Tuesday, August 07, 2007

My Zen Habits August Challenge

Zen habits is a recent blog that I subscribed to recently. It is a wonderful blog about personal development and it is written with a perspective of of Zen Buddhism. It is all about simplifying your life!

Zen Habits runs a challenge for each month for his readers through the forum on his site. The users can register a challenge that they want to achieve within the month, and they are to practice and report progress online, through the forum daily. It is kind of like your personal accountability team.

This process of practicing a new habit for 30 days to internalize it has been proposed by many a personal development trainers. I first heard about it on Steve Pavlina's blog, and then I read about it on several books and other web sites and blogs. I have tried this approach several times, but at all times, it didn't go through for more than 2 weeks. I think the biggest reason was he lack of a personal accountability team. I never made myself personally accountable for my goals.

This time I decided to add that element to it. So I registered for the August Challenge on Zen Habits forum. I recorded my challenge for this month. But will I be motivated and to be accountable to the other people on the forum? Well, I could be, I could not be! But there is no loss of face if I don't!

So the way I figured it, in order for me to be really accountable for achieving my goal, I should put it here, on this blog. And everyday, I can make a progress update by way of a comment and intermittently, I can write a post reviewing the process. And come the end of the month, I will have to update on the result achieved.

Lose 5 Kilos by the end of the month.

I will attempt this by:

  1. Eating moderately and not giving into indulgences
  2. Exercising daily on the TimeWorks. The prescription is to do only 4 minutes a day!

Stay tuned for my updates!