Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Motivation Monday: How to Use “Environment Design” to Accomplish Your Goals Easier and Faster

Episode Date: September 17, 2018

This episode is part of a weekly series that I have dubbed “Motivation Monday.” (Yes, I know, very creative of me. What can I say, I’m a genius…) Seriously though, the idea here is simple: Every Monday morning, I’m going to post a short and punchy episode that I hope gets you fired up to tackle the workouts, work, and everything else that you have planned for the week ahead. As we all know, it’s one thing to know what you want to do, but it’s something else altogether to actually make yourself do it, and I hope that this series gives you a jolt of inspiration, energy, and encouragement to get at it. So, if you like what you hear, then make sure to check back every Monday morning for the latest and greatest installment. Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.muscleforlife.com/signup/

Hello, my friends. This is Mike Matthews from Us For Life and Legion Athletics back with what is going to be the first of many more podcasts. As I've mentioned in the last couple podcasts, I've been conspicuously absent from everything, from the blogs, from social media, from YouTube, from this podcast, because I've been doing nothing but, well, nothing really. No kidding. I've been doing nothing but working on the new third editions of my flagship books for men and women, Bigger Leaner Stronger and Thinner Leaner Stronger, respectively. And yeah, it was a lot of work because I wanted the books to be

out by the end of the year. And basically that meant that I had, yeah, I had about two months to rewrite the books from scratch because that's what I wanted to do. Obviously the books have a ton of good information and people really like them, but I wrote the second editions four years ago. I know more now. I'm a better writer now. I've gotten a ton of really good feedback from readers. So I knew exactly what I needed to do to greatly improve the books. And that essentially meant rewriting them. So I had two months to rewrite them and then record the audio books, which turned out to be a bit more of a pain in the ass, literally, than I anticipated. Because it took us about a month working on it pretty much every day for anywhere from, let's say,

three to eight hours, depending on what else I had to do. And it was good, though, because not only, you know, I think the audiobooks are better with me having read them because I know exactly how I want things to be said and what I want to emphasize and de-emphasize and so forth. But it also forces you, of course, to read every single word slowly, which makes for the ultimate final draft of any written work. Maybe you could say, have someone else read it to you slowly, might even be better. But reading it yourself slowly, deliberately, carefully is great because it forces you to consider every word. Is that word needed?

Is there a better way to say it? And looking at that, you know, at the word level and then at the sentence level and at the paragraph level and so forth. So the books are definitely better for my having read them. And I'm really happy with how the books came together. Really, really happy. Again, I've said this a couple of times now, my goal going into this project was,

and it still is, to write what I hope people will say are the best fitness books ever written for men and women. And if I can't do that, that's ultimately up to you and everybody else in the market, of course. And if I can't do that, that's ultimately up to you and everybody else in the market, of course. But if I can't accomplish that, I can at least say for myself that these are the absolute best fitness books I am currently capable of writing.

It's been four years since I wrote the second editions, and I'm really happy with the improvements that I've made. And so I've restructured the books. I've taken some information out that probably wasn't all that necessary. I've replaced it with information that's very necessary, I think, based on reader feedback and just interacting with literally thousands, tens of thousands of people and readers now over the years.

I was building, over the last four years since I published the second edition have been building a pretty extensive list of just good ideas that people would send me. You know, I've I have a I have an email that I send to people whenever I interact with a reader where I ask them, hey, what's part of my little email, I have my own little email sequence that I work through with people. And one of the questions I ask is, is there any way that I could improve the book? Like, just let me know. And people have come up with a lot of good ideas. So anyways, that's done now. Audiobook's done. I still have to actually record the foreword for, it's going to be actually for both Bigger, Leaner, Stronger and Thinner,

Leaner, Stronger. And it's from Mark Ripito, which is, which is great. And I really appreciate Mark doing that. So I still have to record that. And there's probably a couple of little odds and ends, but the bulk of the work is done. And that means that digital files should be out in November, eBooks and audio books. Oh, and this also includes the journals for men and women, the year one challenge for men, the year one challenge for women, also fully updating those as well. Not only are the programs changing slightly, the women's program is changing a bit more than the men's, but the rest of the journals are being updated as well and being changed as well to just include more information, be more user-friendly, more informative, give you more of what you might want with you in the gym for reference and so forth.

