How to get back on track instead of sabotaging your progress

It's painful, but all too often, that is the end of the forward momentum for a long time. Today, we're gonna talk about how to survive these inevitable episodes and get yourself back in the game more quickly.

Over the years, I have worked with a lot of people on various aspects of behavior change, mostly having to do with health behaviors. I've witnessed and celebrated some amazing breakthroughs and successes, but I have also seen people stumble and struggle regularly. Something happens, or sometimes the problem is that nothing happens, and they fall back into old habits or patterns that they'd successfully moved away from. Now that's not the tragedy because this is just part of the change process. What I do find tragic and completely unnecessary is when these lapses cause people to give up entirely, and I get it.

It takes a lot of effort to create positive momentum, to break old habits, to get new behavior patterns established. And, also and, you know, we probably don't talk about this enough. It also takes some effort to stay engaged and motivated once that novelty wears off. Now, if we have done our job right, we have created an environment that supports those new behaviors. We've reduced the friction.

We've built a support network. And if you're working with me on behavior change, we're doing all of those things. But I can't completely inoculate you against those times when you mess up. You fall off the wagon. And, you know, I've actually gotten to the point where I start to worry a little bit if the people I'm working with are doing too well, just sailing through without any resistance, not because I want them to fall or to stumble, but because I want to be there when they do.

I wanna be there to show them how not just how to succeed, but how to recover because this is a skill that many of us have never been taught, and it is essential to your long term success. Sometimes when people experience a lapse, they lapse back into old behaviors. They chalk it up to self sabotage. They'll say, I must I must just hate myself because I always sabotage my own success. Or I've heard people say, I must just not want this badly enough.

You know what? I don't think that that's what it is at all. Your lapse is not a sign that you can't or you don't deserve to have or keep whatever it is that you are pursuing, and you have not ruined or canceled out your previous progress. But when people give in to those kinds of self defeating and catastrophizing thoughts, it often leads to further lapses instead of leading to repair. And before you know it, a couple of small lapses have snowballed into a full blown relapse or a return to a behavior or a pattern that you had actually succeeded in putting behind you.

Now, of course, it's disappointing when we realize that we've departed from our goals or we've not done what we had planned to I'm is attach a story to that, a story that says, I always do this to myself, and then you just throw your hands up in the air and you give up because there's no point in trying. You end up interpreting what's a very normal human behavior or experience into some sort of character flaw or a diagnosis or your destiny. And before you know it, you're in a spiral of self loathing and hopelessness and helplessness that just leads you to quit whatever it is that you're working on. And, usually, when that happens, we quit with a vengeance. It's not just that we give up on our savings goal.

We go on a shopping spree. We don't just give up on the healthy eating plan. We eat everything in the fridge. Okay. So what is the alternative to this?

How can we take a lapse, which is going to happen sooner or later, but how can we switch our response to it and channel that into a new direction? We need to look at a lapse, not as something that has undone all of our good work. Rather, it really is an opportunity to learn something about ourselves that can ultimately make our future efforts more successful, maybe to learn something about our thought patterns or about the stories that we tell, And I think that when we're doing that kind of introspection, the 2 qualities that you absolutely want to make sure that you are bringing to this process are curiosity because curiosity is value neutral. It's just what happened here, but then also compassion for when we discover that we may have made a choice or made a decision that didn't serve us, or maybe we just flat out screwed up. We need to have compassion for the fact that we are not perfect so that we can forgive ourselves for that and go forward.

That curiosity and compassion give us the space to actually take an honest look at what happened. What was going on right before things went off the rails? How was I feeling? What was I thinking? And most importantly, what were the excuses or the rationalizations that I gave myself?

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, were they valid, or were they just permission giving thoughts? And you know what? A sense of humor can be really valuable in these moments when we're investigating our stories. What was the story I was telling myself? What was that excuse?

Because when we can actually hear those, sometimes, I mean, they're just flat out hilarious. Now I'm not saying that you need to wallow in what went wrong. Our ultimate goal is to move on. But I think sometimes we are in too much of a hurry to put our failures behind us. But here's the thing.

We succeed in life, in business, in behavior change not by putting sufficient distance between us and our failures, but rather by turning toward our failures and allowing them to teach us what we need to know. And then once we've acknowledged that we had a lapse, we can acknowledge our disappointment. We've thought about what we can learn from it. We pick back up where we left off. We rebound.

I love that word rebound. It almost sounds like a rubber band, rebound. And the reason I like this word is because to me, it's more than just a recovery. A rebound actually harvests some of the energy from the mistake or the lapse and then converts it into movement in the opposite direction. To me, that is a really powerful image.

It keeps me from sitting on the sidelines licking my wounds after a lapse and helps me get back in the game more energetically while I still have that energy to harvest. We can just say, alright. That happened. Can I figure out why or how it happened? But more importantly, this next thing I'm going to do, this next step I'm going to take is going to lead me back towards my goal instead of continuing to move away from it.

Here's another visualization that might help. Instead of seeing your laps as some sort of rogue power surge that blows up your modem, you can think of it just as a an interruption in service. Okay. I briefly lost my connection there, but I've rebooted the modem. I'm back online, and now I am going to go on.

And you know what? Maybe it's time to get a surge protector to put on that modem to help me maintain my connection in the future. But rebounding from a missed shot or rebooting the modem after a loss of service, it's so much easier to come back from than some sort of story about being a self saboteur. Our life is really just a series of choices, and every choice we make is a chance to move closer or farther away from the person that we want to become. And, look, if you've made a choice or even a series of choices that you're not happy with, remember that the next choice is still right in front of you, and then you can make a choice that leads you back towards that person that you want to become, that person that you are becoming.

I don't wanna sugarcoat this. Change really is challenging. Support makes it easier. Someone to help you reflect on what happened instead of just spinning out, someone to point things out that you might just be too close to see, someone to cheer you on and bolster you when you feel a little deflated. I've learned a lot about the process of change, and I've seen just how powerful the combination of community and expert coaching can be.

Whatever you are working on or dreaming of for yourself, I encourage you to find a community of people that are working on that too and learning about themselves. Hook into that, and if one of the things that you're working on is weight management, the Weigh Less community is an amazing place to get that kind of support, and you can learn more about what we do in the Weigh Less program at Weigh Less. Life. Thank you so much for being a part of the Change Academy. Let me know what you're working on and how it's going.

Let me know which recent episodes or guests you've found the most insightful or helpful. I really do love getting your feedback.

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