00:00 

This is Intentional Living with Tanya Hale and this is episode number 42, "Change That Sticks." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:20 

Okay, oh my gosh, isn't life just so great? I am so loving where I am right now. I have just had a week of really insightful discovery into myself and into my thoughts and I've discovered something. I think I'm going to talk about it in another couple of episodes when I've had a chance to work through it a little bit more, but I have learned something about my thoughts that has wreaked havoc in so much of my life and so much of my relationships this last week. It started off with me doing something that was that was really kind of unkind to someone else. I think I alluded to that last time and yet as I have worked through it and worked to identify my thoughts, I've found some things that are fascinating to me and I've learned some things that I am just so so grateful to be seeing for the first time in my life because they're things that are holding me back. I'm just in such a place of enlightenment right now and I'm loving it. 

01:28 

I hope to be able to share this with you a little bit and I hope that some of the things that I'm sharing with you are creating this space of enlightenment for you, where you're starting to understand a little bit more about where you are and about where you want to go and help you to see things more clearly. Because there is nothing better than seeing these things and recognizing that this has been holding me back and figuring this out is going to release me. It's going to free me. It's going to give me that freedom that I want, grow into the person that I really want to be. So I'm super excited about what I'm learning on a personal level and I'm excited to share that with you in the next couple of podcasts a I continue to just kind of work through it and process it and figure it out a little bit more. 

02:15 

But today we are going to be talking about change that sticks. So let's start off by thinking about the last time you tried to change something, a behavior in your life or maybe a bad habit and before you knew it you were right back to where you started. So maybe you worked really hard to change your eating habits. You lost some weight, you felt really good and then before long you were right back to the weight that you began at. Or maybe you decided to start exercising and you start off really strong and then before you know it it's been several weeks and you haven't even realized that you stopped exercising until it's been several weeks, right? 

02:53 

So what's going on here? What makes getting rid of old habits so hard and establishing new ones equally as difficult. Okay, well, there's a couple of things at play here and we're gonna take a look at them. The first thing I wanna look at is the amazing things that our brains do, our brains are super efficient machines. The brain is always trying to put things into habit mode so that it doesn't have to work so hard. Okay, so think about when a young child is first learning to write their name. It is excruciatingly painful for them and as parents or aunts or uncles or whatever or teachers, it's excruciatingly painful to watch them go through this, right? Every curve, every corner takes intense concentration. It can take a full minute for them to trace the letters of their name because this is a new skill and our brains are making the first connections between the neurons to be able to learn how to do that. 

03:51 

Okay, an example I love to use is that it's like forging a new path in the forest. We have weeds up to our waist. There are logs and branches and rocks. They're all strewn across the path. It takes a lot of time and a lot of consistency walking this path before it gets worn down to hard packed dirt and before we've kicked off all the rocks and the branches and we've moved the logs, right, it's a lot of effort. But eventually, this path becomes clear, the weeds all die out, the dirt gets hard packed and it becomes super easy to walk. So it works with the child who's learning to write their name, right? It starts off  super hard and then eventually, we get to the point where now, you and I can sign 20 papers in a row and not even put a thought toward what we're doing. We don't have to think, circle around here, cross this thing, we just do it. We've done this behavior so many times that now it doesn't even take a little bit of thought. 

04:51 

Alright, this is what an amazing thing our brain does. If we had to think about every curve and every corner we wrote with every word, it would get exhausting, wouldn't it? As would everything else we engage in. Now there isn't any hardfast data that I've been able to find but it's estimated that anywhere between 40 to 95 percent, that's a huge spread by the way, 40 to 95 percent of what we do every day is habitual. Meaning we really don't even think about the behavior. So yeah that's a huge spread, 55 points, but personally I tend to believe it's on the higher end of that because so much of what we do every day is habitual. Meaning that we don't even have to think about it, we just engage in it before we even, well a lot of times we're not even aware that we're engaging it. 

