Things I’m Avoiding Doing December Challenge Day Twenty – The Problem with Putting a Gun to Your Head
As you may have guessed from the title , today’s email is going to use some pretty dramatic (if unrealistic and completely fantastical) metaphors. If you’re squeamish about violent mental imagery, you might want to give this one a miss. On the other hand if you enjoyed Squid Games, the John Wick movies, or pretty much anything ever directed by John Woo, we should be good! 🙂
If you knew that anyone who arrived late to a meeting would be killed, would you prioritize leaving home earlier and arriving on time?
If you knew that the difference between your loved ones living and dying was your ability to complete everything on your “Things I’m Avoiding Doing” list by the end of the day, would you put your heart and soul into completing your list?
Unpleasant though these images might be, a lot of things that we think of as “impossible” suddenly become extremely possible if someone has a real or metaphorical gun to our heads.
Here’s my question:
What could you get off your list today if you put a metaphorical gun to your head?
Now I’ll be honest – while such a mentally aggressive approach can certainly reap results in the short term, my preference for the inspiration of yesterday’s “Million Dollar question” over the motivation of what NLP co-creator Richard Bandler used to call “Smith and Wesson therapy” is that it’s unsustainable.
While the author Steven King apparently used to motivate himself to write by imagining terrifying monsters screaming at him until he drowned out their voices with the sound of his typing, for most of us, if we keep putting a gun to our heads over time, one of two things happens:
- We realize that it’s an idle threat and it stops “working” to get us into action.
- We get so stressed by the whole thing that we kind of want to pull the metaphorical trigger.
So while you’re welcome to give this a go today and see what comes off your list, I suggest you save it up as a strategy for (very) occasional use only… 🙂
Have fun, learn heaps, and let’s get stuff done!
