#83 Want vs Choose

I don’t wake up every day in love with the prospect of writing a blog post.

But I do love that part of my identity is that I publish something every day.

By not publishing, I would lose that part of my identity and end up frustrated because I gave up something I enjoy. And that’s painful.

So I write.

The secret to sticking to your habits: make the pain of quitting bigger than the pain of getting over the resistance against doing what you know is good for you.

Because the pain of discipline is always easier to bear than the pain of regret.

One of the most potent drivers of change AND perpetuators of old habits is cognitive dissonance:

In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is the perception of contradictory information, and the mental toll of it. Relevant items of information include a person’s actions, feelings, ideas, beliefs, values, and things in the environment. Cognitive dissonance is typically experienced as psychological stress when persons participate in an action that goes against one or more of those things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

What’s interesting about cognitive dissonance is that both “sides” of the dissonance are not equal:

If you think one thing, but you do something else, eventually you’ll start believing what you do, not what you think.

In other words: actions overrule thoughts.

1. If I tell myself I can’t write a daily post (thought) and I don’t write a daily post (action), I perpetuate the belief.
2. If I tell myself I can’t write a daily post (thought) but I gain enough courage and I actually do write a daily post (action), I will start shifting my belief towards the actions I’m taking. In other words: I’ll start believing I can write a daily post.
3. If I tell myself I can write a daily post (thought), but I never actually write that daily post (action), then my belief will start shifting again, and I’ll start believing I can’t write a daily post.
4. If I tell myself I can write a daily post (thought) and I do write a daily post (action), my belief grows stronger.

We usually start in the first scenario until we gain enough leverage over ourselves to change our actions. The moment we change our actions to actions that conflict with our thoughts/beliefs, we’re creating cognitive dissonance.

Then, if we follow through with our new actions, our beliefs start to change.

The big turning point is that moment where you start taking a different action.

Which begs the question:

• How can we gain enough leverage over ourselves to go against our beliefs and change our actions for the better?
• How can we make it so important to us to change (or so painful NOT to change) that we start taking different actions?

Identify your leverage points that jolt you into action, and you gain power over your beliefs and identity.

Day 20 of my daily publishing experiment. What I’ve learned (or remembered) so far:

• Self-trust is built by taking action. On some days I woke up stressed out, thinking “I have no clue what I’ll post about today”. But then I start writing, and the post reveals itself on the page every single time. After experiencing that several times, the fear of posting (or not being able to write anything) is fading away. In other words: action defies excuses.
• Starting to journal (Morning Pages) over 600 days ago led to an explosion in creativity. Starting to publish a daily insight is giving me a similar boost.
• In the past, I leaned towards bigger, longer writing projects that required a lot of energy and thinking before I produced something “valuable”. I now see there’s power in consistently writing short posts about ideas and insights, no matter how insignificant and no matter how imperfect the writing. Because through the writing, I understand them better. I remember them better. And I’m confident that over time, from all these small insights, bigger ideas will emerge.

In short, a pattern I’ve observed many time in the past years is playing out again:

When I start defying my own excuses by taking action, no matter how small, my self-trust grows, my self-image shifts, and I become more of the person I want to be.

Which begs the question:

Where else am I frustrated, holding on to a static identity of the past that I could prove wrong by taking action?