Have you ever set a goal to not achieve it and then felt broken? Best news ever it’s not you. Read on to learn how to finally achieve your goals.
How Your Brain Works
Your brain has three jobs in life that keeps you alive. Our brain was designed to conserve energy, seek pleasure, and avoid pain. We’ve evolved over the years so lets go back to when humans began roaming the earth living in caves. If we wasted our energy, we may not have the energy needed to run from tigers. Seeking pleasure kept our species populated, and avoiding pain kept us alive and able to move around.
Move forward to today. Our brains still do these three things. Thank you brains for working properly, but our brains don’t know that that tiger isn’t coming anymore, that seeking pleasure is available is so many forms some which can be harmful, and that some pain is okay. A little discomfort meeting someone new is totally different than breaking our leg and being unable to run from the tigers and bears.
So if we are aware that our brain does these things then we can bypass the hard wiring in it. For example, I would find myself frustrated because my children all needed me while I was making dinner and the volume was louder then I appreciated. My brain would respond to this “pain” in what I had learned as the easiest way, yelling. Over time my brain learned that when I lost it and raised my voice at my children they would be quiet for a minute. So it created a shortcut to jump straight to yelling during dinner prep chaos.
Allowing Emotions
But when I learned that my brain was just trying to avoid pain, I could sit with that pain instead. I would feel inside my body the emotion of frustration. I would notice my body tense up, heart rate speed up, the temperature rise, and envision this red goop swirling in my chest instead. I would temporarily feel the pain rather than conserve energy and avoid it by yelling at my family.
When you feel emotions rather than resist them, they gradually get less and less intense. Picture them like a waves on a beach. The first ones come crashing in feeling too much to handle, but if you wait it out they get less and less intense. Eventually they become little tiny waves that barely get your toes wet.
Brain Hack to Achieving Your Goals
So being onto our brains is a great way to get leverage over a goal. If we know that we do things to avoid pain, then we can allow that “pain” to grow. Let’s walk thru a couple examples.
Take the stop yelling goal I had. Because I understood that it was reasonable for my brain to go to the short cut of yelling to avoid “pain” or the discomfort of dinner prep. I was able to talk myself thru feeling that discomfort until that became my new normal. Understanding my brain made it easier to try again when I didn’t “do it.” It also was doable knowing that it would last forever. Now I rarely lose my mind prepping dinner. I am calling that achieving my goal.
Let’s say you want to start exercising regularly. Your brain will want to conserve energy and avoid pain. Knowing this makes it easier to over ride the brain’s hard wiring. You can do things ahead of time to make the initial start easier like wearing your workout clothes to bed or picking your workout out ahead of time.
You also can watch your brain try to talk you out of working out. It might sound like “I don’t have time, you don’t have the energy today for this, the kids will never learn to let you workout”, etc. When this chatter comes up you can answer back. Tell your brain, “it’s ok, and we will won’t die from working out.” Over time you will rewire your brain to not freak out about the prospect of working out.
Getting Help to Achieve Your Goals
Sometimes we are too close to goal to see how our brains are tricking us. That is where a good life coach is helpful. They will help you take a look at your goal and how your brain is tricking you. If you want help seeing how your brain is tricking you, book a Complimentary Discovery Call with me. I’d love to help you work thru it during that call.
Until Next Time
-Keira
