A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to fly away for a long weekend on a day’s notice (e.g. booking a cheap flight on Thursday to leave Friday morning). My immediate reaction was “I can’t do that! I have all these things I have to do! That’s crazy! It’s irresponsible!” So I decided not to do it. But I mentioned it to a friend, who exhorted me to change my mind; he said “What will you remember in a year? The time you stayed home to work, or the time you flew away for a last-minute vacation?” That reminded me of the old adage that we don’t regret the things we do, we regret the things we didn’t do. <\/p>\n
So I made a list of the reasons I “couldn’t” go on this weekend trip, and started addressing them one by one on that Thursday. I moved a couple meetings, I worked late that night to finish up a work project, I set up my computer so I could work on my coaching homework on the plane, etc. After doing all of those tasks, I booked the plane ticket at midnight to fly out 12 hours later, and had an awesome weekend getaway. <\/p>\n
This experience reminded me that we see what we expect to see. When I had decided I couldn’t go on this trip, my brain generated all the reasons why it was impossible for me to go, and it was irresponsible to even consider it. Once I decided I would go, then it was immediately clear what I needed to get done to make that happen, and I executed on those next steps. The only thing that changed was my perspective, but flipping from “no” to “yes” changed everything. <\/p>\n
I’ve had this experience before multiple times, so I should have learned it by now. In June of 2012, I had no plans for the week of July 4th, and decided on a whim to do my first bike tour, a six day trip down the coast to Santa Barbara<\/a>. I had been saying I wanted to do a bike tour since buying my beloved Surly Long Haul Trucker<\/a>a year earlier, and yet I never made it happen. Once I decided to do it, I figured out the equipment I needed, bought that equipment, and even did a test camping trip on my bike that weekend before heading out on my tour. I had a similar experience with my trip to India<\/a>; I had never traveled alone internationally, and yet once I decided to go, I somehow figured out everything I needed for a 3-week trip to India in a couple weeks. <\/p>\n The key step in each experience was not figuring out the details of what to do, but just deciding to go. Once I decided to go, the next steps of what I needed to do to enable that decision became clear. But until the decision, my brain came up with all of the reasons why I couldn’t go, why it would be too hard, why it would be a bad or dangerous idea, etc. <\/p>\n In other words, my brain generates reasons to keep things as they are today (the nerd term for this is homeostasis<\/a>, a system’s resistance to change to preserve a stable equilibrium). This is particularly insidious because the brain filters everything that we see<\/a>, such that we tend to see only things that support what we already believe. Changing what we see requires changing what we believe; hence, the advice in the title of this post, Flip your Default. <\/p>\n