Organize Tomorrow Today

Joe Berger, a client from the business world, came to us with a very common story.

He was producing terrific sales numbers, but the way he was going about it was producing a tremendous amount of stress. He also knew he was leaving a lot on the table every month.

Joe would have some incredible, record-setting sales months, but they would inevitably be followed by months with very poor numbers. And his attitude certainly matched where he was on the sales dial. In the great months, he felt like he was on top of the world. But in the slow months, stress and anxiety would consume him to the point that it affected his home life, health, and diet.

What had always eluded Joe was consistent high achievement. Simply put, Joe was a professional rider on the roller coaster of success. He didn’t have the habits that would push him through and keep him on the high plane of success and make the lows less low.

After some consultation, Joe embraced the concept of the “fight-thru,” a strategy we’re going to talk about in this chapter. Once he learned how to win many of the small battles within himself day to day, everything changed. His normal routine of up and then down was replaced by consistent performance and gradual improvement.

In the past two years, Joe’s business has increased more than 40 percent, and he’s lost 40 pounds by avoiding the binge stress eating he used to do. The changes have been so stark that the other people in his group at work named a scale of improvement after him—the Berger Scale of Success, a combination of weight lost and percentage points of business increased.

It all came from learning to “fight-thru,” and it’s something anybody can do—with some practice.

The entire subject of habits—how they’re formed, how long it takes, how easy or hard they are to break—is shrouded in misunderstandings and misrepresentations of the work of one man: Dr. Maxwell Maltz, who presented his ideas in his 1960 book Psycho-Cybernetics.¹

You’ve probably heard that it takes something on the order of twenty-one consecutive days of the same intentional activity to create a habit. That’s something that was pulled out of Maltz’s book and oversimplified to the point where it is far from the point he intended to make.

Maltz wasn’t even talking about habit formation when he introduced the time period of twenty-one days. He was talking about patients who had gone through facial surgery, and the amount of time it took them to change their self-images enough to be used to seeing their new faces. His point was that it took a minimum of twenty-one days for an established mental image to be replaced with a new one.

Of course, folks with bad habits in 1960 were just like all of us with bad habits today. They really, really wanted it to be as simple as grinding out twenty-one days without a cigarette, or following a new exercise routine or a different diet, desperately hoping that this magic number would enable them to make a lasting change. Unfortunately, it isn’t quite that simple.

The reality is that our habits aren’t so much formed as they are in a constant state of formation. They’re either getting stronger or getting weaker, based on how much attention and reinforcement they’re getting each day.

The reality is that our habits aren’t so much formed as they are in a constant state of formation.

If you’re looking for the technical answer, researchers from University College London followed one hundred people for twelve weeks as they attempted to establish one new habit—which ranged from something as simple as incorporating a different food into a daily diet to something as ambitious as starting a long-distance running plan. The study revealed that it took the participants anywhere from two and a half weeks to three and a half months to establish their habits to the point where they did the new thing at least 95 percent of the time.²

Of course, the devil is in the details.

The factors that impacted how long the habit formation took? According to the study, it depended on how much time someone spent working at the new habit, what the habit was, and how different it was from the person’s regular routine. In other words, there is no magic twenty-one-day “cleanse” that will spit you out the other side stronger, thinner, or with more oxygen in your lungs.

But before you get discouraged, there is a process you can follow to develop a set of habits (or regular practices) that will serve you well in your professional and personal life. It’s a matter of following some simple steps that work in concert with how your brain functions—not against it.

In basic terms, behavior patterns or habits start in the same part of the brain as the one responsible for memories and emotions. There’s an external trigger for the habit, the behavior itself, and then the emotional response to the behavior. When you respond to the trigger with the behavior, and the behavior makes you feel good, it reinforces itself into a habit loop. Over time, that loop becomes an ingrained part of your brain’s “programming,” to the point that the habit activity happens almost without conscious thought.

Whether you’re trying to add a new, good habit to your daily routine or replace a bad one with something else, you’re going to go over the same “mental terrain.” Our goal here is to give you a roadmap to that terrain, so that when you get to it, you aren’t surprised by what you see and feel, and you have a guide to help you push through it.

We separate that guide into three different phases—the honeymoon, the fight-thru, and second nature. The mere act of recognizing the phases of habit formation when you see them and calling them out to yourself is a huge positive step, and it will provide a major boost in energy.

The mere act of recognizing the phases of habit formation when you see them and calling them out to yourself is a huge positive step, and it will provide a major boost in energy.

