GETTING IN OUR OWN WAY – Part II

Staying consistent will be the ticket to helping you achieve your ultimate goals. So, let’s look at more ways to turn off the negativity, tune out the destructive voices, and set your sites on moving forward one day at a time, while you implement simple, yet strategic steps, on a daily basis.

Keeping your goals in sight will help you stay consistent. Write your goals down, and put them where you can see them daily. Revisit those goals every morning to help make you conscious about the worth of all the daily actions you will be implementing – like your morning routine, achieving your milestones and organizing your tasks.

Finding someone to talk with who is committed to your well-being and encourages you to work towards your dreams is another way to be consistent. That can be your spouse, best friend, mentor, a colleague, parent or sibling – or anyone who truly cares about you. Set up specific times to update them on your progress as well as your struggles. Be accountable. They can be the sounding board for your thoughts, ideas and emotions.

Sometimes you don’t need advice, but rather you just need someone to listen. Getting things off your chest helps you download all your pent-up anxiety and negative emotions. They can also encourage you when the going gets rough and you are tempted to sneak off quietly and indulge. Those temptations or desires often lose their power when voiced to another person.

It’s also important to surround yourself with positive people in this process. For example, it’s helpful to have a confidant that can help us to differentiate between a true struggle and our own negativity, because all struggle isn’t negative unless we choose to view it that way. It’s much harder to remain consistent in achieving goals that are viewed as negative, draining or perceived as punishment.

The last thing you want is to look for someone who will ultimately commiserate with you and tell you: “One cookie isn’t going to hurt you,” then proceeds to take you out for ice cream to console your feelings. You need a cheerleader who believes in you, one who helps you to overcome, not succumb, in the difficult times.

Another key to consistency is to not demoralize yourself or become demotivated if you end up in a situation that you can’t control foodwise, or even if you have a meal you choose to eat off plan. The key to consistent performance is in knowing that you need to constantly keep moving forward regardless of failures, shortcomings or circumstances beyond your control. It’s not about perfection.

Although we can’t always control everything, we have to be willing to take responsibility over those things we can control. We all make mistakes. Review what you do so that you can find out where things go wrong and then set out to address that issue. If things fall apart every night at 8pm when you sit down to watch TV, you may need to change your nightly TV habit and replace it with something else until you are stronger.

Understand too, that it’s always easy to shift blame or responsibility onto someone else when you fall short – it’s a common way to shield ourselves when we feel vulnerable to failure. But ultimately, it doesn’t address the issue. It won’t fix anything to do so.

The good news is that we get to decide the direction of that change. Will we allow it to be destructive or productive? Will we choose to consistently do things that have the potential to damage our bodies and self-esteem, or will we consistently choose to do things that promote our health and sense of self-worth? Choose wisely!