Don’t Read the Menu
Do you tell yourself you are going to work harder, eat better, exercise more or change your lifestyle? You commit to it for a few weeks and then you find yourself right back where you started.
It’s funny, a friend of mine asked me the other day, “How do you get so much done every day?” I had to stop and think about it for a minute but then I said, “It’s simple, I don’t read the menu?” Rightfully, she looked at me like I was crazy. What does reading a menu have to do with getting more done every day?
Imagine this: You are scheduled to go to lunch with a friend and she decides she wants to go the Olive Garden. You enter the restaurant and you have told yourself all day that you are going to eat something healthy and then what happens? YOU READ THE MENU. What happens when you read the menu? You don’t want to eat healthily – especially at Olive Garden where you are tempted with a feast of carbs and fat. Your brain starts to justify all the reasons why you don’t need to eat something healthy. You think, “It’s her birthday,” “Or I can start tomorrow” and before you know it you find yourself eating Fettucine Alfredo with extra parmesan.
When you get home, you look back with regret, beat yourself up and wonder what is wrong with you. Well, I have good news, there is nothing wrong with you. In fact, you are perfectly normal because it is the way our brain works – it is seeking a small hit of dopamine.
This is called the motivational triad - your brain naturally pursues pleasure, avoids pain and efficiency. If you pick up the menu and read it, your primitive brain is going to seek pleasure because that is what it is designed to do! You are going to want to eat a greasy hamburger and fries that much is guaranteed. This is where your pre-frontal cortex comes in - we must learn how to engage our pre-frontal cortex to make decisions ahead of time which helps us reduce the urges we will automatically receive from our primitive brain.
What does this have to do with business?
Eating at a restaurant is an easy example to see how our brain works so that we can notice how this impacts us in other areas of our life. Whether you are trying to eat healthily, get up at a certain time, work on your business, exercise or fulfill a new goal, your brain is going to tell you it is a bad idea. Why? We feel uncomfortable when we try new things, and our primitive brain thinks that our survival is threatened and tells us that we should go back into the cave.
The way to manage this is to engage our pre-frontal cortex by making decisions ahead of time otherwise we are ruled by our primitive brain. Back to lunch at the Olive Garden, what I realized is that not only do I stay thin because I don’t read the menu – I get more done every day too.
Here are three easy tips that I use to help me use my brain to my advantage:
1. I plan everything in advance.
2. I block my calendar for results. For example, I used to block one hour to prospect. Now, I block one hour to make 10 phone calls. Another example is instead of blocking an hour to exercise, I block 45 minutes of cardio as measured on my Oura Ring.
3. I commit to my calendar. This is the part I find the hardest. It doesn’t matter what the activity is on my calendar, my brain generally tells me not to do it. The way I handle this is to notice it and then acknowledge it. I tell my inner voice, “Noted” but don’t give into it.
I have learned that not reading the menu, is really a metaphor for a lot of things in my life. Whether you want to make long-lasting changes in your life or business, making decisions ahead of time with intention will always produce better results than letting our primitive brain rule our lives. What I find so refreshing about this is that I know now that I can do hard things even when it feels scary or when my brain is trying to talk me out of it. In fact, that is the time it is probably more important to do it. When I make decisions ahead of time and complete them, I am honoring myself and getting closer to fulfilling my dreams.
