We’re near the end of this great journey through our virtual tour of a 12 week diet but we still have yet to conquer our fears and deal with a goal that does not come to pass.  Let’s not waste time and just hop right in.

I have thought about this all week long in terms of how I was going to present fear to you.  My initial thought was to sort of pick up where I left off with ‘pressure’ and tell you about the fake voices in your head and how they control you.  However, I know that some good brain cells were set on fire with that post so I will put out those flames later on with another post when we go into the series that discusses the after effects of this diet.   What I feel that most of us lack is an understanding of how real those voices and feelings seem at the time and because of this, how much they can rob us of a healthy dieting experience.  If we can acknowledge in our hearts—not our minds—that those voices are just fear and they are not real, then we may be able to make it through this diet without making any rash, harmful decisions.  But it is the acknowledging that is the hard part.  We have such a tough veneer that most of us aren’t honest enough with ourselves to share that we have fears.  Real fears.  So real, they seem like people in a room to us.

FEAR is an acronym in the English language for “False Evidence Appearing Real”. Neale Donald Walsch

Hands down, the best weapon in war or any other kind of battle is intimidation.  Warring parties would try to convince the other side that they had an advantage in hopes of getting them to surrender without even going to battle.  In many instances it worked and a fight was avoided.  When it comes to something such as dieting, the enemy isn’t another country warring against us; the enemy is in our mind and it will stop at nothing to de-rail us from our goal.  It is real, it occupies real space in our brain and it can become so real that we could almost have a conversation with it on the couch.  Actually, we do have a conversation with it on the couch.

I want to stress this concept to the point of ad nauseam because you may fail to see its relevance and impact in your life.  When you are 7 weeks into this diet but your only 1/3 of the way to goal, it is fear who is going to remind you of that.  When you are in the gym and you suddenly feel portly compared to the week before, it is fear that is making that happen.  When you are deciding on adding extra cardio into your program when you know you shouldn’t or cut out carbs before your plan tells you to, it is fear that gives you the wherewithal to that.  Fear becomes your best friend.  He goes from being just a topic you discuss with someone you trust to a scary man with bad breath who is real, mean and standing right next to you.

As dieters, the things we fear seem so silly when we say them out loud so we keep them to ourselves and it is there that they become true villains in our minds.  They literally take on the human likeness of a 6’3” tall, large frame, ominous looking and strong male who stalks us wherever we go.  He pops up at the most inopportune times and refuses to leave us, even after we have convinced ourselves for the 20^th time that hour he is a figment of our imagination and nothing is going to happen.  He has bad breath and is happy to breathe on us any time we feel we are losing control of our present circumstances.  Thus if life begins to squeeze us emotionally through work, home life or friends, here comes fear to keep us company through that by giving us something else to worry over instead of the real issues at hand.

He makes us anxious.  He makes us get up, go to the cabinets and eat like there is no tomorrow.   He can tell us to take a not-so-good ergogenic aid because without it we will never get to where we want.  He’ll talk all day long if we let him—and we do!  We argue with him, reason with him and even shout at him if we’re alone.  He is in full control and we are at his mercy when he strikes because we 1) want to deny that he is real and 2) do not recognize the behaviors that he brings out in us because we keep denying he is real.  More than anything you must acknowledge his presence to get rid of him or he just keeps sitting at the dinner table in your mind feasting on your sanity.

I’m not even going to try to address conquering fear here and for the most part of this series I have only pointed out emotions and actions without going into how to get over them.  This is mainly because it is not that simple to “fix” and this post is already longer than the line of traffic at a cheap gas station without adding that in.  I promise I will get there.  We have much to cover in the coming months and I think it best to get your mind percolating first.

Tomorrow I will wrap this series up by giving you the last two weeks of the diet.  It may interest you to know that we do not make it to goal the way we want and so I will cover what to do when that happens, as well.  This has been a great series and I really appreciate all the emails and comments.  Keep ‘em coming! Woop woop!

