How to make LIFE CHANGES that stick!

Okay. I know you've tried to make changes in the past, and you may feel like it's just impossible because no matter how many times you've tried, it just doesn't stick. Maybe it works for a little while, but it doesn't stay around long term. And when that happens to you over and over again, you begin to really just feel like it's impossible, or you feel like you're a failure. Or maybe you decide that you must just not want it enough, or you didn't try hard enough. Well, I guess those things could be true. Maybe those things are true. But maybe you set yourself up for failure from the beginning. Maybe there's some things about how to actually be successful in making a change that you're not taking into consideration. Well, that's what I want to talk about in this video. For those of you who are new here, I'm Amber Hollingsworth. I'm a master addiction Counselor, and this YouTube channel is all about understanding the science and psychology of addiction. So you can stay five steps ahead of it. So I guess you could say I know a little something about making changes and how to actually set yourself up for success. And I know a lot of people are thinking about that this time of year. So I'm going to give you five very practical strategies that I feel like if you put these things in place, your success rate is going to go through the roof. It's not that you're setting the wrong goal. It's not that you don't want it bad enough, but you're probably just not putting the right plan in place. And like I said, I'm going to give you five strategies. So let's start with the first one. I will tell you that the last one probably is most important. So make sure you watch this whole video, because the last one is like the fail safe. Okay? The first one, though, the very first thing I think you need to do is ask yourself, why do I want to make this change? Now, I know you think like, duh, Amber, that may be simple, but let me give you some examples of what I mean here. Like, let's say the change you want to make is you want to save more money. Or maybe, you know, maybe the way you're saying it is, I want to spend less money, but really, the truth is, you want to save more money. Why do you want to save more money? Ask yourself that question. And you may even have to. Once you answer that, you may have to ask yourself that again, because, like, let's say, why do you want to save money. Well, I like having money in the bank. Well, why do you like having money in the bank? Well, it makes me feel more secure and I feel safer when I have money in the bank. Well, why does that make you feel safer? And if you can ask yourself that why question two or three times, you're going to get to the heart of the real true reason why, why you really want that thing to happen. And if you will, once you get to that why, if you will reframe your goal into I want that, it's going to be easier to stay motivated. Let me give you a recovery example. If your goal is I want to quit drinking, why do you want to quit drinking? Well, I want my wife to get off my case. Why do you want your wife to get off your case? Well, because it makes me feel like a failure. If you keep going down this line of thinking, what it is, is really, maybe you want to feel like you're a good husband, maybe you want to be a good father. So when you set up your goal, instead of saying something like, I want to quit drinking, say, instead, say, I want to be a good father and a husband. Are you getting where I'm coming at? Identify your why. Like the real why, the underneath, underneath. Underneath why? Because that's really what you're trying to get at. You know, maybe your goal is you want to start a business. You know, why do you want to start that business? Well, I want to make more money. Well, why do you want to make more money? Well, I want to be able to live more comfortably. Well, why do you want to do that? Well, I want to be able to take care of my family. You know, you just get at the root of it. And that's going to help you stay motivated because you're really getting to the true truth of the matter. And honestly, when you dig way down, it's usually about a feeling. It's about, I want to feel a certain way. I want to feel good about myself. I want to feel safe and secure. It's, you know, I want to feel like I'm taking care of my family. You know, I want to feel like I've done my best, Whatever it is, probably a feeling, honestly. So get in touch with that. The second really important tip here that I think will help you a lot is if you will decide if you make your goal more of what you want to put into your life versus what you want to take out. A lot of people focus on something that they want to quit doing. Like maybe they want to quit eating sugar, or they want to quit spending money, or they want to stop drinking, or they want to stop looking at Facebook so much to the day. When you take something out of your life, that's actually a lot harder to pull off than it is to put something into your life. So a reverse way of saying, like, I want to spend money less, it might be I want to save more money. It's actually just. It's just a lot easier to add in a behavior than it is to take out a behavior. The third tip that I want to give you is want you to think about the times you've tried this in the past. And I want you to think hard about it and think, why did it not work? Was there something that you did before that set you up for failure? I can tell you when it comes to, like, addiction and recovery, I can tell you some of the really common things people do set them up for failure. It's not that they don't mean it or that they didn't want it more that, like, let's say they. Let's say you want to quit using drugs, okay? But you think in your head you're going to be able to do