Finally Follow Through
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
181.40744
Summary
When you fail to act on your perennial plans for progress, you end up feeling frustrated, demoralized, and stuck. My guest is a clinical psychologist who has spent his career obsessed with how to tackle the stubborn issue of human existence. His name is Steves Levinson, and he s the co-author of Following Through, a revolutionary new model for finishing whatever you start.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast you get really
00:00:12.280
excited about an idea to start an exercise program or become a better partner or get organized and
00:00:17.600
then you do nothing absolutely nothing it's said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions
00:00:23.660
even if they don't send you straight to hades good intentions that go unfulfilled can lead
00:00:28.600
to real suffering when you fail to act on your perennial plans for progress you end up feeling
00:00:33.260
frustrated demoralized and stuck my guest is a clinical psychologist who has spent his career
00:00:38.600
obsessed with how to tackle the stubborn issue of human existence his name is steve levinson and he's
00:00:43.860
the co-author of following through a revolutionary new model for finishing whatever you start
00:00:48.800
steve first explains the unhelpful ideas we have about why we don't follow through and that its
00:00:54.060
real cause comes down to a tension between two different systems within us he then shares the
00:00:58.840
aha moment he had as to how to reconcile these systems in order to consistently follow through
00:01:03.200
on your intentions and offer strategies on how to put his follow-through method into practice
00:01:07.360
we end our conversation with the idea that the greatest strategy for increasing your follow-through
00:01:11.660
is treating your intentions with a seriousness that borders on the sacred after the show's over
00:01:17.160
check out our show notes at awem.is follow through steve levinson welcome to the show
00:01:36.740
well thank you so you co-authored a book called following through and it's about a problem that a lot
00:01:42.960
of people have we have good intentions but then we just don't follow through with it you're a clinical
00:01:48.400
psychologist and you've spent a lot of your time and career researching and writing about the problem
00:01:53.800
of poor follow-through and helping people who struggle with that what led you down that path
00:01:58.060
well when i began my career i worked at a medical center and spent day after day after day working with
00:02:08.000
and observing patients who didn't get better or didn't get better fast enough or got sick in the
00:02:14.100
first place because they failed to do things that they knew they should do and actually told themselves
00:02:20.740
that they would do and i was just struck by how much of the problems that people have in the realm of
00:02:27.640
health are caused by poor follow-through by just not doing what they intend to do and as i got fascinated
00:02:35.640
with this topic and i saw that there was relatively little research done on it i became interested in
00:02:42.920
the fact that people don't follow through in all areas of their life it's not just it's not just with
00:02:47.320
regard to health care that may be especially consequential but people don't follow through with
00:02:52.960
their good intentions when it comes to relationships they intend to be a better partner a better parent
00:02:59.520
a better child a better anything and they often don't do it despite the fact that they sincerely
00:03:05.500
intend to do it and i i was uh frankly puzzled and perplexed by why this topic which seems to affect
00:03:15.080
just about everyone in various ways didn't get more attention than it did get so i decided i was
00:03:22.320
going to make this my life's work this was going to be my contribution if you will to somehow shed some
00:03:28.620
light on why it is that we humans do such a lousy job of following through on our own good intentions
00:03:36.280
so you mentioned some of the problems that poor follow-through can have so in the health care
00:03:40.820
world i think people see that all the time they go to the doctor the doctor says hey you need to lose
00:03:45.460
some weight but they're like yeah i'm going to start exercising watch my diet but they don't do it
00:03:50.340
but i think we've seen in other parts of our life i think new year's resolutions are the perfect
00:03:55.280
example of poor follow-through we intend to do all these things but we don't and it it ends up hurting
00:04:01.240
us in the short term and in the long term exactly yeah it's just unbelievable the kind of chaos and
00:04:09.220
havoc that poor follow-through wreaks on our lives in every respect i mean just think about relationships
00:04:15.720
people all the time make promises to themselves that they're you know going to be a better partner
00:04:21.900
they're going to do this thing that will help their partner in some way and they just don't do it
00:04:27.780
they decide to improve their posture and they just don't do it they start off with a bang but they
00:04:34.240
fizzle out very quickly before the job is done in every sphere of life finances people intend to save
00:04:41.940
they intend to curb their spending to achieve various financial goals and often they just they just don't
00:04:48.240
do it so if in fact there was a pill that one could take that would enable them to immediately
00:04:54.880
and consistently follow through on all their good intentions it would have an amazing result on the
00:05:02.020
quality of that person's life so you start off your book following through by unpacking unhelpful
00:05:09.100
ideas about why we don't follow through with our intentions so oftentimes when we have a failure of
00:05:14.080
follow through we think well why did it happen and you in your research and just working with people
00:05:18.760
as well you found some common explanations people tell themselves as to why they didn't follow through
00:05:25.100
and the first one you talk about is the follow-through fairy tale explain that myth well the follow-through
00:05:33.040
fairy tale has to do with the fact that we believe something that just isn't true about follow-through we
00:05:39.260
