Change can be & often is hard, especially positive habit, lifestyle & body changes. After all we generally do pretty much the same things, eat the same things, go to the same places each day, etc, etc, etc…….& if these daily habits are not leading or helping us to reach our goals (what ever those goals may be), then we need to start making some changes.
That is where the tricky stuff can start as quite a lot of the time we try to make wholesale sweeping changes across our lives, I’m going to go to the gym every morning before work, I’m going to lose X amount of weight by my summer holidays, I’m never eating takeout again, I’m off alcohol from now on, it’s bed & asleep by 9pm & up at 6am everyday now, etc, etc, etc……sound familiar? These changes, while all can be very helpful & fit in with a healthy lifestyle, can be huge changes for a person to try & make, especially if they try to implement more than one change at a time.
Maybe instead of focusing on big changes in our life or on focusing on the outcomes of these habits or goals, we focus more on the behaviors & smaller habits that can help lead us to our desired goal? Remember,,,
Behaviors = YOU CONTROL
Outcomes = YOU CAN’T CONTROL
I’ll explain a little here, behaviors we control because we can break the path to any goal down into small daily habits that we then practice for 1–2 weeks before moving on to the next habit & all of these habits lead from one to the next in a logical thought out way. We also try to make the habits so small that we hardly realize that we are doing them, however they will add up very quickly over time & the better we get at performing our new habits daily then we can start making the subsequent habits a little bigger or slightly more challenging.
Now when we focus on outcomes, they usually come with having to make a big, if not huge change to our daily routine & the rates of regression back to our old habits from big habit changes like that are something in the region of 80–90%. If we make big changes like say, going from never training to getting up at 6am five mornings a week to train, or if you never eat vegetables to eating a full portion of vegetables with every meal is going to be very hard to be consistent with, especially if something unexpected happens in your life, after all, life happens & much like an outcome we simply can’t always control it from happening.
This all reminds me of a saying from Dr. Layne Norton PhD, “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten!”
To see change you need to make a change & to make a change you need to have a plan & to be in a position to execute that plan it needs to be built around your lifestyle & it also needs to be easy to implement (the level of ease will be an individual thing). So aim high with your goals, however try to keep the steps & habits to those goals smaller & manageable!