When I got into personal development as a teenager I watched a lot about people who were actively creating what they wanted in their lives. That felt very empowering to me.
“Do you mean people can actually decide a big goal to achieve and just make it happen like that!? Wow, I wonder if I can do that!” — I thought.
That quickly led me to the rabbit hole of self-improvement, because I quickly found out that it was harder than I thought to simply choose a goal and make it happen.
I would choose to create a habit or a goal for myself, but I would quickly stop or not follow through in a few days.
I’d scratch my head trying to figure out what happened, but now I know I simply had a system in place that got me the result of NOT doing what I said I would.
Back then I quickly jumped into the assumption that there was something wrong with me. I must have had a lack of discipline, lack of willpower, lack of motivation, confidence…lack of something! Otherwise, that wouldn’t be happening. Or so I thought…
Needless to say, rather than simply getting back on the horse and doing the deed of the habit I set out for myself, I spent an enormous amount of time trying to find ways to fix myself — and I mean months and years!
I looked at every self-improvement and psychological gymnastic method I could find:
- Trying to motivate myself by shouting mantras.
- Gratitude journaling.
- Meditation.
- Regression therapy.
- Journaling shadow work.
- Journaling my dreams and aspirations.
- Learning to follow my feelings, heart and intuition.
- Posturing, bodywork, breathing exercises.
- A confidence course.
- Values exercise.
- EFT technique.
- Read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People — along with many other dozens of self-improvement books.
I could write another 20 bullet points but I think you got the picture.
The main problem with all those things I tried is that I practiced them from the fundamental belief that something was wrong with me — or my psychology — and I needed to fix it.
None of these practices are wrong or bad. I am not trying to dismiss them. But from the stance I was taking of fixing my psychology, they had little to no bearing on my ability to create what I wanted in my life.
However, in hindsight, I can now see that I wasn’t a completely lost cause. Sometimes I did do what I set out to do. Even if only eventually, I would follow through.
I had an idea in my head when I was in Brazil of studying abroad when I was 17 and I did everything in my power to make it happen. At 18 I was on a plane to Finland to begin my studies.
I also had an idea to create a home gym and with the incredible help of my father, we made it happen. I would bring my friends to workout with me and even charged to do personal training with others.
But at that time I believed I followed through on these goals because of my strong desire to create them, in other words, I thought I simply wanted it bad enough. I told myself it was because I was motivated, inspired, or committed to making them happen (all aspects related to our psychology).
Those feelings were really great and helpful to get me started, don’t me wrong, but they weren’t in fact the cause of my follow-through. Now I know that I did what I set out to do because I stuck to a system; a system that ensured that goal got achieved, regardless of how I felt.
Within the paradigm of the mind and psychology, it’s easy to overlook the many moments throughout the course of achieving a goal when we didn’t feel like doing something but did it anyway. We often summarise the entire experience of achieving our goals simply by how we felt at the start of it — “I did it because I felt motivated”. When we do this we turn a blind eye to the systems that were in place underneath all those waves of feelings and thoughts; the systems which were actually the most fundamental factors for achieving that goal.
Why working with systems, not psychology is so much more effective
As Steve Chandler illustrated in his book The Power of Systems, if you have a flight to catch in a few weeks, I bet that you would put some systems in place that would, at the very least, ensure the maximum likelihood of you getting on that plane. For example, you would probably:
- Add the event to your calendar.
- Add a notification to remind you of your flight a few days before takeoff.
- Organise your luggage for the trip.
- Set an alarm or two on the morning of your flight.
- Book a cab or set up your car for the airport.
Observe how none of these systems include how you could feel in the moment. None of them take into consideration your psychology, your mental state, your personality flaws or weaknesses, your dreams and aspirations, how grateful or unhappy you are in life.
The systems are just ways to ensure a goal gets fulfilled, and very importantly, whether you follow the newly introduced system or not, that’s completely neutral and impersonal from the perspective of the system.
You don’t need to check in with your psychology when executing a system, because all that’s needed is to work the system.
Duuh, Just Work the System!
This can sound so stupidly obvious now, but I genuinely didn’t see before that all I ever needed to do to follow through with my goals was to:
- Create a system that works, that ensures the goal is completed (eg. Goal: Run a Marathon > System: Find a running plan online and do it for 6 months.)
- Work the system.
I don’t know if you noticed the bold highlight on “Work the system”. I wanted to make sure to emphasize it. In fact, I will say it again: Work. The. System.
What does it mean to work the system?
Well, when it comes time for you to wake up in the morning from your flight alarm, working the system means waking up when the alarm rings. It doesn’t mean checking how you feel or think about taking the flight, which would fall within the paradigm of psychology.
Years ago, when I was deep into self-improvement, I never thought of simply working the system. I would focus on my mental gymnastics like beating myself up, forcing myself, trying to hype myself up or looking deep within to light up the fire of inspiration that lay dormant somewhere in my heart. Meanwhile, the alarm was going off and I was still under my comfortable bedsheets…
If you need to catch a flight and you somehow manage to do it, it doesn’t matter how you got there, how late or early it was, how in a rush you were, or if you took your time to smell the roses on the way. The truth is, you followed a (likely unconscious) system to get you there.
The good news is that any unconscious system you currently have in place for getting things done in your life can become a conscious choice and even a fun experiment without the need to sacrifice any of your wellbeing along the way.
Working the System Doesn’t Mean Not Feeling Anything
I am not saying thoughts and feelings are wrong or that we shouldn’t have them. Regardless of how much I may have tried to suppress them, I always end up realising that I am still human like everyone else. We will always have all ranges of the feeling rainbow at our disposal.
However, consulting with your thoughts and feelings as a way to gauge whether or not you should follow a system you previously set up from a clear state of mind is not necessary and, most of the time, will be counterproductive.
We can feel what we feel and work the system anyway.
Unless you are functionally impaired by how you feel, you can always work the system. In fact, you will also have a system to deal with how you feel. Maybe your system is to suppress the emotion or pretend it’s not there or maybe it’s to journal how you feel and get all those thoughts out of your head and onto the paper.
A great system I’ve found to deal with uncomfortable feelings (and all others) is to take a deep breath and be with the sensations in the body that thought-feeling is creating. More often than not, after 1–2 minutes of this way of being with, the nervous system (another great system) slows down and shifts from the sympathetic system of stress to the parasympathetic system of calm and relaxation.
The great thing I’ve found about being with is that more often than not after I do that I can quickly come back to creatively pursuing my goals and working my systems.
Final thoughts
If I could instil a fundamental understanding in everyone’s mind is that there’s nothing wrong with you. There never is, unless we think so.
The most effective way I’ve found to follow through with my goals is NOT to check in with the realm of my psychology at all, but instead to 1) Create a system that I think works. 2) Work the system. 3) Adjust along the way.
The 3) point is also very important. Whenever the system I introduced does not bring me the results I want — after I worked the system for a certain amount of time — I can always simply create a new system rather than look again at my psychology and beat myself up or focus on how I am a failure or how disappointed I am for the system not working.
I like to remember that in the system’s paradigm, systems are always neutral and impersonal so it never means anything about me if a system doesn’t bring me the results I wished for. It brought some results. Now I can shift it to bring another result. That’s all.
If you want some help making your life and your goals workable again, reach out. Sometimes all that is needed is one insight to completely change the course of our lives.
