Top 5 Self Improvement Hacks

In this blog, I want to give you five Self Improvement hacks that will help you improve your life and make you into a better version of yourself. And these are hacks that have changed my life which I use every day.

Hack 1 – Reflex Retraining

We’ll start with the first one which is reflex retraining. Reflex is a default way of thinking. Let’s say you get angry quickly or you give up very quickly or you lose hope very quickly. That’s a reflex that needs to be retrained.

Why do we have a reflex? When we get older, we tend to behave the way we do, because of the environment we are brought up in. This includes past experiences and relationships that influence us in certain ways. So to break out of this you need to retrain your reflexes. So, how do you do it?

Well, you do it through affirmations. Affirmations change the way you think and your default reflex thinking. Now, these affirmations are sentences that you repeat to yourself over and over again or you write them down on a piece of paper over and over again. You’re reprogramming your mind and that takes a lot of work. It’s not something that’s going to happen overnight. It takes time. So if you do it for a week or two and it’s not working, don’t give up. You have to stick to it and keep believing that it will make a difference. And trust me it does make a difference.

It’s like making a new path in a jungle. When you walk in an area in a jungle that you’ve never been to before, chances are there’s no hiking trail there. So you know there’s going to be weeds everywhere, there’s going to be branches and even a tree trunk that’s dropped down on the path. And to make a path for the first time it’s going to be difficult, but you do it over and over again. Eventually, if you travel down that path a thousand times, it’s going to become a trail.

And that’s a default way of thinking in your brain.

Many celebrities, successful entrepreneurs, and leaders of the world have touted this as well. And I’m going to give you my perspective. I wasn’t very confident when I first started in software development. I didn’t have a computer science degree. So I was competing with other candidates for job interviews that had computer science degrees.

So I had to not only put in the hard work I did but also had to change the way I think and make myself believe that I can excel at this and pass this interview and beat my competition to get the job. I had to apply the same strategy to my business. I had to change the way I think.

So it takes time and effort. You just have to believe in it and trust me this works. This is a great strategy.

Hack 2 – Positive Consumption

So that’s the first one. The second hack is positive consumption. So what is this?

Well, we’re consuming information from our environment all the time. We learn through osmosis. Just by being. So we pick up certain good habits, certain bad habits, and certain ways of thinking. Now, let’s understand this through an analogy. Consider that our mind is a garden. And a garden contains flowers and weeds. Think of the flowers as positive information and weeds as negative or unwanted information.

So, weeds become detrimental to your garden when we don’t water our flowers. What I mean is that if we don’t consume positive information in our minds regularly, certain negative information starts to rise, just like a weed grows in a garden without any kind of effort.

Just as planting flowers takes effort, so does consuming positive information. It takes hard work. So, start consuming positive information regularly. Build a positive mindset through affirmations.

Hack 3 – Planned and Organized execution

Number three is planned and organized execution. What does this mean?

Don’t wake up every morning without knowing what you’re going to do. You have to already have a plan the night before. So, the idea is before you sleep at night, you write down what you’re going to get done tomorrow. And also, you organize those tasks in the order of priority.

So the most important tasks should be your first go-to tasks in the morning. When you organize it that way, you have a higher chance of completing those more important tasks. Because you’ll promise yourself that “I’ll do this first thing in the morning”. And if it’s not the first thing in the morning, at least you marked it as the high priority task, now that’s going to be triggered in your memory over and over again, that next morning. So eventually, you’ll get to it.

So, this planned and organized execution is critical. The key idea here is task prioritization. The most important tasks should be the first thing you should do when you wake up in the morning.

Hack 4 – Impediment Reduction

Now the fourth hack is impediment reduction. What’s an impediment? It’s something that comes in the way of you achieving something.

Oftentimes it’s hard enough to do something, to start something new. For example to get to the gym or to start a task that you’ve been dreading. But when you sit down and you’re about to do it you shouldn’t be experiencing further impediments. Because your brain will make these impediments even if they are not there.

For example, let’s say you want to learn to program and you have a perfectly working laptop you might think your desktop is so dirty, the hard drive is almost full and you end up ordering a laptop on amazon. Whereas this desktop would have been perfectly fine but now it takes three to four days for you to get started. That’s an impediment you created for yourself instead of getting to the task immediately.

Or for example, you need to work but your workspace is pretty messy. So you spend a day cleaning up the environment and tomorrow you forget the promise to get started on this task. Now months go by, years go by and you never get to it.

There are going to be impediments that your brain creates like “I need the perfect gear”, “I don’t have the required music downloaded on my phone”, “My headphones are not ready”, and “I don’t have the right shoes”. There are so many excuses that your mind can make up to get in the way of you getting work done.

So the key is impediment reduction. Make it easier for yourself to get something done. A way to approach this is, that to plan how you’re going to get started on a given task. And you have to set your environment up beforehand to win. If you’re going to get started on something tomorrow prepare for it today. This is related to planned and organized execution.

For example, you can reduce an impediment such that you make sure your workspace is clear, make sure your laptop is working, it has enough space, and that you have all the required software to do the task. When you want to go to the gym is to make sure that you have your gym clothes ready and your running shoes are ready. Get your music on your phone the night before and be prepared for this.

If I didn’t have my battery charged, I wouldn’t be able to record a video. So I prepare my day the night before because I planned on making a video. So I make sure that my batteries are ready, my mic is hooked up, and my environment is all set up. I have a light, and a whiteboard set up, and make sure my background is not messy. This is how I reduce impediments in my life.

So, set yourself up to win, that’s a huge thing for impediment reduction. It is all about setting yourself up to win so that when you’re ready all you have to do is just press the button and you’re ready to rock and roll.

Hack 5 – Parallel Progression

The fifth one is the parallel progression, of something different.

Let’s say that you have your nine-to-five job, you do that and then you come home and watch Netflix and you have nothing else progressing in life. And one day you just run into a major problem at work and that progress stops. Then you’re going to get depressed.

Burnout happens when all you’re doing is that one job and when you run into a problem and you’re progress just stops. That’s how burnout happens. So you have to continue to progress in multiple facets of your life. Pick a couple of things that you like to do and try to improve in all of those areas. It can be any extracurricular activity like taking karate or judo classes or music classes, singing classes, speech classes, or taking acting classes as I did.

Because when you run into a problem at work while something else is progressing, you will still have a positive attitude the next day with a fresh mind and you can execute the work.

So these were the five hacks. 

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