These patterns of thinking are still hard-wired in our brains today. When we don’t feel overly inspired to work on our goals, our brains often fall back on cognitive distortions. Two common ones are fortune-telling and catastrophizing.
When we don’t want to start a task, we often fall into fortune-telling, with our brain tending to automatically predict a negative outcome such as not being able to do a good job. Of course, there is usually little evidence to support the prediction, which is why it is referred to as a distortion.
Catastrophizing refers to our brain’s tendency to take it a step further and predict a horrible outcome despite little evidence to support this. Catastrophizing can also take the form of predicting that a task will be unbearable when, at worst, it may be only mildly uncomfortable. So remember that these are automatic biases our brains fall back on that are often wrong. Always taking your “gut reaction” or that little doubting voice in your head seriously is going to prevent you from achieving your goals.
Know Your Gut’s Biases
Knowing your Basic Personality Tendencies will help you predict when you are likely to activate these cognitive distortions. Here are some examples of when fortune-telling and catastrophizing may be triggered depending on your unique personality profile:
Average-to-High on Negative Emotions: In situations where you may experience stress such as when you’re going into a big competition like the Olympic trials or playoffs, or face a work deadline. You may feel paralyzed to take action due to your brain’s tendency to try to convince you that you will crumble under the pressure.
Average-to-Low on Extraversion: In situations where you will be facing a lot of stimulation, especially social stimulation like your work or team’s Christmas party. You may end up deciding not to go or experience undue stress beforehand due to distorted thinking.
Average-to-High on Extraversion: When you’ll be facing a lot of down time or under-stimulation. Your brain may predict that having to study plays for your upcoming game or working on a proposal will be unbearably boring. The reality is that it may be somewhat boring, but not unbearable.
Average-to-Low on Openness: In situations where you will be exposed to new and non-traditional activities, new ideas, or new ideologies. For example, your biases may come up when you’re “forced” to spend significant amounts of time with people with different religious or political perspectives.
Average-to-Low on Motivation: When you have to get yourself to do things you know you should be doing, but don’t want to do, like working out.
Average-to-Low on Agreeableness: In situations where you are expected to open up to others or follow another leader who you’re not sold on. This can be when a new coach or manager who you’ve heard negative things about comes on board, or if you’re asked to attend a “team-building” retreat with co-workers that you’re only lukewarm about.
As you can imagine, there are many other examples of how your Basic Personality Tendencies will interact with your situation to trigger cognitive distortions. See if you can come up with some examples of your own.
Knowing your personality will help you become more aware of when your brain will be more likely to activate these biases. This awareness will arm you with a skeptical attitude toward your predictions, immediate reactions or “gut feelings” in these situations.
The 5-Minute Rule
The most effective strategy to overcome a perceived lack of motivation and our cognitive distortions is what is called The 5-Minute Rule and it’s backed by science.56 The 5-Minute Rule is simple. When you don’t feel like doing something you know you should do, such as getting up and hitting the gym, start working on a project, or doing your weekly planning, you make a deal with yourself. You agree to do the activity for five minutes and then decide whether you want to do it or not.
The only way to test the idea of whether you really want to be doing something is to do it for five minutes. After five minutes you can decide to stop. You have to be serious and give yourself full permission to stop. If it turns out to be as bad as you predicted, or worse, give yourself permission to stop.
The reality is, 95 out of 100 times you’ll find that your predictions were wrong and you can keep going. If you do this one activity from this chapter on a regular basis, I guarantee you will be much more likely to reach your goals and will be ahead of about 95 percent of your competition.
What to Do When Plagued by Self-Doubt
If you do all the things noted above and in previous chapters, problems with motivational struggles will essentially be a thing of the past. But some days everything just seems like an uphill battle even when you do get yourself started. This is often because you get hooked by your self-doubt.
The first thing to remember is that self-doubt is normal. You’re always going to have at least some self-doubt. Why? Because that’s what our brains were designed to do. And the reality is having self-doubt is a good thing because it motivates you to avoid danger and to improve as I noted in Chapter 13.
Imagine you’re preparing for the biggest competition in your life. Maybe it’s the Olympics, or maybe you’re about to pitch your startup idea on Shark Tank. Do you think it would be better if, in the weeks and months leading up to these events, you had zero self-doubt?
You may want to answer yes, but the real answer is no. Having no doubts can lead you to underestimate your competition or how hard something is going to be. As noted in Chapter 12, this can make you complacent and unmotivated.
So, self-doubt is your friend. You can’t eliminate it. You need to capitalize on what it offers you. It pushes you to be better.
Sometimes, despite the knowledge that self-doubt is normal and can be helpful, we can’t seem to shake it. When this happens, try the strategies below.
Keep in mind that the following strategies only work when used sparingly. As noted earlier, the brain always wants to stay in a state of homeostasis. So your brain will habituate to these strategies pretty quickly. If you try to use these every day, or even every other day, they will quickly lose their effectiveness.
