Take away your brain’s hiding places

“The time just wasn’t right”. . . “I got too busy”. . . How often do we accept these dog-ate-my-homework excuses—from ourselves and for others—for shirking responsibility for building a better future? Left to its own devices, the brain would be perfectly happy polishing old habits and never trying anything new. So you need to create structures that take away the brain’s hiding places. Here’s one. You can do this with yourself, with one other person, or with a team. 

On Monday, get your clearest bearings on the week in taking initiative to make more of the right new things happen.

On Friday, check in, briefly highlighting what measurably worked better to accelerate progress. That’s it.

Knowing this is coming every Friday creates what brain scientists call “anticipatory performance rise.” Instead of deferring action and initiative, you are more likely to get on with it, picking up the pace, knowing you have to keep improving, and that specific progress is being seen and felt every week, with each Friday adding momentum to the next Monday’s new pilot tests. The game goes up.