I have to have something sweet after dinner
I must drink wine when eating fish to bring out the flavor
How can you celebrate Easter without a candy filled Easter basket?
The bathroom is so far away from my desk – if I drink too much water I spend the whole day walking to the bathroom!
I cannot waste food so I have to eat what my children do not finish
I must have milk and sugar with my coffee
Everyday at 3pm I have to have a cup of coffee
Who wants to workout while on vacation?
There is no way I can workout in the mornings.
I am too tired after work to exercise
I love cheese too much
I love bourbon too much
I love chocolate too much
I love wine too much
I love bread too much
These are all actual statements I have heard from clients in the last week. Can your relate to any of them? They all may sound like excuses but lets call them habits. That is what they are right? We are so conditioned and used to doing certain things that we believe it is fact, a must, a non-negotiable. But…what if…everything was negotiable and we could change things up a bit?
I rarely do this but…I GUARANTEE you can create a healthy behavior that you thought was totally impossible. I am certain you can make it happen. I watch clients change in ways I didn’t think were possible – I am often left speechless with the dramatic changes they achieve. I myself do things everyday that shock me. Oh that last line has left the door open for so many buddies to pick on me but I am keeping it.
How to create change? Make a bad habit into a good one? Make yourself speechless?
Create change for a month. We all have heard the line that it takes 3 weeks to create a new behavior and that is probably true – ish. Just do something for a month and see how it goes. If one day you get off track get back on track for the rest of the month. You may notice after the month that you want to keep that new habit around.
Make it realistic. This is not the moment to change 10 things all at once. Choose one thing. Just one. Figure out how you are going to change it and stick with it for a month.
Be accountable. Write the new goal down, tell a friend, tell me, tell someone, put it in your calendar – do whatever you got to do to remind yourself to stick with it!
Do not over think it. While I am a big fan of over-analyzing, this is not one of those moments. Just do it!
A month will go by far quicker than you realize and you may notice that something you thought was a daily necessity is now a thing of a past. Something you craved is now a distant memory. Something that ruled your life is now gone. Imagine that?
Go break some habits! Start living the way you want.