by Lori Milner
When my son was seven, he asked me for a guitar. I was elated because I thought he was tapping into some creative instinct, so I was happy to go along. He sat down with the guitar and then burst into tears a few minutes later because he had imagined he would pick up the guitar and instantly be able to play. He hadn't considered there would be lessons, hours of practice and feeling out of his depth in between. That's not what he signed up for. He wanted instant gratification! That's what TV and YouTube had sold him, and he wanted the dream. Now! He wanted the outcome without the messy process.
When hearing this story, you have compassion for this little boy because we have all been there and continue to do it. Consider your goals; what have you started and stopped because the process felt too long and overwhelming? Ultimately, feeling out of your depth with the fear it was permanent won the battle over sticking it out. The bridge between the process and the outcome is progress.
Progress is a stacking of micro wins over time that leads you to your desired outcome. A ten-minute walk is your micro-win if you want to get fitter. If you want to become a reader, one paragraph of reading is your micro win. Let's get down to the fundamentals – how do you create progress on your goals? It is a three-step formula about how you choose to ACT: Attitude, Consistency and Trust.
Step 1 - Attitude.
Attitude is the lens through which you view the world; you can choose to have an attitude of self-motivation or self-defeat. Before you even start on your goal, what is your attitude filter? Expect the worst or expect the best? If you truly don't believe you can succeed and tell yourself it won't happen because you've never managed longer than a few months, you may as well not start.
Rather than use your past as a justification for why you can't succeed, use it as evidence of what not to do. What did you learn about yourself? Where did you fall off the wagon? What triggers caused you to derail from your goal?
Adopt an attitude that you aren't starting again from scratch; you are beginning with the depth of self-awareness and experience to lead you to success this time. Take the lessons and drop the story about why you can't do it. Stop lowering your expectations to avoid disappointment. Beware of lowering your expectations of yourself to avoid disappointment.
We tell ourselves that all the good ones are gone or it will never happen for us to create some level of certainty in our lives. Even if you're disappointed, at least you're certain. It doesn't make sense logically, yet we do this because it's safe and protects us against potential failure.
Approach this goal by taking the smallest achievable action, like starting the day with a glass of water. Whatever your goal is, begin your day by drinking one glass of water. It's manageable and doable and creates a trajectory of positive reinforcement. Even if you never managed to get to the gym that day, at least you had your glass of water.
Suppose you aim to get a new certification but tell yourself that even a pass is suitable, or you don't really expect to finish it. In that case, it's a self-protection mechanism to avoid disappointment in yourself or others. It's the same with weight loss; most people go into the goal half-heartedly because their greatest fear is putting the weight back on and what people will think about them.
Have you been lowering your expectations to create certainty? What's a better story?
Start with identity.
A human being's strongest motivation is to stay consistent with how we define ourselves. If you decide you're healthy, you will do things healthy people do. If you haven't decided who you want to become, how will you know you're on the right path? If you want to be the best at what you do, how will that impact your decisions about spending your time? Will you read the book or watch the training video over scrolling the socials with no return on your time?
If you label yourself a procrastinator, lazy, or have zero self-discipline, then you will behave in a way that is consistent with these labels. If you fight for your limitations, you get to keep them.
What also affects progress is the label you think other people have for you. If you're the life of the party but want to quit drinking in the week, the biggest barrier is worrying what others will think of you. I love this quote from author and podcaster Lewis Howes:
"I'm not drinking."
"I'm staying in."
"I don't want dessert."
"I'm having an early night."
"I'm hitting the gym in the morning."
“These phrases are often met with disappointment or a snarky comment about you being boring or old.
Let's stop shaming people for taking care of themselves."
What labels do you need to drop and adopt to start your process with a fresh start?
Set your intention.
The late Wayne Dyer wrote many books on the power of intention. Rather than tell yourself my health is so poor, I will never be able to get fit, set the intention for what you do want. If you naturally default to an expect-the-worst attitude, change your words, focusing on what you want, not what you don't want. It's giving yourself permission to speak what you want into the world. Affirmation plus action will yield amazing results; affirmation without action is a delusion.
