The Now Habit Book Summary – Neil Fiore

The Now Habit Book Summary

The Now Habit by Neil Fiore explores the different attitudes people hold towards starting new tasks and seeing them through and the subsequent feelings they evoke. Most of the time the feelings that are evoked are anxiety, boredom, and being overwhelmed, which we respond to by procrastinating. However, it is not a lost cause, as Neil Fiore points out, by identifying the reason for these attitudes and the type of procrastination we engage in, we are in a much better position to reframe them in a better light and thus make the process much easier.

Introduction

The procrastination habit cycle: get overwhelmed, feel pressured, fear failure, try harder, work longer, feel resentful, lose motivation, and then procrastinate.

If you don’t deal with procrastination, it can become part of your identity, just like any habit, it becomes automated and subconscious. E.g. ‘I am a procrastinator.’

Redefining procrastination: procrastination is not the cause of our problems with accomplishing tasks; it is an attempt to resolve a variety of underlying issues, including:

• Low self-esteem
• Perfectionism
• Fear of failure and of success
• Indecisiveness
• An imbalance between work and play
• Ineffective goal-setting
• Negative concepts about work and yourself

New definition: Procrastination is a mechanism for coping with the anxiety associated with starting or completing any task or decision.

The Now Habit program proposes ten powerful tools for overcoming procrastination.

1. Creating safety – lessen your fear of failure and learn how to bounce back from mistakes with renewed purpose
2. Reprogramming negative attitudes through positive self-talk
3. Using the symptom to trigger the cure – how to use old habits to evoke and strengthen the formation of new, positive habits
4. Guilt-free play will teach you how to strategically schedule your leisure time
5. Three-dimensional thinking and the reverse calendar
6. Making worry work for you
7. Coping with distractions
8. The Unschedule
9. Setting realistic goals
10. Working in the flow state
11. Controlled setbacks

Why We Procrastinate

Your strategic program begins with identifying your procrastination patterns so you can apply the appropriate techniques for replacing them.

Six warning signs to look out for – ask yourself:

• Does life feel like a long series of obligations that cannot be met? Do you:
  • Keep an impossibly long “to do” list?
  • Talk to yourself in “have to’s” and “should’s”?
  • Feel powerless, with no sense of choice?
  • Feel agitated, pressured, continually fearful of being caught procrastinating?
  • Suffer from insomnia and have difficulty unwinding at night, on weekends, and on vacations (if in fact you take vacations)?
• Are you unrealistic about time? Do you:
  • Talk about starting on projects in vague terms such as “sometime next week” or “in the fall”?
  • Lose track of how you spend your time?
  • Have an empty schedule without a clear sense of commitments, plans, subgoals, and deadlines?
  • Chronically arrive late at meetings and dinners?
  • Fail to take into account the actual time it takes to drive across town during rush hour?
• Are you vague about your goals and values? Do you:
  • Find it difficult to stay committed to any one person or project?
  • Have difficulty knowing what you really want for yourself, but are clear about what you should want?
  • Get easily distracted from a goal by another plan that seems to be free of problems and obstacles?
  • Lack the ability to distinguish between what’s the most important use of your time and what’s not?
• Are you unfulfilled, frustrated, depressed? Do you:
  • Have life goals that you’ve never completed or even attempted?
  • Fear always being a procrastinator?
  • Find that you’re never satisfied with what you accomplish?
  • Feel deprived—always working or feeling guilty about not working?
  • Continually wonder “Why did I do that?” or “What’s wrong with me?”
• Are you indecisive and afraid of being criticized for making a mistake? Do you:
  • Delay completing projects because you try to make them perfect?
  • Fear taking responsibility for decisions because you’re afraid of being blamed if something goes wrong?
  • Demand perfection even on low-priority work?
  • Expect to be above mistakes and criticism?
  • Worry endlessly about “what if something goes wrong”?
• Are low self-esteem and lack of assertiveness holding you back from becoming productive? Do you:
  • Blame outside events for your failures because you’re afraid to admit to any deficiencies?
  • Believe “I am what I do” or “I am my net worth”?
  • Feel ineffective in controlling your life?
  • Fear being judged and found wanting?

We often procrastinate when we fear a threat to our sense of worth and independence.