believe that if we have a good intention if we're truly motivated to make some kind of change to make
00:05:45.180
some kind of improvement to make some kind of adjustment and if we're motivated enough we'll do
00:05:50.760
it that's all it takes it's just automatic if we're convinced that we should do it we'll do it and that's
00:05:57.220
very appealing and it's very logical unfortunately it's a fairy tale it's just not true it doesn't work
00:06:03.540
that way we have a very complicated frankly messed up system for dealing with intentions that just
00:06:11.180
doesn't produce that kind of result it isn't automatic it's not automatic that if you intend to do
00:06:17.140
something even if you're highly motivated that you will necessarily do it so we are suckers for logic
00:06:24.680
frankly we humans always assume that things will be logical and it makes perfectly good sense frankly
00:06:31.560
to assume that if we use our intelligence to figure out what we should do we would just do it i mean
00:06:39.240
why wouldn't we but unfortunately logic does not prevail in this case we don't do what we intend to do we
00:06:46.080
often do more what we feel like doing okay so the fairy tale is just because we think something's good
00:06:53.020
we intend to do something good we should just naturally want to do it and even uh you point out like even
00:06:58.020
when those good things are easy doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna follow through with like i think
00:07:02.660
flossing is a perfect example like what's so hard about flossing we know it's good for your teeth but
00:07:08.600
when people intend that they don't do it they still don't do it they don't do it and it is amazing it's
00:07:13.520
been amazing to me and i'm no exception to the rule how easy something can be to do and we still won't do
00:07:20.800
it we still won't follow through there is something about the way the mind is designed the way the human
00:07:27.300
mind is designed and i'm sure i'll get into more of that later that makes it very very difficult to do
00:07:33.860
even the easiest thing consistently and enough to actually create a self-sustaining habit so the next
00:07:41.800
unhelpful theory that people fall to when they fail on their intention putting to action their intentions
00:07:47.200
so i think well okay i intend this good thing it's easy to do i didn't do it therefore it means
00:07:53.380
that i have no willpower and you call this the it must be me theory walk us through that theory
00:07:58.880
well the it must be me theory is just a it just follows from the follow-through fairy tale if in
00:08:06.040
fact it's logical that if you intend to do something you'll do it if you don't do it it's obviously your
00:08:12.180
own damn fault and that's what people do they blame themselves for poor follow-through and from
00:08:19.040
my own research study immersion obsession with making sense of why people do such a lousy job of
00:08:26.540
following through i came to the conclusion and i'm utterly convinced of this that it's not our fault
00:08:32.660
that it's actually the fault of the way the mind is designed to treat good intentions we have a very
00:08:39.780
mixed up system well so let's talk about this system you've been alluding to this so what is it
00:08:45.820
about the system in our mind that often prevents us from following through on the good intentions that
00:08:53.340
we have well it's somewhat complicated but if you look at us from an evolutionary standpoint we are the
00:09:00.220
crowning achievement of evolution we have a system an extremely sophisticated system which is based on
00:09:06.880
intelligence to guide us through life to make decisions big decisions little decisions and all
00:09:12.540
kinds of decisions in between big and little as to what's in our best interest should we do this should
00:09:17.600
we do that should we do the other thing we figure things out we know what we should do we hear from
00:09:23.160
other people what we should do we can collect advice from others who are collecting advice themselves
00:09:28.520
and so we're very good at figuring out what we should do of knowing what we should do but there's still a
00:09:37.440
primitive system in place that is shared by many other living things on this planet including single
00:09:43.840
cell organisms that causes us to automatically move in the direction of the least amount of pain and the
00:09:52.140
most amount of pleasure that's what we do we're we're kind of automatically inclined to do what we
00:09:59.100
feel like doing and not do what we don't feel like doing even though at the same time we're intellectually
00:10:05.400
capable in fact incredibly talented at figuring out what we should do the problem is that when we figure
00:10:12.360
out what we should do it's often at odds with what we feel like doing and what we feel like doing has an
00:10:18.900
advantage because it's automatic whereas figuring things out is manual and you call these two systems
00:10:25.620
the system that guides us by our reason you call the intelligence guidance system and then the one
00:10:31.600
based in evolution you call the primitive guidance system correct correct yes and the primitive guidance
00:10:38.160
system i mean to me it seems like mother nature sort of chickened out when she was you know making plans
00:10:45.680
to install this incredibly sophisticated intelligence based system she thought at the last minute you
00:10:53.180
know what maybe i better not disconnect the primitive system that everyone else has that all other
00:10:59.060
species have i'll just leave it in place without realizing that leaving the two systems in place
00:11:06.360
causes conflict over and over again not just once in a while but many times every day every day
00:11:13.460
people have essentially a war between what they intend to do what they intelligently decide what
00:11:21.080
they intelligently conclude they should do and what on the other hand their primitive guidance system
00:11:26.780
urges them to do based on how they feel yeah there's lots of examples that happens on a day-to-day basis
00:11:33.180
like let's say someone intends to eat better well that's a reasonable intention because it'll help their
00:11:38.460
health etc etc but then they see the potato chips and their primitive guidance system says
00:11:43.380
