If  Pavlina is right and I believe he is, then how do we build the habits that support our goals?

I believe it starts with Unreasonable Committment. 

What is Unreasonable Committment?  Unreasonable Committment is the strength to hold to a committment with teeth and toenails.  It is a particular strength of committment that won’t be denied.

Is there a simple high leverage habit that would change your world?  That is the kind of habit to focus on. 

If you are a parent it may be as simple as making sure the kitchen is clean each evening.  When you and your children are sprinting for school and work, mornings are best are hectic; at worst they deteriorate into screaming matches of “hurry up you’ll be late for school” or “you’re going to make me late for work.”  Tears and hard feelings are the best you can expect from these situations, and you are often late to boot. 

But, if you make an Unreasonable Committment to cleaning the kitchen before you go to sleep, each morning would start out from a do-able baseline.  You would be more cool headed, and if your kids are like mine when you remove the time pressure not only are they happier BUT they move faster. 

An Unreasonable Committment to a simple action can change the whole morning, and your child’s long-term memory of you.

What does Unreasonable Committment mean here?  It means that you do it.  You clean that silly kitchen whether you get in there  at 7 or at midnight.   It is simple, but it is hard.

 Perhaps you have a morning workout scheduled, but your boss calls with an emergency that doesn’t go well and your workout has to be ditched.  This time you took my advice and you wrote out the “backup rules” before you started your workout program.  You decided that if you had to skip your morning workout that you would get it in before bed.  Now, the evening is here and  you get seduced by TV, or the Drudgereport,  or checking email, and poof the time evaporates. It is now past midnight and your workout is still NOT done.

The Reasonable Man will talk to himself and say…its ok.  At least I got the email done, or I am up to speed on the news, or gosh I am tired and tomorrow will be a big day.  This Reasonable Man will talk himself out of taking the action that he needs to take.  He will tuck his tail between his legs and “bail.”  It is not reasonable to hit the weights, or to go out for a 3 mile run at 1 a.m. 

The Unreasonable Man (or woman) will say “ah shit!”  Then he will crank his lazy ass up and get it done.  This is Unreasonable Committment.

At this level  it is not the workout that is important.  It is the promise to self.   It is the character that we build by making and keeping our promises to ourselves.

The key here is Unreasonable Commitment.  When you look at those dishes or the running shoes or that weight set and the hour is late; the decision is not about clean dishes or getting your workout in.  The decision is about self respect. The decision is about your Character with a capital “C.” 

Now, I am not looking down at anyone here.  I have made the wrong choice plenty of times, just ask my poor wife.  She has seen me crawl into bed, tired and grumpy from having made the wrong choice.  In that moment she has seen me make the wrong choice again,  the choice to stay and sleep.  But, she has also seen me drag my sorry ass out of bed and out the door.  She knows that if I do, even with the loss of sleep, I will be much easier to live with the next day.  I will also be much more productive.

My advice is simple, ” get Unreasonable.”  Who cares if it is 1:00 a.m.?  Go make it happen.  Looking in the mirror will be easier.  Things will get done.  Good habits will get made. Change, positive change, will happen.

Decide to be Unreasonable with your next self project.  To decide means to cut off other options.  Decide.  Change one habit forward.  Change one that will matter.  Create habits that will build and move you forward into the person you want to be.  When that decision becomes a habit, you will have changed your Character.   Choose another habit.  Don’t reach for too many new habits at a time.  Remember the power of One.  One habit. One step at a time.

 (see  my articles the Power of One  and Time: Little Bits Add Up)

Adelaide Heinen Youngblood 1913 - 2009

July 20th, 2009

A beautiful and wise woman died today.  She was my wife’s great Aunt, and to us she was truly great.  She taught without knowing she taught.  Her lessons were simple.  She didn’t teach by pontificating, she taught by living with a gentle style and strength that lifted everyone who knew her.  She led by example.

I will never forget my last visit with her.  I had been pulled to Houston by the need to visit a friend having surgery at MD Anderson.  Sadly or wonderfully, his problem drew me there, and on the way out of town my wife prevailed upon me to visit Adie.

