- Good morning, good life, welcome back to AmyTV,
where we come together to help you
go after the life that you want.
We are back for another episode of AmyTV Book Club
and this one is a good one! (clapping hands)
#AMYTVBOOKCLUB.
That was my RuPaul voice.
You're gonna wanna tune in to this episode
to find out how to make your good habits
stick with this trick.
(upbeat music)
I'm so excited because the book we are reviewing today
for AmyTV Book Club is "Atomic Habits" by James Clear.
My friend James, I decided to match your book today,
how are we feeling about it?
Yes, yes, yes!
If you follow me on Instagram
and also the Community tab here on YouTube,
or if you are in Shine Squad, you got first notice
that this is the book we're reviewing today.
I always like to tell you in advance what book I'm reading,
so that when we come here to have book club,
it's kind of like a regular book club,
where we all read it and now we must talk about it.
Did you do your homework?
Mm-hmm, no big deal,
I'm gonna carry this thing all the way through.
I wanna say something first.
I know James, I think he's fantastic.
His work is incredible, I mean,
must follow on Twitter, and a blog that will help you
more than you even knew you needed.
But I was kind of hesitant in choosing this book
for the next book club selection,
'cause I thought we were going
a little bit too deep into habits,
and maybe we needed to branch out a little bit.
But I started reading it anyway, because I had to,
and I quickly changed my mind.
This is an AmyTV Book Club book, okay?
If you haven't read it yet, dig in.
But I'm gonna be telling you today why you should,
and how you're gonna be able to stick with your habits
according to what he writes about in the book
that is a little bit different than what we've heard before.
And it has to do with who you are.
Before I can dig into this review,
you know what time it is.
I have to give a little bit of Twitter gratitude,
and today I wanna shine a light on @EvieDriver.
Evie, thank you so much for watching these videos.
I acknowledge you for your time,
your attention, and your retweet.
That was pretty cool, thank you so much!
If you would potentially like to be featured here
on AmyTV Twitter gratitude,
all you have to do is follow me on Twitter,
and then retweet my latest video when it comes out.
I might randomly select you!
As I'm sure you're not surprised,
I have a whole procedure for reading books,
specifically those of the nonfiction genre.
The first step is the reading phase,
and this is where I read the book,
because that's a requirement.
Next is the download phase,
talking about some of the things
that resonated most with me, and then finally,
is the execution phase.
And this is where I choose one thing
that I'm going to do differently in my life
as a result of reading this book.
Let's talk about the reading phase.
For "Atomic Habits" I actually, of course,
always have a hard copy here,
'cause it's good to have props in a video.
Such a good YouTuber, Amy!
But I actually read this book on Audible.
I love to be able to scale my time
and be able to do things while doing other things.
In this case, it was a lot of working out
and driving to the gym.
I listened to "Atomic Habits" on Audible in the meantime.
James read the book on Audible, which made it exceptional,
but no matter what you prefer, hard copy,
e-book, library book or audiobook,
it doesn't matter what you wanna do,
just snag it, because it's worth it.
After I've read the book, I like to go back
and flip through all my highlights, my margin notes,
my underlines, anything that resonated with me
so that I can kind of see what the trends are there.
So that's what I'm gonna share with you here.
One of the early moments of the book
is something that made me decide that this
was a good contender for AmyTV Book Club,
and so I wanna share it with you
because it's definitely helping me a lot,
and resonating with me.
You know, because you've been around
here probably for a little while,
that I've got quite a few good habits in my life,
but there's always more that I could be doing.
You know that feeling, where you're like,
I can always be doing more, I can always be doing better.
I have that feeling all the time,
and so I'm always thinking,
what are the things I wish I was doing,
what are the habits I wish I had,
and that's what I wanted to find in this book,
something to help me facilitate some of those.
This thing that he said at the beginning
is what helped me toward that,
and what ultimately made this book
a selection for AmyTV Book Club,
and that is thinking about your identity.
He talks about the fact that, sure,
you can say, "I wanna write more, I wanna work out more,
"I wanna blah blah blah blah blah, more."
There's always something we can do more of.
I just got done saying that, literally,
but it's another thing entirely to think about
how it could actually be who you are.
And he talks about identifying yourself
and improving and changing your identity.
So rather than saying, "I'm gonna write more,
"I'm gonna write every day,
"I'm gonna find opportunities to write more in my life,"
start thinking about as, I am a writer,
or I wanna be a writer,
or let's just pretend like I am a writer.
If you're a writer,
if that's a thing that you want in your life,
if that's a thing you wanna be able to say and own it,
then what can you do to facilitate that?
And take small steps to make that happen.
So the two-step process he talks about is,
decide the type of person you want to be,
and then prove it to yourself with small wins.
Now obviously, everybody holds
themselves accountable differently,
but I do think that this is helpful in a mindset shift,
no matter what your personality type is.
Knowing that it's someone you wanna be,
and wrapping your mind around that,
and using it maybe even as a mantra
or a basis for visualization.
And then, reverse-engineering that
into small steps that can make that happen.
I found so much peace in that.
That sounded so much more approachable
and so much more exciting than just,
oh, where can I find a space of 15 minutes
every single day to write?
Without the big vision, none of those intricacies matter.
I absolutely loved that about this book,
and I really hope that that's helpful for you, too.
