PantsKicker.com

I had always been slim until I was about 35. Then I started to put on weight and it bothered me. My first response was the obvious solution: I tried eating less. But then I was hungry a lot and I kept “falling off the wagon” and eating too much, so every few pounds I lost I gained right back (plus a little more). That was discouraging.

I felt discouraged, so what did I do? I used the antivirus for the mind: I wrote down my demoralizing thoughts and argued with them on paper. I discovered several mistakes I made in my thinking, and my desire to try again resurfaced. I decided the situation wasn’t hopeless, and I should try a different tack.

I was already exercising regularly, but to lose weight I started exercising more. I thought I could keep ahead of how much I ate. I would stoke my metabolism so high that I lost weight. And it worked for a little while.

But then I injured my knee. What a setback! That was very demoralizing. Can you see why? The best kind of exercise for losing weight is aerobic exercise. How can you get aerobic exercise without using one of your knees?! It’s almost impossible (I didn’t have access to a pool).

This setback took the fight out of me. I gave up on trying to be slim. And I gained weight. I also felt bad. I was depressed. I was surprised at how disheartened I became. I got up to almost 200 pounds. That’s not really obese for a six foot, two inch man, but I wasn’t slim any more, and it looked like it would just continually get worse.

I’d like to say I used the antivirus for the mind, but in this case, I didn’t. My wife, Klassy, did it for me. “I can’t lose weight without aerobic exercise,” I said one day, “and I can’t exercise because of my knee.”

“Maybe there is some way to lose weight you don’t know about,” she said, “My dad used to say it’s not what you don’t know, it’s what you don’t know you don’t know. Maybe there is something you don’t know about food or exercise — maybe something you don’t even suspect you are ignorant about.”

This was a brave thing for her to say, really, because one of my hobbies has been to study about nutrition, and it has been a strong interest of mine since I was fourteen. I pretty much thought I knew everything about nutrition.

I’m not casual about the things I study. When I say I was “interested” in nutrition, I mean I had read maybe eighty books on the subject, had a subscription to several health magazines for years and read them with keen interest, and I read the monthly Consumer Reports on Health newsletter, the Berkeley Health Newsletter, etc. This was a strong and enduring interest of mine and I thought I knew almost everything about it.

But when Klassy said that, I realized I really didn’t know everything, of course, and maybe there was something outside my knowledge — a way to lose weight I didn’t know about.

The idea that I might not know something — just entertaining the possibility — introduced uncertainty, which is a very powerful antivenom. Uncertainty about a demoralizing belief weakens the power of that belief. It instantly makes you less demoralized and more open to solutions.

As it turned out, a short time later Klassy’s cousin sent her a book called Protein Power, and I read it. Nothing in this biochemically sophisticated book contradicted what I knew about nutrition, but the conclusion was totally different than anything I’d ever read before: that modern people eat far too many carbohydrates than our bodies have evolved to deal with, and a simple solution to losing weight is to eat fewer carbs.

Everybody knows about it now, but at the time, I had never read anything about low-carb diets. I had heard of it, but assumed it was a diet scheme guaranteed not to work (because it was impossible to sustain) like something in the category of “the grapefruit diet.”

I immediately started eating fewer carbs and within two months I lost twenty pounds and stayed there. I felt great. And of course, I was no longer demoralized. In fact, I was happy. I wasn’t helpless about my weight after all.

The cause of my happiness can be traced back to the introduction of a little uncertainty — Klassy helped me feel uncertain about my pessimistic conclusion (that losing weight was hopeless for me).

I was, however, still depressed about my knee. It had been years since I went for a good hard run and I had always counted on that to keep me in a good mood.

I pulled out my trusty tool again — this antivirus for the mind — and looked at the knee problem. After arguing with my pessimistic beliefs on paper, I didn’t feel so demoralized. My motivation returned. I wanted to do something about it, but I didn’t know what. I needed the advice of an expert.

I didn’t want to go to regular doctors because I figured all they could offer was drugs or surgery. So I decided to go to a physical therapist first. I figured if that didn’t work, I could always try something else. But if I got surgery first, I might not be able to try something else.

