Wrestling with Our Humanity to Thrive - A Behooving How-To

It’s February. It’s hard to believe that one month has passed since we began the new year, full of high hopes and big ambitions! How are your new year’s resolutions and goals going, anyways? I think we can probably all relate to the sentiment of Macklemore’s lyrics in his aptly named “Intentions” song:

I wanna be sober, but I love getting high

Wanna give it a hundred percent, but I'm too afraid to try

I wanna live by the law, but still think like a vandal

I wanna get exercise, but I'm too lazy to workout

I want all the finer things, but don't wanna go to work now

I wanna go outside, take my family to the beach

I wake up in the morning, first thing I do is look at a screen, at a screen

Wanna live freely, why isn't it so easy?

I should read a book, but I keep watching this TV

And I know this lifestyle doesn't really feed me

I just tune out to the voice inside that's speaking

The apostle Paul expressed the same struggle when he said “I want to do what is good, but I don’t. I don’t want to do what is wrong, but I do it anyway.” (Romans 7:19 NLT)

If you haven’t lived perfectly into your intentions you set this year, Macklemore, the apostle Paul, and I can relate - you’re not alone. We find ourselves in the unpleasant situation of wrestling with our humanity as we try to better ourselves, as we try to live freely, to have a lifestyle that “feeds me”, to do what is good. But it’s really freakin hard. Not much has changed in the last few thousand years - we are flawed, imperfect, broken humans, who don’t have much more willpower than Eve in the garden. By God’s grace, we’ve been provided with knowledge, mindset, and strategies that make it a whole lot more doable, and I am going to do my best to share the most helpful ones in the post below!

The path to a goal materializing is the result of slow progress towards a new, life-giving rhythm that begins to take root, grow stronger and ultimately becomes “the way we are” - a part of our true identity. The days in this year aren’t so different from the days in last year, yet this brand new baby year is brimming with opportunity, a blank canvas to be painted, a story waiting to be written, a new chance if only we choose to take it.  

I believe now - the beginning of February - is when we need the most support and encouragement in our goals. February is the days of testing. It’s easy to stick to the goal when we’re full of gusto and anticipation in January, imagining new possibilities and heck, everyone else is making new goals too! February is where the real work goes in. We are back to real life. Most other people have forgotten their goals. Cold January days find us short on motivation and energy. Here you are, with a goal you KNOW will make your life more whole and beautiful. It’s very important. Yet on this cold wintry day, you’re trudging along and it’s so much more difficult than it seemed and you’re tempted to forget about it and tell yourself it didn’t really matter, anyway. How we handle these times will make or break the goal. Usually things get harder before they get easier, and now may be that time. The pull on us for the old ways is strong and we want to surrender yet this moment is our greatest opportunity for success. In the exact moment we summon up the strength and make the right choice is the exact moment in which the old ways are broken and new habits are created. This is how the goal begins to materialize and take on substance. It will become easier and easier. Stand strong and you will be able to say “I passed the test. I stood strong in my defining moment. Here I am, victorious.” The way we handle this coming month will determine if you will be here next year regretting you never changed or here deeply grateful, satisfied, and happy with the way you’ve transformed! 

I know what it’s like to fail at goals. In the past year and a half, though, I’ve been achieving what I set out to accomplish - surprising myself more than anyone! I no longer see myself as a woman with no willpower who always lets herself down. What changed? I researched, read and learned the skills I’m sharing below. My greatest wish in writing this is your success, and that it would be a pleasant and encouraging journey along the way! I think the nicest way to do this is to take a quiet moment away from distraction in a pleasant space and journal through each prompt! Taking this moment to strengthen your goal strategy could change your life. This is real self-care - so invest time in yourself. 

