Our son took off with my wife for a birthday celebration of his friend from school.

It is a beautiful sunny day. 

I am sitting at home on the couch with the curtains pulled closed, trying to scrape together the most important from a sudden avalanche of thoughts. I start to hammer away at the keyboard. This article has been ripening inside me for half a year. After a series of half-ideas, long self-reflection and a number of key ‘aha’ moments, I finally got it.

This deliberate work, with the ultimate goal of creating something meaningful, I enjoy greatly. Most materials on my company website are created this way.   

Recently, I noticed that roughly the same amount of time – six months – is how long it takes me to start some useful habit. The same applies to ‘burying’ bad habits. In contrast with the creative process, I don’t need to ‘chew over’ such activities. I attack them rapidly and systematically. The key role here is to consider how the head and body establish a routine, as well as how re-hab works.

For illustration, I present some habits that I am proud of.

• For the last quarter of a century, I’ve been an early bird, dedicating the wee hours of the morning to mastering a foreign language. Like clockwork, I spend about 90 minutes every day, immersing myself in learning new words and phrases, jotting them down in notebooks incessantly. I make it a habit to go over these notebooks from cover to cover regularly and meticulously. Each morning, I tackle around 1500 expressions. I’ve got a pretty good handle on the vocabulary in my six notebooks (English and Swedish). Just recently, I did the math and realized that since 1998, I’ve penned down over 13,000 English and 5,000 Swedish words and phrases. Now, I can’t help but wonder how many more notebooks I’ll need to stock up on in my twilight years.
• For the past 20 years, I have been regularly exercising and running. I train at home for 60 minutes, five times a week. Push-ups, squats, sit-ups and a few exercises with the 13-kilo dumbbells which my dad used to lift when he was young. Once a week, I run 12 kilometers. When I work out I sometimes listen to my favorite radio station or podcast in a foreign language. A lot of the information that I absorb through headphones while training is surprisingly well-remembered, when necessary. Sometimes I just exercise and enjoy the moment of “being in the here and now”.  
• Four years ago, after a long pause, I again began to pick at the guitar (and the nerves of my wife Petra). I practise 30 minutes every day. I begin with 10 minutes of exercises in several scales alongside the picturesque tapping of ‘Mr. Metronome’. The regular rhythm of the tap-tap machine irritated me from the get-go. But it calms me now. At the moment, I can manage the fingerboard at ‘prestissimo’, i.e. 250 strokes per minute. Three years ago, I started at ‘andante’, 90 strokes. The guitar that I received from Petra together with the inspirational book Zen Guitar for my 38th birthday has allowed me to assess and develop my strengths (diligence, endurance, discipline) and limits (tone of voice, improvisation, composition). Last year, I even dared to write down a few of my own songs, which I included in my English lessons. 
• For the last three years, I have had an English lesson with a colleague from my LOS team every week. My communication skills, vocabulary and written speech are improving really fast. Regular investment in personal and professional development is the best way to avoid stagnation. At present, I am working closely with Marianne Perez de Fransius, Pete Bright and Rory Mulvihill. Marianne is a talented entrepreneur, who, among other things, founded and runs the very successful and beneficial Bébé Voyage project. The best English teacher that I have ever met is Pete. It was he who turned me into a patient and disciplined student 20 years ago. I signed up for one of his postgraduate English courses once held at one unnamed language school in Prague. His way of teaching and attitude toward languages later inspired my decision to become a language teacher. After long years apart, Pete and I got back together in 2017. Previously student and teacher, we are now one experienced language teacher and one even more experienced. And then there is Rory. His work and life experience are invaluable for our students including myself. It was Rory who helped me create Idiomania in 2017. This podcast is now popular with our students and consultants. 

I would also like to mention some of the bad habits that I am trying to break right now.

• I am fighting against sugar. These days, I am trying to avoid bread. It has been half a year since I decided to keep its consumption to a minimum. For a few days, I don’t miss chocolate, but then I watch some exciting episode of my favorite TV series and my unsweetened discipline is out the window. Recently, instead of chocolate, carrots have helped. A lot of carrots. Interestingly, I did not have a problem with reducing alcohol consumption. After moving to Sweden in the summer of 2010, I simply stopped drinking. I have a beer or a glass of spirits once a month or so.
• I am a typical procrastinator. For three years, I have had an expired Swedish ID card. Altogether, I have used it roughly two times. Once, in the booze shop, Systembolaget, where the salesman wanted to verify that I was over 20. The local administration building where I could pick up the new ID card in just a few days is three minutes from our home. Can someone please tell me why I have not gone there yet? The reminders from my wife Petra are uncountable. 🙂
• While we are on the subject of Petra, I would like to follow her advice and become a more empathetic observer and listener. It is necessary to open my eyes wider and sharpen my hearing. At work, these things go quite well, but I could do a lot better within my family circle and among my friends. I have improved a bit lately, but I am not quite there yet. I hope to see better results soon.

And what about you? Are you trying to establish or cut out some habits?

My favorite book, ‘Better Than Before’ (2015) by Gretchen Rubin, may also be of help to you. I will introduce a few important tips from this book in the following lesson. 

Martin Norling, LOS Founder & CEO