It was a great decision. The physical therapist told me my main problem was a lack of flexibility. She said when muscles contract again and again without stretching out, over time the muscles get shorter. “When your hamstring gets shorter,” she told me, “it pulls on your knee.” She gave me some flexibility and strength exercises I could do. I did them, and the pain went away! That was almost ten years ago and I haven’t had any knee problems since then. Every once in awhile, I will start to feel some pain in my knee, but I just do some stretching and within days it is gone.

When life presents you with a setback and you feel demoralized by it, the first and most important thing to do is undemoralize yourself. The fastest and surest way is to question your demoralizing, negative thoughts. Inspect them for mistakes.

And as you find mistakes in your negative assumptions, your feelings of discouragement will start to lift. Your mind will open and new ideas and information will be allowed in. You will start doing things to solve the problem (now that you no longer feel defeated by it) and your chances of overcoming the obstacles will increase tremendously.

Mistake-free explanations of setbacks make you highly resistant to feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, discouragement, demoralization, and depression. The habit of explaining setbacks without making those mistakes gives you the ability to bounce back, to try again, and to refuse to give up when things don’t go your way.

Feeling not-at-all defeated by setbacks does more than prevent you from giving up. It makes you more successful at accomplishing your goals. It makes your tasks easier and more fun. Giving up on a goal feels bad. Trying to “push on” when you feel demoralized is not only difficult, it’s no fun.

If you can try again after setbacks, your life will be one of growth and accomplishment. If, on the other hand, even half the time, you give up after a setback, your life will be full of unfulfilled dreams and wasted potential and outright failure.

Every time you try to make your marriage better and your spouse seems reluctant to communicate, every time you try to do a good job at work and run into a problem, every time you decide to get in shape and pull a muscle, your explanatory style — your usual way of explaining setbacks to yourself — will make the difference between trying again or giving up.

And the way to ensure you’ll try again is to write down your negative thoughts and then argue with them. Use the antivirus for your mind.

So now you know. Nature has divulged her secret. You have a powerful weapon against feeling demoralized, disheartened, or depressed.

Practice several times a week, arguing with your own negative thoughts. Sit down and do it for a half-hour at a time. Or simply do it every time you feel even slightly demoralized. You hit small setbacks every day. Use those to train your mind. Write your explanations and criticize them every day.

Habitual mistake-free explanations make you healthier, happier, and more successful. The habit will move you toward accomplishment, success, courage, determination, persistence; toward wins and health and satisfaction.

Here is a summary of how it works:

1. The mind automatically and unconsciously explains setbacks.2. The explanations sound plausible but don’t necessarily have anything to do with what really caused the setback.

3. Those explanations have an enormous impact on what you’re capable of and what you decide to do. They influence your attitude, your mood, your relationships, your ability, your creativity, and your health. What you think matters.

4. To uncover your explanation (to find out what it is) ask, “What do I think caused the setback?”

5. The most effective way to improve your explanations is to simply try to correct mistakes.

6. It works best to write out your explanations and arguments.

7. You can feel better quickly by arguing with your negative thoughts.

The skill to improve is to make your explanations contain fewer mistakes. The skill that will benefit your health, the skill that will bring you more success, the skill that will give you more positive emotions and fewer negative feelings is making your explanations contain fewer mistakes.

Form this habit: Whenever you feel negative emotions, discover what you are thinking and see if anything is wrong with it.

Whenever you feel down: Search for mistakes in your negative thoughts.

Here are the thought-mistakes for easy reference: 22 Virus Definitions

Tags: examples by Adam Khan
No Comments »

A clergyman in his fifties had written the manuscript for a book. Since he lived in New York where all the publishers were back in those days, he spent his spare time going into publishers’ offices and asking them to look at his manuscript. Nobody was interested.

It can, of course, be disheartening to get rejection after rejection. With enough setbacks (and poor explanations of them) something happens that is worse than feeling discouraged. The accumulating failures drain away your motivation. Get disheartened enough and your goal starts to seem undesirable.

Even if you know how to motivate yourself, if you don’t know how to undemoralize yourself, you’re sunk. Why? Because you can be so thoroughly demoralized you lose your desire to even try to motivate yourself, making your ability to motivate yourself essentially worthless.

