David Goggins’ Cookie Jar: Setting Yourself for Success

The new year can be pretty intimidating: your expectations of yourself, the expectations of others, the expectations of the people that are close to you and that of those that are online.

And it can get overwhelming when you realise the scale of the battle you will undertake.

Thus, I came across this mindset technique by David Goggins in his book, ‘Can’t Hurt Me’. It is called the cookie jar.

He explains that when he is going through a particularly tough activity, such as a 100-mile run, he taps into what he calls the cookie jar.

An intense physical exercise can cause tremendous harm to your body. Your body can break from the pain that you put yourself through, such as bloodied and blistered feet, swollen ankles, sore muscles and even more.

At that point, giving up seems like the only option, but what can you do if you cannot accept the thought of failure? What can you do to push yourself beyond your mental limits?

The cookie jar adopts the idea of setting yourself up for success by reminding yourself of your past accomplishments to get motivated to overcome the adversity that you are facing.

In relishing, you have gone through immense difficulty getting yourself to where you want to be.

For example, Goggins went through Hell Week in Seals training three times! He reminds himself of that to push through the 100-mile run without training. He gets motivated by remembering that he had been through hell and back.

Thus, he suggests keeping a list of your past accomplishments, remembering how hard it was to achieve those accomplishments and using it as a weapon to push beyond your mental limits.

The question that you should be asking yourself is: what are the things that you can put in that cookie jar? Things that remind you of how strong and capable you are?