- One year ago, I decided to attempt
12 thirty-day experiments over the course of 12 months.
From drinking more water to taking cold showers
and counting calories.
Each of them tapped into a different area
of self development that I was curious about.
What I hadn't anticipated when I started
was just how difficult that process would be
and how much it would teach me about building habits.
What I can say that I've learned
is that breath work is really fucking hard.
There are some days when I'm just not in the mood.
My brain will come up with all these excuses
for why I shouldn't.
So I wanna make it as easy as possible
and do the most painful thing first,
which at the moment for me is cardio.
So while in my last video, I talked about
some of the general lessons I learned from that experience,
in this video I wanna get more tactical
and give you actionable advice
for how to get your personal habits to stick.
In a couple months I'll be releasing a habit course
going into even more depth about the content in this video.
So if you wanna get updates,
sign up for my newsletter at mattdavella.com.
I first got interested in self-development
back in my junior year of college.
What really started as me just trying
to get better at talking to girls
led me to change literally every aspect of my life.
I started going to the gym daily,
gaining over 20 pounds of muscle in under a year.
I learned everything I could about personal finance,
eventually paying off six figures of student debt.
And while I never really did figure out
how to talk with women,
I did string enough coherent sentences together
to convince my wife, Natalie, into marrying me.
- You find yourselves here at the world famous
Little White Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas, Nevada.
- So while it might be easy to look at my life now
and think that I've always had my shit together,
I truly haven't.
If you met me years ago you'd have met a scrawny kid
who was bad at talking with girls,
who was terrible with money,
but I did have one thing going for me
and it was this deep desire to wanna improve
my circumstances in life.
And as I look back now I realize
that that desire was paramount to getting started.
And the one thing that you need to know
is that your past does not define your future.
It doesn't define where you can go.
So if you let go of that baggage, you can begin to change.
When I first got into self development back in college,
I read dozens of books, listened to audio tapes,
and watched inspiring videos that truly
had a positive impact on my life.
But if there's one thing that you
can take away from this video,
it's that watching this video isn't enough.
Until you take action, you're standing still.
And that was a lesson that I relearned last year
as I started to get into these 30-day experiments
starting back in January, when I did my very first one,
I decided to quit sugar.
After a month of indulging my sweet tooth,
I developed a pretty bad habit of snacking.
And early into this experiment,
I learned an important lesson about habit change.
You need to control your environment.
Not yourself.
I have the self control of a four year old.
When I have snacks in the house, I will eat them.
Cookies, ice cream, chocolate, forget about it.
So I knew that if I wanted to quit sugar,
I would have to get them out of my house.
I just don't have the discipline to resist them.
And if you eat most of your meals at home like I do,
this is the single most important thing you can do
to change your diet and to change your eating habits.
Simply don't bring the junk into your house to begin with.
But apart from food, there are other ways
that you can change your environment
to help you to make your habits stick.
The one thing that really stands out to me
was creating calendars and then putting 'em
in really prominent places.
Places that I could not ignore in my home.
So every day I would feel compelled and be reminded
to continue these habits.
For 30 days of cold showers,
that meant it was right next to our shower.
For 30 days of meditating I stuck it next to our bedroom.
Day five, that's five hours of meditating so far.
Just wasting my days away. - [Natalie] I was gonna say
imagine all the videos you could have done in five hours.
(Matt groans) - For 30 days of breath work,
I kept a small note card near our bed.
There are a couple other ways
to create these kinds of reminders.
The night before a workout,
you can pre-prepare your workout clothes.
When I did a seven-day digital minimalism experiment,
I stuck reminders to the rules I had set for myself
on my computer.
This was just a reminder to me not to check email
again and again throughout the day.
And I often leave my protein container
on the kitchen counter in a prominent place
as a subtle nudge to drink a protein shake each day.
By changing your environment, you can change your behavior.
Sometimes a reminder is all you need
to keep the streak going.
As I'm sure you're well aware,
building New Year's resolutions and habits
is incredibly difficult.
And often when we try, we fail.
So you might be wondering how was I able
to build so many habits over the course of a year,
even if it was just for 30 days at a time?
And really I have to say it comes down to accountability.
(soft music) (film reel whirring)
I released a video earlier this year
called, "12 Habits for Life."
In that video, I talked about how building good habits
has positively impacted my life.
And it's also when I first publicly stated
that I would be attempting to build 12
thirty-day habits in 2019.
So this year, in an effort to try to learn more,
but also to make myself feel very uncomfortable,
I'm gonna be doing 12 thirty-day experiments.
Suddenly, I felt accountable.
Accountable to myself and to those who watch my videos.
I shouldn't call you a bitch, but you're being a bitch.
Now, would you guys really care if I halfway through
decided to quit and give up?
Probably not. I don't think anybody would even notice.
But now that I had said it out loud, I knew it.
It was in this public forum and I just felt
so much more compelled to wanna stick through with it.