that without changing your friends, right? Without changing your work environment, without, like, making other big changes, you're just going to stop doing drugs. Well, it's just not going to work that way because from a practical standpoint, you're not setting yourself up for success, right? If your goal is you want to spend less money, but you're always going into stores, not gonna work. And I know that seems simple, but you really have to put things in place to make it possible. Most people feel like they're supposed to just be able to, like, be strong and willpower into place, but that's probably a really bad plan. For example, I had a young man in my office just. Just right before I did this video, I had some sessions this morning, and this young man I was seeing is. He's a young guy, he's in recovery, he's doing well. But he was saying, amber, I'm just really have trouble with self control. And I said, what do you mean? And he said, I just spend money. Like, I just spend it on stupid stuff on eating out and. And I just don't know why I do that. And I spend all my money, and then by the time it's getting close to payday again, like, I have no money, it's just miserable, and I don't live like that anymore. So we were talking about that, and he said, you Know what it is? I just think I just need to be more grateful for what I have instead of always wanting something else. I said, well, I really like that and that sounds really good. And most counselors will be like giving you an A plus for that. But the thing of it is, is I don't really think it's that deep. I don't think it's that spiritual of an issue. I think it's, what are you doing to set yourself up for success? You know, are you putting yourself in high risk situations where you're gonna spend money? What's not working for you? In the past, it's about the logistical things. And what I ended up telling him leads me to suggestion number four, which is to create some accountability for yourself. Instead of just getting mad at yourself over and over again because you didn't do it or you didn't willpower it, create a gate for yourself, make it really hard not to make the change. So for example, with this young man, I said, well, you're going to have to set up some kind of like automatic system where part of your money goes somewhere else and you don't have access to it. And a lot of people would say, well, that's almost like cheating. You know, you should be more self disciplined. But in the beginning when you're trying to make a big life change, you're gonna have hard days and days when you just don't have the willpower or you don't feel like it. And you need a fail safe plan. In those kind of circumstances, it needs to be really, really hard for you to decide to do otherwise. That's making a smart plan on how to actually stick with the changes and so you can do that. In that case, you know, it's about somehow automatically making some money. Go somewhere where it doesn't have like access to it. When it comes to recovery, it's about, I call it like being out of the recovery closet. Like if everyone knows you're not supposed to be drinking, it's a lot harder to drink. You know, what is it that you can set up in place right now when you're really motivated to make sure that you don't fall through the cracks. Okay, here we go. This is maybe my favorite, best suggestion I have for you. You've got to decide now. You gotta decide when you're in this good frame of mind and you're motivated and you're ready, that no matter what, there's no efforts. I think you know what I mean when I'm saying that, right? I Mean like you have to decide that there's no, like, okay, I blew it, I mess it up, forget it. Now I have this really good friend in recovery, used to say this all the time. He would say, you know what, you can start your day over at any time. And I really like that saying. It just stuck with me because I feel like it's so easy to be like, I blew it, just forget it, I might as well go all the way. You know, we do this in other ways in our life. Like, I had a bad morning, the whole day sucks. You know, we just want to take one bad thing or one thing that didn't go right and then we just want to generalize it across the board and just throw the whole thing away. Like our whole plan. If you decide now that no matter what, there's no like giving up, there's no getting stuck in that self pity or being mad at yourself, that does you no good. If you mess up, you mess up and you can start your day over at 12 o', clock, at 2 o', clock, at 9 o' clock at night. Like, just because it didn't work between, you know, eight in the morning and 10:30 in the morning doesn't mean the rest of the day is not going to work. It's too easy to let ourselves fall into that. Well, I already messed it up, you know, I've wasted it, I've screwed it all up. Like, forget it, it's just not working. And honestly what you're doing is you're just letting yourself off the hook, right? You're just giving yourself an excuse not to pick yourself back up, dust yourself off, figure out what went wrong and put one foot in front of the other. There are going to be bad days, there are going to be days when it doesn't work. I think it's good to like stop, self reflect, figure out what went wrong. And some of that may involve like, man, I'm kind of upset that I did that. But after that, if you stay, you can't just stay stuck there. You've got to sort of get it together and be like, well, dang, I hate that. Like, next time I'll do it this way, get up and move forward. Not tomorrow, not Monday, I'll start over. But immediately, you can start over at any moment, you don't have to wait that waiting thing, you know, I'm gonna start that new change on this day or that day. And that's just always a bad plan. Start right now, like right now, today. Even