- Good morning, good life everyone.
Welcome back to AmyTV,
where I help you go after the life you want.
We are back for another edition
of AmyTV book club.
I know a lot of you have been waiting on this one,
so excited to jump in.
Because as the unofficial president
of the Gretchen Rubin Fan Club
I am so ready for this one.
If you're having trouble building good habits
or maybe even getting rid of crappy ones,
this is going to be a must read book for you.
And I'm gonna tell you why I think so.
(upbeat music)
The book we're going to be reviewing
for AmyTV Book Club this month is
Better than Before, by Gretchen Rubin.
I'm actually kicking myself that it took me so long
to pick up this book.
I'm already a huge fan of Gretchen's
The Happiness Project and The Four Tendencies.
If you have not been on my channel before
I probably talk about The Four Tendencies
in every single episode, pretty much.
I just think the key to life
is knowing whether or not you're an obliger.
More on that later.
But this book is going to be so useful
for a lot of us who are trying to figure out
how to better build habits,
in the most actionable way possible.
It's so easy for people to tell you
what to do or what you should do more of,
"Get more sleep.
"Work out more," all this stuff.
But when it comes to actually accomplishing
it for yourself,
it's about knowing who you are and how to do it.
And this book is gonna help so much
with that, it's incredible.
In just a minute I'm gonna walk through
some of the big pieces that I wanted to share,
things that I love the most.
And my biggest takeaway to execute in my own life.
If you didn't know about AmyTV Book Club yet,
it is something that we do here, semi often.
And I usually like to present the book in advance
in case you wanna read it with me.
The way that you'll find out
is on my Instagram account.
If you follow over there, I post in my stories
what the latest assignment for AmyTV Book Club is,
so that you can pick up a copy as well.
And then I'll let you know when we're gonna review it
so that you can bring your ideas to the table.
And maybe you can share in the comments below
what you thought of the book.
But if you just want the summary
that I have to share with you,
that's another great way to appreciate this book club.
And so you should just be subscribed to the channel
so you never miss an episode.
That way you'll never miss AmyTV Book Club.
Before we dive into my review of Gretchen Rubin's
Better than Before, you know what time it is.
It's time to share some Twitter gratitude.
And today I want to shine a light on Lindsey's Lifenstyle.
Lindsey, thank you so much for that retweet
of my latest video.
I appreciate you.
I acknowledge your time and attention
for tuning in and letting your friends
in on the cool secret that is AmyTV.
If you would, potentially, like the opportunity
for a shout out here on Twitter Gratitude,
then hey, just follow me on Twitter.
It's pretty simple.
Just retweet the video
and I might just pick 'ya.
As I'm sure you're not surprised,
whenever I read a book I have a process for it.
And I actually talked about it in a video last year
called How I Read a Book.
And the way that I do, indeed, read a book
is broken out into three phases.
They are The Reading Phase,
The Download Phase,
and the Execution Phase.
For the details on The Reading Phase of this book,
I do have the hard copy.
But I use this for note taking, highlighting,
getting ready for this video
and stuff like that.
But I actually listened to this particular book on Audible
and great experience.
Love having Gretchen read to me.
So I will link to that in the description below,
if you're more of a listener and less of a reader.
Now that I've read the book, obviously,
otherwise I wouldn't be talking about it,
time to move on to The Download Phase.
And this is the phase of reading, for me,
where I go back and look through all my notes,
all my highlights,
and pull out what the big pieces that I learned from,
the things that resonated with me the most
to kind of absorb them a little bit deeper.
The first thing I wanna point out
is something that Gretchen got to thinking about,
which inspired the writing of this book.
And it's the importance of habits.
She says on page six, in a conversation
with her sister Elizabeth,
"I think I've figured out why habits are so important.
"With habits, we don't make decisions,
"we don't use self control,
"we just do the thing we want ourselves to do,
"or that we don't want to do."
I love that she pointed this out,
because although habits is just
a word that we throw around,
we really forget what it actually means.
And something habitual is something
that starts to just become natural to us.
