Yeah, right! Try telling that to my little one when Santa hasn’t delivered: “But he was thinking about you …”

It just won’t fly.

When it comes to our own successes however, it is often our thoughts that can make or break our outcomes.

Two years ago, for example, I suddenly stopped exercising. My relaxed, but healthy weekly routine of walking, running and yoga petered to virtual halt.

I just couldn’t be bothered.

Whereas I used to enjoy it, I’d find excuses not to go, telling myself I was just taking a break. But the less activity I did, the less I wanted to do — as the cycle goes. Meanwhile an inner voice was raging.

“You are going to get so fat! You’re only just keeping it under control as is. You need to exercise or you’ll be the size of a house!

“What will that say about you? What’s wrong with you?”

Fear and panic were setting in. While I felt terrible about being so ‘lazy’, all the internal threats and cajoling still didn’t seem to motivate me to get moving.

Instead I felt my heels dig deeper, persuaded more to reach for the ice cream than my sneakers. It seemed I had no intention of complying with my mental bully.

Fortunately I try to approach life with a certain amount of curiosity. Rather than beating myself up for beating myself up — as we can easily do (with no benefit), I tried to gain a little objectivity on my thoughts. I was rather intrigued by the pushing and pulling and my complete lack of motivation to exercise. Why didn’t I want to look after my body?

Ah-ha! Finally a useful question! I realised it’s not that I didn’t want to look after my body, it’s just that exercise had stopped being about that for me.

The activities I had started doing because I wanted to be healthy and fit, utilise my body, make it strong and flexible, had become about avoiding being fat and doing what I ‘should’ do and ‘had’ to. Can you see the difference?

Doing anything out of fear or avoidance will suck the joy right out of it. Doing things because we feel forced to or have no choice leads to resentment and tends to awaken our subconscious rebel who will find no end of ways to sabotage us.

It can be easy enough to turn around however. I was up and running with a positive new exercise routine in a matter of weeks. Refocusing on our positive goals and desired outcomes can take us from torturously slogging through a ‘must do’ to feeling joyously pulled towards our highest desires — even when the work is tough.

This motivation key applies to anything, not just healthy lifestyle choices.

It is, however, one of a multitude of tools and techniques covered in my upcoming course on developing a positive mindset for healthy living.

Teaming up with nutritionist Catherine Burns, I’ll be offering a three-part programme designed to break the diet not-so-merry-go-round mentality, to heal our relationships with food and exercise and create sustainable motivation to reach our health and fitness goals.

See www.natural.bm for details.

It is the thoughts that count — and not just at Christmas!

Julia Pitt is a trained success coach and certified NLP practitioner on the team at Benedict Associates. For further information contact Julia on 705-7488, www.juliapittcoaching.com.