68. default programming

If you’re consistently getting frustrated from getting the same results, perhaps you need to look at the story you’re telling yourself. If you take the same way to work, eat the same foods, watch the same shows, complete the same workout, or listen to the same advice as you always have, you’re running on default. Our lives consist of a few simple stories we’ve gotten comfortable with repeating over and over again. They’ve become our programming, and are the reason you’re experiencing the same results in your life, health, relationships, and business that you always have. The most interesting part is that because you’re telling yourself the same stories, the results are predictable.

This fact shouldn’t be discouraging, but liberating in the fact that you can change your life by telling a new story. By adding a new variable into your story, you can change the outcome and produce a different result. In fact, it’s really the only way to change. In terms of health, you can’t get well by telling the same story that made you sick, or unhealthy. You have to change your approach, and it starts by leaving your default narrative. If you want to lose weight or optimize your health, you’re going to have to revise what you’ve been telling yourself, whether it’s improving your nutrition, sleep habits, activity levels or better yet all three. Once you do, you’ll be distancing yourself from your old story by creating a new one in the process, and surprise, you’ll be on your way to a new healthier lifestyle.

Diving a little deeper, it’s an unfortunate truth that most people just want the outcome without having to create a new story for themselves. In doing so, they never rewrite their default narrative, but simply put it on hold to get a temporary result, then eventually put the weight back on. To affect long lasting change, you have to rewrite the whole story, both inside and out. You cannot simply change the external variables — nutrition, sleep, exercise — without also changing the internal variables — mindset, systems we have in place, stories we tell ourselves. This can be more difficult to address in the short term, but far more impactful to achieving the best quality of life you can. For example; if you’re trying to make healthy changes in your life, maybe as a child your parents rewarded you with cookies and cakes every time you did something good, or maybe every time you messed up, you were told to do something physical like mow the grass or chop some wood. It’s possible that you’re subconsciously equating sweets with reward, and physical effort (exercise) with punishment. So you will always derail your progress if you cannot address both internal and external variables when rewriting your story, and getting out of your default programming.

If you’re living your life through the story you’ve always told yourself, expecting things to change, hopefully you can now see why it’s not going to happen. To change, you need to get out of your default programming by rewriting the story you’ve been telling yourself.