Go with me for a moment. Most of your friends come from your job. You are all close in age, you spend 40 hours together and often go to lunch together. In some cases, you even hang out after hours. Then you hire a new person. They are also similar to your age. Then you notice some characteristics: They seem to do things with little thoughts about long-term effects as you "only live once." They seem to talk negatively about many of the things you do They seem unfocused on your companies goals and are a bit self-centered. You try to ignore them, but every time you turn around they seem to be there. They seem to lie to you all the time Would you want to hang out with this person? How frustrating would this person be? How To Turn the Tides on Your Negative Inner Talk Notice it Notice what you're doing when you hear it Talkback and tell them to go away No matter what the inner critic has told you, you do have positive traits, although it may take you some time and discipline to retrain yourself to see them. We all have an automatic selective filtering system that (our brain) will look for evidence in our environment that matches up with whatever we believe to be true about ourselves. We will then disregard other evidence to the contrary. How We Feel About Ourselves Matters Events + Thoughts = Emotions If our thoughts determine how we feel, that means how we habitually think will determine how we habitually feel. (source) Give Your Negative Talker a Name I have a friend of mine who refers to his negative talker as "Grizz" as it's like a bear that roars at him to go eat bad things. I think I'm going to name mine "Charlie." I'm not sure why, but I can hear me telling Charlie to piss off, so I'm going with Charlie. Think about what kind of clothes this person would wear. Visualize this person. Now That It's Easier to See The Negative You Pay Attention to Your Environment The other night I found myself at an ice cream parlor. I thought to myself, why am I here? My inner voice told me one cone wouldn't hurt (lies). What had happened? I had been asked by my ex-wife to attend a Christmas party with her. Not as a date (They actual date had something come up and she didn't want to go stag). I wanted to help, and I'm not worried about us on a romantic level, but there was something in my gut that said this was not the best idea on the planet. The next thing I know, I'm at the ice cream parlor. Seeing Is Believing I have a wi-fi- Digital Scale which automatically enters my weight into My FitnessPal. Consequently, I don't really look at it much. My scale shows if I went up or down from the last time I weighed myself (which is typically daily). As the year is coming to an end, I downloaded all of my stats from Myfitnesspal and looked at the lowest and highest weight of the past years My goal for years has been 185 lbs.  May sites say 190 is the top of the range, and so I wanted to go to 185 Then I say that in 2016 I was five pounds from hitting my goal. After each year getting closer (with 2013, 2014, and 2105 each getting closer). I also see them when I get close to 220, or 225, I ge mad and get dedicated and focused. You Don't Need to Wait Two Weeks To "Start Over" Here is what I've done I'm using habitshare (I talked about this on a previous episode) to focus on the things I need to do (getting sleep, hitting calories goals, activity goals, etc) I joined a Stepbet this helps me focus on being active I bought a new treadmill (more on that later) I'm going to enter my weight into a spreadsheet that shows what my goal weight should be. (All Logical Losers can get a copy of this spreadsheet) My New Treadmill I've said the best exercise is the one you do. I tried a manual treadmill, but in a nutshell, I just liked a motorized treadmill better. I didn't really bother me until it started snowing. My activity went down to nothing, and the weight started to come back up. It wasn't cheap, but I know it would get used. I pulled out a credit card (n