THE HONEYMOON

This is a neighborhood we all know very well. You’ve decided to start a new, regular routine at gym, or keep your desk much more organized, or set up a system so that your client information always gets updated in a central place.

It usually happens because of some kind of jolt—either positive or negative. Maybe you went to a conference and heard a talk that really inspired you, or you lost an extremely important piece of paper in the mess and missed an important deal. Either way, a “triggering incident” produced plenty of fuel to kick off the habit drive.

And the first few days, it might even be easy. After that first vigorous workout in your new routine, you might say to yourself, “Oh yeah, I can do this. I’m ready for the challenge.”

We chart it by email every time we hold one of our training seminars. The students have follow-up access by email for any questions or comments they might have, and our mailboxes fill up the next week like clockwork—with messages about how easy it was to make all the changes, and about how they are already way ahead of the pace we suggested in the program.

But all honeymoons eventually come to an end, and the day-to-day reality sets in.

On day three or day eight or day eighteen, you’ll meet one of the constant stream of obstacles that will test your resolve. You’ll be presented with many different versions of the same question. Will you take the easier route and go back to “normal,” or will you win your “fight thru”?

THE FIGHT-THRU

This is the point where “I can do this” turns into “This is harder than I thought,” or, “Is it really going to matter if I miss a day?” To make it through to the third phase, when the habit becomes second nature, you need to be able to win two or three of these important fight-thru battles with yourself.

Here are the four techniques you will need to do just that.

1. Ritualize

The less you leave up to chance (or procrastination), the better your chances are for success. Ritualize the new habit by scheduling it on purpose at the same time every day. If the habit is getting a thirty-minute run in every day, block it out on the calendar for the same time and make it nonnegotiable. Doing it this way takes most of the thinking out of doing it. You’re almost automating the process. Over his years at UCLA, Coach Wooden built a dedicated set of rituals that put him where he needed to be each day—from his 5:30 a.m. walk, to meeting with assistants immediately after practice to formulate the plan for the next practice, to finding his wife, Nellie, in the stands before a game and making eye contact.

2. Recognize

As we mentioned above, just the act of recognizing the barrier in front of you is a huge step toward getting over it. When it gets to be day three of the exercise plan and you’re lying in bed debating with yourself about whether or not you want to go out in the rain and get it done, recognize where you are. Learn to simply say to yourself, “I’ve entered a fight-thru.” Recognizing that you are in a “fight-thru” is like taking the blindfold off before the fight begins. Now you know what you’re fighting. Remind yourself that “It’s important to win this one, today.” Why? Because each fight-thru win makes the next fight-thru easier to beat, thanks to momentum. Momentum works the other way, too. Each fight you lose makes it easier to quit the next time.

3. Ask Two Questions

As you push through the fight-thru, coach yourself up with two “perspective” questions. Ask yourself how you will feel if you win the fight-thru, and, conversely, ask yourself how you will feel if you lose it. You’re taking the next step past recognizing the facts of the situation and bringing emotion into the equation—which is the most valuable kind of fuel. Emotion promotes action. If you’ve committed yourself to a workout routine, for example, and you hit one of the inevitable fight-thrus, ask yourself the two questions. The first would be, “How will I feel if I win this fight-thru?” Chances are, if you find the strength to win, you will end up feeling like a world champion (even if only for a short period). The second would be “How will I feel if I lose this fight-thru?” If you lose the battle—it will probably bring out the negative emotion that comes with underperforming. Using these positive and negative emotions can help propel you through.

Emotion promotes action.

4. Life Projection

Take thirty seconds and think, in great detail, about where you think your life will be in five years if you’re able to make this change and consistently win your fight-thrus. This is the time to be totally honest with yourself, and really let yourself feel the positives of doing that different thing. Do it in tandem, and go through the same process while thinking about your quality of life if you allow yourself to lose fight-thrus for the upcoming five years. Again, picturing as much detail as you can is really important for maximum effectiveness. The more emotion you bring into it, the better.

The amazing things that world-class athletes are able to accomplish are usually chalked up to freak physical ability—and that certainly can be a factor. But a much bigger factor in those athletes reaching that level is their relentless ability to consistently win the fight-thrus.

Greatness is predicated on consistently doing things others can’t or won’t do. Simply put, success is not about being brilliant. It is about being consistent.

The first time we met one of our baseball clients, he was bouncing around in the minor leagues. He was extremely talented, but in six years of pro ball, he had spent less than a full season at the major league level. He knew he was just a few good habits away from a permanent stay in the big leagues, and he came to us for help.

