GUS (Gave Up Smoking) is a community support diary for Kossacks in the midst of quitting smoking. Any supportive comments, suggestions or positive distractions are appreciated. If you are quitting or even just thinking of quitting, please join us! We kindly ask that politics be left out.
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On the long, twisty path toward successful behavior modification, we frequently run into things that impede our progress. Whatever we call them---hurdles, walls, barriers, stumbling blocks---they all serve pretty much the same function: to bring us, and our plans, screeching to a halt.
They make us question ourselves, they cause our resolve to waver or even fail, they derail our best intentions, and they get in our way (or make us get in our own way).
These barriers to success (psychological, medical, or circumstantial) can be all too crushingly real or completely imagined, but most of them fall somewhere in the middle of that continuum.
See, it's all too easy for us to convince ourselves that the challenge we're presented with---that hurdle, that stumbling block---is a legitimate reason for us to stop a particular course of action. Why? Well, because consciously or not, we WANT an excuse to stop. Change is hard and uncomfortable, and running into one of these things sort of lets us off the hook; it makes a failure in our approach somehow not our fault---not that anyone's slinging blame our way, necessarily; must of us do a good job of that ourselves.
But rather than beat ourselves up for supposed failures, or grabbing onto whatever stumbling block/excuse that life has served up to explain why making this change can't/won't work, perhaps we need to re-think our approach entirely?
The temptation is there for us to review our options and dismiss them out of hand, one after another, because they're somehow flawed or unworkable. Face it: there will always be a reason why something won't work, if the underlying desire to make it work isn't there, or isn't strong enough to sustain you through the sometimes unpleasant effort it takes to change.
We often stubbornly cling to a particular approach because we want it to work, hit the same wall (or the same kind of wall) over and over again, and then get frustrated and complain about the resulting headache. What if, instead, we alter the basic premise?
Let's be honest---if Approach X doesn't work for you now, it's probably NEVER going to work for you, so don't be afraid to get rid of it for good. Don't let it linger in your life as a failed strategy or reason you can't ever change.
Instead, why not leverage the knowledge of what doesn't work for you and turn the supposed barrier into something that actually will? Turn the stumbling block into a stepping stone. Think about it this way: all you need is for one thing to work well enough for you to get to that next stone. Once you're there, you can re-evaluate, change gears if necessary, toss out what doesn't work, find something different or new that does, and then move on to the next stone.
Before you know it, you've made it to the other side.
Who's Your Li'l Buddy?
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