One of our viewers asked, "Doctor Paul, how do you do the right thing when it's hard?"
There's some psychological tricks to this. And I'm going to fill you in on each
one of them. First of all, newsflash! The right thing often is hard. Why is that
anyway? I'm not completely sure of all the reasons for that. But if you notice
this in your life? In fact, you remember in Harry Potter... Did
you watch the Harry Potter series where Dumbledore is talking to Harry and he
says, "There will come a time when you have to decide between doing what is
right and doing what is easy." That implies that the right thing is hard. My
friend Art Coombs is just finishing his new book entitled Hard Easy, Easy Hard.
And it's about this concept where if you choose to do the easy thing right now,
you probably are going to create a harder life for yourself. And then the
converse of that. If you choose to do the hard thing now, you're more likely to set
up an easier life for yourself. Hard easy, Easy hard. Quick example of that: My son
used to run cross-country in high school. And for these cross-country meets, they
would get together and run 5 kilometers in a race. Could you do that
today? I'm not sure I could. But this is what they would do at every meet. What
did they do to prepare for those meets? Well they would get together and they
would work out. They would exercise, they would run. They would basically get
themselves in condition to go run the race on the weekend. Is it easy to go
work out? No. It would be much easier to just go watch a television program
or something. And I remember my son wants commenting, "Oh, it's so hard to go to
these workouts." Well, going to do the workout made it a whole lot easier when
race day came. What happens to those who skip the workout? You can guess it's
gonna be a whole lot harder. I experienced this myself when I moved
here to the town where where we live currently. And I just come out of
graduate school and I just finished my dissertation. I was a little out of shape
physically. I've never been terribly out of shape. But I wasn't up to par. And I
went and ran a 5k race. And it was so hard. Oh, I was sucking air. I was burning
up. I could barely even cross the finish line. And I had stopped several times
during the race. Well, I started to exercise that following year. Exercise is
hard, right? But as they did the hard thing, it made
my life easier. I enrolled in that same 5k the next year and I took third. They
gave me a medal for the old guys. But still I believe everybody has what I
sometimes refer to as a natural knowing. Do you hear the voices? The voices in
your mind some people freak out when a psychologist asked them that. But
honestly, you hear some voices, right? Little voices that say, "Hey, you should
probably go call your mother." Or "You should probably stop at the store on
your way home and pick up a flower for your wife." Or... You know the voices I'm
talking about. Usually, you'll hear the first voice that tells you to do
something really good. It's kind of like the little shoulder angel and shoulder
devil if you want to think of it that way. And little shoulder angel says, "Hey,
you should go do this good thing." And then the little shoulder devil jumps in
and says, "You know what? Here's 5 reasons why you shouldn't do that?" Or why
it's hard. Or the reasons that maybe it's not a good idea to what the first voice
said. Here's the strategy: Listen to the first voice.
Listen to the first voice. That's telling you to do those good things which are
usually hard. Is it easier for me to just drive home or to stop at the store on
the way home and pick up a flower for my wife?
Which one's harder? Well, picking up the flower is harder. But guess what? My life
gets better when I do the hard things. Do the right thing even when it's hard. It's
almost always harder to do that. But really? Because it creates a much easier
life for us. Listen to the first voice and ignore
those 5 that tell you all the reasons why you can't or shouldn't. A couple of
years ago I had the amazing opportunity to interview Jim calf guards on my
podcast Live On Purpose Radio. You can go look it up. It's called the Acorn
principle. Jim is an amazing inspiring man who taught me this next concept: "How
would the person I want to become handle what I'm about to do?" Okay, I'm not sure I
got that completely right the way Jim said it. But you get the picture? "How
would the person that I want to become handle the decision I'm about to make?"
What would that person do in this circumstance? We get this picture of who
we want to be. And it's aspirational sometimes. It's it's a goal. It's a
far-off kind of a thing. Bringing home and imagine that person, that one that
you really want to be. And then ask yourself how would that person handle
this situation. Suddenly, the right thing even though it's hard becomes a whole
lot easier because the person that you really want to be would handle it in
that way. That's a powerful concept. Everything that we talk about here at
Live On Purpose TV becomes easier when you know how to operate the equipment of
your own mind. I hope you have a copy of my both Pathological Positivity. If you
don't, I'm going to buy one for you and ship it to you if you cover
the shipping. Just go to drPaulJenkins.com. Big orange button, click on that.
Fill out your information. I'll get it right to you.