After New Year’s, I vowed to eat healthier. I bought books on the Mediterranean Diet, made a menu plan, carefully bought groceries to set myself up for success. I downloaded a fitness app, marked in my planner how many days a week I’d exercise and what I would focus on. Cardio, then strength, then yoga. Day off, and repeat. I even purchased a cute sports bra that would adequately hold the girls in place on the off chance I finally decided to take up jogging.

Yesterday, I ate a whole pizza.

The best laid plans, am I right?

I sat on my couch, feeling miserably full of pizza and guilt. So much for eating healthy, I guess. I told myself I was setting myself up for failure by even bothering to set goals in the first place. The negative self-talk loop began in full force. That voice that says I’m never good enough, never disciplined enough, never enough of anything. Might as well binge watch TV all night and finish a pint of ice cream in the process.

You can diligently plan in nitty-gritty detail, but eventually we all slip up. When talking about setting goals, there is often little focus on what I call the “emergency plan.” It’s all about how to achieve your goal-- but what happens when you stray so far off course that you’ve lost sight of your goal? What happens when you eat a whole pizza?

When you find yourself tripping over obstacles, be they internal or external, it’s hard not to admit defeat. Especially if you have any perfectionist tendencies. No one likes the feeling of failure. It makes it so much harder to continue trying, particularly once the cycle of negative self-talk has begun to eat away at your confidence. Yet research is showing that failure and mistakes are critical. Even from a young age, failure helps us to learn more effectively, and cultivate what researchers refer to as “grit.” Being able to accept setbacks and continue pursuing a goal is a critical point that has a direct correlation with self-worth. Creating a plan to support yourself in times of struggle, or when you have completely admitted defeat can help you bounce back quicker and continue with your goals.

In case of emergency, break glass. (Please don’t actually break any glass. It’s a figure of speech.)

Think about a toddler learning to walk. When they fall down, do you yell at them and call them lazy or good-for-nothing? I sincerely hope you do not. Instead, you pick them up, applaud them for doing so well, kiss their boo-boos, and send them on their way to keep trying. So, then, why is it that we tend to use this kind of language toward ourselves in our own moments of defeat? The first step of the emergency plan is to allow yourself to have failures. Often, in personal goals, you beat yourself up because of self-imposed unrealistic expectations. Meaning the only person who considers it a failure is you. By allowing yourself to experience failure in a more loving way with self-compassion, you can negate the cycle of negativity that often is associated with a failure.

Positive affirmations can be a really subtle and profound way to begin supporting yourself in times of struggle. Affirmations are short phrases in the positive present tense (“I make healthy choices” or “I have enough”) that can be written down in a visible location and repeated to yourself throughout the day (or week or year). The idea is that by repeating these affirmations with intention, we begin to believe and seek out the situations which make them true. When I first started using affirmations, they felt really foreign and insincere because I was not used to using such positive self-talk. If you need some suggestions on positive affirmations, I have created some cell phone backgrounds you can use to remind yourself throughout your life, which you can find over on our Instagram page.

If you find that you have a tendency toward perfectionism, it can be beneficial to find ways to reward yourself. I’m not suggesting that you begin rewarding every failure; rather, reward yourself when you start over. By associating effort with a positive experience, rather than focusing on the failure itself, you can begin rewiring your brain to look forward to the obstacles and struggles of achieving goals. Create a list of enticing rewards you can use as a dangling carrot when you need motivation to get back on track.

When you are able to approach your goal again in a less emotionally reactive state, begin to look at your original process. What parts worked well? What was more difficult for you to implement into your life, or maybe was unrealistic? By reassessing our original plan, we can fine tune and tweak the process to create a new course of action better suited to our goal. By telling myself I would make healthy food choices and strictly adhere to a meal plan, I was depriving myself of spontaneity and happiness around food. Instead of approaching my goal with such a rigid viewpoint, I have decided to make more transitional goals that lead me to an overall healthier diet, like eating several vegetarian dinners a week and switching coffee for tea in the evenings.

While reassessing your plan, answer the following questions:

Why is this goal still important to me?
Who can I reach out to when I need encouragement?
How can I create benchmarks along my journey, and how will I reward myself for reaching them?

Write down your emergency plan in a visible place, including your re-evaluated goal, your list of rewards, and positive affirmations. I keep mine on the wall of my art studio, where I often find myself procrasti-snacking.

I hope some of this gives you clarity and direction in working toward your big goals. Because, no matter what they may be, you deserve to live a life full of passion and dreams, and be able to accomplish whatever it is you put effort toward. For me, I will continue working toward making healthier food choices-- and eating the occasional entire pizza. But now, it will be guilt-free.

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