Whats Your Gap?

Level 3: Master of the Mundane

Dear Future Guardian,

Summer is swiftly coming to an end here.

As if the world knows the change is right around the corner, it's decided that we're only going to get cloudy rainy days the rest of the month (at least, where we are) - a sneak peek into fall.

(For those who don't know the Pacific Northwest, it's just a tease, we'll probably get another heatwave in a month)

The end of the summer means different things to different people of course. For us, as we have 4 kids, it means we're already deep in preparing for (and in some cases already participating in) school and it's related activities.

That means, we're at the precipice of the fall time sluice where, if I just blink a few times, it will already be Christmas.

That time of year where we slip slide from the beach, to the rain, to the couch, through the pumpkin spice lattes, into all the various continuous holiday decorations, celebrations, and endless but blissfully consistently scheduled activities.

And perhaps thats why so many people hit New Years and think "thank goodness a new beginning! a Reset!"

But you know what.

F*#k the reset.

There is no new beginning.

There's always only ever you, you're only ever here, and it's only ever now.

And in this moment here and now, I've found myself working through Bumpers¹ again. And in doing so I saw all of the above and all of the rush and the tumble that is in front of us,

And I wanted to ask YOU ...

How are you doing?

Let's check in.

And I want to check in with one specific thing.

How are your GAPS doing?

You know.

Those gaps between what you plan (what you say you are going to do) and what you end up doing.

Let's take a moment to slow down before the plunge and ask ourselves ...

How are those gaps doing?

The Gap Struggle

I bring all this up because,

As I read through Bumpers and related materials this week, I couldn't help but consciously think through all my behavior plans and all my actual behaviors, and see just how disconnected I really am.

I doubt I'm the only one struggling with this.

It's easy to look from the outside and see other people successful and imagine that they are just doing all the perfect things, that their behavior matches their plan and all that great stuff.

But we actually can't see any of this in other people - usually all we really see is a mirror.

(And probably what other people project is more likely their plan than their actual behavior anyhow)

If I'm truthful, and I must make myself truthful here for this article to have any meaning or usefulness for you, I have many (many) little and big places in my life where there are behavior gaps.

Where what I say I'm going to do and what I actually do ... don't align.

I can find them in 3 big areas.

Sleeping.

Eating.

Doing. (The work)

Actually, if I tease it apart it starts to feel like my whole life is one big giant mess of gaps and that it's all chaos and I have no discipline.

This is not true of course.

I have just made myself conscious of the gaps (at least, some of the ones I can see and honestly acknowledge with myself). And in that conscious presence the dissonance which gaps naturally create becomes quite loud.

To work through it, I have to let go of any feeling I have - especially because the feeling tends to drive the gap larger in my experience - and look at the truth and the data as dispassionately as possible.

The truth of the coming months is that it will be a whirlwind.

It will be structured, it will be planned.

But it's going to be very full and,

Time is going to slip by.

It's the intent I put into my path right now which is going to most powerfully influence my actions and my outcomes during those periods where I'm so focused on doing all the things that I'm liable to lose conscious presence.

And yes,

I can certainly take time each day and each week to slow down and find that conscious presence with myself (qigong breath work is essential to me now) - but I also know myself well enough that if I don't address some of these key Gaps NOW, I'll find myself around Christmas still in the same place.

With all the seeming gaps at my feet now, so as to not put myself in this overwhelming state of thinking I need to solve every possible problem,

I have asked myself ...

What is the simplest, closest, easiest gap to fill that would have the greatest, most long term positive impact on everything else in my life?

It's basically "The Most Immediate Constraint" of behavior gaps.

Before we continue, a quick aside on gaps.

We're talking about something called the "intention-intervention gap." Since you can read all about it and in Bumpers, I'm just going to give a quick summary.

Principle 4: Bumpers

We all say we're going to do things. We all have a plan.

I'm going to sleep 8 hours a night. I'm going to lift weights 2 times a week. I'm going to walk every day.

And then we all have our behavior.

