Chris, you and Kristy sounded like you had great chemistry in that show. Do you find that you get that chemistry naturally, or is it something that can be trained?

I guess I am thinking poker is such a solitary endeavor, I find it hard to quickly connect with others i meet. Especially in a way that encourages more time in the future, as opposed to random small talk.

Am I way off here? Do you kind of get where I am going with this?

TK

Hey twinskat,
I think I get it, in theory I would imagine it to be a skill. Everyone has their own natural tendencies to be good at x,y or z. But most things, I believe can be learned to a pretty good degree, the question is just, how much work is needed and how would you rate that compared to the time you are not doing something else.
To me, relationships are a wonderful thing, one of those things that are overall more important than others. But one does not have to be a relationship master to be decent at it and enjoy it.

In a future video I will be talking about authenticity. Being yourself and maybe rounding up a few of the rougher edges (that is, if you have any) will smooth things out.

In business you often hear, if you like it, there are probably a million other people that like it also, just a little side note :)

PS: Kristy is a wonderful person to talk to !

Man, this was a great post. Definitely opened my eyes up to embracing the "streak" method. You and I share a similar trait with dealing with depression. When you become depressed, it's quite easy to either put on weight or even lose weight, both in unhealthy manners. I tend to be the type to put on weight choosing food for comfort even though it's the wrong thing to do. My depression has been apart of my life all throughout my 20s, 28 now, but like you I have gone through streaks not even realizing. Going to the gym miserable but at least dedicating some time there to keep at it even if it's a rough session. To think of the process as a streak makes so much sense to me because even if the routine you choose to have isn't perfect as you'd like it to go each day, your still taking part adding to the streak you've kept going which will make you feel better with a sense of accomplishment. Last year was a real rough year for me due to depression and trials and errors with medication but as far as now goes, I'm on something that's helping me out of my slump and getting me back to normal. I feel a little bit better each day and more of my energetic self. I started going back to the gym again and starting to form an overall day routine. I will definitely apply streaks within my lifestyle and be aware of it. Thanks for sharing and all the best.

Hey man, thank you for sharing as well, sorry to hear about your 2017. Let's slowly build on what you have now.
Imo, repetition and doing things will help more than we sometimes realize.
For example, you could start a journal or read something (nearly the same thing) every day that will help your thoughts, to me, the Tao Te Ching was one of the big keys in getting out of my depression wthout the help of meditation. It took a few years and I was not aware of it while in the process. But I went from first thing in the day sit at the computer to, first thing in the day sit on my balcony and read in the Tao Te Ching, every day for years and slowly it became a part of who I am, while in some way it always was a part of me, just did not know about it earlier.
Maybe you have your own philosophy or thing that you can use in the same way and just build a "streak" around that, so that in time you too will see some more very beneficial changes in your life that are lasting.

I think routines, habits, mindset are key, but what might not be as obvious is, that mindset is just like routines and habits, a subconscious skill. You can't just change your mindset over night, it is something that adapts very slowly to consistent work and effort.
Certain things you can change over night, but I think the overall mindset is hard and takes time, because we have lived this way all of our lives.

A great book I can recommend is: The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt.
He talks about the two driving forces in our lives.
The Rider and the Elephant.
The Rider is our conscious mind and the Elephant the subconscious.
(read it years ago, I think this is what it was).
And how it takes time to adjust what the elephant does even if the rider wants it now.

Absolutely my pleasure !

Hi Chris, your thread deeply touched me because since a few months I'm confident in having streaks can improve self-being and permit to be more efficient in what we are doing in general.

I tried a lot of times to decree myself to do sports regurly, doing meditation some minutes a day, etc. But I never achieved it, I always do it juste for some days or just one time sometimes, I don't succeed to give me a self-discipline. I think the harder thing is to start.

If you have some advices to give to me to start a program which looks like yours, it will be really appreciated. I'm don't depressed (I don't think so) but I'm busy of not being able to give the best of myself in what I'm invested.

Thanks a lot for this thread

Hi iCHI,
thank you so much for that warm response and you are most welcome.
There are a couple things here.
What do streaks mean?
They mean, that doing is often more advantageous than not doing and being consistent is more helpful than doing and then dropping things.

On that logic, you could go further by saying, that consistency in execution is key to many things.
Now the question would be, why do we struggle with this?
I think often times it is because we think too much about results and what we want to achieve and it might be so far away for now. But what is NOT far away right now?
Right, focus on doing something small, this you can do and not worry about some big results, in fact, screw results (pardon my french).
I will have a video out on this at some point, it is already in the works.

I think it is more important to get things going than to have them perfect right away.
Repeat and rehearse them often, many times during the day in very small doses.
Yes, you are not really accomplishing, say for instance some muscular changes if you do 10 times 1 push up during a day. But you are accomplishing something that might be even more important, which is, you get consistent in learning that starting isn't so bad and you get good at creating small changes that over time, and this is key here, OVER TIME, will create a big change in your life.
Don't worry too much about achieving your goal next week. You have a whole life to live and setting yourself up slowly OVER TIME, to be able to do things consistently and even enjoy them is more valuable than doing a perfect work out once and then 6 months later another one.
In creating streaks and routines, you should absolutely look for consistency first and then build on that.
Many people look for a big thing they can do that seems near perfect or optimal but they fail to realize that consistency over time is actually more imrpotant and if you have to start smaller, even MUCH smaller, then so be it.

