The ability to give and receive love is an inner strength possessed by those who are happy and content within their lives. Growing this as an inner strength—the ability to give and receive love in relation to making peace with food—relates to the way you treat food as a metaphor for how you treat yourself and possibly others. Do you control your food? Do you over do it with food? Do you obsess about food? How does this play out with your relationship with others and with yourself? How would you define your relationship with food? If it is a struggle it may point to deeper struggles you are experiencing within, which inevitably may impact how lovable you feel.

Relationships can be complicated while also being deeply life enhancing. When you work on a relationship and allow yourself to fully engage without attempting to control the relationship (and therefore control the love you give OR receive), the relationship will naturally improve with effort and focus. If your relationship with food is challenging where you control it at times and you feel powerless to it at times, it may be useful to, first, take a look at your relationship with yourself and then the relationships with those closest to you.

The first place to build awareness relating to your ability to receive love is to check in with how you receive love from yourself and others. Do you feel loved by others? Do you willingly receive love from others? Do you put conditions on how lovable you feel and therefore conditions on the love you are willing to receive? Does receiving pleasure from food in any way equate to where you receive love in your life? Do you use food to feel love?

You can begin to take inventory as to how you receive love—and then consider where food fits in—as the first step. The second step is to determine where you could let love into your life more completely without attempting to control it. The third step is to determine if you feel truly worthy of receiving love. This can be a tough one, however at our core many of us at times can feel unlovable (and then unconsciously reject or feel suspicious of any love that does come our way). If this is you, then you may be attempting to fill that void in other—possibly unhealthy ways. This is usually the sign of being deeply hurt and not getting your needs met in some way or another in your primary relationships in life. There is no need to place blame here, just know that once you can identify the struggle and origination of these feelings, you can begin to heal. One of the biggest tasks in life is to learn how to love ourselves in a healthy way and essentially meet our own needs so we do not look to others to feel loved out of desperation and fear that we aren’t lovable, but rather to enhance life through the meaningful connections we create.

The fact is that each and every one of us is lovable and capable of rebuilding the ability to feel that way. Once you can build self-awareness you can open yourself to receiving love—first and foremost from yourself. Self-love is a softening towards yourself, being kind with how you dialogue with yourself. Often when we overeat or attempt to control food we might think, “what’s wrong with me that I can’t stick to a plan, diet or exercise regimen?” Try softening this to, “what happened to me today, triggered me, or what emotions am I struggling to feel today?” See the difference? Your inner dialogue can make a tremendous difference in how you feel.

The second place is to accept love where it is freely given rather than attempting to chase it. If it’s just from yourself to begin with, practice accepting that and see how that expands with time. When it comes to giving love, do you attempt to love others through how you are with them or through what you physically give, such as food? There are many ways to offer love to others and show people that you love them, however, if you feel you are giving out love with the hopes of receiving it—that may not be authentic, unconditional love. Rather, that may be the feeling of being unlovable and desperate to feel something. When you authentically give love, it comes without condition or expectation and this may be one of the most challenging tasks of our lifetime—to understand, give, and receive unconditional love.

This week, focus on building awareness with how you interact with food. Do you look to food to fill a void, potentially with an attempt to feel or receive love? Do you give out food to attempt to receive love that you may not feel you deserve without something attached? This can be quite complicated to sort out and a bit overwhelming. Remember, awareness is always where to begin. Without awareness you keep moving yet without change and continue to repeat cycles that are potentially damaging—or at least uncomfortable and certainly not useful. When you become aware you have the opportunity to make a choice. You can choose to give and receive love from a place of authenticity. You can choose to recognize your patterns with food and build awareness that food is not love and that you deserve to love yourself.

Self-regulation is the ability to regulate your own behaviors, actions and choices consistently. Self-regulation is a personal strength and for many of us it is a strength that is, well… a work in progress. The ability to moderate your needs, actions and choices from a whole-person perspective—mind, body, spirit—can be a challenge. The good news is that self-regulation is a strength and if you think of it like a muscle, you can make it stronger with repetition and practice. It is a strength that can be honed, developed and utilized in order create how you want to feel about yourself.

These four tools that I list here will help you to establish, create and build upon your self-regulation. These tools are applicable to any area of your life that you would like to feel more in control. If you find you are not following through like you’d like to in certain areas of your life, it will be of benefit to you to strengthen your self-regulation skills. OR if you find that you are excessively rigid anywhere in your life, this indicates an imbalance as well. Over-regulation and obsession with perfection is not healthy either. Living in an overly regulated space is generally not sustainable and it creates unnecessary internal stress and discomfort.

So how do you go about increasing your self-regulation skills? The following are four practical tools that will help you grow in your ability to self-regulate. These four tools are useful and actionable and will offer you the best place to begin.

1. Create a Personalized Plan

When you create a personalized plan, you set yourself up for success. The ability to regulate your behaviors can be hard. If your goal is to heal your relationship with food, your body and yourself but you don’t have any type of plan for how to make that happen, you will not have anything to regulate. This leaves your goals merely a daydream and you will be stuck in a space of fantasizing about what could happen tomorrow. On the other side of the coin is an overly rigid plan. These could include a restrictive diet plan, excessive exercise plan or other extreme measures. This doesn’t allow you to grow in self-regulation because you are relying on an someone else’s external plan to tell you what to do for often just a limited period of time.

