Internal dialogue was something Rob brought up earlier and I wanted to address it in depth because I think it’s important.

Let’s start at the basics:

What is an Internal Dialogue?

So, I don’t want to belabor the point, but basically your internal dialogue is how you talk to yourself about (and by extension how you think about) your goals and your journey towards completing them.  Basically, are you generally positive/supportive when you think about your journey, are you negative/insulting, or do you lie somewhere in between?

Why Does it Matter?

Your internal dialogue may well determine if you are successful with the changes you want to make to your life.  Why?

Well, as much as I hate to say it, Dr. Phil was right.  About 6 years ago, I had a Dr. Phil calendar that had one weight loss tip per day.  And one of the tips was basically that if you beat yourself up about your weight, you going to stop trying to change it.  Why?  The whole weight loss process becomes so negative that you want to remove yourself from it. 

The problem is, I see overly negative internal dialogues all the time when I talk to people about losing weight.  Some people very close to me get on the scale every day even though they know their weight fluxuates.  Still, if their weight goes up, they freak out and start individually lamenting each dish they ate which might have caused them to put on weight.  It’s sad because they’re hurting emotionally themselves when all they did was gain half a pound.

I’ve seen the same for other goals.  I have friends who see every misstep as a major failure and that is met with wailing and gnashing of teeth.  The human psyche can only take so much beating before it will give up and you will end up abandoning your goals.  (Not good.)

On the hand Dr. (well, not really Dr.) Perrin also thinks that there is a danger in being overly positive.  There is a point where you can be so upbeat that you ignore the obvious problems.  In my experience, this is a far less common issue, but it does happen and can lead people into believing that everything is fine and that their missteps aren’t really missteps, they’re blips or one-time issues and they’ll “do better tomorow.”

The Right Internal Dialogue

So, somewhere between happy-happy-joy-joy and I-am-a-total-loser is where I believe the  proper internal dialogue lies.  I guess I would call it “firm, but fair.”

I danced around this issue some when I was talking about Self-Assessment when I said that I had to be honest with myself and list everything that I wanted to change and that I couldn’t flinch or ignore my faults.  I also said that I had to forgive myself at the end of that assessment and realize that I was basically a good person even if I had things I wanted to change.  I was firm with myself, but at the same time I didn’t overaccentuate the negative and I was generally positive about my potential to achieve my goals and stick with it.

Let’s look at another example.  Person A (who is a guy since I’m a guy) wants to lose weight, but for whatever reason decides to have a really extravagant meal.  (I’m jonsing for Mexican, so let’s use that as an example.)  Person A has a margarita, all the chips he wants, cheese dip, a chimicanga with beef and cheese sauce, and fried ice cream for dessert.  (Told you, I am jonsing for Mexican.)  Let’s also assume that this happens outside of the rules of his diet that he set.  (In other words, it’s not his bad meal.)

So, someone with a negative internal dialogue thinks: “I am such a loser.  Why the [bleep] did I do that?  Why can’t I lose weight?  I’m such a bad person.”  A person with a positive internal dialogue might think the opposite: “Eh, it’s okay.  It’s not a problem because it’s just one meal.  I’ll do better next time.”

Neither of these viewpoints are right, in my opinion.  First, Person A is not a loser.  Nor is Person A a bad person.  In the grand scheme of things, that meal hasn’t sealed his fate.  He can still hit the gym and work the meal off.  It’ll be okay.  On the other hand, to dismiss that it happened with a simple shrug isn’t so great either because he did do something which is counter to his goals. 

My prefered internal dialogue is to think of this as a (here it comes) a teachable moment.  Every misstep is a chance to get better.  When I give in to overeating like Person A, what I try to do is pause and understand the conditions which drove me to eat that meal.  I know I’m an emotional eater and when I emotionally eat, I try to find out the conditions which stressed me out and recognize them.  I may not be able to keep them from happening again, but hopefully I can sense that they are happening and try to channel the stress towards something other than eating.

I hope that makes sense and I don’t sound like a jerk.  I just don’t want you to beat yourself up and when the missteps happen (and they will) I want you to take them just seriously enough that you eventually learn not to make them again.  That’s all anyone can ask.

