Dead America

I’m Alec. I’m obsessed with helping people get clarity.

I used to believe that I did not have the willpower or motivation to make big life changes. Then I learned the truth: there are no big life changes. Whether it's been breaking into a new career, overcoming chronic fatigue, moving to a foreign country for my wife's career, or troubleshooting my kids' tantrums, I've learned that change is something I create and maintain with small, daily actions. If a goal or dream looks big, that's only because I haven't yet seen the small steps that will get me there.

Now I'm obsessed with clarity. I love diving into new projects or even new disciplines. I love breaking down how they work, how I can measure success, and how I can design small, simple, and clear steps towards big changes.

I've also spent a lot of time practicing how to help others learn and grow past their obstacles. With a masters in Instructional Psychology and Technology, crisis counseling experience, and years of coaching, I'm ready to help you turn overwhelming life changes into simple, daily habits.

If you're ready to change, request a free, 30-minute consultation.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/easierhabits

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmfiYhaahAE4HWGmRO3ljJg

Website: https://easierhabits.com

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Transcript

Alec Sorensen

Thu, 11/19 11:53AM • 25:50

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

life, day, habits, japan, experiment, people, big, allergies, find, healthy living, bit, small, minutes, alertness, negative, building, feel, organized, alec, living

SPEAKERS

Alec Sorensen, Ed Watters

Ed Watters 00:01

Early in our life, we start forming habits. Sometimes the habits that we form are not good habits. And later in life, we come to a point where we want to change our habits. Well, changing habits can get very difficult. And sometimes we need help finding that right mix to change us. Our guest today, Alec Sorenson from easier habits.com is here just to do that with us. Let's talk a little bit about changing our habits. with Alec, let's get into this. To overcome, you must educate. Educate not only yourself, but educate anyone seeking to learn. We are all dead America. We can all learn something. To learn. We must challenge what we already understand. The way we do that is through conversation. Sometimes we have conversations with others. However, some of the best conversations happen with ourselves. Reach Out and challenge yourself. Let's dive in and learn something right now. Alec, could you please introduce yourself and let our listeners know a little bit about you and your background?

Alec Sorensen 01:53

Sure, I'm a lifestyle design coach for work from home dads. And what that means is I help people break down big life changes that they want to make into small manageable habits that can build up over time, so they can make those changes with confidence. I've certainly experienced lots of big life changes in my own life I've I graduated in 2008 with the big recession and switch from being an English major to a programmer, I went back to school at one point, after I got married, my wife and I decided to switch roles. And I went from being the primary provider to a stay at home dad in the remote mountains of Japan for a little while. And we've come back since then, and done a few more career experiments. Right now we are both working part time, staying with the kids part time so we can have the balance that we're looking for both in our professional lives and in our family. So that's the kind of thing I help other people do as well as breaking into their passions, finding time to do the things that really rejuvenate you, and taking care of your health.

Ed Watters 02:59

So what got you thinking about helping people change themselves like this?

Alec Sorensen 03:04

Well, um, so a lot of it comes from my experience in Japan, where I really figured out for the first time, that very small daily activities can have a huge impact on your day. Namely, when I went to Japan, I was so allergic that I could barely breathe in our little condo that we had. And I got medicine for that right off the bat. But I knew that if I wanted to live in Japan, I would, I wouldn't want to be on medicine the whole time to like control my mold allergies. So I just started doing a whole bunch of research on what are things you can do to reduce your allergies my whole life, I just accepted the fact that I had allergies and there wasn't much I could do about it except for medicine. And then I realized there's a whole lot of research on all sorts of things you could do. And so I tried a bunch and some didn't really pan out drinking more water, for instance is always generally good for you. But I didn't notice any particular reduction of my allergies or ability to breathe when I was on medicine. So I tried a bunch of things out until basically 10 minutes of Yoga a Day allowed me to clear my allergies out. It helps with my back problems. It helps wake me up for several hours. And we were in this like small blizzarding mountain town in January where it was cold all the time. Japanese apartments are not centrally heated. And so and there wasn't very well insulated windows. So it was cold. But like when I did some yoga got my blood flowing for several hours, I didn't worry about the cold. I didn't really feel it so much. And so that was like when I realized small changes enable really big changes like living in Japan, right if I if I couldn't find a way to breathe in our apartment, it wouldn't be very easy to live there. And so that was what got me going along that path, I was, at the time trying to be an entrepreneur as well as stay at home Dad, I went back to being a full time coder for a while. And I just found it eventually, like unsatisfying. I like a lot of aspects of coding, I was working in the education space. So I believed in the products we were putting out. But I personally wasn't helping people transform their lives as much as I felt I could. And that's when I started to make the shift from coding and at the time, I was doing some training in house with the company to being a full time coach for myself or part time coach for myself, I should say.

