2023 is upon us and with the new year typically comes a renewed sense of motivation and goal focus. Most people create the same goals and resolutions year after year only to reflect on them at the end of the year and find that they have not achieved as much as they wanted to. With that realization comes the shame and guilt and the reinforced idea that it simply is not possible to reach your goals. Sometimes it is impossible to see our limiting beliefs and self sabotaging patterns that lead to us being disappointed in ourselves time and time again.
You have it within you to overcome those patterns and finally start to see results moving towards your goals. One of the best ways to start is to find a friend or mental health professional who can support you on your journey to reach your goals. Having someone with an outside perspective who can see the ways your old patterns show up is invaluable because they can also hold you accountable to change it. You have to make your goal clear, with actionable steps that can be taken or incorporated into your daily life. Our old habits will always take over if we do not foster new ones, and the best way to reach any goal is to create daily habits that will move us in the right direction.
Another step towards reaching your goal is to assess what thought patterns you might have that are sabotaging you. For example, if your goal is to get more fit and each year you find yourself starting out strong, then losing steam rather quickly and stopping altogether, you might have an all or nothing cognitive distortion. This means you might quit when you’ve found yourself skipping a few work outs, or you might find yourself ingesting a whole carton of ice cream because you already ate badly that day. This type of thought pattern will lead you to sabotage any success because you will see lack of perfection as a failure and have a hard time with balance.
Another cognitive distortion that might sabotage your success is called “shoulding and musting”. This distortion refers to making unrealistic expectations and demands on yourself. If we apply this one to the goal of getting fit, it would look like deciding to run 10 miles every day when you have never run before, and being hard on yourself if you find yourself not able to do it. This is why creating realistic steps that will over time lead you to your goal is so important. Try aiming for walking for one mile first, then slowly increase and add jogging until it feels doable to run that 10 miles.
If any of this resonates with you, maybe this can give you a renewed sense of hope that you ARE capable of crushing all of your goals. You simply have some things holding you back. If you are looking for someone to help you recognize and change those thought patterns so you can look back on the year 2023 and be proud of how far you have come, reach out to schedule a free consultation with me!