Use Self Awareness to control your environment

I’m going to attempt to type consistently for the next 15 minutes focused on the topic of self awareness. I remember hearing this a lot in Daniel Goldman’s Book, Emotional Intelligence and I’m reminded by its importance of by Gary Varynerchuck’s short, but highly effective 2 minute video on Facebook. That’s where I’m getting my inspiration from.

Knowing yourself and knowing your tendencies is what will create success in your life.  We are all emotional creatures and we frequently act on emotion.  It takes a lot of focus to stay focused on one thing.  How we feel will almost always what we do and how we do it.  You should be able to predict your behavior well enough to not put yourself in situations where you’ll have to use more will power.  Will power is a limited resource and some days it runs low.  On those days where willpower might be low, it’s probably best to stay away from foods you’ll over eat.

Control your environment.

The better you’re able to control your environment, the more likely you’ll succeed.  You have to make things easy for yourself.  You have to take a proactive approach, just as I mentioned in my 7 habits fat loss article.  That means taking initiative and setting your environment up for good diet behavior.  For some people, that means not going out with friends to the bar or having that glass of wine every single night.

To take it a step further, don’t keep wine in the house.  It’s a huge challenge to try to avoid your favorite food and beverages when it’s just a few steps away.  If you make accessing your failure foods inconvenient, it’s less likely that you’ll eat them.

One thing that I’m very self aware about is the likelihood that  I will finish the bag, the box or the case.  With this in mind, I almost always look at my favorite junk foods that have seemingly ‘reasonable’ calories per serving and ignore it. I count the calories per bag, or amount per serving multiplied by servings per container.  In the case of the large bag of Doritos Cool Ranch, 140 calories per serving X 12 servings =  1,680.  There’s a reason why I don’t buy large bags of junk food. I will eventually eat all of it. Same goes for ice cream.

Exercise

The habit of working out isn’t easy for everybody and it use to be for me.  These days working out is a habit – but the problem I face is working out intensely consistently.

There’s a saying, early bird catches the worm.  The people who seem to do the best with hard workouts and consistent exercise are the ones that wake up early in the morning to hit the gym. There’s so much in the day that can go wrong that could interfere with your workout.  I get that there are things in life that take priority over exercise, but that’s why you set up your day for where there is low interference.

Joining a group class or getting a personal trainer will help solve the consistent intensity thing. I like workout partners, if you can mange to find a good one.

There’s more to this self awareness thing, but I’m out of time.