It’s Sunday night, but I had a few good cold shower thoughts this morning.
Truth be told, the thoughts come during the warm portion of the shower. The cold part is just me finding my happy place.
So yesterday, I told you we were wrapping up our habit-building week. I lied.
We got some great feedback, so I wanted to add a few extra tips and tricks to help you start building habits that will actually stick.
Here’s the thing…
Life gets in the way. There will be days when you don’t want to do your new habit. Or you’ll want to fall back to your old habits. In fact, in the early going, you’re going to have a lot of those days.
So, here are three tips to take some of the pressure off you:
- Recruit Partners: Find a buddy, or even better, a group of buddies who want to build the same habit.
We’re competitive people. And I’ll be damned if my buddy is going to beat me at anything.
- Terrible Consequences: This one is brutal, but effective. The trick here is to make the pain of skipping the habit more than the satisfaction you get from skipping it.
In other words…Each time I ___________, I will ____________.
For example:
Each time I skip my workout this week, I will contribute $20 to Fauci’s retirement fund.
Every time I have more than one drink after work during the week, I will let my wife pick out the worst work outfit she can put together.
This is a trick that can get super weird (and fun).
- #nevermisstwice: This happened organically through one of our coaching groups a few years ago.
Missing one day isn’t going to ruin your habit…but two? Yup, because two turns into 30 days before you know it. Never, ever miss twice.
Okay, now that I’ve gotten those off my chest, we can move on to a new subject this upcoming week.
But I’ll leave you with a final bit of advice…
KEEP IT SIMPLE.
Pick ONE habit. Make it a “yes” or “no” habit. Either you did it or you didn’t.
Words like “more” and “better” are useless. WTF does exercise “more” mean? You either walked for 30 minutes or you didn’t. It’s that simple.
You’ve got this.
Your #1 Fan,
Jeff Pelizzaro
PS – If you want to become a lean, mean, habit-dominating machine in 2022…then the 18STRONG App is your new home. No BS. No fluff.
We’ll do it together.