How to Stop Half-Assing Anything

Welcome, guys and gals, to the Man Talk Show. I'm Connor Beaton, and today we're going to talk about the illusion of try. Now, listen, I don't know about you, but anytime that I have heard people say, oh, I'm trying to lose weight, or I'm trying to improve my relationship, or I'm trying to get this promotion, or I'm trying to start my business, it's always said in this way, like, there's a big part of them that doesn't believe that it's going to happen. And there was a perfect example of this that I. That I saw the other day in a Tony Robbins event where he's interacting with this woman, and she's standing up, and she's holding the microphone, and she's talking to Tony, and she's saying, tony, you know, like, I'm trying to fix my marriage. And, you know, I've tried to read. I've tried reading all the books, and I've tried doing all the courses, and I've tried having the conversations with my husband, but nothing seems to be working. I feel like I've tried everything, and. And I'm still failing. And Tony pauses for a second, and he looks at her, and he says, okay, we're gonna do something here, and I just want you to go along with it. Is that okay? And she says, yeah, sure. And classic Tony Robbins. He doesn't tell anybody what the hell he's doing. He just goes for it. So he says, I want you to turn around, and I want you to try and pick up the chair that you were just sitting in. And so the woman kind of looks puzzled, but she says, okay. And she turns around, and she grabs the chair, and she picks it up, and she turns around, and she faces Tony, and she's holding the chair, facing Tony Robbins. And he says, okay, great. So you didn't do what I told you to do. You actually picked up the chair. I want you to try and pick up the chair. So put the chair back down. So the woman turns back around, she puts the chair back down, and she looks pretty puzzled. So she turns back around to him and sort of waits instruction. He says, okay, try and pick up the chair. So she turns back around, she picks up the chair and faces Tony again. He says, no, you picked it up. I want you to try and pick it up. Don't pick it up. Try and pick it up. And so she puts the chair back down, and she still looks puzzled. And there's a few people laughing in the audience because the People watching this are now really starting to get the distinction that Tony is making. So she turns back around, she picks up the chair for the third time, and she turns back to Tony and she's got this little smile on her face. And Tony says, oh, what are you smiling about? And she says, I think I get what you're saying. He says, great, put the chair back down. Try and pick it up. So she puts the chair back down and she turns back around and she starts trying to pick up this chair. And she's pretending she's not lifting it off the ground. She's sort of moving it around a little bit and pushing it and like, pretending that it's too heavy for her to lift up. Like she doesn't have the strength in her legs and her arms to lift up this chair. And, you know, everybody starts laughing because she's like, oh, yeah, she's got it, she's got it. And she turns back around after not picking up the chair. And he says, do you see how you have not been actually working on and fixing your relationship? And she says, yeah. And then they have this other dialogue, you know, they go into this huge dialogue about it. But this was such a great example because so many of us are doing this in our life. We say, I want to. I'm trying to make more money. I'm trying to start this business. I'm trying to fix my relationship or be a better husband or father or mother or business owner. And the reality is that try is an illusion. Try is an illusion. And not only is it an illusion, but what happens neurologically in our brain is that it creates a whole bunch of pathways where failure is not only possible, but failure is very vivid. And so trying. When we say to ourselves, I'm going to try and do something, what our brain does it immediately. Because our brain is a pattern recognition machine learning that tries. That tries constantly to predict outcomes of what's going to happen. So when we say to ourselves, I'm going to try and make more money, and how I think I'm going to make more money is by investing in the stock market. What our brain does is it immediately goes into simulation mode and it says, okay, if I'm going to try and make more money, how might that happen? And so it starts predicting different outcomes. It starts thinking about, okay, what stocks could I invest in? How would I go about doing that? What would I need to learn? And it starts simulating specific outcomes. Now, the problem with that simulation is that because we have used the word try many of those Outcomes. Many of those simulations that our brain then creates are failure based. They are producing failure because we haven't told our brain, we haven't pointed our brain in the direction of I'm going to make more money, full stop. We have said I'm going to try and make more money. And in that, in that mindset we've told our brain there is a possibility, there's a high probability that failure is imminent. And so it tries to predict all of those failures because it wants to keep us safe. But the problem is for very anxious people or for very high performing people that always are very analytical people, they that want to have the outcome, that want to know the outcome and have that security, they go down these pathways of figuring out all of the possibilities and all of the ways that they can fail. And that is a problem because then they fixate on the failures and they forget about how to produce the outcome. So I want to give you three simple things of how to circumvent this, of how to stop trying, of how to stop feeling falling into the illusion of trying and to start doing fully, fundamentally. So number one, eliminate. Try. Eliminate. Notice how