Listen up: You Don’t Need More Willpower
Aug 21, 2022I help my coaching clients learn to be a neutral observer of their own behavior.
What does that mean?
It means that we look at our own actions, we notice them, and we practice not judging ourselves.
It means that we work on looking at our actions as data -- just facts that we collect.
So, if we’re working on losing weight, and then we overeat -- what do we do with that information?
Typically, we’d go into beat-ourselves-up mode and say “I blew it” or “Ugh, I was so bad.”
What’s more, you might believe that you have to regulate yourself in this way.
You might think something like...“If I just let it go, I’ll probably keep overeating, so let me nip that in the bud by calling myself out on it.”
The diet industry tells us that if we’re overeating, we lack willpower. We’re wrong in some way for this behavior.
What we don’t always see is how much negative emotion we create by beating ourselves up over our actions.
If we’re constantly making ourselves feel shitty by how we talk to ourselves – that self-talk is what needs our attention, not what’s on our plates.
Actions depend more on how we feel than how much willpower we have.
If you want to understand why you’re not taking the actions that you say you want to – don’t look to willower.
Instead, it’s time to get curious.
We might ask: What was going on when this happened? What was I feeling? What was I thinking?
Overeating is simply a pattern.
When we work on being curious about it, we can figure out ways to interrupt that pattern and make the lasting changes we want.
This is part of the process I teach my clients to lose weight in a simple and sustainable way -- by using our brains to lose weight and not relying on willpower.
Set up a free 45-minute consultation session with me so that we can see if we’re a good fit to work together.