05:47 

So this is a huge huge blessing. So can you imagine just your morning routine of getting out of bed if you had to think about every movement? Okay. I think I'm awake. Okay, I'm gonna open my eyes. Okay, now I need to turn my head to the right. Okay, now I need to move my left arm, and I need to pick up my phone. Okay, now I need to turn it towards me. Okay, look at it. Acknowledge the time. Okay, now I need to put the phone back down. Alright, now I need to roll my body to the right. I need to move my arm underneath my body. Okay, I need to start to push up while simultaneously swinging my legs off the side of the bed. Okay, now I need to balance in this sitting position. Can you imagine? Can you even imagine if we had to think that every time we got up? And it would go on and on. 

06:39 

Just think about now we've gotten ready. We're putting our shoes on. It's time to tie our shoes. Okay, with each hand I'm gonna grab the laces farther down the eyelids, and I'm going to pull hold on to those laces, and I'm going to pull them tight. Then I'm going to move up past the next set of eyelets, and then I'm going to again grab the lace with my right hand and my left hand. Okay, now pull each side. Alright, now I'm at the top. So now I'm going to pull each lace from the top eyelet. Okay, now I'm going to take the right lace, and I'm going to cross it over the left. Okay, now I'm going to tuck that lace that's now on the left hand side, and I'm going to tuck it over the other lace and through the hole that I just created. Now, okay, now switch laces with each hand. Okay, now pull them tight over the top of the shoe. 

07:22 

Ah, right? That got super annoying for you, didn't it? Can you imagine if every time we tied our shoes we had to do that would be exhausting, right? But as it is, if you have lace shoes on today, I bet you probably can't even remember the tying part of putting them on. It's such a habit that our brains do it without us even being aware of what was going on. Our brain does it so that our mind doesn't have to pay attention to it. We're going to be talking about our brains and our minds. Our brains are the actual neurological connections that are going on. Our mind is the conscious part of us that makes the the conscious decisions. Okay, but our brain, this is something our brain takes over so that our mind doesn't have to. And our brain wants to take over everything that it can because it conserves energy and it makes our lives a lot easier. If we had to expend that much mental energy that we just talked about to get up and to get ready in the morning, that's about all we could do before we were exhausted and we needed to take a nap. 

08:27 

So this automation is a huge amazing thing in our lives. What our brain has done is create a pathway, remember that pathway in the forest we talked about, it's created a pathway for the behavior that now, just like that path in the forest, requires little to no effort to navigate. Quite brilliant, right? Amazing. But this is also what makes change so difficult. Our brain already has a pathway that works and that it loves. So when we seek to change up the routine, it's like trying to forge a new pathway in the forest. Our brains just want to go back to what's easy and what doesn't take any effort. 

09:13 

So remember that our brain wants to conserve energy all the time and so it pushes us towards habits. Doing something differently than we usually do requires energy that our brain may not see as necessary all of the time. Especially if we're approaching it from the A-line of our thought model, the Action line, right? Our brain may not be fully invested in expending the energy necessary to forge a new path in the forest if we're just trying to change the action, the A-line. And this is why it can be so difficult to change behaviors, because we often seek to change just the behavior. And this is the next part that is so important to understand about how to create change that sticks, this long-term change, right? 

10:02 

So if we want to lose weight we may decide to cut out carbs or eat smaller portions or something else like that. But not only is our brain going to fight the change from an energy point of view, but it also is not fully convinced that it's worth it. Our mind is not, okay? If our thoughts surrounding food are remaining the same, our brain is going to keep the same feelings and actions that have got us where we are. So just changing the actions will be extremely difficult and short-term. We may be successful short-term, but it's not going to last. And often our brain is going to fight us on those action changes until our mind gives up and we go back to what we were doing before. 

10:48 

And this is why so many people will lose weight, and then within a few months, be back to where they were before. Or they start a new habit. They start writing in their journal. And then before you know it, they open up their journal and it's been three months and they're like, "what? How did that happen?" Right? Because our mind is going to give up if it's just changing the action. So if we want to help our brain in creating a new habit, we cannot be working from the A line, the Action line. We have to start at the T line or the Thought line. So our thought also has to be one that we can totally get behind and a thought that we believe. If we start with the thought, "I just love lettuce. It tastes better than chocolate." Okay? We know darn well that we're lying to ourselves and that we don't really believe it. Okay? Unless you're like one of those people who just really doesn't like chocolate, you may think lettuce tastes better, but 98% of people really love chocolate. Okay? So though our brain can say it, our mind is not going to believe it. And we have to hone in on a thought that we really believe. Alright? 

