New Year Same you
At the beginning of a new year especially, we often look at what we wish were different. With our bodies, our minds, our relationships, our jobs, with many areas of our lives. We all start out motivated. We want something to be different. Maybe we want to lose weight, maybe we want to eat more healthfully, learn a new hobby, or have a better, more contented relationship. We have a motivation. A real interest in change. But it often feels like there are roadblocks that get in our way to moving forward. So, we find ourselves beginning and then beginning again and then beginning again.
There are many reasons we fall into this trap where motivation is lost and our goals go unmet. I want to focus on one reason this can happen, and the solution that is making a big difference in my life and I hope it helps you, too.
Here’s where things break down for me typically. I have a goal. I have a plan. Sometimes, I even make it to the starting part. But then I get stuck. What creates the stuck-ness in me is my negative self-talk. The inner voice that reminds me I won’t succeed. I won’t follow through. The end result won’t measure up, so I might as well not even try.
Negative self-talk is one of the reasons many of us fail to make good on our goals and our momentum stalls. Negative self-talk is confirmation that we lack confidence in ourselves. We see our neat and tidy New Year’s Resolutions lists, and our goals and objectives written out in pretty colored pens, and then we remember. We remember we can’t be trusted. See the connection?
“Our negative self-talk is rooted in poor self-confidence and our poor self-confidence is based on a lack of self-trust. ”
The negative self-talk is often true. Now, to be fair, our brains do include an unhealthy dose of all or nothing’ thinking and ‘overgeneralization’ for good measure, but at the core, you’re hearing the internal resistance because you know the truth. And the truth is that you don’t keep the promises you make to yourself.
So, what can you do? If one reason we can’t achieve our goals is that we don’t trust ourselves, we have to prove ourselves wrong. We begin by creating a trustworthy Self. This is a concept I learned from Dr. Nicole LaPera and I can confidently say it has changed me. She describes the process much more completely in her book The Holistic Psychologist, but in a nutshell, she says that we develop self-trust by keeping regular small promises to ourselves daily. I’m talking small. As in, I take my vitamins every day or I wash my face every night. Small. Just like others have to earn our trust by their behavior, we have to learn to trust ourselves by our behavior. And just like with others, it often starts small. When I do this enough, I begin to create seeds of self-trust that begin to replace that self-doubt.
I’ve proven that I keep my word with small things, so when I attempt something a tad larger, my self-talk sounds more like this: “Well, I never thought I’d be someone who remembers to take their vitamins every day, but I’ve been doing that consistently for 6 months. I stuck with it, and I honored that commitment I made to myself.” “If I was able to get into a new habit of washing my face every night, I can get into other new habits and be successful with them. I’ve shown myself I can be trusted to follow through.”
Maybe in 2024, instead of big lists of major changes, we focus on small ways to begin to create a Self who is trustworthy, who listens to what we need and does what we need her to do. One tiny act of love at a time.