Part of the Build Your Engine of Improvement Series

Okay folks, so I’ve bandied around the expression “Engine of Improvement” now for some time without really explaining what it is, or how it helps us live our lives. I’ve covered why you need a system already in my aptly titled “Why You Need a System”, today I want to flesh out the more important “how” and cover what it looks like and how we can start building.

Rev Your Engines!

The whole Engineer Your Life concept is not truly about setting goals — it is about how we create a sustainable apparatus the help us achieve them! The engine of improvement is that apparatus, it is a metaphorical vehicle that gets us from A to B. …

Engineer Your Life

Theme

With the U.K. and most of Europe heading into second lockdowns I wanted to focus in on a part of what I talked about last week in “The Power of Perception” (which I recommend in addition to this piece for the coming period by the way), which is what exactly is within our circles of control and what’s outside of it. I believe this to be a complex issue because perception is a large part of it; how we perceive what is inside our sphere of control, and what isn’t, is such a huge factor. Yet, the more practised we can become in being objective (a truth outside of ourselves) in classifying ‘things’ will in turn improve our mindset, and as our perception is improved we’ll be better able to do this classification and the iterative cycle produces improvement upon improvement. And that, friends, is really what we’re searching for here right? …

Engineer Your Life

Theme

This week, I want to explore how we perceive changes and how that perception can affect our outcome.

“The happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts.” — Marcus Aurelius

This topic has deep rooted origins in the philosophy of the Stoics but it also has some more modern research to give it some weight.

Blueprint

This week’s part of the blueprint I’ve chosen to express as a formula.

Where:

pi is perception

Ti is things inside of our control

To is things outside of our control

P(Outcome) is the probability of an outcome

What this formula is expressing is that our perception multiplies the objective things inside/outside our control, or it modifies it. For example, if we have poor perception and our p is less than one, even when there are more things inside of control than outside (i.e. a larger number inside the brackets), our perception reduces that number and therefore actually worsens the situation. An example here might be whether or not we achieve the outcome of going to the gym. Unless the gym blew up, there are more things within our control than outside of it. Poor perception would be creating excuses, “I heard the traffic is bad,” “I’m too hungry now for the gym” etc etc. …

The Importance of Growth

Imagine if you will…

Before I get into some of the main Engineer Your Life concepts, let’s get our Twilight Zone on for this week’s blog post and use our imaginations.

If you never changed

I want you to sit back and visualise what your life would look like if, from this moment forward you never changed or developed yourself. That means no new skills, no chance encounters with ‘the right person’ or the ‘right job’, you might get promoted for ‘time served’ but think about what the reality is based on your current job and others who’ve ‘climbed the corporate ladder’. Take the average of the last month or two and chart the trajectory forward. …

Reflections on how the principles of Engineer Your Life helped me to launch a business in 2020

Okay, so this week was a big week for me. I take no shame in being immensely proud to have launched Steel Viking Fitness to the first members and have it sell out! Combining that milestone and launching Engineer Your Life caused me to reflect on what chief principles of Engineer Your Life so far were instrumental in running a sold-out Steel Viking session. That way I’m hoping you can see how I’ve put them into practice, but also gain an insight into their practical real-world application. I’ve limited the principles to the top three.

1. I Set the Goal in the First Place!!

When I talk about building your engine of improvement, I like to envision it as some kind of projectile weapon. You need the method of propulsion, such as allocating the hours necessary each week to reach the target, you need good aiming and guidance systems to hit your target accurately, but most of all, you just need to point the bloody thing in the right direction. Even if you’re limited to throwing rocks, you stand a better chance of hitting a target if the target exists in the first place. …

An Introduction

A few of the eagle eyed among will see that I’ve been experimenting with this idea of Engineer Your Life in some of my blog posts. It seems it has legs, so I’m launching it into a whole new beast of its own. So, what’s the big idea? Let me explain.

What are the aims of Engineer Your Life?

To set out a blueprint of what you can DO starting today

It kindda does what it says on the tin. There’s a lot of content out there on goal setting and personal development and that’s all fine and dandy. Often however, we set about doing them for a couple of days then life gets in the way and slowly but surely those aims are pushed to the back of our minds and eventually forgotten. Engineer Your Life instead sets out a blueprint, a blueprint which you take part in drawing up to help give you tangible actions to about achieving your goals. …

Engineer Your Life

You may have read my recent article, “Why You Need a System”, if not, give it a read after this and, spoiler alert, I cover why it’s vital you have a system in place to act as an engine of improvement, driving you towards your goals. For those who’ve read it, I’ve hopefully convinced you about the ‘why’, but the ‘how’ is a little trickier. Well, don’t worry, I’m here to add tools to your toolkit and make you an unstoppable locomotive towards a better life you’ve curated for yourself.

The first tool being, you guessed it, incremental change.

Lower Your Expectations

There are two big mistakes I see when people create goals, one is they have good long-term goals but no daily or even weekly action they can take to drive them towards that goal. The second is expecting too much of themselves. Don’t get me wrong its good to set lofty goals, I’m all for it, but if the translation of those goals to daily actions is you need to spend 4 hours making sales calls, and you currently spend 0, its going to be tough to make that happen. Too many goals can have the same effect of make things too complex too fast and requiring too much of you. …

A few of you will have seen rumblings of my latest undertaking: Steel Viking Fitness, and be wondering what in the name of Odin’s beard is it all about? Well, the project is in its infancy right now. It’s mostly an idea, but to make it more real I shall speak its name out loud!

Below is the basic premise, so you might better understand and hopefully tell all your friends about this cool new start up, *a-wink*.

WORKOUT like a Viking

Vikings didn’t faff about with cross-trainers or “hot yoga”, whatever that is. No, they got outside and lifted logs, swung axes and rowed their longboats to Albion’s shores. Damn me to Helheim if Vikings weren’t fighting fit, ready to take on the world. It’s part of what made them so successful, it also seems a damn sight more fun to swing an axe instead of a kettlebell. …