There are two big challenges when it comes to habit change, goal setting, or making and keeping resolutions. Really anything where you want to change your actions to get a new outcome. The first is starting. We've talked a lot about that recently on the podcast, had a frame and set a resolution correctly and connect to what's important to you. The second is not stopping when things go wrong. That's where many people lose momentum and fall off.
We all understand in theory that we should just try again if we fail, but most of us are totally unable to do that without understanding why. It has nothing to do with your character or personality traits or the resolution you picked or your life circumstances. It has to do with your brain, which is good news because it means I can teach you how to change it. So let's get into that today.
Welcome to Unfuck Your Brain. I'm your host, Cara Lowenthal, master certified coach and founder of the School of New Feminist Thought. I'm here to help you turn down your anxiety, turn up your confidence, and create a life on your own terms, one that you're truly excited to live. Let's go. All right, my friends. So we've all done that thing where we set a New Year's resolution or we set a big goal and we create this lovely, perfect plan.
It's all color coded. You've ordered the running supplies. You're sure that starting January 1st, you're going to be a novelist or someone who lives by a beautifully illustrated daily planner or someone who eats 35 grams of fiber in a day, whatever your goal is. And then life intervenes. Maybe dramatically you get fired. You go through a breakup or maybe in small ways that nevertheless throw you off track. Your kid gets sick or you get sick or you get a new project at work that takes up way more time than usual.
Soon you're off track with your goal and you start to feel shame about that. So you vow to yourself to get back on track tomorrow or Monday or next month. And that feels better for a minute, but then the deadline comes and you don't start again. And you keep feeling ashamed and bad about it and eventually you just give up.
There is no shame in having done this once or a thousand times. We all have myself included, but there is a better way. A few weeks ago on the podcast, I talked about the value of embracing inconsistency when you're doing something new.
part of the way that we build up to consistency is learning from the times that we don't show up and follow through. There is a way to learn from your mistakes so you can actually improve. Most of us don't do this because we don't know how. We don't know how to learn from our mistakes. We understand conceptually that it is possible to learn from mistakes and it's one of those things that we think sounds great for other people.
But because we beat ourselves up and criticize ourselves and shame ourselves for making them, we don't really have any idea how to make the emotional experience of learning from them tolerable. Because as soon as we start looking at an instance where we failed or didn't do something, we start attributing it to our own flawed character. We tell ourselves that we lack discipline.
or willpower, or we're lazy, or we're disorganized, or there's something wrong with us that we can't do this new thing naturally and easily and probably everybody else can. We feel guilty, we feel ashamed, we feel anxious, and we end up totally avoiding actually thinking about what happened.
And it's particularly insidious that we are taught that success or failure is a matter of our personality or our characteristics, like willpower or discipline, because it means that we don't get curious about what went wrong because we think we already know the answer. We think the answer is either that the resolution or goal was bad or wrong. It was too hard. Life was too complicated. It took too much time or that we're bad and wrong. So either way, we think we already know the answer and there's no reason to look deeper.
But the truth is that it's neither of those things. It's definitely never the case that you are just inherently bad and unable to do things and there's something wrong with you. I promise. It might occasionally be that the goal was too ambitious or, you know, your life circumstances really changed drastically. But that's not the issue most of the time. It's actually extremely normal to fail at something or not follow through when you were trying to do something new. That's why I've been talking about embracing inconsistency.
And it's an essential part of the process that is required to learn how to actually do it in your life consistently to make it work long-term. So let me give you an example. Let's say that one of your goals is to eat more different vegetables.
I don't know why this is my example this year. It just seems like a good one. So you set yourself a goal like you're going to eat two different vegetables with dinner. That's your goal and your plan, right? You're setting your goal to be, I'm going to naturally manage to eat two different vegetables every dinner just by thinking about it during the day. That's really kind of unconsciously what you're assuming. And then of course life happens. There's traffic. Your kid is homework. They need help with last minute. You end up scarfing cold leftover mac and cheese.
There is so much valuable information in this experience that you can use to inform your next attempt to do it. But most of us miss out on all of that rich information. We just say, oh, today was too hard. I'll try again tomorrow. Or we say, oh my God, I have no willpower. I already failed. But if we were able to defuse that shame and not assume it's impossible, we could get so much useful info from this occasion.
For instance, we could see that dinner is likely to be the most hectic meal for you. So it doesn't make sense to try to wing it. So maybe for the second day, you try planning it out ahead of time. What you'll make for dinner based on what's in the fridge, you look in the morning, you have a plan for the evening.
But then that night, the dog throws up everywhere and you have a fight with your partner and you end up just ordering Pad Thai and throwing your hands up. Again, you can assume it's too hard or there's something wrong with you, or you can review and analyze what went wrong here. Maybe just planning the veggies isn't enough. Maybe you need them prepped before dinner. And maybe when you ordered out, you decided, fuck it, since you're not making your planned meal, you'll just ignore the goal entirely. When you could easily have found Thai food that had two veggies in it and still achieved your goal.
So maybe you try a third time and again, you don't do it. And then you realize, okay, I did plan ahead. I even prepped the veggies for myself, but they required being cooked and I ran out of time. So maybe I need to air fry them when I'm making breakfast or I need to have pre-cut veggies. I can eat raw with dinner.
You see how if you're able to analyze what happened without shame or guilt or drama about it being impossible, you can actually learn something each time to improve the next attempt. And you gain invaluable insight into how to customize the way you achieve a goal or resolution for you and your life and your brain. There is a way to do this analysis without all of that shame and guilt drama. And that's what I'm going to share with you right after this break.