The first habit he needed to incorporate was to control his drinking. He was in no way out of control, but drinking represented a huge component of his social life. He’d finish a game and go somewhere to unwind with “a few” beers, and he’d eat dinner late and stay out socializing. He wouldn’t get home until the early morning hours, and the next night he’d do it all over again.

It sounds like something your mother would tell you, but he really wasn’t getting enough sleep. He woke up late and groggy, and would usually scarf down some fast food in his rush to the ballpark for a game. He would get to work feeling stressed and underprepared, and it certainly leaked into his performance on the field.

By making a basic habit change and committing to drinking no more than three beers on a night before a game, he self-limited his time out. This started a chain reaction of positive events—more sleep, more time in the morning, a healthier breakfast, and a more relaxed and focused attitude at the park.

Now that he had more time to prepare before games, the player decided to adopt another one of the rules we teach. He committed to getting to the field and spending specific time getting himself mentally prepared to play, using the Mental Workout we’re going to talk about in Chapter 6.

He also committed to spending ten minutes before every game doing what is called “deep practice”—training at full speed. One of the player’s weaknesses was pitch recognition. Major league players have just a split second to diagnose what kind of pitch is being thrown and decide whether or not to swing. If you don’t go in with some kind of game plan about the pitches you expect the pitcher to throw, and have some idea what the spin looks like for each, you’re guessing—and you aren’t going to be very successful. The player spent ten minutes standing in with the pitchers during their warm-ups, practicing calling out what pitches they were throwing. His goal was to get three in a row correct before the ball hit the catcher’s mitt. If he didn’t get three in a row, he had to go another round.

The changes he was making were great, but it still took almost a full season of habit development to get them to be a real, integrated part of his routine. He would be the first one to say that it took a huge number of fight-thrus to get there.

The first week he made his commitment to limit drinking, one of his best friends on the team celebrated a birthday. After the game, they all went to the bar to celebrate, and the player finished three beers in the first hour. He was thinking about ordering a fourth, but he recognized that he was in the middle of one of those fight-thrus. He forced himself to think about what would happen if he ordered another drink. He realized his “one more” would probably turn into six more. He pictured getting home at three in the morning, and also imagined what he would feel like when he got to the park the next day. It was not a pretty picture.

He ordered another beer, but he made it a nonalcoholic one, and spent another hour celebrating with his buddy before going home and getting to bed before 1:00.

The reality, of course, is that you won’t win every time. We’re all human, and willpower is imperfect. Four months into his commitment, the player went to a teammate’s wedding and completely lost control, drinking hard and deep into the night. It began a two-week cycle where he returned to the habits that had kept him in the minors in the first place. Even though it was the off-season, he still had responsibilities: he had to keep himself in great shape and be ready for spring training.

The key was that after those two weeks, the player realized that it was getting easier and easier to lose those internal willpower fights, and he didn’t like where he was or where he was headed.

He made himself imagine where he was going to be in five years if he kept allowing himself to fall off the wagon. He was certain that the remainder of his career would be a series of disappointments and underperforming. The thought of never reaching his potential haunted and disturbed him. He learned to use the negative emotion to help recommit himself to his original goals, and doing so caused him to start winning fight-thrus again.

When spring training came, the player was ready. He had his best spring, and he made the big league team. He hasn’t seen a minor league field in three years—he has become a full-time major league starter.

SECOND NATURE

After you’ve won a series of fight-thrus (both big and small), you’ll start to enter that “getting into the groove” phase that feels so good. The new habit has become a regular part of your routine, and doesn’t feel so much like something you have to intentionally remember or push yourself to do.

It’s a great place to be, but you also need to keep your guard up to protect against some really common traps that can send you back to the fight-thru phase. These traps are the reason business professionals don’t repeat strong results year over year, exsmokers become smokers again, and writers never get that first novel completed.

The Discouragement Monster

One of the unfortunate realities of the world is that just because you work hard and do the right things, good things don’t automatically flow to you. Life can happen in streaks and slumps, and it can be incredibly discouraging if you put in the work to change an important habit and it does not immediately produce the benefits you expect. Maybe you changed a key way you interact with potential clients, and it hasn’t yet produced the numbers you expected. Or you changed your diet and it didn’t produce the weight loss you hoped. It is very easy to slip into the mindset of “Why do I bother? It doesn’t matter what I do anyway.” The discouragement monster, as we call it, is so dangerous because it saps your willingness to keep trying. You must remember that scoring often comes in spurts.

The discouragement monster, as we call it, is so dangerous because it saps your willingness to keep trying. You must remember that scoring often comes in spurts.

