Why You Attack Monday And Crumble By Friday

0:03Hi there, welcome along to another episode of High Performance. This is one of our regular weekly episodes with myself and Damian. Hey Damian.

0:10Jake Humphrey: Hey Jake. We just sit and talk about some of the biggest lessons that we've learned after seven years of bringing you this podcast, over 400 episodes. Thank you so much for your continued support and love for the show. Please make sure that wherever you're watching or listening, you hit subscribe, you hit follow, or you just reach out and send us a message. We're going to read some of your messages at the end of the show. But on today's episode, we're asking, why do you feel ready to attack the world on a Monday and you're struggling by the time Friday comes around? It's a conversation really about productivity and overwhelm because it turns out that overwhelm is not a personality flaw.

0:44It's quite simply a maths problem. So the reason why we feel good sometimes and then bad at other times is all to do with capacity. So it's sleep, it's energy, it's confidence, it's clarity, it's control. those are all the things that are moving in our life and it isn't necessarily the workload so i hope that by the end of today's pretty short episode you will feel fully equipped to be able to attack your workload regardless of what else is happening in your life i think it's an important conversation actually to have for anyone i think it's a really powerful topic i think for many of

1:15Jake Humphrey: us you know if it's a time of year where we're going back to school or we're coming back off holidays or, you know, we've just got new tasks that are dominating our agenda, we can often feel squeezed and then we feel that it becomes impossible. And it leads to paralysis by analysis where we do nothing to actually change the situation. Paralysis by analysis. There we go. Dropping the gold very early on. Before we move further, like, is this something that you struggle with? Yeah, sometimes. I go through periods and what I've found really helpful is to recognise that there's often three questions.

1:51Jake Humphrey: If you think of it like a psychological cage, that your ability sits in the middle of it, your ability to deal with the tasks, to have a difficult conversation, to be able to deliver against a target, that sits in the middle of it. But it gets squeezed either by the weight of expectations or the consequences of not doing it. And when those two things get heavier, it squeezes our ability to actually just get on with the job and perform somewhere close to our capacity. So we've seen it from so many of our guests, you know, where it might be a Premier League footballer and the noise or the expectation of a new sign-in and the fans demand that they're going to be revolutionary or it might be, you know, sometimes the Formula One drivers we've spoken to, the consequences of defeat might end their career.

2:37Jake Humphrey: So when those two things start to get heavy, their ability to actually just drive to their capacity or play football to their ability starts to become diminished. So if we can understand how we can deal with it, It gives us the ability to be able to perform under pressure more frequently. And when we were talking about this episode, your face lit up. When I said, I reckon the very first clip that we play for people today should come from... Professor Steve Peters. One of your heroes. Yeah, well, Steve's almost popularised the whole idea of understanding ourselves and our brains better. And if we can understand that and the software that we're working with.

3:15Jake Humphrey: I was going to say many of us, but I wanted to... The reason I hesitated is because I wouldn't just pay respect to those that maybe the neurological diversity. But I think for most of us in terms of what Steve talks about is understanding the mechanisms of our brain. And he summarizes it in three parts. We'll be right back after a quick word from our partners.

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4:28Jake Humphrey: So he's taken a model called the triune brain system and basically given it the metaphor of the chimp, the computer and the human. So for those people that are not familiar with Steve's work, the idea is that the chimp is the limbic part of your brain. It's the same part of your brain that we share with every other living animal on the planet. And the idea is the limbic system does three things. It gives us a sex drive, a desire to procreate. It gives us a desire to stay alive. And it also then gives us a desire to hunt and hang around with people like us. So the computer part of our brain is the hippocampus region.

5:03Jake Humphrey: That's where we store our memories, our knowledge, our wisdom and everything that's happened to us. And then the human part of our brain is the prefrontal cortex, and this is specific to us as a species. And this gives us the ability to be able to see patterns and make sense of them, and also to behave in a civilised way where we have a society agenda. So they're the three parts of the brain that Steve has popularised, but he explains that the chimp brain is always the most powerful, the most responsive, and the part that kicks in first. So why don't we listen to Steve explain why the chimp can often hijack us and make us feel this sense of overwhelm.