Ed Watters 05:37

So let's follow up with that a little bit. How important is healthy living to improve our daily routine?

Alec Sorensen 05:45

Um, so for me, there's a there's kind of a process if you want to make a big change, and and the Healthy Living part is number two in that process, the first thing is just getting clarity on what kind of changes you want to make in your life, what kind of life do you want to have. And I think a lot of people, when they look at that will realize, well, like being tired all the time doesn't jive with my goals, I'm going to need to have more energy, or I'm going to need to be more focused or more organized. And those are the kinds of things you kind of get to in step two, which is building capacity, you try out the things you want to do. Or you try out some of those habits like the the yoga that will enable you to be functional in the way you want to be functional. And you just experiment with some. And I think where a lot of people go wrong in healthy living in particular is that they hear one, they have one idea for how to be healthy, like go to the gym or something like that, or hear one piece of advice on on a blog, they try it out, it doesn't work for them and they quit. And and really the key there, the healthy living that enables you to do what it is you want to do with your life is just experimenting with small habits, 10 minute increments, until you find something that actually has a noticeable effect that's motivating because you can see the results rather than, you know, trying to do healthy living out of discipline, because the habit doesn't work for you so. So yeah, and I think that that's really crucial. And once you start building that capacity of healthy living, that will start opening up hours of your day to be more effective. And that's where you start to make the bigger transformations.

Ed Watters 07:27

So how can we start this process of introducing healthy habits to begin our day in the first place?

Alec Sorensen 07:34

It's really knowing what result you want. So there are times in my life where like in college, for example, where I felt I should be more organized. And but I didn't really define it. And so I would, I even designed my own planner. And I'd stick with it for like a few weeks and then quit because it wasn't really helping me it just felt like busy work to like fill out what I was doing in the planner, and I was doing just fine. You know, getting my assignments in last minute. And I didn't really define what it was I wanted. And there's all sorts of things I could have wanted, like looking back, for example. You know, if I found myself, not hanging out with friends, because I was going to do homework, but then procrastinating doing the homework. So it's really like doing nothing in an afternoon. Like that is a problem I could have solved. And you could have solved that in any number of ways you could have solved it by being more organized and getting down to homework earlier, you could also solve the same problem by just knowing that you're not going to get to your homework before you know 8pm that night and go hang out with friends like it's, it's when you know what change you actually want to make that you start to see those options. And then when you try things out, those habits make sense, right? They either do solve your problem or they don't, right, if you feel like you should go to the gym to be healthy in general, you're going to go to the gym, you're not going to know what results you're looking for. It's not going to feel like anything's getting done. And you're going to quit that. Right. But if you know specifically that what you want is to have more alertness during your like 2pm slump, right? That's a specific problem, you can test things out. And for me like exercise is not what does that well not regular exercises. There's a breathing exercise I could do for like 10 to 15 minutes in the morning. That strangely enough gives me a lot more alertness throughout my day. So I don't feel like I need to take a nap in the middle of the day. And so it's it's it's that thing like know what you want, specifically what results you're looking for and experiment till you find those. And once you find those, it's not the big battle everyone thinks it is because there are days I don't do my breathing exercises. And I feel the difference. So like even when you find the right habit that's making results in your life, it's actually easy to keep because when you don't do it, it's reinforcing you're like wow, this feels awful. Tomorrow I should remember to do those those exercises or I feel tired right now. It's later than I usually do it, but I'm gonna take a break and do those. So I can be a little bit more alert.

Ed Watters 10:06

I see from going through your social media accounts, that you're big on family, how do you organize your life to help keep family first in your life?

Alec Sorensen 10:19

You know, that really depends on your situation, I've talked to people in a number of situations where, you know, fathers who are full time providers, I'm trying to make time for the kids, fathers who have found a little bit of flexibility in a mostly full time job or a full time or mostly full time job by cutting out the commute or other things. And then you know, full time stay at home dads. And that's, it's just something you have to experiment with what works for you. And my advice, again, is make the big life changes by building up to small life changes. So one of the earliest discussions I had with my wife was when our our first child was born. And she was kind of taking care of all the responsibilities. And I thought she wanted to do it as she she kind of seemed to just do it. So I let her and then at one point, she's like, I'm exhausted, could you just do bath time with our son. And I did that for, you know, half an hour we just played, it was really fun. Every, you know, every day, I tried to come up with, you know, some new game to play with our kid, whether it was just like making funny sounds by scritchy sounds by wiping a wet finger on the plastic, or whether it's pouring water in front of him and watch him try and catch it in his hands. You know, it was it was very enjoyable. But that was the beginning of all of our lifestyle design, right. And eventually, you know, bigger and bigger decisions happened when more was needed, right, I moved from a really intense coding job to one that was more family friendly, friendly, smaller commute shorter hours. And then that wasn't quite enough. And so then I went stay at home dad for a while in Japan. And that was too much. That was like too much craziness. And it didn't work out for our families kind of being remote. Our kids didn't have a lot of opportunity to hang out with other kids. So we came back. But like all those big things, like moving to Japan, and being a stay at home dad they came, they started with a small experiment saying like, hey, what if I do this? What if I take the kids here? How can I fit more more time in? And it's just going to be really unique? But start small.

