What's up everybody, this is coach Ajit.
And in this video we are talking about
why do your client quit things,
or why do you quit things, and what to do about it?
Today we are discussing life coaching questions
that will help you identify,
why do your clients quit projects,
or why do you quit any of the projects?
And what is it that you can do,
some life coaching strategies
that will help you help your clients
to stick with what they commit to?
But before we even get into understanding why do they quit.
Let's understand why does anybody quit anything, right?
There are some key reasons
why individuals quit things in their lives, right?
It could be a relationship that you're quitting,
it might be a work, or a task,
or a project that you might be quitting,
you might be quitting a particular social media platform
that you thought was going to be the future,
and then you decided you should quit it.
there's some key fundamental reasons
that leads for that to happen.
One of the reasons why that happens
is because anything that you decided
that you wanna do as a project,
or your client decided that they wanna do as a project,
they started thinking they can achieve that goal
in a particular timeframe.
They set an expectation for themselves.
They said, "All right, I'm gonna go on TikTok,
and I'm gonna nail TikTok in three weeks," right?
And as they started the journey,
they realized it's really not that easy,
that it was too hard.
And that's the first reason why we quit.
We quit because something is so hard
based on the expectation that we set up ourselves.
And because we have that expectation,
we set ourselves up for failure
because we set unrealistic expectations for ourselves.
The second reason we quit is something gets boring,
that it becomes so easy that it's actually boring to do.
How many times has it happened,
where you started a project,
and you were excited about it when you started it,
and then there was a point in the project timeline
where you could do it with your eyes closed,
and suddenly you were not interested in doing it anymore,
and because you were not interested in doing it anymore,
you started to quit on it
without realizing that you're quitting
on something that actually may be fruitful.
So, the second reason why your clients
quit on their projects or relationships,
or health journeys, and so forth,
is because it gets too easy, it gets too boring.
And because it gets too boring,
there's no excitement that drives them
to take action towards it.
You know, one of the reasons why relationships
lose juice or lose the love that it has,
is because when it starts with high dopamine,
and there's excitement, there is curiosity,
there's newness to it,
and at some point we start thinking,
"Oh, you know, my partner is just like that."
Or they always do this, or they always do that.
And we start transitioning our relationship
from this exciting fun thing,
where we were excited about their craziness,
to being concerned about their craziness
and thinking that they are nuts, right?
And is where we go from exciting to boring.
We just get too used to it,
and that's why we quit on relationships,
or that's why relationships grow stale,
is because we lose the excitement around it.
The third reason we quit is because things change.
And when things change,
if you're not adaptable to that change,
we are not adapting to that change,
it becomes really difficult for us to stick around.
It gets too hard, too difficult, too different,
and so, because we are uncomfortable with the change,
we are uncomfortable with the adaptation
that needs to happen, we quit things.
And lastly,
we quit because something is so far out in the future,
we see no light in it happening anytime soon.
And so the journey feels too long, and so we quit.
So these are the four reasons
why you may find your clients quitting their projects,
or you may find yourself as a coach sometimes
quitting on things that you know are good for you.
First is, it's too hard,
second, it's too easy and too predictable,
third, is because change happened
and you were not adaptable,
and fourth, the result is too far into the future.
And because of that,
your coaching client doesn't wanna do it,
you don't wanna do it.
So what can a life coach do in that scenario
to be able to help their client,
to stick with what they know,
even your client knows, is good for them?
What is it that a life coach, a business coach,
a health coach can do
to keep the journey of the client going?
I wanna demonstrate this entire series of questions
with an example from my own life.
You see recently in life, I'd realized
that I had worked on pretty much every area of my life
and they have been great.
I feel really fulfilled as a parent,
I feel really fulfilled as a partner,
I have amazing relationship,
I have amazing place that I live, I am financially free,
I have great habits that I love,
I love writing, I'm able to do that.
So it's everything that I could think of in my life
seemed like I was living my dream life except one thing,
and this was a thing that I quit most often
in the last five or six years.
And this was happening
because I would start my health journey
with an unreasonably high expectation of myself,
and because of that,
I would make things really, really difficult.
