Wondering how Olympic athletes achieve excellence? We dive into the significance of deliberate practice, guided by insights from chapters 5, 18, and 26 of the Habit Mechanic book, including the ten intelligence factors and the nine action factors model. Learn how our coaching programs—from a one-month efficiency boost to a three-month certification as a habit mechanic—can help you develop super habits and reach high-performance brain states. Plus, get the scoop on how to become a certified habit mechanic coach and why you’re just one habit away from success. Listen now to maximize your potential and transform your life today!
Find out more and get your free physical copy here.
Transcript (automatically generated)
Hello Habit Mechanics. It’s Dr Jon Finn here. I hope you’re having a fantastic week so far. Welcome to another Habit Mechanics short. The Olympics are here and for many of us, we’re gonna experience watching some of the best of the best at what they do some of the best of the best at what they do over the coming weeks, and I find that really exciting because we can learn so much from people who are so good at what they do.
00:39
And that’s what I want to unpack in this Habit Mechanics short. That’s what I want to unpack in this habit mechanic short. And to help me to do that, I’m going to start by playing a short clip from chapter five of the habit mechanic book. Remember, you can get a free physical copy of of the book from our website, toughenmindscouk. I’ve actually just been listening, re-listening to uh, chapter five, and I listened to the book lots because I I’m uh forever wanting to keep learning myself and reflect, and I just find the contents of the book endlessly fascinating, even though I wrote it, because every time I listen to a chapter again or read it again, I know something different to the last time I read it or listened to it. My life’s probably in a slightly different place, but yeah, so I just re-listened to the chapter, so here’s a short clip from right at the end of the chapter about an Olympic gold medalist and also a world champion athlete, jessica Ennis-Hill, learning from an Olympic champion.
02:00
British athlete Jessica Ennis-Hill finished her career as multiple world champion and Olympic gold medalist in heptathlon. In a BBC interview with fellow former world champion athlete, michael Johnson, she revealed that as a junior she had never even heard of the event, the heptathlon, much less aspired to be a dominant force in the discipline. So at one point in her life she had no knowledge of an event that she became the best in the world at. She was not born to do it. She worked amazingly hard to achieve this exalted status. The learning science I have shared in this chapter does not say that anyone can become a world champion athlete. It simply says that whatever your current abilities in any area of your life, you can improve them with practice. This is the process Ennis Hill used to become a world champion. Over a long period of time she incrementally, one tiny step at a time, improved her heptathlete abilities or intelligence until she had some of the best heptathlete abilities in the world. It was probably the case that most, if not all, of the ten intelligence factors were working in her favour. This would have made it easier for her to develop heptathlete abilities.
03:32
Moving from heptathlete knowledge to heptathlete skills, to heptathlete habits, the learning process is always the same. You can use it to improve your abilities or intelligences in any area of your life. Learning is your secret superpower. Until the 1990s, it was commonly accepted that once you stopped growing in height, your ability to develop new skills and abilities was extremely limited. It was also commonly accepted that your genetics determined your potential, but modern science has transformed our understanding of the power of learning.
04:20
Frustratingly, old views about human potential still dominate. It is easy to underestimate the power of your ability to learn. This is because you have always been able to learn and are doing it all the time. You have also probably been given some inaccurate and disempowering information about your learning abilities, but the evidence is clear. Whatever you want to get better at, you can. This includes improving your well-being, resilience, performance and leadership.
04:52
Learning is your secret superpower. So I hope you found that interesting, if there’s. I think there’s reference in there to like the 10 intelligence factors, which you can go into chapter five and also chapter 26 in the book to unpack yourself. But this is the challenge really that we all face is that we’ve largely been conditioned to think that we are pretty fixed in our capabilities and it turns out we’re not. We get good at what we learn it, what we practice, not just any old practice, what we deliberately practice, when we really focus and do something intentionally. And that’s why we say learning is our superpower. And I think when it, when we think about learning, it’s often framed from a school understanding, because that’s how we first kind of came to that understanding of learning and the importance of learning. So we we can apply it easily to the concept of learning, to physical things like writing and reading, and then you know things like playing sport etc. Or people learning how to knit or cook. Then we can also apply it to learning the, the kind of contents that we learn at school, like history or the kings and queens of England or how to do addition and subtraction and division, and learning our alphabet and learning about the elements, tables in physics or whatever it is. We kind of get that, we can understand that. Instruments, tables in physics or you know whatever it is, it’s we kind of get out, we can understand that. But when it comes to learning how to think differently, learning how to regulate our emotions, which is at the heart of becoming a habit mechanic, it’s, you know, emotions are at the heart of everything.
