Putting Shoulds in Their Place

Why is it so hard to do as you know you should with healthy eating choices , regular exercise and taking better care of yourself? No doubt, you’ve wondered about this countless times. It doesn’t seem to make sense that if you know what you should do, that you don’t do it or at least not often enough. Yet whenever you don’t do something you intended, there is a good – and valid – reason.

Think for a moment of one thing you know you should do, but don’t. Does the idea of doing it feel inspiring or enjoyable? Or does it feel more like drudgery or a chore? If it doesn’t elicit desire or at the minimum some enticement, than it makes complete sense why you would avoid it. Who wants to do something they don’t enjoy or find distasteful? In fact, to follow through on doing what you aren’t inspired to do takes enormous amounts of energy to overcome the reluctance or resistance. Few people have enough extra energy in their busy and stressful lifestyle to do that. And the guilt of not measuring up to the “should” they carry around on a pedestal further depletes what energy they do have.

When you don’t follow through on a should, this is an opportunity to investigate where the should is coming from and if the rules can be changed or relaxed.

Steps to Dealing with Shoulds

• Think of something you should do that you don’t.
  
• What is it about doing it you struggle with?


• In what way is that struggle valid, and what can you learn from your reaction?


• What might work better for you that is a positive and healthy alternative or solution?


• What would you enjoy more or be inspired to do that supports your real objective?
  

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Inspired to Keep Your Resolutions

How often have you made New Year’s resolutions that you struggle to keep because they were just too much work? I remember making my lists each year of all the things I should change about myself and the things I should start or stop doing. By the end of the first week in January I was always failing to keep up with my expectations, and by the end of January I had given up on my resolutions all together. How often have you had the same experience?

I now do resolutions differently. Instead of focusing on what I should do differently, I focus on picking a few things I would like to experience or do more of in the coming year, and I don’t set a specific date for getting started. I set an intention that I would like specific things to happen and then wait to be inspired to take action. For example, I decided five years ago that I wanted to try Pilates. A few months later I ran into my neighbor, Adrienne who taught Pilates, while doing errands in town. I didn’t know she was teaching Pilates, and I was excited to find out she was working with clients in their homes and didn’t need equipment to do it. This was perfect, and I was inspired to work with her. I loved it, and I’ve been doing Pilates ever since. It wasn’t a struggle; it wasn’t a chore. It was so easy and effortless to get started and stick with it.

Very often, just the act of setting resolutions and feeling excited about a new year can be the inspiration you need to make a change in your life. When I started exercising eight years ago, it was the desire to take advantage of New Year’s that inspired me to make January 1st the date I began my commitment to fitness. There is something inspiring about a new school year or the beginning of the calendar year, and if you feel this way it is the perfect time to take action.

Resolutions and their start dates don’t have to be carved in stone. They can be fluid and adjustable. They can also be chosen to accommodate what you want to experience so they feel good, instead of being a “should” that is measured against a rigid expectation. This year, set yourself up for success instead of disappointment.

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Getting that Good Feeling

Have you ever read fitness or weight loss success stories in a magazine and noticed that what each person is most thrilled about is how great they feel? They are happy to lose the weight of course, yet they discover it isn’t how much they lost that makes them feel so good. What is most exciting is having energy, being able to do more things, gaining self-confidence, and feeling more alive and free.

You forget how much it matters to feel good when you take it for granted or it slowly slips away. It is when you get it back again that you realize it is the key to having a good life and to happiness. When you feel good again, you feel invincible and invigorated. You want to stretch yourself to do more and fully participate in what has meaning to you.

Small changes in your lifestyle are all it takes to start feeling energized, replenished and motivated. These can be getting a bit more sleep, getting outside for fresh air, finding 5-10 minutes to yourself, being active with family or friends, eating breakfast, eating when you get hungry and stopping when you start feeling full, having fresh flowers, or replacing some TV time with a more engaging activity. You may have your own ideas to add to this list. Any one of these can have a positive impact on how you feel, and none of them take much time or preparation.

