Month: November 2021

The tactic of getting time away from daily life in a beautiful relaxing place to gain focus and clarity has already begun paying dividends.

Let me back up because I know I haven’t shared a lot yet.

I have had a dream of building a company for a long time. I waffled about it for a long time, and eventually, I did start a business. Branch Water Entertainment was born. It has served a great purpose for me mentally, but it has not moved past the small side hustle stage. I have a long-term plan, but I will need substantial help to make it real.

This retreat is about the first stage of that help. I have been looking for the ideal way to bring my partner in life, Sarah, into this. This retreat allows us to collaborate on the next steps of this plan. We are figuring out the way our skills fit and where we go next.

First, we have noticed what we want by brainstorming and capturing as many ideas as possible on various themes. Then we identified what we wanted to do first out of all these ideas and things to do. Third, we set about doing the three key first things we identified. Finally, we celebrated doing and completing these first steps.

The concept is out there in so many ways, but sometimes it’s tough to implement it.

When we notice something, we begin to want it. Once we have or do it and like it, we will want to have or do more of it. This loop can be healthy or unhealthy. You can call it a habit, you can call it a ritual, you can call it a process, you can call it a program, but in the end, it’s us.

If we can hack this loop and make it work for us, then we can enact the process of becoming the person we want to be. It sounds simple, and it is. I think this is easy to understand. But just because it is easy to understand does not make it easy to do.

Notice – Want – Do – Like

I like the phrasing of these as the loop elements because noticing is a helpful word when we think about the initiation of the loop. You can use this idea of notice to identify when you end up going down a path you don’t like and the why. The key is that this isn’t an external why because it has to do with our reaction to the noticed thing.

Our reaction to the noticing is encapsulated in the idea of “wanting.” First, we notice, and then we want. The wanting isn’t the action, but it precedes action. If we do not wish to, we will not act. The wanting comes from the noticing, but the wanting manifests our internal reaction to the noticing. The nature of the wanting and relationship to noticing has everything to do with your mindset. It has frequently been said, ‘We can not control what’s happening, only our reaction to it.’

Wanting inevitably leads to doing, and the nature of the doing is related to our mindset. So there could easily be a loop within a loop that creates a negative trigger between wanting something good but then doing something terrible. Self-sabotage is a real thing that many folks struggle with, and here we find a crucial element of teasing apart the loop so we can do some maintenance. Here, we can’t control everything that comes into our view, and we can’t control how that makes us feel, but we can always control what we do.

Once the doing is done, we must classify the experience as did like or did not like. Maybe there were parts of it we did not like, but it comes down to the reward we got. Our brains want to do more of the things we tell them we like, and our brain thinks we like the things we focus the most on. So the things we notice regularly, the wants those noticings well up inside us, the actions we do about those wantings, and how well we like the actions we do.

Stay Safe Out There,
~Zach