30 Days of Excellence

G'day!

For the second time in 2 weeks I went in to work this morning only to be told by my boss that there isn't much for me to do, and that I should just go home and enjoy the day. As you can imagine, I didn't complain too much about it!

Unfortunately, the surf is looking flat today (Swell report rating = 1/10... bleh). It's friggin' 32 degrees outside and I don't feel like being in the sun too much, so I decided to take a few minutes of my day to share with you a "method to success" I've discovered recently. It's called 30 Days of Excellence.

30 Days of Excellence is a really good way of adding new positive habits to our lives, or getting rid of bad ones. It's super simple, and it works. Aristotle once said: "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." I'm sure he would have been a fan of this method.

The first step is to figure out what habit you want to add to, or remove from your life. In my case, I wanted to improve my posture (who doesn't!). I wanted to sit straighter, but mostly to stand up straighter (chest out, head high). I really believe that a good posture has a massive impact on the image we convey, so better get it straight! Pun intended :P

Once you've figured out what you want to change about yourself, you have to commit the next 30 days to making a conscious effort everyday at incorporating the desired behavior into your life. It can help to put reminders around, like a post-it next to your computer or something like that. Also, I found it useful to tell my roommates to notify me whenever they saw me with a less than excellent posture.

Over the course of the 30 days, you'll feel that the new behavior is becoming more and more natural, and that it's starting to require less effort. After 30 days, there are very good chances that you'll have assimilated the new behavior. Boom, just like that, you're a slightly better version of yourself than a month before. Pretty damn cool, isn't?

Vince Lombardi (famous NFL coach) said that "the quality of a person's life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor", and I couldn't agree more. We all are the master of our own life, and we're blessed with the power to make it exceptional. It's just a matter of making it happen.

I've finished my first 30 day period and my posture is definitely a lot better than it was. I still find myself slouching occasionally, but I catch myself quickly and correct it.

I've just started my second 30 day cycle; the new habit I'm trying to acquire is to always answer to my emails, FB messages, and text messages, etc, as soon as I read them. Way too many times have I read a message, felt lazy and told myself I'd just reply later, then totally forgot about it.

From my short stint at the Labatt office in Vancouver, I've learned that "email management" is one of the most important skills in business, and it's one I intend to master by the time I return to the corporate life in a year.

So, if you send me a message in the next month and you don't get an answer within the next 24 hour, please be sure to tell me I'm slacking on my 30 Days of Excellence!

All right, that's all I wanted to share today. If you have any similar "tricks" like that, I'd love to hear them. We can never have too many ways of making ourselves a bit better everyday.

Adios!

Phil