Re-Defining Success

Sometimes is it the way that you are defining success which makes the critical difference between whether you feel you are achieving success or not – and whether you stick with the process in order to actually achieve the final goal.  If you set your marker of success as only the final goal in a long project or process without recognizing all the valuable pieces and stages that help you reach the goal, you may not find enough success along the way to keep going.  And you will be missing the opportunity to witness all that you are accomplishing.

Let’s face it.  The reality of change, goals, and being healthy is that they often require a bit of time and effort to accomplish.  And feeling a sense of success and achievement not only at the end of the journey but also along the way is critical to moving forward.  That is why it is so valuable to have a definition of success that not only encompasses the whole of the process, but which also acknowledges the steps along the way.

As usual, I have a client case story to share that highlights this point.  It is my client Jill whom I spoke about in the post earlier this week who is trying to lose about 30 pounds.  Anyone who has ever tried to lose weight knows that if you are doing it in a healthy way (versus using a radical diet or fasting method which doesn’t keep the weight off in the long run), it can take awhile – especially to shed the final five pounds. 

Jill was feeling frustrated because despite working with a personal trainer for exercise and doing coaching  for four weeks to get a better understanding on the mental patterns behind the eating, she hadn’t lost hardly any weight.  She was not feeling successful because she was using weight loss as her only marker for success.  And even though she recognized that she had uncovered several big “ahas” about her patterns and gained great insight into her behaviors, she hadn’t consciously re-framed her definition of success to include these critical pieces.

As her coach, I could clearly see the changes that were occurring and that not only was she thinking differently, but that she was also making very different choices with a new level of awareness.  But Jill, who was so focused on the number on the scale and the big goal, wasn’t recognizing all that she was already doing and accomplishing.

When I invited Jill to make a list of what she was doing differently NOW, she was able to step into a space of new recognition that gave her a big boost of energy that came from feeling successful.  And to deepen that awareness and make it more concrete, I invited Jill to expand her definition of success.  So now, in addition to using the actual weight loss as a marker of success, she has added in:

• pausing to think about what she eats before eating
• making healthier eating choices (which she realized she has already been doing 50% of the time!!)
• choosing other activities for relaxing at night aside from eating
• decreasing soda consumption to just one a day

Acknowledging these actions as part of her definition of success is new, but she had already accomplished them over the past four weeks.  When she added them to her definition of success, her sense of satisfaction with her process and how she felt about her ability to be strong and move forward increased.  And instead of feeling frustrated, she is now feeling successful and motivated to continue.

So if you are in the midst of a process of change and expansion and are feeling frustrated, I invite you to take a close look at what you are using to mark or define your success – and see if there are other pieces that might be good to add in to your definition as well.

Everyday Choices

Every day you make choices.  And it is those choices that decide whether you are contributing to being in a state of health and balance or whether you are adding to your load of imbalance and heading towards a crisis point.  It isn’t a matter of always making the good, healthy choices 100% of the time that is important.  Rather, what leads to the crisis points of pain, disease and unhappiness is making the imbalanced choices habitually without awareness and without proper counter measures to reduce the impact. 

The first step in being healthy in body and mind is to become aware of what effect your choices create and examining why you make those choices.  Because underneath the choice, even if it isn’t one that serves you, there is usually a legitimate need you are trying to meet.  And once you can identify the underlying need, you can begin to explore other ways of meeting it that doesn’t have a negative impact.   To do this, it is ideal to step outside of the critic and judge and simply try to understand from a neutral perspective what you need.

I had a client who recently went through this process.  My client, Jill (named changed), has been trying to lose weight without success.  In looking at her eating patterns, the time that she has the greatest challenge is at night after a long day of work.  Her habit is to snack in the evening, often fluctuating between sweet and salty foods.  She saw the snacking as the problem and was trying to cut out the snacking without success and then feeling like a failure for not being able to be strong enough.  The effect of this habitual choice was that she was continuing to gain weight and this was not desirable for her.

For Jill, the first new awareness was that snacking was the outlet but not the need.  To change the pattern, she first needed to identify what she was trying to give herself with the food.  As we went below the surface with a few simple questions, she realized that she ate as a stress outlet, as a way of letting go from her detail-oriented job, as a way of rewarding herself for getting through another day.  These were all legitimate needs and taking away the outlet to fulfill them without using something else was not working.

Once you understand the real reason you are making certain choices, you can find healthier ways to satisfy your legitimate needs.  This is step two.  For Jill, she began experimenting with other ways to let go and reward herself.  One was to have a regularly weekly date with her spouse, usually on Friday after the long week.  Another was to read which relaxed her and didn’t have a snacking habit associated with it.  The list of possibilities is unlimited and she’s trying out several to see which give her the greatest satisfaction.

