Be The Person You’d Fall In Love With
Most of us are trying to build a life we love while being at war with the person living it
I spent most of my 30s in a relationship with someone who was wildly unreliable.
No, I’m not talking about my husband. He’s absolutely wonderful.
I’m talking about someone who would make promises every Sunday night like “this is the week I’m going to eat better, sleep more, stop smoking, stop drinking, exercise, meditate, journal, be a better human....”
And usually by Wednesday she’d broken half of them.
By Friday she’d totally given up.
By Sunday she was back making the same promises with the same conviction, pretending last week didn’t happen.
Obviously, that person was me.
And the worst part wasn’t the failing, it was what came after.
The way I spoke to myself would have 100% ended ANY friendship.
What is wrong with you? You KNOW what to do. Why can’t you just DO it? You’re 35, for fuck’s sake.
Does this sound familiar?
We’ve been taught that this is how change works, right?
Be hard on yourself. Hold yourself accountable. Discipline yourself into the person you’re supposed to be.
And if that doesn’t work, try harder. Want it more. Wake up earlier. Hustle harder.
Cool, and how’s that going for you?
Because when you bully yourself into better habits, your brain registers the self-criticism as a threat. Cortisol floods your system. Your prefrontal cortex (the part that makes good decisions) goes offline.
And you reach for the exact thing you were trying to quit, because your nervous system is in survival mode and needs comfort.
For me it was wine and cigarettes.
And this is why you eat the whole packet of biscuits after telling yourself you’d only have one.
Because guilt literally hijacks the part of your brain that regulates decisions.
There’s a lot of research that shows, for example, that dieters who beat themselves up after a “slip” don’t recover. They eat more.
And the ones who shrugged it off and gave themselves a break and a dose of self-compassion got back “on track” almost immediately.
Same behaviour, same slip, but completely different outcome.
Based entirely on how they spoke to themselves after the so-called fuck-up.
Every time you’re unkind to yourself for skipping a workout, or procrastinating, or having too much fast food, you’re not motivating yourself. Actually, you’re making it harder to try again tomorrow.
All that self-punishment isn’t keeping you in line, it’s the thing keeping you stuck.
(Side note: this is also why the “I’ll start fresh on Monday!” cycle exists. You’re not resetting. You’re just recovering from the shame of last week long enough to try again. Ask me how I know…)
Being kind to yourself isn't the same as letting yourself off the hook
And look, I get the resistance. But if I’m kind to myself I’ll just do nothing.
I thought that too. For years. While changing precisely nothing.
Spoiler: compassion doesn’t make you soft. It makes you more likely to get back up. It just removes the part where you have to hate yourself first.
Which makes sense, right? You don’t do your best work for a boss who screams at you. You do it for someone who believes you’re capable and gives you room to figure it out.
We spend so much energy on the DOING of habits. The right routine. The right app. The right morning protocol.
But none of that works if the person doing the habits fundamentally doesn’t trust herself to follow through.
And you can’t build that trust by yelling at yourself. You build it the same way you’d build trust with anyone: by keeping small promises and not being a dick when things go sideways.
But (and this is the bit I wish someone had told me sooner) it’s not just about the inner voice. It’s also about what you’re working with.
We’re told that fix the mindset = fix the habits. But the older I get the more I see that it’s both.
How you talk to yourself AND how your life is set up.
Because you can be endlessly compassionate with yourself about not exercising, but if your trainers are buried in a cupboard and your gym is 40 minutes away and your mornings are already chaos... compassion alone isn’t going to get you there.
You also need to make the thing easier to do.
Your experiment this week
Pick one promise to keep to yourself this week. Something small enough that you’d feel almost silly failing at it. A glass of water before coffee. A ten-minute walk before turning on your laptop. Lights out by 11. One. And when you break it (because you will at some point, because..human), notice what you say to yourself. If the first voice that shows up is for fuck’s sake, you can’t even do THIS? Catch it. Replace it with what you’d say to your best friend. OK. What happened? What do we try differently?
Make that one thing stupidly easy to do. Put the glass by the kettle. Lay out your shoes by the door. Set a phone alarm at 10:15pm. Don’t rely on willpower or motivation. Set up your environment so the thing almost does itself.
Trust isn’t built through grand gestures. It’s built through boring, repeated, tiny follow-throughs. And self-compassion isn’t about letting yourself off the hook. It’s about staying in the game long enough to actually change.
I spent years at war with myself. Trying to punish and discipline and shame my way into being someone I liked. It never worked.
What worked was becoming someone I could trust. Slowly. Imperfectly. One kept promise at a time.
Be that person. Not perfect. Not fixed. Just someone who shows up, tries, and doesn’t tear herself apart when it gets messy.
You deserve that 💛
Much Love,
Noemie x