The Breaking Point…Make the Choice

The greatest catalyst of change for me has been coming to the point where I was really unsatisfied with where I was at and could clearly see the full impact of my current state on my life. I saw how it was hindering me from the life I imagined for myself and became willing to do whatever it took to change. I took ownership of my life. I decided I’d rather go through the discomfort of change than stay in the greater dis-ease where I was. I acknowledged the thing as being a huge deal and connected it to what really mattered to me. Brendan Burchard calls this “raising necessity” and talks about it in his book which you can listen to for free here. I once heard a definition of the root word of “choice” that I love. It is: “cutting away all other options”. This means you are determining in your heart that achieving this goal IS the only option now. You’ve got to stop nurturing excuses and take full responsibility for yourself. This frees you up to fully put your mind to figuring out how to achieve the goal. You’re able to access the problem and then search until you find solutions. If it’s not deeply important, you won’t be motivated over the long haul.

Journal Prompt: What life do you desire for yourself? If you don’t make this change what are the negative impacts? If you make the change, what are the positive impacts? Raise necessity by allowing yourself to realize how big of a deal this is!

Life Mission:

What is your life purpose? The big existential question coming in hot in heavy here, because ultimately you want your goal to be in sync with what your life is all about. 

Journal Prompt: When you are 80, what will you wish you had spent your life doing? Could you write it in a few sentences? If so, that’s a great start to a working life mission statement. Mission statements are flexible and evolve as we grow, but having a baseline is very helpful. It should be something that captures what’s truly at the center of your heart’s desire and doesn’t need to be made to sound good to others! If your goal doesn’t fit into your life mission at all, maybe it’s time to reconsider if this is something you really want to be putting your time and energy into.

Align Your Heart and Subconscious Mind

Before committing to your goal make sure it will actually achieve what you desire. There’s nothing worse than traveling far, only to realize you’re on the wrong road. By the end of the journaling form this section, you’ll have a clear idea of how you’ll be most satisfied.  

Here’s an example. It’s easy to say, “I want to lose weight because then I will be happier”. We can’t leave it at this, because it’s not getting to the heart of the motivation. So we follow it up: what do we really mean by happier? Maybe we discover that we feel when affirmation and approval are mirrored to us from others we will feel happier because of their acceptance of love for us, so we believe we will then be able to love and accept ourselves. If love and approval are the true motivating factors, losing weight probably won’t achieve this. A better option may be to work on becoming a person who’s in love with life, who’s eyes sparkle, who’s passion is ignited, who is positive, confident, kind and genuine. Working through wounds and trauma, letting go of deep grief and breaking down walls around the heart free you to cultivate pleasant and attractive behaviors. A hurting heart produces self-protective behavior than can often be repelling. Perhaps the better goal in this scenario is to cultivate your passion, do something you love, make mental habits of gratitude, accept yourself, or get support through therapy. The crazy thing is, oftentimes these deep heart issues are the cause of weight gain and health problems in the first place, not only because cortisol makes you gain weight around the middle, but also because eating is a common coping mechanism for stress. Read “The Body Keeps Score” for more info on all this!

Maybe you instead say “the goal to lose weight is for feeling more confident.” Getting fit will likely help, but it won’t deal with the deep inner beliefs that are robbing you of confidence and were probably rooted in your heart even before you struggled with weight. There are plenty of fit people who are not confident. Maybe, at this realization, you decide to work on positive self-talk, no longer allow yourself to make self-deprecating comment, look in the mirror and find something you like about yourself, begin a habit of gratitude for your body, practice being comfortable in your own skin, journal each day about how you’d like to feel about yourself and surround yourself with people who do the same. 

Those are two examples where the goal of losing weight won’t necessarily lead to the true heart goal in the end. If the person in the example never took the time to get to the heart of the goal they would be left dissatisfied even if they did lose weight. If they discovered that the goal to lose weight was to be more healthy, strong, live longer, more energetic, more clear-headed, and have a higher quality of life, then losing weight might be the perfect goal! Aligning with your true heart desire is of utmost importance and will produce true satisfaction! Your inner voice will be able to speak to you when there is congruity in your soul and subconscious mind. If you want more on this topic, read “Find Your Why” by Simon Sinek

Journal Prompt: Be like a curious two-year-old with yourself and ask why, why, why? Each consecutive why brings you a level deeper with yourself and under the layers you’ll find your true motivation. I think the best litmus test is asking yourself, “if no one ever knew or saw I accomplished this goal, would I be completely satisfied with the results?” If you discover your goal is not aligned with your heart and subconscious mind, now is the perfect chance to revise and create something sustainable and truly satisfying!