Having a positive attitude and the right intention is the starting point, but it's not enough to create a micro win; it begins with action. You must show yourself you can do it, no matter how small the first step is. Which brings me to the second step to ACT:
Step 2 - Consistency.
Progress is not about how much time you have but consistency. In workshops, I always ask the question – who has 15 extra minutes daily? If you stopped scrolling and checking emails incessantly, you have a guaranteed 15 minutes and probably more than that.
No matter what you want to shift in your life, commit to 15 minutes a day. I prefer the morning because it tends to unfold more predictably, but you decide where your 15 minutes work best. Some key principles to make this a reality:
Schedule this time into your calendar - You can't think about when you will go for a walk or do the meditation; it needs to be scheduled like a meeting in your diary so you can commit to it. It's much more likely to happen when you see it marked for a Tuesday at 3 pm.
Show up to yourself – scheduling yourself is step one, but if you can't master the habit of showing up to yourself when that time arrives, your goal will remain on your someday list.
Showing up to yourself means choosing yourself as the reason why and keeping the promise you made to yourself. That's where your self-belief, self-worth, and self-confidence grow; it's built in the moments of deciding between the snooze button and taking action.
Honour the slot – don't fall into the trap of putting other people's needs ahead of your own. Honour the time and show up to it as you would anyone else you respect in your diary.
Don't wait to feel like it – you may or may not feel like it now. Do it anyway. When you are in the behaviour, you will feel like it and be happy you spent the time on it. Focus on the feeling of satisfaction afterwards rather than wait for the magic bolt of inspiration to appear first.
Celebrate your win – even if you do three minutes of mindful breathing, that's a win. Even if you walk in your driveway for 10 minutes, that's a win. Acknowledge and celebrate the micro-win; it is evidence that you are becoming this new person and making the change real.
Don't focus on duration or intensity to start; you want to create the system. You increase intensity when the system is a permanent feature of your day.
Step 3 - Trust.
How many times have you started a new habit, but about two or three weeks into it, you decided it wasn't working and defaulted to old ways?
It's not because you are lazy or have no willpower; you expect instant gratification with a tangible change immediately. When you couldn't see the desired result quickly, you figured it didn't work, so why bother?
This is where the third step to ACT comes in – trust.
There will always be a gap between starting a new behaviour and seeing the result, especially regarding weight loss and fitness.
If you can trust the process of creating these daily wins, even though you don't see a result and continue to persevere – that's where the magic happens.
There is a tipping point where you notice you have more energy, you are less emotionally reactive, or you can run further without your lungs burning.
Once you reach this tangible point, your motivation peaks because you finally see the reward for your efforts and can wholeheartedly trust in this process.
Trusting the process is going through the discomfort of new behaviours and not letting your inner critic win. Your inner critic will tell you, 'You should be further by now; you should be fitter, wealthier, more successful…".
To persevere through this stage, turn down the volume of the inner critic and find certainty in trusting the process of creating daily micro wins and keeping the promises you make to yourself.
The barrier to trust.
One of the biggest barriers to trusting the process is fear.
It's not fear as in terror but the fear of the unknown and the discomfort of being a beginner again.
Brendon Burchard speaks about three kinds of fears: loss pain, process pain and outcome pain. I added two more to the mix – fear of losing identity and freedom.
Let's put these under the microscope for the example of weight loss.
Loss pain – what if I lose my favourite foods and time? I'm going to lose out on variety and fun.
Process pain – the mission of going to the gym – how people will look at me, and I'll feel like a fool.
Outcome pain - what if I lose the weight but put it back on? It's the fear of failure.
Loss of identity – who am I if I am not the life of the party and the fun person
Loss of freedom – I am spontaneous and creative – routines and restrictions will limit me.
These fears are real for you; ultimately, you sabotage your progress despite knowing better.
