Put your personality to work!

I posted this, mostly verbatim, on a message board recently. I got some positive feedback on it so I thought I would share it here.

It helps to figure out what about your personality you can leverage to help you on your journey. For example, I'm a tightwad and I *hate* wasting money. I can't stand it, it bothers me. I make plenty of it, but I hoard it like there's no tomorrow. My friends actually make fun of me for it. I'm generous when it comes to friends and family, but I also try to live on one paycheck and save the other. I'm weird like that; my friends think I should "live a little". Then again, I'm 33 and have a six figure nest egg and they don't, so it's paying off!

Given that, you might think it would be difficult for me to sign up for gym membership. Nope! If I use it a lot, I'm getting good value for money. I'm all about that. So, I go to the gym a LOT. I actually have it broken down by visit, i.e. I pay $x per month and I go x times per month, so I pay $x each time I go. The more times I go, the "cheaper" each visit gets. I'd be paying the same amount of money whether I went 1 time or 100 times, so I go as often as I can be motivated to go. Some days I'm simply too tired to go, or I feel a little creaky or sore. Then I do the cost/benefit analysis of doctor visits and injuring myself and not being able to go to the gym vs skipping a day. It might sound very Type A and stupid, but it's how I roll.

I can also apply this thriftiness to my food shopping. I now spend more on food than I used to even though I'm single now. This is because I no longer buy junk and I eat a lot more "whole" foods. Since I hate wasting money, I look in the fridge and think, "better eat those tomatoes before they go off," or "that bok choy was expensive...better make a stir fry." Sometimes I have a little sticker shock at the supermarket when I manage to drop $50 in a single visit on just myself, but then I think...."$50 vs diabetes, high blood pressure, shopping at Lane Bryant...it's worth it!"

On the other hand, I can be pretty lazy. Astonishingly so. I suppose it's tied to thriftiness...I don't like to waste energy. Knowing that I have lazy tendencies, I stock my freezer with plenty of healthy microwave meals for those days when I don't want to cook, or don't have the motivation/time to prepare a lunch to bring with me to work. This cuts out the temptation to hit the drive-thru or order a pizza. Hitting the drive-thru involves getting in the car, driving somewhere, waiting, etc. Ordering a pizza involves waiting and then there's always the irritation that comes with the pizza being late or cold. Or wrong. I pop a Lean Cuisine into the microwave on those lazy nights and avoid all that.

Basically I thought about who I am as a person...controlling, thrifty, but also somewhat lazy. I thought about how these tendencies could sabotage my efforts, but also how I could make them work for me. It's almost like I'm tricking myself. I know I'm doing it, but it has worked so far. Also, since I'm a total control freak who borders on obsessive about certain things (the organization of my closet, how my dishes are stacked, etc.), I found religion about counting calories and weighing myself. It feeds into my control freaky/obsessive personality and in the wrong hands could be a bad thing, but in my case it imparts a discipline that might not be there otherwise. I obsess about calories, so I'm very likely to count every tiny little thing I eat, and every tiny little bit of exercise that I do.

So...figure out what your strong personality traits are, even if they're negative (as mine are), and try to make them work for you instead of against you. In the month before I actively tried to lose weight, I was doing a lot of thinking and jotting down. I wanted to go into this eyes wide open.

I'm 33 and it's very unlikely that I'll get less Type A as I get older. It's unlikely that I'll all of a sudden start blowing entire paychecks at Nordstrom's. It's unlikely that I'll suddenly become the kind of person who is active, active, active all day long. So, I'm trying to make the kind of person that I am work for me for a change instead of against me. That's something that does come with age...the wisdom to try to work with what you have instead of trying to become something you're not.