Define Your Goal Clearly

Once you feel really good about your goal, you’ve got to very clearly define exactly what it is. If you don’t you won’t know when you’ve accomplished it! Very important. Having it clearly outlined helps you to plan better for it, too. 

Journal Prompt: Quantify your goal as much as possible. Outline exactly what it looks like to accomplish it. Get specific, and give yourself the satisfaction of knowing when you’ve reached it!

Visualization 

Once you have an aligned, clearly defined, simple, one thing, you probably have a pretty good idea of what your goal will look like. Take it a bit farther and really FEEL in your mind’s eye how it would be to accomplish it. Imagine your future self having reached it - what does it look like, sound like, taste like? Visualization is a powerful tool. It is like a rubber band hooked around you and your future goal, a force pulling you towards it. I love spending time talking with God and He is the one who gives me the visualization to move towards. The vision is usually much more brilliant, beautiful, and more true to my identity than something I could have come up with on my own, and I am delighted and challenged by these pictures. 

Visualization is very practical in that it puts your attention on where you want to be and your mind begins to subconsciously work for you, revealing new opportunities and developing new patterns. As Tony Robbins so brilliantly said, Where focus goes, energy flows! Visualization and the Law of Attraction are things that may seem crazy at first, but I’ve seen it work very well for people I know and I think there is probably more scientific reasoning behind it than it seems. 

They say that hind sight is 2020, but what if you could use your imagination to put yourself in the future, and then look back at the present with that perspective? It would change the way you saw the now so that you can use this perspective to get to the ideal future! Whew! Sounds crazy, but just try it. Try spending one or two minutes each morning in visualizing and see if you like it! “The Secret” is the OG resource for the law of attraction, but I take it with a grain of salt. Another great one is “The Power of the Subconscious Mind” by Joseph Murphy.

Journal Prompt: Imagine yourself in the future having accomplished your goal as described, and write out how it is to be there. 

Willpower to Habit

Studies have found that people have a certain allotment of willpower each day. We start out the day with our willpower tank full, and as we go through the day making decisions and doing stuff it gets used up. This is a pretty important fact considering that the primary factor in changing our behavior IS willpower. Schedule the hardest part of your goal in the morning with your more abundant willpower! The key is to use your willpower wisely until your goal becomes a habit. Once this happens you’re well on your way to success because you will perform it on autopilot. This is a wonderful way God’s grace provides for us, I think, because I doubt we would have the strength to maintain a goal for years on will power alone! Take comfort in the fact that You will eventually find yourself going through the motions of the goal without trying eventually. Until then, budget your willpower wisely!

Journal Prompt: How will you budget your willpower until you’ve created a habit?

The One Thing 

It’s easy to want to start the new years with the gusto of “new year new me” kind of energy. We have this urgency to do a total makeover of our life RIGHT NOW! However, doing it all this approach is counterproductive, if not detrimental. If you want to succeed, find the one thing that is most central in your vision for your future self. 

Gary Keller in his brilliant book “The One Thing” uses his motto “what is the one thing I can do right now, such that by doing it everything else will become easier or unnecessary?” Do the ONE most important thing, and putting all your energy focus on that until it is accomplished. Begin with the most important goal, then move to the second most important, and so on. This strategy has made Gary Keller a wealthy, skilled, and happy man. He gives the example of the domino effect (proven by super-smart math guys) that one domino, only inches high, will knock over consecutively higher dominos until it will theoretically knock over a domino the length between the earth and the moon! So, what is your one-inch domino you can start with today that will eventually have you reaching for the moon?

Journal Prompt: What is the one thing I can do right now, such that by doing it everything else will become easier or unnecessary? 