And being a decision maker in your life
is gonna be very important in success.
But having to make too many decisions throughout a day
is a great way to paralyze yourself
from the really big ones,
when you're dealing with so many small ones.
So the better you develop good habits,
the less likely you have to make big decisions over them
and the more likely you're gonna
do them on a regular basis.
So am I gonna go to the gym?
Or am I not gonna go to the gym?
It's just a no brainer if you just do go to the gym
and that's a habit you've developed,
you're not stressing out over it,
you're not trying to make the decision about it.
This is an important distinction,
because right now you're probably thinking
about a habit that you wish you had,
that you don't because you're already
arguing with yourself every day
to do it or to not do it.
Do you eat the chocolate?
No.
Do you go to the gym?
Yes.
But sometimes no.
But sometimes yes.
like, these are the things you go back and forth on.
We're trying to get it to a point
where you don't have to make the decision,
it just is.
I try to do that as much as possible.
Not make decisions on things
that I don't have to make a decision on.
When I know I have a busy day.
Or I already know that I have a lot on my mind.
Or maybe I need to sit down and be creative,
or write, or make a video.
And if I have too many other things
in my head to think about,
like, "Should I have gone to the gym?"
Then I'm much more likely to not put
my best face forward in everything else that I do.
She also touches on the book,
about The Four Tendencies,
which I kind of briefly touched on
but now I'm gonna talk about again.
She mentions it in here.
It's much better for you to read the entire book on this
and also to take the quiz.
But the overall gist of it is
that we all develop habits differently.
It depends on the personality types that we are.
It depends on how we are best held accountable.
There are four personality types:
The Upholder, The Obliger,
The Questioner, and The Rebel.
I feel like I had such a crisis earlier this year
when I have totally come to the conclusion
that I've been telling everyone I'm a Questioner.
One of my amazing AmyTV viewers
even sent me a mug,
Gretchen Rubin's Questioner mug.
I'm not a Questioner.
I realized I've been trying to convince myself
that I am, but I'm not.
It's very depressing.
I'm actually an Upholder,
which makes a lot more sense to me
because it's a smaller subset of the population.
But I do lean Questioner, in a lot of ways.
But I realized I'm just too much of a rule follower
to be a full on Questioner.
I'm good at questioning the right things
because I think I've had a lot of experience in it,
but I'm totally an Upholder,
which basically means I'm good at being
held accountable from both external
and internal sources.
So if I decide something's important,
I'm gonna do it.
I don't need somebody else to do it.
But if somebody asks me to do something
or if somebody asks me
to follow a certain rule,
if I see a stop sign I'm going to stop.
I'm not gonna question it.
It just is that way.
So external and internal are no problem for me.
An Obliger is really best held accountable
by outside sources.
A Questioner is really best held accountable by themselves.
Once they've decided that something is right.
And a Rebel is really just sure on what
they're gonna have for lunch that day.
They kinda just wing it, I guess.
I don't really understand The Rebel yet.
I know there's a lot of Rebels in this audience,
which is really interesting to me.
So if you have any thoughts on further explaining yourself
that would be great.
When I read the four tendencies
it was even hard to understand how a Rebel operates.
But it doesn't mean that any one of those personality types
even The Rebel, can't build good habits.
It's just about understanding who you are
and how you get better
at being who you are.
Just when you thought that The Four Tendencies
wasn't self identification enough for you,
she goes into a lot of other subtypes
of the type of person that you are.
The decisions you have to make.
The habits that you already have.
Things like Lark versus Owl.
Are you a morning person or a night person?
The marathoner, versus the sprinter,
versus the procrastinator.
The differences between those
and how people get things done.
The under buyer versus the over buyer.
Are you more likely to buy something
even though you know you may already
have it at home?
Or are you pretty convinced you don't need something
until you desperately need it?
And then there's a lot of other examples in the book
but these really get you thinking,
Okay, just because you have a preference one way
and somebody else has a preference another way,
it doesn't mean that you disagree,
it just means that you have different personality types
and that's okay.
