7 key practices to help you achieve your toughest, most important goals. Part 2
By Craig Weller, CPT, US Navy SWCC
4). Use behavior to change negative feelings: One way to deal with negative feelings—which will inevitably come up when pursuing a challenging goal—is to put behavior first. Over time, this allows us to have more control over how we approach any situation. In special operations selection, we used the phrase “quit tomorrow.” When we had particularly bad days, we would tell one another (or ourselves) that we’d just finish out the day. Tomorrow, we could be done with it all and never have to do burpees while soaked in saltwater and covered in sand again.
Inevitably, the next day would come. We’d realize the low point the day before wasn’t that bad, and we’d keep going. In the long run, this took advantage of a phenomenon called self-herding. Self-herding is forming a new behavioral habit by subconsciously referring to what you did in the past under similar circumstances. By not quitting in our low moments, we built a habit of finding a way to keep going whenever things got really bad. Over time, the urge to quit faded because we repeatedly reinforced that bad days still meant that we’d be okay.
Our choices don’t just reveal our preferences. They shape them. If you’re applying this to your own habits, it’s the same process. When you hit a low point, promise yourself you can quit tomorrow. After this workout. After this last round of meal prep. After this section or chapter or lesson. Over time, you’ll reinforce the decision and action to “do the thing that’s good for me right now,” and it’ll shape your future impulses and preferences.
5). Find meaning in being uncomfortable: The Latin root of the word passion is patior, which means to suffer or endure. This is where phrases like The Passion of the Christ got their name. Eventually, the word came to mean not just the suffering itself, but the thing that sustains you while suffering. When we think of people who consistently overcome hardships in order to achieve a big goal, patior is what we see, and it’s easy for us to mistake patior for motivation.
It’s not that these people feel like making small daily sacrifices and trading short-term comfort for long-term happiness. It’s that they have a purpose for doing so. Their suffering has meaning. In order to keep working towards something big, this purpose needs to be a frequent, daily presence in your mind.
In Okinawa, where people have the longest, healthiest lifespans in the world, they call this ikigai: Their reason for living. When surveyed, most Okinawans know their ikigai immediately, just as clearly as you know what you had for lunch. The ikigai of one 102-year-old karate master was to teach his martial art. For a 100-year-old fisherman, it was bringing fish back to his family three days a week. A 102-year-old woman named spending time with her great-great-grand daughter as her ikigai.
This is different from the deepest reason I will describe later on. That deep reason is something rooted in your past, that helps to drive you forward and, as the ancient Greeks used to say, “live as though all of your ancestors were living again through you.” Your ikigai is more about being and becoming. It’s present and future. It’s defining, through your actions, the words that you might put on your tombstone.
6). Use low moments to your advantage: When we experience something that disturbs our equilibrium, such as a tough workout or a bad day at work, a subconscious part of our mind rapidly assesses two things:
Do I know what’s happening?
Do I have what it takes to cope with it?
Our perception of both are derived from experience. The more things we throw ourselves into, whether we succeed or fail, the broader our experiences to refer to when assessing future stressors.
As years of varied experiences accumulate, we can begin to formulate a universal lesson: No matter how many bad things you went through in the past, you were still alive when they were over. This isn’t something you consciously decide. It’s something you teach a deeper part of your brain through practice.
The next time you crash and burn or feel like you keep getting knocked down, remember that even failure provides an opportunity. It’s an earned experience that helps create a more accurate and effective stress appraisal in the future. At some point, your mind will know that you’ve been there, done that—even when you’re in the middle of something awful. You can calmly and rationally move forward with the benefit of hard-earned knowledge.
7). Have a deeper reason: When I had my lowest points in training, I fell back to a mental image of my Dad’s snow boots sitting by our front door. Growing up, we had two cars. My mom was a paramedic and needed one of them. My dad chose to walk to work in the snow every morning so my siblings and I could use the other car to get to school. The mental image of his snow boots represented the countless little sacrifices my parents made for me over the years. Knowing all these sacrifices gave me a deep reason to persevere: I didn’t ever want to have to tell my parents I’d given up.
A deeper reason is the fail-safe that keeps you going when you’ve got nothing else left in your tank.
This mental image has to be uncomplicated, because when you’re hitting rock-bottom from stress, you won’t have the capacity to sort through complex, abstract concepts. You need one image that cuts directly to your core, no matter how tired you are. There’s no surefire way to find that image. Each of our inner worlds is too complicated for this to be an easy exercise. But for a place to start, ask yourself: When you have your biggest successes or failures, who do you want to talk to about them? Why? Think back to a time when someone truly cared about and helped you. Imagine that person watching you in one of your most difficult moments. What do you want them to see?
To summarize, using these 7 concepts, no matter what happens, you can move forward and make progress on any given day. That progress, even if small, actually feels good and can be enough to keep you going… until the next day. This is how you achieve great things—day by day.
Yes, it might be a long, slow, hard journey. But when we look back on our lives, what we remember most will be the things that were worth struggling for—and the way it felt to earn our happiness. Hopefully, this dialogue will help you realize that, if anything, motivation is an outcome, not a starting gun. You can’t control motivation. It can’t be directly pursued.
What you can control is the series of factors that underpin motivation. Just knowing this can help you. Stop waiting for a green light to get started and realize that, even if it’s hard, taking action gets you closer to your goal(s). Also, understand that doing the right thing in the moment is totally within your control.
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