Set Yourself Up For Success - Make It Easy

Plan for success! Brendan Burchard talks a lot about micro-goals that all lead to a giant success. Micro goals don’t seem hard. They don’t even have to be doing the actual goal, but they will make you a lot more likely to achieve the goal. Don’t make a goal so lofty you won’t stick with it. For example, if your goal is working out each morning, you could say, “I have to sit in my car every morning at 6:30 am wearing my workout clothes for 5 minutes, even if I don’t go to the gym”. You would prepare for this goal by putting your clothes at the foot of the bed and putting your keys and water bottle by the door the night before. This approach feels easier than saying you will work out for an hour each morning. If you crawled back into bed after sitting in your car for 5 minutes, you’ve still accomplished the goal. However, the likelihood that you will actually drive to the gym and get a workout once you’re sitting in your car is high. Even if it’s a short workout, it will build the habit of going to the gym so that eventually you do it on autopilot. That, my friends, is the goal of the goal! 

Journal Prompt: Break down your goal into the easiest steps you can think of!

Take Inventory:

If you have tried to reach this goal before and failed, you’re in luck because you have some great data that will be helpful in your approach now. Examine why it was you didn’t follow through. What held you back? What pitfalls and roadblocks will you likely run into? 

Journal Prompt: List the reasons you could see yourself failing. Preempt failure by creating a plan for how you will respond when potential hazards come up. Practice talking yourself through temptations to stay focused on the goal. Read over this list often so that it will be in your mind when the moment of testing comes!

Plan for weakness and temptation 

If you haven’t made this goal before, anticipate how you might possibly screw yourself over. You know yourself better than anyone so think through how you might self-sabotaging so protect your future self. One thing is for sure - any goal worth doing WILL be hard unpleasant. You will probably want to try to justify and talk yourself out of it. You will probably be miserable for a little while. You’ll probably regret making it. Situations will probably come up that are a grey area…would you REALLY be breaking your resolution to do that? Deciding you change an old habit won’t automatically make old patterns, triggers and desires magically go away. We all know that. Desires and urges will come up again, often at first, probably even stronger than ever before. It behooves us to create a solid plan that will keep us well on our way. If we stand strong, after awhile the triggers, urges, cravings, and patterns will go away, and we will be left in peace with our brand new habit chugging along. But first, we have to go through the detox process. I use the strategies talked about here, and I also keep this list handy for when I’m in a pinch and need to quickly redirect my attention:

2-minute meditation 

Dance to a song

Light a candle or aromatherapy and savor the present moment 

Read for a few minutes

Pray a grateful prayer 

Send an encouraging text

Color or draw 

Listen to an inspiring YouTube video

Organize something

Journal Prompt: Think through when you will be most tempted or weak. Plan what you will do in order not to give in - you can use the strategies listed talked about here! Know how you’ll talk yourself through those moments. Be ready!

Give The Blessing You Want & Change Your Subconscious Stories

You may have ideas that are working against you deeply programmed into your subconscious mind. They may be there trying to protect you, put in place for good reasons, but are actually not serving you and are inhibiting you. You may be unknowingly “protecting yourself” from achieving your goals to preserve these beliefs. You’ve got to find and change them for success. Harv T. Ecker does a fantastic job talking about this in “Millionaire Mind” a book a highly recommend for any goal, not just money. He gives the example that if you say rich people are mean and selfish (ostensibly to protect yourself from feelings of jealousy, helplessness or failure, for example), your brain will never allow you to have financial success because, well, you don’t want to be a mean and selfish a person! If your subconscious believes to have financial success, you must be mean and selfish, it will protect you from being successful in sneaky ways you may not consciously notice. Harv’s solution is to bless what you want. Another example is if you want to achieve fitness, don’t criticize someone with a banging bod! It may protect you from feelings of self-loathing, but you need to find a healthier way to deal with it. If you say of babe in a bikini, “They’re probably selfish and dumb and starve themselves.” You’ve charged your subconscious mind with the job of never becoming selfish, dumb, and starving, and it will “helpfully” sabotage your efforts of getting fit! Next time an opportunity comes, say instead “wow! They really look amazing! I am happy for them. They look really healthy and must have worked hard for that! Bless that healthy bod!” 

