In my last four “ 100 Day Life Change Challenges” I made it a goal to listen to some sort of motivational speech every day. So for the past year I have listened to one form or another of a Ted Talk, motivational speech, coaching, etc for 20 minutes every morning. At day 51 of this fourth challenge, that adds up to 351 days of the good, the bad and the downright terrible presentations and I am finding them to be almost like religion in that every life coach and motivational speaker is saying the exact same thing but with their little twist on it...Every guru has their book, their method and their path to their particular form of motivational enlightenment. In other words, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha and Krishna are all pretty much saying the same damn thing we just have our preferences about how we want to accept the message of do unto others, love your neighbor and stop being a dick…
The motivational world has their David Goggins to scream obscenities at you and shame you into taking better care of yourself, Tony Robbins to kindly and sanely show you that you can make your life better and Mr. Les Brown to remind you that no matter what your circumstances are, there is a way out. They are all saying the same damn thing with the same message packaged differently. The same buzz words pop up in every message they convey. Discipline, motivation, goals, new, challenge, truth, determination, perseverance, freedom, tenacity, learning, endurance, courage, hope, time management and my personal favorite, ACTION! Some will tell you to “start slow” because change can only come about incrementally, while others will tell you that change is like a high speed car accident and you need to come out of the gates like a bull with a cowboy on your back…One will say follow the guidelines in their bestselling book and you will get the results the same as they did and then the next speaker will say, find your own way because change is a personal journey but they still have that bestseller just in case you need some guidelines to making your choice as to how you will choose your own path… Same message, different approach… Now let me tell, I have read the books, listened to the messages and followed the path that many of these people have laid down for us. If you read my first 100 Day Life Change Challenge Blog you know I read hundreds of self help books with smug authors on the cover, arms crossed looking at me like, you dumb motherfucker, you should have figured this out for yourself... In fact, so many that my wife questioned whether I was on my journey or theirs and I had to admit that I lost myself in that storm of inspiration… Like a young philosophy student, I was jumping from ideology to ideology in search of the “hack”, the easy way to change my life, the one that would suddenly open my eyes to the way to enlightenment and make me a better, happier, healthier and more understanding person…
Sound familiar? Jumping from one spiritual journey to the next, changing gurus, changing diet plans, exercise plans, changing every time you get bored, buried or burnt out? Can’t find the thing that gives you that wide on you desire…
By the way, there is no life hack for this…
Hopefully, this will help but I don’t have a bestseller for you to buy nor will I release an exercise series for you to try or try to sell you on becoming a vegan, trying intermittent fasting or meditating…What I will tell you is pretty counterintuitive at first glance but hang with me for a second…
In simple terms, you can’t change your mind about the things we are talking about. You can’t wake up a vegan, go to bed out of shape and wake up with an exercise mindset. You cannot “decide” to become a learner instead of a TV watcher…Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not saying you can’t make the decision to try but if you look at the history of your decisions, if you are honest, they pretty much look like a string of failures for as far back as you can see. How many times have you decided to lose that weight, read that book, eat better, or go to bed earlier? How much of that are you doing today? In fact, how much more weight have you put on, fallen further out of shape and do things like hide the book you wanted to read as not to distract you from watching Big Brother? So instead of these “decisions” altering you for the better, they might be shoving you further down the hole you’re in… Multiple failures at not getting the results you desire makes you feel like a failure and failures have a failure mindset making it doubly difficult to climb out of the hole they dug for themselves…
So now what? Sounds hopeless doesn’t it? Listen, you’re making decisions about the wrong fucking end of the plan… I’m going to quit smoking is the end game… I’m going to lose 10 pounds is the end game… I’m going to get a masters degree, meditate 20 minutes day, read every day, learn to play the guitar, and on and on and on… All these things are definitive in that they all are great goals; they are just things that take massive shifts in one thing… Shifts in behavior…
Didja catch that? You have to change your fucking behaviors in order to meet any of those challenges. If I say right now that I am deciding that I am going to paint a perfect copy of The Mona Lisa I have to shift my behaviors in order to meet the criteria it takes to make that happen. I need supplies and I need to use those supplies to start practicing to recreate The Mona Lisa. I’m not going to wake up next Thursday and discover that I “somehow” did it when I wasn’t paying attention.
