Property Hub - Investment Insights & Inspiration - Get Invested: Bushy Martin on how to actually achieve your goals

Episode Date: April 15, 2023

Bushy Martin reveals the obvious but unseen factor that is key to achieving our goals.  This episode reveals the obvious but generally unseen link between what we want, what we do and what we achieve, and how to best bridge the gap. Because deep down we all know what we need to be doing, so what is really stopping us? Bushy says it's all about our habits - the missing link between setting goals and actually achieving them is breaking bad habits and creating new ones. Sustainable success lies at the intersection of self, health and wealth and it’s our ability to develop happy habits, rewarding rituals and daily disciplines (and break and replace old ones) that enables us to bridge the gap from where we are to where we want to be. Three easy ways to Get Invested right now: 1. Subscribe to this podcast now, if you haven’t already, and get the inspiration delivered to your podcast feed each week 2. Get a copy of my book, Get Invested, for FREE, and find out what it takes for you to invest in living more, working less. Go to: https://knowhowproperty.com.au/get-invested-free-ebook  3. Join the Get Invested community. Each month Bushy sends a free and exclusive monthly email full of practical ‘Self, Health and Wealth’ wisdom that our current Freedom Fighter subscribers can’t wait to get each month. Just visit bushymartin.com.au, scroll to the bottom of the page and sign up. About Get Invested, a Property Hub show Get Invested is the leading weekly podcast for Australians who want to learn how to unlock their full ‘self, health and wealth’ potential. Hosted by Bushy Martin, an award winning property investor, founder, author and media commentator who is recognised as one of Australia’s most trusted experts in property, investment and lifestyle, Get Invested reveals the secrets of the high performers who invest for success in every aspect of their lives and the world around them. Get Invested is part of the Property Hub podcast channel, your home for property investment insights, inspiration and stories from Australia’s top property experts, investors, leaders and analysts. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Spotifyand Google Podcasts to get every Get Invested episode each week for free, and also get full access to RealtyTalk, Australia’s top online property show for red hot property investing news and insights direct from property industry leaders and influencers. Property Hub is a collaboration between Bushy Martin from KnowHow Property, Kevin Turner from Realty, show producer Andrew Montesi from Apiro Marketing and Apiro Media, and Australia’s largest independent podcast network DM Media.  For business and partnership enquiries, send an email to: [e-mail] omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

How can you bridge the gap between where you are and where you want to be? Now, you may not realize it yet, but for those that do, this podcast has the potential to be the most important episode that you will listen to. It has the power to transform your life so that you can achieve everything that your heart desires. If there's something in your life that you've been struggling with or something that you've struggled to change, that goal that you've had that you've never quite managed to attain, then this episode is made for you. Today I'm going to reveal the obvious but generally unseen link

between what we want, what we do and what we achieve and how best to bridge the gap. How can you overcome the obstacles that most encounter to bridge the gap between what you want to achieve in your life versus what you end up doing? And why does it always feel that it takes a lot longer than we expect. The answer lies in and the secret to achieving anything lies so the answers to your achievement as well as the obstacles that are holding you back lie in the two-edged sword that's the Welcome to Get Invested, the leading weekly podcast to help you unlock your full potential and enjoy your version of sustainable success that lies at the intersection of your three

elves, yourself, your health, and your wealth. I'm your host and guide, Bushy Martin, and each week we go deep, sharing great conversations with proven experts in all walks of life, including the best investors, property experts, analysts, leaders, founders, sports stars, and health gurus, to uncover their secret know-how on where they invest their time, their skills, and their money, and the benefits that this creates. to help you find out what it takes to break free from the grind and discover your flavour of freedom to create your freedom formula.

You see, the truth is that everyone invests. Every second of every minute of every day, we're investing our time, our skills, our energy and our money in something. Some of us are investing consciously, some unconsciously, sometimes for good, sometimes for bad and sometimes for no impact. Get Invested will help you start living by design, not by default. I'm going to help you to make it happen, not let it happen. You'll hear the top tips on how you can live with conscious intent

so that you can live more, work less, and live your legacy by investing now. You'll enjoy the stories and secrets of high performers who invest for success in every aspect of their lives and discover the top tips on how to get started, how to make the most of your investment journey, and ultimately to be living your dream, not someone else's. As you engage in each episode, you'll glean the information, inspiration and implementation that you need to get empowered

and get invested in imagining and actioning the life that you've always dreamed about. And Get Invested is proudly part of Property Hub, your home for property investment insights and inspiration. Make sure you subscribe now on your favourite podcast player to get every episode of Get Invested and Realty Talk, which is Australia's leading and longest-running online property show that's full of red-hot property investing news and insights

direct from all of the industry leaders and influencers. You can also connect with me personally and join the Get Invested community of fellow Freedom Fighters at ushimartin.com.au or on knowhowproperty.com.au. Now, let's get invested. Hi, Friend Fighters. How do you want to live? What are your goals and resolutions?

Did you make any New Year's resolutions this year? And how are they now tracking? If you know where you want to be, what's holding you back? What's stopping you? What's getting in the way? How can you bridge the gap between where you are and where you want to be? Now, you may not realise it yet, but for those that do, this podcast has the potential to be the most important episode

that you will listen to. It has the power to transform your life so that you can achieve everything that your heart desires if you embrace it and start taking the action that's required. The choice is yours and the power is in your hands. Because if there's something in your life that you've been struggling with or something that you've struggled to change, that goal that you've had that you've never quite managed to attain, then this episode is made for you. Now, I've pondered

a lot on this topic over the years because I get frustrated when people appear to know what they want to do, but they don't do it because they can't see how to make it happen. I keep asking myself, how can I wake you up and shake you up to do what you need to do to truly realize your dreams. Now, I've touched on parts of this in previous episodes over the years, so today I'm going to reveal the obvious but generally unseen link between what we want, what we do, and what we achieve, and how best to bridge the gap. Let's face it, deep down we all know what we need to be doing, so what's stopping us? Today you're going to find out, and I'll share some tips and tricks that have enabled my wife Sonia and I, along with many others that we've had the pleasure of helping

over the years to swim against the tide and achieve our goals and what I'm going to share is simple to comprehend but not that easy to institute and the other reason I'm sharing this now is because I'm also experiencing some personal challenges both mentally and physically that I'm happy to open up about because the risk of achieving your goals is what happens then. How do you keep motivating yourself to keep going once you're living your vision? As the living legend Steve McKnight shared here on Get Invested Last Year, once you've climbed your mountain, you need to create another mountain to climb, because as you become comfortable having achieved your purpose, your good has a potential to get in the way

of your great. So today I'm going to share the inspiration on this topic of goal achievement that I've enjoyed from other living legends like Stephen Bartlett, Simon Sinek and Tom Bilio, and I'll be directly borrowing, repeating and reinforcing a lot of their work and their insights as they're able to say things a lot more succinctly and engagingly than I can. So let's return to the core of the subject. Why don't you end up achieving all of your goals? What gets in the way? How can you overcome the obstacles that most encounter to bridge the gap between what you want to achieve in your life versus what you end up doing? And why does it always feel that it takes a lot longer

