Overcome roadblocks to actions to protect your health or help you lose weight....

Today's Post: Monday, 3-28-2011

Good news!

Have you failed at making positive health changes -- or have trouble getting started -- or trouble with continuing to do the actions that protect your health or help you lose weight?

Here are some ideas to overcome these common problems. They have been proven to work.

1. The most valuable single one comes to me from Peter Drucker, Tony Robbins, and sports.

Peter Drucker made the best and most general statement of it.

Effective people think of all the things they CAN do to achieve results and find one of the most promising and do that right away.

They simply ignore the things they can’t do at first. He found that people often find they CAN do more to get the results they want than they have time for. So they start with the most doable or most promising or the ones that enable them to do more and get started on those.

The pro football coaches that win put it this way, “Take what the defense gives you.” Same idea. Avoid wasting much time on things that won’t work and energetically do what WILL work. You often get great results that way.

What if you still can’t get started or think of anything you believe will work? Tony Robbins had a system that worked brilliantly to solve this.: He had his clients ask themselves this: “What things can I do that MIGHT work?”

He found that was a great way to get people to see the things they could try and realize they had hope of success. They found that they could try some of those things and see if one of them worked. Usually they found one that did work and got the things they wanted but hadn’t believed they could have.

2. Rev. Robert Schuller had the best next step. People who succeed persist in doing the things that work. But people who persist in doing things that don’t work can fail. So, he came up with brief way to say the solution. Use “Experimental Persistence.”

In short, be very committed to the result you want and persist in working to get it. But experiment. Try things that might work that you can do. Keep doing the ones that work. The ones that don’t work, stop doing them and experiment with what might work instead. And keep on doing what works and experimenting with what might work. Use “experimental persistence!”

The study done at Harvard by David McClelland on people who achieve found exactly this factor.

But he found one more key thing. They tended to go most with moderate challenges. For their experiments, they passed up things that were super easy but not very productive once they got started. And, they weren’t overoptimistic to the point of trying things that really had little chance at all. They focused on things that were moderately challenging, that really might work and be quite productive with just a bit of luck or extra effort and did those.

3. What can you do to increase your level of belief enough to get started?

Affirmations have been popular. “I will get this done.” etc.

But if you say this about something you actually have no faith you can do and haven’t been taking action on, it’s a total waste of time. It doesn’t work and nothing happens.

But some social science research and the self help innovator Noah St. John in particular found what DOES work.

The social scientists found that people who simply assume they could do something got less results than those who asked themselves IF they could do something.

Noah St. John found out why and how to use that strategy.

He calls it “AFFORMATIONS.” It starts like an affirmation but winds up going to the first strategy by forming it as a question.

Why CAN I achieve this goal? Why am I achieving this goal with less effort than I expected? Why am I able to do this now when I wasn’t before?

His idea is brilliant and many of the people who have used it well have achieved much more than they though they could at first.

It starts with the positive belief of the affirmation but then makes it believable with the real things you can do and reasons why you can do it.

I can do this. Now let me ask myself why. OK. Since that’s what I can do that will enable me to do this, let’s get started.

4. Today Jillian Michaels email had some other useful ideas.

a) What if you don’t like something you can do that will help you achieve your goals? One of her students said this or something like it. “What you don’t like doing limits what you can achieve. When will you stop limiting yourself?”

Where you go next is a matter of personal style.

I like have your cake and eat it too strategies like, “How can I pay someone else to do this who doesn’t dislike it as much as I do?”

or What can I do to get the same result that I dislike less or even LIKE to do?

(I just used this one. In adding more vegetables to cut down on the fructose in the apple sauce I was eating in order to lose more fat, I tried eating thawed spinach that from a package of chopped spinach instead. It was too slow, it was too messy, and I despised the taste. But I realized I could try unsweetened pumpkin puree. It isn’t as good as applesauce. But it’s OK. And I’ve eaten it since and lost some weight on the scale already!)

My wife is more practical than I and often achieves more in some challenging situations.

Her mantra is “If this gets me what I want, it’s the right thing to do. I’ve learned that I can simply disregard not liking it since I know it gets me what I want.”

b) One of Jillian Michaels’ people added an upgrade or perhaps she said it, “Find a way to actually LIKE to do the things that were hard for you at first.”

Some people manage to do that. And, they get great results because of it.

c) One woman said, "I hate doing something that I am not good at, or something that I don't pick up quickly." But she began bicycle riding anyway until she could do it. And, she found that the positive experience of “getting it” once she had gotten into it enough was so rewarding that it made keeping on easy!

In starting things that others can do that you hate being bad at in the beginning, this one is a great one to remember!

In short, focus on things that might work and that you can do. Try some that look effective. Keep the ones that work or that you get better at doing. And, keep trying new ways when something doesn’t work.

Start right away if only writing a list of things that might work. Pick a couple to try. And, keep going.

5. In protecting your health and losing fat weight, it also helps to think strategically about and focus on upgrading your lifestyle in ways that do those things & in ways you can keep doing once you’ve learned how.

Focusing on doing something temporarily as most people have done with weight loss, gets TEMPORARY results. In short, it always fails!

But the people who make lasting lifestyle upgrades, get permanent results and succeed!

Try these five strategies. You may well find you can succeed in a way you couldn’t have imagined before.