Chris Loper has been writing about self-improvement and helping busy adults with habit formation since 2017. He also writes an education blog for parents and students for Northwest Educational Services. Along with Greg Smith, Chris is the cocreator of Parenting for Academic Success, a series of transformative classes that create empowered parents, confident students, and harmonious families. His most recent endeavor combines his academic and habit-formation expertise to help students thrive in college. Visit SmartCollegeHabits.com to learn more. In 2021, Chris published a humorous memoir titled Wood Floats and Other Brilliant Observations, a book that blends crazy stories with practical life lessons. He lives in Issaquah, WA where he is the owner of South Cove Tutoring.
When it comes to behavioral change and healthy habits, I love commitment. Specifically, I’m a big believer in 100% commitment. When you go all in, your odds of success go way up. However, we sometimes think of commitment as a single, final decision, especially for major decisions like getting married or quitting drugs. In reality, commitment is a series of decisions you make over and over again. It’s an ongoing… Read More »Recommit
Let’s continue our quest to develop better thoughts. Here’s a quick recap of what we’ve covered so far: If you develop more control over your thoughts, it will improve both your emotions and your behaviors because thoughts, emotions, and behaviors are connected to one another in a bi-directional feedback loop. Many of your thoughts are either wrong or unhelpful, so you shouldn’t believe everything you think. Many of your thoughts… Read More »Got ANTs?
About a month ago, I published an article about the power of effort-tracking, which explained how to use an effort-tracking spreadsheet to increase your productivity and exercise more. The thing is, my personal productivity has been excellent, and my exercise is on autopilot, so I hadn’t been using an effort tracker for over a year. But at the time I published that article, I was struggling with burnout. I had… Read More »Recovery-Tracking
Today, I’m offering a quick corollary to my previous post, Don’t Believe Everything You Think. The message here is simple: You are not your thoughts. Our inner experience is largely composed of thoughts. We create and listen to a running narrative of our life. We think about the past. We think about the future. We react. We judge. We wonder. We ponder. We remember. We plan. We predict. It’s easy… Read More »You Are Not Your Thoughts