Disruption

It happens every single year. Just before summer, millions of people start a new diet and exercise routine and get into a great pattern. It’s going well, and November comes around. They get knocked off track by Thanksgiving, and in a couple of weeks the Christmas party circuit starts. By January, they’re right back where they were in June. It can happen a million other ways as well. You might get sick, go on a long vacation, or even take a weekend and put work out of your mind. Whether it’s vacations, illnesses, or holidays, any break in the routine is a potential disruption. And any of those disruptions can put a major dent in your positive habits.

Seduction of Success

Maybe the most dangerous of the three comes when you actually have great success with the new habit. You’ve won the fight-thrus, you’ve changed your pattern, and now you’re really humming along. It’s absolutely human nature to get to that point and think—even for a second—“Hey, I’ve got this licked. I’ve figured it out, and I don’t have to work quite as hard now that I have it down.” Then you test that new theory, and lo and behold, the results still show up for a short while. You allow yourself to believe you’re the special one who won’t have to work as hard as the others to produce results. You know what happens next. You punch another ticket for a ride on the success roller coaster. A few years ago, we worked with a successful college baseball pitcher who was as talented as any athlete we’d ever seen. He pushed himself in training, and he was relentless in his throwing program. He aced his process goals, every day. He got drafted, and quickly worked his way up to the major leagues. After his first full season, though, he started to gradually tail off with his process goal work. Regardless of what we said, we couldn’t get him to realize that he was headed for trouble. He started focusing more on his bank account and the size of his next contract. In three years, he was out of baseball completely. His response to what happened: “The things I did early in my career worked so well, I stopped doing them.”

We have another client who is one of the preeminent personal-injury attorneys in the United States. She didn’t have any trouble in the courtroom, but at times she struggled with some of the other aspects of the job. Her firm compensated her on how many cases she brought in as well as whether or not she won them.

She had always been passionate about helping clients, but, like many attorneys, she didn’t look forward to the part where she had to market herself to new clients. She needed to figure out how to be better at the daily grind of finding potential clients and signing them up.

She determined that she wanted to develop one new habit to get better at that part of her job. To do this, she committed to spending thirty minutes per day writing blog posts for her firm’s website. The idea was to expand her profile and start to be recognized more frequently by potential clients.

Most of this attorney’s struggles came from discouragement. She told us that the hardest weeks were the ones where she devoted hours of time to making new connections but none of it seemed to bear fruit. She kept feeling like she wanted to quit putting effort into looking for new clients, even though she knew that would only make things worse.

She did have some days that went really well, but those days made her struggle in a different way. Since she didn’t enjoy the marketing part of her job, it made her hope against hope that grabbing three or four new clients in a short time would put her in a position where she didn’t have to work on the marketing side so hard for a few weeks or months.

The first step toward beating the enemy—and avoiding going back to the fight-thru phase—is to know the enemy. Our client learned to recognize the discouragement monster when it came—as well as the seduction of success. She learned to recognize the beginnings of “seduction” as one of two conversations she found herself having with herself: “I can’t get the marketing work done today because . . . ” was one of them. The other was “It’ll be okay if I don’t do it today because. . . .”

Recognizing seduction is such an important part of avoiding it. Anytime you catch yourself saying, “I can’t do my most important tasks today because . . . ,” or, “I don’t need to do my most important activities today because . . . ,” you know you are entering the seduction zone.

Recognition is great, but what do you do next?

Anytime you recognize that you’re backsliding, choose to do “a little bit more, for a little while.” If you are becoming seduced, choose that day to do up to 10 percent more on your “1 Must.” Doing just a bit more even for that one day will bookmark in your mind the fact that you have the ability to win fight-thrus.

If you are becoming seduced, choose that day to do up to 10 percent more on your “1 Must.” Doing just a bit more even for that one day will bookmark in your mind the fact that you have the ability to win fight-thrus.

For example, when our client started feeling pretty good about her marketing work, to a point of thinking she might take the day off on the blog posts, she committed to three extra minutes writing that day. It isn’t that writing for three extra minutes (or doing any other habit-related task for a few minutes) will have a huge impact on your results. That isn’t the point of doing it. You’re reminding yourself during that extra time that you’re willing to put in the extra work, and that you’re mentally strong. That you’re different from other people. When “normal” people experience success, they have a tendency to respond by doing a little less. When mentally tough people experience success, they stay totally committed to what caused the success. It’s amazing what that kind of thinking can do for your overall attitude!

When “normal” people experience success, they have a tendency to respond by doing a little less. When mentally tough people experience success, they stay totally committed to what caused the success.

