Can We Get Out of Our Own Way Already?

When you don't want to, how do you focus? How do you stay consistent? How do you get out of your own way?

May 11, 2024

**Long overdue, but here it is! For my 20th edition, I’m taking a quick break from the Nutrition Series to discuss something that’s been relentlessly gnawing at my mind for the past month. Fear not! We’ll pick up part four of the series next week.**

“The greatest gift is courage. She gave me the courage to risk being my true self. I’ll be forever grateful. You find belief in yourself when others believe in you. I didn’t have that belief in myself until someone truly believed in me… When that happens, and you have that courage, you get that gift. It can buy a ticket to someplace you never knew existed.”

Sean Feeney in this week’s Worth Listening To

Worth Listening To

If you’ve ever thought of owning your own business, this episode is absolutely incredible. Sean discusses his experience with negotiating, having people who believe in you (and people you believe in who don’t yet believe in themself), how to engage with the community, and much more.

My favorite interviewer interviewed one of the most interesting polymaths in the world today. The result is a remarkable conversation.

Conversations With a Personal Trainer

These conversations spanned over the course of several weeks, each compounding on the previous. It began with me being asked, “What percentage of working out, both for yourself and your clients, is about the present versus about the future?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer. But the next session with this particular client, I came back with, “40% present, 60% future.” But I quickly added that it likely depends on an individual’s goals and where they are in their life. For example, my guess is a 20-year-old may be 20% present and 80% future-oriented. Conversely, an 80-year-old may be 80% present, 20% future-oriented.

These conversations took place four and three weeks ago, respectively. Together, they sparked the following idea: Planting a tree often takes a long time to bear fruit. The best things for us often take a while to take shape: changing lifestyle habits, investing for our financial future, starting a new relationship. But we don't enjoy the present if we get too caught up in the future. How do we find balance?

Our Present Impact on Our Future Self

“If your body was turned over to just anyone, you would doubtless take exception. Why aren’t you ashamed that you have made your mind vulnerable to anyone who happens to criticize you so that it becomes confused and upset?” — Epictetus via Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation”

Most of the decisions we make on a day-to-day basis are single-player. Even when others are involved, we still choose how we engage with our environment. In a recent discussion with a client, I asked what makes Shakespeare so extraordinary. Why are his plays taught in nearly every high school English class? The ensuing discussion, primarily about human tragedy, reignited an observation I’ve made in my career working with hundreds of people up close: The tragedy of human nature is, while our decisions throughout life are single-player, the value we place on both the opinions of others (validation) and the lives of others (social media) often supersedes our own self-interest.

That these tendencies extend to our health likely goes without saying. In my own case, I can’t spend a few days scrolling Instagram without developing an acute inferiority complex. In Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation, he refers to something called internalized disorders, where people express anxiety or depression inwardly as a sense of hopelessness. It’s a far cry to say I have what would classify as a disorder. But after a few days of scrolling social media, many of the symptoms certainly arise, if only temporarily. These symptoms culminate in a general disinterest in the things I usually find immense joy in: exercising, writing, walking, and being present with my family.

This brings us to the central theme of this week’s article. If most of the decisions we make — especially regarding our health — are single-player, why do we give such vulnerability of our mind to others? Others whose opinions we have no control over nor an ability to know their innermost thoughts. We have our own minds to learn and understand and no one else’s (frustrating as that may be for some).

Finding Your Why

In February, I wrote about how we should focus on playing our own game. The idea was that we would see better results for our health and happiness if we embraced our journey and did not compare ourselves to the people around us. When we make an investment, there are two important factors: first, we expect a return on that investment, and second, it’s single-player. These two factors are essential to understanding our investment in our health.

In many instances, the expected return of an investment is far off in the distance — often years or even decades. When we invest in a financial endeavor, it’s years before that investment pays off; when we invest our heart and energy in a relationship, it takes time before we know if that person is ‘the one’; when we invest in our kids’ futures, it’s decades before we know if we truly did a good job or not. All of these decisions, while reliant on others, are made by us alone. Should we expect immediate returns if your health is also an investment? Should we allow others to shape our road for us?

In his conversation with Patrick O’Shaughnessy, Tim Ferris says,

“You have to be very careful about being shaped by your audience. If you allow yourself to be purely shaped by your audience feedback, you will be a comic caricature of your most extreme behaviors and beliefs. And, if you sustain that long enough you will become the mask that you are wearing. Then you’re fucked.”

He soon after says,

“As soon as we start doing this, instead of me following what I’m most interested in, we’re dead. This is like a lemming transmogrifier. As soon as you step into this slipstream, you are coming to groupthink and group pressure. And you’re going to become something you don’t want to be. You’re going to make yourself very hard to disambiguate from other people, so I constrain that.”