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Boost of Confidence

Have you ever felt badly about your ability to reach a certain goal or outcome when you didn’t achieve something you thought you should? If so, you may have even felt badly about yourself, assuming you should have been able to follow through, go the extra mile or will yourself to just do it. This happens even to the best of us.

What is interesting is the more you judge yourself (or feel judged) for not succeeding, the harder it becomes to ever fully achieve the goal. Can you think of a time when this was true?

You can push yourself harder, try to get others to force you, or admonish yourself more, but most likely the end result is you will have greater resistance and probably give up altogether. When this happens, you will also lose some of your self-confidence. I’ve watched this with clients over the years and seen it in myself.

What boosts your confidence is seeing yourself succeed, even if that success is learning two aerobic steps a week, setting a fitness goal of being active for 15-20 minutes three days next week, or setting time aside to relax for 5 minutes. It isn’t how much or hard you do something that determines if you are successful. It is being certain of your ability to achieve what you set out to do and having experienced success in having done it. The more success you have, the more willing you become to try a bit more – but again only as much as you know you can handle and succeed at.

As I have learned, it is totally acceptable to start off small or easy when you are getting started with a new activity, setting goals for yourself, or changing your habits. Each small success boosts your confidence and instead of feeling resistance to doing more, you will feel eager to see what more you can do. As I am fond of saying, “the more you can do, the more you want to do”, and I watch as clients who started off walking just a mile or so when they started end up doing long charity walks, runs or triathlons a year or more later. They would never have reached those levels if they had pushed themselves to do more at the beginning. Instead they allowed each success to boost their confidence, and with each boost they did a bit more until they surpassed their wildest expectations and confidence levels.

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Follow The Spring in Your Step

It is spring and a time when our bodies want to move and get out into the fresh air. If you are like me you may be feeling antsy to get out and do something, yet it may not be enough to actually get you out. Consider what might be holding you back.

The easy answer is bad weather. But even in good weather many people who say they want to get out find they resist it. If this is you, what else besides the weather is holding you back? It could be that you can’t think of anything that sounds appealing or doesn’t seem too boring. Walking is an easy and great way to get out, but it doesn’t appeal to everyone. It doesn’t have to. I’ve had people tell me they don’t like to walk, but they assume that it is pretty much their only choice (particularly if they aren’t fit) and that they should walk.

If you don’t like to walk, then you won’t want to do it regularly and you will resist being active. Consider other outdoor activities that sound more interesting or enjoyable to you.

If you are fit, there are countless possibilities and many outdoor programs available to help you discover new ways of enjoying the outdoors and extending your potential.

Maybe you already know about your options, but you still have some resistance to being active outside. I have been in this situation, and for me I don’t like to be out mid-day because of my fair skin and susceptibility to heat exhaustion which limits some of my choices. But I can choose to be out earlier or later in the day.

Sometimes the resistance is hard to identify, because it is an unconscious belief or feeling. It may stem from anxiety about trying something new or and it may simply be you aren’t used to being active outside and need a buddy to give you ideas, confidence and support. If you ask yourself what you are feeling or what you believe about being active outdoors, you will likely get some insights.

This week, follow the spring in your step and consider ways you would enjoy being more active outdoors.

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Is Your Dr. Part of the Problem?

I got a call from a close girlfriend of mine last week, who was upset. She’d gone to the doctor for her annual physical, and she was totally unprepared for what her doctor told her. She had gone expecting to hear that she was in amazing shape for her age and given an “atta girl” for how well she takes care of herself. She and I both turned 50 last year, and we take pride in the things we do to keep ourselves fit, healthy and youthful. But that isn’t how the visit went.

She was seen by a female physician she hadn’t met before, who reviewed her blood work and gave her the routine examination. Then the doctor told her sternly that she was pre-diabetic and her blood sugar levels were as high as they had been six years earlier. She continued to tell her that she was overweight, needed to exercise seven days a week at a minimum of 30 minutes, change the way she ate and come back in six months to see if she needed to go on medication. This doctor didn’t seem to care that my girlfriend regularly exercises, is not actually overweight and had never been told her blood sugar levels were pre-diabetic in the past. She also had no empathy for how hard it would be to fit more into an already busy schedule.