Perfectionism often occurs when we over-identify who we are with our work. From this fear follows the counterproductive drive toward perfectionism, severe self-criticism, and the fear that you must deprive yourself of leisure time in order to satisfy some unseen judge.

Those who gain their sense of identity from many areas are more resilient when failing in any one area.

Many procrastinators have a family pattern whereby praise was often withheld from them because “it might go to their head.” If all a child receives is criticism or so-called constructive feedback on how it might be improved, then there is a lot of friction to engaging in tasks.

There is one main reason why we procrastinate: it rewards us with temporary relief from stress. It takes us away from something we view as painful or threatening.

The cycle goes as follows – Perfectionistic demands lead to → fear of failure → PROCRASTINATION → self-criticism → anxiety and depression → loss of confidence → greater fear of failure which leads to → stronger need to use PROCRASTINATION as a temporary escape.

How We Use Procrastination

We can become addicted to the rewards of procrastination, learning to use it in three main ways:

1. As an indirect way of resisting pressure from authorities (external demands)
2. As a way of lessening fear of failure by providing an excuse for a disappointing, less-than-perfect performance
3. As a defense against fear of success by keeping us from doing our best.

Choosing to procrastinate can be a sense of plausible deniability – as time is wasted there is less time to do your best work, therefore you cannot be judged to the standards of your best work.

Fear of success involves three central issues:

1. You find yourself in conflict over the awful choice between advancement and friends.
2. Success in completing a project means facing some painful disincentives to success (more responsibility),
   1. E.g. looking for a new job, or paying back loans.
3. Success means advancement to increasing demands and a fear of ultimate failure sometime in the future. It is essentially a fear of delayed failure.

In one of its more insidious forms, fear of success can express itself through unconscious self-defeating behaviour.

If one is criticised every time they succeed, then they can create a negative association to success.

There is a reluctance to leave what is familiar for the unknown (promotion, new responsibility, new pressure).

How We Procrastinate

Once you have identified the specific negative behaviours you can use their trigger to redirect your energy toward your goals.

By assigning a level of importance to your tasks you can see when you’re making progress on what’s really important. Assigning an A (most important), B (important) and C (least important) can be a good way of instilling this system. 

If you have too many urgent tasks, it indicates poor time management.

A procrastination log is used to try and identify the reason for avoiding an activity. This can be a specific thought, justification, attempted solution, or resultant thought. 

The idea is to note down any underlying negative attitudes and beliefs that lead to feelings of victimhood, deprivation, pressure to be perfect, or fear of failure.

Ironically, on a psychological level, you are often the one who raises the stakes, changing a straightforward task into a test of your worth.

We overcome procrastination only when the dread of something worse gets us there.

Procrastination and Anxiety Work in Five Stages

1. You give a task or a goal the power to determine your worth and happiness. When a perfect performance is linked to the sole measure of your self-worth.
2. You use perfectionism to raise the stakes, for example, linking your performance of a task with your value as a human being.
3. You find yourself frozen with anxiety as your natural stress response produces adrenaline to deal with threats to your survival. The more issues you pile upon this task the more serious the threat if an error occurs.
4. You then use procrastination to escape your dilemma, which brings the deadline closer, creating time pressure, and a higher level of anxiety.
5. You then use a real threat, such as a deadline, to release yourself from perfectionism and to act as a motivator.

To overcome this, you need to have a plan B and a plan C, rather than being overly dependent and overly insistent on plan A as the only way to achieve and survive.

In order to maximize your performance in a stressful world, you must create a protected and indisputable sense of worth for yourself.

How to Talk to Yourself

The self-talk of procrastinators often unconsciously suggests and reinforces feelings of victimhood, stress, confusion, and resistance to authority. E.g. “I should do it, but I don’t want to. I have to because they’re making me do it.”

Changing how you talk to yourself is a powerful tool for disengaging from procrastination patterns of hesitation and indecision.

The “have to” statement communicates to your subconscious mind:

• I don’t want to do it.
• They’re making me do it against my will.
• I have to do it or else!—something awful and terrible will happen. I will hate myself.
• This is a no-win situation: if I don’t do it I’ll be punished; if I do it I’ll be going against myself.

When you engage in this self-talk your brain must tackle two conflicting situations: providing the energy needed for the task and providing the energy to resist threats to the integrity of the self (threats to survival). The former causes a stress response, while the latter causes a depressive response.