5:42The chimp doesn't do that. It can't. It starts with what I want and then compares to reality, which is not a good way to start, but that's how it does. And that's what most people go through the day with. Hence, you get road rage. You know, you're saying, I want the traffic to flow smoothly. No one jumps in. No one cuts me up. Everyone's, you know, it's so, I'm glad you're laughing. It's so ridiculous. It's a ridiculous concept. There are always going to be idiots on the road or people having a bad day or people making mistakes, you know. But our chimps don't interpret any of that. It's just I am not getting what I expect to happen.

6:19You know, when I mention the human and chimp, the bottom line is whenever I work with anyone, I take them away from their world because I keep saying, if we can get you in a room and get your robustness and prepare for resilience, if someone's in a good place Nothing touches them. The kids won't touch you getting late for school because you'll deal with it. Someone cuts you up, you won't have road rage. In fact, nothing's going to get to you. Now, I'm not wanting people to be robots, but I'm saying you'll manage any feeling you get, any emotion. But generally, most of the negative emotions won't appear.

6:52So you say to me, I get road rage, right? So I would say, first of all, stop. You don't get road rage. You don't. Your chimp gets road rage. You need to understand what the chimp's doing and correct it and say, that's not helpful. See, I think that's so interesting, Damien, because I know from my own personal experience, when I'm going through a period of procrastination or I'm delaying something or I just don't feel like I'm in flow, I will often look at external things and say, well, this isn't in a great place or, you know, there's been challenges with, you know, my relationship with my friends or my wife or, you know, the kids have got a crazy time at school or there's some business challenges that I'm dealing with.

7:30And actually what I think is really interesting about Steve Peters and why I like the fact we started there, is he's really saying to us and to our entire audience, quite often the thing that's holding you back is within you. So if you keep on looking outside of you for the answers, you're never going to actually deal with the chimp.

7:46Jake Humphrey: Yeah, exactly. So in Steve's language, the idea that the chimp always assumes that the traffic's going to flow freely, everyone's going to make smart decisions, and you're going to get from A to B in the time that you want. And the reality is, we know that that's not the case, but if you've not prepared it and almost got the chimp prepared for the fact that things are going to go wrong, people are going to make mistakes and you're likely to be delayed if you leave too late, well that's where your chimp then kicks off and starts to feel that sense of overwhelm. So what I think would be helpful is we pivot from that and go so how do we start to challenge the chimp, how do we prepare for it and a great example of someone that did precisely that is the explorer ash dykes now i loved ash because a lot of these sort of explorers often come from wealth or privilege or certain backgrounds whereas he described to us really powerfully how he earned his money in a fish and chip shop in north wales and saved up to go and do these adventures and these explorations often on a budget but part of that so part of those financial constraints meant that he had to prepare for the worst so although he hoped for the best he would prepare for the worst and work out what could go wrong, what could kill him.

8:58Which is like the total opposite of what we've just heard from Steve Peters, which is we set ourselves up for success. Yeah. And then when the world doesn't deliver what we want on our terms, which it often doesn't, then it derails us. So really what Ash is about to tell us is that he does the total opposite.

9:11Jake Humphrey: Yeah, let's listen to him explain it. As I'm training, I'm telling myself or I'm trying to put myself in certain scenarios, if there's going to be wolves, expect to be attacked. If there's going to be blizzards, expect them to be the biggest and the baddest, not because I want to face the biggest, but if I'm thinking of worst case scenario and worst case was unfortunately bound to happen, it won't approach me by surprise, which will send me into flight rather than fight. It comes as something I anticipated, I expected. So now I've got to just crack on and get through it. I mean, that's a brilliant example there that Ash sort of articulates that, well, what could kill me is a question that we can all adapt, that maybe take away some of the the extremity of it but what could go wrong and if he's willing to lean into that question the chimp then starts to manage our expectations and it becomes a bit easier to carry another good example though is when we spoke to um shane parish like i know that you were a fan of shane massive yeah and he's you know he's the writer of the farnham street blog but he also wrote a brilliant book called clear thinking and i signed up for one of his online courses which was decisions by design which is how do we make better decisions under pressure was it good yeah really good because he the bit that i took away from it was the lead domino effect where he talks about sometimes you just have to deal with the thing that's right in front of your face i like the quote from the lions captain paul o 'connell who said just win the moment in front of your face and shane articulates something very similar there about when we're feeling overwhelmed just deal with the immediate thing that's demanding your attention.

