You know what’s easy?
Punishing ourselves.
Setting ourselves up to fail.
Making the same choices and being disappointed in the same results.
Blaming others.
Being overwhelmed.
Not finishing things….and all that other unjoumorous stuff…
Last week my new client wanted to put some items in the car while we working on a fairly large project. I asked him to wait until we were done categorizing, but he told me I was micromanaging and put the items in the car. Upon his return, I waited for him to recollect what task we were doing on his own. He checked a couple of things that we’d already completed before returning to what we were doing (pre-trip to the car). Did we manage to complete everything? Absolutely. Was it optimal? Nope.
People often say they need to “get out of their own way.” But much of what I do with my clients is get in their way. Disrupting their natural habits protects them from themselves and helps them inch toward different habits. Our habits don’t just change on their own, we need help. Our natural habit is to interrupt…especially ourselves!
Gloria Mark, associate professor at University of California, Irvine explains:
“People are as likely to interrupt themselves” as be interrupted.” And, “We looked at all work that was interrupted and resumed on the same day. The good news is that most interrupted work was resumed on the same day — 81.9%– and it was resumed, on average, in 23 minutes and 15 seconds, which I guess is not so long. But the bad news is, when you’re interrupted, you don’t immediately go back to the task you were doing before you were interrupted. There are about two intervening tasks before you go back to your original task, so it takes more effort to reorient back to the original task…So there’s a cognitive cost to an interruption.”[1]
The methodology of Joumor has been developed over nearly 13 years. The idea is to move from task to task and complete it easily with increased dopamine (feel good brain neurotransmitter that helps you make decisions) before moving on. It’s the hardest thing to do, but literally the most rewarding productivity-wise. I explained this concept to my client.
At the end of every session we review what the most Useful part of the session was and why. This helps clients tap into their own self-awareness as well as guide me how to structure our sessions to be most effective.
When I asked my new client, he responded: “The most useful part was hearing about the methodology and the neurotransmitters. How Joumor is about setting yourself up with a series of wins. I like that, I’m gonna try it.”
Setting yourself up to win is hard. It takes discipline and requires change. It will make things easy. You’ll feel clear and in control. And believe it or not, easy can be hard for us…we’re not used to such clarity and freedom. But in this Joumorous case, hard is good.