And understanding what those are
is gonna help you know
what the right gut instinct is for you
as you are building out habits for yourself.
One of my favorite parts of the book
is where she talks about your foundation.
It's very easy to say
that you have to make changes in certain areas of your life,
but if you don't have a good foundation
it's not going to matter.
The foundational habits that she talks about
are sleep, moving,
eating and drinking right,
and uncluttering.
These are the four basics, she basically says,
"That if you have these, habitually, pretty good,
"where they're not stressing you out
"in and of themselves,
"then you can start to make other changes in your world,
"build on other habits.
"Because these will be there to help support that."
I cannot wait to read Outer Order, Inner Calm by Gretchen,
coming soon I believe.
Where she talks about this uncluttering issue.
We obviously reviewed, if you remember,
on a previous AmyTV Book Club episode,
the life changing magic of tidying up.
That was such a big one for me.
I'm saying this now,
and my office is still a little bit cluttered, oh my God.
It is amazing,
how just cleaning up your area
can just completely change your energy.
And how much you get done.
And how overwhelmed that you feel.
So definitely read this piece on foundational habits.
Because if you're trying to do something else,
like building a habit of blogging every day,
but you're not getting enough sleep,
you're not going to the gym.
You don't eat well and you just snack at your computer.
Do you really think you're gonna write
a blog that's gonna rock the world?
Arguable I'm sure.
But you've got to have a lot of these
other things centered
to make a big difference.
Scheduling, I love that she talks about scheduling.
This one I definitely did not have to learn from her
but I love to hear when people talk about things
that I talk about.
I have calendar blocked my life to no end,
as I'm sure, if you've been around here before.
But she talks about the fact that,
if it's on the calendar, it happens.
And I could not agree more with that.
If you wanna get something done on your to do list.
If you wanna get lots of things done
that are on your to do list,
are you actually planning out the time and space
where that would happen?
Use your calendar.
It could be a desk calendar.
It could be Google Calendar.
I tend to go digital because things
are moving and shaking in my world a lot.
But schedule it.
Get things done.
Use the time you have.
We all have the same amount of time, use it.
There was a great piece about accountability partners.
This one's always kind of weird for me
because there's two different types of resolvers, right?
There's public and there's private,
and she talks about that.
And I'm definitely a private resolver.
When I come up with some grand idea or some scheme,
I'm gonna be like,
"Yeah, I'm just gonna do it and I'm gonna shock the world."
I'm totally into the element of surprise.
But there's people like Obligers
who are totally perfect for having an accountability
partner if they're actually going to do something.
If you are held accountable by external sources,
find those external sources
to help you be accountable in the work
that you wanna do,
with the habits you're trying to build.
Accountability partners, she does talk about
are important for all those four tendency types.
But Obligers are certainly gonna benefit the most.
And you should think about what the right
accountability partner looks like for you.
Although I'm sort of like element of surprise,
private solver, type of person,
I do have an accountability partner.
And it's usually you.
Because I show up every Sunday and Wednesday
and I know what you're gonna hold me accountable if I don't.
My Detail Therapy listeners,
they hold me accountable on Tuesdays,
stuff like that, that makes my content a habit.
That's one example of an accountability partner for me.
A big, big, big, piece for me
was the part about the strategy of convenience.
To me, it is so important
that things become convenient.
I schedule out most of what I have to do.
And I even schedule the habits
that I already do very easily,
or ones that I'm trying to pick up more regularly.
But for the stuff that's more challenging for me,
not just scheduling it but making it convenient,
is extremely important.
She talks a lot, in this book,
about finding the problem,
so that you can resolve it.
And that is definitely connected to convenience, for me.
I'll give you an example.
Lucy, I've told you,
she's a little high maintenance, that one, yeah.
So high maintenance to the point
where sometimes I will convince myself
that I shouldn't go work out,
because she's having a little bit of anxiety.
She's got a little too much energy.
And I'm like, "I can't leave her right now.
"I can't, I've scheduled this 1/2 hour block for the gym,
"but I can't leave Lucy because,
"look at her, she's so stressed out."