Celebrate Good Times

Point of order!  No matter your internal dialogue, don’t forget to celebrate.  In fact, celebrate like we celebrate my son’s accomplishments.  What does that mean?

My son can spell one word: his name and he’s done it like 500 times.  Still, we want him to learn to read and write so ever ytime he spells his name, we party like it’s 1999.

Do that.  Feel free to overcelebrate.  Today, when I didn’t cram down the BBQ and fries when I wanted to, I told Twitter.  I wanted those accolades because I did something big and I deserved it.

You do the same.  That’s an order!

Okay, this post gets way more personal reflection-y than I wanted, but there’s a point to it I swear.  What I want to focus on is three themes:

1. Time
2. Honesty
3. Forgiveness

Like I said in my introductory post, the thing that got all this kickstarted was the health problems, but even before that I was finding myself increasingly dissatisfied with some parts of myself.  Just little things here and there that I know I could be doing better.  Perhaps after a while, my dissatisfaction with those things might have led me to make some of the changes I am talking about here, but my guess is not.

See I’m pretty good at kidding myself or settling or doing the small amount to partially fix a problem and not really solving the root cause.  You know, that whole thing about treating the symptoms and not the disease.

I say that not to beat myself up, but rather to say this whole reimagining thing didn’t just happen.  I didn’t decide that I wanted to change my ways and then launch the website, first I had to figure out what I wanted to change.  Even though I had been feeling sort of psychically “off” for a while, I still needed a period of reflection and criticial analysis of myself then and myself how I want to be.

It was a tough process which ranged from stepping back at times when I was angry and asking myself “Why am I losing my composure?  Why is something so small making me so mad?” to thinking on several occassions “I liked myself better in high school.  Is that because I was naive or was I truly a better person?”

Basically, overtime, I had to be honest with myself.  Unflinchingly honest.  I had to look at myself in the mirror and not look away.  Not gloss over the imperfections and the things I didn’t like.  (In case you’re wondering, that was both literally and figuratively part of the process.  One of the ways of dealing with being overweight for me was never looking below my neck in the mirror.  Makes it easier to pretend you’re not as heavy.)

At the end though, I had to be honest.  I had to know the things that were bothering me about me and I had to know how much they bothered me so I knew in what order to tackle them.  By now, you can probably tell the thing that was bothering me most was my weight.  It’s why I am tackling it first.  Even if nothing else falls in line, I will at least feel better about myself because of it.

Lastly, after I had picked myself apart, clear down to the bone, I had to do one more thing or else I wouldn’t be able to do this.  I had to forgive myself or at least accept myself.  I had to remind myself that yes, I have issues, but I’m not a horrible person.  I’m not even a bad person I don’t think, just a person who would do well to change his ways.

And I can accept that.  I can accept that I would prefer to be skinny, but my wife and child still love me even though I’m fat.  I’m not going to hell because I dress shabby.  I still have a good career even if my hair is a bit shagified.

I thnk that, ultimately saved me.  I am pretty sure psychologically I would reject this whole thing if I had to wake up every morning and recite every reason I had F—ed up my life.  I’d fall off the horse and go about my merry way, never the better.  Instead, I have resolved to say that I got here through a series of actions or inactions I would prefer I hadn’t made, but I did and I can live with it.

And that honestly, is something I can live with.  It’s how I can have a huge list of things about myself that I want to change and not delve into piles of self abuse.  I don’t know about you, but accepting my nature as one who has made mistakes and working past them feels a lot better telling myself what a loser I am.  I think if you try it, you would find it works better, too.  Just guessing!

With that said, I think a quick recap’s in order.  So I could start my reimagining, I first had to figure out what I wanted to change.  Even though I had some ideas, I still spent a goodly amount of time figuring out exactly what I want to change.  During that time, I had to be completely no-holds-barred honest.  Any fault, any problem, any issue had to be noted and I had to keep my eyes open.  Once I had that list though, I then had to sit back and say that, at the end of the day, I wasn’t a bad person because of all the stuff I wanted to change.  Merely a person in a state of flux.  And that was okay.