Episode 57 – This Master Habit Will Help You Build All Other Habits

Introduction    00:00:03    Marketing, explosive growth, and revolutionary secrets that can catapult your business to new heights. You’re now listening to The Underground Marketer Podcast with your host Tudor Dumitrescu, the one podcast devoted to showing new businesses how to market themselves for high growth.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:00:25    Welcome to the underground marketer. This is the place where we deliver the real truth about marketing and explore big ideas that can help new businesses thrive and grow into big ones. I’m your host, Tudor. And today we’re going to talk about dealing with pain while you build positive habits. So this is a topic that’s very important for a lot of people, because all the time in life, you’re trying to form positive habits and reinforce them and obviously get rid of negative habits and stop them from happening. And all of these actions, they involve pain, right? And if you cannot accept that pain, and if you cannot deal with that pain, you are unlikely to be successful, right? When it comes to those activities. So the way to actually solve this is that you have to become adjusted to handling the pain. That’s actually involved in building a positive habit, or obviously getting rid of a negative one.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:01:30    So there are certain techniques that you can use that are going to help you when you have to deal with discomfort or pain. The first one is that you should learn to basically get some distance from your thoughts, because a lot of people, you know, we are sort of merged with our thoughts and what happens is that you have a feeling or a thought of discomfort or of pain, and you immediately identify with it and you see it as part of you and part of who you are, and that prevents you from getting some distance from it. And seeing it just as another experience, you know, just something else that’s coming into the field of your awareness. And if you want to be able to handle pain and discomfort more effectively, then you have to learn how to basically detach from those thoughts and feelings that you’re getting.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:02:30    Because if you’re not able to detach from your thoughts, and if you remain all the time, merge to them, you’re going to have a very difficult time to do this. So there is a couple of techniques that you can use to help you get some distance from the thoughts that you’re feeling and the feelings that you’re actually experiencing at the moment. So, um, one way to one very useful way at least is for me to remind myself when I’m dealing with pain or discomfort that the pain or discomfort is actually going to come to an end very often when we’re in the middle of experiencing pain or discomfort, we have no idea. And I’m speaking about an actual idea in terms of our feelings that that’s going to end. You know, we become desperate many times when we’re feeling pain, because we experience the pain as if it were eternal and as if it were never going to end.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:03:29    And that’s why we experience it as super important. And basically a part of who we are. We don’t see ourselves as different from that pain, putting it in perspective and focusing on the fact that at some point it’s going to end is very useful. Another very useful to get some distance from the thought and stop identifying with it is to see a purpose behind that pain and behind that struggle or that discomfort that you’re experiencing. You know, if you are experiencing pain and you are thinking that the pain is meaningless, right, and you’re just suffering and there’s no point to it, then it’s going to be a lot more and it’s going to feel a lot more painful to you, right? And you don’t want to be in that place. You want to be able to detach from it. You want to be able to see a purpose behind it.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:04:23    You know, something that’s good and that’s positive. That’s going to come out of it. And it doesn’t really matter what discomfort is. You know, you can always find a positive reason to go through it. Even if the positive reason just happens to be that it’s going to help you to basically become stronger and to develop discipline or to develop mental toughness. And every time you’re dealing with discomfort or pain, it’s actually an opportunity for you to develop mental toughness and discipline. And if you actually start seeing it this way, and you start focusing on the pain, through the prism of those more positive thoughts, then the pain itself and the discomfort is going to be easier to handle for you. A third way of dealing with discomfort in these situations is to gain some awareness of the discomfort as an object inside the field of your current experience and see yourself a separate from it.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:05:28    You know, and you do this very carefully by noticing that just like you’re seeing whatever colors you are seeing in front of yourself. You’re also feeling the feelings that you’re feeling. And you’re thinking the thoughts that you’re thinking, right? And just like you many times, you don’t control what you’re seeing in front of yourself. Like you don’t control. For example, if there’s a tree in front of yourself, or if you are looking at a computer at the moment, or if you, maybe you are in traffic or you’re looking at your phone or whatever it is, you many times you don’t control that in a similar way, you don’t control the feelings that you’re experiencing and the thoughts that are going through your mind. There is such a thing as strategic thinking, let’s call it. And that’s when on purpose, you are driving your attention to concentrate and to think about a certain subject, right?  