10:46Jake Humphrey: Let's listen to him explain it. The fear is that we can't make the destination that we want to make. So what do we do? We don't do anything. We do analysis paralysis. What is the one thing that I can do today to put myself in a better position? I call it first step confidence. You need the confidence or next step confidence to take the next step. And so if you want to leave your job, I don't need the confidence to be able to lead my job. I need the confidence to acquire the next skill I need to put myself in a better position for success. I need the confidence to just take one step forward and maybe that's volunteering for a new role at work.

11:21Maybe it's getting myself involved in a different way. I need to shake things up and I need the confidence to do that. That doesn't mean I'm going to get a new job out of it. It doesn't mean all of these things. I love that clip, right? Because it plays into so many of the things that I think. And I know this is going to sound nonsense, right? Because this is a podcast called High Performance. I'm sitting next to a man who stood in lecture theatres and spoken to the biggest businesses in the world and worked with the biggest sports teams. But there's a bit of inspiration for me from Frozen. Go on.

11:48Do you like the films? Yeah, I do. Go on. I think it's Olaf who goes, just do the next right thing. The snowman. Yeah, the snowman. Just do the next right thing. And I think sometimes we get so overwhelmed with life, as often we do, that we do end up in analysis paralysis. Is that the right phrase? We get this analysis paralysis. and I've certainly been there myself where I'm so concerned about what various decisions are going to lead to that I end up making no decision at all. And of course, why do I do that? Well, it's the safest thing in the world. If I don't make a decision, I have no consequences to deal with.

12:22And I remember hearing that and thinking, just do the next right thing. I mean, it's the simplest bit of information in the world. But I remember when I read or actually listened to the audio book of Will Smith's book, his autobiography, and he starts with a story about his dad and his dad basically says to him and his brother, I want you to build a wall out the front of the house and like a huge pile of bricks and a very tall, very long wall. And him and his brother are like, well, we can't do that. And his dad said, why? And they said, well, look at the, they're like 11 years old or something.

12:54There's two of them. They'll look at the wall. Look how tall it is. Look how long it is. Like that's going to take us months. And the dad said, well, why can't you do it though? And they're like, well, because it's so big. And he's like, well, no, this, you only need to do one thing and they were like well what do you mean one thing he said well lay a brick and then when you've done that lay another brick and when you've done that lay another brick and that's actually something that has really helped me we'll be right back after a quick word from our partners because as you know I sort of carry a a lot of different hats whether it's you know a high performance presenter or the high performance founder or the co-founder of Whisper or being a dad or running the foundations or working as the chairman of the Community Sport Foundation or previously as a sports host and all the other sort of things I've done.

13:43I so often used to sit down on a Sunday and have this like empty feeling on my stomach. And I'm sure a lot of people listening to this can relate. You look at the week ahead and you literally think, I've got no idea how to get through this. And actually it was when we had that conversation with Shane Parrish that I thought, well, I just need to change the way that I look at the week. the week isn't going to change, but the way that I approach the week is. So we just went on holiday with the kids. And my wife, who is a little, she won't mind me saying, a bit of a catastrophizer, she tries to kind of go through every eventuality or every scenario so that she can be prepared for it.

14:18So on our flight home, you know, it was a really hot day. We had to pack, you know, because our kids are still like 10 and 13, so they like to pretend they're useless whenever there's a job that needs doing. And Harriet was like, we've got to pack for the kids. We've got to travel to the airport. we've got to get there we've got to get on board and one of the airports we were in Sicily one of the airports was shut because Mount Etna was erupting so all those fires had been sent to the airport we were at in Padermo and the airport was rammed and I was saying to Harriet look right now all we have to do is pack the bags like there's literally nothing like we can't deal with a busy airport right now because we're still in the hotel so let's just pack the bags and I was talking I was talking about exactly this in the car with the kids I was like the only thing we need to do right now is look out the window and see Sicily for the last time and then when we got to the airport, mate, the queue, you know, when you walk into an airport and you're like, there literally can't be this many people on the plane.