than we expect? The answer lies in the essence of the three Fs of sustainable success that I so often talk about, where achievement and sustainable success lies at the intersection of yourself, your health, and your wealth. Self is how you think, what you believe, along with your attitudes, outlook, and expectations. Health is about the habits, rituals, and daily disciplines that you develop that either become the engine of your growth or your demising decline for your compounding returns. And if you get yourself and your health right, then your wealth is the outcome

that will pretty much take care of itself if you invest in action. And the secret to achieving anything lies within your self-help and wealth parameters. So if our self is about our thoughts and our wealth is the fruits of our labor, then what links the two is the health of our habits. So the answers to your achievement

as well as the obstacles that are holding you back lie in the two-edged sword that's the quality of your habits. Which means the key question that you need to ask and answer is how do you break and make your habits? Our lives are quite simply a manifestation of our habits, the things that we repeatedly do. So as many of you have correctly identified, if we can change those habits we can make and break behaviors, take control of our lives, and finally achieve our most important goals. And in my life, all of the good things have come after I break a habit that's had me trapped in some sort of limiting and sometimes toxic cycle that I've been what appears to be sleepwalking through. And so habits and studying how they're made and how we make them and break

them has actually been one of the most important realisations of my life. I've spent years researching and reading every book that I could on the science of making and breaking habits. In this episode, I'm going to share everything that I've learned and everything that you need to know that's backed up by the most up-to-date scientific research on habits and changing behaviour. And I do this in the hope that if what we actually share today helps one of you to change a behavior that you've always wanted to change, that creates a new happy habit that enables you to change and take control of your life for the better, so that you can achieve all of your ideal lifestyle goals, then it's been worth it. And I challenge you for that person to be you.

So let's get into it. Multiple scientific studies have found that most people give up their New Year's resolutions and goals within a month. And according to a recent study, of the 41% who made new year's resolutions only nine percent were successful in keeping them by the end of the year yes you heard me right only nine percent this means that if you make a new year's resolution at the start of the year by the end of the year only nine percent of you will have followed through and achieved it sustainably that's less than one in ten now this may sound quite demotivating and you're probably now thinking that resolutions and goals are a bit of a pointless waste of time with very little chance of success. But the same study also reveals something that strongly suggests

otherwise. Because six months after setting a New Year's resolution, 46% of people who made them were still successful in achieving it by developing good, happy habits, compared to just 4% of people who made a similar goal that wasn't a resolution. now that's a whopping 1050 increase in the probability of you achieving your goal after six months if you set it as a resolution now it's important here to distinguish the difference between what I call a goal and a resolution a goal is something that you decide that you want to achieve by when but a resolution goes further than this because it's a public declaration made to others of what you want to change. A resolution encompasses both context and a journey

because you are outwardly declaring that you're going to change from where you are and what you're currently doing and transitioning to doing and being something else. Now similar research by famous psychologist John Norcos has found that resolution makers are more than 10 times as successful in changing their behavior than people who want to change but haven't made a formal resolution. So clearly there's something happening here that's supported by science and psychology in the realms of intention making that makes resolutions important because it involves the public declaration of your intent alongside the critical importance of breaking bad habits and creating new ones. In this way, the bridge between where you are

and where you want to be all comes down to your habits. Bad habits will get in the way and hold you back, while good habits will help you get there. So today I'm on a mission to help you join the ranks of the successful 9%. So let's start by asking what are habits and why do we have them? In simple terms, habits are repetitive behaviours wired so deeply into the neural pathways of our brains that we perform them almost automatically without having to think about them. so why do we have habits habits are very useful prehistoric modes of operation that have evolved from our ancestors because decision making and thinking consumed so much of our time and energy and the reality is that if you never made habits you'd be spending way much more of your limited

decision making time and mental energy on routine things like how do i get from my bed to the bathroom in the morning? Or how do I get to work? Now, if you had to use the majority of your active thinking time on these repetitive mundanities of everyday life, you wouldn't have the remaining capacity to solve unique and high value challenges. So to free us up to concentrate on solving life threatening or growth initiatives, your brain created habits, which are neurological pathways that fire together so frequently and successfully that your brain wires them together to save you time and energy.

And here's the real kicker. Scientific research has confirmed that once habits are formed, they're encoded in your brain forever. Now, this is revelational and one of the keys to unlocking why you may be struggling to overcome your old patterns of behavior

in order to achieve new things. Most of us tend to believe that we can make a bad habit disappear for good. but reliable research tends to suggest otherwise. Let me share a story about some experiments that were conducted on rats in a maze and what this has uncovered about how we can make and break habits. Picture the human brain as an evolutionary onion that has progressively become composed of layer upon layer of growing cells. Most of our complex thinking about things that we really ponder over and things that really trouble us happens in the most recent outermost

layers of your brain which is the part of the brain that you're listening that you're using to listen to me right now. As you go deeper inside your brain towards the center of the skull you'll find a golf-sized ball with a lump of tissues that's called the basal ganglia and this is where all of your habits are stored which I'm going to refer as your habit HQ for ease of reverence. Now this prehistoric part of the brain is the same Habit HQ control centre that can be found inside the brains of rats and many other animals. So in order to study the Habit HQ, world-leading researchers from MIT conducted experiments with rats where they monitored the rats' brains. The scientists started by making a clicking sound as they put rats inside a

T-shaped maze with some delicious chocolate hidden somewhere inside it. The first time the rats were put into the maze, they would wander up and down the centre aisle, sniffing corners and scratching at the walls. They could smell the chocolate, but they couldn't quite figure out how to find it. When they reached the top of the T in the maze, the rats often turned to the right, away from the chocolate, and then wandered left, sometimes pausing for no obvious reason at all. Eventually, the rat found the chocolate in all of the trials, but there was no clear pattern in their search or their wandering behavior. On the surface, it appeared like each rat was taking a leisurely, unthinking, casual stroll. But when they looked at the brain scans of these rats at

these exact moments, it told a completely different story. While each rat wandered through the maze for the first time, the habit HQ in the core of their brains was actually working in overdrive. Each time a rat sniffed the air or scratched the wall, its brain exploded with activity as if it was carefully and meticulously analysing each new site. And although the rats looked calm, their brains were feverishly processing everything. But as soon as the rats had found the chocolate once, their brain activity completely disappeared when they were placed back into the maze. It was as if the rats were now on autopilot and they no longer needed to process things. They no longer needed to think because a new habit had been formed.

So the habit HQs took over seemingly automatically by retrieving the stored information how to get from where they were at the start of the maze to the chocolate. And as if possessed by the habit HQs, the rats glided straight to the chocolate without pause in the same way that we all glide unconsciously

to that familiar part of the house or drive to work without having to consciously think every single morning when we wake up, without having to consider the directions on how to get there. so because the rat was on autopilot its brain was freed up to think about other things now in theory the rat could glide effortlessly to the chocolate while also pondering a complex problem that it was having and by navigating the maze over and over the rats form what scientists

now call a habit loop now there are three steps in a habit loop step one is that you need a cue which in this case was the click sound they played when they dropped the rat into the maze. This is similar to the old story of Pavlov's dog, where Pavlov would ring a bell before he fed his dog, and after a few repetitions of this, the dog would start salivating as soon as he heard the bell ring. The cue, in turn, makes the brain's Habit HQ activate the stored routine.

