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  • Michael Glover

    Michael Glover is a Mindset & Performance Coach, helping people balance mental, physical, emotional and spiritual health in order to build strength from the inside-out and realise their truest potential. Feel free to add him as a friend on Facebook or check out his #1 rated podcast, Enlightened Entrepreneurial Badasses.
How to Use Neuro-Associations to Skyrocket Your Productivity
Productivity

How to Use Neuro-Associations to Skyrocket Your Productivity

Optimized productivity is a kind of ‘Holy Grail’ for many people. There are many podcasts, blogs and so many other things out there solely dedicated to productivity. And then there are a million different systems, tools, apps and products available as well. All focused on, in simple terms, getting more done in less time. But I don’t want to focus on those. Yes, it’s great to get organized, have a system that works for you and to utilize apps and new technologies.

How to Get the Hard Things Done Without The Struggle
Mindset

How to Get the Hard Things Done Without The Struggle

Michael Glover is a Mindset & Performance Coach and a regular writer for Goalcast. In a recent article, I talked about creating habits without using willpower. Although I stand by everything I said in the article, I wanted to follow that up by clearing up a few things. More specifically, clearing up a few things around what to do when things get tough. It seems a takeaway some people got from the article was that in order to make something a habit, it should feel relatively easy all the time. That we should quit if things get tough because it means it’s not the correct path for us. And effectively just ride off into the sunset on a unicorn to live a life where everything we do is always filled with joy and excitement. Of course, this wasn’t my intention. I’m fully aware of the need to ‘work hard’ and take action repeatedly in order to achieve any goal in life. The Glorification of Hustle But ‘work hard’ is, when you sit back and think about it, a very generic term. What does it actually mean? I feel like I’m now exposed to a magnitude of motivational or educational posts, videos, articles, memes, Instagram pics and all sorts of stuff every single day. And there’s a large core contingent in there that glorifies this whole ‘hustle culture’ to those of us who want to achieve things and continually better our lives. Not winning? Work harder. Not achieving? Hustle more. As a young, impressionable person desperately seeking success, what I took from this was that achievement is always a hard grind. That it wasn’t fun and you had to struggle your way there. So I felt like I always needed to be doing more and more. And if I wasn’t doing more, then I felt guilty. Because, according to the ‘social media people’, successful people just ‘kept on hustling’. Calculated Hustle Of course, the premise is absolutely spot on. As I said earlier, if you want to achieve something in any area of life, we need to go out there and take big action. But having this connotation of struggle and grind that comes along with ‘the hustle’ means this is exactly what we attract into our lives. And who wants to live a life full of struggle and grind? So I suppose what I’m suggesting is, yes, it’s a good thing to adopt an action taking, ‘hustle’ mentality. But not to simply do it blindly in a scatter gun approach because some YouTube video or Instagram post said about the virtues of working harder and harder and harder. Why don’t we use a more ‘calculated hustle’? A hustle that’s more about simply working out where the destination is and following the path of least resistance to get there. Find what works for you and trust in the process without feeling like you have to be always doing something for fear of missing out. Don’t get me wrong, there are always going to be times when there are challenges and obstacles in the road. And sometimes it’s necessary to just identify them and take them on. All I’m saying is that we can take on the ‘hard things’ without continually needing to make life itself so hard. Building Discipline Even when we’re taking the road of ‘least resistance’ there still will be resistance at times. There still will be times when it gets hard and tough and we want to quit. This is where discipline comes into play, not willpower. Becoming clear on our own plan to get to where we want to go and disciplining ourselves to, effectively, follow through on what we said we would do. And this comes as a theme throughout our entire lives. We’re not just hanging onto willpower, the particular plan to build a bigger business, improve our physical health or achieve whatever other goal we might have. Rather, we’re stepping into the entire identity of being a ‘disciplined person’. It’s a subtle, yet powerful difference. Because how we do one thing is how we do everything. Being disciplined in our approach and starting to follow through in all areas, even the seemingly little ones like not sleeping through our alarm or sticking to a daily meditation practice can have carry-on effects into all other areas of our lives. So, yes, as I said in my previous article, it's the key to discovering your own path that you’re most likely to enjoy and want to do. But once you’re clear on exactly what that path entails, it’s crucial to ‘build your discipline muscle’ by becoming the person who follows through on what they say they’ll do in all areas of life.

