Truth Bomb Tuesday: This is how to unlock this mind-blowing productivity hack
There’s this idea that I see pop up in popular media all that time that bugs the bug-poo out of me. And it’s this idea that we can achieve change in our life through conscious thought and action.
“Remember to keep you back straight and your shoulders back. Remember to breathe from your belly. Remember to have a positive and loving mindset.”
What a crock.
Do you have any idea how many things are on my to-do list? You want me to ‘remember’ to keep my shoulders back? Every hour of every day?
I literally do not have the RAM for that task. Nobody does.
The best we can hope for is to sit at our desk for 15 minutes with good posture before we get a terse email from a customer that draws all our attention, and every thing we were trying to do with our posture goes out the window.
If your strategy for change – for any change – involves you ‘remembering’ to do it, then it’s doomed to failure.
No. When we’re building something new into our lives, we need to make doing it easier than not doing it. We need to make it a habit.
Like brushing your teeth. No body consciously remembers to brush their teeth. You have built a habit out of it, so when it comes time for bed, it’s just easier to go through the routine than not doing it and going to bed with furry teeth.
Same story with posture. If you want to keep your shoulders back you need to tonify your back muscles so sitting with your shoulders back is just easier and more natural than slouching.
So this is the golden rule. Any change that is built on ‘remembering’ over the long run will fail.
I’m thinking about this in the context of last week’s post about the power of self-compassion. What the studies are showing us now is that people who are more compassionate with themselves are more able to try new things, and just generally enjoy life. Oh, and they get more done.
It’s a pretty amazing result. And it’s a wake-up call for a culture that glorifies self-criticism.
But the question then is, how do we make ourselves more self-compassionate?
Well, we can try to remember to be more self-compassionate. Every waking moment we can try and hold the thought that we should be more compassionate to ourselves.
And obviously that’s not going to work.
Rather, we need to make being self-compassionate more natural than not being self-compassionate.
To me that sounds like a job for affirmations.
Repeating phrases of loving self-acceptance over and over to yourself starts to carve the feeling of those phrases into your brain.
In time, it will start to feel natural for your thoughts to follow those neural pathways. It will start to feel odd to follow the old ways of thinking.
It’s a practice that works. But it’s going to take some time.
There’s a saying in Kung-fu, that if you practice a move the wrong way a 1,000 times, you have to do it 2,000 times the right way for it to stick.
That is, we have to undo all our training and conditioning.
So it’s not a practice for immediate results. But trust me, in the end, you do have the capacity to rewire your brain. You do have the ability to love yourself.
Now, the affirmations that are going to work for you will depend on your own particular circumstances and life experiences.
But to get you started, PositivePsychology.com has a few suggestions:
There’s more. But hopefully this gives you an idea.
But get started on it. Self-compassion just might be the key to getting more done AND having more fun.
DB.