I went through a bad breakup last year. Around a few months later, I got a gym subscription and a personal trainer. I had never set foot in a gym back then.
Mental blocks and how you see yourself
I've never been a fitness freak. I’d never thought that I'd be a gymbro. This is what I call a mental block. I crafted this fixed perception of myself; I saw myself as a geek who is productive in his free time. Why spend my precious time at the gym when I could be more productive?
I should be at my computer trying to learn something new. Or, I should spend long hours working to get a promotion faster. This is a bad thought process. First of all, hours worked isn't tied to your chances of a promotion as this amazing article explains:
Because of this mental block, I was terrified of going to the gym on my first day. I felt everyone would know I'm an imposter at the gym. And, I felt like I'd lose a bit of my identity if I did so. After all, I make fun of gymbros.
I'm not telling you to go to the gym and get a trainer. I’m telling you that you should not limit yourself to what you perceive yourself to be.
I’m not a [insert hobby/activity/interest/skill] guy
I think it takes a lot of mental willpower to challenge your perception of yourself. I don’t see myself as a person who is a good artist, a good musician, or a good swimmer. I can’t do any of those things (I should probably get swimming lessons) and sometimes I feel like I’ll never get good at them.
But it’s important to realize that you can be good at almost anything- most of us can. Whether you will actually be good depends on how much time you put into it. Most of us are limited by our time, not by some innate inability.
Sure, you won’t be an Olympic level runner - even a lot of time might not be enough to win an Olympic medal. You might not become a world class footballer either. But, you can become more fashionable, you can be a good chess player, you can be a marathon runner, you can be a musician, and you can talk to that cutie at work/school.
There’s so many things you, me and most people can achieve just by putting some time into it. If you are privileged to have that time, you just need to put it to use.
Why would I even do this?
Because it feels good. It feels incredible knowing what you can achieve if you put in some time and effort. It feels amazing to realize you can do anything and be anyone.
Just learn a few different things and challenge your perception of yourself. You’ll then stop saying “Oh I’m not an X person”, and start saying “Yeah I could be an X person if I wanted to”.
Changing habits and trying new things
The key to learning a new skill is consistency and consistency requires habit. There’s a few ways I build a good habit and learn a new skill. I’ll explain below along with a few examples and how I used them for my gym habit:
Building new habits requires hard-to-miss cues and a plan of action - if you want to read more books, put your books in front of you and make a clear plan of action e.g. read 10 pages every Monday, Thursday and Sunday at 10PM. This makes the activity much more tempting and harder to miss.
Introduce immediate satisfaction - link an immediate reward to an activity. Most skills require some time and effort to get good at and thus have delayed gratification. If you want to run every morning, maybe take a run past a nice cafe and grab some breakfast. You don’t need to keep doing this, just long enough to build the habit. I used to grab coffee from my favorite cafe after gym and thus used to look forward to it.
Remove friction from your habits - make it as easy as possible to carry out an activity - if you wanna learn to cook, have all your ingredients ready. Having to go to the store before you start will probably demotivate you from cooking. I have my gym clothes, water bottle and shoes ready and packed on gym days.
Use trackers - this also helps with immediate gratification. Use a hobby tracker (I use this one for Android, and used this one when I was on iOS) especially one with a streak function so you get some instant gratification from your habit.
Use social contracts - social contracts are a good way of getting you to commit to your plans. Tell a friend you’ll buy them coffee if you don’t read 50 pages in a week. This is enough to be slightly embarrassing and motivate you. This is also why having a gym buddy works - missing gym means admitting to your gym buddy that you’re slacking off. For me, my personal trainer was a form of a social contract.
Spend money on it - losing money is usually a good motivator to stick to your goals. But it needs to be something constant and it needs to be significant. A monthly expensive gym subscription is a better motivator than an annual cheap one. When the bill comes in monthly and it’s expensive, it’ll motivate you to go to the gym at least for the first few weeks of the month. An annual subscription only hurts for the first few months and then it becomes easier to forget. It’s even easier to stop if the bill doesn’t hurt your bank balance. If you don’t want to spend money, you can also put a certain (preferably large) amount inside a savings account if you miss a day, for example. For this point, it was my personal training fees and expensive gym subscription that helped me.
Use habit stacking - stack a habit onto an existing one. If you want to learn to paint, maybe do it every night after you do your skincare routine. I didn’t do much habit stacking for the gym but I did use it to start reading books after dinner.
Most of these are from James Clear’s fantastic book - Atomic Habits. If you don’t want to read the book, a Blinkist subscription is a good way of getting key ideas from a book.
This is going to sound like a motivational seminar now
I think the only thing blocking most of us from doing certain things and getting better at them is a mental block - something that takes willpower, habit and effort to change.
But I do believe a lot of us can change themselves and be better at things they wouldn’t even think they’d be able to do. And the moment you break those mental blocks, you’ll feel like your skills are boundless.
Best of luck and I hope to see a lot of you booksmart nerds turn into hot guitar players and you hot guitar players turn into booksmart nerds.
Big fan
what a man