Thinking up goals is easy. Ideas about what you want come easily to mind — maybe even too easily. And feeling motivated to take action (to accomplish a goal you want) comes naturally to most healthy people. You want your goal to happen, so of course you’re motivated.

But if setting goals is easy and motivation comes naturally, why don’t you accomplish every goal you set? Because setbacks demoralize you if you don’t explain them well.

It happened to the clergyman. One day, while he was talking to his wife, he decided he had experienced one setback too many and his goal to get his book published became undesirable. He threw his manuscript in the trash, saying he’d had enough.

Remember this, please: When you make mistakes in your explanations, it not only nudges you toward failure and giving up and depression, it leads to selling out.

The clergyman’s wife knew how much the manuscript meant to him, so she reached into the trashcan to pull it out. “No,” he said, “I’ve wasted enough time on it. I forbid you to take it out of there.” And she never did.

But the next day, she was thinking about it and got an idea. She took the manuscript (still inside the wastebasket) to another publisher. The publisher, intrigued by this unusual way to bring in a manuscript, read it and loved it. He published it, and boy is he glad he did! The book became one of the bestselling books of all time!

The irony is that the book is The Power of Positive Thinking.

The story seemed too ironic to be true, so I wrote to the Peales and asked if it was really true. I heard back from Mrs. Peale, who said yes, that’s the way it happened.

Positive thinking is different than explanatory style. With positive thinking, I’m sure Norman Vincent Peale would have felt good about throwing that manuscript in the trash. He would have kept his cheerful disposition.

With an unthwartable explanatory style, he would have simply tried again, perhaps in a different way.

We’re talking about the ability to try again after a setback — the ability to encounter a setback without giving up in defeat or feeling the goal is hopeless.

What kind of hopeless explanation would make someone throw away their life’s work? Norman must have thought something like, “My book is unpublishable.” Or “Nobody wants it.”

Mrs. Peale must have explained it differently. Perhaps, “It hasn’t been seen by the right publisher.” Or maybe even, “It hasn’t been delivered the right way yet. Perhaps in a trashcan would get someone’s attention!”

Read next: Defeatism Is Defeatable

Tags: examples by Adam Khan
No Comments »

My Grampa Bill lived near Kitty Hawk when he was a kid, and used to go watch the Wright brothers testing their aircraft. One time, because the Wright brothers wanted to shut the mouths of the doubters and improve the accuracy of some of the crazy stuff newspapers were printing about their work, the brothers invited reporters out to Kitty Hawk for a demonstration.

Everything went wrong. It was raining pretty hard and they were having trouble with the engine, so they didn’t get a chance to do anything until late afternoon. They made one attempt that day, and although the aircraft got up some speed, it never got off the ground.

The rain didn’t let up, so they had to wait two more days before they tried it again. This time they got about seven feet off the ground before the plane crashed.

The next day, a New York Times headline said, “FALL WRECKS AIRSHIP.” (The negative bias of the newsmedia was in full swing even way back then.) It was more than a year before any reporters came out to visit.

But the Wright brothers continued their work, as determined as ever. Why? What kept them working when they had so many failures? It all boils down to how they explained the setback to themselves. If they told themselves their goal was impossible, or that they weren’t capable, or some other explanation that took the wind out of their sails, they would not have pursued their goal, and they would have disappeared into oblivion. Anybody who explains their own setbacks that way gives up in defeat.

But the explanations the Wright brothers made of their many setbacks must have been more sensible. They must have thought the problems were fixable. They must have believed the cause of the setbacks could be changed. Explanations like these keep people from feeling demoralized in the face of setbacks.

It’s not willpower. It’s the way setbacks are explained. Remember that.

Most people think you can force yourself to keep going even when you believe it is hopeless. But when you “know” it’s hopeless, you won’t force yourself. When you are sure you are defeated, it is irrational to persist.

If you really want a drink of water, and you have an empty glass in your hand, and you can see it is empty, you won’t bother to try to take a drink from it. You know it is hopeless.

