I Knew Better. So Why Did I Keep Doing It?

Dalhousie days - when a 15-minute walk somehow seemed less appealing than accumulating parking tickets.

When I was in university, I lived about a 15-minute walk from campus. Naturally, I drove. I'd leave home with just enough time to get to Dalhousie, find a parking spot and make it to class in the Biology building. There was plenty of street parking around campus, with one small problem: most of it had a two-hour limit. No problem, I told myself. I'd go to my first class, come back out, move the car, and carry on with my day. Simple.

Except that's almost never what happened.

After my first class, I'd think, I still have an hour. I'll move it after the next one. After the next class, I'd forget. Or I'd remember and think, Well, it's probably too late now. Or, occasionally, I'd employ the highly sophisticated strategy of: Maybe they won't ticket me today. They usually did.

Before long, I'd accumulated more than $300 in parking tickets, a fairly significant problem when my part-time lifeguarding job paid about $8 an hour.

So naturally, I dealt with this problem by ignoring the tickets. Eventually, notices started arriving at my parents' house. Ticket after ticket. My dad would get frustrated and tell me, quite reasonably, to just walk to class. I agreed. My mom suggested leaving earlier so I could park somewhere without the two-hour limit. Also reasonable. I agreed with her too. I knew walking would solve the problem. I knew leaving earlier would solve the problem. I knew continuing to park in the same place and hoping for a different outcome was costing me money I didn't have. And yet, month after month, I kept doing it. Sometimes I walked. Sometimes I left early enough to find a better spot. But somehow I kept ending up back in that two-hour parking zone.

Knowing wasn't the problem.

Looking back, what's interesting to me isn't that I didn't know what to do. I knew exactly what to do. I had information. I had advice. I had options. I even had motivation because $300 in parking tickets was a pretty compelling reason for a university student earning $8 an hour.

And still, changing what I actually did was difficult.

We tend to repeat behaviours that are familiar, convenient or already built into our routines. Even when the consequences aren't particularly helpful, the thing we're already doing can feel like the easiest choice in the moment.

But what if we could make a different choice easier?

What if, instead of simply telling myself I should walk, I'd looked at what kept getting me into the car every morning? What would have needed to change the night before? What made leaving earlier difficult? What could have made walking the easier, more automatic choice? What was actually getting in the way?

Our health isn't so different.

Most of us aren't short on information about how to be healthier. We know movement matters. We know sleep matters. We know eating well matters. We know managing stress matters. And sometimes a healthcare professional  has given us very specific advice about a change that could improve our health.

Yet knowing what would help and actually making it happen consistently in real life are two very different things.

Our choices don't happen in a vacuum. They happen when we're tired. When we're busy. When work runs late. When the weather is terrible. When someone needs us. When the old routine is easier. When motivation disappears. And sometimes being told what we should do, even when the advice is completely correct, isn't what we're missing.

We need to understand what is getting in the way.

We need to explore what matters enough to make change worthwhile.

We need to find changes that can actually fit into the life we're living.

And sometimes we need support while we figure that out.

That's where health coaching can help.

Health coaching isn't about giving you another list of things you should be doing.

It's about helping you bridge the gap between knowing and doing, and finding changes that work not just in theory, but in your real life.

And discovering what else might be possible.