How to Change Our Habits Without Relying on Willpower
Self-Development

How to Change Our Habits Without Relying on Willpower

Michael Glover is a Mindset & Performance Coach and a regular writer for Goalcast Willpower is often a pretty glorified concept. Being able to ‘grind through’ something, not give up and come out the other end a winner is a story many of us like to meet with applause. In fact, it’s frequently seen as a cornerstone of a ‘strong mindset’ and sometimes even as a necessary attribute for anyone wanting to achieve something with their life. Of course, there are times in each of our lives where we will have to do things we don’t really want to do. Where we’re required to take a deep breath and just ‘get it done’. And willpower is a very useful thing to call upon in these situations. The problem, though, is when we start pulling that magical bottle of willpower off the shelf over and over again in an attempt to change our long-term thinking, habits and behaviors. Because, like a bottle of anything, willpower is a finite resource. We will run out at some point. And it’s not so easy to run down to the store and stock up every week like it is with the ketchup. Change vs Transformation Changing our habits in any area of life typically follows a very similar outline. Take losing weight, for example. We find a ‘plan’, will ourselves to keep doing it, maybe get some kind of result before, more often than not, falling off the wagon and it all ending up back at square one again. It’s a similar story time and time again when it comes to businesses, careers, self-improvement, relationships and many other aspects. We start, will ourselves to stick to habits, fall out of the habit and then swiftly move on to the next thing. Essentially, we continually call on willpower in an attempt to force ourselves to do stuff we don’t really want to do. We use willpower to temporarily change our habits and see temporary change in our lives, without ever really achieving true transformation. Because change, by its very definition, is…changeable. We can change a habit quite easily, hold on by our fingertips for a period of time, get a result, be hugely grateful when it’s over and then change back to what we were doing in the first place. It’s like holding your breath and hoping you can just will yourself through life without having to exhale. Transformation, on the other hand, is much more permanent. We don’t go back on transformation. By definition, we have transformed, and going back would require another transformation back into the old again. How to Transform These are subtle, yet very powerful differences. But it all begs the question of how we actually transform. How do we make sure that we have actually transformed, and are not just clinging to change hoping it will stick? A huge player in doing this is a part of the brain called the basal ganglia. This is, to put it simply, what could be referred to as the ‘home of habit’. It’s where we store actions and behaviors that the brain sees as beneficial to store and be available on autopilot. Unfortunately, accessing the basal ganglia isn’t as simple as willing yourself to do something for 21 days, 60 days, 90 days or however long many ‘experts’ suggest it takes to form a habit. Because calling on willpower, regardless of how long we manage to do it, is, in fact, counter-productive to habit creation. The brain is always listening. And repeatedly doing something while thinking how much you can’t wait for it to end is a big, fat red flag. Not only will the brain decline to store this behavior as a habit, it will also send you every impulse, craving and signal it can to get you to stop doing it as soon as possible. Work with the Brain So we are literally fighting our own brain when using willpower in an attempt to store long term habits. Unsurprisingly, it’s much more effective to work with our brain. The brain is much more willing to input an action or behaviour into the basal ganglia when we’re repeating something we want to do. Not just that we want the outcome of a repeated action, but that the action itself is something we genuinely want to do and enjoy doing. Finding ways to enjoy, or even love, what you’re doing is a much quicker and more effective path to getting those habits on autopilot and achieving long-term transformation. In fact, it simply becomes a matter of discipline, not willpower, in order to repeat something enough times to input it into the basal ganglia. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a long winded “just do what you love and everything will be ok” speech. I’m still advocating the relevancy of moving towards specific aspirations, goals or visions for the future in various desired areas of life. And I’m certainly not saying that everything should always be amazing and be full of sunshine and rainbows without any signs of resistance showing up at any time. But when the path to getting to wherever it is we want to go isn’t filled with so much resistance and struggle, it becomes monumentally easier to take consistent, repetitive action that soon becomes habit. The Most Optimal Way? At this point, many people start wondering about whether doing this is the most optimal way of achieving a goal or vision for the future. Surely, if we want to achieve something, the best advice is to copy or learn from someone who’s already achieved it. But we can look at this both objectively and subjectively. Objectively, the best and most optimal way forward to a goal, whether it be in business, health or anything else, is to find a specific, exact and definitive path to achieving it in the shortest time possible. You take the step-by-step actions over and over and you get the desired result. In reality, however, if that ‘optimal’ way forward isn’t suited to us, as individuals, then it’s not going to work. Or at least, it’s not going to work long term. And if the fruits of our labor don’t last particularly long, is that really the most optimal way? Following these paths that we can’t stick to, no matter how ‘optimal’ they seem to be, end up becoming not so optimal because results take longer to achieve and aren’t long lasting anyway. And perhaps the path that maybe seems slower at the outset and gets criticized by others is, in fact, the most optimal because it’s our own path. The one we want to take and enjoy doing. So simply using discipline to repeat the actions and behaviors we enjoy taking in order to store them as habits is the most optimal way to achieving our goals. Because we will never achieve a life we love by repeatedly doing things we loathe. And isn’t loving life what it’s all about?