So all the digital stuff is going to be out in November. And then the hard copies will follow, I would say December slash January, because there's the print time, the time it takes to print all the books. And then I have to also figure out, do I want to then take all the current second edition stuff and like set it aside and sell it in other, there are other channels like wholesale channels that we sell books through. Do I want to do that? Or do I want to just sell fully through the second edition and just let it naturally phase into the third edition? But either way, December slash January for all the hard copies and I'll be emailing about it. I don't

think I'm going to go as hard as I went on the launch for the little black book, but I'll definitely be sending some emails and explaining to people why I rewrote, why did I do these new third editions? What's different. Um, and you know, also some good news for, for everybody who currently has a digital copy of Bigger, Leaner, Stronger, Thinner, Leaner, Stronger, or the year one challenges for men and women, you're going to get the new stuff for free. You'll be able to just update your Kindle content, which I'll include some instructions or a link on how to do that in the emails that go out. But basically you're going to get the new stuff for free. You'll be able to update both eBooks. So you can do that through Kindle and then audio book will also

be updated for free. I don't think it updates automatically. I think you're going to have to do it manually, but it's easy to do hard copies. Of course, if you want a hard copy, you're going to have to, you have to get it. I can't update your hard copy, but that's it for now in terms of general updates. And that means also something I'm excited about is just I'm going to get back to the weekly content grind now. So I'm going to get back to writing articles for both Muscle for Life and Legion and recording more podcasts and YouTube videos and just, yeah, getting back on that regular routine. So with that said, let's get to it, starting with, of course,

this Motivation Monday episode. Quote first, this one comes from Seneca, the famous Roman philosopher, the Stoic philosopher. And he said, quote, show me a man who is not a slave. One is a slave to lust, another to greed, another to ambition, and all men are slaves to fear. Now, most of us have a pretty good idea of what's good for us and what's not. Most of us know that we should eat well, we should exercise regularly, we should drink less alcohol, we should stop smoking, we should spend less time on social media, less time in front of the TV, and so forth. And some of us even know more, and we could quickly outline the exact things that we should start and stop doing to markedly improve our lives. And most of us have also tried to live out these things that we know and

failed to one degree or another, only to fall back into our old dysfunctional ways. Now, if you're like me, you've probably chalked up these failures to a lack of willpower or self-control or grit, and you were probably right to some degree. Those things definitely do matter. What you probably didn't finger, though, was something far more influential than most of us realize and, fortunately, of us realize and fortunately far more easier to change than our personalities. This is something that we can never escape from and something that is pushing and pulling at our ideas, our feelings, our behaviors every minute of every day. Now, what is this? If you guessed the environment, what is this? If you guessed the environment, you are correct. The environment, this is the invisible hand that subtly molds our attitudes, our decisions, our habits, and over time, it molds our lives for better or for worse. The environment is that dead hand that sways

so many of us to engage in so many of the same self-destructive behaviors. In fact, I think it's not unreasonable to say that organizing your environment to support your values, to support your long-term goals, is one of the simplest and most powerful ways to increase your chances of living up to them, embodying them, realizing them. Don't believe me? Well, to understand the surprising power of the environment, let's start by reviewing a study conducted by scientists at Columbia University that analyzed organ donors by country. Now, what these researchers found is that donation rates varied widely around the world, with countries like Denmark and Germany as low as 4 and 12 percent, respectively, and others like France and Poland with near-perfect scores of 99.91% and 99.5%.

Even more puzzling about the research were differences in the donation rates of culturally homogenous countries like Denmark, 4%, and Sweden, 85.9%. And Germany, 12%, and Austria, 99.98%. Now, if it's not because of geographical or cultural or social differences, what could explain this? Well, as it happens, the extraordinary discrepancies stemmed from the most ordinary of things, the forms that were being used to recruit donors. You see, in the low donation countries, the forms contained this line. If you want to be an organ donor, check here. In other words, check here. In other words, these forms required people to voluntarily join the program. In the high donation countries, however, the forms read like this. If you don't want to be an organ donor, check here. In other words, they require people to voluntarily opt out, to decline participating in the program. Now think about that for a second. The way that you're

asked a question can dictate your decision on something as deeply personal as what should be done with your body when you die. Furthermore, think about this from the perspective of a politician who wishes to increase organ donation rates in their country. Imagine how much time, money, and effort they could spend trying to move that needle with education, incentives, or even coercion, maybe through taxation, when all they really need to do to obtain near-perfect compliance is change a single line of text in a humdrum government form. Now, the researchers of that paper, the Columbia University scientists, concluded the following about how our environments inform our lives. They said, quote, in most cases, the majority of people

choose the default option to which they were assigned. In other words, most of us tend to just go along with the design and flow of the people and things that surround us. For better or for worse, most of us choose the paths of least resistance. So if a box on a form is unchecked, we'll probably just leave it unchecked. If cars are lining up in a given lane on the highway, we'll probably join them. If we display fruit in our kitchen instead of junk food, we'll probably eat more fruit. I mean, this isn't particularly shocking, but what came as a surprise to me at least is just how many aspects of our lives run on near autopilot guided by the scores of cues provided by our environment. For instance, high-priced entrees on restaurant menus have been shown to lure people into ordering more expensive items.

