A Formula For Pushing Harder

I just discovered something that I always knew to be true but I didn’t have the words, or psychology to explain it.

Throughout my life, I’ve always been able to set intermediate goals to help me push me through hard, long or difficult tasks. Getting through an 8 hour drive by playing a game to just make it another 45 minutes… Doing 2000 burpees in a day by focusing on just 500 at a time… Chunking down a big project to redesign my website into daily steps.

These big deeds got done by mentally reframing them into more doable amounts, and only recently I heard Former Navy SEAL Rich Diviney talk about his formula for how this works. When there’s a difficult, uncertain task that you need to push yourself to get through, you need 3 elements: Duration, Pathway, and Outcome.

Duration is picking a point in time that isn’t an endless horizon, but something concrete and digestible. Instead of feeling overwhelmed by the impossibility of a task, you mentally reframe it to the next milestone. Psychologically this works because when you hit it, then you get rewarded by the achievement and get infused with more motivation that will help you attack the next milestone.

Pathway is about the action plan. It’s clearly defining what needs to happen within the constraints you’ve outlined, and how you’ll go about making progress toward. There needs to be a belief that what you’re doing will work in getting you to the milestone.

And last is Outcome. You can’t completely trick yourself out of the larger task at hand, in the back of your mind you know that there’s more to come after the immediate milestone. That’s why you need to believe that the overall mission is meaningful. That the outcome you’re pursuing is worthwhile, and that you believe in the overall result you’re set to achieve.

After learning this framework I put it to the test, and it worked. I got on the treadmill and wanted to run on it fast for 15 minutes. The original plan was to run the first half fast and then drop the pace down a touch to ride it out. Once I got halfway, I figured I’d stretch the fast pace a little more to 10 mins. Then when I got to 10 mins, instead of slowing the pace I chose to speed it up for the next 5 minutes to push myself. And even further, in the last minute I sped it up even more to finish strong!

I don’t know that I could have committed to the workout I just described... It was way faster than I thought possible, and the only way I achieved that was by setting intermediate milestones on the path to something greater. 

This is a framework you can apply to anything that feels hard to do. Reframe to an intermediate duration, align your pathway to achieve it, and connect it to the larger outcome. Step by step, you’ll go further than you knew you were capable of!