Next, I loved his four simple steps to better habits.
This is where he talks about those four steps,
the cue, craving, response, and reward.
The more we start breaking down
the different habits in our life, good and bad,
and seeing what each of these things is,
and what roles happen throughout a habit,
the more we can actually see
where the opportunities to change are.
So the cue and the craving are that problem phase,
and then the response and reward are the solution phase.
So a good example, one of the first ones he gave is,
your phone buzzes with a new text message, that's the cue.
The craving is that you wanna know
what's in your text message! (chuckles)
I mean, that little red bubble isn't gonna check itself!
The response is, you grab the phone
so that you can check the text,
and the reward is that you read the text
and now you know exactly what's in it.
And you have sort of that dopamine release
of knowing that there's activity happening on your phone,
and what that activity is.
If this habit is considered bad in your world,
which, particularly in mine, it is,
I actually can't think of someone
where this would be a super great thing,
especially if you're doing deep work.
But if you are checking your texts so often
that you're getting distracted from other things,
you need to figure out the cues and the cravings,
the responses and the rewards,
that are gonna help you to keep this
from being such a dominant presence in your life,
such a dominant part of your attention.
So he talks about how you can change some of these things,
and how you can make other options more appealing
by making adjustments within this process.
I just think it's so great
thinking of what causes a bad habit.
If the bad habit is you're on your phone all the time,
then figuring out, reverse-engineering that there's a cue,
that notifications are going off,
and now how can we fix that from being
so consistently happening, now you can think about
really limiting a bad habit from happening!
We don't often look at things in that minutia,
and sometimes it really would benefit us to!
And finally, he talks about habit stacking,
which I live for.
I have quite a few habit stacks in my life as it is,
especially in my morning routine,
but it's always so good to find new ways to do that.
Essentially, what I'm saying is,
after you do one habit, then you'll start another.
When I wanted to start doing morning pages every day,
I said, "After I wash my face,
"I'm going to pour myself a lemon water.
"And then after I make my lemon water,
"I'm going to sit down and do morning pages."
And with those stacking processes,
I was able to integrate this thing
that I've been doing every single, well,
let's say every single weekday, for a really long time.
But then when you take that and you also add
temptation bundling, it is super fun.
Temptation bundling is after
you've done a habit you need to do,
you get to do a habit you want to do.
So I liked this because I kind of combined the two,
it was like habit stacking and temptation bundling,
what can we do here?
If I need to hit 10,000 steps every day
and I'm not doing it, I can habit stack, right?
And I can say, "After lunch,
"I will get on the treadmill for 20 minutes,"
just to add those extra steps to my day.
But to make that more interesting,
I'll use temptation bundling and say,
"After lunch, I'll get on the treadmill and walk every day.
"While I'm on the treadmill and walking for 20 minutes,
"I get to watch 'Real Housewives'!"
It's kind of like an opportunity to say,
you did something you were supposed to do,
now you can do something that brings you more joy
and gets you excited because you did
the other thing that maybe was less so.
This is super interesting to me because I think
that the pairing of things can be so helpful,
no matter if they're satisfactory or not,
but if it's exciting to you, at least the thing
that might be harder for you to do gets easier.
I don't wanna give away the whole book,
so I'm really trying to be careful here
about what all I say, but knowing each of those things,
just think about your cue, craving, response, and reward
for any habit that's going on in your life.
Mark that out and say, "Is this good, is this bad?"
And start thinking about how you can change it.
Read the book for a lot better direction
on making those changes and how exactly you would do that.
So now let's go into the execution phase.
Those are the things that resonated with me the most,
but this is the thing that I'm gonna do differently
in my own life thanks to this book.
There were a lot of options with this,
but that last one, the habit stacking,
and the temptation bundling,
there's so much opportunity there.
And now I wanna be thinking about that
a lot more in my life.
Like I said, already have a ton of habit stacks.
But now how can I improve them with temptation bundling?
There are still lots of things I write every week,
what do I wish I did this week?
I think it's healthy because when you see those trends,
you can say, "Why am I not doing it?
"Why am I not doing that, if I wish I was doing it so much?"
But then there's the other things that are like,
okay, just guilty pleasure here,
can we just have a little bit of that.
So what does that look like for you?
'Cause that's the thing that I'm going
to do differently in my life,
and I think that could be so helpful
for a lot of other people who are trying to figure out
how do you logistically make this work?
Because it's not just about the tips and tricks
and hacks and strategies.
It's about your mindset.
And you've gotta be a little pumped about this life!
So how do you get pumped?
Let's talk about what we learned from James
and his book in a tweetable.
"Small habits don't add up.
"They compound," James Clear.
Alright, I wanna hear from you!
What habit, what good habit, do you wanna start,
that you think that this book could help you with?
Share that in the comments below.
And I have one more tweetable for you.
Let's let James know we appreciate him and acknowledge him
for writing this amazing book.
Check out the link in the description to let him know
he was a part of #AMYTVBOOKCLUB.
That's all for today, thank you so much for tuning in.
I appreciate it as always.
Make sure you subscribe for good vibes,
kiss the ones you love (smacks lips)
and go after the life you want.
Cheers. (upbeat music)
Gettin' a little weird today.
I also have a hair in my mouth, how fun!
We are back for another (waggles tongue).