If you do fall into one of those traps, it isn’t the end of the world. It’s like going back to driver education school after you get a collection of speeding tickets. You go back to the fight-thru phase and win some more of those to earn your place back in second nature.

The overall win is the commitment to pushing past the fight-thru phase no matter how many times you have to go back to it. Remember, every time you win a fight-thru, the next one gets easier to win.

Remember, every time you win a fight-thru, the next one gets easier to win.

That’s not to say the process is going to be easy or pain-free. If you want to be extremely successful, you have to commit to doing things that many people aren’t willing to do. If it was easy, everybody would do it. But just like physical training makes your body strong, perseverance and willingness to relentlessly fight thru the obstacles make you mentally strong.

It is the training ground for mental toughness. You’re establishing winning as a habit.

“PUKE-A-LICIOUS” WORKOUTS

One of our NHL clients showed us just how powerful the “a little more for a little while” concept can be. This player was one of the top players on his team, and the team had done so well they had qualified for the playoffs with three weeks to go in the season.

When that happened, the coaching staff got everyone together and told them to lay off their strength and conditioning training, so they would have “fresh legs” once the postseason started.

Our client was young and strong, and one of his “3 Most Important” items was to get four additional strength and conditioning workouts in every week. He wanted to listen to his coaches, so he stopped doing the workouts—and promptly found himself playing the worst hockey of his career going into the final days of the regular season.

After talking to the coaches and getting permission to get back onto his workout routine, the player decided to make one modification. During one of the workouts, he would push himself harder, for just a few minutes—to the point where his mouth started watering and he was about to vomit.

When we asked him why he did it, he quickly answered, “It’s in those puke-a-licious moments that I’m reminded how much of a badass I really am.”

In those extra, intense workouts, the player was bookmarking in his mind that he was different. While other players were worn down, or were taking it easy at the end of the season, he was staying committed and even doing more. He was reminding himself that he was growing stronger as the season wore on.

This experience had a huge impact on his confidence, and he’s now considered one of the top two-way players in the game.

The Big Why: Habit formation is more than a twenty-one-day set-and-forget process. Life is a constant state of fluctuating habits.

The Inversion Test: Learning to win one fight-thru makes it easier to win the next fight-thru. Losing one fight-thru makes it easier to lose the next, too. If you want to stop making progress, do not put effort into winning your fight-thrus.

Act Now: Learn to recognize what’s happening. Write down on a piece of paper one fight-thru you are currently experiencing.

Some examples from our clients:

PRO ATHLETE (THIRTEEN DAYS AFTER THE SEASON ENDS)

I do not want to start my off-season training. I want to relax. I had a great season last year and I am feeling unmotivated about getting things going for the upcoming year. Even though my trainer is on me and I know I need to get going, I am thinking about putting it off for another week. Winning the Fight-Thru: I reminded myself how I will feel on day one of OTA’s (organized team activities) if I don’t come in feeling at the top of my game. I have had years before where I started the season not in my best shape, and those years are not the years I want to repeat. The other side of it is when I show up in the best shape of my career: it feels great, my confidence is high, and it always causes me to have a strong start to the season. For me, a strong start is very, very important.

FINANCIAL ADVISOR

I just had my best month ever and I am feeling really strong. I find myself thinking about my results and thinking that maybe, just maybe, I will not have to keep pushing so hard. Even though it only takes about an hour each day to complete my “1 Must” of proactively calling three clients and one prospect per day, I am coming up with excuses to let myself off the hook. Winning the Fight-Thru: I remind myself that the single most important reason I had such a strong month last month was because I made my proactive contacts daily—no excuse. I know I need to continue this and I force myself to realize that “process guarantees results . . . good and bad.” If I follow a bad process, I will have poor results. It’s that simple.

PHYSICIAN

I have been staying up late watching the NBA playoffs. I played college basketball and I love watching the big guys hoop. When my alarm goes off at 5:00 I know I need to get up if I am going to have time to get my workout in. Problem is, I am just too tired, and I know I need more sleep if I am going to be sharp for my patients.

Winning the Fight-Thru: I’ve lost ten to twelve pounds over the past six months and I feel really good about doing so. I know if I keep giving myself a pass on making my workouts, it will be just a matter of time before the lost weight comes back. If I am going to get up at 5:00, I know I need to get at least seven hours of sleep for my mind to be sharp. I need to begin setting a “lights-out curfew” for myself no later than 9:45 p.m. each night. I can record the games and watch them commercial-free the next morning while I work out. If pro-athletes set lights-out curfews, I guess I should be approaching my performance the same way.