Ideas to Help you Stay on Offense Archives - Page 13 of 13

Bookish Weapon Number Two

Bookish Weapons, Ideas to Help you Stay on Offense

We have all said we were committed to something. Maybe it was to get up earlier, lose weight or even more serious, stay married to someone. Keeping commitments is another story, even the ones that are more formalized like marriage. Things get in the way, like our feelings. We just don’t feel like it. We are tired so we don’t want to get up. We just get too hungry to stay on that diet. Maybe we fell out of love so ow we don’t want to be in the marriage. Bookish weapon number two is real commitment.

Real Commitment

In his great book “The Spartan Way,” Joe DeSena gives the best explanation of real commitment I have ever read when he tells the story of Japanese Tendai Monks that in order to become a monk must walk around a mountain 200 times. A higher order has to walk it 1000 times. They have been doing this for a thousand years and the monks would carry a knife with them. If they didn’t make it they would kill themselves. There were 450 monks that attempted this and only 45 did it. The rest died. That is real commitment!

Joe says, “Commitment means that you will do what you said you were going to do, even when you don’t feel like doing it. Anything less is pointless.”

What could you accomplish if you grasped this concept and made it a part of your identity so that when you made a commitment it was in stone? I bet you would not make them so lightly. You would give them serious thought, but once you committed it would happen.

The Daily Grind

Now that you understand what real commitment is all about you can apply it every day. If you say you will meet someone at a certain time, you will be there at that time. It is a commitment. If you say you are going to put in eight hours on the job, you do it. You don’t spend half of the time scrolling Instagram.

If you decide you are going to lose weight you do it. Simple! If you decide you will exercise every day, you do it. Simple! However, as you probably already know it might be simple, but it is not easy. As Jerzy Gregory says, “Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life.”

Bookish Weapon Number One

Bookish Weapons, Ideas to Help you Stay on Offense

Let’s look at three powerful statements that taken together are one Bookish Weapon. But first, bookish weapons are everywhere because books are readily available especially in the area of self-help. Today’s bookish weapon is from “The Resilience Factor,” by Karen Reivich, PH.D. and Andrew Shatte, PH.D. This book really helped me train my mind.

The Resilience Factor, review by Bill Montgomery

Do you know your ABCs?

They are the basics for handling adversity. You could say this is the ground zero bookish weapon. The A stands for adversity. That one is pretty easy. What about B & C? First (or I guess it is second) take C. C is for consequences, feelings, and behavior.

Most often when adversity happens we feel something, do something, or both. Stimulus – response. Pavlov’s dog, right? Often we get wrapped up in the consequences without even realizing how we got there. It is much more complicated than that and we can have much more control over our feelings and behavior. That brings us to the B in ABC.

“B” stands for Beliefs

This is what you believe about the adversity. Let’s say you get a flat tire in the morning on the way to work. Is it an inconvenience or is it going to ruin your whole day? Well, if you have a belief that the beginning of a day sets the tone for the whole day, then maybe it will ruin your day. Remember, your beliefs determine your consequences, feelings, and behavior.

The authors do point out that sometimes, like when a bear is about to attack you, or your pet gets run over by a car. The emotions are triggered by the event and not beliefs.

Use this knowledge to identify beliefs and help you clarify what happened. Discover the belief that triggered your emotion. Now, challenge it.

Bookish Weapons

Relvich and Shatte give you three statements that help you be resilient in real time:

A more accurate way of seeing this is…
That’s not true because…
A more likely outcome is…and I can…

As I mentioned these three statements are a Bookish Weapon themselves. They are powerful and force you to think through the situation and my favorite part of the book.

There are also what they call Iceberg Beliefs. I think Tony Robbins would call them Global Beliefs like “Life is a struggle.” They can support you or not. The question to ask is, “What is this belief costing me?

Stay on offense!