Remember my fitness plan? I’ve committed to 50 pushups a day and one hour of aerobic exercise five days a week. In the next few posts I’ll build my influence strategy to guarantee that I stick with my plan. The key will be to combine influences from each of the Six Sources of Influence. Today, I’ll focus on Source 1, Personal Motivation. Review Source 1 strategies on pages 83–110 of Influencer.

Personal motivation is about intrinsic satisfaction—whether you enjoy or find meaning in the vital behavior. It also deals with temptation and mindless inertia. This is an extremely rich topic, so I’ll pick just a couple of issues: dealing with painful pushups and overcoming couch gravity.

Pain: Pushups hurt, but we humans have an amazing capacity to deal with pain. I use a technique called the mini-max theory of pain: If you can minimize the maximum pain, then you can handle lower levels of pain without much bother.

For example, I do 25 pushups and then sit and review the worst feelings of pain—the panting, the pounding heart, the backache, the burning biceps, etc…. Then I wait for these feelings to subside—about 15 seconds. From first pushup to last is 30 seconds, so the total pain window is well under a minute. Next time, as I get ready to begin my pushups, I think, “In a minute this will be over.” I can stand most anything for only a minute.

Another pain aspect: The first 10 days of pushups creates some pains that last longer than 15 seconds. Be sensible. I tapered from 25 a day to 50 over the course of a week. At the end of my first week I no longer had sore joints or muscles—except during my one-minute pain window.

A second strategy: One of the most powerful ways to enlist personal motivation is to decide that the behavior is an important part of your personal identity. I say to myself, “I am a person who does 50 pushups a day.” I’m doing these pushups because they are what it means to be physically fit which is an important part of who I am. Now the pain signals self respect and most of us are willing to put up with a lot of pain when it leads to self respect.

Couch Gravity: Many of our best-laid plans are undermined by the twin devils: temptation and mindlessness. I fully intend to begin my run—right after lunch. But 1 pm finds me napping on the couch, caught in its fearsome gravity.

Here is the challenge: When we make our plans we inevitably underestimate the power of the couch. We think we’ll be as motivated after lunch as we are now. When people are asked to predict their own future desires, their predictions are nearly always inaccurate. And not just a little off. They are wildly inaccurate. People profoundly underestimate the power that future temptations and inertia with have on their motivation and desires.

Here’s the way psychologists explain it. Humans have two “operating systems” a Know System and a Go System.

• The Know System is deliberate, conscious, thoughtful, reflective, and purposeful. It’s our logical, rationale, planning self.
• The Go System is automatic, unconscious, instant, and effortless. It’s our intuitive, carefree, reactive self.

The plans we make while we’re in our Know System won’t work if something throws us into our Go System which can be irresistibly powerful.

Here’s one approach for defeating your Go System. Make plans when you’re in your Know System and take steps to lock yourself into these plans. When Ulysses knew his ship was approaching the Sirens with their tempting songs, he took two precautions. First, he had his sailors lash him to the mast of his ship, so he couldn’t steer toward their songs. Second, he made all the sailors plug their ears with wax so they couldn’t hear the Sirens’ songs. Ulysses locked himself into a plan before the Sirens could throw him into his Go System.

How do I lock myself into a run? I schedule myself to run with someone else, usually my wife, Kathy. I make the commitment in the morning when my resolve is still strong. Fortunately for me, Kathy is a true force of nature—more powerful than the most powerful couch. She can help me achieve critical velocity to escape its eerie power.

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Posted by David Maxfield on April 2, 2008 6:23:00 PM MDT #