Edition #17

Hi All!

Here is your weekly serving of practical guidance and inspiration to ensure you live your life with purpose. Feel free to forward this along to friends and family. Enjoy!

I wanted to give a quick shout to the 2 amazing individuals who have joined us since last week. Thanks for being here and welcome to the Never Idle team!

Read Time: 5 Minutes

Master Your Mindset

I’m Not Good At…

My self-talk was telling me “I’m not good at learning languages.”

“I don’t know how people become bilingual and beyond.”

I carried this belief about myself for many years.

I even went to Mexico last year and had my Spanish tested in the real world.

Despite being far from fluent, this experience forced me to practice and I learned many new phrases, had genuine interactions with my friend’s Mexican buddies (in Spanish), and learned a valuable lesson.

The lesson: The belief I carried about not being good at languages came down to one thing. A lack of experience.

Why on earth would I expect to be good at languages when I scrapped by in language studies in school, didn’t dedicate myself to self-study, ignored spoken Spanish whenever I was around it, and never tried to speak it?

To expect to be good at something I never tried to do would be totally unreasonable.

While I am still not fluent, taking real-life opportunities such as the above and applying myself has given me hope I can one day reach the level I used to think was impossible.

Let’s apply this to you.

Think about a skill you believe you are bad at. Perhaps it’s:

• Math

• Sales

• Writing

• Dancing

• Drawing

Now ask yourself:

1) How much time have I spent learning about it?

2) How much time have I spent doing it?

If your answers are ‘none’ or ‘very little’ then of course you aren’t good at it.

The amount of investment you have made in that skill makes it unreasonable for you to be good at it.

Here’s where your mindset change is going to take place today.

You have to believe you can acquire a skill or character trait in order to actually develop it over time.

I know, you’re thinking “Duh Austin, of course.”

But we all limit ourselves like this all the time.

We bucket ourselves into the ‘I’m not good at this’ category and then we never try.

It starts with belief.

If you never believe you can, you never will.

How do you overcome this limiting belief?

Think about the skill you want to acquire.

Has anyone done this before?

If the answer is yes, why can’t you do it if you do the same thing as them?

“Yea, but they are just better at that than I am.”

Cut that shit out!

Remember - They have dedicated hundreds if not thousands of hours to learning and implementing this skill so it is only reasonable that they are ahead of you and therefore better than you right now.

It’s true, belief alone will not get you there.

But belief paired with dedicating time can and will make you good at something if you are consistent.

The best way to stay consistent in this context: Mentally prepare yourself for the fact that:

• You will not be good at the skill for a while

• The process will be painful

Going into it with this understanding gives you a better chance to come out the other side because you know you’re going to suck and fail a lot but you will also learn a ton.

Think of it this way:

Stage 1: Starting Point

• No Experience

• I suck at this

Stage 2: Start the Process

• Learning, Applying, Making Mistakes

• I still suck at this but I see progress

Stage 3: Consistency with the Process

• Bouts of Failure, Repetition, Gaining Experience

• I’m okay at this

Stage 4: Inflection Point

• Continued Repetition, Countless Experience, Results Proving Progress

• I’m good at this

How long you stay at each stage is dependent on your approach, consistency, belief, and the specific skill you are trying to learn.

But you will move from stage to stage by embracing this mindset and the learning process.

By doing so you will unlock your potential to grow.

Simply put, YOU HAVE TO TRY!

Don’t hold yourself back any longer.

Pick a skill and go be relentless!

Hone Your Habits

Catch and Replace

This is the 3rd issue in a series on bad habits. The goal is to equip you with tactics you can use to break the bad habits in your life.

Have you ever caught yourself during or immediately after performing a bad habit saying “Oh man, I just did it again?”

If so, you are not alone.

This technique is for those exact situations.

It may sound counter-intuitive at first but stick with me.

I call it Catch and Replace.

The 1st step is pretty obvious: Catch yourself performing a reflexive bad habit (say biting your fingernails).

Step 2: Immediately perform a good habit (say 5 push-ups).

This may feel like you are almost rewarding the bad habit (or punishing based on your thoughts about push-ups 😜) but in fact it is neither of those things.

What it does is backed by scientific literature: It creates a cognitive and temporal mismatch between the bad behavior and the good behavior.

In other words, if you are able to catch and replace enough times, you change the neural firing in your brain from a closed loop (Neuron A and Neuron B firing in a connected loop) to an open loop (for example Neuron A and Neuron C firing separately).

This allows you to manually intervene, literally rewriting your mental script.

You add pieces to the sequence (add push-ups to biting your nails) and it avoids the negative consistent loop from repeating itself.

Like all techniques for cutting bad habits, this isn’t perfect and certainly won’t be a one-time fix. Bad habits are engrained deeply in our neural systems.

But this is absolutely a tool you can add to your toolkit to break reflexive bad habits over time with conscious thought and consistent action.

2 final thoughts:

• This works best with reflexive bad habits such as mindless activities like picking up your phone and scrolling, nailbiting, aimlessly heading to the pantry for snacks

• Make sure the good habit you add to the sequence is quick and easy to perform. It must be performed immediately following the bad habit. i.e. 5 push-ups rather than a 40-minute workout.

Go catch those bad habits and replace them with habits you deem positive!

Words of Wisdom

You can complement this weekly newsletter with short reminders, ideas, and thoughts about personal development by following me on Twitter.

Thanks for reading! And always remember…

Slow and steady. Never Idle.

Until next week,

Austin Sargent