When you say you’re committed to (fill in the blank), have you ever wondered how your body knows you are committed?

This week I’ve been studying with Benjamin J. Harvey and he gave a mind-blowing explanation of the Law of Commitment.

In fact, we are biologically designed to succeed if we follow the Law of Commitment.

In your body, you have cells called Astrocytes.

Astrocytes respond to two things. They respond to what’s called increased impulse traffic where the impulses are travelling down the same neural networks over and over again as well as taking urgent action.

With a couple of coaching processes we can trick the astrocytes by combining increased traffic with urgent action.

Say you have a habit that you want to accelerate. If you did the same thing every day, once a day for a year, you would have “zapped” your neurons (electrical chemical impulse travelling down the axons) just 365 times. But if you sit down and do 1000 zaps in a sitting, this is the equivalent of taking 3 years to form the habit. So you are accelerating the number of times the neural network fires, causing the astrocytes to wake up and ask, “What’s going on?”

The astrocytes then wake up your glial cells called Oligodendrocytes which wrap your axons with myelin.  It’s the myelin that is responsible for your ability to learn and retain the habit. The myelin insulates your neurons so the impulses can travel faster, in fact, up to 100x faster through a neuron that’s wrapped with myelin compared to one that isn’t.

With a little bit of habit hacking, you can actually achieve your results 5x faster.

Think about it this way. The only way to know that you’re committed is by your speed of response.

If you have kids you’ll see this by how quickly they put on their shoes to go to a friend’s party compared to how long it takes to put on school shoes. They’re committed to going to the party.

For yourself, notice how quickly you get into action to respond to an SMS to a person you’re committed to vs someone you’re not committed to. The same goes for your work. You speed up your response to the tasks you’re committed to vs those that you aren’t.

This is absolutely fascinating.

We can say we are committed, however now we know how to tell if we’re really committed and we also know how we can hack the system to accelerate our results.

Let me know what you’re committed to and how quickly you’re getting your results. Reach out if you’d like to accelerate your results.

 

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Go to https://shirleydalton.com/Weekly-Thoughts.

You know animals can teach us a lot about life.

It was Good Friday and Ross and I were relaxing in the loungeroom when we noticed three kookaburras sitting on the railing on the front verandah.

They weren’t there long before they were joined by magpies, a currawong and a butcher bird.

Now, ordinarily Ross and I would not feed birds because we recalled a sign in a Queensland national park when we were travelling that said, “A fed bird is a dead bird”.

So generally, we won’t feed birds.

For some reason, on this day, Ross had some left over meat and so he threw it on the verandah.

The kookaburras jumped in, grabbed what they could, flew off and proceeded to shake their beaks to kill their prize.

The butcher bird also took flight, grabbed a piece and flew off.

Not so the magpies and currawong.

They hesitated.

They were on high alert.

They kept looking this way and that.

To Ross and I there was clearly no danger.

They could have quickly swooped down, grabbed their share and flown off.

Still they waited.

Still they hesitated, until finally one of the magpies made a daring dash.

With prize in mouth, the magpie took off.

I didn’t see it again until a week later when I heard a commotion outside.

As I looked out the window, the magpie was scolding its young and pushing it away as it ran across the yard with its stash from a few days before.

The magpie then hid its stash under the bushes on the other side of the yard.

So what are they teaching us?

Apart from “Don’t feed the birds”, they are teaching us not to wait, rather to just jump in.

If fear is holding you back, you are likely to miss out.

If there is something you want, I encourage you to just jump in and go for it.

The sooner you do, the sooner you’ll get your prize.

In fact, I have a poster in my room that was a gift from a podcast guest, that says, “Everything you want is on the other side of fear”.

Just jump in.

P.S.  Invite your friends to get the Weekly Thought delivered directly to their inbox.

Go to https://shirleydalton.com/Weekly-Thoughts.

P.P.S.  If you are feeling fearful and you would like to release that fear, we have a transformational tool that can help. Contact us if you’d like to know more.

Before we get into this week’s thought, I just want to acknowledge the readers who answered the challenge last week and messaged me with the tasks they wanted to be held accountable for.

Well done! All were completed in the week, so just to remind us of the benefit of having a coach, I call it the “BAQS System” because a coach, has your “back”. A coach can help to:

1. Identify your Blind Spots
2. Be your Accountability partner
3. Ask quality Questions, and
4. Provide suggestion on Strategies that you may not have thought of.

Now to this week:

This week I presented the first of 6 online presentations.

Whilst I’ve practised and practised and practised, I still felt very nervous.

One strategy that I use to reduce the nervousness is to repeat over and over, “If You Get Nervous, Focus On Service”. I believe this originally came from Doreen Virtue.

So let’s unpack that.

Often our nervousness comes because we are focussing on ourselves. We are concerned to:

1. Look good
2. To have others think well of us
3. To not make mistakes

This is the wrong focus to have.

Ask yourself, why are you doing the thing that makes you nervous?

In most cases, it’s because you want to help others.

This could be through an uplifting song or play. It could be teaching and presenting some information. It could be speaking in public. It could be playing a sport.

No matter what the motivation is, keep in mind, “If you get nervous, focus on service”.
Focus on the people that you can help and why you are helping them.

Focus on the audience for your concert or play.

Focus on your team and/or the spectators when playing a sport.

This little mantra and change of focus and mindset works.

Forget about yourself and focus on the reason why you are doing it and for whom.

Let me know what makes you feel nervous and how you can apply this great little reminder.

P.S.  Invite your friends to get the Weekly Thought delivered directly to their inbox.

Go to https://shirleydalton.com/Weekly-Thoughts.

P.P.S. Go to https://ShirleyDalton.com/Events to register for my upcoming Live online ZOOM presentations, “5 Pillars To Become An Effective Leader” and “Reset Your Mindset: 4 Steps to Change Your Thoughts and Change Your Life”.  There’s nothing to buy.  Just pure content that I want you to have so you can create what it is you want.