18. Making Decisions Ahead of Time

My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, running coach and mindset expert. I believe mindset is the most powerful and most underrated tool you have as a runner. So I’ve devoted my life to helping runners like you develop the mindset you need to fuel your inner fire and become the badass runner you were meant to be. This is The Running Mind podcast.

Hey there, and welcome to The Running Mind podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. I’m your host and the life coach for runners. And today, I’m going to be talking about a cool little brain hack that you can do. I’m going to teach you this today. It’s all about making decisions ahead of time. It’s a simple technique. It’s not always easy to do. It’s not easy to do at first, but it gets easier. We’ll talk all about that in just a minute.

But when you commit to doing this, you kind of trick your brain, okay? You can, it’s a cool way to build confidence, confidence in yourself, build trust in yourself, create momentum towards your goals, keep you motivated, get more done. All of that in just a minute.

First, let me ask you a question. Have you tried using running as a way to lose weight? And has this ever worked for you? My guess is probably not. Because I’ve tried this. I’ve tried this for years, and it has never worked. And I know why now. But running was not working.

I was running many, many miles to try to lose weight and I wasn’t getting any results. I tried all these different diet plans. I tried using sheer willpower. I tried restricting calories, none of this stuff worked. So I did tons of research. And I finally found the answer. It turns out that I had an unnatural over desire for food, and no amount of running was ever going to fix that.

I also learned that this wasn’t entirely my fault. My over desire, this unnatural over desire was caused by things like the way our food is made the way it’s marketed to us. And mostly by the way that I had trained myself to think and feel about food. So I was an over eater, okay, I was over eating. But the overeating was just a symptom.

The real problem was an underlying physical, mental and emotional relationship with food. And when I figured out those three things, when I figured out how to fix those three things, I was able to lose the weight easily. And I’ve been able to keep it off. So I’ve dropped 23 pounds in the last couple of months here. I’m actually back to the weight I was at when I was training for Ironman back in 2013.

And back then I was working out like over 20 hours a week. And today I’m barely working out at all, seriously, I’m running a couple of times a week, I go for a walk every now and then. But I’m not doing that kind of training. And I’m back to that weight. And then one of my weight loss clients just checked in with me this morning.

And he said he’s lost 29 pounds since he started working with me just six weeks ago. He says he feels great. He has tons of energy. He no longer suffers from those crazy food cravings and doesn’t have those uncontrollable urges anymore. And he says that for the first time in his life, he feels completely in control of his weight. He even said that he doesn’t have any pants that fit him and so he’s got to go buy all new clothes, which is not a bad problem to have.

But if you want to learn how to do this, if you want to learn how to change your physical, mental and emotional relationship with food, I’ve created a brand new training program. It’s free, and it’s called How to Become a Lean Running Machine and you can get it right now just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/lean to get the free training.

You’re going to learn why running more and eating less does not work to lose weight, and you’ll learn what to do instead, you’ll discover why we store fat on our bodies and how to train ourselves to burn more of it. You’re going to learn how to reprogram your mind so you stop craving food that does not serve you and you’re going to understand how to break those emotional eating habits.

Now I explain the science behind all this. I provide solutions to help you recalibrate your body to manage your mind to control your emotions. Just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/lean. And you’ll discover the secrets to becoming a lean running machine. And spoiler alert, it’s not about counting calories, and you don’t have to run 20 miles a day. Okay, just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/lean and learn how you too can become a lean running machine. Cool.

So today we’re talking about making decisions ahead of time. This is a cool, cool brain hack. I’m really excited about talking about this today. So before we get into the content here, the actual solution, what we’re going to do, I need to explain a couple of things to you, I need to talk to you about how your brain works.

Now, we have kind of two brains, we have a primitive brain, and we have a modern brain, we have this primitive area of our brain called our amygdala. And this is often called the fear center of our brain. Now, the amygdala is like, responsible for our fight or flight response. Okay, this is like an old part of our brain that was used, you know, created eons ago, okay, so, a lot of times people call this our reptilian brain, or I like to call it our lizard brain, okay?

