Knowing what you know of my husband and I – that we do our best to live a healthier lifestyle – it may come as a surprise to learn that Graham was a smoker for almost seven years.
One day, after a very challenging soccer game, he decided he wanted to quit. He was finding it was getting more and more difficult to play soccer with his lungs not at their best.
Because his love for soccer trumped his enjoyment for cigarettes, he quit smoking and never looked back. That is aside from sharing what he coined, “the lesson of quitting.”
This lesson is one worth hearing about because it can help you achieve goals and cut out unhealthy habits much faster and more effectively.
It’s this simple; quitting something that has been a habit for a while is a lot easier when you can disassociate your identity from the thing you’re trying to quit.
Simply put, what he had to do in order to quit smoking was decide that he was not a smoker. For years he had told himself the opposite; he believed he was one, and that smoking was very much a part of his identity.
In order to stop smoking, he learned that his identity had to be reformed. He had to start saying he’s not a smoker and more importantly, start believing it.
This insight has been extremely helpful for our clients. It works, regardless of the goal they’re setting out to achieve. For some, that’s a weight loss goal, for others, it’s a goal to become a runner or weightlifter, or to become more flexible.
Changing the body begins with first changing the mind. For example, someone wishing to lose weight may identify themselves as “the bigger one” or “big boned” or “the one with a sweet tooth,” but they’ll need to change that to become “the healthy one” or “the strong, fit, lean, active one.”
Rather than surface level habit forming, lasting change needs to go deep into the foundations of our belief sets.
What we believe about yourself is what we will live out of. We’ll make choices based on who we believe we are.
“Becoming” isn’t easy, but it gets easier when we can start to believe that we are in fact who we are becoming and that it is possible.
If we believe we’re an athlete, we’ll make decisions based on that belief set and then we will become an athlete.
If we decide we’re a runner, we’ll choose to run more often and make choices from a place of being a runner.
If we believe we’re the healthy one, we won’t make unhealthy food and lifestyle choices as often.
If we believe we’re the active one, we won’t make inactive choices as often.
There’s a proverb that says it well; “as you think in your heart, so are you.” We are what we believe we are. We become what we first believe.
So, whatever your goal may be, no matter the size of the goal, you’ll need to start by first reforming your belief set and then stepping out to become it.
For Graham that was unbecoming a smoker by becoming and believing he was a healthy soccer player who didn’t smoke.
Obviously, his actions then needed to line up with that in order to be able to quit, but they align much easier when we first touch the belief that resides under the surface.
So whatever your goal, disassociate who you are from what you’re trying to quit, then believe that you can achieve what you are aiming to and I promise you this, you absolutely will achieve it.
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This is a monthly opinion piece; Alison Brown is a local business owner, mother and published author.
