Change Your Life Now: Two Skills You Can Implement Right Now, to Change the Quality of Your Life

Above you see highlighted what might be considered the core of behavior change.  To the left you have your instinctual, on the spot decisions.   To the right, you have something much more unique (although not exclusivey belonging) to the human race:  Intellect, planning, self awareness.   But in the center, that is where the true behavior change master focuses their initial effort.  By making it a habit to control each of these four elements, you gain two huge advantages:

1. You learn how to consciously and easily switch between the Instinctual and Thoughtful Mind, which both have their own distinctive advantages and disadvantages

2. You make acquiring productive behavior both easy (Principle of Least Effort) and rewarding (Profit of Action Principle).  

So what are these four area?

Logic- Making a habit of being able to think things through, and Plan.

Values- Making a habit of taking abroader moral perspective on things.

Emotion- Making a habit of knowing, expressing, and effectively dealing with your feelings.

Exercise- Making a habit of being aware of, taking care of, and using your body.

These all sound vague, but they break down to specific skills, all of which are scientifically validated,  which through the use of The Succes On Autopilot System, you can turn in to habits.

So bringing this back to down to earth, what are two skills I can give you right now, which, if turned into habits, would immediately help you out:

Cognitve Reappraisal

This is used to go from the Instinctual Short Term Brain to the more long term focused brain.  It's especiall useful to combat cravings and desires for bad habits.

1.Label: Turn your brain on, by consciously labeling the desire, and go a step further by judging it. "I want a cigarette... this is bad"

2.Bring your values into it, by tying the reason that you can't do it in with your beliefs and values about what's right and wrong.

3. Bring your long term planning mechanisms in, imagine the long term awful benifits of doing the behavior.

4.After 10-15 minutes, the craving or desire should fade.... now that your long term brain is involved, offending excitors no longer have the same weight.

Beware of moral disengagement as portrayed in the first example in the video above.  The course also goes over "Cognitive Restructing", the process of changing your values and rules to make them more consistent and productive.

Motivational Priming

This technique is used to go from the Thoughtful Mind to the Instinctual Mind, and bring you to a state of immediatet positive action, it's effective when trying to defeat procrastination of a positive behavior.

1.Take a deep breath, relax every muscle in your body, release tension.

2.Stop Labeling, become intensly aware of the sensations provided by surrounding stimuli, but do not try to put words or thoughts to them.

3.Perform an action (such as a specific movement) or expose yourself to a stimulus (such as the above video clip) which gets you into a motivational or determined state.

4. You won't be able to help but doing the action you were previously procrastinating.  

The key to this one is identifying stimuli or movements (which are stimuli in themselves) which can induce positive states within you.  One particularly helpful way to do this is to take a look in the mirror, or better yet, videotape yourself, when you are in these positive states.  Replicating the body language and facial expressions of a state will immediately bring you into that state.

The course also goes over how train new stimuli to specific states, and even how to take two or more states and combine them with one stimulus, creating "anchors" to the desired states.

I hope these help you guys in your quest to become more effective, productive, succesful, and integrous individuals.  As always, I'm interested in getting feedback on how they worked for you, or any questions you may have about the techniques.  Leave a comment, or shoot me an email at MagicMattG(at)Gmail.com and I'll get back to you as quick as possible.

Thanks,

Matt