11:57 

So maybe we start with a thought like, "I really want to have more energy." Or maybe, I want to not feel so bloated and thick all the time. So those are more likely to be thoughts that you can really believe. And this is a great place to start. Okay? Over time, if you continue to feed your mind these types of thoughts, your feelings and your actions will begin to align with those thoughts. And then once you actually do start to have more energy, the thought will change from, "I really want to have more energy" to "eating this way is giving me so much more energy." Alright? And then that's going to create a feeling of maybe excitement or maybe a feeling of a positive feeling that's going to create then more positive actions. It's going to want us to help keep eating that way. And this thought may, "this thought of eating this way gives me more energy may change over time to healthy food is a great way to fuel my body." Right? Which may help you eventually get to the point that you think that food is fuel. And when we start thinking of food as being fuel, instead of food as being fun, the whole way we approach food changes. Alright? So this is where we can start to see where our mind starts to take over. When our mind really starts thinking in this instance, food is fuel, then it's going to change every other feeling and action associated with it. 

13:31 

Okay, let me give you another example. When I first started exercising regularly, when I was a young mom, I was motivated more by the thought, "I want to stay in shape. I want to get back to where I was before my baby was born." Okay? I've had a lot of different thoughts over the years. 20 years is a long time, but I've thought things like "I really like feeling strong," to "I feel so much better when I'm consistently exercising." A thought I'm entertaining more as I get older is "I want to be active and healthy as I get older. I don't want to slow down and become incapacitated." 

14:06 

So all of these thoughts are true and as my life has changed so have my thoughts. My thoughts have needed to change to keep up with my changing life but the thing that has kept me exercising regularly for over 20 years has been my positive thoughts about how it helps me. If I were to focus on negative thoughts my mind would never buy in enough to stay with it long enough to create that new pathway in my brain. Remember the pathways are really really tough to get started. Think about walking that pathway through the forest, forging a new path, how difficult it can be, right? And without the right thoughts we don't buy into them without We don't buy into them enough to stick with it to create a new pattern of behavior, right? Because our brain's going to keep saying, "oh, let's just go over to the old path. It's so much easier. It's just so much easier, so much easier." And eventually, that brain is going to wear down our mind if our mind is not fully invested. 

15:08 

So all this time had I been thinking, "I hate exercising, but I guess I have to." My mind would put up a lot of resistance, and it would end up exercising out of sheer willpower. And here's something we need to understand about willpower. It will only take you so far. Studies have shown that willpower is an expendable resource, and that we only have so much of it. The more willpower we use, the less of what we have for later on. We can run out. That's one reason why we can start off so  strong with changing behavior at the beginning of the day and eat a really healthy breakfast. And by late afternoon, we're running for the Twinkies or the ding-dongs, right? By late afternoon, we're completely out of willpower, and we'll then engage in every behavior that we initially set out where we wanted to change. Willpower is really trying to use brute force to change our behaviors. 

16:07 

But think about, just like with your children, brute force may work right up front. They may change their behavior right up front with us being in their face. But long term, that child is going to rebel, and things will get worse than they were before. Because the resistance is so strong with our kids. But we work the exact same way. By trying to use brute force or willpower with our minds, we not only run out of steam because we've used up all of our willpower, but our minds want to rebel against a use of force. And this is when we start to self-sabotage. This is when we start to do the exact opposite of what we set out to do. Sometimes we do it outright, but other times it can be really, really subversive in what we start doing. So our minds are going to fight back against willpower. But when we can insert a thought that we really believe, our minds will get on board and stick with it long enough to begin to create those new pathways in our brains. 

17:15 

Okay, and then here's what happens. The more we walk the new path the more beat down it gets and the easier it is to walk it. The less we walk the old thought path the more the weeds start to grow up along the sides and then it rains and softens the dirt and more weeds grow and they break up the dirt and then branches and logs fall across it and eventually the old path is overgrown and more difficult to walk than the new path. And this, my friends, is when we have created change that sticks. But it all starts with creating a thought that we can believe in and then consistently changing out the old thought for the new thought. 

