You’ve heard it so many times before, I’m sure. But just because it’s a cliché, doesn’t mean it isn’t 100% true! No matter what you want to achieve, you must have a plan – preferably a written one, with each action step clearly outlined – in order to succeed.
In last week’s Deep Dive webinar – part of the membership benefits of my EmpowerEd health and nutrition education program – I discussed various types of plans (for both healthy eating and exercise), and how to go about constructing them.
One of the most important situations you need to plan for is handling social occasions. Your resolve to eat for maximum health, vitality and your ideal weight is likely to be tested from many different directions at most social gatherings: your own cravings for unhealthy food; social pressure to conform with what everyone else is eating; being challenged by others whose beliefs about food conflict with yours… If you want to leave the birthday party, family get-together or evening with friends, with both your relationships and your sense of personal integrity intact, you’re going to need a plan!
There are two main reasons why other people apply social pressure to you: either your behaviour challenges their beliefs, so they feel an intense urge to make you conform in order to reassure them that their beliefs are ‘true’; or it triggers guilt or shame in them because they secretly know they should be doing what you’re doing, but haven’t been able to bring themselves to do it.
Once you understand the different types of social pressure and the internal forces driving each of them, you can work out a plan to handle them with grace. Thinking through the forms of social pressure you’re likely to be subjected to, writing your responses to each of them, and rehearsing them in advance helps you feel more confident when you’re actually in the situation, and dramatically increases the likelihood that you’ll be able to stay true to yourself.
That’s what one of my clients, whom I’ll call Leanne, did to keep herself out of trouble with her dietary nemesis, cake.
As I discussed in the Deep Dive webinar ‘Setting Up Your Environment For Success: How to engineer your home, work and social environments to support your goals’ (which is available to view instantly when you join the EmpowerEd program) Leanne has a busy social life, and the way her friends like to socialise is over a rich, multiple-course restaurant meal! Dessert was what really brought Leanne unstuck; once she had just one bite of cake, an addictive switch flicked in her brain, and her diet would go off the rails for weeks, until she was incapacitated with a migraine. After recovering from the migraine, she would swear off cake and recommit to a healthy diet… only to succumb to temptation and social pressure at the next night out with friends, and repeat the whole pattern again.
Leanne came to me for help with breaking this self-destructive cycle, and together we formulated a plan to help her handle this difficult social situation in a way that protected her from unwanted scrutiny and questioning by her friends, and allowed her to stay on track with what worked for her physical and mental health.
5 years down the track, Leanne is now migraine-free, remains at her healthy weight without struggle, and has no temptation to eat cake! While her friends attribute their creeping weight gain to ‘middle-aged spread’, Leanne enjoys being One Hot Mama in her 50s ;-).
I’ve included a downloadable Plan for Handling Social Events along with the recording of the ‘Setting Up Your Environment For Success’ webinar. Oh, and you’ll learn the details of Leanne’s successful plan in the webinar too.
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