Can you define your future? Right now as you read this, can you articulate what you are going to be doing, what you are going to look like, how you are going to be acting in a year, two, three, five years from now? I am going to go out on a limb here and say probably not. You know it is a good idea. You know that coming up with a future vision, defining exactly what you are striving to become is a powerful thing – yet for some reason you (actually me too) avoids it. Why?
Why is it that such an important activity of sitting quietly for several hours and considering your future, planning out the vision of who you want to become is something we will just simply put off and never do? Similar in business, planning the future of your business objectives is equally hard. Planning and taking the time to set the stage for where you are headed is not something we humans really enjoy doing.
Funny really, because when I have done it – I feel great afterwards. I feel like I have momentum and excitement. I have a plan, I have a direction and that gives me a sense of freedom and confidence in making decisions throughout the day. So why do I fight doing this exercise, as I know in my heart that it is something I need to do periodically and with enough frequency to keep the ship moving in the right direction.
Well, I have studied this out a bit. There has been research in psychology on this very topic. The roots of this topic are the same roots on the research into procrastination. An example study I was reviewing this morning by the NWO – Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. This study is titled – get ready for it – “Promoting Effective Intentions: Volitional Scaffolding, Implementation Intentions, and Bedtime Procrastination.” I think these scientists were actually trying to figure out why people put off going to bed and stream just one more show on Netflix. They also were concerned with why our good intentions, our plans never work out and we go right back to bad habits and slide back into usual routines.
This study refers to another scientist, Gollwitzer, who in 1993 coined the term implementation intention. These are detailed plans that humans can create with a specific structure behind them. If you have read my previous blog posts, you might remember my long rant on “WOOP” thinking. A sort of If-Then type of implementation intention for future goals. The reason we do not want to plan, is because we know that we will fail and we do not know how to plan in the first place. We avoid it because we do not know what we are doing and doing something that is going to fail anyway is really discouraging.
The is the core of my blog on the 365 commitment. I created an implementation intention around habit forming. 50 days in to that intention, I saw the value of having a methodology to implement my future vision. This provided me a simple method to add future goals, because now I had a way to implement. On day 50 I added my exercise routine to the mix. To quote this research directly – “the road to health is paved with implementation intentions.”
Amazing, my entire life I have fought through this exact problem. I always had great intentions. If my intentions would have become reality, I would have been scaling the Himalayas laughing with the enlightened ones – however – thousands of crushed and broken plans later I found myself on the road to hell paved with those intentions. Ok, I am being a bit dramatic. Nevertheless, the point is that my many intentions failed and now I know why. I did not really have a way to implement those intentions and the systems I came up with were too complicated and overwhelming. On day 1 – I was on fire. On day 2 – I was back to my old routines.
We now have the secret. A very simple implementation intention around forming a habit, a commitment for 365 days. Keep it up, you have the path now. You know what to do, now just keep doing it.
Guy Reams (420)
365 Alumni
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