You can gain control over your attitude, your performance, and your pain
Training programs can help you shift from the monkey brain to the conscious brain.
Take charge over motivation and improve attitude—with positive mantras and easy running.
Use rehearsal drills—break up a task into doable parts performed step by step.
Magic words tap into successful patterns and our intuitive and creative powers.
Dirty tricks will distract your reflex brain and activate the frontal lobe.
You can learn how to manage and eliminate pain’s hold over your motivation.
The choice is yours. You can take control over your attitude, or you can let your monkey brain go through a series of negative reactions that usually result in low motivation and reduced performance. By using the proven strategies in this chapter, you can turn a negative attitude into a positive one, reprogram the reflex brain to stay on track to a positive goal, and tap into the incredible powers of the right brain. Whether you struggle to get out the door when running by yourself or you need more motivation to keep going when it’s tough, you have a better chance of success when you have a strategy. This is your motivational training program.
To understand motivation, look inside the mental command and response center—your human, conscious brain. If you don’t focus on each aspect of your workout, however, you can allow the subconscious monkey brain to be in charge. When stress accumulates to a significant level, this emotional production center takes protection action to reduce motivation and reduce effort level.
If the subconscious brain is conducting your run (which is common) and stress builds up, a stream of negative attitude hormones are released that trigger feelings that make us want to slow down, quit the workout, or avoid starting the workout. The reflex brain also reduces blood flow to the frontal cortex and to areas of damage that it has already identified. This results in a sensation of pain that normally would not be felt by the damage alone. This pain is the result of TMS.
Note: I am not suggesting that you should run through pain when there is chance of a serious injury. When you have pain in a weak link area that you suspect is an injury, check with your doctor to verify. In many cases, the pain is stress-induced TMS and can be managed cognitively.
By engaging the conscious brain in the frontal lobe, we can usually stay on track and very possibly push to a higher level of performance—even when there is significant stress. See the section on confronting TMS in the chapter, Situations.
The first step is to go through the stress diffusion procedure in the chapter, “Stress Activates the Monkey Brain”. Then you are ready to go through a series of mental training drills that will reprogram your reflex brain. With the conscious brain always in charge, you can back off the effort if there is a legitimate health or safety issue (very rare), or check your magic mile to ensure that your goal is not out of your current range of ability.
These drills can allow you to move from one doable step to the next. By managing pace and diffusing stress, the creative and intuitive right side of the human brain can be active and search for solutions to current problems with connections to your inner resources—your spirit.