hey guys before the video starts i just wanted to let y'all know that our coach program is actually expanding threefold coaches are all personally trained by me and are there to help you with problems like procrastination motivation depression anxiety and helping you get unstuck so check out the first link in the description below hey guys i'm dr oliver konoja i'm a psychiatrist and co-founder of healthy gamer and we're on a quest to help the internet with its mental health so today i want to talk to you guys with about something really important it's one of the things that keeps people sort of stuck in failure and that's a principle called moving goal posts so one of the damnedest things that we do to ourselves is that a lot of times anytime we succeed we actually our mind does this little flip that turns success into a failure and i call that principle moving goal posts so a lot of times you know we'll set goals for ourselves right we feel like a failure because we're um maybe we're out of shape or you know we don't wake up on time or things like that and then our mind does
something really really tricky when we try to make a change so what will actually end up happening is we will make a change at some point right one day you'll eat something healthy and then instead of viewing that as success success our mind does something really tricky if we eat a salad for lunch our mind does this really slippery thing is that it tell it tells us oh we should have done this a long time ago why didn't we start sooner right and oh now we're going to start eating eating healthy every day so our mind takes one success and it turns it into a failure just think about that right and it does it in two ways the first thing is that we beat ourselves up for not doing it earlier even though we're taking a step in the right direction instead of being inspired by it instead of being motivated by it instead of giving ourselves a pat on the back what do we do we beat ourselves up and so bizarrely we our success we turn this positive energy in this good thing in our life that oh we ate healthy today and we turn it into a failure we transform it into a failure about the
past oh i should have been eating healthy my entire life and watch what your mind does it's tricky right and so it takes positive energy and turns it into negative energy the second thing that we do that sort of destines us for failure is that we take a success and then we move the goal posts we say oh i ate healthy today now i'm going to eat healthy tomorrow the goal that you woke up with today was healthy today it's not to eat healthy for the next week or the next month or the next year it was a small goal and you can accomplish a small goal you can take one step at a time but our mind does the damnedest little thing which is that it takes a success and moves the goal posts on us right and then we destin ourselves for failure so we say okay i ate healthy today now i'm gonna eat healthy the entire week and that's not something that you're really capable of right because what can you actually do you can eat healthy maybe one meal but when you the second that you have one success
you move the goal posts on yourself and you set yourself up for a success or for a failure that because the success that you want is not really going to be feasible right you take taking one step forward and then suddenly you expect so much more from yourself you take the concept of your success and then you move the goal posts you change the way you define success okay i ate healthy today now i have to eat healthy for the entire week and that too transforms your success into a failure so stop moving the goal posts on yourself be really really careful because this is what leads to a life where you feel like a failure every day the crazy thing about this is that you're not a failure every day you guys are actually succeeding all the time the problem is that you won't let yourself sit with that success you won't let yourself give yourself a pat on the back all that ends up happening is that you move the goal posts on yourself and you expect so much more than you're capable of right instead of focusing and practicing
and getting better at eating healthy the second you eat healthy today you expect so much more of yourself tomorrow and the next day in the next day and then what happens is you inevitably fail and when you fail comes all the shame comes all the disappointment comes all the oh i can't you know i i'm lazy i'm undisciplined i don't have any willpower look at all those people out there that are so much better than i am i wish i was disciplined enough to eat a salad every day no my friend that's not what you should wish what you should wish is exactly what you've accomplished which is that i wish every now and then i could eat a salad because if that's the goal post that you set for yourself and you don't let yourself move it you can succeed and then you become a different person you become someone who succeeds sometimes and fails sometimes which is a wildly different thing from someone who fails all the time and why do you fail all the time because you keep on moving goalposts on yourself and so then we have to we have to beg the question why do we do that
why do we move the goalposts it's because of all of that negative perception that we have to balance right if i view myself as a complete failure if i view myself as someone who fails all the time the only success that will balance that is a huge success it's not good enough if i'm 300 pounds overweight it's not good enough to eat a salad one day a week it's just not good enough and that's what we tell ourselves right because we have this perception that we're so overweight or that we're so much of a failure that we have to balance it with a big success it's the only way to make up for how bad of a person you are is you have to have an astronomic success if you dropped out of college you can't finish community college you've got to go to harvard right you got to balance that success because you feel like such a failure there's got to be a huge success otherwise it's not enough and so when we eat healthy for a day we say i gotta eat healthy for a month
