How to Change Yourself

Writing down your New Year’s Resolutions list is a depressing activity. You need to face the shame of needing to start with “lose fat” for the 8th year running. I’d always get hyped up, watch some motivational videos on YouTube while eating some pumpkin seeds, set a goal of ‘abs by summer’ and repeat the process next December. The first year I didn’t need to include this goal was 2023. In the process, I learned about achieving goals and what they require of us.

If you’re like me, your goals are a wishlist rather than an invoice. I was obsessed with the idea of waking up one day and being transformed by God into the body of my dreams. I was fuming when that didn’t happen, despite me doing 100 sit-ups the night before. On an invoice, on the other hand, there is a price to be paid. This price is called Change.

Change is hard, but following the advice from this article, you won’t have to waste another New Year’s Resolution for getting a six-pack.

Start With Why

To become an overnight success, you need to work non-stop for 10 years without anyone ever noticing. And to sustain hard work, you need a strong reason to endure the pain that comes with it. Working out so you can pull a double biceps at a Starbucks and put it on TikTok? Or working out so your shoulder strengthens and won’t dislocate again? Both can help you get on track, but intrinsic motivation keeps you on track in hard times, while external motivations fail to resist when things go south.

If there’s a behaviour you want to weed out, show yourself that it’s harmful. Blow it to the extreme and mind the consequences. I heard the story of an overweight guy attending a self-help seminar. He wanted to lose fat but had a sweet tooth. Tony Robbins, the coach at the event, instructed him to consume only candy for 24 hours. At first, he was laughing and eating ecstatically. The next day when he woke up, he was very dehydrated and lethargic. After the 24 hours passed, he did not want to look at candy for a long while.

The value we place on any activity comes from lived experiences. Purposely add a near-traumatic one and you’ll be allergic to Jägermeister all your life.
Understand your current values. If you’re asked why you yearn for your goal, how many answers can you give? How many of those are your own desires?

Take ownership

Responsibility has a bad rep these days. No one wants to be responsible for anything because they feel they’ll be blamed for the situation in the first place, and we don’t want to be at fault for anything. We want to appear perfect, and fault is the polar opposite. But responsibility is step zero to changing anything.

If you’re fat because God intended you to be 50 kilos overweight, or you’re broke because the universe hates you and constantly gives you a cherry next to the 3 sevens, there’s nothing you can do to change, you’re only a victim. This is bananas.

To get fit, you need to accept that your past indulgence made you fat. You decided to brush your teeth with Twix bars. Your back hurts because you sit at work and then you sit down to play. You’re poor and need to face the fact that you’ve spent more money in the last 5 years on cigarettes than you did on your kids. You created your life. You can create a new one.

What is the excuse you hear most frequently from people? “It’s always been like this.”
Saying that will take all power away from you and make you a victim of circumstances. It implies that you have no choice, that someone else is at fault, be it the Universe, God, or the Facebook message you didn’t forward to 16 friends back in high school.
It had been like this because you’ve been repeating the same thing over and over again. Face it, take responsibility.

Set a goal

You are at the wheel now. It’s time to set the destination on the GPS.
Imagine you’re in a dense area where you can only go very slowly. Do you give up or keep going?
Imagine the road ahead is blocked. Do you give up or take another route?
Now imagine the highway, where you blink twice and you’ve gone 10 kilometres.

The end of all three is the same, but your experience on the road is not. It’s disheartening to turn around, even if it’s easy to. Bumping into a huge obstacle towards your dream can break you. Slow progress fails to motivate you. On the highway, it’s cruise control.

Want to run a marathon? Run 1 km every day until you find it easy. Then run 2.
Want to write a book? Write 1.000 words every day.
Want to lose fat? Walk 10.000 steps every day.

Notice all these measurements are in my control. In contrast, if you say you want to lose 10 kgs, you don’t achieve success until you wake up on day 250 and you are 10 kilos lighter. With an input-oriented goal, you can feel the thrill of success every day.

Output-oriented goals are disheartening too. Despite our best efforts and dieting for 2 weeks, doing our cardio and self-affirmations, the scale might go up. Our bodies are complicated. Your best bet is to keep doing what you’ve been doing. All your actions can only increase the probability of success.

You should count on yourself screwing up; make it hard to do so

It sounds like a folk tale, but there are three opponents you need to fight to achieve your goal. Namely: forgetfulness, impulsivity and procrastination.

With Google Calendar, it’s easy to handle forgetfulness. Decide beforehand when and where you will work on your task, and write it in your Calendar. When it’s time to focus you will get a handy notification, the sound you’ll dread sooner or later. This way, you will not overbook yourself either, so you won’t have to bring your laptop to the pub.

Tackling impulsivity should not be based on mustering all the willpower in the world. I can resist anything, except temptation. I cannot think of a harder torture than having a Twix bar in front of me but it doesn't fit into my allotted calories for the day. But if I don’t have access to it? It doesn't even cross my mind. We’re emotionally driven, that’s why we can end up with a stomach full of food and a mind full of regret after binging.