I actually more often sleep closer to 6 hours a night. It's been 3 months since I've lifted weights. I don't track at all how many days I go for a walk (sure isn’t every day).

That's the gap.

Between what we say we'll do, and what we actually do.

And it's important to be consciously aware of the gap, not just so that we can fix the gap and get our behavior to match our plan, but so that we can stop being delusional with ourselves about what's really going on.

It's so easy to get into this space of thinking about ourselves based on how we plan to act.

And then ignore the actual reality of how we're acting.

That's the foundation of DALA.

Put On Your DALA Glasses

Unfortunately, when your behavior and your plan don't match, it becomes really really hard to move forward intentionally with change to make the life you desire happen.

This is from Bumpers²:

"The crippling anxiety many people feel is not a byproduct of a strategy or a plan, nor are feelings of powerlessness a byproduct of our behavior alone. They are both byproducts of the dissonance created by the gap between the two."

I bet if you're honest with yourself, there are a ton of these little gaps in your everyday life.

Here's another example from my own:

I recognized a long time ago that I am much happier, in a better state, enjoying life more when I weight my leisure time toward reading books and doing things with my hands (even if it's playing a board or card game), over activities involving a screen.

That was a key discovery in my Dopamine Fast, which you can read about here:

The Real Cost Of Dopamine

And while sometimes I consciously do this, because unconscious drift allows easy dopamine to make me it's bitch, I find my books collecting dust on the shelf while my phone, the tv, and youtube get waaaaay too much of my attention.

See. A gap.

I say I'm gonna read, I watch youtube instead.

I could go on and on.

With all the gaps I have two choices.

I can either change my behavior to match my plan, or change my plan to match my behavior.

I like starting with changing the plan, because behavior is more difficult to change than the plan, AND if I don't like the plan, that motivates me to actually change my behavior and let the plan follow that change.

Example: If I say I'm gonna spend all my free time with my phone in front of my face ... saying that out loud kinda makes me a little ill. Writing about it here makes me a little ill. I think I'm far more likely to consciously change my behavior because of that.

But if I dig through everything, there are a lot of little behaviors like that.

Which brings me back to an earlier point I made ...

What's the one I could focus on now that may have the greatest impact overall?

Which brings us to the idea of the most immediate constraint.

Again, I'm not going to go into super detail on The Most Immediate Constraint as you can read/listen all about that here:

Identifying The Constraint [ 2 of 3 ]

Let me propose how it applies to the Intention-Intervention Gap.

Because one of the main reasons to focus on the most immediate constraint is that it gives you a singular step to focus on, to put your resources towards, and if accurately assessed will, when removed, return or add new resources to what's available.

In other words,

Its the easiest, closest, simplest challenge you can solve which will have an immediate positive impact on everything else.

To figure that out for myself,

I looked across my spectrum of behaviors. I didn't detail out every single one which I wanted to positively impact but I considered the spectrum, my day to day life, my interactions, and I asked myself which one behavior can positively or negatively impact the most of these at once.

For me,

That turned out to be my sleep.

Because I know personally I am just better on all accounts if I get enough sleep, and enough sleep tends to be 7.5-8 hours every night. And I know that I can get by on 6-6.5 if need be, but before too long that seems to stack up and cause cascading problems.

More difficulty with work, with health, with relationships, etc.

So,

It stands to reason that in the water hose of my daily life behavior, the most immediate constraint is my intention-intervention gap with respect to my sleep.

In fact, I think for myself it's not worth putting a huge amount of effort, focus, energy, resources in to solving any of the other gaps before I solve this one.

I could work on my nutrition, but if not getting enough consistent sleep negatively impacts nutrition then how can I really solve that?

This is all my personal experience of course - YMMV.

Every category where I have behavior gaps is positively improved by sleep - consistency/creativity/productivity is unavoidably heavily influenced by how rested I am. The weeks I bump closer to averaging 8 hours a night vs the weeks I average closer to 6 hours are wildly different in terms of the kind of sustained creative work I'm able to accomplish.

