The Secret to Pushing Yourself
Nearly everything you do in life can be broken down into two categories: 1) push behaviors and 2) pull behaviors. Push behaviors are the behaviors you must force yourself to do because your mind puts resistance in front of you. It could be studying, running, eating healthy, waking up early, or something similar.
On the other hand, pull behaviors are the behaviors you innately want to do with no resistance. It could be listening to music, watching movies, shopping, consuming social content, eating comfort food, snacking, playing games, or something similar.
As you can see, it’s natural for push behaviors to be better for you and pull behaviors to feel better to you. Therefore, the best way to manage this contradiction is to combine push and pull behaviors with each other. This is the secret to pushing yourself.
For example, I do a long run of at least 6 miles twice a week. This is a push behavior for me. I also really enjoy listening to Audible books, which is one of my favorite pass times and a pull behavior for me. Consequently, to motivate myself to do my long run I only allow myself to listen to audio books while on these runs. By combining these two push and pull behaviors, I now look forward to my long runs since I get the audio book as a treat with it.
This example is the takeaway. If you need the push behaviors for success, and you dread doing them, success will be exponentially harder. As a result, the best thing you can do is to find a method to use what pulls you to push you.