I love my daily dose of
exercise. Most high-performers do
because they look at it like a performance-enhancing habit. Being a competitive
athlete for most of my life, I trained my brain to expect daily movement and
loads of sweat. There is no habit better
in my books than one that automatically drives you to engage in a routine that
supports your health mentally, emotionally and physically.
It is no different than any
other performance-enhancing strategy you are trying to build; short-term pain
equals long-term gain. We’ve all heard
that saying before. We all know that
real results require real hard work and whether you’re in the weight room or
the boardroom that means many repetitions of the same patterns of behavior.
Why is it then that so many
of us have such difficulty trying to establish habits that support our
long-term goals? It quite simply comes
down to this-our brain’s lack the motivation to change.
I call it leverage. We don’t get out of bed in the morning unless
we have a pretty compelling reason to do so.
That’s the trick. Our brain will always
migrate away from pain and towards pleasure.
That is how our brains condition these bad habits in the first place-we
associated too much pain to not doing the current autopilot behavior and too
much pleasure to engaging in it.
Our brains are meant to keep
us safe and alive-that’s why we have a brain. It guides our decision-making, most
of which is completely autopilot (95-97% each day). We condition the autopilot choices through
constant and continuous conscious effort and reinforcement. And since the brain is meant to keep us safe
and alive, it doesn’t like to have to undo all of its hard work and effort by
having to change the automatic decision-making process-thus, its resistance to
changing habitual patterns of behavior.
So how do we motivate the
brain to want to exert the mental energy and effort required to break a bad
habit and create a more self-supportive one in its place?
We must create new leverage.
Leverage is motivation and
you need motivation to stay high in order to achieve any long-term goals
(making more money, getting to the next level in your career, creating higher
quality relationships). To keep
motivation high enough to sustain the effort required to create lasting change
in your autopilot decision-making (an absolute must when wanting different
results in any area of your life), you must tip the motivational scales in your
favor. You must associate more pain to
staying the same and more pleasure to creating the change.
Motivation is like the caffeine
switch in the brain. When it is activated it engages your nervous system in a
way that propels and supports you towards your goals. If conditioning new habits is the goal, try
the following top-notch performance-enhancing strategy to do so:
·
First identify
the long-term goal clearly using as much specific and descriptive information
as you possibly can (clearly define the new result you crave).
·
What new habits
must you establish to support you achieving that new result (in other words,
state clearly the new habit you are trying to condition)?
·
Ask yourself what
the pain of staying the same is (no change in current results)?
·
Next, connect
with as many benefits as possible to achieving the long-term change you crave.
·
When in the
moment of choice between old habit and new habit, practice connecting with your
new leverage.
·
Practice
associating your brain with the pain of engaging in the old habit and the
pleasure of engaging in the new habit every time you are faced with the
decision to act in congruence with your long-term outcome. Science says it will take 30-50 repetitions
of this exercise to successfully reprogram that pattern into a habit.
Sure it is tough to break bad
habits and establish new ones but trust me, it is well worth it. Remember the statistic that states 95-97% of
your daily choices are made on autopilot-your habits are a huge factor
contributing to your current level of personal and professional success. If it’s good enough for athletes like Sydney
Crosby and Tiger Woods, it is good enough for you. Just keep reminding yourself like the professional
athletes do-short-term pain for long-term gain.
Remember to make every
performance count!
-Coach Susan
Want to learn how to program your brain for personal
and professional success? Former
professional athlete and Princeton graduate, Coach Susan Hobson is the
Principal Performance Coach at Elite: High Performance Coaching, a
science-based coaching process designed to drive your health, wealth, self and
business performance to the next level. She works with high-performers like
professional athletes and busy professionals like all of you.
To qualify for a FREE consultation, you can visit www.elitehighperformance.com and
enter your email. As a special bonus, will also receive her weekly motivation coaching
videos delivered straight to your inbox.
Alternatively, you can email her at: Susan@elitehighperformance.com
or call her at: 416-801-9779.
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