In her, 4-year term as a player for the women’s college soccer team at Principia College, Kim Bulter, emphasized learning to focus on two metrics. They were mindset and the ability to run and keep running.
The starting of the season was pretty rough and the team got destroyed by their opponents. Each loss took a little bit of motivation from them and broke them down little by little. The coach embraced a technique that he shared with his players.
“Okay, you’ve got 5 minutes to sulk” and he would start a timer on the bus as they headed back home. Then, he would start a 10-minute timer where the players had to talk about specific things that went well during the game.
Once the 10 minutes were over, another 20-minute timer was set where each player contributed about a specific good thing a different player did and once that ended there was no discussion about the game.
He was training them to focus on the positives and use the discussion to learn ways they could pre-plan for the next game.
This actually has a name in psychology called Implementation Intention.
It is a concept I learned a while ago which emphasizes focus on planning for the worst in order to perform your best. This can seem counterintuitive at first because it is asking you to think about the worst situations that can happen. It's so you can pre-plan for steps to take when those setbacks arise. This can be applied to many different areas of life. For example, let's say you're going on a diet, it's easy to start and say "I'm on a diet now" but what happens when the next enticing thing shows up.. you quickly break your promise and falter.
Instead, implementation intention would be to take some time to plan your response for these exact situations whether that includes eating candy, junk food, or whatever is your vice.
You are 100 percent disciplined to your existing set of habits - Gap and the Gain by Dan Sullivan, Benjamin Hardy
There are certain benefits that come with putting implementation intention to use. A sense of increased self-control when the environment around promotes lazy behavior, usually he bad one.
It helps take the guesswork out when you're suffering from decision fatigue and push to beat it. It is what it sounds like being tired from making choices and it most often comes when you have too many choices to make. The end of the day is the worst because you are physically just tired to choose and don't want to think about it.
Habits are most vulnerable to breaking down in such an environment. Again, the indecisiveness leads to choosing the easier option which turns out to be the negative one. Imagine just having planned in such cases what you're going to do and having a checklist or steps to follow without losing any more willpower.
Going back to another dieting example. Andy loves to eat chocolates. In fact, he loves to eat something sweet pretty much all the time. People have told him he might need to cut down his sugar intake but he doesn't seem to make any changes.
It wasn't until he gained 10 pounds when he finally paid more attention to his looks in the mirror. He realized he needed to make a change but when the time came to take action he succumbed to his choices. Another victim to decision fatigue strikes out.
Decision fatigue wins but we can change the response to be something different, something good. If you think about the sugar then you do 10 push-ups as the response.
Eventually, your response becomes practiced and a condition tied to something which over time leads the behavior to become a habit. Instead of consuming sugar, your mind wants to avoid the perceived pain of doing push-ups all the time so you start to wean off the old negative habit.
The goal is to create an environment that allows the healthier choices to be the easy one and by pre-planning (Implementation Intention) the desired behavior to happen when willpower is low.
I want to leave you with some questions to think about for your own environment.
What is one place you can change it slightly to make the healthier choice easier?
What is a pre-planned behavior you will change to when you're tired from making choices?
Thank you for taking the time to read this article. The support provides a chance for greater serendipity.
If you’d like to share this article → You can do that below.
If you found the newsletter valuable ☀️ then why not share it 👆with someone you know 📨.
Favorite Finds 🌱🌱
Ever wondered what to do with all those old photos? Now you can use GANs ( Generative Adversarial Networks) to recreate old photos using Deep Learning. A subset of machine learning which focuses on these types of applications goes way deeper and is too crazy to focus on a single post. This is a side-project of the authors and it’s pretty interesting to see how far image recognition has come through. You can easily test it out on your phone but I’ve noticed better results while using a laptop or desktop. Let me know if you tried it out.
P.S. Not every picture will work because no model is perfect and has flaws that eventually get improved on.
Research suggests we need at least 2 hours of sun each day. This was certainly something I wasn’t focusing on but after watching the video it really inspired me to make some kind of change. It presents the scary reality in a simple story and what are some ways we could take action to change. It’s about a 3-minute watch but leaves a lasting message.
One Quote 📖
Weekly Life Update 🎯
If you’re new on the journey, welcome aboard! 👋🏾 Have a great week! 📅 Let’s keep building! 🚀 ✨ Let’s be friends ✨