But this part of our brain is responsible for the fight or flight for those primal urges that we have for just survival. It’s always wanting to avoid pain and seek pleasure. Okay, so this is all of our like primitive urges, this part of our brain, the amygdala is responsible for all that, okay. We also have an evolved brain, and this is called our prefrontal cortex.

And the prefrontal cortex is, is more modern, it’s one of the newest parts of our brain. This is the part of our brain that controls cognitive behavior. It controls planning, it’s responsible for decision making. Okay? So just so you understand the difference between the two, we have our, our lizard brain, that’s the fight or flight, the fear center, the primitive urges, and then we have the prefrontal cortex. This is our modern evolved brain responsible for cognitive behavior, and decision making, okay.

So when it comes to making decisions, clearly, we don’t want to be using our amygdala. We don’t want to be using our lizard brain to make our decisions for us, okay, but too many of us do that. We do this all the time, we’ve trained ourselves to just give in to those primal urges, at all costs, okay? This is not good for us, okay.

So when it comes to reaching a goal, succeeding in anything that you want, like, if you want to succeed in running, let’s say you want to run a marathon, or let’s say you want to lose 50 pounds, either of those things, is just a series of decisions that you make along the way. Okay, Tony Robbins actually has this quote, and I love this quote, he says, “It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.”

So do you want to leave your destiny up to your primitive brain? Probably not. We want our destiny to be shaped by our prefrontal cortex by our thinking, cognitive decision making brain, okay. So what happens though, is we don’t do that, we have learned over our whole lives really to just give in to these primal urges to just be the lizard brain, okay?

But what happens when we do this is we make a decision, and then when the time comes to actually act on that decision, we give in to the feelings we’re having in that moment, okay. We don’t do what we say we’re going to do. So we may, we may plan on running tomorrow. But then tomorrow comes and we wake up in the morning, and we had it on our schedule to run five miles at 6am.

And then at six o’clock, your alarm, you know, or 5:30, your alarm goes off, and you’re like, I don’t feel like it. And so you just hit snooze, and snooze, and snooze, and you get up at like 7:30 or whatever. You just don’t feel like running. So you’re giving in to that primitive urge of like, oh, this is uncomfortable. I don’t really feel like doing this right now. So you don’t do it.

Or maybe you plan on eating healthy food tomorrow, okay, and then tomorrow comes and then you know, you’re at the company in the break room, and somebody has some cupcakes sitting there and you’re like, ah, screw it, I’m just going to eat five cupcakes, whatever, who cares? You know, like you’re just giving in to those primitive urges.

You know, you have this desire, this craving and you just give into it. That’s letting the primitive brain that’s letting your lizard brain run the show. Okay, you’re when you do this though, and we do this with everything in our lives. That’s crazy. When you do this, you’re putting your lizard brain in charge of your goals and your dreams. That’s crazy.

But I see this all the time. Runners, they don’t run. People who say they want to lose weight, and they just eat whatever the hell they feel like. And what do you get when you do that, when you continue to give in to these urges? You get nothing, you don’t get the results you actually want. You don’t get anything done, you don’t create the momentum you need. You don’t feel motivated, you feel stuck.

So you end up just giving up on your goals and your dreams, and leaving your lizard brain in charge of your life. And this, when you do this, it’s like a dream killer. Okay? Well, that sounds terrible, but it’s true. Okay, so instead, you want to put your prefrontal cortex in charge of your decision making, you want your modern evolved brain running the show, okay? You want that planning, thinking, and cognitive brain to be making decisions and following through on those for you.

This part of your brain is far superior at setting goals and accomplishing things, okay? You’ve got to train yourself, though, to use this part of your brain, it’s really easy to just use your primitive, primal fight or flight, you know, fear center, like just just get into that that’s easy to do. It’s not easy to use your prefrontal cortex to plan ahead, to write out your training plan to plan what you’re going to eat, and then actually do those things.