My health and fitness plan are in many ways directly and indirectly influenced by my sleep as well.

There's the obvious direct connection to sustained regulated internal biology that comes from getting enough sleep consistently. There's also the slightly indirect, as historically I tend to eat my emotions, and the less rested I am the less regulated my emotions - that turns into an unfortunate feedback loop.

Then there's the further indirect where, when I am not rested enough it takes me a lot longer to wrangle my work in place and I struggle with balancing time in the day for movement and fitness (not even to mention the energy component).

And I recognize that in all that are layers of excuses and different perspectives I could take in the whole matter.

But that's all kind of my point.

If ALL of those problems are potentially solved by just going to bed at 10 instead of midnight ...

What in the 9 hells am I ever doing stealing so much from myself with those 2 hours?

And for that matter,

If I know this, how can it all get away from me?

And if I solve this problem, will it just come back again?

That's the fun nature of life.

It's moving.

It changes.

You might have an element “solved” and then something changes and it becomes unsolved. But you may also not really consciously see the change and how the change impacts your life. You may be in denial about the impact of that change. You may think that the change is temporary and decide to put off adjusting to it.

Here's an obvious one.

Last year we had a baby. Soon he will be 2.

Through all that time there has been constant impact on my sleep. But, how that dynamic comes about has shifted, and keeps shifting. Beyond just how he directly impacts my sleep but the dynamic that having tiny growing child instills in our day to day home life means a constant shift as well.

I've been clinging to old habits and "solved" schedules because I had found something that had worked before.

But now it doesn't.

And even though I've gone through this process before ... of having to redesign "solved" schedules and behaviors ... it still sneaks up on me when it all changes again.

It's obvious in hindsight.

Of course.

Hindsight is a crystal ball.

I allowed my human mindset to let me ignore the shifting sands in favor of thinking I could just power through it all - no change is preferable to the human mindset, even in the face of change being put upon me which I cannot say no to.

The change that I consciously know is happening.

I guess that's why restraint is the key word in the champion's vocabulary.

Because the human mindset is such a rigid and powerful force it takes slowing down, stepping back, and looking with the champion's mind at the current situation to wrestle conscious awareness back into reality.

Let me bring this all back to YOU,

Because this isn't meant to be an article of "woe is me" - I just intent-fully used myself as an example so that you might feel encouraged to slow down and critically assess your own behavior gaps.

The way I see it I have two bits of advice.

The first is obvious. Slow down.

Look at your plan in everything. All your behaviors. All aspects of your life. And do your best to be critically, dispassionately honest with yourself about what you say you want to do, and what you really actually do.

Consider all those behaviors and ask yourself what is the one above all others that would be most impactful if you closed the gap - either by changing the plan or the behavior.

Now is as good a time as any to do this.

My second thought ...

I am contemplating a way of handing the change creep that happens.

That situation where I end up with a growing disconnect between plan and behavior due to changes in life I am not consciously accepting along the way.

What can we do going forward to create a perspective which can help maintain the desired behavior/plan match no matter what happens in life?

Maybe this is a sort of Bumper.

Here's how I see it for myself:

If so many of my behavior gaps can effectively be positively (or negatively) impacted by focusing on the one - sleep - then it stands to reason that going forward, in the face of change, one of the best ways I can handle that is to just notice when change is happening ...

And then consciously ask myself ...

Ok, but what about my sleep?

If I know that this one impacts so many of my other behaviors and so much of the rest of my life in such a positive way, then it stands to reason that I sacrifice almost anything else before I sacrifice sleep.

And if I find my sleep being negatively impacted by something I look at the entirety of my day and my week and make conscious choices to support that above all else.

This is all just a conscious assessment of an intention-intervention gap, how to close it, and then how to set Bumpers moving forward to maintain the closure.

What about your Gaps?

Let me know in the comments below, let's hash them out.

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Be Useful. Be Present. Love the Journey.

Joseph Robertson

, CMO The Guardian Academy

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1. Get Bumpers Free

2. Principle 4: Bumpers