Now, step two is the routine. The routine for the rats was to walk through the maze towards the chocolate. And step three is that you need a reward, which in the case of the rats was the delicious chocolate at the end of the maze. Now, this three-step cue, routine and reward forms the habit loop. And habit loops happen to be exactly the same for humans. As an example, when I was young, my dear old dad, the original Bushy, always used to light up a cigarette, his beloved Peter Stuyvesant's, every time he jumped in the car.

He didn't smoke anywhere else, just every time he got in the car to drive. And he used to drive and smoke for miles around the countryside in the rural back blocks in his role as a stock and station agent. Without realising it, Dad had created a queue routine reward habit loop where the car was the queue. Q's are often a familiar repetitive environment that creates and causes neurological pathways to form in the brain that fire up our habit HQ's so every time dad got in the car his habit HQ would be activated and he'd reach for his packet of ciggies in the glove box which became his

habitual routine just like the rats walking through the maze and then he'd light up and draw back deeply and the ingested nicotine would release the fuel wood dopamine chemical into his brain which was his reward. Now the cues don't need to be obvious or physical. For me for example whenever I feel stressed or under pressure which is generally self-imposed I reach for comfort food as a delusional escape and a reward for working hard. Now these examples of the rats in the maze chasing chocolate and dad's car smoking reinforce the saying that old habits die hard and based on the science this is great news for your good habits but bad news for your bad unhealthy habits because the rat maze trials also revealed that even when you eventually remove the chocolate

the rats would still run exactly the same way through the maze in fact the researchers even found that and went as far as saying that when they tainted the chocolate with a chemical that made the rats nauseous, they would still run exactly the same way through the maze. So even though the rats eventually stopped eating the chocolate reward at the end of it, their routine was still the same and the cue was still the same. Now even more interestingly, the researchers then found a way to temporarily interfere with the rats brains to shut off the automatic habit loop that was resulting in them running left through the maze so that they then started running right. but when the researchers interfered with the rat's brains again and disabled the new temporary

running right habit loop the rats instantly went back to the original habit of running left through the maze at the same speed certainty and accuracy as they'd done previously. They didn't need to relearn the old original pathway habit loop again and their brain scans confirmed that they weren't thinking about it and they were straight back onto autopilot. To everyone's surprise the researchers found that the original habit had never been forgotten as it was always lurking in the backs of their brains ready to be re-triggered. So old habits don't die hard, they don't die at all. Now this fact is fundamentally important if you're trying to stop a habit. The reality is that you can never get rid of them and when you stop and think about it this actually makes complete sense.

if you think back on your traumatic experiences in life you'll know that their memory remains permanently ingrained in your brain which would have been life-saving for humans back in ancient times when learning to run away from beasts of prey was critical to our survival and this pattern permanency also helps to explain why 91% of us who make resolutions to form new habits or create new behaviours fail within 12 months because habits can't be broken. Now this isn't an excuse to give up or give up on breaking or changing your habits. We just need to be smarter about how we do it because the good news is that they can be forgotten and they can be replaced most importantly. Returning to the rats and the chocolate maze study, the results help the

scientists conclude that the brain can quickly toggle between an old habit and a new habit. So while old habits remain totally intact and retrievable in an instant, habits can be broken and they can be replaced. They just can't be removed. In this context, when we reflect on the cue routine and reward cycle of habit loops, it's not surprising that 91% of people won't make will maintain their goals and resolutions and why 25% of us won't even keep a resolution for a week. This is because our old habits are still there. They never die. And often the same cues are still there in our lives, whether it's an environmental cue like the car to trigger my dad smoking or the stress response that triggers my comfort food eating. So it's all well and good understanding

this and even trying to interrupt the habit loop cycle, but the real answer to staining a new habit is more complicated to get those new neurological pathways to fire together and then wire together scientific studies conducted all around the world in humans and animals so that you need to do something more we need reinforcing repetition now how much repetition is required is is still up for debate and the jury's out and to be honest from the research it doesn't appear that there's a one-size-fits-all when it comes to how much repetition is required, which probably reflects the point that we're all different in our physiology and the type and difficulty associated with the habit when acquiring it also comes into play. Some studies suggest it takes 21 days to

form a new habit, while others are up to 66 or even 90 days or more. The point here is that you need to keep routinely repeating new behaviours on a continual basis until a new habit pattern is on autopilot for you. And I personally think that putting a timeline on the formation of a new routine can be dangerous because as soon as you set an expectation, you're setting yourself up to fail if the new behavior pattern isn't embedded by the prescribed time and you're then just as likely to give it up and give it away. So for me, once you've decided to reach a goal by taking regular repetitive action, just assume that you're going to keep doing it forever and that it's now a permanent part of your life

and it will actually feel easier. As Stephen Bartlett has quoted, University of Oregon's Social and Effective Neuroscience Lab says that since habits take practice from repetition to form, the same is also true when it comes to breaking them. So in order to break unwanted habits and make new ones on your road to bridging the gap between where you are and where you want to be

and achieving your life goals, I'm now going to share the six key guidelines and approaches to making and breaking habits that have the most scientific evidence to support them, which I'm going to call the habit laws to success. And the first key guideline or success habit law is pretty obvious based on what we've just been talking about, which is don't focus on stopping bad habits, focus on replacing them. Now, I'm sure you've experienced this as much as I have over the course of your life, but I've found that it's almost impossibly difficult to actually stop a habit. For example, we love starting our day with an early morning walk with our smiling Samoyed

rescue dogs as part of our daily 6am routine, which is to grab a beautiful steaming hot cup of takeaway coffee from our local barista. Now, there are many times that I've tried to stop this habit over the years. I've tried to go cold turkey, I've tried to substitute a coffee for chai tea or hot chocolate, but as soon as I smell that beautiful aroma of freshly ground coffee beans, I'm done. Now I've managed to switch to decaf most mornings and I've even given up dairy in favour of coconut or almond milk but there's nothing better than starting the day with that liquid gold as we enjoy a stroll in nature with our four-legged friends. So delving into the science to try and figure out why and what happens when we try and stop doing a bad habit

reveals that focusing too much on stopping something often makes you rebound eventually and you end up doing it more. The reality is that humans are action-oriented creatures, not inaction-oriented. And a number of studies have shown that the more you suppress your thoughts about something, the more likely you are to think about those things over and over again,

and therefore end up reverting back to the old bad habit. One study done in 2008 on appetite found that those who suppress their thoughts about eating chocolate exhibited behavioural rebounders, where they ended up consuming significantly more chocolate than those who didn't and I can actually certainly relate to this giving me rum and raisin dark chocolate every day of the week and there's been multiple times in my life where I've made a solemn pledge to myself to quit something and because I'm so focused on quitting the thing and depriving myself of it

