Ep #327: Who You Want to Be During the Process

Hi! Most of us spend a lot of time thinking about who we’re going to be when we reach a goal.

When you reach the goal of stopping binge eating, you probably imagine what you’ll be like, how you’ll feel, how you’ll act, and how you’ll identify yourself. And you think it will all be great!

So you feel great just thinking about it….as long as you believe that it’s actually possible for you to get there.

But, how much time do you spend thinking about who you want to be until you get there?

That’s not something most of us tend to think about as often. Or at all.

But it’s so important that you do because if you’re not being intentional about how you show up while you’re in the process of stopping binge eating, you might end up showing up in ways that are going to slow down your progress or even stop it.

Who you decide to be will affect how you feel, how you act, and the results you get.

And you get to decide who you want to be as you go through this process.

Now, you might not have realized that. You might not have realized that you don’t have to be pessimistic, negative, hard on yourself, frustrated, or apathetic as you go through the process of stopping binge eating.

You might instead think that that’s just how you are, or think that that’s just what the process is supposed to look like, that it’s like that for everyone, and that’s what it’s supposed to be like when you work on big goals.

But no.

How you respond to mistakes and binges, what you tell yourself when it gets hard, when you don’t feel like doing the work, and just how you talk to yourself day to day, what you think about the process, all of that is determined by you.

You don’t have to be beating yourself down mentally, or be mean and harsh with yourself, or identify as someone who can’t stop binge eating, or as someone who is a failure, is too weak, or is too lazy, or you don’t have to have little quits, or be impatient, or not take the time to learn from binges and overeats.

You don’t have to be that person.

It doesn’t matter who you’ve always been, who you’ve been in the past, you can be different this time.

And if you choose to be different this time during the process, then you will absolutely get different results.

Really think about this.

Every other time you’ve tried to stop binge eating, what kind of person were you being?

Were you doing any of the things I just mentioned?

Were you quitting on yourself? Were you not committed? Were you being hard on yourself? Were you doubting yourself?

It is very likely that if you were, then that is one of the main reasons why you weren’t successful.

It’s not that you can’t be successful, it’s that you were getting in your own way and you were making it harder for yourself.

It’s so hard to reach a goal when you’re being super negative along the way, and when you’re quitting on yourself, and when you’re impatient, or so many other unuseful things.

You’re not going to feel good, which is going to take away your motivation, drive you to stop trying, and bring you down.

And if you’re someone who has little quits along the way, you’re making it so it will take way longer to get to the end.

Or if you quit often enough, you’ll never get there.

So, as you are going through this process of stopping binge eating, as you’re doing this work, as you’re becoming a person who is binge-free, who do you want to be?

What kind of person do you want to be as you’re going through this process?

You’re going to decide that and then every single day, you’re going to do your best to be that person.

You can more intentionally be a person who is self-compassionate, which is something a lot of people need to work on.

Being hard on yourself is just going to make you feel bad and bring you down. But being someone who is compassionate and understanding of yourself will feel so much lighter so you’ll feel better and the better you feel, the easier it will be to keep moving forward.

You can be a person who is encouraging with yourself. Telling yourself you won’t be able to do it for whatever BS reason you tell yourself, like because you’ve been doing it too long or because you haven’t been able to stop before, is going to make you feel hopeless and without hope, you will do nothing. But when you are a person who is encouraging with yourself, you’ll pump yourself up a little bit, you’ll get little pep talks, you’ll keep your belief in yourself up and you need to that belief in order to move forward and keep going.

You can be a person who is curious about yourself and about your binges. If you binge and try to forget about it, you learn nothing. You don’t give yourself a chance to understand why you binge and what you need to do differently. You don’t learn your patterns and what you need to work on more. You miss learning opportunities. And if you binge and just beat yourself up about it, again, that’s not going to help you.

But if you’re someone who takes some time to look back at what happened before the binge, and get curious about what happened, and look for unused tools or unuseful thoughts or justifications or something you did that lead to the binge, then you’re going to find information that will help you move forward. So instead of repeating the same mistakes over and over and over, you’re going to get better and better and not repeating the mistakes. Curiosity will help you to find the answers you need to do better.

And if you are intentionally being more like that, it will help you to be someone who is resilient. You can be a more resilient person as you go through the process this time. You can be someone who doesn’t stay down when they fall. You can get back up more quickly, get back to doing the work, and get back to eating how you want to be eating because you’re not going to let one binge take away all your belief in yourself. You’re going to hold on to that belief and know that one binge doesn’t mean you can’t do it, it just means you have something to learn and to work on. And because you’re being curious and encouraging, you’re going to find the lesson and get to work on it.