How To Be More Confident In All Areas Of Life
Self-Development

How To Be More Confident In All Areas Of Life

Michael Glover is a Mindset & Performance Coach and a regular writer for Goalcast Confidence is one of those things I’m sure almost all of us have struggled with at some point in our lives.Being confident and having ‘more self-confidence’ can help us achieve great things. Yet a lack of it can leave us playing a much smaller game than we’re capable of in all areas of life.I’ve struggled with self-confidence my entire life and it’s held me back in many areas. In fact, it’s only a sign of my own recent personal growth that I can confidently, yet paradoxically, admit to having struggled with confidence.My past is filled with moments of choosing not to put myself out there or go beyond my comfort zone. Whether it be progressing in sports, talking to girls or trying to be successful in business, my scarcity of self-confidence always seemed to be a huge obstacle in my way.What is Confidence?After spending a large part of my life wishing to be one of ‘those people’ who ooze confidence at every turn, I came to the realization that I was thinking about it in a way that was serving me very poorly.A huge mistake we make when thinking about confidence is seeing it as this ‘binary’ concept. We tend to think about people being confident in either a ‘you are or you aren’t’ way. But this is vastly oversimplifying things.We all feel confident in some areas of our lives and lack confidence in others. I’m very confident in my ability to write, coach, produce a podcast, play soccer, drive a car and various other things. Yet if you asked me to fly an airplane, my confidence would come crashing back down to earth.So the idea that we can either be ‘a confident person’ or ‘not a confident person’ in such a clear cut way becomes pretty nonsensical.Action Comes FirstWhat this means, then, is that we have somehow developed confidence in certain areas of our lives. We pick things up, do them repeatedly and eventually get to a point where we feel confident in doing them.The key aspect to pick out here is that the action comes first, not the confidence.When we first learn to drive, most of us are not confident. In fact, most people I know were pretty terrified their first few times of getting behind the wheel on an actual road. But getting back in that driver’s seat time and time again allows us to keep building our confidence to a point where we end up jumping in the car without thinking twice about it.We don’t sit at home waiting for confidence to suddenly appear. Just hoping that one day it’ll all sort itself out and we’ll just have the confidence of someone who’s been driving for 30 years injected into us.And this rings true in any situation. Piloting an airplane seems monumentally daunting to anyone who’s never done it before. But, in essence, it’s no different than learning to drive a car. You learn how, practice and eventually become confident in your ability to do it.It’s the action that comes first and enables us to keep building up that confidence.Getting to the RootMaybe that news of action coming first isn’t exactly groundbreaking to you. Even if you hadn’t consciously thought about it before, it might seem kind of obvious when brought to the forefront of the mind.And it still leaves us in this ‘catch-22’ situation of needing to take action to build confidence, yet not having the confidence to take the action in the first place. It’s easier said than done, although not entirely ludicrous, to suggest conquering a lack of confidence in public speaking by just getting on stage and doing it.The root, I believe, of all this that needs addressing comes back to our idea of self-worth. Or, more specifically, how we measure our own self-worth.Driven by societal ideology, without really thinking about it we create this story in our heads about our self-worth being attached to how well we perform. As if we’re only worthy of being an upstanding member of the human race if we perform to some high standard in many, or even all, of the things we do.Ironically, this strive for higher and higher performance actually creates poorer performance due to the sheer desperation to prove ourselves surrounded by it. And what’s more, poorer performance that’s potentially combined with a barrel load of anxiety and inner turmoil.To put it simply, we lose confidence in something we want to do before we even begin due to the fear of negative judgment on our performance. We start off lacking confidence because we don’t have faith in our ability to do a particular thing and perform to some exceptional standard.Your Existence is Your WorthDon’t get me wrong; I’m not saying we should all just stop striving to achieve things in life. That we should all just sit back and not care about performing well in anything and everything we do.But it’s powerful to understand that reaching higher levels of performance in many things in life can come from not tying our own self-worth to it.When it comes down to it, each and every person reading this article is proving their own self-worth simply by being here. It’s in-built and not something we have to find elsewhere. In fact, our existence is proof that we are worthy of existing.When we reframe it in this way, it becomes okay to maybe be at 50% one day or to struggle and not be any good at certain things. That this happening doesn’t somehow make you any less worthy of being a human or receiving whatever you desire in life.Understanding this opens up space for us to just show up wholeheartedly each day. We let go of this exhausting desperation to prove our worth to ourselves and others through our performance in each and every little facet of life.So we gain the self-assuredness to go out there and just… perform. Perform to the best we possibly can. And while knowing that how we do doesn’t somehow detract from our worth as a human being.It’s a much more peaceful way of doing things.Looking for more resources? Check out our quotes on confidence.