and fresh bread springs immediately to mind here due to my hypothyroidism need to be gluten-free so when I eventually break and capitulate often because I'm stressed or maybe because of other factors I end up penduling so far the other way because I felt like that I've been depriving myself and missing out on that thing that it becomes a craving it's the old story of what you think about you bring about and the more you're deprived of something the more you want it similarly a 2010 study published in the journal of psychological science found that smokers who tried to restrain their thoughts about smoking ultimately wound up thinking about smoking even more. And all of this reminds me of the advice that my driving teacher gave me many years ago

in high school when he said that the car will always go in the direction that your eyes are looking. So if you want to avoid crashing into cars that are hurtling towards you on the other side of the road, don't look at the cars coming towards you because you're likely to veer towards them. So instead, look straight forward into the distance where you want the car to go. And this seems like a quite good analogy for what we're talking about here, because for the first law of breaking and making habits, you end up doing the thing that you're focusing on. So don't focus on stopping smoking or stopping eating, focus on the behaviour you want to replace it with. As further evidence of this, again, the University of Oregon Social and Effective Neuroscience Lab

observed something that reinforces this. They found that if you're a smoker and you tell someone not to smoke, your brain and your subconscious still hears and focuses on the word smoke. Conversely, if you tell yourself to chew on a lifesaver lolly every time you want a cigarette, which is actually how my father ended up kicking his car cigarette smoking addiction, your brain has a more positive action-oriented goal to then focus on. Now, dad didn't just take the cigarettes out of the car altogether, which might have caused him to rebound if he felt deprived and was constantly thinking about them. He replaced them with a new action-oriented habit for his brain to latch onto and focus on. Now similarly, scientists suggest

that if sitting down for dinner triggers that glass of wine that you've been trying to knock off for a while, don't just eliminate the glass of wine from your life overnight. Instead, double down on hydration and make sure the fridge is stocked with healthier alternatives that you love drinking. Now I need to reiterate here that doing something just once won't be enough to form a new habit. It takes time, commitment and repetition. So don't feel discouraged if it takes longer than you think and if you fall off the wagon a few times, don't give up, just keep going because eventually it'll become a familiar rewarding routine. Let's now turn to success habit law two which is know your cues. As you've already heard with the rat maze chocolate experiment

and with dad's smoking example knowing your cues is incredibly important and often overlooked when you're trying to alter behaviors and habits. As I've touched on already with the three main parts of habit loads being a cue a routine and a reward cues are often just a context where you tend to trigger and engage in that behaviour. So if you want to break a habit, step number one has to be getting crystal clear on exactly what your cues are. If you're aware of them, then you're empowered to do something about it, because the science shows that you're most likely to relapse to an old bad habit in the context of when you usually perform that bad habit. So knowing your cues and your triggers can help you to avoid them and scientists say that if a smoker disposes of a

cue like an ashtray or something that reminds them of that habit then they're significantly more likely to give up smoking. Similarly if you're trying to save money to invest but you never seem to have any money left before your next pay, cut up your credit card, don't tap your purchases and just have the amount of cash in your pocket between pays that you're comfortable spending, with the remaining accumulating in your savings or offset account. And when your cash and your hand runs out, you've got nothing left to spend until your next pay. So with all of this in mind, capitalising on life changes can also help you to break unhealthy habits and start new ones. For example, if you're moving to a new city or starting a new job, or you're mixing in a new

social environment, or just deciding to take a new and different route to work every day, we might think that's bad timing to start thinking about making new habits because we're so busy but the science suggests the complete opposite think about it if our cues come from our environment usually your current familiar environment is full of hundreds of different cues and triggers your home your commute your dog walk your social context even your friends collectively all of these environmental factors embed hundreds of cues and triggers that lead to routines that get you rewards and those triggering cues routines and rewards holding your bad habits in place. So if you're used to stopping off at that fast food spot on your way home from work

changing your route gives you the opportunity to break that cue. It effectively removes the cue which means that you can remove the routine and then hopefully the reward. So change and variety and doing something different and new is a mother of invention here. It creates a sort of blank canvas as a way to start creating new habits. For example, if you're trying to get fit, then putting your runners in an obvious place where you can't help but trip over them every day is a great new cue to go to the gym or for a jog or a walk.

And when it comes to food, I've been saying to my wife, Sonia, for some time now that temptation starts and ends at the supermarket. So if you don't want to buy the things that you don't want to eat, then the triggers of temptation won't be there at home to lead you astray. Now, this leads us to success habit law three, which may actually be one of the most important, and it states that willpower is not enough. Now, this may surprise you as it's been drummed into us that the only thing that separates from achieving the things that are important to us

is our level of willpower and our mental strength. But again, the science tends to indicate otherwise. And this is perhaps one of the major reasons why 91% of us don't stick to our resolutions. Now, many studies have shown that willpower is the single most important contributor for individual success, and this is no doubt true. But for a long time, most of us believed that willpower is a skill that you can develop, and once achieved and acquired, your willpower remains constant forever. However, PhD scientist Mark Muravan has argued that if willpower is a skill, then why doesn't it remain constant throughout the entire day or throughout the whole week?

Why does willpower seem to fluctuate? Well, to test this, he conducted an experiment to prove that willpower, like all of the muscles in our body, gets exhausted the more we use it throughout the day. In his lab, he conducted a very simple experiment. he set up one bowl of freshly baked cookies and another bowl of radishes which might be healthy but for me they're definitely an acquired taste now most people would prefer to eat the hot delicious cookies over radishes so the participants in the study were divided into two groups one group was instructed to eat the delicious cookies and ignore the radishes while the other

group was instructed to ignore the delicious cookies and to eat the radishes and i definitely wouldn't have liked to be in the second group. After five minutes the researchers re-entered the room and gave both groups a puzzle but unbeknown to the participants the puzzle was actually impossible to complete. Now here's where it gets really interesting. The group that had eaten the cookies with their unused reservoir of willpower because they didn't have to use any restraint looked way more relaxed when they were trying to solve that impossible puzzle and they'd actually continued to try and solve it over and over and over again with some working for more than half an hour before the researcher told them to stop. Now on average the cookie munchers spent about

19 minutes trying to solve that puzzle before they eventually quit. In comparison the reluctant ratty cheaters who suffered depleted willpower were the opposite story because they had to practice restraint by not eating their cookies and they actually then acted completely differently. They vented frustration as they worked to try and solve the puzzle. And one complained that the whole experiment was an absolute complete waste of time. Some of them put their heads on the table and closed their eyes in submission. And one of them even snapped at the researcher when she came back in. Now, on average, the radish eaters worked on the puzzle for roughly eight minutes before quitting,

which was 60% less time than the cookie munchers. Now, I don't know about you. But to me, this was very surprising. Now, some might try and argue that the sugar in the cookies gave them extra energy to keep working harder. But other similar studies without the sugar produced the same results. So it's clear that any time you're practicing restraint, your willpower wanes. So willpower isn't just a skill. It's like a muscle that gets tired and fatigued as it's forced to work harder, which means that there's less power left the more you use it.