And then as I started to try these 30-day challenges
and post them online, I heard from people
in the comments and on social media
asking me what my next challenge would be.
As the months went by, my accountability
to these 30-day challenges grew.
But you don't need to have a YouTube channel
or an audience to find that same kind of accountability
in your life.
So as my friends and family started to find out
about these challenges, they too started asking questions
about what I was currently working on.
And really what they were asking for
is what kind of agony was I currently going through?
Was it cold showers? Waking up at 5:00 AM?
Or quitting coffee?
And I think what you'll find is
when you do this for yourself,
when you start to tell your family and friends
about these things that you're working on
and trying to improve, you'll find way more encouragement
instead of people criticizing you.
You'll find people that want you to win
and they want you to succeed
and them talking about it with you every time they see you,
you knowing that those conversations are gonna happen,
are a powerful way to keep that habit going.
In addition to going macro and sharing it publicly
you can also go micro and find one person
to become your accountability partner.
They could be somebody that you pay,
like a personal trainer or a life coach,
or it could be a spouse or a friend
that have a similar goal to you.
So about six months ago, Natalie came to me
and asked me to show her around the gym
and some of the equipment that was foreign to her.
Up until this time she had primarily only done classes.
So I agreed.
And for the first time I had a gym partner.
We went to the gym every day together,
five, sometimes six days a week.
And what I realized was how powerful it is
to have that accountability partner with you
to encourage you and push you to go to the gym,
especially when you don't want to.
- Having you there as someone who kind of knows the gym
and was able to introduce me into a few things.
I knew how to use some of the equipment
totally took that social anxiety away
and has allowed me to over time,
make a regular practice of going to the gym,
even now without you.
Like, I think I went to the gym with you
every day for a month.
And then after a month, when I felt comfortable,
more relaxed, like I was able to go without you.
And that habit has stuck, which has been really awesome.
- The biggest benefit I found was that it reduced
our ability to create excuses.
If one person was feeling shitty,
they didn't feel like going to the gym,
the other person would give them
that loving kick that they needed.
And when we were at the gym,
I was most surprised by how suddenly my form improved
and how I no longer skip my ab workout or cardio.
Having someone there to work with you
will keep you accountable in ways
that you hadn't even realized.
So there's one video that I made last year that seemed to
resonate with people in a way that I hadn't expected.
It was called the two-day rule.
And it's a powerful approach to habit change
that will give you the best chance at getting them to stick.
(calm music) (film reel whirring)
I implemented the two-day rule last year when
I attempted to build three habits at the same time
in my video, "How to Hack Your Habits."
With the two-day rule it's very simple,
I don't let myself take two days off in a row.
I could take one day off,
I can take multiple days off in a week,
but having two days off in a row,
I know from my experience, that it's so much more likely
for me to have, have 3, 4, 5 days off
and then I completely lose track of the habit.
So I just had a really long, full-day shoot.
I didn't have a chance to go to the gym in the morning
and I skipped yesterday.
So that means that according to the two day-rule,
today I have to go to the gym.
It made the entire process much easier,
more enjoyable, and gave me guilt free breaks
when I needed it.
By using the two-day rule,
we can leverage these moments when we need rest,
when we need some time off,
but also make sure that we don't break
that momentum by skipping day after day after day.
When you're first building a habit
you can kickstart behavior change by consistently showing up
each and every day for the first 30 days.
As long as you're not overdoing your daily commitment,
like by working out so much that you're too sore
to get outta bed the next morning,
doing the habit every day can help you build momentum.
You want to get to a place where
you don't even have to think about the habit.
That's truly when it forms.
And while it might not feel like it's possible,
you will get to a point where it's more difficult
not to do the habit.
So if there's one thing that I've learned
over the past 12 months of building habits,
but really from the past 10 years
of my own personal development journey,
it's that the process never ends
and that there will always be a struggle and that's okay.
But the sooner that you learn that
and the sooner that you realize that
you can start to show up and actually enjoy it.
Enjoy those moments where you're just not getting it,
where you have to try over and over and over again
to get it right, that's okay.
You're gonna fail. You're gonna screw up.
Just get used to it.
But if you show up with that positive attitude every day
and just keep trying to do better
that's really all you can ask of yourself.
(Matt claps)
That was cool.
So real quick, before I wrap things up.
As you might have heard,
there are really intense fires
raging through Australia right now.
It's really sad what's happening there
and I wanted to do my own small part in trying to help out.
So all of the ad revenue from this video is gonna be donated
towards the efforts to recover as well as fight these fires.
And if you guys wanted to contribute for yourselves,
I'll leave a link or two down in the description
to make it easy for you.
Even if you contribute $5-10
that would really mean the world to me.
Australia's become like a second home to me.
And I just know how, how wrecked a lot of my family
and friends who live in Australia are because of this.
So if you could help out
that would really mean a whole lot to me.
Thanks for watching.
And I'll see you next time.