How To Stop Self-Sabotage And Why We All Do It
Mindset

How To Stop Self-Sabotage And Why We All Do It

Self-sabotage is a strange concept. The idea that someone would willfully impair their own happiness or success seems, on the face of it, absurd. Yet what we term “self-sabotage” is an all too common occurrence that holds many of us back from living the happy, healthy, successful life we crave. How To Stop Self-Sabotage And Why We All Do It It was only 18 months ago that I exited my personal training studio business after drowning in my own self-sabotage. Despite investing thousands in its start-up and gradually growing the client base, it seemed like I just continually found ways to stall the progress and keep myself stuck. I knew what I had to do to get that business to the position I wanted it, yet, for some reason, I just couldn’t seem to get myself to do it on a consistent basis. What success I did have felt extremely forced and I ended up miserable, stressed and just needing to get myself out. We do this in all areas of our lives. We want to be healthy but can’t get ourselves to make consistent changes. We want to be successful but we hold ourselves back. We want to be happy but choose fear and frustration instead. The normal reaction from the ‘outsider looking in’ is to criticize and jibe with the usual comments of “you just don’t want it badly enough” or “just hustle harder”. But I believe this is an issue rooted at a deeper level. I’ve seen people invest thousands in businesses, turn up for gym sessions over and over and read every self-help book going, but still manage ruin everything they've worked for at crucial times. Is it fair to cast off their reason for remaining stuck in whatever area of life as them ‘just not wanting it badly enough’? There is more to it. Conscious vs. Subconscious What we tend to forget in our modern day ‘action, action, action’ world is the huge difference that exists between our conscious and subconscious brains. In fact, it’s estimated the average human goes through the day with their subconscious in charge a whopping 95% of the time. That means only 5% of our daily activities are consciously controlled. So it’s very easy to say on a conscious level that we want to lose weight, be healthy, become successful and experience happiness. If our subconscious isn’t programmed for this then we can’t help but hold ourselves back. Think of it like riding a giant elephant, where the elephant represents the subconscious, and you are the conscious mind, sitting on top. We can struggle all we want to turn right, but the elephant is so big that if he wants to turn left, then there’s nothing we can do. It’s the same with our subconscious controlling almost everything we do. When we truly see how powerful the subconscious mind is, it becomes completely understandable when we start ‘sabotaging’ ourselves. If we have beliefs, limits, and preconceived ideas about who we are buried deep in our subconscious, then it’s only logical that it be a monumental struggle to override them through the relatively feeble conscious will. What the Subconscious Really Desires What we term ‘self-sabotage’, then, is simply a clash of conscious and subconscious desires. When we get a moment to sit back in conscious thought and consider what we want from life, most people would wish to self-actualize and achieve their own definitions of health, wealth, success or happiness. We can conceive of this quite comfortably and may get periods of excitement about various directions we can see ourselves going. This is when we have that spur of the moment flicker of motivation and commit to starting that business, signing up for that gym