slowly inch their way back, you can build a habit backwards.

But if you intentionally build a habit forwards in a very, in the least willful way possible in something that takes the least amount of effort possible. If you can do that, then you can change your life.

It’s not going to happen overnight. It happens over time.

It’s this very subtle, subtle, subtle, subtle, subtle, subtle change. But what ends up happening is you look back six months, you look back a year, and all of a sudden you’ve come somewhere, you’ve done something that you wouldn’t have been able to do.

You can see it going forward into the future relatively easily. Okay, there’s a whole bunch of nuances to this. There’s a whole bunch of details that really make a big difference in getting it going, to getting the habit started, to make sure you stick to it in that in that first period of time.

A lot of people say, Oh, it’s an idea years ago that 21 days can create any habit it’s not exactly true. For one thing, I have it can start can be picked up a lot sooner, or a habit can take a whole lot longer to build it and it really does depend.

There hasn’t been any that I’ve seen direct science saying what the difference is, but habit becomes a very physical thing in your mind, they say it’s actual tracks that get put into your brain. And until that’s installed, it’s going to it’s not going to be second nature, it’s not going to be easy.

This is the plan, make it easy.

One of the big things that I’ve fought for years and years and years is the concept of accountability. Having an accountability partner or having somebody that you’re accountable to or having a mentor that you check in with on a regular basis.

These things just bristled, bristled the independent means, I don’t want to be dependent on anybody else. But that accountability, if you can see it as a necessary temporary crutch in order to build a positive habit, in order to switch a habit process, or it means you could technically even take away a habit this way.

You kind of have to replace it with something. If you are developing a positive lifestyle, then having accountability short term is really really, really important thing.

Especially if you’re not able to do it without it, which is more common than not when it comes to those most difficult habits that you’re looking to build. So just a couple ideas, the accountability for tonight.

I’m here to tell you, I’m going to start exercising a little more.

In fact, right now, as soon as I’m done here, I’m going to go get on my bike, and I’m going to exercise and it doesn’t matter if I even do anything. I’m going to sit on that bike so that I get used to sitting on it.

If I do that every night, I will work out once in a while. And that working out once a while is a lot better than not working out at all.

One of the things that I had lost a lot of weight initially was doing high intensity interval training, which is really scary, disgusting word, phrase, I never liked the word intensity or anything like that.

It just never did anything for me.

But this specific style of exercise, you only do three or four times a week. And it has a lot of benefits at least for my body type or whatever my situation is I really enjoy it and helps helps me mentally helps out with the mental fog quite a bit and the ADHD, if you have any of that going on what whether you believe in it or not.

It’s whatever that is, in people’s minds, I’ve got it. And it, it’s a lot easier for me to stick with something and concentrate if I burn off a lot of that extra energy.

So hopefully that’s helpful to you.

That’s all I have for tonight, a little slice of life but business is life. And if you’re a business owner, if you own a business, it’s one of those things that you wait, I can’t ignore the personal life issues that go along with owning a business, because that’s so much of what your business is made out of.

I was working with a client earlier today and talking to a lot of the staff. And so many of the issues, go back to that business owner, and nothing’s going to change in the business till that person does. But you can’t force it either.

So you kind of have to ease it along as best you can. And you wait, you wait for good things to happen, hopefully. So if you’re going if you’re looking to make some changes in your business, change some things up here, trick yourself into being whatever you want yourself to be and you can you can get there for sure.

Go check out my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business. You can get a free copy at AmazonProofBook.com You just download it.

It’s easy AmazonProofBook.com. That’s all I have for tonight. You have a good one. We’ll be back tomorrow.

In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.

Habits & Daylight Saving Time ⌚

Posted on by brianjpombo

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Thoughts on habits and how daylight saving time can blow all that up for a time.

Transcription

Habits and daylight saving time.

I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J Pombo Live.

And yes, I did say daylight saving time all the people go nuts if you say savings, even though we all grew up saying it that way, but supposedly the correct way is daylight saving time.

Let’s talk about habits and how they apply.

Habits, we talk a lot about habit-building here, especially if you’re early on in your entrepreneurial journey. And you are learning how to teach yourself to do the right thing to do the things that matter in business and trying to grow your business habits really matter a whole heck of a lot and learning how to build habits.

So you don’t burn yourself out just trying to plow through everything with willpower, you know, eventually that energy runs out. And you have to have other things that help make up the difference.

I was pretty lucky early on to not ever be really good at willpower, I burn out real fast if I’m just trying to force something. So I’m very protective of how much force I put into things.

I’ve gotten good, not gotten good. I’m in the process of getting better at building habits and realizing what works and what doesn’t work, what allows me to start, but also what allows me to keep going.

