Have you ever gotten stuck in a loop of conversation with yourself? When you’re quiet and alone you let out sighs of exasperation that you did that again…You wonder if you will ever drop the weight…You rehearse conversations with others and tell yourself, “You always do that!”
I find myself often stuck in a narrative of my own where I keep telling myself the same thing over and over again. With time, that narrative becomes my narrative…it becomes my identity. I am fat. I don’t follow through. I am depressed. I am anxious.
Science has shown us that our brain is malleable. As you repeat these narratives over and over you begin to make connections between the neurons in your brain. As those initial connections form and then are repeated, those worn paths soon get gravel and then get paved and repaved. They become hardened and a part of who we think we are.
As you seek to change, you will find that you do the same things over and over again rather unconsciously–overeating, people-pleasing, anxiety, etc. That’s because you have not done a lot of work extracting those tendencies in the way you conduct yourself and are not very self-aware of who you are and why and how you operate in the world around you.
We are what we repeatedly do. Not what we believe we do or what we say we’ll do. Or as Aristotle said, “Moral excellence is the result of habit or custom.” You have to work at it and develop excellence in your life. I have found that I struggle with self-awareness. I can find myself acting and re-acting in the world without much thought as to why I’m saying or doing something.
The first step toward honest and real and lasting change is to develop self-awareness. This could be the time-tested discipline of journaling. It could be meeting with a spiritual advisor who you can verbally process your decisions with. It could be a trusted group of 2-3 people you can run ideas by. Whatever it is, you can start to grow in self-awareness and see what your patterns and repetitions in life are.
Most people just accumulate knowledge but they don’t do the work of actually engaging with the world and their inner person to effect the change they’re longing for. I have done this for decades when it comes to food. I’lll share more about this journey at another time. For now, though, simply slowing down and doing the work is what you are called to do.
If you’re serious about becoming a better person, you can begin now. Here’s one of the practices I teach in my personal development course My New Rich Life you can practice: Take five minutes and a piece of paper or open a document on your phone or laptop and begin writing whatever comes to mind. This is called stream-of-consciousness. Here’s a prompt to get you started: “I feel (circle one) happy, sad, anxious, fearful, angry because of ____________”…and just start writing!