(For part 2 click here)

Think about areas of your life you would like to improve or even just explore. It could even be skills you would like to try just for fun. Make a list of 10 at least.

Now pick a couple and commit to explore and start learning in those areas. Commit to take action. To help keeping your commitment, you might want to register on www.coach.me and add specific studying tasks, new skills or new habits you want to learn. Depending on what you are committing to (it could be to just stop picking your nose), you will need to take a course or read books.

Free courses can be taken on Coursera. Paid ones are on Udemy and Lynda.

For books, there is of course Amazon, among others, and if you are happy to read digital books, Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited allows you to borrow many books every months for a fee (and you can even try it for free for one month).

Block time in your calendar for your learning. Set up specific (SMART (link to definition of SMART)) goals week by week for the next 30 days. Measure your progress as you go along and pay attention to the differences it makes in your life. Also, make sure you reward yourself when you are hitting specific milestones (achieving goals), it will help to keep yourself motivated.

After 30 days, you should review your progress and make decisions:

1. Habits: you need to decide whether you want to stick with a habit you have built (did you notice a positive impact on your life?) or even take this habit a step further.
2. Studying: if you have been studying in a certain area, do you want to keep exploring that area?
3. Skills: if you have started building new skills, you need to decide if you want to persevere with your learning.

Once you have made your decisions, it’s time to build your next 30 days plan!

If you decided to keep building a habit, since you have already committed to it for 30 days, it should pretty much already be part of your life. If this is not the case, make sure you persevere for a few more days. Once the habit is ingrained in your life, it will be part of you and carrying on with the habit will be easy and natural so you want have to focus energy on it anymore.

If you have been learning new skills or studying in a certain area, you will now have acquired the habit of studying them as well as more confidence in your competence, so it will become more natural to carry on with your studying.

In your 30 days plan, you can now add new skills, habits or studies you want to pursue in the next month. You should limit the number of pursuits every month to a maximum of 5, or even less depending on the intensity of each pursuit and whether they are brand new topics to you or a continuation from last month. You can also very well decide to carry on with a very similar plan to last month. However you need to make sure you take the time to review your situation properly and not quickly decide to just carry on with the same plan.

That’s it! You are now building yourself a life of constant discovery and wonder. Every 30 day, you can review your plan and decide where you want to take your life. You will be amazed how new skills can improve your life!

If you want to take your learning further I suggest reading Maximise your potential. The book compiles wisdom of 21 different leading creative minds and gives you step by step approaches to learn more effectively, grow you knowledge and expertise.

Amazon US: 

Amazon UK: 

Now, take control of your life in part 4.