well carbs and fat you need to eat that because that's good for survival and so you eat the carb fatty
00:11:49.420
potato chips the same thing with distraction well i need i'm going to spend my time just working on my
00:11:54.600
work and not being distracted by social media but the primitive guidance system loves novelty because
00:11:59.920
novelty can help you maybe find new resources that can help with survival or novelty could be a danger a
00:12:07.180
threat so we're just cued into novelty and so we have this intention to work on a document but then
00:12:14.560
that pgs says now let's look at this new shiny thing on facebook exactly exactly and this is constant
00:12:21.960
it's not just once in a while it's constant and we're stuck with these conflicting systems that
00:12:29.080
coexist but don't cooperate and often the instructions they give are at odds with one another
00:12:34.640
and unfortunately the primitive guidance system has the edge because again it works automatically
00:12:41.620
we automatically know what we want we automatically feel things we don't automatically come to
00:12:49.280
conclusions and we don't automatically have those conclusions actually control our behavior in fact
00:12:55.420
our behavior is controlled more often than not by how we feel and not by what we decide this reminds
00:13:02.740
me of daniel kahneman's idea of like brain one brain two like thinking fast thinking slow same same
00:13:08.620
sort of idea both of them are useful in certain situations but they can often work at crosshairs
00:13:13.120
against each other exactly exactly and they don't work together there's a possibility that coincidentally
00:13:19.440
they can but they don't deliberately work together there's nothing about the wiring
00:13:24.040
in place that guarantees that they will work together in our best interest often it's very
00:13:31.920
much the opposite i mean you decide you should do this it's really important and then you end up
00:13:37.480
doing that because the automatic primitive guidance system pushes you in that direction so how do we
00:13:44.100
resolve this tension between the primitive guidance systems and the intelligence guidance system
00:13:48.720
well many years ago when i was uh profoundly obsessed with this whole matter of why people don't follow
00:13:57.400
through and what i could do what kind of contribution could i make to helping people follow through better
00:14:02.680
i had this aha moment and the best way for me to describe it is is to give an example if you feel tired
00:14:10.900
and you intend to go to sleep you're in good shape because the feeling tired which is an expression
00:14:18.280
of your primitive guidance system happens to be in compliance with or in alignment with your intention
00:14:27.260
so when you feel when you automatically feel like doing what you also intelligently intend to do you're in
00:14:35.260
good shape because you have the power of the primitive guidance system pushing you to do exactly what your
00:14:42.720
intelligence based guidance system has advised you to do so if you're sleepy and you intend to sleep
00:14:49.180
you'll sleep if you're hungry and you intend to eat you'll eat the problem arises when those things are
00:14:55.520
not in alignment which is often so what i discovered or the path that i went down in my thinking was that
00:15:02.620
if we can figure out if we can essentially trick the primitive guidance system into wanting to do exactly what we
00:15:10.920
decide what we intend to do will be in good shape if you can make yourself feel hungry because you need
00:15:19.260
to eat that's good if you can make yourself not feel hungry because you don't want to eat that also is
00:15:25.480
good so it's a matter of tricking the primitive guidance system into wanting to do feeling like it needs to do
00:15:34.300
the same thing you intend to do this reminds me there's an analogy i've heard about our faculty
00:15:40.260
to reason and our emotional faculty and it's our emotional faculty is often like an elephant it's big
00:15:46.440
it's powerful and if you try to you know tell the elephant where to go through brute force you're going
00:15:54.240
to lose exactly and so what you need to be is you need to be like a rider on top of this elephant
00:15:59.380
and guide it gently with your intelligence but like you're letting the elephant it's not like you're
00:16:04.860
using brute force again i think it's kind of like you use the word trick but yeah i think that's what
00:16:08.540
you're kind of doing you're guiding this big giant elephant of emotion and desires that we have to do
00:16:13.760
the thing we want to do yeah brett the way you put that is is actually perfect we are at once the
00:16:19.860
elephant and the elephant trainer so through your research and your writing and you're working with
00:16:24.820
people on this problem of poor follow-through you've come up with different tactics tools techniques
00:16:29.940
that people can use to to get their primitive guidance system to line up with their intelligence
00:16:36.020
guidance system and the first one you talk about is called spotlighting what is spotlighting and how does
00:16:42.660
that help us follow through well spotlighting is is based on the observation that good intentions
00:16:49.600
only work when they're at the top of your mind plain and simple if you decide for example i always use
00:16:56.820
this example because i think most people can relate to it if you decide at 8 30 one morning that you
00:17:03.340
really need to improve your posture you think you would give a better impression to others you would
00:17:09.420
seem more alert you'd seem more engaged more involved it would just be good for you besides it being good
00:17:14.880
for your back so you're going to improve your posture that's what you've decided that's your
00:17:19.500
intention if you start that at 8 30 by 9 a.m if you're like most people you've forgotten about it
00:17:26.560
you'll remember if you happen to see someone who's slouching rather badly or if you slouch rather badly
00:17:32.580
enough that you notice it or you nearly fall off your chair or someone calls attention to it that's
00:17:38.700
fine that will bring the intention that sunk to the bottom of your mind up to the top again
00:17:43.980
