Taking Action 2.0

You have the plan. You’ve put it on the calendar. You know what you want to do. Then the time comes, and you don’t do it.

What happens next? If you’re like many of the people I coach, you get frustrated with yourself and try to push harder.

But the action isn’t where the pattern starts. Your thoughts create your feelings. Your feelings drive your actions—or your inaction—and your actions create your results.

Trying to change the action without understanding the thought and feeling behind it puts you in a battle with your own mind.

For Episode 300, I went back to the first episode of this podcast, which was about why we don’t take action. I was struck by how much the teaching was the same. These ideas remain foundational: understand yourself with compassion before you try to change yourself.

Look at what you can control

The Self-Coaching Model separates circumstances from thoughts, feelings, actions, and results.

Circumstances are outside your control. Other people are circumstances. Your past is a circumstance because it has already happened. You can’t go back and change it.

Your present thinking is different. You can become aware of it and learn to choose it deliberately.

Most of us haven’t been taught to watch our thinking. We respond to thoughts we don’t even realize we’re having, and then wonder why we feel the way we do or keep repeating the same behavior.

Understanding the Model gives you a way to see the pattern. Instead of looking only at what you did, look at the feeling that fueled it and the thought that created that feeling.

Why another reminder didn’t get her exercising

I worked with a client who wanted to start exercising. She wanted to lose weight and be healthier. She planned the exercise, set reminders, and scheduled it. When it was time, she didn’t do it.

I asked what she felt right before deciding not to exercise. She recognized apathy. There was no drive to follow through.

Then we looked for the thought creating that apathy. She believed the exercise wouldn’t matter anyway.

She had exercised before without seeing the results she wanted. She didn’t enjoy it. She was telling herself she had to do it, while also believing it wouldn’t make a difference.

The pattern made sense: thinking it wouldn’t matter created apathy, and apathy drove inaction.

Another reminder wouldn’t address that thought. Another demand that she exercise would still leave her trying to act against the feeling she was creating.

Don’t turn awareness into another reason to attack yourself

When she recognized the pattern, she wanted to change it immediately. She also started getting angry with herself for creating her own apathy.

I asked her to slow down. If someone told you they didn’t think something mattered, wouldn’t you want to understand what they meant? Could you offer yourself that same curiosity?

She had spent years on punishing diets and painful exercise programs. She had been beating herself up and feeling exasperated with what she had tried. Of course her thinking about exercise reflected that experience.

We weren’t using that understanding to decide she could never exercise. We were using it to help her build a relationship with herself in which she could actually see what was going on.

I asked her to notice the pattern without rushing to change it. Once she understood it, she could decide whether she wanted to think differently.

You can’t really change your thinking until you understand it. Compassion is part of that understanding.

What feeling fuels the action you want to stop?

The same process applies to an action you’re taking that you don’t want to take.

If you’re overeating, start by identifying the feeling driving it. It may be anxiety, resistance, frustration, apathy, or something else. Then look for the thought creating that feeling.

One of my clients repeatedly thought there wouldn’t be enough and she would miss out. She wasn’t aware of how often she thought it. The thought created anxiety, and the anxiety drove overeating.

When she discovered it, she wanted to dismiss the thought as ridiculous and simply stop thinking it. Again, I asked her to understand it first.

As a child, she had experienced not having enough love and food. The thinking had been practiced with strong emotion, and the pattern continued into adulthood.

Once she recognized what was happening, she could be kind to herself and comfort herself without food. Without creating the same anxiety, she didn’t have the same need to overeat.

You don’t have to reconstruct every detail of your past to do this work. What matters is recognizing the thought you are thinking now and being kind to yourself as you see it.

Learn to watch your mind

Watching your thoughts requires stepping back enough to observe your mind instead of treating every sentence it produces as the truth.

At first, what you find may surprise you. You may see old thoughts, repetitive negativity, or patterns you’ve never consciously chosen.

I describe an unsupervised mind as a toddler running around the house unattended. When you turn the light on and see what’s happening, you may want to turn it off again.

But looking gives you access to your power to change. You can begin to understand why you are getting the results you’re getting.

Choose something you want to do but aren’t doing, or something you do that you want to stop. Ask what you feel in the moment. Then ask what you are thinking that creates the feeling.

Write it down. Look at how the thought, feeling, and action fit together. Give yourself time to recognize the pattern rather than demanding an immediate replacement thought.

Change from understanding

Your brain likes repetition and efficiency. A thought you have practiced for years won’t necessarily change because you criticize yourself for having it.

Trying to force change without understanding the pattern means using your mind to fight your mind. When it’s you against you, you lose.

Start with curiosity. Ask why you do what you do. Listen to the answer instead of using it as evidence against yourself.

There is a reason the action makes sense to your brain. Finding that reason helps you see the thought and feeling combination driving it.

Then you can decide what you want to change. You can practice deliberate thinking from a place of compassion and understanding, instead of trying to beat yourself into a different life.