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:06:19    And then there’s also the general kind of thinking, you know, which just goes on by itself. And it happens without your involvement, right? If you, you are completely uninvolved and those thoughts just happen in your mind. And it’s the same thing when you are dealing with pain, when you’re building a positive habit, right? So maybe you want to start prospecting every day, right? And you know that that’s essential to grow your business, but every time you prospect, you feel anxiety, right? So you can start to relate to that feeling of anxiety differently. You know, you can start treating it as just something that you’re momentarily experiencing in your field of awareness, and it’s not who you are. Right. And there’s nothing wrong with experiencing that feeling. And once you start having those shifts, your awareness and in how you experience it, then it becomes less painful and it’s less of a roadblock.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:07:14    And once you start removing those roadblocks building, the positive habit gets easier. The other thing you can do, obviously, as we said before, you can remind yourself that the anxiety is not going to be permanent. You know, maybe you’re going to feel anxious for the first calls you make, or for the first people you reach out to. But at some point, the anxiety that you experience while you are doing that activity is going to subside. You know, maybe it’s going to take a few days to get there, but at some point you are actually going to get rid of it, right? All these techniques. And we’ve mentioned three so far, you can apply, you know, and it doesn’t matter what the positive habit is. And likewise, if you’re dealing with a negative habit, it doesn’t matter what that negative habit is. Maybe it’s smoking, right.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:08:02    And maybe is that every time you start feeling anxious, for whatever reason you go and you start smoke, right. And smoking then really is a way for you to deal with that discomfort. And that’s why you form that habit. And that habit is maintained by the fact that you’re not accepting the pain and you don’t know how to handle the pain in a different way. And these three strategies that I’ve shared just shared with you will help you handle the pain in a different way. Right? And aside from this, the other thing that you can do with some positive habits that you are looking to build, and you have to experience some pain to actually get those habits in place. The other thing that you have you can do is that you can use the negative feelings as fuel towards actually building that positive habit.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:08:55    And the way you do this is by basically changing what you focus on, right? So typically while you are experiencing some pain, let’s just say that you are experiencing the pain of quitting smoking, right? And you, you have a, you feel the need to smoke, right? And you feel anxiety and you have all those feelings and all those thoughts bubbling inside your head. And while you are experiencing them, what most people do is that they actually focus a hundred percent on those feelings to the point that those feelings and those thoughts become a hundred percent of their experience in that moment. So one thing that you can do here, and there’s actually two things that I will share with you, but the first thing that you can do here is that you can start focusing and broadening your awareness to include other things that you’re experiencing at that moment.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:09:49    You know, it may be as simple as becoming aware that you’re breathing or becoming keenly aware of what you’re actually seeing in front of you or becoming keenly aware of the feeling of sitting in a chair and other feelings that you’re feeling at that moment. You know, maybe you’re feeling a breeze from the wind on your face or whatever it is, right. Maybe you’re feeling the sun of your, on your skin, you know, becoming aware of the worm, warmth that you’re feeling at that point on your skin, basically trying to broaden your awareness is going to be really helpful to overcome the momentary pain that you’re feeling. Because once you broaden your awareness, then that pain is only a small part of your experience and it stops being the whole of your experience, right? So you sort of start tuning the pain down and tuning other elements of your experience up, right? 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:10:44    So that you have much greater control and much greater tolerance of your pain. The, the other thing that you can do is, as I was saying before, shift the pain and reframe it to the point where it’s actually a motivator, you know, and it’s not a de motivator anymore. And the way you do that is by focusing your awareness from the immediate pain that you’re feeling to the pain that you would feel if you don’t build the positive habit, or if you don’t get rid of the negative habit, if you’re dealing with smoking, right. And the habit that you’re trying to get rid of is pretty much to quit smoking. And you are experiencing a lot of pain. Instead of focusing on that pain, you can shift your awareness and you can try to become aware of the pain that you will experience if you keep smoking.