and it will work for a while but on its own intentions no matter how important they are
00:17:49.900
they tend to sink to the bottom of the mind and they become useless so spotlighting is about using
00:17:56.960
prompts around you around cues reminders anything at all that will take a good intention that you have
00:18:04.140
and bring it to the top of your mind so for example people who intend to improve their posture for
00:18:10.140
whatever reason they can use a little reminder device that every 10 minutes sends them a private
00:18:16.220
signal that they have decided means i'm no slouch it says to you i'm no slouch i intend to sit up
00:18:24.840
straight to stand up tall that's important to me it just reminds them of what they already know
00:18:30.320
what they've already decided and that's all it takes to get them to actually make the change
00:18:36.120
improve their posture and if they do it often enough it will become a habit but without that
00:18:41.520
intentions just again they sit at the bottom of your mind and they don't do you any good at all
00:18:47.540
one example you gave in the book that i liked about spotlighting you were working with a guy
00:18:52.360
who had an anger issue at work when he would talk to his co-workers that he was in charge of he would
00:18:57.980
be really gruff with them and he knew it was a problem and he had all these intentions like i gotta do
00:19:01.740
better and he always failed and then you told him well is there a situation where you're you're not
00:19:06.860
gruff with people that you're leading and he was like yeah when i coached my kids little league team
00:19:11.220
like i'm really i remember that yes yeah i that means a lot to me to help these young men develop
00:19:17.100
their talents and to develop their capabilities and i i just i love that that's when i met my best
00:19:22.540
and what you had him do is like well put up reminders in your office about being a little
00:19:27.480
league baseball coach and that was his spotlighting he uh yeah he he went uh he went pretty far with
00:19:33.360
that and he he actually printed up little memo pads notepads with a bat and ball on it and used
00:19:41.340
baseball as a theme for everything he could possibly do so that he was immersed in it all the time and
00:19:46.860
it always made him think about that aspect of his identity where he behaved in accord with his
00:19:53.060
intention and he wanted to bring it over to areas where he wasn't behaving in accord with his
00:19:58.340
intention a key thing however is that you know a lot of people will put up motivational posters or
00:20:04.500
something and think that that will do the trick it won't because anything that's just static in your
00:20:10.080
environment will eventually fade to the background and it loses its ability to actually bring your
00:20:16.620
intention up from the bottom of your mind so you have to keep at it you have to keep coming up with
00:20:22.640
new prompts new cues new reminders that keep an intention alive and well and active at the top
00:20:29.460
of your mind we're gonna take a quick break for your words from our sponsors
00:20:32.920
and now back to the show all right so spotlighting is the first tool the next tool you talk about is
00:20:43.200
willpower leveraging what is that willpower leveraging is really important and it's at the core
00:20:50.280
of my whole program of my whole program or my whole system for improving the ability that people have
00:20:56.500
to follow through willpower leveraging is is well let's let's first talk about willpower willpower is
00:21:04.140
basically a measure of a person's ability to do something they believe they should do when they
00:21:10.920
don't feel like doing it or to resist doing something they do feel like doing when they feel like they
00:21:17.560
should resist it and it's like physical strength in many respects and it's especially like physical
00:21:25.240
strength in the sense that how much you can accomplish with the strength you have depends on
00:21:31.100
how you apply that strength so for example i always consider if you had to change a tire on your car
00:21:37.560
you would have enough physical strength to lift up the car if you apply the physical strength to a tool
00:21:44.800
that's designed to leverage your strength like a tire jack if you tried to lift up the car with your
00:21:51.940
own bare hands and then just set the bumper on your knee while you unscrew the lug bolts with your hand
00:21:58.440
that wouldn't work very well so you have enough strength if you apply it correctly you don't have enough
00:22:05.260
strength if you don't apply it correctly and the same is true with willpower for example someone who
00:22:12.080
doesn't have the willpower to resist eating their absolutely favorite food but a food that they've
00:22:18.980
put on the list of foods that they shouldn't be eating they could resist the temptation if they took
00:22:25.620
that food and put it in a safe somewhere behind armed guards in estonia or you know someplace very far
00:22:34.260
away where there there ain't no way they can get to it they would have enough willpower to resist it so willpower
00:22:42.400
leveraging is about using your willpower to take an action to take a step that actually causes you to require
00:22:50.980
less willpower going forward to follow through on your intention it would take less willpower to make a phone call
00:22:57.940
to have somebody come and take away a temptations than it would for you to have the temptation right in
00:23:03.740
your face every day and have to resist it so so that's what it's all about okay so it's using your
00:23:10.860
willpower to basically modify your environment exactly i think people this is often called an odysseus pact
00:23:16.400
right from the odyssey where when odysseus is about to go into the sirens he wanted to hear how the
00:23:22.460
sirens sounded but without going crazy so he had his crew time to the mast so he could hear and but
00:23:30.340
not go crazy so yeah sort of you're binding yourself preemptively so you don't have to worry about it
00:23:35.800
when you actually face the temptation correct you know often people have trouble with you know what i
00:23:41.420
refer to as follow-through hygiene practices that you can engage in that will improve your ability to
00:23:46.940
