I heard this the other day from self transformation expert Anthony Robbins: “We don’t do half the things we want because of the way we chunk things.” What he ment was we put off doing stuff that would add value to our lives and that ultimatetly we really would enjoy, simply because of the detail we choose to focus on. Let me give you an example of what I mean. I was talking to a friend the other day I’d sent info to back in January. Stuff she really would have benefited from using in order to have better control over a health issue she’s been grappling with for years and is greatly impacting her quality of life. When I asked how she was going with it she said she really hadn’t done much with it all these months, why? Too hard!
She asked me how I was going with something she was helping me with and I had to admit to the same failing.
We laughed and as the conversation went on I observed that really what was missing was a conditioning of our selves to make us follow through. In other words strategies that would make doing what we want in order to achieve our goals automatic. Because when we get into healthy habits of doing we can reach our goals with much less effort. I went on to give an example of some of my own routines, like early morning meditation, followed by exercise, followed by making fresh carrot juice. She laughed out loud and said for her doing stuff like blog posts, which I was struggling with at the time, would be 100 times easier for her to do than juicing ever would. I stopped and said “yup sometimes we struggled with it too, when we made it to complicated”. Thinking about all the steps, from buying the twenty kg bag, to lugging it up the stairs, to storing it, to getting the carrots out, putting the juicer on the counter, washing the carrots, juicing, cleaning the juicer, drying and storing it again. Wow! It’s enough to make you go” I don’t have time to make fresh juice I think I’ll have another coffee!”
It’s all because of the way we put it together. See once upon a time when you were learning to drive, it was overwhelming there were ten things you needed to simultaneously and it just about fried your brain trying to sort it all out, but when you got your licence and got some experience engine on, clutch in, gear change, break off, signal, look in rearview and side mirrors, steer, accelerate all became part of one thing, called driving. Now you drive, chow down on your big Mac, and talk on your cell all at the time without blinking an eyelid. Creating habits for healthy living can become just as easy if we focus on the outcome and not all the detail. Think about it if someone told you in advance all the grim detail of learning how to drive would you have. If you’d let the detail stop you learning think of all the freedom you’d hve thrown away.
Oh it was fun putting this blog post together, now I feel like some carrot juice.
Till next time
Chunk it right!
Nancy