And who else do you want to be?

Do you want to be a determined person? Do you want to be a committed person? Do you want to be an optimistic person? Do you want to be a disciplined person?

You can be all of those things. I know it sounds cheesy and cliché but you really can be who ever you want to be and whatever kind of person you want to be as you go through this process.

But you first have to decide who that is.

What qualities would benefit you this time around that you don’t usually have as you try to stop binge eating?

With practice, and with intention, you can embody them.

Now, will you be perfect at embodying them at first? No, you won’t. And you probably won’t ever be perfect because you are an imperfect human.

But, this time, you’re also going to be a person who doesn’t only accept perfection. That’s definitely an important one. You’re going to be a person who allows themselves to do good enough. You’re going to be a person who doesn’t blow mistakes out of proportion and make them into a huge deal when they’re not. If you make mistakes, you’re not going to make it mean that you’ve failed or that you’re hopeless, you’re going to look at the facts of what happened, get curious about what went wrong, learn from it, strategize for the future, and move on.

This time, you’re going to be a person who allows yourself to grow in the process instead of expecting yourself to stop bingeing right away or expecting yourself to have your ideal eating habits right away and expecting all the food noise to go away right away.

This time, as you’re going through the process, you’re going to be someone who chooses to be patient, and allow yourself to slowly become the person you want to be.

And this time, you’re going to be a person who is accepting of where they are in the process instead of getting frustrated that they’re not farther. You are where you are. This is what’s true. Accept it, so you can be calm instead of frustrated, and keep on going.

Now, you might hear all this and be like, “yeah, I want to be that kind of person but I don’t know how.”

And here’s what I’ll tell you.

If you want to be that kind of person, you need to speak to yourself the way that kind of person would.

That’s how you become that person.

What is different between you and a person who is how you want to be, is the self-talk.

So, how does a person who is resilient speak to themselves when they make a mistake?

How does a person who is compassionate speak to themselves if they make a mistake?

How does a person who is committed, or a person who is not a perfectionist, or a person who is accepting of themselves, or a person who is determined, or a person who is disciplined speak to themselves?

However they would, that’s how you’re going to speak to yourself.

How you are, how you act, how you show up, who you are in this process, is going to be determined by your thoughts, your self-talk, how you speak to yourself.

So if you want to be a different person than before as you go through this process this time, your thoughts and self-talk need to be different.

If you want to be more disciplined and committed, you’re not going to just not do something important that you don’t feel like doing. You’re not going to put it off because you don’t feel like it today. You’re going to acknowledge that you don’t feel like it and you’re going to tell yourself that you’re going to do it anyway because that’s what a disciplined person would say to themselves. They would say that they’ll do it anyway.

If you want to be someone who doesn’t quit when it gets hard, or if you binge, you’re going to tell yourself that you will keep going no matter what and that you will get back to work and that you can do better.

If you want to be someone who isn’t a perfectionist, you’re going to tell yourself that your day isn’t ruined, that you haven’t screwed up everything, and that you haven’t failed. You’re going to tell yourself that you can still do your best for the rest of the day, or the rest of the weekend, or rest of the week, or whatever time period, and that doing your best from now on will make a difference. You don’t have to be perfect to make progress.

So, decide who you want to be and start talking to yourself just as that kind of person would.

And make sure you’re not telling yourself things you don’t believe because that’s not going to help you. BS-ing yourself won’t do you any good.

The kind of person you want to be doesn’t BS themselves, they tell themselves what they believe to be true.

Do that. Even if it’s not super positive, find something that’s more aligned with who you want to be than who you don’t want to be.

More aligned is better than not aligned at all.

It’s better to tell yourself that it’s possible you might be able to do this than to tell yourself you can’t.

It’s better to tell yourself that you might not have ruined the whole day than to tell yourself that you did.

Better is better.

So speak to yourself better. Speak to yourself in ways that the kind of person you want to be would speak to themselves, or as close as you can get right now.

You get to decide who you are going to show up as as you go through this process of stopping binge eating and you can be a different kind of person than you were before.

Decide who you want to be in order to help you progress, to help you to actually get to your goal, and to not make it extremely difficult and exhausting along the way.

Who you decide to be as you go through this process is up to you and how you speak to yourself throughout this process is up to you.

Decide to embody useful qualities and to speak usefully.

Alright, go be the person you want to be right now both in your thoughts and actions. And I’ll talk to you next time, bye bye.