How to Break the Loop of Shame & Reach Your Goals

Ugh. I ate the whole cheesecake again

 

Here’s a simple shift in thinking that can help you reach your goals and spare you the “loop of shame.” You know the loop of shame.

The loop of shame goes like this:

1. You say: “By X date, I will Y.”

2. You feel good about “having a goal.”
3. Life gets busy.
4. Date X comes, and you haven’t made any real progress on Y.
5. You eat a cheesecake.
6. Full of regret and fresh resolve, you decide it’s time to change!
7. You say: “By X date, I will Y.”

… and so on. Okay, maybe it’s not always a cheesecake, but you get the idea.

The loop of shame is all to easy to fall into. In our minds, simply setting a goal can feel a lot like making progress towards a goal. Of course it’s not. So how do you break the loop of shame and make real progress?

The problem is the deadline. Deadlines are comfortably far in the future. We have plenty of time. But deadlines aren’t action. They’re merely an arbitrary line in the sand.

The trick to breaking the loop of shame is to dispense with the deadline and instead schedule time to work on the goal. Don’t say: “I’m going to lose ten pounds by January.” Say: “Tomorrow at 6PM I’m going to take an hour walk in the neighborhood.” Don’t say: “Next year I’m going to have 100 more followers on Twitter.” Say: “Tomorrow morning at 8AM I’m going to spend thirty minutes and find six interesting articles to tweet about throughout the week.”

You reach goals through action, but to take action you must schedule time for the action. If you want to do something you’ve never done in the past, you have to start doing something you’re not currently doing, right?

Schedule time for progress and progress you will make.  Email us at richardgraham@kw.com