15:09Like, what the frig? And again, I just said to the kids, the only thing we can do right now is stand in this queue and just tick off the people as they start to check in and that's sort of how we approach the whole thing and I think it's a really valuable thing for life because there are sometimes days when, you know, there's 10 or 15 things in the diary. You can't do those 10 or 15 things the minute you wake up but the minute you wake up you can just have a stretch or make a coffee or give your wife a cuddle or your kids a kiss do you know what i mean it's only doing those little things so i think starting to sort of shrink what we're doing is important and i'd like to take us to a clip from ali abdal who is a kind of used to be an nhs doctor um for people that don't know the story he then produced some literature about how to study for exams and it went like insane went viral and he eventually quit the nhs and he's kind of a productivity expert you can find him on youtube He has podcasts.

15:59He's a really cool guy. I'd like to play a clip from him that kind of explains this much better than I can. Here he is. Discipline is when we use the limited resource of willpower to do a thing. The way I think of discipline is that discipline is fine to get over the hump. Sometimes you do just need to give yourself a bit of a nudge to get started for just two minutes or five minutes. And I call this the five minute rule. You just do the thing for five minutes. and at the end of the five minutes, you can decide, do you want to stop or do you want to continue? And most of the time, for most things, especially if we've done the energizers, play power and people, once we get started with a thing, we've started enjoying it.

16:37It's a good vibe. We're going to continue going with it. I used to have a five minute hourglass on my desk. It was like three quid off of Amazon and I would just turn the hourglass and that would be my cue to, I'm just going to do the thing for five minutes. And then before I knew it, the hourglass is gone. I'm in the flow. I'm doing the thing. And that was another sort of prop that helped me get over the inertia. so that's him talking about his five minute rule just giving yourself just five minutes just do the thing for five minutes at the end of those five minutes you've got a decision to make well

17:07Jake Humphrey: that's exactly what you described like when you're at the airport let's just queue here for five minutes and then once you're there you'll do another five we'll do another and i know people can be a bit like a bit sniffy of this they can be um this guy all these productivity hacks it's all a load of bollocks but actually whether it's Annie Abdel talking about five minutes or Mel Robbins with the five second rule you know she just gives herself five seconds to do it I actually do think it's really valuable can I play a quick clip from James Clear oh he's one of your favorites yeah I mean an amazing guy brilliant author like one of my one of my heroes I've referred to the conversation we had with him all the time I'd love to get him back on James can you please come back on the show and stop being busy all the time um but here's James Clear the author with a similar a bit of information for people.

17:56I always encourage people to start with what in the book, I talk about the two minute rule, take whatever habit you're trying to build and you scale it down to something that takes two minutes or less to do. So read 30 books a year becomes read one page or do yoga four days a week becomes take out my yoga mat. And the real key there is that you're encouraging yourself to start small because you want to master the art of showing up. You know, you want to become the type of person that does it consistently. There's that quote from Ed Lattimore where he says, the heaviest weight at the gym is the front door.

18:30So he talks about something, doing something for two minutes. And that is about habit formation. Yeah, yeah. So you can criticize this stuff. You can say it's a load of nonsense. But the reality is the experts are telling us it works. The science is telling us it works. And actually, I can tell you from personal experience, that when the world feels overwhelming, action does two things for me. Action leads to motivation. We know that, right? Action is the thing that begins the process. But almost more importantly than that, for me, action removes the anxiety. If I just begin, if I just take that first step, I feel like I'm starting to attack the problem.

19:10So that's really the advice for people today. Instead of seeing everything all in one go, break it down to one small thing and just begin. You know, whether you give yourself the five-minute rule for Mali Abdaal, the five second rule from Mel Robbins or the two minute rule from James Clear they're all doing exactly the same thing and they are effective

19:26Jake Humphrey: Well that line you used there Jake I think is worth just going back to and exploring that idea of action removes the anxiety because a great example of somebody that told us precisely that was when we sat down with Jamila Jamil Yeah I do remember when she said that she was sort of like on this linear career path of sort of becoming a Radio 1 DJ she was a successful model she was being offered all kinds of lucrative deals, but internally she felt rotten. And she went to a counsellor, she said, and the counsellor said, well, the only difference between you and a doormat is a doormat is supposed to have its feet wiped on it.