The self-talk of “should” creates the following negative, self-critical comparisons:

• “Should be different” compares an imagined ideal state with a current negative reality.
• “Should be done” compares the finished point with a bad or negative starting point.
• “Should be like him/her” compares a person you envy or admire with a bad, inadequate self.
• “Should be there” compares an imagined blissful future with where you are now.

Just as the “have to’s” will elicit stress, the “should’s” will elicit depression.

“Have to’s” and “should’s” do not communicate to the mind and body a clear picture of:

• What you choose to do
• When you choose to do it
• Where you choose to start it
• How you choose to do it

Challenge every “I have to” with a decision. You don’t have to want to do the task, nor do you have to love it, but if you have to do it you might as well make it as pleasant as possible. 

Five ways to go from a procrastinator to a producer:

• Replace “I have to” with “I choose to.”
• Replace “I must finish” with “When can I start?”
• Replace “This project is so big and important” with “I can take one small step.”
  • The bigger and more overwhelming the project seems to you, the greater your tendency to procrastinate because it lacks clarity.
• Replace “I must be perfect” with “I can be perfectly human.”
  • Replace demands for perfect work with acceptance of your human limits. Accept so-called mistakes (really feedback) as part of a natural learning process. Don’t condemn small steps of progress as insignificant.
• Replace “I don’t have time to play” with “I must take time to play.”
  • Knowing that you have something to look forward to in the near future lessens the dread of difficult work. “I choose to start on one small step, knowing I have plenty of time for play.”

Guilt Free Play, Quality Work

Guilt-free play is based on the seeming paradox that in order to do productive, high-quality work on important projects, you must stop putting off living and engage wholeheartedly in recreation and relaxation.

Being taught that work is unpleasant and that we are lazy leads us to believe that we need the pressure of “have to’s” and “should’s” to keep us from escaping to play.

When attempting to motivate yourself to start working on a goal, you should use attraction rather than threats to pull you towards your goal. Punishing tactics often create a paralyzing rather than a motivating effect.

The “pull method” recognizes that distant and indefinite rewards (promotion after 4 years) don’t motivate as much as more immediate and definite rewards (leisure, seeing friends, etc.).

To control your work habits you must make the periods of work shorter (less painful) and the rewards more frequent and immediate (more pleasurable)—interlacing short periods of work with breaks and rewards.

By scheduling guilt-free play first, it gives you a sense of freedom in your life as you know when you can settle into short periods of focused quality work. It gives clarity on when you should work

The vitality of play can carry over to your work.

Overcoming Blocks to Action

When pracrastination is your sole defence against something you fear, it becomes a difficult habit to unlearn, however, there are alternative ways of coping with it.

The three major fears that block action and create procrastination are:

1. The terror of being overwhelmed
2. The fear of failure
3. The fear of not finishing.

The three corresponding Now Habit tools: 

TOOL #1: THREE-DIMENSIONAL THINKING AND THE REVERSE CALENDAR

This normal level of anxiety will remain overwhelming if you:

1. Insisting on knowing the one right place to start. Instead, realise there are several adequate starting points.
2. Have not permitted yourself time along the course of your project for learning, building confidence with each step, and asking for help.
3. Are critical of the fact that you’re only starting. Each achievement is diminished by being compared with the imagined ideal.

The Reverse Calendar

• Breaking down a goal into ‘next tasks’ so that it is approachable and gives clarity. Then assigning these tasks from the main deadline back until present day.

TOOL #2: THE WORK OF WORRYING

Worrying plays a role in alerting you to danger, but without a plan to get out of it you will just end up ruminating about it.

A six-step process for facing fears and creating safety. Ask yourself these six questions: 

1. What is the worst that could happen?
2. What would I do if the worst really happened? And then “what would I do?”
3. How would I lessen the pain and get on with as much happiness as possible if the worst did occur?
4. What alternatives would I have? What would I have to do to increase the alternatives that are acceptable to me?
5. What can I do now to lessen the probability of this dreaded event occurring?
6. Is there anything I can do now to increase my chances of achieving my goal?

TOOL #3: PERSISTENT STARTING

It takes work to procrastinate and it takes work to face your fear of finishing. So why not tackle the work that’s going to reap the most long-range benefits?

Prepare Challenges to Negative Statements and Attitudes

• • “I need to do more preparation before I can start.” Be alert to when preparation becomes procrastination.

