"It's that time of year when the world falls in love..."
The Christmas Waltz by Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn
I'd like to think that New Year's thinking includes bringing back the love to your blog. You might not think that, but let's go with that belief as we continue with this year's Blog Exercises.
This is the year of the journal. Many thought it was last year, but it is this year as sales of the blank, dotted, lined, and designed journals continue to rise in the book industry due to the Bullet Journal and other related journaling and diary-writing techniques and tips flood the web. More people than ever are blogging, sharing their thoughts and opinions through social media platforms with the world, and documenting and tracking their life on paper, hopefully leaving a legacy of memoirs behind.
As the United States and many other countries around the world age, preservation of experiences, opinions, perspectives, and thoughts on their daily existence become precious. As the old saying goes, "When a person dies, it's lie losing a library." Let this year be the year you preserve your own library's worth of knowledge.
Yes, it is time to reboot, restart, and get to some kick ass blogging. Make it now. Make it good. And start sharing.
As a reminder to all, blogging does not require a blogging. Blogging is the process of publishing and sharing your thoughts, experience, knowledge, expertise, and discoveries with the world online. You could be using a blog, Facebook, Twitter, or whatever publishing platform you desire.
Today's blog exercise involves doing that reboot and restart by setting your blogging goals.
Now, there is a caveat to this exercise. Neuroscience has discovered that if you want to succeed, don't tell anyone about your goals. I know this goes against the grain of blogging's purpose, but according to a study by Gollwitzer, Sheeran, Michalski, and Siefert published in May 2009 issue of Psychological Science, as reported in Psychology Today, if you want to achieve your goals, don't share them.
The researchers identified two types of goal choices: identity and career. A career goal is one that advances a person's working life and decisions. An identity goal influences a person's concept of who they are, their identity, to be a good parent, to eat better, volunteer and contribute more to society, be a better spouse or partner, be a better child and caregiver to older parents, exercise more, learn new skills, tasks associated with changing or reinforcing behavior, attitude, and self-identity.
They suggest that when people announce an intention to commit to an identity goal in public, that announcement may actually backfire. Imagine, for example, that Mary wants to become a Psychologist. She tells Herb that she wants to pursue this career and that she is going to study hard in her classes. However, just by telling Herb her intention, she knows that Herb is already starting to think of her as a Psychologist. So, she has achieved part of her identity goal just by telling Herb about it. Oddly enough, that can actually decrease the likelihood that Mary will study hard.
Gollwitzer and his colleagues provided evidence for this point. In one clever study, they had students interested in becoming Psychologists list two activities that they would perform in the next week to help them achieve that goal. Half of the people handed what they wrote to the experimenter who read it over and acknowledged reading what they had written. The other half were told that the exercise of writing down their intentions was given to them in error, and that nobody would be looking at it. The following week, all of the participants were contacted again and were asked to remember the goals they had written down the previous week and then to write down how much time they had spent on those activities. The people whose goals were read by the experimenter actually spent less time pursuing those activities than the people whose goals were not read. A number of follow-up studies were presented as well that ruled out other explanations for this finding.
The article suggested that it is best to "let actions express your intentions louder than your words," which is our starting point.
In 2017, Angela Duckworth and Katy Milkman began a cross-industry research project called "Behavior Change for Good." Explained in a Freakonomics podcast episode, which intends to follow their progress, people "repeatedly make decisions that undermine their own long-term well-being," so how can science study the problem of self-destructive behavior to help behavior change for good, thus permanently influencing us to make positive and "good" decisions that impact our lives and the social experience.
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Your blog exercise is to learn more about the stats on your blog and off your blog and integrate them into your decision-making process for your blogging.
