Are You Setting Yourself Up To Fail?

“If you pick the right small behaviour and sequence it right, then you won’t have to motivate yourself to have it grow. It will just happen naturally, like a good seed planted in a good spot.”

~ BJ Fogg

There is a paradox at the heart of perfectionism. Perfectionists hate failing, making mistakes or getting things wrong. At the same time, perfectionists love to set completely unrealistic goals. It's a recipe for constantly feeling like you're failing.

One area I see this a lot with my clients is creating new habits and practices. People think they're doing the right thing and set off with the best intentions only to find themselves falling short of their own impossible standards (which they don't even recognise as impossible) a couple of short weeks later.

"I'm going to work out every day." "I have to meditate for at least 30 minutes every morning." "I'm going to stop using my phone in the evening."

All sound like great things to be doing and I guarantee, expressed like this, will fail.

We set ourselves up to fail when we're absolutist in our approach. It's always or never. We expect ourselves to show up every single day. In short, we expect ourselves to be robots executing an algorithm.

Newsflash, we are messy, imperfect, fallible human beings, not machines.

If we want our habits and practices to stick, we have to work with our humanness, not against it.

Have an underwhelming minimum

I don't know anyone who genuinely practices anything every single day. Even the most dedicated practitioners I know practice 5 or 6 days a week and I suggest even that is far too ambitious for most of us mere mortals. This is a baseline, not a target or a limit. You are allowed to exceed it! Your underwhelming baseline should feel totally achievable - imagine if you were ill or having a really busy week at work, could you still achieve your underwhelming minimum. Because life happens and we're more likely to stick at something if we've planned for life getting in the way.

Focus on your why

It's easy to get caught up in the logistics of a practice and forget why you're doing it. The goal might look like meditating for x number of minutes; the desire might be to start your day with more calm, to become more aware of your thoughts, to support your other embodied practices. When we come back to the why, we realise that there are lots of ways to achieve the same end, which means there are options. If your goal is to start the day more calmly, maybe some days your routine is to meditate and other days it's to have a bath instead of a shower or to read a novel while drinking your morning tea. Focusing on the why is also motivating on those days that you're struggling to follow through.

How is as important as what

We get so focused on what we want to do, we can easily forget the how. And the how follows the why. Last year, I committed to a yin yoga practice to help me find more gentleness in challenges (I'm not as flexible as I'd like so many yin postures are hard for me). I would be completely undermining my practice if I forced myself to go to yin yoga, to turn up rushed and distracted, and to then beat myself up for not doing it right. I had to practice gentleness in every aspect otherwise I was just reinforcing the patterns of harshness that I was trying to loosen. Ask yourself how you can design your practice in a way that supports the feelings of you why.

Dance to your own beat

So often, we structure our habits like other people do, only to discover we're not like that other person. You know how you respond to accountability, deadlines, rewards and so on so use that information to design structures that actually work for you. For example, if you respond better to praise than punishment, structure your accountability to be reward-based. If punishment (e.g. giving up money if you miss your goal) hasn't motivated you in the past, you're not suddenly going to become a different person and be motivated by it.

Be specific

The more detailed you can be in your plan, the more likely you will follow through. I'm going to eat less cake is much less likely to work than I only eat dessert on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

Anticipate challenges

The clients I see most successfully implementing new habits and practices are those who spend some time planning for the worst. By anticipating the challenges, those clients put plans in place to navigate those challenges more effectively. A classic example is laying out your gym clothes the night before (or even sleeping in them as one client did). All this is to make your life in the moment of doing something new as easy as possible. And let's face it, the thing you are trying to do is hard - it must be otherwise you would be doing it already without even thinking about it. So how can you make it easier for yourself?

Experiment, experiment, experiment

You will not get this right the first time. Or the second or even the third. That's not the point. Your practice will never be perfect. Even if you get it 'just right' for a bit, life changes. You change. You move into a different season of the year or your life and that perfect practice doesn't work so well. These practices are there to support us to show up more authentically, compassionately, and responsively to life. They're not a performance. So keep experimenting. Whether it goes as you hoped or not, you can keep learning about yourself. An experimental approach helps keep you flexible and responsive, rather than repeating old perfectionist patterns of rigidity and harshness.

So, "I have to do my morning routine of meditating, journaling and yoga every day" might become something like
This month, I want to see how practising meditation, journaling and yoga regularly helps me start my day well. I want to feel calm and start my day with intention. I am committing to doing at least 5 minutes of each practice 4 times a week between 7 and 8 am in my bedroom. I will put my yoga mat and journal out the night before. If I'm successful, I will spend one morning reading my book in the bath.

Where are you setting yourself up to fail? Maybe making some of these small adjustments help you achieve the goals you want to.