Day 14. Prime Yourself for Power

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Think about a moment in your life when you felt personally powerful.

A time when you felt fully in control of your mental state—when you had the confidence + motivation to take action based on the boldest, highest version of yourself, with the sense that your actions would be effective…

Maybe it was at work, at school, at home, or in some other part of your life.

Take a few minutes right now to remember and reflect on that experience of your personal power, on how it felt.

Done?

Now, if you really took a couple of minutes to do the exercise above with me, you’re probably feeling pretty good right now…

Thanks to that little exercise, your psychological state was—and likely still is—infused with feelings of confidence, motivation, and strength.

And here’s why: When you remember and reflect on empowering experiences from your past, you’re engaging in the act of priming yourself for power.

I could just have easily asked you to remember a time when you felt powerless, demotivated, or stressed out, but of course, I don’t want to bring you down…

If you did that, however, it also would have changed your psychological state, at least temporarily—for the worse. Those unhappy sensations would have come flooding back into the hidden recesses of your brain.

Much of what we do, or do not do, depends upon how we feel.

• When we feel powerful, we lean into life’s big challenges.
• When we feel powerless, we lean away from life’s big challenges.

And when it comes to sparking our motivation, power is everything…

Researchers tell us that others can prime us to feel either more powerful or less powerful—all within a matter of seconds.

How?

By exposing us to an empowering or disempowering language pattern.

Or by having us recall an empowering or disempowering experience from our past (like the exercise we did at the outset of this lesson).

Much of this can be done through the use of emotionally-charged language.

For example, I once read about an experiment in which researchers took a group of 10 volunteers, split them into two groups, and assigned members from each group an arbitrary role of either “Boss” or “Employee.”

Guess what happened?

The BOSS group displayed boss-like behavior, while the EMPLOYEE group displayed more submissive behavior.

If you were to conduct an experiment like this, you’d observe exactly what the researchers from this study did: that there’s a startling similarity between language and behavior.

In other words:

• Exposure to powerful language results in powerful behavior.
• Exposure to disempowering language results in disempowering behavior.

Bottom line? In order to perform at your peak and feel motivated consistently, you’ve got to be primed for POWER 💪

In just a moment, we’ll discuss how you can do this, but first, it’s important to point something out:

Whether you know it or not, you’re already priming yourself all day long.

The problem for most people though, is that they either:

(a) Don’t know they’re priming themselves, or

(b) Aren’t priming themselves for power as often as they can.

But here’s the good news: any one of us can become better at priming ourselves by creating and using little nudges or reminders of encouragement that trigger powerful feelings—which in turn help us become and behave more powerfully, both physically and mentally.

The idea here is this: In each challenging or demotivating situation you come across, nudge yourself to feel a little more courageous + motivated, to act a bit more boldly, and to step outside the walls of your comfort zone.

With practice, you’ll eventually end up where you want to be.

How to apply this method to motivation

• To prime a powerful mindset, recall + remind yourself of how you’ve felt and performed with peak motivation and power in the past.
  • (FYI: Most people do the opposite of this—they prime themselves for powerlessness by reminding themselves of all the times they performed poorly in the past.)
• In order to cultivate more power and motivation, remember to focus on your values (which we discussed on Day 13) and ensure that you recall + reflect upon your greatest moments of personal power from the past so that you can create more moments of personal power now and in the future.