How to Ensure You'll Actually Do What You Say You'll Do.

An interesting thing happened over the weekend.  At the start of the year, I established the intention to "live a lifestyle that creates a desirable weight."   Ideally, I wanted to maintain a decent weight without having to work too hard for it.  The easier it was to maintain, the better.

At this point, I'm happy to say about 5 lbs away from my goal.  With 5lbs left, I decided to be a bit more intentional.  With the weekend approaching I told myself "I'm gonna eat healthy for the next few days."

Fast forward 24 hours and I'm ordering from a drive thru menu.  The following day, I place an online order for a veggie pizza.  That was in complete misalignment to the intention that I set the day before.  That's when I deiced to take a completely different approach.  Instead of putting out a weak intention and allow things to magically happend, I changed the strategy.


That very minute I decided what my actions would be the following day.

Before leaving the house, I told myself, "I'm going to the super market to pic up a salad for lunch."  A decision had been made.  Now it was up to me to follow up and make the right choice.  I headed out to attend a Beauty Convention. By the time I arrived, I had salad in the passanger seat ready for lunch time.  

The main difference between the drive thru visit and the healthy green salad is intention.  When I'm hungry (while out and about), I rely on past actions to make current choices.  This time, I was very specific about the action I would take before the time arrived.  I knew which grocery store to go,  I knew exactly what kind of salad I wanted. It was a clear imgage in my mind and every easy to execute.

You might remember from a previous article that past actions create our default future.  If we've repeated an action enough, it becomes a habit. More importantly, it's stored in our memory for future use.  We have to break that programming.  One of the first steps to take in reprogramming is to tell yourself  EXACTLY what you're going to do in when that situation arises.  When I told myself that I'll eat healthier, my subconscious had no way of interpreting that into real action.  But when I said, I will drive to Publix to pick up a water and salad, my desires were completely understood.

Last week, I told myself which specifically tasks I needed to complete on a daily basis.  I don't want autopilot making major decisions for me.

Not yet.

Running on autopilot can no longer be an option.  Not until I've invested weeks and months making the right choices.  Until then, this has to be a very manual process.  I have to chose what gets accomplished today and how I operate.  I must will chose actions that bring me closer to my goals.   Hour by hour I have to set the intention for what my actions will be for hour or day ahead.  This will be a continous process of setting intentions and course correcting along the way.  Just because I say I'm going to do something, does that mean that I'll execute according to plan 100% of the time? Of course not, but my chances of making better choices skyrockets when I set mini-short-term intentions instead of just letting things happen.

No longer will I allow leave my choices up to chance. We have to decide the exact direction of our hour/day/life before we live it.