Reasons To Succeed
“It’s not motivation you lack; it’s just that you have the wrong priorities.”
Although you may not be aware of it, your mind right now is doing exactly what it thinks is best for you. Yes, there is a part of you that wants to lose weight and change your lifestyle, but you have a lot more thoughts that tell you it’s OK to carry on living the way you are. Too many of these types of thoughts are part of the reason for you being overweight. This same principle applies to every aspect of our lives.
To demonstrate just how this works, ask yourself this question, “Why do you want to lose weight?”
If you have a pen and some paper, write down all the reasons why you want to lose weight, or you can just list them in your mind.
Usually when someone is asked this question, and it doesn’t matter what the goal is, they will only be able to list maybe five to ten reasons, and normally those reasons are extrinsic, which means they are external, material goals rather than something that will change how they think and feel internally and improve how they feel about themselves as a person.
For instance, when someone is asked why they want to be rich, the list of reasons is usually something like; so they can buy a new car, buy a new house, go on more holidays, buy their parents a home, help other people, feel happier and less stressed, and look after their family. People normally falter before they can list ten strong reasons and few of these reasons will be to improve themselves intrinsically.
Research by the leading experts on destructive habits, Professor James Prochaska and Professor Carlos DiClemente, shows that to build the motivation you need to maintain a challenging habit, like weight loss, your reasons to succeed need to far outweigh the reasons, or excuses, that you give yourself not to stick to the habit, and the more reasons you have the greater your chances of success.
The reasons to succeed and the excuses you give yourself, which we cover in the chapter Smash the Excuses, are two of the fundamental elements of the Transtheoretical Model of Behaviour Change, developed in the 1980’s by Prochaska and DiClemente. Their model of change has a proven 60-75% success rate for helping people find the motivation they need to give up life challenging habits, such as smoking, taking drugs, and overeating. Impressive statistics, especially considering the doctors never ask the participants involved to stop smoking, taking drugs, or go on a diet.
Instructions
The objective of this exercise is to create a list of reasons why you need to, want to, and have to lose weight and keep it off for the long term. This will add Value to the Motivation Equation and reduce the Delay. Take some time to list every benefit you can think of to achieve your weight loss goal and maintain the habit of a healthy lifestyle thereafter. Remember, it’s important to try and list intrinsic as well as extrinsic reasons. Here are some questions and answers to get you thinking: How will it affect your health? How will it affect you financially? How will it affect your family? How will it affect you socially? How will it affect you emotionally? Even if your habit is well established and you’ve been doing it for a while, it’s still good practice to keep adding to your list of reasons to succeed to bolster your resolve for the future and for when life throws you a curve ball. 50 reasons or more would be a good number to work towards for your list. It may seem a lot, however, when people list the reasons and excuses they give themselves for NOT doing something, most people can quickly list 20 or more right off the top of their head. Listing 50 or more reasons to succeed isn’t too difficult when you start to think about it, and the research clearly shows that the reasons to succeed need to far outweigh the reasons not to succeed in order to achieve success. Here are a few other reasons to succeed: “Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.” ~ Joseph Campbell