Apparently, it takes a bit to break old patterns. It takes both physical and mental cues to reset or break old patterns. The physical aspect, from my point of view, is to literally shake you out of them, giving you an opportunity to not fall into the same pattern as you usually would. Today was mainly about how to train ourselves physically to give ourselves an opportunity to break out of these “states”. I assume that we’ll be handling the mental aspect of this on Monday.

Obviously, the “state” that we want to break away from is the negative state. Returning to my example of procrastinating, it’s very obvious that I have a specific mental state that I get into when I start to procrastinate. I can’t specifically explain what that is, but what’s also obvious is that I whenever I get into this mental state, I also display a specific body language associated with it.

So Tony’s lesson for the day is to physically “break” these negative body languages as well as your negative mental state by immediately performing some positive ones. It’s sorta like doing laughing yoga on a personal level, especially when you need it. Once you start doing the physical motions to a certain action, you mind automatically copes to follow those actions.

I know that before I pump myself to do push ups or some heavy weights, I sorta jog around, swinging my arms around and perhaps doing some punches in the air (uppercuts). And I notice that I do this whenever I want to psyche myself up. I tested myself on breaking out of one of my old patterns using this physical means of changing my “state” today. Today is also Day 3 of my Couch to 5K Running Plan, but I really wasn’t feeling it. On top of that, it started to rain just as I got ready to put on my shoes. Usually, this would have immediately prevented me on going running. But instead, I shook myself out of it by doing these motions, and pumping myself up. And the result is that I’m elated that I did go running today. I have a feeling that I should be mentally linking this feeling of elation to my workouts.

Now what I need to work on is performing these actions and breaking myself from my procrastinating mental state. I’ll give it a good try this evening and this weekend!

Day 5 of Personal Power!

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