And then life was always changing,
so I would associate that I cannot keep the habit
of going to the gym, or eating healthy
because life has changed too much.
So had all the factors that I just shared with you
on why we quit things stacked on top of each other,
and I found a reason to quit on my own health.
And so recently,
I had recommitted myself to my health journey,
and I see visible changes in my wellbeing,
and my energy levels, and everything.
Now, let me walk you through what I asked myself
as a life coach, as a self-coaching question to myself
so I didn't quit this time.
So I asked myself the first question,
and you wanna ask your coaching clients this question,
you wanna ask yourself if you as a life coach,
as a business coach,
as a health coach, on quitting on things.
The first question to ask yourself is to,
why do I quit?
You know the four reasons why you may quitting anything,
ask yourself, why is it that I quit?
Blank, whatever is the situation that you've been quitting.
Try and observe your own thinking, and your own thought,
is go, "Why is it that I quit my own journey?
Like I know this is good for me, right?"
I knew working on my health is good for me,
I'll have more energy, I'll have more energy for my kids,
I will feel better, I will be more capable of serving love,
which I wanna do in the world,
I'll be more amazing as a partner to my wife,
I'll be more amazing as a parent,
I'll be more amazing as a child to my parents,
why would I quit?
And I found the reason why I was quitting
is because I was setting
such unrealistic expectations on myself
that I would give up even before I had tried enough
to get close to the outcome that I really wanted in my life.
I hadn't given myself a fair enough chance as a human being
to actually continue to work towards my goals.
I had not given myself the opportunity of thinking,
living a healthy life is a lifestyle choice,
it's not a moment in life, you don't do it for a day,
you find a lifestyle that fits you
and that gives you the energetic outcomes,
the health outcomes that you're seeking, right?
But I had to ask that question to myself
to be able to even identify why I was quitting.
So ask yourself, ask your clients,
why is it that you're quitting?
Blank, whatever that is that they're quitting.
And that's the first question.
The second question you wanna ask is, is this a pattern?
Is this something that you repeatedly do?
Is quitting a habit by any chance for your clients,
for your coaching clients?
And the reason why you wanna ask that question
is because sometimes
while these four are the big reasons to quit,
sometimes there are small and big traumas in our lives
that have set ourselves up for quitting,
where any time we're about to achieve success,
our trauma show up,
and because of those traumas, we start to quit on things.
So ask your clients, your coaching clients these questions,
is this an observable pattern,
are you quitting in every area of your life,
or is there a particular area where you can spot
where you tend to quit more frequently
and more often when you start your journey?
And if there is a particular area
where you tend to do this more often,
like I had around health,
is there something, is there an event,
is there a situation that may have programmed you for this?
Now, I found that I had a small trauma around it,
and I say small traumas and large traumas,
is because sometimes there are small events in our lives
that create big impact and big stories in their life,
but they're so small
that they can be reprogrammed fairly easily
with coaching questions and self coaching,
and by hiring coaches
that can work with you around the topic.
And sometimes they're large traumas,
which are PTSDs or something that was so life-threatening
that it's almost impossible for you
to get past it just by ourselves,
and you need a therapist or some kind of medical advice
for you to really be guided through that experience.
So, if it is a small trauma, you as a coach can guide them,
if there's a large where they need a therapist support,
or they need more advanced support
with even medication, if that is the case,
it's rare, but if that happens, that happens,
you may wanna address that in that way.
But if it's a small trauma like I had, which was,
I had constantly been told a story off,
because that was the story around my high household,
because everybody in my extended family,
and if you know about my background,
we have 23 people living in the same house,
so I had a big extended family.
Everybody in my standard family we were not very wealthy.
And the way to demonstrate wealth
and the love and acceptance and health in my family
was if you were slightly overweight.
I know this sounds really weird to hear here,
but this was an actual story.
It's people would comment
if a kid looked healthy and normal,
but they would be excited about a kid
that was slightly overweight.
They said, "Oh, that's a healthy kid."
They are a little overweight,
you should be a little chubby, right?
Again, this is not to say if this is right or wrong,
I'm just saying that was a trauma for me,
because for me that reflected on,
"Oh, if I'm losing weight, I may not be healthy,
I may not be wealthy."