Your subconscious will also buy into how you define yourself. If you constantly belittle and criticize yourself, your subconscious will govern you in line with those beliefs. For example, if you are overweight and would like to be more healthy, you’ll never be able to if you tell yourself “Being fat comes naturally to me. It’s a genetic thing, family members are overweight as well. I just can’t do it, it’s impossible for me. I’m just big-boned. I have a slow metabolism. I’m just a big person”. These are preservation stories and maybe a solution to stave off feelings of shame, fear of failure. To reach success you must take responsibility for your thought patterns. Replace these stories with things that support your goals such as “At heart, I am truly a healthy, fit, strong person. She’s just hiding right now. I believe being healthy is available to me. I believe in epigenetics. I’m going to take good care of myself and nurture myself until I am really thriving.” Stop self-sabotaging yourself with excuses. Once you take responsibility for your life, you’re very close to achieving the goal. Observe your self talk to discover what your perseveration stories are. Once you know what negative thoughts are deeply programmed in you, you will recognize them when they come up. As you become aware of them, work to replace them with positive ideas. Over time the positive thoughts will come up naturally! I think this may be the most powerful point of all in this post!

Journal Prompt: What preservation stories have you been telling yourself? What is your self talk like? Observe yourself, and find ways to replace these negative stories with helpful ones that will make you thrive!

Visual Progress:

If you’re a visual person, create rewarding ways to see your progress, like a graph you can color in each time you make a step closer to your goal. I made a penny jar set up for myself, where I have a stash of coins and each time I make the right choice, I get to put a penny in the jar and watch them add up!

Journal Prompt: Research visual progress strategies and choose one!

Surround Yourself with Support 

Who you surround yourself with has a massive impact on who you are becoming. We’ve all heard the statistics of how you are more likely to do self-harming things when you are friends with people who are doing them. Choosing to surround yourself with people and community that supports your goal will make it much more likely you will achieve it. This is one of the most powerful tools you can use to reach success. Offer to buy coffee and chat with a person you know who’s already made progress in the area of your goal. It would be neat if you had a friend who had the same goal and you could encourage each other and share what you’ve learned and how you’re improving. It would also be great if you could try joining a meetup group or take a class on the topic to have more communal support! One of the beauties of the modern age is how we can surround ourselves with positive influences via the internet. Subscribe to youtube channels, follow on Instagram, listen to podcasts, and read books, from people who inspire you in that area. As you start down that path, you will find yourself connecting with more and more resources. It will make a world of difference! The neat thing is, slowly it will feel “normal” to live into this goal because the people you’re surrounded by all do it. It feels totally doable then!

Journal Prompt: Pick one or two ways to surround yourself with positive support!

Well, that’s all folks! I this was helpful. My wish is that you could utilize some of these strategies without having to read all the books I did to learn them and go through as much trial and error as I did to succeed! A great piece of advice I’ve heard is “pick one strategy and stick with it” so if you feel overwhelmed by this extensive list, just pick a few of your favorites and be dedicated to them! It will likely be enough to make the difference. 

If you’re interested in getting even more inspired by the topics I wrote about, here’s a reading list below! By the way, if you click through my link to purchase the book or download it on audible, it will help support this blog, so if you’re interested I’d be grateful if you used this link! Amazon will approve me to be an associate after 3 purchases are made through my links, and I’ll be really excited when that happens!

Reading list 

“The Body Keeps Score” By Bessel Van Der Kolk M.D.

“The One Thing” By Gary Keller

“The Power of the Subconscious Mind” by Joseph Murphy.

“High Performance Habits” By Brendan Burchard

“The Power of Habit” By Charles Duhigg

“Millionaire Mind” By T. Harv Eckker

Planners:

The Productivity Planner - I use this daily and it has ordered my days in a way that changed my life.

The One Thing Planner - By Gary Keller - dieing to try this one!

The High Performance Planner - By Brendan Burchard