Training the monkey: Why feelings don't matter.

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Good feelings will not help you achieve what you want to do. Motivation, confidence and happiness will not generate action. 

If the good feelings come, it is because you took action, not the other way around.We do not need the right combination of feelings before action can take place, and if we wait for motivation, confidence or some other vague positive emotion to well up before the action, this puts your mind in the hands of whimsy, the monkey-mind, where no progress is made, and shiny objects distract us.

Many of these messages come from well-meaning friends who tell you that you just need to follow your dreams, or believe in yourself, or to just have confidence, or other such unhelpful advice. These in turn come from a popular culture full of advertising and immediate gratification which has made the monkey in our minds the king, as if our feelings are all that matters.

Not so. Our feelings get in the way of progress, and form bad habits. It may feel like motivation, as if we are in control, but unscheduled action relies on whimsy to get make progress, and as we become reliant on it, we are less likely to carry through on the project.

Motivation and confidence come AFTER the action. The motivation we feel for getting something done is an imaginary projection into the future. It isn’t real. We don’t feel the motivation to get fit, write a book or to form awesome relationships, what we feel is the imagination of what it would be like to have already done it.

Once we pull our minds back into the present moment, the moment where we must put on our gym shoes, pick up that pen, or strike up a conversation at the risk of rejection, we don’t have that motivation because this situation is now real, not projected, and doesn’t match what we imagined. Our minds would much rather stay in our comfort zone or chase shiny objects than doing what seems like hard or potentially painful work.

Even if we DO manage to well up whimsy to the point of action, then all we have done is to make the monkey the boss. No matter if we do or do not make it to the gym, if we rely on motivation to get us there, the monkey is king. Tomorrow the monkey might decide we would rather stay home, and Facebook our time away.

We can, however, use this to our advantage. The monkey is wonderfully creative, capable of great ideas (even if it doesn’t want to actually do them), and can be used to great effect so long as we control when it gets to play.

We can imagine a better future, and goals to get us there. Thank the monkey for its help with imagination, then get to scheduling tasks. When the time comes, you perform the tasks for a very specific time. When the time comes, do them no matter what the monkey has to say. Achievement then becomes a matter of merely following your own instructions from the night before.

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This will not only get the thing done that you wanted to do, but will train your monkey. Even if you spend the two hours of scheduled writing time doing nothing but staring at a blank page, you will have defeated distraction that day. If you got your gym shoes on and left the house, but didn’t quite make the gym, that’s a partial victory over the monkey’s reluctance.

So, do this:

1. Schedule a time to schedule.

2. Imagine a goal in line with your values.

3. Research the steps to the goal, and schedule them.

4. Do the tasks you assigned yourself. If you get stuck, set smaller goals for tomorrow. If you get repeatedly stuck, research a different approach and try that.

5. Repeat 3 and 4 until goal is achieved.

6. Go to 2.If you haven't yet worked out your values, schedule this as your first goal. I recommend reading Sir Ken Robinson and Russ Harris for help on this. Links below.

Feeling good is not guaranteed in this process, but you won't know that until it is complete. Maybe you had different expectations than you thought you did. That’s worth exploring, because maybe there is an untapped value hidden there. Schedule some time for that.

Along the way, praise yourself for at least the partial effort you put in today. So, you spent ten minutes writing crap you can’t use, then lost an hour and a half on YouTube? Well, that’s ten minutes more than yesterday. Huzzah. Find the victory, no matter how small, and praise it.

And enjoy the benefits of a well-trained monkey. Ken Robinson:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If2SdpCR1iM

Brian Johnson on Russ Harris’ book:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNkq7Ht1kG4

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