Willpower won’t help you. When you feel demoralized, finding a mistake in your explanations is the only thing that can save you.

“Through some strange and powerful principle of ‘mental chemistry’ which she has never divulged,” wrote Napoleon Hill in 1937, “Nature wraps up in the impulse of STRONG DESIRE ‘that something’ which recognizes no such word as impossible, and accepts no such reality as failure.”

Nobody knew what “that something” was back then. In a chapter on persistence, Napoleon Hill recommended willpower for persisting after a failure. We now know better.

Nature has divulged her secret to the unremitting efforts of cognitive scientists. It isn’t willpower. It is sensible explanations of setbacks that makes people determined and persistent. Good explanations are Nature’s secret “something” that gives people strength in the face of obstacles. Those who explain setbacks in the least demoralizing way have the most persistence.

In other words, the way to become more persistent is to make sure you don’t jump to demoralizing conclusions about the cause of the setback.

Instead of gritting your teeth and forcing yourself to try again even though you feel it’s hopeless, try eliminating the feeling of defeat to begin with and then persist naturally, driven by your desire — which remains undiminished by feelings of defeat.

Read next: An Aspiring Writer With a Sensible Wife

Tags: examples by Adam Khan
No Comments »

Dougal Robertson was sailing across the Pacific Ocean with his family when three killer whales simultaneously struck their boat. (Killer whales often attack larger whales like that, striking it to stun it. Then they eat it.) The sailboat started sinking — fast! Within minutes, their boat was gone and they found themselves sitting in silence in an empty ocean, completely dazed.

The thoughts going through Dougal’s mind were filled with despair. Why, he thought, had he been so reckless as to endanger his family’s life like this? How could he have risked their lives with his selfish desire to educate them in such an unorthodox way?

He himself started sinking — into feelings of despair and hopelessness and guilt as he thought about the loss of his boat, the danger his family was in, and the foolish mistakes he had made.

They were in the middle of the Pacific on a raft and a little fiberglass dingy, without a radio, without a homing beacon, and a long way from shipping lanes. The wind and currents were moving in the opposite direction of the nearest land. They had very little food or water.

The situation was grim to say the least, and as Dougal thought about it and felt anguish for putting his family in this situation, he suddenly realized his face was showing his hopelessness.

He knew his depression would ruin any chance they had of surviving. He was the leader. They were all looking to him. His own despair would demoralize them all, and he also knew a defeated person doesn’t do what he needs to survive.

Dougal had to rise out of his depression. Driven by the necessity of so great a responsibility, he spontaneously invented the way out.

He had never read a book about cognitive therapy. He didn’t know there was such a thing. But he started exactly what cognitive therapists teach their clients to do: He debated with his own demoralizing thoughts.

His first thought was, I shouldn’t have brought them out in the ocean. “But,” he argued with himself, “Douglas had grown to manhood in our 18 months at sea. The formerly shy and introspective twins had become interested in the world, had expanded their understanding of other people and had awakened their desire to learn more.”

But I took them out on such an old boat. “It was of much heavier construction than newer boats, and sank slower than a modern boat would have, allowing us time to get off the boat and safely into the life raft.”

But I have now risked their lives. “What happened was as unforeseeable as an earthquake or an airplane crash.”

Dougal’s crash-course in anti-defeatism worked. He revived. His demoralization vanished and was replaced by a firm determination to get his family home safely. He explained their situation and what needed to be done, and they immediately started taking actions that helped them survive.

They spent 38 days on in their lifeboat and dingy, overcoming one obstacle after another without losing heart, and they all made it home alive.

Stories of survival show very clearly the power of arguing with defeatist explanations. You can see the usefulness of the principle in naked relief when shown in such harsh live-or-die circumstances. You can see that the only hope the Robertsons had of making it home alive was to keep trying. Giving up meant death. Had they succumbed to despair, the slim chance of survival they had would have vanished as quickly as their sailboat beneath the waves.

Dougal Robertson wrote a book about his family’s experience. It is one of my favorite books of all time. Check it out: Survive the Savage Sea.

Read next: The Flying Kitty-Hawk Brothers

Tags: examples by Adam Khan
No Comments »