I'm sure that we all have had the experience of starting something new...some new diet, exercise regimen, or New Year's resolution, only to find ourselves falling back into old ways of being. And, that's not because we have decided that the new behavior isn't valuable. Quite the contrary, at the beginning, we were convinced that making these changes were important and maybe even necessary to creating the life we want.

What happened is that we fell into the gap, the space between effort and results, and this is where most people give up. I came across this concept in an article by Shawn Thomas, a certified productivity coach and the husband and business partner of Maura Thomas, one of the top ten experts in time management and attention management. Maura writes a wonderful newsletter that I subscribe to, and recently she alluded to an article by her husband, Shawn, about why change is so hard.

What I loved about the article is that Shawn not only made us aware of the "gap," he also spoke to the neuroscience behind this tendency to give up when our efforts don't seem to be resulting in significant change.

This fits very nicely with my Top of the Mind philosophy that speaks to how and why the limbic system resists change. In other words, given that this part of the brain is designed for survival, it tends to prefer what is known versus what is unknown. Plus, our old habits are "hard wired" in our brain in the form of neural pathways, and this often results in our interpreting a lack of progress as a sign that we should just quit trying.

The key here is awareness. When we know that new habits take a while to produce significant change (generally, around two months), then we can trust the upper 80% of our brain (what I call the Top of the Mind) to keep trying versus giving up.

The thing to remember is that behavior validates belief! When we push through the gap and continue to work toward meaningful change, we validate the belief in our ability to influence the quality of our lives, and even begin to rewire the brain in a way that makes future efforts more likely to succeed.

What has your "gap" looked like in the past, and knowing this, what do you want to do differently in the future?