- Are there other ways to, like, hack into that?
And I'll throw you a curve ball,
but there's this concept of affirmations.
Ya know, what people say out loud every day,
what they are, with the hopes that they become that person.
Is this a way to, maybe, hack in to some
of this habit-forming stuff and
what are your thoughts on it?
- Yeah, so, affirmations or
visualisation or
the kind of idea of like it fake it 'til you make it,
I don't think there's anything wrong with those things.
There's nothing wrong with being more,
if you get to choose what story you tell yourself,
you might as well choose a positive one, right?
But I do think that my method differs a little bit
from positive affirmations or from fake it 'til you make it
in the following way.
So, fake it 'til you make it, is asking you
to believe something about yourself
without having evidence for it yet, right?
You say, "I'm a healthy person, I'm a healthy person,"
even though you haven't gone to the gym yet or whatever.
And we have a word for beliefs that don't have evidence.
We call it delusion, right?
Like at some point your brain doesn't like this mismatch
between what you're saying and what you're doing.
And, so, the only nuance, the difference in my argument
is that I think that we should
let the behaviour lead the way.
So let the behaviour drive the belief
rather than the belief drive the behaviour.
And, to be clear, it can work both ways.
And it does throughout daily life,
like people adopt a new belief
and then they take a new action because of it.
But I think that if you're trying to get yourself
to latch on to a new identity or
tell yourself a new story,
it's more powerful to let the behaviour lead the way
because the behaviour provides immediate evidence
that you are that kinda person.
So, if you say, "I'm a healthy person,"
you might be able to,
it's like a short-term strategy
and you might be able to amp yourself up
or motivate yourself in the moment.
But if you do five push-ups,
you immediately have proof, "I'm a person who works out."
And there's something about that evidence
that I think makes it easier for you
to root that new story in something.
It gives you a reason to actually hold onto it.
And, so, for that reason, I think it's more useful
to start with the small habits,
build up some evidence and proof of that new identity,
and then the more that you do that,
the bigger the pile of evidence becomes,
the more reason you have to actually believe,
"Hey, that is me."
- Yeah, maybe some combination of both or something.
When you were talkin' about the workin' out story,
I kept thinkin' of this Arnold Schwarzenegger quote
from the movie "Pumping Iron" when he was like,
he was like every rep I was smiling, he said,
'cause it was getting me one step closer to Mr. Olympia.
And then you look at him and you're like,
"Okay, I can see why Arnold would think that,"
but most people, every rep is pain
and they don't see it.
So is that a way of him, kind of,
hacking forward for future payouts?
- I think, um, I think that is similar
to what you mentioned earlier about, like,
oh, cigarettes are poison or the story about the bread,
like all carbs being unhealthy or whatever,
is that he was finding a different way,
he was developing a new meaning
for the same experience, right?
Usually it's the meaning you ascribe to that experience is
my muscles are burning, this is painful,
I'm not enjoying this, it requires sacrifice.
And he twisted that around to say this is great,
the pain means I'm growing, it means I'm moving forward,
I'm getting closer to my goal, and so on.
And I think there's something powerful about
good habits become easy habits
when you can learn to find joy
in delaying gratification, right?
And, so, he was finding a way to get pleasure
out of the process of putting in the work.
And that can be a really powerful motivator in the long run.
- Is that called reframing, kind of, when you.
- Yeah, yeah.
And I think that there's,
I thought about writing about this more,
I haven't written a tonne about it yet,
but I think that there are strategies
and a few different mindset reframes
that you can go through that can really change
the likelihood that you stick with the habit.
If you learn the right story to tell yourself,
it becomes easier to maintain that over the long run.
The tricky part is, I think it's really easy
for people to come up with, like,
total BS about what those stories should be,
and, like, you know, just kind of invent a bunch of stuff
that nobody can verify or check.
And, so, then we just say all these things that,
maybe, don't actually move the needle.
So I don't know much about that,
about the right way to do it,
but I think for sure there's a way
to tell yourself the right story
and it changes the way that you act in the long run.
- Yeah, but it also has to be, like, credible.
Otherwise, I think your subconscious
just gonna see BS comin' a mile away and is just like,
"Nah, you know, I don't think so."
And then maybe you revert back.
- And that's kinda my point about
let the behaviour lead the way rather than the belief.
Because, if it's not credible to yourself that,
"Oh, I'm a healthy person," then you look at yourself
in the mirror and you're like, "No, you're not."
You know, like you don't have any proof of that.
But it's like, well, I did five burpees today,
so today I was healthy.
Then you actually have reason to make that
be a credible story in your mind.
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