Writing Down Your Goals! Reading Summary - Power of Habit

I am loving my new reading habit! Today's "Power of Habit" reading was about willpower! Fun to read about habits and willpower while forming a new habit. It's making it easy for that 15 minutes of reading to be the first thing I do. 

This chapter started by discussing the idea of delayed gratification, and how children who displayed the ability to wait 15 minutes to earn an extra marshmallow scored higher on their SAT exams years later. Many studies of willpower have since followed.

One that I find fascinating was a study that looked at recovery activities for elderly people that had joint replacement surgeries. They recruited a bunch of folks averaging 68 years of age, and gave them a book of guidelines for rehab with 13 blank pages in the back, one for each week's goals. Half the participants were instructed to write out their goals for each week. The other half were given no specific instructions. The ones that wrote out their goals for each week started walking twice as fast as the others!

But even more interesting is that the ones that did the best created a written plan for "inflection points", those points they knew would be the most difficult and the easiest time to give up. Like that first step was so painful, it would be easy to just sit back down. One man specifically wrote that he would take 2 steps before he stopped so it would be harder to sit back down.

One man made an afternoon routine of walking to the bus stop to greet his wife as she returned from work...that 3:30 walk was the longest and hardest of his day but it had the biggest reward, "Hi Honey, welcome back!".

Companies like Starbucks also have robust employee training systems in place where they give workbooks with blank pages to their employees so that they can write down a plan to deal with "an angry customer", " a wrong order", "a long line", and they give them coping strategies to help formulate their response (like the LATTE plan). Then the manager will role play scenarios with the new employee. In this way, even new employees with little professional experience become well trained in setting aside personal difficulties of the day and experts in customer service.

Good stuff. I know that I have things I'd like to have more willpower with. One of my groups that I am involved in right now involves creating a "vision board" for 1 and 5 years down the line. I came up with a list of my 1 year beachbody coach goals and wrote those down. Based on today's reading...I'll be much more likely to achieve them! : )