“Man makes plans and god laughs.”
We’re a few days into 2023.
I unintentionally just gave myself a week’s holiday from the newsletter.
Many of us have ambitious projects going to plan. Others might already be making the odd guilty allowance or delaying starting. Plenty won’t have bothered because they are happy with their life or they know that trying and failing is no fun.
So I wanted to dig into reliability:
Where does it come from?
Why are we so reliable at some things and so bad at others?
Most importantly - can we encourage our reliable side to turn up in the areas we struggle with?
Nature and nurture of our unique strengths
We are all brilliantly unique and with that comes strengths and weaknesses. People who are spectacularly useless in some aspects of life have areas of high reliability.
Whenever you are reliable, it means you find it easy to spend time on this thing. Time that you could use to do anything else of course.
I am weirdly reliable at exercising.
A busy ‘time-poor’ millennial who somehow always has time to exercise. Like every day. I hate rest days and often accidentally go for a 10km run because it’s nice.
So why do I always exercise when so many people struggle and where does my reliable nature appear from when I struggle with so many other things?
Just to be clear - this blog is not about exercise but if you are trying to do more exercise right now it might help.
This is about why we can do something reliably and what we can learn from that element of our behaviour and take into other parts of our life.
You could very much do the same thing for a non-negotiable activity you always do to understand why and how you do it.
Priorities vs. Requirements
This brings us back to thinking about time and how we perceive it. For me, exercise is not a sacrifice of my time.
Exercise does not appear in my agenda of ‘possible things to do each day’.
Exercising is an omnipresent essential, like sleeping and eating. It is part of being me.
Sure, I don’t always hit my sleep goal or sit down to enjoy every meal mindfully. Yet I always do the minimum effective dose of sleeping and eating.
If the day is hectic, I will have less time for exercise, but there is always time.
Simply put - I exercise every day because it is not a priority, it is a requirement.
It does not fight for my time against other priorities because in my mind it transcends priority levels.
It is one of my core fundamental needs.
In fact, getting my exercise fix can impact my other responsibilities.
Essentially I am addicted…
So how did that happen?
Positive addictions
I always enjoyed adventure but I’d never choose to do something like running for the love of it. It was a slow process of positive feedback that slowly became ingrained in my psyche.
Now I enjoy exercise for an extensive list of reasons. Mainly these:
Makes me stronger and more capable:
I can carry excessive shopping/large furniture over distances or upstairs and importantly run for planes/trains without fear of dying or coughing up a lung.
The stronger you are, the lighter your body feels. The less the weight of the world weighs you down.
It makes fun things possible like adventures, world records and satisfying my curiosity to see how far I can push my body
Makes me healthier:
Reduces effects of ageing. (from your skin and bones to your mind)
Gives your immune system better odds.
It makes me look and feel better about myself and more confident.
Fun:
It’s time out - I find it genuinely relaxing and a place I go to for thinking and processing.
No expectations or judgement - anything I do for work or social media has a concept of quality or ‘good enough’. Exercise is what it is. I turn up and do my thing and no one gives a flying fuck except me.
Social - a great way to spend time with people. Hiking, running, sailing, dancing, boxing, gym, skiing and of course team sports. Some of my favourite memories with others involve exercise.
FOOD
You have to eat more!
Better energy:
Daytime energy - a workout pumps those hormones and keeps me going.
Reverses a slump - Even when I feel tired I know if I just start and just get through the first ten minutes of exercise the rest of the session will be great.
Better sleep - exhausting your body pushes it to rest properly, which also means your brain gets proper sleep.
This also has a feedback effect that if I don’t exercise my sleep can be worse making me afraid of not exercising.
Learning:
Books and podcasts can be in your ears keeping you interested and informed.
Many exercises improve motor skills and balance.
Seeing new places, new routes, new friends and new capabilities.
Positivity:
Hormone highs - Exercise blast genuinely makes your body chemistry happier.
Possibility - You are more likely to see the positive sides of possibilities whilst exercising (see the movement effect).
At least one win - If the rest of your day is a disaster you can at least feel positive about something and not feel guilty about the comfort food.
Rounding that up
So it satisfies me on both a short-term and a long-term outlook. I enjoy it in the moment and I enjoy the feeling of investing in my future.
When I have problems it helps me solve them and there is no worry of failure. In fact, I have a strong fear of not doing it.
The addiction is not just in my mind but also in my body. It feels restless and angsty like a dog bred for running miles each day that has been put in a cage.
