Procrastination is not the worst enemy when it comes to personal development and building the life of your dreams. Rather, forgetting, in its simplest form is your worst enemy.
For example, you decide you’re going to start exercising and eat a healthier diet to lose weight. Your motivation is strong, and there’s no doubt that you know exactly what you need to do to lose weight.
By the end of the first week you have made some progress in the form of better eating choices and consistent exercise. By the end of week two you begin to forget how powerful your motivation was when you started your diet and exercise plan.
You begin to get used to the idea of being on a diet and exercising, but in all the wrong ways. Instead of developing the habit, you simply stop remembering to go exercise.
It’s not that you stopped caring; it’s that you’re no longer intrigued with the concept of losing weight.
A few weeks or months later you have another experience that causes some sort of emotional pain due to being overweight. The cycle begins again.
The wave of motivation brings another temporary change in behavior but no lasting improvement in your quality of life. It’s not that you don’t care. It’s that you forget how much you care.
Is there a solution to this cycle of motivation and forgetting? Absolutely! But for the solution to work, you have to first admit to yourself that you have not yet learned to control your own behavior.
If you continue to assume that your mind will automatically follow through with whatever intentions and willpower you have at this moment, you will fail once again.
Here’s the challenge, start treating your own mind as a powerful tool that needs maintenance to keep functioning properly. Your mind is incredibly powerful and it should be the focus of any efforts you design for change in any area of your life.
If you do not start with your mind, all your knowledge, information, skills, and plans will result in only minor success relative to what you could have accomplished.
The first and most important step in learning to focus and control your mind is to monitor it. You want to observe your thoughts and motivations as they change over time.
If you want to lose weight by exercising and eating a better diet, start by monitoring your motivation and the degree to which you continue to think about maintaining the specific behaviors that will lead to your success in losing weight. You will fail to remember to follow through with maintaining your motivation and actions unless you use some form of log to track your progress.
A log is a point of leverage for controlling your mind. You simply get into the habit of rating yourself each day on the important points of change that you’re trying to bring about in your life. So you give yourself a rating on your overall motivation during the past twenty-four hours to stick with the changes you’ve decided on for losing weight.
One of the incredible advantages of using this method is that as you begin to notice your motivation decreasing, you can take immediate action to build your motivation up again.
Getting good at these two skills (monitoring and purposely tweaking your motivation and specific areas) will lead to more success in your life than any other effort. It will change your financial mastery, physical health, skill-development, and even your ability to change how you relate to people.
You can learn how to do both self-monitoring and self-motivation at an expert level by leveraging the information and training of the Life Modification system.