In order to make changes, it isn’t about decisions about what you want out of yourself. Making goals is great, but without changes in behaviors, those goals aren’t worth a puddle of piss… If you say you want to quit smoking and you continue your ritualistic behaviors attached to your habit of smoking, it’s called a pipe dream. (No pun intended but on the proof reading I saw the humor…) For instance, if you say to yourself, “it’s time to quit smoking” and you walk out to the spot you smoke at every day at the same time you do every day with the same robotic behaviors, you aren’t going to quit anything, you’re just going to bury that “decision to quit” like you bury everything else that makes you uncomfortable about yourself. If you decide that the time has come to lower your blood pressure and lose the weight before the threat from the doctor to put you on medication becomes real and lunch comes and you drive to the same restaurants and eat the same food, the decision you made yesterday wasn’t a decision, it was a wish… Just like every other time you have said “I wish I could lose this weight”…
This isn’t easy and the struggle never stops… I fight lethargy, laziness, and my own obstinate attitude every day of my life. I make excuses that I have to overcome, I want to eat things I shouldn’t and if you think getting up when it is still dark outside to exercise for 2 hours and meditate before I come to work is something I want to do, you’re more of an idiot than I am.
Let me stop right there and go off on a tangent…. Aw, you missed me didn’t you? Hahaha…
For all of you people out there who are runners and you talk about that “runner’s high” you get when you push past the point of exhaustion… I would like to say right now I hate your fucking guts… For all the people out there who love the gym and can’t wait to get on the treadmill, I hate you… Everyone has a different journey and I think I am more jealous of you than I hate you. I don’t get high from burpees, running or cardio… I don’t step up to the 0445 yoga mat with a boner… Like my digital mentor Joe Rogan says, “If I only worked out when I felt like it, I would be a fat motherfucker…” So seriously, my journey to this level of fitness hasn’t been easy, and I suspect that it will never be easy. I have far more respect for the fit person that doesn’t necessarily like exercise than I do for the person who gets a runner’s high… I do not like burpees in the darkness of the early morning, I like sleeping much better… If I had my choice with no consequences, I would choose pizza and vodka with cranberry followed by a fat bong rip rather than healthy food and meditation…
Maybe that wasn’t as tangential as I thought… These behavior changes that I made are based on what I spoke of before… The decisions I made long ago were to lose weight, be in better health, have a better attitude, be calmer, stop drinking, stay off drugs, avoid the problems of growing older in poor health… But those decisions were useless without me changing my behaviors. That’s why in the mental health field we talk quite a bit about behavior modification. That’s why we have sober living communities to remove people from their toxic environment to a place where people are trying to develop better habits. That’s why we have exercise groups with people who don’t go to the pizza place after a five mile run… We have to MODIFY OUR BEHAVIORS in order to meet goals…
Now after hundreds of hours of motivational speakers, hundreds of books, years of trial and error with diet and exercise and hundreds of hours of meditation, I still do not call myself an expert… I do however live a life that lots and lots of people ask questions about and I have modified my answers time and time again trying my best to convey my knowledge of how I attained this level of positive behavior modification. Only now am I starting to see that all these people that we listen to help us live better, the psychologists, social workers, Recovery Specialists, motivational speakers, authors, and life coaches are really just repeating one message in a myriad of different formats and codified language… That message is a simple, and quiet and quite powerful: Change Your Behaviors and Change Your Life.
Want to learn the guitar? Get a guitar and practice instead of some behavior that wastes your time… Want to lose weight? Change the behaviors making you gain weight… For every action, there is an outcome… Change the action, change the outcome…
Get to work…
