Adam Pedley

Following on from one of my previous posts You Know You Should But You Still Don’t I asked the question on why people don’t follow through.

Well the universe was listening once again and tony robbins created a few videos on why people don’t always follow through, which was extermely enlightening, as is most of what tony says. http://tonyrobbinstraining.com/320/interview-with-frank-kern-and-john-reese/

I will go through those videos in my next post but I also wanted to touch on something that I still think will prevent most people from following through. And that is the ability to admit when their information about a subject is wrong.

For some people it is extermely hard to even get them to listen to such advice as is offered above.  The things that can stop new ideas and teachings from being accepted include

• Pride (normally the biggest, and especially prevalent in an argument)
• They trust their source of information too much that they couldn’t possibly be wrong
• It may mean they have to accept they have done something bad or awful to a loved one or friend

It is OK to be wrong. Admit it and move on or be stuck in your false reality forever more. I have been proven wrong many times and as much as it sometimes pains me to admit it to friends or family I do. I have even admitted I was wrong on an occasion where I had to accept I did the wrong thing by my son. But now I can ensure I don’t do it again in the future to other children I may have and that I will not redo it again to my son.

So my advice, get over any pride issues you may have, be open to EVERY idea no matter how absurd in your mind it sounds and listen carefully to everything that is given to you. And by absurd I even mean if someone says “if you jump off the effiel tower you get transported back in time 30 minutes” even listen to that. Don’t try it out obviously, but think it out and listen to the person saying it. They may be correct. And who knows you may be travelling back in time 30 minutes next week or listening to someone who tells you how to make a million dollars and actually doing it.

This is more a thought provoking article as I am yet to learn the answer. I also thought it would be great to post this as it shows where I have come from and my own journey. Years from now I expect I will have grown considerably and will not even be able to comphrend this post in the way I do now. So it is my hope to leave a trail of where I have been so that when I acheive my goals and see results, others who want those results can easily follow my mental path. But on with the point..

There are many things in your life you should be doing. For example exercising several times a week, or not eating fast food. And while many of us take note of these we still continue to do something we know we shouldn’t or should.

I used to drink heaps of soft drink, and heaps of junk food, until suddenly I started feeling the effects. I started getting head spins, unexplained by CAT scans, and shoulder/bone aches after drinking many sugary soft drinks. Even after this I continued for a while until I needed to stop. I am proud to say it has been over 5 years since I have even touched soft drink and feel better for it. Then years later I stopped with the fast food as I was getting very overweight (I actually classified as obsese).

Now I am back down to a healthly weight but back to my point, why did it take me so long to do something. Why must I have waited until I was seeing physical signs that I knew where coming before I acted. Even scarier still, why do some people who see the signs still keep going?

If you were at your death bed and someone said would like an extra few years of life or all those memories of chocolate you ate, what you would say? If you chose chocolate memories please leave a comment and tell us why (as I am baffled). I expect most would say I would like the few extra years please.

So why not take that choice now, why wait until its too late and you are only looking back in regret?. I hope to find out soon and I will post my thoughts and hopefully an answer as soon as it comes to me, now that I have asked the question.

I still am yet to figure out as I still do a few things that I know are not completely healthy for me. While my habits have changed so that I am now not going to die when I’m 50, I still am aware they will take some years away. Maybe I am just hoping for something that will make it all better.

Maybe hope has something to do with it. Others may call it delusion.

Television is something that is in almost everyones home and the amount of time its switched on is getting longer and longer. At my personal worst when I was a teenager the TV would be on as soon as I got home from school until I went to bed and first thing in the morning for a few hours until I went to school. That makes around 8 hours a day in total time the TV is on.

As an adult TV would come on after my children are in bed and not at all in the morning. As my children are still very young I haven’t let them watch TV at all. Yes they will learn about it sometime soon, but it’s much better seeing them in the backyard playing.