follow through because they feel like it's restricting their freedom who wants to be tied to a mast
00:23:51.540
right who wants to be locked in a cage who wants to be prevented from accessing something that you're
00:23:57.800
drawn to but to me freedom from failure is the highest order of freedom in my book that you can
00:24:05.140
ever achieve the ability to intelligently restrict yourself so that you're unable to do something that
00:24:12.120
violates your own important intention that to me is the ultimate form of freedom okay so different ways
00:24:18.180
you can do willpower leveraging that came to mind you mentioned uh if there's a snack that you like
00:24:22.700
to eat just get it out of your house is one thing get it out of your house yeah it takes less willpower
00:24:28.160
to do that than it does to have it stare in your face and call your name all day long some other
00:24:34.800
tactics i've seen say someone likes to check their smartphone a lot you can delete the apps that are the
00:24:40.320
most addicting for you or you can even set up things where you can't even access the apps or
00:24:45.100
there's apps that do this willpower leveraging like well you only you only get 30 minutes on instagram
00:24:50.780
and after you used your 30 minutes you're done other tactics i've seen with that you can turn
00:24:55.060
your screen gray apparently that makes the screen the smartphone less enticing money i think you talk
00:25:01.560
about in the book people who had uh problems with credit card debt they just got rid of their credit
00:25:06.520
cards if they weren't willing to do that i've heard people freeze their credit cards like in the
00:25:10.920
freezer um so if they ever needed it ice yeah it would it would take forever to get it that was
00:25:15.620
like a last minute emergency thing for their credit card right so all these people are are using
00:25:21.440
circumstances they're using their environment as an aid in following through they're making it harder
00:25:28.220
to do the wrong thing the thing that they don't intend to do and easier to do the thing that they do
00:25:33.540
intend to do again can i give you an example of my the co-author of uh following through pete grider
00:25:40.520
had a problem he and his wife had a problem they they wanted to get on an exercise regimen like many
00:25:46.540
people do and they thought the easiest way to do that is to buy an expensive piece of exercise equipment
00:25:52.480
which very quickly became a clothing hanger then they bought a more expensive piece of exercise
00:25:58.340
equipment thinking that they just hadn't spent enough and that became a clothing hanger also
00:26:02.900
so nothing worked and then they had a brilliant idea they would follow through by going to the humane
00:26:10.060
society and adopting a large dog that needed a lot of exercise and that was quite lovable and from
00:26:19.520
there on that was their exercise machine that worked because from then on every morning they would get up
00:26:26.380
when they used to think oh boy we should really get on that exercise bike or that treadmill or whatever
00:26:32.720
it was that they had at the time and they didn't really feel like it and ultimately they often
00:26:37.160
didn't now they had casey who was lovable and who had to go out and they cared about casey and they
00:26:44.600
cared about their carpet so they got up and they took him out whether it was raining or whether it was
00:26:49.360
snowing or it didn't it didn't make any difference they did what they had to do and he had to get
00:26:53.960
exercise so he got exercise so they took one step they took one step they adopted a dog
00:27:00.500
and it solved their problem with exercise whereas trying to solve the problem by relying on the right
00:27:07.760
reasons to exercise didn't work but going around and creating a change in their environment that would
00:27:15.800
push them that would make them feel like they had to do the very same thing that they intended to do
00:27:21.680
then they got the job done it's all about you're trying to line up the pgs with the igs that is
00:27:26.780
exactly what you're trying to do and this idea of willpower leveraging it made me think of this idea
00:27:31.360
of temptation bundling from the psychologist katie milkman and she has this idea same sort of thing
00:27:37.040
it's basically if there's something you don't like to do you bundle it with something you do like to do
00:27:42.520
and so the example she gave from her own personal life is she did not like exercise so what she did was
00:27:49.980
she said well i'll allow myself to watch my really trashy tv shows or read a trashy book that i really
00:27:57.480
really enjoy but only when i exercise and so she was able to actually exercise became this thing she
00:28:03.380
looked forward to because she got to watch her shows that she wanted to watch and read the books
00:28:07.120
she wanted to read so it's yeah tentational bundling so another thing if you're like your taxes for
00:28:11.980
example if you want to get your taxes done early instead of waiting to the last minute you could do
00:28:16.780
something like well i don't like doing my taxes no one likes doing their taxes but i'll allow myself
00:28:21.740
to eat you know some snack that i really really enjoy but it's not great for me but i'll allow
00:28:28.860
myself to do that so you're bundling something that yeah you're basically bundling that pgs like that
00:28:33.300
primitive guidance system with your igs yes again you're you're being the elephant trainer to your
00:28:39.960
elephant yeah can i give you yeah go ahead can i give you another example sure this there's my favorite
00:28:45.420
example of creative following through so this fellow had trouble like so many people have getting
00:28:52.660
into an exercise regimen he joined a fancy health club thought that would do it it didn't joined
00:28:59.900
another health club he thought that would do it it didn't and then he came up with this idea here's
00:29:05.160
what he did he decided that from now on he made a deal with himself from now on he said i will only own
00:29:11.560
one stick of underarm deodorant number one number two i will keep that underarm deodorant in my locker
00:29:19.760
at the gym so he would wake up every morning and he would feel like he did before he made this deal
00:29:26.620
