Using Logical and Natural Consequences

They were amazing, their feats were astronomical, and nobody was handing them bags of protein powder to reach these goals. In the 200,000 years that the human species has existed, the human body hasn't changed all that much. It's still made up of the same tissues, and it still takes competing against other humans to get you to points you didn't know existed. The athletes that I mentioned were leaders in their field because they had the will to train, the desire to win, and the discipline to follow through on all of it. Will, desire, and discipline beat the shit out of everything. If you have those three things, you can do anything. Will is the process by which people decide on and deliberately exert action/control to do something or to restrain their own impulses. One example is the endocrine system, particularly the thyroid gland. When the gland is not producing sufficient thyroid hormones to keep the body's metabolism running efficiently, a signal is sent to the pitu-itary gland. It responds by producing a hormone that travels back to stimulate production of thyroid hormones. In effect, one gland asks another for help and gets it. Even before a baby sees the light, it has already established a complex communication system in which it is able to signal to its mother's body to meet its needs. Upon birth, the infant's facial expressions, and vocalizations continue the function that communicates to the mother, I am vulnerable and I need you to help me, and these communications help the infant survive. Yet, as we grow into adulthood, the instinct to ask for help seems to be inhibited. The world is filled with presidents, CEOs, managers, and front line employees who have all failed because they did not ask for help- the same holds true for students at all levels of education. It is also true that many marriages suffer because partners do not follow their natural instinct to request the support of each other. Why is care soliciting, even when we know we need it and when it is the natural action to take, so often ignored? It is an inherently challenging task because attending to one's subjective state to describe it disrupts the merging of action and attention that characterizes being in flow. Researchers have used a variety of measures to identify, characterize, and quantify the subjective experience of flow in daily life. These measures include (a) qualitative interviews that probe the nature and conditions of the flow experience, (b) paper-and-pencil measures that address the frequency of flow or its component dimensions in people's lives, and (c) real-life, real-time measures of the nature and everyday contexts of flow experience that use the Experience Sampling Method or ESM (Csikszentmihalyi & Larson, 1987).

In ESM studies, participants carry a paging device. When signaled, they record their activities, thoughts, and subjective states at the time. ESM research is more resource-intensive than other approaches to the study of flow. Nevertheless, data about the daily experience of families, adolescents, and working parents, including longitudinal data, have been collected. Large-scale data collection concerning the frequency of flow is a possibility as a component in evaluation of the population's optimal psychological functioning. Recently, the U. S. When an actor knows that he's going to be shirtless for a portion of a movie and there's a lot of money riding on a picture, believe me he will be disciplined and will work hard toward making sure he looks his best. Actors don't want to be embarrassed. They don't want to let anybody down. And they care about their careers. This is your motivation to do everything you can to achieve your goals. You've got to be 100 percent committed. I always say that you are better off with a 100 percent commitment and a half-ass plan than you are with a great plan and a half-ass commitment. When I started training Chris Pratt, we were at a gym in Hollywood. Every day he showed up and gave it his all. The people in the gym would look at him like, Who is this guy? Vulnerability: Positive Feelings-Not Vulnerability is an important evolutionary concept that refers to anything that puts a creature at risk, makes a threat to its survival. The vulnerability could be part of its nature--for example, a creature's slowness, which puts it at risk to a faster predator. Or the vulnerability could be part of the environment, such as the drying up of a water hole.