While watching TV I was equivalent of a zombie. A blank stare into a small black box or in people’s cases today, a large flat panel on the wall. Using almost no brain capacity and wasting my life away. If I was to look back 50 years from now, what do you think approximately 73,000 hours of tv would have brought me? Nothing much.

So why did I decide to stop watching TV. Big brother 06 was the catalyst for me. I couldn’t take it anymore. Reality TV was doing nothing more than irritating me. So I unplugged the tv aerial (I recently turned it into a phone outlet).

What happened over the next few months. Well I watched DVD’s. Scrubs over and over again (I think I could quote almost each episode). And I dowloaded Stargate and Smallville. On the upside I wasn’t watching any advertisements, which is quite a good thing considering I recently learned that subliminal advertising is actually legal in quite a few countries as long as it is a certain number of frames. These frame rates however still classify it as subliminal and considering the zombie state most people are in, even if it did flash up for a second and was clearly visibile most people would not notice it.

To start curbing my tv watching I would try to put on the tv as late as possible. Each night getting later and later. I also stopped having the tv on if I was doing something else. I know most people like the background noise, but after a few days you easily adjust. Then I was still on my laptop while the tv was on at night. This habit stopped when the tv finally blew up and the only way we can watch tv now is on my laptop. I have decided not to go and purchase another tv.

So now its almost down to just watching a movie on dvd every now and again. Some nights the tv/laptop hasn’t even been turned on. I find I get a lot more work done on the laptop, I play Uno or a board game with my wife and even spend a bit more time cleaning the house. I know the last one isn’t very appealing but I have reclaimed more time to spend with my wife, family and house.

To me the hours I will have spent doing something more worthwhile will be a great thing to look back on in 50 years time, and will give me many more experiences and options. Even if you cut out 1 hour of tv a day, in 50 years time you will save 18,262 hours of your life to something more meaningful.

I imagine all of us, including me still has some bad habits that we live with day to day. So even though we know that we shouldn’t be doing certain things such as eating that chocolate or sitting in front of the tv, we keep doing it. Why do we keep doing this I have found to be a number of reasons, including the subsconscious mind and instant gratification.

The subconscious mind likes for things to be the same. It likes to continously tick over processing all your body functions. It doesn’t understand future or past events, it just lives in the now. So when you want to change something or say I am going to change something, it doesn’t have a clue what you are on about and doesn’t even want to give it a try.

The next thing that would normally get in your way is the want for instant gratification. You want that chocolate so you eat it. But then after an hour you are not really enjoying the consequences of the chocolate. You are feeling full, you are most likely experiencing the sugar crash.

With instant gratification you need to start making conscious decisions at a lot more points during your day. Your sub sconscious is liking the similarity and instant gratification is making eveything seem rather appealing.

At each point you are about to eat, or sit down or do a task, think, what benefit will this give me in later life. You might think oh well the chocolate will give me a bit of extra weight this week, so what. You need to start thinking further down the line.

In 20 years time what will my life look like if I eat this. Will I have diabetes, will I have heart complications, will I be highly prone to heat disease, will I be able to play around with my grand kids, will I even be alive for my grand kids?

You only have approximatley 4000 weeks on this Earth. Most reading this I imagine may be about a quarter to half way through. What are you going to do with the last 2000 weeks you have left. Make sure its 1000 weeks by eating badly, maybe extending it to 2500 to 3000 weeks being very healthly.

Yes, its going to be painful at points sitting their not eating that chocolate or other delicious meal. If you are a heavy coke or coffee drinker be prepared for withdrawal symptons. I will detail how I lost almost 40Kg in 6 months in a post shortly, but for now I will leave you with this thought.

In 40 years time are you going to be looking back on your life saying, I’m really glad I ate all that chocolate and drank all that coke and had all of those cigarrettes. Or are you going to be saying I am really grateful I made the right decisions and now I have an extra 20/30 years to live?

Remember that this decision can also be about wealth. If you make the right choices now, in later life you will be enjoying the benefits.