9. Take Action
Taking action is really important. Set actions for each area in your life you want to work on. How much can you manage? If you’re doing nothing now, then trying to change 10 things at once is likely to be a stretch. It is more important to take consistent action than to take a whole lot of actions, then do nothing.
By taking action it gives you a sense of control and helps create positive emotions, important feelings to have on your recuperation journey. We have created a tracking sheet for you to use to keep track of your actions. This is a daily record of your actions. It isn’t always easy to keep to the plan so set yourself a target for the overall actions you plan to take for the week or the month. Reward yourself if you achieve 80% of these. Of course, if you hit 100% then double the reward. Just make sure that the reward doesn’t contravene one of your targets.
The goal should be to take massive action, however you may need to do this in small steps. Take Radically Changing Your Diet, giving up dairy, meat and refined sugar all on the same day would be really hard, but doing them one at a time is definitely easier. For example say giving up meat. Assuming you eat meat every day, start with one meat free day per week, then after 2 weeks give up two days. After 14 weeks you can be meat free. Massive action but in small steps. Do the same with dairy and refined sugar and in 9 months you will have
radically changed your diet and likely be feeling a lot better physically and emotionally
When you are in a situation think of the role you should be taking and the attitude you need to have for that period of time. By that I mean if you are the nutrionist then choose the attitude you need to be that role.
One of the biggest things I have ever learnt is the ability to choose my attitude. Sometimes we can’t do this, but even in these situations we can work on how long we stay in that state. Zig Ziglar once said, and I paraphrase as I can’t seem to find the actual story. The story takes part as a conversation, so I will put one voice in Italics
“How are you today?”
“Terrible but I will be fine in an hour”
“Why will you be fine in an hour”
“Well something happened that upset me, so I am going to be upset for another hour, then I’ll choose to not be upset anymore.”
“If you are going to choose to be not upset in an hour, why not choose that now?”
“Because I believe I have a right to be upset about this and I deserve to be upset, but I don’t want to let it ruin my life”