The only way to let go of the fear is to trust in a new process, which means exposing yourself to discomfort.
Author Tony Robbins says that the quality of your life is proportional to how much uncertainty you can comfortably manage.
If you want to stop drinking wine in the week, then permit yourself to feel icky about it. Don't act on the inner critics' taunts –allow the craving to come up, sit with it, and it will eventually dissipate. Can you be OK with the discomfort of the craving without giving in to it? When you trust the process and find you are sleeping better, you have less anxiety, and you have more energy, you will wonder why you didn't give this up sooner. When you feel the discomfort is too much, interrupt your default pattern by asking yourself, 'What's the next right action?' and then do it.
The last piece to the puzzle is to replace your wine habit with something else. Consider why you are drinking in the first place – is it to feel calm or settle your anxiety? Is it to connect with others in a social setting or feel a sense of belonging?You have to be honest with yourself about your triggers and what drinking gives you. To help you calm down and feel less anxious, consider other options like meditation, yoga, sport, or a hobby like colouring, martial arts, cooking, or gardening – something that allows your mind to wander or a creative outlet. It can even be to make yourself a cup of herbal tea rather than drinking the wine.
Consider the emotion and thoughts before you reach for the wine; how can you anticipate your trigger and interrupt the pattern with a new choice? When you successfully avoid the urge and make a better choice, celebrate yourself because this is evidence that you can trust yourself to make the hard choice when it counts.
It's a stacking of micro wins over time and acknowledging them in the moment that builds your confidence. When you trust yourself, your confidence grows, allowing you to bring this confidence capital to any area of your life.
Motivation is not the key to progress. Progress is the key to motivation.
Change is not created in one massive action; it is a series of micro wins over time.
Your greatest power is knowing you control your choices – no one can take this away.
When it comes to habits, you can't rip up old railway tracks; you need to lay new ones over. Now and then, you will go down an old track and make a default choice, but that's OK. That's being human.
Let's say you gave into the glass of wine; rather than criticise yourself, laugh at yourself. Then get curious about what triggered you, or maybe you decided you didn't care and wanted the wine at that moment.
Now move on and don't obsess over it. I like to say it was a glitch in the software; it's light-hearted, and I don't end up taking myself too seriously.
You know you are growing when you can catch yourself in the act of the old pattern and course correct sooner. The old version of you would sit in a mood for a week; the new version sits with it for an hour, lets it go, and moves on.
Final thoughts.
ACT is the bulletproof formula for progress and achieving your goals because it doesn't rely on willpower, motivation, or external people.
A – choose a positive attitude and live as though life is rigged in your favour.
C – consistently schedule yourself into the calendar, show up to yourself and take action.
T – Trust the process of creating daily micro wins, turn down the volume of the inner critic and celebrate your wins. Then press repeat.
Choosing to ACT is the difference between one day and day one.
In the inspirational words of CS Lewis:
"You can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending."
Here's to messy change and beautiful progress.
Warm wishes,
Lori
Lori Milner is the engaging facilitator, thought leader and mentor known for her insightful approach to being a modern corporate woman. Her brainchild, the successful initiative Beyond the Dress, is the embodiment of her passion to empower women. Beyond the Dress has worked with South Africa’s leading corporates and empowered hundreds of women with valuable insight on how to bridge the gap between work and personal life. Clients include Siemens, Massmart, Alexander Forbes, Life Healthcare Group, RMB Private Bank and Unilever to name a few. Lori has co-authored Own Your Space: The Toolkit for the Working Woman in conjunction with Nadia Bilchik, CNN Editorial Producer. Own Your Space provides practical tools and insights gleaned from workshops held around the world and from interviews with some of South Africa’s most accomplished women to provide you with tried-and-tested techniques, tips and advice to help you boost your career, enhance your confidence and truly own your space on every level. Own Your Space is the ultimate ‘toolkit’ to unleash your true power. It’s for the woman who wants to take her career to new heights and who is ready to fulfil her true potential.
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