It probably won’t come as a surprise to you when I tell you that pushing yourself to be motivated doesn’t work.

Any of us can remember committing to being healthier, exercising more, losing weight, cutting back on social media, or daily meditation, and being better for a while but then falling off. Only to feel like things will never change. So, we revert into our old patterns and feel defeated.

How might this year be the one that is different, the year that you create what you most desire?

Human beings have an average of about 70,000 thoughts per day. Some 90% of them are the same thoughts as the day before. The same thoughts create the same choices which yield the same behaviors, the same experiences and ultimately the same emotions. It’s easy to see then why if we don’t change our thoughts, it becomes very hard to change our lives.

When considering your goals for 2019, let’s examine your core motivation, the deep desire within you that is yearning for a different emotional experience of life. This is your why.

Thinking about being motivated doesn’t create motivation.

Let’s first establish the foundational principles of behavioral change:

• Our thoughts are the language of the brain.
• Our feelings are the language of the body and describe how we are experiencing life. The body is the emotional barometer that shows us our thoughts.
• Felt emotion comes from thought.
• New experience is a result of our behavior matching our intention.
• Our established identity and its associated beliefs change when we think in new ways.

Neuroscience research has shown that when we create an emotional feeling state that matches what we desire, we create the neural hardware in the brain that makes the action automatic when practiced over and over. So rather than thinking ourselves into motivation, we must experience the feeling of what we desire as if it has already happened. This then creates the neural pathways in the brain that will facilitate the necessary action steps.

We feel the way we think and we think the way we feel. To change yourself or your life, the thought must be combined with the felt emotion in the body of what you most desire – inspiration, abundance, worthiness, empowerment, love, wealth, success, health, wholeness, or whatever it is you yearn for.

There are four critical steps:

• Get clear about WHY you desire this outcome. This is the deep emotional connection to the outcome. For example, let’s say you want to lose 20 pounds. You might say that you want this because you want to look good for your high school reunion. Let’s go deeper. Why do you want to look good for your high school reunion? Perhaps it’s because you want to feel accepted in way that you never were in high school. What would that feel like for you? Getting to the deeper why allows you to access the feeling state that you are desiring from achieving the goal.
• Imagine the outcome. We must believe in the future that we cannot yet see. Accessing the feeling of what you most desire builds the neural hardware in your brain as if it has already happened. To convince your body emotionally of the health, wealth, career, relationship, or joy that you desire, you must believe in this outcome. Imagine what it will be like, look like, and how it will feel. Ask yourself questions like “What would it be like?” Have an image – a new job, a new house, a new relationship, new level of health and vitality, etc. – of what it will look like when you achieve your goal. This allows the brain to create a hologram for it. When we visualize, mentally rehearse and emotionally embrace a future event, we convince the body emotionally, which signals genes in new ways and shifts our epigenetics.

Timothy Gallwey’s book “Inner Game of Tennis,” published in 1974, though based on an exploration of the metaphysics of sports, articulates the essential principles at the core of this theory.

“In every human endeavor, there are two arenas of engagement: the outer and the inner,” Gallwey writes. “The outer game is played on an external arena to overcome external obstacles to reach an external goal. The inner game takes place within the mind of the player and is played against such obstacles as fear, self-doubt, lapses in focus, and limiting concepts or assumptions. The inner game is played to overcome the self-imposed obstacles that prevent an individual or team from accessing their full potential.”

• Understanding the obstacles that might get in your way. This involves connecting to the thoughts that bring you back to the same obstacles you had last year, and every prior year that blocked you from achieving your goal. We talk ourselves out of greatness. When we are aware of the thoughts that revert us back to our old selves, we can catch them so they never slip by unnoticed.
• Make slow steady progress.Build on small wins. Practice and repetition turns neural pathways into neural superhighways and this recreates who we are. Literally we are changing who we are neurologically which means we make new choices, create new behaviors and have new experiences that produce new emotions. The brain responds to repetition, imagery and emotion. Encourage and remind yourself every day: “I am worth it!”“I can do this!” This type of self-encouragement helps us to unlearn our past emotions and biologically dismantle our old self.

When the mind and the body are working as one, nothing external can deter you from what you most desire.

What is the accomplishment you want to be celebrating at the end of 2019?