The Campbell Academy Blog (57)

The lizard Brain of inconvenience

HT to Millie for the idea for this blog.

Millie and I were chatting in the kitchen at the practice today about inconvenience and how things that you really know you should and want to do can be painted by your internal narrative as something inconvenient that you can do without and avoid.

Football training is one of the things that fall into this category a lot.

It's Thursday today, and all of my weeks are really busy and really long (in a really good way). Still, by the time it gets to Thursday at 7 p.m. in the winter when it's dark and raining, I'm less than enthusiastic about the prospect of coaching 15- and 16-year-old boys for two hours under floodlights on the Astroturf in the freezing cold.

The funny thing is that every time I finish that session, I am delighted that I have done it, and I am grateful that it is in my life, but every single time I come to that session, particularly when the nights are dark, I would rather be sat at home eating chocolate in front of Netflix.

For Millie, It was riding her horse last night in the rain (with Alison).

She loves her horse to bits, and she's desperate to ride her horse, but at the end of a long day at work and when the weather is bad and the night is dark, who wants to sit on top of a horse and then have to do all the things you have to do to make sure the horse is ok when you could just put on your comfy clothes and sit on your sofa.

Seth Godin used to talk a lot about the lizard brain and that part of your head which is creating a narrative which is destructive and stops you in your tracks from achieving the things you want to achieve.

It carried on again this morning; my alarm went off at 6.20 in the pitch black to get me out of bed to get on my bike at 6.45 so that I could ride for an hour until 7.45 so that I could come back in and make sure my 15-year-old boy (one of the ones I coach at football) had actually brushed his teeth before he went to school and give him a lift to school.

At 6.20, my lizard brain kept me in bed till 6.30.

By the time it was 6.45, I was drinking my second shot of coffee, patting my dog on the sofa in the warmth.

On this occasion, I managed to drag my arse out to the shed for about 6.55 and ride for 50 minutes.

These are the ways to overcome the lizard.

Once I had finished the ride and came back in, I felt terrific and delighted that I'd managed to do it.

It's just hard in the moment to get over the myth of inconvenience that the lizard brain sells us, but to get to a better place, we must.