Building Better Habits

Good Afternoon Everyone! This week we will talk about building better habits. Building habits is important in the long term, so we aren’t expending all this extra energy towards new things we keep trying to throw into our daily routine. Forming a habit is so helpful because it’s something you just do. It’s not something you have to continue to remind yourself about or continue to forget about.

Willpower is the key to achieving everything we want in life, according to science. Our willpower is not infinite. “It’s like a muscle you can work only so much before it fatigues.” This is why we must use our willpower to create the habits that we want to form. The habits we create will become common practice to us and we will be able to accomplish what we want without having to exert our will. 

“..all great teachers tell us to master our fundamental needs – our rest, nutrition, and exercise – before we strive for specific goals. If you don’t have a strong foundation, you won’t be able to build up to reaching your potential.”

A few tips before we get into this series: 

1. Eat healthy, nourishing food when you are hungry. Listen to your body and respond accordingly and then you can continue to direct your focus on your goals. 

2. Focus on controlling your breathing and take a deep breathe more often. It will allow you to have a clearer mind and can boost your will-power in times of distress. 

3. Meditate. Meditate. Meditate. Meditation will strengthen your brain and give you a clear mind to enable you to form habits, regulate emotions and control your decision making.

STEP 1 – Identify Your ‘KEYSTONE’ Habit – Once mastered, this habit will have the greatest impact on your life. It is the base of all of your other habits that you want to build. We also have to remember that we can’t build every habit we want all at once, otherwise we will overwhelm ourselves. Set yourself up for success. 

Take today and really think about your goals. Get a notebook and a pen. Write down your goals and the habits that you need to build to be able to achieve those goals. Decipher your ‘key’ habit that will form a support the rest of your habits you want to form. Create an action plan with structure. Write down how you will execute this habit (what time/how long/what you need to accomplish this/how you will do it). The ‘key’ or ‘keystone’ habit that you choose will be the first and only habit you will focus on everyday for at least a month. This can be daily exercise, a full 8 hours of sleep, implementing meditation, or simply adding a smoothie into your daily diet. This habit will lay a foundation for positive change. 

What is it that keeps us going every single day? Well the answer is simple. We work hard and pursue what we do because of our ‘WHY’ “Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche believed that anyone who has a strong ‘why’ can endure almost any ‘how.’” In that same notebook from yesterday, write down why you are building each habit. Identify what the benefits of each habit and focus directly on your first, keystone habit. Your ‘why’ is very powerful. If you know and feel strongly about why you are creating this habit, then it will be that much easier to master it. 

Any setbacks, adversities, or pain that you go through while forming this habit can be endured when you know why you are doing what you’re doing. Remember why you’re doing it and you will thrive in the process. 

How will you hold yourself accountable? 

Commitment – This word and the meaning behind it is so powerful. The commitments that we make to ourselves can be life changing and they can feel so good. 

Every new year we have the intentions of committing to our resolutions. Our new year resolutions can translate into new habits. We must not waiver, we have to stay focused and we have to have the willpower to commit to our new habit daily. We have selected our ‘keystone’ habit, identified our how and why, and now we must commit and put our plan into action. You should commit 100% to doing the work necessary to build your habit. Take no days off and tell yourself that this work is non-negotiable. You owe it to yourself to invest in yourself. 

Practice makes perfect, right? Daily practice of a habit will create a momentum for you to stay committed. Skipping days or only focusing on building a habit part time will not form the habit. We do have to remember to have grace with ourselves if we do make a mistake, but that’s just it. It’s a mistake. We want to fix that mistake immediately and continue with our daily practices until they become second nature. 

When we are establishing a habit in our life we must practice daily and stay consistent. 

Step one to consistency: track your progress on a calendar or in that same notebook. The act of marking something off feels so good and gives a sense of accomplishment. Monitoring and keeping track of your actions holds you accountable and keeps you motivated to keep going. Set a reminder on your phone that goes off the same time every day or put a sticky note somewhere where you will see it every day to keep you on track. 

Let’s say you made a mistake and forgot or something came up that you were unable to accomplish your practice. Write it down! Mark it on your calendar and write why you missed your practice. This way you are staying consistent with tracking and you are taking full responsibility for why you missed. Remember have grace with yourself, but stay strict to your plan. 

We have two more steps of learning how to set yourself up for success to build habits. Today we want to encourage making this process easy on yourself. If you are telling yourself “I want to do x” and having no plan as to how you are going to execute it, you are making it hard on yourself. You have this goal you want to make a habit. We talked about this a bit. We want to create a micro list or a plan of action to be able to build this habit.

For example: Goal/Habit: I want to meditate morning and night. 

Now ask yourself how you are going to make that happen. Start slow and small. This is a big step to go from never meditating to meditating twice in one day. Create your plan of action day by day, week by week and build. Start with one minute of meditation in the morning and one minute of meditation at night and after a week if you are getting comfortable and staying consistent, start to add. Small improvement is still improvement. 

You can also make it easier on yourself by saying it’s okay to your imperfections. If one day you are not feeling up to your practice, just do it anyways, but tell yourself it’s okay if your practice sucked that day. At least you did it and you can mark it off for the day. Find ways to keep yourself motivated by creating an easy pathway for success. 

We are coming to a close with our building a habit series with some words of advice. Simply embrace and love the process. Growth is a rollercoaster. Installing a new habit into your daily routine is a process and it will be filled with good and bad days, but embrace each day as it is. Love yourself and what you are doing because you know it will make you a better you in the end. 

“Hal Elrod, author of The Miracle Morning, has a great way of looking at this. Elrod argues that it takes 30 days to establish a new habit. He says the process involves three phases. The first one will feel unbearable. The second will feel uncomfortable, but you’ll begin feeling the benefits. After the third phase, you’ll feel unstoppable. It’s in the last phase that you’ll feel on fire. People couldn’t pay you to stop practicing your new habit because it feels fun.”

It’s not easy to be great, otherwise everyone would be. Before you know it you will be a master of your new habit, but what you will need is patience and persistence. Keep going, friends! Soon enough you will have the willpower to face new obstacles, build better habits and create the life you want for yourself. You are now fully equipt with all the tools to successfully tackle a new habit! Good luck! Thank you for being here!