The problem for me was,
if I leave her here all stressed out,
I'm gonna be stressed out, working out,
even though I have a convenient built in gym.
Which, that part I knocked out.
It's in my building, which is awesome, no commute.
But Lucy was my hold up.
And I realized, "You know what?
"I have to prioritize my health.
"I'm already home all day long with her.
"What more does she need from me?"
Amy can go get a work out, okay?
Mama needs to work out.
So, I've resolved that just like when I leave the house,
she gets pent up in the bathroom.
She gets the entire bathroom to herself.
There's water, there's everything she needs,
blankets, pillows,
the whole nine yards.
I put her in there just as if I were leaving the house.
Even though I'm still in the building
because that way I don't have to stress out.
She knows when she's in that area
that I've left and I will be right back.
And her mindset is good.
And my mindset is focused on the goal.
And finding the convenience in everything
is so important when you're trying
to make a consistent habit.
Going to the gym isn't hard for me mindset wise.
I'm happy to go to the gym.
But if there are other things that make
other people uncomfortable,
or other dogs uncomfortable,
because I'm an Upholder I want to accommodate those
as well as myself.
So the convenience factor of that
is really important for me.
And the last thing I'll point out
is something that I have talked about
here on the channel before.
Because I love this.
I totally believe in this.
Is the difference between rewards and treats.
Rewards are something that you say,
"I'm gonna get that.
"I'm gonna give that to myself
"when I reach a certain point."
And then you reach that point
and then you reward yourself.
And it may cause you to retreat back to your old ways
or you don't keep up with the habit
or whatever the case.
Or worse, if you say,
"I'm gonna lose 10 pounds and I'm gonna
"offer myself a cupcake as a reward."
Then are you really giving yourself a reward
where you're actually setting yourself back
on how you got to where you got to?
I'm a believer in the treat,
which means, "Hey, you know what?
"Just because I want to indulge in this.
"just because I think this would be nice,
"I'm gonna treat myself."
So whenever I get a handbag it's just because
I'm treating myself.
Not because I've reached some milestone
or something in my work.
Because both live in their own ecosystems.
I love myself a handbag.
And I love myself a milestone or a win.
I want both.
And the reward should be that you achieved something.
The reward should be that you kept up with that habit.
The treat should not be related to that.
Alright, now we move on to The Execution Phase
which is where I choose the one thing
out of the book that I read
that I'm going to implement into my life
as a way of executing on the book that I read.
So instead of just reading a book and saying,
"That was nice, bye."
You're actually saying, "Oh, I learned something from this
"and this is the change I made, accordingly."
And for the execution phase I am choosing,
the strategy of convenience.
Clearly I just went through this whole song and dance
of how that made such a difference for me.
And so that is something I'm actively implementing
in a lot of different areas.
Things I find myself to have a hard time with,
like cooking dinner.
I'm not a natural cook.
Well, things like Blue Apron have helped me
to make it convenient.
And I'm making meals more regularly.
So that's the thing I'm implementing a lot more in my life.
And that's the thing I took from this book,
that is certainly making a change for me.
All right, let's show what we learned here,
with a Tweetable.
"Take a good look at who you are and smile.
"This is what you have to work with
"and what you have to work with is more than enough,
"just start."
Now I wanna hear from you.
What was your biggest takeaway from Better than Before,
by Gretchen Rubin?
I wanna see that in the comments below.
If you didn't read it,
what habit are you working on
that you hope this book could help you with?
Leave it in the comment below.
And I have one more Tweetable for you
in the description.
I want you to go give a shout out to Gretchen
for such an awesome book
and such a great impact on this community.
I know a lot of you have enjoyed her work as well.
I'm secretly trying to get her on Detail Therapy
so why don't you go over there and tell her
that she should be on my podcast.
Okay?
Goals, let's do it.
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.
And go after the life you want, cheers.
(upbeat music)
Okay, I'm literally 10 minutes late for a facial.
So I don't think I even had any bloopers.
I just breezed right through that one.
(upbeat music)