Here's a thing about me. I own multiple copies of the books that have been the most important to me, especially when they are self-help books or books that I'm trying to learn something from, because I like to read the hard copy of the book, but then I like to listen to the audio book as well, because I pick up on different things when I listen than when I read with my eyes. And I hear things differently, my brain processes the information differently, and audio books are something I can listen to on the road, doing things around the house,
even in a bathtub. So that's why I'm so excited to tell you that the Take Back Your Brain audiobook is available now wherever audiobooks are sold, and it is narrated by yours truly. So even if you've already gotten the book in hardcover, if you really want to make sure that it all sinks in, especially if you have a little trouble focusing or paying attention sometimes as we all do these days, really recommend that you also get the audiobook, listen to it in the background, your brain will actually learn by osmosis, and it will all
sink in and stay in even better. So in order to actually manage to analyze what went wrong and brainstorm solutions, we need to defang the shame, guilt, and anxiety that come up when we fail or break a resolution or don't follow through. The first crucial mindset shift is actually one I mentioned in the first half of the episode.
But I really recommend that you adopt this as an intentional thought to think on purpose ahead of time from the beginning when you are setting your goal or resolution. And that mindset shift that thought is it is a normal and essential process to fail and learn from it. It is a normal and essential part of change to fail and learn from it.
It is a normal and essential process of achieving a goal to fail and learn from it. A goal or resolution in the abstract is like buying an item of clothing off the rack. It rarely fits exactly how you want it to. That's why you take it to a tailor. You get the hem shortened or the neckline changed. Or it's like learning to walk or talk or dance. It requires practice and trial and error. So we want to start from that premise. And I really recommend that or something like it as an intentional thought.
Then there are three kind of qualities or stages of the process of analyzing and learning from a failure or a missed action you didn't take. The first step is to validate yourself for trying and to look for anything you can call a success. I know it seems impossible when you aren't doing something, but did you maybe do it the first day, even if you didn't do it the second day? If not, did you at least think about it on the first day, even if you didn't do it? Can you at least validate yourself for having chosen this resolution and trying to make an effort?
Looking for anything to see as a tiny success is crucial because that is how your brain will start to shift your identity to being someone who is succeeding. The second step is to be nice to yourself and everyone wants to skip this. We think if I'm nice to myself, I'm just excusing my failure and I won't do better. But being mean to yourself is actually why you are not doing better because it's preventing you from learning from what goes wrong and adjusting your approach to make it easier.
So how can you be a little kinder in your self-talk about having failed or not followed through? Step three is where you actually analyze what went wrong.
but do not skip steps one and two. In step three, we want to actually look at what happened and see what conclusions you can draw from it about how to better set yourself up for success for your next attempt. What went wrong? What circumstances came up? What thoughts and feelings did you have? How can you solve for those or prevent them from happening or equip yourself to overcome them on the next attempt?
Step three is what everybody just wants to jump to, but you cannot skip steps one and two. Steps one and two literally prime your brain for step three. Step three requires your prefrontal cortex. That's your higher powers of imagination, creativity, problem solving, strategic thinking. Those are scientifically proven to be harder to access when your nervous system is activated and you are flooded with anxiety or shame.
And that's what happens when we look at failure and our mean to ourselves about it. So doing step one and step two is not just like being nice for no reason. It's actually literally soothing your brain, calming it down so you can use it to its best ability and actually learn something. So you need to do one, two, and three in this order. Look for success, be nice to yourself, then analyze and see what you could do differently.
That is how you can make 2025, the year that you actually keep your resolutions and achieve your goals. I actually created an entire process for doing this called the 3C process. And it's available only inside the Feminist Self Help Society, which is my members only coaching experience. When you join the society in the next 72 hours, so that's by midnight on January 3rd, you actually get access to an entire mini course on how to make and keep resolutions or any kind of goal.
It walks you through all of my best teaching from start to finish, from coming up with the idea for a resolution or goal, choosing one that aligns with your life and values, planning it effectively, executing it correctly, and now a clear, simple process, the 3C process, to use any time you follow the wagon, fail, or don't follow through, so you can get right back to succeeding.
I'm even going to be teaching this brand new 3C process live inside the society in January in something called the Momentum Workshop. And then the society coaches will be hosting follow up calls to help you work through the process as you practice it. You should also know that our price is going up on January 4th. The investment for the society has been the same for eight years, but we're finally raising it for 2025. But if you join,
On or before January 3, midnight, your time zone, you get to keep the current lower price as long as you stay. And if you're a current member already in the society, don't worry, you are keeping your lower price you already have as long as you stay too.
So, bottom line, when you join by midnight, January 3rd, your time zone, you get that mini resolutions course, you get to attend the Momentum Series in January to keep you on track with your goals, and you get to lock in the lowest price the society will ever be. Truly a no-brainer for starting 2025 off right. So, to get all this goodness, just text your email to plus one, 347,
934-8861. There's no code word necessary or visit unfuckyourbrain.com forward slash society. That's plus one, three, four, seven, nine, three, four, eight, eight, six, one. Just send us your email. You don't need a code word. We'll send you the link right there or go to unfuckyourbrain.com forward slash society.
If you're loving what you're learning on the podcast, you have got to come check out the Feminist Self Help Society. It's our newly revamped community and classroom where you get individual help to better apply these concepts to your life, along with a library of next level, below your mind coaching, tools, and concepts that I just can't fit in a podcast episode.
It's also where you can hang out, get coached, and nerd out about all things thought work and femme this mindset with other podcast listeners just like you and me. It's my favorite place on earth and it will change your life, I guarantee it. Come join us at www.unfuckyourbrain.com forward slash society. I can't wait to see you there.
