Episode 4: Be Your Future Self Within 30 Minutes of Waking Up

Good morning, everybody! At least it is morning for me. Welcome to episode four of The Work Of Becoming podcast! Today, I want to tell you a little story about my life, and I want to talk about one of my favorite questions to ask myself which is: “What is the simplest way for me to get the result I want?”

So, as you may or may not know, about two weeks ago, now, I was really sick. It wasn’t COVID, but it was something that was nasty (an absolutely nasty cold). And so, I was literally in bed for, like, four or five days, and right now in my life I am tracking macros which means I’m tracking my food, I’m trying to eat a certain amount of protein everyday, and that’s really important for me just because I am on a medication that basically takes away my appetite. So I track my food to make sure that I’m eating enough to support my mental state, to support my physical state, to support my training, everything like that.

And so, I had been tracking macros really successfully. I had had a really good week right before I went to this reunion and then got sick at the reunion and then came back. When I was done being sick and I was ready to go back into tracking, I was having a really hard time hitting my protein goal, and, essentially, if you zoom out, the macro version of this situation is that something that I was doing before with a fair amount of ease was not now giving me the same amount of ease. Something that was really easy before in my life was now feeling difficult.

And I’m sure we’ve all had a situation where we’ve told ourselves, “Ugh, I used to be able to figure this out so easily. I used to be doing this habit everyday no problem.” Then we get frustrated, and we’re like why is this hard now, and we tell ourselves something along the lines of, “Oh, I just need to figure it out. I just need to try harder. I just need to click back into my old routine.” What we do is because it was easy before or because it was working before, we start to try to replicate past situations rather than actually auditing our new situation and circumstances to see what might work better.

So, in my case, I was looking back at what was working before I was sick, and that was really tracking my food the night before, having a rough plan of what I was going to eat, but pretty much, no matter what, was in my house, I was doing pretty good at hitting that protein goal. Here’s what I want to remind you. Tasks, themselves, or actions, themselves, aren’t easy. Actions are easy within a circumstance, and when that circumstance changes, you might have to approach it a different way, okay?

So, since I had kinda fallen out of my normal eating patterns, I recently have been A, sleeping in a little bit more because I got off my sleep schedule when I was sick as well, and B, I haven’t had as much hunger in the mornings, and so, that has been the real obstacle to hit my protein goal is that I don’t want to eat anything when I wake up, and it’s really hard for me to get around that.

So, that brings me to my solution today which is to ask myself one of my favorite questions ever which is: okay, what is the simplest way to get the result I want? I’ll say it one more time: what is the simplest way to get the result I want? So, for me, the result I want is to have eaten 140 grams of protein every single day. When you ask yourself, “How could I make this more simple,” what your brain tends to start to do is bring to your attention all of the different obstacles you might be facing that are making that thing complicated. So, for me, immediately when I asked myself that question, I thought to myself, “Well, if I had more easily accessible protein sources available.”

The other thing that was going on this past week is I was doing my birthday sale, so I was very busy. There was a lot of information coming in, and we didn’t have a lot of easy access protein in the fridge, things that I can just literally walk to the fridge, open it, eat something without having to cook anything or prepare anything. So, that was my solution. I was like, okay, in order to make it absolutely as easy as humanly possible for me to hit my protein goal, I need to have more easily accessible protein.

And so, then I started thinking about what a fun or appealing way for me to get that protein might be, and I remembered that I really love the Fairlife Core Power protein shakes, the ones that have 42 grams of protein per shake which is like basically a third of my protein for the day. So, what I did was I told myself, “Hey, I’m gonna buy these protein shakes.” So, I went on Amazon. I bought a pack of 12 of these protein shakes, and I haven’t had a problem since they arrived two days ago because I’ve been drinking one of those every single day, and I’ve been hitting my protein goal.

One thing I want to remind you about this situation is that your current solution doesn’t have to be a forever solution, right? Do I want to spend the money to drink a Core Power protein shake every single day? No, right? Do I have protein powder in the pantry that is cheaper and probably a, quote, “better” or “more economic” way for me to get my protein shake? Yes. But right now, in the morning, I don’t want to make a protein shake. I have resistance towards getting up, filling that cup with water, shaking it all up. It doesn’t sound appealing to me. And so, if I can provide myself an easy solution that matches the circumstance that I’m in right now, that is gonna keep me on the right track towards my goals.

So, that is what I’ve got for you today. If you’re encountering a problem, if you’re hitting an obstacle on the way to what you want, ask yourself, “What is the simplest way to get the result I want?”