The cycle of improvement and decay

​Allow me to set the stage by telling you a story.
 
A man and a woman were in a relationship. Both ran their own businesses. The woman was also a single mother.
 
As time went on, she began to lose confidence in her ability to handle her own affairs.
 
It started out when she asked her partner to help her respond to certain business emails she didn’t feel completely confident about handling correctly.
 
She asked for her male partner’s input about whether she was wording these emails in the best way.
 
Over time, this evolved to the point where the man was answering all her emails for her and conducting her business correspondence on her behalf.
 
The cycle progressed until she lost confidence in dealing with her clients in person, too.
 
She would go to work, and in the middle of the day, she would have to call up her male partner for help, either because she wasn’t sure how to handle certain situations or she just didn’t feel competent to manage her business on her own.
 
She eventually progressed to the point where she couldn’t function in social situations.
 
She would go to business meetings, lunches, and conferences. In the middle of trying to network and socialize with people, she would panic and freeze.
 
Her male partner would have to go with her so that he could step in at the right time, make their excuses, and take her away.
 
He would then spend hours calming her down, rebuilding her confidence in herself, and going through a lengthy and agonizing process of coaching her back to a state where she could face all her obligations and challenges.
 
The situation continued to deteriorate until the woman became so depressed and even suicidal that she ended the relationship.
 
She no longer felt like an asset to her male partner’s life and she no longer wanted to drag him down with her.
 
Here we see the first example of the vicious circle of one bad habit leading to another.
 
The following diagram illustrates this cycle in action.

​In this example, the woman became stressed at work, which happens to all of us.
 
She failed to handle this stress on her own, which caused her to lose confidence in her ability to handle this stress.
 
She began to doubt her own competence because, in fact, she wasn’t competent to deal with these situations on her own.
 
The idea that she was no longer competent to handle her own affairs caused her to lose respect for herself, which further eroded her confidence in herself.
 
Losing confidence in herself and questioning her own competence made her even more stressed about dealing with situations she once had no problem dealing with.
 
This loss of confidence further undermined her ability to cope, which caused her to fail to meet further challenges, which further degraded her sense of competence, self-respect, and self-worth.
 
This became a vicious cycle of ever-increasing descent into helplessness, self-loathing, and over-reliance on others to accomplish tasks she should have been able to accomplish herself.
 
The only way to get out of this is to break the cycle.
 
In this case, the male partner could have flatly refused to answer her emails for her.
 
Instead of helping her avoid these tasks, he could have bolstered her confidence and encouraged her to push through her self-doubt to meet the challenges on her own.
 
Meeting these challenges and overcoming her own fears is the only way to counteract the corrosive effect of always running away from them.

​Once we start doing this, the cycle leads us to ever-increasing levels of confidence, self-respect, and a certainty in our own competence.
 
We see ourselves handling these situations. We feel more competent to handle these situations, which leads us to take bolder steps to meet future challenges and overcome them.
 
This cycle plays out in dozens of areas of our lives.
 
For our second example, let’s look at the cycle of overeating and weight gain.
 
Here we see the same process at work.

​We gain weight from over-eating and inactivity. We see ourselves in the mirror as we would rather not see ourselves, which causes us to think badly about ourselves.
 
We might over-eat to ease our feelings or we might just think, “I already look terrible. It doesn’t matter if I eat this.”
 
This causes us to over-eat again. We know in our hearts that we’re letting ourselves down, which saps our self-confidence and self-respect.
 
We see ourselves in the mirror as still being overweight and unable to improve, which causes us to feel hopeless and unable to change, so we continue to think it doesn’t matter if I just eat this one thing right now just for today.
 
This is why people continue to gain weight year after year. This is why people fail to lose the weight and get healthy.
 
They get trapped in this cycle of losing respect for themselves. They see themselves as already overweight and don’t feel competent to change it, so they fall back on the one thing that comforts them—eating more than they should.
 
Here again, the only way to get out of this is to break the cycle and reverse it.

Once we start eating healthy and exercising consistently, we start to see results. This boosts our confidence and gives us the motivation to keep going.
 
We stick to our nutrition plan and our exercise routine, so we see further results, which makes us feel better about ourselves.
 
This gives us the willpower to resist the urge to cheat and slack off. We want to continue to see better results and we don’t want to lose the results we already have, so we don’t fall off the wagon in ways we might otherwise.
 
This pattern repeats in every aspect of our lives.
 
Every aspect of our lives is either cycling upward or it’s cycling downward. The only way to reverse the trend is to start cycling in the opposite direction.
 
As long as we stay in the same cycle, we’ll continue to go in the same direction, either up or down. The choice is always ours and we can change it at any time.
 
I’m not saying it’s easy. It isn’t. The only option is to bite the bullet and shatter the cycle.
 
The alternative is staying trapped in the same pattern of self-destructive negativity for the rest of our lives—and none of us wants that.
 
I hope this helped someone today. God bless you all.
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