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:11:38    Right? So become aware of it. You know, maybe it’s more difficult to climb on stairs. Maybe you are coughing more than you would cough. Otherwise maybe you feeling of heaviness in your chest, whatever it is, whatever the negative consequences are, just become aware of that. And you can choose to bring into your awareness long term consequences as well. Stuff like developing lung cancer and the pain of not being able to breathe and the pain of coughing off blood and all the rest of it. Right? And when you do this, the pain of basically not smoking that that pain is going to be much smaller than the pain of smoking, right? So then you sort of turn the pain on its head and now pain is what actually motivates you to stop smoking and to not smoke anymore. And that’s obviously for a negative habit, but then you can do the same thing with a positive habit.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:12:37    You know, let’s say that we’re talking about prospecting, right? And this is the habit that you want to build. You want to reach out to 30 different people every single day, right? And if this is the habit that you want to build within yourself, you can start focusing instead of focusing on the anxiety that you’re experiencing every day, while you’re doing it, you can start focusing on the feelings and the negative consequences that you’ll experience. If you don’t prospect stuff, like you’re not gonna be able to get your business off the ground and how you’re going to feel about that, how you’re going to feel about other people who can get you and telling you that you failed, you know, maybe people from your family and so on. Think about the people who didn’t believe in you and how this is going to prove them, right.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:13:28    Start thinking about other pains as well. Things like, for example, how you’re going to have to get a job again, and you’re going to have to start working once again. And the reason for that of course is because you haven’t managed to form the positive habit. And once you realize that, and once you bring those factors into your awareness, then you are going to have a lot more drive and a lot more energy. And you’re basically going to shift the pain from something that’s stopping you from building that habit to something that’s empowering you and getting you to actually build that habit. And again, it’s, it’s all about controlling your awareness in life. There probably is, or there probably are very few things which are more important than controlling your awareness and where your focus goes. Right? Most of our problems come because we have no control over our attention and over our awareness, whatever happens in the external world grabs hold of our awareness, whether that’s stuff that’s happening inside our head or directly in the world that we perceive outside of ourselves, it doesn’t matter where it’s happening.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:14:45    But the, the one matters is that it, it gets a hold of our attention and we no longer control what we pay attention to. So this is I would call it the master habit, right? If you can develop this master habit of controlling your attention and what gets your attention, then you’re going to find it much easier to deal with pain when it comes to building any other habit, right? Any other habit is going to become a lot easier to develop. Once you develop this master habit of basically being able to gain control over your attention and to stop the external world world from always wrestling control over your attention. And it’s very hard to do. I mean, that’s sort of what Buddhist monks and people who spend a long time in meditation and in all those practices, that’s what they’re trying to do. And of course, I mean, life gives you a lot of opportunities to exercise control over your attention.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:15:45    You know, you, you don’t need to meditate. There’s 1,001 things that come and that wrestle for your attention every day, and you can exercise control, you know, by having a plan by sticking to that plan, by following through and so on. And that’s ultimately how you do it. And building the master habit is probably the most important thing that you can do. So that’s pretty much what I wanted to share. In today’s episode, I hope that you found the tips that I shared with you for dealing with pain and discomfort while in building positive habits or getting rid of negative ones useful. And remember the master habit that we discussed, which is control over your attention. If you can develop control over your attention, then dealing with the difficulties and discomforts of life and building positive habits and achieving whatever you want to achieve is going to be a lot easier, right? Because you’re going to be in charge of yourself. So that’s pretty much what I wanted to share for today as usual stay tuned for the next episode. And until next time, remember to keep growing your businesses and providing massive value to the world. You are the reason why we’re all growing creature. Our freedoms are expanding and we’re all living in greater prosperity. Thank you.