Ed Watters 12:38

Yeah, you know, I, I noticed that a lot of people, they hang on to old things. It's a habit that we have, I say that sometimes we have to move on people, places and things get heavy. And if things like that get heavy, we have to find new ways to begin. So how important is it to let go of negative minded people that hold you down? And, you know, make it hard for you to make your life a good life?

Alec Sorensen 13:16

Yeah. I mean, generally, I flip things around a little bit more towards the positive, ie, it's more important to make sure that you're having the right kind of positive people in your life, that will have a bigger impact on you than making, for for most people, I think there're extreme circumstances, for most people than cutting out the negative, right. And if you are trying to fill your life full of positive influences, it will become more and more obvious that you know, if there is a negative influence either a negative thing that you're doing that's really dragging you down, or a negative relationship in your life that that you don't seem to be able to turn around or that somebody else doesn't seem interested in turning around, you know, then that comes out in sharp relief. And if you've been focusing on bringing positive influences into your life, you don't have to, like cut that relationship out, and then have nothing right. You can just say, Oh, well, I'd rather spend my time with these, you know, these positive relationships or these positive activities. And so I guess I can spend less time on this thing that's bringing me down. So so I think that happens eventually. I think that is critical, right? Like if you want to make more time for good stuff in your day, you're going to have to cut down on the bad stuff. And I find just personally that happens more naturally, by just focusing on you know, bringing more positive relationships into my life. And for me, like bring that more specifically that looks like reconnecting with old friends, people who are creative, doing interesting things that make me think like, Oh, yeah, I studied creative writing, but I haven't written anything since college. And here's one of my friends who's kept up with writing. Maybe I'll keep in touch with them, and they'll bring out that creative spark in my life. And then when that happens, you know, I'll have to figure out what it is that I don't have time for anymore.

Ed Watters 15:11

I like that outlook, you know, bringing positive before the negative is always good. So how often should we step back and observe and measure our progress that we've made in our life change?

Alec Sorensen 15:27

Yeah, that gets on on the reflection piece. And that's, I mean, that is absolutely critical, I think, to any life change. And for me, I think the answer of you'll have to experiment with this again, yourself. But what has worked for me over lots of experiments is trying to reflect a little bit each day, but like very low fidelity, like a couple bullet points of things I might have learned today or might think about doing differently. Then in a week, I might do, you know, a more extensive like journal, thinking about like, what are the key lessons, takeaways I might do so a little bit more planning, my goals are generally on weekly levels, rather than daily levels. Where I'm thinking about, what am I going to do differently this week? And then but, but in terms of like, actually evaluating change, I mean, most significant changes happen over a period of time. And this is actually kind of a frontier I haven't fully developed but you know, doing quarterly half year or year, year reflections, or I don't have an organized version of doing them, I usually do have some kind of long term check in with my wife that kind of happens more organically about like, how are we doing with our lives and what's our next step. But you know, that might be where you actually see the difference. So like day to day, you'll just have a few ideas week to week, you might change some behaviors. But it's going to be usually on the scale of months that you're going to start or longer that you're going to see significant results if you're trying to make a major life change.

Ed Watters 17:10

With the onset of COVID-19, we all get stuck inside a little bit more, I find myself sitting at the computer a little bit more. How do we organize our time to be more productive with our life in this bubble of COVID-19 right now?

Alec Sorensen 17:34

Yeah, there are so many things with that, I think you you highlighted that we spend more time sitting at a screen and inside. And that's something that's good to be aware of. And if you really want to destress and relax. One of the best things we can do these days is get outside and get away from screen. Period of time without screentime before bed will help you sleep better, right? Like just physically help you sleep better. But there's also so many distractions as so much crazy negative media. Getting out into the real world is sometimes helpful to realize like, although the news is bombarding you, constantly and and so people, and it filters through your social media and everything, constantly bombarding you with everything that's going wrong, and everything is crazy. It's not that those...