Why do we make poor choices, especially when it comes to our health?
Reflect on today, how would you categorize the choices you’ve made with your health?
Some poor choices may include:
- Choosing soda over water or green tea
- Sitting for long periods of time
- Eating poorly
- Not getting enough sleep
- Failing to relax
When you are working on developing healthier habits you need to understand the choices you make and how they effect your health.
When coaching clients, we take time to look at how their choices are leading them to develop healthier habits and then make an action plan on how to move past their poor choices.
Using the following eight tips, take your poor choices and turn them into a learning opportunity to make better choices for your health.
Identify the Poor Choices You Repeat
You can’t take action on your poor choices until you identify and acknowledge them. Strive to be more aware of the present moment. If you make a poor choice, ask yourself if this is something you keep doing. Once you have an idea of the poor choices you keep making, you can correct them.
Why Does This Keep Happening?
Once you have singled out a poor choice (or more) that you keep repeating, ask yourself why this keeps happening. Getting to the root cause of why you are repeatedly making the same choice is important because it allows you to address the underlying cause.
How Do My Poor Choices Harm Me?
A great way to avoid making the same poor choices again is to carefully consider how they are harming you. When you identify the negative impact, you will naturally feel more motivated to stop them.
Learn a Lesson from Your Poor Choices
A poor choice isn’t a problem if it teaches you a lesson. Make sure that you take a lesson from each poor choice you make. When it comes to recurring poor choices, the lesson should be identifying ways to avoid making that choice again.
Make a Plan
If you are struggling to avoid certain choices, make a plan of attack. Take the time to write down steps you can take to address the choices you are making. This simple act not only gives you a plan to take action on, but it also helps your subconscious recognize the poor choice (hopefully) before it happens again.
Change Your Habits
If you keep doing the same things, you are going to keep making the same choices. It might be time for you to switch things up a bit. By building positive habits (or avoiding negative ones), you change the way you do things. Ideally, this means you will get different results, which may be enough to avoid certain recurring poor choices.
Address Your Weaknesses
Once you have identified your recurring poor choices, check to see if they are caused in part by any weaknesses you have. If so, consider taking the steps needed to address those weaknesses. If you can’t address a weakness on your own, consider asking a close friend for help.
Surround Yourself with Honest Friends
A great way to break the cycle of repeated poor choices is to have friends that aren’t scared to tell you how it is. When you have loved ones that feel comfortable calling you out, it helps you avoid making the same poor choices repeatedly. They will tell you the things that you might not want to admit to yourself.
Forgive Yourself
Developing healthier habits will take time. Do not become your own worst enemy when you choose poorly. Forgive yourself. You made a poor choice, accept it. Now, what are you going to do about it? Allow yourself to learn and grow through your poor choice.
Give yourself time to grow into a life filled with healthier habits. Your success comes when you learn and grow from those poor choices you made, rather than giving up on the process of becoming heathier. Adopt a growth mindset and grow stronger and healthier.
Here is a worksheet you can use to help you work through those days when your choices worked against your goals to become healthier. This is a .pdf fillable worksheet that is yours upon request when you click the image below.