Ask yourself some powerful questions. Simply asking yourself the following questions can often get you out of your funk. Think about the goal you are trying to achieve. Then ask yourself:
Why is this goal important to me?
What will happen if I achieve my goal? How will my life be different?
What will happen, or what’s at stake, if I don’t achieve my goal?
When we‘re in a bad mood or feel unmotivated, we often have a particular set of neural networks in our brains that are activated. These act as a negative filter or lens and are related to cognitive distortions described earlier. These networks bias your mind toward seeing the negative in yourself, the world around you, and your past and future.
If you are average-to-high on Negative Emotions, then you will be more prone to falling into these states. When these networks are activated, it’s almost impossible to spontaneously think in a more realistic, positive, and optimistic way. The following exercise will force your mind to reactivate the neural networks that are active when you’re feeling positive, hopeful, optimistic, competent, and triumphant.
Relive past successes and peak experiences. To do this, make sure you have about 5 to 10 minutes without interruption:
Turn off all alerts from your computer, phone, and gadgets. Put a Do Not Disturb sign on your door. Do whatever you have to do to make sure you can put all of your attention into this.
Sit and close your eyes.
Take six slow and long breaths over one minute. Do this by breathing in slowly through your nose to the count of five seconds. Then without pausing, slowly breathe out through your mouth for another five seconds. This will increase your heart rate variability which leads to a relaxed but focused state that can bring cognitive clarity. More on this in the upcoming books in this series.
Now, think back to a time when you achieved something that was meaningful to you, or a time when you had a peak exper
ience in your life. It should be a time when you were performing near your potential, when you felt alive, absorbed in what you were doing, and excited. It helps when this was a challenging experience in which you ended up triumphing.
Imagine and relive how you worked hard to overcome the challenges. Do not skip this step. You need to recall how you went through tough times and came out on top.
As an example, one of my peak experiences was the successful defense of my Ph.D. dissertation. It was years in the making and I pulled out all the strategies I could think of to get myself prepared. I was filled with a combination of self-doubt (“what if I fail?”) and excitement (“if I pass this, I will finally have my Ph.D.!”). It started out worse than I thought when I fielded some really tough questions and critiques and realized that some of the committee members were playing hardball! But I eventually settled in and got my bearings. I got in the zone and got on a roll. By the end of it, I felt I could do another three hours. I felt great and got lots of positive feedback from some of the audience members and the committee. I felt on top of the world. In my mind I recalled how I was at the bottom of my class in junior high and most of high school and how far I had come.
This achievement felt so good because I not only beat the odds, what others thought I was capable of and my original self-doubts in my academic abilities, I did it all because I followed my passions. Your peak experience may be much different than mine. What matters is that it’s something that you’re proud of and where you performed well. Don’t be humble!
Now, in your mind, relive your peak experience as if it were happening again for the first time. Imagine it happening through your own eyes, in the first person. Use all of your senses. Vividly imagine what you saw, heard, felt, and even smelled if you can recall. Even if you can’t recall all the details, feel free to elaborate somewhat. If it’s easier for you, describe it out loud or write it out. Whatever works for you is fine.
Stay in the moment for at least 3 to 5 minutes. Don’t judge what you’re doing. Just be there again. Really focus on the positive feelings you had when you were peaking or when it was over. Bask in it as long as you want.
Next, you can either get to work or move on to the next exercises.
Envision yourself successfully achieving one of your goals, whether it be a longer-term goal or simply the goal for the day. To do this, follow the same lead-in process as above — get privacy, close your eyes, breathe six slow and long breaths over one minute. Then imagine yourself in detail overcoming any challenges and succeeding at your goal by incorporating as many senses as possible. Again, it’s essential for you to imagine all the potential challenges you could face and how you will overcome them. Do this for 1 to 5 minutes.
Call a trusted friend or relative. Sometimes when we are so stuck in a rut of low motivation or self-doubt, we need to hear some inspirational words from someone we care about.
Tell them about the difficulty you’re having. It may be feeling unmotivated, fearful, or self-doubting.
Tell them you have a negative filter activated and are having a hard time seeing things optimistically, realistically, and positively.
Ask them if they would be willing to help you remember previous successes, how far you’ve come, what you have to offer the world, and if true, how proud they are of you.
Look back at your goals and progress. This can serve to remind you how far you’ve come and how you’ve overcome a lot of resistance before today.
If all else fails, decide that maybe today is not going to be as productive as you had hoped — and accept this. We all need down time to perform at our best. Sometimes high achievers develop unrealistically perfectionistic ideas that they should be working on their big goals all the time. The mind and body often can’t keep up with this pace. If you try, you’re going to burn out and underperform in the long run. Taking time off is important. Athletes definitely need rest days for their bodies to recover, but also for their minds to rebound. For those of you whose work is creative, a day or two away from it almost always results in new ideas and a refreshed perspective. Rest, distraction, and daydreaming are essential for creativity as well. So listen to your mind and body!