Now let’s talk countermeasures.   A countermeasure is an action or series of steps that helps counter the imbalanced action or less-than-desirable side effect from your choice.  Sometimes even knowing a certain action isn’t the healthiest way to meet your need, you still choose it.  And as long as you do this consciously and know how to diffuse the negative impact with countermeasures, occasional choices are okay and won’t lead to crisis points. 

I’ll use an example of mine from just last night.  I don’t drink alcohol because even small amounts make my body feel bad.  Maybe it’s a reaction to sugar.  I’m not sure of the why but I am very clear on what it does!  I also don’t have a need to use alcohol to feel comfortable in social settings or need to do it just because others are.  Therefore, I am perfectly content not drinking.

But every once in awhile I make a choice to have a drink and last night while listening to Irish music with my family at Trinity Pub in Milwaukee I chose to have a Nutty Irishman Coffee (decaf of course since I also don’t drink coffee and with my high energy definitely don’t need the caffeine).  Knowing my body’s reactions to alcohol, I took the proper preventative steps such as eating first and drinking several glasses of water to counter the dehydrating aspects of the drink.  Upon reaching home, I even took some Ayurvedic herbs that help digest sugars and chewed some fennel seeds to settle my stomach.  All of that helped – yet my stomach was still upset, I had a slight headache, and didn’t sleep well.  So this morning I followed up with a nice bowl of immune boosting hot cereal, a clementine, and cup of chamomile green tea. 

I am feeling better.  My countermeasures helped decrease the severity of what I would have felt.  But the drink only gave me a slight amount of satisfaction because I discovered what I really had been craving was the creaminess of coffee with cream and not the sweet of the alcohol.  And the side effects and amount of effort to counteract them weren’t worth the level of satisfaction I got from that choice. 

Armed with my latest knowledge, next time I’ll know to just choose the coffee with whipped cream and skip the alcohol.  This is step four: use each experience whether good or bad to help your future choices.

Whatever choices you make each day, making them with greater awareness and building on the experiences that come out of the choices will help you make choices more consistently that do serve you.  And if you have any stories of you journey with choices, feel free to share.

Find The Key To Unlock Your Pattern

In changing a habit or pattern, we often tend to try to change the outer behavior without finding the core key that unlocks the pattern itself.  However, as a BodyMind Coach, I have found the process of shifting patterns to be far more effective when you look underneath the surface of the outer behaviors and find the hidden lock first.

I had a client do just this over the past two weeks.  My client, Jane (name changed) is wanting to shift her eating patterns.  She feels that she eats excessively often as a stress response and is not happy with the results of the extra body weight.  In the past, she has tried to control the eating with restrictive dieting and mental planning – neither of which has worked.  From these past experiences, she has felt that she is lacking in self control and that if she could just control herself and her eating, the problem could be solved.

This feeling of lack of self control often shows up in trying to change a habit based on treating the outer symptoms.  Because the outer behavior is really the outlet or vehicle for the underlying need, if we respond only to this vehicle, we aren’t really taking care of the need that we are trying to meet with the behavior.  And as a result, the attempts aren’t successful and we often think it’s because we’re not trying hard enough instead of realizing that we’re trying to fix the wrong part of the problem.

Over two sessions, Jane was able to understand more about how she is using the food and where some of the pattern came from.  The first big “Aha” for Jane was that at the core of eating large amounts of food was a fear of losing something which came an earlier event in her life, again where she felt a lack of control.   The amount of food she was eating was an unconscious way she was trying to “fill up” that empty space.  While this “Aha” left her feeling light and happy since she had uncovered a piece of the puzzle, it in itself didn’t automatically change her behaviors.

In the second session, Jane explored the different times she wanted to eat when it wasn’t purely to satisfy her physical hunger.  Though she identified three major situations when she tended to overeat, she discovered that within each of those areas she was using food as a reward to counterbalance something that felt challenging.  With this realization, we acknowledged that she had a legitimate need that her body-mind was trying to meet.  And that her current way of meeting that need wasn’t serving other parts of her.  Her homeplay for the week is to explore all the ways she can reward herself that satisfy that need for counterbalancing her challenges without making her feel bad in other ways.  At this time, Jane has also made a conscious choice not to use food as one of the possible rewards though for some people finding different, healthier foods could also be an option.

Jane is turning her lock.  She may not completely have the door to her pattern fully open, but she is well on her way.  And her example highlights beautifully that by understanding what the lock is, you are much more able to find the key to unlock it!

I will be exploring more of these ideas and other ways to Beat the Weight Loss Blues on Monday, January 18th.  Come and join the fun if you are looking for your own keys.  Click on the above underlined link for all the registration details.