20:01Jake Humphrey: You're just putting yourself in that position. And she came up with this whole idea of just start really small, start taking action really small. Let's listen to her talk about micro nodes. I'm just not going to do it and it's OK. It's just like little moments. It doesn't make me any kind of hero. It's just little no's. Like, no, you cannot show up late an hour and a half for me to a mate. No, you cannot treat me this way. So cool. I mean, another brilliant bit of advice. And you know what I like about this show and the way that we do these Wednesdays? You know, you've just heard from a kind of an actor and a presenter and an activist.

20:41You've heard from James Clear, who's an author. Ali Abdaal, who was an NHS doctor. Shane Parrish, who's a blogger and a thinker. Ash Dykes, who's an explorer. Steve Peters, who's a, I always get this wrong, psychiatrist, I would say psychotherapist. Can we finish with a sports person? And I don't think you know that I'm going to recommend this guest, but you spoke to Alistair Brownlee. I wasn't available for that conversation. It's one of the greatest conversations I think we've ever put out on High Performance. Should we finish with a clip from him and I'll let you choose whatever clip you think we should play?

21:10Jake Humphrey: Yeah, definitely. Well, I loved Alistair. And like Will, our producer had told us for ages that he had a friend who knew him and said, you need to get this guy on. He's the embodiment of high performance. And we know what he did in terms of his double golds at the Olympics in the triathlon, but it was his ability to boil it down into really tangible steps that any of us could take that I really want to focus on. And when we spoke to him about that idea of getting up at five o 'clock every morning and having to go into cold water plunges and things like that, he admitted, he said, there's never been a day where I've wanted to do it so let's listen to him explain how he got from his warm comfy bed into a cold water plunge the alarm goes I'm getting up and you motivate yourself to get out of bed to get a cup of tea and then you motivate yourself to get in the car and then you motivate yourself to get out the car and on the pool because you're going to interact with your friends so you know there's a social motivation there and then you motivate yourself to get in the pool.

22:10And, you know, in the space of that 30, 40 minutes, there could be 10 different forms of motivation. And then finally, you're racing up and down, you know, racing Johnny in the lane next to me. And that's a competitive motivation. So, yeah, you have to break it down and find what motivates you for those particular moments. So there you go. What a way to end. Alistair Brownlee with some great advice about getting out there and getting going. And I really hope that you've heard the conversation that we've had and you now realise that actually all of the tools that you require to do the things that you've been struggling to do are already within you.

22:47You can already adopt one of the five second, five minute or two minute rules. You can already take Alistair Browning's advice and just get yourself out of bed. You can also understand that you've got a chimp inside you that is setting really high benchmarks for you to try and achieve and when you don't, that's the thing that's derailing you. It's not the things that are happening outside you. and also that great advice from Shane Parrish and many other people that just be really honest and set yourself targets that you think that you can achieve and it's this great reminder, Damien, as so many of these episodes are, that life is 95 % how we react to the 5 % of stuff that actually happens to us.

23:22Jake Humphrey: Yeah, definitely. And to go back to your point about the diversity of our guests, I think this is the point that we're not talking to sports people or academics, we're talking to people that are dealing with the same challenges that the rest of us are and they're telling us the wisdom that they've learned that works for them, that any of us can adopt ourselves. If the episode is valuable for you, please make sure that you share it with someone, you pass it on. Even if you can just hit like or subscribe wherever you're watching or listening to this, I can't tell you like about 99.9 % of people that enjoy our show are not already subscribers and it makes such a massive difference to us if you can subscribe.

23:56Before we finish, a few quick comments from our audience. Neil Gardner, 5437, spoke to us about the Shane Parrish interview and said my favourite guest yet, a brilliant discussion and points that all of my family can take on board and implement, especially me. Thank you very much, guys.

24:12Jake Humphrey: And Mylin at TNS told us about Alistair Brownlee that she thought it was very clever breaking things down. If you see something as a whole, it can be overwhelming, much easier to be present and not think ahead. And if you do do something, do it well. It means you can pay attention to what you do, keeping you present. They mentioned that Johnny Wilkinson says high performance for him is total engagement in what you're doing. So it's a really nice way to finish. If you are going to do these things, fully commit and see where it takes you. Thank you so much, Damien. Thanks, mate. Please continue to enjoy the High Performance Podcast.

24:46Please share it with your friends. Stay humble, curious and empathetic. And we'll see you next time.

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