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What do you do when you are committed to something and don't follow through?
Episode 97
Welcome back to Design Your Destiny, everyone. Today, I'm gonna be talking about something that is common, and that is: what do you do when you commit to something, but you don't follow through. Like, what do you do? I think it's a challenge that many people fall into. And oftentimes my clients have faced this challenge. To be committed to something means that you have decided to do something. There are many factors that can come into play in our commitment to do something. One of those things is how committed are we to the thing that we are pursuing– whether it's a business venture, a partnership, deciding to relaunch the podcast as I am here, changing directions, deciding to build out your business in a new and different way. How committed are you to that?
Probably one of the most common mainstream, if you will, ways of looking at commitment is people who decide to go into fitness, or to weight loss, healthier eating those types of things. And people often associate their success, or lack of it, with their willpower.
The first myth that I want to debunk is that willpower works.Willpower does not work. Willpower is a function of the conscious analytical mind. Our conscious analytical mind, even though we believe it runs the show, it does not run the show. So as you go through your day, say you're someone who has, committed and I'm gonna use health as an analogy, but you can apply this to anything in your business. You can apply it to anything in your life, say that you were committed to your health, and you decided that you're going to stop drinking caffeinated beverages, and you're going to drink warm water. That's a big thing right now, "the warm water challenge".
Say you're gonna commit to that each and every time that you go to drink water, you are making a choice each and every time you think, oh, you know what? I would really like a cup of coffee, or I would love a soda or an energy drink. You are making a decision when you're using willpower. You were relying solely on individual decisions to get you where you want to go.
[00:03:59] So what does that mean? If you're relying on individual decisions to get you where you want to go, when you end up with a lot on your plate, whether it's a lot of deadlines coming due, something unexpected happens in the business or with the client or a project, or even in your personal life, your relationships, especially if you have kids, life can be really unpredictable when these unpredictable things come up. If you're relying solely on your decision making and you get into a space where your stress response is activated, you have a lot of things going on in your conscious mind that you are sorting out, you're going to possibly, most likely, revert to your old habit. It's easier. It's easier than having to make the conscious choice. Now water versus energy, drinks and caffeine. That's kind of easy because you can set your day up by making sure that all you have available is water, but if you're stressed out and you're worn down and you're going to the kitchen and you have all kinds of options, your mind's just not even gonna think about it. Your subconscious goes, oh, well, we always go to the caffeine, let's go to the cafe. Your willpower is like a battery on your cell phone. The more tired we become, the more that we have on our mind, the more things that we are processing, the weaker that willpower becomes.
[00:05:33] If you're committing to something new, the biggest, most important thing you can do is just decide, and in the words of one of my mentors, declare it, make a declaration. Actually, a couple of my mentors, when it comes to bringing something new into your life, you define it, you decide it, and you declare it. And that really just sets it in your mind as an unbreakable standard, which goes to identity. If you've listened to episodes 86 and 87, GREAT, if you have not, I want you to go back and listen to episodes 86 and 87. I talk
Published on 3 years, 4 months ago