Using Success to Motivate/Maintain
Acknowledging positive change reaffirms commitment to personal goals.
Maintaining a hard-won victory over weight loss, smoking, or other addictive behaviors takes effort and requires knowing the processes to use to assure long term success.
You've worked hard to change the self-defeating behavior that was affecting your health, your relationships, and your self esteem. Whether your life changing efforts were to lose weight, stop smoking, control alcohol and substance abuse, or any of the many addictive behaviors that are so difficult to change, now that you've altered your behavior there is one important stage of change that will assure long term success: Maintenance.
Maintaining your new way of daily living as other life issues come to the forefront can be just as difficult as the initial change itself. After a long period of focus, concentration, and success at losing that extra thirty five pounds, it's natural to relax your efforts assuming you've "got-it" and your new way of eating is fully assimilated.
It probably isn't. New Year's resolution research by James Prochaska shows that after six months, sixty percent have failed. Only one out of five life resolution initiatives will last two years.
Why is that? Despite the harmful effects of addictive behaviors, we continue to harbor them because they provide benefits: stress reduction, anxiety relief, and comfort are among them. If you haven't put in place appropriate alternate behaviors when the stress of a family illness hits, there's a new crisis in your business, or your wife informs you she's seeking a divorce, a return to smoking, eating, drinking, or spending will offer sorely tempting relief.
The maintenance phase of change deserves and requires as much energy and commitment as the action phase. Maintenance is often not as satisfying as the other stages; seeing pounds melt off each week gives strong feedback signals that are motivating. The people who praised your efforts and remarked on how good you look have stopped commenting; the new you is old hat.
What can you do to retain your hard-won success?
- Keep a list handy of the negative aspects of your old problem-causing behavior.
- Continue to remind yourself of why you launched this effort in the first place.
- Note the difficulties you've faced and overcome.
- Give yourself credit for your success thus far. This is not a time to modestly shrug off your efforts. Maybe anyone can do it, but most don't.
- Renew your commitment and continue to make your new way of living a priority; don't take it for granted.
Don't be surprised if you have a brief relapse. Most people do. Research shows that only about one in five people permanently overcome long-standing problems on the first try. One lapse does not mean failure. It just means one lapse. You can learn from it and put processes in place to prevent future recurrences.
