In psychology, cognitive dissonance is where you have two conflicting beliefs or ideas about something.

E.g. someone continuing smoking, despite knowing the negative health effects.

Right now, I’m experiencing blognitive dissonance – two conflicting thoughts about my blog. I’m unsure which style I’d like to blog in:

1. Documentation of my life. Sharing my own lifestyle, goals and experiences day to day, complete with images from my own life. I love reading blogs about what other people are up to, and I love watching daily vlogs on YouTube.

2. Sharing my philosophical ideas, personal development tips and advice. No need to create my own images. I can do this in bed in my pajamas at 1am and still pump out some words onto a page that still have value.

Option 1 feels egocentric and takes a lot of work, and option 2 feels impersonal and lazy.

What would you rather see from me?

Here’s how today’s post would go, considering both options:

Documentation Option

Yesterday we flew into Tenerife to get some much needed sun (Brighton is freezing at the moment!). I’m on day 15 of my 50 push ups in 30 days challenge, which means I have to do 20 push ups today. To be honest, I’m a bit nervous about it, because 25 is my record, and it took me a while to build up to that last time, and since I’ve been on this super-charged 50 push ups schedule I haven’t had as much time to build up my strength. I never have any photos of my push ups because I’m always alone when I do them! Tomorrow I’ll get my sister to film and photograph me doing them I think, so you can see where I’m up to.

I've also been thinking about doing a 2020 Impossible Goal Setting Workshop online, so anyone can attend from all over the world. Let me know if you’d prefer to watch a Facebook Live or join a group together on Zoom, I’ll be doing it in few weeks, before the New Year. (I’m SUPER excited for the New Year – NYE always has a special magic to it for me. The start of a new era, a fresh start, a new opportunity!).

Theory Option

Habit Tracker

External accountability is one of the most important things you can possibly do to make a goal happen. For more than a year I’ve been using the HabitShare app, which means that I share my goals with my accountability partners and they can see when I’ve checked in. It looks like this:

So if you read my post from the other day, you’ll know one of my philosophies is: if it matters, do it daily. These are the 5 things I’m doing every single day.

1. Meditation. I meditate every single day because I set myself the challenge to do it for 365 days in a row. Tracking it makes it 100x easier to remember to do.

2. Vitamins. I take vitamins and some medications I need to thrive, and they are so important to me, I never want to skip them. I used to go days without taking them because I would forget. Now, because every night before I sleep, I check my Habit Tracker, I never ever forget.

3. Daily blog for two years – another challenge. I’d been wanting to blog for about 5 years, and I’d only been occasionally publishing. Once I set the challenge I knew I would need a tracker to keep me accountable. You can look back through my posts and see that I have indeed posted on my blog every single day for the past 146 days – and will do for at least 730 days (who knows, maybe after two years of blogging I will set another blogging challenge).

4. Funnel Diet. Despite the name, it has nothing to do with food! I called it a diet because I want to work on it with the intensity and force someone would if they were on a diet. A diet requires sacrifice and a lot of thought power dedicated to it. I’m committing to a short term sprint of working on my sales funnel until it’s done, rather than a long term lifestyle choice, like my vitamins or my blog. To me, being on a funnel diet means working on my sales funnel every single day, and tracking it. I know this is the one thing (implementing a great sales funnel) will make a difference to my audience reach. Eventually this ‘diet’ will finish and I will replace this daily habit with the next thing that is my #1 priority. Tracking it is crucial to staying on track, because even if it’s two in the morning, I know I better do something towards it.

5. Push Ups 50! This is another sprint goal. I have an overall goal of 100 push ups, but this month I have decided to hit 50, and I’m following a plan. Today I need to do 20 in a row, and to be honest I’m a bit nervous because 15 was tough, but I’m ready for this! I can do it. Keep track of it alongside my other goals makes me feel so dedicated to it, especially because I HATE seeing a red circle on my tracker. It feels like I’ve ruined everything.

Tracking my habits has changed my life and I’m so grateful to have the ability to do this (but you don’t need a fancy app – ever since I was a kid I’ve been making habit trackers with gold stars and stickers!).

Which one did you like better?
As I wrote this, I felt that the content is more thought out for the theory option, but it’s more fun with the photos in the Documentation option. In an ideal world, I would like to mix the two and have strong content AND strong photos, but I’m not sure how that would work, because my pictures don’t match my habit tracker. Hmm.

Let me know what you think in the comments!