Moving on to building confidence that your desired change will be successful.
I’ll give you an example from my own life. Over 15 years I have struggled to maintain a consistent meditation practice. I fell off the wagon a bit for a stretch of 2 years even though I knew all about the positive benefits. I made a commitment to restart my practice but wasn’t very confident that I’d stick with it this time. As so often the case, coaches don’t practice what they teach but in this case, I did follow my training as a behavior modification specialist. I went through everything that I’m walking you through right now. I figured out a few things that were competing with my time (do I really want to meditate when I could watch the Great British Baking Show!?!?) and I also figured out my “why” in a very clear way: when I meditate regularly I have a much more positive outlook on life. Other steps to increase my confidence were to set daily reminders, work with a menu of varying meditation forms so I wouldn’t get bored with it and also ask my partner to meditate with me as a shared activity.
So, here are some strategies to increase confidence when it comes to behavior changes:
What do you know about yourself that makes you successful in other areas of your life? How can you use that strength in this process?
Maybe you’re very organized or you’re more motivated when you have the support of friends or family, maybe reducing distractions and physically removing them or yourself from them helps. Play with this a bit and yes, you got it, write your strengths down.
What were the barriers in the past for you? How can you navigate them better this time?
What do you need to make yourself successful?
Don’t minimize or discount the successes you’ve had in the past. They all add up and you can learn from them. If you can identify why you struggled in the past you can brainstorm other ideas on how to tackle the problem. Doing this with a partner is often helpful because another brain might work completely differently than yours.
Example: I’ve failed to play more tennis because I couldn’t find any partners.
Enter Meike as a brainstorm partner: You can always rent the ball machine. Or how about going out and taking a few buckets of serves? Heck, use the wall at Gates. Or join one of my classes And yes, as always, commit your thoughts to paper!
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