Your focus should be on the process, not some arbitrary result.
For me, with losing weight, of course I wanted to lose those 100 lbs or 45 Kg asap, but this was not the way to think, but rather, find the right process for myself and then just live that way, the losing weight part was just the desired byproduct of the right process executed with consistency. I have now eaten very well for over a year and don't feel like I am in any danger of falling back.
My weight loss has been much slower than could have been possible and at times it was not fun to see that I have again lost almost no weight that week. I analyzed whether or not I was doing something wrong and when I did not find anything, I just went on with business as usual and over time I lost weight and got more healthy and fitter than I had been in the past years.

Verse 63 in the Tao Te Ching basically gives you all the instructions needed and if they are not clear right away, no problem, sit with it some more.

Basically. Do the small things, never look at the big things and if problems come up, give yourself to them and solve them.
You want to regularly work out and meditate?
Reframe those two things (and truly reframing it in your mind might also take some time).

Instead of I know I should meditate 20 minutes a day and work out 20 minutes a day, doing 5 exercises with different reps and sets and what not.

REFRAME
For the next 4 weeks, I will meditate every day for 1 minute and my work out will consist of 10 push ups (fill in any exercise or stretching you wish) each day, spread out however I wish during the day.
You can of course adjust this in any way you like, you could even have 1 push up per day or only have yoga or stretching routine that lasts a few minutes.

While you are doing it, look for high quality presence, but don't worry about doing a lot, worry instead about doing and bringing quality to these few minutes.
You can only influence what you are doing anyway, you have no immediate influence over your long term results unless you bring consistency.

A key to understand,
is to realize where the true problem lies.
It likes in how you approach it. Make it smaller, make it easily doable and once you feel like this thing is a part of you, add a small extra. If you have now meditated one minute for 4 weeks, maybe add 30 seconds to it, again, keep the changes small, you can play around with it, you can add 3 minutes and if you feel l ike you are started to dread it, reduce it again.

In my personal meditation, it went something like this.
I started with 2-7 minute silent meditation, it was sooo hard that I was inconsistent. Then I did guided meditation for a few weeks for 5-15 minutes, that was much easier and I was slightly more consistent. Then I went back to silent meditation and again I sort of struggled with 5-7 minutes. Then I found this app, like I described above. And I pushed myself to be more consistent with the small practice that I had and then I noticed that the app also showed me my streak and that became an extra motivation for me.
I somehow after a few weeks of consistent silent meditation got up to 17 minutes, but sitting was sometimes difficult in some form of yoga type pose. So I reduced it again to like 10-12 minutes. Then I found that meditating lying down in bed worked well for me, so I did that and my times went up to 40-50 minutes. I did that for a good while and later on started to mix the two. In the beginning I still judged what a good and a bad meditation session was. But as time went on, I started to see and understand that all sessions weren't good or bad, they just were and that the body and mind need the different types to process life and get more calm.

These days I still mix things, I find sitting crosslegged on my sofa is very enjoyable, but some days I might lie down and do a Wim Hof Breathing meditation. The only thing I don't mix or mess with is my consistency. I usually enjoy meditation to some degree, but there are those days where I don't want to do it and do a last minute before midnight 2-10 minute meditation instead of my normal 20-60 minutes.

Sorry for the very long text, this topic is very dear to my heart and I can't help myself at times :)

Thank you guys for these wonderful responses, they are such a pleasure to read !

What a text, it's been very long but very educational.

I don't know how but you perfectly sumed up my way of thinking and what I lived notably for poker. When I started to work on my game about one and a half year ago, I watched a lot of videos, streams, I red articles, etc. until I started to crush my limits. I thought I didn't have Nothing else to learn, I just have to continue to win and go up limits. And now since 3 months I'm just losing all the time because I lost that consistency in working on my game. And that's absolutely the traduction of what you said in a real context. I was looking for what happened, why I started to lose that much, is that because of luck, did I became bad, but I feel I play good. And truly, that's not the case, my game has drift with the time because I stopped working on it, having the discipline I had on it before because of my previous results.

So now, I know what I have to do, I feel I will more focus on the game instead of losing my time surfing and doing Nothing efficient. Concerning your programs of work out and meditation I think I could take the same to start, it doesn't look hard but as you said, it permit being really focused on it and doing it perfectly. For the meditation, I think I will firstly try with guided meditation because I already did that and it made me feel so calm that I think it really could be beneficial for me.

I thanks you so much for this message, it truly opened my eyes and gave me tons of way of improve my way of living and also for my projects. Thank you so much again.

Hey you are very welcome !