It agitates me physically and mentally to sit down for too long.
I have very easy fallbacks which means I don’t need to sit around beating myself up for not exercising. It’s easier to just go do some.
The logic of exercising has become an emotional feeling for me.
I love it, feel I need it, and I fear not doing it.
How does this help???
Well hard and healthy habits usually aren’t fun straight away. Running sucks until your body is lighter than the strength of your running muscles.
Once you cross this threshold it magically starts to feel much easier and enjoyable. This doesn’t happen overnight.
What you need might are bigger running muscles or writing muscles or the ability to sit down and do your work muscles.
Whatever your goal is, it probably still requires a strong force of will to make you do it before it will start to feel easy or fun.
For me, it was signing up for my first triathlon that made me actually get up in the morning to train for my swimming and running. It added an external motivation to get through that painful hump against my weaker personal motivation.
Marathon Projects
Don’t rely on your crappy reliability to do your dream habit each day just because you want to be better at something.
Force a habit by setting a marathon project. Then add things to make it enjoyable.
A marathon where you raise money for a cause creates the necessity to have a training schedule you must stick to. You have many external reasons to stop you from looking like a failure in front of lots of people.
From there you can add things to make it fun. Training buddies with a coffee and cake afterwards, finding new routes to explore and listening to great books or music. Packing yourself some epic snacks is always a delight.
This applies anywhere.
If you want to write more:
Start a project to publish a 500-word minimum blog every day for a month or list your future book on amazon pre-sale so then you have to write and finish it.
Do things you enjoy like going to your favourite coffee shop or a different coffee shop or make your own shed in the garden. Join a writing group and share ideas and playlists.
Do it for your own interest: write about your fascinations, write to solve your problems, write to tell your story, write to be kind to yourself.
If you want to meditate more:
Do a full ten-day retreat. (details here - they are free)
Learn to laugh at your pain and smile at your problems. Remove yourself so far from the chaos of life that you can finally breathe.
Realise that 10 minutes of meditating a day is just a microsecond of your life and yet, even in this briefest pause, it is a sanctuary within which you can truly relax and know yourself.
Reliably unreliable no more
If you are unreliable at something, expect to continue to be very unreliable at it until you have a structure in place that makes it a non-negotiable.
For it to become a core part of your day as much as eating or sleeping there has to be a reason.
Create a greater purpose so that way it doesn’t fight with your other priorities.
It takes time for feedback functions to kick in like stronger muscles making it easy. So force the habit to happen until it is easy.
You know your why, but you need to force your how.
You know where you want to go but you haven’t created a path to follow. You are a dreamer and not yet a doer.
So you need to convince yourself it’s worth doing using some logic, writing down all the reasons it would be a great goal and picture your brilliant life afterwards. Then remove all responsibility from your unreliable motivation by committing to something you can’t back out of.
What now?
There are things in your life that you can do reliably, there is nothing wrong with you. You are not unreliable.
You just haven’t made it easy to be reliable. Motivation will not last when your physical state isn’t ready and your mental state doesn’t love what you're doing.
Do not enter battle without a plan or any weapons. So make both.
Decide your priority that you really want to transform into a requirement.
Write out all your reasons.
Picture your great life once you do this and really feel it.
Make a marathon project and add stakes, money, and external accountability.
Creatively come up with as many ways to make it fun.
Throw everything at it whilst not trying to achieve too much straight away.
Remind yourself of your goal and your path every day.
Resolve not to fail. If life messes up your plans one day, resolve to never fail two days in a row.
Build the mindset that it must be done.
Build the muscles that make it easy.
—
Michael Phelps didn’t win so many swimming medals because he loved competing. He won because he loved swimming.
For him, the competition days were the work he had to show up for so that he could enjoy the fun of training all day.
Being in the pool was home for him.
The goal is not the thing to enjoy, but the work to get there.
Make the work you need to do your home.
On the subject of food here is what I ate in one day of cycling.
On the subject of making training fun. This is Allison Vest a pro climber setting herself silly challenges to make mobility training more interesting.
“The concept of “play” has always been motivating and exciting to integrate into my training.
If my motivation is low to train on small edges, and I reframe it into “I wonder if I can do …”.
Today, a rest day, I was having a hard time getting motivated to do some mobility work, until I wondered to myself if I could roll from my front to my back to my front again with a book on every limb.
Might seem silly, but it gets me to the gym and can really jump-start or turn a session around.
Obviously, discipline is important, but so is play, and not taking yourself too seriously.”
- Allison Vest