06:57
Um, not to get too much into this right now, but there’s a lot of people right now struggling and people looking to get ADHD diagnosis or they’re getting that diagnosis and actually, for me, that’s wrong because it’s not about attention. Adhd is attention deficit disorder. Emotions come before attention. So the language isn’t quite right there and I think I’ll unpack that in another episode. But we, I think we struggle to understand that we are thinking all the time and when I say that, automatically, some people will be saying to themselves I’m not thinking all the time, but it’s there. You see, it’s this voice, it’s in your head, it’s always on and it’s largely subconscious.
07:52
We say that most of what we’re doing and thinking most of the time is a habit. In other words, it’s automatic or semi-automatic. We have this tiny bit of consciousness. Just notice it now. Well, your attention probably is in your ears. Just notice where it is in your ears. It’s just at the cusp of the ears. Or if you’re looking at something, it’s just around the eyes. Everything else in your body is running pretty much on autopilot.
08:17
But we do have this little bit of consciousness that we can use to help us to practice thinking differently and practice regulating our emotions differently, and this is the key if we actually want to be healthier, happier and at our best more often. So if we can use our secret superpower, learning, and we can focus that on getting better at managing our emotions, then everything else that we want to get better at will become easier, including controlling our attention. And that is the key, and this is, um what the entire habit mechanic approach is set up to do. We know the limitations of books, for example, so that’s why we also have that mechanic university app. That’s why we also offer now habit mechanic coaching.
09:18
But at the heart of it all, it’s about learning how to regulate your emotions, um, so that you can sleep better, you can eat more healthily, you can exercise in a way that you want to, you can manage stress effectively, you can build robust confidence levels, you can perform in any situation or be your best in any situation, whether that’s building new relationships or, you know, standing up and giving a public performance or doing the long jump in the o Games. You can manage your focus and your productivity levels so that you can be efficient and effective with your time. We see time and time again, when people learn how to regulate their emotions, that they can easily do the equivalent of eight hours worth of work in five hours, and that’s why we say you know, having mechanic coaching that we can help you to do save an extra three hours every day. But at the heart of that, it’s about getting better at managing your emotions, in other words, emotional regulation or what social scientists would call self-control. That’s the heart of it. It’s the heart of everything that we talk about in the habit mechanic approach.
10:48
Here’s the problem and just looking at some stats which I think I mentioned in a previous pod it’s that talk therapy is not very good at all at helping you to practice managing your emotions. We can see that very clearly in the data. So 58% of people this is peer-reviewed, published scientific research. I think there are about 60,000 people in the studies I’m talking about. This is not an opinion, this is not one study. This is a meta-analysis. 58% of people do not respond at all to CBT, which is seen as the gold standard of talk therapy.
11:38
So why? Why doesn’t it work? It’s because talking about your problems and what you’d like to do differently is not the same as deliberate practice. I’ll say that again Talking about your problems and starting to do what we might call intelligent self-watching in our process and then stating what you’d like to do differently is not the same as deliberate practice. And that’s why we created Tougher Minds and the Habit Mechanic approach over the last 20 years, because we knew there had to be a better way to help people to be healthier, happier and at their best more often. And the conduit for that is high quality practice and what we target whether you’re reading the book or you’re working in the app, or you’re working with one of our expert coaches or, in fact, you’re training to become a certified habit mechanic coach so that you can coach others, we’re focusing on using what we call our 10 intelligence factors and also our 9 action factor model so that we can supercharge the learning process.
