This week on Winning In Business, Angus Pryor the Practice Growth Specialist will be sharing with you why self control is overrated and how you can practise self control.
Now today, I wanted talk to you about something I read a book by a guy called James Clear, and the book is called “Atomic Habits”. And he raises a very interesting people. When there are things we don’t have in our lives, particularly around habits, we often assume that it’s because we don’t have great self control whether it relates to usually your health, your weight or your exercise or I don’t know, maybe it’s some work related thing, but what he says in the book is that establishing great habits is not about self control.
For one thing, what happens is as the day goes on that your willpower it’s like a muscle and essentially you can get decision fatigue. So really getting yourself into great habits is actually not about great self control. It’s much more about things like coupling together good habits, for example, one of the things he mentions in the book that I’ve been doing ever since I read it is so that I’m going to exercise the next day, I put my exercise gear out for example, if I want to exercise tomorrow, I’ll put it out tonight so that tomorrow as I get up, I’m not even really making a decision. I’m just putting on my gym gear in the morning. And that’s what causes the habit of exercise.
The other one that he talks about in fact, Tai Lopez talks about something called the availability bias. And the idea is that our brain has a bias towards what is readily available. So if you want to form a habit that says, I’m going to eat more fruit, then put a fruit bowl where it’s very easy to see.
On the same token, we’ve just had family members visit us, and they gave us some chocolate, which was sitting out on the bench and I’m going, availability bias. Get that chocolate the hell out of here, because if it’s there I’m going to eat it. So bottom line, self control is overrated.
You’re much better to watch out for that availability bias, whatever is available and you can access it you’re much more likely to do that. Well use it for good and against the things that you don’t want to. And then for your habits, you can sort of predecide and couple things, like if I want to go to the gym, I’ll put my gear up the night before. Catch you next time on Winning in life.