Episode Transcript
Last week we talked about the “learning trap”: the process of
using learning as a way to delay taking action. Learning feels
good, but it doesn’t require us to change our habits; only taking
action can do that. This week, I want to talk about what happens
when you do start acting, but it doesn’t go the way you hoped it
would.
Most people beat themselves up when they make a mistake,
especially when we’re trying to change our habits. “I should have
known better,” we tell ourselves. This can set off a shame-spiral,
which makes us bury our heads in the sand instead of
recommitting to our new habit and getting help.
Join me on today’s episode as I talk about why shame is never a
productive or useful approach to changing our habits. “I should
know better” is a lie that prevents us from practicing new
behaviors and changing our brains. You need to leave the
judgment behind, put on your scientist hat, and observe your
brain and emotions if you want to create lasting change.
Hi, everybody, and welcome to The Arm Coach podcast, episode
#29.
Alright, so let’s dive into today’s topic. So last week we were
talking about learning and how learning can actually be a trap. It
is so mind-blowing to understand that this is possible. If you
haven’t listened to that episode, last weeks episode, I want to
make sure you go back and check it out.
The reason why learning can be a trap is because you’re not taking
action. It feels so virtuous. You just keep learning and learning
and learning, but you’re not actually going out there and doing
anything different because you tell yourself, oh, I just need a little
bit more information before I figure this out.
So here is the thing; I want to talk about what happens when you
start taking action. So you get out of that learning trap, you start
taking action, but then the action you take does not go as you
hoped it would. Okay, so let’s say you committed to the nutrition
formula and 3 arm workouts a week. Maybe it was for 90 days or a
year or forever. Whatever it was, you committed to the nutrition
formula and 3 arm workouts a week and then you made the
decision to eat a cookie. What then?
Here’s what I hear from my clients and what I used to say to
myself all the time. “I should have known better.” This especially
starts to come up when people start learning about the brain and
the habit and how it works. So you’re doing all the work of
gathering information, you’re doing all the work of expanding
your mind, but you’re not yet seeing that information and the
learning translate into knowhow.
So you take an action, it doesn’t go the way that you intended, you
tell yourself I should have known better, I should know better,
and then what do you do? What does that thought create for you?
Well guess what, shame. You start beating yourself up. You just
keep focusing on how I had all this information and I know now, I
should know better, but I still made the decision. So what’s wrong
with me?
We go into this whole shame spiral. I want to show you today why
this thought, I should know better, it’s also a trap. You have to
drop this line of thinking because I promise, it is never useful.
You know, I recently received an email from a follower about this
and she was telling me, I’m doing all this work, I’m working so
hard, I’m listening to the lessons every day, I’m making progress,
I’m following the nutrition formula, I’m taking notes on my
thoughts and emotions, doing all the work, and then wham, I was
stressed out one day, I had a massive to-do list, and what did I do?
I decided to eat a tray of Cookies. I told myself I needed a snack to
relax and to get myself through my workload. And now I’m just
telling myself I should have known better and all the work I’ve
done, it feels like it doesn’t count. I want you to think about how
many times this has happened to you. I know that this used to be
a really regular pattern for my own brain.
But I want to just take a second to see how this unfolds in the
think-feel-act cycle. Now remember, what is creating how you feel
are your thoughts. However you are interpreting what happened,
whatever judgment you are attaching to it. Because the neutral
circumstance, and it really is neutral, guys, is a decision to eat
Cookies.
That doesn’t cause you to feel anything. That does not create a
feeling until you attach meaning to it, until you have a thought
about that decision. And for so many of us, it’s the thought, I
should know better. When you think that, you create the feeling of
shame and guess what we do when we feel shame? Not only do we
beat ourselves up, but we start hiding. We bury our head in the
sand. We don’t want to look. We don’t want to ask for help. We
don’t want to reach out.
And in fact, the brain starts going on a hunt for evidence that
you’ll never be able to figure this out. So you start looking back
into history, looking back into your past and finding evidence of
other attempts where you tried and you failed. So you start
collecting this kind of logbook of see, see, I’ll never figure this out.
And then what is your result? Your result of course is that you
literally don’t know better because you aren’t using your brain,
you aren’t using what you know to meaningfully change the habit.
You’re not learning, you’re not growing, you’re not problem
solving. You’re beating yourself up. You’re hiding. You’re looking
for evidence that you can’t do it.
Remember, this is the really important piece of the think-feel-act
cycle. Your results that you create will reinforce that original
thought. So if you are telling yourself that the decision to eat
Cookies means I should know better, you will create results
proving that true. In this case, literally creating an environment,
creating actions where you don’t know better because you aren’t
using what happened to grow or to learn or to change the habit.
You’re just using it to beat yourself.
When you beat yourself up, whenever you beat yourself up, you
aren’t understanding a habit better. You aren’t identifying the
permission-giving thoughts that you had that you could then
subsequently change. You aren’t identifying any of the cues that
were connected to the urge to eat cookies. You’re not even
examining how you responded, what was your automatic response
when the urge appeared.
