New Year New Me?
Let me share a slightly different approach...
January is the time people tend to set big new goals for themselves. I often hear "I want to lose 10kgs and train 6 days a week" or "I want to run a marathon" or "this is the year I finally get on top of my nutrition/alcohol consumption".
Personally I am ALL FOR having things to work towards, but the problem I see most people run into (I am absolutely guilty of this myself) is that they have no plan in place to implement the habits that are needed to achieve these goals. They have the destination in mind without the process, so when the process gets hard... we 'fall off the wagon' back into our old ways.
So I want to offer up some info about habits... do with it what you will!
Contrary to popular belief – habits are about who you are being rather than what you are doing. One of the main reasons as humans we don’t stick to the habits we would like to adopt or permanently disregard ones we’d like to get rid of; is because we don’t get on board with them emotionally or mentally. This means when our new habits become challenging or boring, we abandon them for something easier/more fun/tastes better/ or provides a sense of immediate gratification. And honestly – a lot of people drop their new habits or fall back into old ones because they are trying to fill an emotional void within themselves.
Failures people experience in the past often cloud their confidence around what they are capable of achieving in the present and future.
The way to keep upping your habits game is by channelling a powerful positive mindset and consciously thinking thoughts that are aligned with where you want to go and who you want to become. Staying focused on who you are becoming regardless of who/where we are now assists with not getting bogged down in minor ‘slip-ups’ as we need to consider it as a journey rather than a short term fix.
Key elements involved in habit creation:
The Trigger – can be in the form of a sound/action/thought/feeling/smell/sight/emotion and send cues to our brain that it is time to perform a habit.
The Sequence – Habits are our bodies way of lightening the load on our brains – they happen on auto-pilot so the brain can perform other tasks and take in other information.
Repetition – if you think of the brain as a jungle– when we create new habits we have to hack through vines and bushes to create a new path. By continuing to use this new path everyday it gets easier and easier to walk along. This is known as establishing new neural pathways in which habits flow through automatically without thinking about them.
Ease –the easier things are, the more likely we are to do them. The easier you make repeating the habits you want in your life (and the harder you make ones you want to lose) the more success you will have.
Patience – new habits low on the instant gratification scale as they take a while to produce the desired result. i.e. eating salad for a week won’t make you skinny and lifting weights for a week won’t make you muscly. So some key points for this stage: relish in the fact you show up at all, keep track of your progress to see how far you’ve come, and look for the little wins i.e. 50 push ups instead of 30.
Identity – shift your identity to match the habits you are adopting. Habits are not just our actions; they are our beliefs, thoughts, words, and our perception of ourselves and the world around us. For a new habit to stick it needs to become a valuable part of our identity.
‘Our realities are determined by how we habitually perceive ourselves and our worlds.’
The first step in any major change in your life is always awareness. Start noticing the specifics of how you’re behaving right now so you can change the actions you are making that are not in alignment with where you want to be heading. The most profound change you can make with habit alterations is start identifying as the person you want to become.
