Why You Don’t Follow Through

Stop gaslighting yourself to start following through

Not following through is one of the top ten ways that women get in their own way.

Has this ever happened to you?

It’s Sunday night and you decide that this week you’re going to start working out again. You find time in your calendar tomorrow and feel good about your plan. But when the time comes, you aren’t motivated and you do have some work things you should finish off, so you put it off until tomorrow.

The next day, you’re tired because you didn’t sleep well, so you put it off until tomorrow in the name of “self-care.”

Wednesday is going to be busy, so you set your alarm for 6:00 am and promise yourself that you’re going to hop out of bed and work out then. But you hit the snooze button and promise yourself that you will find time later.
Later, you get distracted.

And then why bother even thinking about it because everyone knows that you can only start a new habit on a Monday.

Replace exercise with whatever your thing is… familiar?

If you’re making commitments to yourself and not following through, you’re destroying your self-trust.

Factoring in Feelings

You can try different logistics and tactics, but since you’re not a robot and you have feelings, you can’t just program yourself to behave a certain way. We like to think we’re logical, and that’s why you’re gaslighting yourself. You’re telling yourself things like “I’ll do it tomorrow,” or “I’m too tired,” or “I should finish the work thing,” but you know that if you were really committed, you would figure it out a way to do it.

To rebuild self-trust, you need to stop being reactive to feelings that make you want to negotiate yourself out of taking action and learn to generate the feelings that get you into action.

The only way to do this is with a well-managed mind.

The Well-Managed Mind

A well-managed mind is something you create through thought work, which just means studying your thoughts, looking at what results they are creating, and then deciding what thoughts to focus on.

Don’t generalize; you need to dig into the weeds when you’re feeling the urge to not follow through and be really clear about your assumptions and the decisions you’re making.

You want to catch yourself negotiating and ask yourself what’s objectively true and find out what you’re trying to convince yourself of.

Spoiler alert, you know you won’t be in the mood to do it later.

You want to explore what feelings you are trying to escape or avoid. You want to examine what you have to gain and what you have to lose, both long term and short term.

The Freedom of Clarity

When you’re operating from the clarity of a well-managed mind, you’re not going to waste your time and energy gaslighting yourself. You don’t need to validate your decisions to feel good about yourself; you just seek to understand them. You’re going to get to know yourself better than you ever have.

With this clarity and understanding, you can make the next decision. If you decide to start exercising next week, you’re going to anticipate the resistance and plan accordingly. You will collect data on what happens in order to decide how to proceed.

When you’re able to do this, you’ll be amazed at how much more productive and focused you can be. You’ll stop wasting time and energy trying to gaslight yourself into believing that you have good reasons to not follow through. You’ll start to trust yourself again, and you’ll realize that you’re capable of doing hard things.

The more you follow through for yourself, the easier it becomes.

So don’t let yourself off the hook so easily. Don’t gaslight yourself into thinking that it’s okay to break your commitments. And as you build your self-trust you will find that you are on your own team, that you can do hard things, harder than you realize. You will use your thinking for the things that actually matter. You’re going to have more time because procrastinating is a huge time suck. So what would you do if you had extra time and energy?

You’ve got this.

xo,

-SJM

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