A massive part of this endeavor is writing what’s on my mind and synthesizing what I’ve learned into concise thoughts — particularly as it relates to health. As a client recently described, it’s a creative outlet. Yet, with each passing week, the pressure to write what others want increases (even though this is mostly made up in my mind, it’s still a significant roadblock).

This is where the parallel to embarking on a health journey exists. There are a lot of unknowns when starting. What to eat? How much to eat? What exercises to do? How often? When looking for guidance, it can be very easy to fall into the trap of copying others or simply becoming overwhelmed.

While they may seem very different superficially, they are actually quite similar. If exercise strengthens the muscles, writing strengthens and clarifies the mind. Without pursuing what interests me, I may as well be writing to please everyone. The results would be terrible since writing is already hard enough for me. Likewise, copying someone else’s health routine will most likely yield similarly bad results. Without knowing your own why, what keeps you going when an obstacle presents itself?

In both instances, knowing your core why enables you to create a process revolving around this North Star.

Making Better Decisions

In Think Twice: The Power of Counterintuition, Michael Mauboussin argues that it is better to understand one's decision-making process than to worry about the outcome. In Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts, Annie Duke makes a very similar argument:

“What makes a decision great is not that it has a great outcome. A great decision is the result of a good process, and that process must include an attempt to accurately represent our own state of knowledge. That state of knowledge, in turn, is some variation of ‘I’m not sure.’”

I can certainly attest to these statements. When I began investing in stocks, I bought without much, if any, in-depth research on the actual company itself. But it was highly recommended by a ‘guru’ online, and how could it possibly fail?! Here’s the problem. If you’re copying someone else, how do you know if it’s working? In 2017, I was teaching myself how to buy and sell stocks. Late that fall, there was speculation Canada was going to legalize recreational marijuana sometime in the second half of 2018. So, I put about 50% of the value of my brokerage into cannabis stocks. The problem was that this wasn’t an original idea, and I knew nothing about the actual companies.

It was great for about a year. With everyone flooding the market with the same “original” idea, the stocks skyrocketed. Basic supply and demand. Only there’s a saying in the stock market that I didn’t understand at the time: “Buy the rumor, sell the news.” Because I was copying everyone else, I didn’t have a process. It’s easy to play armchair quarterback and say, “Why didn’t you sell?” To which I would reply, that’s precisely the point. I eventually sold for a modest gain, significantly less than the paper value a month or two prior and less than had I simply put that money in the S&P 500. This is why process matters.

Similarly, many people who come and see me at Envision Fitness for their consultation have first had a negative experience trying to improve their health. Too often, it’s a previous injury at another gym. But most commonly, it’s a lack of results on one’s own — whether it’s not knowing which exercises are best or needing extra accountability. And, as we’ve discussed before in this newsletter, it’s very understandable. There is simply too much noise and too many people telling you what you should do because it worked for them. Not to mention, not many people genuinely enjoy exercising.

How do you create a process? Some brilliant individuals do this for a living, many of whom I routinely quote in this newsletter. I highly encourage reading their work and listening to their conversations on podcasts. However, I think the best place to start is by asking yourself what you're seeking, admitting what you don’t know, and asking more questions (hopefully, this newsletter is helping to answer some of those questions for you).

Going back to my conversation with a client about making decisions based on the present versus the future, you need a balance of both that works for you. Factor it into your process. “If I make X decision, what do I want the Y outcome to be?” If you really don’t want to do something in the present, you may find having a future-oriented process incredibly useful. That process could be as simple as a post-it note on your refrigerator reminding you how good you’ll feel after: “Your future self will thank you.” Or it could be a goal posted on your refrigerator: “Your future self wants you to lose 20 pounds. Put down the ice cream!” (Yes, that last one was aimed right at myself.) And on the days you do want to do that thing, your process will help make the most of it in the present. If you really want to work out but you only have 30 minutes, your process will keep you efficient.

Do you use processes in your day-to-day life? Do they help you make better decisions?

Final Thoughts

I will end on this note: Your health is single-player. As much as the people closest to you may love you, they cannot do the work for you. Too many people fail to get out of their own way when it comes to their health. I’ve seen it happen many times, and I’ve also been guilty of it. If we want greatness for ourselves — to feel energized, wake up excited for the day, and be self-determinant and independent as we age — we have to do the work. For our future selves and our present.

But we are also in this together if we choose to be. Therefore, it is never a bad thing to ask for help. As Sean Feeney said in this week’s Worth Listening To episode, sometimes internal belief takes belief from an external source. And just maybe that belief can be the spark that inspires someone to change the trajectory of their life.