Follow through with those things. But you want to use your prefrontal cortex, you want to use it to make decisions and keep those promises that you make to yourself. Okay. So how do you do this? Well, step one is to plan ahead. So get the steps that you need, figure out what your training plan is, figure out what you’re going to eat, okay, and then put that stuff on your calendar.

Alright, so plan ahead, plan your runs for the whole week, plan on what you’re going to eat for the week. And I tell my clients always plan at least 24 hours in advance, this is key. You know, if you make plans for an hour from now, you’re already into that lizard brain thinking because you’re already like responding to how you feel in the moment, okay, and you, you cannot do that, you have to plan ahead of time, okay? It’s so easy to just give into the urges in the moment. Okay. So number one is to plan ahead, always, always, always plan ahead.

And then number two, there’s only two steps to this, by the way. Number two is to follow through, do what you say you’re going to do. If you put a training run on your calendar for tomorrow morning at six o’clock, do your training run tomorrow morning at six o’clock, when the time comes tomorrow to eat a healthy meal, eat what you said you’re going to eat, don’t deviate from that, okay?

Don’t deviate from your pre-planned schedule, or your pre-planned eating plan or whatever it is. So when you do this, you start to train yourself, you start to train your brain to use more of the evolved brain and you start to quiet the lizard brain. You stop giving in to the primal urges, like I don’t feel like it. And you start building momentum towards your goals.

So you plan ahead, and you follow through, you plan ahead and you follow through it, you plan ahead and you follow through this is how you get stuff done. This is how you build momentum and trust in yourself. This is how you build motivation. Your motivation is a feeling. That feeling is created by thoughts. You know, so what do you want to think? What do you want to do so that you feel motivated? Motivation doesn’t come from outside of you. It’s a state of mind.

So here’s an example from my weight loss clients. Okay, this is what I tell them to do. And this is how we apply this when it comes to losing weight. So I make them well, I encourage them and make anybody do anything. But I encourage them to plan all of their food for at least 24 hours in advance. Okay plan, I recommend writing out a two week eating food plan which we call a protocol. So write out a two week protocol. This is what I’m going to eat every day. Okay?

But at least 24 hours in advance you plan what you’re going to eat and then you only eat what you said you’re going to eat okay, you don’t deviate from that ever. So you choose foods that are going to fuel your body in advance and then you only eat what you said you’re going to eat. You do not deviate ever, okay?

You don’t give in to those primitive urges, or the cravings, and I teach my clients, I’ve got some awesome tools and strategies that they can use for how to deal with the cravings and urges when they come up because they do come up. But I teach them to honor their protocol no matter what.

And this is hard to do at first, because it’s uncomfortable. Our primitive brain is saying, like, I don’t want to be uncomfortable here. You know, I’m all about avoiding pain, and seeking pleasure. And this feels kind of painful to me, it’s not pleasurable. But I gotta tell you something, that uncomfortable feeling, it goes away, and it goes away pretty quickly, when you stick to this, you know, might be a few days, it might be a couple of weeks, but it goes away.

And then what happens is, my clients, they begin to lose weight, they begin to feel good about themselves, they start to build trust in themselves, they know that they can then go to a party, and they don’t eat the cupcakes that are there, not because they’re like white knuckling it and starving themselves and forcing themselves not to and using sheer where willpower is because they’ve built up some mental toughness, they’ve built the confidence that they need, and they just no longer have those cravings and those urges, okay, they begin creating these new mental habits.

They’ve hacked their brain, they’re creating new neural pathways, they’ve been creating new behavior patterns. So they’re no longer a slave to the lizard brain, their prefrontal cortex is now running the show. And it’s a lot easier for them to just stick to their plan. And they keep making steady progress, they get to their goal weight, and they end up having to buy all new clothes, which is a good problem to have, right.

But they’ve built so much trust and confidence in themselves that, you know, when it comes to just maintaining that weight, it’s a piece of cake. Pardon the expression, it’s easy for them. It’s a cupcake. And it takes practice, I gotta tell you, it’s not easy.