At 96 she was still living at home with the help of her son. Frail and tottering she met me at the back door. There was a small sign there. It said that back door friends are best.   That sign had been my first impression of her 16 years ago when she was a youngster of 80.

She opened that back door and greeted me with a hug, saying that she was so glad to see me and wasn’t I wonderful to take time out of my day to visit with her.  She mentioned that she was now fully blind, that her hearing was failing, and would I please sit right beside her on the couch so that she could hear me.  She paused for a moment after we sat down as she realized what she was doing.  It was an awkward pause… and there was never an awkward pause in her presence.  She said, “Ah, there I go complaining, silly me,” as if she was disgusted with herself.

In that moment she took my hand, seemingly hungry for human touch. I hugged her thin shoulders and told her, “Hey Adie, I understand. My mother went through this. You can talk to me.  Go ahead and complain a bit.  It’s ok.”

And so she did.  For the first time in the 16 years that I had known her, she complained. She told me  what it was like to be 96. Many of her dearest friends were long gone. Her health was failing. Her blindness meant she could no longer see those she loved, and hearing loss left her in fear of an increasing isolation. For three minutes she held forth without a pause and without interruption or comment from me.  The pain of being  in love with life yet feeling it slip away was palpable.

Then she stopped.  It was sudden.  After a short pause, she looked up with a mischievous smile and said, “Enough of my grumps, let’s talk about the good stuff.”

For the next three hours we talked about life, and work, and kids, and growing up.  I told story after story from our children’s lives; the five year old in-your-face girl athlete who has never met a stranger, and the ten year old precociously intellectual boy. She asked question after question, pulling information and stories from me that I had thought long forgotten. And still she gave better than she got. She told stories of her life, and her years, and her world.  Story after story tumbled out, hers and mine and ours.  They are faded a bit now, blended together. But what I remember clearly is the laughter.

It had been a brutal few years for our family; we had lost a beautiful home betting on a business, and then had lost the business.  We had given everything and now must re-build from almost nothing.  She knew all of this and more.  She understood the pain and the need to heal and grow and re-build.  She understood and helped me understand that a woman and a man would face this differently.  She didn’t lecture or analyze, but  she taught… and I listened.  Closely.

For three hours I took a Master’s class on living, and loving, and moving forward.  And laughing in the face of the pain and helping others to laugh.

For three hours, I sat beside her frail, failing body and let her lead us down a path of life and love and laughter. It was non-stop, no breaks, no pauses, just one story tumbling after the other.  Sometimes interrupting each other as close friends or family will with a completed sentence or thought.

Later as I drove away, I looked back in wonder.  At 96 she had been more alive in those three hours than most of us ever achieve. I also remember thinking:  That’s about the right ratio—three minutes of complaining, and three hours of love and laughter.

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At the end of the day most workouts work if you do. This weight set or that machine. This run or that bike ride. You can argue the relative merits all you want, but if you work at it, they pretty much all work.

That brings us to my 3 rules for the perfect workout.  Do it! Do it! Do it! And a bonus rule, Love it!

Do it is pretty simple, just go out and do it. Choose something easy for your age and fitness level. Yes, I will say that again very slowly.  Choose. Something. Easy. Choose to do it regularly. Choose a time that works for your life, your family, and your schedule.

Now pretend you’re Nike, kick your butt in gear and go do it.  Motivation is much easier if you know the task will be easy.  Much easier.  The immediate goal is simple.  It is not weight loss, nor fitness, nor even health.  The immediate goal is to create a new habit. A solid life-changing habit.

Perhaps you can barely jog to the corner.  Then go half way.  Make it easy. Do it again tomorrow. Are you sore on that second or third day?  That means you did too much.  Tomorrow, sit your butt down and for the exactly the same amount of time that it takes to do the workout, sit and visualize it fully and completely. (I will go through this process in detail in another article.) Then go out again on day 3 and do your workout.

Translate Do It, Do It, Do It into Habit, Habit, Habit.

