Expats: Habits and Motivation to Change

If you’ve had time to reflect on 2016 and discovered some interesting things about you and your habits, great you can use that insight to help with your goal setting. If you haven’t, you can check out the questions you need to ask yourself here. Now, let’s consider the steps you need to take to find and achieve your new goal.

Firstly, Find your TRUE motivation.

Ditch any resolution that has a negative word it in. All the perennial favourite resolutions are out: Lose Weight; Quit Smoking; Drink Less, they are usually underpinned by the really unhelpful word DON’T. Don’t eat cake, chocolates, fries, don’t smoke, don’t drink. Our brain has an interesting habit of deleting the word don’t from a sentence, for example if I say “don’t think of a purple elephant” … you did it didn’t you! Goal setting has to be about positive intention to be effective. I’d recommend picking a single goal to focus on.

Step 1 – Describe your goal in the positive. For example: Protect and nurture my body.

Step 2 – Make your goal more real. For example: You can do this by imaging what you would look like and be able to do, if you cared for your body in this way. Enjoy working on this image, to make it more colourful, add feelings, etc. If that’s not your thing, find a photo that captures this. Keep coming back to this image when temptation strikes.

Step 3 – Watch out for your inner child and inner parent fighting. Many of us tend to engage our inner parent to bully us into make a change and our inner child doesn’t like it. Inside our head the exchange might go like this….

Inner parent “I shouldn’t really have a drink”

Inner child “One drink won’t hurt anyone and it’ll be fun!”

Inner parent “I mustn’t risk it, I’ll want another”

Inner child “But, it’s been a hard day and it will help me relax”

Inner parent “You’re right, but just a small one”

… and so on.

Control your inner parent by watching out for words like: should, must, never, always – all good signs the inner parent has taken over. Be aware that your inner child will find opportunities to sabotage those parental commands. Help your inner adult keep on track. It’s crucial to keep focused on the end goal – that image you have of yourself and make or break habits to help yourself. Step 4 will help with this.

Step 4 - Use your Motivation and change Habits.

We are what we habitually do, so hijack this to help with achieving your goal. Remind yourself of what you’ve already learnt when you reflected on 2016 about yourself and habits and use this now. Deal with the most difficult thing first, do you have a repeating habit or unhelpful habit that is likely to sabotage your goal? For example you may give up on change as soon as you make one little error, saying “that’s it I’ve blown it, I’m rubbish at this!” and discard your goal. Plan for the habit kicking in and being disruptive, work out how you recover or neutralize it. Find ways of stepping towards your goal with small, gradual habit changes. If you found when you reflected on 2016, that you were able to make or break a habit use that insight now, if not be pragmatic. For example rather than taking out a shiny new gym membership, commit to 15 minutes of any type of exercise every day for at least 30 days.

Why 30 days? That’s how long it takes to form a new habit.

And lastly, I come back to a really important theme for Expats, be gentle with yourself. An Expat life is full of temptations and unusual situations: visitors come and ‘holiday’ with you at many times during the year, it’s hard not to join in with their celebratory eating and drinking; you will face many novel and stressful situations where you may fall back on old coping mechanisms and you may only be in your current country for a while and want to do/see/eat/drink/experience as much as you possibly can. You’re human not an automaton. Enjoy, pause the goal but don’t lose sight of it. Keep up the good habits and get back to working towards your goal. Happy 2017!