How To Improve Any Area Of Your Life By Using “Set Points”| Vishen Lakhiani

Have you ever noticed how as time goes on, certain aspects of your life tend to somewhat slip? Maybe you feel you don't have as much energy as you did in your younger years, or you start putting on weight as you get older, or your savings start depreciating. Or maybe you aren't having as much sex as you normally have, or you don't feel like you have as close a relationship with your kid as you did before. Why does this happen? Why do we sometimes slip? Well, the reason is because human beings are a lot like frogs in boiling water. So here's the analogy of the frog in boiling water, right? If you take a frog and you dump him in a pot of boiling water, he's going to jump out. But if you take a frog and you put him in a pot of room temperature water, you slowly increase the heat so it gets to boiling slowly, the frog will not realize the water is boiling and he will die. See, what happens is as time goes on, certain things in your life are going to slip. But because you don't have a detection method, you don't realize it's slipping. And before you know it, you're wondering, oh my God, how did my body get this way? Or oh my God, how did my relationships get this horrible? Or where did all that money go? Now, we can prevent this, and there's a simple system that I'm going to teach you that will prevent you from slipping. It's called slippery set points. Now what is a set point? A set point is simply a bare minimum threshold that you establish for yourself as a promise that you will not go below. So here's an example, right During Christmas or when you're traveling, often we go on food binges and we put on weight. Do you have a set point that tells you that if your weight ever goes above a certain limit, you have to enact a correction procedure to bring it back. So here's an example. You come back from a long holiday, you, you measure yourself. Let's say your weight set point is 60kg and you found you're at 61kg. Well, this is a clue that you have to enact a set point correction procedure. Your set point correction procedure might be running two miles every day till your weight goes down, or it might be going on a low carb diet. No matter what it is, you enact that procedure and you get that weight back to 60kg. You need to establish a set point and measure it every two weeks or every month to make sure it's stable. You can establish set points for your weight, set points for your fitness. I measure my fitness set point with something really simple, such as the number of push ups I can do. And if I fall below my set point, which is 50, immediately I start increasing the amount of exercise I do on a daily basis. When you know and hold firm to your set points, what you start to find is that you stop slipping as much. Life becomes more predictable, it becomes better. You find that the effects of aging, the effects of pigging out over on a big Christmas dinner or going crazy during a vacation don't disrupt you as much. But when you don't have set points, you are allowing yourself to slip. You can establish set points in all areas of your life. Take finances. How much savings are you going to keep in your bank account at all times? And if it ever slips, what do you have to do to get it back up? You can establish set points for your relationships. How often would you be going out on a date with your loved one and if that ever slips, you bring it back up? You could be establishing set points for your intellectual life. How many books do you read in a given month? And if it slips, you jack it back up. You need to make sure that you have your set point. And secondly, you have your set point correction procedure firmly established. So when you slip, you know exactly what you need to do to get back to your set point. An important thing about set points is to make sure that it's totally achievable. It's a bare minimum that that you know you can meet. So rule number one, establish your set points. Think about all the areas in your life that are important to you and start establishing those non negotiable set points and think about your set point correction procedure if you ever slip. There's a second rule, and I love this rule, and that is if you do slip, you set a goal to raise your set point. Let's say you find that you can regularly do 50 pushups, but after a long vacation where you weren't exercising as much, you come back, you do that set point test and you find that you've dropped to 47. Well, aim to get back to 50, but try to go a little bit beyond 51. So when you establish your set point correction procedure, aim to go to 51, make that your new set point. This has two important effects it's going to have in your life. Number one, it means that no matter where you are, not only are you not slipping, but you're actually gradually improving. And number two, it reframes failure in your mind. See, when you do your set point test and you find that you've dropped in terms of your your financial goal or your health goal, the natural human tendency is to feel sorry for yourself or to feel upset that you have failed. But when you reframe that and you decide that that drop is simply going to be a kick in the butt to go beyond your set point and to raise it by just a few achievable points, you've turned what is seen as failure or disappointment to what is now a challenge or a new goal. So now you're pursuing it with an optimistic slant. So when you think about it this way, you're also reframing your mind to ignore the failure, but to instead challenge yourself to constantly get better. Set points themselves are really simple tool to prevent yourself from ever slipping. But when you enact a set point correction procedure and aim slightly higher than your previous set point, you're now on a path to constant improvement in every area of your life that you can measure.