Since the cookie and the radish willpower study was published way back in 1998, numerous other studies have reinforced exactly the same thing, which has now become termed the willpower depletion theory. in one similar experiment which the results are almost hard to believe volunteers who were asked to suppress their feelings as they watched an emotional movie gave up much sooner on a physical exercise test that they had to do afterwards to measure their stamina than the other group of volunteers who watched the film and were allowed to react in whatever way they wanted to which is more evidence of willpower waning after it's been tested through restraint and in another similar study that came to exactly the same conclusion a group of people were first out to suppress certain thoughts and were then actually less able to stop the laughter in a follow-up test

which was designed to make them giggle so if all of this science is correct which it appears to be then willpower is actually a limited resource which means that the more pressure restrictions and strain you put on yourself when you're trying to make a new habit and break an old one the less chance you have of achieving them and the more chance you have of rebounding and relapsing into the old bad habit. This is likely why unsustainable crash diets, savings plans and long-term investments often don't work because diminishing willpower means we just aren't likely to last the distance. It appears that anytime you feel like you're depriving yourself of something that you really want, your fading willpower ends up failing and you fall back into relapse of your

old short-term fixed habits. And this is likely why a 2014 study indicated that nearly 40% of people failed on their new year's resolutions because the goal was too unsustainable or unrealistic. And 10% said they failed because they had too many goals. This is why it's so important when you're thinking about what goals you're setting to make sure that they're small enough and achievable enough to become sustainable without the need for major sacrifice, which is going to deplete your willpower reserves. Now, I don't know about you, but for me, this is quite revelational, particularly over the last couple of years during the chaos of COVID, when my resilience has been put to the test and my normal daily disciplines, rewarding rituals and happy

habits have been generally disrupted. And when I throw on top the long COVID lasting side effects of reactive arthritis, the temporary turn of asthma for the first time in 20 years, and a series of psoriasis skin breakouts that have contracted from the explosion of inflammation in my body after suffering two bouts of COVID, along with multiple moves during this time, the bad dietary habits I've developed and the spasmodic hit and miss exercise regime that I've drifted into because it's become actually too painful to do so now start making more sense it's because my willpower was fighting wars on many fronts and my depleted and fatigued willpower reserves mean that my level of determined stick-to-itiveness has been affected so consequently

my diet exercise and weight have all been yo-yos what about you is your willpower spread too thin across too many fronts for too long a period of time perhaps it's time to simplify and reduce your number of goals and expected changes so that your willpower can then sustain them this is why you shouldn't try and give up every bad habit or create big new habits all at once and that you have at the same time and why setting less goals will increase your chance of completing them because by setting too many big unrealistic sacrifice centric goals your willpower is likely to be under unsustainable strain and it's likely to run out and you'll fail and rebound back into your old bad habits. It's also why so many psychologists and scientists

have found that the best way to create a new habit isn't by depriving yourself of all rewards which is actually totally counterproductive. According to the science it's about finding new rewards, healthier rewards, and less addictive rewards, but nonetheless, making sure that you still reward yourself in some way every day along the way. And this leads nicely into success habit law four, when it comes to breaking bad habits and forming new ones, which is that you need a better reason to quit. Neuroscientists have found that even if you replace a bad habit with a better one, sometimes the original habit will have a much stronger biological reward than the thing you're trying to substitute it with. And if you remember what I said earlier about the rat maze

chocolate experiment, the habit's always going to be there. So even if you substitute it, you can easily just toggle back because your bad habit never disappears. Your neural pathways in your brain, just like a well-worn track, have been fired together and wired together. Returning to my father Butchie seeing his car smoking example his brain obviously knew that the lifesaver lollies were not as addictive as the nicotine he was getting from his cigarettes and therefore wasn't producing the same euphoric feelings in the reward center of his brain as the ciggies did but this is where the importance of having a bigger and more intrinsic motivation comes into play where the word intrinsic basically means a reason for you not doing something that's genuinely

and personally important to you, not something you're doing for external rewards or payment, which falls into the camp of extrinsic motivations. Let me share a couple of personal examples that have changed my life. For many years, my reason for improving my habits and getting fit, losing weight, and cutting junk food out of my diet was so that I could complete better on the hockey pitch every year. It was actually what I now see as a fairly superficial short-term

manual goal so every year my new year's resolutions including goals around losing weight going to the gym a number of times a week and eating healthy food portions obsessively until the hockey season ended and then I'd immediately revert back like the rats in the maze snitting out the chocolate who started running left again I'd immediately revert back to my old habits of eating and drinking too much junk food and getting slack with my exercise as some form of crazy reward for being good during the season so it wasn't until i learned that my long-running hypothyroidism autoimmune disorder and recent related long covid inflammation inflections of asthma reactive arthritis and psoriasis that kicked in that i researched long and hard to discover that my

leaky gut issues are the true base cause of all my growing health symptoms because this cocktail of autoimmune inflammation issues threatened my enjoyment of life that i'd actually taken for granted for so long and suddenly it really hurt to exercise. I was getting around like a moaning and groaning old man. I couldn't bend my fingers. My skin and scalp started to break out. I was putting on weight and I felt like I was aging prematurely from all of the pharmaceuticals that doctors were describing that would actually cause a host of other and potentially worse side effects and I was actually becoming depressed at where this was all heading. By taking the time to really get to the root cause of my health issues instead of just treating the symptoms and learning

that my gut health is critical and that can only be improved and solved sustainably by combining exercise every single day, being very careful about what I do and don't eat, along with careful vitamin supplementation, getting good regular sleep and eliminating my stress responses as much as possible, I finally understood how mission critical and foundational our health is to anything and everything in our lives. Because without a health, we've got nothing. Now this again was quite revelation, revelational to me and as I've always taken my health for granted and many times I put it on the back burner behind my work and wealth goals. But my growing list of ailments taught me firsthand how fragile our health and our lives are.

It can change seemingly overnight if our health and fitness aren't treated as number one. Now, this again was an epiphany for me, that our health, fitness and flexibility are the most important foundational things in our lives and that ignoring them, not caring for them constantly or putting things off by not creating regular healthy habits around sleep, diet and exercise is a massive quality of life and potentially life-shortening mistake because we tend to delude ourselves that we've still got plenty of time and because we don't see the instant results

of our resulting cumulatively bad habits, it just doesn't seem to matter enough. And my father is another classic example of this that has affected many hard-working Aussie men of his generation. His she'll-be-right-made attitude towards his health and ignoring it and putting it on the bottom of his priorities as he focused purely on work caught up with him in his 50s when his body started to fall to bits. He suffered bowel cancer, he had multiple strokes

and a bunch of debilitating disorders that meant that he ended up spending the last 10 years of his life paralysed down one side of his body, slurring out of the side of his mouth in a wheelchair, just at the time he was expecting to start enjoying the fruit of all of his years of hard labour by ticking off his long-awaited bucket list. So with this growing and palpable realisation that everything in my life is contingent on my health and I stand to lose everything without it, my self-health has become my first and biggest priority. It has given me a huge, powerful, intrinsic reason to get and stay healthy

continuously instead of just riding the annual health rollercoaster around the hockey season. Now, don't get me wrong. This is still a big work in progress and I still slip back into my old bad eating and drinking habits on occasions when my willpower is low or I'm feeling stressed for all the reasons that I've been talking about because let's face it, we're all human and no one's perfect.