• “You cannot judge your rate of progress by your current ability or knowledge.”
• “At this rate I’ll never finish” – The rate of learning and accomplishment in the beginning of a project is often slower than you’re accustomed to.
• “I should have started earlier.” – Make sure you reward every step of progress, regardless of how small.
• “There’s only more work after this.” – Keep this work separate from your decision about future projects.
• “It’s not working.” – Difficulties and negative thoughts are not a sign to give up, but a signal to be creative in how you resolve the difficulty or go around it.
• “I only need a little more time.” – Don’t fall into the trap of feeling victimised by a system, that rewards people for what they accomplish rather than the fantasy of doing the ideal – perfect job. Learn to cope with criticism and take your ego off the line – separate your worth from your work. 

Essentially, all large tasks are completed in a series of starts. When you’re afraid of finishing, keep asking, “When can I start?”

The Unschedule

The Unschedule is a system that helps to change the way you perceive work by integrating the “guilt-free play” concept into a system. The idea is to invert how we normally schedule our time, instead of scheduling work, you schedule your fun activities and things that contribute to your life outside of work, and then you try to fit in small bouts of work around them (unscheduled work).

You are essentially removing the option of ‘resorting to a fun activity to procrastinate’ off the table. So when you are in a period of non-scheduled time, you know its time to work.

Without a record of your legitimate commitments to leisure, you’re more apt to feel guilty about lost time or to feel depressed when you see blank spaces on your schedule and can’t remember how you spent the time.

The Unschedule builds your confidence in two ways:

• First, it gives you immediate and frequent rewards following short periods of work, rather than delaying a sense of accomplishment until the task is completed.
• Second, the habit of recording each period of work gives you a visible reward that allows you to see how much concentrated, uninterrupted work you have completed each day and each week.

Some of the rules to start with include:

• Do not work more than twenty hours a week on this project.
• Do not work more than five hours a day on this project.
• You must exercise, play, or dance at least one hour a day.
• You must take at least one day a week off from any work.
• Aim for starting on thirty minutes of quality work.
• Work for an imperfect, perfectly human first effort.
• Start small.

The Unschedule builds up a subconscious desire to work more and play less. It reframes work from a chore to a challenge. Instead of thinking you don’t have enough time, it creates a dynamic where you try to find time around the things you have already scheduled in.

How to Use the Unschedule

1. Schedule only: 
   • Previously committed time such as meals, sleep, meetings.
   • Free time, recreation, leisure reading 
   • Socializing, lunches and dinners with friends 
   • Health activities such as swimming, running, tennis, working out at the gym 
   • Routine structured events such as commuting time, classes, medical appointments
2.  Fill in your Unschedule with work on projects only after you have completed at least one-half hour.
3. Take credit only for periods of work that represent at least thirty minutes of uninterrupted work.
4. Reward yourself with a break or a change to a more enjoyable task after each period worked.
5. Keep track of the number of quality hours worked each day and each week.
6. Always leave at least one full day a week for recreation and any small chores you wish to take care of.
7. Before deciding to go to a recreational activity or social commitment, take time out for just thirty minutes of work on your project. It 
   • Uses your attraction to the pleasurable activity to get you started more often
   • Allows you to enjoy the leisure activity without guilt
   • Starts your subconscious mind working on the project while you play.
8. Focus on starting.
9. Think small.
10. Keep starting.
11. Never end “down.” That is, never stop work when you’re blocked or at the end of a section. Stick with something and then quit when you are just starting to make ground, this energy will propel you next time you start up. 

Using the Unschedule provides five major benefits:

1. Realistic timekeeping. You become acutely aware of how much time is really left for working on your stated goals.
2. Thirty minutes of quality time. By starting small you will have more opportunities during your day to chip away at the big.
3. Experiencing success. By doing smaller sessions, you will experience success more often.
4. Self-imposed deadlines.
5. Newfound “free time.” – When one of your leisure activities is cancelled, you can suddenly find yourself thinking with relief, “I have free time; I can work.”

Fine-tuning your Process

You can strengthen your ability to switch more readily from your old pattern to the new by planning a controlled setback to rehearse your reactions: 

To test yourself using a planned setback:

• Choose a project on which you are likely to procrastinate
• Notice the warning signs of procrastination associated with this project
• Consciously choose to procrastinate for a few hours to observe the self-statements that lead to guilt and self-criticism.
• Notice how this process of self-criticism leads to guilt, depression, and resentment. By consciously procrastinating, we become aware of the downsides of it, therefore making us less likely to do it next time. 