We're also more likely to buy things in the supermarket that are at eye level. Showing men pictures of bikini-clad women has been shown to make them act more impulsively. impulsively and people who are dieting will skip a quote milkshake and turn down candy chews but have no qualms about drinking a smoothie or eating fruit chews. What's also surprising is just how many elements of our environment have been carefully and scientifically engineered to elicit very specific responses, responses that often don't benefit us very much. In their best-selling 2009 book, Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein referred to this as choice architecture. And they believe that powerful organizations like corporations and governments can and should help create environments that incline us toward personally and socially responsible behaviors, a soft paternalism, if you will.

behaviors, a soft paternalism, if you will. I say, why wait for someone else to do it? Why wait for mega corporations or governments? Why not take up designing our environments as a personal project so they nudge us toward the specific outcomes that we desire? Why not prearrange better default choices for ourselves in our lives so we can better stay on course even when we're just cruising on autopilot? And I think a good place to start is to think about how we can change our environment to make the good habits we want to adopt easier and the bad habits that we want to kick harder. And a simple way to do this is removing steps from the former, from the stuff that we want to start doing and adding them to the latter,

the stuff we want to stop doing. So for example, if you want to start eating more nutritious foods, let's say, you can place them more visibly in your refrigerator, your kitchen, and your pantry. This makes it easier to grab something nutritious when you're hungry. And if you'd like to eat less junk food, you could tuck that stuff away in a cabinet that you don't open regularly, or in a drawer somewhere or whatever, which would make it harder to access.

Let's say you'd like to get better about doing your morning workouts. You could set your workout clothes out the night before, right? That removes a slight obstacle that can dissuade you from leaving the warm embrace of your bed at 6 a.m., 7 a.m., 5 a.m., whenever you need to get up. If you'd like to drink more water throughout the day, you can keep a water bottle at your desk at work, which is what I do, instead of soda, for example, and you can fill that water bottle up every time it's empty. That way, you always have water at hand. Then if you want soda, you'd have to get up. You'd have to go to the kitchen

or you have to go to the vending machine. It adds a little step. And so when you feel the desire to drink something, when you have a little thirst pang, you could either reach for the water, easy, drink it, or you have to get up and go to the vending machine. Chances are you're just going to drink the water. If you'd like to save more money, you could set up automatic weekly withdrawals from your checking account into your savings account, for example. That's what I do for my W-2 income, for my weekly paycheck income from my various companies. I just have automatic transfers because I know what those amounts are. They're the same amounts every week, so it just automatically transfers. Then any additional income through distributions and so forth, I have to do manually, but those weekly drip, drip, drip deposits add up over time.

Going down the list, let's say you'd like to reduce the time that you spend on social media. An easy way to do that is to uninstall the apps from your phone, right? Making them less convenient to use. You can always reinstall them, of course, but that additional step may deter you just enough to help you change that pattern of behavior. Because of course, that's what we're going for, right? Is that eventually the good stuff just kind of turns into your automatic default behavior. So my point here is the options are endless. Really, all you have to do is brainstorm ways to make things you want to do more immediate, more visible, and more accessible,

and the things that you want to stop doing less so. And if you take the time to do this, if you sprinkle your environment with cues that lead to more positive behaviors and help remove their more harmful counterparts, you might be surprised at how much easier it is to make positive changes in your life. Now, if you like this kind of stuff, I recommend that you read the definitive book, at least the currently definitive book, I think, on the subject, which is Willpower by Roy Baumeister. The subtitle is Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. Great book, lots of great insights. And also I want to share with you a little exercise you can do, a do this now. So first, I want you to write down three things that you want to start or stop doing, like exercise on a regular schedule, eat less at dinner,

stop sleeping in and skipping morning workouts, for example. Then I want you to write down three ways that you can adjust your environments to make it easier to do the things you want to do and harder to do the things you don't want to do. For instance, in the case of exercising on a regular schedule, let's say you want to start your days with a 20-minute walk. What simple changes could you make to your environment to make this easier? Well, here are some ideas. You could put your walking shoes and your headphones in front of your bedroom door or in your car so you see them when it comes time to walk. Let's say it's early morning or after work, for instance. You could find a podcast or an audiobook that you

