lesson 2 Mini Willpower course

So what I want to teach you about today is cat. That's why I went out in the last video cat stands for counter ambush training. So cats is a system that I developed myself after studying about willpower, I developed this system in order to be able to respond to a situation where you are really hijacked, it's almost like you're ambushed by something that you're trying to resist. So you know, here's a classic example, you're on a diet, there is some type of food that you want to give up something you want to resist eating, and you are confronted with that thing, that chocolate declare that piece of cake, those bars of chocolate. Now, when you are confronted by in fact, by

anything, anything that offers you the promise of reward, it could be some tempting vision of the opposite sex. It could be social media, by the way, you could put spend hours and hours browsing the internet, going on social media, wasting your time, procrastinating, just not getting things done. All of these things in different ways. If you think about it, they all promise, some reward, maybe the reward of ease, comfort, relaxation, maybe it's the reward of some physical reward, some beautiful tasty dish, or something that is going to meet your, your, your physical needs in some other way. What are your emotional needs all of these things, that it's a promise of reward,

actually, what's very important is just because there's a promise of reward, it doesn't actually mean that when you get it, it's going to make you happy. But that's a whole different subject. So what happens when you're confronted, you're ambushed, maybe even you've prepared yourself. But suddenly, there is that thing. Now what happens when when you see something or you experience something or you're in that situation, where you feel that promise of reward, there is a neurotransmitter called dopamine, and it kicks in. And dopamine actually has a really strong physical effect, it affects you physically, it's something you can identify like, your heart, your

heart rate will increase your muscles will tense. And often when you've given into temptation, you think afterwards, what was I doing, I didn't even realize I didn't even know what I was doing. I spent hours on eye, looking at those things I didn't even realize it. This is can be very, very powerful. In fact, because it's a neurotransmitter, it's a chemical that's in your brain, it actually takes over your brain. And you don't really think logically anymore. That's actually what dopamine is designed to do. It's designed to stop you thinking it's designed to stop you planning and just make you act. There are other things that kick in like your fight and flight response, that

actually makes your ability to pause and plan and think about the long term harder. Remember, willpower is all about delaying gratification in order to reach a long term goal. So dopamine fight or flight response makes it a lot harder to do that. So cat, counter ambush training is a system that allows you to deal with those urges. So cat has really a few stages. The first stage I call, it's the ABC, d of cat, the ABCD of cat. So the first stage is awareness. That is really understanding what is happening. This is a whole big topic, understanding dopamine, understanding the fight or flight response, being able to identify it, developing that self awareness within

yourself. So you know when that's happening. So that's the first thing. The B is breathe. Very simple thing but very powerful and very effective. What you need to do is when this feeling kicks in, as dopamine takes over, your heart beats up, you need to slow yourself down. And the best way to do that one of the best ways to do that actually one of the best way to go and pray two rakaat if you could, but sometimes it's just not practical. So what you need to do is breathe, you take a long, deep breath and it's a breath that goes deep into your stomach you breathe in and the ideal is in to breathe into the count of seven, and then to breathe out to the count of seven. So that's what

you want to do. And you can do that for me once or twice is enough. Try and do three breaths. So that's that's the A is awareness. The B is breathe. The C is

change, it's very important to change your state. So once you slow yourself down, you need to remove yourself from that situation, get away from that chocolate bar, get away from that computer screen, put down that phone, where all those social media things, whatever it is, that's tempting. You just get away from it give you an that's what you need to do change the state change your condition. It's like my Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam said, you know, when he advised us about when we're angry, angry actually getting angry, it's just another thing that we need to get control of, you can apply the cat strategy brilliantly, if you're getting angry, as well. So as the prophet, he told us

also to change your state, if you're angry, and you're standing up, sit down, if you're sitting down and you're angry, lie down, or go and make we do this is all changing the state. So that's the the C, and the D is delay. So what you want to do is give yourself time, you want to give yourself a timeframe, in which you can just separate from your yourself from that thing. Give yourself an amount of time, like 10 minutes, and that's it. After 10 minutes, I can get back to whatever it is I need to do. And Inshallah, if you implement that cat strategy, it will really, really help keep you away from being ambushed by those temptations. So why don't you try it out and see how it works. It

works for me, and I know it's worked for lots of other people and in Charlotte's gonna work for you too. In the next video, I'm going to be giving you the key to why you need to know more about willpower and I'm going to be sharing with you a very personal story that not many people know about.