When we start out on any diet or self-improvement plan, we are full of excitement and motivation. We’ve seen some motivational TED talk or just finished the latest book on Marcus Aurelius and now we feel ready to finally change our life.
We buy the new jogging shoes, join the gym, and even announce our new goals and commitments to friends and family. After all, that guy giving the TED talk mentioned something about making yourself “accountable,” so you follow the advice, thinking it will ensure that you stick with your promises.
You may feel this level of motivation for a few days or even a few weeks before you hit the obstacles. Real life and all its problems and responsibilities come crashing down. Your boss gives you a tough time over the sales report you just submitted and demands it be rewritten, requiring a few late nights at the office. Your kid’s report card comes in, which suggests that you need to spend more time with your 5th grader, or she will fall behind on critical math skills. Someone close to you gets sick and needs your help so you’re going to have to rearrange your schedule.
Before you know it, you are back to your old habits, back to the familiar, comfortable groove that led you astray in the first place.
We’ve all experienced the initial blast off of a project or goal. The booster rockets are all firing and we see nothing but smooth and blue skies ahead. We’ve tapped into that powerful reservoir of power called momentum and reaching our goal seems a near certainty.
But, inevitably, problems will arise along the way. Just like a pilot flying a passenger airliner across the Pacific on a 14-hour flight, turbulence will eventually arrive. And when it does, it shouldn’t be something you fear or try to avoid, but something you expect and are prepared for.
As you set off on your quest to live a healthier life by exercising and eating nutritious, low-carb meals, and avoiding the cookies, chips, and other junk food snacks that made you sick in the past, you will encounter a lot of setbacks. And on those days when you do give in to temptation, you can’t allow those slip ups to derail your entire plan.
You may be tempted to throw in the towel after a weekend of complete debauchery spent with loads of donuts, pies, Doritos, and M&Ms, but you would be like a pilot who panics and parachutes out of his 737 at the first sign of turbulence. You can’t allow these inevitable moments of weakness to convince yourself that you simply aren’t capable of following through on your goal to living a healthier life.
But what’s going to make reaching your goal a lot easier is establishing a healthy set of habits that puts your behavior on automatic pilot. Just as brushing your teeth before bedtime is something you don’t even think about, repeating an action every day will eventually become an automatic behavior as well. You won’t even have to rely on willpower by that point. The new behavior will be so embedded in your brain that you will carry out that behavior without much thought at all.
But to get through those months where you’re working hard to establish the desired behavior, you must accept the fact that you will often feel like you’re not up to the task, that it’s beyond your reach, capability, or endurance.
This is the time when you have to remind yourself that for every two steps forward there’s always one step back. Keep this in mind whenever you hit those obstacles. Never throw away all the progress you’ve made just because you had a bad day or even a bad week where you gave in to temptation. Learn to expect this and you will be able to pick yourself up off the canvas and fight another round. And that’s the key to success in anything; learn to keep getting up after getting knocked down.
