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Last week, in Part 2 of our Follow-Through Series, you used mental contrasting to help boost your commitment to your meditation goal. There’s a good body of evidence to show this technique helps people succeed in reaching goals. This week, you’re going to create plans to help you overcome obstacles that stand in your way.

If you missed the beginning of the Follow-Through Series

Click here for Part 1: Why is Follow-Through Difficult?

Click here for Part 2: Use Mental Contrasting

Our second Follow-Through strategy is called implementation intentions. They’re if-then statements that help you plan strategies for getting past any difficulties that stand in the way of reaching your meditation goals.

Here’s an example:

If I feel too tired to do sitting meditation, then I’ll do walking meditation, instead.

The if part of the statement describes an obstacle. The then part describes how you’ll get past the obstacle.

You create these strategies in anticipation of potential obstacles, and they work because they make your obstacle-management strategy automatic. When you don’t have to think about how to handle an obstacle, over even whether you should handle it, there’s a better chance that you will deal with it instead of skipping your meditation. Psychologist, Peter Gollwitzer introduced the concept of implementation intentions and his research demonstrates that they help boost the probability of reaching your goal.

The technique

The technique is simple:

List the obstacles that stand in the way of reaching your goal. If you completed the exercise last week in Part 2 of the Follow-Through Series, you’ve already created this list. 

Create an if-then statement for each obstacle, specifying how you’ll handle it if it comes up. You can find lots of strategies for dealing with obstacles in the blog post about practicing diligence. 

Review this list regularly to remind yourself of your plans. You might even post it where you’ll see it often. And, you can add to it whenever you need to.

Take your time. Be thorough in creating your list of obstacles and be realistic when creating your strategies for managing them. The worksheet below can help.

When it comes to the goal of creating a meditation habit, choose strategies that will allow you to do some kind of meditation or mindfulness practice, even if it’s much shorter than the one you planned to do. When establishing the habit, the most important thing is to practice daily. The practice might be very different than your scheduled practice, but the act of practicing strengthens the habit.

Today’s practice: Complete the intentions exercise worksheet

The following worksheet walks you through the exercise. I recommend that you write or type out your if-then statements so you can refer to them often.

Worksheet in MS-Word format 

Worksheet in PDF format 

Worksheet for Google Docs

Up Next Week

Next week, I’ll reveal the final strategy for following-through...