Hi everybody Dr. Cobb back with you this week.
Hope you’re having a fantastic week.
This week, I want to get back to our discussion of habits, and habits change, and habit can impact your life.
I want to start off this week by telling you a little story. Years ago, during a combatives course with Tony Blauer who’s one of my mentors and teachers for a long time. He said something that stuck with me ever since.
He was talking about watching a boxing match, and you can apply this to a boxing match, or MMA, or any kind of combat sport. He said, you know what’s really interesting to me, because people are always fascinated by the knockout punch, if it was a hook or an uppercut, or whatever that knock the other guy out.
Most people forget are the hundreds of punches that set that up. The thousands of hours of training, that the boxer who knocked the other one out, and had to go through in order to get to that point. What he was just basically trying to bring up was that it is the mastery of basics, the mastery of elite habit formation that actually leads to long term success.
What prompted me to think of that story, is I was reading a little bit this week, and some of you maybe a familiar with a gentleman named Seth Godin.
He’s one of my favorite authors, he writes some really interesting stuff. I printed out one of his quotes this week, to put up in my office. It says your audacious life goals are fabulous, we’re proud of you for having them. But, it’s possible that those goals are designed to distract you from the thing that’s really frightening you, the shift in daily habits that would mean a reinvention of how you see yourself. Now, it’s kind of an interesting phrase, and interesting thought for me.
Because I like goals, I like thinking about outcomes, but if I put this in the context of the boxing match, remember that the knockout is the outcome. That’s the thing that everyone gets excited about, I want to be able to do that. But, the ability to knockout your opponent, your ability to lose weight, your ability to start an exercise program. Your ability to stick with the Vision Gym so that you’re working on all these different skills to improve your vision.
Anything that you’re trying to do to better yourself, you really want to consider thinking about it in terms of process and not results. The knockout is the result; the process is all the training that led up to it. One of the things that I would love for you to continue to consider this week is how can you instill simple habits in your life. Simple, what some people say keystone habits, or call keystone habits, in your life.
Habits that everything else will begin to flow from. For me, one of the most important things I’ve done since the start of the year, as I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, is I’m using my rubber band reminders of the things I want to do on a daily basis, or on a hourly basis, that’s number one. Number two, our text message exercise program that I’ve been talking about in previous blogs, has also been tremendous for me.
My level of energy, my level of activity has gone up, and these are just useful scientifically researched ideas that if we can plug a new habit into something that happens to us in our daily lives on a regular basis; we’re going to do a lot better than instilling it, and maintaining it. It is from our habits that our future life will be built. What I’m encourage you to do this week is if you want to lose 20 pounds, let’s forget about the whole process of being losing 20 pounds and just work on the simple habit of maybe putting your fork down between bites at every meal.
Make it small; make it reproducible… something that you can depend on so that over the course of the coming year as you acquire better and better and greater numbers of great habits, you have systems in place, that are going to propel your life in the direction you want it to go. That’s my encouragement to you this week, think about the process and not the results. Goals help you know what you want but it’s really the habit formation that will get you there. Once you have your goal in mind, forget about it for a while.
Spend three or four months building the habits that lead to it. I promise you amazing things can happen in your life.
Have a fantastic week; let us know if we can help you with anything.
Thanks.
