Think of the times you’ve attempted a behavioral change but didn’t get very far. Chances are you started off with lots of enthusiasm, but the effort got lost somewhere along the way.
Change is hard. The path of least resistance leads straight to the familiar ways of doing things. The demands of your busy life distract your attention from your behavior change project. Old habits have a way of reasserting themselves.
Accountability Will Help You Succeed!
In life coaching, accountability is one of the most powerful tools for helping people succeed. Accountability literally means making an account. When you know you are going to make an account to someone else, you are more likely to follow through with the steps you’ve committed to for reaching your goal. An on-going relationship with someone to whom you make an account helps you stay on track over time.
Involving another person in your behavior change program helps you strengthen your commitment and maintain your focus. When things go well you have someone to celebrate with. When problems arise there’s someone to help you identify what went wrong and figure out how to get back on track.
Here are three ways you can create accountability in your life:
1. Enlist a Friend:
You have probably noticed that you’re more likely to stick with an exercise program when you find a buddy to participate with you. If you just don’t feel like getting up early one morning to take that run, you’re much more likely to get moving if you know you’ll let your friend down if you don’t show up.
You can make a contest of it, seeing who reaches a weight loss or savings plan goal first. You could also make a bet with a friend or family member. If you succeed at your behavior change, you win your bet in addition to the satisfaction of achieving your goal.
Engaging a friend or family member will not only help you succeed. Working toward a shared goal will provide companionship and strengthen the relationship.
2. Join a Group or a Class:
When you make a group or a class a part of your weekly schedule, you improve the chances that you’ll follow through. The structure of a weekly class or group creates a routine in your life that becomes a regular habit.
It can be much easier to get to the gym for an exercise class, than to work out on your own. If you try doing it at home, it’s easy to get distracted by the kids, the TV, or the thousands of other things you need to do around the house.
Participation in a group brings you into contact with others who share your interests or goals. Other members can offer encouragement and support. If you are motivated by competition, comparing your progress to others’ can provide an incentive. Twelve Step, weight loss, and smoking cessation groups all provide ongoing support to help you establish and maintain healthy behaviors. Joining a book group provides social interaction and stimulating conversation, in addition to making sure that you get those books read.
If your goal is developing a new skill, such as photography or playing the guitar, or pursuing an interest such as becoming a wine connoisseur, a class provides information and guidance in a systematic manner. You can also expand your social network when you come into contact with others who share your interests.
3. Hire a Life Coach:
A life coach is a professional, with expertise in helping you achieve your goals. Your regularly scheduled meetings keep you focused on your objectives amid the distractions of your daily life. Reporting on your progress, both in and between sessions, creates the accountability and support that maximize the likelihood of your following through on action steps. The feedback you receive, whether celebration of successes or problem solving to address unexpected challenges, will help you to succeed.
Whatever your goal, you increase the chances that you will succeed if you create accountability. And achieving your goals will make your good life better.
Jeannette Samanen, Ph.D.
Jeannette’s professional development began with graduate school at the University of Oregon. Her first post-doctoral position was at the Boston University School of Medicine where, as an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry (Psychology), where she specialized in stress management and behavioral medicine. Jeannette has had over 30 years of experience as a life coach and psychologist and derives great pleasure from helping clients transform their lives for the better.
If you believe you can and if you believe you can’t, you’re right.
-Henry Ford
How you think influences the way you act and feel in major ways. Negative beliefs about yourself hold you back more certainly than external forces can. You actually have enormous control over what you think. It’s a matter of turning old habits of negative thinking into new practices of positive beliefs. Doing this will improve your confidence and empower you to achieve your goals.
Negative beliefs fall into two categories: self-criticism and worry.
The Problem with Self-criticism:
It doesn’t matter whether self-criticism addresses the past or the present or self-doubt raises concerns about the future. Negative thinking always undermines you. Beating yourself up about regrets from the past distracts you from what you need to focus on in the present and brings you down. Doubt in your abilities saps your energy and confidence and holds you back. The expectation that you’ll fail inhibits you from attempting new things. It’s hard to succeed if you are plagued by negative thinking.
It may seem that negative thinking serves a protective function. Many of us were raised with the notion that criticism is necessary for success. We believe that focusing on what we do wrong will prevent us from making the same mistakes again. It can also feel like self-criticism protects us from attacks from others. If we catch what we do wrong first, we may be able to correct it before someone else notices. If we criticize ourselves aloud, others will know we’re already aware that we’ve done something wrong and may refrain from blaming us.
Of course it’s important to learn from your mistakes and it may be appropriate to acknowledge them to others. You just don’t need to beat yourself up. It’s much more effective to calmly notice an error and then focus on what you need to do to correct the problem.
Jeannette Samanen, Ph.D.
Jeannette’s professional development began with graduate school at the University of Oregon. Her first post-doctoral position was at the Boston University School of Medicine where, as an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry (Psychology), where she specialized in stress management and behavioral medicine. Jeannette has had over 30 years of experience as a life coach and psychologist and derives great pleasure from helping clients transform their lives for the better.
I am often surprised at how unconscious my coaching clients are of their negative self-talk. The first step toward replacing your negative thinking with positive beliefs is to pay close attention to what is going on between your ears. Monitor your thought content for critical self-statements like, “You idiot!” or “How could you DO that???” Listen carefully to the words that come out of your mouth.