You are not Michael Jordan or Serena Williams or Lance Armstrong.  Professional atheletes, especially the elite ones, long ago made the habit of working out. They do it smart and hard. If you are a pro athelete, you are not reading this article.  You are out there earning your paycheck.  You already have the discipline that comes from a deep long term habit. AND you have the  best coachs, trainers and nutritionists in the world to make sure you that you don’t do too little, nor too much.

Get over it, guys.  We are not pro atheletes.  The pros will smoke us at 20 and 30 and often at 40, but if you keep at it and if they get lazy after they retire, you can smoke them at 50, 60, 70 and beyond.

If you want to be a “Lifer” in fitness start at the habit level.  Otherwise, every plan and commitment you make will fall apart and eventually you will quit. Most people avoid pain when they can.  This “no pain, no gain’ thing is for the pros who get a paycheck for painfully pushing the ragged edge.  The rest of us need to focus on starting and NEVER stopping.

Your first job is to start the habit.  Your second job is to keep the habit. Forget that nonsense about it taking 21 days or one month to create a lifetime habit.  Bull.  It takes what it takes. Each kind of habit, and each person is different.

Focus on creating a LONG term habit, and to do that you must make it a habit that you enjoy.  Don’t batter your body; and don’t destroy your will and your self respect.  Take one step at a time and keep stepping.

Studies have shown that most people over-estimate what they can do in a day or a week or a month.   BUT the same studies show that most people radically under-estimate what they can do in a number of years.

Schedule it.  Then Do It. Congratulate yourself and then Do It again.  Sore?  Back off the work, but stay on the schedule.  Build the habit and the habit will build you.

Did you ever “pinky promise” when you were a kid? Do you remember what that is?  That’s when two friends link pinkie fingers, and promise.  In my school it was the girls who did the “pinky promise,” while most of us boys did some kind of pretend “blood oath.”  The specifics don’t matter now, but that promise was a serious thing.  

My point is that kids “get it.”  

 A promise is a promise; my 6 year old reminds me. Children know that a promise is something special, and they remember it.  (They remember it especially well when you make the promise to them.)

What then is a promise? Does it have value in the modern world?  What if you can’t trust the person making the promise?  What if that person is you?

 Let’s take that one at a time. A promise is a personal commitment to take, or to refrain from taking a specific action. It has value only if you have reason to believe the person making the promise.  Do you have reason to believe in yourself?  

 There it is bald and ugly.

 Do you break your promises? Most especially, do you break the promises you make to yourself? Did you make a promise to yourself to be frugal, to workout, to drink less, to quit smoking, or not to buy and eat junk on the way home?  How did you do?

My martial art teacher says that will power grows arithmetically, and falls apart geometrically.  What does that mean?  It means that it grows slowly, and if you screw up it  falls apart quickly.

 The tough part is that we often trap ourselves. 

 We set up situations where we can’t NOT break our self promises.  We promise to workout 7 days a week, at this or that huge intensity.  Guess what happens?  The body falls apart and can’t sustain the work, or handle the discomfort.  Or maybe we promise a child to take them to a movie on Satuday, when we know darn good and well that our boss controls our schedule on that day. We make it a promise, rather than a conditional because it is easier in the moment.

 I have done this in the past trying to be a “nice guy.”

When it comes to a promise, too often we try too hard to be nice and not hard enough to be sure and certain. It seems easier (read that  as nicer!) to make it a  promise.  A promise is stronger than a conditional.  We are saying, “yes I can and will do that.”  We are not saying “I’ll do it if I can, or I’ll do it if I don’t have to work.”  A promise makes the other person happier, and we are off the hook for the moment.  But what if it doesn’t work out, what if we have been hasty and we were wrong? What if we can’t make it happen?

Something that stinks usually hits the fan doesn’t it? And, sometimes that’s one fast spinning fan.

Get in the habit of promising only those things you can deliver. As Tony Robbins says, write the rules so that you can win. 

I have a commitment to workout 7 days a week for at least an hour.  That’s a big big commitment, and I have failed at it dozens of times over the last two decades. BUT, now I can do it. My record so far is something over 500 days.  Why does it work now?   It works because I have refined the concept of  “daily workout.” I know there will be emergencies. I know the kids will get sick.  I know a critical project will appear at the worst time.  So, I allow myself to log-up hours ahead, and to use meditation as a part of it . Guess what?  Now its do-able, and I feel much better about my ability to meet my self-made promises.  