All of that information is lost to you because instead what you’re
doing is taking what happened and inserting this narrative of ‘see,
see, I’ll never figure it out. I have all this information, I’ve been
listening to these sessions, I’ve been really doing all the work, I’ve
been trying to be introspective, and still I can’t do it.’
That’s what you’re doing instead. You are creating a self-fulfilling
prophecy for you that you should have known better and then
your result is that you don’t know better because you didn’t use
what happened to actually collect data that could help you on your
journey.
When you do this, you are just creating more harm against
yourself because what do we do? What really is the logical
extension of I should know better? It starts to sound a lot like 'I
must really be screwed up. Because how could I have all this
information and not change how I’m showing up, not change my
actions? Something must really be wrong with me if I’m listening
and trying to learn and still not following, still not making
decisions that I like.’ That is where we end up, and that is a
terrible place to be.
But now listen; why do you repeat old habits even when you have
new information? Let’s talk about that. Why does that happen?
There is one simple reason and it’s not because something is
wrong with you. It is literally only because your brain at this
moment has not yet overwritten the old habit with the new one.
Remember, your brain is able to do this. You have a human brain,
which means you are blessed with neuroplasticity, and all that
means is that you can change your brain. You can have habits that
don’t serve you and overwrite them with new ones.
Now, if that hasn’t happened yet, it’s not a problem. You’re just
not there yet. It literally can only happen by practicing a new
action over and over and over again and this is why action matters
so much and I don’t want you to get stuck in just trying to learn.
You got to go out and you got to practice following your Action
Planner.
You have to practice following your Action Planner when you feel
stressed or you feel overwhelmed. You have to practice following
your Action Planner when your brain is saying we’ll start
tomorrow, you deserve it, everybody else is. You have to practice
following your Action Planner when you’re home alone and bored
or when you get home from work and need to decompress.
You have to practice in these moments and you have to do it over
and over again. That is how you literally overwrite an old habit
with a new one. And most importantly, you just have to practice
having that urge to not follow your Action Planner appear and not
automatically answering it. Habits are created through repetition.
You created the habit of not following your plan through
repetition. You just didn’t realize you were creating a habit at the
time. You did that unconsciously.
Now you have to create a new habit consciously. And the thing
that will get in the way of repetition time and time again is beating
yourself up, going into a shame spiral, hiding, burying your head
in the sand. The blame game that your brain is operating under
right now is literally slowing down the process of change.
I love thinking about it that way because then not beating myself
up isn’t about 'oh, you should be nice to yourself.’ It’s literally, ‘oh,
this is just slowing down the process of change.’ I should know
better, that thought is preventing you from creating a new habit.
Because listen; what do you need when you don’t honor a
commitment that you made? What do you need when you tell
yourself, I’m going to follow my Action Plan and then you don’t
follow your Action Plan? The only thing you need is to start
problem solving. That’s it. To strategize, to figure out how to
approach the situation differently next time. You do not need
beating yourself up. In fact, beating yourself up serves no useful
purpose.
I say this to my clients all the time. Are you willing to put on the
hat of a scientist? Are you willing to look at yesterday or last
weekend as just data points? Not good or bad, not right or wrong,
just data points. And are those data points taking me closer to the
ultimate result that I want, or further away?
And if it’s taking you further away, can you learn from that? Can
you just look at how much did I eat, what excuses did I make,
what was I telling myself about the urge, what was I telling myself
about the desire? Can you gather all that information and observe
it from a place of a scientist where you’re just looking for data?
You’re not bringing a lot of judgment to it.
That ability to do that is so powerful because once you have all
that data, you can decide how you want to proceed, what you want
to do differently next time, what it’s going to take to show up
differently and make a different decision. But you cannot do that
if you are basically in a vacuum of information, which is what
happens when you beat yourself up.
Listen, the thought I should know better, it really is nonsense. You
will do things differently when your brain has created a new habit.
And if you’re not doing things differently yet, if you’re not
following your Action Plan when you tell yourself that you will, if
you’re not doing your arms exercises as much as you want, it just
means you haven’t created a new habit. That’s not a problem. It
just means that you need more practice, and are you willing to
sign up for that? Are you willing to sign up for more practice?
The reason why most people don’t want to is because they think
that practice is going to feel terrible because if I don’t do it
perfectly, of course then I’ll just hate myself. But that is not the
automatic outcome of practicing something and failing. That only
happens when you make it mean something really negative about
who you are and your future, and your ability to change.
Because here’s how you will know when the brain has created a
new habit. And listen, I’ve watched this happen in so many areas
of my life and it stills blows my mind and I watch it happen with
my clients and I am always so excited for them when I start to see
this change. You will know when you have created a new habit
because you will see that kind of excuse come up, ‘I deserve it,
who cares, why not, screw it,’ and you will immediately have an
additional thought come up, ‘oh, I know what this is going to lead
to.’