People who possess “hardiness” – a constellation of three personality characteristics, commitment, control, and challenge –  have been shown to withstand stress and resist illness better than their peers who lack them.

Whenever you are finding it difficult to complete a task, remind yourself how you dealt with the feeling in the past.

Certain types of distractions, such as strong emotions, need to be dealt with immediately, but the large majority of distractions can be dealt with after you complete some quality work.

If you are having extreme difficulty concentrating, quickly jot down any distractions on a separate pad. Once you’ve completed some work, the craving will subside, regardless of how strong it was thirty minutes earlier.

There are at least five types of distractions:

1. Strong Emotions. These distraction deserve your immediate attention. You may be using work as an attempt to distract yourself from facing strong emotions.
2. Warnings of Danger. Real or imagined threats will interrupt your ability to concentrate by stimulating an adrenaline reaction. Remove threats and do the work.
3. “To-Do” Reminders. If you don’t already use a list to jot them down
4. Escape Fantasies. If you anticipate long periods of deprivation, you can expect an increase in fantasies about food, sex, and vacations. Record your escape fantasies to plan your future guilt-free play.
5. UFOs—Unidentified Flights of Originality. Quickly write them down so you can consider them later if you wish.

The following steps will help you to maintain the motivation necessary to set and complete your goals:

1. Recognize the work of procrastinating. Let go of the fantasy that you can escape work by procrastinating.
2. Freely choose the entire goal. State your goal in the form of a choice or decision: “I freely choose to work on…” This gives you more control over your goal experience. 
3. Create functional, observable goals. Vague goals must be translated into something tangible you can do, actionable steps. 

The Procrastinator in Your Life

People learn in different ways, so to make sure they understand how to do something, they must be shown in their own way of understanding otherwise they may procrastinate.

• For example, “Former Raiders coach John Madden says that for some players you simply tell them the play and they immediately know it; others must be shown diagrams before they can form their own mental image of what to do; and still others won’t really grasp the play until they physically run through it so that they can feel the play, as well as see and hear it.”

When recognition for a job well done precedes any criticism, it lessens fear of failure about mistakes; recognizes that subordinates are doing something right and that their efforts are appreciated; and gives direction that is less likely to offend and is more likely to be heard as useful instruction on how to accomplish organizational objectives.

Frequent encouragement helps a worker to feel motivated now while on the path to distant rewards. Use subgoals and subdeadlines to give a greater sense of achievement and as an opportunity to offer rewards or direction along the way to the completion of the big task.

Actionable Steps

The program begins by identifying your procrastination patterns. Try an ask yourself these key questions:

• Does life feel like a long series of obligations that cannot be met?
• Are you unrealistic about time?
• Are you vague about your goals and values?
• Are you unfulfilled, frustrated, depressed?
• Are you indecisive and afraid of being criticized for making a mistake?
• Are low self-esteem and lack of assertiveness holding you back from becoming productive?

By assigning a level of importance to your tasks you can see when you’re making progress on what’s really important. Assigning an A (most important), B (important) and C (least important) can be a good way of instilling this system.

A procrastination log is used to try and identify the reason for avoiding an activity. This can be a specific thought, justification, attempted solution, or resultant thought.

To overcome this, you need to have a plan B and a plan C, rather than being overly dependent and overly insistent on plan A as the only way to achieve and survive.

Challenge every “I have to” with a decision. You don’t have to want to do the task, nor do you have to love it, but if you have to do it you might as well make it as pleasant as possible.

Five ways to go from a procrastinator to a producer:

• Replace “I have to” with “I choose to.”
• Replace “I must finish” with “When can I start?”
• Replace “This project is so big and important” with “I can take one small step.”
• Replace “I must be perfect” with “I can be perfectly human.”
• Replace “I don’t have time to play” with “I must take time to play.”

To control your work habits you must make the periods of work shorter (less painful) and the rewards more frequent and immediate (more pleasurable)—interlacing short periods of work with breaks and rewards.

By scheduling guilt-free play first, it gives you a sense of freedom about your life as you know when you can settle into short periods of focused quality work.

Tools to tackle the terror of being overwhelmed, the fear of failure, and the fear of not finishing.