Know What to Focus On When
As noted in the last chapter, there is process focus and outcome focus just as there are process and outcome goals. Most of the time, we want to have a process focus when working on a task.
When you have a process focus, you are in the present moment focusing fully on the task at hand. This is critical for peak performance. You see, our brains have limited resources. To perform at our best at whatever task we’re doing, whether we are an entrepreneur pitching a big idea to key investors or an NHL goalie trying to stop a puck in an overtime shootout, we will perform better if we are fully focused on the task at hand in the present moment. And when I say the present moment, I don’t mean plus or minus 10 minutes. I mean right now. When our attention or focus shifts to what happened even a minute ago, or what may happen in the next minute, we are diverting precious brain power away from where it should be focused.
So imagine this: You’re a goalie in a shootout and 30 seconds ago you let the last shot in. The next player is barreling down the ice to try to score on you. If you’re still thinking about what you did wrong on the last shot, or what it will mean for your team’s playoff chances if you lose the shootout, a big chunk of your brain is not attending to the task at hand, and you’re guaranteed to underperform. You might as well put beer in your water bottle or tie one hand behind your back because a mind that isn’t fully focused on the immediate moment is an impaired mind.
Same goes if you’re pitching your complex idea to investors and you’re thinking about why the guy in the blue shirt just got up and walked out of the room. Your pitch will suffer.
Process focus is similar to what is commonly referred to as mindfulness. Mindfulness generally refers to being fully present in the moment. As you can imagine, having a process focus and being mindful can also be helpful in many other aspects of your life. Just imagine trying to have a meaningful conversation with your significant other if your mind is focused on things like what you’re going to watch on Apple TV later tonight!
When we are in the zone or flow, our focus is on the process, not the outcome. Many of the strategies outlined in this book and the upcoming books in this series will enable you to more easily get into the zone or in flow.
Recall that having an outcome focus occurs when you are focused on the result or what you want to achieve. There are times when you want to have an outcome focus, such as when your task is relatively simple and possibly boring and you notice your motivation or energy is low. Bringing to mind your outcome goals, or focusing on what you’re hoping your current activity will achieve, can keep you moving forward.
So when you’re about to get on the ice for the beginning of the shootout and you feel exhausted and unmotivated, that’s the perfect time to focus on what it will mean if your team wins. Or if it’s late the night before your big pitch to investors and you’re tired and want to check in for the night, but still have important work to do, you may want to remind yourself of how landing these investors could catapult your start-up to a level you only dreamed of. This will help boost your motivation and energy.
Let me give you a real example. Jay was a top-level mixed martial artist who contacted me hoping to take his game up a notch. He actually was doing really well, but was smart enough to know he wanted to leave no stone unturned when it came to his mental game. One thing he didn’t realize was that he was focusing on process and outcome at the wrong times, based on bad advice from a former coach.
During cardio training with the heavy bag, Jay’s former coach would repeatedly tell him to focus on his form and the sound of the bag when he hit it. In other words, during a boring task that was meant to build up endurance, his coach was telling him to focus on the process. Jay found these cardio drills boring and exhausting and found himself giving up early as a result.
Also, when Jay was about to step into the ring, his former coach would encourage him to imagine what it will mean to win. But Jay was both high on Negative Emotions and Motivation, so he didn’t need any help getting emotionally activated or motivated. Thinking of the outcome of winning and what it would mean only made him go from activated to over-activated and nervous. During the matches, his former coach would repeatedly yell from his corner “win this one and you’re in the UFC!” So in the middle of the match, Jay would be thinking of what it would be like to achieve his dream of competing in the UFC. As you can imagine, this strategy only served to make him over-activated and used up his brain’s precious attentional resources.
Once I explained to Jay the difference between process and outcome focus, it immediately made intuitive sense to him. He also relayed this to his new coaches. We worked on using an outcome focus when he was doing mindless cardio drills, or when he had to motivate himself to hit the gym when he was tired.
So now when he does mindless cardio drills, instead of focusing on the sounds of the bag or his form, he focuses on what it would mean to achieve his dream of a UFC contract.
Similarly, just before and during competition, Jay now focuses on the process, or exactly what he has to do. He strives to stay in the present moment. With the aid of his new coaches, he learned to stay 100 percent focused on his opponent and look for openings. Just these two simple changes in his focus improved his motivation and energy during training, and his ability to read and react during the fight.
There are a number of other strategies to improve your ability to focus that are too numerous to include in this book. These include attention training, meditation, neurofeedback, cue-words, and others. These will be further elaborated on in the upcoming books in this series.
Achieve Page 17