And I didn't even recognize
that was the subconscious programming that I had.
Now again, this is not to body shame anyone or anything,
I'm talking about my personal reflection,
so please take it in context of my story.
Everybody has a personal choice
and must have a personal choice on what they deem healthy,
what they deem fit, right?
I consider myself healthy and fed
when I have certain energy levels on a day-to-day basis.
And I feel that is more true for me
now than it was in the past
when I was eating foods
that were not really serving my energy.
So it is completely personal,
I'm simply reflecting my personal experience.
So identify that small or big trauma
that a person may have,
your client may have, you may have,
around a particular life situation
where you're quitting on things.
It may be programming that you have had
that you need to work with
and self-reflect on, and self coach on
so you can get past it
and create a better outcome for yourself
based on that small trauma,
which is more likely to be in your scenario.
The third thing that you wanna do,
and this is the key to creating new habits
and new rewarding habits for yourself,
is we very often think
that we need to heal our past completely
for us to create new movement in life.
Where else most of our new movement in life
when the past is not so traumatic
that it definitely needs healing,
is actually created by reward.
If you wanna take an example, think about it like this.
If somebody gave you more money to do a particular act,
if money was something that you measured as your success
and you were excited about it, let's say,
you will tend to do that act more easily.
If you got a raise, for example, if your client got a raise,
they will do that job even more excitedly.
Why? Because there's more reward associated to it.
We always want to do things
when there's a bigger reward at the end,
and we wanna do only the neural pathways
where there's more reward in the end.
Now, these rewards usually are not money centered,
they're usually things like food,
because there's a dopamine head that you get immediately,
there's some kind of curiosity that is lying ahead,
there's some kind of discovery that's happening,
you're really managing your dopamine.
Really what I'm talking about here,
is you're kind of going,
"Okay to get what will hit my dopamine levels
in a way that I will see a reward
that is greater than the reward
that I have with my current behavior of quitting," right?
So what is it that you reward yourself,
and knowing consciously or unconsciously,
when you quit something, right?
Because you most likely
are rewarding yourself with something.
It could be that,
"Oh I quit, and I need a bucket of ice cream."
You're rewarding yourself still, even in sorrow, right?
So you wanna find out what that reward is,
and now you want to ask yourself,
what is the new more exciting reward that I can associate
with this particular non quitting attitude
so I can stick with my journey.
So those are the fundamental three questions
that will help you identify, why are you quitting,
is there a reason in the past that is there,
or is there a wrong reward system
that you've set up for yourself, creating a habit loop
that is not serving you anymore
and serving your clients anymore?
And so as a life coach, as a business coach,
as a health coach,
you wanna now question these things.
So once you've identified, "Okay, what is happening,
why is my client quitting,
is there a small or a big trauma around it,
is there some reward association that they have around it?"
Once you're identified these three things,
now we talk about how is it that you can create
new reality or new pathway for yourself so you don't quit.
Now, the key to success of this model
is that you do what we are going to suggest
as a strategy for at least 60 to 90 days.
I have no scientific backing that says a 60 to 90 days,
but my personal experience suggests
that for me and for my clients,
it has always been either 60 or 90 days
that they repeated this particular behavior,
and because of that,
they got into a habit of not quitting,
or not putting that thing that they were always quitting
and create a new habit around it,
because anyways, that was a desired outcome
that they wanted to have,
they just had to create new neural associations
to keep doing the pathway.
So the first thing that you wanna do,
is to find small habits and not big expectations
that move you towards the direction of things
that you wanna continue doing.
Let's take an example of my health journey
like I was suggesting.
So previously what I would do is I would say,
"All right, I'm gonna hit the gym six days a week,
and I'm gonna work my butt off every day,
and I'm not gonna eat anything that I like," right?
And that was the perfect recipe for me quitting everything,
and that's what was happening every time,
is I would not eat the food for five or six days,
and then I'll be like,
"This is garbage, I'm not doing it."
Or, I would be so tired and exhausted
that I didn't wanna hit the gym again,
and then I would miss it for three or four days,
and then of course I was not going back to the gym.