Learn to “pinky promise” and be serious about it. Start today.  Design a small, but useful self-promise or commitment.  Make it something that you KNOW you can do.  Write it down and make it happen. Live the rest of your life normally.  Later when that promise has become a habit, pick another.  Build the habits that build your personal power.

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Yup, commercial message time.

Over the last decade I have found Tony Robbins work incredibly valuable. Yes, his late night infomercials come off a bit “snake-oil-ish”  But, having bought his books and courses, and having used and perused every one, I have to say that he is amazing and worth well over anything he charges.  Below are Amazaon links to some of his products.  If you like my work, click through to Amazon from here .  Your price will be the same as buying elsewhere and I will get a tiny commission.  Thanks!!
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Have you ever run the bleachers?  Perhaps you were in a High School gym class.  Maybe you were older and working with a trainer to get back in shape.  It is a brutal exercise, but you can do it. Your legs and lungs will burn and you may have to slow down to a walk, but you can do it if you take one step at a time. 

Now try leaping 4 or 5 steps at a time.  Do I hear the sound of your head whuummphing into the steps? Likely.

 Now drop back and walk the bleachers three times a week for 2 or 3 months.  Then jog them a bit as you walk. Give that a month or three. Now begin to run them a few at a time.  Six months into your project you are charging up that row of steps like you were made for it.

 Guess what?  Now you can run the bleachers and sometimes leap a few steps at a time.  You are building power using the Power of One.

You are building the power of your body AND your will.

Find your bleachers, and use the Power of One. Take one step today and another one tomorrow.  Don’t try to charge up there today, but take that first step, and commit to the next one tomorrow.  When your buddy is giving up six days or six weeks into doing too much too soon, you will still be making progress with the Power of One.

Pundits, gurus and hacks of all kinds talk about “Finding your Mission.” Some of them know what they are talking about, but many of them are just trying to separate you from your money.

The truth is that you know your Mission. Down underneath, where you live but are often afraid to look, you know your Mission.

Someone once put it this way. “If you had unlimited time, money and talent what would you do?” And, I will add “if you weren’t afraid that someone you love would laugh at you in disbelief.” For me the answer was always “Write.” This was my Mission (caps intentional) and for me the corollary of Write was Pursue the Human Potential. Study the ways that we humans pursue, expand and achieve our potential.

I hid from this, and massaged it into many other things. I was growing up on a Kansas farm and the most important virtue there was practicality. “Be practical!” I heard that a Million times a year. (That is 2,740 times a day, or 172 times an hour in a 16 hour day… or 2.8 times a minute… and yes, that seems about right.) Building another line of fence was always more important than building a future, let alone reading another book, no matter how it drew me.

Still, I remained a writer and a thinker. In the 5^th grade I produced my first Philosophic proof, and by the 8^th grade I was kicked out of religion classes for asking questions the Priest couldn’t answer. He seemed to really dislike the fact that I did my homework, AND studied up on his “answers.”

My son enters 5th grade this fall. He is much like me; can I help him avoid my mistakes? As hackneyed as it sounds, only time will tell.

So, there I was a writer and a thinker trapped on a farm in Northeastern Kansas. The local library was closed most of the time, and I could never get there when it was open. One time about 6th grade I set up a card table in a spare bedroom. On it I put my mother’s cheap, but nearly new electric typewriter. I was determined to crank out stories. I will never forget when the mother that I loved dearly showed a few unfinished, unedited pages to friends of hers without asking. My embarrassment was palpable.  I never again wrote openly at home.

I will go back to this many times… you know your mission. Have the courage to fight for it.

I knew it at 10, but with lots of help from loving and well meaning people I found the strength to ignore it. For decades. Ouch!

My advice here is DON’T. Don’t delay. Don’t stop. Don’t give in. And, Don’t stop working to be who you really are.

