Do you feel like things are going to be different this year? It’s 2020. You set a New Year’s resolution, it feels fresh, it feels new. I have spent New Year after New Year feeling this way.

This year is different for me. You won’t find me at the gym 5 times a week or following a new meal plan. I’ve finally cracked the code of achieving long term success and I never plan on going back.

For years, I set resolution after resolution revolving around weight loss. Maybe mid-December I would make the decision that things would change. I would decide that the coming year was going to be my year. I had lots of fun and ate whatever I wanted over the holidays because I knew that come New Years, things would be different.

I mustered up all my will power and I worked harder than I ever had in my life. I might have even started to see some results. But a few days/weeks/months in, life happens. I got invited to a party. Or invited out to lunch. Or I got emotionally triggered. It wasn’t working.

Things got hard. Slowly, but surely, I slipped away from my goals and right back into my old patterns.

This endless cycle ended up solidifying the original beliefs that I had about myself. Things like: I have no willpower or I’m not meant to be thin or I’m not willing to give up wine or I just love cookies too much. For as long as I can remember, my excuse was “I just have a sweet tooth.” I acted almost as if I had no control over it.

The truth is, I didn’t have conscious control over it. This was my pattern for as long as I can remember.

Slowly but surely I’m learning to break the patterns. Here’s what I do instead:

I first need to find out where the goal is coming from.

To do this, I ask lots of questions about the root of the goal itself. To get the real answers, I need to be still and feel them, not think about them.

Is this goal in alignment with my true North? Does achieving this goal feel good to me? As a society, we have a lot of expectations that are placed upon us. It is so easy to get wrapped up in these expectations and believe that they will bring us happiness. When I caught myself adopting these expectations, the internal motivation never happened for me. It was never something that my soul truly wanted.

Am I looking for some kind of reward or happiness with this goal? Do I believe that once I lose 20 lbs I’ll be happy? Or if I get my salary to a certain level I’ll feel good? Or validated? If the answer is yes, I need to take a step back. Happiness is never in the future. When I looked to some outside goal to bring me happiness, I never found it. Happiness is right here, right now. Happiness is in the present moment. Happiness comes with a full understanding that I am enough, exactly as I am, with or without those 20lbs or that higher salary. If I don’t know how to live in this exact moment right now, I’ll never be in the moment long enough to achieve long term happiness. When I hit the 20lb mark, I’ll likely want 25. When I hit the salary level, I’ll likely raise the bar again as soon as I get to it. Looking to the future for happiness was like trying to chase the carrot on a stick. I could never reach it.

Once I find a goal that I am genuinely connected to, then I move onto the next step:

Who do I need to become in order to achieve this goal?

Success starts as an inside job and it’s achieved in the present moment, not in the future. What does that mean? It means I need to overhaul my entire belief system and lifestyle for the long term.

One of the biggest obstacles for me (and I believe most of the world) is that I lacked the tools to effectively overhaul my belief system. When I set health and fitness goals, I was only focusing on my exterior world. So I’d go to the gym more regularly, make extra trips to the grocery store, cook healthier foods and really push for that external reward.

But my internal world was fighting back. I lacked an understanding of how my brain worked and did not understand how to work in partnership with it. My brain was working against me. As much as I wanted to be a healthy eater, I would still get triggered emotionally. Oftentimes, I lacked the ‘willpower’ to stand my ground.

I like to imagine our brains like a garden. As we grow up, the people in our lives and our experiences seed our garden with beliefs about ourselves and about the world. Sometimes we plant our own new seeds or sometimes seeds were planted for us. These beliefs can either be empowering or limiting. Limiting beliefs are like weeds and if left unattended, can take over.

It was my ‘truth.’ Before I became consciously aware that my garden existed, my subconscious just followed the rules in my garden. At some level, I thought the beliefs in my garden was just who I was. When I did finally become aware, I had no idea how to manage or nurture it.  The idea of cleaning it up was completely overwhelming because my garden was an overgrown mess.

Deciding to make change without getting to the source is like pulling the weeds at the surface and not digging up the roots. They will grow back. They always do. For me, my lifetime struggle with emotional eating was rooted back to events deep into my childhood.

When I learned how to heal my inner child (more on this in a future post), the emotional eating just went away. The emotional eating was the result of some deeply rooted weeds in my garden planted when I was a young child. I finally learned how to pull the weeds out from the root. As a result, foods no longer trigger me. I can have a balanced relationship with food without constantly trying to battle those inner cravings.

And then I have one final step…

I let go of the outcome

If I’m focusing daily on becoming better and better, then the goal gets pulled into the present moment. The goal actually becomes the process and not the outcome. It becomes the daily actions that need to be taken. It is the journey, not the destination. In reality, there is NEVER a destination. Attaching to an outcome is a way of living in the future. I vow to live in the present moment, as much as possible. I align my compass to north, adjust when necessary and enjoy the journey!

Let’s say I want to lose 20 lbs. In my old ways of setting a goal of losing 20 lbs, I would focus on all the things that needed to be done to lose 20 lbs. Maybe I would start going to the gym, snack less, eat more fruits and vegetables and work hard to fight my internal cravings. If I was “successful”, I often took my foot off the gas pedal when I lost the 20lbs and then went back to my old lifestyle. The problem is, that old lifestyle is why I was 20lbs overweight in the first place. Or maybe I would get derailed by those emotional cravings along the way. Either way, I would end up spiraling back to where I was when I started. It was a vicious cycle.

If instead, I focus on becoming the person who is naturally 20lbs lighter, I focus my efforts on uncovering the roots of what got me to being 20lbs overweight in the first place. I then go to work to uproot them. I plant new beliefs in their place. These new beliefs change my actions and these new actions effortlessly get me to my ‘goal’ of being 20lbs lighter. Nothing changes when I hit the 20 lbs lighter mark because I changed my mindset which in turn changed my lifestyle. I have now become the person who is 20lbs lighter. My garden gets overhauled with new beliefs that support my long term efforts and the cycle is broken. Boom.

With the goal of lifelong learning, I can weather the storm. Overcoming the storm becomes a part of the goal. I can overcome the obstacles. I can learn from my mistakes, make changes and keep moving forward.

At the end of the day, it’s not about a lofty dream of a perfect garden, with no plan on how to make it happen or how to maintain it. It is instead about wanting and learning how to be a lifelong gardener and loving every second of it.