because i have 300 pounds to lose eating eating healthy one day a week is not going to give me the success that i need to be where i want to go and so we move the goal posts because we've got to make up for lost time right we've got to make up for it because we're such a failure and why do we have to move the goal post because we view ourselves as such a failure so what happens when we start to see ourselves as instead of a complete failure someone who succeeds sometimes and fails sometimes if you start to see yourself that way then suddenly you don't have to move the goal posts as well right you don't have to be an absolute because you're successful half of the time you only have to you only have to move the goal posts a little bit more you don't have to move them a huge amount you just have to move a little bit more and then something magical happens because the less you start moving the goal posts the more successful you become and the more successful you become the more your identity changes
to no longer being a failure and the less of a failure you feel about yourself the less you move your goal posts the less you move your goal posts the more successful you become the more you view yourself as a success and the less you have to move your goal posts you guys feel stuck in a cycle of failure and that absolutely sucks and don't get me wrong it is a cycle right because with each failure more shame you have to make it up more each year that goes by that you fall more and more behind the more miraculous you have to be to make up for lost time if you're 24 years old you just have to make up for a couple of years if you're 28 years old you have to make up for so much more time if you're past your 30s now you have to really do something miraculous to turn things around and so the bigger gap you create for yourself the more of a failure you feel like and then the more of a failure you become because the
the goal posts have moved so far that there's no human way there's no plausible way that you can actually succeed you destine yourself for failure so it is absolutely a vicious cycle and the question is how to break it and the good news is that the vicious cycle works both ways if you can start to to take one step forward and be satisfied with it right if you can take one step forward and not move the goal posts and you can say you know what i did a good job today at the end of the day today is a day that i actually ate healthy today is a day where i may be 300 pounds overweight but i know at the end of today i'm not 301 pounds overweight if you can give yourself one success and then not move the goal posts then you shift your perspective about yourself the more you shift your perspective the less you move the goal posts the easier it is to succeed and then the more you shift your perspective
and then eventually you become the person that you want to be you become the person that you see and you envy you become the person that other people envy they look at you and they say man that person is disciplined that person isn't lazy and the crazy is that you are exactly the same thing that you used to be the only difference is what you do in here the only difference is that you perceive yourself to not be a failure anymore because you don't actually fail all the time no one fails all the time it feels that way but you don't actually fail all the time and then what you focus on is okay i ate healthy today i ate healthy today and i ate unhealthy for the next five days this week i'm gonna see if i can do one day a week of eating healthy and then you can do that right and then the next day next week now here comes the tricky thing what do you do the next do you bump it up to two days a week no no no that's moving the goal post the next week you say let's see if we can do it again
let's see if we can eat healthy one day a week and then the next week do you move it to two days no no no still one day a week and something really magical starts to happen because if you stop moving the goal posts even though you set your target at one day a week you'll start to eat healthy more you'll start to be inspired and then you'll say oh wow i actually ate healthy three days a week today that's crazy i better eat healthy three days next week no no no then you go to two be careful about moving the goalposts the second you start to expect yourself to be perfect every day the second you start to expect more from yourself than you're capable of is the second you doom yourself to failure and so acknowledge where you are and do the best that you can today and set low expectations for yourself instead of correcting for all of the
crap that you've had to deal with in the past instead of making up for lost time because it's hard right you can't lose 300 pounds in a week but that's sure as hell what you feel like have to do so don't give in to that don't move the goal posts on yourself expect more from your less from yourself let yourself be worse than you are and let yourself be successful at taking tiny steps there's no shame in eating healthy for one day create that shame in our mind by moving our gulpos it isn't enough i should have done it a long time ago right so be careful and something magical will happen if you see yourself moving those goal posts and you don't let yourself do it because you have to catch yourself doing it first in order to stop it and the less you move your goal posts the more your life is going to turn in a positive direction and that's going to be a vicious cycle too and that's what happens with people who lose 300 pounds it's a vicious cycle of positivity instead of a vicious cycle of negativity
and that vicious cycle is born out of not letting yourself move the goalposts so i hope that this little tidbit and this little insight into why you're doomed for failure why you're destined to failure helps you because it really does help as you start to see this stuff happen in your mind you can see how you work as a person and you can start to make changes in your life and if you guys like this kind of stuff if it is helpful to you let us know by liking or subscribing or commenting and the more that we hear from you about like what's helpful and what isn't that's how we know what to do so thanks a lot for listening guys i'm dr k from healthy gamer and good luck and don't let yourself move your goal posts you