Changing my mindset was key to getting into great shape and building a healthier life.
I realised that until I could see myself as someone in great shape…I could never be that person.
What does that mean?
It’s all about self image. We all have an image in our mind of who we are, what we do, what we eat, who we are friends with, what we are capable of, and so on.
I realised my behaviour over time would always come back to match this self image.
So if my self image did not include a healthy lifestyle, I would always be battling against myself. Because exercise and eating well were not part of my true self image.
It also meant that doing exercise and eating well felt hard. Really hard.
The solution? I needed to change my self image to the type of person I wanted to be.
I knew who I wanted to be. I wanted to be someone in great shape. Someone who had a great diet and who exercised regularly. And I wanted it to feel easy.
Simple….
But how to achieve this?
I started visualising myself doing the things I wanted to do. Visualising myself being the person I wanted to be.
I would shut my eyes and see myself going for a run. I would shut my eyes and see myself preparing a great meal and eating it. I would see myself in the supermarket buying great foods.
I would see myself being offered sweet tempting treats and me refusing. I would see myself as someone with no desire for these.
I also started saying daily affirmations to myself. I would tell myself ‘I have a great diet’, ‘I am someone who exercises 3-4 times a week’ and ‘I’m someone who lives a super healthy lifestyle’.
I told myself enough that I started to believe it. I was reprogramming my brain to think like the person I wanted to be.
I’m still not sure how this worked. I’ve read theories that say the brain can’t necessarily tell the difference between real and imagined experience. And so if you imagine something enough times, your brain and body start to internalise it as a real experience.
Whatever it is, it worked.
Why was changing my mindset important? It meant I wasn’t having to motivate myself all the time to do what I wanted to do. It just became…part of who I am.
I also realised that taking action and doing the things I’d visualised was still important.
Taking action, eating well and doing exercise were critical to reinforcing my new mindset and providing the proof to my body and brain that I was behaving in line with the new image that I had created for myself.
I realised to truly change myself…my mindset and taking action needed to go hand in hand.
Here’s how I think about it…
My self image is like a peg driven into the ground. The action I can take is limited to the ground around the peg. And this area only includes behaviours that are consistent with my self image.
I’m physically attached to the peg by a bungee. So I can pull on it and get a little bit outside my comfort zone.
If I pull really, really, hard, I can get further away from the peg, into new territory. This territory might include eating well and doing exercise. But eventually the bungee will pull me back into my old behaviours.
But, that isn’t the only way.
With very little effort, I am able to pull the peg out of the ground, walk over and replant it in a place with a new mindset. A mindset and self image that is based around a healthy lifestyle.
Now, my comfort zone around the peg is full of behaviours that align what I want to be. Behaviours like eating well and doing exercise.
Because these behaviours are in my new comfort zone, the mental and emotional effort required to do them is minimal. It’s just the natural state of affairs.
With the peg in a new position, if I pulled really hard on the bungee, then I can take myself back to a place where I could be lazy and eat badly…but this place now feels alien and uncomfortable.
Eventually the bungee will pull me back to where my self image is planted. Where my new healthy behaviours live.
This is why I call my mindset the brain’s cheat code. Changing my mindset was remarkably easy (you can start instantly and I found that consistent reinforcement for a period of 30 days repositioned my self image. By 60 days I had a rock solid new self belief).
The system I put in place to do this took very little effort. I would spend anywhere from 5 minutes to 30 minutes a day dreaming, visualising, seeing my new image and saying affirmations to myself.
If that sounds like a long time remember you can be working on changing your mindset whilst doing many daily tasks. For example lying in bed, having a shower, walking to the train station, commuting, having lunch etc.
I have no doubt that the shift in my mindset was the foundation to me changing my lifestyle and getting into great shape.
Once I shifted how I thought about myself, I found myself behaving in a way that achieved my goals. No resistance. No tension. Just easy alignment and congruence.
Without this…change would not have been possible.
