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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