Internal choices are weaker than those dictated by the outside world

One of the things that is required of me as a part of the Z-Health executive team is that we all have coaches to hold us accountable in various parts of our lives. We just started this program this year, and it’s shaping up to be pretty powerful.

I have the same commitment with my teen mentoring program. We have to set two goals each academic semester, and then do weekly check-ins to ensure we are making progress towards those goals — and we have people to hold us accountable if we are not.

Right now, I’m in the midst of a book for the upcoming Z-Health 9S Sustenance & Spirit course that talks a lot about the neurology of decision-making, which talks about this same thing as well.

So, when I ran across the following study, I was intrigued.

Internal choices are weaker than those dictated by the outside world. An excerpt is below, or follow the link previous to read the entire abstract.

“Our study has two implications for our understanding of human volition. First, our brains contain a mechanism to go back and change our mind about our choices, after a choice is made but before the action itself. Our internal decisions are not set in stone, but can be re-evaluated right up to the last moment. Second, changing an internal choice in this way seems to be easier than changing a choice guided by external instructions.

“We often think about our own internal decisions as having the strength of conviction, but our results suggest that the brain is smart enough to make us flexible about what we want. The ability to flexibly adjust our decisions about what we do in the current situation is a major component of intelligence, and has a clear survival value.”

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