But by zooming out through the purpose created by a bigger and better reason, I'm now making much more well-informed choices by limiting the things that I know that are bad for me and doing more of what's good for me. and this is all because I finally have a better and more sustainable reason and this is exactly the same approach you need to adopt when it comes to investing in your wealth making a little time to invest now through good regular investing habits that allow you to use the time you've

got to get your time back where your income needs are then met without relying on you and your time to generate it so what about you how much do you invest in today across the key elements of your self-health and wealth that are going to help you to attain and sustain your lifelong term what happy healthy habits rewarding rituals and daily disciplines do you employ on a regular basis or conversely what unhealthy habits do you continue to do that are going to come back and bite you in a big way down the track if your cause and purpose is big enough and strong enough you'll do whatever's required to make it happen and your intrinsic reason will become both a magnet and a compass a magnet in the sense that you'll do whatever it takes and navigate whatever

obstacles and overcome whatever speed bumps along the way to make it happen but it'll also become your compass in that every day-to-day decision you make is then based on whether it's taking you closer to or further away from where you want to be now this is the same reason why i strongly advocate that you get crystal clear and excited about exactly how you and your family want to live and how much that lifestyle costs before you start investing because the vivid details of your ideal lifestyle will act as a high-powered attractive unstoppable magnet that will allow you to overcome the inevitable issues that you're going to encounter along the way and they'll allow you to last a distance to enjoy the fruits of your long-term investment journey. You need to

start with a very clear picture of the end in mind, which is the essence of starting to live with intent that we call living by design. My point with all of this is that sometimes your good habits don't stand a chance because you don't have a good enough or big enough reason. Like me, you may want to keep fit or look good for a season. Or you may think that you can invest for a short term to make quick money. But none of this will help you achieve sustainable success and however you decide to define it. Let me paraphrase a great saying by Tony Robbins that perfectly sums this up.

Change only happens when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change. Unfortunately, most of us don't make the changes we know we need to make until it's easier to change than it is to stay the same. Now, regrettably, this means that most people need a real scare before they truly embrace the changes that they need and they know they need to make.

It might be a death in the family or some kind of financial strategy before they experience strong enough evidence and develop a strong enough reason to make the required changes. And sadly, this has been the case for me too many times in my life. On too many occasions, I've had to lose something important to learn the real value of it, like my first marriage or my dad and then my mum's life. before I had these realisations and became serious about actually making the changes that deep down

I already knew I needed to make. Now my hope for you by sharing all this is that you won't need a stressful tragedy of your own to realise what truly matters to you or to give you the intrinsic motivation that you need to live more aligned with the person that you want to be and the life you want to enjoy long term. And this now brings us to success habit law five, which is that stress is your subjugator. Many of our habits, both good and bad, like smoking, excessive sugar consumption, overspending or flicking aimlessly through our social media feeds, involves our brain's dopamine or reward system. And dopamine is a feel-good chemical that transmits signals between neurons in the brain. So the first time you engage in a new rewarding behaviour, you automatically get

a euphoric feeling from doing it as a result of that dopamine release. This leads to changes in both the connections between neurons in the brain and the system responsible for action, which largely accounts for why we start to form habits in the first place. and many of these rewarding things like sugar or substance or substances or scrolling are powerful and chemically addictive as well which means the habit is even harder to break and our psychological reaction to them can be linked all the way back to our evolution in our caveman and cavewoman days over 8 000 years ago when our food was unspiced and unsweetened, and there weren't sweets or highly addictive substances

like tobacco and alcohol, which weren't introduced until about 2,000 years ago. In this regard, research at Stanford University therefore suggests that our brains just aren't well equipped to deal with the big rush that we get from these substances and practices, and if we now look at our shopping centres and supermarket shelves, it's quite clear that they're totally designed around things that would give us this habit-forming dopamine response in our brains. It's no coincidence that checkouts are packed with impulse-buy sweets, cigarettes and alcohol that sell so well because they induce that all-important instant dopamine release in our brain which acts as the reward part of our habit loops. As a result, we keep on coming back to the

supermarket, petrol station or local store for more and more, which means more shops and takeaways now crowd our shopping centres catering to our addictive habit loops and if you stop and think about our shopping centres most of them are selling sugar, caffeine, highly processed foods and short-term fashion items for this very quick fix reason.

Now I've always wondered if highly processed foods like hamburgers, french fries and pizzas along with social media scrolling, posting and likes trigger the same neurological habit loops like smoking or other addictive drugs. And recent findings published in the Journal of Clinical Nutrition conclude that they actually do. Where scientists studied a group of overweight men between the ages of 18 and 35 years old. The men were all given similar milkshakes to drink.

However, one had a high glycemic index and then the other had a low glycemic index, where the glycemic index is an indicator of how fast blood sugar glucose levels spike after consuming certain foods. as an example we find carbohydrates like cookies baked goods pasta white bread and white rice all have a high glycemic index which means they're quickly digested while low glycemic carbohydrates which include whole grains vegetables and fruits are generally broken down in a much slower way so after the two groups of men were given the milkshakes they had an MRI scan of their brains which analyzed the activity in the reward part of the brain and revealingly subjects in the experiment who consumed the high glycemic milkshakes had spikes in their blood sugar levels

which then plummeted four hours later and as their blood glucose levels decreased these participants developed excessive hunger and their brain scans demonstrated high levels of activity in the region of the brain which is associated with addiction. Now this brings us back to the research findings at Stanford University that revealed that you're more likely to do the thing you don't want to do when you're stressed out. In other words, you're more likely to go in search of that dopamine hit in the form of sugar, processed foods, alcohol, or drugs, etc. when you're stressed out. Therefore, one of the most unobvious but most important things you can do to make a new habit stick and form enough repetitions in that early phase to make the neurons fire together and wire together

is to keep your stress levels low especially in that critical early phase while you're forming that new habit loop now again this has been quite revelational to me as I've always embraced stress as an indicator that I'm actually challenging myself and stretching myself to do and achieve more by trying to become comfortable by with being uncomfortable perhaps but perhaps I've actually been self-sabotaging myself and limiting my progress without knowing it by taking this too far. So if you're trying to form when you haven't, whether it might be going to the gym, eating healthy or investing in property, if you want to join the ranks of the 9% of people who actually achieve and sustain their New Year's resolutions, you don't just focus on the habit, but you need

to be aware of controlling and managing your stress. Because high stress levels are one of the resistance forces that act against your willpower reserves that we spoke about earlier in relation to habit forming. Now, I think we can all relate to this because we all intuitively know deep down that when we're stressed, we tend to revert back to bad habits. My tendency to revert back to eating the wrong foods as some sort of delusional escape reward when I'm stressed and working too hard is actually a classic case in point. And this is exactly why studies have repeatedly proven that stressed people make bad choices as they go in that desperate search of instant things that will make them feel good in the short term. And because of this stress-induced

response, most of us are generally very bad at delaying gratification. Now, I've also come to learn in my own life, and those of many other investors that our know-how team have helped over the years, being able to delay gratification is one of the real keys of achieving any goal we have in life across the full spectrum of health, fitness, diet, relationships, business, and wealth, etc etc. So let's recount on what is delayed gratification. We've all heard of this term for most of our lives but what is it and why is it so important? What's the research that proves the importance of it and how do we actually do it? Well the definition of delayed gratification according to the science is the ability to delay an impulse for an immediate reward to receive a