At first, it will be uncomfortable, but that’s okay, because you can handle a little discomfort. You know, your lizard brain is always trying to avoid pain and seek pleasure, it does not want you to be uncomfortable at all, you know, your lizard brain is gonna say just eat the Ben and Jerry’s, you know, or you don’t really need to run today, it’s fine, you’ll be fine.

But you cannot listen to that lizard brain, okay? Except the fact that there will be a little discomfort when you are, you know, going for some big goal that you want, except that you will be uncomfortable. That is part of the process. But do what you said you’re going to do no matter what. And do this over and over again. Plan ahead and follow through, plan ahead and follow through. Keep the promises you make to yourself. And it gets easier. And the more you do it, the easier it gets. And the more you do it, the easier it gets.

And you build mental toughness, you build confidence in yourself, you build trust in yourself. You said you were going to run and you did. You said you are only going to eat what you put on your food plan and you did, you stuck to it. You didn’t give into the urges eating give into the primal cravings. This builds a huge amount of trust in yourself. It builds a huge amount of trust in your ability to accomplish things that are important to us.

One of the problems is we get stuck in this moment of, you know, giving into an urge to eat the ice cream, even though we know we shouldn’t. And we know we’re not going to lose weight if we eat the ice cream, but we do it anyway. And what we’re doing here is we’re making the ice cream more important than our long term health and our weight loss goal.

We’re trading a tiny bit of immediate gratification for getting to our goal weight for feeling good about ourselves. You know, we trade away our long term health and happiness for some tiny bit of short term pleasure. So when you plan ahead and follow through you build trust and confidence in yourself and there’s really there’s nothing you can do. There’s nothing you won’t try.

You know you train your brain so you don’t make decisions on the fly that you make all of your important decisions ahead of time when you stick to them. This is a cool little brain hack. I’m telling you it works. You create new neural pathways and you create new brain patterns, right these are like new mental habits. And then you create these new patterns of behavior that become easier and easier over time.

So you’ll know you’ll have this confidence and confidence in yourself that no matter what you will stick to your training plan. And when you know that, when you know that no matter what you’re going to stick to your trading plan, how do you think you’re going to do in that marathon? Probably pretty damn awesome.

When you know, no matter what you’re only eating what’s on your food plan, how much easier do you think it’s going to be for you to lose weight, probably a lot easier. This is a simple little brain hack. But it’s so incredibly powerful. Most people have no idea how to do this. Most people just listen to their primitive brain, they just let the lizard brain run the show.

They let the lizard brain make all of their decisions, they just give in to all the primal urges no matter what. And most people never make any progress toward their goals because of this. And they always feel like they’re stuck. And they are stuck in this loop of like, avoid pain, seek pleasure, avoid pain, seek pleasure, and they’re not willing to get even a little bit uncomfortable. And so they don’t get anywhere. And their life sucks and they can’t figure out why.

Instead, learn how to use your evolved thinking brain practice using your prefrontal cortex. Put your modern thinking brain in charge of all of your important decisions, plan ahead, follow through, plan ahead, follow through, just keep doing that. And I promise you, you’re going to be a mental badass, there’s nothing you won’t be able to accomplish seriously. Alright, that’s all I got for you today.

Next week, I got something cool that I’m doing for you. Starting next week, I’ve got the first in a three part series that I’m doing all about why runners gain weight, and what you can do to lose the weight and how to become a lean running machine. I’m gonna be talking about that over the next couple of weeks. I’m excited about sharing that stuff with you guys. I’m really passionate about this.

I’ve had amazing results in my weight loss journey over the years, and most recently, some some sharing this with other people. They’re starting to get amazing results. And I want to share this with you guys. So that’s all I got. Listen, I got lots and lots of love for each and every one of you, my friends, always. I’ll talk to you soon.

If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles or starving yourself and you’ve had zero results, you are not alone. This model of weight loss is broken. It’s never worked, and it has to be replaced. That’s why I created a powerful new training just for you called How to Become a Lean Running Machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss and you’ll learn the three secrets to losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to runningleanpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become a lean running machine.