Beyond
Walking

By Ronda Gates, MS

Ronda Gates, MS, is a pharmacy grad who traded her white coat for a pair of athletic shoes and never looked back. Her health promotion business, LIFESTYLES, provides motivational speaking, program development, and fitness assessment services to support people making a lifestyle change. She has developed health promotion programs for many organizations nationwide.
Visit www.rondagates.com for a complimentary subscription to Ronda’s weekly email newsletter.

An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

— Henry David
Thoreau

The Choice Is Yours:
Overcoming Self-Defeating Behaviors

Have you ever said, “I know what I need to do, I just can’t seem to do it”?

I’ve yet to meet someone who denies the presence of this inner critic who raises its ugly head too often to remind us of our inadequacies — including our failure to maintain a commitment to ourselves or to others.

Take Jean for example. Every year, as the calendar turns to April, Jean can’t sleep. Her head aches and she finds herself exercising more than she needs to. The root cause of Jean’s insomnia, headaches, and escape to exercise is anxiety about the forthcoming tax deadline. After last year’s eleventh-hour exercise in frustration, Jean purchased a computer program to record her expenditures, balance her check book, and fill out her tax forms. Despite initial enthusiasm, she never got around to installing the program. Now, with a filing deadline looming, she is frantically attempting to find her W-2 forms, bank statements, and donation receipts. All the while she beats herself up for procrastinating every time she thought about getting the program installed. “I know what I need to do; I just can’t seem to do it.”

In contrast to Jean, Bill doesn’t have a problem doing paperwork. He enjoys the time-consuming busy work he accomplishes at his desk and the praise he gets from his boss for being such a hard worker. Bill’s problem is his commitment to exercise. There’s a history of heart disease in Bill’s family. He resolved to make a daily workout a priority so he could lose excess weight and improve his health. Last month he joined a health club, but his initial burst of enthusiasm waned and his resolution is continually sabotaged by excuses. “It’s raining too hard to go out.” “I’ve too much work to do.” Bill also says, “I know what I need to do, I just can’t seem to do it.”

Procrastinating and avoiding commitments are two of many self-defeating behaviors that prevent us from responding to life in healthy ways. Others include overeating, perfectionism, fear of success, prejudice, daydreaming, unwillingness to say “no” — anything that:

• occurs frequently
• is something you want to change
• interferes with your happiness, and
• insulates you from being your best.

Our mind has several levels. The conscious mind governs choices we think about including how we dress for a workout, the route we plan to take on a given day, or whether we will participate in a walking event. Since the conscious mind is too busy to deal with everything we must do to live, the more repetitive tasks and behaviors fall to the unconscious mind, which operates “without thinking.” For example, you rarely think about the step-by-step process used to start your car, how to fold your arms or cross your legs, or which hand you will use for any activity. When we learn something new we use our conscious mind. Once we repeat a behavior often enough, it moves to the unconscious mind. It’s the unconscious mind that often governs self-defeating behaviors.

These behaviors often have their roots in our childhood. The non-logical mind of a child who doesn’t have the support or skills to manage a stress, will respond to the stress in a child-like way. In time that child-like behavior is rooted deep in the unconscious and plays itself out as we get older. For example, a child told to do a homework assignment without the required instruction to complete the assignment may
put the task off. After several similar experiences, procrastinating becomes the unconscious behavior that plays itself out, as we see with Jean and Bill, under similar circumstances in adulthood.

Self-defeating behaviors continue because they produce a payoff. In the case of Bill, who hasn’t experienced the better health and enhanced self-esteem payoff of a regular exercise program, work gives him a payoff he’s used to — accolades from his boss.

The good news is that for most of us, self-defeating behaviors are ultimately so out of sorts with our true self we become dismayingly aware of the price we pay for the behavior. Our discomfort becomes a catalyst for change. Ready to be transformed we are willing to examine self-defeating behaviors and the opportunities we miss when we fail to change. If we engage the support of friends (or professionals who make us accountable), we learn and use the skills that become the foundation for a break through. A SMART (specific, measurable, action-oriented, realistic, and timely) approach to changing a self-defeating behavior into a life-enhancing behavior can, with repetition, become rooted in our unconscious mind. A useful software program, when purchased, gets installed and used. A commitment to exercise becomes a reality. Successful repetition of a life-enhancing behavior produces a payoff without a price and we are transformed, setting the stage for tackling the next challenge and actualizing our potential. It’s worth the effort!

If you need help overcoming excuses that keep you from exercising, consider the purchase of Every Excuse in the Book: How to Benefit from Exercising by Overcoming Your Excuses by Jeanne Murdock. Jeanne has remedies for 120 excuses that support self-defeating behaviors. The book is available at: www.beanfit.com

Overcoming Self-Defeating Behaviors is one of many life-enhancing workshops provided by Ronda Gates in corporate settings. Learn more about the services provided by LIFESTYLES by Ronda Gates and register for Ronda’s free email newsletter at www.rondagates.com.