Cognitive dissonance - the mental discomfort that happens when going for a goal

Before I started my journey as a life coach, are used to set goals and I used to encounter something very uncomfortable.

When I would experience that discomfort I would make it mean that I did something wrong.

I would make it mean that maybe I’m not supposed to have that goal.

What I learned along my journey was that there’s a term for that mental discomfort and that term is cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort when you are between two beliefs and trying to believe the two thoughts at the same time.

This is where we’re trying to believe “I can create a new goal”, but your brain is holding onto all the belief of “I cannot create a the goal”.

The cognitive dissonance is where those two thoughts contradict each other and our brain is genuinely having a mental discomfort.

Cognitive dissonance happens when you’re going for a big goal and evolving into new thoughts and feelings.

Like me, most people would give up when they experience cognitive dissonance.

To create a new goal, we are required to grow and evolve and to be able to think and feel new thoughts and it requires us to become the new version of ourselves and hold new thoughts.

Cognitive dissonance is normal, everybody experiences it.

I teach my clients that the mental discomfort is just part of the process of evolving.

I teach my clients how to move along from the old thought and feeling to the new thought and feeling using a tool that we called bridge thoughts.

Bridge thoughts of where you create thoughts that help you bridge from one end to the other.

The old thought is “ I cannot”.

The new thought you want to believe it is “I can”.

The bridge thoughts that I teach my clients are thoughts like:

“it is possible that I can”.

“I am willing to consider that I can”.

“It’s likely someone like me can”.

This helps our brain start believing in the possibility of the new thoughts and creates awareness for the mental discomfort and the normalcy of all of it.

If you would like to dive deeper into concepts like this, that show up along your journey of creating goal, schedule a consultation and lets identify how the mental discomfort shows up for you.