"All rising to a great place is by a winding stair" Francis Bacon
In creating a healthy mindset, you have to focus on the need to build up a strong sense of what it is you want to have.
This is often called a ‘Desired Situation’. The reason for doing this is because of the Reticular Activating System. The RAS ensures that the more powerful your goals are the greater the chance of you achieving them.
In past blog posts we discussed whether you are willing to pay the price to achieve your success; the price being those things that you either currently want to have and don’t want to give up, or those things that might happen which you would prefer to avoid.
So, to enable you to make lasting change, on the one hand, you need to build a strong ‘desirable situation’ and on the other, you need to understand our ‘current situation’.
If you can gain an understanding of your Current Situation, you can begin to understand not just what you are doing that is producing results you don’t want to have, but why.
The key focus of these coaching lessons is to help you change your habits. Most people know what they need to be doing; they just struggle to do it.
So, although I will be giving you plenty of advice on exercise and nutrition in the coming weeks, what I really want to help you do, is discover how you can make the changes required to achieve the goals you desire.
One thing for you to do is to keep records. If you keep records it will provide you, and the coach you are working with, all the information needed to identify what is working for you and what is not.
Change occurs first at the ‘awareness’ level. You would have begun to understand this more when you realised why you really want to improve your health, but just as importantly what has been holding you back from making the changes, i.e. the price you will have to pay.
Most of what we do is not done on a conscious level but unconsciously. We are creatures of habit who are responding all the time to situations in our environment by our conditioning or programming.
This is a good thing because if you didn’t, every time you walked, talked, or wrote something you would have to think about how to do it. Habits allow us to operate in the world without much effort.
The downsides of habits are that sometimes things we learnt in the past no longer help us today.
For example, as a person ages, they lose muscle, which burns significant calories in the body, they also slow down in their energy expenditure.
Therefore if they continue to take in as many calories through their habitual eating patterns they will put on weight.
Therefore, to make your success permanent you have to ensure that you resolve the underlying issues behind what has caused your situation today.
Keeping Records
By keeping records of your progress, you will begin to see patterns emerging. These will help reveal your current behaviours. These behaviours are things that are producing your results; good or bad.
What you have today is a result of how you are behaving, how you are behaving is a result of your current conditioning or your habit patterns.
The keeping of records will enable you to identify some of the things that help you and those things that hinder you. More importantly, you will begin to find out the causes behind your behaviours which will help you to resolve them.
The other benefit of keeping records is that it enables you to see your progress. I work on the basis that success breeds success.
When you see the results, you are achieving you begin to believe more in your ability to achieve more. Your motivation increases and this will help you to keep going when obstacles arise; as they surely will.
Speak to me to find out more about how to keep your records.
Meanwhile though, here are some of the things you want to be aware of:
- What type of foods are you eating; what foods are you choosing and why?
- How big are the portions; do you pile your plate up in fear that it might be some time before you eat next?
- When do you tend to eat; do you eat regularly are you a snacker, do you skip breakfast or do you eat late at night?
There are lots of things you can record, but what you are looking for are those habits that appear to be getting in your way.
Once you have identified these you can begin to discover why you have them and put in place more resourceful solutions.
The key thing to understand is that if you make the right behaviour changes then the results will come.
Chris, myHealthCoach