Notice when you are harsh on yourself and ask gently, “Is that appropriate?” If your self-criticism habit is firmly entrenched you will probably reply with an emphatic “Yes!” Then ask yourself how you feel when you treat yourself so meanly. If you are honest with yourself, you will notice that you feel deflated or discouraged or some other unhappy feeling.
Now, gently correct that thought or statement. Tell yourself, “Just because I did that, doesn’t mean I’m an idiot,” or “It would have been better if I had done that differently, but beating myself up isn’t going to help anything.”
At the beginning, you may need to watch out for beating yourself up for being mean to yourself: “You idiot! There you go again! What’s WRONG with you? You’ll never learn to be kind to yourself!” Use humor when old habits of negativity reassert themselves: “Oops! There you go again!” Or, you could even say something like, “Sweetheart, you do not deserve to treat yourself that way. Life is too short for such cruelty!”
As you correct your negative thinking begin to replace it with positive beliefs. If you do something you are unhappy with, ask yourself, “What can I do to fix this?” or “What is the learning here?” Encourage yourself by affirming that you’ll do better next time. Over time you will change the habit of negativity to the habit of positive, encouraging thinking. As you do this, you will empower yourself to act free of the fear of beating yourself up should things not turn out exactly as you would like them to. You will also feel much more confident and self-accepting. All of which, of course, will help you to achieve your goals and make your good life better.
Jeannette Samanen, Ph.D.
Jeannette’s professional development began with graduate school at the University of Oregon. Her first post-doctoral position was at the Boston University School of Medicine where, as an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry (Psychology), where she specialized in stress management and behavioral medicine. Jeannette has had over 30 years of experience as a life coach and psychologist and derives great pleasure from helping clients transform their lives for the better.
Inch by inch, life’s a cinch. Yard by yard, it’s real hard.
Are you procrastinating, overwhelmed by the size of an important task you need to complete? When faced with a big job, think small.
It’s easy to become paralyzed when the job you need to do seems too big to handle. In those situations it’s helpful to remember the salami image. There’s no way in the world you can stuff an entire salami in your mouth, but you can polish it off easily one slice at a time. The thinner the slices, the easier it is to do.
It’s crucial to break any big job into doable steps. When faced with a daunting task, first identify the steps necessary to reach your goal. The smaller the steps, the easier they are to accomplish. Once you get moving by taking baby steps, you develop momentum. That momentum will help you move forward, enjoying the task as you go.
The operative word here is “doable.” Most people stymie themselves with unrealistic demands. Unwilling to be satisfied with small steps, they end up doing nothing. It is important to delight in any progress you make while working toward a goal, no matter how small that progress may seem.
A client came to me recently seeking help to finish his doctoral dissertation. He needed a Ph.D. in order to get the job he wanted and he couldn’t get his Ph.D. until his dissertation was complete. He had been working on the dissertation for over a year. By the time he came to see me he had done no work on it at all for several months and was completely stuck.
My client and I identified fifteen small steps that would enable him move forward. We determined that he could reasonably expect to complete the first two of those steps by our next session.
“I couldn’t be happy with that,” he protested. “I’d feel like I hadn’t done enough if THAT were all I accomplished! I’d need to get at least eight of those steps done to feel satisfied.” Of course, even five of the steps we had identified would have been too much to realistically accomplish in one week. Overwhelmed with so much, my client would have fallen back into his old pattern of doing nothing.
How often are you like my client? Unable to live up to unrealistic expectations, do you end up doing nothing at all?
If there is an important project that you are stuck on, ask yourself, “Am I insisting on too much from myself?” If your expectations are unrealistic, you may thwart your own progress.
Examine whatever daunting task you are facing. Break it down into the smallest possible steps. Set realistic goals related to accomplishing those steps. By giving yourself permission to take baby steps, you will begin moving in the right direction. The progress you make will encourage you to keep going. In this way you will eventually achieve your goal.
In fact, my client felt great after completing the two small steps he set out to do that first week. Getting at least something done was a definite improvement over the inactivity of the preceding months. The following week he accomplished the next small segment. Before long he was rolling ahead toward completing his dissertation.
When you allow yourself to be satisfied with baby steps, you, too, will achieve your goals and make your good life better.
Taking a walk gets you moving. It can help to change the scene and offers the opportunity to gain new perspective on any situation you may be dealing with.
When you exercise, your body produces endorphins, those hormones that create a natural high. Walking can put you into the meditative state in which creativity flows.
Taking a walk is not taking a hike. A walk can be very, very brief. Just taking a walk around the hallways in your office building or around the block can make a difference.
Here are three ways that taking a walk can help you improve productivity, manage stress and enhance creativity:
1. Take a walk during your lunch break
Leave the building and walk around outside. Breathe the fresh air. Be on the lookout for an unexpected treat – the beauty of bright clouds blowing across a blue sky, the gift of birdsong, a bright flower growing in among the grass. You’ll come back to work refreshed and you’ll work more effectively.
2. Take a walk when you’re under stress
If there is something upsetting you, walking around for a few minutes can help you calm down and gain a different perspective on the challenge you face. You’ll be better able to deal with the situation when you return.
3. Take a walk to inspire creativity
As you walk along, be open to insights that come to you. Walking is actually a type of meditation that can help your creativity to flow. Many of these newsletters have come to me while taking a walk along the Schuylkill River in nearby Valley Forge Park. As I walk along, my mind as my arms and legs moving in rhythm, the ideas and the words to express them just flow.
When you take a walk regularly, you create a habit that can benefit you physically, mentally and emotionally for the rest of your life!