What do you have to do today? Maybe a long detailed report, whole stack of meetings, make dinner, do laundry, somehow squeeze in a workout. Ah, I hear you. Between work, family, friendships, and looking after our health, there's a lot that we feel like we have to do. But therein lies the problem thinking about what we have to do make something
automatically feel like a burden. Your self talk is really powerful, but thankfully it works both ways, and today we're going to find a simple hack to improve your self talk. My name is doctor Amantha Imba. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium. And this is How I Work, a show about how to help
you do your best work. For the month of October, every episode of How I Work is going to be themed around well being at work, because goodness knows we need it. So let's get to today's tip around improving your well being. If you're a morning exerciser like me, you probably had many mornings where you've literally had to drag yourself out of bed, reluctantly, put on your gym gear and force yourself out the door to go for a run. For me. I exercise five mornings a week.
It's become quite habitual, actually, but I definitely have days where it's the last thing I want to do. My brain tells me it would be so much more enjoyable to just lie in bed just a little bit longer and have a warm shower on a cold morning instead of lift weights in my freezing cold garage. But I say to myself, I have to exercise, and begrudgingly I go and do it. But could that be a better way of talking to myself, A method that actually makes me want to go and exercise rather than have it
feel like a chore. Well, it turns out there is now. While competing in one hundred k Ultra Marathon in twenty eleven, Turia Pitt was caught in a gas fire and suffered full thickness burns to sixty five percent of her body.
But surviving that is the least of her achievements. Turia has gone on to become best selling author, a two time iron Man, and a humanitarian, and in twenty seventeen she gave birth to her first son, hack of I that after becoming a mum, Turia told me when I had her on how I work that she became really aware of her own self talk around feeling like she had to do certain things. She would think to herself, I have to go and clean his room, or I have to prepare his food, or I have to wash
his clothes. And when you tell yourself that you have to do things, it's really easy to start resenting them and for them to feel like an obligation and something that you don't actually want to do. So after becoming aware of the impact her language was having, Turia made a simple change. She started saying I get to so she would say, I get to pick up hack of eye, I get to play with hack of eye, I get to be around it. I get to watch him as
he grows up. And for Turia, just changing her language really reminded her that it was an opportunity, like it was a choice, and it was something that she got to be really grateful for now. Interestingly, Touria also started to use this strategy in her professional life. So as part of her work, she delivers a lot of keynote presentations, and she often gets really nervous beforehand and just stuck
in her own head. She worries that she won't articulate herself clearly, or that people will think she's an idiot. So what she does is she really has to stop and remind herself before the speech that it's not that she has to do a speech, but that she gets to do a speech, and she sees that that's a pretty awesome opportunity that a room full of people potentially want to listen to her and what she has to say.
So the effectiveness of the get to strategy lies in the fact that it reframes the activity from being mature to a gift. It taps into intrinsic motivation instead of extrinsic. Specifically, when we feel like we have to do something, it's like an external force is telling us to do the activity. We don't have a choice. But when we get to do something, it reframes the activity into one where we have control and choiceover we're choosing to exercise, for example.
It makes our choice feel like it's in line with our own values and wishes. So maybe your challenge for this week is to put this strategy into action. So think about a behavior that you know is good for you, but that you've got some negative self talk around. Maybe it's a healthy habit that you're trying to form, such as eating more vegetables or sticking to an exercise regime.
Or maybe it's about a work task that you've been avoiding or procrastinating over because chances are you're telling yourself that you have to do it, so deliberately rephrase your self talk into using language I get to do this task, and consider how doing the task aligns with what matters to you, such as being healthy or doing a great
job at work. If you enjoyed today's show, you know someone that you think might benefit from this little strategy for the well being at work, maybe share the episode with them. And if you're looking for more tips to improve the way that you work, I write a short fortnightly newsletter that contains three all things that I have discovered that helped me work better, which range from interesting research findings through the gadgets that I'm loving. You can
sign up for that at Howiwork dot co. Howiwork dot co and there's also a link in the show notes. How I Work is produced by Inventium with production support from Dead Set Studios, and thank you to Martin Nimba who does the audio mix and makes everything sound awesome, See you next time.