with himself i don't really want to get up i don't really want to go to the health club i don't really
00:29:31.740
want to exercise but oh heck if i don't i'm going to stink all day and i don't want to stink all day
00:29:40.440
i'd rather go to the go to the health club so he would go to the health club use his deodorant
00:29:46.060
and would feel like a total idiot if he just used his deodorant and then snuck out went home because
00:29:51.140
everyone had greeted him and so he stayed there and he exercised so again he couldn't get something
00:29:57.540
done for all the right reasons he had so many reasons to stick with an exercise program so many
00:30:04.720
reasons good reasons excellent reasons real reasons they didn't work what did work was when
00:30:11.260
he created a bad reason a stupid reason a silly reason an irrelevant reason but one that moved him
00:30:18.740
and the key here is that what moves you moves you what doesn't doesn't if it doesn't work it doesn't
00:30:25.220
work and if it does work it does work it doesn't matter if it's silly if it's foolish if it's irrelevant
00:30:30.040
if it works it works and that's one of the things that people have to get used to if they're going
00:30:36.480
to become a follow-through champion okay so spotlighting keeping those intentions front of
00:30:41.360
mind is the first tool willpower leveraging the second tool and you said these are the two most
00:30:46.020
powerful tools to help you have more follow-through but you also list some other ones as well that can
00:30:51.220
help and one of them is the leading horse to water strategy what is that this is one of my my
00:30:57.480
favorite strategies that i've used a lot and i still use a lot and as i have before let me give
00:31:02.280
you an example because that's the best way to describe the strategy i had decided and again i
00:31:07.520
seem to be preoccupied with exercise today but i was going to start myself on an exercise routine
00:31:14.600
using an exercise bike that i had purchased and what i found was that the whole idea of exercising
00:31:22.560
sitting on a bike and pedaling for 20 minutes was it felt like it was an eternity and it was very
00:31:29.340
unpleasant and i did it and then i didn't want to do it the next day and i didn't want to do it the
00:31:35.160
day after that and i did it sometimes but not much and it was awful so i decided that i would lower the bar
00:31:43.860
in terms of what i was requiring myself to do so that i would have a chance to actually behave in
00:31:50.400
accord with my intention i would make my intention much easier so that i could behave in accord with
00:31:56.260
it and maybe build some momentum to get going and eventually do what i fully intended to do so here's
00:32:02.960
what i did i basically reformulated my good intention to getting dressed and sitting on the damn bike
00:32:10.140
and so i did that i did that every day but what i noticed was that as i was sitting on the damn bike
00:32:16.460
sometimes i figured well what the heck i'm sitting here anyway i might as well pedal i'd pedal a little
00:32:22.320
bit sometimes i pedaled a lot sometimes i pedaled 20 minutes and eventually what happened was i created
00:32:29.120
the shell of a habit so to speak i made a foundation for a habit of exercising every day without fail
00:32:38.120
and uh even though i didn't always exercise for 20 minutes the more i did this the more i did the more
00:32:45.760
i did exercise for 20 minutes and eventually it just became automatic i i did this years ago and now
00:32:52.160
i would never even consider for a moment not exercising it's just it's just now a habit and now it works on its
00:33:00.360
own so the key to leading the horse to water is to take away to sort of detoxify the task that you
00:33:10.640
intend to do to get all the things that make it avoidance worthy out of it and make a promise only
00:33:18.680
to do the parts that are easy that don't turn you off that don't repel you and to do that and just to
00:33:26.400
keep doing it without requiring you to do any any more at all not one iota more than the basic that
00:33:32.900
you've required until you actually build the foundation of a habit so the lead the horse strategy
00:33:40.120
is basically just make it as easy as possible just show up you just got to show up and show up
00:33:45.660
if you do the thing great if you don't no big deal that's fine just showing up is all you got to do
00:33:51.120
exactly because that allows you to do something that normally you don't do i talk about the avoidance
00:33:57.240
monster every time you feel like oh geez i don't want to do that that is the kiss of death for
00:34:03.640
following through so you want to you want to allow the avoidance monster to stay asleep so you want to
00:34:09.840
tiptoe around it and the way to tiptoe around it is to detoxify your intention to make it as as easy
00:34:17.340
as possible to do as much as you can to establish your intention so so that means you're not going
00:34:25.700
to do the whole thing but you're going to do part of it so that you pave the way to do the whole thing
00:34:31.460
another strategy you talk about is the right before wrong strategy what's that one well in a way it's
00:34:37.920
very similar because you with right before wrong you're doing the same kind of thing in that you're
00:34:43.080
trying not to wake up the avoidance monster which is again going to destroy your effort at following
00:34:48.980
through in right before wrong you essentially allow yourself to do the wrong thing as long as you do
00:34:56.380
the right thing first best example of this is if you're on a diet and you've sworn off donuts and
00:35:03.580
pastries that you make a deal with yourself that you'll eat an apple before you eat a donut or pastry so
00:35:11.200
you're not prohibited from doing the thing that you eventually intend not to do which is to eat
00:35:17.600
the donut but you're going to eat an apple first you can do the right thing before you do the wrong
00:35:22.920
thing and that makes it much easier to establish the pattern the habit of doing the right thing
00:35:29.100
because if right away you require yourself to stop doing the wrong thing that your pgs wants you to do
00:35:36.420
you're not going to make it you're going to fail so you say to your pgs i'll make you a deal you can
00:35:42.060