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Do you really know how to set goals or do you just write a bunch of ‘wants’ on a piece of paper and hope for the best?  Goals are great things to have because they keep us focused and wanting more of ourselves, but do you write them risk free?  Do you stop short of really demanding something of yourself that might possibly illicit a change out of you?  What I really want to know is…

How High Would You Climb If You Could Not Fall?

I want to know.  If you knew there is was no chance of you falling, how high would you go?  What would you write on that piece of paper as a goal?  Why would knowing you would not fall change anything? 

GOAL SETTING

Here is one task that I truly feel is misinterpreted.  There are many theories about goal setting and I do not want to go into any of them in this post but Mindtools and MyGoals.com both have great theories on how to set goals and put them into action so you can check them out if you want to be super technical about it.  But I want you to think before you even go there to learn how to put any goal you have in action, “Am I already limiting myself when I set my goal?”  When you go to write that goal down and put it into action, is it already clipped at the edges to make it pretty and doable lest you stick your neck out a little and take a risk?

ENDLESS GUARANTEES

(This is for the ladies, guys.  Sorry.  I have one coming for you soon, hang tight.)

We women need to Believe.  We have an insatiable desire to believe in something and invest in it.  It is hard wired into our system.  When we were younger, it was the hot band/singer at the time.  As we aged, it was a college professor.  Getting into the work field had us looking up to our mentors/leaders ahead of us.  No matter what stage of life we are in, we are looking to believe…so that we know we can do it, too.  We need reassurance.  We need a guarantee.  We need to know that we are not just making something up and that it can be done.  And then when we have that, we need it some more.  And then we look in more places for more reassurance.  And finally, we look again!  In other words, we very rarely come to a place where we believe that we too can achieve the task at hand and we are in a never ending search for a guarantee that we can do what we are setting out to do. 

REVERSE THE PROCESS

Instead of having you write down a lofty goal and then filling you with endless quotes as to why you are good enough to do what you want to do, I want to just ask again:

What is going to happen if you do not achieve that goal?  OR

How High Would You Climb If You Could Not Fall?

If there is no risk of harm, why stop climbing?  Can you write that out for yourself?  What is the worst thing that can happen if you set a lofty goal, take a risk and then fall short of it?  Will you lose your house?  Will it end your marriage?  Can you still pay for your kids to go to school?  What’s the worst thing that can happen?  Why can’t we just Trust and Believe that if we do what we are supposed to, that everything else will fall in place?  Where are we failing ourselves?

We buy into products (Mary Kay, Pampered Chef), people (Tony Robbins, Deepak Chopra), methods (The Secret) and etc. and we become motivated enough to sit down and write goals for someone we do not believe in!!  Is anybody hearing me here??  Invest in yourself!  Believe in yourself because I ask one more time, “What’s the worst thing that can happen if you fall short of that goal?”  You would either try again or analyze what went wrong and fix it.  But no matter what, you would be a better person in the end.  You will have learned, grown, expanded, become more confident just knowing the world didn’t explode—you will have done something more than just the usual, “I want to lose 5 pounds.” 

Sticking your neck out is rewarding.  Standing up to your fears is tremendous.  Yes, you did not get the part in the Broadway show that you wanted (totally made up scenario here), but you went to 10 auditions and met 2 influential producers and got some great experience in the mean time.  You would have never done that the year before so yes, you fell short of your goal and you may feel dejected because you did not get the part, but guess what, you are still alive and you can still perform.  What was the risk?

FACING FACTS

I feel like Mondays are a time when everyone sits down and writes up new goals for the week, month or whatever.  Go ahead, write your normal goals down on paper…and then write one helluva whopper of a goal that makes you shake in your boots.  Go ahead, I dare you.  What’s the worst that could happen?

Make this a good week, folks! 

p.s. My little one is much better.  Thank you everyone!:o)