Habits

Bad Habits: Pavlov’s Bell/ Conditioned Response.
After my morning swims, I’m off to catch my train to work. Once I’m on my train, I finally have a chance to eat my post workout snack, typically a Balanced Energy Bar and an apple. That’s a good habit. Problem is on the way home, I get on a train and feel the need to eat something. Stupid right? Situational Habit/ conditioned response. I guess. Ring the bell Pavlov.
Nothing to do here other than be aware of it and make it stop.

In the same field, I have been feeding my Starbucks addiction again. Bad in a few ways.
1) Expensive
2) No nutritional value
3) Even though it’s decaf there is enough caffeine in there to cause some “side effects” for me. Heart Palpitations, Makes me feel more hungry, then of course the possibility of headaches if I don’t feed the addiction. I know it’s decaf but there is still caffeine.

I was completely off coffee for a while, it’s just that my will power had to triple in order to fight it. A year ago, I would pass 1 Starbucks on the walk to work. Now I pass 3. This is walking from 34th St to 22nd. Fortunately I don’t care for Dunkin Donuts coffee, I’d have to add 3 of those as well. As for the countless Delis and coffee/donut carts along the walk, I’ve just convinced myself that their coffee is terrible, even though’ I’ve never tried it.
Anyhow, I now have 3 reasons to keep walking past each place I walk past every day.

Waking up early enough to exercise in the morning:
Making this happen took quite a number of weeks. I take the law “an object at rest, tends to stay at rest” very seriously. Yet I eventually adjusted my evening schedule to accommodate my morning workouts. Well our morning workout schedule has changed up a bit lately and it was very easy to start ignoring the early alarm because there was no workout scheduled.
Well we just got a few Yoga DVDs, they are now my fill-in workout for any weekday morning that I don’t have something planned. This will help keep my sleep schedule in place and add strength & stretching to my weekly schedule.
Wednesday morning was my first DVD yoga session. It was laughable. Flexible isn’t an adjective anyone is going to use to describe me. I’m just going to keep in mind that “swimmer”, “biker” or “runner” were not words people would have used to describe me a couple years ago.

Okay, all that up there was health/nutrition related. Let’s look at some other stuff.

My lack of attention to keep my office organized both at home at work. This one will take some serious effort. At both places, I feel I am handed physical things all the time which I really don’t have a place for them. I’ve got to figure out how to handle that problem.

Money, Budget/Investing: A couple years back, I realized that I wasn’t being disciplined enough with my investing. So I decided I should find an advisor. After many emails and phone calls I found that I would have to double my salary before these people would even be interested in talking with me. I might have the minimum portfolio value they were looking for when I retire. At which point I probably won’t need an advisor…
One guy finally did meet up with us. It was a 2 hour meeting, we thought it went very well. Following that meeting his office never returned an email or phone call. After that I lost all momentum on that project.
Of course my portfolio has been beaten down badly lately, I don’t feel badly about this. Almost everyone is in the same boat, you just take notes and learn from the situation. There is a saying “there is money to be made every day in the market, you just have to know where to look”. That’s very true and optimistic but really not very helpful. I’ve only been investing for 13 or so years, but one thing has become obvious to me. There are times when investing is easy. We are likely very close to the beginning of one of those times. I really need to put some effort into making this a priority for the next 18 months. I’d like to think I’ve learned some hard lessons and that it’s time to put those lessons to good use. (I’m guessing my stock blog will be back up and running soon).

The budget is another thing which I need to spend some time with. We’ve made attempts at this in the past and the plans have never worked. We either never stuck with it long enough to create the new habit or perhaps the “system” we created required too much effort. I’ll try keep this in mind as we take another shot at this. This time around at least we have an “Incentive”. We have been wanting to have some work done on the house. I believe if we were serious about our budget we could make this happen.

I feel I’m going into all this a bit more optimistically that I may have a few years ago. After all, I’ve made some significant changes in my habits the last couple years. Eating/Exercising/Sleeping. The things on this list can be approached in the same way, schedule time for it, make it a priority, make it happen.

Finally, here is the catch phrase for inspiration. Along with a link.

It's about Our Need to Change, and Desire to do so. When want meets willing, there is no limit to how high we can climb.