It’s Your Story — Feel Free To Hit Them With A Plot Twist Any Time You Like.
I’ve been facing a lot of changes this year, who hasn’t — right? New job, new house, new roommate, and new lifestyle but same goals. With all these changes it’s been really hard to 1) make sure I’m maintaining my positive habits and 2) build on those habits an and create new good habits.
I have more things I need to fit into my day, I have a house to maintain (much more work than my tiny little apartment), I’m building a business so I can kiss 9–5s away for good, and I’m taking care of a newborn by myself for 10 hours a day.
That’s a lot. I’ve been struggling to make sure I’m getting 7–8 hours of sleep, to meal prep so I have healthy options throughout my busy day, I’m struggling to get my 15–20 minutes of daily reading in, I’m struggling to maintain my skin care routine, to workout as much as I’d like to… Never mind keeping up with dishes and laundry and grocery shopping and oh great! the water softener needs needs water softener salt and where do I even buy this — I’ve never had a water softener before.
I was having a difficult time keeping up with all these things as it was and I also wanted to add in a daily outdoor run to my routine (in order to help work towards my goal of getting a flat tummy!)
New goals, new changes in our lives, and new responsibilities usually means we need to make changes to our current routine and habits to meet those goals and take care of every thing we need to in a day.
I decided that what I needed to do to meet my goals was wake up earlier so that I could knock out some of my goals in time that wasn’t interrupted by a hungry baby, or a client phone call or IG begging for my attention or any of the other things that never fail to interrupt our days.
The goal I’m working on is to wake one hour earlier. 5:30am — wake up, go a 3 mile run, do a workout, get ready for the day (including taking care of my skin and not spilling coffee beans all over the kitchen for my roommate to clean up later)- I’ve done this before. In fact when working for my corporate world job I would wake up at 4:30am and workout from 5–6am and be to work by 7am but it’s been a while since that was my routine and thinking I could just set my alarm back and do it no problem was naive to say the least.
Most people cannot just flip habits on a dime like that.
The first few days I was unsuccessful. Waking up only when forced to start my day. Frustrated but not willing to give up I readjusted the expectations I had for myself.
I still had my alarm at 5:30 but had “snooze alarms” set too and I didn’t expect to just wake up one day and be able to fulfill my full plan for myself. I decided thats ok. Achieving some of the goal is better than not at all.
When we’re building new habits we might only complete a portion of the new habit when we’re starting out. For my new morning routine this is what the first week looked like
Day 1 — woke up at 6:20am only giving me an extra 10 minutes and I would usually just scroll through IG but thats not why I was trying to wake up early so I put on my workout clothes and laced up my shoes and did a 10 minute workout.
Day 2 — I woke up at 6:10am still not enough time to fulfill my new desired morning routine but there was time for a 5 minute run and a 10 minute work out so again I put on my shoes and did just that.
Day 3–6:00am wake. This is 30 extra minutes.. time for a 10 minute run and a 10 minute workout and time to clean up the kitchen before it was time to care for baby Joey.
Day 4– 5:45am wake up but I closed my eyes and suddenly it was 6:10am. That’s ok. Time for run and work out.
Day 5- 5:55am wake up. Run ☑️ workout ☑️ kitchen cleaned ☑️
I’m still working on waking up earlier so that my run can be longer but it’s important that I’m building the routine even when I don’t have time to run as long I’d like or do as many chores as I’d like..
You have to start showing up to your habits before they are habits. You have to allow yourself room to fail (WITH GRACE!) and realize there is a point to doing it even if you don’t get to fully achieve the goal — making a goal 50% or 25%.. hell 5% of the way is better than not making it at all. Its the foundation to getting there. It’s the building blocks of becoming the person we want to be.
You don’t wake up one day and decide to carry out better habits (or maybe you can but it’s really hard and probably won’t be long lasting)
My current favorite author, James Clear, has a fantastic book on breaking down old habits and building new habits. I highly recommend reading his Atomic Habits novel. His many tips and tricks and goes through the psychology behind how habits are broken or created.
I’ll paraphrase my process that he has inspired:
- Where do you want to go?
- Where are you now?
- What’s one step you can take to get closer?
Step one: visual the person you want to be and think about the daily habits of that person.
Step two: identify the habits you currently have an make a list of the habits that are advancing your goals and list of the habits that are hurting your progress towards your goals.
Step three: indemnify a habit you can change in the positive direction. Work on that every day until you change the habit.
Step four: pick a new habit to change and repeat steps 1–3
Recognize Not everything will be changed at once — Start showing up to good habits even if you aren’t all the way there — use trial and error until you can make the habits work for you.
Keep going. You don’t fail until you stop trying.
