Day 16: Keep going!

OK, so you are now over 2 weeks into achieving your goal.  Have you lapsed?  Any moments of weakness?  Or has it just started to dawn on you that this might be a bit harder to achieve than you previously thought?  Don't worry, all of these are common experiences and can even be a necessary part of the change process.  (I will say more about this in a few days).  So, this week's tips are aimed at keeping you resilient, tips to keep you going when the going gets tough!  We start with:

Tip 16:  Have strategies for moments of weakness

Relying on will power alone to achieve your goals is a tough way of going about things.  A more realistic approach is to accept that you are human, you have emotion-driven desires that can sometimes override rational thought, that the world is a busy place and people will make demands of you that might intefere with your goal and that sometimes you will be just too tired to put in the effort.  So, if you recognise any of the above, then it can be useful to have in place some strategies for when temptation comes calling.  Strategies fall into two main categories; strategies for prevention and strategies for recovery.  Strategies for recovery are essentially about forgiveness and learning from the experience.  (See Tip 13 for some hints on how to learn from setbacks).   Today we will cover some helpful tips for prevention:

• Learn to spot the earliest warning signs.  (As an example, I have learned through experience that an involuntary eye twitch is a sign that I am stressed or over-tired.  Now I know the early warning sign I can take action early, before it becomes a problem.)
• Put an 'interrupt' in between the stimulus and the response.  If your immediate reaction to feeling hungry is to raid the fridge without thinking, then an 'interrupt' is something which puts a pause between the thought/feeling and the action.  This pause then makes the action a conscious choice (and you may decide to choose a different action).
• 'Interrupts' can be simple things to remind you of your overall goal (eg the picture on the fridge that we talked about in Tip 7).  You can then make a conscious cost/benefit analysis (Is it worth it to open the fridge door?).  You can also use interrupts that change your perspective (I may get instant gratification by eating this chocolate bar, but how will I feel later?).  If you have made the goal part of who you are (See Tip 15) you can ask yourself 'Is the action about to take representative of who I am and what I choose for myself?'  (That one usually does the trick!).
• Finally, in keeping with Tip 6, if your interrupt has caused you to stop what you were about to do (ie you avoided your moment of weakness) then make sure you do something else. Fill the hole left by stopping, with a more positive behaviour that is in service of your goal. (Eg If you were driven by hunger, you might still want to eat something but make it a healthy option rather than reaching for the biscuits for an instant hit.  If you are aiming to control your emotions, then find a way of expressing your anger in an assertive rather than aggressive way).