membership, beginning that diet programme or going ‘all in’ with a relationship. But then the subconscious comes into play. And the subconscious brain, all 95% of it, simply wants one thing – safety. It wants us to have access to food, shelter, to get as far from danger as possible and to feel connected to other humans within the safety of a tribe. There’s no thought or care about whether we’re successful, happy, sad, rich, poor, healthy, overweight, famous or anything else. All the subconscious cares about is to keep us safe. So when we start to come up with conscious desires that oppose this, we cause a conflict and an ‘internal tug-of-war’ scenario where one side is monumentally more powerful. Training the Subconscious Maybe this all sounds interesting, intriguing and all very simple in an ideal world. But the question remains; How do we get past it? If we’re continually finding ourselves on this path of ‘self-sabotage’ and somewhere along the line bowing down to our subconscious desires, how do we break that pattern and achieve anything in life? This is where we usually get ourselves stuck. We try and try and try on this treadmill going nowhere attempting to force that giant elephant underneath us to move in the opposite direction. When we feel like giving up, we listen to the people telling us we ‘don’t want it badly enough’ and fill everything with feelings of guilt, shame and resentment believing that we’re ‘just not cut out’ for this. In actual fact, the solution comes at a deeper level. Rather than trying to ignore everything inside us and willing our way through, we need to get to know and understand what’s happening inside us at a subconscious level. Attempt to tame that giant elephant. Most of us don’t know our subconscious. In fact, many of us don’t even really acknowledge the fact that it’s there. But the first step to training it to be more aligned with where we consciously desire is to talk to it. Spend some time by yourself and become aware of what is actually going on in your head. What do you think about yourself and life? Taming the Elephant The paradoxical thing here is that we have a subconscious that’s set for survival in a world where it is now, for most of us, relatively easy to survive. Gone are the days where our brain needs to protect us from near constant threat of sudden drought, famine, harsh weather or attack from predators. What this means is that many of the modern day threats that pull us back into the subconscious brain and away from conscious desires are potentially not real threats. They are perceived threats. Of course, this doesn’t make them any less real to us in the moment. But if we can begin to recognize these moments and talk to our subconscious brain, we can start to re-pattern new ways of thinking into it. Ways that serve us in line with our conscious desires. The key is to become aware of everything in the first place. When I checked in with my own thoughts and what was regularly running through my subconscious mind, it changed the game for me. Suddenly, I was no longer scrambling for success and happiness in the dark. I switched the lights on, so to speak, and saw the internal obstacles holding me back. So I would invite you to tune in to exactly what’s happening inside. What are the fears, the beliefs and the negative thoughts that keep you stuck? And simply ask yourself whether each of these are real and what a better thought would be. It’s not an instant fix. But it’s this regular and continual re-patterning of new beliefs into the subconscious that enables us to learn better serving programs and identities and prevents our pursuit of happiness being overthrown by a rebellious elephant.