have your donuts but first i'm going to eat an apple and you can do that and then you'll establish
00:35:47.760
the pattern of doing the right thing often what happens when you use right before wrong is that by
00:35:53.220
doing the right thing consistently you no longer feel as much like doing the wrong thing right you
00:35:59.760
might just eventually find yourself craving apples and not having as much interest in donuts
00:36:04.960
yeah you eat the apple you might be full you don't want to eat a donut either exactly another
00:36:10.000
strategy you recommend people doing is striking while the iron is hot what's that strategy
00:36:15.060
striking while the iron hot is it's really more of a i would say an insight than a strategy but it's
00:36:21.960
based on the fact that when you have an intention that's born out of inspiration excitement enthusiasm
00:36:29.700
you better realize that that intention isn't going to last i call these intentions carbonated
00:36:35.840
intentions they're full of fizz but they also fizzle out very fast and go flat so an example was a
00:36:44.180
salesperson i worked with who went to a conference he had gone to many many conferences and workshops and
00:36:50.780
symposia before and usually he would hear some idea that he thought was practical and insanely positive
00:36:59.420
and would definitely work for him would improve his business increase his sales and and uh why wouldn't
00:37:05.820
he do it and by the time he got home from the conference he had pretty much forgotten about not
00:37:10.760
literally forgotten but he didn't do it he didn't implement these tactics well so he learned about this
00:37:17.120
strategy of striking while the iron is hot and when he heard of a strategy for improving sales
00:37:24.360
that involved making appointments with his clients to get feedback from them about his services he thought
00:37:31.720
this is a great idea i'm going to do it but this time instead of just saying i'm going to do it and
00:37:37.160
waiting to get home and not do it he immediately called his assistant told her about it and told her to
00:37:43.160
call his clients and set up appointments right now so the appointments will be scheduled when he gets
00:37:48.500
back and he followed through so the key to striking while the iron is hot is to do something anything
00:37:56.640
that's in the direction of implementing your intention at the time that you form the intention
00:38:02.560
because otherwise you might as well just kiss it goodbye if it's a carbonated intention it probably
00:38:08.640
won't last it won't last a day two days three days it's it's just not going to make it so you want
00:38:15.140
to get something in motion right away and that motion will help you get in motion the rest of it
00:38:21.720
to implement it well and another thing you recommend too besides these other strategies is when you make
00:38:27.160
an intention make it you got to make it a very serious matter i think oftentimes we make intention we do
00:38:32.680
kind of flip and like oh that'd be great but you said you actually need to make these things
00:38:36.320
have some moral weight to them so what does that look like and how does it help us follow through
00:38:40.740
well that's you know if someone asked me well what is the single thing i can do i you know appreciate
00:38:46.440
all these strategies and you know i'm sure they would work but you know i'm not really interested
00:38:51.040
in that what's the simplest single thing that i can do to be better at following through than i am now
00:38:58.160
i would say it's to take your good intentions seriously and what i mean by that is that
00:39:04.980
to consider a good intention to be a solemn promise that you make to yourself you make
00:39:11.520
promises to other people all the time and if you don't keep them your promises they lose clout
00:39:18.140
they lose credibility they lose their effectiveness and the same thing is true with promises you make
00:39:23.980
to yourself when you form a good intention you're making a promise a solemn promise to behave in a certain
00:39:30.460
way so you have to take that seriously you shouldn't just lightly make the promise it's not
00:39:35.400
just you know oh boy you know it would be good if i did this or if it would be good if i did that
00:39:40.240
that's not good enough can you actually do it will you actually do it do you have the resources you need
00:39:46.880
to do it are you prepared to make the sacrifices you need to make to do it and only after vetting
00:39:53.500
a potential intention should it be adopted now that means that you probably will adopt fewer intentions
00:40:00.140
than you normally do than you do before you take your intentions seriously seriously but that's a good
00:40:07.800
thing because we adopt too many attentions we treat them as if they're a dime a dozen and frankly when
00:40:13.680
you treat them as if they're a dime a dozen that's about what they're worth they have they just don't
00:40:18.400
have clout they're just not effective so the more careful we are about adopting an intention and the
00:40:24.640
more we treat it like the solemn promise that it is the more likely we are to behave in accord with
00:40:31.240
them and you make this analogy i like the live like you should date intentions and then when you're
00:40:36.220
ready to commit like then you marry the intention right when you date somebody you're kind of figuring
00:40:40.300
out are we compatible is this someone that i like i get along with and so there's a flexibility
00:40:44.860
there if it doesn't work out you can just okay it's not working out we move on to someone else
00:40:49.760
uh but when you finally marry somebody that's a big deal you can't do that anymore you're with this
00:40:55.160
person uh for better or for worse yes and i'm a clinical psychologist so i think about mental health
00:41:01.660
and i think about general happiness satisfaction in life to me there is nothing more unsatisfying in
00:41:09.720
life and nothing more that drags people down in terms of their outlook and their attitude than
00:41:16.180
hauling around a whole bunch of intentions that they're not behaving in accord with so one of the
00:41:24.200
things that i recommend which is somewhat controversial to go a little further with the marriage analogy
00:41:29.960
