The Four Friends That Can Make or Break Your Goals

The Saboteur

The Saboteur can’t live with your success, whether it’s weight loss, higher education, a promotion at work, starting or continuing a family, getting married…. You get it. The Saboteur will not-so-discretely try to bring you down. Let’s take weight loss for example, a Saboteur will tell you how wonderful you’ve done on your diet, maybe she’ll say something along the lines “wow, it’s only been 10 days! You look great. You’ve lost 3 lbs already; why not reward yourself with pizza and wine.” When you protest the Saboteur will say “You deserve it, if you lost 3 lbs in 10 days, just think where you’ll be in 20 days! A little pizza and wine to unwind isn’t gonna hurt you. In fact, it’ll probably help you motivate yourself to work out even harder tomorrow.”

That sounds like some solid logic right there, right? So you indulge. Oh yes! You indulge. And it was a great night, hanging with the Saboteur, girl talk, pizza, wine, laughs and fun! Sure we all do need it sometimes and sure it helps you unwind. But you know how hard the next day is. You jump on the scale and no difference from your indulgence. You still fit into your jeans, which have been looser in the last few days on your diet. You got that “I got away with murder” feeling and you’re loving it! So what happens when the Saboteur texts you to see how the wine is wearing off and all of a sudden, before you can even realize it, you’ve agreed to hit the mall instead of the gym. Hey mall walking is totally exercise. Good enough right? Well now you’re hungry from trying on all those sizes that used to be too small. The Saboteur suggests the food court. And since your jeans still fit and you bought a M/L instead of a L/XL shirt today you do it.

That’s how the Saboteur works. Whether she realizes it or not, she sets out to sabotage your goals. You don’t need a devil on your shoulder when you got her. Every benchmark you hit on your goals, she is there to talk you down a step or two. And you wind up not even blaming her. She gets away with it all because she does it under the guise of being a friend. She pumps up your ego and tells you that you deserve a little fun, she encourages you to be bad and you end up liking it. Until of course the 3lbs you lost in 10 days turns into 5 lbs you gained in 20 days, making you 2 lbs over your starting point. Wanna lose 100+ lbs instantly? Ditch the Saboteur until after you hit your goal.



The Motivator

The Motivator totally means well, sure she’s encouraging, but she always comes off as overbearing. The Motivator gets word of your goals, let's use weight loss again, and starts spamming you inbox with all these “tried and true” diets she’s used in the past, “that totally worked”. She textes you throughout the day to see if you’ve gone to the gym, when you’re going to the gym, how the gym was, and when you wanna go to the gym again. If you let yourself slide a little and you confess this to her you always get the “momma’s very disappointed in you” look. You know it ‘cause your mom gave it to you anytime she “wasn’t mad”.

It always starts out with an invitation, or what she believes is an invitation, from you. Something as simple as, “I’ve been thinking of trying hot yoga”. All of a sudden she’s at your door Sunday afternoon with her Lulu Lemon knock-offs (seriously, who can afford $100 spandex you’re gonna sweat in and get stinky?) and class sign up form in hand, with a I-wanna-smack-that-too-chipper-grin on her face. She says something like “Hey, you know how you mentioned you wanted to try hot yoga? Well, I was reading the paper this morning and saw there was a class in 20 minutes at the local gym- let’s go!” You try to give her the usual stand-by excuses, you got the kids, it’s Sunday, you’re doing laundry… She’s firing back at you with the answers to all your excuses, they offer babysitting, there’s hot yoga with prayer service, and they’ll wash your laundry. What kinda gym is this? Babysitting? Sunday Service? Laundry? I wanna go! Just don’t tell the motivator. So you drag your out of shape butt to the gym and discover Hot Yoga is exactly that- Hot. Yoga. The temperature in the room is hovering around 35C and you can barely keep your head level enough to touch your knees let alone your toes and then lift it in the air in some kinda fancy pose they’ve named after an exotic plant or animal. Ouch!