So I asked myself, "Hey, I always quit all my help,
let's create some simple programming
that allows me to actually stay present to my health journey
and be able to actually create movement around it
that gets me excited
and creates a new reward structure around it.
So I said, "Okay, what is the small things that I can do?"
So, first thing that I did was I picked up a routine
that actually we share here at Mindvalley, called 10X.
This routine requires you to go to the gym
three times a week for 20 minutes each day, and that's it.
So it's in total 60 minutes a week.
So it's not a big commitment, it's very easy to do,
the routines are pretty structured,
it's the same exercises you do,
so it's not like you're going,
"Oh, I need to learn some complex thing
to be able to see any results."
So it was a simple enough thing to do.
So I said, "Okay, let me follow this 10X routine,
let me commit to this 20 minutes, three times a week,
which is easy enough to follow, let me do that."
The essence of that is create micro habits,
create habits that are small,
things that are easy to do,
create something that is so easy to do
it doesn't feel like effort, it doesn't feel like,
"Oh, I have to like do a special preparation to do this,
you can just do it with your being fairly easily."
Second key to creating new realities for you
so you don't quit.
You see just doing the same thing again and again,
we'll get you bored, right?
And that's the second reason why we quit things,
is because we were bored out of our mind
doing what we were doing.
So you don't want it to be easy,
you want it to be challenging.
So the second key is that it needs to be progressive.
In my scenario,
it's called progressive overload,
it's a known physical fitness thing,
where you are picking up progressively higher weights
every time you go to the gym,
or every couple of weeks you go to the gym.
And so, what I was doing is like every couple of weeks,
a couple of days, I would make it a little bit harder
for me to do the routine that we supposed to do.
So it wasn't easy every time I hit the gym,
but over the course of time,
I constantly picked up more and more weights,
and because of that, I had something to look forward to.
I was hijacking my dopamine by saying,
"Oh, what is it that I'm gonna pick today,
oh, how much weight can I do now?"
Right?
So I was hijacking my dopamine
to stay curious and interested
in that change that was coming next.
The third key is that it needs to be assuring.
You need to feel like you're making progress
because when you feel like you're making progress,
if you're like, "Oh, I'm moving towards
the target that I have,
I'm not not moving towards it,
I have some progress towards it."
And because it has some progress towards it,
guess what happens?
You're excited about it,
you wanna stay with the journey because there's progress.
So you wanna find that assurance.
My insurance was, am I picking up higher weights,
is my body looking different,
am I feeling different, which is the key to everything
that I wanted to change in my life,
and how do I feel after I'm done, right?
Which also is the fourth key, which is, is it rejuvenating?
Because if it is not going to give you energy,
you're not gonna stick with it,
you're going to only stick with things
where the reward is so exciting.
I feel after my 10X workout that I'm so rejuvenated,
I'm excited, I'm elated, I'm more fun as a person,
because it rejuvenates me,
it doesn't take energy from me, it gives energy to me.
And then it's rejuvenating,
you want to keep doing it,
because the reward for sticking with the habit,
sticking with what they're doing,
is greater than quitting it.
And that's when you create a winning structure,
you create a winning scenario for you, your clients,
as you coach them through any scenario,
through life, through business, through health,
through anything for them to be able
to stay present to the journey and keep with the journey,
because they are getting more reward
than what they were getting as they quit
what they were doing.
Now, I know this might have been
a life-threatening presentation for you
because you have learnt so much about why you quit things,
why a client quit things,
why you may have potentially quit things in the past,
and how to really re-engineer yourself to not quit things.
And I know you're gonna use this information,
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Also, I want you to make sure that you share this
with any coach or client that you think needs help
in not quitting things that are really important to them.
They understand why they have been quitting
and they can create a new habit of not quitting,
not quitting if it's important to them, especially.
I know you're engaged in this video,
you've watched it all the way till now,
tell me what was exciting for you,
put it in the comment section below
and hit that like button.
I would really appreciate your comments and thoughts
on this idea of why we quit,
and how to stop ourselves from quitting.
Thank you so much for watching.
This is Ajit Nawalkha, and you watched it on Evercoach.