more favourable and significantly greater reward at a later time. Great examples of delayed gratification are the lives and legacies of legends like Warren Buffett, Nelson Mandela and Gandhi who have all been prepared to sacrifice things in the short term to enjoy much greater rewards in the long term. Just google their story to see how embracing delayed gratification has transformed their lives and made the world a better place. And in parallel with this, Albert Einstein was famous for saying that compounding returns are the eighth wonder of the world. But when this is quoted, the most important part of what he said about this is generally left out. And that is, he added, those who understand it earn it, while those that don't pay for it. What Einstein meant

here is that the exponential curve of compounding returns works both ways. For the 95% who don't develop happy habits and daily disciplines and understand the benefit of delayed gratification and compounding returns, who don't get invested in their self-help and wealth development, life gets progressively worse without realising it until it's too late, like a frog in a slowly boiling pot. Having that extra cake with your coffee every day won't make any difference today or tomorrow, but over time, you'll put on weight. Conversely, going to the gym won't make any obvious difference today or tomorrow, but over time, you'll get in shape. It's why most hardworking Aussies end up retiring on very little because they focus both eyes on immediate cash in their

career rather than splitting their vision and investing in long-term passive income creating investments. This is actually the essence of success or failure that Jeff Olson talks about in his great book, The Slight Edge, which is a must read for anyone wanting to see what it takes to achieve any form of sustainable success. So you can stay comfortable now and end up very uncomfortable in the future if you don't invest in delayed gratification, or you can embrace what might feel a little bit uncomfortable now by investing in delayed gratification will then help you to end up very comfortable in years to come. The choice is yours, and only you can decide. Now, to demonstrate the long-term importance of delayed gratification, a famous Stanford

University professor named Walter Mischel began conducting a series of important studies around this concept starting way back in the 1960s. During his experiments, Mischel and his team tested hundreds of children between the ages of four and five years old, and revealed what is now believed to be one of the most important characteristics of success in all aspects of life and his now famous study is often referred to as the marshmallow experiment that I've actually talked about before on Get Invested and you've no doubt heard about it. Now the experiment began by bringing each child into a private room and sitting them down on a chair and placing one delectable marshmallow on the table in front of them. The child was then given a choice where

the researcher said I'm going to leave the room for a few minutes and then I'll come back and you can eat this tasty marshmallow if you want to if that's your choice but if you don't eat it I'll give you a second marshmallow when I come back in. So the choice was simple the children could eat one treat right now or enjoy two treats when the researcher returned. The researcher then left the room for 15 minutes and as you can imagine some kids jumped straight up and swallowed the marshmallow straight away before the researcher had even left the room while others hilariously struggled and wiggled around in the chair and tried to restrain themselves from eating it but eventually they gave in a few minutes later. And finally there were a few of the children that

did manage to wait the entire time and enjoyed two marshmallows instead of one. Now the marshmallow experiment became famous not because of the children's funny reactions but what made it famous fascinating and actually mind-blowing many years later was that as those same children became fully formed adults the researchers conducted follow-up experiments and they tracked each child's progress in a number of different areas in their life and what they astonishingly found was that the children who were willing to delay gratification and waited to receive the second marshmallow ended up having higher exam scores later in life. They end up having lower levels of substance abuse, lower likelihoods of childhood obesity, better social skills as reported by their

parents and friends, and generally they achieve better scores in most areas across their entire lives. And just as importantly, the kids that didn't reach for the first marshmallow and became successful adults also had much better responses to stress and were less stressed as kids and less stressed as adults. So clearly it appears that stress undermines our ability to regulate impulsivity and stress hijacks our brains and if you're stressed you won't be able to delay gratification. You'll continue to reach for those marshmallows and as a result you might not achieve your goals. Now the Stanford researchers in the marshmallow experiment continued to follow each child for more than 40 years and year after year the group who waited patiently for the second

marshmallow succeeded in every capacity of their lives that they were measuring. In other words the series of experiments proved that our ability to delay gratification was critical for success in all aspects of our lives and we now know that stress is a key factor in preventing us from delaying gratification. Now, I'm confident that you'll see this everywhere in your life as I've seen it in mine. I'm not sure why, but when I was a kid and my two brothers and I were given Easter eggs, my other brothers would scoff them down straight away. But I'd keep mine for weeks in the fridge, chipping off small bits at a time. And this really infuriated my brother so much that he used to call me Scrooge McMartin. Now, it's actually become an innate habit that stood

me in good stead throughout my life. So if you're able to delay the gratification of buying sweets or fries or ice cream on your way home from work, this is likely to increase your chance of eating healthy when you get home. And there's countless other examples. So my big conclusion, which isn't obvious, is at the start of your journey to creating a new habit in order to achieve one of your goals, you have to focus on the simple stuff that makes your life as stress-free as possible and science has proven that those foundations are things like more sleep and regular exercise and opting for daily stress reduction techniques like meditation massages or walking or running or whatever helps you to deregulate de-stress and decompress

because scientists have repeatedly shown that this alone will increase your willpower and drastically improve your chances of cementing new habits and achieving your big goals in your life Now, it's interesting because most people, and I've been one of them, wouldn't think that sleep's as an important factor in improving habits and achieving your goals. But the science is very clear on this. And according to a world-leading sleep expert and neurologist, Cathy Goldstein, that Stephen Bartlett quotes, sleep plays a major factor in the success or failure of your goals and resolutions. For example, if you're trying to lose weight or eat healthier, a lack of sleep decreases leptin, which is the hormone that makes you feel full. It also boosts ghirling, which is often referred to as the hunger hormone, which increases appetite, promotes fat storage and can cause you to make poor food choices. Similarly, for those of you that have goals associated with work,

like becoming better on your work or getting a promotion or improving your business or investing in your wealth, the science is very clear on this. A lack of sleep reduces your productivity, and interestingly, sleep-deprived people are described as less ethical, not as alert, not as motivated, and not as cheerful, which I guess is pretty obvious. while those of you that might want to boost your social lives and relationships

a lack of sleep has been shown to contribute to poor mood and markedly worse social interactions so sleep is another one of those foundations that we often overlook and it's now becoming a much bigger priority in my life in terms of the timing consistency and duration and i'm glad to say that i no longer use an alarm clock to get up as we rely on our smiling semi dogs to come in and pour our bed in readiness for our early morning walk. So if you want to break or make a new habit on your way to achieving your goals and resolutions, success habit law five is to forget all the complicated tips, tricks and hacks and focus instead on these basics. Because it's been proven time and time again that you'll succeed if you feel good and if you're not

overstressed. Now, stress relief and management is definitely another big work in progress for me that I know is actually going to have a massive long-term benefit. So don't underestimate or ignore its impact, especially if you're a closet perfectionist like me who inadvertently puts a lot of pressure on yourself to perform. And that brings us to our final and sixth success habit law which is actually so simple and easy and powerful and powerful that it's almost unbelievable it involves you doing a one second exercise which the science has shown is tremendously effective in helping you to create a new habit can you guess what it is it's the power of asking yourself binary response questions now you're probably scratching your head wondering what the hell am

