Fake it until you make it

My son is a chiropractor.

Before he qualified as a chiropractor, I guess I felt the same way as most other people about my health: I need to exercise, watch my diet and avoid harmful substances: if I feel ill, I’d take a pill or visit the doctor.

I’ve never been particularly unhealthy or super-healthy: just ‘normal’!

But, having listened to my son’s public talks on health, and now having sessions with him on a regular basis, I’ve started to see things differently.

If we REALLY look after our body, heart and mind, then they’ll look after us.

I.e.

  • Body: we’re renewing BILLIONS of cells every day: so good diet is not just a good idea, it’s a vital building block of health. And exercise directly affects all our internal organs and promotes vitality.
  • Heart: how we feel and think directly affects how our biology works (yes, there is direct proof of this), so we need to pay careful attention to our thoughts.
  • Mind: the more we know, the more we know we don’t know (to quote Socrates), so we need to keep asking and learning … and trying to apply what we’ve learnt.

And there is the nub of the problem:

  • Trying to apply what we’ve learnt.

We all know what we need to start doing more or less of, in order to proceed effectively down the path of better health, wealth and happiness. And we’re always learning more.

But actually changing our habits and doing things differently is a harder kettle of fish altogether.

This is because our subconscious is super powerful: it controls 95% of our actions and was hard wired into us in the first 6 years of our lives.

So we subconsciously act in ways that are pre-programmed by our subconscious.

  • If we have been programmed with ‘You’re lazy’, we’ll probably find it hard to be motivated.
  • If it’s ‘disorganised’, then we’ll forever be mucking up our personal organisation.

It may of course be very positive and empowering – some people were lucky enough to have had an enlightened and empowering childhood – but mostly it’s likely to be full of negatives and ‘you must not’s.

So, if we want to try and apply what we’ve learnt, and start developing new habits that are more effective and get us better results in less time, it’s very likely that this is going to be hard work: we need to de-programme our previous sub conscious ‘limiting’ beliefs before we can start to re-programme and develop the new habits.

That’s why we so often fail: the old habits are just too strong.

So, what can we, in reality do about this?

… (Bearing mind we’re already snowed under, stressed and struggling just to cope with the day to day for much of our time) …

On researching this, I’ve learnt that there are two ways to do this.

  1. Hypnosis (which, incidentally, is the state of brain consciousness we were in between the age of 0 to 6), or
  2. Constant repetition of small steps (which is how we learnt to do things like walk and talk).

So: if we want to try and apply what we’ve learnt and keep progressing on the path to ever more effective behaviour, producing ever more health, wealth and happiness, we need to adopt one of these two strategies.

Hypnosis or repetition.

I have been for hypnosis to change some destructive beliefs and issues in my life, but it seems to me that you can’t do this every week.

But you CAN do repetition every week.

All you need is:

  1. A common-sense system you believe in (like ‘Slow Selling’)
  2. Small steps (because large ones are just too hard and will make you want to give up)
  3. A simple system to ensure you keep up the repetition (like the ‘weekly compass plan’ and the ‘go the extra inch’ systems

(Which is why we’ve designed everything in Slow Selling’ to conform with these principles.

OK, that sounds good, so why, in reality, is it so hard to apply these simple, common-sense systems? Why do many people start a change and then stop? (See my previous blog on this called ‘Stop stopping’).

And it seems the answer is: because progress is slow, and when we start taking the different actions, they so often feel alien and uncomfortable.

So we stop doing them before they’ve had time to take effect.

So I asked my son, Joe, what his advice on this conundrum might be.

And his response was: ‘Fake it until you make it’.

By which he means: when you start changing an action (because you’ve learnt a new, more effective one than your previous ineffective habit), it seems fake: it takes effort, it feels unnatural and you don’t want to do it.

But if you keep doing it, fake it until you make it, then it’ll become continually easier, and, over time, you’ll see the results and start wondering how you ever managed to survive with your old habits.

It seems that ‘fake it until you make it’ is therefore a really helpful phrase and plan of action.

Fake it until you make it!

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