Today is a victory over yourself of yesterday, tomorrow is victory over a lesser foe
- Miyamoto Mushashi

There’s a reason I named my website Attentive Man. The name is very personal and stems from the fact that I was extremely inconsistent and often a downright failure when it came to being attentive. This lack of attentiveness was often in all areas, from my interpersonal relationships, to my relationship with my wife and even periods of inconsistency in the areas of engagement with my clients.

The idea of engagement was key. For all the times I was engaged with my family and professional life I would go through periods where I was completely disengaged. It was based on often not having my priorities straight, but it was also based on the fact I had really bad habits when it came to organization and focus. Things that come so naturally to people like my wife (thoughtfulness, organization) just don’t come natural to me. As a result, my wife and I weren’t flying in formation as a couple or as a family. The sad part was this pattern had gone on for years. I would have periods of improvement and then revert back to inconsistency. We men have to be engaged partners. We have to be engaged fathers. We have to be engaged employees and business partners. You can’t be partially engaged. So what was the answer?

The answer for me was to aggressively research and understand why I had these patterns and how to take an active and data driven approach to correct these behaviors. What I learned was fascinating and with the help of two great minds in the areas of habit forming I’ve been able to take a proactive and (hopefully) permanent approach to fundamentally alter how I form and maintain habits.

James Clear: I was incredibly lucky to come across James Clear at exactly the right time. Although I devour a wide variety of podcasts each week around my business travel and exercise routine, I hadn’t been introduced to James. The release of his book Atomic Habits perfectly coincided with a period that I really needed to finally and fully do the research to rebuild my habit stack. James was doing the round of popular podcasts to introduce his book and I badly needed to find a more scientific approach to tackle this area of my life. His website jamesclear.com is full of tremendous insight on how to create better habits, make better decisions and live better lives. It would be impossible to sum up the great insight on both James’s website and in his book, so I won’t even attempt to do that here. The biggest takeaway for me is that habits aren’t permanent and if you proactively come up with a system to alter poor habits, you can.

Daily Test Questions and Marshall Goldsmith: A major system that I’ve implemented in my life is daily test questions. I picked up the concept of daily test questions from well known management guru Marshall Goldsmith in his book Triggers- Creating Behavior that Lasts— Becoming the Person You Want to Be. The book is jam packed with insight and I strongly recommend it to anyone who is looking for ways to not only form better habits but to better understand how to identify poor habits and behaviors that are impacting their lives.

Daily Test Questions are a ritual designed to score yourself in a variety of different areas, both person and professional, that represent progress toward your goals and reflect key areas of your life. I created an excel spreadsheet with these questions (I have 24) that essentially documents my day. There are seven boxes where I score myself on a 1 to 10 scale, one for every day of the week. At the end of the week I’ll tabulate the spreadsheet and then compare to previous weeks. That is my report card for the week. During the business week I’ll tie in my daily goals with certain professional and personal action items I need to complete that day by writing down ten key goals for each day on the other side of the document.

The questions all start with “Did I do my best to”. Here are some examples:

Did I do my best to set clear goals?
Did I do my best to find meaning?
Did I do my best to be happy?
Did I do my best to be fully engaged?
Did I do my best to learn something new?
Did I do my best to be grateful for what I have?
Did I do my best to avoid trying to prove I’m right when it’s not worth it?
Did I do my best to not waste energy on things I cannot change?
Did I do my best to exercise; meditate?
Did I do my best to have a healthy diet?

The key to the exercise is to score yourself honestly and recognize that real change happens each day and incrementally. It’s why I particularly like the quote by Miyamoto Mushashi that I started this article with: Today is a victory over yourself of yesterday. Tomorrow is a victory over a lesser foe. Real change doesn’t happen overnight, but it does happen with small incremental change daily. The activity of documenting it accomplishes a few real things 1)it makes you implement the organization in your life to actually review and score daily. There are busy days where I simply have trouble finding the time to do this, but its a constant reminder to me that I’m not going to continue to improve the areas I’m targeting on the worksheet if I can’t even do the worksheet daily. 2)Secondly, the worksheet is a reminder that you are never always getting better, there is always going to be ebbs and flows. The key is that you are mindful of these areas and are working to impact them daily.

Most importantly I like the fact that the questions are structured with “Did I do my best”. This is a reminder that all we can control is our behavior, our activity and our effort. Some things are simply beyond our control. In the past I had tendency to point the blame to others when things didn’t go my way. Over time I’ve come to the realization that things aren’t always going to go my way and I just need to accept that fact. What I can control though is my effort.

I strongly encourage anyone looking to form better habits to become more attentive and engaged in their personal and professional lives to check out both James Clear and Marshall Goldsmith. Their impact on my life in a very short period of time has been incredible.