Her goal was to lose weight.
Her plan was to get to the gym three times per week and track her food.
When we met at the end of the week, she’d done neither.
So we tried again. Get to the gym one time, don’t worry about tracking anything. When we came back together the following week, she’d missed on those goals as well. And she was beating herself up, hard, for all that she wasn’t doing. All of the progress that she wasn’t making.
“I know what I need to be doing,” she said. “I’m just not doing it. I just need to try harder.”
And therein lies two of the most common myths when it comes to behavior change. That making change is simple, and that making said change is just a matter of willpower. Those two myths are the root of a great deal of shame when it comes to change.
If we assume that developing a new habit, or breaking an old habit is simple, then we are upset and frustrated with ourselves when we find the change harder to make than when our friend set out to make the same change. There’s something wrong with us. We are incapable of change. We just need to try harder and put in more effort.
The same can be said of believing that our behaviors are simply a matter of willpower. We berate ourselves when we don’t have the discipline to start or stop a new behavior. We just need more willpower.
And yet we already have a ton of willpower – we use that resource to do our jobs, to take care of our families, and to be a responsible member of society. Our struggle to make positive self-change is more complicated than self-control or effort.
There are so many other factors at play.
Going back to the client whose goal it is to get to the gym three times per week and change her diet and who is struggling.
We continued to meet over the course of the next few months – she made some progress, but after six months was disappointed in herself that she hadn’t accomplished more. She hit some goals and missed others and was trying to decide whether or not being healthier was even worth her effort (see the post from a few weeks ago about our monitor).
Over time, our conversations gradually switched from setting SMART goals to talking about other aspects of our life. She talked about how her life-long battle with weight has always hung heavy over her head. We talked about her shame – about her struggle to love herself and her body – we talked about her ambivalence about the process. How she both wanted to lose weight and also feared making some of these changes.
She found a good therapist.
Then she started really doing the hard work, about past traumas and hurt, about grief, about identity. As she had those conversations, she began to find more room in her emotional world to make some of the SMART goals. She got to the gym. And she started taking back her life, piece by piece.
The story isn’t based on any one person. It’s based on hundreds of interactions I’ve had with clients over the years. The thing about this whole behavior change process is that it’s wound up pretty tight with this whole feeling thing. And this emotion thing. And this life thing.
So if you are one of those people reading this post right now and feeling like changing habits should be easier, or you just need to try harder, stop for a minute and challenge those thoughts. Dig a little deeper. Examine your defensiveness. Examine your ambivalence.
And try to give yourself some grace. Because as much as I love Nike, change is never as easy as just doing it.
In this moment, do you accept yourself just as you are?
I know. Heavy question for a Wednesday afternoon, or whenever you’re reading this.
But I’ll ask it again; in this very moment, do you accept yourself just as you are? I don’t. There aren’t many days when I do actually.
“What is
It’s just a funk.
I’m teaching a personal development workshop at the gym.
I’m holding a space for people to work on self-improvement at the gym.
The window opened out onto the roof of the porch. On a gray spring day, I lifted up the window and stepped out onto the roof, and sat down, my hands around my knees. I pulled the hood of my sweatshirt tight around my face, and pulled the sleeves over my hands.
In the distance, I could see the faint blue line of Lake Erie bumping up against the charcoal gray sky.
I myself am entirely made of flaws, stitched together by good intentions. – Augusta Burroughs
I drove by her every day for almost a year.
Not directly by her per se.
But I drove past the town and the nursing home where she lived each time I visited my parents.
I can’t say that I thought of her every time I passed the exit, but gradually, as the days and weeks and months sailed by, my avoidance became louder and louder.
Shameful feelings rattled around in my head as I felt like the irresponsible granddaughter who lacked the respect and courtesy to even stop by and say hello to her own grandmother.
I loved my grandmother very much, but I didn’t really know her. Not the way that my niece and nephew know my own mother, as someone who plays with them and goes to all of their plays and dances and sporting events. She babysat us sometimes, but never came to any of my little league or high school games.
This is just one of the many flaws I think of about myself when I do any kind of self-reflecting.
I wrote her a few letters in college and got the kind of response that she was capable of – a note to say hello and tell me about the weather and then sign off by not wanting to keep me; she did that often. In letters or in a phone call, she often ended by saying something like “well, I don’t want to keep you,” as though my conversation with her was a burden.
In some ways I guess it became that.
By the time I was in my late twenties and working odd jobs in Western Pennsylvania she no longer lived in her old farm house. The stairs had become too much and so she moved in, first with my parents, and then in a retirement home. I’d walk in the door and the t.v. would be on, playing some day time game show, and around the room were lined reclining chairs and people who seemed neither lucid nor interested in being lucid.
I suppose that it was that lack of interest that scared me the most.
Any time I walked through the doors of that place, the place where she ultimately died in 2009, I felt a sense of loss. An incredible, intolerable sense of a collective giving up on life.
If 2020 were a piece of furniture, it would not be a hat rack.
Because there has not been one thing that you can hang your hat on this year. Typically there are many things you can rely on happening in any given year. Opening day for baseball for instance. College football in the fall. Kids going back to school. The school year even starting. The presidential election being decided on the actual day of the election.
These are all events that, up until this year, most of us could arguably say would happen no matter what.
What is the best part of what I do?
Healthy striving