Andrea Seydel LLH Podcast show notes
WILLPOWER DOESN'T WORK: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success
INTRODUCTION
If you want to get more done, don't worry about willpower- focus on motivation. Benjamin Hardy reveals that productivity is really about clarity and commitment.
If you're relying on willpower to lose weight, improve your relationship, or achieve more with work, YOU'RE DOOMED TO FAIL. BECAUSE- Willpower doesn't work- We will debunk so many myths about what truly makes people successful.
This book helps us accomplish more in less time buy changing your entire approach to confidence and personal commitment.
The environment around us is far too powerful, stimulating, addicting, and stressful to overcome by sheer will power. The only way to survive and thriven today is to create and control our environment. We will learn about lasting personal change, high performance, creativity, and productivity can occur only by strategically designing your goal-enriching environments.
Get ready to discover how small changes in our surroundings can lead to big changes. You'll learn how to regularly unplug and make big decisions outside of your routine environment, how to embed "forcing functions" into your life for peak productivity and focus, how to rotate your environment frequently for optimal and on going energy, and many more strategies to productivity shape your world so you can consciously evolve into the person you want to become.
In this podcast/workshop/bookclub you will learn: Why willpower doesn't work. How your environment shapes you. How to make willpower irrelevant. How to outsource high performance and success to your environment.
You will also discover: The power of your surroundings. The myths of willpower. How to reset your life. The power of designated spaces. How to make positive choices automatic and create triggers to prevent self-sabotage. How to make change happen and grow into your goals.
Bottom line is NO MATTER WHERE YOU ARE, YOU CAN CHANGE. If we do not create and control our environment, our environment creates and controls us.
WHY WILLPOWER DOESN'T WORK
Let me guess you've tried willpower to kick the habit but fell back into old patters. You've tried new years resolutions, but by february ev3rything r3eve3rts back to how it was a year ago. You've set big goals, life changing goals but despite hard work= FAILURE. IT MUST BE US THAT IS THE FAILURE RIGHT? WRONG!!
Willpower- or the power to exert your free will against internal or external obstacles. According to psych research your willpower is like a muscle. It's a resource that depletes with use. As a result, by the end of the day, your willpower muscle is exhausted. USING WILLPOWER WILL GIVE YOU MINIMAL PROGRESS.
Rather than relying solely on your own internal resolve and strength, true commitment means you've built several external defense systems around your goals. It means making the achievement of your goals inevitable.
WHEN IT COMES TO ACHIEVING GOALS, MAKING COMMITTED DECISIONS INVOLVES: 1. INVESTING UP FRONT. 2. MAKING IT PUBLIC. 3. SETTING A TIMELINE. 4. INSTALLING SEVERAL FORMS OF FEEDBACK/ACCOUNTABILITY. 5. REMOVING OR ALTERING EVERYTHING IN YOUR ENVIRONMENT THAT OPPOSES YOUR COMMITMENT.
OUR ENVIRONMENT SHAPES US
1. EVERY HERO IS THE PRODUCT OF A SITUATION: UNDERSTANDING THE POWER OF SURROUNDINGS
We meet the situation that we find ourselves in. We rise to the occasion.
Our potential is shaped by what surrounds us. Being radically honest with who you need to be in all that matters now. THE OPINION OF OTHERS BECOMES IRRELEVANT. Your willing to face your fears and inner demons head on. You become willing to give up your low living, wastefulness, your bad habits, and addictions, your distractions. YOU BECOME WILLING TO TAKE YOUR RESPONSIBILITY REQUIRED!! IT's time to be the person you know you can be. Your world needs you to rise up.
2. HOW YOUR ENVIRONMENT SHAPES YOU: THE MYTH OF WILLPOWER
Most self-help advice continues to encourage people to change themselves. You cannot change yourself without changing your environment. Every environment has rules or norms. Those rules determine the behaviour of the people in those environments. Write and unwritten rules. Like driving on the right side of the road. We are acting in a role or a particular way based on rules of the situation. Rather than exerting more force or willpower, if we want to change our lives, we simply change our environment and the roles we are playing.
HOW TO MAKE WILLPOWER IRRELEVANT
1. RESET YOUR LIFE: MAKE POWERFUL DECISIONS OUTSIDE YOUR ROUTINE ENVIRONMENT
Your brain ope3rates best when in a rested and relaxed state. Take a break. Plan life and goals away from routine.
TIPS: Weekly planing session using a journal. Reflect on the last week and make better plans for the following week. What did you do well? WINS? What are your plans for coming week. How to take what you leaned. Your big goals-WHY? Your sub goals, Specific todo's you must complete. Include your planned rituals, learning, relationship, work, fitness, etc.,
2. DESIGNATE A SACRED SPACE: ESTABLISH A DAILY ENVIRONMENT TO STAY ON COURSE
Do you have a sacred space you go to align and connect with yourself? Do you have a place to meditate, think, pray, visualize? Is your daily journal the foundation for your long term success? Are you on track? Do you give yourself time?