I talking about? And what has this got to do with forming habits and achieving goals? Well, this mind-blowing maneuver is based on what's called the question behavior effect. It's an incredibly simple phenomenon where asking someone about performing a certain behavior drastically influences whether they do it in the future or not. Now, the effect has been shown to last for more than six months after you just ask a simple question. A pioneering study on this published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology indicates that asking the right question is the key to behaviour change. So instead of telling someone else what to do or just saying what you're going to do in relation to a goal that you're trying to achieve, you need to ask a binary

question. For example, if you want to start going to the gym to get fit, instead of saying I'm going to start going to the gym every day, it's way more effective based on the science to ask yourself a simple question, which is, are you going to go to the gym? Across repeated psychological studies, it's been proven that if an individual isn't exhibiting healthy behaviour, if they then ask a question about that behaviour, or they ask themselves a direct question about their behaviour, it serves as a reminder of their choices. In their studies, where you ask direct binary questions that can only be answered with yes or no responses, this simple technique has been proven to influence people to cheat less, to exercise more, and to volunteer more, etc.

And the key here isn't to ask any question or to ask it in any way. It's to ask a question which encourages a definitive yes or no answer. And interestingly, researchers found that the question behaviour effect was most effective and most powerful when the question was administered via a computer or a paper and pencil survey. So why does this work? Why isn't it just as effective to say it to somebody? Why is it better when a medium that can't respond, that just has a yes or no box on it,

is more effective than asking your friend or yourself the same question? Well, there are several theories about why the question behaviour effect works, but most researchers believe it's related to something called cognitive dissonance. cognitive dissonance is where your ideal self which is the person that you want to be doesn't match up with your real self which is who you actually are so although you might want to be a healthy person your behavior and your actions might not be aligning with that they might not be aligning with the actions of a fit healthy person so if someone asks you the question or if you ask yourself the question are you going to go to the gym today saying no would cause a lot of

mental discomfort. So to ease our discomfort, you're likely to actually say yes. Then once you say yes, your prediction that you're going to exercise that day becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because the question has reminded you of who you want to be and the path to becoming that person. By answering, are you going to go to the gym today? You've set an intention to walk that path. It's a simple question that serves as a reminder that helps you to deliver the path and it gives you the opportunity to send a clear intention to yourself and to whoever else of what you're going to do. And the reason why this works even more effectively when answering yes or no to the question, especially on a computer or with a pen or paper, is because these binary choices in

a yes or no box don't allow for clarification or excuses. And we all know that both of these allow us to wiggle away from confronting the reality of who we want to be, the path of getting there and establishing an intention. So if I ask you whether you are going to start doing something, you may well clarify by responding that you plan on starting to exercise next month, or I'm going to stop sugar next month, or I'll start going to the gym as soon as my schedule or allows me to, or I'll start investing once I have more time or when the conditions are right. You can always come up with a convenient excuse to delay or defer. But by limiting your responses to either a yes or no to a question, it doesn't give you any room to create an excuse or a

justification or to deceive yourself because you need to commit by responding whether it's a yes or a no. You need to commit one way or the other. So the next time you're tempted to make excuses for your behavior, and we all do it every day, or we're tempted to lecture someone else about what they should be doing differently, try using a binary question instead. As an example, I've been working long hours to produce this podcast episode, and I know that I need to be going to the gym. So to improve the chances of me doing it, I need to ask myself the simple question, Bushy, are you going to go to the gym? And no surprise, and feeling a little bit weird right now, I reply to myself, yes. So use it on yourself. Ask yourself a clear yes or no question about an

area of your life that you're struggling to find motivation in daily. And if you want to help someone in a more effective and empathetic way, instead of just saying or telling someone you should quit smoking, for example, you can ask them, are you going to quit smoking? Are you going to apply for that new job? Are you going to start investing and saving? Are you going to buy an investment property? And make sure you ask them for only a yes or no answer. But remember to tread carefully here and show caring empathy in the way that you deliver this question, because sometimes questions like this can come across too bluntly and can actually be perceived as judgment and unspoken criticism, which will actually undermine the entire approach. But raising someone else's

awareness of their behavior this gently delivered challenge to their ideal self can lead to significant behavior change so now that we've come to the end of these six success habit laws in conclusion don't let the statistically high likelihood of failure with your goals and resolutions put you off trying because the science also proves that goals and resolutions are effective for achievement in every aspect of your life so set yourself up for success by using and applying the laws that I've outlined in this podcast and please do everyone a favour by subscribing to Property Hub and sharing the link to this episode with a friend that may also be struggling with something and a habit they want to break or to help them make a new one on

their way to achieving their unrealised goals and resolutions as this is the only proven bridge that will take you from where you are to where you really want to be because the road to sustainable success is all about developing happy habits rewarding rituals and daily disciplines so by doing this and sharing this and other episodes of get invested freely you'll enjoy the fulfillment that only comes from giving and helping others without ever expecting anything in return which is a big part of why i spend so much time and get so much enjoyment out of doing this podcast and remember that life is all about trying failing fast and failing forward and then getting up and trying and trying and keep trying

because this journey called life is actually meant to be hard and we'll all continue to stumble and hit hurdles in all areas of our lives because this is when we learn our greatest lessons and make our greatest changes. So just keep picking yourself up and keep going because for every habit that we've successfully formed

and for every habit that we keep struggling to form, we'll all reach a time when we've broken our bad habits and made good ones on our way to embracing delayed gratification and creating new behaviors that will actually deliver your ideal lifestyle as you continue to help others do the same so what are your goals and resolutions what are your investment goals what are you going to do by when and in the spirit of changing habits to bridge the gap to your goals let me conclude this episode by engaging the question behavior effect to help you achieve your desired growth habits with the following binary yes or no question are you going to

achieve your goals? Yes or yes? Until next time, get invested and stay invested. Thanks for getting invested. Now, here's three easy ways you can take action to start making it happen, to ensure you build momentum and start living by design, not default, so that you're following your freedom formula. Firstly, subscribe to this podcast if you haven't already and keep the weekly inspiration coming. Secondly, get a copy of my book Get Invested for free and find out what it takes for you to invest in living more and working less. Just visit bushimartin.com.au forward slash books or knowhowproperty.com.au or click on the links in the show notes. And thirdly, join me and the Get Invested community. Each month I send a free

an exclusive email full of practical self-help and wealth wisdom that our current Freedom Fighter subscribers can't wait to get. Just visit bushymartin.com.au, scroll to the bottom of the page and sign up. And there you have it. In three easy steps, you're on your way to dusting off your forgotten dreams and making them a reality. Get Invested is proudly part of the Property Hub, your home for property investment insights and inspiration. When you subscribe to the show, you get all of your Get Invested episodes, along with Realty Talk, Australia's longest running and leading online property show for red-hot property investing news and insights, direct from all of the industry leaders and influencers. And finally, feel free to connect with me on Twitter, Facebook

and LinkedIn, as I'd love to hear your feedback, your inspiration, your ideas and your questions and queries anytime. Thanks for listening. Hear you next week. And as always, dream as if you'll live forever and live as if the days you'll last.