Human beings are creatures of habit. We make 95% of our daily decisions without making use of our conscious mind. On average, 70% of our daily thoughts are identical with those of the day before & 40% of our behaviour is repeated every day, purely out of habit. Just think about that for a second… 70% of all your thoughts today, were ones you had yesterday.
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It seems unsurprising then, that habits and mindset are so hard to change. The subconscious mind is a gale force wind in the sails of your ship, while you have a single pair of conscious oars to change the heading of your thoughts.
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With this in mind, it seems that waiting for motivation to rear it’s head before you can attempt a new task is putting the cart before the horse. More than that, it’s believing you need a horse at all when the cart just needs you to push it yourself, because the horse is a dick who doesn’t want to listen.
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Do you “need” motivation to go to the gym? Or sit down & read a book? Or clean your room? Or do you ACTUALLY just need to get up & do the thing in question. This isn’t a call to arms for people to stop being pussies, it’s an identification that believing your mindset needs to change before your actions can is problem causing, backwards logic.
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The girl who has pontificated about going to the gym all day & used up all of her willpower to drag herself there under the belief that she needs to motivate herself to go achieves no more than the girl who blindly got in her car after work & turned up because she took the action needed (getting in the car) to achieve the goal she wanted (training at the gym). Especially when you remember that willpower IS a limited resource (see Dr Roy Baumeister & his radish experiment).
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In this way, your more easily controlled life element (actions) feed your more difficult element (thoughts). You don’t need confidence to talk to the girl at the bar, you just need to talk to her. The confidence will arrive as a byproduct. You don’t need discipline to not eat the chocolate bar, you just need to do the action that prevents it (not picking it up) & you will feel disciplined as a consequence.
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#ThingsBecomeThoughts
– Chris Williamson (Modern Wisdom Podcast)