like to listen to so you have something else to look forward to while you're walking. You could go straight to the park after work and do your walk there before going home for the night. park after work and do your walk there before going home for the night. Any of these things might be enough to make the habit stick and eventually become an automatic, integrated, ingrained aspect of your life. Now let's look at eating less at dinner. You could plate your meal and place the leftovers in Tupperware and in the fridge before you start eating. You could brush your teeth immediately after eating the amount of food that you intended to eat. You could take your dog on a walk immediately after eating the amount of food you intended to eat because they're not around to eat more. Each of those things would work well because,

of course, they just make it harder or impossible to keep eating. And as for stopping sleeping in and skipping your morning workouts, you could, as I mentioned earlier, you could set your workout clothes and shoes the night before so you don't have to figure out what to wear in the morning. You could prepare your pre-workout meal the night before. So all you have to do in the morning is eat it and head to the gym. You could set two alarms so you can snooze one and still get up in time to work out, or you could move whatever it is that you're using for an alarm, whether it's your phone or an analog alarm or some other device, you could move it away from the bed, forcing you to get up out of bed to turn it off. That helps a lot of people. And I know these

things might seem kind of trivial to you, but don't discount their effectiveness by removing any and all excuses you might try to find or make when it comes time to act. You can greatly increase your chances of falling through. Sometimes something very minor like setting out your clothes, your workout clothes can be the difference between getting out of bed and into the gym or just sleeping for another hour or two. And just to give you more examples, let's say you wanted to drink less caffeine throughout the day and more water. So in this case, you could downsize your coffee mug. So you have to get up more often for refills. That could discourage excessive consumption.

You could make a smaller pot of coffee in the morning. You could make sure that you've drank at least two liters of water before you start drinking coffee. And another one, based on just emailing with a lot of people, is let's say that you wanted to start eating more nutritious lunches. You wanted to ditch the takeout for lunches. So some ideas here, you could find some salad recipes that you really like. So you actually look forward to eating them every day. You could meal prep, you could prepare all the ingredients for the week in one go. Sundays are good for this for most people. So then you don't have to be chopping lettuce and vegetables every day and nuts and whatever else you want to put in the salad. You could prepare the salads at night.

That's what I do personally, of course, without the dressing. And you could place the salad in the fridge, which again is what I do. So I eat a salad every day for lunch. I prepare it at night, I have it in the fridge. So then in the morning, I just grab it and I go. And one more example, one final example, just to make sure that this is crystal clear. So let's say you want to get more sleep. You want 30 more minutes of sleep every night. You could remove the TV from your bedroom if you have one in your bedroom, which you should do anyway. There's actually research on this now. Basically, if you want the best possible sleep, you should use your bedroom for sleep and sex and that's it. But by removing the TV, you're, of course, then not tempted to watch TV instead

of sleep, and it will help you develop better sleep hygiene. You could download software like Cold Turkey, getcoldturkey.com, which would allow you to block access to your favorite websites. It could be an hour before bedtime, or you could even block access to the internet altogether if you want. And that's when you generally should probably be getting off the screens at least an hour before bedtime if you want to optimize your sleep. And another thing you could do is you could set an alarm on your phone to remind you when it's time to start getting ready for bed so you don't forget. And that's it for the examples. I hope you found them helpful and I hope you will take the time to take action. This doesn't take very long. Try it for yourself. Write down those three things you want to start or stop doing,

and then write down three ways that you could adjust your environment or environments, depending on where you're at throughout the day, if you're moving around, but how you can adjust things to make it easier to do the things you want to do and harder to do the things that you don't want to do and see how it goes. Now, if you liked this episode and you want more information like it, then you definitely need to check out my newest book, The Little Black Book of Workout Motivation. This was actually a bonus chapter from the book. And this book is my personal and 100% practical and hands-on blueprint for transformation, both inside and outside of the gym. I promise that this book will provide you with new and

valuable knowledge and skills that you will be able to use for the rest of your life. In short, I wrote this book to help you fix the things that are most holding you back from doing and achieving the things that you care the most about. So if you want to learn how to overcome the mental blocks that are making you unmotivated, unhappy, and unhealthy, then this book is for you. The Little Black Book of Workout Motivation is for you. And you can find it on all major online retailers like Audible, Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and Google Play. And I should also mention that you can get the audio book, which I recorded myself.

So if you like listening to me talk about this stuff, you're gonna like the audio book. And you can get this book 100% free when you go to www.workoutmotivationbook.com slash audio book, and then sign up for an A audible account. I myself love audio books because they let me make the downtime that I spend commuting, prepping food, walking my dogs, and so forth into something that's more valuable and productive. So if you want to take Audible up on this offer and get my audio book for free, then

go to www.workoutmotivationbook.com slash audio book, and then click on the little sign up today and save button, create your account. And voila, you get to listen to my little Black Book for free.