NORTHERN PLANNER

Before Roger Bannister broke the four minute mile it was considered near impossible, but hen athlete after athlete began to break it.

Now its considered routine in elite athletics. Turns out the milestone was in everyone's head. 

In a TV series about Bannister, the actor playing him was an okay runner, when he copied Bannister's running style for filming, he was consistently faster.

He was better when he pretended to be someone else. Put another way, he conned his brain into breaking the limits he set on himself. 

Physical barriers are one thing, the greatest hurdle to leap over tends to be the one in your head.
If you tell yourself you can't do it, you'll almost certainly be right.

But what if you changed the narrative?

You are not a fixed thing, you can hack yourself in all sorts of ways. Good and bad. 

Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer did a study on hotel cleaners. They did a healthy chunk of physical exercise every day in their job, but most didn't see their daily grind as working out, they saw it as work.

Amazingly, they all exceeded the daily recommendations for physical exercise, but their bodies didn't seem to benefit from the activity. Body fat, BMI, waist to fat ratios, they were more in line with the amount of exercise these women believed they did, rather than the actual activity. 

Exercise wasn't enough, the mind had to know they were working out. 

They were then divided into two groups. The first shown the calories their daily activity burned, the second were given no information at all. 

In just a month, the group with the information saw body fat, BMI etc, all reduced. The second group stayed exactly same.

The only difference was one group realised they were exercising and the other didn't. Exercising is not enough, you need to believe you are. 

In other words, if you can convince the mind, the body will follow.

If you believe you are exercising, your body will respond. Just as if you believe you're taking a pain killer, you feel less pain even if all you took was a sugar pill.

The implications are far reaching. You can make yourself creative, confident, diligent, who knows, I may convince myself not to be shy one day.

None of us are not fixed, we're not complete, we're not stuck. We just believe we are.

We all have our four minute mile barriers that only exist in our heads.

Many us may be already doing amazing things, we're just not able to see it that way. Just as the cleaners couldn't see their job as a daily workout. 

The mind can be trained, it can be fooled. The trick is to turn it into your friend instead of your foe.

That's quite a liberating thought isn't it?