method in the process has to be completed prior to moving on. Be patient, it will take as long as it takes. If you are willing to engage, anyone can achieve a six-hour baseline. That baseline will put you at a level of performance you cannot yet comprehend. The baseline is nonnegotiable.
The first method has three parts: 21 days of overcoming your excuses, facing your fear, and the 24-hour challenge. Oddly enough, over the past six years of training leaders, athletes, and entrepreneurs, I have witnessed many people attempt the three methods to honor your word and never give up. Few quit in the first seven days. Some completed the three in 30 days. The rest have taken from one month to six months to make it through.
The first method is the simplest and was not intended to be so difficult. However, most people are so ego driven they refuse to kill off their excuse engine. To truly honor your word, you will have to overcome all your reasons and excuses and do what you said you would do. Sadly, we all have excuses that keep us from our own greatness. Honor your word or honor your excuse, the choice is yours! You must see for yourself how you use excuses to get out of doing your life. And, you must honor your word for 21 days straight, without interruption.
My experience in training men and women, SEALS and snipers alike, validates the notion of a 21-day cycle of learning new skills. Twenty-one days of simple activity to carve out a new way of doing anything.
With the acquisition of the most primal skill known to man, honoring your word and never giving up, you must do all 21 days. You must force yourself to do the simple activities to expose your own particular excuses. The real intent of this experience is to expose your excuses and reasons and then, in the face of those believable excuses, do what you promised.
These various excuses are nothing if not believable. There are books written about your excuses to convince you not to do what you said. Often the experience is rather comical watching people deal with excuses. You will find them to be subtle, seductive, and believable. If you let them run your life like they currently do, you are stuffed into a rut. You will find you have constructed a world around you to prove your excuses are more powerful than just saying you are going to do something and executing on that thing.
It takes 21 days to kill off your excuses and reasons and change the environment around you that supports your excuses. Stop excusing yourself from being the person you want to be and just go do what you said you would do. Honoring your word is more effective and much easier as it entails much less drama.
The First 21-Day Evolution
We perform really well when our system is turned on and in motion during the day and is shut down properly every evening. What I didn’t realize is that the skill isn’t being taught unless you are on a high-performance team or your parents are on point and accountable. In order to show the value of honoring your word and not giving up, I want you to learn the skill of turning on the human system. The method, again, is simple . . . but not easy.
Most of us have a human system that has never intentionally been turned on and, clearly, has never been turned off every day. You, as the driver of this human system, must learn to intentionally turn it on and off every day to succeed.
The method will only take 15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes at night. The first thing you do after waking and the last thing before lying your head down for sleep. Fifteen minutes to turn on and 15 minutes to shut down the human system.
The two-part method is to sequentially turn on the functional parts of the human machine:
Three Simple Things: Spiritual Baseline
1. Morning Action
Do push-ups, sit-ups, and squats: move every muscle and joint. During week one, do 10 of each; in week two, do 20; and conclude in week three with 30 of each.
Turn on all five senses: move your eyes through every focal plane; listen for three sounds; smell something pleasant; taste something pleasant; run something with texture, like a hairbrush or a sponge, over your skin.
Drink eight glasses of water throughout the day.
2. Night Action
Do the same before bed for 21 days straight.
3. Excuses
On a notepad, write down the time and every excuse or reason that comes up and makes you want to stop.
It’s a simple method I call “the awakening.” You will find reasons to excuse yourself very graciously from doing it. You will either come up with a reason in the first week, you will simply forget in the second week, or worse, you will believe your excuses in the third week and quit. You will most likely quit on honoring your word. This first 21-day challenge will show you what is causing you to fail in all areas of your life.
As you prepare yourself for either a 21-day easy learning experience or a six-month tranche of excuses that seduce you into oblivion, the four most noted excuses are as follows. Maybe seeing them written prior to engagement will help.
This is too painful
This is stupid
My spouse/lover/friend doesn’t support me
I forgot
Clearly, pain can be believable. Pain, once used as an excuse, will always stop you.
Saying “this is stupid” has destroyed more endeavors than any excuse known to mankind. What you may not realize is that there is always a point in time when what you are doing is just stupid and makes no sense. You will ask, “Who in their right mind would keep doing this?” or say, “I cannot keep doing this.” Overcoming “this is stupid” will be the most important aspect of your life. If you don’t overcome this conversation, I can personally promise you one thing: you will stay right where you are in life with the same complaints and reasons and blame everyone but your own choices. “This is stupid” excuses you from change, from taking a step, and from success.
The other seductive excuse to not honor you word is the lack of support from a spouse. Without knowing the outcome of the intimate nature of spousal support, most spouses negatively impact the drive of their loved one. Neither spouse really intends to destroy the other, yet even a sideways look or a scoff of being inconvenienced will derail the one trying to honor their word. Get on board or just tell your spouse openly they don’t have your support. I highly recommend being your spouse’s cheerleader and always supporting. Unfortunately, the opposite is the reality, due to the fear of being great and a complete lack of understanding what it truly means to be in a relationship. We’ll discuss relationship later.
The final of the top four reasons to quit that I have encountered is the most surprising. To make matters worse, it doesn’t seem like an excuse. The reality of the excuse “I forgot,” is that everyone, everywhere uses it. You will forget to do the simple thing you agreed to do. It doesn’t seem to matter how weighty or simple the thing is. We forget to turn off the stove and burn the house down. We forget to fill the tank with gas and run out of gas when least convenient. We forget to say hi and cause unintended ripples in the experience of life for others. In the 21-day challenge, most people forget to do one of the promised things in the last three days. And have to start over. That reality is the life people lead.
The power of the