Sit down and unearth your Mission today. Get a cup of coffee in some comfortable space, and spend a single hour writing down what you love to do, and what you wish you did every day, and all those things that you were always good at.  I will say that again… write down all those things that you were always good at. It is the things that come easily, that we often ignore. If it comes easily, it often doesn’t seem important, but it may be the most important thing.

Now file away the notes. Do the exercise again in a week or a month. Then pull out the first list and take a long look. Likely you know what you will find. Believe it.

Ok… there may be a few of you reading this who found your Mission long ago. But, I challenge you. If you read all the way to the end of this article, I will bet that something is missing. Do the same exercise; use it to refine your Mission. Use it to get even more on track.

Now set it up and go do it. Make it happen. Remember, if you are not on Mission, it is just your life that you are wasting.

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The best help I ever found on the question of a personal Mission was Stephen Covey’s work. But, despite the fact that I have devoured many, many non-fiction works I found his somewhat inaccessible. It wasn’t until I began listening to Covey read his own work that I began to “get it.”  Below is a link  to his Seven Habits book.  You can use the link to buy the book, or to find his used CD sets at a discount.   And yes, (smile) this is a commercial message… if you buy something there I will get a tiny bit of commission.

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Have you ever had something that you really wanted?  Did you try a bit, and then back off?  Did you keep thinking about it in the odd moment?  Did the sands of time keep running, and you wondered?  Wondered if it was practical? Wondered if you could?  Wondered if you would? 

 I have.  I did. 

 That’s why I take Gary Vaynerchuk to heart.  He says that if it is in your “DNA,” you must do it.  Anything less will make you less than who you really are.

Don’t fight your “DNA.” Be who you really are.  Today.

Read my “Time: Little Bits Add Up.”  We all have the time.  Do we have the courage?

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Have you ever had a real kick in the teeth?  I don’t mean the friendly kind.  I mean the kind that leaves you spitting teeth, and getting stitches; the kind that buys the surgeon a new Porsche.  

Did you get up?  Did you face your challenge? Did you grow forward anyway?  If you did, then you know what you are made of.  If you gritted the teeth you had left; and moved forward anyway, then you know what you are made of. 

And if you didn’t, are you gun shy?  Do you still want?  Do you still wonder? If you thought you could, would you?

There is a simple rule in life.  We are what we make of ourselves.  Ayn Rand said it well when she said “We are all beings of self created soul.”  Our character is our choice.  We can choose, but its seldom easy.  Get some help.  Find a friend.  But get up. Take that action.  Make it happen.  You can’t do it all today.  But you can take one step forward.  Each one gets easier.

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Louis L’Amour had a Western character named Tell Sackett.  Tell told a story about going to the local Saturday night dance during his teens.  He went every Saturday night, and each and every Saturday night he got pounded by the same guy. 

Now after two or three Saturday night beatings, you or I would likely do the “smart” thing, and give up.  But Tell kept just kept showing up and giving it his best.

 Every Saturday night it happened, and the next Saturday night Tell showed up again. Finally, one night the other guy freaked out and shouted “I can’t do this anymore.” He ran away and never came to the dance again.  

Tell put it like this, (imagine a strong Western twang here…) “I just kept a showing up, and hitting his fist with my face until he up and quit.”

(Quotes above loosely paraphrased.)

When things get tough, I think about Tell Sackett.

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Perhaps you have heard the old joke: 

The American Businessman meets the Buddha and after cordial greetings.  The American says “Come on, don’t just sit there!  Do something!

The Buddha looks at him calmly and says, “Don’t just do something, Sir.  Sit there.”

As a Martial Artist and a Businessman, when I first read this I laughed and laughed.  It touched both sides of me so completely.  We all need to sit, to meditate, to contemplate.  Whether we do it in a formal meditative posture, or whether we do it with a long walk in the park, we all need to contemplate and clear our minds.

The flip side:  We all need to take action.  Many times we need to “Do-It-Now!”  Much of the Zen approach to meditation was designed to teach the swordsman to be in the moment; to let nothing, nothing at all,  interfere with the action of the moment. 

 Lesson:  Live in the moment.  If it is time for stillness, be still.  If it is time for action, do it now.  Don’t wait.

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