This week's article won't necessarily make sense for everyone, but it certainly will for enough people to make it worth sending.
When I was big I always said that I was really unhappy but only because I was big, and that if I was slim I would be this super happy guy.
I had everything in my life, a lovely wife, fantastic kids, nice house, new car, enough money to go on holiday and go away when we wanted, and I even had the dog to match the stereotypical perfect life.
So surely once I lost weight then I would go on and be gloriously happy? In fact, it was reported in the press that "Mike is now an ecstatic 13 and a half stone"....funny, because I wasn't!
The reality was that I was really unhappy. As I have said before, I was more unhappy when I was first slim than I was when I was big, because I could no longer turn to food to cheer me up and hence, I had a breakdown.
The problem I had was that I felt like something was missing in my life. I felt that I was 80% complete but I needed something more, and I hadn't a clue what it was but without it I felt lost.
I felt that I "should" be happy as others would give their right arms to have what I had, but even so, I really wasn't happy. Instead of eating to cheer up I just changed the habit to other outlets which caused even more chaos.
Now the more I speak to other overweight people they believe, falsely in my opinion, that if they were just slim everything would be great. If it was true that being slim meant being happy, then you would never have got big in the first place. Therefore being slim is a good sign of health and fitness but it certainly is not the golden land of happiness.
As part of the course and book that Steve and I are working on we cover what creates true happiness. It was while going over this early in my NLP training that I realised what the problem was! By having everything perfect in your life, everything planned out and total security you get what I can only describe as "Bored!"
Therefore, what I was craving was excitement, uncertainty, something that would be "fun". Getting up, going to work, coming home, watching TV, going to bed, getting up etc etc makes you question "Is that all life is?"
Where I went wrong, was instead of having a lot of security in my life and just looking for a little excitement, I did the dieters trick of all or nothing, left Jo and went on a bender. What I actually did was create total chaos in my life which gave me the excitement and fear but then I craved the stability!
The key to this article is how do you find balance? You need a lot of stability in your life i.e. relationships, home, finance etc but you also need some uncertainty in your life in terms of excitement. The key is to make that excitement with a positive outcome.
For example, at present, I am training to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro in January. It absolutely scares me as I have never done anything like it before, but the excitement of looking forward to it, planning it and then doing it allows me to do my day job and other routine things in my life, as I have found a balance.
Turning this to you, are you truly happy? Do you think you have the right balance in your own life? Do you crave control and certainty so much that it becomes boring? Or do you crave freedom so much that you create chaos and go from one thing to the next without ever settling on something? But the absolutely key question I ask all my 1-2-1 clients is "Do you like yourself?" and the answer to that usually starts
If so, you need to understand that to be happy you need to have both in your life. Most of it being the certainty, but with some of the uncertainty, therefore how can you make your life exciting without turning to food to help you pretend it is exciting?
Have a fantastic week!
Mike :-)