The plan is to increase the friction towards the habits you want to avoid doing. Leave the Twix bar in the shop. Put your phone on Do Not Disturb. Go into the woods and live in those hand-dug homes from Facebook for a week if need be.

Lastly, procrastination - the buzzword of the productivity space. When you have something important to do, suddenly the mundane entices you more. There’s an essay due? I better do the laundry. Let’s cook to avoid starving during my deep work. I have an extra second to check social media while I sauté these onions. Whoa, there’s a great video on writing essays on YouTube, must watch. They recommend a book, and down the rabbit hole, I am.

In moments of procrastination, you need to remind yourself of your Why. Hold your dream in your mind.

I also have some insights that are not that voodoo.

First, you should split your work into small steps. Write one sentence. If you feel like taking a break, take one. Then come back, and write another one. Have a low barrier to success so you won’t be intimidated by the task. A lot of times, you will feel like writing a second sentence. Soon you’ll have a paragraph.

If you want to join a gym, first ask for a tour; you’ll look forward to going there the next day. Having to do the hardest full-body workout you found online will get you sore for a week, and you’ll abhor hearing about weights.

You can design your environment to facilitate your work too. I call this the ‘Put your Kindle in the bathroom’ principle. Have everything ready — mise en place. When it’s time to work, you can start immediately. Guitar practice begins with playing the guitar, not bringing a ladder to remove the guitar case from the top shelf.

Bundling your task with a fun activity can help too. Back in the day, I had a stationary bike that gathered dust for years. I had the idea to ride it while playing FIFA. I woke up 420 grams lighter.

Procrastination usually disappears when there is a deadline. The infamous 30-page research paper we write one night before the due date. You can evoke the same effect by giving yourself strict deadlines with a small punishment, like donating $1000 to Scientology if you don’t improve your bench press this month. Placing a bet with someone works as well. The first time I dieted down, I was in a bet with a friend and needed to send pictures of my weight every week. I didn’t want to look like a failure.

Lastly, have something to look forward to after your work session. Reward yourself with a Twix bar.

Keep on track

All right, we’ve managed to survive the first week, but we’re in it for the long run. How do we keep on track?

First of all, we need to trust the process. Results will come, but only on their own terms. We won’t be able to plan for them, nor should we expect them. Imagine you’re tearing off a single sheet from a toilet paper roll. Then another, then one more. Nothing changed. Yet, if you keep going, the roll will shrink. Eventually, it will run out. The process works, so should we.

We know what to do, we have faith, now we must become consistent - to do the hard work, especially if we don’t feel like it. Viewing myself as a continuous streak of selves helped me the most in this regard. Whenever I try to postpone work, I look at my future self and imagine him having to deal with my current assignment, and having his own on top. I don’t want to screw that guy over.
After results come, I make sure to think back to my past self and thank him for doing this for me.

And what about the constant worry that you might be missing out on incredible results because you don’t supinate your wrists during biceps curls? I say keep learning constantly and integrate new knowledge into your process. Experiment. Educate yourself on the topic. Listen to podcasts. Watch tutorials on YouTube.

The last step to change is to make it your identity.
Manson’s law of avoidance: The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid doing it. Reversed, we get ‘The more something conforms to your identity, the more you will seek doing it.’

If you feel you’re a fat person on a diet, it inherently means someday in the future you will be off the diet. It brings baggage. It is only a band-aid you’re applying to a wound, but you keep touching the hot stove every time it’s healed.
If you feel like a healthy person, you just eat healthy shit most of the time.
Streaks are irrelevant. If you’re counting the days, you’re always on day 0.

So how do you upload new beliefs and overwrite the old ones? Find the information, resources, and the people that align with the new beliefs.
Search for people who make you get off your ass and work, and consume a lot of content from them or their mentors.

Take your to-do list. Convert it to a to-be list — write down the traits of the person who would inevitably end up where you want to be. Imagine you’re that person. Empathise with that person. Be that person.

One way I managed to do this is through mindful dreaming. After successfully following my workout and diet protocols for 8 months, I had a disturbing realization. I still saw myself as fat. When I was standing in front of a mirror in my dreams, the image I saw, unbound to any physical limits, was the body I had at my highest weight. This was absurd. I knew that if I didn’t change that, I was bound to end up where I started.

There’s no Microsoft Update for your self-image, so how did I go about it? I stopped trying and started doing. Proud Yoda would be.

Your subconscious doesn’t communicate through words or logic. It communicates through feelings. To connect to your inner self, you need to abandon reason. After all, I knew that I was fit, but I couldn’t just write down the sentence “I’m fit” 123 times and be done. You need to use images, you need to use emotions. You need to let your self-image dissolve and the emotions rush through your body.

Remind yourself of who you are now. Let your best person be the reflection in your dreams.

Make your future self proud of what you did today.