Give me the one thing you're sick of starting over with.

What this actually looks like

Let's use food, because we all eat.

It doesn't matter whether the problem you bring me is money, fitness, nutrition, weight or something else entirely. Food is just easy to picture.

You want to lose weight. You know what to do. You're not doing it consistently enough to get results.

First, we get nitty-gritty specific.

Because specificity is a superpower that always moves us closer to the solution.

Are there times when you do eat the way you intend to? What's different on those days?

Is breakfast and lunch easy, but dinner is where it falls apart? Are weekdays solid and weekends a completely different story? Why?

What happens on the days you follow through that doesn't happen on the days you don't?

Circumstances, perspectives, routines, moods. All of it. What's working. What isn't. What frustrates you. Which perspectives help and which ones hurt. What reliably makes this easier, and what reliably makes it harder.

We mine all the data we can from your patterns.

Then we look forward.

Maybe a day. Maybe a week. Where's an opportunity coming up where we can put DEFENSE to work?

Say it's tomorrow night, after dinner. We know you're usually fine all day, but around 8:30 or 9:00 you start negotiating.

So we look at what we know. Your patterns. Your perspectives. Your frustrations. What tends to be happening around you, and what tends to be happening inside your own head.

Do we know what success looks like in that moment? What can we put in place together to increase the odds?

We build something specific that we can test.

Here's the part I really want you to understand.

We're not testing it so you can come back and tell me you did it.

Of course I want you to win. But I also want to know what happens when the DEFENSE we built collides with your actual life.

Because sitting together and deciding what should work is one thing.

The perspective that felt sturdy when we talked about it suddenly isn't so convincing.

Now what happens?

Maybe what we built works beautifully. Maybe part of it works. Maybe you do the exact thing you said you didn't want to do.

Most people take that last one and reduce it to: I screwed up. I said I was going to do this and I didn't. Here we go again.

And in doing that, they throw away almost all of the useful information.

We won't.

I don't just want to know whether you did it. I want to know how it unfolded.

What happened? What were you thinking?

What changed between the moment you intended to follow through and the moment you didn't?

Did the DEFENSE we built even come to mind? Did part of it help? Where did it fall short?

Did something show up that neither of us anticipated?

Did we correctly identify the vulnerable moment, or did your real life just show us the opportunity is somewhere else entirely?

That's incredibly valuable information. Because now we're not guessing.

Your actual life just gave us more data about your stubborn problem. That's exactly what we want.

So we use it. We adjust. Then we put it back into your life and test it again.

I'm not looking for someone who needs another plan.

I'm looking for the person who has one stubborn problem that has survived all the plans.

If you're thinking, Elizabeth, I am so tired of this one, that's the one I want.

Give me that problem. Give me four weeks.