Behavior Change Revisits Your Biggest Challenges
Change is a circle. It is not a perfect upward line no matter how badly we wish it was. Once you start making small changes, you will revisit the same challenges repeatedly. Only with each turn, the experience of trying again and reflecting will bring progress. The challenges that first brought you to make changes will start to look and feel different. Offering new perspectives on your relationship with that challenge and shining a light on new challenges. Maybe even offering a rearview mirror that shows a new perspective of your past efforts. Change happens by taking small steps in a new direction with consistency over a long period of time.
Making changes to our actions regarding food is changing our relationship to both food and ourselves. And it will tug on the thread attached to our self-worth and family dynamics. What happened in our childhood kitchen and our caregivers' relationship to food will suddenly come to light when we start making healthier decisions. That’s okay, but it's a part of why taking small steps might feel worthless or unconformable in the begining. We all want to wave a magic wand and have the life we want. But small steps are the science of behavior change.
We know all or nothing changes don’t work. We often want to go full steam ahead and make all the changes to our routines, our feelings, and how we think about food because we want to skip the uncomfortable parts. But that type of action doesn’t have longevity.
“You don’t find yourself in the perfect moment. You build yourself by choosing how you are going to work through the imperfect ones.” - Cory Allen
The challenges won’t just go away when you decide to make changes, but they will change themselves. At times, the same barriers will reappear. At first, it will feel like you are just not making progress. That’s why the systems you build to make your effort easier are so important. Days go off plan, and they will do so repeatedly. When they do, you will drop to the level of your systems that align your actions to the changes you want. Your motivation to make the changes you want to make will wane and disappear altogether and then roar back to life. In the meantime, the systems you have built to ensure you take the actions you want will keep you going.
The first few weeks or months of change are about building the systems and building new neuropathways that eventually become the change you want to make. Neuropathways take a lot of energy to make and our brain makes this difficult. Our old patterns are more efficient. Building new habits takes time but once you find yourself doing that first small step regularly, you can add the next step, and let that lead you to your ultimate goal.
This will feel challenging and push your confidence. But confidence comes with action. Doing the first step over and over again shows your brain that you are capable of doing the thing. This is how you build trust with yourself that you can do it. The “work” is when you have to do the thing without confidence for a little bit of time. This is where most people freeze and start to abandon not only their original goal but themselves.
When we first realize we want to make changes to our eating habits, we may come to this decision without being ready to make the necessary changes. Additionally, we might not know what changes we want to make or what the challenges to those changes are for us. It will take some time to go through all the steps of change. I have seen this many times with my clients and with myself.
This is how it usually goes:
We acknowledge we might want to make some changes.
We will start to seek new information or even schedule sessions with a professional who gives us a list of things to do. We are somewhat aware of the challenges we are facing, and we may wish to take action. We also might not be aware of the challenges, but we are aware of the symptoms causing us problems. The real issue may still be hidden from us.
Then we sit on that information without doing any of the things, finding ourselves frustrated again because now we know what to do, and we still aren’t doing it. We start to bring awareness to why we aren’t taking action. We may now really be aware of the challenges and have a desire to take action. Or we may still be unaware of the underlying challenges. We could still be questioning what the challenges are and what are the right changes to make.
Our confidence takes yet another nose dive, which means we will definitely not take action because we have become frozen, unsure, or our ego is starting to take over and decide for us.
Some time goes by, and we decide ok now is the time to take action. So we review the information we have and try. We start to make plans that are aligned with our goals.
That one action was so uncomfortable to keep doing as life keeps getting in the way. We decide these must be the wrong actions. We bring more awareness to what is holding us back and the actions we need to take.
Then, eventually, the pain of not taking new actions becomes too great, and we try again. Still uncomfortable. We evaluate what is working and what is not working, which is also uncomfortable. This time, we start to make new decisions that align with who we are, where we want our life to go, and we finally start to see some progress.
We stop taking action.
We try again, yep, can confirm, this is still uncomfortable. We take more action and/or different kinds of action for a longer period of time.
We stall once more and then try again but this time we try for even longer than the last time. We start to see more progress.
Then we might finally keep going, or we might start over again.
This cycle happens again and again with different actions for different reasons at different times in our life. But now we start again each time we get off track. We have evidence that we can do it. We have built enough trust in ourselves to keep trying and acknowledge that progress isn’t perfection, it’s just about continuing to try again.
Does this sound familiar?
What we might not feel at the moment is that this is progress. This is how change happens. It does not happen all at once; it occurs in tiny steps over a longer period of time each time we try again. Our excitement to make a change will ebb and flow through this timeline. We can't depend on how excited we are, but we can definitely seize it when it comes through! We can also reward ourselves when we take action.
We make the change we want to make when we stay in the uncomfortable moments of the new actions a little longer each attempt. Find some calm in those uncomfortable moments. A coach can help you identify the discomfort at play and how to keep going through it. You can discuss what systems to implement so you stop depending on motivation to make a change. They can help you take action when you are uncomfortable. It’s important to acknowledge when these new actions are uncomfortable and are worth doing anyway. It’s part of the “work” you have to do with yourself to reach your goals. The longer you can take action anyway, despite what is happening around you and how uncomfortable you are, the more you will make the changes you seek.