Continuing the last topic where we saw the importance of accountability, habits over willpower and motivation…
Let’s learn how to form these key habits in your own life…
First of all, understand that we are all different with varying daily routines.
So you need to look at your own life, your daily schedule and then decide which habits you can adopt that will help you… not immediately, but after six months, a year.
There’s a whole separate topic with examples of many key habits, but for now, let’s just keep going with the flow here.
Here’s an example…
STEP 1
On a paper, or in your book or diary, just write down what are the things you wish to achieve health-wise and weight-wise…
For example, obviously you want to lose weight… so let’s write down:
I Want To Lose 15kgs
And let’s say… you also want to minimize general stress in your life so you write…
I Want To Reduce Stress
So if these are your 2 goals for the next 6 months-1 year, next, we analyze what things can you do on a daily basis that will give you steady results if you diligently follow them every day, for a year?
Here are some things we can think of…
1 Let’s say, instead of the usual morning tea and biscuits, you decide to have a nutritious, early morning protein + greens smoothie…
… so you start your day feeling full and energetic, while avoiding obvious bad foods like sugary biscuits or crackers.
Of course, again, the nutritional section has more ideas, but let’s just put this down for illustrative purpose…
Next, maybe you might write…
2 Go for a 10 minute jog/walk every morning, which not only gets your blood pumping (and burn some calories), but also revitalizes your body for the day ahead.
And finally, to help with the stress, how about…
3 Meditate for just 10 minutes every morning
And with this… instead of 40 different things…
You just have 3 things to do every day
And they do not even take too much of your precious time.
Now, to get these things done…
… what do you need to actually DO?
Let’s see…
… How about waking up just 30 minutes earlier, preparing and drinking that smoothie, going for that quick run, and then come back and meditate.
And that’s it for the day, you continue the rest of your day NOT worrying about your weight, your diet and other things.
… these small habits which slowly build up towards your end goal.
And then, you do the…
STEP 2
The next step is to get a calendar (preferably put one up in your bedroom)…
And then what you do at the end of the day is, put a checkmark like this , next to the habits you did for that day, and just leave a blank space , for the days you didn’t…
So for example, maybe last week, you had that early morning smoothie 3 times, you went for a run 4 times but you meditated just 2 times.
So now you can see the checks and blanks for each of them.
Something like this…
Then the final step…
STEP 3
The final do is analyze what happened on the days you did not follow your habits… because you need to know why/where you failed, so you can try them or alter them for the upcoming weeks
So if you decided that one of your habits was to have a smoothie in the morning every day, but you saw that you didn’t do it 4 days out of 7.
Next, ask yourself why didn’t you do it? Don’t say “it just failed”… try to remember why it failed.
Maybe the problem was lack of time, maybe it just takes too much time in the morning… so then a solution could be – buying and keeping the ingredients ready, ahead of time, ready to go in the morning.
Or maybe you can simply blend the smoothie the night before and keep it in the fridge.
There are all kinds of ways to overcome our own personal objections, and once you know what problems stand in the way, you can find ways to overcome them.
Because again, remember, all you are doing is training yourself, your mind, to adopt simple habits, and not creating huge and overwhelming goals.
Finally, the last thing to do is creating new habits for the coming week.
For that, once you know what’s working and what isn’t, you can change and modify your new habits based on what didn’t work out in the past.
So maybe you decided to exercise every day but it didn’t work because the gym was too far.
Or you are doing workouts you hate, or you are simply doing too much.
So now we can think of 2 ways to counter that.
1 Get a closer gym or do it at home.
2 Do workouts that you enjoy, and do them only for half the time as before.
Then track for another week.
If it goes well, you can build up on these habits for the next week.
The keywords being = CONSISTENCY and SMALL EFFORTS.
Again, remember, this is a fundamental shift in your philosophy… it’s not about “goal setting” anymore.
It’s all about tracking your few vital habits every day. You are not going to think daily as to how far you have come
Why?
Because you know these habits will get you there eventually, it’s only a matter of ‘when’, not ‘whether’.
So continuing… when it comes to the new habits for the next week, we go back and look at the calendar and say something like…
“Ok, I only had that smoothie 3 out of 7 days, something is failing. What can I do to improve that?”
Or maybe you realize that meditating in the morning is not working for you. Maybe you are just not fresh enough, or the kids are up and all this stuff is going on in the house.
So the new habit this week might be to meditate before lunch.
Or let’s say your daily jogging/walking is not happening in the morning. So is there a possibility that you can walk back home from work in the evening?
In short, the new habits for the next week are all about building off what you did in the week before….
… and this is the simplest of all techniques to conquer your own excuses and your own barriers, and train your mind to stick with the plan…
… which WILL eventually get you to your goal, one daily step at a time.
KEY THINGS TO REMEMBER:
1 First, analyze your own life and decide the key habits you can develop. (We do help with this later, and you can also talk within our group for ideas.)
Look out for VERY small habits, minimum time consuming habits you can adopt in your daily schedule.
2 Next, use a small calendar and put a checkmark on the days you did those small things/habits.
3 Finally, at the end of the week, see how you fared, how many days you were able to do the things you decided.
If something’s going good, you were successful 5/7 days, great job, keep doing it…
If not… try to analyze what went wrong, and how you can work around it…
And in this way… simply by managing one single day at a time… and just a few small habits at a time, you will make steady progress towards your goal.
And in the times you think that the goal is unreachable and results are slow… remember that it took you a lot of time to gain weight too, so it’s only natural that it will take some time for your body to re-stabilize.
Respect your body, take your time to change it, treat it well, and soon YOU will be that person other women ask – “Kaunsa diet kiya!?”