Top of the mornin’ to ya, this is [email protected] and I was looking for a place to shoot my video this morning and I looked out in the park behind our house and I saw this tree just flowering up and celebrating spring with glory and flowers and leaves. Spring’s an exciting time. A lot of us come into new goals and new habits and new patterns that we want to achieve and one of the tools we can use to do that is rewards. Rewards are quite helpful for us. But they can be detrimental as well. Some rewards can be good and some can be bad.

As I was reflecting on how to present this, I was thinking of lagging and leading indicators in business. A lagging indicator is the money, the customer, the profit. The leading indicator is the sales calls, the communication, the relationship building, and all the things that are way, way before we make the sale. They lead to that sale. They’re harder to measure and scope out, but they actually give us the results that we’re looking for. And I created some terms for rewards. There’s a planned rewards and reflective rewards. Planned Rewards are like the leading indicators. Um, when I get something done way over here, planned it, I said, when I do this, when I achieve this over from him from this point I moved to now and achieve it, I get this reward, the glory in that is the reward can be appropriate and it can be something that’s going to motivate you and drive you to getting it done. So a planned reward, for say eating as the example I’ll use is when I get to there, I can buy a new gym bag or when I achieve for what, four weeks of this eating under 2,000 calories or under 1,500 calories, I get a new whatever it is.

One of the things that happens with rewards sometimes is when I get three weeks of good eating, I can’t eat like poo for a week. No, that’s a bad reward for an eating habit. And the other kinds of battery rewards or the reflective rewards, those are the ones that weren’t planned out. They’re like–they lack–they’re impulsive, they lack that plan, reward situation, and a reflective reward is, “Oh, I made it through Easter and I ate good all day.” And then the next three days, you eat all the candy from Easter as a reward because, oh, I made it through. I did that. I achieved that thing. One, the achievements are smaller. We allow ourselves to give reflective rewards and they’re usually inappropriate. It’s like I did this and I’m gonna reward myself with the counter case. Eating well is my, I did it for that day, that hard day, that holiday, that Christmas, that Thanksgiving, I did well. I eat small portions and I had a good time and I enjoyed the company. So now I can eat badly for the next few days. So planned rewards often support or are in another category of our life that helps support what we’re doing without breaking down what our goal was, what our achievement was, and they can also be scaled up so that we’re asking more of ourselves to earn those rewards.

This is a challenging subject in today’s society. The day of the marshmallow test is passed and we’ve all learned from it, but we’re still a society of immediate gratification. And if we can use planned rewards and maintain those planned rewards to form new habits, our life is going to become easier and better. Top of the mornin’ to ya this is Brian.

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