How to Believe In Yourself in 3 Super Simple Steps
Self-Development

How to Believe In Yourself in 3 Super Simple Steps

We can have all the strategies and blueprints in the world to improve our lives, but if we don’t truly believe we can do it, or that we deserve it, we will forever remain stuck.But how do we learn to believe?Something I’m discovering more and more about life is that our beliefs are at the heart of everything. Like most people, I crave to live a life full of happiness, healthiness, joy and success with as little stress and overwhelm cropping up as possible.But, also like many people, I always struggled to believe in myself, and to believe in what was truly possible for me. I’d go through stages of feeling good and getting myself into a conscious mindset of positive thinking, before being pulled crashing back down to earth when the fingers of my subconscious wrapped themselves around me again.And there I would sit, crashing up and down on this belief roller coaster without getting anywhere. Stuck. Trapped. Lost in the cycle of self-sabotage.What are beliefs?As I delved further into this realm, I felt like I was constantly being told I just needed to “believe everything was possible” without ever being given the how-to part. So my first step towards getting a hold on all this was to start understanding more about beliefs and where they come from. This led me to the realization that we can see everything in our world within the context of three categories: truth, opinion and belief.Truth is absolute and unarguable. It’s knowing the sun will rise tomorrow and the feel of the wind on our face.Then there’s opinion, which we know is just that – an opinion. It’s part of our human ability to make judgements and then form opinions about everything we see on whether something or someone is right, wrong, good, bad, etc.Beliefs, on the other hand, are formed when we take opinions and treat them as truths. To us, they are real and unarguable and we struggle to see past them.To me, simply becoming aware of this was powerful. Just being open to the possibility that everything we "believe" to be a truth may actually be an opinion leaves the door open for transformation. Because, by definition, opinions are open to debate and can be changed.Breaking the cycleDespite now understanding more about beliefs and where they come from, I was still left with the nagging question of how to shift this on a deeper level relative to my own self-image and esteem.On a conscious level, I was now becoming aware of the possibility that what I believed about myself wasn’t necessarily true. I could therefore alter how I see the world and myself in a way that served me and my life goals in a better way.But I still remained stuck. To me, seeing was believing. I considered myself to be a ‘logical person,’ and so if I was to believe something different, if I was to really start believing in myself and my power to change things, then I would need to see evidence first. But I didn’t see any change in my situation, so I couldn’t shift internally. I was stuck in a cycle of my situation dictating my internal state.If things were to truly change, I would need to break the cycle and shift my internal state first. Because shifting our internal state is the only way to consistently take on different actions and behaviors, which, in turn, changes our reality and current situation.In other words, I needed to learn how to believe before seeing.Shifting our inner stateSo to believe in yourself, you need to first shift your inner state, as this will create huge ripple effects in the way we see our reality, from the inside out. I’ve found the best way of doing this is through a simple three-step process involving awareness, challenging and aligning.1. AwarenessThis is monumentally powerful. It involves becoming absolutely clear about what is going on inside your mind currently. Examining your present state of mind is often somewhat "curative" in its own right.All too often, we label our thoughts as negative, bad or wrong and attempt to ignore and suppress them in the hope we can just plough on through. But taking some time to actually listen to what’s going on in there can create epic levels of self-awareness, and help you uncover what is ‘steering the ship’ on a subconscious level.When I did this for myself, I simply went off to a quiet place with a notepad and tuned into my own thoughts. So I would invite you to do just that, to ask yourself questions about what you believe about yourself and life, and to record what comes up.2. ChallengeThe next stage is to challenge these ‘negative’ thoughts we’ve just brought into our awareness.I couldn’t believe the kind of self-talk going on inside my head when I first did this. How can you learn to believe in yourself when you're constantly talking yourself down?I found that the process of identifying each individual thought or belief, figuring out where it came from, and then asking ‘is this true?’ was incredibly transformative in and of itself. Suddenly, the situation gets turned on its head and, rather than just allowing the negativity to fester inside us, we can look it square in the eye and challenge its credibility.3. RealignAfter the first two steps, I had effectively created a "blank slate" of sorts, and was now in the position of being able to align myself with an inner state that served me better.So step three is to quite simply consider just that. What belief, thought or way of being would better serve my desired outcome? How can you get to an inner state where you can believe in yourself?Of course, like many things in life, this isn’t a quick fix. Each of us spend our entire lives forming our unique belief systems, so altering that on a deep level is going to take work and repetition. But working to continually create awareness, challenge and realign elements of our internal dialogue enables us to change our state in the long term. If we change our state, we change our behaviors. And if we change our behaviors then we change our reality.