17:57 

Okay, so for example, I love doing this coaching gig. I really just love it so much. And I'm working towards getting to do this full time because I love it so much. So school gets out for summer and I have all day every day to work on things for my business, which during the school year I'm working all day long with middle schooler kids and I come home and I've expended a lot of energy there. And sometimes it's difficult to feel like I want to spend the time, right? Because I'm so busy during the school year. But during the summer, I can start off at eight o'clock in the morning working when I've got a lot of energy, I've got a lot of focus, right? So it can, but even with that, it can be so easy for me to fall into the thought that "okay, I have to go get to work." Or "I just really deserve a break after such a long and difficult school year." Are both of these thoughts true? Probably a little bit. I like to believe that they're true, right? But if every time I sit down here at my computer, I insert one of those thoughts, "oh, I just really deserve a break," how much progress am I going to make on my business? Very little. My mind is going to rebel because it will feel as though it's being forced to do something, work on my business that it doesn't want to do because otherwise I'm thinking I really deserve a break instead. 

19:22 

So however, this is what I'm finding fascinating, when I choose to think different thoughts such as, "I love working on and thinking about these things," which I do, or the thought, "I'm so excited for when I can do this full time," which I am, everything changes. Those are thoughts my mind believes and they help to keep me focused. And then after several hours of focusing in and working, I walk away feeling amazing and energized and empowered and those feelings help to reinforce the thoughts such as "I love working on and thinking about these things" or "I'm so excited when I can do this full-time." Those feelings help reinforce those thoughts and the behaviors that follow from those thoughts. And then the next time I sit down to work on my work on my business my mind finds it easier to engage with those positive thoughts because the path is getting worn down and established, so this time it's easier to think and my motivation is easier to engage. My mind is starting to see the fruits of those thoughts. And once my mind is all in then lasting change starts to happen. But it starts with learning to recognize the current thoughts you're having that are holding you back from lasting change and learning to identify thoughts that will carry you through to behaviors that will stick. 

20:52 

This is where coaching is such a valuable tool. I know as I work with coaches that they will show me thoughts I'm having that I am not even aware of, but that are holding me back from the changes I really want to make. And the thing that's fascinating to me is when I'm working with these coaches, I'll be telling them what's going on and I'll even say these thoughts out loud. And I'm still not hearing them and I'm still not registering that that is what I'm thinking. And it often takes this outside coach and outside source to hear what I'm saying and to replay it back for me and to bring it to my consciousness. And then I'm like, "oh my gosh, really, I'm thinking that?" And it's just amazing to me that as aware as I try to  be of my thoughts, I am still blindsided by thoughts that I have that are holding me back and that are keeping me from real change. 

21:45 

So if you're struggling with creating lasting change in your life, get on my website, tanyahale.com, go to the "coaching" tab and sign up for a free 20 minute coaching session to get you started. It can be a life-changing experience working with a coach. Having a coach help you see what thoughts are going on in your head and how they're holding you back is shocking sometimes, it is for me. It can help to get you on a path you wanna be on and help you figure out how to stay on that path, how to get where you wanna go. Okay, isn't growing up amazing? I love this process of growth. Gosh, I don't know where that emotion came from except that this is a brilliant place to be. And I love it and I just wanna share it with you so much. I want you to understand that growth is where it's at. This is where we really find that peace and that contentment and that purpose and drive. that we want in life. Promise you that, alright? 

22:51 

So hang in there, figure things out, give me a call and schedule that free coaching session if you feel like you need some help. It is so worth it. Is it a lot of work? Yes, this growth is a lot of work, but boy, the emotional investment is, the payoff is amazing. Just can't even figure it out. Alright, so if you've not subscribed to this I would like you to leave a review. If you're a consistent listener, there's a reason you're a consistent listener. Hopefully it's because this is a great thing for you and you're learning some things. If that's true, will you please leave me a review? I want to have a hundred reviews on there and I'm not very close to that right now. I know that it's easy to listen and listen and not leave a review, but I would love for you to leave me one so that I can reach my goal of a hundred reviews. And if you'll share this with people who you think would also benefit from learning these great tools and these great skills, I would so appreciate it. I hope you have a terrific week. I hope that your growth game is on and that you are seeking to just be more aware of your thoughts. And I hope that you start figuring out the things that you want to figure out to be in a better place. Alright, have a terrific one and I will talk to you next time. 

24:09 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.