When someone is rebuked, told they aren’t ok, ordered about and frightened, they naturally feel upset and part of that feeling often gets turned on themselves as if they did something wrong. They will then try to comply with the demands. But too much change at once is hard to sustain and seldom successful, which puts them in a terrible situation. The common reaction is guilt, which often leads to feeling more depressed and deciding to cancel the next appointment. Sadly those same doctors who are demanding so much of their patients are too busy to notice or care if the appointment gets missed.
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Get Pumped Back Up to Reach Your Goals

New Year’s is a time that rekindles the excitement of a fresh start. It offers a chance for a clean slate, new beginnings and the belief that a better year lies ahead. With it comes a burst of motivation to make changes in your lifestyle, which is the much needed catalyst for taking action and following through on your goals.

Now, four weeks later, that feeling of enthusiasm has probably gone flat. The holidays are a distant memory and the day-to-day realities have pushed most (if not all) of your goals under the rug. If you are like most, this experience is repeated every January until you give up on the idea of resolutions altogether, believing they don’t work and that maybe it doesn’t really matter if you make any changes after all. Am I close?

If so, you’ve missed an opportunity to take advantage of your desire to change and make use of that short lived catalyst to get you into action. Those moments don’t come around all that often, so they do matter. It could be months, another year or even many years before you feel inspired to make that major change again. Statistically most people give up on their resolve to meet their goals within two weeks, and this is borne out by gym use every January – peaking the first week and trailing back off by the end of the month.

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Make Intentions, Not Resolutions

On New Years millions of people will make resolutions for 2008, driven by things they think they should improve about themselves. Not by what they really want in their life. As a result, most resolutions will be broken within weeks if not days. This is because they won’t be fueled by a passion for something wanted badly enough to make lasting behavioral changes.

Change is hard and you need to really be motivated to get through the days when you are fighting against yourself. If you want the end goal badly enough you will persevere and “just do it”. But if you are doing it to please someone else or because you “should”, you won’t have the drive in you to stick with it until it becomes easier and a part of you and your lifestyle.

A friend of mine, Denise, pointed out to me that there is a difference between making a resolution and an intention, where a resolution suggests we have to overcome what is wrong in our life and an intention is aligning ourselves to our hearts and spirit. While the dictionary doesn’t make much of a distinction between them, I think her view offers a great way to approach the New Year. Instead of making resolutions, think about what you really want in your life and what your values are. What does your heart tell you that you need more of? What are you tolerating that you want to change so that you are happier? What is your body trying to tell you that would make you feel better?

An intention is a clear vision of where you want to go or what you want to achieve. You may want to feel physically freer and better by losing weight, and may even know how much you would like to lose. As important as determining how much you want to lose, you want to know why you want this and what you will get from losing the weight. It might be to feel physically better in a specific way, to feel more sexually appealing to improve a relationship, to have the energy and stamina to do what you love most, or to reduce your risk of a particular illness. Identifying what you really want to accomplish and why strengthens your intention, and it helps you stay clear on why it matters to make a significant change in your lifestyle.

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Don't Try to Rely on Willpower

Willpower is mind over matter, self-discipline and a resolution to control yourself. You probably know by now that willpower doesn’t really help you gain control over your eating or unhealthy lifestyle habits.

But are you blaming yourself for a lack of willpower instead of recognizing that willpower isn’t the right answer in the first place? Are you looking at someone else and judging them for their lack of willpower? People do it all the time, and it doesn’t help anyone. In fact it has the opposite effect. The more you, or someone else, exerts their will to force you to be better, the more you will resent it and ultimately resist it and do the opposite of what was intended. I’ll bet you can think of numerous occasions where this was true.

At a time when there is increasing pressure from employers, doctors and others to force people to lose weight and get healthy, there is an underlying belief that the problem with people who aren’t in shape is simply a lack of willpower. While anyone can will themselves to comply for a period of time, once they stop they will revert back to their old ways or even take on worse habits for an equal or longer period of time.

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