hi everyone welcome to this series on how to become indistractible based on my best-selling book indistractable how to control your attention and choose your life today we are going to be talking about internal triggers the very first of four key strategies to becoming indistractible mastering our internal triggers you know our internal triggers are these uncomfortable emotional states that we seek to escape from and while we love to blame the external triggers things like the pings and dings and rings in our environment the fact of the matter is that most of our distractions begin from within we have to understand fundamentally what really motivates us and that the problem is much bigger than just our technology fundamentally the reason we try and uh look for distraction is because we are trying to escape some sort of discomfort because fundamentally time management is pain management so for all the lost productivity lost time that comes from distraction fundamentally we have to understand that it is our inability to deal with discomfort our tendency to get bored with things quickly to feel anxiety stress uncertainty whatever case might be these internal triggers are fundamentally the deeper reason that we get distracted and if we don't learn to manage those emotions we cannot begin to manage our time so as opposed to resisting the urge to check your phone or eat that piece of chocolate cake if you're on a diet or smoke that cigarette what we need to do is to learn how to deal with desire in a healthy way that leads us towards traction rather than distraction and this fundamentally comes down to reimagining these uncomfortable internal triggers that we have to understand how to view them differently by reimagining not only our trigger but also the task as well as our temperament how do we reimagine our internal triggers well we can look for we can look differently at those internal triggers to understand where they are coming from and what we might do to deal with them in a more healthy way starting with understanding what is the preceding emotion that we feel when we're about to get distracted so psychologists tell us that by simply writing down these internal triggers by knowing noting what it is that we feel right before we check our phone or look at email or scroll social media or check the news or whatever the case might be whatever distraction you might be struggling with if you can write down that internal trigger that is an amazing first step to start helping you get control and mastery over that discomfort the next thing you want to do is to explore that sensation not with contempt not with beating yourself up and telling yourself that somehow you're deficient or broken if you get distracted but rather with curiosity by being mindful around why am i experiencing that sensation where is it coming from and delving deeper into the root cause of the problem what we want to be very careful of is also these liminal moments liminal moments are the times between tasks so if you've ever gotten up from your desk to go to a meeting and then check your phone on the way to the meeting or from from the meeting and now you're still checking your device you're still checking email 30 45 minutes after you've come back and you wanted to get started on that project and now you're even more delayed than you were before these are all examples of these limital moments we want to be very careful about those limital moments and make sure we have strategies and tactics in place to deal with them when they rear their ugly heads and we are likely to get distracted what we also want to do is to reimagine the task that psychologists tell us that the way we look at a difficult task has a profound impact on how we deal with it and what we can do is reimagine these tasks so that they're not quite so uh onerous they're not quite so difficult for us to do by looking at them differently how can we do that we can add deliberateness and novelty to each task to make them fun but not necessarily for the sake of enjoyment how can something be fun and not be enjoyable it doesn't necessarily have to be we don't need to put a spoonful of sugar on things the way mary poppins told us to no we can actually just look for the intrigue the variability the novelty in a task and that can actually make that task pass by quicker and help us stay focused on what we actually want to do with our time and attention the next thing that we can do is remember that play does not necessarily have to has to be pleasurable it just has to focus our attention it just has to harness our mind so that we can get through that task so we can look to the the psychology of slot machines or social media that utilize what's called a variable reward that variableness that mystery that intrigue that keeps us engaged so if you can take an otherwise dreary task and find the variability find the nuance find the mystery that actually can help focus your attention so that you can stay on the thing you actually want to do with your time the next thing we can do is to reimagine our temperament you know so many of us have these self-limiting beliefs that really do backfire and hurt us in our day-to-day lives starting with this idea that many people carry around that willpower is somehow a limited resource that we run out of willpower like someone would run out of gas in a gas tank and this gained some credibility in the psychology field for a while until it was discovered that in fact this research did not bear out that meta studies found that this idea that we run out of willpower we call it ego depletion isn't actually real unless you believe it was real so if you're the kind of person who believes they run out of willpower the way that someone would run out of gas in a gas tank it literally becomes true and that's the case with all kinds of limiting beliefs people who say to themselves oh i have a short attention span or i have a an addictive personality or i'm no good with time management you know all of these beliefs really do have a profound impact on our performance so what we have to do as opposed to labeling ourselves with these self-limiting beliefs we can do instead is to practice self-compassion psychologists tell us that people who practice self-compassion are much more likely to accomplish their long-term goals well how do we do that we can talk to ourselves the way we would talk to a good friend that's a seminal practice a key to uh to cultivating self-compassion so what we want to remember in summary here from this very first episode on becoming indistractible is to understand the deeper reason why we get distracted is the deeper reason why we are motivated to do anything that fundamentally the reason we go off track is because time management is pain management that if we don't know how to cope with discomfort we won't know how to deal with distraction we have to deal with these deeper reasons why we go off track by learning tactics to harness these internal triggers so that they propel us forward like rocket fuel towards traction rather than allowing them to take us off track into distraction by realizing that most distraction overwhelmingly starts from within it's not just about the pings and dings outside of us the fundamentally we have to figure out what's going on inside of us to make sure that we can stay on track and not get distracted from the things that are important to us in life that we can reimagine the internal trigger we touch just a few techniques that we can use to reimagine the trigger we can also reimagine the task as well as reimagining our temperament now this is just a very short introduction there are many more tools and techniques in my book indistractible how to control your attention and choose your life in the next video which i hope you'll tune in for we'll dive into the second pillar of becoming indistractible we'll talk about how to make time for traction i hope you'll join me it was a pleasure being with you and you can always follow me on my website near and far dot com or on linkedin you can find me at forward slash near a all n-i-r-e-y-a-l thanks so much and see you next time