When you create your own personal plan to grow self-regulation, and in sticking with the example of healing emotional eating, losing weight or improving your body image, your plan will need to set manageable guidelines. Your plan will need to have small changes that are actionable and realistic. Your plan will need to offer you space to grow (meaning you will have to learn from mistakes) and make the changes that will allow you to meet your goals and will be sustainable over time. Your plan will need to have opportunities for you to reflect and make shifts and changes as needed. Your plan is yours. Not your friends, your moms, your co-workers, but yours. Your plan will need to fit your personal needs. Your plan will need to offer you space to create growth through self-reflection and self-awareness. Your plan will encourage the shift to create the ability to self-regulate your own needs in mind, body and spirit.

To begin, you need to identify what you want, why you want it. Determine your personal values in life and how you connect these to what you want in order to help support yourself and create the change you want. Then set specific (meaning measurable), doable (they will actually fit into your current life), and desirable (meaning you truly WANT it) goals. Each goal needs action steps that you can take daily, no matter how small, so that you are creating movement and momentum consistently towards what you want. Create a timeline for reflection, reevaluation and what to do when you achieve a goal. Your ability to create this personalized plan for YOU in and of itself demonstrates an ability to practice self-regulation!

2. Recognize Where You Sabotage Your Goals

When you bring awareness to where you are sabotaging yourself, you have two choices. The first is to stop the self-sabotage and the second is to give up. Ok, maybe it’s not that simple. But if the option of stopping the self-sabotage sounds like the more appealing option than giving up (which is equal to giving in to any negative beliefs about yourself: I can’t do it, I’ll never change, it’s too hard, I will fail, why bother, what’s the point, blah blah blah…), it will require some work. This work includes self-reflection and a decision to change your thoughts, beliefs about yourself and your actions. I call this self-saboteur the Deal Maker, if you want to read more about that concept, I have a chapter dedicated to it in my book, or you can read more on my blog here.

For today, what you need to know is that this part of yourself will sound convincing in its effort to foil your plans to make the change in your life that you desire. If your goal is to create greater health, to eat healthy, to move your body more, to lose weight, to save money, to change careers… no matter what it is, if you are not fully committed, you set yourself up for self-sabotage. Some examples of self-sabotaging thinking are “I have to be perfect,” or “I will fail” which only leads to the feeling of why bother or what’s the point. Your internal Deal Maker will try to put off taking action towards your goals and it uses these negative beliefs about yourself to keep the lie and resulting inaction going. Your internal Deal Maker preys on your fears. When you can highlight for yourself the exact thoughts, beliefs and fears that derail you, you can challenge them, work with them, and change the way you respond to them. When you are aware of the roadblocks that show up and you struggle to push through and past them, when you see that you are in your own way, you can do something about them. This is a daily practice. When you can understand where you tend to self-sabotage and see the common excuses and fears that your Deal Maker uses to keep you from taking action, you can recognize that they are not valid. You can recognize that there is another way. This leads me right into the next step: MINDSET!

3. Change Your Mindset

When you change your mindset, you change everything. When you place something into your mindset before you plan to do it and you spend time visualizing yourself doing it, you are FAR more likely to do it. When you leave your plans in a fantasy space, you are FAR less likely to take action. Mindset is a decision that you make ahead of time. Mindset is a shift in perspective and it’s intimately tied to self-regulation and self-discipline. However, it is not discipline that you might think of in terms of punishment or consequences. I am talking about reward based discipline because making progress and meeting your goals feels amazing!

One of the most important elements of creating a focused mindset is the perspective you bring to what you want. If you view hard work as draining, overwhelming, tiring and inaccessible to you, it will only be another barrier to address. If you view hard work as rewarding, building momentum, creating the change you desire and freeing you to live the life you want, then you are well on your way to achieving what you want. When you change your perspective you change your whole life! Take time daily to create a mindset of action. Visualize why you want what you want and connect with the belief that what you want is possible. And this leads me right to the final tool to build healthy and balanced self-regulation skills.

4. Create an Accountability System

The only person you can truly be accountable to is you. When you are “held accountable” to others, it implies the possibility of punishment or reward. When you are accountable to yourself, your personal follow through IS the reward. Your progress IS the reward. Creating a life you love and managing your life in a way that feels as though you are regulating your behaviors in a way that aligns with what you want IS the reward.

All of that being said, being involved in an accountability group can help maintain your momentum. When you have others to cheer you on or share your struggles, you will feel more connected. This helps you tap into energy reserves that come from feeling supported and encouraged. Begin by setting up a review system for yourself so you initially will know what you want to work towards, what it will take to get there, and any struggles (areas of potential self-sabotage) that may arise. Talk these through within your accountability team. Your accountability team could be peers, friends, family, people you meet in a Facebook group, co-workers, someone from the gym or anyone else who has a vision for their life and is ready to stop dreaming about it and ready to make it happen. If you find you could benefit from additional support hiring a coach or therapist will offer this level of support and accountability as well. When you are consistently taking action towards your goals, you are building the ability to self-regulate. When you share that within a pair, group or team setting you inspire others and receive inspiration to make it happen.

Building self-regulation as an internal strength takes time. If you have struggled with this for a long time, know that it will not happen overnight! Change is hard, growing is often uncomfortable, but it is absolutely worth the effort. When you follow these steps of creating a plan, help yourself get out of your own way, develop a focused mindset and a method of accountability, you will see the changes within your life. The first place to start is always with what you want and why you want it. Reminding yourself often of your ultimate goal will help you make the necessary and at times uncomfortable choices that grow your self-regulation. Every time you choose your plan, you choose to not believe negative thoughts, you don’t respond to your internal fears, you take time to create a healthy mindset and you check in with yourself and your supporters, you are growing your self-regulation muscle! Keep me posted on your self-regulation journey!