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In Part I of this article I wrote, Leverage is a powerful principle that you can use to increase your success in both your business and personal life. If you missed it you can read it here.
“If you give me a lever long enough, I can move the world”
Archimedes
While the principle of leverage is a powerful tool in achieving higher levels of success in your business, it’s equally powerful tool to use in your personal life.
Using leverage in your personal life requires looking at it from a slightly different perspective. In this case, we’re referring to using leverage to motivate yourself in the direction you want to go.
You’ve likely heard this idea referred to as The carrot and the stick approach.
Here’s what Wikipedia has to say:
The carrot and stick approach (also “carrot or stick approach”) is an idiom that refers to a policy of offering a combination of rewards and punishment to induce behavior. It is named in reference to a cart driver dangling a carrot in front of a mule and holding a stick behind it. The mule would move towards the carrot because it wants the reward of food, while also moving away from the stick behind it, since it does not want the punishment of pain, thus drawing the cart.
Where this comes into play in your everyday life is when you’re looking at a goal or some change you want to make.
For example, one of the biggest challenges many of us have is staying committed to a program of regular exercise. I don’t know about you but I can find innumerable ways to procrastinate exercising.
In order to be able to motivate myself to get up and start moving, I use the principle of leverage by doing a simple two part exercise that is designed to give me enough leverage to overcome my tendency to not exercise.
In thinking about your goal or the behavior you want to change or create, imagine a time in the future where you have already taken the necessary action and achieved a successful result. Then complete the following activity:
Step 1. Pour on the Pleasure
Write everything you will gain by having taken action now. Be sure to include all of the great feelings, experiences, achievements, etc., that you will receive a a result of having done whatever it is you wnt to do.
In the case of having exercised regularly all this time you may write how much better you feel and how much more energy you now have. You could include how good you look and how much better your clothes fit. You might write about how great it feels to hear your spouse comment abput how fit you look. You could include the good news youve received from your health practitioner, as a result of your new, healthier habits.
Really pour on the great feelings and amplify your success. When you read and imagine this successful outcome here in the present, your subconscious mind accepts it as real. You will soon notice you’re making better and healthier choices as a result of doing this.
This is your “moving toward” motivator. You’re motivating yourself my imagining all the pleasure you will enjoy and what you will gain by taking action now.
Step 2. Bring on the Pain
Write everything you’ve been misssing out in the present by not being healthier or more fit. You might include not being able to play with your children or grandchildren, running around to doctors more and more as you age, having to buy larger and larger size clothes. Not having enough physical and mental energy to accomplish all the things you want.
How many different sizes of clothes do you have in your closet?
Heres a tip: get rid of any size you don’t want to be, other than what you must keep in order to function while you’re Working your program. By making it harder to be comfortable at an unhealthy weight, you gain additional leverage. Refusing to buy bigger clothes can give you further leverage.
You goal here is to create as much pain possible, real and imagined, in the preset tense. This will be your “moving away from motivator.”
To put it another way, it’s your “Stick” in the “Carrot and the stick” scenario, with the pleasure motivator in Step 1. being the “Carrot.
When you find yourself starting to procrastinate, take out your journal and reread what you wrote.
Before and during your exercise, you can feel and imagine the health you’re achieving. There’s a very good reason why virtually every Olympic and Professional athlete for the past thirty years or more has used visualization as a performance enhancement.
If you want to know more ways to make changes and begin to create the life you were born to live, take action now.
As the title of my international bestselling book asks:
What are you waiting for?: It’s Your Life