The Habits Behind Your Results: Make 2023 the Year of Foundational Thinking

I was recently talking to a friend who had a big goal for 2017: lose 30 pounds. She bought a new cookbook full of healthy recipes, planned out her meals for a week, and filled her grocery cart with fruits and vegetables. She said her first couple of days went well, and she even made it to an early morning yoga class. But then, the other shoe dropped.

After a hectic day at the office, she was just too tired to put together the meal she had planned for dinner. Instead, she went into autopilot mode and ordered pizza. Waste not, want not, she said to herself when she packed pizza leftovers for lunch the next day. And just like that, her big goal was off the rails.

Autopilot Kicks in When Life Gets Tough

Sound familiar? It sure did to me! Many of us have had big goals and big plans to develop a new habit, and then we get tired or stressed and our new habit gets dumped for our old ones. When our physical or mental resources are depleted or need to be directed away from our new habits, we rely on old habits. I call this our autopilot setting.

Our habitual choices drive our results, for good or ill. Autopilot is a blessing and curse. It can help sustain us through stressful times, but it makes it very difficult to make lasting change. There is some good news. If we can commit to changing our foundational habits and ways of thinking, we can change our autopilot settings.

Changing Foundational Thinking Supports Success

Reprogramming your autopilot settings requires changes to your foundational thinking. And I won’t lie to you: this can be tough. It helps to have a strong vision of how your life will be better once you develop your new habits. See it, feel it, smell it, and keep this vision in front of you as you brainstorm the new autopilot settings you need to achieve it. Remember, once you change your autopilot setting to the habits that get you what you want, sustaining that change becomes easy.

Make 2017 your year of new foundational thinking. What changes to your autopilot setting will help you create change that sticks? Request the TiPS foundational thinking tool today and start reprogramming your autopilot. For personalized support, contact TiPS today.