Bending the World to You

I was just chatting with a former client, Bobby, and I asked him how he was doing and he said,

Phil, I am bending the world to me.

I loved hearing this and I even got a little verklempt. 

The first time Bobby and I ever talked he said,

I don’t want to settle for scraps anymore.

It was serendipitous too, because I’d been thinking about agency and how we shift from passive, where the world happens to us, to active, where we make the world happen.

About how we take the helm of our own vessel after we’ve been adrift for years.

The Chasm Between Knowing and Doing

There is a chasm between knowing and doing that spans wider than the Grand Canyon.

Sometimes, people know exactly what they want to do and even have some idea how to do it yet somehow they still remain stuck. As a result, even the best health and fitness advice can wind up wasted.

The tenets of personal health are simple and plenty of knowledgeable people have spent years communicating them clearly to the public.

I can summarize in 17 words:

Eat real foods. Move your body. Rest. Stay close to your people & have a little fun.

Frequently though, the how-to is not the problem.

So what’s the deal with this chasm between knowing and doing and how do we cross it and really make it stick?

Bandura and Human Agency

Albert Bandura, the father of social cognitive theory, described human agency as, 

Our ability to steer the course of our lives by our actions.

I can not stress how important this is.

We are either active or passive participants on this brief journey.

We are the captain, taking the helm of our own vessel, or we are passengers, acquiescing to the untamed seas that steer us by whim.

And sometimes we might even take the helm in one area of our lives while drifting with the current in others. 

So how do we differentiate between those who drift and those who take action?

Bandura found that what we believe about ourselves plays a critical role in human agency, especially whether we believe we can successfully attain the goal at hand or not. 

If we believe we can accomplish something, we will be more likely to act. If we doubt we can accomplish something, we will be less likely to act.

He called this self-efficacy. 

Cultivating Agency

So how do we raise self-efficacy and cultivate agency? 

How do we learn, not in this intellectual way where we understand but remain paralyzed, but in this deep experiential way where we take sustained action?!

Over the past few months, I’ve been running a 36 hour fast with a few clients every other week and a few weeks ago I invited a wider group to join in. In the next few weeks, I will write about this in more detail here on Prime Cuts for those who might be interested.

The work with clients comes after a series of smaller steps which builds the capacity to fast for 36 hours and the self-efficacy related to those smaller steps. 

These steps include fasting for shorter periods of time (intermittent fasting) and lowering carbohydrate consumption which improves our ability to burn fat for energy.

One participant messaged me, 

I found this fast to be more mental than physical.

Fasting can have incredible physiological benefits including cellular healing, weight loss, decreased disease risk, etc. but that’s a post for another day.

For this post I am much more interested in how fasting can affect what we believe about ourselves.

We fast for 36 hours one time and here are two things we might learn:

1. I can be hungry and live with it.

2. I have more control over when I eat than I realized.

That is increasing self-efficacy right there! 

I possess self-determination and I have considerable control over the outcome.

And then guess what happens? 

The second time people do this 36 hour fast, it gets a little easier, and the third time, it’s no big deal.

We are internalizing control. We are taking the helm!

If we do the thing we’re trying to do even once, it can begin to change how we perceive our capacity.

If we do it again, it positively reinforces these new self-perceptions.

Crossing the Chasm Between Knowing and Doing

Reading this over, I notice that I made it all sound so simple. Well, that’s a bug, not a feature, and I apologize, because I have no idea how any of this works.

I do know that there is an amalgam of processes occurring here which include cognition, behavior, emotions, core self-beliefs, past experiences, personality, social perception, the environment, and more.

How these all fit together is a personal dynamic, n = 1.

But I do know there is something powerful going on here and an important shift in what we believe about ourselves and what we believe we can do.

And I also know that we can internalize control and cultivate agency in a graded fashion for all kinds of health and fitness endeavors. I did it myself and I have helped others do it.

Maybe we want to run a 5k. We can start with walking a mile, and then walking that mile with a few 100 meter jogs interspersed, and then we can jog the whole mile, and then we jog further etc.

We can even generalize beyond health and fitness.

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I am the founder of Pearl Institute. I have recently updated my services menu and have added a Workshop called Crushing ‘24 and Beyond. You can check it all out here.