Like I said, the Motivator totally means well, but wouldn’t you just like to squash her? My advice, keep the motivator around. She’s as annoying as a bum rash but she’ll keep your butt from spreading like a rash across the couch. Maybe sometimes hit ignore when you see her call for the 10th time that day to tell you about these running shoes that “totally made all the difference”.





The Self-Absorbed

The Self-Absorbed friend is just darling, but she could care less about your problems. To keep with the theme, let’s talk weight loss. This person has never experienced a problem such as yours, she cannot relate, and worst of all she chooses not to. She asks you how you’re doing and what’s new and when you tell her about your diet and how you’re working out, you get a response like “Cool, I don’t really see the point in working out or dieting”. Then moves on to tell you all about her life and the to-die-for shoes she just bought that match her belt she bought last week perfectly and she’s thinking of buying the matching jacket but isn’t sure if it’ll go with other outfits in her closet and that may be a waste of money. What do you think?

So you end up having an hour long conversation about her problems. And you know what? They could be more important and life-altering than her attire, but they all sound just as unimportant to you. Not because they are unimportant or trivial, she could be talking about her cat missing which, I totally take seriously. It’s not the subject of her conversation; it’s that it is always about her. Every. Single. Time. It is always about her. She asks “Hi, how are you? What’s new?” not to hear the answer but to use it as a segway into her life because she knows it’ll be followed by, “and you, what’s new?”. Even if she can sympathize with your problems, like your diet, the Self-Absorbed will turn it into her weight issues and her stories on how she wants to lose weight.

The Self-Absorbed don’t want friends, they want response boxes. Someone or thing to agree with them and to keep the flow of conversation by saying, “Ohhh really, then what happened”. The Self-Absorbed can completely unravel you simply by not validating your life and your goals. You hang out with someone who doesn’t care about your weight loss and you start to not care about it either. And to the Self-Absorbed, if you already spent that much money on the shoes and belt, you gotta get the matching jacket. It only makes sense.



The Brain

Yep, The Brain is you. Inside your own head you are all 3 of these negative people to have around when you are trying to reach your goals. Inside your own brain you will sabotage yourself, you will motivate yourself to the point of unrealism, and you will find any subject but the one that is most important to you at the present moment to focus on.

We’ve all done it, after we start seeing result we convince ourselves to go back down the road that got us in trouble. We talk ourselves into eating that delicious juicy cheese burger. And since we broke with the cheeseburger we might as well have some fries… Heck sprinkle some cheese and pour the gravy on that, let’s make it a poutine. I am feeling French today after all.

We’ve been our own worst motivators; we’ve searched online, printed off new work out routines. Picked up the latest copy of Fitness magazine and folded down 10 pages of different diets and different work outs that’ll shed 10 lbs in a month. We spent so much time researching and compiling our new diet and workout routine there’s no way we’ll fail this time. We tell ourselves we’ll work out every single day and we’ll only eat kelp from now on instead of lettuce. That’s what kelp is for right? Does anyone know? We motivate ourselves to the point where we don’t want to do anything. It’s just too much.

Perhaps you’re not self-absorbed; if you’re a woman you are probably constantly helping and serving others. It’s in your nature. However, in all of us lives laziness. It’s your laziness that is self-absorbed. Laziness wants to survive. Laziness sees the end of the world and it’s not going down that easily. It works double, triple, quadruple time to survive. Which is kinda funny considering it’s lazy, ironic really. This part of your brain will have you focus on everything but your goal. Laziness is the procrastinator, the distractor, the part of your brain that’ll convince you you’re not important. Before you know it laziness has taken over, set up camp on your couch and will tell you anything to make you stay.



The Solution

To beat all these, you must find a happy common ground. You need the Saboteur so you don’t lose yourself. The Saboteur will give you a reality check and a reality break. The Motivator will help you along your way. When you’re feeling like you’ve done enough or you don’t even know where to begin the Motivator will be there to help you. And why would you need the Self-Absorbed, you ask? Well, everyone needs a distraction from their life and their problems every once and a while. And, Sunday wouldn’t be Sunday without lazy.


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