is that if you've adopted an intention and it's not going anywhere you're just not doing anything
00:41:35.200
with it for crying out loud just divorce it get rid of it don't haul it around with you as a reminder
00:41:41.940
of how you're not following through just make an announcement to yourself if you have to make it to
00:41:48.560
other people that you no longer intend to do xyz it's just not workable maybe some other day but for
00:41:55.980
now get rid of it this idea of taking your intention seriously reminds me of some research that a group
00:42:01.280
of psychologists did at mac ewan university in alberta canada and we wrote about this i will link
00:42:07.820
to it in the show notes but they talked about how gandhi and this guy he's a prussian prince from the
00:42:13.940
19th century named herman von puckler muskow they had this idea of unbreakable intentions you know
00:42:20.700
gandhi when he made an intention he called it a vow and puckler muskow he called it a grand expedient
00:42:26.800
and they both thought if i break this thing it was a blight to my character i mean this is what
00:42:32.380
muskow said if i were capable of breaking it after such mature consideration i should lose all respect
00:42:39.980
for myself and what man of sense would not prefer death to such an alternative so he took this really
00:42:46.920
serious like it was like a sense of like i mean it was like existential for him to keep i like his
00:42:51.340
thinking these intentions he had for himself and he said that like he only made an intention after he
00:42:55.560
thought about it a long time and then only then he would make it and then once he did it's like this
00:43:00.240
is life or death here that i keep this and i'm sure his follow-through record was outstanding because
00:43:06.240
he took his intentions truly seriously you know just to illustrate how important this is most of the
00:43:13.660
time we're full of baloney when we make an intention for for example we can decide where okay i'm going
00:43:21.600
to work on this report that i've been putting off because it's very unpleasant i'm going to work on
00:43:26.600
it this afternoon okay so we make that promise it seems like a sincere promise but it's not a sincere
00:43:33.080
promise and here's the way to test how sincere it is would you give up your new car if you didn't do
00:43:40.300
that would you give up your firstborn child would you give someone the deed to your house if you don't do
00:43:47.520
what you intend to do and most people would be horrified if asked those questions of course i'm
00:43:51.960
not going to do that i'm not going to risk my car my house my firstborn i'm not going to do that
00:43:56.320
well then the truth is if you won't then you're not really serious about what you intend to do
00:44:03.400
and most people are not serious about what they intend to do and that's why their intentions don't
00:44:10.060
work very well okay it's taking intention seriously and i guess you also talk about in the book
00:44:14.720
what tactic you use or how you're gonna implement these tools it's going to vary from person to
00:44:20.140
person it's going to vary from maybe task to task like maybe some tasks you'll use the you know lead
00:44:26.760
the horse to water strategy another one you might use the right before wrong strategy it's going to
00:44:31.780
take experimentation and some flexibility as you try to figure this stuff out yes yes and what you know
00:44:38.540
what i offer is a toolkit not instructions on when to use the hammer when to use the screwdriver when
00:44:44.700
to use the pliers it takes experimenting and the key thing is to be honest about what works and what
00:44:51.320
doesn't work if it works it doesn't matter if it doesn't make sense doesn't seem logical doesn't seem
00:44:56.400
appealing it doesn't matter if it works it works if it doesn't work it doesn't work do more of what
00:45:01.480
works do less of what doesn't work i always recommend that people start out with gentle strategies but
00:45:08.160
if gentle doesn't work don't hesitate to take out the explosives you have to follow through and you
00:45:14.740
can follow through on virtually anything that you want if you're willing to take out the explosives
00:45:20.500
well steve this has been a great conversation where can people go to learn more about the book in your
00:45:24.920
work well they can learn about following through at amazon it's available at amazon and the audio version
00:45:31.680
of it is available at audible and also right now i've got a i've created a website with a colleague
00:45:38.300
of mine called following through.org which is dedicated to helping people do a better job of following
00:45:44.940
through fantastic well steve levinson thanks for time it's been a pleasure thank you brett my pleasure
00:45:50.220
my guest today was steve levinson he's the co-author of the book following through a revolutionary
00:45:54.900
new model for finishing whatever you start it's available on amazon.com you can find more information
00:45:59.460
about his work at his website follow through.org also check out our show notes at aom.is
00:46:04.340
slash follow through where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic
00:46:07.820
well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast make sure to check out our website at
00:46:18.800
artofmanless.com where you find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles written over the
00:46:22.820
years about pretty much anything you think of and if you'd like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the
00:46:26.300
aom podcast you can do so on stitcher premium head over to stitcherpremium.com sign up use code
00:46:30.580
manless to check out for a free month trial once you're signed up download the stitcher app on
00:46:34.200
android ios and you start enjoying ad-free episodes of the aom podcast and if you haven't done so
00:46:38.440
already i'd appreciate if you take one minute to give you a review not the podcast or spotify
00:46:41.520
helps out a lot and if you've done that already thank you please consider sharing the show with a
00:46:45.580
friend or family member who you think would get something out of it as always thank you for the
00:46:49.460
continued support until next time it's brett mckay reminding you to not listen to the aom podcast