Self Helping Yourself

Self Improvement Made Easy

Archives for November 2019

Name Your Troubles

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I tend to struggle around this time of year. I suspect it’s a bit of Seasonal Affective Disorder, brought on by the time change and season making it get dark early. It’s been especially bad recently, because my wife has had to travel a lot for work, so I’ve been lonely, and my job has been exceptionally stressful, leaving me mentally exhausted. 

While normally my depression is kept under control by medication, lately the medication hasn’t been enough. You may have noticed that the output on my blog has fallen. And maybe I’m being a bit self-critical because of the depression, but I feel like the quality has fallen somewhat as well. (That’s also borne out by semi-objective measures of quality, such as conversations sparked, reshares, Facebook Likes, etc.)

I believe it’s important to destigmatize mental health problems. I wouldn’t be embarrassed to admit that I had the flu, and I shouldn’t be embarrassed to admit that my depression has been hitting me hard lately.… Read more

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People – Habit 6: Synergize

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Continuing our series on the Seven Habits.

Synergy has become one of those corporate wankspeak buzzwords that makes many people’s skin crawl. The sort of thing that you’d expect to come from annoying management consultants that charge big corporations staggering amounts of money to put together presentations full of blathering nonsense that just waste everyone’s time, and then are immediately forgotten because they contain zero meaningful content.

As demonstrated by management guru Weird Al Yankovic.

But remember that in 1989 when Seven Habits was released, Synergy wasn’t such a cliche. It only became a cliche because so many people recognized the value of Covey’s ideas. (And then decided to throw the terminology around without any pragmatic actionable advice behind it.)… Read more

Taking Feedback

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Recently a friend of mine commented on Facebook that he thought my blog had too many pictures and wacky captions, and that it was becoming a distraction from the main articles. I asked other friends what they about this, and the general consensus seemed to be that most agreed with him. So I decided to cut back on the number of photos per post. 

This was actually a relief to me, since I had been spending more time searching through stock photos and coming up with captions than actually writing the posts. I was glad to be able to reduce that time and focus on the core mission of the blog.

Shortly after, I saw this friend in person, and he was apologetic. This surprised me, until I realized that from his perspective, he had insulted his friend’s passion project. But from my perspective, he had done me a big favor by helping me improve something that was important to me.… Read more

Other People’s Perspectives

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I recently wrote up a blog post. When I reviewed it, I wasn’t very happy with what I had written. So I went through to rewrite it, trying to change the tone, cutting or altering sections that didn’t seem to work, and tweaking it over and over again. But still, something didn’t seem right.

Eventually I decided that I could keep working on it forever, but instead I needed to just finish it and accept that it wasn’t my best work. Which is fine. Not everything can be my best work – That’s why it’s called my best work. And by definition 50% of what I write will be below my average quality. So I did the final layout, added photos, and scheduled the post to go live the next morning.

Just before I went to bed that night, I realized what it was that was bothering me. The post was about how a certain belief that some people have about nutrition and weight loss is wrong.… Read more