Change is hard. Maintaining the status quo can be even tougher.

Working toward a big goal takes a lot of grit and discipline. You may imagine that everything will be so much easier once you reach your goal.  You can finally relax and enjoy your accomplishment. But that transition, from active change to maintenance, can be really tricky. And we’re often completely unprepared for that.

If we’re not careful, we can let what we’ve attained slip through our fingers, simply because we don’t feel as motivated or rewarded by maintaining the status quo as we did by making progress toward it.  

In this episode, I have a few suggestions for how we can prepare better for what happens after we’ve achieved our goal. 

Things to listen for:

  • How the fear of backsliding can diminish the excitement of achieving a goal.
  • Why we need to learn how to sustain new behaviors without relying on external tracking or counting methods.
  • How electronic “rewards” hijack our brain
  • How to celebrate progress toward the goal without progress becoming the goal
  • Why reaching a goal is less important than what achieving that goal enables us to do.
  • What are the habits and behaviors required to maintain that new state?
  • Developing the identity that matches our new status quo

Mentioned

Creating your transformation toolkit (Weighless workshop)