though it's new Year's Eve, you could start your new plan. You don't even have to wait till tomorrow. It can start right now. And when you realize that, that there's no like these like false start lines, your start line is wherever you start, right? It doesn't even have to be on the hour, it could be at 3:30 in the afternoon. Imagine that, right? You decide when that start line is and you can redraw it and redraw it as many times as you need in order to get where you're going to go. There's going to be some backwards and forwards and that's okay, you just keep getting there and you just tweak and you figure it out along the way. One of my good friends that used to tell me, and this is very true, he used to tell me that I'm like a shoot first, aim later kind of person. Other people are like, aim, aim, aim and never shoot. Because I just like go for it. I'm like, yeah, because then, you know, you're only 3cm off to the left and the next shot's going to be pretty close. That's what I mean when I say just start. And if you mess up, it's just a learning experience, you know, and then you, and then you know, you need to adjust three inches, right? And you try again, maybe you're off two centimeters, you know, you know exactly what went wrong and how to readjust. You got to get that kind of attitude and thinking about it, that's what it's really going to take. Alright, now let's hear from some of you, one last little bonus thing you can do is you can say out loud, what is the change that you want to make? So I want to give you guys an opportunity right now to put that in the chat or in the comments. If you write something down or you say something out loud or you tell someone else, you're so much more likely to follow through with it because already when you've done that, it's like making it real. And it's a way of creating some accountability for yourself. So tell us what it is, what do you want in your life? And try to really get down to that. Why you know that, that feeling state the thing that you're really, really, really after. All right, I'm gonna take some time here. We're gonna go through and say hey to everybody. Hey Anna from Californ. Let's see, Lori's with us and true crime curators here. Let's see, see what true crime is. Say I love this point. Sometimes it's not that deep. It's just a matter of setting yourself up for success. I know, right? It's like, I love that, like, deep answer, but I'm like, nah, it's not that deep. This is just a practical issue. Sometimes things are just simpler than we want to make them. Especially in addiction recovery, we want to make things so much deeper, and we spend all this time looking for all these underneath reasons. Well, there's got to be a reason why they keep relapsing. It's probably not that deep, people. It's probably keep relapsing because they keep putting themselves in a certain situation, or they're really worried about letting go of a particular person they need to let go of. Look at the practical stuff first. Lori says, I need you in my ear 24 7. Somebody. One of the viewers recently told me this week, it was funny, Lori. They said whenever they get into their strategy plan, whenever they get in their head and they start making the strategy, that their voice sounds all Southern. Their voice in their head like mine. And that cracked me up. And they're not from the south, so I thought that was funny. With the Southern voice. Recovery is super hard, but it is possible, according to Jackson. I think one of the things, you know, Jackson saying is, yeah, it is hard, but sometimes we can sort of psych ourselves out by telling ourselves, like, only 10% of people make it, and it's so hard, and no one ever stops this. But those things aren't true. And when we feed ourselves those kind of statements, you know, that it's just impossible, those kind of things, then you're really subconsciously setting yourself up for failure when it comes to addiction recovery. Thousands and thousands and thousands of people get recovery every single day. And the difference is, and people that get it and people that don't get it is are you willing to do what you need to do to make the changes People get all caught up in? Like, this program doesn't work, or that program works, but not this one. And people fight about it, but the success rate is really a lot more about, like, will you make the other changes, the practical changes that you need to make in order to make sure you're successful? Let's see here. Hey, Sue, I see you there. See what Amy has to say. A lady I know in recovery says she goes and starts her day over by brushing her teeth and washing her face. Oh, I like that. She's almost got a ritual. Like, it's like a clean sleep. Like, it does make you feel all sort of like fresh and new. When you brush your teeth and wash your face, I kind of like it. That's pretty good. If that's your plan, though, you better put your toothbrush and your little makeup wipes in your purse so you can start that over. Even if you're at work or if you're at the target, you need to go in there and get a fresh start. Carry it with you. I like that plan. Laurie says. Oh, you're talking to Wendy. So I don't see many people putting in here. What are your goals? What do you want more of? Tell me, what do you want to be different? And if possible, tell me what you do want to have versus what you don't want to have. Because like I said, these are the simple things that you can do to set yourself up for success. Which one of the things on this list was your favorite one or the one that maybe you hadn't thought of before? Thank you, everyone for joining us. I hope everyone has a wonderful, happy 2021. And I will see you guys all next Thursday. It will be in the new year. And I look forward to hearing how you're doing with your goals. Bye, everybody.