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This is Primal Potential and I am your host, Elizabeth Benton. Through education, motivation, and implementation, we will bridge the gap between knowing and doing so we can master fat loss naturally and help you reach your highest potential. Let's get started.

Hey everybody and welcome back to the Primal Potential podcast. I am Elizabeth Benton and hopefully you can tell my voice is slowly coming back. I really do appreciate your patience guys. I know it can be hard to listen to somebody that feels a little bit under the weather.

But like I say, the show must go on. Not going to leave you guys hanging without an episode. Here's what happened. I was working on one of the Daily Motivations podcast. I know a lot of you guys are tuning into those daily episodes on my other podcast, the Daily Motivations podcast. You can find it on iTunes or on Stitcher. It's still hasn't been approved by Spotify yet. Don't know what the deal is there.

But I was working on an idea for that and I thought, you know what? I really need to elaborate this. I am going to make it a mini-sode over on Primal Potential because I think that it can be a great exercise to help many of us myself included improve our decision making.

Let me ask you this. Do you ever find yourself negotiating in your head with your internal self-talk in a way that doesn't help you reach your goals? For example, maybe you are justifying dessert after dinner or a snack when you're not hungry because you've been good or because it's a healthy dessert or because it's just one thing and it's not really going to make a difference or maybe because you work together.

But if you're not out that day, I know I've gone through those justifications and I've shared before on the podcast if you have to justify it, it's probably something you might want to rethink.

The bottom line is this and sort of the underlying theme of this episode is that wherever you are in your life right now, whatever your body looks like, whatever your habits are, your thinking got you there, right?

The way you make decisions, the way you think about and rationalize your choices, that is responsible for where you are right now. So often, we focus on the behavior we want to change, we want to eat less sugar, we want to snack less often, we want to drink less alcohol, we focus on the behaviors, the actions.

But guys, our behaviors are driven by our thinking. So if you want different results, if you want to improve your body, improve your health, improve your finances or even your relationships, it begins by thinking differently, right?

Our behavior is driven by our thoughts. And so when we focus on just the behavior change, we miss what is triggering that behavior, what is creating those patterns of behavior.

If you don't think differently, you're not going to choose differently, you're not going to act differently, right?

When you make those choices that you don't feel so good about afterwards, those choices that don't leave you feeling very proud, those choices that you could point to as the reasons for your lack of progress, I want you to consider what is your thinking behind them, what is the thought process or the rationalization, the justification behind those choices or patterns of behavior that you want to change.

Identify them, are you using the argument, oh, but I've been so good or what's the point who cares, I'm tired, are you saying I'll start tomorrow or I've earned it or it won't hurt, it's just this one small thing.

The first part is identifying the thoughts that drive the behavior, don't just focus on I want to eat less after dinner, I want to drink less alcohol, you've got to nail down the thoughts that drive the behavior.

Because all behavior stems from thought, right? Then from there, just think differently about it one time, one time, right?

In order to change the thought, you first have to identify it, okay? But once you identify it, you're more likely to notice it when you begin that internal dialogue, you begin that process of rationalization or justification.

And then I'm not suggesting that you have to craft the perfect counter response, see, that's what happens when we try to change the behavior.

I drink too much, so I'm just going to stop drinking. We're not looking for the behavior change and we're not looking for the perfect response.

We're looking to first identify what are the thought patterns, the rationalizations, the justifications that trigger the behavior and then think differently.

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