I get a lot of email from clients who tell me how their friends / coworkers family members are trying to sabotage their efforts.

Ugh, I know. It’s frustrating.

But instead of fighting reality – let’s explore why this might happen. If you understand why, it’s a lot easier to deal with.

First, we have to understand human behavior – at its worst.

A study quoted in the book The Paradox of Choice gave participants hypothetical choices concerning status and asked for their preferences. For example, people were asked to choose between a) earning $50,000 a year with others earning $25,000 or b) earning twice as much, $100,000 a year but being surrounded by people earning $200,000.

More than half the respondents chose the option that gave them the better relative position. That means earning $50,000 to $100,000 because they were at $50,000 earning more than others, while at $100,000 they were earning less than others.

Although we’re hard wired to compare, it’s who you compare yourself to that can make or break your happiness. Ideally, you wouldn’t compare yourself to anyone. Really!

Because we now know that many would prefer the better relative position, it’s easy to see why people would sabotage your efforts.

Let’s go even deeper…

Are you familiar with the term cognitive dissonance? This happens when we have two conflicting desires. For example, smoking. It is well known that smoking cigarettes can cause lung cancer yet every person I’ve ever met wants to live a long, healthy and fit life.

The uncomfortable tension caused by these two opposing ideas is known as dissonance.

As humans, we look to get rid of this uncomfortable feeling. This is known as dissonance reduction.

The only way to get rid of this uncomfortable feeling is by a) quitting smoking b) denying that people actually get sick from smoking or c) justifying and rationalizing.

For example, a smoker could rationalize their behavior by believing that few people get sick from smoking, it only happens to people who smoke more than they do, if smoking doesn’t kill them something else will, they’ll quit next year or they only live once.

In essence, they either need to take action (quit smoking and get whatever help they need <---- this is very hard!) or they need to make themselves feel better by rationalizing their smoking - which is what most people do (<---this is much easier and that's why most people do it).

Knowing both of these concepts let's explore why even people who love you dearly would sabotage you:

1. They wish they had the courage to take action and do something about their health and fitness but in reality they rather just talk about doing something. So, to make themselves feel better they try to bring you down.

2. They enjoy being the thinner one - aka - better relative position.

3. They feel bad whenever they eat unhealthy because their desires and actions aren't in alignment. To get rid of that uncomfortable feeling they encourage you to do the same so they don't feel as bad. In this case, in their head, two wrongs do make a right.

4. They are used to you being the out of shape, over weight person so they feel threatened that you're going to become a different person. They want their 'old' friend back because they felt 'safe' with you that way. ---> Here is an opportunity for you to squash these fears.

Again, as sad as it is – it’s human nature. Soon we’ll explore ways we can actually deal with those who sabotage us.

I wanted to share a routine with you that my extremely smart friend, Cal Newport, does that’s extremely corny but also great.

Cal is incredible. He is an aspiring professor who just completed his PhD at MIT and is now completing his post-doc there too. While doing all of this – he was maintaining his popular blog, Study Hacks, and is now on his 3rd book. If anyone knows about productivity and stress – it’s him.

So, a while back he had a post about he drastically reduces work stress with a shutdown ritual.

When he’s done with work for the day, he says his magic phrase, “schedule shutdown, complete.”

I know. I know. Even he was embarrassed to admit it. But there’s a golden nugget for us…

Many people do the worst of their eating late at night, when no one is around, after they already had dinner.

I want you to try a new routine this week. I’ve been experimenting with it for a few months and it’s helping a lot.

As soon as you’re done with dinner, I’d like for you to go to the bathroom and brush your teeth. Even better would be to floss, and use mouth wash as well.

Then before you go back to the kitchen to clean the dishes, log on and submit your feedback.

I promise the dishes will still be there.

By doing this not only are you cleaning your mouth and in essence ‘closing the kitchen’ so to speak but you’ll also be way less likely to eat anything else while you’re cleaning up the kitchen.

Many people eat 3 dinners. While they’re preparing dinner, during dinner and after dinner. This will definitely help with the after dinner eating.

Because your mouth will feel so fresh, you won’t want to eat anything else. You’ll also be less likely to have mouth cravings – which is when you ‘truly’ just want something sweet.

One of the many reasons why MBT works so well is because lying to yourself (and us) is the worst feeling in the world. Of course, if you choose to eat something after submitting your feedback, you’ll feel compelled to report to us. And that’s okay. Honesty is key! But it just adds another barrier to eating.

“Do I really want to eat this?” “Do I really want to email my tutor about this?”

And if you feel like getting all goofy, instead of saying, “schedule shutdown, complete,” how about saying, “feedback is submitted, kitchen is closed!”

Happy Friday!

I’m fascinated by the story we tell ourselves – about ourselves.

Hear me out. We all have an ego. Some bigger than others but we all have one. Our ego is essentially the way we perceive ourselves. Or the story we tell our self about our self.

We also have an ongoing story that we tell ourselves. And it becomes very easy to connect random occurrences into a ongoing story that makes sense to us. This is known as our preferred narrative.

In other words, we’ll rationalize everything. This is good and bad. It’s good because if we didn’t have the miraculous ability to rationalize, we wouldn’t be able to function in this insane world.

But it’s bad because if something we do doesn’t fit into our story we tend to ignore it.

For example, if someone thinks they are extremely honest – and if they do something that is dishonest – they will somehow completely ignore it and rationalize it.

They will chalk it up to something other than being dishonest.

Being self-aware certainly helps. However, we’re all only self-aware to an extent – because of this phenomenon.

So how does this apply to us? I think it applies to us immensely.

Every time you indulge in unhealthy food what do you tell yourself? Every time you let up during a workout as opposed to pushing harder what do you tell yourself?

Every weekend what do you tell yourself?

Now when you start to pay attention to your actions, as opposed to your story, it starts to get really interesting.

Because your story is the person you really want to be. That’s how you’d like to view yourself.

Your actions, of course, are you! You can’t define anyone but by their actions.

You can be great. But unless you do great no one will know that.

Think about that today and this weekend. Make your actions follow your story!

If we can master our emotions, we’ll be less inclined to eat junk. And that is why I spend so much time writing and talking and thinking about happiness.

If we can work on ways to become happier and figure out ways to make ourselves happier, we’ll be setting ourselves up for success!

Here’s the problem, though.

All we ever heard as a kid was “stop crying” or “relax” or “calm down” or “everything will be alright!” But no one ever told us how to deal with complex emotions.

When our mind floods with emotions we might feel panicky or upset or anxious or angry. How about feelings like rage, loneliness, abandonment, shame? These feelings can be horrifying.

The challenge with feelings and thoughts is that we can’t control them. There are a lot of new-agey books that are sorta goofy in my opinion. Many suggest that we ‘let go of our ego’ and all sorts of things.

The reality is I can’t control my thoughts. They just pop into my head. As do my feelings.

If we were all going to a gorgeous island that was beaming with sun we’d go prepared with sun tan lotion. (One day I hope this is the case, as one of my dreams is to have an annual MBT retreat!)

Well, what if we prepared ourselves for when we’re sad or anxious or unhappy, etc?

What if we had a secret stash of things to do or look at or people to call when certain feelings arise? The idea here is to figure out ways to positively deal with our emotions.

The goal is to actually face them head on because we have a bunch of ways we can soothe ourselves that don’t require food. We don’t want to stop and then have to deal with them later on. And that’s what emotional eating is simply doing: delaying the inevitable.

It’s also important to remember that, like clouds, feeling and emotions do pass! We must remember this.

Remember: The monster is never as scary as it seems! Ever.