Don’t you just hate that moment when you realize you’re stuck in an all-too-familiar rut? Was it wasting hours on Twitter, drinking too much or getting into that argument that went nowhere? Does your mind ever go : “ How the **** did I do it again? ”

Well here’s how.

Whenever you do something, you either do it to move toward someone or something that’s important to you, or you do it because you got hooked. How? Fish get hooked when they bite bait. We get hooked when we bite the bait of certain thoughts or feelings. Then we get pulled into doing things we wouldn’t have done, wouldn’t got hooked. Driving to work the other day I got cut by a teenager in a beat-up car. When I got to the office, I launched into a tirade about reckless teenage driving. Was I hooked!

One of my friends is passionate about fishing. He’s all about catch-and-release fishing. He says it changed him. First, he started mashing the barb on his hooks so he could more easily unhook and release fish. But what really shocked him is how, over time, some fish have changed. It used to be that when they did bite, they’d fight so hard that when you reeled them in, they be near-dead from all the struggling. These days, you barely feel these fish bite, and they’re super easy to reel in. They barely flail. Easy to unhook and throw them back in the water. These fish appear to have somehow learned that once hooked, the less you flail, the faster you’re back to swimming to wherever you were swimming to before biting.

I have become one such fish. And you? Would like to learn how to bite less and become a fish adept at catch-and-release? Believe it or not, all you have to do is learn to notice hooks and what you do next. And, when you notice you got hooked, notice when you fight and flail more and when less. After all, if fishes could do that, would they need to get rid of hooks?

Click here to download our hooks worksheet, and let us know how it goes. Remember, fishing is not catching!