“Quitting smoking is the easiest thing I’ve ever done. I’ve done it hundreds of times.” -Mark Twain
Ah Mark Twain, always so funny and wise. This is one of my favorite quotes because it so beautifully describes the human condition. Stopping a habit and creating a habit can be one of the most challenging things we ever do. Changing our lifestyle is difficult. I know because like Mark Twain I’ve tried to change my life hundreds of times. Tomorrow is the day where I start eating only healthy foods and no more snacking. This is the month where I really get serious about exercising. This is the year where I really get serious about my health. This is the year where I kick ass and do what it takes to get my business to the next level.
We all start with these big hopes and dreams and ideals of what could be, only to quit months, weeks, sometimes days later. Why? Why is it so hard to just get my act together and do what I say I’m gonna do? That was the question I set out to answer when I first embarked on my own wellness and personal growth journey. It bothered me that me and so many others struggled with changing and doing the things that we KNOW are good for us. Knowledge does equal power but only to the extent that we act on that knowledge. If it were as simple as when you know better, you do better, we’d all be able to make changes in our lives and we’d all have the bodies, health, finances, work life, and relationships we want. Clearly, there’s more at play here.
I’ve learned many things from brilliant minds in the field in my journey to discover the answer to this question. Here’s one important thing we need to understand. All those big ambitious goals that we set at New Years, were created by our CONSCIOUS mind. It’s the mind that helps you focus and it’s the overly optimistic and hopeful part of your brain. The logical mind that understands what needs to be done and wants you so badly to do it. Only problem with this part of the mind is that it’s not fully in control. See, we have a much more powerful part of our mind called the SUBCONSCIOUS mind.
And this, my friends, is the guy that’s running most of our lives. It’s the part of our mind that remembers everything that’s happened to us, good or bad. It’s the part of our mind that controls all the functions of our body without us having to think about it. It’s the part of our mind that wants us to stay comfortable, the part of our mind that equates change to danger. And this is key because a lot of times it has its own agenda of what it wants to do. I liken it to an elephant with a mouse as it’s rider. If the mouse wants to go left but the elephant wants to go right, who do you think will win?
The mouse can scream all it wants to go left but if the elephant doesn’t want to go left, it doesn’t matter. The elephant needs to be ON BOARD with what the mouse wants to do first. This is how our subconscious mind works. The conscious mind can say it wants to eat healthy and lose weight and completely change my life but if my subconscious mind doesn’t agree, then trying to make those changes will take a lot of willpower. Why is that a problem? Because unfortunately we do not have infinites supplies of willpower. This is why people like Steve Jobs or President Obama wear the same clothes all the time. They don’t want to waste precious brain power making decisions on the small things. They want to save that for the more important decisions.
So when you’re working hard from morning to night to resist all the foods you’re used to eating, while cooking in a way that you’ve never done before, while eating foods that maybe you don’t enjoy eating, while also incorporating a new exercise routine that is hard to do- your subconscious mind FREAKS out. It feels like there’s too much change happening and it begins to create a stress response. It also takes tons of willpower to do all of this. The little mouse is yelling and screaming, and maybe gets the elephant to do it’s bidding for a while. Until the elephant gets tired and decides it would rather go back to the old route, the way things were.
That ladies and gentlemen is the process of New Year’s resolutions failing. So if you’re someone who feels like they always have great intentions only to fail when it’s barely February, understand that it’s not your fault. You have something working against you. You’re not a lazy, unmotivated, undisciplined person that’s doomed to be a fat loser for the rest of your life (I’m saying this because I bet you’ve said this or something meaner to yourself in the past. I know I have!). What needs to happen, is you need to lovingly coax the elephant and get it to cooperate with the mouse. When that happens, change is easier and more sustainable and doesn’t create an inordinate amount of stress.
I’ll talk more about how to do this later, but I’d love to hear from you. Have you gone through this process yourself? Where you set a big goal, start it, only to crash and burn later? What has your experience been when it comes to creating change in your life? Let me know in the comments below!