And we’ve as I said, we’ve discussed this a lot on this channel, you could watch other videos about it, one of the things that I’ll throw people off, though, is a change at all in schedule.

Your body gets into a rhythm with time, you know, during, if you have a certain time of the day that you take a nap, your body starts shutting down during that time, if you have a time of the day that if you have the time at night where you go to sleep, your body tends to go to sleep at that time, that there are certain rhythms and the older you get, I think I could be wrong on this.

But at least for myself, the more ingrained these rhythms get, and the more specific my body gets about doing things in a very specific rhythm. I don’t know if that’s the case with you, too.

I mean, leave me a comment and let me know if you’re any different. But as I’ve gotten older, I really do have to stick to more of a schedule, or at least I have to acknowledge that there’s a schedule there, that my body is trying to go one way when I’m trying to go another, nothing is more true than when we switch times, back and forth.

Those of you in Arizona and Hawaii, I know you don’t do that. I don’t think Hawaii does it. I know Arizona doesn’t and that’s fabulous.

I wish we could institute that countrywide for those of you in the United States. And I know a whole lot of the world still practices, daylight saving time where you switch up an hour or back an hour throughout the year drives me nuts, drives my body crazy.

My whole family goes bonkers because we send the kids to bed at a very specific time every night. And when that gets thrown off there and they go nuts for, you know, a couple of days, because their bodies are off. They’re not used to it.

In any habits, I build up the slightest change in schedule in terms of what I things I’m used to doing, when I start really messing with that all of a sudden habits get thrown off and I forget to do something that I’ve built a habit of doing.

So how do you fix that?

How do you make sure that you stay in rhythm even though certain things are going to be off?

You go on vacation you do this Daylight Saving Time happens?

How do you handle that?

I’ll tell you how I handled the only way I found how to handle it is to acknowledge that it exists is that changes. Flip things around and you have to have things marked down.

So that you go back to them and say okay, what are all the things that I know I got to do during the day or during the week or what have you?

What are the things I know I got to get done that can fall through the cracks when something changes during the holidays?

It’s guaranteed because we pick up our entire family and go down south I’m in Southern Oregon. My family’s in Northern California, we drive for eight hours with my family all the way down and hang out with the rest of my extended family for a week on end, both during Thanksgiving and during the Christmas period.

And at least a week usually. And it gets crazy. It throws everything out the window and so the more things I build into my life has habits the more I have to watch them and I have to be aware when something’s coming up.

If it’s something that’s predictable, it’s better. But it’s something that’s coming up, be ready for it and be ready to watch your habits and keep them on track as best as you can as much as possible.

The other piece of this that I have neglected through the years that I’ve discussed here, and I’m going to be discussing more because it is so imperative to everything you do.

If you have team members or other people that you work with, that they’re on top of also, and that is the idea of really having people depend on each other.

So really having people that can check up on you, and you can check upon them. When it comes to your habits having pieces built-in.

There are different ways of going about doing this. A lot of you people who work with me know, I’m a stickler for this and that this is one of the things I’ve been instituting over, especially over the last year.

Every book I’ve been reading has been pushing it more and more to the forefront of my mind as being a key piece that has slowed me down through the years is not having that extra oversight, not having somebody there to be able to keep me on my toes. in it.

I think a whole lot of that comes I don’t mean to go too far off, off the board here.

But with me personally, a whole lot of that comes from childhood, going to, you know, dealing with school and dealing with all the societal pressures trying to get you to go one way or the other, whether it’s right or wrong. There are always pressures. And if you resent that pressure, you may rebel against it like I did.

But then you’re left without any structure whatsoever. And there’s nothing wrong with having dependency systems to having some systems, which help keep you in line and help move you forward in the direction that you think’s right for you to go in.

So don’t throw it all don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater like I’ve done for years and years. We sift through it and find out what works for you. When it comes to habits, there are good habits and their bad habits.

And there are good ways of developing habits and bad ways of developing habits. You don’t want to ever become completely dependent on other people at the same time. In order to build a habit, sometimes you need to have someone checking up on you. So that’s a little piece of how to survive Daylight Saving Time craziness.

Well, as I’m recording this, we just switched over last night, it hasn’t even been 24 hours and so still not used to the new time system. And I don’t think I’ll ever get used to switching back an hour or forward an hour. It’s just a strange deal. But we’re going to survive it.

We didn’t get to choose all the rules of this world. But sometimes you just got to survive them and move on. So hopefully that’s helpful to you.

I’ve got a book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business.

It’s all about the concept of how to make yourself completely competition-proof. You can get a free copy at AmazonProofBook.com.

I’m going to be back here tomorrow night trying to be here every day. It’s another one of my habits. You have a good one. Get out there and let the magic happen.