If you feel like you’ve hit a brick wall in your progress and feel like giving up, you are not alone. Pitfalls can sneak in and destroy your party just when it starts getting good.
To combat these little gremlins 2 simple cognitive behavioral methods that will ditch them right away.
First is the Rational Counter Attack, followed by the Hindsight is 20/20 in advance method and finally thought stopping. Combine all three and you are certain to drive negativity from the brain and replace it with positive action.
Rational Counter Attack -
The rational counter attack is a way you can meet the pitfalls head on and take the wind out of their sails.
What you do is start out with a blank sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle. On the left, you write your pitfalls. Again, pitfalls are thoughts or actions that effectively stop you from working on your goal.
On the right, you write a logical counter attack to those destructive thoughts and actions.
Here’s an example:
| Pitfalls | Logical / Rational Attack |
| I will always be fat. | Who says? Did a doctor tell me I’d always be fat? Or is it a part of myself that doesn’t want to lose weight. Maybe I’m afraid of the attention I’ll get from losing this weight. |
| It’s not worth all of this effort for so little weight loss. | How much effort have I really put forward so far? I get out and jog/walk a few times a week and skip a few desserts. Poor baby! |
| A piece of cake and ice cream never hurt anybody. | Oh really? With diabetes at an all time high? C’mon, I can do better than that. How about I cut back to a bite’s worth of cake and skip the ice cream? |
| This is never going to work. | …said the image in the crystal ball? I am no fortune teller.This is just my spoiled inner child who wants results NOW. However, I’m all grown up now and know it will take longer than 2 weeks to meet my goal.Let’s work this plan that has worked for so many other people and see where it takes us. If I haven’t seen results in the 90 day trial period I’ll try something else. |
The Hindsight is 20/20 in advance method
When we are negative about taking an action that leads toward the successful completion of our goal, taking that action becomes almost impossible. But we can use 20/20 hindsight to reveal that action isn’t as bad as it seems.
What can be fun is to see what a hallucination this negativity is.
Step 1: Take out a piece of paper and write your undesirable task on it. Then before you do the task, give it a rating about how enjoyable it is. Rate it between 1 and 10 with 1 being the least desirable.
Walk/Jog for 30 minutes enjoyable factor:
Before: 1 <—-3——————————>10
Since you are feeling negative anyway, this will be a low number. Choose whatever number seems right. In the example above the person picked 3 – indicating the task will not be enjoyable. It ranks pretty low on the 1 to 10 scale.
Step 2: Do the action you just rated and pay attention to how you feel throughout and afterwards. When you return, rate how enjoyable the task was in hindsight.
Below is an example of a client’s hindsight enjoyable factor that they just rated mentally at a 3!
Walk/Jog for 30 minutes enjoyable factor:
After: 1 <————————–7——–>10
So you can see, our minds will play tricks on us if we aren’t paying attention. 
Give this a try when you are feeling negative about taking action. After you do it a half dozen times or so you’ll see that trusting your emotions to dictate your actions is not a smart way to get things done. It’s better to let those pitfalls be and take action anyway…
