For the past two years, if you were looking for me on weekday mornings between 8 and 9 am, you would have found me at my local CrossFit – that workout regimen that combines Olympic gymnastic and weightlifting moves and high-intensity aerobic training with weeping, grunting and collapsing. This was going to be the habit that upgraded my physique! This was going to be the new activity that changed my life for the better!

Guess what? It didn’t work – and not for the reasons you might think. It didn’t work because I misplaced my halo.

For two years, I believed that if I exercised the way that professional athletes do, I could also eat the way professional athletes do. 50 pull-ups? 100 squats? 200 sit-ups? Surely that’s a recipe for carte blanche dining, right? As it turned out, it wasn’t. I had fallen prey to a behavioral halo effect bias that was hurting me both physically (100 squats!) and emotionally (feeling stuck at the same weight).

The “halo effect” is defined as the tendency for a person’s positive or negative traits to “spill over” from one personality area to another in others’ perceptions of them. My halo effect was behavioral – I was expecting the benefits of one overwhelming positive action (intensive exercise) to spill over into another area of my life (my eating habits). I thought that if I behaved beautifully in the gym, I could misbehave at the table. So maybe I could have gotten away with it a little bit, but I couldn’t get away with it nearly as much as I told myself. And as much as I tried to right-size my portions, I couldn’t shake that “halo” feeling that I shouldn’t have to work out so hard to still eat so little.

I am not alone. Have you ever worked for a manager who believed that her intelligence and talent gave her the right to explode at her direct reports? Behavioral halo effect. Do you know a major donor who thinks that the size of his gift permits him to boss other volunteers (as well as professionals) around? Behavioral halo effect.

And how about you? Do you:

• Treat your members and customers with incredible patience at work…and then come home and blow up at your kid for leaving his shoes in the hall?
• Give your undivided personal attention to your boss but keep one eye on your cell phone when a direct report wants to talk with you?
• Attend every board meeting but cancel your supervision meetings?
• Make sure your babysitter or nanny never wants for anything, while brushing aside your spouse’s needs?
• Take care of everyone else while ignoring your own health and happiness?

If you answered yes to any of these, your halo is hollow. You’re allowing one set of positive behaviors to cast an artificial glow on others that clearly don’t deserve a spotlight. How do you fix it? Stop granting yourself permission and excuses to behave carelessly, and start giving yourself credit for the fact that you clearly have what it takes to act responsibly, considerately, and like a mensch. If you can do it somewhere, sometimes, and with some people, you can do it (almost) everywhere, every time, and with most people. Especially with and for yourself.

So how did I drop the halo and its blinding effects? I quit exercising and eating like a linebacker and started working out like someone who needed to 1) have better balance and 2) be careful about what she ate. I no longer allowed one overwhelmingly positive action to grant me permission for excess or carelessness.  By dropping the halo, I raised the bar for my behavior and dropped the excuses — along with almost 25 pounds — along the way!