Postpone

Often your personality can be very good at it: postpone. Next week you will start with dieting, on January 1 you will stop smoking, after the summer holidays you will start exercising, even twice a week, etc. And ultimately in most of these situations nothing really happens. Why does your personality do this?

Your personality has developed certain patters through the mechanism perceive > judge/interpret > feeling > hold onto feeling or get rid of it, of which the outcome in one way or the other is 'successful' for him. So the experience of smoking brings you something you have taught yourself to value over the alternative. Same applies to little exercise, food habits and such.

Now through your plans your personality introduces a new standard, one in which for example 'healthy food' would give a desired outcome - you know through all publications on food that you could score with that one as well. However, what he fails to take care of at the same time, is that the reason why you adopted the first pattern, disappears. So actually he introduces a new standard, but the need for the outcome of the present one has not disappeared.

And since you know what you get with the old standard and the new one usually seems less attractive - be it for a lack of experience with it alone, but also because of what you have to do or not do because of it - postponing is a fine alternative: you do want to, but in this way you do not have to experience the expected accompanying unpleasantness right now. By the time you reach the date you set for this, your motivation is likely to have decreased considerably because the intensity of the interpretation which lead to your desire to now start doing those 'good' things, already has been weakened. So the later it gets, the easier it is to let your original motivation decrease even further, and postponing thus almost automatically leads to not doing. This is of course a good thing for your personality who has to take care of an outcome 'nice' for you. The guilt you are likely to experience because of your not changing things is likely to be pushed out of your awareness soon as well.

Postponing is a good moment to become aware of the reasons why your personality strengthens your présent patterns and maintains these. In itself it is not so much about changing the pattern itself (usually you only replace one standard with a new one), but to become aware of your need for it and why you do create this in the first place. Once you truly face that, your need for it will decrease more and more and there will be more mental space available for other aspects - your inner Self will effortlessly fill this mental space when you do not replace the one pattern with a new one. Also, release yourself from always having to have a pleasant outcome.