I believe Prof. Rao’s point is that your actions follow your beliefs. If you try to change your actions without addressing your beliefs, then ultimately you return to where you were before (because you’re trying to be something else)… but when you change your beliefs, your actions change automatically.

It’s a good point about addressing the underlying stress that was there in the first place, as opposed to trying to construct a rule to make the problem easier to tolerate.

I love idea of the 9pm rule! After the MBA I think I’ll give a variant of that a go, although I fully take-on board your thoughts about how this fits in with a CPM approach.

Interesting to think of forcing change on oneself as ‘doing harm to oneself’. Many of the CPM exercises increase awareness of parts of oneself that one might like to change – how should one go about implementing those changes?

By investing in the process, not the outcome, I presume it IS okay to focus on the PROCESS of change, so long as one doesn’t invest in the outcome)? If so, is the change really ‘doing harm to oneself’? Choosing to walk a different journey, to flow outside the grand-canyon of our a habits, is (for me at least) one of the points of CPM. I’m not sure where it will lead, and I’m not ‘forcing’ a direction, so hopefully this is not ‘doing harm’ to myself.

From one possible point of view – Ensuring you have your laptop turned off by 9pm is possibly a goal you are investing in and forcing on yourself (‘doing harm’). You say this helps releive stress and the pressure to get things done – perhaps it is the pressure itself (why do you feel the pressure to get stuff done?) that needs to be tackled rather than the outcome (ie without the rule you’d be on the laptop all evening)? … Just one possible point of view.

I’ll have a think about how I might factor something like this in to my life… Perhaps we can discuss a suitable approach over coffee over one of the next couple of weekends?

Cheers,
Dan