keeping new years’ resolutions
New Year’s resolutions seem a great idea at the time, don’t they? A great way to start the year as we mean to go on, getting rid of unwanted habits, improving fitness, or even starting new things.
So why is it that so many of us find ourselves giving up on our resolutions before we even get to the end of January?
Your subconscious mind will attempt to sabotage your efforts. In this blog I share why this happens and what you can do about it
Let’s start by looking at our subconscious mind and core emotional needs…
Your subconscious mind is like a 7-year-old who is in charge of your entire life. It is innocent and loving but understands everything as a seven-year-old would. If we try to force it to do things, we end up with an uncomfortable feeling. This is because we are trying to get it to do something it does not want to do.
Every one of us has three core emotional needs linked to survival – love, certainty or safety, and significance (feeling good about ourselves). In life we have only so much energy and time and our subconscious mind will make decisions based on meeting these emotional needs. In fact, it will even prevent us from doing activity which it does not associate with meeting these needs, or which threatens these needs.
So, let’s apply that to the idea of New Year’s resolutions…
In the short term, changes we decide to make often take away comforts, or mean doing things we do not particularly want to do. For some of us there is a nagging voice that it is not going to work, even before we start. As a result, our emotional needs are threatened, and our subconscious mind creates ways to self-sabotage our efforts – you know that voice creeping in saying “it’s ok if I miss a day”, or “just one chocolate will be ok”!
If your subconscious mind is getting it’s needs met through your current behaviours, trying to change at a conscious level doesn’t always work; as soon as you stop paying attention, your subconscious mind sends you thoughts or even cravings to get you to do what will meet your emotional needs in the short term.
Some people say that they have willpower. Willpower is rarely strong enough, unless you can get by with unmet emotional needs until you start to see the results which make you feel good about yourself. These fill your significance bucket and provide the stimulus to sustain the changes you have made. However, you need to have a very strong desire and be utterly certain that it will end in a good result if it takes away your needs in the short term.
For most of us, if we want to change anything in a sustainable way, we need to consult with our subconscious mind for it to help us, so that it’s aligned with what we want to do.
So, what can you do to continue to meet the New Year’s resolutions you have set?
At a conscious level you can schedule it in, so it doesn’t feel like it’s stealing time from something else. You can reward yourself or combine it with something you do enjoy. You can break the effort down, so that it seems more manageable and less daunting.
If you really want to change, you need to associate that change with meeting an emotional need. Begin by identifying what emotional need your current behaviour is meeting and then what you can replace it with that also meets this emotional need.
At a subconscious level you can do this in a way that makes the new behaviours easy and effortless. Many people ask for my help if they keep sabotaging their own efforts, or when they don’t know what to change and how to change it. The tools I use with my clients are a way of negotiating with the subconscious mind to align and reassure it.
I offer a free habits kick start session, enabling you to discuss the changes you want to make, identify possible blocks and decide your next steps.
Click the link to book your free habits kick start session or ask me a question. https://www.jouff.co.uk/contact
Take care
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