often you use try in your dialogue. And what I would encourage you to do is a 30 day try challenge. And what I mean by this is for 30 days notice and mark down either in your phone or in your journal how often on a daily basis you're using the word try, whether it's within your relationship or your business or your company, just notice how often you use the word try and start trying. Start trying haha. Start eliminating that word out of your vocabulary and just catch yourself constantly saying try and eliminate it out of your dialogue entirely. Step two. This is one of my favorite things in the whole world, has radically changed my life. Whole ass, everything and stop half assing anything. And what I mean by this, and this is a big concept, right, is that it's, this is the idea that either it's a hell yes and you're going to go full in and full out, or it's a hell no and that you stop sitting in this gray zone of I'm going to try and do this. And when we start to act and produce results from this place, from this methodology, what happens is we start to shift our brain into the space of telling it that we are going to do this 100% and then we start prioritizing in our life, we start making and shifting things around in our life to make that outcome a priority and we stop creating all of these predictive outcomes that could potentially end in failure. So when you whole acid you have no choice, you go all in, you stop halfing it, half assing it, you stop pretending, you stop trying. And the great thing is is that this becomes a very simple and a very clear way to choose. Because either it's a hell yeah or it's a hell no. And the great thing is, is that this can bring some clarity. So what I would encourage you to do is while you are doing this 30 days of noticing how often you use the word try, start to make a decision from the place of what would it look like for me to whole ass this decision. And that brings me to number three, which is when you decide when you choose that you're going to commit and it's a hell yes and you're going to move in that direction, then you commit with 100% of your energy and that you give yourself to that space 100%. And the great thing about that is that when you put that much energy and effort into it and not only will your priorities start to align, but you start to eliminate the mental construct and the mental rumination of failure. So a great question to ask yourself is if failure wasn't an option, what would I do? If failure wasn't an option, what would I do? How would I act? Who would I reach out to? What would I learn? How would I get up? I hear so many people that talk about their morning routines and they're like I'm going to try and wake up at six and they're going to try and drink the water and I'm going to try and go to the gym and then I try and meditate and then I'm going to try and come back home and have a cold shower. And then the next day you talk to them and you're like, how did your morning routine go? And they're like, oh yeah, well I tried to get up at 6, but I was too, you know, I was too tired so I slept in. And then I, you know, I tried to go to the gym but you know, I was really exhausted so I just rested. And you're like, no, you didn't actually try to do anything. You just didn't do it. That's actually what happened. What happened is you didn't try to do anything. You just didn't do it. So notice that when you shift this mentality to how would I act if failure wasn't an option? How would I act if I was going to whole ass of this? You just do it. You might not like it you might not like getting up at six o' clock in the morning, you might be exhausted in your routine, but. But you do it anyway because you have committed to it. Now, the one caveat that I want to add into this, the one caveat that I want to add into this is that when you act in this way, when you start to really claim that anything that you do, you are going to do 100%, you will notice that you start to manifest things in an entirely different way. Because most people are not operating from this space. Most people are operating, 98% of people are operating from the space of try in so many areas of their life. And when you start doing, you start standing out and people start to gravitate towards you because you have this uncanny sort of other world mentality that anything is possible and that you can do anything and you start producing those results in the world. And when you start producing those results in the world, people are going to want to know what your secret is. And so just be aware that if you start doing this and you start producing the results and you really start whole assing everything and you commit to it and you stop using the word try and you just start doing that, a lot of people are going to be drawn to you. They're going to want to work with you, be in relationship with you, like learn from you. They're going to be drawn to you. And so the opportunities that you're going to start getting are going to exponentially increase. And my invitation for you is to really be conscious of what you are saying. Yes, to continue to use this mentality of what do I want to commit to? What am I willing to hold ass? Because you know that you only have 24 hours in a day and you got to be sleeping for hopefully seven to eight of those. And so you only have so much time in the day. So what do you want to commit to? 100%. So that's what I have for you today. This is Connor Beaton signing off. Please subscribe. Please man it forward to just one person, share this episode with just one person. Whether you're watching us on YouTube or Spotify or itunes or wherever you're watching or listening to us, please man it forward, share this with one person. We don't do any marketing for this podcast, so I appreciate you because we have cracked the top 100, 200 on iTunes and so I greatly appreciate you tuning in. So until next week, it's Connor Beaton signing off.