TOOL #1: THREE-DIMENSIONAL THINKING AND THE REVERSE CALENDAR

This normal level of anxiety will remain overwhelming if you:

1. Insist on knowing the one right place to start. Instead, realise there are several adequate starting points.
2. Have not permitted yourself time along the course of your project for learning, building confidence with each step, and asking for help.
3. Are critical of the fact that you’re only starting. Each achievement is diminished by being compared with the imagined ideal.

The Reverse Calendar

• Breaking down a goal into ‘next tasks’ so that it is approachable and gives clarity. Then assigning these tasks from the main deadline back until the present day.

TOOL #2: THE WORK OF WORRYING

A six-step process for facing fears and creating safety. Ask yourself these six questions:

1. What is the worst that could happen?
2. What would I do if the worst really happened? And then “what would I do?”
3. How would I lessen the pain and get on with as much happiness as possible if the worst did occur?
4. What alternatives would I have? What would I have to do to increase the alternatives that are acceptable to me?
5. What can I do now to lessen the probability of this dreaded event occurring?
6. Is there anything I can do now to increase my chances of achieving my goal?

TOOL #3: PERSISTENT STARTING

Prepare Challenges to Negative Statements and Attitudes

• Be alert to when preparation becomes procrastination.
• Remind yourself that the rate of learning and accomplishment at the beginning of a project is often slower than you’re accustomed to.
• Make sure you reward every step of progress, regardless of how small.
• Keep your work separate from your decision about future projects.
• Be creative in how you resolve the difficulty or go around it.
• Learn to cope with criticism and take your ego off the line – separate your worth from your work.

How to Use the Unschedule

1. Schedule only:
   • Previously committed time such as meals, sleep, meetings.
   • Free time, recreation, leisure reading
   • Socializing, lunches and dinners with friends
   • Health activities such as swimming, running, tennis, working out at the gym
   • Routine structured events such as commuting time, classes, medical appointments
2. Fill in your Unschedule with work on projects only after you have completed at least one-half hour.
3. Take credit only for periods of work that represent at least thirty minutes of uninterrupted work.
4. Reward yourself with a break or a change to a more enjoyable task after each period worked.
5. Keep track of the number of quality hours worked each day and each week.
6. Always leave at least one full day a week for recreation and any small chores you wish to take care of.
7. Before deciding to go to a recreational activity or social commitment, take time out for just thirty minutes of work on your project. It
   • Uses your attraction to the pleasurable activity to get you started more often
   • Allows you to enjoy the leisure activity without guilt
   • Starts your subconscious mind working on the project while you play
8. Focus on starting.
9. Think small.
10. Keep starting.
11. Never end “down.” That is, never stop work when you’re blocked or at the end of a section. Stick with something and then quit when you are just starting to make ground, this energy will propel you next time you start up.

Plan a controlled setback to rehearse your reactions: 

To test yourself using a planned setback:

• Choose a project on which you are likely to procrastinate
• Notice the warning signs of procrastination associated with this project
• Consciously choose to procrastinate for a few hours to observe the self-statements that lead to guilt and self-criticism.
• Notice how this process of self-criticism leads to guilt, depression, and resentment. By consciously procrastinating, we become aware of the downsides of it, therefore making us less likely to do it next time.

There are at least five types of distractions:

1. Strong Emotions. These distraction deserve your immediate attention. You may be using work as an attempt to distract yourself from facing strong emotions.
2. Warnings of Danger. Real or imagined threats will interrupt your ability to concentrate by stimulating an adrenaline reaction. Remove threats and do the work.
3. “To-Do” Reminders. If you don’t already use a list to jot them down
4. Escape Fantasies. If you anticipate long periods of deprivation, you can expect an increase in fantasies about food, sex, and vacations. Record your escape fantasies to plan your future guilt-free play.
5. UFOs—Unidentified Flights of Originality. Quickly write them down so you can consider them later if you wish.

The following steps will help you to maintain the motivation necessary to set and complete your goals:

1. Recognize the work of procrastinating. Let go of the fantasy that you can escape work by procrastinating.
2. Freely choose the entire goal. State your goal in the form of a choice or decision: “I freely choose to work on…” This gives you more control over your goal experience.
3. Create functional, observable goals. Vague goals must be translated into something tangible you can do, actionable steps.