13:01
And if we go back to the Jessica Ennis Hill story, with a different coach, jess would not have got the results. She got One of the core reasons and there’s a lot of good documentary evidence of Jessica Ernest Hill’s training practices, and I tell a number of those stories actually in the Habit Mechanic book is so we can actually see how she was practicing. And she was practicing in a different way. She wasn’t just sitting down with a coach and saying, well, you know what, I want to jump further in the long jump, and the coach was giving her some tips and tricks about how she might do that. They then worked day in and day out to practice in a very deliberate way, jess being able to not only learn the skills but put the skills into practice in pressure situations so that she could actually jump further and she habitualized that process. So if you actually want to get better at doing more deliberate practice around regulating your emotions and that could be so you can sleep better, so you can manage stress better, so you can be more focused and productive, so you can be a better leader, then I would definitely recommend that you work with a habit mechanic coach, because we don’t just do talk therapy, we take you on a journey from knowing to doing to habitualizing the thing that you want to get better at and automating those thinking patterns so you don’t just know what you’d like to do differently, you actually make it into a habit. So, yeah, that’s my insight for today.
14:59
Um, I hope this encourages people to go back into the uh chapter five now and and reread that. And I also mentioned the nine action factors model which is in chapter 18, and actually, the 10 intelligence factors I unpack in greater detail. I introduce them in chapter 5 by unpacking greater detail in chapter 26. But when you’re watching the Olympians in the Olympic games, just think about how they got so good. Yeah, some of them will have some genetic advantages, but the journey to getting from being born to becoming an Olympic champion or just even representing your country at the Olympics, the most important thing in that journey is deliberate practice and take some confidence from that, because wherever you are right now is not your end destination. Your end destination will be driven by what you practice today, tomorrow, next week and so on.
16:16
And again, you know we make the habit mechanic book as possibly as good as we possibly could. And it is written. It’s a little bit like a coach in the way that, um, it interacts with the reader. It’s not a book to read once, it’s a manual for life, but it’s a book and it’s limited in its ability to change behaviour. We created the how I’m, a Mechanic University app to make the tools in the book more practical so people can actually practice using them. And you see, if you go into the app, you see people doing that every day. But ultimately, if you really want to change your behaviour, you you know you need a coach, and all those olympic athletes have got coaches, but they don’t have any old coaches. They have the best coaches in the world, and that’s what we pride ourselves in is that we are. We’ve developed our practices and our coaches to be the very, very best in the world, because it’s not just about talk therapy that has no impact on 58% of people. I’d argue more than that, that they use it. It’s about helping you to do more deliberate practice around how you regulate your emotions.
17:32
One exciting new feature you will see if you’re listening to this pod in something like spotify or apple, you can now text messages. There’s a little button should be beneath the sort of the top of the, the description. I think it says send us a text or something. So please do submit questions. Tell us who you are so we can give you a shout out, because it would be great to hear from you. If you’re interested in our coaching. Get in touch, you can book a free call so we can help you to understand more about what’s going on for you and how we can help you to understand more about what’s going on for you and how we can help you.
18:19
Remember, if you don’t have a physical copy of the book, you can get one from the website. It’s free, plus shipping. We’re just trying to make that as easy as possible to get into people’s hands. And if you’re not in the app, get in the app and start using it, because it’s a great. The app and the book are designed to work together as a, as a combo, because the app allows you to put things into practice, um, in a way that we can’t just get from just reading a book. Can’t just get from just reading a book.
18:57
Yeah, and the other thing I’d say is is that you know, we know, that getting good at things takes time.
19:00
So that’s why, um, our coaching programs, we have a one-month program where we work with you for an entire month to give you a real good chance of developing some new super habits, getting into those high charge brain states more often and just being more efficient and effective with how you spend your up time and your down time, but also we have a three-month program where we, where you, can become a certified habit mechanic.
19:28
So, certified habit mechanic, um, and that’s where we work with you for three months and we guarantee some really great outcomes. And if we don’t get those outcomes for you, you don’t pay, um, because we’re so confident we can get them for you. And then, yeah, finally, if you want, if you want to become a certified habit mechanic coach so you can train others or coach others to become certified habit mechanics, then, uh, get in touch and we’ll, we can explain that process as well. Okay, thank you for listening. I hope you enjoy the rest of your day and, yeah, any questions, send us a text or get in touch and, um, we will respond to you. Remember, you’re only ever one habit away.