Similarly, an executive's demeanor could be his or her personal vulnerability, while a drying up of capital like the water hole could be an external vulnerability. Whether internal or external, the creatures that can quickly identify and protect their vulnerabilities will have an edge, and thus be favored by natural selection. We all are born with vulnerabilities, and it also follows that we are all programmed to make efforts to protect those vulnerabilities- just like the blackbird chick, we cannot survive without the aid of others. Vulnerability is part of human nature, but I've found that few people like to acknowledge it. In speaking to a group of several hundred husbands and wives, I asked: How many of you like to feel vulnerable? A few days later, I asked the same question in a classroom filled with executives. I know that you will not be surprised to hear that not one person in either group raised his or her hand, although there were a lot of laughs. Bureau of the Census has shown interest in using the ESM to gather data about Americans' subjective experience, including flow, on a large scale. Already, at the other end of the spectrum in terms of measures, a single item has been included on a Gallup poll (D. Clinton, personal communication, 1998) and on a German national survey (Noelle-Neumann, 1995) to gauge the frequency of flow experiences in a broad cross-section of each population. Both polls asked how often the respondents experience involvement so intense that they lose track of time. The results of the two polls were similar. Although about one fifth of those surveyed (16% of Americans, 23% of Germans) reported having the experience described on a daily basis, more than one third in each poll indicated that they rarely or never experience involvement so intense that they lose track of time (42% of Americans, 35% of Germans). The proportions of people reporting that they do not experience flow raise questions about intervention. Several successful interventions informed by the flow model have been undertaken (Inghilleri, 1999 Massimini & Delle Fave, 2000). It bears noting that these interventions have focused on identifying and cultivating interests and activities that provide enjoyment rather than directly targeting the quality of experience itself. As already described, when one is in flow, the quality of subjective experience influences what one seeks to do next. He gave every single rep his absolute best effort. He earned every drop of sweat. And look where his career went.

He had the desire to transform himself. Be consistent. You've got to be disciplined enough to make sure you stick to the plan you have. That doesn't mean you won't have a setback. In fact, you will undoubtedly have a setback. But then you'll get back on track because your will and desire dictate that in order to get the results you want, you have to be disciplined enough to follow through. You have to be consistent. People don't like to feel vulnerable. Why should this be so? The answer from the standpoint of your evolutionary heritage is that vulnerability is a natural stimulant for unpleasant feelings of anxiety and fear. Anxiety Disorders Back on the savannah, it was a perilous time, and survival was won every day. It was an era when an individual's vulnerability or a group's vulnerability literally could lead to death. To help protect these vulnerabilities, to bring them to the awareness of the individual so that they could respond to the threat message and act to resolve the threat, Mother Nature evolved anxiety and fear. These emotions have the evolutionary function of warning you of a threat. Note that in the time of your ancestors, vulnerabilities were predominantly of the physical domain: speed of a creature, comparative strength in an individual (making a weak individual vulnerable to doing poorly in the hunting party), unstable climatic and geological forces. These vulnerabilities all threatened the physical life of an individual and the clan. Back then, anxiety was not just a nervous disorder, it meant the difference between life and death. Subjective states provide feedback about the changing relationship to the environment. Anxiety and boredom are attended to as negative feedback and flow as positive feedback; one continuously adjusts the ongoing relationship with the environment to find the optimal balance point between one's capacities for action and the perceived opportunities for action.

What happens at any given moment is responsive to what happened the moment before within the relationship, rather than being dictated by some drive ascribed to the person or some directive ascribed to the environment. In a flow activity, motivation is emergent in the sense that proximal goals arise out of the interaction between person and object (Csikszentmihalyi, 1985 Csikszentmihalyi & Nakamura, 1999). Because the subjective state is intrinsically rewarding, people seek to reproduce flow experiences. As they master challenges in an activity, however, they develop greater levels of skill, and the activity ceases to be as involving as before they must identify increasingly complex challenges if they are to continue experiencing flow. Experiential goals thus introduce a principle of selection into psychological functioning that fosters growth. The optimal level of challenge stretches a person's existing capacities (eg, Vygotsky, 1978) staying in flow results in a more complex set of skills. Because the dynamics of flow align optimal subjective experience with the stretching of capacities, to find flow in what one is doing--to be caught up in an activity from moment to moment for its own sake--is to grow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990 Massimini & Delle Fave, 2000 the Aristotelian notion of happiness as the realization of one's potentialities). No one is doing this for you. This is all YOU. I said earlier that fitness starts with you. And it does. If you have these three qualities, you will succeed. You can see it in people. They may get there at different times, but you just know it when someone is going to make it. They do so because they want to. There's not a damn thing anybody can do for you if you don't want to do it for yourself. And there's no amount of product, powder, or new workouts that will get you where you want to be. It aided early man to survive in a hazardous environment because these emotions warned the individual to be on guard. Indeed, anxiety would help change disorder to order. As the eons passed, the world became safer for humankind, but the anxiety and fear instinct remained intact.