What are your feelings telling you? How can you change them?

When I think back to when I was in my worst shape and at highest weight I was constantly eating unhealthy food. After some self examination I was able to realize that I wasn't eating to fuel my body, rather I was eating to fill an an emotional pain/need that had not been met. So I was eating unhealthy foods (and lots of it!) as an unconscious way to cope with my feelings. Around this time I came across a great book by Cal Banyan called The Secret Language of Feelings. From the great foundation of that book I found great personal success by tweaking his method and forming a protocol that better suited me and I would like to share that with you. 

I call this the NCIS Transformational Self-Help Protocol. NCIS is a protocol to transform your feelings from “bad” to satisfaction and fulfillment. 

Help I’m Stuck!... Well while having people’s hands get stuck together is one of my favorite hypnosis demonstrations that would not be a practical way of writing this blog. So while I am not physically stuck right now I have been busy working with many clients on keeping them from getting stuck and abandoning their New Year’s Resolutions.

Statistically only about 45% of Americans still make a New Year’s Resolution and of those, about 29% have already abandoned the resolution all together and in 10 days that number will jump to 36%. Even more surprising is that by the end of the calendar year only 8% of people will have been successful in keeping their New Year’s Resolutions.

As Rich pointed out in his last post, goal setting is a key to success and achieving one goal can allow other goals to be met at the same time without much effort. So why don’t people achieve their goals? Well one reason is people are not correctly setting their goals. The simplest way to create good goals is to make your goals S.M.A.R.T.

S = Simple. Specific.

The last tip to maintain your waistline over the Christmas holiday doesn't even have to do with food or water. Love Everyone. Here is an extremely common occurrence for a lot of people. Food = Love. Right away its easy to assume I am talking about the person eating the food but it also includes the person preparing the meal.

We've all heard the phrase “My eyes were bigger than my stomach”. Tip #2 is so simple it’s almost silly, just use a smaller plate. This is a subtle psychological trick that really works because the mind takes the image you receive and interprets it based on a proportional scale and not actual volume. Have you ever looked at a picture and had trouble trying to understand how big an object is? Like seeing a picture of a cruise ship then seeing one in person it’s very hard to understand the actual size based on the photograph.