Like, you’ll be onto yourself, which is amazing to go from a place
of just obeying whatever permission-giving thoughts you’re
having to actually being onto them and understanding where
they’re going to take you. Or you’ll have an urge appear and you’ll
just say like, ‘hi, I know you, I’ve seen you before, it’s okay,’ and
you’ll move on.
I love watching my clients do this. When they watch urges appear
and all of a sudden it goes from like, ‘I hate it, it’s terrible, urges
are the worst,’ to ‘oh hey, of course you’re here, I have practiced
blowing off my Action Plan in this situation or when I feel this way
over and over again. Of course you’re here. Not a big deal.’
Or you’ll know that you have a new habit when a negative emotion
will crop up. It can be anything. Stress, anxiety, awkwardness,
insecurity, loneliness, whatever it is, and your brain will have that
desire, I should eat and veg out, and then all of a sudden, this new
thought will appear and it will remind you opening a bag of chips
and watching tv will literally only help you pretend that you feel
better. It will not help you in the long run.
It seems kind of crazy. I know. It seems kind of crazy when you
are not yet in this place to think that your brain will actually be
able to do this, it will actually be able to intervene with the
thoughts creating your desire and the thoughts giving you
permission to not follow your Action Plan, but I promise, it is
possible if you’re willing to practice. Until then, until you get to
that point, you just have to be willing to keep problem solving no
matter what. Not five times, not 10 times, as long as it takes.
You have to be willing to look at the decisions you make in life
around your Action Planner without judgment. But now listen;
learning how to do this around food and exercise is so powerful
because guess what, it’s not just the decisions we make around
food and exercise that we have a lot of judgment about. Learning
this skill in this arena will transform your life because you will be
able to apply it to everything.
You have to be willing to understand that shame spirals are not
going to help you problem solve. What will happen, you will lose
days and days and days feeling terrible. You will lose days beating
yourself up and not wanting to look and hiding and not asking for
help. This used to happen to me all the time. I just remember, it
was like I could lose weeks sometimes feeling so bad, feeling so
ashamed about my behavior, and I’d think about how much I
stunted my ability to create change because I was lost in the
shame spiral.
So listen, no matter what you believe, shame is never productive.
Never. It is a thought error. It is a faulty belief, the idea, ‘oh, if I
feel bad enough then I’ll change.’ We get a lot of messages that
this is the case, but it is never true. The belief that you can shame
yourself into change is simply wrong, and the way that we know
that is the think-feel-act cycle.
Because here’s what you will learn; once you start paying
attention to how this cycle works, you will start to see that
negative thoughts never create positive actions. If you’re not
taking positive actions, you cannot create positive results in your
life. Negative thoughts lead to negative feelings, which drive
negative actions and create negative results. That’s just the way it
works.
And people want to argue this with me, and you know what? I
wanted to argue this for a long time because I was so used to
trying to shame myself into being a better person and trying to
shame myself into stopping overeating. And you know what?
Sometimes I could shame myself into stopping overeating
temporarily, but here’s what I discovered.
Whenever that was the case, whenever I was saying no to food
because I kind of hated myself, what would happen was I would
turn to other things to numb how I would feel. So I would just
take the behavior of overeating and it would become overdrinking
or overspending or overworking. I would just turn to another
numbing behavior.
And eventually, I always went back to eating because I would get
to a point where I would think, ugh, well I feel this miserable or
I’m this screwed up, so I might as well eat. Because that pattern of
using something, using an external substance to cope with how I
felt, it was still there. I hadn’t done anything to change it.
Even if you are able to hold out for a while, even if you are able to
say no for a while, if your ability to feel good about yourself, to
think that you are an okay person is dependent on whether or not
you eat the food or whether or not you pick up weights or whether
or not you spend the money, whatever it is, just ask yourself what
happens the moment that you make a different decision. What
happens the moment you decide to eat or decide to not pick up
weights or rack up the credit card bill, whatever it is?
You just use it as evidence that you’re a bad person and that
you’re never going to figure this out and that something’s wrong
with you and that maybe you’re broken. You’re right back where
you started because what you’re trying to do is prop up your self-
worth by never making a mistake and doing things perfectly. And
it’s impossible, and that’s why it’s so exhausting.
It’s exhausting to try to be a perfect person and to never fail and to
never make a mistake so that you can feel good about yourself. I
should know better or I should have known better, they’re lies.
You have got to drop this line of thinking right now if you want to
change your arms. The way to do this is to switch. It’s a very
subtle change, but it makes all the difference. ‘I can understand
better’.
‘I can understand better’ will send you in the direction of problem
solving. Hiding, beating yourself up for days, that only stalls you.
You cannot shame yourself into changing the habit. I promise, it
will not work. And even if you are able to use that shame to say
no, I guarantee you’re going to feel miserable in the process. The
only way to change a habit is to problem solve, and you can only
problem solve when you aren’t beating yourself up.
Shame will keep you hiding. It will have you bury your head in the
sand. So next time you tell yourself, I should have known better,
make sure you switch to, I can understand better. That will help
you change the habit.
Alright everybody, that’s it for today. I will see you next week.