TIPS: Make a morning routine. Get yourself into a peak state DAILY. Journal, affirm. Reconnect deeply with yourself and your why. Visualizations and journalling. RECONNECT WITH YOURSELF IN YOUR SACRED SPACE.
3. REMOVE EVERYTHING THAT CONFLICTS WITH YOUR DECISIONS: SUBTRACTION IS PRODUCTIVITIY
Eliminations is the fastest path to prgress and forward momentum. Remove the excess baggage keeping you in your environment.
TIPS: The key things to delete from your life are: Physical Stuff. (Emails, garage, closets, Clear the garden of your life) All distractions- Attractive but ultimately bad decisions. (eliminate options Paradox of Choice) People who don't make sense. (surround yourself with people who remind you more your future than your past) Commitments you never should have made. Working memory (short term memory Clogged or cluttered= Opportunity cost. Clear communication ( don't procrastinate)
4. CHANGE YOUR DEFAULT OPTIONS: MAKE POSITIVE CHOICES AUTOMATIC
Figure out what defaults you already have inlace. EG. STRESS WINE. STRESS TV. Default behaviours are ingrained and triggered by external environment. They are unconscious and habitual. EG addiction comes from having ineffective defaults in place. Envifroment is full of trigger after trigger. DESIGN YOUR DEFAULTS
TIPS: Disrupt the default. DOn't be a slave to your environment. Take a break from technology. Work less, make yourself not always available. Unplug from work. Create routine, or rituals. Allow yourself to be unavailable. Act on instinct and intuition, not impulse and dependence. (Alcohol, food) BE MINDFUL of your environment and triggers in the environment. DEEPEN HUMAN CONNECTION- THe opposite of addiction is connection. Willpower and doing it alone won't work.
5. CREATE TRIGGERS TO PREVENT SELF-SABOTAGE: PUTTING FAILURE-PLANNING TO WORK
By first envisioning the various shapes failure might take, and then planning you automatic responses to each of the situations, you can start training your brain to put them into action long before your need to.
TIPS: 1. Environmental design is outsourcing your working memory to your environment. Implementation intentions: IF.....then i'll.... statement. "if-then" For when you encounter a tough condition. IF I START TO PLAY SMALL OR WORRY ABOUT BEING JUDGED... I WILL THINK OF MY MENTORS AND ALL THE PEOPLE I HAVE HELPED. IF I FEEL LIKE WINE DURING THE WEEK... I WILL DRINK A WATER AND GO FOR A WALK FIRST.
2. Visualize the process, not just the outcome. Write down and visualize the process. Which include obstacles to your goals and how you'll deal with them. TRY: Think about top goal. write down top goal. give it a timeline, imagine all the potential obstacles you'' face in achieving that goal. Write those obstacles down. Come up with "if-then" responses to each obstacle. Write down statements. Write the contains in which you will absolutely quit.
OUTSOURCE HIGH PERFORMANCE AND SUCCESS TO YOUR ENVIRONMENT
1. EMBED "FORCING FUNCTIONS" INTO YOUR ENVIRONMENT: MAKE CHANGE HAPPEN
Self-imposed situational factors that literally force you to act and achieve what you intend. EG. Intentionally leave your cell phone into car when you get home.
How can you invest more of yourself and your resources into your goals as a forcing function? Social pressure is a forcing function. Check in with someone done it. What ways can you create social pressure to your current goals? What ways can you make the consequences of your actions more motivating or impactful?
You can create enriched environments through the use of forcing functions such as: HIGH INVESTMENTS, SOCAL PRESSURE. HIGH consequences FOR POOR PERFORMANCE. HIGH DIFFICULTY, and NOVELTY In what ways can you begin to embed these environmental components into your life?
2. MORE THAN GOOD INTENTIONS: HOW TO ADAPT TO NEW AND DIFFICULT ENVIRONMENTS
Be an adaptive leaner with a growth mindset. Only way to master new and difficult environments is to force yourself out of your shell and habits. Mindfully access the situation at hand and do what is required.
Create scenarios with big challenge and responsibility. Rise up and be committed. Commit like a big wave. Invest in yourself and your decisions. EMBRACE UNCERTAIN SITUATIONS and emotions.
3. GROW INTO YOIUR GOALS: OUTSOURCE YOUR MOTIVATION TO HIGH PRESSURE ENVIRONMENTS
Make motivation and willpower irrelevant. Positive stress and high demand, your motivation to success is sky limit.
TIPS TO OUTSOURCE MOTIVATION: Accountability. Goals public. Set High expectations of others and self. Invest up front and schedule them in advance. Surround yrouself with people who have hight standards. Compete with people who have higher skills and collaborate with them. Make commitment and DO. Find a mentor., Join a mastermind of role models.
MAIN TAKE AWAY
NO MATTER WHERE YOU ARE, YOU CAN CHANGE. If we do not create and control our environment, our environment creates and controls us.
This book teaches us how to purposefully shape our environment. It explained whey our environment shapes us. We are not fixed, independent and unchanging beings. WE CAN GUIDE WHO WE BECOME! WE CAN change and create our environments that will ultimately create us.